...one of the contingencies of hiring an H1B worker is that the employer has to prove that they cannot find a worker of equal skill in the US job market...my wife is currently here on an H1B, and I am fairly sure that there are not many people that can do her job...
Another thing to consider is that jobs are being redefined. Today there are people doing the work of 2, 3, even 4 people. Is it still ethical to hire an extremely talented H1B worker to do those kind of jobs? Even when it displaces several american workers in the process?
It's like taking the intellectual 1% of the world population, and dumping them all into the US job market. If you re-define every engineering job as requiring someone with a 180 IQ, then it's unlikely that job will be filled by an american. If there are 6,000 million people in the world...and 250 million in the US, then americans represent 1/24th the world population. That means that all things being equal, 1 in every 24 of this "intellectual elite" will be an american.
It's bad enough to have an H1B displace a single job, but if every H1B displaces 3 or 4 jobs here for american workers, that's a crisis.
Why is this so hard to understand?
on
BusinessWeek on Wi-Fi
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There is also an interesting bit about a business model for wireless carriers.
There is no business model for wireless, that's why it's so great!
It's 100% commodity based. Companies build commodity products, and the consumer purchases them to become part of the ISP. Mesh routers, 802X nodes, etc are all self-sufficient "black boxes" purchased by users for users.
The last thing we need is another middle-man sending us a bill for something that's free!
Actually there are only a few compelling reasons to leech files:
1) The RIAA is targetting uploaders for persecution. So if you just download you're safe.
This problem is solved if freenet gets the anonymity feature right.
2) Local network congestion and PC lag.
This is most noticeable when playing online games. If Kazaa is working in the background things get very laggy. The solution to this is easy and I'm surprised Kazaa hasn't implemented it. Simply allow the user to designate "time windows" for uploading. If it were me I'd leave my P2P application running 24/7, and set the controls so that all my uploading was done while I was asleep, at school, or at work. Hopefully the freenet apps will have a feature like this.
3) Bandwidth caps.
This is the most difficult problem, especially for students in universities where caps are being enforced. Hopefully 802X and other "free"(I.e. unmetered) wireless P2P technologies will resolve this problem.
"Leeching" is mostly about avoiding poor performance, or the "law", or a big bill. The first two problems are easily solved in software. The third relies on faster connections, which I'm sure we're all hoping for.
The point of it is that it isn't productive at all.
I disagree with the philosophy behind your premise. There's no demonstrable proof that a form of recreation can't eventually result in the production of valuable services and resources.
We're in the infancy of the information age, frontiers are being explored. Time will no doubt reveal any multitude of productive and pleasurable activities. Just because you hate your job doesn't mean you're doing something worth while.
These guys who use solar power in their homes, and sell the surplus to the power company, could also use the surplus to create hydogen fuel for their cars. That's self-sufficiency.
Based on the power that Television companies hold, does anybody really think this is going to happen? We have a hard enough time with the record labels, now they want to go up against people like NBC?
Yes, but it's actually even worse than that. Frankly it's nothing less than cival war. The world economy as we know it is based upon the principle of distributing scarce resources. IP in all its forms is a way of trying to extend the economics of scarcity(capitalism).
People like Newton, Euclid and Euler were happy to give thier stuff away. Mostly because they were personal achievements, the result of one great individual's genius. Nowadays armies of programmers, engineers, technicians and scientists are required to get results. They demand salaries, and require equipment and laboratory space. Noone would make an investment like that without being ensured a profit.
We're living on the forefront of building the greatest information distribution network mankind has ever known. It's a recipe for disaster. Here we are dramatically increasing the liquidity of information, and at the same time desperately needing to control information. These are opposite forces. One force is technical, the other is political, social, and economic. Politicians and lawyers are desperately scrambling to plug all the leaks like Napster, Kazaa, etc. But every time they plug one, 3 more pop up.
