BUt... but... trees cause global warming by decreasing the Earth's albedo! Darn those trees! They're dark, and absorb more energy, creating more heat. Damn trees! So, you're WRONG, and planting bazillions of trees will only doom us!
>> H1B's do depress wages. If the H1B's were not available, companies would pay more for skills in short supply, students would have more incentive to gain those skills, and the imbalance would be corrected. Using foreign labor to fill the gap allows companies to pay less (because supply is increased) and creates larger skill shortages in the future.
Fill the gap? What gap? There are tons of qualified Americans available for technical jobs. They are just expensive compared to Indians. The H1-B was just an invention to be able to save big corporations a ton of money on labor while at the same time screwing over a couple hundred thousand hard-working Americans who paid a lot of money for their education.
I disagree with you on your assertion of L visa programs. My company actively uses L visas to bring Indians over to replace American workers. Huge, wealthy multinationals are the only ones who can use L visas, and all they have to do to get an Indian engineer an L visa is give them a fake business card with the word "manager" on it somewhere. There are no requirements to pay prevailing rates for labor, and usually stays can be extended indefinitely, or there has to be a 30-day exit from the US once every 12 months, or something like that.
In my office, 40% of our workforce has been replaced with L-1 Indians on a semi-permanent to permanent basis. My company even bought outright an Indian engineering firm just to gain "indian multinational" status and have access to the labor pool.
The L visa is 10x more insidious than the H1-B. At least there is _some_ regulation to the H1-B, but the L is a free-for-all.
You have just proven that not only do you know a bit about the US constitution, but that you in fact know more about the constitution than your average US Law School graduate.
The students are free to go to another school if they do not like the terms under which a particular school is offering its "services." The school is there to provide educational services and may offer ancillary services under any terms it deems necessary and appropriate to achieve the stated mission. If, as part of those ancillary services, the school offers internet access to the student population, it is perfectly within its rights to restrict use of said access or networks to activities that are necessary and sufficient to further the educational purpose of the institution. There is nothing in the Law that says the prospective student is the authoritative body to determine what services are "appropriate" to the general population. The only empowerment that lies with the student is to decide whether to attend the institution. It is furthermore an unreasonable burden to the school to be required to negotiate individual contracts.
The bottom line is, when the student decided to attend the institution, s/he agrees to abide by the AUP the school has in place for the ancillary network services it offers, and that is the end of the story. Your vehicle analogy is specious and irrelevant.
I'm thinking plenty accurately. When the students signed up to go to school, they indoubtedly signed an agreement to abide by the school's rules, which I assure you contained a "do not do that" clause for circumventing network security. The network belongs to the school, not the students, and the students have to play by the rules. They bypassed security with the express purpose of breeching the contract they signed with the school.
The Bill probably does not, however, prevent an insurance company from saying "Oh, we see you have a genetic predisposition for cancer, so therefore if you ever get cancer, it will be a pre-existing condition and will not be covered." So naturally, the insurance company won't mind not charging higher rates because there is nothing in this bill preventing them excluding whatever illness you DNA says you might get some day. The Bill probably also contains language that makes collecting DNA without your knowledge or consent perfectly acceptable.
[/wild speculation]
This is why I pay for routine care and maintenance in cash out of pocket, with a doctor that is a friend of mine. The blood test company gets a vial with the name "John Doe" on it.
What, exactly, is your implication? What American passenger jet was developed with taxpayer money for the express purpose of undercutting competition from a manufacturer in another country in their own market?
I've got news for you. Failure to adequately plan your finances doesn't excuse you from adequately planning your finances. Tell me how it is that there are people who raise families of 4 on $30K per year and are still able to save money (I have a good friend in this very situation) while others make twice that and don't have two nickels to rub together?
Seriously, there is something wrong with you if you cannot put 10-20% of your income away for a rainy day.
You know that what they are asking you to do is illegal. However, even if they coerce you into doing it under threat of losing your job, you will still be guilty of the crime and will suffer the punishment. You will also probably be scapegoated, and your superiors will disavow all knowledge, and probably even claim that your documented evidence of being ordered to do this was fabricated.
Your moral duty at this point is to leave your job. If you can't afford to quit, well, that's your own damn fault.
If I park my $30K SUV in Center City Philadelphia with the engine running and the windows open, and someone steals my car, it is still their crime, not mine.
If a beautiful woman is jogging in the park in micro-shorts and a tiny sports bra, and a rapist attacks her, the crime is the rapists, not hers.
