Using Paypal to pay for things has been quite easy for folk who have credit cards in India, but until now accepting payment using Paypal was impossible for Indian sellers without a US/UK bank account. With Paypal’s new “Request a Cheque” feature, this is set to change.

Now Indians can get rupee cheques mailed to them from Paypal on request (minimum $150 equivalent with a $5 service charge). This ought to be a big boost for e-commerce in India because it’s now a lot easier for most Indians to sell on eBay or over the web than it was previously.

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If you mail a bomb through the post, the law doesn’t hold the post responsible. However, if you sell porn on Baazee (now Ebay’s Indian arm), Baazee’s CEO Avnish Bajaj goes to jail.

For those who don’t know about the Delhi MMS scandal, here’s coverage. This ‘unexpected consequence’ was triggered by a college kid using Baazee to sell VCDs of that clip — apparently innocuously labeled “Delhi girls having fun” — on Baazee. For those who want to know why Baazee’s CEO’s arrest was brain-dead, there’s a great thread now running on India-GII.

All over the world, and indeed even in India, network service providers are given “common carrier” exemptions as long as they cooperate with the authorities. The ‘arrest first, look up the law later’ attitude the Indian police have displayed here do them no credit.

Update: several news outlets, including Rediff and the Indian Express, reported Friday Dec 17 that “anyone who transmitted [will] face action.” Considering the video made the rounds in Delhi on MMS far before it got sold on VCDs in Palika Bazaar, I wonder when Airtel and Hutch (Delhi’s leading MMS providers) will be taken to task (hint: never).

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Instapundit talks about how easily accessible bits are changing the fundamentals of several industries, and finds the creeping hand of Karl Marx. For example in computer software

the first indication came when the falling price of computers crossed the point where the average programmer could afford to own a computer capable of producing the code from which he typically earned his living. This meant that, for the first time since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the ownership of the most critical tool of production in the most critical industry of the world’s leading economy was readily affordable by the individual worker. Throughout the first three decades of the Information Age, the individual worker was still dependent on his employer for his means of production, just as any textile worker in Manchester or Lawrence was in 1840.

Suddenly, this changed. Now it is as if a steelworker could afford his own blast furnace or rolling mill, an automobile worker his own assembly line.

It is hardly surprising that the nascent free software movement exploded in the early 90s, especially after Linus’ success with Linux — powered by cheap x86 processors and a cheap data network (the Internet) the share-alike academic ideal of MIT AI Lab became a practical reality for millions of users.

As pointed out, there are lots of interesting implications for webloggers (free news/opinion creators) and audio- and video-casters (free broadcasters): the entreched media will find it hard to compete in an environment where one-man shops can reach out as much as they do. Like the computer software industry, entrenched media will not die, but it will have to change.

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I decided to try out the optimized MOOX Firefox builds today (I used the SSE-ready M2 build of Firefox 1.0). An interesting quirk I observed is that the text reflow bug #217527 that caused havoc on Slashdot goes away with this build. This is consistent with how timing bugs sometimes vanish, although by the same token the MOOX builds could introduce several other bugs. I have now switched off Raefer Gabriel’s Slashfix extension and Slashdot renders well again. Lucky me.

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The Belmont Club and The Adventures of Chester have excellent coverage of the Fallujah campaign.

What I find interesting is how well the Marines have adapted to urban combat. Of course, there was a huge body of literature on the subject, but this is the first real campaign that shows urban theaters present no great shelter from a modern armed force.

Also interesting is the extent to which infantry is using technology:

For the first time in a major battle, guided artillery is being used quantity. In addition to the now familiar JDAMs, or GPS guided bombs, there are now GPS guided shells. Space based positioning satellites, laser range finding, robotics and networked computing are now as much a part of infantry combat as the boot heel.

Compare this with even the second Gulf War, when poor coordination between various branches of the armed forces (and especially the US and English troops) led to quite a few blue-on-blue casualties. Given that the Fallujah operation occupies a smaller geographical area and thus gives far less wiggle room to the men on the ground, I believe the US armed forces have figured out how to do jointness right.

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If you use Firefox and visit Slashdot, especially as a logged in user, you may have noticed Firefox mess up the rendering on the home page and many inner pages. This is due to Bug #217527 and it seems it will not be fixed in Firefox 1.0 (but is scheduled to be fixed thereafter). I wish the Firefox devs would reconsider, it’s never a good idea to render one of your biggest booster sites badly.

That said, workarounds exist: hit Ctrl+ followed by Ctrl- to reset the display. Or download the latest Mozilla trunk builds. Or (gasp) use IE, it works great with Slashdot.

Update 9 Nov 2004: Hardgrok has a handy little hack extension that sort of fixes this problem, although /. pages opened in background tabs still get borked.

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India’s new Broadband Policy is finally out. NIXI (it says) will finally mandate proper intra-India routing. Outdoor Wifi is allowed ‘in principle’. A basic minimum defintion of broadband has been made — a 256kbps always-on connection. Access providers can partner to utilize and improve available copper for DSL-grade lines. Cable TV providers can provide broadband. DTH providers can provide ‘receive-only’ Internet service (whatever that means). Good progress. The only question in my mind is–

How the hell can Indian citizens demonstrate technological leadership when it needs to look at its government in askance to implement something as non-earth-shaking as broadband-based business plans? Why do we need a Soviet-era policy document that prescribes 256kbps when we have huge amounts of unlit fiber capacity in this country? Why does the government have to mandate basic technical measures like the NIXI?

