The german stellerator Wendelstein 7-X aims for up to 30 minutes of confinement. At the moment only a some very earlier tests have been done, that did not aim for long confinement but just to check that everything is okay with the installation. Wendelstein 7-X started operating end of last year and EAST started operating in 2006. This chinese tokamak aims for confinement of up to 1000s and has reached 102 seconds of confinement after 10 years. At the end of 2013 they already had reached 30 seconds. Wendelstein 7-X will first do some experiments that do not aim for a really long confinement time, only up to 10 seconds. These experiments are planned to last about 2 years, after that they will install some additional equipment, that is planned to take 15 month. The chinese record should thus last for at least 3-4 years. But news from Wendelstein 7-x have been very positive, I would not be surprised if confinement works extremely well.
This sounds like a good idea, however when using a 240V surge protector at 100V you need to consider the reduced power rating. The power rating is likely mostly an maximum current rating and the same amount of power at 100 V instead of 240 V uses 2.4 times the current. So if you need 150 Watt maximum power at 100 V, you should use a 240v surge protector rated at least 360 W.
These results seem to be very questionable. Their graphs claim that in some configurations almost all 4k read requests are handled within 100 ns. But getting even a single DRAM burst from a random DRAM location already takes almost 100ns, even through the memory controller is connected with a much tighter interface, optimized for low latency and PCIe is much slower than DRAM interface. Even without overhead 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes ( 8 GB/s) can only transfer 8 KB per s. Transfering a 4 KB Block should thus take at least 0.5 s or 500ns and that does not include any overhead nor the time needed to actually send the request to the SSD, open the page from the NAND flash, run ECC and decompression.
It is a rule of thumb, but a very inaccurate one. If the BMI of someone is 30, it is extremely likely that he or she should lose weight. But if the BMI is 25-28, then it is very unclear. Depending on muscle mass, fat distribution, blood pressure, sugar levels, he or she might be perfectly fine and healthy or too fat. Some people with a BMI of 25 should lose weight, while others with a BMI of 27 are perfectly fine. So basically BMI does not tell you anything that most people would not know without the BMI. Someone with a BMI of 30 usually noticed that he or she should lose weight. BMI is helpful to people with body image disorders that think they are fat with a BMI of 18 or are healthy and just a little bit chubby with a BMI of 35. But normal people do not get much extra information from the BMI. Waist-to-Height Ratio is actually much more useful.
Everyone can figure out why someone who is overeating more than 500 calories a day gets fat. But even if someone consumes just 50 calories (a small apple) each day too much, he or she gains 5 lbs each year, in ten years he or she can easily go from normal weight to obese. It is almost impossible to estimate both calorie intake and use to such a high accuracy.
Calorie counting only works because people will also constantly monitor their weight and adjust calorie intake accordingly. People can usually not get a stable weight by calorie counting. They will do classical bang-bang (on/off) control and constantly switch between eating a few hundred calories less than needed and eating a few hundred calories more than needed. That way calorie counting does not have to be very exact and still works but also causes stress. If calorie intake and use could be monitored more precisely people would not need to switch between two different states, but instead tiny adjustments of meal size would also work.
Makani uses a completely different approach: They use a wind turbine to generate electric energy and just use a kite to get the turbine to 250m height, while the kites from switzerland are basically passive kites and the aerodynamic lift is used for generation of power. Makani could generate energy contiguously while this SwissKitePower approach would alternate between ascend and retraction phases and only produce power during ascend.
Well, the pill is an environmental factor, but it works both ways. It seems to increase breast and cervical cancer rates, but decreases the risk for Ovarian, womb and bowel cancers.
Both Islam and Christianity (and Judaism too, since they share the Old Testament with the Christians) advocate genocide and violence in their holy books. Why aren't they banned?
No, they don't. They describe genocides and mass killings in their holy books but no mainstream flavor of Christianity, e.g.: Lutheran Protestants or Roman Catholics understands these parts as advocating another genocide. They are not saying something such as "Let's finish the job and kill the remaining Canaanites." You cannot just take these holy texts, use your own interpretation and then based on your own interpretation decide to ban them, even through the meaning of the text as understood by the adherents of a religion is completely different. Interpretation matters a lot for holy books. Mainstream versions of these religions interpret their holy books in a way that is not advocating genocides.
Wooosh! I think the gravity of this strange example is a clear indicator you're starting to realize the slippery slope you just entered.
