There’s a war raging right now for control over the internet. In this war, there is no clear battlefield but there are several points of interest: Washington DC, Hollywood, internet service providers and your own living room. It’s a complex war with many players, but at its most basic level it is a push and pull between content creators and content consumers.

Content creators are the people that write books, record songs and produce movies. These people argue (rightfully) that they deserve to be compensated for their work. If there is no hope for compensation, these people have no incentive to continue producing content. When that happens, both the creators and the consumers lose.

Content consumers are the people that read these books, listen to these songs and watch these movies. We are all content consumers. We see valuable content, we open our wallets and we pay to consume that content. Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to go.

Piracy has put a big crimp in things lately thanks to the ease of information sharing on the internet. With torrents and an endless stream of file sharing sites, it’s no longer absolutely necessary for content consumers to open their wallets and hand over their hard-earned dough to content producers. Certain content creators, namely large media companies, have reacted by lobbying congress and in an effort to gain more control over the internet.

Opinion Time

I’m all for paying content creators for their hard work. These people provide a product that we value and it only makes sense to pay them for it. If we stop paying them, they stop producing. For that reason, I do not support internet piracy.

However, the freedom of the internet is the most important thing to consider here. It is not worth clamping down on the internet in order to stop piracy. There are a few reasons why I feel this way.

1. The internet is beautiful because it is free of interference

The internet is a medium for an exchange of information that is free from influence. No longer is it necessary to rely entirely on the words of a politician or some news media company that may or may not be biased. You can research facts on your own, read wildly different opinions and come to your own conclusions with the help of the internet. The internet also provides a means for individuals to communicate their ideas to the rest of the world. You don’t have to have a position as a newspaper columnist or talk show host to put your ideas in front of the eyes of millions. A single person with a computer can broadcast his ideas to the world free of censorship.

When a politician tells you that the employment numbers are this or that most people feel a certain way, you no longer have to take him at his word. You can research these things for yourself on the internet. It is infinitely easier to fact-check our leaders with the help of the internet.

Any effort to clamp down on the internet will have negative consequences. The more power we give to our leaders, the harder it is for us to express our ideas online. We become frogs in the pan as we give more and more control over the internet to a few people in Washington, DC.

2. The internet is good for innovation

Along the same vein, the internet has low barriers to entry. If you have a burning desire to get your thoughts out there, the only thing you need is access to a computer. You do not need lawyers, business licenses, expensive property or physical distribution channels. The more we regulate the internet, the more we stifle innovation.

The internet in its current form fosters innovation. People with good ideas can put those ideas into action. The internet is the last free frontier where individuals can get out there and act on their ideas with relatively little risk. Just a few examples include Google, Facebook, PlentyOfFish.com, Zappos.com and countless “small time” internet millionaires.

Government intervention always results in higher barriers to entry. When the government gets involved, things get unnecessarily complicated. If we give the government too much control over the internet, we will kill the greatest source of innovation on the planet.

3. The horse is already out of the barn.

Piracy exists and it’s not going anywhere. No matter how many laws you pass, you’re not going to stop people from using the internet for nefarious purposes. Any laws that are passed will only serve to limit the international flow of information that the internet provides. People that want to use the internet for theft will always find ways to do exactly that.

Look at the prohibition of alcohol and drugs. Our society tried once already to end alcohol consumption and that got nowhere. We spend billions of dollars on the War on Drugs and yet there is no end in sight. This is not an argument to just allow piracy to go unchecked, but the point is that heavy-handed approaches are ineffective. Passing laws and giving up our freedoms is not an effective way to combat certain types of undesired behavior.

As soon as we put one policing mechanism on the internet, pirates find a loophole. It’s a never-ending game of cat and mouse. The problem is that the longer this game continues, the more freedoms we lose. Pirates find one way to transmit their goods, the government clamps down. Pirates find another way to transmit their goods, the government clamps down. It never ends.

What’s with all this “Government” Talk?

