Of course that won't happen - these companies are selling you, so they will do nothing that will reduce their user base, even if it makes it a higher quality.
Plus, remember, Facebook, Twitter, etc make their livelihood on ads, and one of the metrics they can use to justify ad prices (not to mention silly stock valuations) is "active users". You better believe those millions of auto generated FB accounts spamming every popular page/celebrity/etc posts are "active users" (very active!)
Take that with a grain of salt, obviously, as Gruber is the most biased Apple-Fanboy-Journalist in existence. Though, actually, if he says something Apple is bad, it must be REALLY BAD.
:) I don't make a salary, I own my own business... I suspect a lot of those houses are bought the same way, by people who have money, but don't earn a lot of money, if that makes sense.
Well, if you own your own business you probably *should* make a salary. Incorporating and paying yourself moderate salary (with the rest being profits as the primary/only shareholder, of course) is almost always going to be better for tax purposes. Thank the current ridiculous discrepancy between individual and corporate tax rates for that one...
And it turns out, that's not all *that* different from what I was saying - those houses are definitely bought by people who "earn" money, it's just not through their salary. Basically they took a risk (and were possibly paid less *salary* than they were worth) in exchange for stock options. If that risk was at Facebook, Twitter, etc (or one of the MANY other companies that either IPOed or was acquired) then they may have ended up with $$$ in stock options. That windfall then gets used to make a huge down payment on a house, since their *salary* just wouldn't be enough for an $8000/mo mortgage...
Not racism. I was describing the fact that compared to the USA, the places that a lot of these folks come from are much worse places to live, which is part of the reason they come here on H1-Bs.
Yeah, describing India or China (which is what we are talking about, since they make up the VAST majority of H1-B) as "Thirdworldhellholeistan" is not racist or derogatory at all.
It's funny, because really, it's not even accurate any more. I assume you have never been to either of those countries. China is rapidly approaching an even larger income gap than the US (Shanghai is more expensive than NYC), and India's college educational system for tech is making the US system as a whole look like a joke.
And I'm not sure where you are working, but SW engineering salaries have quite literally exploded over the past 5 years or so. It's not at all uncommon to see $400-500k+ offers (including benefits) these days
Bullshit.
Well, sorry that you aren't being offered that, but it doesn't mean others aren't (and as I said that number includes all benefits, ie. insurance, 401k matching, profit sharing/options/RSR/etc). It is pretty mind boggling to someone who has been in this industry for a while, I suppose. But the demand for sr. developers/architects is insane right now, if you are good.
Perhaps, but someone is getting paid that, who else is buying the $3 to $5 million dollar houses out there?
Those house are bought with stock options. In fact, even with "normal" houses/condos (in the Bay Area that would probably be $800K-$1.5M) the estimate is 40% of the down payments are enabled by stock options. Despite what the media wants you to think, $3-$5M houses are still for "rich people", bought more specifically with "stock options from employees at the right place at the right time".
Almost no one here buys $5M houses based on a "salary". Most typical software engineers are still saving up for 15+ years to put a down payment on a $1M+ house. Note as well, the rent here is also ridiculous, so those high salaries don't mean as much if you throw away $3000/mo on a 1 BR apartment.
To summarize: if you like Dallas, by all means stay there! And anyway it's all subjective. You can live "nicely" on $250K ANYWHERE. To pretend otherwise is just being a first world jack off.
Shifting the burden of proof. These logical fallacies are out in force today. I guess that's why you posted AC. No, I'm not going to go prove each and every one of those jobs exist, because that's why we have the US Dept of Labor, etc, to collect this information. Go look it up, it's trivially easy.
The 65K H1-B work visas are new applicants not renewals which is uncapped.
You do realize only the new ones change the job pool, right? Durrr...
Also, close your mouth? Not all of us move our lips when we read and write, AC.
Again, as has been covered on/. extensively, there is no shortage of American STEM graduates.
No, that hasn't been covered on/. extensively because it's just not true. Look it up. There were 40,000 CS degrees last year, and almost 4,000,000 openings in various engineering and IT fields. I'm pretty sure 2 orders of magnitude could be considered "a shortage".
And I'm not sure where you are working, but SW engineering salaries have quite literally exploded over the past 5 years or so. It's not at all uncommon to see $400-500k+ offers (including benefits) these days.