This is a slippery slope, sure. But that slope is slippery just means you need to be very careful, not that you are guaranteed to slip if you step on the slope. Also notice that the US also ban some types of speech: libel, national security, copyright, trade secrets, obscenity.
Every harmful-vs-beneficial analysis is based on certain cultural assumptions.
Sure, but a small subset of these cultural assumptions is part of the German constitution. This small subset is big enough to allow the classification of certain kinds of hatespeech as very harmful and not beneficial.
Many people have a culture+religion which says genocide of certain groups is OK, so if you ban "hate speech" but don't ban the religion itself, you're being inconsistent.
If a religion cannot exist without extreme hate speech then it is banned. Just like a religion that mandates ritual killings of other humans is banned. However, almost all religions come in many different flavors. If only some flavors mandate illegal things you cannot ban the other flavors of the religions, that are within the bounds of the laws.
Based on what I just said, you probably know where this is going. Let's make religions illegal! They cause harm to society (Islam is oppressing women, for example, and Christianity has historically had similar traits and still has) and as such are clearly not valuable.
No?
No, because causing harm is not enough to show that something is clearly not valuable. All sorts of things are causing harm. Many people are dying every year in traffic accidents, still we are not banning cars. And many people are dying in hospitals because of malpractice, still we are not closing all hospitals. You cannot look at harm alone, but need to look at benefits as well. The benefits of hospitals and cars are quite clear.
You look will find completely different assessments of harms and benefits of religion. It is completely unclear, if religions add something valuable to the society or if they are cause harm. Especially because religions concern topics where the same thing is perceived as harm by some people and as a benefit by others, e.g.: some people will consider staying virgin until marriage to be beneficial, others will consider it harmful. So how would you tell if it is harmful or beneficial?
The constitution does not say anything about extramarital sex. If religions are causing more benefits than harms is a completely unclear question and differs a lot based on personal viewpoint. However the German constitution has a clear stance on human dignity. Stuff such as killing humans just because they are migrants is always unacceptable from the viewpoint of the constitution.
This has always bothered me. How can denying historical facts be *illegal*? That's an extreme form of thoughtcrime.
It is not a thought crime, as long as you only think that the holocaust never happend it is legal, but once you start telling people it is illegal. Telling people that the holocaust never happened is causing real damage by inviting violence against minorities and could cause Jews and other minorities targeted in the holocaust to leave Germany.
Now there is your problem right there. Who gets to define what is "valuable" and what is not? How is this any different from the past Germany is trying to distance itself from?
This was my personable opinion on valuable. Do you personally think that this kind of hatespeech is valuable? Or do you just think that is hard to define valuable?
The good news is that it is not really required to define valuable precisely. If it is unclear, if a piece of speech is valuable or not, then it should be legal. But if something is clearly not valuable and could cause harm to the society, then it is fine to make it illegal.
Also think about it from a different perspective: These extreme forms of hate speech could only be a valuable contribution to the society, if unchangeable parts of the constitution that guarantee human rights are wrong. The constitution does not allow to kill people just because they are migrants. If want to claim that extreme hatespeech might be a valuable contribution to the society, then having a constitution that guarantees certain rights to everyone, would be a problem, because it prevents the implementation of what is proposed the hatespeech.
It's not a crime in Germany to say racist things. However claiming that the holocaust never happened is a crime, as well as some extreme forms of hate speech. Voicing an opinion against people migrating to Germany is perfectly legal and is done all the time by various people on German TV stations or newspapers. But it is not legal to call on people to kill migrants or to claim that all migrants are human waste and therefore do not deserve humane treatment. I think that is perfectly fine and is not restricting valuable opinions in any way.
Maybe in the US. At least here in Germany it is legal to administer doses of morphine or other pain killers that might kill the patient as a side-effect, if these high doses are required to control the pain. However, doctors from hospices usually dispute the view that a proper dosing of morphine will hasten death. If you would administer the doses used in hospices to someone unused to opioids, they would kill, but we are talking about people that have usually received high doses of opioids for long time. The real issue is often that doctors are afraid of killing the patient by raising the dose and people being in pain because of that, even through raising the dose would not really kill the patient.
1.The atheism of a person who has never heard of god is clearly not a belief system or even a religion.
2. But the atheism of someone who has heard of God and writes angry books on why believing in god is evil and why all kinds of theism should be destroyed, that can be a belief system and awfully close to a dogmatic religion.
Some people people say atheism is not a religion, just like not collecting stamps is not a hobby. However, there is no club of the american non-stamp collectors, there are no people that write books about the dangers of stamp collecting, etc.