If you’re wondering why I seem to have an unnatural fear of the government, it’s because the government has recently made moves to squeeze in on the internet. Several ominous pieces of legislation have been introduced over the past couple of years by our fine men and women in DC. These pieces of legislation are supposedly designed to combat piracy, but privacy advocates have expressed serious concerns.

SOPA

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) caused a big uproar among the tech community in early 2012. The act was designed to stomp out online piracy by giving the government the authority to tell US-based companies to restrict access to entire websites.

The problem right now is that many websites that host pirated material are hosted overseas and are thus immune to US actions. Therefore, SOPA would give copyright holders the ability to demand that search engines and payment processors in the US to stop linking to and working with infringing websites.

The flaws in this bill are so numerous that I can’t even list them all here. In short, the wording was so vague that nobody knew how far the law would go. In theory, the law would give the government the ability to shut down websites for linking to a “bad” website or even for hosting user-submitted content. Websites such as YouTube could have been shut down entirely if a single person uploaded copyrighted content.

Another problem is that the bill gave the United States a wide international reach. Even if a foreign website acted according to the laws of its host country, the US would have had the ability to take action against that website. These are just two of many flaws in the SOPA bill. You can visit the Wikipedia link above to read more about it.

Fortunately, there was such widespread outrage that lawmakers decided to postpone the bill. SOPA isn’t gone yet, but at least it was stalled for a while. We have yet to see the final outcome of this piece of legislation.

CISPA

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) was introduced in late 2011. The authors of this bill claimed that it was designed to help the government fight cyber security threats by making it easier for US companies to share information with the government.

Many organizations immediately expressed their outrage after reading the contents of this bill. Once again, vague language was the culprit. The bill did not make it clear how much information the government could request from companies, when that information could be shared or how that information could be used.

During House debates, the author of the bill defending it with the following appeal to emotion: “Stand for America! Support this bill!” He then went on to assure the House that there was nothing to worry about. Coming from a politician, that is not the most convincing argument I’ve ever heard.

PIPA

The PROTECT IP Act, also known as Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), is another bill very similar to SOPA. This bill was drafted in order to give copyright holders a means of disabling access to websites that are deemed to host infringing material.

Yet again, the bill was criticized for its vague wording. If a single page on a large website (let’s say Reddit for example) is deemed to contain copyrighted content, the entire website could be removed. This would kill user-based websites such as Reddit, YouTube, Twitter and others. The concern is that a single visitor could upload something that causes the entire website to be effectively shut down.

Too Much Text – Get to the Point Already

The point is this: although most of us can agree that internet piracy is a bad thing, we cannot afford to continue to give up the freedom of the internet for the sake of ending piracy. Governments around the world have a long history of implementing freedom-suppressing laws that do more harm than good.

I do not support piracy at all, but the route we are travelling is dangerous. The vague wording of the above laws is more dangerous to the world than pirates. Information is freedom and we cannot let the government get a stranglehold on the internet. Once we go down that road, it becomes a slippery slope.

One of the problems is that big media producers are holding onto an outdated business model. Big media companies fear the loss of all the middlemen that get between artists and their audiences. The internet skips the middlemen by bringing producers directly to the people. If the big media companies would embrace the internet instead of resist change, they would be able to find new ways to monetize their content.

Change is a scary force for large corporations and governments because it changes the status quo. People get comfortable with the way things are, they learn how to game the system and they become very trigger happy when something comes along to threaten that easy cushion. But the free market has shown as time and time again that for every old business model that dies, a new and more efficient model rises in its place.

So should we just give up on piracy? Not at all. We already have measures in place to combat internet piracy. Let’s put those mechanisms to work and leave the internet alone. And if a little piracy does sneak through the cracks, well, that’s the price of freedom. It’s a price I’m willing to pay. I don’t see anyone starving yet.

==== About the Author ====
Sara Richardson is a freelance writer and regular contributor to OnlineFileStorage.com. She enjoys all things tech and is a staunch supporter of internet freedom.

