I'd agree with the judges interpretation of the law here.
They're not making stuff up, but trying to keep up with technology. The extremely specific meaning would be very hard for the legislature to keep up with... So they include IM, what about VoIP? What about MySpace? Slashcode? Slashcode Journal entries? Jabber? (private IM versus public IM?), PHPBB? Blogs? Web 2.0 AJAX tools like WebFroot Shoutbox??? Hell, under strict terms you all define even Hotmail could be made not to count... after all if both users are Hotmail users, and they log in via the HTTP site on Port 80 does their interaction qualify as "email" because it won't ever travel over SMTP as it's all on the same server!!!!
Well come on, which is it? Are we going to have judges split technical hairs all day.. or will we just call "electronic mail" any kind of "electronic message"... as a side note, even Microsoft and the SEC are leaning toward classifying their rules and technologies as "electronic messaging" for much the same reason.. things like the Martha Steward case where they got into the same discovery rules over whether info was Faxed, emailed, IMed, etc to be considered inside trading.
the way the ICC was used in most cases was consistent with it's intended meaning... A citizen of the USA is a fully privelaged citizen of every state they need to cross in order to engage in commerce. There's absolutely no reason that some in between bigot state should have the right to treat a black trucker (for example) any different than a white trucker. That's against the VERY spirit of the ICC clause. A citizen should engage in any commerce in another state just as legally as their own. Imagine a Black company owner purchasing land and machinery thru their corporation only to be deprived of it's use when they arrive and are found to be black? And YES, the framers knew EXACTLY what they were doing... and that's exactly how they intended it to be used. Remember, in 1776, some states still had OFFICAL state religions... if you were from Maryland you were Cathloic, Virgina Episcapalian... the states at the time DID make laws baring "vulgar" non-religous (right religion) people from owning certian property or staying in certian places, as well as had laws that you had to observe certian local religous holidays.... that translates EXACTLY to what the South was trying to do in the 1950's.
funny, technically, the way the northern states should have dealt with the civil rights issues was by generating a "white card" that said you could use all the services white people could, then the southern states would be required to respect it... either way, the states after the civil war were compelled to honor the federal constitution... I don't recall race being written into that document at all. In fact there is one clause about "titles of nobility" that states have to treat all citizens the same.. that should have been good enough. I think it would be fun/benificial to go back to the supreme court and re-argue some of those famous cases CORRECTLY, and still get the same results. Many of the cases tried in the late 1800's early 1900's were so loaded with crap, blantant judicial bigotry it would get a judge impeached today. Things like Dread Scott where the court upheld that a person wasn't really a person because their ancestor was a slave and therefore 2/5 of them was counted as a citizen (even though the constitution clearly counted persons in CURRENT condition of slavery, not their children!) is absolutely sickening perversion of everything the constitution stood for. But it tainted, and STILL taints the case law of the Supreme Court to this day!!! In many of those early cases the justices specifically refused to see "all men as equal" as written in the constitution... so the "activists" had to find creative ways to force the issue.
really, the line shootings were just regular street thugs cashing in on long lines of people, in the middle of the night, loaded with cash, planning to pay for a $600+ toy. I'm surprised due to flagrant lack of security by the retailers there weren't MORE line muggings.. maybe the human race isn't as bad as I thought?
people say that late nite encounters generally require both people to be in bed.. at nite? But that will cut in to World of Warcraft time! Any govt mandated decrease in WoW time we must fight against!!! We can look at those female creature on our second monitor.
but the businesses can send the foreign workers back to their poor country when they're done with them... the home workers expect welfare or unemployment when the fashionable skills are no longer needed, or half way across the country.
That aloof attitude is the problem that businesses perceive with the education process right now. Software education needs to start turning out people that can tackle a whole project right out of the gate, and not expect to have their hand held. Would you hire a lawyer with no actual practice in COURT, or an Doctor that hadn't made quite a few people well? I'm not saying we need to make "code monkeys" but somebody with a degree in software should be able to build a whole system on their own, even if it's just a small one. They need to be able to design, document, test, interview users, use change management software, conform to industry rules, etc. It seems like academic programs almost deliberately shun those types of things... because "we don't have to".