Especially in the US most people that do not believe in god, do not call themself atheists. This is because most of the time, when someone calls himself an atheist, he is the "religious" kind of atheist, not just the kind that does not care about god or thinks that god is not necessary.
I'm not sure if they actually cheated on the US MPG numbers. The advertised MPG US are quite a bit lower than the european ones. This could be a result of a different test cycle but also a result of not being able to cheat in the US. In Europe they did stuff like mixing diesel fuel into the oil supply and increasing the tire pressure beyond the allowed range. This increases MPG but will cause the engine to break early and would be dangerous on real roads.
There are good reasons to be critical of the H1B program, but the issues of people without college degrees are not caused by H1Bs, after all there are less than 100k H1Bs and on other hand there are 121M citizens 25 years and over with no college degree. Cancel all H1Bs and these people would still have problems to find good jobs. These issues are caused by moving almost all manufacturing offshore. At the same time a lot more people went to university and businesses can usually find someone with a degree, even without H1Bs.
More expensive placebos actually work better. (And placebos administered using a syringe also work better than pills.) At the same time many real medications are abused as placebos, e.g: when GPs prescribes an antibiotic to a patient that most likely has a viral infection without a additional bacterial super infection that is effectively a placebo but with real side effects. A "homeopathy" based placebo might work very well for some patients and in most cases will be very cheap, even if not as cheap as other sugar pills.
Because a minor illness might still be a huge issue for the patient from his or her subjective perspective. A placebo can help a lot in these circumstances and can sometimes be a better alternative to not doing anything or prescribing medication that works only slightly better than than a placebo and has real side effects that can sometimes be worse than the wanted effects.
Placebos work, so why shouldn't GPs be allowed to prescribe them?.
This is not an uncommon argument, even among physicians. But there's a simple rebuttal, in my view: Giving a placebo conflicts with the patient's right to be informed.
Physicians prescribing homeopathic sugar pills can fully inform their patients that no good study ever showed that these pills worked better than a placebo. Many patient will still accept them. Also GP's would not prescribe them because they think they are useless, but prescribe them because they work well as a placebo and a placebo can sometimes be the medication with the best profile of wanted effects vs. side effects. Placebo's are evidence-based medicine. The placebo effect is extremely well documented and studied.
But even if the patient is not informed, things are not that simple. Patients deserve the best possible treatment (which sometimes might be a placebo or might have extremely rare but very scary side effects that will cause patients to stop taking their medication), at the same time patient deserved to be fully informed. Sometimes it is just not possible to achieve both goals. No matter how GPs act in such a situation, they will always fail in some respect. Not properly informing patients can sometimes be the smaller ethical issue.
Placebos work, so why shouldn't GPs be allowed to prescribe them? I think it is much better for public health if GPs are allowed use placebos such as homeopathy, than if people are avoiding GPs and are using people that are not allowed to prescribe real medicine when beneficial. For minor illnesses without an effective evidence based treatment it is perfectly fine to prescribe a placebo. It is also fine to prescribe a placebo in addition to conventional treatment, if the conventional treatment is not effective enough.
The real prevailing wage is hard to check. Companies will just not mention some of the special skills of that person and then they can hire a very skilled person for more than 110% "prevailing wage", when they are really paying 80% prevailing wage. Or they are paying 110% prevailing wage but expecting 200% working hours.
I think a much simpler solution would be to change the random lottery to a list that is ordered by wage and give the H1B only to people on the top of that list. That would make it hard to abuse H1Bs to drive down wages and give priority to the people that would likely really contribute the US economy. It could also potentially drive up wages for us workers: If companies are required to offer 200k per year to a foreigner with a certain skillset to guarantee him a H1B, then us workers with the same skillset will also notice what their skills are worth and will demand higher wages. And if the lowest wage that still qualified for a H1B is too low, then you just reduce the number of H1Bs.
I doubt that. ARM and MIPS chips are optimized for high energy efficiency and low price point, not high performance. A top of the line ARM Cortex-A57 performs about the same as an Intel Silvermont Atom.
As the content is likely mostly static: What about a single PC with many USB3.0 -> HDMI adapters + USB 3.0 Hubs? Sure, refresh rate will likely go down to something like 10 Hz because of bandwidth limitation but that should fine for your kind of content and driving all screens from the same PC could be very useful for administration.