Sometimes it takes an against the grain idea for a new idea to take hold. That’s the direction Amazon has taken with its debut tablet, the Kindle Fire. It’s no revolution in terms of the setup. It won’t run faster than the iPad. It won’t have more apps, and it won’t do neat and fancy things that the iPad doesn’t. How, then, will it beat the iPad? It will compete on the one plane that Apple refuses: price. The Kindle Fire will cost just $199.

The decision to price the Kindle Fire below almost every other tablet on the market was a deliberate one for Amazon. Earlier this year Retrevo conducted a study of potential tablet buyers. Among those who indicated they planned to purchase a tablet in the near future, 79 percent said that they would consider an Android tablet over the iPad, provided it cost less than $250. Amazon took that one step further on the pricing front, creating an immediately attractive tablet that should cut into Apple’s sales this holiday season.

At the same time, Amazon assumes a huge risk with this pricing scheme. They’ll lose $10 for every Kindle Fire sold on parts alone. That ignores the costs of assembling the tablets, of shipping and handling, of the free Amazon Prime membership, and of the marketing — not to mention the research that went into creating the tablet. Those add up to a substantial loss on every unit sold, which Amazon will report at quarterly earnings reports. That could put them in a tough spot with investors, who generally don’t react well to losses.

While Amazon will take a loss per physical unit, a total loss might not be in the cards. On top of that, the Fire is not Amazon’s endgame for tablets. Both of these points provide reasons why pricing the Fire at a loss will work out for Amazon in the long run.

While the Kindle Fire technically runs on Android, it is not a typical Android tablet. It does not run Honeycomb, which is Android’s current tablet OS. The Fire’s OS doesn’t even look much like Android. That’s because Amazon designed it around a smartphone version of Android, laying Amazon services all over the place. Want to buy an app? You won’t get it from the Android Market, but rather from the Amazon App Store. Cuddling up with a movie? You won’t watch it on Netflix, but rather on Amazon Instant Video. Filling your Fire with tunes? You’ll buy them at Amazon’s MP3 store. If you’re loading songs from your own collection, you’ll upload them through Amazon’s storage locker. E-books, of course, will come directly via the Kindle Store.

In other words, Amazon has set up the Kindle in a manner similar to the iPad. Everything flows through Amazon. Instant Video will bring in more Prime subscriptions, which will net Amazon $80 per year per subscription. They’ll sell more music and more apps, since it will all be directly integrated into the Fire. Amazon has even worked out deals with magazine publishers, giving Amazon yet another stream of revenue. So while they might take a hit on the physical parts, they’ve set up an environment whereby they can more than recoup that loss via media sales.

Moreover, the Kindle Fire is not Amazon’s killer tablet. That one is still in the works. The Fire is more a device to test the waters. If they see a quality response to that, and perhaps see the Fire eating into iPad sales, then they can come out with their big honkin’ tablet. But before they can do that, before they can go toe-to-toe with Apple, they have to prove to consumers that they can put out a device worthy of competition with Apple. And make no mistake: there’s little chance that Kindle would take a loss on a 9- or 10-inch tablet. It would be at a price point directly competitive with the iPad. But by the time they release it, they’ll have established a reputation with the Fire.

The reputation aspect is no small factor. Take a look at Research In Motion. Last year they decided to expand the BlackBerry brand with the BlackBerry PlayBook. The tablet itself isn’t bad at all. Physically, it looks a lot like the Fire. Yet RIM had trouble moving units. Part of that was software — the PlayBook had no native email, calendar, or contacts applications, and App World pales in comparison to other tablet app marketplaces. Another reason, though, was reputation. RIM had not established a reputation with consumers, and that made it harder to move PlayBooks at a $500 price point. It’s no surprise that they’re expected to move more units this holiday season, when they plan to offer a number of promotions and rebates.

