L-1 visas are intracompany transfers. You must prove a direct corporate relationship with an international company that has employed the beneficiary for one of the past three years. If you aren't an international company, no L visas for you, period.
Duh, how many large employers are not "international"? The L1 is about specialized knowledge; the H-1B is about importing programmers.
I don't have any numbers, and I work on the East Coast, but I find "90% Computer Programmers" figure highly dubious, the firm I work for handles a fair amount of H-1b cases, and they are a grab-bag of occupations, if anything I would say that biomedical researchers, both in acadamia and in commercial research shops, are the biggest group.
You seem amazingly uniformed on the subject considering your occupation. I suggest you google on "matloff law journal" to get the summary. Get the white paper which I've linked to in another comment in this discussion for the full report.
They used up about 15000 for this year so far, as far as I know. Looks like somebody coming up with the number actually did his homework for a change.
Considering their claims, it looks like they weren't really all that interested after all. They couldn't find 20,000 of these hot talents they were discussing in all the colleges and universities in the US?
H1B is not about IT only.
Yes, it also includes fashion models, but the latest figures I've seen indicate that over 90% of H-1B visas go to programmers.
So you are suggesting that their should be NO way to bring a useful talented specialist from another country? What are "normal immigration channels" you are talking about? Name one and tell me how long it will take. L1?
Doesn't the L1 visa do exactly that? It allows a company to bring in people with special knowledge and even pay them at the foreign rate - oh, wait, that's a downside compared to the H-1B, isn't it?
There is no other useful way of bringing talented people in, and if you think we will be better off sending them packing, you do not know what you are talking about.
How could we "send them packing" unless they were here in the first place? Why do you think that "them" are more talented than the people already here?
I would not be able to replace H1B folks in my department, for any money, with anybody. And given their pay and headache involved with our lawers
I think you are being disingenuous. The phrase "for any money, with anybody" proves it. If your H-1Bs are irreplaceable, what happens when they die? Given your position, you know full well that there is minimal legal expense unless your company is sponsoring the H-1Bs for green cards.
I would agree that abuse should be fixed - but taking away easy and legal immigration would only make it worse.
The H-1B is suppose to be a non-immigrant visa, but since you make your living on the reality of that immigration loophole, you can't be expected to say anything less.
We do have "plenty of engineers", but they charge too much. Solution: bid lower to compete with foreign labor. Just like how everyone you buy from bids lower to get your business.
There is no union of engineers that determine the going wage. Companies are free to offer what they will, only they don't. The company stock price goes up when layoffs and outsourcing are announced. Stock analysts and CxOs love it, so it happens. Why should the engineers who built a great big company lose their jobs because the new CEO wants a bigger bonus? Who says the people who made the company make too much? You? How? WTF do you know?
You do look for bargains, don't you, hypocrite?
Well, since you've decided to degenerate into calling names, may I call you Moron? OK, thanks. Moron, there's a difference between a bargain and the cheapest price. A bargain is getting good value for your money. A cheap WalMart shirt that falls apart in a few weeks is not a good bargain compared to a more expensive shirt that will last for years. I recently paid 20% more for some major yard work to a company with a good reputation over the lowest bid, and it was done well and on schedule. I got a bargain.
Excuse me? I didn't say none of them had been used. For such a (claimed) hotly needed category, the 20,000 visas should have been snapped up immediately by the IT industry that was so desperately in need of these folks.
That's the whole idea - do not fight H1B, fight misuse of H1B for low level folks.
The entire H-1B program is a scam. There is no shortage of IT labor, which is the claim that the ITAA made to get Congress to pass this boondoggle. It is a perversion of immigration law that allows certain companies to bypass normal immigration channels. In effect, it is an IT bracero program complete with all the negative connotations that implies. You've already admitted you make a living from this program, so you don't really have a good position to make judgements from. (Please forgive the ending preposition.)
Re:OK, that's obvious on the surface...
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
I fail to see what is unethical about it. I find it unethical to force companies to hire expensive and bad american IT people instead of cheap and good foreign ones.
Heh. Yes, it's hard to spot your agenda. American IT workers bad. Foreign IT workers good. I thought most of us were beyond that kind of stuff.
I would agree with you if the H1-B hire were underpaid (like the outsourcing of some clothes/shoes factories) but AFAIK that's not the case.
PDF alert, if you're really interested in learning something about the subject (my guess is you're not).