I like the link.. but couldn't Microsoft be accused of the SAME thing. They employ more people to make more software, and cut competition...and they DON'T pay Dividends either. Ford got sued for it and Bill made it a business model.
you do have one good point, all jobs you posted were in the most expensive part of Silicon Valley! No sane American would live there for those wages. But instead of moving to someplace with schools, educated workers and cheaper real estate, they want H1Bs to live in hovels in "rich man's slums" instead of spreading out into the rest of the US of A.
that's also why they build most of the cars they sell HERE with US workers.. as well as BMW... Americans actually do quality work CHEAPER than in Japan or Germany. Those companies realize that our government are suckers for sloppy management.. and they are eating the good employees up like hotcakes. Most German or Japanese companies can tell you EXACTLY what they want you to do... unfortunately, they leave little room for short term advancement and tend to be to "high-school" for my tastes. American companies can't give you a definite job description ever... they always expect employees to be able to pick up the slack for funding shortages, unexpected up sizing, or downsizing or management mis decisions. American companies are not productive because business owners and managers are always chasing the "big dream" and not running the business they have RIGHT NOW. Productivity at auto makers has gone up 7-9% every year for 10 years, but automakers still loose money? Hint, it's not the workers, even the lazy union ones costing money. Perhaps we need to import MANAGERS under H1B and not techs.
because if the bodies are restricted from moving freely but the owners of the products can move their stuff freely, it's not really a "free" market is it. People in India can't just move to another country where they get a better deal... heck, even as a US citizen you can't just move to Canada to get a better deal on employment without special permissions... so the Human Capital is not a movable resource. "Business" then is a shell moving game to move the product where the labor is cheapest while staying on the move to keep the local populating from ever catching up to the standard of living where you're selling the product. It's not all bad, but it's not a "free" market, governments all over the place play favorites with which citizens will be allowed to move the goods across the boarders. And those rules make it very unfavorable for new entries into the market.
I'd argue that a "kid" out of school nowdays, particularly in tech, is shouldered with more responsibility than a 5-10 vet was 20 years ago...
The trouble is that employers don't KNOW what they want. How many play the "jack of all trades" card with new recruits. We need somebody that can do 1/2 of 4 different jobs because that's what the last guy we laid off after 20 years was doing.... but they don't want to PAY for somebody really good at just ONE of them. That's where American Workers differ from those in every other country! While Americans should be more disciplined and professional at their careers, that's not what employers want and pay for. Even in say Michigan versus Arkansas, I do more different kinds of work than my counterpart at our other plant, even though he has a higher position than I do... but the other plant is "more profitable" so they "deserve" the extra staff to have "unique" positions, the rest of us need to suck up and make the company money. I've switched "vocations" more than once in my short career because that's what the company needed because they changed focus, grew, or layed off too many people... that's what MOST American companies expect now. The job is EXTREMELY rare where they will say we need a C++ coder to ONLY do C++, and not expect you to do user documentation, training, product research etc. And that's where the H1Bs excel.. but that's dishonesty on the part of the companies... more than dishonesty, it's business laziness... the owners of most companies really have no clue what their customers WANT. Most American business owners "fell" into the job... and they don't have the skills to grow a business.. they don't know how to hire IT staff, they don't know how to hire Engineers, they don't know how to hire marketing.. and they don't want to LEARN!!! So they complain about not having enough "ready made" employees... but they can't sit down an write out detailed job descriptions about what they want those "highly skilled" employees to do.
yes, but if you mount enough of a defense to file counter claims, then that starts getting nasty for them. Like you said, in civil cases, courts don't always care about if you show up...what happens if they get sloppy on a busy day and just "assume" you'll show up, but instead YOU file counter claims that they miss... if it becomes common place, then it becomes very abusive to the RIAA lawyer time running around filing motions for all these counter claims.. miss one and it sets precedent!!!
