"Jumping through hoops" means that hiring H1-B is more complicated (which is true). How does it damage the value of your job? If anything, it makes it more enticing, since the same hoops don't have to be jumped through to hire you.
Simple. Say I want $120,000 and I know I'm worth it because my skills match other Americans I know working similar positions (say I e-mail people working at various companies or talk to them at meetups). The company can, however, get someone competent at $80,000/yr with less experience and a little hoop jumping. And those hoops cost maybe $2000. It's a net profit to go for it for the company. The financial people look at that and say "clearly the second is the best option." The very act of going for that cheaper worker is disruptive to my own endeavors, because the company will advertise at $80K, and either tell me I'm overqualified or not qualified, even if I'm a perfect candidate for the job (not that I'd actually apply, because the salary is too low, you see the downsides in both cases for me here?).
No, it's because they get to apply for a green card while living and working in the USA, and from there for citizenship. Basically, it's pretty much the only viable road to citizenship for a skilled professional, excepting the green card lottery (which is, well, a lottery, so it's not something you can build your life around).
That's still a non-monetary benefit that tips the favor of bean-counters toward H-1Bs. Whatever the goals of the worker. It's disruptive. I'm fine for smart, educated, or otherwise capable people becoming US citizens. I'm not fine for the only good way to make that happen disrupting our job market. That's like cutting off your foot to cure an itch. And no, I don't have a ready-made solution to the problem. It just bothers me.
Wrong. H-1B is duel intent in that you can (important, CAN, not MUST) be the holder of an H-1B AND seek legal immigration (that is, you can apply for and get your green card legally while working here on an H-1B).
We're not talking about labor. We're talking about skilled professions. In skilled professions, the salary of a position varies WILDLY with experience and ten billion other factors. There is no fixed standard salary for a software engineer with 2 years experience who knows technologies A, B, C, D, E, and F. The position pays whatever the company says it'll pay, and people who companies think are more valuable make more money. This is where H-1Bs cause significant disruption. Say you can hire an H-1B who is competent (note, I've never said anything about an H-1Bs ability to actually perform a job, I'm not a bigot nor an idiot, because I know H-1Bs who are incredible people and wickedly smart) at 70% the rate Americans want in that position. So you lower the salary and advertise for it, get nobody applying because it's way too low, so now you go pick up your H-1Bs. That's disruptive.
We're talking about H-1Bs, not immigrants. Yes, it is a fact that a H-1B visa is *NOT* an immigration visa, it is a temporary employment in the USA which allows that person to relocate here for the duration of employment.
But I'll bite. Here's why people are upset about it: To get H-1Bs, companies must jump through hoops, and those hoops damage our job market and the value of our jobs. Also, H-1Bs are willing to accept a lower salary because they get to live in the USA without immigrating. This is why companies like them (not because they might actually be skilled workers).
I wouldn't hire someone who is an expert DBA, expert front-end and back-end developer, expert IT in every operating system ever made, and a professional athlete, too. I don't expect such a person exists, so putting a price-tag of $5,000,000/yr on that position is ridiculous. If the job entails a lot of work in different fields such that it's difficult to find a single person capable of doing every task, you split it up. It's the same reason you don't encapsulate tens of thousands of lines of unrelated code into a single function (it has no purpose, at that point). Honestly, that position has very little responsibilities from the perspective of most IT professionals who actually do anything domain-related. It's purely administrative. That's why we're upset at $800K. It's pretty clear the ICANN is just a money-making machine and the people at the top of it are cashing out big time without being required to actually think (hence: gTLDs and cooperation with the government to censor individuals).
1. Come up with useless retarded ways to extort money from businesses and/or people.
2. Hire a CEO and funnel the money into his pockets to draw attention from the ridiculous salaries people who don't even come into work make.
SOP for businesses these days. It's about time we cut the legs out from under ICANN, and maybe even remove the head, too. ICANN has such an insignificantly infinitesimal role in Internet management, they could be shut-down today and only a handful of people in the world would notice (primarily the people actually making money from it).