Quite frankly we're seeing capitalism faced with a challenge that it will not likely survive. The problem is so huge, and both camps of the IP argument have such deeply rooted arguments that there's actually no "sane" compromise. Both sides of this argument are absolutly right, and their also dead wrong. This is how revolutions happen. When a technology comes along and forces a society to change. Revolution is painful, and very difficult to endure. But information technology is forcing us grow up. I don't think there's one of us who can honestly say we have a solution.
We all appreciate the terrible dangers of DRM. On the flip-side every one of us knows, especially in the current economy, how neccesary it is to get paid for doing work. Which for most of us is programming or designing or maintaining technology. We can't do this for free, because noone is building homes for free, or cooking our meals for free, or making our clothes for free.
This is a clash of absolutely irresolvable interests, something that is pushing our society to the brink. There's also no reason to believe that we've reached the worst of it. Something dramatic and revolutionary needs to occur in order for us to find a way out of the IP mess.
In the mean time the UWB/P2P/802.X/etc. pipe dreams will be at odds with the media giants, engineering firms, pharmaceudical companies, software shops etc. From the article:
NBC gets to bathe you in "Friends," followed by a very special "Scrubs," and you get to sit passively on your couch. It's an asymmetric bargain that dominates our cultural, economic and political lives -- only the rich and famous can deliver their messages -- and it's all based on the fact that radio waves in their untamed habitat interfere with one another.
Except they don't.
He's correct, but getting intimate with photons is not the silver bullet to this problem. The problem is that our entire economy is based on maintaining the myth of scarcity of information. And almost everyone has a stake in that myth. We're stuck folks. And capitalism won't get us out of this.
That embedding these kinds of technological controls into the very architecture of computing has the capacity to become a form of political control in the not so distant future.
And this is problem for politicians how? If the aim to in influence our leaders, how is tell them this going to benefit us in any way?
If anything it will only prompt them to implement DRM faster.
He was refering to people that went to their community tech school. Took a 4 month Microsoft, Novell or Cisco course and then expected to call themselves Network Engineers, when really they are, at best, lowly network technicians
I agree with you. But I think the backlash of elitism has gone too far. It's time to moderate a bit. There are many would-be engineers who spend 4 hard years studying to be career engineers. Many of those people are being forced to find work in other fields.
Just because you're the 1 in 3 who managed to:
"actually went to 5 year engineering schools, paid the big bucks for a much better education, and are now highly in demand."
Doesn't mean it's true for everyone, or even the majority of people who studied engineering.
Nonsense. You'd never see someone saying "There is still a shortage of REAL ditch diggers". It's sad that programming has become so elitist. So that only the cerebral hitler youth are allowed to do it.
If being a "REAL developer" means having a 200 IQ, then you're excluding about 99.99% of the human population. The world needs capable programmers more than it needs "real" programmers.
Exactly, in fact the first and primary reason has nothing to do with technology at all. It's about remembering that there are types of people who will infiltrate any industry, no matter how beneficial that industry is to mankind, and sell everyone short just to make a buck in a hurry.
Best case in point is Lucent Technologies. Lucent was a spin-off of Bell Labs, and represented some of the very best and brightest in the industry. The corporate culture was one of innovation, and progressive technologies.
The company is now a smoking crater. Largely due to wholely irresponsible internal fiscal management. This was a great company, with a history of producing highly innovative products and services. Most of that has been irrevocably destroyed.
It's a story of a few greedy, self-serving people at the top of the organization selling out the lives, careers and dreams of the thousands of technicians and engineers that comprised the company in its best years. One could argue that "stock options fever" is in part responsible for creating an environment like that...but I'm hoping that we've all suffered enough from that delusion to ensure that it doesn't happen again any time soon. Real products, for real people, in the real world....and hopefully real accountants to make sure things stay that way.
The upcoming 2.6 kernel is looking to be a desktop user's dream come true
followed by parent:
I cannot tell you how long I've been waiting for something like this. As an avid Microsoft fan, one of my biggest beefs was the inferior performance of the Linux GUI and its components.
Well I hope you can wait another 20 years or so, because that's about how long it's going to take.
