It is not possible, unfortunately, to approach the issue of nuclear arms proliferation in a purely abstract and rational manner because humans are not purely abstract and rational beings. Although MAD is not absolutely effective in all cases, as Mr. Hellman correctly points out in his essay, neither are the alternatives, IMHO, any more appealing. There will always be people and leaders in this world, Iran and Pakistan for example, who have or are rapidly acquiring nuclear arms AND are NOT, for various reasons, deterred by the prospect of their own destruction. How can we get rid of our weapons when countries like Iran are building arsenals of their own? Would any of us want to live under threat of nuclear blackmail from an ascendant and nuclear armed Iran? If living in a world wide Islamic theocracy is the alternative to a third world war then I would rather fight, even if it meant certain death, then live in a tyrannical and theocratic society.
If the author of TFA, Martin Hellman, is so concerned about the low speed pass then why not equip the glider with an emergency booster rocket? That way, if he ever finds himself without enough speed to come around and land he can activate the emergency booster rocket to gain enough speed to safely glide back and land OR he could equip his glider with a rocket powered ejection system OR (perhaps more feasibly) an aircraft parachute (a feature that is becoming more common in other light aircraft as a safety precaution against engine failure at a bad time).
I have always been of the opinion that a clamshell notebook cannot really be much smaller than the width of the average pair of human hands plus about one inch or so. If you go smaller than that then you are competing with the large array of thumb typing mobile devices from Nokia, RIM, and others. There is a reason why the sub-notebook category doesn't go much smaller than about 6x9x1 or so and it has to do with the size of human hands and useful screen resolution more than anything else. There are and have been some tablets that are in between, but tablets that small seem to be mostly targeted at niche or specialized markets (i.e. ruggedized tablets for warehousing, inventory, or remote control) and I haven't seen many people using them in my travels in preference to a blackberry or a full fledged sub-notebook.
highly capable phones are a nightmare, especially when you add in that the average American is as smart as a radish.
Truth be told, the American cell phone carriers would probably prefer that customers accept something like this while paying out the wazoo for service and not complaining. If they thought that they could get away with it then they would do it.
One also has to consider the amount of staff time that goes into implementing a technical solution including research, setup, maintenance (possibly, unless the solution is fully automated), and opportunity costs (other things that staff could be doing with valuable and limited resources and time). It is not fair, IMHO, for a third party, the music industry in this case, to impose a burden of scanning and policing a private network for copyright infringements, assuming that such a thing can even be done reliably which is also in dispute, where the university is a third party to any accusations of infringement, does not encourage infringement vicariously, and maintains the network for substantial unrelated and non-infringing uses.
RTFA - Drives are in separate bays for easy access. HDD's would not fare very well in oil, even proprietary super secret oil.
Which is as it should be. Most of the noise from your drives (DVD/CD, HDD, etc...) is going to be from vibration transferred to the chassis and not from airflow. This can be easily mitigated by rubber standoffs so that there is no metal bolted directly to metal (the Antec QuietPC cases have come standard with this feature for some time now).
Nobody wants their indoors to be ~80 degrees (which electricity conservation nuts are always pushing) if they have air conditioning. The ideal temperature, for most people, seems to be around 72 degrees or so if you are going to be indoors for a while or around 69 degrees if you constantly have people coming in from the hot outdoors (in the mall for example). The solution is not to push "hair shirt" solutions on the public and chide them for reasonable electricity usage, but rather to build more generating capacity and promote efficiency where pracitical. The conservation only crowds, opposing ALL new power plant (greenpeace et al), have been beating their drums for decades now and it hasn't been working.
