Slashdot Mirror

1. no offshoring and no H-1B/L-1 employment
2. no offshoring and H-1B/L-1 employment
3. offshoring and no H-1B/L-1 employment
4. offshoring and H-1B/L-1 employment

To eliminate some combinations that are impossible, we first consider whether we can eliminate offshoring. Offshoring occurs from the moment that Americans engage in trade with any foreign country. For example, if we buy apples grown in Thailand, then we are engaging in offshoring because the foreign labor grew those apples. Can we eliminate foreign trade? No.

The stickier question is whether offshoring eliminates jobs. According to the "The misery of manufacturing", "The Economist" says, "No." The USA is a big market, and manufacturers locate engineering and design centers in the market in which they have a significant presence. For example, Hyundai is now building a factory and design center in the USA, according to "Speed Kills" by "Forbes".

Therefore, we cannot eliminate offshoring, and it is neither bad nor good. It is neutral. We are left with only option #3 (offshoring and no H-1B/L-1 employment) and option #4 (offshoring and H-1B/L-1 employment).

Can we eliminate H-1B/L-1 employment? Absolutely yes. Since companies can offshore their R&D work, they can build an R&D center in India and hire all the engineers that they claim to need. Each engineer hired in India will cost only 1/10 of the cost of an H-1B/L-1 engineer.

Supporters of H-1B/L-1 employment say that an Indian employed as an H-1B worker in the USA will spend his $100,000 salary in the USA, thus creating more jobs. That observation is bogus. If the Indian wants to work for an American company, he should go back to India to work at $5,000 at the American site in Bangalore. The American company will then save $95,000. That money does not simply sit idly in the bank. The American company will re-invest that $95,000 into the domestic facilities and hire an American citizen.

Furthermore, when Hyundai sets up its design center in the USA, the Indian will be in India, and the jobs at the design center will go to American citizens.

In short, option #3 (offshoring but no H-1B/L-1 employment) is the best scenario. In fact, offshoring defeats the strongest bogus argument supporting H-1B/L-1 employment. When a company like Google says that it absolutely needs to hire H-1B/L-1 workers because Americans are not good enough, then we say, "Fine. Set up shop overseas. There is plenty of labor there."

Please read "H-1B Myths". Contact your representative in Washington and tell them to terminate the H-1B/L-1 program. Do not wait for the person sitting at the next computer terminal to do your civic duty. Move your ass. Do the your job.

... from the desk of the reporter

It probably seems intuitive to you, and that's the problem. Lots of intuitive things just aren't true, because usually your guesses are based on incomplete or simply incorrect information. That's why it's important for scientists to prove their theories instead of just accepting them blindly.

That's a very good point. For instance, it is "obvious" that plastic cutting boards are better than wood, right? Well, actually no...

Here is just one interesting comparison of cutting boards.

Sometimes you just have to set aside your assumptions and find out.

Harris Miller, by the way, the head of the ITAA. This is a
front organization for Bill Gates in Washington.
Harris Miller is not a tech expert, but an
immigration lawyer. He made his career lobbying
for importing more itinerant laborers to pick
crops. Impressed with his skills, the richest
people in America hired him to lobby for more H1-B
visas. Unfortuneately for American workers, he
suceeded. Norm Matloff has some information on Harris Miller here.
more information here.

Note: a guy that looks a lot like Miller
drives a Big Mercedes with Virginia vanity licence tags saying "ITAA".
He goes 95 MPH when everybody else is going 70-75 and runs people off the road.

How? First, please visit the web site that explains "H-1B Myths". Professor Matloff, who teaches computer science at a top-notch university, has campaigned tirelessly to terminate the H-1B program.

Anyhow, we have only 2 choices.

1. H-1B employment but no outsourcing.
2. Outsourcing but no H-1B employment.

The second choice is best and will result in the long-term gain of jobs for Americans. The United States of America (USA) is a big market, and companies will set up shop in the USA once their share of the market reaches a certain critical size. As well, domestic content laws facilitate this trend. Toyota and Honda are excellent examples; they have built huge manufacturing and design facilities in the USA.

