> they are often from corrupt countries where going to the authorities is most often not an option!
Exploited H-1B: "Hey, INS! I'm bein' repressed!"
INS: "Really? We'll look into that! (It's a lot more fun than servicing legal immigrants, and we don't get any funding from Congress for anything other than enforcement actions). Hey, wow, you're right! Your employer is violating H-1B regs. Your H-1B is now revoked."
Exploited H-1B: "What the fuck?"
INS: "You have 10 days to get on the plan or we'll send guys with guns to bust your door down too, dipshit. But thanks for telling us about your lousy employer. It made our fuckin' day."
I know some H-1Bs who aren't being exploited by their employers. Both of them describes the INS as the most inefficient, corrupt, and wholly-distasteful organization they've encountered. Comparisons with KGB and Stasi are frequent. INS officials are often abusive - there are no appeals at ports of entry, and the enforcement mentality permeates the organization to the last man.
If you ever want to see the banality of evil in America, you need look no further than your nearest INS office.
Millions of dollars on APCs and H&K MP5 submachine guns to get a rugrat from Cuba out of a house. Over a year to process the form that says "OK, given that DOL has approved your labor cert (6-8 months upfront), so once we process this form (I-140), you'll be allowed to apply for the Green Card and wait another four years for that form (I-485) to be processed".
First Presidential candidate who abolishes INS and replaces it with a Beat-On-The-Illegals arm and a funded Services-To-Legal-Immigrants arm, gets my vote. The present organization appears to be little more than "Beat-On-Everyone".
"We put a lot of money into astrology and I think it's sensible to put just a little bit in to making certain that we know if there is a danger of an object hitting our very fragile planet", said Lord Sainsbury
> if I was born a Cancer when the moon and Saturn were aligned in metaconjunction > (or whatever), will I get hit by an asteroid?
That's Sainsbury's point - that there are more people interested (and voting with their dollars) for astrology over astronomy - and that this fact does not speak well to our sense of priorities as a species, nor does it bode well for our long-term survival prospects.
Frankly, if humanity gets wiped out by an errant rock because its citizens are more interested in "looking for signs in the stars" than actually looking at the stars, then it probably deserves to be wiped out.
(It's a sad commentary on society how pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo beats real science in the world of the mundanes. Fer chrissakes, the real universe is goddamn fascinating. Stars made of diamond. Atomic nuclei the size of cities and the mass of suns, rotating hundreds of times per second. Just for starters. The gods of the astrologers are weaklings, limited by mundane imaginations. But astronomy has opened my mind up to things I could never have imagined.)
> You may receive unsolicited emails (a.k.a. spam) from unrecognized sources.
Is it just me, or is that a little too specific? When was the last time you saw this kind of language when other "e-commerce" sites got cracked?
I mean, I'm not accusing DC of doing this, but if I were a marketing company, and my product was based on being able to track who scanned what ad, and I were to sell my database to mainsleaze spammers (e.g. MessageMedia, m0.net, and other "legit" spam-for-hire outfits, as opposed to the MLM and MMF pyramid/quack-medicine/pr0n scammers), this is exactly how I'd do it.
Those of you who gave DC a "spamtrap" address - say, a dc-spam-12345@yahoo.com type of thing, to trace the spam you got from DC and to not be detectable with a traditional dictionary attack on Yahoo - keep an eye on your headers.
If the spam's from a random dialup IP, it's probably a dictionary attack or maybe, in 3-6 months, if there was a cracker, then maybe the addresses did get resold.
But if it comes from a "mainstream" spam-for-hire company with real money behind it, and advertises real products, you just might want to suspect that DC themselves sold the data to the mainsleazer.
Hell, I'll bet it's even in their "privacy policy" that they have the right to do so. So blaming an imaginary "Hacker X" shouldn't be necessary in the first place. Again, I'm not accusing them, and I have no evidence that this is the case, but I must confess I'm just a little bit suspicious that maybe there's more to "Hacker X" than meets the eye.
Umm, lemme get this straight, there's a whole lotta lead in a typical CRT.
And this lead leaches out of the glass in the landfill how?
And while we're at it, the talk of banning lead solder seems also to be a crock - the non-lead alternatives to solder have higher melting points, meaning changes to manufacturing processes for chip and board alike.
Now, leaving aside the expenses that these changes will add to your gear (because like a good envionmentuhlists, we all believe that any cost is justified "even if it saves one chiiiyuld"), you've solved one problem, but created another one, namely:
Crappy solder means higher failure rates, which means even more crap thrown into landfill.
This is fine if you're a manufacturer - you get to sell the customer two $59.99 VCRs and a $150 TV every couple of years as the solder joints - already crap in most consumer gear as witnessed by the flood of complaints in sci.electronics.repair - go cold on you and the customer can't be bothered to get it fixed because the cost of "junk it and buy a new one" is less than the cost of "fix it".
All that's changed in this wacky EU proposal is that the gummint gets to charge the company another ~10-20% as a penalty for making disposable crap - the company then passes the costs on to you. It's no skin off their nose when the consumer would rather have a $150 (or $150+$20 "green" tax buried in the price = $170) piece of crap than a $500 piece of equipment.
You wanna really help the environment? Screw this "gummint oughta tax manufacturers who make products we don't like" crap. Just do two things:
Press manufacturers to build quality into their products the way they used to. Gear made in the mid-80s is still going strong - gear made in the mid-90s is mostly crap. Be willing to pay 15% more for a screen that'll last 5 years longer than its bargain-bin neighbor.
Reuse, don't recycle. My current TV is a 27" set that someone left out for garbage. The fault was a $0.25 capacitor that took out a $3.20 amplifier chip. Because the previous owner cut the AC cord on the thing (presumably they didn't want anyone trying to fix it - fsck that!), I spent another $5.00 on a cord from Rat Shack. The goddamn cord was my biggest expense.
Now, not everyone can (or should!) fix their own gear, especially if it's a TV set. But that fix was trivial, and any repair tech would have recognized the failure instantly (vertical deflection failures are common on this model), and said "$5 for the new parts, $50 for knowing which parts you need".
Hell, even if you don't want it fixed, consider giving it to a local repair tech. "Hey, if you can fix it, it's yours, find someone who wants it".
Back to my set - that set was made in 1993, just at the start of the decline in consumer electronics quality. But it's still going strong a couple of years after I picked it up. I fully expect this set to last until HDTV renders it (and all our other sets) obsolete in 6-8 years.
(And yeah, I'll be stocking up on lead solder, just in case it's banned by the time I need it to fix something!)
Side note -- the real cause of failure in that set - and many monitors and TVs - was dust buildup. High voltages used in monitors and TVs mean lots of static to attract dust. The dust coats the components, trapping heat. The heat is what killed the capacitor, resulting in the failed amp chip.