Current estimates have Amazon selling 5 million tablets between now and the end of the year. If that’s an accurate figure, Amazon will have entered the tablet market with a bang. They might take a $50 million loss on parts and even more when factoring in all costs, but they’ll recoup that with added media sales. But, more importantly, they’ll send a positive message to consumers. By releasing a highly heralded tablet at a low price point, they’re inviting positive reviews. Those positive feelings will carry over, and will give Amazon more leverage when it releases a larger, more powerful tablet. That seems to be the only way to compete with the iPad. Amazon, apparently, has it all figured out.

Joe Pawlikowski is the editor of BBGeeks, a site dedicated to helping BlackBerry users get the most out of their devices — including RIM’s tablet PC, the BlackBerry PlayBook.

If I were given a dead kitten for every mind blowing piece of information I saw on the internet, I would be quite rich by now, selling those dead kittens covertly online to a bunch of shady dead kitten enthusiasts and then investing that money on a webpage dedicated to dead kitten paraphernalia, photos and Google AdWords. (Of course, one has to assume that I do not fly into a blind rage and kill the nearest human responsible for the kitten’s death and go to jail thereafter. But this is also the internet, and anything is possible)

Yes, anything is possible on the internet. This one invention has fundamentally changed all civilization touched by it in a matter of years, akin to the steam engine and electricity. It has become a tool with which any layperson can become aware of a niche subject if said person puts their mind to the task, and learns concepts, ideas and practical use of the subject from the comfort of their homes. It is a medium of communication that far outperforms any other kind of relay that human civilization has used in its history. However, the biggest draw to the internet is that it is not subject to any kind of restriction wherever it has been put to use, and users can freely roam it in search of atypical and curious information.

An astute reader would, at this point of time, either chuckle at my seemed ignorance about internet restrictions, or write a harshly worded comment forming an ad hominem argument relating the size of my genitalia to the propensity to naiveté regarding the aforementioned internet restrictions. I believe the last sentence of the previous paragraph may be worded as the biggest draw to the internet is that it is not seemingly subject to any kind of restriction wherever it has been put to use, and users can freely roam it in search of atypical and curious information.There definitely are restrictions on the internet, and while the ways to circumvent these bans and blockages do exist, oftentimes the methods prove to be quite cumbersome for those who are not very internet-savvy; they do not even bother with knowing these methods because they either do not know of the existence of the banned places, or they do not bother about the aforementioned banning because they were not going to go there in the first place, right?

Wrong.

Censorship is the granddaddy of book burning. Book burning itself is a symbol and method of proscription, and its political ramifications of essentially erasing’ a religion or a reign’s past so that the current dominator can write their version of history. In George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty Four, the protagonist works in a department of the totalitarian regime built on this very concept of erasing and rewriting history. Ironically, Nineteen Eighty Four was itself banned or challenged for its views as being intellectually dangerous for society.

So if a three hundred and twenty-six page book written in the year Nineteen Forty Nine has challenged the views of great number of people, many of whom were in positions of authority to actually effect an injunction on the book, I wonder how many such quantities of text, photographs and videos have appeared over the years on the internet that have been censored due to their content being deemed unpalatable for the general public’ by a core group of people in positions of authority?

Does this not easily look like an abuse of power vested in those people? Internet users in the United Kingdom have recently been plagued by the same question with four of the country’s big Internet Service Providers (ISPs) bowing to the pressure imposed indirectly by the Mothers’ Union to shield children from sexualized imageryand have decided to make sexually explicit sites an opt-in’ for those who wish to see it. Elsewhere, the admins of Reddit have banned a community under the website called Jailbait where people could find non-nude photographs of girls who are allegedly underage.

Both these bans come under the broad principle of a small bunch of people deciding what is right or wrong for the consumption of an extremely large populace.

