There would have to be some signal that "commercial starts here" and "commercial ends here," otherwise how would the DVR know when to disable fast forward? The OSS DVRs, such as MythTV, could key in on the signal and outright block the commercials entirely. Wow... sign me up!
You missed a key part here. I'll add it in bold for you...
H1-B visas are supposed to be issued to workers in the cases where a company didn't find a "qualified" citizen to do the job.
This is not how they are used in practice. What happens is that the job requirements are specifically written to be ludicrous: "28 years of AJAX experience, 21 in Java, etc." and often run 4 pages in length. They put this on Monster for a month and all job applicants laugh at it as an obvious H1B bid. Once they get no realistic response [by design] their favorite Indian body shop contacts them with a resume full of outright fabrications. Low and behold, it matches the job requirements! (Note that many of the resumes will contain the same misspellings as the job requirements document.)
Now, if they are ever audited (extremely rare), they can wave this paper and say, "See? He was the only qualified applicant!"
The grey area is that the body shops write the CV and make stuff up out of thin air. It is completely insane and unethical, but what does the worker have to lose? "After all, it was the body shop who lied, not me!"
Rather, how did lawyers and doctors build up their overpaid status?
They created a monopoly by requiring [justifiably] strict licensure to practice their craft in the U.S. The AMA and the bar, I would suppose? The would probably be a good technique for engineers. I can't imagine it would be easy to do until tech worker unionize and require licensure for entry.
You're right. Let's terminate the H1B program and simply have an open immigration policy.
I see some practical problems with this approach, but if it was applied evenly I could accept it.
I believe other professions might not see it this way.
It would be intriguing to see the backlash from the general public once they discovered that most blue-collar jobs were going to disappear overnight. I doubt they would sit still for it. Why should I? It is happening to my profession now, albeit on a smaller, more-limited scale.
As I told another respondent, you have no way of knowing what my skills are. I happen to think my particular skills set me above many of my peers. I ask, however, to compete against the same potential field of employees that other professions do. Instead, my profession has been singled out and laws passed that artificially lower my potential salary.
Heck if I know what I'm really worth, there are many factors, but I sure would have liked the opportunity to find out.
The H1B Visa program is not worth attacking here. $250K sounds like a well paid lawyer or doctor salary, engineers in the US have never earned this kind of money on average, even before H1B became a hot button topic.
Maybe engineers would be a lot closer to lawyers and doctors if the market had been allowed to run it's course during the dot-com boom? We will never know what engineers are truly worth until the different professions are on an even playing field again.
As a data entry employee, you have the ability to go out and test to see if you're worth $100 per hour to a potential employer. That right has been taken from me. I ask for it back.
You have no idea what my qualifications are so have no factual basis for your assumption that I am not qualified. I believe I am worth quite a bit more than companies are currently paying. You also have no idea what the market really thinks I'm worth. The market has rigged it so that I must compete with an artificially inflated workforce. Is there an H1B visa equivalent for lawyers? I don't know. I might feel better about it if the lawyers and politicians had a special visa program for their fields too.
If you truly believe the free market should determine my worth then so be it! I propose we leave it to the companies to discover, just as Apple has on this occasion, the hidden costs of outsourcing.
I merely ask for no exceptions to our general immigration policy. My skills are not special per se, just in very high demand (note that industry says so every year once the H1B visas run out). Under a free market this means inflated costs for those services. If my demands get too high, let my peers compete to give me a reality check. I don't mind... really!
The key point is that I am not asking for special treatment. Quite the opposite, in fact, as I am asking for equal treatment with other professions. Eliminate the H1B program.
I disagree. I do not think they can do the job I can do, an opinion I believe is supported by the termination of this particular outsourcing attempt. My IT skills, cultural knowledge, communication ability, and physical presence give me the advantage.
I just wish I would be paid what I'm truly worth. The H1B visa program needs to be eliminated. $250,000 salaries for awhile goes a long way toward improving our domestic IT training, importing labor just artifically limits those salaries. Let the immigrant IT workers jump through the same hoops the immigrant physical laborers do.
I don't get it. Every time a law like this rears its head Slashdot goes nuts. Why shouldn't the sale of violent games to minors be restricted?
Because, in any truly free society, the burden is on you to prove that the sale of violent games to minors is detrimental. It is not my responsibility to prove the contrary.
