H1B workers have to pay the same level of taxes as a US citizens, including Social Security which they normally won't be able to collect unless they eventually get green cards or US citizenship.
"There is a different class of visa for that - employees of multinational companies going from one country to another."
That is the L1 visa, used for management. They use that to send the project managers and executives to the US. But the on-site developers have H1B. If they're using the L1 to send the regular developers, that's visa fraud.
Except that the H1B is being used to support and expand outsourcing. The big outsourcing companies send developers with H1B to clients in the US to provide an on-site presence to coordinate with the larger development teams in India or China. Without the H1B program being used like that, either the entire project would be done in the US, or American developers would fill the roles of the on-site technical leads.
Access to secret data and documents should be on a need-to-know basis, or a practical approximation of it. It's clear that he had access far beyond what he needed to know. If he can't get at the sensitive documents in the first place he can't copy them to USB or use his cellphone to take pictures of them or upload them to his Wikileaks partners.
"Al Capone was convicted on the basis of an "encrypted journal" that the government interpreted."
Did the government interpret it, or did they force Capone to interpret it? There's a big difference there.
The 5th Amendment doesn't stop the police from trying to brute-force the encryption key until they find it. The protection is against forcing you to interpret the data for them by supplying the password from your brain.
"Forcing somebody to unlock their data is not the same as forcing somebody to sign a statement. After all, it's real data, it's already there. By being forced to unlock the data you are not being forced to say something new, it's not new information that is on the disk, it's not like you are forced to say: I am guilty, here is the body.
You are forced to open a box that may have data providing that you are guilty, but that information is already there and it's not new, you weren't forced to first create that data and then give it up, you are forced to open the data that existed already in a form that is not attached to you, it's independent of you, it is already existing outside of you."
Those box and lock analogies don't really apply to encryption. Every byte of data is already available to the police, it's just that it's not in a form where they can discern any meaning from it. Decrypting isn't unlocking a safe, it's transforming the contents of an already-open safe into something the police can interpret.
The 5th amendment protects you from having to help the police interpret the evidence against you or give them information from your brain to reveal your association with the evidence. Having to decrypt the drives would both be helping the police interpret the data and effectively admitting to ownership or control of the data.
At this point they apparently have enough to convict him for possessing child pr0n, but that's not their main goal.
Their main goal is to obtain a precedent-setting decision that they can use to force other people in the present and future to decrypt their hard drives.
or "technical lead" or "team leader" or whatever who was organizing how all the pieces fit together, and reviewing the team members' designs to ensure they're compatible with each other and the rest of the system.
It's a management failure that they didn't assign somebody to be in that role (or otherwise have the team choose who within the team will be the technical lead).
If loading software turns a general-purpose computer into a new machine, the patent for that "new machine" should include all the internal details to make it work, particlularly the source code. Then if somebody else implements the same concept with different source code and different algorithms, they made a different machine so it's not infringing.
Just like amputee athletes have prosthetic legs specialized for running which they don't use for walking around on a day-to-day basis, she might benefit from a prosthetic specifically made to hold a paintbrush, or one where the end of it actually is a paintbrush. That could be both cheaper and more usable than a prosthetic hand which attempts to use intricate finger controls to try to hold a paintbrush.
Yes, it's true that the patent is only on the isolated gene, and not the gene in the form as it exists naturally in the body.
However, the process for isolating this gene is something that has already been done for years with other genes, so there is nothing patentworthy in isolating this gene.
" Your hypothetical construction worker just didn't have that negotiated into his contract or written into law somewhere. Instead, he negotiated to be paid upfront, rather than not getting a wage at all for his hard work and promised the mere possibility of future profits if the building actually made any money down the road."
You're missing the big difference here, which is that the law by default gives the artists a lifetime entitlement of royalties, whereas the construction worker doesn't have that default right embedded in the law. The law is giving strong preferential treatment to one type of creator over the other; it's not just about their negotiating abilities.
Probably a total of a half-dozen times in the 3 or 4 years it was in effect. But that's largely because there was so much code already written before the policy was in effect, and it wasn't enforced rigorously enough. For example, code reviews didn't require going through a diff from the previous version, and code reviews weren't always done consistently and thoroughly.
By contrast, there were a few dozen times when I was painstakingly searching through old versions to figure out if something was deliberately deleted vs. the programmer forgot to put it there in the first place. Appropriate comments would have saved time there. That was made worse by the horrible version control system in use.
At a previous employer, there was a *written* rule for deleting significant blocks of code.
If a properly functioning block of code already in production was being deleted due to changes in business requirements, a comment should be inserted at or near the point of deletion, which mentions that some code was deleted and the original code can be found in version x.xx, and preferably a phrase saying what it did.
However, if the code was not yet released to the production system, or was being deleted because it's buggy, it was acceptable to simply delete it without leaving a comment (if somebody needed to research an old bug they could look in the bug tracker, which would show which version of the code last had the bug, so there was no need to mention the bug-deletion in the code).
Guatemala wants to deport him to Belize, but he is a US citizen. Instead of trying to stay in Guatemala, I would think he has a better chance of convincing them to return him to the US (at his expense, due to the greater distance compared to Belize) than of being allowed to stay in Guatemala.
But I see no sign that he's trying to go back to the US. Did he surrender his US citizenship?
I was referring to going back to the US from Guatamela. Once he's in Guatemala, he could either seek to get on a plane to the US like a regular passenger, or ask Guatemala to deport him to the US at his own expense.
If Belize is a problem for him, why doesn't he move back to the US? He still has his US citizenship, and Guatemala will seek to deport him to the US.
How can he have a valid asylum claim if his country of citizenship isn't giving him a problem? Or is he going to claim that the US will extradite him to Belize?