Another stumbling block to wider Linux adoption is the excellent support that Microsoft gives to developers on its platform with Visual Studio and all of the Microsoft Developer Network resources (extensive documentation, excellent articles, expert commentary, etc...). In fact, I would bet that Visual Studio and the development tools make up the smallest market, in terms of sales volume, in which Microsoft is directly involved. If it were not for.NET Microsoft would have already lost and they know that which is why they continue to put so many resources into developer support, even though Visual Studio makes no money directly (it probably looses money actually), (think developers, developers, developers, deve....) because they know that as the developers go with platform support the regular users will follow. If the Linux community really wants to gain ground on Windows then they have to start competing more effectively against Microsoft in the developer tools and support markets (and Eclipse is not as good as Visual Studio, but it could be better and compete better if the OSS community was serious about competing with Visual Studio instead of trying to convert everyone to eMacs or VIM with gcc on the command line) which is a source of strength for Microsoft and the Windows platform.
take a look at the Euro and the Pound versus the Dollar.
A strong currency does not necessarily mean a strong economy. In fact, the opposite is very often the case (that is what I love about economics, it is so often surprising and deliciously counter-intuitive and yet still true).
It seems to me that a few very loud people quite badly aren't going to shut up until Jobs give each and every single one of them their own free, customized mac.
Perhaps that was the plan of the complainers all along. In fact, it might be cheaper in the end for Apple to silence the most prolific whiners with some free merchandise on the condition that they stop complaining in public and don't disclose the terms of the settlements by which they got their free customized macs.
It amuses me to see how government always wants to have its cake and eat it too. I agree that widespread use of strong encryption and good security practices is of great benefit to society, but some Senator or law enforcement agency is bound to complain that their ability to wiretap or access encrypted data is being compromised by these better private security measures. Strong encryption and good security are two edged swords, they help us and they help our enemies as well, there is no way around that. Personally, I don't have a problem with that. I would rather live in a society were encryption is used, privacy is paramount, and some criminals and evil doers are a bit harder to catch, not a bad trade-off IMHO. However, there will doubtless be howls of indignation from the law enforcement community, which contains more than its fair share of self-righteous authoritarian pricks, about how criminals are getting away with crimes and going unpunished. I suppose that my response to them would be to make better use of the tools and laws that we already have instead of depending upon ever more egregious invasions of our collective personal privacy and abridgements of our Constitutional rights merely to prevent some drug addict from getting his fix or some high school students from posting pictures of themselves on MySpace or Facebook.
Zip is a well known file format so the router could, presumably, inspect the individual contents of the zip file as well. For example, most anti-virus scanners and file system browsers already provide this feature built in.
I was disappointed with how TNG treated the Q Continuum, making it look like some borish midwestern scene.
I think that you are thinking of episode 18 (Death Wish) of season 2 of Voyager where they visit the Q Continuum and Q (the one who takes the name 'Quinn' upon being made mortal) clearly states, when the away team expresses surprise that they are standing on a road in the middle of desert next to a gas station, that the whole scene, "was a representation of the Q Continuum that falls within the human level of understanding". Or in other words, the Q Continuum is not a 'borish midwestern scene', that was only how the Voyager away team perceived it not how it literally was to the Q themselves.
The makers of CopyRouter claim that it can even be used to defeat encryption and compression of files in the Internet's Wild West: the peer-to-peer file-sharing tools such as Gnutella and BitTorrent.
What are they going to do? Detect and Man in the Middle every single connection attempt that goes through their router? The file sharing tools will simply upgrade to stronger encryption, such as AES, and harden the connection handshaking against MITM attacks (perhaps by introducing public key infrastructure with well known key server(s)). It was my understanding that the present crop of file sharing tools provide obfuscation (ROT13 and the like) and not real encryption to set the bar just high enough to prevent packet inspection. However, it would not be difficult to implement stronger encryption methods (if they haven't done so already), should that prove necessary. In fact, the CopyRouter folks are at a distinct disadvantage in any encryption arms race since MITM and other cryptanalysis techniques are much more computationally expensive than the encryption itself AND the users outnumber the routers by thousands or even tens of thousands to one. The NSA might more credibly claim to be able to do this, but they have acres of underground super computers consuming as much electrical power as a small country, so I am very skeptical when anyone claims to be able to "defeat encryption" and doubly so when a private company mentions it as a bullet point in their power point presentation. It is more likely that this is a private company trying to sell a pig in a poke to ISPs and governments who don't inspect the merchandise to carefully or don't know any better.