Actually the bar is even higher than this! Not only must it be proven detrimental, but you also have to prove that it's the governments role to legislate it. A much harder task IMO.
True. With one caveat: If they say it enough times then the people. including the lawmakers, will believe it to be true. Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy?
If your eCommerce business is run in, say California, then it should charge California sales taxes.
Yeah but that would never fly because it would discourage businesses from setting up in regions that have sales tax.
Exactly as it should be. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the free market in action! As an added benefit it relieves overcrowding because, in general, the more crowded the region the higher the taxes needed to support the infrastructure.
Part of the problem stems from the corporate environment. It is a cost vs. benefit thing.
Management view: "If all of our existing capital is being spent on fixing something we have already been paid for then we are losing money. We should spend it on something that is going to make us more money, i.e. development."
Part of the reality is, that by selling v2.0 (new and improved!), they get to make more money selling you bugfixes.
Is it too much to ask for a simple and powerful software program that can do the 45 things photographers do most in Photoshop?
As a software person I'll get right on it! So, which photographer do I design for? Photographer A, or photographer B who's top 45 only overlaps A's by 3 features?
I would imagine all it would take to get any photographer to stop using it would be if it's missing a few of their top 45. OMG! Am I arguing the pro-bloat line? Someone shoot me.
First we must distinguish between the concepts of price, which is determined by the seller, and the value, which is determined by the buyer. The value of something, at any given moment, is the amount that the highest bidder is willing to pay for it; no more, no less. While the seller is free to set the price of their product where they want, the fact that someone else makes an equivalent product and offers it for less is a perfect example of a free market in action. You cannot control the value of your product.
Despite what the extreme left would have you believe, there is such a thing as improper behaviour.
Improper is a long cry from illegal, a requirement for an arrest. What they do is rude, but not illegal. In fact, such public property is exactly the place to do it since one has no such freedoms on private property.
This article made me think about my assumptions and what I believe. A lot of our belief system is based on what is known as the scientific process, in which peer review is an essential component. There are so many things that I just don't have the time or desire to learn about (e.g. quantum physics) yet I can believe, at least at some level, that a given statement is true if enough eyeballs have reviewed the research performed.
This is similar to the critique of Wikipedia recently posted. The cranks get equal "weight" as the true experts on Wikipedia. Thank goodness the research community doesn't work that way.
By replacing the barcode, you are not saying "I will pay $5 for this microwave oven", you are saying "This microwave oven is a bottle of soda".
A smart [read: not greedy] thief would do their homework first and put an $80 microwave barcode on a $120 microwave model. The text that displays would be very brief, displaying Microwave Oven or something similar, and would not trigger suspicion with an attentive cashier.
Social observation shows that this type of self-restraint is rarely found among criminals. Greed takes over quickly.
With all the time spent on making spam filters, why don't we spend that time working out a new protocol for email transfers, one that would not be able to spoofed,
Because there's nothing wrong with SMTP. SMTP already has extensions to allow authentication but it still requires a central authority to say "He is Senior Frac, we verify it." No one will trust such an authority even if it was scalable enough. If you think spam is caused by a lack of authentication, you're sadly misinformed. The cause is a lack of responsibility by the sending networks to enforce proper behavior of their users.
or spend that time installing server side programs that put a small time delay between messages as well as bandwidth restrictions for all outgoing mail?
These technologies exist. Unfortunately, most that install them stop monitoring them. Such work is considered a resource hog which the ISP would much rather spend on signing up new customers. Bandwidth restrictions on a customer who is running their own MTA makes things much more complex and much less scalable.
Wonderful, if you just want to stop seeing the spam. I, however, would enjoy not having to pay for it's delivery. This is the ostrich method of spam fighting.
If people stop receiving spam, and therefore the morons among us stop giving money to spammers by buying their crap, and thus remove all semblances of profits obtained through spamming, there won't really be much incentive to spam anymore, will there?
Boy, that's a losing battle you propose. The spammer only needs one sucker out of 10 million to stay in business (since he steals his advertising costs). Yet, the defending network must educate all 10 million not to buy from spammers, an impossible task.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please do this! I hope all channels do this!