on the other hand this is EXACTLY what every lawyer faced with one of these should be doing.. the RIAA is scatter shot filing thousands of suits at once.. they don't have the lawyers to cover them all.. a really clever group of lawyers could figure out how many lawyers there really are and schedule court times to spread the lawyers as thin as possible. Try to get the RIAA lawyers to be in 2 , or 3, or 4 places at once. Combine with counter claims that gets to be VERY dangerous for the RIAA.
true, most revolutions happen from the newly lesser rich, that find the glass ceiling in the law protecting the really rich/ landed. Right not there are not many of the newly minted rich over there just yet. Right now they're all feasting off the teat of freshly deregulated government controlled resources... they're getting the inside track on govt controlled real estate, and jobs ahead of everybody else. One day they'll wake up and realize the big bad communists thought the whole thing was a mistake and they'll start taking stuff back. And the newly minted rich Chinese will mount a rebellion the likes not seen before. Right now "capitalism" is in a happy, honeymoon period over there... on day the commies will pull the rug out... and all the newly rich real estate moguls and middle managers used to their taste of the west will get it all yanked away... the common people won't care, "new boss same as the old" and all, it won't be international students standing in front of tanks, it will be the people that own the tank making companies that rebel next time.
the best example is the Pirate Bay in Sweden!!!! The Swedish laws allow the Pirate Bay, but only barely. The US went to their country and beat their govt over the head with the WTO agreement for something the Swedes found "morally allowable"... that's a fair and equal comparison to what the An-who-gians are claiming.
they should back the Pirate Party!!!! After all, the US govt has no right stepping on the swedes if they turn around and illegally restrict another nation's trade.
Windows has pretty good backward compatibility for binary programs. In most cases you can dig out a CD or Floppy from 10-15 years ago... or longer, and windows will still know what to do with it. Even with some of the really flaky "copy protection" companies used to build by putting broken code in their EXEs windows will still try to recreate those bugs and run the program. It's quite impressive how much time they spend re-engineering their mistakes in each new OS because you CAN'T update your software for the new OS.. that's the game... it's a "binary-only" world and they try like hell to keep it that way.
I like that line too.. funny how Microsoft alawys expects somebody else's margins to take the hit to bring the cost of computing down... notice how the price of Vista went UP for the version with Aero? You'd think after 5 years of pure (85-90%) profit from windows already they wouldn't have made up costs to recover. Hasn't Microsoft already been rewarded quite handsomely for their version of Windows XP? After 5 years why would anybody expect to PAY for those features... everybody has them already! For example a $1000 cpu from 3 years ago would be work $10 bucks today, why is software somehow different, why must we pay for the same thing over and over? Let alone MORE! Microsoft is still believing that businesses "owe" them for such a wonderful system... in a capitalist system NOBODY is owed after the work is done... they like to tell other companies that, but don't seem to get the idea them selves.
Microsoft uses "free" as a method to differ payment for the product while denying somebody else the revenue from their hard work. The problem with Microsoft is that they believe ONLY MICROSOFT SHOULD BE PAID.. they don't share the wealth with others very well. Example... where's DVD playback in windows... that's right, Microsoft is too cheap to pay the royalties, so they expect somebody else to do that.. and so it is with many technologies they "adopt"... If M$ can't buy into the company or get a one time payoff, they take their ball and go home... but they make their ENTIRE business off selling software per seat, per server, per instance, per unit, etc... They don't believe in PAYING recurring royalties for software either... they just have more cash to flash around so they don't have to.
in a word, Yes. Hating M$ is a sort of passtime for us. Being as may slashdotters work in IT related fields... like helpdesk, server admins, etc... it's a special kind of hatred, becuase their products bring us so much joy each day.
It's the same thing Walt Disney did in Orlando to build Disey World. You want to offer people a fair, above average price, but don't want them taking advantage of your "notariety" as a billionare to make unreasonable demands.
but if they DO figure it out, YOUR Screwed! you go to JAIL for contempt of court trying to spare yourself a few thousand dollars of RIAA punishment. While you're in jail for contempt, they have the civil case without you! and enter an even bigger default judgment!
exactly what I was thinking, you'd think IBM would know better than to get involved in "domestic surveillance" after the place IBM Germany went in the 1940's... And that was WITHOUT computers!!!