Practical upshot -- if you read a few FAQs (e.g. http://www.repairfaq.org) and learn the basic safety rules for working in a monitor, you can probably save yourself a lot of headaches by just getting in there and cleaning out the dustbunnies every 5 years.
Less heat. Less stress on parts. Less landfill. Happier planet.
Or to borrow an old WWII slogan: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."
> If I give my children a 'moral' upbringing only by sheltering them from 'imorality,' I can only protect them to the point that I can control their environment.
>
> The key is encouraging children to develop deep understanding. I cringe when I ask my daughter why something is wrong and she says 'because you said so, Dad.'
Thank you for doing more good in five minutes than these filter-felchers will accomplish in their lifetimes.
I'm gonna shamelessly karma-whore, despite the karma kap, by quoting myself from an earlier Holland Library discussion:
I learned about the Holocaust at
about age 8 or 9, watching war documentaries. Seeing a clip of Hitler hollering his lungs out in this
majestic-looking square, facing thousands of adoring fans, and having seen the occasional swastika
spraypainted on the walls of my public school, I wondered aloud who
was this guy with the funny moustache and
squiggly symbols behind him, and why did all the people seem to like him so much?
Dad made a very quick judgment call (a clue to AFA: this is how you protect kids, it's called "parenting"), and
said "He's a very, very evil man", which I tentatively took for granted, although I didn't quite understand why.
Dad picked up on my confusion, warned me that I might see some things that would disturb me, but invited me to
have a seat. Being a kid, of course, I couldn't resist a golden opportunity to watch "adult stuff". (More style
points for Dad:-)
So Dad and I watched the rest of the documentary and followed the history of WWII together. Six weekends
later, 50,000,000 were dead on all sides, but the war was mostly over, our side had won, the Russians were
blowing the hell out of the rubble that was once Berlin, and our troops finally started liberating the camps. And I
had a much better appreciation of what Evil was.
"So the Russians were the good guys, right? So how come they're the bad guys now?" (Kids can come up with
the most embarassing questions...)
So Dad (hey, nobody said parenting was easy:-) had to tell me about Stalin. We went to the library (oh, irony, a
library, of all places!) and checked out some books. I found out how he came to power. What he did afterwards.
Why we overlooked it during WWII. The purges. The KGB. Another 10,000,000 on top of Hitler's 6,000,000.
Yet more Evil.
Over the next few years, I realized that you don't get to pull off anything really Evil without the support - or at
least wilful ignorance - of the people. All that stuff about "the banality of evil"; excuses like "just following
orders", and "hey, I'm bummed by it, but I just drive the bulldozer, it's not like I can stop them".
Evil is what happens when you let government - any government - get out of control. And all that is necessary
for Evil to triumph is that Good do nothing.
It took a parent to teach me that, not an Internet filter.
You see "Plans to Peer at a Black Hole's Event Horizon", and the first thought you have is "who the hell is Blackhole.com or Eventhorizon.com, what do they have to do with P2P, and why haven't I heard of them before?!?!"
> it's not as bad as an ex-boyfriend's that was covered in dried semen,
Worst I had to clean up was a coffee spill in a keyboard from a cow orker with a serious dandruff problem. While doing the cleanup, I discovered something else amusing.
In the case I experienced, I pretended not to notice, because, what the hell, HR's not my job, and the cow orker in question was getting the work done. But it may come in handy should you ever have to break out the Bag Of Dirty Tricks.
I even hesitate to publicize this, but what the hell. No such thing as security through obscurity, right?
"How to determine the amount of time your SO (or a problem cow orker( is spending surfing for pr0n:"
Take a small jeweller's screwdriver.
Run the screwdriver the length of the keyboard between two rows of keys.
Lift the screwdriver and examine the hair.
Depending on hairstyle, the ratio of pubes to straight hairs is directly proportional to the amount of time spent surfing for pr0n.
In a corporate environment, that's probably probable cause for an investigation. Best to do this discreetly on your HR manager's 'puter first to see if it's gonna work.
Of course, I must now add the following corollary:
If you see a whole lot of your cow orkers running around the office tomorrow, frantically swapping keyboards with other cow orkers, you can further assume that whenever they're not surfin' for pr0n, they're reading Slashdot.
Contact fuckedcompany.com and do what comes naturally.
>If you delete all of their default bookmarks, they come back. I
figured it out once, it was triggered by the "Personal Folder" or some name like that. You could delete all the
bookmarks, but not that bookmark file.
If you look at the big-ass file on netscape.com that describes preferences.js, you'll see this is a "reserved" setting, with a note to the effect of "we're not gonna tell you what it does, 'cuz we don't want you fuckin' with it".
> > Never doubt the power of government(s) making something illegal.
> Just like Marijuana is illegal, as are "bongs." And we know nobody uses those right....right?
Which means that if you're carrying a bong which tests positive for once having had marijuana smoke passed through it, you get busted for "drug paraphenalia".
Likewise - owning an MP3 player will be fine. Owning a computer will be fine. But owning an MP3 player will be probable cause for an officer to seize the computer and examine it for MP3 files. Even if you've deleted the MP3 files, if they can recover evidence (e.g. old bytes in the FAT portion of the disk) that the MP3 files were there, you go to jail.
> In this case, i think we all know where the public stands (the vast majority, at least) - all the corporate money in the world won't save a politician once he's been voted out of office.
Support for marijuana legalization is remarkably high in the US. Please explain why no major political candidate supports legalization.
Even a small portion of the corporate money in the world appears to be quite sufficient to thwart the public's will.
Actually, as much as you mock the "mp3 players are like guns" and suggest bogus new laws, I'd say you're closer to the truth than you know.
5. No gun/MP3 sales at trade shows. Shit, this article is about restricting MP3 players from tradeshows.
6. Trigger locks / "play-key" locks. A "play-key-lock" is exactly what SDMI is designed to implement.
7. Registration of gun/MP3-player owners. The industry goal of all music in pay-per-listen formats implies per-user registration, or at least data-collection.
9. Manufacturers of MP3 players pay for potentially lost CD sales or get sued by cities. Apparently you haven't been to Canada, where there's a "tax" on all blank media, or even in the States, where the "tax" applies to "music" CD-Rs, which are just like any other CD-R except that RIAA has browbeaten consumer electronics manufacturers into rejecting CD-Rs that don't have the extra bits that indicate payment of the tax.
11. Why do you think it's taken three years for CD-based MP3 players to come out? And why do you see very little interest in this area from the manufacturers? What killed DAT?
As long as we're comparing MP3 players and firearms (and you're trying to pretend that the person who made this comparison was clueless), you also forgot one:
12. Most end-user modifications are felonies. SDMI backed up with DMCA makes "screw this pay-per-listen crap, I'll sample MP3s at the line-out jack" a felony. The maximum penalties are comparable to those associated with modifying a semi-automatic weapon to have full-auto capabilities.
> What matters isn't how offensive you are; it's who you offend.