Slashdot Mirror
The german stellerator Wendelstein 7-X aims for up to 30 minutes of confinement. At the moment only a some very earlier tests have been done, that did not aim for long confinement but just to check that everything is okay with the installation. Wendelstein 7-X started operating end of last year and EAST started operating in 2006.
This chinese tokamak aims for confinement of up to 1000s and has reached 102 seconds of confinement after 10 years. At the end of 2013 they already had reached 30 seconds. Wendelstein 7-X will first do some experiments that do not aim for a really long confinement time, only up to 10 seconds. These experiments are planned to last about 2 years, after that they will install some additional equipment, that is planned to take 15 month. The chinese record should thus last for at least 3-4 years. But news from Wendelstein 7-x have been very positive, I would not be surprised if confinement works extremely well.
This sounds like a good idea, however when using a 240V surge protector at 100V you need to consider the reduced power rating. The power rating is likely mostly an maximum current rating and the same amount of power at 100 V instead of 240 V uses 2.4 times the current. So if you need 150 Watt maximum power at 100 V, you should use a 240v surge protector rated at least 360 W.
Yes, unfortunately the mu did not show up. Let's see if the html entity works: nope
Seems you have to use u for mu on slashdot.
These results seem to be very questionable. Their graphs claim that in some configurations almost all 4k read requests are handled within 100 ns. But getting even a single DRAM burst from a random DRAM location already takes almost 100ns, even through the memory controller is connected with a much tighter interface, optimized for low latency and PCIe is much slower than DRAM interface. Even without overhead 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes ( 8 GB/s) can only transfer 8 KB per s. Transfering a 4 KB Block should thus take at least 0.5 s or 500ns and that does not include any overhead nor the time needed to actually send the request to the SSD, open the page from the NAND flash, run ECC and decompression.
It is a rule of thumb, but a very inaccurate one. If the BMI of someone is 30, it is extremely likely that he or she should lose weight. But if the BMI is 25-28, then it is very unclear. Depending on muscle mass, fat distribution, blood pressure, sugar levels, he or she might be perfectly fine and healthy or too fat. Some people with a BMI of 25 should lose weight, while others with a BMI of 27 are perfectly fine. So basically BMI does not tell you anything that most people would not know without the BMI. Someone with a BMI of 30 usually noticed that he or she should lose weight. BMI is helpful to people with body image disorders that think they are fat with a BMI of 18 or are healthy and just a little bit chubby with a BMI of 35. But normal people do not get much extra information from the BMI. Waist-to-Height Ratio is actually much more useful.
Everyone can figure out why someone who is overeating more than 500 calories a day gets fat. But even if someone consumes just 50 calories (a small apple) each day too much, he or she gains 5 lbs each year, in ten years he or she can easily go from normal weight to obese. It is almost impossible to estimate both calorie intake and use to such a high accuracy.
Calorie counting only works because people will also constantly monitor their weight and adjust calorie intake accordingly. People can usually not get a stable weight by calorie counting. They will do classical bang-bang (on/off) control and constantly switch between eating a few hundred calories less than needed and eating a few hundred calories more than needed. That way calorie counting does not have to be very exact and still works but also causes stress. If calorie intake and use could be monitored more precisely people would not need to switch between two different states, but instead tiny adjustments of meal size would also work.
Makani uses a completely different approach: They use a wind turbine to generate electric energy and just use a kite to get the turbine to 250m height, while the kites from switzerland are basically passive kites and the aerodynamic lift is used for generation of power. Makani could generate energy contiguously while this SwissKitePower approach would alternate between ascend and retraction phases and only produce power during ascend.
Well, the pill is an environmental factor, but it works both ways. It seems to increase breast and cervical cancer rates, but decreases the risk for Ovarian, womb and bowel cancers.
Both Islam and Christianity (and Judaism too, since they share the Old Testament with the Christians) advocate genocide and violence in their holy books. Why aren't they banned?
No, they don't. They describe genocides and mass killings in their holy books but no mainstream flavor of Christianity, e.g.: Lutheran Protestants or Roman Catholics understands these parts as advocating another genocide. They are not saying something such as "Let's finish the job and kill the remaining Canaanites." You cannot just take these holy texts, use your own interpretation and then based on your own interpretation decide to ban them, even through the meaning of the text as understood by the adherents of a religion is completely different. Interpretation matters a lot for holy books. Mainstream versions of these religions interpret their holy books in a way that is not advocating genocides.
Wooosh! I think the gravity of this strange example is a clear indicator you're starting to realize the slippery slope you just entered.
