Musk's idea is much simpler - he just wants to offload his excessive battery cell inventory from the low Tesla sales to the stupid fans, not save the world.
Stupid fans? I thought those were a Dyson invention, not Tesla?
How much jail time did Photobucket executives get for allowing such lax security in their app in the first place? Must be at least twice the 5 years that these two are getting. Maybe more. Right?
One reason they demand proof of commercial insurance is an obvious one. What happens if they decide to help move, and some glitch on their part strapping down a motorcycle causes it to fall over, then smack the sides of the truck, destroying the other stuff inside?
With most trucking places, you file a claim, call it done. Without insurance, you have to go to court, and may not even get a chance at scoring damages.
There are also commercial licenses in Texas for truck driving. Using a service that doesn't use CDLs may be cheaper... but it is against the law.
The last time I moved, the insurance included with my move was 60 cents per pound - for any coverage beyond that, I had to purchase supplemental coverage. So if they drop your 50 pound $1000 TV, they'll pay you $30.
As a member of the younger generation, I feel that the younger generation is whinier and lazier. I feel like half the man that both of my grandfathers were, one who fought in a war I see in movies, was an amazing cook, a skilled gardener, and worked two job back breaking jobs to raise his kids while the other paid his way through university while still finding time to play university football and did his stint in the military. When they wanted to work, they'd knock down doors to get employed while kids these days drop off a resume and consider that job hunting. I could go on and on about how the current day generation pales in comparison to the generations before us but I'm sure it will fall on deaf ears.
I'll agree with you there -- my great grandfather started working in a coal mine when he was 17, fought in a war, smoked every day of his life since he was 16 (with hand rolled cigarettes), maintained a 4 acre yard and large garden, raised (and slaughtered) his own chickens. He spent the last 20 years of his life living alone (his wife died "young" at 60). Up until the last year of his life he maintained he house and yard on his own, reroofed his garage on his own when he was 70 - didn't even tell family he was going to do it, no one knew about it until he was done, he shoveled the coal into his coal fired furnace every winter, he eventually stopped raising chickens after one time when the wolves or coyotes got into the coop and he got tired of patching it. He lived to be 82 years old. He never could get accustomed to those new-fangled remote controls for the TV (back when state of the art was an audio based remote) and walked up to the set to turn it on and off. He still managed to keep ice cream and cookies ready for the grand kids when they visited
Me? I'm too lazy to even cut the grass so I bought a condo with no yard, and the grocery delivers my groceries so I don't even go to the store, let alone slaughter my own meat.
If you are using another definition of the word wave (such as that used by physics to refer to light, sound, etc.) when talking about water, you really should specify what you mean.
Given that their paper was published in Nature, they used the correct term for the phenomena.
Internal gravity waves, the subsurface analogue of the familiar surface gravity waves that break on beaches, are ubiquitous in the ocean. Because of their strong vertical and horizontal currents, and the turbulent mixing caused by their breaking....
Thank god this is something they seem to realize is NOT the case in TX, and fortunately TX has the space to spare. I, for one, can't f- STAND living all packed in close together like that. I perceive it as some kind of mental illness.
Just don't complain when gas goes up again and all of that space to spare means that you have a 60 mile round trip commute so you're spending $10+/day in gas to get to work.
I live in a dense area (not quite urban, not quite suburban). When I lived 20 miles from the office, I took the train, now I live 3 miles from the office and ride my bike -- I couldn't tell you how much it cost to fill up my car because it was over a month ago.
It could be fixed by simply changing the zoning such that only single-family houses were allowed
This is exactly the sort of crap that leads to urban sprawl, and all the wasted hours on commutes, pollution, oil consumption, etc. We have the same problems in the Bay Area, where SF rejected more than 95% of building permits last year, and 90 minute commutes are routine. If you don't want the sprawl, the only alternative is dense housing in the core city. We need to stand up to the NIMBYs, or even worse, the BANANAs.