The mothers of Mothers’ Union UK has obviously never heard of parental internet control software such as Net Nanny which makes me question their knowledge of the internet as a whole. These people do not understand the anything goes on the internetconcept and have firm rules about what and what should not be viewed by society. Of course, they are the same people who arbitrarily decide on what societyshould be or not be. These are the same people who wish to make upstanding members of the society’ with their ideals akin to a factory production line. And (this is admittedly a long shot) these are the kind of parents who make trash like Toddlers and Tiaras possible. If only they would wake up and browse the internet for a while with an open mind, but no they have to think of the children!

On the other side of the spectrum is Reddit that has always been a champion of free speech and free see, and free hear and free download. The ban of /r/jailbait has struck a controversial chord in the community and has polarized discussion on what constitutes free speech and what should never ever be done because the reputation of the site is at stake. This argument regarding the reputation of the site stems from the fact that Reddit was seen under an awful light by Anderson Cooper of CNN when he did a one-sided coverage of the site that indirectly claimed that Reddit consisted of a huge population of perverted pedophiles who spent their entire day watching lithe, semi-nude bodies of society’s underage daughters. If you had been to erstwhile /r/jailbait, astute reader, you would also claim that if these were society’s daughters, then society has gone to the dogs. Indeed, when an unsavory community is made specifically to test Reddit’s determination to uphold its protection of free speech (I am talking about a community that links to pictures of dead children) but Reddit fails the test with another community page because of some TV news anchor’s one-sided report, it does boggle one’s mind.

Nevertheless, there is a case for Reddit’s administration, for the subscribers of /r/jailbait might have been engaged in a trade of child pornography which is morally and legally base. However, how does the case stack for Mothers’ Union UK, as they are essentially muting a bustling industry (which is quite harmless to the consumer as opposed to the tobacco or the alcohol industry) because they do not understand (or want to understand) the internet and how to educate their child about it.

The question that arises here is one of perceived freedom. How does a civilization such as ours claim to be free when, given an opportunity, it crushes any sort of deviation from the apparent norm? Why is homosexuality such a grievous sin and how do two men or women falling in love with each other in any way harm children? This entire perception of society colors the word very word deviantin a terribly bleak and distrustful hue that burns pictures of perversion against said deviant in our brains.

Have we, the urban civilians, really become free from the bonds of prejudice or have we really invented another form of prejudice under the vague umbrella of being morally right’?

Color me disappointed.

Today I logged in to Google Plus again only to find half of my Indian acquaintances having stopped using Google Plus. I wonder what took them this long. I stopped the very next day I ‘got in’.

I was more annoyed that my funny, smart twitterers with wicked sense of humor were just pretentious on twitter and all smart and boring on Google Plus. Why? Because Robert Scoble and other have started using Google Plus at their blog and highly interactive commenter.   Anyhow, I guess it got annoying and boring for them as well eventually that they stopped plus-ing (?). Google recently announced that they have crossed 25 million users on Google Plus. That’s quite an achievement on its own. Facebook took 3 whole years to achieve that mark. Although it’s unjust to compare Facebook and Google Plus as Google is widely known brand.

The point is,   none of my Indian acquaintances are active on Google Plus. When Google Plus crossed 20 million users last week, according to comScore, 2.85 million users were from India making India the second largest country to use Google Plus. So is it true that aggressive growth can only be achieved through inorganic growth? Why are my Indian friends finding it difficult to get used to Google Plus?

First, Circles is a new concept and if users do not add the right kind of people in their circle the social network gets extremely boring. I recently came across a site (Recommendedusers.com) that has grouped people in accordance to what they update. People are categorized into Artists and designers, Podcasters, Bloggers, Women in Tech and so on. Once you populate your circles even Google Plus can be fun.

Today, Linkedin announced that they have crossed 10 million users from India. That’s quite an achievement. According to the latest data available, around 5.3% of population use in Internet in India as of 2009. That is, almost 16% of Internet users in India have a profile on Linkedin.

But is this a milestone that really matters?