Slashdot Mirror
They're not making stuff up, but trying to keep up with technology. The extremely specific meaning would be very hard for the legislature to keep up with... So they include IM, what about VoIP? What about MySpace? Slashcode? Slashcode Journal entries? Jabber? (private IM versus public IM?), PHPBB? Blogs? Web 2.0 AJAX tools like WebFroot Shoutbox??? Hell, under strict terms you all define even Hotmail could be made not to count... after all if both users are Hotmail users, and they log in via the HTTP site on Port 80 does their interaction qualify as "email" because it won't ever travel over SMTP as it's all on the same server!!!! Well come on, which is it? Are we going to have judges split technical hairs all day.. or will we just call "electronic mail" any kind of "electronic message"... as a side note, even Microsoft and the SEC are leaning toward classifying their rules and technologies as "electronic messaging" for much the same reason.. things like the Martha Steward case where they got into the same discovery rules over whether info was Faxed, emailed, IMed, etc to be considered inside trading.
the way the ICC was used in most cases was consistent with it's intended meaning... A citizen of the USA is a fully privelaged citizen of every state they need to cross in order to engage in commerce. There's absolutely no reason that some in between bigot state should have the right to treat a black trucker (for example) any different than a white trucker. That's against the VERY spirit of the ICC clause. A citizen should engage in any commerce in another state just as legally as their own. Imagine a Black company owner purchasing land and machinery thru their corporation only to be deprived of it's use when they arrive and are found to be black? And YES, the framers knew EXACTLY what they were doing... and that's exactly how they intended it to be used. Remember, in 1776, some states still had OFFICAL state religions... if you were from Maryland you were Cathloic, Virgina Episcapalian... the states at the time DID make laws baring "vulgar" non-religous (right religion) people from owning certian property or staying in certian places, as well as had laws that you had to observe certian local religous holidays.... that translates EXACTLY to what the South was trying to do in the 1950's.
funny, technically, the way the northern states should have dealt with the civil rights issues was by generating a "white card" that said you could use all the services white people could, then the southern states would be required to respect it... either way, the states after the civil war were compelled to honor the federal constitution... I don't recall race being written into that document at all. In fact there is one clause about "titles of nobility" that states have to treat all citizens the same.. that should have been good enough. I think it would be fun/benificial to go back to the supreme court and re-argue some of those famous cases CORRECTLY, and still get the same results. Many of the cases tried in the late 1800's early 1900's were so loaded with crap, blantant judicial bigotry it would get a judge impeached today. Things like Dread Scott where the court upheld that a person wasn't really a person because their ancestor was a slave and therefore 2/5 of them was counted as a citizen (even though the constitution clearly counted persons in CURRENT condition of slavery, not their children!) is absolutely sickening perversion of everything the constitution stood for. But it tainted, and STILL taints the case law of the Supreme Court to this day!!! In many of those early cases the justices specifically refused to see "all men as equal" as written in the constitution... so the "activists" had to find creative ways to force the issue.
really, the line shootings were just regular street thugs cashing in on long lines of people, in the middle of the night, loaded with cash, planning to pay for a $600+ toy. I'm surprised due to flagrant lack of security by the retailers there weren't MORE line muggings.. maybe the human race isn't as bad as I thought?
people say that late nite encounters generally require both people to be in bed.. at nite? But that will cut in to World of Warcraft time! Any govt mandated decrease in WoW time we must fight against!!! We can look at those female creature on our second monitor.
but the businesses can send the foreign workers back to their poor country when they're done with them... the home workers expect welfare or unemployment when the fashionable skills are no longer needed, or half way across the country.