A friend inherited a house in SF (Sunset district) that was in pretty poor shape - he looked at the cost and time to get a permit to tear it down and replace it with a 2 unit duplex that would have fit almost within the same footprint of the existing house. He quickly gave on up that due to the cost and no assurance of ever getting his plan approved -- anyone nearby could tie up the planning process nearly indefinitely and he can't really afford to sit on an unoccupied house for a year or more while waiting for planning approval.
Instead he opted to do a nearly down to studs remodel back into a single family house. Everyone in SF complains about the cost of housing, but no one seems to want higher density.
I don't get it, what is the big tech challenge to overcome here? Seems like the biggest issues are legal (exemptions from the FAA already made though) or logistical.
I don't get it either, it sounds like both of the tech challenges mentioned in the article (1000 ft altitude and 90 second space) could be resolved through the use of an altimeter and a stopwatch. As interesting as this may be to airplane buffs, I don't see the relevance to Slashdot unless the planes are piloted by robots... or at least have frickin' laser beams attached to their heads.
If it ever happened on a plane, then it means that the maintenance was intentionally skipped. If they reach 248 days of continuous operation then a number of significant maintenance cycles have been skipped (some 23-25 inspection / maintenance cycles that generally require shutting down the electrical system). The generators in question are attached to the engines. The engines have a overhaul schedule that is shorter than 248 days of continuous operation. If they managed to reach this point, then the major maintenance cycles have been skipped and the engines are long overdue for a tear down inspection and overhaul. Any plane which could reach this point, 248 days of continuous operation missing all of the required maintenance; this is not a plane (or an airline for that matter) which anyone should be flying on.
You would think that if this situation was unlikely to ever happen in practice that the FAA wouldn't have deemed it necessary to issue an AD requiring that the GCUs be power cycled at intervals no longer than 120 days. You'd think they'd already be aware of required maintenance intervals that require powercycling the GCUs, and they waived the usual comment period before issuing the AD due to the perceived imminent danger.
A commercial plane will most probably undergo through several maintenance events and checks during that sort of time frame, where cycling the power is part of the procedure.
It's very reassuring to know that it probably won't happen.
As of 2007, jet fuel (called "kerosene for aviation" by the IRS) is taxed at 21.9c/gal unless it is used for commercial aviation (airlines such as American Airlines and United Airlines and small chartered commercial jets). Because such commercial operations are subject to the federal transportation tax, they are subject to a reduced fuel tax of 4.4c/gal.
I've never understood why they won't transfer me to an otherwise empty seat on an earlier flight when I happen to be early for a connection. It would seem to be in their best interest to fill up the planes and push the "empty seat" to a later flight when they have a chance of selling it, but they never do offer me a free change, they always want to charge me an extra $50, so I just get a soda and wait it out.
They used to do that, I used have no problem fly standby on an earlier flight when I got there early. But then I guess they found out that it's convenient for passengers so it's something that they need to charge for because no one should get anything for free when flying.
How does this work with checked luggage? Presumably your stuff won't be pulled from baggage if you aren't expected to get off in Chicago, but instead in LA.
Obviously, if you only have carry on luggage, that works fine.
I think that's implied -- if you check your bags to the destination on the ticket when you don't intend to travel to that city, then you deserve to lose your bags.
Too bad it was just a procedural dismissal due to wrong venue and not due to the merits of the case.
United said such ticketing schemes violate its fare rules. For one thing, the tickets capture seats that will go unused, and an airline would have no way to sell those unused seats
Well, actually, they already *have* sold those seats -- to the person that bought the ticket and decided not to use the rest of it. But it's not true that they have no way to sell those seats -- if the flight is overbooked or full, then they'll fill the unused seat with a bumped or standby passenger. But if they want to be able to sell that seat before departure time, all they have to do is give the ticket holder a way to cancel that leg of the bookng, perhaps refunding a small percentage of the purchase price as an incentive to do so.
So it's not true that they have no way to sell the seats, they just don't want to do it.