Some  interesting statistics on Linkedin users in India:

• 16105 professionals listed the term social media’ in their profiles
• 19027 people in Indian listed bollywood’, hollywood’ or film’ in their LinkedIn profile

Speaking from personal experience, I honored Linkedin today for their 10 million achievement in India by logging in to Linkedin after almost six months. A couple of weeks ago, I wanted to hire a few writers for my site but I surprisingly didn’t even think about Linkedin for the search. Instead I just created  a page for requirements and posted it on Facebook and Twitter. The result? I received more than 30 responses from people whom I would hire in a blink of an eye.

But that’s not all. Apart from being almost useless when it comes to finding a right hire, Linkedin is also a spam center for those social media experts. Here’s Alok Kejriwal from Contest2win.com  outing his frustration on Linkedin spam. As I look in to my Linkedin inbox, I find more requests for endorsements from people with whom I have never done any business and messages from people promoting their business as if they were distributing some broucher advertisement.

There’s no denying that 80% of jobs comes through reference. Job listing sites like Monster, Naukri, etc stand little or no chance is the social age yet major companies make use of these job listing sites for hires.

I am yet to come across anyone receiving a job offer via Linkedin or finding a deserving candidate, for that matter. If you have, please share your story in comments section.

In April, Facebook announced that it has about 25 million (now 28.5 million) users in India.  Facebook users in India range from business people and students to public figures and institutions. And applications like  Branchout could turn into a good alternative to Linkedin without requiring me to logging in to a  separate  site for the same. Unless Linkedin really solves any purpose it will just remain a online presence for me.

Foursquare, a darling startup of everyone, might have raised a lot of money and might have an unusually handsome co-founder. But if you followed Techcrunch disrupt NYC, this year, when Michael Arrington questioned Dennis Crowley about the revenue foursquare is generating, he did not wish to answer.

Now at a platform like Techcrunch disrupt, who wouldn’t want to brag? It’s either they are making tons of money or they are making nothing. Nada. In my opinion it’s the later one. Now while the whole checking in funda is cool and was fun while it lasted (I’m already suffering from check-in fatigue), foursquare doesn’t really have a business model except for tying up with businesses for offering returning customers some offers.

But how would Square/Google Wallet take away Foursquare’s business you ask?

Foursquare, in my opinion would have to start looking at something different to generate revenue or should have exited when chance had arrived.

Either Foursquare needs to quickly find a new way to generate the revenue or stay stubborn and die the the internet death. It would be sad to see the yet another brilliant startup die a Digg like death where it couldn’t innovate and adapt with the competition.

Even as the number of engineers in the US continues to shrink, India is churning out engineers by the hundreds of thousands. Much has already been said and written about the quality of engineering graduates in India. Much more qualified people than me have penned their frustration with the state of engineers in India. Nevertheless, as a Computer Science and Engineering student who is at the brink of graduating, I couldn’t help but jump into the discussion.

In 2008, India produced 3.5 lakh (350 thousand) engineers. However, raw numbers don’t tell the entire story. When it comes to number of engineers per million people, there are only 214 engineers in India, compared to 1435 in South Korea and 765 in Japan. Of course, this isn’t all that surprising, given that the percentage of secondary and higher secondary pass outs in India is also significantly lower than in other developed nations. The real worrying statistic is that even after one year of graduation, 30% of Engineers in India remain unemployed. According to the Wall Street Journal, 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India’s high-growth global industries. The situation is so dire that leading IT Services companies like Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro have been forced to extend their initial training program for freshers in order to impart basic skills required on the job. And these are not companies that are not known for doing a lot of real engineering work. You can imagine how hard it must be for fledgling startups and software companies to attract real talent.

While opining on the state of engineering in India, most pundits have ripped apart the Indian education system. Right from the grassroots level, India’s education system ignores all the key facets of engineering, viz. curiosity, learning by experimentation, and problem solving. The explosion in the number of colleges handing out B. Tech degrees have resulted in a dire shortage of qualified teachers. The bar for becoming a teacher at the under graduate level has been lowered so much that it has become a folklore that students who don’t get recruited are the ones who end up becoming teachers.

