Dude, I'm not one to leap to conclusions, but the guy was sat outside this man's house for *hours* in an SUV on a laptop. That ain't normal. If you can afford a Ford Egregious, at the very least you can afford dial-up. He was up to something - I'd stake my reputation on one of the Internets on it!
How about this... if you leave your backdoor open by mistake, you're arrested and sentenced to 20 years in the jail for distributing kiddie porn.
Sure, the AP owner made a mistake, most likely through ignorance, but the possible punishment (A-Team style 'framed for a crime he didn't commit') thing far outweighs the error, I think.
...but the actual facts are more compelling. It seemas though the person using the unsecured wifi was engaged in less than legal activity. If the owner is lucky it was just spam - but it could well have been credit card fraud or even (gasp!) child porn.
The moral of this story? Don't switch wi-fi on unless you *really* know what you're doing.
My parent's home town in the UK (pop. 60,000) has fiber to the premises. They have a nice little drop box on the wall of their house where the demarc is. It was put in about six years ago, for free, by a private cable company.
It's kinda weird to see a set-top box with a fiber line running to it.
It is also flawed in that they considered solar energy as a power input.
By the same criteria, he should have considered all the sunlight required to grow the trees that then fell into the swamp and got compressed to make oil.
You're right, of course. DTDD, while fiction, did give an accurate portrayal of D-Notice useage. Just like how the "Yes, Minister" series often gave startling insights into how the Civil Service worked.
And you ignore the fact that regardless of the energy source, ethanol is *still* a net sink of energy. *Regardless of the energy source*.
Well, duh.
I'm not ignoring it - I know that energy is lost in state changes. But as I just pointed out to someone else, it's not the loss that's a bad thing - it's because the original Source of All our Energy, the Sun, doesn't shine at night.
We can't use solar or hydro power everywhere. We have no portable nuclear reactors for our Atom Cars. So we must used stored energy - the question is how do we store it, and how much (and what kind of) energy must be used to make it storable.
The article's author argues that because ethanol creation uses fossil fuel at the moment it's bad, and we shouldn't use it (and more fossile fuel is used to create it than we get out of it, so we should just burn gas directly).
I argue that we can fix that, and the loss of efficiency is worth it to have a stable, storable, environmentally friendly fuel.
There's no reason why hydro, solar or nuclear sources couldn't be used to produce ethanol. We just don't do it now. Sure, it's conversion and we lose efficiency with state changes, but the sun doesn't shine at night, you can't take a waterfall with you wherever you go, and batteries have their own environmental cost.
Because you can't take the waterfall with you, and the sun doesn't shine at night.:)
The energy must be stored somehow for use on demand. Putting it into a combustible liquid is one way. Putting into a battery is another - although at the moment the process of making and disposing of the batteries is very environmentally unsound.
"Taking grain apart, fermenting it, distilling it and extruding it uses a lot of fossil energy," he said. "We are grasping at the solution that is by far the least efficient.".
He ignores the fact that, if we wanted to, we *could* arrange the production chain so that it was not dependent on fossil fuel. You could build your farming and fermentation facilities to use solar or hydro power, for example.
Sure, it's fossil-intensive *now*. But it's also not a major energy source yet. If we needed to we could clean up the energy chain - there's no part of the process that requires fossil fuel sources.
If you liked Blake's Seven, you'll like Firefly. I've seen both, and there are many similarities (outlaws on the run from oppressive interstellar government, with the whole 'freedom fighter' thing cropping up) - and they're both well written sci-fi.
So, yes, Serenity can easily match that. Rent the DVDs sometime and watch them in order. You will not be disappointed.
They'll come in, do an audit, fine the beezubus out of them, and give you a cut.
Then take that money as a severance package and get a job with some folks who aren't complete kneebiters.
I dislike the BSA as much as the next/.'er, but if you're a business, and you can't afford the software license, then use something else. Don't copy it. It's not like there aren't GPL'ed software for most needs.
Back in the day, I used to buy all my games for my Amiga 500 from an indie game store.
