The following link describes how a growing number of Palestinians are giving up on their dream of having a two state solution.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-fg-onestate8-2008may08,0,5661634.story
This is good news. There can only be peace when all of the parties involved realize that it is better to live together, despite all of the differences, than apart. Without that realization, there can be no long term peace.
The current ability to obtain skilled labor for cheap is short lived. This is for the following two reasons:
1. As foreigners become more confident in their ability to service more wealthy countries, they will raise their price to the point where it becomes questionable whether the low price compensates completely for the inconvenience of a gap in geography and language.
2. As the wealth of developing countries increases, local demand for services in those developing countries increases. As that demand increases, so will the prices of the services.
Hence, the current loss of American jobs to out-sourcing is short lived. Let's say that any society needs 3% of it's man hours for Data Entry. At present, those expensive Americans who used to do data entry are in danger of loosing those jobs to Indians, who can do the task almost as well, for a fraction of the price. However, if all of the Indians who are capable of doing data entry are working for Americans, who is supporting the Indian business that need them? The answer is that as the economies became more similar, the demand for services will also become more similar. Then, in the name of simple efficiency, the Indian data entry candidates will work for Indian companies, and the American data entry candidates will have their jobs restored.
Why does the world seem to progress at a faster rate that it has in the past?
It's not because people are more intelligent than they were in the past. It's because people are better educated.
The open and rapid communication between people enables people to focus their genius on what has not been discovered, and develop the existing knowledge further.
I have a baby.
One problem I've had recently is securing her while changing her diaper. The basic idea to help this is to make some sort of harness that would secure the baby's legs and/or arms during changing. A search on Google Patents yields the following result. I think an elevated device to secure the legs might come in handy.
A refrigerated food dispenser that is simple enough to be operated by a baby would enable baby's to feed themselves on their own schedules, without parental help. This would be similar to the water dispensers used for gerbils. The device would have to avoid mess by limiting the despense, and prevent spoiling of liquids by refrigeration.
Why do standard keyboards only have 2 keys that give any indication of what they are via touch? Keys F and J have little bumps that indicate to the user the key that their finger is touching.
Why not have different types of bumps for different keys? In the same way that blind people learn to read braille, the typist will, over time, learn to quickly recognize the textures and identify them with different keys.
This would enable touch-typing even when disoriented or with one hand.
Sometimes a table's legs get in the way of sitting comfortably at the table. The leg of the table keeps the chair and you at a distance from the table.
A simple solution is to have a chair with a split down the middle big enough to fit the leg of the table in it.
Have you ever wanted to look at two tabs in your browser at the same time? As far as I know, FireFox doesn't have any function to "detach" tabs.
If you could detach, resize and reposition browser tabs, they would mimic the function of desktop windows. You could have a "virtual desktop" of sorts running in your browser.
Being able to use tabs as windows would further the dependence of the user experience on any specific OS. I wonder if this is why Microsoft was the last to enable tabbed browsing.
