Now, don't mind me not being born here or not understanding the politics of the Internet very well, but don't we live in probably the most capitalistic country in the world?
Given that, I don't know why is everyone so surprised that Yahoo! wants to charge. What I don't understand is, can you really live off sponsors forever? Eventually, I see all these services charging... How else are they supposed to feed those large teams of programmers?
Can you go to the grocery store and get stuff for free? Hell no. I know there's alternatives, as in, you can grow your own veggies (e.g. pot;-), or visit a non-paying search engine, but eventually, doesn't it boil down to the old adage - "you pay, you play?"
Napster won't wither because of "don't kill the messenger", but sure as f**k we all knew that everyone on there has pirated at least ten songs, if not more. So, how can Napster stand to make any profit just by letting everyone share files? I dont get it.. They have to start charging some measly fee..
I know it isn't nice to take away something that was given for granted (free), but I just cannot comprehend or better yet, visualize, how are these companies supposed to make money unless they start charging? Can you put yourself in their shoes, i.e. it was your company.. Would you settle for no or little money? Would you like to make MORE money and expand? Well, just how are you gonna do that by letting people spread pirated songs and not charging them something for the service and fend off the RIAA with the revenue/profits?
Someone explain to me the basics of capitalism, 'cause I apparently, the C.S. graduate, is clueless;->.
Thank you.
You dont really know how far into space was this event noticed with their telescopes, which would cut the time of arrival, by some certain amount. So it may not have necessarily happened so long ago...
Which is why you should go to http://www.wamu.com/accounts/index.html, Washington Mutual offers true free checking, no monthly minimums required, no direct deposit required, no hidden charges/fees. Yes, it's a savings and not a commercial bank like Citibank, but does your average John Doe and Jane Doe give a shit for the benefits (or negativities) of large commercial banks? I doubt it. Washington mutual will cut it for most people with what they offer... on top of what I said, free visa check cards, free PC banking (excluding bill pay, which charges some ridiculous monthly amount). Check it out, you'll see what I'm talking about.
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Re:quantum security and the new elite
on
Quantum Security
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· Score: 1
You can always use the one-time pad algorithm to encrypt any given plaintext, in which case, even with quantum-computing, you couldn't break it because you won't know the difference between what is the right or wrong plaintext once you've deciphered it into whatever looks "logical" to you. When you use this method however, you'll have to worry about distribution of the key, which I believe is a lot less to worry about than encrypting your message with Blowfish and having the government break it with their e.g. 32 bit quantum computer;-), right?
Heh, when I read this story, I was in sheer awe.. you know why? Because I am a step away from getting my permanent residence a.k.a. "green card" in this country, and am working on an H1-B visa here.. Immigrant, as most of you already know, while they are immigrating, and even after they've gotten their green cards, are basically not supposed to "earn" much more than a traffic ticket (eg. speeding...).
So, I'm just contemplating (in awe again), just what the fu*k would or should have happened if one of us, the 120,000 (annual quota) H-1B's in this country stumbled upon that site this guy described, which I won't even mention here:) (Carnivore eh?:), and we all are basically on work visas and 'readily deportable' for any felonies or misdemeanors?
And let's say that we even got off the hook like this guy did, how do you think the INS is going to view "has been taken in for questioning by the FBI, on a suspicion of "cracking, hacking, blabla" and had equipment confiscated for evidence purposes" or something along those lines?
Shit, by the time the EFF or ACLU or anyone can even assist my immigrant ass (as if I wasn't entitled to the same civil liberties as anyone else, right?), the INS will be buying me a one-way ticket and exporting me like an NFS UNIX partition out of the country ASAP!:)
So, is _THAT_ fair? You are all getting petrified that some agent breathed down your neck a bit, but what can they ultimately do to you? Suck your.... I don't wanna say it. But to me, or other immigrants? They can _raise_ hell and get us deported, solely on people's superstition and belief in adages like "once a criminal/suspect/pick your favorite adjective, always a criminal/suspect/pick your favorite adjective".