More precisely, a local man used to run his mail-order business out of his front room in my town, and he was the *only* person in town who sold Amiga software. All the stores (ok, the two stores) that carried Amiga titles were 15 miles away in the nearest city. But that's not the point:)
The article mentions that games sold by distributors go for $41, which is then resold by retail from $50 up. This sucks, and is not how it used to be. Back in the day (in the UK, at least), MSRP was 25 pounds - but you could buy those titles mailorder for 17 pounds. Which meant they were sold by the distributor to the retailer (or mailorder bloke) for around 13 quid. This is what's called a normal channel - with the retail margin being around 50% of wholesale channel cost. Nowadays, though, publishers in the US are operating in a massive price-fixing cartel, and squeezing retail margins - dowqn to 10%. Which means only the big retail chains can survive. It also means you can't buy games cheap from mail order any more - it's $50 whether you get it from Best Buy down the street or mail-order.
I suggest you look at who sits on their boards-and who provides much of their funding-and the political support for their governmental funding.
College Boards don't make hiring decisions at the H1-b level. L1 and direct LPR sponsorship, perhaps. But not at H1-b level. If you're good enough to warrant a Board-level hiring decision, you're not going to be coming in on an H1-b.
The big factor though is that they largely compete for a similar skill set with the corporate world-who generally have more money.
That's the case for every job at every non-profit. I know, I've worked for three of them. This is a non-issue - even citizens choose to work for non-profits at less than the prevailing private industry wage. Is this fixing the labor market to harm industry, too? I chose to work at a non-profit research institution for less than the market rate. Am I hurting industry by doing so? Should we force non-profits to pay prevailing industry wages? Or just when they're hiring foreigners?
When you grant upwards of 463,000 work visas in a profession with 3,000,000 US workers, you can't help but to affect markets. I suggest you consider the work of George Borjas at Harvard. I've seen the work the Fed submitted on this topic-it was _deeply_ flawed and lacking in the most basic intellectual integrity.
That's 463,000 current H1-bs, issued over the last six years in all categories (i.e. nurses/healthcare and other non-technical positions). 35,000 technical H1-bs were issued for FY04/05. Have you tried hiring IT workers recently? I have. A little under half of the resumes that came across my desk were from folks requiring some kind of work visa, or the holder was an LPR. And they were no worse qualified than the citizens who applied for the posts. This tells me that there actually aren't as many qualified citizens with those skillsets as you think there are. If there was a significant pool of citizen workers out there who were qualified, I'd have expected the number of Americans to vastly outnumber the immigrant worker applicants. This was not the case. What this also tells me is that a lot of H1b holders lost their jobs and are trying to stay in status or be forced to leave the country (labor mobility with an H1-b is pretty restricted). Whereas the locals either don't want to move, or just aren't qualified. I suspect it's a bit of both (and we did see some woefully under-qualified citizens and immigrant workers applying for the jobs, too).
Yes, and about 50% of them are getting green cards-that they wouldn't have gotten without their H-1b visas-and many of the rest are using other mechanisms like L-1 visas to continue to work in the US
L1 and H1 are two completely seperate visa categories with very little overlap. Heck, read the definitions for an L1 sometime - it's called the Foreign Executive visa, it's for management only. I quote:
The L classification applies to intracompany transferees who, within the three preceding years, have been employed outside of the U.S. continuously for at least one year (or six months for Blanket L applications), and who will be employed by a branch, parent, affiliate, or subsidiary of that same employer in the U.S. in a managerial, executive, or specialized knowledge capacity.
You can't go from an H1-b to an L1 without leaving the US for at least six months (if you're a big multinational with a blanket visa), and only then if your previous employer was also your L1 sponsor. This does not happen very often. The vast majority of L1 visa holders have worked for a major multinational abroad for at least a year prior to being transfered to the US in a management capacity.
There is no causal relationship between holding an H1 and getting a green card. The application process doesn't care what your initial visa status is (so long as it's legal, and not a J). The CIS considers each application atomically, on its own merits. An H1b merely does not
You, sir, are a little on the crazy side. Putting aside, for the moment, the fact that your reply is pretty incoherent...
1. We were talking about jobs in non-profit educational institutions. There are not corporate-sponsored in any way.
2. "Once an occupation gets special immigration status". There is no such status in immigration law. There is no such status recognised by the Department of Labor. Please cite the relevant Federal Register or statute.