I'm suspicious of any argument resembling "nothing we do today needs X, so therefore nothing needs X, so therefore nobody needs X, so therefore nobody should [almost always with an implicit ~be allowed to~] offer it".
I can't even use a 2 gigabit connection at home,
Yes you can. You have a _6_ gigabit connection at home. It 's your SATA link. That's getting slow, these days.
I tried plugging my SATA cable into the cable box for faster internet and it didn't work -- plus that 1 meter cable length limitation means I have to sit on the floor in front of the TV to use it.
So I figured if SATA was good, then plugging it right into the PCI bus would be better, so I plugged the ethernet into my PCIe x16 bus so I could enjoy 120Gbit speeds. But that didn't work either.
What am I doing wrong? It's almost as if internet access and local system buses are completely different and incompatible.
Nobody cares if you don't use it. There is demand for it so it's useful enough. Not to mention ISPs have been teasing us with fiber since the 90's. It's like asking "who needs more than 1 gallon per minute water service at home?" It isn't up to you.
Who is asking for it? Where is this demand coming from?
I think your analogy is a bit off -- I already have a 20 gallon per minute pipe to my house. Maybe 100 gpm would be useful from time to time, I could understand paying for that. And maybe once a year when I'm filling my pool, 1000 gpm would be nice but certainly not worth paying extra for since i'd utilize it so rarely. But 2000 gpm? Who needs that, and what are they doing with it?
I can't even use a 2 gigabit connection at home, I have no 10 gig router or ethernet switch to plug it in to, and I doubt many residential users do. I primarily use the internet over Wifi, and I can "only" get around 200mbit from my Wifi (if I'm in the same room).
I hardly think "Can't use an Apple Watch" ranks very highly on the list of reasons not to get a tattoo since there's such an easy workaround -- don't buy an apple watch.
How about "Emergency services personnel can't use a pulse oximetry device on your tattooed skin in order to save your life following a car accident"?
The device that's being interfered with is a pretty standard non-invasive pulse ox device that happens to be built into the watch.
Maybe the paramedics should use a standard finger pulse-ox meter instead of an iWatch.
The sensors on the Apple Watch and other devices use specific color range of light to detect blood flow through the skin. The tattoo ink can block it. Yet another reason not to mark up one's body.
I hardly think "Can't use an Apple Watch" ranks very highly on the list of reasons not to get a tattoo since there's such an easy workaround -- don't buy an apple watch.
When I travel far enough to fly, I don't usually travel by myself, I'm usually on vacation with family or on a business trip with coworkers, so by adding just one person to the car, that makes driving and flying almost equivalent -- probably even moreso since I can drive from my house directly to my destination instead of driving 20 miles to the airport on one end, then another 30 miles on the other end.
If we were willing to pay double or triple the market rate, we could probably entice happily employed candidates to come work for us,
I don't think you understand the concept of "market rate". If you have to pay more to get qualified candidates, then that higher rate is the market rate.
Well that's *a* market rate, but not a fair market rate. If the intention is to use scarcity to drive up wages without bound, then at least my company is large enough that we have a better option -- open up an offshore research center, move half (or even all) of the development team there and do our offshore hiring from there.
My company hires a lot of H1-B's (typically PhD's from various European countries), and while we pay a good salary, we can't find enough american workers to fill our open positions. If we were willing to pay double or triple the market rate, we could probably entice happily employed candidates to come work for us, but our salary costs are already high, and paying several times market rate would probably drive the company into the ground.
Your post is anecdotal evidence that H1B visas are depressing market rate. Maybe you should figure out why people won't come work for you at what you consider to be "market" rate.
A large part of it is because we're a startup, and though we can match the salary of Google, Facebook, Apple, etc, we don't have the big name, nor the stability that comes from working for one of the big guys. We've got several Executives that are well connected in the industry (and came from Google and Apple), and they have a pretty good idea of what the big companies are paying and we know we're competitive with the salaries.