Well one problem is that they have an "apps for business" and they specifically market to businesses, but they offer no business features. For instance, not having the software change on you. It's not a business feature for software to significantly change over-night requiring re-training of employees. That's a reason not to buy/use software, if anything. For that reason, almost any other service is better than any of their apps. How would you like it if your SQL db automatically updated itself and broke half your triggers and queries, or if your programming language was constantly being updated with backwards compatibility not a primary focus and you couldn't compile on an older version, thus requiring you to rewrite millions of lines of code every few months, potentially? That's pretty much the same impact a massive UI usability downgrade has on a large company that relies on a google app would have (like the recent GMail interface epic wtf fail).
If you call it a "success." I witnessed Obama's campaign and then listened to the man for one minute and was instantly motivated to get up and go vote for anyone else, literally, ANYONE else, even Palin. Maybe "this guy is SO terrible, you should vote against him" is a better motivation than "hey look, I'm embracing technology while wearing a big smile on my face, never mind half of what I'm saying is contradicting my own actions in office!"
RIAA, would you like to sue Microsoft for having software that ships in Windows that can record audio-out and save it to a wav/mp3 file? And how about Apple, for my iPhone having the same feature (even if the sound is more difficult to get off the device). And pretty much anyone else with a digital audio recorder. Because right now, I can record your songs right off the radio, in fairly OK quality! What if I hum your new hit single? What if I type some of the lyrics? Just curious here. The MPAA failed miserably in this battle against VCRs, what makes you think you're going to succeed with music?
Oh and, why is Google going along with this? This is implementing a DRM by effectively disallowing access to YouTube to anyone who saves its content. What next, you'll ban me from YouTube if I re-enact something I see on YouTube as well? The only logical step to follow this action is to ban all users who put up videos that are clearly exercising Fair Use of content posted on YouTube, because clearly they had to download copyrighted content to do it!
Startups and consultancies should not be paying more than a steady job in the first place, especially when you can completely book consulting for years out (making it a "steady job" effectively). The way to solve the problem for these companies is to offer entry-level wages for training for fresh college grads, the people startups don't want because they need a year or two to get up to speed. Then when they have been "groomed" as you say, you give them a nice fat salary increase to be competitive with their experience and ability, with guaranteed salary reviews (and increases), bonuses, and lots of non-monetary perks. A lot like the startups do. If these people are being poached by non-profitable companies floating on investor cash, major companies pulling in hundreds of millions to billions a year should be able to afford to keep the best of the best around, no matter what. And your managers should not be making 50-80% more than an engineer. It creates this artificial and completely ridiculous "growth" track where an engineer after 5-10 years of experience has only one way to advance his career: becoming a manager. Managerial tasks and engineering tasks are completely and totally distinct. Most of us want to keep writing code and designing things. If salaries for doing so don't continue to grow competitively and the only way to "make more money" is to advance in some ridiculous political hierarchy of managing things (most of which don't need managing), you have a severe problem.
And we need something better than Glassdoor to collect anonymized salary data so we can publicly see who's paying slave wages and who's actually competitive.
Only because it's not illegal to completely ignore the field (which should be corrected). This industry is so backwards. Nothing should be opt-out, because if I have to figure out and maintain a gigantic list of shit that I need to opt-out of, I'm going to be in a nightmare. Instead, everything should be opt-in, and that preference should mean something. It should be up to the people providing these "personalized services" to convince me and others that sharing my information PROVIDES A BENEFIT TO ME, not to them or their affiliates. And then, and only then, will I enable it.
This extends far beyond advertisement tracking. Search engines shouldn't keep a list of your search history unless you ask them to. Neither should YT. Both Google and YT are opt-out, and the data is likely still kept for policing reasons (so it's not a true opt-out, it's just a "don't show that to me" type option). Look at the recent AT&T privacy thing. They mass e-mailed a letter to tell everyone that they need to opt-out of having their personally identifiable information shared with AT&T's affiliates. WHAT THE FUCK? And to inform people via an e-mail without requiring a read receipt is just so classy. Got an overly zealous spam filter? Boned. Filtering AT&T messages because they're always offering you "deals on new phones" and telling you that your bill is ready even though it's on auto-pay? Boned. Don't check your e-mail often (or just that e-mail often)? Boned. There are probably millions of customers who don't have the slightest clue what's about to happen to their information. I demand laws that make this kind of shit illegal. EVERYTHING that undermines privacy should be opt-in. EVERYTHING. There is no exception. It is your job to convince me that your service is VALUABLE TO ME, not just to you. And then when I decide as such, and only then, should you be able to do ANYTHING with my personal information or online activity. I'm talking about fines per infraction over $5000 so violating the rights of 1,000,000 people would be financial suicide for even Google or Facebook.