Which is in itself pretty fucking offensive:)
I s'pose technically it should be Jack Valenti who needs a judge to pull the skin of 'is ass over 'is head and turn 'im into a fuckin' wheelbarrow, but Jack's so old there's probably not enough skin to work with. 'Sides, he's already got his head up his ass. But Hilary's got plenty of ass to go 'round. A judge with a little clue could really go to town.
> What matters isn't how offensive you are; it's who you offend.
Well, at least I didn't traffic in a device used to circumvent a technological measure. Unless you XOR my comments on Jack, Hilary, and Michael with... oh, wait, that's the CueCat hack.;-)
Interesting thought - what happens when the CueCat folks start handing out the audio version of the thing, which will turn blips and bleeps during TV commercials into keyboard streams that send your 'puter to a web site. (Leaving aside the fact that if you're watching TV, you're not looking at the screen, and if you're looking at the screen, you don't want it hijacked by some ad.)
Since we all know it'll be hacked in a few hours after release, I point out that while an audio encoding of DeCSS would sound like crap in a Bach cantata, it'd fit perfectly into some industrial dance music...
The Cocky Sticks' tracks, "I'm a Catholic Girl, of course I swallow!" (featuring samples like "OK, whoever hasn't had their dick in my mouth, form a line over here, uh, I mean at all today", from what appears to be a gangbang video), and "Fuckin' Wheelbarrow" ("I'll pull the skin o' yer ass o'er yer head and turn ya inta a fuckin' wheelbarrow!", which sounds like something I'd pay good money to see a judge do to Hilary Rosen, come to think of it)... don't contain offensive content. We won't even get into Adolf Hitler (oops, thread's over!) being sampled into "House of the Rising Sun".
Personally, I think the Cocky Sticks are great. I love 'em. Got a (paid-for!) CD of 'em. But while I'm not personally offended by their samples, I'm willing to say that many might be. But a bunch of goddamn code expressed as speech?
But it seems to me that Michael Robertson really has become Hilary Rosen's bitch as a result of his my.mp3.com trials.
And that is far more offensive than anything I've heard or seen in the music on MP3.com.
"Wisen up 'cuz on Election Day, we'll see who's banned in the USA"
- 2 Live Crew, from "Banned in the USA", a parody of Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" - and endorsed by Bruce - written in response to Tipper Gore and the PMRC's attempts to eradicate them in the late '80s
And in addition to nuking chain letters, how about turning off the one thing worse than HTML email:
That fscking piece of crap known as MIME-type text/enriched.
What dr00ling m0ron at Qualcomm thought it was a good idea to embed HTML-style tags in email that aren't HTML, in order to combine the cow-felching ugliness of HTML mail with Microsoftian interoperability?
And I'll go one better - lose the goddamn spyware/adware "business model", Qualcomm. Lose it NOW. The day you went this route is the day Eudora stopped being an email client and started being a Trojan.
> You know what I do when I find a site that is broken without
> javascript? I leave and never come back.
Ditto, except I leave a present in their server logs before I go.
Like a 404 to "http://www.stupidsite.com/fuck/you/and/the/javash it/you/rode/in/on.html"
If you wanna express how pissed off you are, express it. On the sites where webmaster@ isn't a black hole, it's usually some marketroid who says "but Java's cool! you need to turn it on to see it!". I figure if anyone's actually reading the server logs, there's at least the possibility that they're geeky enough to appreciate the humor in such a log entry.
> [Slashdotter Hrunting calls attention to marketroid Black's attempt to confuse an > ISP's right to block incoming traffic to port 25 (MAPS blocking 23 known spam domains associated > with "top web sites",), with some sort of censorship of traffic on port 80 >("By MAPS standards, 25 of the 25 web sites should be blocked")
The marketer knows the difference. He's just trusting that most of his readers won't.
Another case in point from the same guy - "23 of the top 25 web sites don't use the double opt-in".
Whenever you hear someone refer to it as "double opt-in", it's a marketroid.
>
Whenever you hear it described as "confirmed opt-in" or "opt-in with confirmation", you're talking to someone who knows what they're talking about.
The goal of the marketroid is to make "Hi. [IP address] signed you up. If that's really you, hit reply and verify that it was you" sound as inconvenient as possible.
Hence "double opt-in". There's no second opt-in, just a confirmation that's part of the single opt-in. But "double opt-in" sounds complicated and redundant.
To a marketroid, the goal is unverified opt-in, ("Hi! [Spam] To get more spam, hit reply! If you don't hit reply, we'll delete you from this list and opt you back in next week!") which is, as anyone with a mailbox knows, indistinguishable from opt-out: ("Hi. [Spam]. To get removed (and added to our sucker list), hit reply".)
Ever wonder why abortion rights advocates call themselves "pro-choice", not "pro-abortion"? Or why abortion rights opponents call themselves "pro-life", not "anti-abortion"?
Same shit, different smell.
If it comes out of a cow's ass, it's cowshit. If it comes out of a marketer's mouth, it's bullshit.
> Questions like "why are we here?", by the way, are purely factual and obviously in the realm of observational science
Huh? If by "why are we here", you mean "how did homo sapiens evolve?", you're absolutely right. That question is within the realm of science.
I meant "is there any purpose to our existence as conscious beings? What are we supposed to do with our lives?" That's metaphysics.
And while the opinions of scientists on that question are every bit as useful and interesting as the opinions of philosophers and religious types, they're just that: opinions. I know of no scientist who would call them "facts" in the sense of scientific truth.
To take the question "Why are we here" in the sense in which I meant it:
Dawkins would argue argue "No reason beyond providing an environment (a body and reproductive system) to propagate your genes. Indeed, you only exist in a form that's capable of asking such a silly question because 'consciousness' happens to be just one of about 30 million effective methods (species) that genes use to ensure their propagation".
A follower of Zen would say "Mu." The very notion that there exists some "thing" that one is "supposed" to do with one's life is wholly bogus in Zen. It's like asking a mathematician "What quantity is expressed by the sum 2 + fish?".
A Christian would say that one ought to follow the example set down by Christ in the Bible. (Umm, and the next Christian beside him would say the same thing, but they'd disagree violently on exactly what that example was;-)
And a Fundie of any religious stripe would say that one also ought coerce everyone else into doing the same thing.
If you've got a double-blind experiment that will determine which of these (and the other zillion-odd religious and philosophical viewpoints out there) is demonstrably right, I'd like to see it.
I point out that the scientific method can be expressed in five words:
Hypothesis. Materials. Method. Data. Conclusion.
CaptainCarrot writes:
> [in response to me saying "Science solves real-world problems, I should substitute "physical" for "real"]
Quite right!
As you might have guessed, I had my scientific materialist ("right tool for the job", "religion is a way to help you deal with certain feelings") hat on when I wrote that. The notion that "real" might constitute anything beyond the material world was quite preposterous to me, and so I said "real-world" when I meant "physical world".