And then what happens to my 8 year invested in education/job/life/etc in this country? Should it all go down the drain? Well, damn, I smell a U.S. Supreme Court case getting accepted here for review for violating my constitutional rights...
that is, IF and ONLY IF, I can get a Tourist visa to get back into the country and get past the U.S. border:-/... Scary you think? You're lucky you were born in the U.S. of A...
CRC press would be fools not to either a) drop the lawsuit and just issue cease-and-desist order (which would demonstrate a real concern about copyright, and not money), or b) after "winning" the suit, they should publish the encyclopedia much like http://www.brittanica.com (e.g.) and have it serve the net, the people, anyone...
Whatever happened to migrating toward 'paperless environments'... Is all of U.S. laws driven by one simple motto - greed, and nothing but?
Sad, it truly is... patenting knowledge, patenting one-clicks, copyrighting knowledge that's been there in excess of 200 years, patenting the sound of the Harley-Davidson... what's next? Patenting quarks because someone proved they're there first while working at Mega-greed-corp. Inc.???
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Re:If anonymity is the cause of repeated stories..
on
Anonymity
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· Score: 1
Oh, and you had no idea what the threat was caused or inflicted by... A completely forgotten motive, 15 years ago, you humiliated a gay person in front of your coworkers. At the time it seemed funny, but 15 years later, the previous scenario I mentioned above happened to you...
Do you still believe your premise?:)
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Re:If anonymity is the cause of repeated stories..
on
Anonymity
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· Score: 1
I'm a maniacal but intelligent killer (that is possible, no?). I issued you a death threat. I spent the 33 cents for a stamp, and I left no DNA marks on any part of the envelope (like licking it in order to glue it;-). You got my threat and took it to the police. The police looked it over, and since you are in a shitty part of L.A., they already have their hands full of better business to do and tell you to basically shove the threat up the wazoo. Two days later someone comes and runs you over with a car. To you, and the LAPD, it was a bluff. But now you're R.I.P.-ing.
Your claim that "no source that is unverfied can be trusted" is still false on its face, because the above scenario is quite feasible. It's not like the police is going to set up 24 hr surveillance for you, regardless of how real or unreal the threat was...
Deal with that!:P
I ran Linux 2.0.x (latest stable) with X on a 486dx2 w/32 M ram. It was a Gateway 2000:) PC.
And it ran quite well!
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Re:If anonymity is the cause of repeated stories..
on
Anonymity
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· Score: 2
So essentially, if you got an anonymous death threat, since you have no way of verifying its authenticity or source, you can not trust it. Hypothetically, two days later, someone runs you over with his car. You're now dead. Was the threat unreal this time around because it had no verifiable source at the time you read it?
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Re:Throw-away accounts won't save you
on
Anonymity
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· Score: 1
Mixmaster remailers 'guarantee' virtual anonymity. Private Idaho is one of these programs that utilize cypherpunks at http://www.eskimo.com/~joelm/pi.html
or http://www.gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer.html
How are we going to fend off yodling(sp?) music once we inhabit Mars? Once we evolve into Martians, we'll be susceptable to yodling... Doesn't anyone remember "Mars Attacks" with Jack Nicholson? I'd say the grandma' from the movie that killed the Martians certainly raises some doubt about Mars' inhabitability;-).
To support this guy's claim, I came to the United States when I was 16. Right now I'm 24. So, that adds up to virtually 8 years of being here. I finished high school in Vero Beach, FL, my B.S. in computer science in Orlando, FL at UCF (www.ucf.edu), and started working fulltime in 1997. I looked up some statistics in my college to see how many people in fact take C.S. as their major - the stats I found were very disheartening - out of 30,000+ student body, only about 1100 at that time (in 1996-7) were CS students. I'd say half of those were non-American, and the other half that were American, have come to study CS under the impression that it is all about WWW development, or the internet or writing games (i.e. a-la Quake 3;-). As soon as these people hit across courses which are considered core computer science (i.e. CS1,2,3 or discrete structures), half of them get weeded out. I had a friend who could not pass Calculus I 4 times in a row, and finally decided to switch to an MIS major because he couldn't handle the math in the CS program. So, out of 1,100 enrolled, maybe 40-50% of those will live to graduate with a C.S. degree, and half of those who do graduate, still can't tell the god damn difference between a char *, and a char [] in C and don't understand computer architecture well enough to know what byte alignment means on an Intel or what it means on an HP platform.