They exist to do namespacing. There's a reason us engineers namespace things in our code, too. Sure, we could put everything under a super global namespace and just fight for names (who gets "Array" or "LinkedList" ??). The real problem is a lack of clear scoping rules (better defined TLDs) and policing of them. Outside of.edu and.mil (and a few others), you don't have to "prove" you fit into that TLD category, so.net,.com,.org, most country TLDs, and so on have all been merged into one big ".misc" category, effectively.
The system has value, but not if those running it just hand everything out to anyone who wants to pay for it. It's clear ICANN is and always has been a huge money grab, so there's no hope for them to do a good job with it. It's curious to think if a distributed system would work better. That is, some corporation buys the domain "com" and licenses subdomains under it "google.com". But then they have complete control over that domain and there aren't any real regulations (they can enforce rules or not enforce rules at their leisure).
What I don't really understand in all this is why the cost of registering a name is increasing more quickly than inflation. From the design of the system the impact on an additional name in the system is insignificant (both insertion time and query time). Adding a new name has almost no cost associated with it -- so why is it getting more and more expensive? Is this ICANN grabbing money or just registrars forming a huge trust to generate profits from nothing?
That list shows the real problem. You're looking at administrative numbers. Down at the very bottom where the numbers start hitting $60K/yr, cut that in half and you're seeing what the numbers look like for professionals working non-administrative positions in Universities, from professors to IT professionals to doing all the damn paperwork that makes those Universities function. The pay scale is literally upside down. Administrators provide almost no value. The president of my tiny little local state school was pulling in $350K/yr base salary with TONS of added non-financial contributions on top of it. That's over an order of magnitude higher than the average salary in that area. And the man did absolutely nothing, ever. Useless bureaucracy with massively inflated salaries doesn't do anything for education. Fundamentally broken hierarchical structures completely undermine the education system, and when they raise tuition, the only people who see a salary increase are administrators. The rest of that increase goes into budgets. So you end up with IT professionals with 5-15 years of experience making under $40,000/yr while entry-level administration positions are sitting at $90K with a fat raise to $110+K in a year. Those positions aren't even business critical -- try running a University without IT these days. This system is beyond totally broken.
Have you watched a professional CS match? It's completely littered with wall spam, grenade bounce glitches, and on and on. You can spend 5 hours trying to figure out what the bounds of penetrable wall are and where the sound of player footsteps or fire line up with them or you can load up a cheat designed to show you wall trace depths and penetration levels on weapons to render walls green and transparent if you can shoot through them + show on screen where a sound originated from so you can quickly match sound direction with whether or not it can be shot through a wall. Instant knowledge, no need to spend hours and hours wasting your time trying to figure it out. Using a tool to get better at a game is what professionals do. It's what professionals do in everything. If you can create something to increase your competency, you do it. For instance, quake 3 pros use custom maps designed for training -- whoops.
You seem to be confusing the concept of "cheating" and "training." Cheating is abusing something that other people DO NOT have access to in order to gain an unfair advantage. If you load up an aimbot in league play, you are cheating. If you learn exactly where to aim and how to wall shoot with a cheat before league play and dominate because you know better than others how to do it, you are not cheating. You're just better at the game. It's their fault for not taking advantage of what the available tools can teach them.
The japanese circa WW2 have a bone to pick with your theory that science doesn't give an "unfair advantage."
And thanks for this well structured, well thought out post. Clearly I said that I spent all my time cheating in public servers. The truth is that myself and others spent all of our time in our own servers with vac disabled with friends or others who were also using cheats to better understand the game or try to make their cheats better than other peoples'.