This is a slippery slope, sure. But that slope is slippery just means you need to be very careful, not that you are guaranteed to slip if you step on the slope. Also notice that the US also ban some types of speech: libel, national security, copyright, trade secrets, obscenity.
Every harmful-vs-beneficial analysis is based on certain cultural assumptions.
Sure, but a small subset of these cultural assumptions is part of the German constitution. This small subset is big enough to allow the classification of certain kinds of hatespeech as very harmful and not beneficial.
Many people have a culture+religion which says genocide of certain groups is OK, so if you ban "hate speech" but don't ban the religion itself, you're being inconsistent.
If a religion cannot exist without extreme hate speech then it is banned. Just like a religion that mandates ritual killings of other humans is banned. However, almost all religions come in many different flavors. If only some flavors mandate illegal things you cannot ban the other flavors of the religions, that are within the bounds of the laws.
Based on what I just said, you probably know where this is going. Let's make religions illegal! They cause harm to society (Islam is oppressing women, for example, and Christianity has historically had similar traits and still has) and as such are clearly not valuable.
No?
No, because causing harm is not enough to show that something is clearly not valuable. All sorts of things are causing harm. Many people are dying every year in traffic accidents, still we are not banning cars. And many people are dying in hospitals because of malpractice, still we are not closing all hospitals. You cannot look at harm alone, but need to look at benefits as well. The benefits of hospitals and cars are quite clear.
You look will find completely different assessments of harms and benefits of religion. It is completely unclear, if religions add something valuable to the society or if they are cause harm. Especially because religions concern topics where the same thing is perceived as harm by some people and as a benefit by others, e.g.: some people will consider staying virgin until marriage to be beneficial, others will consider it harmful. So how would you tell if it is harmful or beneficial?
The constitution does not say anything about extramarital sex. If religions are causing more benefits than harms is a completely unclear question and differs a lot based on personal viewpoint. However the German constitution has a clear stance on human dignity. Stuff such as killing humans just because they are migrants is always unacceptable from the viewpoint of the constitution.
This has always bothered me. How can denying historical facts be *illegal*? That's an extreme form of thoughtcrime.
It is not a thought crime, as long as you only think that the holocaust never happend it is legal, but once you start telling people it is illegal. Telling people that the holocaust never happened is causing real damage by inviting violence against minorities and could cause Jews and other minorities targeted in the holocaust to leave Germany.
Now there is your problem right there. Who gets to define what is "valuable" and what is not? How is this any different from the past Germany is trying to distance itself from?
This was my personable opinion on valuable. Do you personally think that this kind of hatespeech is valuable? Or do you just think that is hard to define valuable?
The good news is that it is not really required to define valuable precisely. If it is unclear, if a piece of speech is valuable or not, then it should be legal. But if something is clearly not valuable and could cause harm to the society, then it is fine to make it illegal.
Also think about it from a different perspective: These extreme forms of hate speech could only be a valuable contribution to the society, if unchangeable parts of the constitution that guarantee human rights are wrong. The constitution does not allow to kill people just because they are migrants. If want to claim that extreme hatespeech might be a valuable contribution to the society, then having a constitution that guarantees certain rights to everyone, would be a problem, because it prevents the implementation of what is proposed the hatespeech.
It's not a crime in Germany to say racist things. However claiming that the holocaust never happened is a crime, as well as some extreme forms of hate speech. Voicing an opinion against people migrating to Germany is perfectly legal and is done all the time by various people on German TV stations or newspapers. But it is not legal to call on people to kill migrants or to claim that all migrants are human waste and therefore do not deserve humane treatment. I think that is perfectly fine and is not restricting valuable opinions in any way.
The legal limit is "dont kill the patient".
Maybe in the US. At least here in Germany it is legal to administer doses of morphine or other pain killers that might kill the patient as a side-effect, if these high doses are required to control the pain. However, doctors from hospices usually dispute the view that a proper dosing of morphine will hasten death. If you would administer the doses used in hospices to someone unused to opioids, they would kill, but we are talking about people that have usually received high doses of opioids for long time.
The real issue is often that doctors are afraid of killing the patient by raising the dose and people being in pain because of that, even through raising the dose would not really kill the patient.
There is some truth to both sides of this debate:
1 .The atheism of a person who has never heard of god is clearly not a belief system or even a religion.
2. But the atheism of someone who has heard of God and writes angry books on why believing in god is evil and why all kinds of theism should be destroyed, that can be a belief system and awfully close to a dogmatic religion.