Improvements to the kernel which fascilitate a performance boost to interactive processes? This is like 1 of 498 things that needs to be implemented to be as functional as the NT varients within a desktop-object paradigm.
How you can expect object-oriented behavior from an OS that lives and breathes C is beyond me however. Unix is antiquated, and cumbersome. With 500plus megs of RAM on desktop machines, there's no excuse anymore for sacrificing good design for performance considerations. A COM/CORBA type approach to computing is eons away from being implemented within the UNIX environment.
Sure UNIX is fun, and it has a rich history, and it's neat if you like hacking c and batch running your own stuff, but it is several generations behind what we should be using in an OS. Even NeXT is antiquated in it's approach, and you guys are still talking about how great it is to use X windows? You're fucking insane, all of you!
At least the other 99% of the computing population can use windows and isn't forced to live in your very strange world. They all have to pay the MS tithe however:(.
I wonder if this applies to the seven rules for spotting bogus science?
Believe it or not, basic celestial mechanics still has several unsolved problems.
For instance noone knows exactly how to model the formation of ring structures like the Kuiper Belt(a ring of asteroids orbiting the sun), or Saturn's rings.
but the question I have is that if no one gets into the arena (and obviously 100 is a lot) then who will supply the demand?
Noone has time to play 100 MMORGS. It's not like 100 books or video games we can polish off in a year. These are games that require 10-20hrs a week. Week after week, month after month, and even year after year. Noone has the time or money to play more than 4 or 5 MMORGs in thier lifetime.
I've played around 100 console game titles, 50 PC game titles, 2 "medium" OG's(counter-strike, and BF1942), and 1 MMORG(Everquest). The time, money, and social sacrifices involved in playing MMORGs excludes the possibility of playing more than a few in any given year.
So instead of measuring demand like most PC games, or films, or music might be measured...it makes more sense to measure demand like cars, and washing machines. MMORGs tend to be long term investments, that customers retain loyalty within for years at a time. 100 MMORG titles suddenly appearing within a market like that seems highly excessive.
You hear that sound? Every massively multiplayer game maker is suddenly trying to switch business plans to moderately-multiplayer
Yes, but he underscored the importance of community within the game. You can't get persistent community in a game that has only 64 players per server. Clans are about as close as you get, but it's still a very loose sense of teamwork.
Games like Everquest, with thousands of people per server, have many guilds of some 20 to 100 players each. These guilds share experiences, "travel" together on-line, see the sites etc. It provides a much more compelling and genuine sense of community than could be provided in a BF1942 type setting.
Putting secrets in the game might not be very useful, but that applies for both single and multiplayer games, if someone wants to find it, they will, and the fact that the game is played ONLINE does not have anything to do with its SECRETS being posted online, these are two irrelated things.
Mmm, not really. I think he's got a point. It's somewhat sad that we've lost this aspect of gaming forever. I remember games like Zork, Wasteland, and The Bard's Tale requiring some pretty sophisticated puzzle solving skills. Sometimes it would take days, or even weeks before the player came up with a solution. But after all the hair-pulling, and pacing back and forth in front of the computer, finding the solution(on your own, of with your friends) was exciting! It's an experience that the next generation of gamers won't get to have.
Nowadays if you're presented with a problem in a game, it's just a few steps away from being solved. You just goto Google, enter a few keywords, take 5-10 mins reading and bingo you've probably found the solution.
Most of us think of the internet as a beneficial and enabling technology, but in this case it's caused the end of an era.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry bad link, for some reason Slashcode filters an underscore from the link. You'll have to copy paste to get there manually. Here it is:
http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
I ran across this Iraqi citizen's blog if anyone is interested. It's updated daily.
...and a bigger threat to world peace than Hussein ever was.
...one of the contingencies of hiring an H1B worker is that the employer has to prove that they cannot find a worker of equal skill in the US job market...my wife is currently here on an H1B, and I am fairly sure that there are not many people that can do her job...