3. These wages are not "artificially lowered". I suggest you pay more than cursory attention to the Dept of Labor's job classifactions and wage analysis, and how those figures are arrived at. Short version : prevailing wage is based off two things - job classification (per DOL specifications) and what American citizens are paid to do those jobs in that region. It is specifically designed to avoid non-immigrant workers from being able to depress the labor market.
This is not to say that abuse of the H1 system did not/does not occur. But H1 abuse makes up a diminishing fraction of total H1 visas. DHS/CIS has been really cracking down on this since 2001.
The result of this is that there's lots of folks in the US on H1b who are now trying to find other jobs to keep status, and are being declined. They are returning to their home countries. The total number of H1b holders in the US has been steadily declining over the past 3 years.
It's fine if you want to blame everything on those damn immigrants, but please don't delude yourself into thinking your belief is either rational or based on fact.
"I enjoy slaughtering beasts," he said, "and I think of my relatives constantly."
Now now, you should at least let folks who don't know about Amber know which book you got that delightful quote from, so they too may enjoy R. Zelazny's work.:)
(the ones at major universities are exempt from the cap)
Specifically, non-profit research institutions are exempt from the cap. It's a way to let research institutions keep their grad-students here, working in the US, rather than having them take what they've learned back home.
Check out the demo of grad-students in the US some time - about 50% of them (and over 75% of them in things like biochem, physics, comp-sci and the like) are foreign students. The US higher-ed system depends on foreign grads for much of its cash, and much as it's a noble thing for us to train folks who can then go back to their home countries and improve things there, it's better for the US if they stay here, and benefit us. 9/11 and the subsequent knee-jerk against F-1 holders did tremendous damage to US R&D efforts and to university budgets.
Know your Visa law. L-1 are non-resident work visas for foreign executives of multinational companies. i.e Management. At the end of the 2 year period, the executive is expected to go home, unless the visa is renewed. And in any case, the visa holder is being paid for by a multi-national company that has a US presence.
H1-b are non-resident work visas for skilled professionals. There is no direct path from H1-b to Green card. You still need an employer willing to cut an entirely new req for you and sponsor you for green card (which has its own Dept of Labor requirements). Also, there's extensive wait-lists for green cards from certain countries (specifically India and China).
The only thing special about H1-b is that it's intent-neutral - it does not preclude you from applying for a resident visa (green card) at the same time. But the only thing that really matters is having an employer willing to go the extra distance to get you one - something the sweatshops won't do, as once you have your green card you can go work elsewhere.
The prevailing wage laws are useless-and rarely enforced.
That is no longer the case. INS/DHS/DOL has been cracking since 2001.
There're exceptions to the 'trendy is good' rule, but they tend to be at the smaller VC firms. And a few VC firms even have highly technical folks as partners. But they're rare.
Oh, dear. Here we go again...let's bash the immigrants!
This year's (FY0405) quota of H1-B ran out in two days, back in September. Food for thought.
Also, the INS (now DHS) has been very aggresive recently in cracking down on abusive H1b positions - not that they don't exist, but they make up a very small proportion of total H1b applicants.
That means that those that are left in the pool really *are* for prevailing wage positions that cannot be filled by local talent. The harsh fact that some Americans seem to be unable to grasp is that, when you turn to the rest of the world for experience you will often find people who are really quite good - better than the locals, in fact. It's better to bring these people to the US (and pay them in dollars, and tax them here, and hope that they stay) than to outsource the work to India or whatever the current outsourcing bugbear of the week happens to be.
If the starry-eyed socialists would stop regulating our economy into the second world, we'd not be losing jobs the way we are.
Last time I checked, the Republicans were in power. Have been for four years, will be for another four. And they control Congress and the Whitehouse. And while the Elephant is many things, it is not a socialist.
How does one connect with a VC or angel investment firm?
Contacts. The Real Money (tm) comes from knowing people who know people, who can get your pitch into the right hands. I have relatives who do this (both as angels and as VC firms), and it's all from who you know. There're very few, if any, 'cold call' plays that end up with money from their VC firm.
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Dude, I'm not one to leap to conclusions, but the guy was sat outside this man's house for *hours* in an SUV on a laptop. That ain't normal. If you can afford a Ford Egregious, at the very least you can afford dial-up. He was up to something - I'd stake my reputation on one of the Internets on it!