The biggest problem with American immigration law is its schizophrenic goal of reuniting families (dropping any and all standards for extended family members once the first member is approved) while hating immigrants in general (partly due to the results of the all-encompassing family-reunion goal).
I agree, the policy which allows the unskilled laborer to bring his entire extended family to the United States is terrible immigration policy. However, it is possible to disagree with both this policy AND the current incarnation of the H1B visa program without being inconsistent on the immigration issue.
This is a real business problem, because it does hurt the ability of American firms to recruit and hire the world's best and brightest. Increasingly, we've HAD candidates (especially from Britain and Scandinavia) tell us point blank that we couldn't pay them enough to move to the US. Period, full-stop, end of story.
So open an office in the foreign country, that is what all of the major firms (Microsoft, IBM, Sun, etc) are doing anyway. You can hire the best and brightest without bringing them here to the United States. As you yourself have said, many of them, for various reasons, don't want to come here anyway.
Canada, sure. But America? As far as they're concerned, we've turned into a mean, paranoid police state that automatically treats foreigners like criminals. Accurate or not, that's increasingly the perception held by foreign professionals about life in America.
It is probably true that foreigners with a certain ethnic background (particularly those that wear a turban) are likely to get more than their fair share of hassles here in the United States.
and it's definitely hurting our competitiveness against companies in countries like Canada that are willing to roll out the red carpet and treat them like welcome, valued guests.
Perhaps, but with "face time" being much less important than it used to be, particularly in IT and other analytical fields, and becoming less so all of the time it is likely that any disadvantage would be small and decreasing over time as outsourcing becomes an ever more effective and attractive alternative to specialized visas. We should reserve visas and naturalization for those immigrants who are both educated and intelligent and willing to become citizens because they share our vales and not just a desire to make money. The United States and Europe already have enough problems with invading alien cultures who utterly refuse to assimilate without adding to them.
Is there a branch of the Pirate Party here in the United States? Wouldn't it be cool if someone asks your registration and you could say, "Yeah, I'm a registered Pirate".
and if they TRIED to just walk away from them, you can bet the creditors would do their best to follow them "home".
Something tells me that an American collection agency is going to have a hard time collecting a foreign debt (with interest!) from a Pakistani who goes home to Islamabad. Americans don't have a lot of credit there, pun intended, if you know what I mean.
I know *I'd* tell any government that tried to treat me as badly as ours treats non-American professionals to go fuck itself and die.
That is what the Pakistanis and other Arab countries tell us to do all of the time, but the key thing to remember is "their country their rules." If you are a foreigner in a foreign country then you can either play by their rules, whether you like them or not, or leave their country, it really is that simple.
The majority of the H-1B's that I've worked with have been bright, intelligent, and talented individuals with skillsets not easily available in my market.
Then you have been fortunate, but a substantial portion of the 65,000+ H1B slots available in the United States do fall victim to the sort of abuses previously described. The temptation to "get their money's worth" from an employee with less recourse than a comperable American citizen is simply irresistable to many companies. I myself worked previously at a company (no longer work there) where at least two (2) of the staff, a washed up mechanical engineer and another who lied about being an algorithm developer on his H1B application (both from Pakistan...this was before 9/11), were basically being worked lots of overtime as telephone help desk support. Now granted, that was probably an pretty bad situation whereas you had a pretty good situation and the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, but the cracks in the H1B system are well known and frequently exploited if my first hand experience and the second hand experiences of others are to be believed.
It's the people that come over on the H1B program that we most need to encourage to immigrate, they are smart people who will raise the standard of living in the US.
