I dunno, but this Washington Post article shows that it’s not a slam dunk that the US is really so far behind India and China creating engineers as common knowledge would have us believe. Turns out there’s a good chance that the US numbers were quite a bit higher then reported and the Chinese numbers (originally based upon reports from the Chinese government) were highly inflated for a number of reasons.

When you think about it, China and India have a vested interest in reporting higher then actual numbers (to increase interest in getting companies to open offices in their country) and many companies (both US and foreign) have a strong reason to perpetuate those numbers (to perpetuate the myth that there is a labor shortage in the US).

So being a geek I enjoy your typical geek toys like my Treo 650 and home theater (just upgraded to an Onkyo TX-SR803). Anyways, ever since switching from Verizon (expensive, not great feature list, but good coverage) to Cingular (less expensive, more features, almost as good coverage) I’ve been fighting with interference between the phone and my powered subwoofer.

Anyways, long story short, is that this is apparently a common problem for TDMA/GSM phones and subwoofers which take line-level input. Basically, the phone traffic is picked up by the speaker and is amplified to an audiable level. Very annoying.

Apparently, having high quality shielded audio cables aren’t enough… your sub needs to be shielded as well. As it turns out, a lot of high quality subwoofers aren’t shielded, because shielding is usually only to prevent the magnents in the speakers from interfering with TV’s. Since most people don’t put their subwoofers near their TV’s (unlike satellite speakers) there isn’t usually any need to shield them.

So what’s the solution? Dunno. Maybe if I were to get a shielded subwoofer it would solve the problem, maybe not. Not really sure I want to make a $350 gamble. I’ve had one friend suggest wrapping it in aluminum foil and grounding it to solve the problem…. not sure that’ll go with the decor in the living room though.