However, the poor quality of education is not the sole reason for the current situation in India. The other driving factor is the attitude of the society. While, in the US, students are comfortable taking up courses like Humanities and Social Studies, Communications, and Media Arts, in India, most students believe (or are forced to believe) that the only two real career options before them are to become a doctor or an engineer. As a result, students who don’t have the will or the aptitude to become an engineer enroll for an engineering degree. This increase in demand has lead to the increase in the number of colleges, which in turn has lead to the lowering of the bar. It’s the lure of an offer from TCS and Infosys, rather than the attraction of building something that motivates engineering students in India. Even the criteria for getting into these colleges is misplaced. If you can mug up a few organic chemistry formulae, and have practised enough to solve some mechanics problem in Physics, chances are that you can get into a fairly esteemed institute of engineering.

Here are three completely random observations that I have made during my interaction with other Computer Science and Engineering students from several colleges across India:

1. A staggering portion of the graduates aren’t even capable of accomplishing basic tasks like installing Windows or Linux operating system. Yes, many of the CSE graduates being produced by the Indian colleges are technically challenged.
2. Most of the students in colleges around India, can’t even write simple algorithms like Bubble Sort or Binary Search, even if their life depended on it.
3. Worse still, many of the lab instructors, who have been entrusted with the responsibility of teaching programming can’t write real code.

I am not suggesting that all engineers in India are clueless, or that all of the academicians are incompetent. However, a disappointingly large fraction is. Installing an Operating System has very little to do with Engineering. However, it does exemplify a lack of willingness or aptitude for even very rudimentary problem solving.

Undoubtedly, there is a lot that is wrong about the education system in India. However, it will also be wrong to ignore the positive impact that education has already had on India. Yes, quantity currently supersedes quality in India. However, most people will probably prefer the current situation over the situation ten or fifteen years back. Sridhar Vembu, the founder of ZOHO, very effectively pointed out the positive impact that even these substandard educational institutes are having on the society. In his own words,

The education for the most part was of poor quality, but that does not matter, because of what I have called the Placebo effect of education. What it confers is confidence, while the real knowledge is gained on the job – which is why dropping out of college doesn’t do much damage to upper-middle-class kids, who presumably already have an ample supply of confidence.

Most good things in India happen in spite of the government, and not because of it. When the quality of Engineering graduates picks up, it will also be because of a combination of factors that will have very little to do with the ministry of education. It might be because some premier institute decided to lead the way by encouraging hacker culture, instead of learning by rote. It might be because of the opening up of new lucrative career paths as the Indian economy grows and flourishes, which will reduce the (false) compulsion that most students feel to get into an engineering college, which in turn will lead to new batches of engineering students who will study engineering not because it will improve their chances of getting a job, but because they truly want to understand how stuff works and they want to build things. Among those will be several brilliant minds that will be able to dream big enough to change the world.

Image via OpenClipArt

Why is Mozilla the target of a take-down notice from U.S. Homeland Security and what the heck is MAFIAAfire?

Back in December of last year, I asked a simple question: is Homeland Security Now Working for the Recording Industry?. In the article, I explained how the MPAA and RIAA (Movie and Music industry groups) have bribed the U.S. Congress with millions of dollars and now have ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), a division of DHS (Homeland Security) in their pockets.

ICE has seized dozens of website domains over the last few months, supposedly to crack down on piracy and copyright infringement. Several new sites were taken down this week and new targets were likely suggested to ICE by the MPAA or RIAA. In a congressional hearing last month, ICE director John Morton admitted that his organization was acting on tips from industry representatives,and other leads.

Here’s what you’ll see if a site was taken down by ICE.