So, a natural question arose in my mind (and I'm sure many others' too) - why is it that virtually all graduate students and at least half of the undergrad ones are entirely foreign, on F-1 visas, fighting their way through school, living in ramshackled halfhouses (so to speak;-) and then later converting to H-1B's and occupying virtually 50+% of the hightech position in the IT industry?
I have my own explanation as to why this is the way you see it currently - and to state it briefly at first - IMHO - it is a lack of appreciation by U.S. citizens of what their country provides to them and a complete sense of appreciation in people who are coming from abroad, from third-world countries (such as mine, former Yugoslavia), where we were never afforded the same lifestyle that we have here now (well, at least most of us couldn't have the same lifestyle..).
Why this lack of sense of appreciation is present in U.S. born/raised citizens, and not in foreign people? Is it valid to say that someone who grew up here in the U.S. took many things for granted, whereas the foreign person could only dream of such things? But then, what about people from foreign countries who _did_ have a similar lifestyle in their home country and are "just as lazy" as the math-hating American when they come here (such as myself:)? Do I lack that sense of appreciation because I had a REALLY nice life in Yugoslavia because my parents made far more than the average person? Would an "American bloodtype" citizen that was born in Yugoslavia think like one of these foreigners that invade the U.S. educational institutions/companies now? Would my GPA have been any higher than a 3.0 if I was born in poverty in Yugoslavia rather than well-off? I don't know - one could write a PhD thesis in sociology/psychology based on these few questions - though one thing is obvious even if not completely supported by fact - foreign people tend to be more persistent than Americans born/raised currently in the U.S.
I'm not going to say foreign born people are necessarily smarter or more intelligent than a U.S. born/raised person. That's highly subjective, as I've seen quite a number of PhD's that are Americans, born/raised here in this country. So, there's an exception to every rule. However, most of these PhD people (let's just call them that for sake of argument) are age 50 or older. What does that mean? Well it may mean a lot of things, but to me it means that the conditions in the U.S. under which these American PhD's were born and raised 30-50 years ago were much different than the conditions that the U.S. is currently experiencing (economic or otherwise). Of course, I know a U.S. born PhD who is 30-something years old from my former university, but he is the only one, to be completely honest, and that, I would assume, is far less PhD (or M.S.) candidates/students/completions than those 30-50 years ago. So, the economic/overall condition 30+ years ago may not have been so rosey as it is now, however, that "grayish" condition long ago made those older math/engineering/physics PhD's (50+ right now) behave more in a "third-world country" manner when it came to their studies. And that meant enduring throughout the course of the study, and not giving up easily, if at all.
Of course, this is just one theory of why now foreign people are invading hightech industry/education in the U.S., but I'll stick with it until someone offers a better one, or a more reasonable one.
So, have all these economic/technological/societal advances undoubtedly contributed to the lowering of the quality of education (as a parallel issue) and the lowering of the academic morals in majority of U.S. born people with regards to the engineering/math/physics and as of recently (25-30 years or so) the computer sciences fields? If I had to answer this question, I'd have to say, yes, probably so. After all, on the flipside of the enrollment numbers for the CS program, I can tell you that out of the 30k+ students, at least 29% were some sort of business management majors.
So what does this say? It says (to me at least) that people born here are looking for more and more esoteric, sophisticated professions, such as business management, or other "executive" or management positions within companies. What many of these people that do take bus. management as their major do not realize is when they come to manage a group of "slanteyes", or Hindus or Yugoslavs;-) or Peruans or Chilleans or Israelis or Palestinians, in the field of software engineering, often times they find themselves at a loss. This especially applies to people who are supposed to handle hands-on programming teams (code monkeys?:) and at the same time communicate the business ideas of those "higher up" the company chain. Without a _solid_, _equivalent_ and even _better_ understanding of the CS/CE/EE areas, they are _bound_ to fuck up sooner or later and drive a department into oblivion, or a smaller company into annihilation as I have personally witnessed this at my former company where we had a highly skilled, and highly educated (the least we had was a B.S. in CS or theoretical physics and highest a few PhDs in C.S.) team of people who produced some _extraordinary_ OMT designs and tons of C++ code to implement those designs, and returned virtually flawless software apps under the leadership of a Jamaican PhD in C.S. nigger (yeah, I'm sure he won't mind me calling him that as I know him so well and he'd know why I called him that - because everyone "loved" him because of his color rather than his merit to the company:) who graduated from a U.S. university with a PhD in C.S. and a M.S. in C.S. and theoretical and applied physics.