In my mind, the answer is, we’re too used to following to see the opportunity to lead.

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Via Instapundit:

Foresight Institute has appointed Dr. Peter Diamandis, Chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation, to lead the think tank’s Nanotechnology Prize Steering Committee. The leading think tank and public interest organization focusing on nanotechnology, Foresight Institute established the Feynman Grand Prize in 1996 to motivate scientists and engineers to design and construct a functioning nanoscale robotic arm with specific performance characteristics.

I’m a little sceptical of prizes in nanotech because unlike space (with its huge — especially as you get to geosynchronous and beyond — initial investments, unknown potential for return and potential years before breakeven) nanotech is generally understood to be much more commercially lucrative and has lower initial investments. There is also no dearth of academic and commercial research in the subject worldwide. Hence the prize does not quite add as much value here as it in the case of the X Prize. Failed attempts at winning the Feynman Prize will also not be (discounting gray goo scenarios) as potentially spectacular as failed rocketry/plane-launch attempts, thus possibly affecting public interest, but that’s another story.

On the other hand, most of this research is materials-oriented work (such as nanofibers in your pants), and a robotic arm that performs as well as simple bacteria is still a BHAG, so perhaps some good will come out of this.

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Though I have been skeptical about current approaches for rich net apps, I’ve been looking at Macromedia’s Flex and Laszlo for some time to see if they come up to scratch. Of late, both have been in the news — Laszlo because they open-sourced their app server, and Flex because Macromedia announced its giving away the software to qualified non-commercial users for $9. This is all good, however, neither of these two quite leave me satisfied.

Both currently compile to Flash. Flex (I believe) is wedded to it. Laszlo, while theoretically target-independent, currently supports only Flash. Flash is known to be fast (even though non-Windows implementations have typically been a tad slow) and is used widely for ads, animations and short games; however looking through simple demos like the Amazon store shows that the the UI is far more sluggish than a standard HTML interface.

Also, both approaches currently are lousy, accessibility-wise. Even considering the work done by Macromedia to improve accessibility in Flash 7, I cannot imagine Amazon converting every page on its store to this format (and if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be any point implementing the order/checkout process in Flash, since that would mean subjecting shoppers to two different interfaces).

Then there are the developmental hurdles of declarative programming (not necessarily a bad thing; but it is unfamiliar to many developers and needs a good WYSIWYG IDE to be productive) and a costly application server sitting between your data and your users. And what does all this buy you? Why, Drag and drop! Data binding! Platform Independent Fonts! Sigh — supposedly obsolete IE has handled all of this since version 5, and has 85% of the browser market. The Mozilla crew is catching up, and the WHAT-WG process will ensure Safari and Opera do, too.

I can understand there may be a market for these products among those who need rich net apps right now, but those looking at this from a strategic point of view would do well to either target IE only, or wait for XAML (which is going to be baked into IE in Longhorn), or work with other browser vendors and the WHAT-WG to ensure that Web Forms 2.0 ships ASAP (and withstand a diversity of UIs as browser vendors work to iron bugs out of their Web Forms implementation, as they did with CSS, for a while).

Bottom line: upgrading the browser results in a far superior user experience than hacking together kludges on the server that execute on the client via plugins. And because of this, Flex and Laszlo, while attractive, look like products whose windows of opportunity are closing — fast.

Update Oct 12: Dr Dreff comments; he says Rich Internet Apps (RIAs) have a future without MS — he specifically mentions Apple — and MS never ships on time anyway. True, but Safari developers have been active on Web Forms 2.0, and his points do not invalidate my proposition that delivering your entire UI through a “presentation server” and requiring a plug-in to view it has no future when HTML itself can be extended to support modern UI niceties like drag/drop, fonts and autocomplete. In fact, if Adam Bosworth’s Caching Framework ever sees the light of day, it could, in conjunction with a modern widget set, revolutionize the way web apps are done — web users can finally get the same experience current Lotus Notes users do when they work with their apps offline.

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47 years to the day after Sputnik, SpaceShipOne touches down in Mojave and wins the X-Prize. Though the prize is no longer in contention, others, such as the Da Vinci Project, plan to follow, making the dream of regular, cheap non-government spaceflight many more steps closer to reality.

To place what has happened today in context, the Mercury missions in the early 60s cost $1.5 billion in 1994 dollars. SpaceShipOne’s flight, on the other hand, cost just under $25 million.

On the X-Prize webcast, I’m listening to Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X-Prize Foundation who’s talking about how one spaceship is not enough, how real space travel will depend on having a fleet of ships, each with competing designs offer the public increasingly lower costs. Right on. In fact, to keep the spirit of competition in space alive, the Foundation is planning an annual spaceflight grand prix called the X-Prize Cup that should become to space vehicles what the F1 Grand Prix circuit is to automobiles.

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