Re:OK, that's obvious on the surface...
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
Seems the garment industry had this worked out a long time ago. A few years ago you could still find sweatshops in the United States with imigrant workers chained to their work tables. Wasn't that Kathy Lee's undoing?
I believe Kathy Lee was caught hawking sweatshop clothing and quickly got religion. The real point is that the garment workers unionized. Companies claimed they were too expensive and moved the industry overseas, where pesky things like unions weren't a problem. Organizing IT workers however is (with all due respect to your nick) like herding cats, and it hasn't happened. Companies still claim we're too expensive (although they set the wages) and are importing labor and moving the industry overseas. There's a disconnect somewhere.
When you realise that tech companies ask for more students to go through american universities and for more people in general to take up programming, it is for the same reason that the US tries to persuade OPEC nations to pump more oil. When seen in this light none of this seems particularly surprising (or evil, for that matter).
I guess that's true if you consider people's lives and futures to be a commodity. When someone like Bill Gates or Andy Grove convinces US students to take on huge debts to get an education in a field where they know their companies are really unwilling to hire those graduates, I consider that pretty evil. If you don't want US workers, then don't lie to students and waste their education (and money) just to lobby Congress for legislation to help make you richer. I find it hard to believe the depths to which American corporate management has sunk.
Now to me this means H-1b hires are generally more entry-level than the average worker (duh!). That's not saying that there probably isn't a fair bit of fraud and misrepresentation of the level of a position, especially since the employer sets the level themselves and then documents the requirements, but it's not happening on an industry-wide level as the article would have you believe.
You can't have it both ways. If the positions are entry-level, then the ITAA is lying when they say they can't find skilled workers. It's even more of a lie considering the number of experienced IT workers in the unemployment line. Then the industry claimed they were losing the "best and brightest" who were here on student visas. Congress supplied a new category of H-1B for these post-graduates, and guess what - they haven't been used. It is an industry-wide misrepresentation of the true situation. There is no penalty for lying to Congress if you're not under oath and your campaign contributions have been paid.
Moreover, INS (now USCIS) has a prevalent wage requirement for H-1B workers. I believe that wage is about $75K for software engineers currently. Thus, any employer offering a salary below this rate to a software engineers should/would be denied the H-1B visa.
There is a big difference between should and would. First, there is no active enforcement of H-1B program regulations. That has never been funded by Clinton or Bush, so the DOL simply doesn't do it - they don't have the people. The only way to get enforcement of the regulations is via lawsuit against a company. Second, any company hiring H-1Bs is allowed to use its own method to determine prevailing wage if they want, and the last time I checked, nearly 70% did so. They are also allowed to set the worker's title of course, so it's easy to hire an experienced programmer as an associate. The government's own study (as well as independent ones) have shown H-1Bs are paid 15% to 30% less than resident workers for the same job. (And I gave links to all this stuff the last time this subject came up, so it's pointless to do it again - it doesn't do any good.) Just because your company doesn't abuse the program doesn't mean that other companies are as ethical.
But on the other hand, employees who say "we have plenty of engineers" is just saying "I want to be paid more".
When the US engineering unemployment rate is 5%, we have plenty of engineers. Before the last decade, rates were typically around 2% or less. Importing labor when there is already a glut only puts more people out of work.
However, this student manages to write down more than 90% of the answers correctly on every exam without writing down anything that looks like the process of doing calculus. Would you fail this student for not "knowing" calculus? So long as he can do it, does the way he does it factor into how you would grade him?
Yes. Math teachers are anal that way. I have been graded down for not showing all the steps required to solve a problem. I have also scratched out a correct answer (with steps shown) during an exam and then provided an incorrect answer and was still given partial credit for the question. Grading is about the knowledge of the subject being demonstrated. Providing a correct final answer proves nothing - you could be cheating. I graded a lot of programming labs, and the cheating was rampant (zero for all involved unless you could convince the professor that you'd been copied without your knowledge).
With all this computational capacity at their disposal, it's too bad that most people are so incredibly stupid. Is this some sort of failing of evolution?
No, it was the invention of television which sucked up all available resources.
As long as he picks the appropriate experts and actually listens to their advice, one can be a very effective leader with this sort of setup, president or manager in some company.