H1-Bs from Thirdworldhellholistan
Well, now we see why you were arguing without facts - racism is at the root of a lot of these debates, huh?
Oh, that's just silly. VPs at many Bay Area companies aren't making $750k, and I'm pretty sure they aren't being outsourced or competing with H1-Bs. You aren't going to be offered $750k unless the job requires skills that are in such high demand and low supply they are practically unique - which is very rare in this industry.
And even more importantly - I assume you already have a job (I assume anyone claiming they should be paid in the top 0.01% of engineers isn't unemployed except by choice). So what good does that do to fill the hundreds of thousands of openings given a current 2-4% unemployment rage for software engineers? All it does is shift the job somewhere else. Doesn't solve the problem in the slightest.
Your point is yet another logical fallacy. So many on this topic today...
Calling someone a paid shill because you disagree with them is the lowest form of argumentative fallacy, usually reserved for anti-vax, tea partiers, and global warming deniers.
everyone who has been in tech and looked for a job via non-friend (public) channels has seen their share of being rejected and ignored even though your quals and the job are nearly a carbon copy of each other (happens to me all the time).
Nope, I haven't seen that. I and most of my friends and coworkers are getting constant calls from recruiters, and usually have 5 offers and a counteroffer within a couple weeks when looking around. And my company always has a half dozen open recs we are trying desperately to fill, and we pay the same - very competitive - salary whether you were born in the US or elsewhere.
The tech job market in the Bay Area is the best for employees that I have seen in my 25 years here. Good new college grads (which are rare) can make $150k, experienced developers $250k+, and architects $400-500k with bonuses (and that's not including stock options/grants). And WHY is that the case? Just because companies like throwing large amounts of money at employees? No, it's capitalism as usual, and when demand goes up but supply doesn't, prices go up as well.
I doubt there are more than 100 jobs, country wide, that NEED special talent that is not available here already. I might even be estimating that too much, too.
I already answered this, but again to state FACTS vs your complete guessing: the software engineer unemployment rate in the SF Bay Area is now under 2%, and hiring growth was up 17% last year. There are something like 150,000 unfilled software engineering openings. And before you say "hire from outside of the Bay Area" - nationally it's still only 4%.
Either your company hires from the bottom of the barrel or you are writing from 2007. Clearly you are not at a Bay Area software company, because no one says "engineering firms" here, that's just bizarre.
The last 10 candidates we made offers to had multiple competing offers. I think we hired 3 of them, which was pretty damn good when you take into account these offers are in the $200k+ range, sometimes significantly more with bonuses and benefits. One was American born, one a Chinese citizen with a green card, and one Indian with an H-1B and a PhD from UC Berkeley. All had similar years of experience and were offered with ~5% of the same salary. The same is true of most of the highly competitive software companies here, so your "cheap labor" argument in this case is - utter bullshit.
Anyway, you need to provide some FACTS before you can hope to have a credible argument. Here are a few: the software engineer unemployment rate in the SF Bay Area is now under 2%, and hiring growth was up 17% last year. There are something like 150,000 unfilled software engineering openings. And before you say "hire from outside of the Bay Area" - nationally it's still only 4%.
The FACT is it's a huge growth industry in the US right now and there just aren't enough experienced software engineers in the US to fill the openings (nor are we educating nearly enough smart new developers to compensate).
If you were alive when your great great grandfather Herr Shultz tried to come over you'd have kicked his ass out and you wouldn't have even been born.
The H1-B Visa program only allows 65,000 per year (which is insanely low considering there are over 500,000 open tech jobs that currently can't be filled with competent domestic workers). I can guarantee you the company I work for would pay the same for an American worker as a foreign H1-B worker, if we could actually fine ANY worker that we found competent to do the job...
what we have now is a 'grab, take, return home' situation. we don't give these folks citizenship. look, if they are valuable, give them citizenship and let them be like the rest of us! let them live with the long-term results of what we all are going to face. if you come to shit in my country, take what's good and then leave, do you think people will want to like you?
Why should anyone take your word that this is the "norm"? Because it's absolutely NOT.
I work in tech with many foreign born coworkers and the only ones who have not tried as hard as humanly possible to get their green card and citizenship are the Europeans (because yes, being middle class German, British, French, etc will pretty much guarantee you comfortable retirement and health care). Not a single one of my Indian or Chinese coworkers have any interest in going back to their home country after making American tech salaries. They are the same as anyone else here, wanting to buy a house, raise a family, etc.