How about this... if you leave your backdoor open by mistake, you're arrested and sentenced to 20 years in the jail for distributing kiddie porn.
Sure, the AP owner made a mistake, most likely through ignorance, but the possible punishment (A-Team style 'framed for a crime he didn't commit') thing far outweighs the error, I think.
...but the actual facts are more compelling. It seemas though the person using the unsecured wifi was engaged in less than legal activity. If the owner is lucky it was just spam - but it could well have been credit card fraud or even (gasp!) child porn.
The moral of this story? Don't switch wi-fi on unless you *really* know what you're doing.
My parent's home town in the UK (pop. 60,000) has fiber to the premises. They have a nice little drop box on the wall of their house where the demarc is. It was put in about six years ago, for free, by a private cable company.
It's kinda weird to see a set-top box with a fiber line running to it.
It is also flawed in that they considered solar energy as a power input.
By the same criteria, he should have considered all the sunlight required to grow the trees that then fell into the swamp and got compressed to make oil.
But he doesn't.
You're right, of course. DTDD, while fiction, did give an accurate portrayal of D-Notice useage. Just like how the "Yes, Minister" series often gave startling insights into how the Civil Service worked.
It's funny, because it's true.
Exactly.
:)
The same reason we use high-fructose corn syrup for sweetener instead of sugar cane like the rest of the world.
It's a fixable problem, but we may have to endure a few years of the Brazilians laughing at us while we all push our cars to work for want of fuel.
And you ignore the fact that regardless of the energy source, ethanol is *still* a net sink of energy. *Regardless of the energy source*.
Well, duh.
I'm not ignoring it - I know that energy is lost in state changes. But as I just pointed out to someone else, it's not the loss that's a bad thing - it's because the original Source of All our Energy, the Sun, doesn't shine at night.
We can't use solar or hydro power everywhere. We have no portable nuclear reactors for our Atom Cars. So we must used stored energy - the question is how do we store it, and how much (and what kind of) energy must be used to make it storable.
The article's author argues that because ethanol creation uses fossil fuel at the moment it's bad, and we shouldn't use it (and more fossile fuel is used to create it than we get out of it, so we should just burn gas directly).
I argue that we can fix that, and the loss of efficiency is worth it to have a stable, storable, environmentally friendly fuel.
There's no reason why hydro, solar or nuclear sources couldn't be used to produce ethanol. We just don't do it now. Sure, it's conversion and we lose efficiency with state changes, but the sun doesn't shine at night, you can't take a waterfall with you wherever you go, and batteries have their own environmental cost.
Because you can't take the waterfall with you, and the sun doesn't shine at night. :)
The energy must be stored somehow for use on demand. Putting it into a combustible liquid is one way. Putting into a battery is another - although at the moment the process of making and disposing of the batteries is very environmentally unsound.
"Taking grain apart, fermenting it, distilling it and extruding it uses a lot of fossil energy," he said. "We are grasping at the solution that is by far the least efficient.".
He ignores the fact that, if we wanted to, we *could* arrange the production chain so that it was not dependent on fossil fuel. You could build your farming and fermentation facilities to use solar or hydro power, for example.
Sure, it's fossil-intensive *now*. But it's also not a major energy source yet. If we needed to we could clean up the energy chain - there's no part of the process that requires fossil fuel sources.
If you liked Blake's Seven, you'll like Firefly. I've seen both, and there are many similarities (outlaws on the run from oppressive interstellar government, with the whole 'freedom fighter' thing cropping up) - and they're both well written sci-fi.
So, yes, Serenity can easily match that. Rent the DVDs sometime and watch them in order. You will not be disappointed.
Maybe this is a British thing.
No - this book just confirms what some people suspected for many years : that bad writers are not the exclusive domain of the United States.
Report them to the BSA.
/.'er, but if you're a business, and you can't afford the software license, then use something else. Don't copy it. It's not like there aren't GPL'ed software for most needs.
They'll come in, do an audit, fine the beezubus out of them, and give you a cut.
Then take that money as a severance package and get a job with some folks who aren't complete kneebiters.
I dislike the BSA as much as the next
Back in the day, I used to buy all my games for my Amiga 500 from an indie game store.