Which is a long way of saying that what's "real" to me is a function of me mental state at any given moment in time. Or "Who is the master who makes the grass green?" (As you can guess now, I'm in a Zen state:)
Incidentally, I note that my belief systems have been fairly carefully evolved to have relatively minor areas of overlap. To use the example at hand, there's not much in the Zen concept behind "you are the master who makes the grass green" that gets in the way of the principles Jesus elucidated in, say, the Sermon on the Mount, and it's a very elegant way of reminding yourself that there are damn good reasons why the scientific method requires double-blind experiments.
> ISTM that many hackers feel the world is far
too fscked up to have been created by a perfect, good being.
I finally got around to playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri last night, and finished it in a couple of all-nighters.
Your quote reminds me of something from the game. Paraphrasing the game, "The question isn't why a perfect God would create this universe, but why a perfect God would create a universe at all".
My take on the topic at hand: Geeks are freethinkers. Because we acknowledge that it's very hard for one geek to understand all that's going on inside these boxes we call "computers", we're tolerant of views in the absence of conclusive evidence. All geeks believe that what does on inside the box is understandable, but the process whereby any one geek understands a piece of code is something uniquely a function of (a) the geek, and (b) the code.
If I extrapolate these beliefs about computability to the Real World, I see two tendencies:
First - geeks will choose world views that imply the world is understandable and that there are processes whereby one can change the world.
Whether it be Fundamentalist Christianity ("know God and follow His commandments"), Paganism ("Change the world through acts of Magick"), Buddhism ("You are the master who makes the grass green"), or Scientific Materialism ("The world operates according to physical laws which can be divined through experiment"), all of these world views provide adherents with tools whereby reality can be manipulated.
Unlike normals, geeks tend to be tolerant where evidence is unclear. We're willing to use the best tool for the job.
The scientific method is an excellent tool for figuring out how gravity works and why the stars shine. It's not as useful a tool for answering the answers to philosophical questions like "Why are we here", and "How shall we live?". Religions are pretty good for this. You may not like the answer any one religion provides, but you have to admit it's an answer.
Normals tend to want one tool for everything. Fundamentalist Christian Normals have a lot of trouble with dinosaur fossils. Scientific materialists have trouble with metaphysics. Normals end up like Linux users without an xterm trying to use Internet Explorer to rename 100 files, or MSOffice users trying to write annual reports in TeX.
The "joke religions", such as the Church of the SubGenius, or Discordianism, have a significant place in geek culture because they're explicit demonstrations of an important principle - "best tool for the job" doesn't mean "science or religion", but can mean multiple religions for multiple types of religious type questions.
Traditional religions have never tolerated this - they tend to be monolithic one-size-fits-all solutions geared for memetic propagation, rather than best-of-breed solutions for particular subsets of philosophical problems.
Christianity's great for when you want divine retribution upon your foes, or comfort in a better world ahead.
Buddhism's great for existential angst when nothing makes sense anymore - that's OK because it's not supposed to make sense.
Paganism and shamanism have been unbeatable for 5000 years for enjoying that ancient part of your brain that just wants to strip down nekkid and bliss out dancing around a giant burning wooden sculpture around this time of year.
And the joke religions are great for when you start taking any one of the serious religions too seriously.
Normals hate having to pick and choose and learn something new every time they encounter something new. Geeks love having to adapt - we do it for fun - it's what happens every time we design new software, debug old software, or play any game from Quake to Everquest to D&D.
I'll close off by describing my belief system: I'm a scientific materialist when solving real-world problems; I have no need of the God hypothesis to explain physics, evolution, or even human intelligence. I've chosen the Christian God (and I freely admit "because that's how I was brung up" - an accident of the religious affiliation of my parents, who infected me with the Judeo-Christan meme) as my arbitrary Big Brother figure. But I also like the Zen and Existentialist approaches to life when Big Brother doesn't give me what I want.
Oddly enough, I appear to lack the capability to really get into the altered mental/emotional states experienced by Pagans, neo-shamans, or to use the modern equivalent, trance/techno music and dance. So I concluded that the "really mystical" stuff that started this thread wasn't for me. (But if it's your thing, hey, more power to ya. It's your brain; if you've got the circuitry to enjoy this kinda stuff, enjoy the hell out of it!)
And I'm a card-carrying SubGenius. Which means I'm not really here -- I left Earth on July 5, 1998 with the rest of the SubGenii, and am beaming this message to MWOWM from my Pleasure Spacecraft. You are actually a brain in a vat, living in a World Without Slack.
The movie The Matrix was a practical joke we decided to play on you to see if you'd figure it out. Of course you missed the point completely, just like we knew you would. But it was right there in the movie -- for stupid primates to believe in a virtual world, it's gotta suck.
And that, humans, is why the world (well, at least the one you slackless gimps live in) is so fscked up.
> H-1B visas are not as good for foriegn workers, giving them the option of citizenship would be.
Agreed. H-1B slavery exists solely because times to get a green card have gone from ~6 months to ~3-5 years since the mid-80s.
The reason for the extreme backlog is political - vote-hungry politicians actively pandering to xenophobia, or more often than not, "benign neglect" of the INS service arm (vs. their "enforcement arm") being used to give plausible deniability to the very same politicians when the accusations of xenophobia start flying.
It's a "nudge, nudge, wink, wink, it's really a shame that we never got around to properly funding the services arm of INS again this year, isn't it?" that plays well to xenophobes both on the Hill and within the INS itself, but provides plausible deniability whenever anyone accuses a politician of xenophobia. Best of both worlds in terms of grabbing votes at minimal PR cost.
> I'm working with an H1B colleague who changed jobs and told me he didn't have much trouble > doing it. He just found the new job first, got the paperwork rolling and then gave two weeks notice on his old job.
What you forget is that the speed with which this can happen is a function of geography.
There are four INS service centers where you "get the paperwork rolling". Some of them can take upwards of 2-3 months to approve an H-1B transfer from one employer to the next.
If you're in one of the slower regions, finding an employer who's willing to make an offer today, but not have you start work for another 2-3 months -- possibly longer, given INS' continued inability to deal with its backlogs -- can be a considerable impediment to job mobility of an H1-B.
Finally, on the Green Card side, the "fast" route is at least a 2-3 year process. The "normal" route can take upwards of 5-6 years. Since an H-1B is only valid for six years, getting a Green Card is a highly dicey proposition.
The bottom line all comes down to money, culture, and bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy side is self-explanatory - INS has consistently been rated the most dysfunctional federal organization in the Union.
The money side has led to a cultural problem, however, which is this: INS has two mandates:
enforcement against aliens unlawfully present,
services to aliens legally present
How are these mandates funded? Briefly:
Congress funds INS' "enforcement" budget, and INS is legally prohibited from using these funds in the "services" side of the organization.