The only difference between 100 years ago and today is that many immigrants can actually MAKE enough money to send some back to their families. In fact that's often the case because (legal) immigration is now so picky we only accept those who can make upper middle class salaries... So, wow, is that so horrible to your sensibilities that not all modern immigrants are minimum wage workers who can barely support themselves?
If you seriously think the current American workforce can fill the positions that many of the H1-B Visas are taking, you have not been involved in any significant tech hiring in the last few years. My company is only moderately competitive and we have been almost totally unable to find competent engineers to hire in the last year...
It's amazing that the same people who (actually, no - who's GRANDPARENTS or beyond) built themselves up as immigrants working hard are now claiming that we are letting "foreigners" come in and "take our jorbs!"
"Brain drain" aka immigration of the brightest and most motivated around the world is what always has and will drive American innovation. The myth of "American Exceptionalism" is that it is somehow based on being BORN on the North American Continent. That's absurd. It's based on people wanting to COME to the North American Continent because at some point in history we actually welcomed smart, motivated people who wanted to work hard to achieve their own dreams.
Though the FCC could step in and apply their own regulations I doubt they would even consider it for non-broadcast access.
Actually, they already have very specific rules for captioning Internet streaming content that Netflix and all other streaming companies follow (the misunderstanding that Netflix "doesn't do captions" is totally wrong - the vasty majority of their content is captioned):
This lawsuit was trying to claim that those already extensive rules aren't enough and the ADA requires all content to be captioned. Luckily the courts didn't agree...
It's common for movies that are distributed in a country that generally doesn't speak the movie's language, of course. Though they are called subtitles in that case.
The actual FCC rule about whether captions are required for streaming depends on two things: when the content originally aired on TV and when the device displaying them was built/updated (so that devices that were built before the rules don't apply). It's actually pretty fair.
The lawsuit was basically an attempt by lawyers to apply the ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act) to Internet closed captions to argue that those reasonable FCC rules aren't enough, and they should "get money" from companies that are really trying as hard as they can to follow the actual rules...
There may be some stupid comments here, but the general discourse (as we are having now) is actually WAY above average for tech sites. And infinitely more intelligent than, say, the "CopBlock" Facebook page of which the comments are about 95% either images/memes of cops getting beat up or various statements related to killing cops.
And while I agree there is probably almost zero reason for a SWAT team going to a random anonymous tip, they are certainly needed for raiding known gang or drug operations. Basically, use appropriate force - when you think the criminals have automatic weapons, go in with automatic weapons. When the tip is anonymous and against a 22 year old with no criminal record, maybe a bit of discretion is in order.
Basically, the police don't seem to have any actual policies or playbooks for various situations (or if they do they ignore them), and instead are following the "let's use everything we have" strategy to way too many situations...
To include the somewhat overused quote from Ben Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Problem is, (to paraphrase) people prefer security over freedom, and so are giving up the latter left and right these days. The problem is, honestly, for the vast majority they will have (somewhat) increased security with no noticeable loss of freedoms. People only realized how bad things have become if they are one of those small minority whose rights are violated, wrongly prosecuted, or killed.
If you have ever actually read posts of the Facebook followers of those sites, it's basically a bunch of morons (including many gamers) posting various anti-police rants and meme photos about killing cops.
The sites themselves do at least get valuable information and videos published about clear examples of police overreach and brutality - but the majority of commenters on these sites are the worst kind of trolls not helping reform anything, just promoting more violence (luckily, of course, they are just a bunch of dipshits hiding behind keyboards instead of actually acting on their impotent threats).
Just give them a lifetime ban them from using computers along with house arrest. That would be a fate worse than death - living in their parents' basement with nothing to do.
If the police HAD ended up killing someone over the incident it's very possible the person calling in the fake threat could be tried for murder, so if the police didn't end up killing anyone it could still be attempted murder. It's all about intent.
If there was no proof of malice or intent to have the person killed but he was, it would likely be manslaughter - and "attempted manslaughter" is pretty rare since if you didn't mean for someone to be killed and they weren't, it's probably not applicable.
Why would you need a proof of concept for something that is almost completely useless? It's not like they are going to now put the effort into making it a "real product". As far as "hacks" go, it's pretty hokey.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course that won't happen - these companies are selling you, so they will do nothing that will reduce their user base, even if it makes it a higher quality.