If a shoplifter steals a pair of jeans by passing it around the RFID detector, it is not the store's fault for not having tighter security.
If a kid knows it is against the rules to bypass a security measure, then the kid is breaking the rules. End of story.
Ahh ok... I live in Southeastern PA where electric rates are about 0.17/kwh at PECO's usurious electric rates. I heat my house with B20 biodiesel and I also have a space heater for my bedroom since it's still cheaper to heat one room with electricity than it is to heat the whole house with oil at night. I bought an 85% efficient air heater when I moved in, and I use about 300 gallons of oil over the winter, at a cost of about $2.50/gal.
I also live in a townhouse with 2 common walls, so I only have two surfaces and the roof exposed. That helps a little.
The health care system will be fixed when people actually take responsibility for themselves and live a healthy lifestyle instead of becoming lazy fatasses living on McDonalds and just figuring they'll let the doctors fix it all when they get sick..
>> Burning methane is a GoodTHing. Methane has approx 27 times the greenhouse effect of CO2, so burning it produces power and reduces greenhouse gases.
Thank you! Maybe now the liberal establishment will understand that the 12 Billion chickens we have raised for food consumption create more greenhouse gas than all of the cars on the planet. Yes, can you believe there are approximately 2 chickens alive for every human being on the planet? The average person eats 10 kilos of chicken meat every year, which is about 7 chickens. So, every year, 42 billion chickens are raised and slaughtered for human consumption.
>> Solar will be good once solar cells can actually pay for the costs of their own manufacture in less than 20 years.
This will never happen because commercially produced silicon bandgaps do not last that long. Longer-lasting bandgaps can be created, but they are so much more expensive that they could never pay for themselves either - even if electricy got really expensive, because that same expensive electricity would be required to grow the cell.
Remember kids, the energy required to grow a commercial silicon cell will never ever be recovered from that cell in terms of bandgap potential. The bandgap breaks down before that can happen.
Biofuels are unclean for the same reasons dinofuels are. In fact, the production of dinofuels is FAR cleaner than the production of biofuels. With dinofuels, you're starting off with hydrocarbons and ending with hydrocarbons. All you're doing is cracking long chains down to shorter chains to get what you want.
With biofuels, you have to MAKE hydrocarbons, which is a much dirtier process than simply cracking existing ones. Also, what do you think is used to fertilize the crops that are grown to make biofuels? Commercial fertilizers, which contain lost of phosphorous, nitrates, and hydrocarbons, are made from dino sources, so really all we're doing to make biofuels is adding extra steps to the process, which wastes energy.
For every gallon of biodiesel produced from vegetable oil, 3 gallons of diesel must be burned to create the energy required to go through the process. Every gallon of ethanol pumped into your car requires 11 gallons of diesel to get there, mainly because ethanol cannot be piped. It has to be trucked as soon as it is made because it is water soluble and if it sits too long, it'll get wet.
Remember, we're not putting the ethanol in the gas to use alternative energy sources. We're putting it there to reduce particulate emissions from cars - at an incredibly high price.
My lactose threshold is 337 watts, but then again, I am a trained cyclist. The most I have ever exerted over a 5 second interval was 1108 watts. Professional cyclists can push 1500 watts over a 5s interval and have a lactose threshold around 400-450 watts (which may not seem like much more than 337, but believe me, those 60-110 extra watts HURT).
First, HD-DVD is/was losing the format war, BIGTIME. So, who is to say that the HD-DVD consortium didn't conveniently "leak" the key in hopes that millions of geeks would run out and buy HD-DVD players? If I were a big movie studio contracted to the HD-DVD format, I might even go along with this depending upon how many of my movies were released under the "leaked" key.
We're all being duped, I think. This whole thing is just a giant publicity stunt on the part of the HD-DVD consortium. Combine this with WalMart deciding to go HD-DVD-only, i think the tables may very well have turned to HD-DVD's favor.
Slashdot Mirror
It should be:
"26 assertions about global climate change disagreed with by the other political side, without using any substantive evidence in support."
BUt... but... trees cause global warming by decreasing the Earth's albedo! Darn those trees! They're dark, and absorb more energy, creating more heat. Damn trees! So, you're WRONG, and planting bazillions of trees will only doom us!
Oh, the humanity!