That aloof attitude is the problem that businesses perceive with the education process right now. Software education needs to start turning out people that can tackle a whole project right out of the gate, and not expect to have their hand held. Would you hire a lawyer with no actual practice in COURT, or an Doctor that hadn't made quite a few people well? I'm not saying we need to make "code monkeys" but somebody with a degree in software should be able to build a whole system on their own, even if it's just a small one. They need to be able to design, document, test, interview users, use change management software, conform to industry rules, etc. It seems like academic programs almost deliberately shun those types of things... because "we don't have to".
I like the link.. but couldn't Microsoft be accused of the SAME thing. They employ more people to make more software, and cut competition...and they DON'T pay Dividends either. Ford got sued for it and Bill made it a business model.
you do have one good point, all jobs you posted were in the most expensive part of Silicon Valley! No sane American would live there for those wages. But instead of moving to someplace with schools, educated workers and cheaper real estate, they want H1Bs to live in hovels in "rich man's slums" instead of spreading out into the rest of the US of A.
that's also why they build most of the cars they sell HERE with US workers.. as well as BMW... Americans actually do quality work CHEAPER than in Japan or Germany. Those companies realize that our government are suckers for sloppy management.. and they are eating the good employees up like hotcakes. Most German or Japanese companies can tell you EXACTLY what they want you to do... unfortunately, they leave little room for short term advancement and tend to be to "high-school" for my tastes. American companies can't give you a definite job description ever... they always expect employees to be able to pick up the slack for funding shortages, unexpected up sizing, or downsizing or management mis decisions. American companies are not productive because business owners and managers are always chasing the "big dream" and not running the business they have RIGHT NOW. Productivity at auto makers has gone up 7-9% every year for 10 years, but automakers still loose money? Hint, it's not the workers, even the lazy union ones costing money. Perhaps we need to import MANAGERS under H1B and not techs.
persistent little devil aren't you! That's like the 4th time in a row for the same comment. But I like it!!!
because if the bodies are restricted from moving freely but the owners of the products can move their stuff freely, it's not really a "free" market is it. People in India can't just move to another country where they get a better deal... heck, even as a US citizen you can't just move to Canada to get a better deal on employment without special permissions... so the Human Capital is not a movable resource. "Business" then is a shell moving game to move the product where the labor is cheapest while staying on the move to keep the local populating from ever catching up to the standard of living where you're selling the product. It's not all bad, but it's not a "free" market, governments all over the place play favorites with which citizens will be allowed to move the goods across the boarders. And those rules make it very unfavorable for new entries into the market.
The trouble is that employers don't KNOW what they want. How many play the "jack of all trades" card with new recruits. We need somebody that can do 1/2 of 4 different jobs because that's what the last guy we laid off after 20 years was doing.... but they don't want to PAY for somebody really good at just ONE of them. That's where American Workers differ from those in every other country! While Americans should be more disciplined and professional at their careers, that's not what employers want and pay for. Even in say Michigan versus Arkansas, I do more different kinds of work than my counterpart at our other plant, even though he has a higher position than I do... but the other plant is "more profitable" so they "deserve" the extra staff to have "unique" positions, the rest of us need to suck up and make the company money. I've switched "vocations" more than once in my short career because that's what the company needed because they changed focus, grew, or layed off too many people... that's what MOST American companies expect now. The job is EXTREMELY rare where they will say we need a C++ coder to ONLY do C++, and not expect you to do user documentation, training, product research etc. And that's where the H1Bs excel.. but that's dishonesty on the part of the companies... more than dishonesty, it's business laziness... the owners of most companies really have no clue what their customers WANT. Most American business owners "fell" into the job... and they don't have the skills to grow a business.. they don't know how to hire IT staff, they don't know how to hire Engineers, they don't know how to hire marketing.. and they don't want to LEARN!!! So they complain about not having enough "ready made" employees... but they can't sit down an write out detailed job descriptions about what they want those "highly skilled" employees to do.
on the other hand this is EXACTLY what every lawyer faced with one of these should be doing.. the RIAA is scatter shot filing thousands of suits at once.. they don't have the lawyers to cover them all.. a really clever group of lawyers could figure out how many lawyers there really are and schedule court times to spread the lawyers as thin as possible. Try to get the RIAA lawyers to be in 2 , or 3, or 4 places at once. Combine with counter claims that gets to be VERY dangerous for the RIAA.