I may have gotten off on a tangent here, but I'm a living proof of where the U.S. educational system is taking its own citizens and where it's taking the foreigners that it lets in on F1's, H1's etc. It is a fact of life, that these business majors who overwhelm most U.S. universities right now can't tell a byte from a bit, yet, they believe they are somehow entitled to producing "Great Ideas" that a software engineer could somehow "not see as clearly as those business people with a vision" for the company's future and its development.
Unfortunately, this type of company politics, eventually led to my former company's demise, and they are now on the verge of bankruptcy from what I understand from one of their people on the inside, who remained a friend of mine up till now, long after I left the company along with the other 4 brilliant members of our team we called "Borg":-) because of the highly stable OO code we were able to produce in virtually "no time" fully backed by OMT designs that all of us were required by our Jamaican PhD nigger to write before we ever touched 'vi' to code.
I don't want to and I won't even get into the kind of racial prejudice that plagued this former company of mine, especially aimed at us, foreigners, who were HARDLY paid a fucking prevailing wage... That would be a WHOLE different ball game for discussion, and would involve going back to the Cenozoic period of humanity, where the male with the darker skin type threw a rock at the male with the lighter skin complexion, and the one with the lighter skin called the other one a nigger, and the nigger than called the whiter one a "racist fucking pig", and that's how it all started to develop "_naturally_" of course, as many people would like to advocate in their sick deluded minds that racism is a natural rather than a learned thing. So, let's just forget about the racial/ethnical diseases that plagued my former company....
I am sorry I got off on a tangent here, and perhaps a bit off topic, but I believe many people are confused about how H1B's have it in the United States, how they're treated, and why the educational systems in the U.S. are not as good as the foreign ones and why U.S. companies are forced to bring in people from abroad rather than people from inside. Yes, the indentured labor thing is valid - to a certan extent - but then there ought to be something called a national pride that the U.S. should take in its educational system and its products - people who are highly skilled in ALL areas, including CS/CE/EE. That national pride should prevent U.S. companies from hiring a foreign worker in lieu of an American one, at least in MY opinion. I would be _damn_ proud of this country and its educational system, and I'd be blue in the chest from hitting myself if I could say that the U.S. of A. has produced the BEST there is of Computer scientists/engineers/physicists in the whole wide world and I'd be _damn proud_ to have the honor of hiring and paying such a worker what he/she deserves. If Americans woke up from the euphoria they are living in right now which is a result of the high standard of living, and started thinking like what I described above - then MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, you will see a complete rebound in CS/CE/EE enrollment the way it used to be many years ago when people valued the technical/engineering professions a hell of a lot more than now, during this "business" frenzy period. If American colleges (especially the undergrad stuff, which now resembles a freeking vocational program in C.S. rather than a real program) produced high quality grads in CS/CE/EE, I'm virtually positive that companies will eventually start to hire a lot more Americans than foreign workers. So, it's not just that they need "indentured" labor, they also need SKILLED labor too. And that is exactly what they're doing, hiring skilled labor. Whether it came from India, or the United States, to a large, visible company like Sun, Microsoft, or Oracle, it would not matter. Most of those people, foreign or not, do get paid the same wages as their American counterparts....
So, quit whining about "indentured labor", respect the H1B's a tad more than what's been shown by some people on/., get your kids' interest into CS by stimulating their brain from early age, drop the racist/ethnocentric notions, study hard, don't give up, live below your standards... and hell, maybe THIS country will EVENTUALLY live the Borg principle:-).
I hope some of this was usefull. If you don't like it, then state your opinion if you wish.. I'll be glad to hear it.