:)
More precisely, a local man used to run his mail-order business out of his front room in my town, and he was the *only* person in town who sold Amiga software. All the stores (ok, the two stores) that carried Amiga titles were 15 miles away in the nearest city. But that's not the point
The article mentions that games sold by distributors go for $41, which is then resold by retail from $50 up. This sucks, and is not how it used to be. Back in the day (in the UK, at least), MSRP was 25 pounds - but you could buy those titles mailorder for 17 pounds. Which meant they were sold by the distributor to the retailer (or mailorder bloke) for around 13 quid. This is what's called a normal channel - with the retail margin being around 50% of wholesale channel cost. Nowadays, though, publishers in the US are operating in a massive price-fixing cartel, and squeezing retail margins - dowqn to 10%. Which means only the big retail chains can survive. It also means you can't buy games cheap from mail order any more - it's $50 whether you get it from Best Buy down the street or mail-order.
And that's sad.
College Boards don't make hiring decisions at the H1-b level. L1 and direct LPR sponsorship, perhaps. But not at H1-b level. If you're good enough to warrant a Board-level hiring decision, you're not going to be coming in on an H1-b.
The big factor though is that they largely compete for a similar skill set with the corporate world-who generally have more money.
That's the case for every job at every non-profit. I know, I've worked for three of them. This is a non-issue - even citizens choose to work for non-profits at less than the prevailing private industry wage. Is this fixing the labor market to harm industry, too? I chose to work at a non-profit research institution for less than the market rate. Am I hurting industry by doing so? Should we force non-profits to pay prevailing industry wages? Or just when they're hiring foreigners?
When you grant upwards of 463,000 work visas in a profession with 3,000,000 US workers, you can't help but to affect markets. I suggest you consider the work of George Borjas at Harvard. I've seen the work the Fed submitted on this topic-it was _deeply_ flawed and lacking in the most basic intellectual integrity.
That's 463,000 current H1-bs, issued over the last six years in all categories (i.e. nurses/healthcare and other non-technical positions). 35,000 technical H1-bs were issued for FY04/05. Have you tried hiring IT workers recently? I have. A little under half of the resumes that came across my desk were from folks requiring some kind of work visa, or the holder was an LPR. And they were no worse qualified than the citizens who applied for the posts. This tells me that there actually aren't as many qualified citizens with those skillsets as you think there are. If there was a significant pool of citizen workers out there who were qualified, I'd have expected the number of Americans to vastly outnumber the immigrant worker applicants. This was not the case. What this also tells me is that a lot of H1b holders lost their jobs and are trying to stay in status or be forced to leave the country (labor mobility with an H1-b is pretty restricted). Whereas the locals either don't want to move, or just aren't qualified. I suspect it's a bit of both (and we did see some woefully under-qualified citizens and immigrant workers applying for the jobs, too).
Yes, and about 50% of them are getting green cards-that they wouldn't have gotten without their H-1b visas-and many of the rest are using other mechanisms like L-1 visas to continue to work in the US
L1 and H1 are two completely seperate visa categories with very little overlap. Heck, read the definitions for an L1 sometime - it's called the Foreign Executive visa, it's for management only. I quote:
You can't go from an H1-b to an L1 without leaving the US for at least six months (if you're a big multinational with a blanket visa), and only then if your previous employer was also your L1 sponsor. This does not happen very often. The vast majority of L1 visa holders have worked for a major multinational abroad for at least a year prior to being transfered to the US in a management capacity.
There is no causal relationship between holding an H1 and getting a green card. The application process doesn't care what your initial visa status is (so long as it's legal, and not a J). The CIS considers each application atomically, on its own merits. An H1b merely does not
???
You, sir, are a little on the crazy side. Putting aside, for the moment, the fact that your reply is pretty incoherent...
1. We were talking about jobs in non-profit educational institutions. There are not corporate-sponsored in any way.
2. "Once an occupation gets special immigration status". There is no such status in immigration law. There is no such status recognised by the Department of Labor. Please cite the relevant Federal Register or statute.
3. These wages are not "artificially lowered". I suggest you pay more than cursory attention to the Dept of Labor's job classifactions and wage analysis, and how those figures are arrived at. Short version : prevailing wage is based off two things - job classification (per DOL specifications) and what American citizens are paid to do those jobs in that region. It is specifically designed to avoid non-immigrant workers from being able to depress the labor market.