The problem is that he did pick an appropriate expert, Colin Powell, then cut him out of the loop and ignored his good advice when it didn't fit with his (Bush's) preconceptions. Now, he has only neocons for advisors - not appropriate for the "uniter" he claims to be.
No, no. It has to be something with less mental involvement and more action and storyline. I know. We'll make a movie based on Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, and we'll call it Pearl Harbor . . . no, how about Tora! Tora! Tora! ?
What's counterintuitive about this? My 5 year old daughter's picked this up (using old gravity game on her iMac).
This reminds me of Jimmy Carter's debate with Ronald Reagan and Carter's 12-year-old daughter's (claimed) obsessive concern with nuclear proliferation. I suggest something similar to Godwin's Rule that would apply to any thread that tries connecting eugenics and any particular OS/platform. Call it the Cyborg Rule, perhaps?
Maybe this is just another marketing ploy for the Disney movie "Chicken Little".
OMG! And there's no vaccine for the Chicken Little bird flu that doesn't exist yet! AHHRRHHGGG! We're all gonna maybe die in an epic pandemic!!! (Of course we're all going to die anyway, but that's no reason to give up an opportunity to create panic.:)
No, I don't get lots of spam. Most of it is denied at the SMTP protocol level and is never even written to disk. Most of the rest is filtered out based on content and/dev/null'd before it reaches the mailbox delivery step. The client side filter is then left to handle the very small quantity of mail that is difficult to discern with more general measures and makes it past the SMTP and MDA level and is of course then downloaded by the useragent for fine-tuning of the local filter.
Okay, I've seen responses like this in the past, and I'll admit that I have little knowledge of how the whole thing works (because I'm not really interested as long as it works). However, whether those messages are being dumped into my throw-away hotmail account's junk folder or being transported *somewhere*, they are being written to disk somewhere. They are also using up bandwidth during transport, and that bandwidth is not being paid for by the spammers. I don't understand the logic of people who claim spam is not a problem just because they don't see any in their inbox. That seems a bit like claiming that the termites aren't really a problem because your house hasn't fallen down yet.
I dont know about you but i would like my CEO to be sober while he reads my genuine ideas
I would prefer my CEO dead drunk and passed out so he has less time to come up with his wonderful ideas that waste the company's resources and screw the company's employees. I'll even make a donation to the CEO's vodka fund and another for the board of directors.
Building a system is fun, but reliability on a home built is not so good. Motherboards seem to go out faster on home built systems in my experience.
Either you're not following ESD safety procedures during assembly, or you're buying cheap components. The only times I've had failures from motherboards, power supplies, or CD/DVD drives was with two name-brand machines I've owned - the others I built myself, and they've been far more reliable.
I may be presuming entirely too much rationality on the RIAA's part, but surely they aren't THAT dumb. I do agree that the consumer needs to be wary of what these industry interest-groups are planning, but your claim there doesn't seem to make much sense.
Sense? These are the same people who believe they should still get paid nearly $20 for a 30-minute Fleetwood Mac CD. Movies that old (and 2 hours long) are available on TMC for free (or 1% of your cable bill if you want to split hairs) or on DVD for 5-10$. By rights, that music should be public domain now. These are the same people who have repeatedly been convicted of price-fixing and payola and then lobby the government for "protection". These are the people who got the government to enact an industry-pocketed tax on audio CD media. That doesn't make sense. Never underestimate the greed of the RIAA members or the craziness of a severely wounded animal - in this case, one and the same. If the RIAA had the technology to produce play-once CDs for a dollar, they'd be on it like flies on a cow patty. What ever gave you the idea that the RIAA was interested in or cared about musical artists? Your claim makes no sense.
Why spend all this time and effort to make something last only once, when it should last forever??
Microsoft is giving the studios what they really want: a pay-per-view product on media. (I'm sure the RIAA would love to have the same thing for CDs.) The problem is that the MS solution requires special DVD players, which makes all existing DVD players unusable with these discs. Even then, I don't see what's to stop me from running the output to my Linux PC's TV card and burning a regular DVD (unless MS also intends to require special TVs). I hereby declare this DRM scheme DOA.
What Microsoft really wants is that lock on DRM servers that was mentioned, but the studios are so avaricious that they will jump at any dumb solution that's offered and fill Microsoft's coffers while chasing the ghost of a dead business model. Everybody think about the great (new) movies you've seen in the past year that came from the major studios and shout 'em out . . . Okay, nevermind.