Another thing to consider is that jobs are being redefined. Today there are people doing the work of 2, 3, even 4 people. Is it still ethical to hire an extremely talented H1B worker to do those kind of jobs? Even when it displaces several american workers in the process?
It's like taking the intellectual 1% of the world population, and dumping them all into the US job market. If you re-define every engineering job as requiring someone with a 180 IQ, then it's unlikely that job will be filled by an american. If there are 6,000 million people in the world...and 250 million in the US, then americans represent 1/24th the world population. That means that all things being equal, 1 in every 24 of this "intellectual elite" will be an american.
It's bad enough to have an H1B displace a single job, but if every H1B displaces 3 or 4 jobs here for american workers, that's a crisis.
There is also an interesting bit about a business model for wireless carriers.
There is no business model for wireless, that's why it's so great!
It's 100% commodity based. Companies build commodity products, and the consumer purchases them to become part of the ISP. Mesh routers, 802X nodes, etc are all self-sufficient "black boxes" purchased by users for users.
The last thing we need is another middle-man sending us a bill for something that's free!
Actually there are only a few compelling reasons to leech files:
1) The RIAA is targetting uploaders for persecution. So if you just download you're safe.
This problem is solved if freenet gets the anonymity feature right.
2) Local network congestion and PC lag.
This is most noticeable when playing online games. If Kazaa is working in the background things get very laggy. The solution to this is easy and I'm surprised Kazaa hasn't implemented it. Simply allow the user to designate "time windows" for uploading. If it were me I'd leave my P2P application running 24/7, and set the controls so that all my uploading was done while I was asleep, at school, or at work. Hopefully the freenet apps will have a feature like this.
3) Bandwidth caps.
This is the most difficult problem, especially for students in universities where caps are being enforced. Hopefully 802X and other "free"(I.e. unmetered) wireless P2P technologies will resolve this problem.
"Leeching" is mostly about avoiding poor performance, or the "law", or a big bill. The first two problems are easily solved in software. The third relies on faster connections, which I'm sure we're all hoping for.
The point of it is that it isn't productive at all.
I disagree with the philosophy behind your premise. There's no demonstrable proof that a form of recreation can't eventually result in the production of valuable services and resources.
We're in the infancy of the information age, frontiers are being explored. Time will no doubt reveal any multitude of productive and pleasurable activities. Just because you hate your job doesn't mean you're doing something worth while.
"Paul eventually blinds himself"
Yep, that's what happens when you play with your sandworm all day.
Photons + Water -> Hydrogen & Oxygen -> Water.
These guys who use solar power in their homes, and sell the surplus to the power company, could also use the surplus to create hydogen fuel for their cars. That's self-sufficiency.
Based on the power that Television companies hold, does anybody really think this is going to happen? We have a hard enough time with the record labels, now they want to go up against people like NBC?
Yes, but it's actually even worse than that. Frankly it's nothing less than cival war. The world economy as we know it is based upon the principle of distributing scarce resources. IP in all its forms is a way of trying to extend the economics of scarcity(capitalism).
People like Newton, Euclid and Euler were happy to give thier stuff away. Mostly because they were personal achievements, the result of one great individual's genius. Nowadays armies of programmers, engineers, technicians and scientists are required to get results. They demand salaries, and require equipment and laboratory space. Noone would make an investment like that without being ensured a profit.
We're living on the forefront of building the greatest information distribution network mankind has ever known. It's a recipe for disaster. Here we are dramatically increasing the liquidity of information, and at the same time desperately needing to control information. These are opposite forces. One force is technical, the other is political, social, and economic. Politicians and lawyers are desperately scrambling to plug all the leaks like Napster, Kazaa, etc. But every time they plug one, 3 more pop up.
Quite frankly we're seeing capitalism faced with a challenge that it will not likely survive. The problem is so huge, and both camps of the IP argument have such deeply rooted arguments that there's actually no "sane" compromise. Both sides of this argument are absolutly right, and their also dead wrong. This is how revolutions happen. When a technology comes along and forces a society to change. Revolution is painful, and very difficult to endure. But information technology is forcing us grow up. I don't think there's one of us who can honestly say we have a solution.