The "services" budget must therefore come out of user fees, which are wholly inadequate for the number of legal immigrants (and H-1B and TN nonimmigrants, and most importantly, the American businesses who employ them) requiring prompt response times for processing of their requests for services to which, under law, they are entitled.
After many years of this funding imbalance, is it any wonder that INS personnel themselves see the "enforcement" arm as the "cool place to work" and the "services" arm as the "poor bastards in the basement with the dripping pipes?"
And that, folks, is why there's money for a SWAT team equipped with modern body armor and top-of-the-line H&K MP5 submachine guns and armored personnel carriers to go after an 8-year-old kid, but it takes four months for an H-1B guy to say "can I work for SGI instead of Sun Microsystems", and probably over four years before Transmeta can get permission to hire Linus Torvalds on a permanent ("Green Card") basis.
> Does he not realize that the "Internet Community" is millions strong, and includes his neighbors, > friends, co-workers, kids, and what not? These are the people using services like BeamIT.
Well-said.
In a spirit of vicious irony, I present the following sample from NWA's "100 Miles and Runnin'":
But we got ten thousand niggaz strong,
we got everybody singin' ma "Fuck da Police" song,
and while you treatin' my group like dirt
yo' whole fuckin' family is wearin' ma T-shirt
For you young 'uns who don't remember, NWA is where Dr. Dre's got his start in 1989-1990. What goes around comes around.
> your thinking on SSL is flawed. Nothing of the higher level protocols (eg http) is un-encrypted. Try sniffing an SSL connection some time.
Yeah, I just recalled Hotmail as an example where the sign-in process was done securely, but everything else was done in plaintext. Rather a silly implementation.
As for SSL in general, what was I thinking when I posted that? (I shouldn't try sniffing an SSL connection, I should just try drinking more coffee before I post a brainfart like that again.) *doh!*
> So according to [Shotgun's] analogy with car sales and women, Amazon.com will charge more for something that an AOL user wants to buy as opposed to a Linux slut?
No, spamazon.com will charge someone coming from aol.com more for "The Internet For Dummies" and less for "TCP/IP Network Administration", unless the User-Agent: says they're running a non-Microsoft box, in which case the price breaks will be inverted.
In a conventional bookstore, you can't fine-tune the price in response to your customer's profile, because the customer is anonymous. On Spamazon, the customer profile can be used to gauge the likelihood that a customer will pay a premium for a product, and prices can be hiked accordingly.
The goal is to maximize revenue from each market segment without telling any market segment what's going on.
Think Al Gore "talkin' tha ebonics to tha homiez" when speaking to NAACP, and "taking the initiative in inventing the Internet" when speaking to whites.
Spamazon.com speak with forked tongue. Tackhead no do business with.
Slashdot Mirror
I know some H-1Bs who aren't being exploited by their employers. Both of them describes the INS as the most inefficient, corrupt, and wholly-distasteful organization they've encountered. Comparisons with KGB and Stasi are frequent. INS officials are often abusive - there are no appeals at ports of entry, and the enforcement mentality permeates the organization to the last man.
If you ever want to see the banality of evil in America, you need look no further than your nearest INS office.
Millions of dollars on APCs and H&K MP5 submachine guns to get a rugrat from Cuba out of a house. Over a year to process the form that says "OK, given that DOL has approved your labor cert (6-8 months upfront), so once we process this form (I-140), you'll be allowed to apply for the Green Card and wait another four years for that form (I-485) to be processed".
First Presidential candidate who abolishes INS and replaces it with a Beat-On-The-Illegals arm and a funded Services-To-Legal-Immigrants arm, gets my vote. The present organization appears to be little more than "Beat-On-Everyone".
Oops. Mea culpa. Of course, never trust a journalist to know the difference between astronomy and astrology ;-)
> if I was born a Cancer when the moon and Saturn were aligned in metaconjunction
> (or whatever), will I get hit by an asteroid?
That's Sainsbury's point - that there are more people interested (and voting with their dollars) for astrology over astronomy - and that this fact does not speak well to our sense of priorities as a species, nor does it bode well for our long-term survival prospects.
Frankly, if humanity gets wiped out by an errant rock because its citizens are more interested in "looking for signs in the stars" than actually looking at the stars, then it probably deserves to be wiped out.
(It's a sad commentary on society how pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo beats real science in the world of the mundanes. Fer chrissakes, the real universe is goddamn fascinating. Stars made of diamond. Atomic nuclei the size of cities and the mass of suns, rotating hundreds of times per second. Just for starters. The gods of the astrologers are weaklings, limited by mundane imaginations. But astronomy has opened my mind up to things I could never have imagined.)
On the appeal of science vs. mysticism: "Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder", an essay by Richard Dawkins.
The dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space program. Must we follow in their footsteps?
Is it just me, or is that a little too specific? When was the last time you saw this kind of language when other "e-commerce" sites got cracked?
I mean, I'm not accusing DC of doing this, but if I were a marketing company, and my product was based on being able to track who scanned what ad, and I were to sell my database to mainsleaze spammers (e.g. MessageMedia, m0.net, and other "legit" spam-for-hire outfits, as opposed to the MLM and MMF pyramid/quack-medicine/pr0n scammers), this is exactly how I'd do it.
Those of you who gave DC a "spamtrap" address - say, a dc-spam-12345@yahoo.com type of thing, to trace the spam you got from DC and to not be detectable with a traditional dictionary attack on Yahoo - keep an eye on your headers.
If the spam's from a random dialup IP, it's probably a dictionary attack or maybe, in 3-6 months, if there was a cracker, then maybe the addresses did get resold.
But if it comes from a "mainstream" spam-for-hire company with real money behind it, and advertises real products, you just might want to suspect that DC themselves sold the data to the mainsleazer.
Hell, I'll bet it's even in their "privacy policy" that they have the right to do so. So blaming an imaginary "Hacker X" shouldn't be necessary in the first place. Again, I'm not accusing them, and I have no evidence that this is the case, but I must confess I'm just a little bit suspicious that maybe there's more to "Hacker X" than meets the eye.
And this lead leaches out of the glass in the landfill how?
And while we're at it, the talk of banning lead solder seems also to be a crock - the non-lead alternatives to solder have higher melting points, meaning changes to manufacturing processes for chip and board alike.
Now, leaving aside the expenses that these changes will add to your gear (because like a good envionmentuhlists, we all believe that any cost is justified "even if it saves one chiiiyuld"), you've solved one problem, but created another one, namely:
Crappy solder means higher failure rates, which means even more crap thrown into landfill.
This is fine if you're a manufacturer - you get to sell the customer two $59.99 VCRs and a $150 TV every couple of years as the solder joints - already crap in most consumer gear as witnessed by the flood of complaints in sci.electronics.repair - go cold on you and the customer can't be bothered to get it fixed because the cost of "junk it and buy a new one" is less than the cost of "fix it".