Further, by terminating H-1B employment, you ensure that American jobs stay with Americans.

The second choice also directly deals with the strongest bogus argument by unethical American companies like Intel and possibly Google. Even when Silicon Valley has 8% unemployment, they insist that cannot find American workers for critical jobs and that they must hire H-1Bs. We in the Slashdot community should say, "Fine. Go set up shop overseas. There is plenty of labor there."

... from the desk of the reporter

The Department of Labor would disagree. If the issue of "qualified" were entirely up to the subjective judgment of the employer, then any high-school graduate can see that the H-1B laws allow any unethical American company at any time to access the world's labor market. The article "Experience with H-1B's?" describes a violation of the H-1B laws, or the H-1B laws are broken. The Department of Labor will say that "Experience with H-1B's?" describes a violation of the H-1B laws.

Come on, folks. Forward a copy of "Experience with H-1B's?" to the Department of Labor. Check its contact information.

While you are on-line, please visit the web site called "H-1B Myths". Professor Norman Matloff is a professor at a top-notch university in computer science and has testified in Congress. He has claimed repeatedly that there is no labor shortage in computer science and that companies like Google hire only a tiny percentage of qualified applicants. The article "Experience with H-1B's?" confirms what Professor Matloff says and provides enough information to investigate a violation of the H-1B laws. The article claims that companies like Google and IBM want "star" programmers instead of merely "good" programmers.

... from the desk of the reporter.

Let me guess.

Owens @ UC Davis

Akeley and Hanrahan @ Stanford

I can't speak for how you prepare your food, but mine is generally cooked for more than 2 seconds and goes straight from pot or wok to clean plates

Actually, most of my food isn't cooked at all. Go read through this and see if, using your current preparation methods, you still think it makes a big difference if your food hits the ground. Do you use a wooden cutting board? Ever let things thaw outside of refrigeration? Ever have eggs a little runny? When you reheat something like pizza, do you cook it long enough and at a high enough temperature to kill everything?

Another good point is do you ever eat out? I used to work at a four star french restaurant whose kitchen was anything but clean. I've also eaten at a number of restaurants that were later closed for health violations.

We regularly eat food that has been in more perilous places than our floors. If I'm making a salad and a cherry tomato pops out onto the floor, I'm gonna pick that up, run it under the faucet (for what very little good that does), and then I'm gonna eat it.

Many have! I'm working on a thesis at the moment that does just that, and others, such as GrIDS have coined the term "Early Bird" before.

I went to the University of California, Davis and paid the ~$4000 tuition and ~$1500 with loans. Help me get back at them by slashdotting the site!

While these books may seem well researched and informative, it is important to note their main financial contributer while doing their research was the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints(Mormons). In fact, the publishers of these two books was founded in New York, but moved it's headquarters to Salt Lake City, Utah, and is majority owned by the Mormons.

Why does all that matter? Conflict of interest. Remember, the mormons are the ones that claim their founder, Joseph Smith, translated a previously "hidden" "message from God" into english from ... Egyptian heiroglyphics. And while his translation has been completely debunked, millions of Mormons continue to believe. And the Mormon church wants nothing more than to trick more people. So they Have hired Lesley and Roy Adkins to slowly add credibility to their story of "enlightenment from God through their prophet".

This is one of the wealthiest institutions in the world, and they are trying to legitimize their claims. In fact, Mormons have already invaded much of the U.S. political system and once in power, they will censor all other belief systems and, using their overseas propoganda army they will attempt to take over the world.

If you buy into these books, you are buying in to the Mormon conspiracy.

This public service announcement brought to you by ICBLF

The tech worker shortage was all bullshit to begin with. Look here.

Sorry, but you're wrong. Oh, you're right about what the law says, but you are very wrong about how it actually plays out in the real world. I strongly suggest that you do a little reading.

Congratulations, though, on apparently finding one of the few honest companies to sponsor you. Still, I couldn't help but notice:

That is exactly the way it works, judging by the raise I was given to bring my salary up to fair market level when my Green Card application was in progress...