There would have to be some signal that "commercial starts here" and "commercial ends here," otherwise how would the DVR know when to disable fast forward? The OSS DVRs, such as MythTV, could key in on the signal and outright block the commercials entirely. Wow... sign me up!
You missed a key part here. I'll add it in bold for you...
This is not how they are used in practice. What happens is that the job requirements are specifically written to be ludicrous: "28 years of AJAX experience, 21 in Java, etc." and often run 4 pages in length. They put this on Monster for a month and all job applicants laugh at it as an obvious H1B bid. Once they get no realistic response [by design] their favorite Indian body shop contacts them with a resume full of outright fabrications. Low and behold, it matches the job requirements! (Note that many of the resumes will contain the same misspellings as the job requirements document.)
Now, if they are ever audited (extremely rare), they can wave this paper and say, "See? He was the only qualified applicant!"
The grey area is that the body shops write the CV and make stuff up out of thin air. It is completely insane and unethical, but what does the worker have to lose? "After all, it was the body shop who lied, not me!"
Rather, how did lawyers and doctors build up their overpaid status?
They created a monopoly by requiring [justifiably] strict licensure to practice their craft in the U.S. The AMA and the bar, I would suppose? The would probably be a good technique for engineers. I can't imagine it would be easy to do until tech worker unionize and require licensure for entry.
You're right. Let's terminate the H1B program and simply have an open immigration policy.
I see some practical problems with this approach, but if it was applied evenly I could accept it.
I believe other professions might not see it this way.
It would be intriguing to see the backlash from the general public once they discovered that most blue-collar jobs were going to disappear overnight. I doubt they would sit still for it. Why should I? It is happening to my profession now, albeit on a smaller, more-limited scale.
As I told another respondent, you have no way of knowing what my skills are. I happen to think my particular skills set me above many of my peers. I ask, however, to compete against the same potential field of employees that other professions do. Instead, my profession has been singled out and laws passed that artificially lower my potential salary.
Heck if I know what I'm really worth, there are many factors, but I sure would have liked the opportunity to find out.
The H1B Visa program is not worth attacking here. $250K sounds like a well paid lawyer or doctor salary, engineers in the US have never earned this kind of money on average, even before H1B became a hot button topic.
Maybe engineers would be a lot closer to lawyers and doctors if the market had been allowed to run it's course during the dot-com boom? We will never know what engineers are truly worth until the different professions are on an even playing field again.
As a data entry employee, you have the ability to go out and test to see if you're worth $100 per hour to a potential employer. That right has been taken from me. I ask for it back.
You have no idea what my qualifications are so have no factual basis for your assumption that I am not qualified. I believe I am worth quite a bit more than companies are currently paying. You also have no idea what the market really thinks I'm worth. The market has rigged it so that I must compete with an artificially inflated workforce. Is there an H1B visa equivalent for lawyers? I don't know. I might feel better about it if the lawyers and politicians had a special visa program for their fields too.
If you truly believe the free market should determine my worth then so be it! I propose we leave it to the companies to discover, just as Apple has on this occasion, the hidden costs of outsourcing.
I merely ask for no exceptions to our general immigration policy. My skills are not special per se, just in very high demand (note that industry says so every year once the H1B visas run out). Under a free market this means inflated costs for those services. If my demands get too high, let my peers compete to give me a reality check. I don't mind... really!
The key point is that I am not asking for special treatment. Quite the opposite, in fact, as I am asking for equal treatment with other professions. Eliminate the H1B program.
I disagree. I do not think they can do the job I can do, an opinion I believe is supported by the termination of this particular outsourcing attempt. My IT skills, cultural knowledge, communication ability, and physical presence give me the advantage.
I just wish I would be paid what I'm truly worth. The H1B visa program needs to be eliminated. $250,000 salaries for awhile goes a long way toward improving our domestic IT training, importing labor just artifically limits those salaries. Let the immigrant IT workers jump through the same hoops the immigrant physical laborers do.
I don't get it. Every time a law like this rears its head Slashdot goes nuts. Why shouldn't the sale of violent games to minors be restricted?
Because, in any truly free society, the burden is on you to prove that the sale of violent games to minors is detrimental. It is not my responsibility to prove the contrary.
Actually the bar is even higher than this! Not only must it be proven detrimental, but you also have to prove that it's the governments role to legislate it. A much harder task IMO.