That is true in theory, but the present H1B system leaks like a sieve and too many of the existing slots are being taken up by opportunistic foreigners who overstate their qualifications (they will do or say anything to get into the United States even if they have to lie through their teeth, they don't care) and the employers who bring them in (they don't care if they waste a spot that some other company, perhaps their competitor, really needs for a REAL qualified engineer). This is part of the reason why there is so much pressure every year to raise the H1B cap, because many of the slots are wasted and those companies who actually want to use the H1B program for the intended purpose find themselves unable to because other less scrupulous companies have wasted some of the slots by bringing in under qualified foreign personel to work low level IT jobs that could easily be filled by even half way competent Americans.
The reality is that for the programmer type jobs that so many rail against the employer will outsource the project if they can't find or import enough talent at the right price to complete the project on time and on budget.
Then perhaps that is what they should do, since an American isn't going to get the job anyway and the existing H1B program has shown itself to be rife with abuses. I understand what the H1B program is supposed to accomplish, but one of the great mistakes is to judge a program or policy based upon its intentions rather than its actual results. The H1B system should either be fixed so that only qualified personel are admitted after an American could not be found to do the job or the job should be outsourced. Right now companies place fake job postings on job boards with impossibly long lists of qualifications that almost no human being could meet, just to meet the statutory requirement that no American fit the bill (of course, the H1B they eventually import doesn't match those qualifications either, but nobody actually checks up on that once the application has been approved). They make sure that their job posting fails to find an American candidate because they have already made up their minds, before even posting that they don't want to hire an American for the job. That is just one further example of the perverse sorts of incentives created by the present H1B program.
The problem is that the "prevailing wage" is a vague term given the variety of skills and experience candidate might have for a given position.
Not only that, but what the employer says that the H1B employee is paid officially on the pay stub and what they are actually paid, usually due to mandatory unpaid overtime, are often two different things entirely. What is an H1B going to do, complain? If they say anything then the company will fire them and jerk their sponsorship so fast that their heads will still be spinning when their butts get kicked all the way back to their countries of origin. The H1Bs are lucky to be here, they know it and the company knows it, and thus they will put up with a lot more abuse, much more than most US Citizens would put up with, just to keep their jobs and remain here in the United States.
Even if the process is efficient it might still require a high amount of energy input and not scale well due to constraints on renewable power sources and non-polluting power sources such as sunlight, wind, geothermal, and ocean waves. I am skeptical that enough energy could be diverted from these renewable sources, in light of alternative demands for that energy, to completely close the carbon cycle at our present levels of hydrocarbon fuel consumption. In other words, there will still be demand for natural hydrocarbon fuels because they will be cheaper than artificial conversion of gaseous C02 to fuel for some time to come and probably remain that way until most of the remaining natural hydrocarbon fuel has been extracted from the ground and used. The best that will probably come of this process is to ensure that hydrocarbon fuel will never be completely exhausted as long as the sun is still shining and the world is still turning, but it might become very expensive in the far future (i.e. a luxury that only the very wealthy can regularly afford to use).
I seem to remember that the NBC olympics site (which used Silverlight) had plugin installation that was fairly easy with Firefox (which doesn't support ActiveX so it was obviously not IE only) and didn't require many manual user actions such as downloading and running an installer separately. Now granted, that was on Windows XP, but if it can be made to work with Firefox on Windows with a plugin then wouldn't that same Firefox plugin be available on Linux?
or if there's an exogenous shock to the markets then the formal models will be ill-equipped to explain much less predict.