What's funny is the title of the linked article, Microsoft invents a 'one-play only' DVD to combat Hollywood piracy. Hollywood has always been a great promoter of piracy. There must be hundreds of movies glorifying piracy. The most recent I can think of is Pirates of the Caribbean, where the pirates are the funny, intelligent, good guys. Is Hollywood sending us mixed messages?
What on earth do you mean? All I'm saying is that the fact that others don't follow it does not really harm the viability of the argument given that there are other reasons why these people don't follow it. Please clarify your argument. thanks. ...
The problem with this is: just because others are prejudiced towards americans, does not mean that americans should be prejudiced towards them. Furthermore, (assuming) they don't embrace diversity as much as the u.s is no reason not to embrace diversity ourselves.
I suggest you look at my original response. If I may do a loose quote/paraphrase, what you said was that American universities should rightfully recruit foreign students because they weren't inflicted with American culture. If you think American culture is an infliction (or affliction - the terms share a common root and meaning), and you're an American, then I suggest you emigrate. If you're not an American, then your dual standard is amazing to say the least.
Also I think you're making an assumption when you say 'America is the most ethnically diverse nation on the planet'.
Feel free to prove me wrong. I'm just going by the writings of far smarter people than I.
You haven't really argued against the core of my argumentation (that diveresity is good), all you've done is say, "others don't believe diversity is good", which doesn't really help increase the overall discourse happening here.
No, your argument is that diversity is good for (and needed by) American universities, but not necessarily for universities in other countries. If diversity is good, then all should practice it. Given that American universities are far ahead in "diversity", your focus should be on getting foreign universities to practice diversity.
Example, America got rid of slavery but at the same time there were countries in the world that didn't. Just because other countries disagreed on the question of slavery, did that make slavery right? Hell no.
Does condemning America for past slavery while other countries still practice it do anything to help those still enslaved? Not really, although it may give you a warm fuzzy about your imagined enlightened attitude.
Slashdot Mirror
L-1 visas are intracompany transfers. You must prove a direct corporate relationship with an international company that has employed the beneficiary for one of the past three years. If you aren't an international company, no L visas for you, period.
Duh, how many large employers are not "international"? The L1 is about specialized knowledge; the H-1B is about importing programmers.
I don't have any numbers, and I work on the East Coast, but I find "90% Computer Programmers" figure highly dubious, the firm I work for handles a fair amount of H-1b cases, and they are a grab-bag of occupations, if anything I would say that biomedical researchers, both in acadamia and in commercial research shops, are the biggest group.
You seem amazingly uniformed on the subject considering your occupation. I suggest you google on "matloff law journal" to get the summary. Get the white paper which I've linked to in another comment in this discussion for the full report.
They used up about 15000 for this year so far, as far as I know. Looks like somebody coming up with the number actually did his homework for a change.
Considering their claims, it looks like they weren't really all that interested after all. They couldn't find 20,000 of these hot talents they were discussing in all the colleges and universities in the US?
H1B is not about IT only.
Yes, it also includes fashion models, but the latest figures I've seen indicate that over 90% of H-1B visas go to programmers.
So you are suggesting that their should be NO way to bring a useful talented specialist from another country? What are "normal immigration channels" you are talking about? Name one and tell me how long it will take. L1?
Doesn't the L1 visa do exactly that? It allows a company to bring in people with special knowledge and even pay them at the foreign rate - oh, wait, that's a downside compared to the H-1B, isn't it?
There is no other useful way of bringing talented people in, and if you think we will be better off sending them packing, you do not know what you are talking about.
How could we "send them packing" unless they were here in the first place? Why do you think that "them" are more talented than the people already here?
I would not be able to replace H1B folks in my department, for any money, with anybody. And given their pay and headache involved with our lawers
I think you are being disingenuous. The phrase "for any money, with anybody" proves it. If your H-1Bs are irreplaceable, what happens when they die? Given your position, you know full well that there is minimal legal expense unless your company is sponsoring the H-1Bs for green cards.
I would agree that abuse should be fixed - but taking away easy and legal immigration would only make it worse.
The H-1B is suppose to be a non-immigrant visa, but since you make your living on the reality of that immigration loophole, you can't be expected to say anything less.
Not another "insightful" populist...
If you want to moderate, shut up and do so.