Plus, remember, Facebook, Twitter, etc make their livelihood on ads, and one of the metrics they can use to justify ad prices (not to mention silly stock valuations) is "active users". You better believe those millions of auto generated FB accounts spamming every popular page/celebrity/etc posts are "active users" (very active!)
Take that with a grain of salt, obviously, as Gruber is the most biased Apple-Fanboy-Journalist in existence. Though, actually, if he says something Apple is bad, it must be REALLY BAD.
:) I don't make a salary, I own my own business... I suspect a lot of those houses are bought the same way, by people who have money, but don't earn a lot of money, if that makes sense.
Well, if you own your own business you probably *should* make a salary. Incorporating and paying yourself moderate salary (with the rest being profits as the primary/only shareholder, of course) is almost always going to be better for tax purposes. Thank the current ridiculous discrepancy between individual and corporate tax rates for that one...
And it turns out, that's not all *that* different from what I was saying - those houses are definitely bought by people who "earn" money, it's just not through their salary. Basically they took a risk (and were possibly paid less *salary* than they were worth) in exchange for stock options. If that risk was at Facebook, Twitter, etc (or one of the MANY other companies that either IPOed or was acquired) then they may have ended up with $$$ in stock options. That windfall then gets used to make a huge down payment on a house, since their *salary* just wouldn't be enough for an $8000/mo mortgage...
Not racism. I was describing the fact that compared to the USA, the places that a lot of these folks come from are much worse places to live, which is part of the reason they come here on H1-Bs.
Yeah, describing India or China (which is what we are talking about, since they make up the VAST majority of H1-B) as "Thirdworldhellholeistan" is not racist or derogatory at all.
It's funny, because really, it's not even accurate any more. I assume you have never been to either of those countries. China is rapidly approaching an even larger income gap than the US (Shanghai is more expensive than NYC), and India's college educational system for tech is making the US system as a whole look like a joke.
Bullshit.
Well, sorry that you aren't being offered that, but it doesn't mean others aren't (and as I said that number includes all benefits, ie. insurance, 401k matching, profit sharing/options/RSR/etc). It is pretty mind boggling to someone who has been in this industry for a while, I suppose. But the demand for sr. developers/architects is insane right now, if you are good.
Perhaps, but someone is getting paid that, who else is buying the $3 to $5 million dollar houses out there?
Those house are bought with stock options. In fact, even with "normal" houses/condos (in the Bay Area that would probably be $800K-$1.5M) the estimate is 40% of the down payments are enabled by stock options. Despite what the media wants you to think, $3-$5M houses are still for "rich people", bought more specifically with "stock options from employees at the right place at the right time".
Almost no one here buys $5M houses based on a "salary". Most typical software engineers are still saving up for 15+ years to put a down payment on a $1M+ house. Note as well, the rent here is also ridiculous, so those high salaries don't mean as much if you throw away $3000/mo on a 1 BR apartment.
To summarize: if you like Dallas, by all means stay there! And anyway it's all subjective. You can live "nicely" on $250K ANYWHERE. To pretend otherwise is just being a first world jack off.
Shifting the burden of proof. These logical fallacies are out in force today. I guess that's why you posted AC. No, I'm not going to go prove each and every one of those jobs exist, because that's why we have the US Dept of Labor, etc, to collect this information. Go look it up, it's trivially easy.
The 65K H1-B work visas are new applicants not renewals which is uncapped.
You do realize only the new ones change the job pool, right? Durrr...
Also, close your mouth? Not all of us move our lips when we read and write, AC.
Again, as has been covered on /. extensively, there is no shortage of American STEM graduates.
No, that hasn't been covered on /. extensively because it's just not true. Look it up. There were 40,000 CS degrees last year, and almost 4,000,000 openings in various engineering and IT fields. I'm pretty sure 2 orders of magnitude could be considered "a shortage".
And I'm not sure where you are working, but SW engineering salaries have quite literally exploded over the past 5 years or so. It's not at all uncommon to see $400-500k+ offers (including benefits) these days.
H1-Bs from Thirdworldhellholistan
Well, now we see why you were arguing without facts - racism is at the root of a lot of these debates, huh?
Oh, that's just silly. VPs at many Bay Area companies aren't making $750k, and I'm pretty sure they aren't being outsourced or competing with H1-Bs. You aren't going to be offered $750k unless the job requires skills that are in such high demand and low supply they are practically unique - which is very rare in this industry.