1) Data converting. I integrate data from diferent sources (diferents labs) using python scripts.
2) Bioinformatics: With biopython I do very diferent tasks, like design primers in batch and data converting, but this time using the parsers included in biopython. Now I'm working on an adaptation of this program:
SNP_Discovery I'm also making a GUI for CL program (here: GUI BLAST)

I was RIF'd in May 2001 just after the dot-bomb collapse, and was unable to even secure an interview. In the two years that followed, I netted only two interviews although I have over twenty years in programming. I know this had a lot to do with my age, since it was communicated to me through recruiters and other sources that longevity in the field directly translates into dollars. They see that hiring younger necessarilly means hiring cheaper.

Read the paper - it's all in there.

Are drugs the answer then? Should we just put all our livestock and laboratory animals on Prozac? Dr. Mench feels that while "mood altering" drugs are an important tool in helping animals to cope or preventing stress or injury we should view them as a band-aid until we design management practices that improve welfare.

Prozac

Go here if you don't believe me. Tell me, when was the last time you saw a job advertisement asking for a MS and no experience? If you got a full ride that would be one thing, but driving yourself into debt from student loas isn't the way to go. If all that money's really burning a hole in your pocket, you're better off getting a bunch of certs instead, since it seems employers now pay more attention to those than they do degrees.

Well, they could have picked a less dignified picture ..

http://sja.ucdavis.edu/images/einstein-lg.jpg

Gamma rays will kill RAM contents... anyone know how resilient HDs are to these? Various error correction schemes/circuits can be used to limit these effects (as others have discussed). You're restricted to 4Gig with a 32bit bus... the 64bit variety for > 4G... and big RAMs aren't that cheap! The memory management/corruption problem could be avoided if the RAM were put on a separate data bus and controlled explicitly by some sort of a SQL controller with exclusive access to the RAM. Perhaps a chip with a processor for codeable memory indexing algorithms and a shmit load of RAM might be useful in the future.

I'm sorry to say this, but it's already been done. Several border states have already sued the Feds and won. If I remember correctly, the awarded sums were in the billions of dollars. The basis for the suits was the fact that the states had to pay for immigration benefits and jail time for illegal immigrants.

I was surprised to see this on here. I have done most of the programming for these projects and have worked closely with each person mentioned. You can check out our outdated website for some of our previous projects at the BAESIL website.

You can also direct questions to me and I'll try and help.

Also We have looked at other methods of killing plants, such as knifes and even flame throwers. Saving on herbicide has it's obvious benefits.

And if anyone is looking for a machine vision programmer, hire me =)

Hypercomputing. Gilson is a salesman. What I want to know is who is the technical designer on his team? Note that Gilson's machine is based on a paper published by Mark Oskin, Fred Chong, and Tim Sherwood. (This paper was about something called "Active Pages" and has a lot to do with Processing-In-Memory, research that we are also working on). I would think of Chong as being the lead investigator. Here's his homepage: Active Pages This article is chock full of no-namers, but one name does have weight. That's Allan Snavely, who published a very informative piece on benchmarking the Tera MTA. It doesn't surprise me that he was trying expose Gilson's machine as a hoax - Snavely has a big interest in multithreaded parallel machines, and so PIM-like Distributed Memory Architecture like this one is rather suspect. He's also a performance nut (what self-respecting computer engineer isn't?) Take Snavely's comments with a grain of salt. Snavely has most likely read Chong's Active Pages ISCA paper, made back in 1998. He's known about the possibilities of reconfigurable FPGA computing for 5 years, and this is probably his first experience interacting with an actual compiler for it. In our business, whenever anyone sees a compiler for a machine - even if it is theoretical, it's automatically known to have "have promise". Just don't hold the future of computing to that.

UC Davis has the Bargain Barn, with an online list of everything they're selling here. The hook and ladder fire truck has dropped to $4000 because they haven't had any takers. If only I wasn't a poor student....

UC Davis has a pretty good surplus unit called the Bargain Barn. You can find lots of test/medical/older computers/printers/monitors. I know they have a lot of cheap PII's - my department just gave them a batch to sell.