You speak like you have a few hundred mills. laying around, why dont you leave us your real email/name so we can come work for you, us, slanteyes, redskinned, etc etc. ok, DUDE?
If we had an interface that was as good as the Windows UI (and provided the same continuity! Important!), with the power and stability of Linux - the sky's the limit.
Ok Sherlock, if you _really_ distrust the NSA, Rijndael, Twofish etc etc. and are ultimately paranoid that no algorithm ever invented by any country/government body/research or educational institution/company/etc. why don't you use the one-time pad then? A moron could understand its principle, the only problem you got there is how are you going to hide/transport the keys which will be stored on some high density media? Sheesh, have a little faith in the world's eye on cryptology...
Good enuff until they start making 32 bit quantum computers;-).. then all the PGP's in the world are gone down in flames. OK, that was just wishful thinking.. for now:).
Slashdot Mirror
Given that, I don't know why is everyone so surprised that Yahoo! wants to charge. What I don't understand is, can you really live off sponsors forever? Eventually, I see all these services charging... How else are they supposed to feed those large teams of programmers?
Can you go to the grocery store and get stuff for free? Hell no. I know there's alternatives, as in, you can grow your own veggies (e.g. pot ;-), or visit a non-paying search engine, but eventually, doesn't it boil down to the old adage - "you pay, you play?"
Napster won't wither because of "don't kill the messenger", but sure as f**k we all knew that everyone on there has pirated at least ten songs, if not more. So, how can Napster stand to make any profit just by letting everyone share files? I dont get it.. They have to start charging some measly fee..
I know it isn't nice to take away something that was given for granted (free), but I just cannot comprehend or better yet, visualize, how are these companies supposed to make money unless they start charging? Can you put yourself in their shoes, i.e. it was your company.. Would you settle for no or little money? Would you like to make MORE money and expand? Well, just how are you gonna do that by letting people spread pirated songs and not charging them something for the service and fend off the RIAA with the revenue/profits?
Someone explain to me the basics of capitalism, 'cause I apparently, the C.S. graduate, is clueless ;->.
Thank you.
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So, I'm just contemplating (in awe again), just what the fu*k would or should have happened if one of us, the 120,000 (annual quota) H-1B's in this country stumbled upon that site this guy described, which I won't even mention here :) (Carnivore eh? :), and we all are basically on work visas and 'readily deportable' for any felonies or misdemeanors?
And let's say that we even got off the hook like this guy did, how do you think the INS is going to view "has been taken in for questioning by the FBI, on a suspicion of "cracking, hacking, blabla" and had equipment confiscated for evidence purposes" or something along those lines?
Shit, by the time the EFF or ACLU or anyone can even assist my immigrant ass (as if I wasn't entitled to the same civil liberties as anyone else, right?), the INS will be buying me a one-way ticket and exporting me like an NFS UNIX partition out of the country ASAP! :)
So, is _THAT_ fair? You are all getting petrified that some agent breathed down your neck a bit, but what can they ultimately do to you? Suck your .... I don't wanna say it. But to me, or other immigrants? They can _raise_ hell and get us deported, solely on people's superstition and belief in adages like "once a criminal/suspect/pick your favorite adjective, always a criminal/suspect/pick your favorite adjective".
And then what happens to my 8 year invested in education/job/life/etc in this country? Should it all go down the drain? Well, damn, I smell a U.S. Supreme Court case getting accepted here for review for violating my constitutional rights... that is, IF and ONLY IF, I can get a Tourist visa to get back into the country and get past the U.S. border :-/... Scary you think? You're lucky you were born in the U.S. of A...
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Whatever happened to migrating toward 'paperless environments'... Is all of U.S. laws driven by one simple motto - greed, and nothing but?
Sad, it truly is... patenting knowledge, patenting one-clicks, copyrighting knowledge that's been there in excess of 200 years, patenting the sound of the Harley-Davidson... what's next? Patenting quarks because someone proved they're there first while working at Mega-greed-corp. Inc.???