This is not to say that abuse of the H1 system did not/does not occur. But H1 abuse makes up a diminishing fraction of total H1 visas. DHS/CIS has been really cracking down on this since 2001.
The result of this is that there's lots of folks in the US on H1b who are now trying to find other jobs to keep status, and are being declined. They are returning to their home countries. The total number of H1b holders in the US has been steadily declining over the past 3 years.
It's fine if you want to blame everything on those damn immigrants, but please don't delude yourself into thinking your belief is either rational or based on fact.
"I enjoy slaughtering beasts," he said, "and I think of my relatives constantly."
:)
Now now, you should at least let folks who don't know about Amber know which book you got that delightful quote from, so they too may enjoy R. Zelazny's work.
Games are supposed to be all about making Will Wright feel like a God.
Your only role is to purchase the game, then sit in Awe at his Magnificence.
(the ones at major universities are exempt from the cap)
Specifically, non-profit research institutions are exempt from the cap. It's a way to let research institutions keep their grad-students here, working in the US, rather than having them take what they've learned back home.
Check out the demo of grad-students in the US some time - about 50% of them (and over 75% of them in things like biochem, physics, comp-sci and the like) are foreign students. The US higher-ed system depends on foreign grads for much of its cash, and much as it's a noble thing for us to train folks who can then go back to their home countries and improve things there, it's better for the US if they stay here, and benefit us. 9/11 and the subsequent knee-jerk against F-1 holders did tremendous damage to US R&D efforts and to university budgets.
Uh.
Know your Visa law.
L-1 are non-resident work visas for foreign executives of multinational companies. i.e Management. At the end of the 2 year period, the executive is expected to go home, unless the visa is renewed. And in any case, the visa holder is being paid for by a multi-national company that has a US presence.
H1-b are non-resident work visas for skilled professionals. There is no direct path from H1-b to Green card. You still need an employer willing to cut an entirely new req for you and sponsor you for green card (which has its own Dept of Labor requirements). Also, there's extensive wait-lists for green cards from certain countries (specifically India and China).
The only thing special about H1-b is that it's intent-neutral - it does not preclude you from applying for a resident visa (green card) at the same time. But the only thing that really matters is having an employer willing to go the extra distance to get you one - something the sweatshops won't do, as once you have your green card you can go work elsewhere.
The prevailing wage laws are useless-and rarely enforced.
That is no longer the case. INS/DHS/DOL has been cracking since 2001.
John M. Perry, CEO of the processor in question, claims the data was merely being kept for "research purposes."
Well, that makes it all OK, then, doesn't it? So long as it was for Science.
Preach it, bro.
There're exceptions to the 'trendy is good' rule, but they tend to be at the smaller VC firms. And a few VC firms even have highly technical folks as partners. But they're rare.
Oh, dear. Here we go again...let's bash the immigrants!
This year's (FY0405) quota of H1-B ran out in two days, back in September. Food for thought.
Also, the INS (now DHS) has been very aggresive recently in cracking down on abusive H1b positions - not that they don't exist, but they make up a very small proportion of total H1b applicants.
That means that those that are left in the pool really *are* for prevailing wage positions that cannot be filled by local talent. The harsh fact that some Americans seem to be unable to grasp is that, when you turn to the rest of the world for experience you will often find people who are really quite good - better than the locals, in fact. It's better to bring these people to the US (and pay them in dollars, and tax them here, and hope that they stay) than to outsource the work to India or whatever the current outsourcing bugbear of the week happens to be.
If the starry-eyed socialists would stop regulating our economy into the second world, we'd not be losing jobs the way we are.
Last time I checked, the Republicans were in power. Have been for four years, will be for another four. And they control Congress and the Whitehouse. And while the Elephant is many things, it is not a socialist.
How does one connect with a VC or angel investment firm?
Contacts. The Real Money (tm) comes from knowing people who know people, who can get your pitch into the right hands. I have relatives who do this (both as angels and as VC firms), and it's all from who you know. There're very few, if any, 'cold call' plays that end up with money from their VC firm.
Also, it helps to be doing something in China.