We all appreciate the terrible dangers of DRM. On the flip-side every one of us knows, especially in the current economy, how neccesary it is to get paid for doing work. Which for most of us is programming or designing or maintaining technology. We can't do this for free, because noone is building homes for free, or cooking our meals for free, or making our clothes for free.
This is a clash of absolutely irresolvable interests, something that is pushing our society to the brink. There's also no reason to believe that we've reached the worst of it. Something dramatic and revolutionary needs to occur in order for us to find a way out of the IP mess.
In the mean time the UWB/P2P/802.X/etc. pipe dreams will be at odds with the media giants, engineering firms, pharmaceudical companies, software shops etc. From the article:
NBC gets to bathe you in "Friends," followed by a very special "Scrubs," and you get to sit passively on your couch. It's an asymmetric bargain that dominates our cultural, economic and political lives -- only the rich and famous can deliver their messages -- and it's all based on the fact that radio waves in their untamed habitat interfere with one another.
Except they don't.
He's correct, but getting intimate with photons is not the silver bullet to this problem. The problem is that our entire economy is based on maintaining the myth of scarcity of information. And almost everyone has a stake in that myth. We're stuck folks. And capitalism won't get us out of this.
Actually he just realized that there is no future for alternative energy.
The replicans will just nuke whoever they want to get the oil they need.
That embedding these kinds of technological controls into the very architecture of computing has the capacity to become a form of political control in the not so distant future.
And this is problem for politicians how? If the aim to in influence our leaders, how is tell them this going to benefit us in any way?
If anything it will only prompt them to implement DRM faster.
He was refering to people that went to their community tech school. Took a 4 month Microsoft, Novell or Cisco course and then expected to call themselves Network Engineers, when really they are, at best, lowly network technicians
I agree with you. But I think the backlash of elitism has gone too far. It's time to moderate a bit. There are many would-be engineers who spend 4 hard years studying to be career engineers. Many of those people are being forced to find work in other fields.
Just because you're the 1 in 3 who managed to:
"actually went to 5 year engineering schools, paid the big bucks for a much better education, and are now highly in demand."
Doesn't mean it's true for everyone, or even the majority of people who studied engineering.
There is still a shortage of REAL developers.
Nonsense. You'd never see someone saying "There is still a shortage of REAL ditch diggers". It's sad that programming has become so elitist. So that only the cerebral hitler youth are allowed to do it.
If being a "REAL developer" means having a 200 IQ, then you're excluding about 99.99% of the human population. The world needs capable programmers more than it needs "real" programmers.
The reason is simple economics: there is more demand for and less supply of techies
Umm...did I just step into a time machine? This is 2003 right?
Five Reasons to blow you life savings.
Exactly, in fact the first and primary reason has nothing to do with technology at all. It's about remembering that there are types of people who will infiltrate any industry, no matter how beneficial that industry is to mankind, and sell everyone short just to make a buck in a hurry.
Best case in point is Lucent Technologies. Lucent was a spin-off of Bell Labs, and represented some of the very best and brightest in the industry. The corporate culture was one of innovation, and progressive technologies.
The company is now a smoking crater. Largely due to wholely irresponsible internal fiscal management. This was a great company, with a history of producing highly innovative products and services. Most of that has been irrevocably destroyed.
It's a story of a few greedy, self-serving people at the top of the organization selling out the lives, careers and dreams of the thousands of technicians and engineers that comprised the company in its best years. One could argue that "stock options fever" is in part responsible for creating an environment like that...but I'm hoping that we've all suffered enough from that delusion to ensure that it doesn't happen again any time soon. Real products, for real people, in the real world....and hopefully real accountants to make sure things stay that way.
*crosses fingers*
From the article:
:(.