How did "1 in 3,000" get to be "about one in 1,000" in the first sentence? I don't think those are in the about range.
The latter means... Nothing at all.
True. With one caveat: If they say it enough times then the people. including the lawmakers, will believe it to be true. Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Of course! Having 1cm accuracy is oodles better than 20m accuracy for tactical nukes. They're such precision instruments donchaknow.
If your eCommerce business is run in, say California, then it should charge California sales taxes.
Yeah but that would never fly because it would discourage businesses from setting up in regions that have sales tax.
Exactly as it should be. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the free market in action! As an added benefit it relieves overcrowding because, in general, the more crowded the region the higher the taxes needed to support the infrastructure.
A link to the decision paper (approx 310KB). I hope their server is up to it.
If not, maybe someone could put up a torrent?
The IE7 phishnet?
Part of the problem stems from the corporate environment. It is a cost vs. benefit thing.
Management view: "If all of our existing capital is being spent on fixing something we have already been paid for then we are losing money. We should spend it on something that is going to make us more money, i.e. development."
Part of the reality is, that by selling v2.0 (new and improved!), they get to make more money selling you bugfixes.
Is it too much to ask for a simple and powerful software program that can do the 45 things photographers do most in Photoshop?
As a software person I'll get right on it! So, which photographer do I design for? Photographer A, or photographer B who's top 45 only overlaps A's by 3 features?
I would imagine all it would take to get any photographer to stop using it would be if it's missing a few of their top 45. OMG! Am I arguing the pro-bloat line? Someone shoot me.
The assertion of price fixing is ludicrous.
First we must distinguish between the concepts of price, which is determined by the seller, and the value, which is determined by the buyer. The value of something, at any given moment, is the amount that the highest bidder is willing to pay for it; no more, no less. While the seller is free to set the price of their product where they want, the fact that someone else makes an equivalent product and offers it for less is a perfect example of a free market in action. You cannot control the value of your product.
Despite what the extreme left would have you believe, there is such a thing as improper behaviour.
Improper is a long cry from illegal, a requirement for an arrest. What they do is rude, but not illegal. In fact, such public property is exactly the place to do it since one has no such freedoms on private property.
This article made me think about my assumptions and what I believe. A lot of our belief system is based on what is known as the scientific process, in which peer review is an essential component. There are so many things that I just don't have the time or desire to learn about (e.g. quantum physics) yet I can believe, at least at some level, that a given statement is true if enough eyeballs have reviewed the research performed.
This is similar to the critique of Wikipedia recently posted. The cranks get equal "weight" as the true experts on Wikipedia. Thank goodness the research community doesn't work that way.
A smart [read: not greedy] thief would do their homework first and put an $80 microwave barcode on a $120 microwave model. The text that displays would be very brief, displaying Microwave Oven or something similar, and would not trigger suspicion with an attentive cashier.
Social observation shows that this type of self-restraint is rarely found among criminals. Greed takes over quickly.
With all the time spent on making spam filters, why don't we spend that time working out a new protocol for email transfers, one that would not be able to spoofed,
Because there's nothing wrong with SMTP. SMTP already has extensions to allow authentication but it still requires a central authority to say "He is Senior Frac, we verify it." No one will trust such an authority even if it was scalable enough. If you think spam is caused by a lack of authentication, you're sadly misinformed. The cause is a lack of responsibility by the sending networks to enforce proper behavior of their users.
or spend that time installing server side programs that put a small time delay between messages as well as bandwidth restrictions for all outgoing mail?
These technologies exist. Unfortunately, most that install them stop monitoring them. Such work is considered a resource hog which the ISP would much rather spend on signing up new customers. Bandwidth restrictions on a customer who is running their own MTA makes things much more complex and much less scalable.
Wonderful, if you just want to stop seeing the spam. I, however, would enjoy not having to pay for it's delivery. This is the ostrich method of spam fighting.
If people stop receiving spam, and therefore the morons among us stop giving money to spammers by buying their crap, and thus remove all semblances of profits obtained through spamming, there won't really be much incentive to spam anymore, will there?
Boy, that's a losing battle you propose. The spammer only needs one sucker out of 10 million to stay in business (since he steals his advertising costs). Yet, the defending network must educate all 10 million not to buy from spammers, an impossible task.