In the meantime, most European countries have effective immigration laws, since they don't rely on an imported underclass to keep their economy going...

http://www.agecon.ucdavis.edu/facultypages/martin/ Germany/Germany.htm

As for your atheist persecution complex, give me a break.

If they get their hands on this then we may have a problem.

Isn't this how the great Irish potato famine started?

Read this, paying especial attention to section 5, and then re-examine your questions...

The last class of people was called slaves.

Do you like it or not, but H1B workers cannot change their employers unless INS approves it.

In some countries free people live in poverty, not only slaves. In USA both slaves and freemen (citizens and GC) have not a bad salary and some social protection (H1B slaves have it less, of course). But it doesn't make any difference. The slave is slave, if he cannot go free to another employer even if the other employer agree to hire. Consulting companies, re-selling the work time of their H1B slaves (often even without any contribution from a management side - just pure hours), make the picture even more clear.

If you don't really like the word slaves, then use another word - coacroaches, rates or parasites, that what americans mean anyway when they want to protect US job market from being infested by immigrants.

After a brief search here is one article and another one (both old, cannot find newer quickly) showing how the US export of cheap products kills the local industry and creates the stream of illegal immigrants flooding the US job market.

It's a perfect illustration: US wants to play the globalization game when it comes to US product export, but wants to close the border when it comes to the international job market response. That's not fair.

Norm Matloff gives a very detailed analysis of why the fear of jobs leaving is bogus.

The law says they have to be paid the prevailing wage, but the law has no teeth, so they aren't, and they in simple supply and demand, plus witht he green card applications and other things that make them vulnerable, put their wages down and have helped drag our wage down, which is why IT wages have fallen for the first time in a decade recently.

Of course people can listen to your idea and cringe like babies at the thought of jobs moving elsewhere and bending over and taking whatever is given them. Having known many IT workers who were probably dorks who were beaten up through high school, it doesn't surprise me they carry this wimpy attitude into adulthood. Norm Matloff responds to your question in a very detailed manner, as well as other H1-B questions for anyone interested.

U.C. Davis has some nice information on the subject. You get to play with pH meters, refractometers, measure specific gravity, titrate total acidity, figure out how much K2CO3 to counter high acidity, etc.

The people calling for more H1Bs didn't want better labor, they wanted CHEAPER labor. You're implying that labor from outside of the country as being inherently better than American labor, which is rather racist. But they certainly are willing to accept less money in exchange for being a slave.

H1Bs are based on the idea that there are no qualified citizens to fill the position. Yes, a foreign worker might be better educated or might not, but the H1B system is supposed to insure that a visaed worker doesn't displace a citizen or resident alien. And various sources, such as Norm Matloff have shown that there really never was a shortage, just that that software industry enjoyed cheap slaves who couldn't easily hop countries.

I personally think that if India's education system is so great, then folks there should start their own companies and develop their own products. But I think that that American companies exporting tech jobs is bad for the US. And if you think that is racist, then you're wrong. I don't care if they're exporting them to China, Ethiopia, India, Mexico, or Ireland - they should keep them inside the US.

"Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" is one of the most thorough and compelling papers I've seen on the subject. It can be found at heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html

A computer-science professor in California has statistics to show that programmers have careers not much longer than pro-football players.

Putting aside the issue of programmers versus engineers, Professor Norm Matloff finally gets some credit, albeit indirectly, on the /. homepage.

I'm just a technician, but every working EE and 95% of working Programmers I know are considerably older than 29.

Maybe it really is that bad in places like San Jose, I don't know. If so, then it's time to do something about the H1-B situation, and that means Unions. I know that's an unpopular concept among the high tech crowd, but sometimes it's the only way to protect yourself.

The point on the political spectrum that the original post may be searching for is Americans for Gun Safety -- which is a very moderate group that acknowledges the right to bear arms while making a strong factual case for laws to ensure that everyone who buys a gun goes through a background check.

The Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis is run by Garen Wintemute MD, who is an emergency room physician, licensed gun dealer, and sometimes gun owner. He is highly respected in the field. His research generally supports laws that make it harder for people with minor criminal records to get guns, but he is not afraid to tell the gun violence prevention advocates when they've got it wrong.