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Do you still believe your premise? :)
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Your claim that "no source that is unverfied can be trusted" is still false on its face, because the above scenario is quite feasible. It's not like the police is going to set up 24 hr surveillance for you, regardless of how real or unreal the threat was... Deal with that! :P
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So, a natural question arose in my mind (and I'm sure many others' too) - why is it that virtually all graduate students and at least half of the undergrad ones are entirely foreign, on F-1 visas, fighting their way through school, living in ramshackled halfhouses (so to speak ;-) and then later converting to H-1B's and occupying virtually 50+% of the hightech position in the IT industry?
I have my own explanation as to why this is the way you see it currently - and to state it briefly at first - IMHO - it is a lack of appreciation by U.S. citizens of what their country provides to them and a complete sense of appreciation in people who are coming from abroad, from third-world countries (such as mine, former Yugoslavia), where we were never afforded the same lifestyle that we have here now (well, at least most of us couldn't have the same lifestyle..).
Why this lack of sense of appreciation is present in U.S. born/raised citizens, and not in foreign people? Is it valid to say that someone who grew up here in the U.S. took many things for granted, whereas the foreign person could only dream of such things? But then, what about people from foreign countries who _did_ have a similar lifestyle in their home country and are "just as lazy" as the math-hating American when they come here (such as myself :)? Do I lack that sense of appreciation because I had a REALLY nice life in Yugoslavia because my parents made far more than the average person? Would an "American bloodtype" citizen that was born in Yugoslavia think like one of these foreigners that invade the U.S. educational institutions/companies now? Would my GPA have been any higher than a 3.0 if I was born in poverty in Yugoslavia rather than well-off? I don't know - one could write a PhD thesis in sociology/psychology based on these few questions - though one thing is obvious even if not completely supported by fact - foreign people tend to be more persistent than Americans born/raised currently in the U.S.
I'm not going to say foreign born people are necessarily smarter or more intelligent than a U.S. born/raised person. That's highly subjective, as I've seen quite a number of PhD's that are Americans, born/raised here in this country. So, there's an exception to every rule. However, most of these PhD people (let's just call them that for sake of argument) are age 50 or older. What does that mean? Well it may mean a lot of things, but to me it means that the conditions in the U.S. under which these American PhD's were born and raised 30-50 years ago were much different than the conditions that the U.S. is currently experiencing (economic or otherwise). Of course, I know a U.S. born PhD who is 30-something years old from my former university, but he is the only one, to be completely honest, and that, I would assume, is far less PhD (or M.S.) candidates/students/completions than those 30-50 years ago. So, the economic/overall condition 30+ years ago may not have been so rosey as it is now, however, that "grayish" condition long ago made those older math/engineering/physics PhD's (50+ right now) behave more in a "third-world country" manner when it came to their studies. And that meant enduring throughout the course of the study, and not giving up easily, if at all. Of course, this is just one theory of why now foreign people are invading hightech industry/education in the U.S., but I'll stick with it until someone offers a better one, or a more reasonable one. So, have all these economic/technological/societal advances undoubtedly contributed to the lowering of the quality of education (as a parallel issue) and the lowering of the academic morals in majority of U.S. born people with regards to the engineering/math/physics and as of recently (25-30 years or so) the computer sciences fields? If I had to answer this question, I'd have to say, yes, probably so. After all, on the flipside of the enrollment numbers for the CS program, I can tell you that out of the 30k+ students, at least 29% were some sort of business management majors.
So what does this say? It says (to me at least) that people born here are looking for more and more esoteric, sophisticated professions, such as business management, or other "executive" or management positions within companies. What many of these people that do take bus. management as their major do not realize is when they come to manage a group of "slanteyes", or Hindus or Yugoslavs ;-) or Peruans or Chilleans or Israelis or Palestinians, in the field of software engineering, often times they find themselves at a loss. This especially applies to people who are supposed to handle hands-on programming teams (code monkeys? :) and at the same time communicate the business ideas of those "higher up" the company chain. Without a _solid_, _equivalent_ and even _better_ understanding of the CS/CE/EE areas, they are _bound_ to fuck up sooner or later and drive a department into oblivion, or a smaller company into annihilation as I have personally witnessed this at my former company where we had a highly skilled, and highly educated (the least we had was a B.S. in CS or theoretical physics and highest a few PhDs in C.S.) team of people who produced some _extraordinary_ OMT designs and tons of C++ code to implement those designs, and returned virtually flawless software apps under the leadership of a Jamaican PhD in C.S. nigger (yeah, I'm sure he won't mind me calling him that as I know him so well and he'd know why I called him that - because everyone "loved" him because of his color rather than his merit to the company :) who graduated from a U.S. university with a PhD in C.S. and a M.S. in C.S. and theoretical and applied physics.