And even more importantly - I assume you already have a job (I assume anyone claiming they should be paid in the top 0.01% of engineers isn't unemployed except by choice). So what good does that do to fill the hundreds of thousands of openings given a current 2-4% unemployment rage for software engineers? All it does is shift the job somewhere else. Doesn't solve the problem in the slightest.
Your point is yet another logical fallacy. So many on this topic today...
Calling someone a paid shill because you disagree with them is the lowest form of argumentative fallacy, usually reserved for anti-vax, tea partiers, and global warming deniers.
everyone who has been in tech and looked for a job via non-friend (public) channels has seen their share of being rejected and ignored even though your quals and the job are nearly a carbon copy of each other (happens to me all the time).
Nope, I haven't seen that. I and most of my friends and coworkers are getting constant calls from recruiters, and usually have 5 offers and a counteroffer within a couple weeks when looking around. And my company always has a half dozen open recs we are trying desperately to fill, and we pay the same - very competitive - salary whether you were born in the US or elsewhere.
The tech job market in the Bay Area is the best for employees that I have seen in my 25 years here. Good new college grads (which are rare) can make $150k, experienced developers $250k+, and architects $400-500k with bonuses (and that's not including stock options/grants). And WHY is that the case? Just because companies like throwing large amounts of money at employees? No, it's capitalism as usual, and when demand goes up but supply doesn't, prices go up as well.
I doubt there are more than 100 jobs, country wide, that NEED special talent that is not available here already. I might even be estimating that too much, too.
I already answered this, but again to state FACTS vs your complete guessing: the software engineer unemployment rate in the SF Bay Area is now under 2%, and hiring growth was up 17% last year. There are something like 150,000 unfilled software engineering openings. And before you say "hire from outside of the Bay Area" - nationally it's still only 4%.
Either your company hires from the bottom of the barrel or you are writing from 2007. Clearly you are not at a Bay Area software company, because no one says "engineering firms" here, that's just bizarre.
The last 10 candidates we made offers to had multiple competing offers. I think we hired 3 of them, which was pretty damn good when you take into account these offers are in the $200k+ range, sometimes significantly more with bonuses and benefits. One was American born, one a Chinese citizen with a green card, and one Indian with an H-1B and a PhD from UC Berkeley. All had similar years of experience and were offered with ~5% of the same salary. The same is true of most of the highly competitive software companies here, so your "cheap labor" argument in this case is - utter bullshit.
Anyway, you need to provide some FACTS before you can hope to have a credible argument. Here are a few: the software engineer unemployment rate in the SF Bay Area is now under 2%, and hiring growth was up 17% last year. There are something like 150,000 unfilled software engineering openings. And before you say "hire from outside of the Bay Area" - nationally it's still only 4%.
The FACT is it's a huge growth industry in the US right now and there just aren't enough experienced software engineers in the US to fill the openings (nor are we educating nearly enough smart new developers to compensate).
If you were alive when your great great grandfather Herr Shultz tried to come over you'd have kicked his ass out and you wouldn't have even been born.
The H1-B Visa program only allows 65,000 per year (which is insanely low considering there are over 500,000 open tech jobs that currently can't be filled with competent domestic workers). I can guarantee you the company I work for would pay the same for an American worker as a foreign H1-B worker, if we could actually fine ANY worker that we found competent to do the job...
what we have now is a 'grab, take, return home' situation. we don't give these folks citizenship. look, if they are valuable, give them citizenship and let them be like the rest of us! let them live with the long-term results of what we all are going to face. if you come to shit in my country, take what's good and then leave, do you think people will want to like you?
Why should anyone take your word that this is the "norm"? Because it's absolutely NOT.
I work in tech with many foreign born coworkers and the only ones who have not tried as hard as humanly possible to get their green card and citizenship are the Europeans (because yes, being middle class German, British, French, etc will pretty much guarantee you comfortable retirement and health care). Not a single one of my Indian or Chinese coworkers have any interest in going back to their home country after making American tech salaries. They are the same as anyone else here, wanting to buy a house, raise a family, etc.
The only difference between 100 years ago and today is that many immigrants can actually MAKE enough money to send some back to their families. In fact that's often the case because (legal) immigration is now so picky we only accept those who can make upper middle class salaries... So, wow, is that so horrible to your sensibilities that not all modern immigrants are minimum wage workers who can barely support themselves?