All that's changed in this wacky EU proposal is that the gummint gets to charge the company another ~10-20% as a penalty for making disposable crap - the company then passes the costs on to you. It's no skin off their nose when the consumer would rather have a $150 (or $150+$20 "green" tax buried in the price = $170) piece of crap than a $500 piece of equipment.
You wanna really help the environment? Screw this "gummint oughta tax manufacturers who make products we don't like" crap. Just do two things:
Now, not everyone can (or should!) fix their own gear, especially if it's a TV set. But that fix was trivial, and any repair tech would have recognized the failure instantly (vertical deflection failures are common on this model), and said "$5 for the new parts, $50 for knowing which parts you need".
Hell, even if you don't want it fixed, consider giving it to a local repair tech. "Hey, if you can fix it, it's yours, find someone who wants it".
Back to my set - that set was made in 1993, just at the start of the decline in consumer electronics quality. But it's still going strong a couple of years after I picked it up. I fully expect this set to last until HDTV renders it (and all our other sets) obsolete in 6-8 years.
(And yeah, I'll be stocking up on lead solder, just in case it's banned by the time I need it to fix something!)
Side note -- the real cause of failure in that set - and many monitors and TVs - was dust buildup. High voltages used in monitors and TVs mean lots of static to attract dust. The dust coats the components, trapping heat. The heat is what killed the capacitor, resulting in the failed amp chip.
Practical upshot -- if you read a few FAQs (e.g. http://www.repairfaq.org) and learn the basic safety rules for working in a monitor, you can probably save yourself a lot of headaches by just getting in there and cleaning out the dustbunnies every 5 years.
Less heat. Less stress on parts. Less landfill. Happier planet.
Or to borrow an old WWII slogan: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."
This ain't new, kids.
>
> The key is encouraging children to develop deep understanding. I cringe when I ask my daughter why something is wrong and she says 'because you said so, Dad.'
Thank you for doing more good in five minutes than these filter-felchers will accomplish in their lifetimes.
I'm gonna shamelessly karma-whore, despite the karma kap, by quoting myself from an earlier Holland Library discussion:
Quoth Tackhead in this http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/02/23/10172 33&cid=122
You see "Plans to Peer at a Black Hole's Event Horizon", and the first thought you have is "who the hell is Blackhole.com or Eventhorizon.com, what do they have to do with P2P, and why haven't I heard of them before?!?!"
Worst I had to clean up was a coffee spill in a keyboard from a cow orker with a serious dandruff problem. While doing the cleanup, I discovered something else amusing.
In the case I experienced, I pretended not to notice, because, what the hell, HR's not my job, and the cow orker in question was getting the work done. But it may come in handy should you ever have to break out the Bag Of Dirty Tricks.
I even hesitate to publicize this, but what the hell. No such thing as security through obscurity, right?
"How to determine the amount of time your SO (or a problem cow orker( is spending surfing for pr0n:"
- Take a small jeweller's screwdriver.
- Run the screwdriver the length of the keyboard between two rows of keys.
- Lift the screwdriver and examine the hair.
- Depending on hairstyle, the ratio of pubes to straight hairs is directly proportional to the amount of time spent surfing for pr0n.
In a corporate environment, that's probably probable cause for an investigation. Best to do this discreetly on your HR manager's 'puter first to see if it's gonna work.Of course, I must now add the following corollary:
I believe what you want to do is:
user_pref("custtoolbar.has_toolbar_folder", false);
If you look at the big-ass file on netscape.com that describes preferences.js, you'll see this is a "reserved" setting, with a note to the effect of "we're not gonna tell you what it does, 'cuz we don't want you fuckin' with it".
If that doesn't work, also try adding:
user_pref("custtoolbar.personal_toolbar.Version" , 0);
user_pref("custtoolbar.personal_toolbar_folder", "Netscape_engineers_are_weenies");
Fuck them and the marketers they rode in on. And that goes for Nutscrape and Internet Exploiter.
> Just like Marijuana is illegal, as are "bongs." And we know nobody uses those right....right?
Which means that if you're carrying a bong which tests positive for once having had marijuana smoke passed through it, you get busted for "drug paraphenalia".
Likewise - owning an MP3 player will be fine. Owning a computer will be fine. But owning an MP3 player will be probable cause for an officer to seize the computer and examine it for MP3 files. Even if you've deleted the MP3 files, if they can recover evidence (e.g. old bytes in the FAT portion of the disk) that the MP3 files were there, you go to jail.
> In this case, i think we all know where the public stands (the vast majority, at least) - all the corporate money in the world won't save a politician once he's been voted out of office.
Support for marijuana legalization is remarkably high in the US. Please explain why no major political candidate supports legalization.
Even a small portion of the corporate money in the world appears to be quite sufficient to thwart the public's will.
- 5. No gun/MP3 sales at trade shows. Shit, this article is about restricting MP3 players from tradeshows.
- 6. Trigger locks / "play-key" locks. A "play-key-lock" is exactly what SDMI is designed to implement.
- 7. Registration of gun/MP3-player owners. The industry goal of all music in pay-per-listen formats implies per-user registration, or at least data-collection.
- 9. Manufacturers of MP3 players pay for potentially lost CD sales or get sued by cities. Apparently you haven't been to Canada, where there's a "tax" on all blank media, or even in the States, where the "tax" applies to "music" CD-Rs, which are just like any other CD-R except that RIAA has browbeaten consumer electronics manufacturers into rejecting CD-Rs that don't have the extra bits that indicate payment of the tax.
- 11. Why do you think it's taken three years for CD-based MP3 players to come out? And why do you see very little interest in this area from the manufacturers? What killed DAT?
As long as we're comparing MP3 players and firearms (and you're trying to pretend that the person who made this comparison was clueless), you also forgot one:Which is in itself pretty fucking offensive :)
I s'pose technically it should be Jack Valenti who needs a judge to pull the skin of 'is ass over 'is head and turn 'im into a fuckin' wheelbarrow, but Jack's so old there's probably not enough skin to work with. 'Sides, he's already got his head up his ass. But Hilary's got plenty of ass to go 'round. A judge with a little clue could really go to town.
> What matters isn't how offensive you are; it's who you offend.
Well, at least I didn't traffic in a device used to circumvent a technological measure. Unless you XOR my comments on Jack, Hilary, and Michael with... oh, wait, that's the CueCat hack. ;-)
Interesting thought - what happens when the CueCat folks start handing out the audio version of the thing, which will turn blips and bleeps during TV commercials into keyboard streams that send your 'puter to a web site. (Leaving aside the fact that if you're watching TV, you're not looking at the screen, and if you're looking at the screen, you don't want it hijacked by some ad.)
Since we all know it'll be hacked in a few hours after release, I point out that while an audio encoding of DeCSS would sound like crap in a Bach cantata, it'd fit perfectly into some industrial dance music...
