[The Duke]

if latin american and india have such "talent", why can't they develop these industries internally, why must we export Oracle to India 500 workers at a time, let India develop their own database companies.

I think the answers to your questions are pretty self-evident. They haven't become superpowers because their national histories have not been conducive to that. This, however, does not reflect on the potential of individuals who by circumstance of birth happen to live there.

And there is plenty of true innovation taking place all over the world today. In fact, many of those technologists can't work within the US because, by their measure, the US is not a "free country" ( ref. http://www.openbsd.org/crypto.html#people )

[oceanview]

well, at least we agree on that, if US corporate executives weren't so hell bent on sending these jobs out of the US and filling their own pockets with the cost savings, these countries would not on their own be able to develop these same industries which would compete with the US ones a lower cost profile.

[Cronos]

I think the reason why they haven't started world beating comapnies so far is that they've both just had 50 years of independence, like the US in the 1830s or so, pretty fresh. Many Chinese and Indians ahve been at the core of our tech companies here in the US and also in NASA and other science foundations (wasn't the third fastest supercompauter built by a team under an Indian prof?). Their countries had and still have too much regulation to set up a company there. The problem is that they are reducing these hinderances while we are actually increasing them, with additional regulations, taxes, tariffs, laws, enviromental wacko regulations etc.