Top-end players used cheats while training. Being able to intimately learn sound->positioning and where you could shoot through walls with what weapons were made possible by sound-esp and wallhacks. Aimbots that aimed at actual hitboxes instead of models gave a better sense of where to shoot to score hits in various animation sequences. Looking at the actual recoil spreads and their trends for different guns (and using pitch/yaw compensation instead of nospread) showed you how to compensate for recoil extremely effectively. Armed with this knowledge, you're far better at the game than average people.
I developed cheats for a while and I was also a cal-i level player. I went 23-0 legit in one side before being banned in a cal-i scrim back in 1.5, and then barred from scrimming with that team again (and a friend was the manager, he swore up and down that I was cheating). This was before it became common to use cheats to study the game, so I had a huge advantage. You can even download modified maps that have transparent walls if you don't want to run some shady executable cheat (now, you couldn't then). People had made player model mods before that painted the head a bright blue/green that made it very obvious where you should aim (and this was accompanied by color-based aimbots which were pretty terrible).
When we're talking about competitive gaming, researching the game to this level with the assistance of cheats is clearly a benefit. If cheats are treated like some form of a plague where once a person is infected they should never be able to ever play again, you're really just dealing with a massive ignorance. You know, the ignorance of all these bad server admins than ban anyone who's better than them. "Once a cheater, always a cheater" level stupidity. Headshot 5 people in a row? BANNED, too many headshots, must be a cheater!
If we adopted this type of reasoning in science, cutting open a body to figure out how it works would be cheating and would be disallowed. Deconstructing atoms with supercolliders would be considered cheating and disallowed. The creation of vaccines and medicines that cure diseases unnaturally would be considered cheating and disallowed. And if you ever violated any of these rules, you'd be sentenced to death, because once a cheater, always a cheater, and cheaters should be permanently banned from the game (life, in this case). Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?
VAC and PB both already do this -- there are insecure servers in most games. If you get "banned," you can still play. But the flipside is also true, you can search for those insecure servers in the first place and cheat without risk of getting banned, then go back to normal games without cheats on. Not in this solution -- you can't join "cheater friendly" servers until you've already been banned. Terrible idea.
What's not to like? How about the fact that the only way to get to the "special" world is to be caught cheating outside of the "special" world. Why can't I say "I want to play in the special world and use this cheat, then when I'm bored go back and play normally." You can do that with Punkbuster games (just search for punkbuster disabled servers, or put up your own). You can do that with VAC games (just search for insecure games). On and on and on. People who want to create cheats can with most games and cheat with other cheaters for fun (creating a cheat can be incredibly satisfying, you know, even more satisfying than actually playing the game legitimately). They don't have to have their account banned from all regular servers to do so.
So what's not to like? That this system is a step backwards. It offers no benefits, only drawbacks.
When I worked in IT, the last week of my employment was filled with me building as much documentation as possible about things I did (that weren't obvious or were one-offs that didn't merit documentation at the time) so that someone else could do those things. On the last day, I removed my own access from every account I owned and we went through every generic admin-level account and my coworkers changed those passwords (especially those used in tools I wrote), including any global admin passwords we had. It wasn't much of a "pull his plug," and in fact it was quite pleasant, even a relief. I walked away in a completely amicably fashion, even though I disliked the politics that occurred there, likely because I already had a much better job lined up.
As to "data theft" -- I kept a copy of some of the projects/code I developed as tools while working there. For one, as a record of something I did for myself, and two as a thing to look back on later in my software engineering career and laugh at (and maybe submit to TDWTF). Nothing of importance, no data from any databases, no log files, no compromising information. Most of it is HTML/CSS/JS, some of it is basic PHP that generates HTML from templates and does some really basic LDAP stuff, and a little that connects to a MySQL db to pull down configuration or store basic data, nothing really fancy. I would never take data that would be clearly "the company's" in any proprietary fashion, or that contained information to any person's identity or any such other personal information. Both because it's wrong but because I'm quite sure it's illegal, and I'm not a complete idiot.
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I hereby declare that duel === dual!