Some people people say atheism is not a religion, just like not collecting stamps is not a hobby. However, there is no club of the american non-stamp collectors, there are no people that write books about the dangers of stamp collecting, etc.
Especially in the US most people that do not believe in god, do not call themself atheists. This is because most of the time, when someone calls himself an atheist, he is the "religious" kind of atheist, not just the kind that does not care about god or thinks that god is not necessary.
I'm not sure if they actually cheated on the US MPG numbers. The advertised MPG US are quite a bit lower than the european ones. This could be a result of a different test cycle but also a result of not being able to cheat in the US. In Europe they did stuff like mixing diesel fuel into the oil supply and increasing the tire pressure beyond the allowed range. This increases MPG but will cause the engine to break early and would be dangerous on real roads.
There are good reasons to be critical of the H1B program, but the issues of people without college degrees are not caused by H1Bs, after all there are less than 100k H1Bs and on other hand there are 121M citizens 25 years and over with no college degree. Cancel all H1Bs and these people would still have problems to find good jobs. These issues are caused by moving almost all manufacturing offshore. At the same time a lot more people went to university and businesses can usually find someone with a degree, even without H1Bs.
More expensive placebos actually work better. (And placebos administered using a syringe also work better than pills.) At the same time many real medications are abused as placebos, e.g: when GPs prescribes an antibiotic to a patient that most likely has a viral infection without a additional bacterial super infection that is effectively a placebo but with real side effects. A "homeopathy" based placebo might work very well for some patients and in most cases will be very cheap, even if not as cheap as other sugar pills.
Because a minor illness might still be a huge issue for the patient from his or her subjective perspective. A placebo can help a lot in these circumstances and can sometimes be a better alternative to not doing anything or prescribing medication that works only slightly better than than a placebo and has real side effects that can sometimes be worse than the wanted effects.
Placebos work, so why shouldn't GPs be allowed to prescribe them? .
This is not an uncommon argument, even among physicians. But there's a simple rebuttal, in my view: Giving a placebo conflicts with the patient's right to be informed.
Physicians prescribing homeopathic sugar pills can fully inform their patients that no good study ever showed that these pills worked better than a placebo. Many patient will still accept them. Also GP's would not prescribe them because they think they are useless, but prescribe them because they work well as a placebo and a placebo can sometimes be the medication with the best profile of wanted effects vs. side effects. Placebo's are evidence-based medicine. The placebo effect is extremely well documented and studied.
But even if the patient is not informed, things are not that simple. Patients deserve the best possible treatment (which sometimes might be a placebo or might have extremely rare but very scary side effects that will cause patients to stop taking their medication), at the same time patient deserved to be fully informed. Sometimes it is just not possible to achieve both goals. No matter how GPs act in such a situation, they will always fail in some respect. Not properly informing patients can sometimes be the smaller ethical issue.
Placebos work, so why shouldn't GPs be allowed to prescribe them? I think it is much better for public health if GPs are allowed use placebos such as homeopathy, than if people are avoiding GPs and are using people that are not allowed to prescribe real medicine when beneficial. For minor illnesses without an effective evidence based treatment it is perfectly fine to prescribe a placebo. It is also fine to prescribe a placebo in addition to conventional treatment, if the conventional treatment is not effective enough.
The real prevailing wage is hard to check. Companies will just not mention some of the special skills of that person and then they can hire a very skilled person for more than 110% "prevailing wage", when they are really paying 80% prevailing wage. Or they are paying 110% prevailing wage but expecting 200% working hours.
I think a much simpler solution would be to change the random lottery to a list that is ordered by wage and give the H1B only to people on the top of that list. That would make it hard to abuse H1Bs to drive down wages and give priority to the people that would likely really contribute the US economy. It could also potentially drive up wages for us workers: If companies are required to offer 200k per year to a foreigner with a certain skillset to guarantee him a H1B, then us workers with the same skillset will also notice what their skills are worth and will demand higher wages. And if the lowest wage that still qualified for a H1B is too low, then you just reduce the number of H1Bs.
I doubt that. ARM and MIPS chips are optimized for high energy efficiency and low price point, not high performance. A top of the line ARM Cortex-A57 performs about the same as an Intel Silvermont Atom.
As the content is likely mostly static: What about a single PC with many USB3.0 -> HDMI adapters + USB 3.0 Hubs? Sure, refresh rate will likely go down to something like 10 Hz because of bandwidth limitation but that should fine for your kind of content and driving all screens from the same PC could be very useful for administration.