The upcoming 2.6 kernel is looking to be a desktop user's dream come true
followed by parent:
I cannot tell you how long I've been waiting for something like this. As an avid Microsoft fan, one of my biggest beefs was the inferior performance of the Linux GUI and its components.
Well I hope you can wait another 20 years or so, because that's about how long it's going to take.
Improvements to the kernel which fascilitate a performance boost to interactive processes? This is like 1 of 498 things that needs to be implemented to be as functional as the NT varients within a desktop-object paradigm.
How you can expect object-oriented behavior from an OS that lives and breathes C is beyond me however. Unix is antiquated, and cumbersome. With 500plus megs of RAM on desktop machines, there's no excuse anymore for sacrificing good design for performance considerations. A COM/CORBA type approach to computing is eons away from being implemented within the UNIX environment.
Sure UNIX is fun, and it has a rich history, and it's neat if you like hacking c and batch running your own stuff, but it is several generations behind what we should be using in an OS. Even NeXT is antiquated in it's approach, and you guys are still talking about how great it is to use X windows? You're fucking insane, all of you!
At least the other 99% of the computing population can use windows and isn't forced to live in your very strange world. They all have to pay the MS tithe however
Nah, this is where Kazaa shines.
Yes, this stuff does get complex.
I wonder if this applies to the seven rules for spotting bogus science?
Believe it or not, basic celestial mechanics still has several unsolved problems.
For instance noone knows exactly how to model the formation of ring structures like the Kuiper Belt(a ring of asteroids orbiting the sun), or Saturn's rings.
If you don't believe me check out this link.
Stealth technology, and smart weapons.
this is a tough nut to crack.
Communist Russia jokes aside...this nut is so tough that it's cracking us.
but the question I have is that if no one gets into the arena (and obviously 100 is a lot) then who will supply the demand?
Noone has time to play 100 MMORGS. It's not like 100 books or video games we can polish off in a year. These are games that require 10-20hrs a week. Week after week, month after month, and even year after year. Noone has the time or money to play more than 4 or 5 MMORGs in thier lifetime.
I've played around 100 console game titles, 50 PC game titles, 2 "medium" OG's(counter-strike, and BF1942), and 1 MMORG(Everquest). The time, money, and social sacrifices involved in playing MMORGs excludes the possibility of playing more than a few in any given year.
So instead of measuring demand like most PC games, or films, or music might be measured...it makes more sense to measure demand like cars, and washing machines. MMORGs tend to be long term investments, that customers retain loyalty within for years at a time. 100 MMORG titles suddenly appearing within a market like that seems highly excessive.
You hear that sound? Every massively multiplayer game maker is suddenly trying to switch business plans to moderately-multiplayer
Yes, but he underscored the importance of community within the game. You can't get persistent community in a game that has only 64 players per server. Clans are about as close as you get, but it's still a very loose sense of teamwork.
Games like Everquest, with thousands of people per server, have many guilds of some 20 to 100 players each. These guilds share experiences, "travel" together on-line, see the sites etc. It provides a much more compelling and genuine sense of community than could be provided in a BF1942 type setting.
Putting secrets in the game might not be very useful, but that applies for both single and multiplayer games, if someone wants to find it, they will, and the fact that the game is played ONLINE does not have anything to do with its SECRETS being posted online, these are two irrelated things.
Mmm, not really. I think he's got a point. It's somewhat sad that we've lost this aspect of gaming forever. I remember games like Zork, Wasteland, and The Bard's Tale requiring some pretty sophisticated puzzle solving skills. Sometimes it would take days, or even weeks before the player came up with a solution. But after all the hair-pulling, and pacing back and forth in front of the computer, finding the solution(on your own, of with your friends) was exciting! It's an experience that the next generation of gamers won't get to have.
Nowadays if you're presented with a problem in a game, it's just a few steps away from being solved. You just goto Google, enter a few keywords, take 5-10 mins reading and bingo you've probably found the solution.
Most of us think of the internet as a beneficial and enabling technology, but in this case it's caused the end of an era.