Simple. Say I want $120,000 and I know I'm worth it because my skills match other Americans I know working similar positions (say I e-mail people working at various companies or talk to them at meetups). The company can, however, get someone competent at $80,000/yr with less experience and a little hoop jumping. And those hoops cost maybe $2000. It's a net profit to go for it for the company. The financial people look at that and say "clearly the second is the best option." The very act of going for that cheaper worker is disruptive to my own endeavors, because the company will advertise at $80K, and either tell me I'm overqualified or not qualified, even if I'm a perfect candidate for the job (not that I'd actually apply, because the salary is too low, you see the downsides in both cases for me here?).
That's still a non-monetary benefit that tips the favor of bean-counters toward H-1Bs. Whatever the goals of the worker. It's disruptive. I'm fine for smart, educated, or otherwise capable people becoming US citizens. I'm not fine for the only good way to make that happen disrupting our job market. That's like cutting off your foot to cure an itch. And no, I don't have a ready-made solution to the problem. It just bothers me.
Wrong. H-1B is duel intent in that you can (important, CAN, not MUST) be the holder of an H-1B AND seek legal immigration (that is, you can apply for and get your green card legally while working here on an H-1B).
We're not talking about labor. We're talking about skilled professions. In skilled professions, the salary of a position varies WILDLY with experience and ten billion other factors. There is no fixed standard salary for a software engineer with 2 years experience who knows technologies A, B, C, D, E, and F. The position pays whatever the company says it'll pay, and people who companies think are more valuable make more money. This is where H-1Bs cause significant disruption. Say you can hire an H-1B who is competent (note, I've never said anything about an H-1Bs ability to actually perform a job, I'm not a bigot nor an idiot, because I know H-1Bs who are incredible people and wickedly smart) at 70% the rate Americans want in that position. So you lower the salary and advertise for it, get nobody applying because it's way too low, so now you go pick up your H-1Bs. That's disruptive.
We're talking about H-1Bs, not immigrants. Yes, it is a fact that a H-1B visa is *NOT* an immigration visa, it is a temporary employment in the USA which allows that person to relocate here for the duration of employment.
But I'll bite. Here's why people are upset about it: To get H-1Bs, companies must jump through hoops, and those hoops damage our job market and the value of our jobs. Also, H-1Bs are willing to accept a lower salary because they get to live in the USA without immigrating. This is why companies like them (not because they might actually be skilled workers).
I wouldn't hire someone who is an expert DBA, expert front-end and back-end developer, expert IT in every operating system ever made, and a professional athlete, too. I don't expect such a person exists, so putting a price-tag of $5,000,000/yr on that position is ridiculous. If the job entails a lot of work in different fields such that it's difficult to find a single person capable of doing every task, you split it up. It's the same reason you don't encapsulate tens of thousands of lines of unrelated code into a single function (it has no purpose, at that point). Honestly, that position has very little responsibilities from the perspective of most IT professionals who actually do anything domain-related. It's purely administrative. That's why we're upset at $800K. It's pretty clear the ICANN is just a money-making machine and the people at the top of it are cashing out big time without being required to actually think (hence: gTLDs and cooperation with the government to censor individuals).
Corruption, it's always the same answer: money.
1. Come up with useless retarded ways to extort money from businesses and/or people.
2. Hire a CEO and funnel the money into his pockets to draw attention from the ridiculous salaries people who don't even come into work make.
SOP for businesses these days. It's about time we cut the legs out from under ICANN, and maybe even remove the head, too. ICANN has such an insignificantly infinitesimal role in Internet management, they could be shut-down today and only a handful of people in the world would notice (primarily the people actually making money from it).
That's what you'd tell them, right? Sorry, but I couldn't resist!
Well one problem is that they have an "apps for business" and they specifically market to businesses, but they offer no business features. For instance, not having the software change on you. It's not a business feature for software to significantly change over-night requiring re-training of employees. That's a reason not to buy/use software, if anything. For that reason, almost any other service is better than any of their apps. How would you like it if your SQL db automatically updated itself and broke half your triggers and queries, or if your programming language was constantly being updated with backwards compatibility not a primary focus and you couldn't compile on an older version, thus requiring you to rewrite millions of lines of code every few months, potentially? That's pretty much the same impact a massive UI usability downgrade has on a large company that relies on a google app would have (like the recent GMail interface epic wtf fail).