We're pretty strong at college recruiting, and have all the interns we can handle as well as recruiting new graduates that are doing research in our field, but we still need more senior people for some roles, and these are hard to find,a lot of them are already locked up at the big companies (Google, Apple, investment banks, etc) and aren't interested in switching jobs.
H1B fees and legal expenses are not cheap, nor is paying international relocation expenses for a candidate and his/her family, so we're certainly not saving money by hiring H1B's.
How can any company have a position which "can only be filled by H-1B workers when no qualified American — at any wage — can be found to fill the position"?
With a high enough salary, any position can be filled, so unless companies are expected to get into bidding wars and offer multi million dollar salaries to compete for one of the american workers that could fill the position, how can such a policy be enforced? My company hires a lot of H1-B's (typically PhD's from various European countries), and while we pay a good salary, we can't find enough american workers to fill our open positions. If we were willing to pay double or triple the market rate, we could probably entice happily employed candidates to come work for us, but our salary costs are already high, and paying several times market rate would probably drive the company into the ground.
Surprising that so few hams in Nepal are setup for HF operations. I wonder how many HF ham stations there are in the U.S. One can't tell by license class. I know that in a real emergency my QRP FT-817 is not going to be the most reliable but until I can fork out for some bigger solar panels and batteries to run an amp, 5 Watts is going to be what I've got. With morse code that's enough to work the world, sometimes. Beats the hell out a walkie talkie.
I've been a licensed ham for almost 20 years and don't do HF because I don't find it to be very fun or interesting - making a contact 1000 miles away has lost its allure (to me) in the internet age. I do participate in local disaster drills using VHF/UHF, but am not really interested in HF to get out of the area. Though my club dues do help pay for their HF equipment, and I'm glad that we do have members interested in HF. I can run a VHF/UHF crossband repeater from my car for an unlimited time thanks to solar, but I can't reach much farther than I can see since I don't do HF.
Slashdot Mirror
Musk's idea is much simpler - he just wants to offload his excessive battery cell inventory from the low Tesla sales to the stupid fans, not save the world.
Stupid fans? I thought those were a Dyson invention, not Tesla?
How much jail time did Photobucket executives get for allowing such lax security in their app in the first place? Must be at least twice the 5 years that these two are getting. Maybe more. Right?
Devil's advocate:
One reason they demand proof of commercial insurance is an obvious one. What happens if they decide to help move, and some glitch on their part strapping down a motorcycle causes it to fall over, then smack the sides of the truck, destroying the other stuff inside?
With most trucking places, you file a claim, call it done. Without insurance, you have to go to court, and may not even get a chance at scoring damages.
There are also commercial licenses in Texas for truck driving. Using a service that doesn't use CDLs may be cheaper... but it is against the law.
The last time I moved, the insurance included with my move was 60 cents per pound - for any coverage beyond that, I had to purchase supplemental coverage. So if they drop your 50 pound $1000 TV, they'll pay you $30.
As a member of the younger generation, I feel that the younger generation is whinier and lazier. I feel like half the man that both of my grandfathers were, one who fought in a war I see in movies, was an amazing cook, a skilled gardener, and worked two job back breaking jobs to raise his kids while the other paid his way through university while still finding time to play university football and did his stint in the military. When they wanted to work, they'd knock down doors to get employed while kids these days drop off a resume and consider that job hunting. I could go on and on about how the current day generation pales in comparison to the generations before us but I'm sure it will fall on deaf ears.
I'll agree with you there -- my great grandfather started working in a coal mine when he was 17, fought in a war, smoked every day of his life since he was 16 (with hand rolled cigarettes), maintained a 4 acre yard and large garden, raised (and slaughtered) his own chickens. He spent the last 20 years of his life living alone (his wife died "young" at 60). Up until the last year of his life he maintained he house and yard on his own, reroofed his garage on his own when he was 70 - didn't even tell family he was going to do it, no one knew about it until he was done, he shoveled the coal into his coal fired furnace every winter, he eventually stopped raising chickens after one time when the wolves or coyotes got into the coop and he got tired of patching it. He lived to be 82 years old. He never could get accustomed to those new-fangled remote controls for the TV (back when state of the art was an audio based remote) and walked up to the set to turn it on and off. He still managed to keep ice cream and cookies ready for the grand kids when they visited
Me? I'm too lazy to even cut the grass so I bought a condo with no yard, and the grocery delivers my groceries so I don't even go to the store, let alone slaughter my own meat.