Tablet PCs have changed the way we view computers. Instead of having to tote around a bulky laptop, it’s now possible to enjoy all of the laptop’s functionality in a wafer-thin computer that fits easily in a purse or the side pocket of a briefcase. Yet despite all of the benefits that come along with having a smaller computer, some may question how functional such a machine really is when it comes to providing easy access to online education.

According to a paper presented at the 25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, Penn State University set out to study the affect that tablet computing technology had on online mathematics courses. The results were mixed, with tablets, and their PC counterparts, presenting problems related to the rendering of mathematical symbols. This is because most are geared specifically towards the written word, meaning that students of online courses related to mathematics should be particular careful when selecting a tablet PC.

Although tablets may pose problems for math and science students, they can be a great alternative for many other students and even faculty members. An study published in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology points out the ease of use that is inherent in tablet PCs has the ability to make faculty interaction with students much more fluid. When the faculties the of science and engineering departments at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology tested using tablets in an educational capacity they found their computer usage skyrocketed and e-mails were answered more promptly. Similarly, the teachers speculated that tablet PC usage by students would lead to enhance instructor-student interaction and would improve students’ note taking ability, as the would be able to handwrite notes rather than rely on the sometimes faulty input of typing.

Ultimately, it seems that tablet PCs will become an essential element of class design, be it a traditional or online class. While more research is needed to further understand the importance of tablet PCs and their impact on online classroom learning, it is possible to speculate that their portability, ease of use and versatility will lead to enhanced student-faculty interactions and increased understanding of subject matter.

==== About the Author ====

Lindsey Wright is fascinated with the potential of emerging educational technologies, particularly the online school, to transform the landscape of learning. She writes about web-based learning, electronic and mobile learning, and the possible future of education.

Google recently announced Chromebook that will be available in market starting June 15. For the uninformed, Chromebook is Google’s ambitious project to get into the desktop OS world. What differentiates it from the other desktop OS is that Chrome OS is a cloud based Operating System.

While for eons we have used traditional Operating System which supports a Hard Disk as a primary storage location, with Chrome OS Google wants you to store everything on the cloud. We already do that on our current OSes. Be it Windows, Mac or even Linux. Our current OS stores all the data on the hard disk and synchronizes with the cloud when we have access to internet. Google wants to change that and get rid of Hard Disks and wants you to store everything on Cloud, as mentioned previously.

It sounds quite exciting and surely is a different way to look at things but again falls in ‘launch at wrong timing’ category. For one, we still do not get access to the Internet in every corner of the city. Like when I’m travelling in train even the 3G stick stops working. In such cases the Chromebook is a just a dead meat for me.

The other grouse that I have with Chromebook is that our upload speed has still not reached the nirvana level. While Download speed enjoys quite a few MBPS, we are still stuck with slow upload speed. And with Chromebook to have everything on cloud, we really really need to take the upload speed into consideration. In my opinion there’s a fatchance for Chrome OS to be a success unless Google implememts their high speed Internet everywhere. For a product to launch, timing is the most important aspect and Google knows that better. Google launched Google Wave which was well ahead of its time. There’s a not so sweet history of products failing because they were launched well ahead of its time. Brightkite was the first to tinker with Social location check-ins but users were ready only when Foursqaure launched its little game. So timing is important and this is not the timing to launch a full fledge cloud based OS.

My last complaint is the cost of the Chromebook. You can get the   Samsung device which comes with 12.1-inch screen with an 8-hour battery life and will retail for $429 (Wi-Fi enabled) and $499 (3G enabled laptop), while Acer’s device will be an 11.6-inch display and a 6.5-hour battery life. Acer’s notebook will start at $349 and up. While it’s still cheaper than its competitor OS netbooks but it doesn’t count the amount of money you’ll be spending later for storing all your data. I’m pretty sure n coming months Chrome OS users would be spending money to access their own data from cloud rather than storing it. In my opinion in coming years storage space will get so cheap that it would be practical for companies to just give it away for free and charge for accessing the data instead.

What do you think? Will you be buying Chromebook when it releases in June?