>> H1B's do depress wages. If the H1B's were not available, companies would pay more for skills in short supply, students would have more incentive to gain those skills, and the imbalance would be corrected. Using foreign labor to fill the gap allows companies to pay less (because supply is increased) and creates larger skill shortages in the future.
Fill the gap? What gap? There are tons of qualified Americans available for technical jobs. They are just expensive compared to Indians. The H1-B was just an invention to be able to save big corporations a ton of money on labor while at the same time screwing over a couple hundred thousand hard-working Americans who paid a lot of money for their education.
I disagree with you on your assertion of L visa programs. My company actively uses L visas to bring Indians over to replace American workers. Huge, wealthy multinationals are the only ones who can use L visas, and all they have to do to get an Indian engineer an L visa is give them a fake business card with the word "manager" on it somewhere. There are no requirements to pay prevailing rates for labor, and usually stays can be extended indefinitely, or there has to be a 30-day exit from the US once every 12 months, or something like that.
In my office, 40% of our workforce has been replaced with L-1 Indians on a semi-permanent to permanent basis. My company even bought outright an Indian engineering firm just to gain "indian multinational" status and have access to the labor pool.
The L visa is 10x more insidious than the H1-B. At least there is _some_ regulation to the H1-B, but the L is a free-for-all.
No hybrid... no diesel.. no nothing.. just a 1.5L engine, a 3bbl carb, 57bhp, and up to 74mpg with a tailwind...
Or a 1990's car stereo deck... especially from Aiwa or Sony..
You have just proven that not only do you know a bit about the US constitution, but that you in fact know more about the constitution than your average US Law School graduate.
The students are free to go to another school if they do not like the terms under which a particular school is offering its "services." The school is there to provide educational services and may offer ancillary services under any terms it deems necessary and appropriate to achieve the stated mission. If, as part of those ancillary services, the school offers internet access to the student population, it is perfectly within its rights to restrict use of said access or networks to activities that are necessary and sufficient to further the educational purpose of the institution. There is nothing in the Law that says the prospective student is the authoritative body to determine what services are "appropriate" to the general population. The only empowerment that lies with the student is to decide whether to attend the institution. It is furthermore an unreasonable burden to the school to be required to negotiate individual contracts.
The bottom line is, when the student decided to attend the institution, s/he agrees to abide by the AUP the school has in place for the ancillary network services it offers, and that is the end of the story. Your vehicle analogy is specious and irrelevant.
I'm thinking plenty accurately. When the students signed up to go to school, they indoubtedly signed an agreement to abide by the school's rules, which I assure you contained a "do not do that" clause for circumventing network security. The network belongs to the school, not the students, and the students have to play by the rules. They bypassed security with the express purpose of breeching the contract they signed with the school.
What's REALLY funny is that the title of this bill is "High-Tech Worker Relief Act"
Haha... relieving us of what, our jobs?
[wild speculation]
The Bill probably does not, however, prevent an insurance company from saying "Oh, we see you have a genetic predisposition for cancer, so therefore if you ever get cancer, it will be a pre-existing condition and will not be covered." So naturally, the insurance company won't mind not charging higher rates because there is nothing in this bill preventing them excluding whatever illness you DNA says you might get some day. The Bill probably also contains language that makes collecting DNA without your knowledge or consent perfectly acceptable.
[/wild speculation]
This is why I pay for routine care and maintenance in cash out of pocket, with a doctor that is a friend of mine. The blood test company gets a vial with the name "John Doe" on it.
What, exactly, is your implication? What American passenger jet was developed with taxpayer money for the express purpose of undercutting competition from a manufacturer in another country in their own market?
I've got news for you. Failure to adequately plan your finances doesn't excuse you from adequately planning your finances. Tell me how it is that there are people who raise families of 4 on $30K per year and are still able to save money (I have a good friend in this very situation) while others make twice that and don't have two nickels to rub together?
Seriously, there is something wrong with you if you cannot put 10-20% of your income away for a rainy day.
You know that what they are asking you to do is illegal. However, even if they coerce you into doing it under threat of losing your job, you will still be guilty of the crime and will suffer the punishment. You will also probably be scapegoated, and your superiors will disavow all knowledge, and probably even claim that your documented evidence of being ordered to do this was fabricated.
Your moral duty at this point is to leave your job. If you can't afford to quit, well, that's your own damn fault.
If I park my $30K SUV in Center City Philadelphia with the engine running and the windows open, and someone steals my car, it is still their crime, not mine.