How can they? That is the definition of a stochastic process and random is just that; by definition it cannot be predicted with certainty. The financial markets are well known examples of systems which have random variables which cannot be predicted or controlled and it was a mistake, by those in power, to believe that they could be controlled for.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not possible, unfortunately, to approach the issue of nuclear arms proliferation in a purely abstract and rational manner because humans are not purely abstract and rational beings. Although MAD is not absolutely effective in all cases, as Mr. Hellman correctly points out in his essay, neither are the alternatives, IMHO, any more appealing. There will always be people and leaders in this world, Iran and Pakistan for example, who have or are rapidly acquiring nuclear arms AND are NOT, for various reasons, deterred by the prospect of their own destruction. How can we get rid of our weapons when countries like Iran are building arsenals of their own? Would any of us want to live under threat of nuclear blackmail from an ascendant and nuclear armed Iran? If living in a world wide Islamic theocracy is the alternative to a third world war then I would rather fight, even if it meant certain death, then live in a tyrannical and theocratic society.
If the author of TFA, Martin Hellman, is so concerned about the low speed pass then why not equip the glider with an emergency booster rocket? That way, if he ever finds himself without enough speed to come around and land he can activate the emergency booster rocket to gain enough speed to safely glide back and land OR he could equip his glider with a rocket powered ejection system OR (perhaps more feasibly) an aircraft parachute (a feature that is becoming more common in other light aircraft as a safety precaution against engine failure at a bad time).
I have always been of the opinion that a clamshell notebook cannot really be much smaller than the width of the average pair of human hands plus about one inch or so. If you go smaller than that then you are competing with the large array of thumb typing mobile devices from Nokia, RIM, and others. There is a reason why the sub-notebook category doesn't go much smaller than about 6x9x1 or so and it has to do with the size of human hands and useful screen resolution more than anything else. There are and have been some tablets that are in between, but tablets that small seem to be mostly targeted at niche or specialized markets (i.e. ruggedized tablets for warehousing, inventory, or remote control) and I haven't seen many people using them in my travels in preference to a blackberry or a full fledged sub-notebook.
highly capable phones are a nightmare, especially when you add in that the average American is as smart as a radish.
Truth be told, the American cell phone carriers would probably prefer that customers accept something like this while paying out the wazoo for service and not complaining. If they thought that they could get away with it then they would do it.
One also has to consider the amount of staff time that goes into implementing a technical solution including research, setup, maintenance (possibly, unless the solution is fully automated), and opportunity costs (other things that staff could be doing with valuable and limited resources and time). It is not fair, IMHO, for a third party, the music industry in this case, to impose a burden of scanning and policing a private network for copyright infringements, assuming that such a thing can even be done reliably which is also in dispute, where the university is a third party to any accusations of infringement, does not encourage infringement vicariously, and maintains the network for substantial unrelated and non-infringing uses.
RTFA - Drives are in separate bays for easy access. HDD's would not fare very well in oil, even proprietary super secret oil.
Which is as it should be. Most of the noise from your drives (DVD/CD, HDD, etc...) is going to be from vibration transferred to the chassis and not from airflow. This can be easily mitigated by rubber standoffs so that there is no metal bolted directly to metal (the Antec QuietPC cases have come standard with this feature for some time now).
keeping the house hotter inside
Nobody wants their indoors to be ~80 degrees (which electricity conservation nuts are always pushing) if they have air conditioning. The ideal temperature, for most people, seems to be around 72 degrees or so if you are going to be indoors for a while or around 69 degrees if you constantly have people coming in from the hot outdoors (in the mall for example). The solution is not to push "hair shirt" solutions on the public and chide them for reasonable electricity usage, but rather to build more generating capacity and promote efficiency where pracitical. The conservation only crowds, opposing ALL new power plant (greenpeace et al), have been beating their drums for decades now and it hasn't been working.