If you seriously think the current American workforce can fill the positions that many of the H1-B Visas are taking, you have not been involved in any significant tech hiring in the last few years. My company is only moderately competitive and we have been almost totally unable to find competent engineers to hire in the last year...
Absolutely!
It's amazing that the same people who (actually, no - who's GRANDPARENTS or beyond) built themselves up as immigrants working hard are now claiming that we are letting "foreigners" come in and "take our jorbs!"
"Brain drain" aka immigration of the brightest and most motivated around the world is what always has and will drive American innovation. The myth of "American Exceptionalism" is that it is somehow based on being BORN on the North American Continent. That's absurd. It's based on people wanting to COME to the North American Continent because at some point in history we actually welcomed smart, motivated people who wanted to work hard to achieve their own dreams.
Though the FCC could step in and apply their own regulations I doubt they would even consider it for non-broadcast access.
Actually, they already have very specific rules for captioning Internet streaming content that Netflix and all other streaming companies follow (the misunderstanding that Netflix "doesn't do captions" is totally wrong - the vasty majority of their content is captioned):
http://www.fcc.gov/guides/capt...
This lawsuit was trying to claim that those already extensive rules aren't enough and the ADA requires all content to be captioned. Luckily the courts didn't agree...
It's common for movies that are distributed in a country that generally doesn't speak the movie's language, of course. Though they are called subtitles in that case.
The actual FCC rule about whether captions are required for streaming depends on two things: when the content originally aired on TV and when the device displaying them was built/updated (so that devices that were built before the rules don't apply). It's actually pretty fair.
http://www.fcc.gov/guides/capt...
The lawsuit was basically an attempt by lawyers to apply the ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act) to Internet closed captions to argue that those reasonable FCC rules aren't enough, and they should "get money" from companies that are really trying as hard as they can to follow the actual rules...
There may be some stupid comments here, but the general discourse (as we are having now) is actually WAY above average for tech sites. And infinitely more intelligent than, say, the "CopBlock" Facebook page of which the comments are about 95% either images/memes of cops getting beat up or various statements related to killing cops.
And while I agree there is probably almost zero reason for a SWAT team going to a random anonymous tip, they are certainly needed for raiding known gang or drug operations. Basically, use appropriate force - when you think the criminals have automatic weapons, go in with automatic weapons. When the tip is anonymous and against a 22 year old with no criminal record, maybe a bit of discretion is in order.
Basically, the police don't seem to have any actual policies or playbooks for various situations (or if they do they ignore them), and instead are following the "let's use everything we have" strategy to way too many situations...
That's ok, at long as the 8th got the joke ;)
To include the somewhat overused quote from Ben Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Problem is, (to paraphrase) people prefer security over freedom, and so are giving up the latter left and right these days. The problem is, honestly, for the vast majority they will have (somewhat) increased security with no noticeable loss of freedoms. People only realized how bad things have become if they are one of those small minority whose rights are violated, wrongly prosecuted, or killed.
If you have ever actually read posts of the Facebook followers of those sites, it's basically a bunch of morons (including many gamers) posting various anti-police rants and meme photos about killing cops.
The sites themselves do at least get valuable information and videos published about clear examples of police overreach and brutality - but the majority of commenters on these sites are the worst kind of trolls not helping reform anything, just promoting more violence (luckily, of course, they are just a bunch of dipshits hiding behind keyboards instead of actually acting on their impotent threats).
Just give them a lifetime ban them from using computers along with house arrest. That would be a fate worse than death - living in their parents' basement with nothing to do.
It's not that flawed.
If the police HAD ended up killing someone over the incident it's very possible the person calling in the fake threat could be tried for murder, so if the police didn't end up killing anyone it could still be attempted murder. It's all about intent.
If there was no proof of malice or intent to have the person killed but he was, it would likely be manslaughter - and "attempted manslaughter" is pretty rare since if you didn't mean for someone to be killed and they weren't, it's probably not applicable.
Why would you need a proof of concept for something that is almost completely useless? It's not like they are going to now put the effort into making it a "real product". As far as "hacks" go, it's pretty hokey.
And since the primary purpose of Netflix is to promote DRM, they won't drop DRM from that.
I thought the original article was the dumbest thing I'd read on /. today until I read this post.
Except no, they just put a fairly lame hardcoded demo in ROM. This is such a non story...