I may have gotten off on a tangent here, but I'm a living proof of where the U.S. educational system is taking its own citizens and where it's taking the foreigners that it lets in on F1's, H1's etc. It is a fact of life, that these business majors who overwhelm most U.S. universities right now can't tell a byte from a bit, yet, they believe they are somehow entitled to producing "Great Ideas" that a software engineer could somehow "not see as clearly as those business people with a vision" for the company's future and its development.
Unfortunately, this type of company politics, eventually led to my former company's demise, and they are now on the verge of bankruptcy from what I understand from one of their people on the inside, who remained a friend of mine up till now, long after I left the company along with the other 4 brilliant members of our team we called "Borg" :-) because of the highly stable OO code we were able to produce in virtually "no time" fully backed by OMT designs that all of us were required by our Jamaican PhD nigger to write before we ever touched 'vi' to code.
I don't want to and I won't even get into the kind of racial prejudice that plagued this former company of mine, especially aimed at us, foreigners, who were HARDLY paid a fucking prevailing wage... That would be a WHOLE different ball game for discussion, and would involve going back to the Cenozoic period of humanity, where the male with the darker skin type threw a rock at the male with the lighter skin complexion, and the one with the lighter skin called the other one a nigger, and the nigger than called the whiter one a "racist fucking pig", and that's how it all started to develop "_naturally_" of course, as many people would like to advocate in their sick deluded minds that racism is a natural rather than a learned thing. So, let's just forget about the racial/ethnical diseases that plagued my former company....
I am sorry I got off on a tangent here, and perhaps a bit off topic, but I believe many people are confused about how H1B's have it in the United States, how they're treated, and why the educational systems in the U.S. are not as good as the foreign ones and why U.S. companies are forced to bring in people from abroad rather than people from inside. Yes, the indentured labor thing is valid - to a certan extent - but then there ought to be something called a national pride that the U.S. should take in its educational system and its products - people who are highly skilled in ALL areas, including CS/CE/EE. That national pride should prevent U.S. companies from hiring a foreign worker in lieu of an American one, at least in MY opinion. I would be _damn_ proud of this country and its educational system, and I'd be blue in the chest from hitting myself if I could say that the U.S. of A. has produced the BEST there is of Computer scientists/engineers/physicists in the whole wide world and I'd be _damn proud_ to have the honor of hiring and paying such a worker what he/she deserves. If Americans woke up from the euphoria they are living in right now which is a result of the high standard of living, and started thinking like what I described above - then MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, you will see a complete rebound in CS/CE/EE enrollment the way it used to be many years ago when people valued the technical/engineering professions a hell of a lot more than now, during this "business" frenzy period. If American colleges (especially the undergrad stuff, which now resembles a freeking vocational program in C.S. rather than a real program) produced high quality grads in CS/CE/EE, I'm virtually positive that companies will eventually start to hire a lot more Americans than foreign workers. So, it's not just that they need "indentured" labor, they also need SKILLED labor too. And that is exactly what they're doing, hiring skilled labor. Whether it came from India, or the United States, to a large, visible company like Sun, Microsoft, or Oracle, it would not matter. Most of those people, foreign or not, do get paid the same wages as their American counterparts....
So, quit whining about "indentured labor", respect the H1B's a tad more than what's been shown by some people on /., get your kids' interest into CS by stimulating their brain from early age, drop the racist/ethnocentric notions, study hard, don't give up, live below your standards... and hell, maybe THIS country will EVENTUALLY live the Borg principle :-).
I hope some of this was usefull. If you don't like it, then state your opinion if you wish.. I'll be glad to hear it.
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Have you checked out BeOS yet?
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