The CDC WISQARS statistics system will let you find out how many people died from gun injuries (and other causes) by year, age, cause, state, etc. You'll find things that neither side is willing to say loudly -- like the majority of gun deaths in America are suicides. It's also nice technology.

1. Hiring practices in the IT industry (age discrimination, H1B, etc.) Here is a good place to read more.

2. Software licensing practices, UCITA etc.

3. Copyright and Patent issues, especially related to the corporate "land grab" mentality towards ideas and code. This has the most drastic long term effects, while the previous two are easier (I think) issues for Congress to address.

the stability of these releases are questionable, and they have been known to cone dump into various output files.

Cone dumping is a problem... hopefully, this new vehicle solves it.

Who cares about constant? Play with the thermostat and get your your spray bottle so you can create pretty graphs like these.

The preprint is posted on the arXiv.org web site, which is exactly that, a place to put preprints. Preprints that appear there have not been subject to peer review, so at this point, this is an annoucement of a result, which is very different than a number of mathematicians with the appropriate background agreeing that this is a proof.

The abstract from the arXiv is:
This paper proves that any simply connected closed three dimensional stellar manifold is stellar equivalent to the three dimensional sphere.

and the intro of the paper says that "Since every 3-dimensional manifold can be triangulated and any two stellar equivalent manifolds are PL homeomorphic, our result does imply the famous Poincare conjecture."

There is a nice front end to the math part of the arXiv from UC-Davis at this link

How credible is this study? It's a pilot study making a request for more funding and it hasn't been peer-reviewed yet.
How do we know this isn't a ploy just like the Marin County Breast Cancer power-grab/funding-grab?

From The Coming Global Oil Crises:
"The major energy inputs in U.S. corn production are oil, natural gas, and/or other high grade fuels. Fertilizer production and fuels for mechanization account for about two-thirds of these energy inputs for corn production (Pimentel, 1991)."

Nathan

The speec refernces a paper written in 1974 that describes the hack in greater detail and axpands on variations. The Multics article Ken referenced can be found HERE and the trapdoor he discusses is around page 52 or so.

Now, my four year old son says "dad, we should write a story about this and that and publish it at my homepage so kids all over the world can read it". "Dad, let me play tetris on your Communicator" - heck, he has even already broken 2 communicators (dont tell my employer :)) Also, I quess I was around 11 when I first used a mouse. And maybe 9 when I first punched in the first letters using a keyboard.

Things chance. 20 years from now kids learn to use computer when they are 2. You and the teachers have to work seriously hard to even have a change to be at same level on some detailed area of knowledge. Teachers should - and already concentrate - in teaching larger concepts and teach to ask why - instead of how.

I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head:

• cams to allow Internet visitors to view the interior
• The groundskeeper or caretaker ought to have Internet access
• The people who give tours and such could interact with online visitors
• A security system
• Cause Sir Isaac would think it was really cool if he was alive today

Bottom line: this is a subject which is not pleasant to ponder too deeply.

Someone addresses the H1B Problem More data on the H1B problem Proof that the NSF caused the H1B Mess

Plus the flooding of H1b Visa Workers and the layoff of the Dotcom workers caused a 25% unemployment of IT Workers. Making IT workers "A dime a dozen" in the eyes of managers. People who used to earn $60,000USD to $90,000USD a year now have to compete for $20,000USD to $40,000USD a year jobs in the IT market that require more skills and education than their former jobs did. If their college degree is ten years old, they are rejected because the knowledge they learned is now obsolite (unless they are COBOL programmers or something that doesn't expire that quickly). My degree is now ten years old, and I either have to go back to college and get a new one, or hope that my AAS will get me a job somewhere.

Plus managers have always discriminated against IT workers, calling us all sorts of names, working us 60 hours or more a week at no extra pay, trying to get us to write code faster but not understanding than when code is slammed out at those speeds that it isn't as reliable.

That an Microsoft changing everything every three years doesn't help. Why it is enough to turn a developer to Linux and C++ with a bit of Java and Perl. ;)