If a beautiful woman is jogging in the park in micro-shorts and a tiny sports bra, and a rapist attacks her, the crime is the rapists, not hers.
If a shoplifter steals a pair of jeans by passing it around the RFID detector, it is not the store's fault for not having tighter security.
If a kid knows it is against the rules to bypass a security measure, then the kid is breaking the rules. End of story.
Airbus is a prime example
"We're going to make the biggest, fastest, dreamiest jet in the world, and it'll be the cheapest jet money can buy!!!!!"
"Oh, by the way, oh pretty please can we have $5 billion in free money to build it with? Thanks citizens of Europe!!!"
Ahh ok... I live in Southeastern PA where electric rates are about 0.17/kwh at PECO's usurious electric rates. I heat my house with B20 biodiesel and I also have a space heater for my bedroom since it's still cheaper to heat one room with electricity than it is to heat the whole house with oil at night. I bought an 85% efficient air heater when I moved in, and I use about 300 gallons of oil over the winter, at a cost of about $2.50/gal.
I also live in a townhouse with 2 common walls, so I only have two surfaces and the roof exposed. That helps a little.
The health care system will be fixed when people actually take responsibility for themselves and live a healthy lifestyle instead of becoming lazy fatasses living on McDonalds and just figuring they'll let the doctors fix it all when they get sick..
>> Burning methane is a GoodTHing. Methane has approx 27 times the greenhouse effect of CO2, so burning it produces power and reduces greenhouse gases.
Thank you! Maybe now the liberal establishment will understand that the 12 Billion chickens we have raised for food consumption create more greenhouse gas than all of the cars on the planet. Yes, can you believe there are approximately 2 chickens alive for every human being on the planet? The average person eats 10 kilos of chicken meat every year, which is about 7 chickens. So, every year, 42 billion chickens are raised and slaughtered for human consumption.
That's a shitload of Methane (pardon the pun).
>> Solar will be good once solar cells can actually pay for the costs of their own manufacture in less than 20 years.
This will never happen because commercially produced silicon bandgaps do not last that long. Longer-lasting bandgaps can be created, but they are so much more expensive that they could never pay for themselves either - even if electricy got really expensive, because that same expensive electricity would be required to grow the cell.
Remember kids, the energy required to grow a commercial silicon cell will never ever be recovered from that cell in terms of bandgap potential. The bandgap breaks down before that can happen.
Biofuels are unclean for the same reasons dinofuels are. In fact, the production of dinofuels is FAR cleaner than the production of biofuels. With dinofuels, you're starting off with hydrocarbons and ending with hydrocarbons. All you're doing is cracking long chains down to shorter chains to get what you want.
With biofuels, you have to MAKE hydrocarbons, which is a much dirtier process than simply cracking existing ones. Also, what do you think is used to fertilize the crops that are grown to make biofuels? Commercial fertilizers, which contain lost of phosphorous, nitrates, and hydrocarbons, are made from dino sources, so really all we're doing to make biofuels is adding extra steps to the process, which wastes energy.
For every gallon of biodiesel produced from vegetable oil, 3 gallons of diesel must be burned to create the energy required to go through the process. Every gallon of ethanol pumped into your car requires 11 gallons of diesel to get there, mainly because ethanol cannot be piped. It has to be trucked as soon as it is made because it is water soluble and if it sits too long, it'll get wet.
Remember, we're not putting the ethanol in the gas to use alternative energy sources. We're putting it there to reduce particulate emissions from cars - at an incredibly high price.
If your house needed 6kW all the time, your monthly power bill would be on the order of $700/mo.
My lactose threshold is 337 watts, but then again, I am a trained cyclist. The most I have ever exerted over a 5 second interval was 1108 watts. Professional cyclists can push 1500 watts over a 5s interval and have a lactose threshold around 400-450 watts (which may not seem like much more than 337, but believe me, those 60-110 extra watts HURT).
The prisons are already full
First, HD-DVD is/was losing the format war, BIGTIME. So, who is to say that the HD-DVD consortium didn't conveniently "leak" the key in hopes that millions of geeks would run out and buy HD-DVD players? If I were a big movie studio contracted to the HD-DVD format, I might even go along with this depending upon how many of my movies were released under the "leaked" key.
We're all being duped, I think. This whole thing is just a giant publicity stunt on the part of the HD-DVD consortium. Combine this with WalMart deciding to go HD-DVD-only, i think the tables may very well have turned to HD-DVD's favor.