We do have "plenty of engineers", but they charge too much. Solution: bid lower to compete with foreign labor. Just like how everyone you buy from bids lower to get your business.
There is no union of engineers that determine the going wage. Companies are free to offer what they will, only they don't. The company stock price goes up when layoffs and outsourcing are announced. Stock analysts and CxOs love it, so it happens. Why should the engineers who built a great big company lose their jobs because the new CEO wants a bigger bonus? Who says the people who made the company make too much? You? How? WTF do you know?
You do look for bargains, don't you, hypocrite?
Well, since you've decided to degenerate into calling names, may I call you Moron? OK, thanks. Moron, there's a difference between a bargain and the cheapest price. A bargain is getting good value for your money. A cheap WalMart shirt that falls apart in a few weeks is not a good bargain compared to a more expensive shirt that will last for years. I recently paid 20% more for some major yard work to a company with a good reputation over the lowest bid, and it was done well and on schedule. I got a bargain.
Incorrect, most of them had been used.
Excuse me? I didn't say none of them had been used. For such a (claimed) hotly needed category, the 20,000 visas should have been snapped up immediately by the IT industry that was so desperately in need of these folks.
That's the whole idea - do not fight H1B, fight misuse of H1B for low level folks.
The entire H-1B program is a scam. There is no shortage of IT labor, which is the claim that the ITAA made to get Congress to pass this boondoggle. It is a perversion of immigration law that allows certain companies to bypass normal immigration channels. In effect, it is an IT bracero program complete with all the negative connotations that implies. You've already admitted you make a living from this program, so you don't really have a good position to make judgements from. (Please forgive the ending preposition.)
I fail to see what is unethical about it. I find it unethical to force companies to hire expensive and bad american IT people instead of cheap and good foreign ones.
Heh. Yes, it's hard to spot your agenda. American IT workers bad. Foreign IT workers good. I thought most of us were beyond that kind of stuff.
I would agree with you if the H1-B hire were underpaid (like the outsourcing of some clothes/shoes factories) but AFAIK that's not the case.
PDF alert, if you're really interested in learning something about the subject (my guess is you're not).
Seems the garment industry had this worked out a long time ago. A few years ago you could still find sweatshops in the United States with imigrant workers chained to their work tables. Wasn't that Kathy Lee's undoing?
I believe Kathy Lee was caught hawking sweatshop clothing and quickly got religion. The real point is that the garment workers unionized. Companies claimed they were too expensive and moved the industry overseas, where pesky things like unions weren't a problem. Organizing IT workers however is (with all due respect to your nick) like herding cats, and it hasn't happened. Companies still claim we're too expensive (although they set the wages) and are importing labor and moving the industry overseas. There's a disconnect somewhere.
When you realise that tech companies ask for more students to go through american universities and for more people in general to take up programming, it is for the same reason that the US tries to persuade OPEC nations to pump more oil. When seen in this light none of this seems particularly surprising (or evil, for that matter).
I guess that's true if you consider people's lives and futures to be a commodity. When someone like Bill Gates or Andy Grove convinces US students to take on huge debts to get an education in a field where they know their companies are really unwilling to hire those graduates, I consider that pretty evil. If you don't want US workers, then don't lie to students and waste their education (and money) just to lobby Congress for legislation to help make you richer. I find it hard to believe the depths to which American corporate management has sunk.
Now to me this means H-1b hires are generally more entry-level than the average worker (duh!). That's not saying that there probably isn't a fair bit of fraud and misrepresentation of the level of a position, especially since the employer sets the level themselves and then documents the requirements, but it's not happening on an industry-wide level as the article would have you believe.
You can't have it both ways. If the positions are entry-level, then the ITAA is lying when they say they can't find skilled workers. It's even more of a lie considering the number of experienced IT workers in the unemployment line. Then the industry claimed they were losing the "best and brightest" who were here on student visas. Congress supplied a new category of H-1B for these post-graduates, and guess what - they haven't been used. It is an industry-wide misrepresentation of the true situation. There is no penalty for lying to Congress if you're not under oath and your campaign contributions have been paid.
Moreover, INS (now USCIS) has a prevalent wage requirement for H-1B workers. I believe that wage is about $75K for software engineers currently. Thus, any employer offering a salary below this rate to a software engineers should/would be denied the H-1B visa.