I loathe the idea of ever living in New York City but would love to live in a ghost town. You know what they say about assumptions, man!
If you call it a "success." I witnessed Obama's campaign and then listened to the man for one minute and was instantly motivated to get up and go vote for anyone else, literally, ANYONE else, even Palin. Maybe "this guy is SO terrible, you should vote against him" is a better motivation than "hey look, I'm embracing technology while wearing a big smile on my face, never mind half of what I'm saying is contradicting my own actions in office!"
RIAA, would you like to sue Microsoft for having software that ships in Windows that can record audio-out and save it to a wav/mp3 file? And how about Apple, for my iPhone having the same feature (even if the sound is more difficult to get off the device). And pretty much anyone else with a digital audio recorder. Because right now, I can record your songs right off the radio, in fairly OK quality! What if I hum your new hit single? What if I type some of the lyrics? Just curious here. The MPAA failed miserably in this battle against VCRs, what makes you think you're going to succeed with music?
Oh and, why is Google going along with this? This is implementing a DRM by effectively disallowing access to YouTube to anyone who saves its content. What next, you'll ban me from YouTube if I re-enact something I see on YouTube as well? The only logical step to follow this action is to ban all users who put up videos that are clearly exercising Fair Use of content posted on YouTube, because clearly they had to download copyrighted content to do it!
When is this nonsense going to end?
Startups and consultancies should not be paying more than a steady job in the first place, especially when you can completely book consulting for years out (making it a "steady job" effectively). The way to solve the problem for these companies is to offer entry-level wages for training for fresh college grads, the people startups don't want because they need a year or two to get up to speed. Then when they have been "groomed" as you say, you give them a nice fat salary increase to be competitive with their experience and ability, with guaranteed salary reviews (and increases), bonuses, and lots of non-monetary perks. A lot like the startups do. If these people are being poached by non-profitable companies floating on investor cash, major companies pulling in hundreds of millions to billions a year should be able to afford to keep the best of the best around, no matter what. And your managers should not be making 50-80% more than an engineer. It creates this artificial and completely ridiculous "growth" track where an engineer after 5-10 years of experience has only one way to advance his career: becoming a manager. Managerial tasks and engineering tasks are completely and totally distinct. Most of us want to keep writing code and designing things. If salaries for doing so don't continue to grow competitively and the only way to "make more money" is to advance in some ridiculous political hierarchy of managing things (most of which don't need managing), you have a severe problem.
And we need something better than Glassdoor to collect anonymized salary data so we can publicly see who's paying slave wages and who's actually competitive.
Do you want another one of those guys? :)
Just when I thought I had plenty of space for my HD porn.
Only because it's not illegal to completely ignore the field (which should be corrected). This industry is so backwards. Nothing should be opt-out, because if I have to figure out and maintain a gigantic list of shit that I need to opt-out of, I'm going to be in a nightmare. Instead, everything should be opt-in, and that preference should mean something. It should be up to the people providing these "personalized services" to convince me and others that sharing my information PROVIDES A BENEFIT TO ME, not to them or their affiliates. And then, and only then, will I enable it.
This extends far beyond advertisement tracking. Search engines shouldn't keep a list of your search history unless you ask them to. Neither should YT. Both Google and YT are opt-out, and the data is likely still kept for policing reasons (so it's not a true opt-out, it's just a "don't show that to me" type option). Look at the recent AT&T privacy thing. They mass e-mailed a letter to tell everyone that they need to opt-out of having their personally identifiable information shared with AT&T's affiliates. WHAT THE FUCK? And to inform people via an e-mail without requiring a read receipt is just so classy. Got an overly zealous spam filter? Boned. Filtering AT&T messages because they're always offering you "deals on new phones" and telling you that your bill is ready even though it's on auto-pay? Boned. Don't check your e-mail often (or just that e-mail often)? Boned. There are probably millions of customers who don't have the slightest clue what's about to happen to their information. I demand laws that make this kind of shit illegal. EVERYTHING that undermines privacy should be opt-in. EVERYTHING. There is no exception. It is your job to convince me that your service is VALUABLE TO ME, not just to you. And then when I decide as such, and only then, should you be able to do ANYTHING with my personal information or online activity. I'm talking about fines per infraction over $5000 so violating the rights of 1,000,000 people would be financial suicide for even Google or Facebook.