How do these waves affect the moon given that they are subsurface waves and don't affect the surface?
Generally when talking about water, the definition of a wave specifies it is on the surface:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wave"a disturbance on the surface of a liquid body, as the sea or a lake, in the form of a moving ridge or swell."
If you are using another definition of the word wave (such as that used by physics to refer to light, sound, etc.) when talking about water, you really should specify what you mean.
Given that their paper was published in Nature, they used the correct term for the phenomena.
Internal gravity waves, the subsurface analogue of the familiar surface gravity waves that break on beaches, are ubiquitous in the ocean. Because of their strong vertical and horizontal currents, and the turbulent mixing caused by their breaking....
Thank god this is something they seem to realize is NOT the case in TX, and fortunately TX has the space to spare. I, for one, can't f- STAND living all packed in close together like that. I perceive it as some kind of mental illness.
Just don't complain when gas goes up again and all of that space to spare means that you have a 60 mile round trip commute so you're spending $10+/day in gas to get to work.
I live in a dense area (not quite urban, not quite suburban). When I lived 20 miles from the office, I took the train, now I live 3 miles from the office and ride my bike -- I couldn't tell you how much it cost to fill up my car because it was over a month ago.
It could be fixed by simply changing the zoning such that only single-family houses were allowed
This is exactly the sort of crap that leads to urban sprawl, and all the wasted hours on commutes, pollution, oil consumption, etc. We have the same problems in the Bay Area, where SF rejected more than 95% of building permits last year, and 90 minute commutes are routine. If you don't want the sprawl, the only alternative is dense housing in the core city. We need to stand up to the NIMBYs, or even worse, the BANANAs.
A friend inherited a house in SF (Sunset district) that was in pretty poor shape - he looked at the cost and time to get a permit to tear it down and replace it with a 2 unit duplex that would have fit almost within the same footprint of the existing house. He quickly gave on up that due to the cost and no assurance of ever getting his plan approved -- anyone nearby could tie up the planning process nearly indefinitely and he can't really afford to sit on an unoccupied house for a year or more while waiting for planning approval.
Instead he opted to do a nearly down to studs remodel back into a single family house. Everyone in SF complains about the cost of housing, but no one seems to want higher density.
I don't get it, what is the big tech challenge to overcome here? Seems like the biggest issues are legal (exemptions from the FAA already made though) or logistical.
I don't get it either, it sounds like both of the tech challenges mentioned in the article (1000 ft altitude and 90 second space) could be resolved through the use of an altimeter and a stopwatch. As interesting as this may be to airplane buffs, I don't see the relevance to Slashdot unless the planes are piloted by robots... or at least have frickin' laser beams attached to their heads.
I will never buy a DRM coffee machine...
Unless you're a prostitute, don't fuck your customer.
Or Apple -- you lock in your customers all you want if you're Apple.
If it ever happened on a plane, then it means that the maintenance was intentionally skipped. If they reach 248 days of continuous operation then a number of significant maintenance cycles have been skipped (some 23-25 inspection / maintenance cycles that generally require shutting down the electrical system). The generators in question are attached to the engines. The engines have a overhaul schedule that is shorter than 248 days of continuous operation. If they managed to reach this point, then the major maintenance cycles have been skipped and the engines are long overdue for a tear down inspection and overhaul. Any plane which could reach this point, 248 days of continuous operation missing all of the required maintenance; this is not a plane (or an airline for that matter) which anyone should be flying on.
You would think that if this situation was unlikely to ever happen in practice that the FAA wouldn't have deemed it necessary to issue an AD requiring that the GCUs be power cycled at intervals no longer than 120 days. You'd think they'd already be aware of required maintenance intervals that require powercycling the GCUs, and they waived the usual comment period before issuing the AD due to the perceived imminent danger.