There is a big difference between should and would. First, there is no active enforcement of H-1B program regulations. That has never been funded by Clinton or Bush, so the DOL simply doesn't do it - they don't have the people. The only way to get enforcement of the regulations is via lawsuit against a company. Second, any company hiring H-1Bs is allowed to use its own method to determine prevailing wage if they want, and the last time I checked, nearly 70% did so. They are also allowed to set the worker's title of course, so it's easy to hire an experienced programmer as an associate. The government's own study (as well as independent ones) have shown H-1Bs are paid 15% to 30% less than resident workers for the same job. (And I gave links to all this stuff the last time this subject came up, so it's pointless to do it again - it doesn't do any good.) Just because your company doesn't abuse the program doesn't mean that other companies are as ethical.
But on the other hand, employees who say "we have plenty of engineers" is just saying "I want to be paid more".
When the US engineering unemployment rate is 5%, we have plenty of engineers. Before the last decade, rates were typically around 2% or less. Importing labor when there is already a glut only puts more people out of work.
However, this student manages to write down more than 90% of the answers correctly on every exam without writing down anything that looks like the process of doing calculus. Would you fail this student for not "knowing" calculus? So long as he can do it, does the way he does it factor into how you would grade him?
Yes. Math teachers are anal that way. I have been graded down for not showing all the steps required to solve a problem. I have also scratched out a correct answer (with steps shown) during an exam and then provided an incorrect answer and was still given partial credit for the question. Grading is about the knowledge of the subject being demonstrated. Providing a correct final answer proves nothing - you could be cheating. I graded a lot of programming labs, and the cheating was rampant (zero for all involved unless you could convince the professor that you'd been copied without your knowledge).
With all this computational capacity at their disposal, it's too bad that most people are so incredibly stupid. Is this some sort of failing of evolution?
No, it was the invention of television which sucked up all available resources.
As long as he picks the appropriate experts and actually listens to their advice, one can be a very effective leader with this sort of setup, president or manager in some company.
The problem is that he did pick an appropriate expert, Colin Powell, then cut him out of the loop and ignored his good advice when it didn't fit with his (Bush's) preconceptions. Now, he has only neocons for advisors - not appropriate for the "uniter" he claims to be.
IT'S TETRIS - THE MOVIE
No, no. It has to be something with less mental involvement and more action and storyline. I know. We'll make a movie based on Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, and we'll call it Pearl Harbor . . . no, how about Tora! Tora! Tora! ?
What's counterintuitive about this? My 5 year old daughter's picked this up (using old gravity game on her iMac).
This reminds me of Jimmy Carter's debate with Ronald Reagan and Carter's 12-year-old daughter's (claimed) obsessive concern with nuclear proliferation. I suggest something similar to Godwin's Rule that would apply to any thread that tries connecting eugenics and any particular OS/platform. Call it the Cyborg Rule, perhaps?
Maybe this is just another marketing ploy for the Disney movie "Chicken Little".
OMG! And there's no vaccine for the Chicken Little bird flu that doesn't exist yet! AHHRRHHGGG! We're all gonna maybe die in an epic pandemic!!! (Of course we're all going to die anyway, but that's no reason to give up an opportunity to create panic. :)
No, I don't get lots of spam. Most of it is denied at the SMTP protocol level and is never even written to disk. Most of the rest is filtered out based on content and /dev/null'd before it reaches the mailbox delivery step. The client side filter is then left to handle the very small quantity of mail that is difficult to discern with more general measures and makes it past the SMTP and MDA level and is of course then downloaded by the useragent for fine-tuning of the local filter.
Okay, I've seen responses like this in the past, and I'll admit that I have little knowledge of how the whole thing works (because I'm not really interested as long as it works). However, whether those messages are being dumped into my throw-away hotmail account's junk folder or being transported *somewhere*, they are being written to disk somewhere. They are also using up bandwidth during transport, and that bandwidth is not being paid for by the spammers. I don't understand the logic of people who claim spam is not a problem just because they don't see any in their inbox. That seems a bit like claiming that the termites aren't really a problem because your house hasn't fallen down yet.
I wonder if they make jokes about us in Vietnam.
"giving up already? what are you, an American?"
Vietnamese respondent in California: "Ha ha. So I'll be paying your phone bill again this month? I give up."
Get off my lawn you Yahoos, er kids or chats or whatever you are. BTW, I'm turning the sprinklers on again this Halloween, so you've been warned!