They exist to do namespacing. There's a reason us engineers namespace things in our code, too. Sure, we could put everything under a super global namespace and just fight for names (who gets "Array" or "LinkedList" ??). The real problem is a lack of clear scoping rules (better defined TLDs) and policing of them. Outside of .edu and .mil (and a few others), you don't have to "prove" you fit into that TLD category, so .net, .com, .org, most country TLDs, and so on have all been merged into one big ".misc" category, effectively.
The system has value, but not if those running it just hand everything out to anyone who wants to pay for it. It's clear ICANN is and always has been a huge money grab, so there's no hope for them to do a good job with it. It's curious to think if a distributed system would work better. That is, some corporation buys the domain "com" and licenses subdomains under it "google.com". But then they have complete control over that domain and there aren't any real regulations (they can enforce rules or not enforce rules at their leisure).
What I don't really understand in all this is why the cost of registering a name is increasing more quickly than inflation. From the design of the system the impact on an additional name in the system is insignificant (both insertion time and query time). Adding a new name has almost no cost associated with it -- so why is it getting more and more expensive? Is this ICANN grabbing money or just registrars forming a huge trust to generate profits from nothing?
That list shows the real problem. You're looking at administrative numbers. Down at the very bottom where the numbers start hitting $60K/yr, cut that in half and you're seeing what the numbers look like for professionals working non-administrative positions in Universities, from professors to IT professionals to doing all the damn paperwork that makes those Universities function. The pay scale is literally upside down. Administrators provide almost no value. The president of my tiny little local state school was pulling in $350K/yr base salary with TONS of added non-financial contributions on top of it. That's over an order of magnitude higher than the average salary in that area. And the man did absolutely nothing, ever. Useless bureaucracy with massively inflated salaries doesn't do anything for education. Fundamentally broken hierarchical structures completely undermine the education system, and when they raise tuition, the only people who see a salary increase are administrators. The rest of that increase goes into budgets. So you end up with IT professionals with 5-15 years of experience making under $40,000/yr while entry-level administration positions are sitting at $90K with a fat raise to $110+K in a year. Those positions aren't even business critical -- try running a University without IT these days. This system is beyond totally broken.
They were played in servers dedicated to such, with other players doing the same. The more you know.
Have you watched a professional CS match? It's completely littered with wall spam, grenade bounce glitches, and on and on. You can spend 5 hours trying to figure out what the bounds of penetrable wall are and where the sound of player footsteps or fire line up with them or you can load up a cheat designed to show you wall trace depths and penetration levels on weapons to render walls green and transparent if you can shoot through them + show on screen where a sound originated from so you can quickly match sound direction with whether or not it can be shot through a wall. Instant knowledge, no need to spend hours and hours wasting your time trying to figure it out. Using a tool to get better at a game is what professionals do. It's what professionals do in everything. If you can create something to increase your competency, you do it. For instance, quake 3 pros use custom maps designed for training -- whoops.
You seem to be confusing the concept of "cheating" and "training." Cheating is abusing something that other people DO NOT have access to in order to gain an unfair advantage. If you load up an aimbot in league play, you are cheating. If you learn exactly where to aim and how to wall shoot with a cheat before league play and dominate because you know better than others how to do it, you are not cheating. You're just better at the game. It's their fault for not taking advantage of what the available tools can teach them.
The japanese circa WW2 have a bone to pick with your theory that science doesn't give an "unfair advantage."
And thanks for this well structured, well thought out post. Clearly I said that I spent all my time cheating in public servers. The truth is that myself and others spent all of our time in our own servers with vac disabled with friends or others who were also using cheats to better understand the game or try to make their cheats better than other peoples'.