Another stumbling block to wider Linux adoption is the excellent support that Microsoft gives to developers on its platform with Visual Studio and all of the Microsoft Developer Network resources (extensive documentation, excellent articles, expert commentary, etc...). In fact, I would bet that Visual Studio and the development tools make up the smallest market, in terms of sales volume, in which Microsoft is directly involved. If it were not for .NET Microsoft would have already lost and they know that which is why they continue to put so many resources into developer support, even though Visual Studio makes no money directly (it probably looses money actually), (think developers, developers, developers, deve....) because they know that as the developers go with platform support the regular users will follow. If the Linux community really wants to gain ground on Windows then they have to start competing more effectively against Microsoft in the developer tools and support markets (and Eclipse is not as good as Visual Studio, but it could be better and compete better if the OSS community was serious about competing with Visual Studio instead of trying to convert everyone to eMacs or VIM with gcc on the command line) which is a source of strength for Microsoft and the Windows platform.
or roughly equivalent to the number of registered and self avowed Libertarians among us a percentage of the voting population.
take a look at the Euro and the Pound versus the Dollar.
A strong currency does not necessarily mean a strong economy. In fact, the opposite is very often the case (that is what I love about economics, it is so often surprising and deliciously counter-intuitive and yet still true).
It seems to me that a few very loud people quite badly aren't going to shut up until Jobs give each and every single one of them their own free, customized mac.
Perhaps that was the plan of the complainers all along. In fact, it might be cheaper in the end for Apple to silence the most prolific whiners with some free merchandise on the condition that they stop complaining in public and don't disclose the terms of the settlements by which they got their free customized macs.
It amuses me to see how government always wants to have its cake and eat it too. I agree that widespread use of strong encryption and good security practices is of great benefit to society, but some Senator or law enforcement agency is bound to complain that their ability to wiretap or access encrypted data is being compromised by these better private security measures. Strong encryption and good security are two edged swords, they help us and they help our enemies as well, there is no way around that. Personally, I don't have a problem with that. I would rather live in a society were encryption is used, privacy is paramount, and some criminals and evil doers are a bit harder to catch, not a bad trade-off IMHO. However, there will doubtless be howls of indignation from the law enforcement community, which contains more than its fair share of self-righteous authoritarian pricks, about how criminals are getting away with crimes and going unpunished. I suppose that my response to them would be to make better use of the tools and laws that we already have instead of depending upon ever more egregious invasions of our collective personal privacy and abridgements of our Constitutional rights merely to prevent some drug addict from getting his fix or some high school students from posting pictures of themselves on MySpace or Facebook.
Zip is a well known file format so the router could, presumably, inspect the individual contents of the zip file as well. For example, most anti-virus scanners and file system browsers already provide this feature built in.
I was disappointed with how TNG treated the Q Continuum, making it look like some borish midwestern scene.
I think that you are thinking of episode 18 (Death Wish) of season 2 of Voyager where they visit the Q Continuum and Q (the one who takes the name 'Quinn' upon being made mortal) clearly states, when the away team expresses surprise that they are standing on a road in the middle of desert next to a gas station, that the whole scene, "was a representation of the Q Continuum that falls within the human level of understanding". Or in other words, the Q Continuum is not a 'borish midwestern scene', that was only how the Voyager away team perceived it not how it literally was to the Q themselves.
The makers of CopyRouter claim that it can even be used to defeat encryption and compression of files in the Internet's Wild West: the peer-to-peer file-sharing tools such as Gnutella and BitTorrent.
What are they going to do? Detect and Man in the Middle every single connection attempt that goes through their router? The file sharing tools will simply upgrade to stronger encryption, such as AES, and harden the connection handshaking against MITM attacks (perhaps by introducing public key infrastructure with well known key server(s)). It was my understanding that the present crop of file sharing tools provide obfuscation (ROT13 and the like) and not real encryption to set the bar just high enough to prevent packet inspection. However, it would not be difficult to implement stronger encryption methods (if they haven't done so already), should that prove necessary. In fact, the CopyRouter folks are at a distinct disadvantage in any encryption arms race since MITM and other cryptanalysis techniques are much more computationally expensive than the encryption itself AND the users outnumber the routers by thousands or even tens of thousands to one. The NSA might more credibly claim to be able to do this, but they have acres of underground super computers consuming as much electrical power as a small country, so I am very skeptical when anyone claims to be able to "defeat encryption" and doubly so when a private company mentions it as a bullet point in their power point presentation. It is more likely that this is a private company trying to sell a pig in a poke to ISPs and governments who don't inspect the merchandise to carefully or don't know any better.