A commercial plane will most probably undergo through several maintenance events and checks during that sort of time frame, where cycling the power is part of the procedure.
It's very reassuring to know that it probably won't happen.
The government does give them our money. Kerosene is taxfree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
As of 2007, jet fuel (called "kerosene for aviation" by the IRS) is taxed at 21.9c/gal unless it is used for commercial aviation (airlines such as American Airlines and United Airlines and small chartered commercial jets). Because such commercial operations are subject to the federal transportation tax, they are subject to a reduced fuel tax of 4.4c/gal.
I've never understood why they won't transfer me to an otherwise empty seat on an earlier flight when I happen to be early for a connection. It would seem to be in their best interest to fill up the planes and push the "empty seat" to a later flight when they have a chance of selling it, but they never do offer me a free change, they always want to charge me an extra $50, so I just get a soda and wait it out.
They used to do that, I used have no problem fly standby on an earlier flight when I got there early. But then I guess they found out that it's convenient for passengers so it's something that they need to charge for because no one should get anything for free when flying.
How does this work with checked luggage? Presumably your stuff won't be pulled from baggage if you aren't expected to get off in Chicago, but instead in LA.
Obviously, if you only have carry on luggage, that works fine.
I think that's implied -- if you check your bags to the destination on the ticket when you don't intend to travel to that city, then you deserve to lose your bags.
Too bad it was just a procedural dismissal due to wrong venue and not due to the merits of the case.
United said such ticketing schemes violate its fare rules. For one thing, the tickets capture seats that will go unused, and an airline would have no way to sell those unused seats
Well, actually, they already *have* sold those seats -- to the person that bought the ticket and decided not to use the rest of it. But it's not true that they have no way to sell those seats -- if the flight is overbooked or full, then they'll fill the unused seat with a bumped or standby passenger. But if they want to be able to sell that seat before departure time, all they have to do is give the ticket holder a way to cancel that leg of the bookng, perhaps refunding a small percentage of the purchase price as an incentive to do so.
So it's not true that they have no way to sell the seats, they just don't want to do it.
I'm suspicious of any argument resembling "nothing we do today needs X, so therefore nothing needs X, so therefore nobody needs X, so therefore nobody should [almost always with an implicit ~be allowed to~] offer it".
I can't even use a 2 gigabit connection at home,
Yes you can. You have a _6_ gigabit connection at home. It 's your SATA link. That's getting slow, these days.
I tried plugging my SATA cable into the cable box for faster internet and it didn't work -- plus that 1 meter cable length limitation means I have to sit on the floor in front of the TV to use it.
So I figured if SATA was good, then plugging it right into the PCI bus would be better, so I plugged the ethernet into my PCIe x16 bus so I could enjoy 120Gbit speeds. But that didn't work either.
What am I doing wrong? It's almost as if internet access and local system buses are completely different and incompatible.
Nobody cares if you don't use it. There is demand for it so it's useful enough. Not to mention ISPs have been teasing us with fiber since the 90's.
It's like asking "who needs more than 1 gallon per minute water service at home?" It isn't up to you.
Who is asking for it? Where is this demand coming from?
I think your analogy is a bit off -- I already have a 20 gallon per minute pipe to my house. Maybe 100 gpm would be useful from time to time, I could understand paying for that. And maybe once a year when I'm filling my pool, 1000 gpm would be nice but certainly not worth paying extra for since i'd utilize it so rarely. But 2000 gpm? Who needs that, and what are they doing with it?
I can't even use a 2 gigabit connection at home, I have no 10 gig router or ethernet switch to plug it in to, and I doubt many residential users do. I primarily use the internet over Wifi, and I can "only" get around 200mbit from my Wifi (if I'm in the same room).
I hardly think "Can't use an Apple Watch" ranks very highly on the list of reasons not to get a tattoo since there's such an easy workaround -- don't buy an apple watch.