I dont know about you but i would like my CEO to be sober while he reads my genuine ideas
I would prefer my CEO dead drunk and passed out so he has less time to come up with his wonderful ideas that waste the company's resources and screw the company's employees. I'll even make a donation to the CEO's vodka fund and another for the board of directors.
Building a system is fun, but reliability on a home built is not so good. Motherboards seem to go out faster on home built systems in my experience.
Either you're not following ESD safety procedures during assembly, or you're buying cheap components. The only times I've had failures from motherboards, power supplies, or CD/DVD drives was with two name-brand machines I've owned - the others I built myself, and they've been far more reliable.
is 42/0 42 times 1/0?
It's close enough for very small values of 1.
I may be presuming entirely too much rationality on the RIAA's part, but surely they aren't THAT dumb. I do agree that the consumer needs to be wary of what these industry interest-groups are planning, but your claim there doesn't seem to make much sense.
Sense? These are the same people who believe they should still get paid nearly $20 for a 30-minute Fleetwood Mac CD. Movies that old (and 2 hours long) are available on TMC for free (or 1% of your cable bill if you want to split hairs) or on DVD for 5-10$. By rights, that music should be public domain now. These are the same people who have repeatedly been convicted of price-fixing and payola and then lobby the government for "protection". These are the people who got the government to enact an industry-pocketed tax on audio CD media. That doesn't make sense. Never underestimate the greed of the RIAA members or the craziness of a severely wounded animal - in this case, one and the same. If the RIAA had the technology to produce play-once CDs for a dollar, they'd be on it like flies on a cow patty. What ever gave you the idea that the RIAA was interested in or cared about musical artists? Your claim makes no sense.
Why spend all this time and effort to make something last only once, when it should last forever??
Microsoft is giving the studios what they really want: a pay-per-view product on media. (I'm sure the RIAA would love to have the same thing for CDs.) The problem is that the MS solution requires special DVD players, which makes all existing DVD players unusable with these discs. Even then, I don't see what's to stop me from running the output to my Linux PC's TV card and burning a regular DVD (unless MS also intends to require special TVs). I hereby declare this DRM scheme DOA.
What Microsoft really wants is that lock on DRM servers that was mentioned, but the studios are so avaricious that they will jump at any dumb solution that's offered and fill Microsoft's coffers while chasing the ghost of a dead business model. Everybody think about the great (new) movies you've seen in the past year that came from the major studios and shout 'em out . . . Okay, nevermind.
What's funny is the title of the linked article, Microsoft invents a 'one-play only' DVD to combat Hollywood piracy. Hollywood has always been a great promoter of piracy. There must be hundreds of movies glorifying piracy. The most recent I can think of is Pirates of the Caribbean, where the pirates are the funny, intelligent, good guys. Is Hollywood sending us mixed messages?
What on earth do you mean? All I'm saying is that the fact that others don't follow it does not really harm the viability of the argument given that there are other reasons why these people don't follow it. Please clarify your argument. thanks.
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The problem with this is: just because others are prejudiced towards americans, does not mean that americans should be prejudiced towards them. Furthermore, (assuming) they don't embrace diversity as much as the u.s is no reason not to embrace diversity ourselves.
I suggest you look at my original response. If I may do a loose quote/paraphrase, what you said was that American universities should rightfully recruit foreign students because they weren't inflicted with American culture. If you think American culture is an infliction (or affliction - the terms share a common root and meaning), and you're an American, then I suggest you emigrate. If you're not an American, then your dual standard is amazing to say the least.
Also I think you're making an assumption when you say 'America is the most ethnically diverse nation on the planet'.
Feel free to prove me wrong. I'm just going by the writings of far smarter people than I.
You haven't really argued against the core of my argumentation (that diveresity is good), all you've done is say, "others don't believe diversity is good", which doesn't really help increase the overall discourse happening here.
No, your argument is that diversity is good for (and needed by) American universities, but not necessarily for universities in other countries. If diversity is good, then all should practice it. Given that American universities are far ahead in "diversity", your focus should be on getting foreign universities to practice diversity.
Example, America got rid of slavery but at the same time there were countries in the world that didn't. Just because other countries disagreed on the question of slavery, did that make slavery right? Hell no.
Does condemning America for past slavery while other countries still practice it do anything to help those still enslaved? Not really, although it may give you a warm fuzzy about your imagined enlightened attitude.