And thank you for reminding me what a scary word loyalty truly is.
I seem to recall that the ceremonial daggers carried by the Nazi SS in WWII bore the inscription "My honor is loyalty" on the blade.
The biggest problem with American immigration law is its schizophrenic goal of reuniting families (dropping any and all standards for extended family members once the first member is approved) while hating immigrants in general (partly due to the results of the all-encompassing family-reunion goal).
I agree, the policy which allows the unskilled laborer to bring his entire extended family to the United States is terrible immigration policy. However, it is possible to disagree with both this policy AND the current incarnation of the H1B visa program without being inconsistent on the immigration issue.
This is a real business problem, because it does hurt the ability of American firms to recruit and hire the world's best and brightest. Increasingly, we've HAD candidates (especially from Britain and Scandinavia) tell us point blank that we couldn't pay them enough to move to the US. Period, full-stop, end of story.
So open an office in the foreign country, that is what all of the major firms (Microsoft, IBM, Sun, etc) are doing anyway. You can hire the best and brightest without bringing them here to the United States. As you yourself have said, many of them, for various reasons, don't want to come here anyway.
Canada, sure. But America? As far as they're concerned, we've turned into a mean, paranoid police state that automatically treats foreigners like criminals. Accurate or not, that's increasingly the perception held by foreign professionals about life in America.
It is probably true that foreigners with a certain ethnic background (particularly those that wear a turban) are likely to get more than their fair share of hassles here in the United States.
and it's definitely hurting our competitiveness against companies in countries like Canada that are willing to roll out the red carpet and treat them like welcome, valued guests.
Perhaps, but with "face time" being much less important than it used to be, particularly in IT and other analytical fields, and becoming less so all of the time it is likely that any disadvantage would be small and decreasing over time as outsourcing becomes an ever more effective and attractive alternative to specialized visas. We should reserve visas and naturalization for those immigrants who are both educated and intelligent and willing to become citizens because they share our vales and not just a desire to make money. The United States and Europe already have enough problems with invading alien cultures who utterly refuse to assimilate without adding to them.
Seems like he was even more prescient than I thought.
I suppose the McCain ought to get himself a no chamber in which to conduct his strategy meetings to counter-act the prescience of Obama.
Is there a branch of the Pirate Party here in the United States? Wouldn't it be cool if someone asks your registration and you could say, "Yeah, I'm a registered Pirate".
and if they TRIED to just walk away from them, you can bet the creditors would do their best to follow them "home".
Something tells me that an American collection agency is going to have a hard time collecting a foreign debt (with interest!) from a Pakistani who goes home to Islamabad. Americans don't have a lot of credit there, pun intended, if you know what I mean.
I know *I'd* tell any government that tried to treat me as badly as ours treats non-American professionals to go fuck itself and die.
That is what the Pakistanis and other Arab countries tell us to do all of the time, but the key thing to remember is "their country their rules." If you are a foreigner in a foreign country then you can either play by their rules, whether you like them or not, or leave their country, it really is that simple.
The majority of the H-1B's that I've worked with have been bright, intelligent, and talented individuals with skillsets not easily available in my market.
Then you have been fortunate, but a substantial portion of the 65,000+ H1B slots available in the United States do fall victim to the sort of abuses previously described. The temptation to "get their money's worth" from an employee with less recourse than a comperable American citizen is simply irresistable to many companies. I myself worked previously at a company (no longer work there) where at least two (2) of the staff, a washed up mechanical engineer and another who lied about being an algorithm developer on his H1B application (both from Pakistan...this was before 9/11), were basically being worked lots of overtime as telephone help desk support. Now granted, that was probably an pretty bad situation whereas you had a pretty good situation and the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, but the cracks in the H1B system are well known and frequently exploited if my first hand experience and the second hand experiences of others are to be believed.