true, most revolutions happen from the newly lesser rich, that find the glass ceiling in the law protecting the really rich/ landed. Right not there are not many of the newly minted rich over there just yet. Right now they're all feasting off the teat of freshly deregulated government controlled resources... they're getting the inside track on govt controlled real estate, and jobs ahead of everybody else. One day they'll wake up and realize the big bad communists thought the whole thing was a mistake and they'll start taking stuff back. And the newly minted rich Chinese will mount a rebellion the likes not seen before. Right now "capitalism" is in a happy, honeymoon period over there... on day the commies will pull the rug out... and all the newly rich real estate moguls and middle managers used to their taste of the west will get it all yanked away... the common people won't care, "new boss same as the old" and all, it won't be international students standing in front of tanks, it will be the people that own the tank making companies that rebel next time.
the best example is the Pirate Bay in Sweden!!!! The Swedish laws allow the Pirate Bay, but only barely. The US went to their country and beat their govt over the head with the WTO agreement for something the Swedes found "morally allowable"... that's a fair and equal comparison to what the An-who-gians are claiming.
they should back the Pirate Party!!!! After all, the US govt has no right stepping on the swedes if they turn around and illegally restrict another nation's trade.
Windows has pretty good backward compatibility for binary programs. In most cases you can dig out a CD or Floppy from 10-15 years ago... or longer, and windows will still know what to do with it. Even with some of the really flaky "copy protection" companies used to build by putting broken code in their EXEs windows will still try to recreate those bugs and run the program. It's quite impressive how much time they spend re-engineering their mistakes in each new OS because you CAN'T update your software for the new OS.. that's the game... it's a "binary-only" world and they try like hell to keep it that way.
I like that line too.. funny how Microsoft alawys expects somebody else's margins to take the hit to bring the cost of computing down... notice how the price of Vista went UP for the version with Aero? You'd think after 5 years of pure (85-90%) profit from windows already they wouldn't have made up costs to recover. Hasn't Microsoft already been rewarded quite handsomely for their version of Windows XP? After 5 years why would anybody expect to PAY for those features... everybody has them already! For example a $1000 cpu from 3 years ago would be work $10 bucks today, why is software somehow different, why must we pay for the same thing over and over? Let alone MORE! Microsoft is still believing that businesses "owe" them for such a wonderful system... in a capitalist system NOBODY is owed after the work is done... they like to tell other companies that, but don't seem to get the idea them selves.
Microsoft uses "free" as a method to differ payment for the product while denying somebody else the revenue from their hard work. The problem with Microsoft is that they believe ONLY MICROSOFT SHOULD BE PAID.. they don't share the wealth with others very well. Example... where's DVD playback in windows... that's right, Microsoft is too cheap to pay the royalties, so they expect somebody else to do that.. and so it is with many technologies they "adopt"... If M$ can't buy into the company or get a one time payoff, they take their ball and go home... but they make their ENTIRE business off selling software per seat, per server, per instance, per unit, etc... They don't believe in PAYING recurring royalties for software either... they just have more cash to flash around so they don't have to.
in a word, Yes. Hating M$ is a sort of passtime for us. Being as may slashdotters work in IT related fields... like helpdesk, server admins, etc... it's a special kind of hatred, becuase their products bring us so much joy each day.
It's the same thing Walt Disney did in Orlando to build Disey World. You want to offer people a fair, above average price, but don't want them taking advantage of your "notariety" as a billionare to make unreasonable demands.
but if they DO figure it out, YOUR Screwed! you go to JAIL for contempt of court trying to spare yourself a few thousand dollars of RIAA punishment. While you're in jail for contempt, they have the civil case without you! and enter an even bigger default judgment!
if you call our country a democracy, but don't use your right to vote if you can, it's not much of a democracy is it?
exactly what I was thinking, you'd think IBM would know better than to get involved in "domestic surveillance" after the place IBM Germany went in the 1940's... And that was WITHOUT computers!!!