DeCSS code in an MP3 is "offensive lyrics".
The Cocky Sticks' tracks, "I'm a Catholic Girl, of course I swallow!" (featuring samples like "OK, whoever hasn't had their dick in my mouth, form a line over here, uh, I mean at all today", from what appears to be a gangbang video), and "Fuckin' Wheelbarrow" ("I'll pull the skin o' yer ass o'er yer head and turn ya inta a fuckin' wheelbarrow!", which sounds like something I'd pay good money to see a judge do to Hilary Rosen, come to think of it)... don't contain offensive content. We won't even get into Adolf Hitler (oops, thread's over!) being sampled into "House of the Rising Sun".
Personally, I think the Cocky Sticks are great. I love 'em. Got a (paid-for!) CD of 'em. But while I'm not personally offended by their samples, I'm willing to say that many might be. But a bunch of goddamn code expressed as speech?
But it seems to me that Michael Robertson really has become Hilary Rosen's bitch as a result of his my.mp3.com trials.
And that is far more offensive than anything I've heard or seen in the music on MP3.com.
"Wisen up 'cuz on Election Day, we'll see who's banned in the USA"
Hey! It's working! I did a search for "BBW" and got back so much pr0n that Big Brother showed up and took my 'puter away!
Big Brother really is watching, and he must really hate it when you start looking at nude .GIFs of his even-bigger sisters ;-)
That fscking piece of crap known as MIME-type text/enriched.
What dr00ling m0ron at Qualcomm thought it was a good idea to embed HTML-style tags in email that aren't HTML, in order to combine the cow-felching ugliness of HTML mail with Microsoftian interoperability?
And I'll go one better - lose the goddamn spyware/adware "business model", Qualcomm. Lose it NOW. The day you went this route is the day Eudora stopped being an email client and started being a Trojan.
> javascript? I leave and never come back.
Ditto, except I leave a present in their server logs before I go.
Like a 404 to "http://www.stupidsite.com/fuck/you/and/the/javash it/you/rode/in/on.html"
If you wanna express how pissed off you are, express it. On the sites where webmaster@ isn't a black hole, it's usually some marketroid who says "but Java's cool! you need to turn it on to see it!". I figure if anyone's actually reading the server logs, there's at least the possibility that they're geeky enough to appreciate the humor in such a log entry.
> ISP's right to block incoming traffic to port 25 (MAPS blocking 23 known spam domains associated
> with "top web sites",), with some sort of censorship of traffic on port 80
>("By MAPS standards, 25 of the 25 web sites should be blocked")
The marketer knows the difference. He's just trusting that most of his readers won't.
Another case in point from the same guy - "23 of the top 25 web sites don't use the double opt-in".
The goal of the marketroid is to make "Hi. [IP address] signed you up. If that's really you, hit reply and verify that it was you" sound as inconvenient as possible.
Hence "double opt-in". There's no second opt-in, just a confirmation that's part of the single opt-in. But "double opt-in" sounds complicated and redundant.
To a marketroid, the goal is unverified opt-in, ("Hi! [Spam] To get more spam, hit reply! If you don't hit reply, we'll delete you from this list and opt you back in next week!") which is, as anyone with a mailbox knows, indistinguishable from opt-out: ("Hi. [Spam]. To get removed (and added to our sucker list), hit reply".)
Ever wonder why abortion rights advocates call themselves "pro-choice", not "pro-abortion"? Or why abortion rights opponents call themselves "pro-life", not "anti-abortion"?
Same shit, different smell.
If it comes out of a cow's ass, it's cowshit. If it comes out of a marketer's mouth, it's bullshit.
Same shit, same smell.
Huh? If by "why are we here", you mean "how did homo sapiens evolve?", you're absolutely right. That question is within the realm of science.
I meant "is there any purpose to our existence as conscious beings? What are we supposed to do with our lives?" That's metaphysics.
And while the opinions of scientists on that question are every bit as useful and interesting as the opinions of philosophers and religious types, they're just that: opinions. I know of no scientist who would call them "facts" in the sense of scientific truth.
To take the question "Why are we here" in the sense in which I meant it:
Dawkins would argue argue "No reason beyond providing an environment (a body and reproductive system) to propagate your genes. Indeed, you only exist in a form that's capable of asking such a silly question because 'consciousness' happens to be just one of about 30 million effective methods (species) that genes use to ensure their propagation".
A follower of Zen would say "Mu." The very notion that there exists some "thing" that one is "supposed" to do with one's life is wholly bogus in Zen. It's like asking a mathematician "What quantity is expressed by the sum 2 + fish?".
A Christian would say that one ought to follow the example set down by Christ in the Bible. (Umm, and the next Christian beside him would say the same thing, but they'd disagree violently on exactly what that example was ;-)
And a Fundie of any religious stripe would say that one also ought coerce everyone else into doing the same thing.
If you've got a double-blind experiment that will determine which of these (and the other zillion-odd religious and philosophical viewpoints out there) is demonstrably right, I'd like to see it.
I point out that the scientific method can be expressed in five words:
Hypothesis. Materials. Method. Data. Conclusion.
Quite right!
As you might have guessed, I had my scientific materialist ("right tool for the job", "religion is a way to help you deal with certain feelings") hat on when I wrote that. The notion that "real" might constitute anything beyond the material world was quite preposterous to me, and so I said "real-world" when I meant "physical world".
Which is a long way of saying that what's "real" to me is a function of me mental state at any given moment in time. Or "Who is the master who makes the grass green?" (As you can guess now, I'm in a Zen state :)
Incidentally, I note that my belief systems have been fairly carefully evolved to have relatively minor areas of overlap. To use the example at hand, there's not much in the Zen concept behind "you are the master who makes the grass green" that gets in the way of the principles Jesus elucidated in, say, the Sermon on the Mount, and it's a very elegant way of reminding yourself that there are damn good reasons why the scientific method requires double-blind experiments.
I finally got around to playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri last night, and finished it in a couple of all-nighters.
Your quote reminds me of something from the game. Paraphrasing the game, "The question isn't why a perfect God would create this universe, but why a perfect God would create a universe at all".
My take on the topic at hand: Geeks are freethinkers. Because we acknowledge that it's very hard for one geek to understand all that's going on inside these boxes we call "computers", we're tolerant of views in the absence of conclusive evidence. All geeks believe that what does on inside the box is understandable, but the process whereby any one geek understands a piece of code is something uniquely a function of (a) the geek, and (b) the code.
If I extrapolate these beliefs about computability to the Real World, I see two tendencies:
- First - geeks will choose world views that imply the world is understandable and that there are processes whereby one can change the world.
- Unlike normals, geeks tend to be tolerant where evidence is unclear. We're willing to use the best tool for the job.