It's the people that come over on the H1B program that we most need to encourage to immigrate, they are smart people who will raise the standard of living in the US.
That is true in theory, but the present H1B system leaks like a sieve and too many of the existing slots are being taken up by opportunistic foreigners who overstate their qualifications (they will do or say anything to get into the United States even if they have to lie through their teeth, they don't care) and the employers who bring them in (they don't care if they waste a spot that some other company, perhaps their competitor, really needs for a REAL qualified engineer). This is part of the reason why there is so much pressure every year to raise the H1B cap, because many of the slots are wasted and those companies who actually want to use the H1B program for the intended purpose find themselves unable to because other less scrupulous companies have wasted some of the slots by bringing in under qualified foreign personel to work low level IT jobs that could easily be filled by even half way competent Americans.
The reality is that for the programmer type jobs that so many rail against the employer will outsource the project if they can't find or import enough talent at the right price to complete the project on time and on budget.
Then perhaps that is what they should do, since an American isn't going to get the job anyway and the existing H1B program has shown itself to be rife with abuses. I understand what the H1B program is supposed to accomplish, but one of the great mistakes is to judge a program or policy based upon its intentions rather than its actual results. The H1B system should either be fixed so that only qualified personel are admitted after an American could not be found to do the job or the job should be outsourced. Right now companies place fake job postings on job boards with impossibly long lists of qualifications that almost no human being could meet, just to meet the statutory requirement that no American fit the bill (of course, the H1B they eventually import doesn't match those qualifications either, but nobody actually checks up on that once the application has been approved). They make sure that their job posting fails to find an American candidate because they have already made up their minds, before even posting that they don't want to hire an American for the job. That is just one further example of the perverse sorts of incentives created by the present H1B program.
The problem is that the "prevailing wage" is a vague term given the variety of skills and experience candidate might have for a given position.
Not only that, but what the employer says that the H1B employee is paid officially on the pay stub and what they are actually paid, usually due to mandatory unpaid overtime, are often two different things entirely. What is an H1B going to do, complain? If they say anything then the company will fire them and jerk their sponsorship so fast that their heads will still be spinning when their butts get kicked all the way back to their countries of origin. The H1Bs are lucky to be here, they know it and the company knows it, and thus they will put up with a lot more abuse, much more than most US Citizens would put up with, just to keep their jobs and remain here in the United States.
Even if the process is efficient it might still require a high amount of energy input and not scale well due to constraints on renewable power sources and non-polluting power sources such as sunlight, wind, geothermal, and ocean waves. I am skeptical that enough energy could be diverted from these renewable sources, in light of alternative demands for that energy, to completely close the carbon cycle at our present levels of hydrocarbon fuel consumption. In other words, there will still be demand for natural hydrocarbon fuels because they will be cheaper than artificial conversion of gaseous C02 to fuel for some time to come and probably remain that way until most of the remaining natural hydrocarbon fuel has been extracted from the ground and used. The best that will probably come of this process is to ensure that hydrocarbon fuel will never be completely exhausted as long as the sun is still shining and the world is still turning, but it might become very expensive in the far future (i.e. a luxury that only the very wealthy can regularly afford to use).
I seem to remember that the NBC olympics site (which used Silverlight) had plugin installation that was fairly easy with Firefox (which doesn't support ActiveX so it was obviously not IE only) and didn't require many manual user actions such as downloading and running an installer separately. Now granted, that was on Windows XP, but if it can be made to work with Firefox on Windows with a plugin then wouldn't that same Firefox plugin be available on Linux?
or if there's an exogenous shock to the markets then the formal models will be ill-equipped to explain much less predict.
How can they? That is the definition of a stochastic process and random is just that; by definition it cannot be predicted with certainty. The financial markets are well known examples of systems which have random variables which cannot be predicted or controlled and it was a mistake, by those in power, to believe that they could be controlled for.