Category: news

Service for a fee, in airlines.

I just read a newspaper article (sfgate) that airlines in the US are slowly charging fees for a lot of services that passengers used to take for granted. Some of the services include:

  • Charging for checking your bag (some airlines used to charge only for second bag, more recently American Airlines has started charging for security-checking your first bag too.
  • Charging for requesting an aisle seat/more leg room seats like the bulkhead/exit aisle seats
  • Charging for meals on the flights
  • Charging have increased for rescheduling tickets

Why ? The airlines say, the reason is the increasing price of oil. They have to meet their operating margins somehow ! Slowly airlines in India have started complaining about the price of oil as well. Will these charges come to India too? We already have charges for rescheduling and ‘no-meals’ on budget airlines. All we can do is to wait and watch.

Read the full article here.

Deccan chronicle … smrtr ? fastr ? lessr?

(pic: sans serif -> Karnataka Photo News)

Whats up with Deccan chronicle and its stinginess for words. The ads are all over Bangalore. Apparently they use lesser words and more news. And hence they are fastr to read? And you can read the paper fastr? The next thing they will be doing is to write in the new fangled SMS English (or are they already doing that ?). Imagine a serious news being written in that lingo. This is how it would look like.

AIIMS gets doc bk

New Delhi: Centr on Thu suffrd a setbk with the Suprm Crt strkng dn the AIIMS and PIMER(A)A and restrng P. Venugopal as AIIMS Drctr. 🙂

(or)

V will tame infl : PM

PM M.Singh on Thu promisd that the UPA govt led by the Cong would tame infl in coming months and roll back infl rate to reasonable levels. ;-0

Hmm. Cannot imagine reading news like that. Whatever will the austere kaapi drinking I-cannot-see-the-light-of-day-without-reading-Hindu mafia in Chennai do?

News burst about Yahoo and Microsoft

(pic courtesy: cnet:news.com)

Everyone has heard about the proposed take over of Yahoo by Microsoft. Their repeated increase of their offer price, and Yahoo not giving in. Lots of people predicted yahoo shareholders would be upset, and newspapers reported that Yahoo stock plunged – because they did not take what seemed to be a good offer etc. But did anyone do an accurate calculation, like what Kottke did ?

On Jan 31, the day before Microsoft offered $31/share for Yahoo, YHOO was at $19.18/share (market cap: $26.4 billion) and MSFT was at $32.60/share (market cap: $303.6 billion). At the close of trading today, YHOO closed at $24.37/share (market cap: $33.5 billion) and MSFT was at $29.08/share (market cap: $270.8 billion). In other words, the Microsoft offer increased the value of Yahoo! Inc. by more than $7 billion and decreased the value of Microsoft Corporation by almost $33 billion. In still other words, in attempting to take Yahoo by force, they let an amount equal to Yahoo slip through their fingers. Why isn’t anyone writing about Yahoo’s amazing stock gains and Microsoft’s plunge?

If everyone did, the whole concept of media sensationalism would die ! (and I sure wish it did, after the unfortunate incident of me watching Headline news the other day!)

Congratulations ISRO.

(Pic courtesy: http://www.isro.gov.in/)

Congratulations are due to the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) for their world record launch of 10 satellites in one go. Wow. The entire world is now in awe. Way to go ISRO. The last record was by the Masters of Rockets – Russia, which had launched 8 satellites in one go. This gives ISRO immeasurable credibility in its capabilities. Now, people will no longer shake their heads in disbelief, when they hear about Chandrayan – the planned moon trip.

Indian Election Commission awakens to the tech age

Last week, when I was travelling on the bus to work, I happened to notice the following news items.

  • BJP opens its website. It is a pretty crappily designed site – atleast when viewed in Firefox. Go see for yourself. (www.bjp.org)
  • Election Commission considers placing of e-ads (ads in websites/popups etc) as election propaganda material, and costs towards placing these should be accounted for.
  • There will be a timing restriction on election propaganda SMS’s.

It is heartening to see, that the EC, and some of the parties are waking up to the tech-age … atlast.

Fleeing Computer Science

We have been hearing for some time now about students not choosing computer science as a major in the United States. Now, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and IEEE-CS have teamed up to prepare a brochure aimed at high school students to gear them up and encourage them to take up Computer Science.

Two interesting points I saw in this article:

  • At Stanford, CS has dropped from being the second largest major to the seventh. Often they end up in the economics or biology departments instead, not necessarily because they want to become economists or biologists, but because they’re following the money. Finance and health care are seen as more cutting edge.
  • The work of computer scientists is highlighted as finding solutions to “real-world problems” in fields from robotics to digital forensics.

Does this study include only American citizens or does it involve the score of Indian students who go to the US of A for graduate studies. Also, it is very interesting to see the ‘booming’ of engineering colleges in India, and the number of CS majors in the country increasing.

No more TNPCEE

President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam has given his assent to the Tamil Nadu Bill that seeks to abolish the common entrance test for admission to professional courses in the State. According to Higher Education Secretary K. Ganesan, the next step would be for the government to issue a gazette notification, which would contain the date from which the new Act would come into effect. For the past three years, the State government has been trying to abolish the the Tamil Nadu Professional Courses Entrance Examination (TNPCEE) on the ground that rural students found it difficult to cope with the test. They were unable to either pay for or compete with students in urban areas, who had easier access to coaching centres.

(excerpt from The Hindu)

The Tamil Nadu Government (India) has been pushing for abolishing the state wide entrance exam for engineering colleges in the state. Apparently a couple of days back, the President of India, gave his approval to this. So now what ?

The state of affairs in getting admission into engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu is screwed up enough already. Now nepotism and bribery will reign supreme. What is education going to these days ?

Two points I am ticked about:

  • Notice what the politician dude said, the next step is more of informing the press and a gazette notification etc. There is no mention of what the ‘real’ next step would be in, in terms of reform
  • The TNPCEE is based mostly out of the Class XII syllabus. I know, because I prepared for it. Why would someone have to ‘pay’ or ‘have access to tuition classes’ for this. Ideally, doing well in the XII boards in a state board school should qualify enough to get in.

Big brother is watching

Yup. Big brother is defenitely watching. It is very frightening to see what is happening in Britain. The Britons are being watched by the Government like never before. There is a camera for every 14 citizens apparently watching them 24/7.

The cameras are also talking now! Some of these cameras are being fitted with loudspeakers, so that the government can chastize wrong doers instantaneously. This is not a sci-fi movie.

Read the following bloomberg article.

George Orwell Was Right: Spy Cameras See Britons’ Every Move by Nick Allen (bloomberg)