How about "Emergency services personnel can't use a pulse oximetry device on your tattooed skin in order to save your life following a car accident"?
The device that's being interfered with is a pretty standard non-invasive pulse ox device that happens to be built into the watch.
Maybe the paramedics should use a standard finger pulse-ox meter instead of an iWatch.
The sensors on the Apple Watch and other devices use specific color range of light to detect blood flow through the skin. The tattoo ink can block it.
Yet another reason not to mark up one's body.
I hardly think "Can't use an Apple Watch" ranks very highly on the list of reasons not to get a tattoo since there's such an easy workaround -- don't buy an apple watch.
When I travel far enough to fly, I don't usually travel by myself, I'm usually on vacation with family or on a business trip with coworkers, so by adding just one person to the car, that makes driving and flying almost equivalent -- probably even moreso since I can drive from my house directly to my destination instead of driving 20 miles to the airport on one end, then another 30 miles on the other end.
I don't think you understand the concept of "market rate". If you have to pay more to get qualified candidates, then that higher rate is the market rate.
Well that's *a* market rate, but not a fair market rate. If the intention is to use scarcity to drive up wages without bound, then at least my company is large enough that we have a better option -- open up an offshore research center, move half (or even all) of the development team there and do our offshore hiring from there.
My company hires a lot of H1-B's (typically PhD's from various European countries), and while we pay a good salary, we can't find enough american workers to fill our open positions. If we were willing to pay double or triple the market rate, we could probably entice happily employed candidates to come work for us, but our salary costs are already high, and paying several times market rate would probably drive the company into the ground.
Your post is anecdotal evidence that H1B visas are depressing market rate. Maybe you should figure out why people won't come work for you at what you consider to be "market" rate.
A large part of it is because we're a startup, and though we can match the salary of Google, Facebook, Apple, etc, we don't have the big name, nor the stability that comes from working for one of the big guys. We've got several Executives that are well connected in the industry (and came from Google and Apple), and they have a pretty good idea of what the big companies are paying and we know we're competitive with the salaries.
We're pretty strong at college recruiting, and have all the interns we can handle as well as recruiting new graduates that are doing research in our field, but we still need more senior people for some roles, and these are hard to find,a lot of them are already locked up at the big companies (Google, Apple, investment banks, etc) and aren't interested in switching jobs.
H1B fees and legal expenses are not cheap, nor is paying international relocation expenses for a candidate and his/her family, so we're certainly not saving money by hiring H1B's.
How can any company have a position which "can only be filled by H-1B workers when no qualified American — at any wage — can be found to fill the position"?
With a high enough salary, any position can be filled, so unless companies are expected to get into bidding wars and offer multi million dollar salaries to compete for one of the american workers that could fill the position, how can such a policy be enforced? My company hires a lot of H1-B's (typically PhD's from various European countries), and while we pay a good salary, we can't find enough american workers to fill our open positions. If we were willing to pay double or triple the market rate, we could probably entice happily employed candidates to come work for us, but our salary costs are already high, and paying several times market rate would probably drive the company into the ground.
Surprising that so few hams in Nepal are setup for HF operations. I wonder how many HF ham stations there are in the U.S. One can't tell by license class. I know that in a real emergency my QRP FT-817 is not going to be the most reliable but until I can fork out for some bigger solar panels and batteries to run an amp, 5 Watts is going to be what I've got. With morse code that's enough to work the world, sometimes. Beats the hell out a walkie talkie.
I've been a licensed ham for almost 20 years and don't do HF because I don't find it to be very fun or interesting - making a contact 1000 miles away has lost its allure (to me) in the internet age. I do participate in local disaster drills using VHF/UHF, but am not really interested in HF to get out of the area. Though my club dues do help pay for their HF equipment, and I'm glad that we do have members interested in HF. I can run a VHF/UHF crossband repeater from my car for an unlimited time thanks to solar, but I can't reach much farther than I can see since I don't do HF.