Top-end players used cheats while training. Being able to intimately learn sound->positioning and where you could shoot through walls with what weapons were made possible by sound-esp and wallhacks. Aimbots that aimed at actual hitboxes instead of models gave a better sense of where to shoot to score hits in various animation sequences. Looking at the actual recoil spreads and their trends for different guns (and using pitch/yaw compensation instead of nospread) showed you how to compensate for recoil extremely effectively. Armed with this knowledge, you're far better at the game than average people.
I developed cheats for a while and I was also a cal-i level player. I went 23-0 legit in one side before being banned in a cal-i scrim back in 1.5, and then barred from scrimming with that team again (and a friend was the manager, he swore up and down that I was cheating). This was before it became common to use cheats to study the game, so I had a huge advantage. You can even download modified maps that have transparent walls if you don't want to run some shady executable cheat (now, you couldn't then). People had made player model mods before that painted the head a bright blue/green that made it very obvious where you should aim (and this was accompanied by color-based aimbots which were pretty terrible).
When we're talking about competitive gaming, researching the game to this level with the assistance of cheats is clearly a benefit. If cheats are treated like some form of a plague where once a person is infected they should never be able to ever play again, you're really just dealing with a massive ignorance. You know, the ignorance of all these bad server admins than ban anyone who's better than them. "Once a cheater, always a cheater" level stupidity. Headshot 5 people in a row? BANNED, too many headshots, must be a cheater!
If we adopted this type of reasoning in science, cutting open a body to figure out how it works would be cheating and would be disallowed. Deconstructing atoms with supercolliders would be considered cheating and disallowed. The creation of vaccines and medicines that cure diseases unnaturally would be considered cheating and disallowed. And if you ever violated any of these rules, you'd be sentenced to death, because once a cheater, always a cheater, and cheaters should be permanently banned from the game (life, in this case). Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?
VAC and PB both already do this -- there are insecure servers in most games. If you get "banned," you can still play. But the flipside is also true, you can search for those insecure servers in the first place and cheat without risk of getting banned, then go back to normal games without cheats on. Not in this solution -- you can't join "cheater friendly" servers until you've already been banned. Terrible idea.
What's not to like? How about the fact that the only way to get to the "special" world is to be caught cheating outside of the "special" world. Why can't I say "I want to play in the special world and use this cheat, then when I'm bored go back and play normally." You can do that with Punkbuster games (just search for punkbuster disabled servers, or put up your own). You can do that with VAC games (just search for insecure games). On and on and on. People who want to create cheats can with most games and cheat with other cheaters for fun (creating a cheat can be incredibly satisfying, you know, even more satisfying than actually playing the game legitimately). They don't have to have their account banned from all regular servers to do so.
So what's not to like? That this system is a step backwards. It offers no benefits, only drawbacks.
When I worked in IT, the last week of my employment was filled with me building as much documentation as possible about things I did (that weren't obvious or were one-offs that didn't merit documentation at the time) so that someone else could do those things. On the last day, I removed my own access from every account I owned and we went through every generic admin-level account and my coworkers changed those passwords (especially those used in tools I wrote), including any global admin passwords we had. It wasn't much of a "pull his plug," and in fact it was quite pleasant, even a relief. I walked away in a completely amicably fashion, even though I disliked the politics that occurred there, likely because I already had a much better job lined up.
As to "data theft" -- I kept a copy of some of the projects/code I developed as tools while working there. For one, as a record of something I did for myself, and two as a thing to look back on later in my software engineering career and laugh at (and maybe submit to TDWTF). Nothing of importance, no data from any databases, no log files, no compromising information. Most of it is HTML/CSS/JS, some of it is basic PHP that generates HTML from templates and does some really basic LDAP stuff, and a little that connects to a MySQL db to pull down configuration or store basic data, nothing really fancy. I would never take data that would be clearly "the company's" in any proprietary fashion, or that contained information to any person's identity or any such other personal information. Both because it's wrong but because I'm quite sure it's illegal, and I'm not a complete idiot.
What if the subpoena is from NBC? You know, the massive copyright holder that Comcast owns?