Traditional religions have never tolerated this - they tend to be monolithic one-size-fits-all solutions geared for memetic propagation, rather than best-of-breed solutions for particular subsets of philosophical problems.Whether it be Fundamentalist Christianity ("know God and follow His commandments"), Paganism ("Change the world through acts of Magick"), Buddhism ("You are the master who makes the grass green"), or Scientific Materialism ("The world operates according to physical laws which can be divined through experiment"), all of these world views provide adherents with tools whereby reality can be manipulated.
The scientific method is an excellent tool for figuring out how gravity works and why the stars shine. It's not as useful a tool for answering the answers to philosophical questions like "Why are we here", and "How shall we live?". Religions are pretty good for this. You may not like the answer any one religion provides, but you have to admit it's an answer.
Normals tend to want one tool for everything. Fundamentalist Christian Normals have a lot of trouble with dinosaur fossils. Scientific materialists have trouble with metaphysics. Normals end up like Linux users without an xterm trying to use Internet Explorer to rename 100 files, or MSOffice users trying to write annual reports in TeX.
The "joke religions", such as the Church of the SubGenius, or Discordianism, have a significant place in geek culture because they're explicit demonstrations of an important principle - "best tool for the job" doesn't mean "science or religion", but can mean multiple religions for multiple types of religious type questions.
Normals hate having to pick and choose and learn something new every time they encounter something new. Geeks love having to adapt - we do it for fun - it's what happens every time we design new software, debug old software, or play any game from Quake to Everquest to D&D.
I'll close off by describing my belief system: I'm a scientific materialist when solving real-world problems; I have no need of the God hypothesis to explain physics, evolution, or even human intelligence. I've chosen the Christian God (and I freely admit "because that's how I was brung up" - an accident of the religious affiliation of my parents, who infected me with the Judeo-Christan meme) as my arbitrary Big Brother figure. But I also like the Zen and Existentialist approaches to life when Big Brother doesn't give me what I want.
Oddly enough, I appear to lack the capability to really get into the altered mental/emotional states experienced by Pagans, neo-shamans, or to use the modern equivalent, trance/techno music and dance. So I concluded that the "really mystical" stuff that started this thread wasn't for me. (But if it's your thing, hey, more power to ya. It's your brain; if you've got the circuitry to enjoy this kinda stuff, enjoy the hell out of it!)
And I'm a card-carrying SubGenius. Which means I'm not really here -- I left Earth on July 5, 1998 with the rest of the SubGenii, and am beaming this message to MWOWM from my Pleasure Spacecraft. You are actually a brain in a vat, living in a World Without Slack.
The movie The Matrix was a practical joke we decided to play on you to see if you'd figure it out. Of course you missed the point completely, just like we knew you would. But it was right there in the movie -- for stupid primates to believe in a virtual world, it's gotta suck.
And that, humans, is why the world (well, at least the one you slackless gimps live in) is so fscked up.
Agreed. H-1B slavery exists solely because times to get a green card have gone from ~6 months to ~3-5 years since the mid-80s.
The reason for the extreme backlog is political - vote-hungry politicians actively pandering to xenophobia, or more often than not, "benign neglect" of the INS service arm (vs. their "enforcement arm") being used to give plausible deniability to the very same politicians when the accusations of xenophobia start flying.
It's a "nudge, nudge, wink, wink, it's really a shame that we never got around to properly funding the services arm of INS again this year, isn't it?" that plays well to xenophobes both on the Hill and within the INS itself, but provides plausible deniability whenever anyone accuses a politician of xenophobia. Best of both worlds in terms of grabbing votes at minimal PR cost.
> doing it. He just found the new job first, got the paperwork rolling and then gave two weeks notice on his old job.
What you forget is that the speed with which this can happen is a function of geography.
There are four INS service centers where you "get the paperwork rolling". Some of them can take upwards of 2-3 months to approve an H-1B transfer from one employer to the next.
If you're in one of the slower regions, finding an employer who's willing to make an offer today, but not have you start work for another 2-3 months -- possibly longer, given INS' continued inability to deal with its backlogs -- can be a considerable impediment to job mobility of an H1-B.
Finally, on the Green Card side, the "fast" route is at least a 2-3 year process. The "normal" route can take upwards of 5-6 years. Since an H-1B is only valid for six years, getting a Green Card is a highly dicey proposition.
The bottom line all comes down to money, culture, and bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy side is self-explanatory - INS has consistently been rated the most dysfunctional federal organization in the Union.
The money side has led to a cultural problem, however, which is this: INS has two mandates:
enforcement against aliens unlawfully present,
services to aliens legally present
How are these mandates funded? Briefly:
Congress funds INS' "enforcement" budget, and INS is legally prohibited from using these funds in the "services" side of the organization.
The "services" budget must therefore come out of user fees, which are wholly inadequate for the number of legal immigrants (and H-1B and TN nonimmigrants, and most importantly, the American businesses who employ them) requiring prompt response times for processing of their requests for services to which, under law, they are entitled.
After many years of this funding imbalance, is it any wonder that INS personnel themselves see the "enforcement" arm as the "cool place to work" and the "services" arm as the "poor bastards in the basement with the dripping pipes?"
And that, folks, is why there's money for a SWAT team equipped with modern body armor and top-of-the-line H&K MP5 submachine guns and armored personnel carriers to go after an 8-year-old kid, but it takes four months for an H-1B guy to say "can I work for SGI instead of Sun Microsystems", and probably over four years before Transmeta can get permission to hire Linus Torvalds on a permanent ("Green Card") basis.
Don't believe me on that last part? Read Linus' own testimony before the congressional hearing last February.
> friends, co-workers, kids, and what not? These are the people using services like BeamIT.
Well-said.
In a spirit of vicious irony, I present the following sample from NWA's "100 Miles and Runnin'":
For you young 'uns who don't remember, NWA is where Dr. Dre's got his start in 1989-1990. What goes around comes around.Yeah, I just recalled Hotmail as an example where the sign-in process was done securely, but everything else was done in plaintext. Rather a silly implementation.
As for SSL in general, what was I thinking when I posted that? (I shouldn't try sniffing an SSL connection, I should just try drinking more coffee before I post a brainfart like that again.) *doh!*
No, spamazon.com will charge someone coming from aol.com more for "The Internet For Dummies" and less for "TCP/IP Network Administration", unless the User-Agent: says they're running a non-Microsoft box, in which case the price breaks will be inverted.
In a conventional bookstore, you can't fine-tune the price in response to your customer's profile, because the customer is anonymous. On Spamazon, the customer profile can be used to gauge the likelihood that a customer will pay a premium for a product, and prices can be hiked accordingly.
The goal is to maximize revenue from each market segment without telling any market segment what's going on.
Think Al Gore "talkin' tha ebonics to tha homiez" when speaking to NAACP, and "taking the initiative in inventing the Internet" when speaking to whites.
Spamazon.com speak with forked tongue. Tackhead no do business with.