"What is the reasoning behind it being illegal to sell your non-vital organs? Is it to prevent people from being coerced into it under the guise of a legitimate transaction?"
Years ago in India when selling kidneys was legal, many people actually were coerced into selling their kidneys. Sometimes the coercion was by family members, other times by the kidney brokers who would get a cut of the transaction. This particular case is aggravated by the age of the donor (seller), a 17 year old minor.
"Always wondered why this was the case. You'd think if this venue was opened up, there would be more organs going where they are needed without requiring the donor first have a nasty case of death."
Or it could actually decrease the available supply if people who would have otherwise donated out of kindness start demanding more and more money, making the transplants more unaffordable. And some people staying out of it altogether because they're disgusted with the coercion and corruption.
If you make it standard procedure to ask for an account number, the customers will ensure that the number is known to the individuals who call for support.
Slashdot Mirror
H1B workers have to pay the same level of taxes as a US citizens, including Social Security which they normally won't be able to collect unless they eventually get green cards or US citizenship.
"There is a different class of visa for that - employees of multinational companies going from one country to another."
That is the L1 visa, used for management. They use that to send the project managers and executives to the US. But the on-site developers have H1B. If they're using the L1 to send the regular developers, that's visa fraud.
Except that the H1B is being used to support and expand outsourcing. The big outsourcing companies send developers with H1B to clients in the US to provide an on-site presence to coordinate with the larger development teams in India or China. Without the H1B program being used like that, either the entire project would be done in the US, or American developers would fill the roles of the on-site technical leads.
Ultimately somebody has to be trusted, but that level of trust shouldn't be placed in the hands of a 29-year-old contractor.
Access to secret data and documents should be on a need-to-know basis, or a practical approximation of it. It's clear that he had access far beyond what he needed to know. If he can't get at the sensitive documents in the first place he can't copy them to USB or use his cellphone to take pictures of them or upload them to his Wikileaks partners.
"Al Capone was convicted on the basis of an "encrypted journal" that the government interpreted."
Did the government interpret it, or did they force Capone to interpret it? There's a big difference there.
The 5th Amendment doesn't stop the police from trying to brute-force the encryption key until they find it. The protection is against forcing you to interpret the data for them by supplying the password from your brain.
"Forcing somebody to unlock their data is not the same as forcing somebody to sign a statement. After all, it's real data, it's already there. By being forced to unlock the data you are not being forced to say something new, it's not new information that is on the disk, it's not like you are forced to say: I am guilty, here is the body.
You are forced to open a box that may have data providing that you are guilty, but that information is already there and it's not new, you weren't forced to first create that data and then give it up, you are forced to open the data that existed already in a form that is not attached to you, it's independent of you, it is already existing outside of you."
Those box and lock analogies don't really apply to encryption. Every byte of data is already available to the police, it's just that it's not in a form where they can discern any meaning from it. Decrypting isn't unlocking a safe, it's transforming the contents of an already-open safe into something the police can interpret.
The 5th amendment protects you from having to help the police interpret the evidence against you or give them information from your brain to reveal your association with the evidence. Having to decrypt the drives would both be helping the police interpret the data and effectively admitting to ownership or control of the data.
At this point they apparently have enough to convict him for possessing child pr0n, but that's not their main goal.
Their main goal is to obtain a precedent-setting decision that they can use to force other people in the present and future to decrypt their hard drives.
or "technical lead" or "team leader" or whatever who was organizing how all the pieces fit together, and reviewing the team members' designs to ensure they're compatible with each other and the rest of the system.
It's a management failure that they didn't assign somebody to be in that role (or otherwise have the team choose who within the team will be the technical lead).
If loading software turns a general-purpose computer into a new machine, the patent for that "new machine" should include all the internal details to make it work, particlularly the source code. Then if somebody else implements the same concept with different source code and different algorithms, they made a different machine so it's not infringing.
Just like amputee athletes have prosthetic legs specialized for running which they don't use for walking around on a day-to-day basis, she might benefit from a prosthetic specifically made to hold a paintbrush, or one where the end of it actually is a paintbrush. That could be both cheaper and more usable than a prosthetic hand which attempts to use intricate finger controls to try to hold a paintbrush.
"Someone wrote a bit back that 70% of their applicants, who passed the HR screening I believe, couldn't even code fizz-buzz."
That looks like a problem with HR's ability to screen.
It can extend beyond 6 years with a pending green card application.
Yes, it's true that the patent is only on the isolated gene, and not the gene in the form as it exists naturally in the body.
However, the process for isolating this gene is something that has already been done for years with other genes, so there is nothing patentworthy in isolating this gene.
" Your hypothetical construction worker just didn't have that negotiated into his contract or written into law somewhere. Instead, he negotiated to be paid upfront, rather than not getting a wage at all for his hard work and promised the mere possibility of future profits if the building actually made any money down the road."
You're missing the big difference here, which is that the law by default gives the artists a lifetime entitlement of royalties, whereas the construction worker doesn't have that default right embedded in the law. The law is giving strong preferential treatment to one type of creator over the other; it's not just about their negotiating abilities.
Probably a total of a half-dozen times in the 3 or 4 years it was in effect. But that's largely because there was so much code already written before the policy was in effect, and it wasn't enforced rigorously enough. For example, code reviews didn't require going through a diff from the previous version, and code reviews weren't always done consistently and thoroughly.
By contrast, there were a few dozen times when I was painstakingly searching through old versions to figure out if something was deliberately deleted vs. the programmer forgot to put it there in the first place. Appropriate comments would have saved time there. That was made worse by the horrible version control system in use.
At a previous employer, there was a *written* rule for deleting significant blocks of code.
If a properly functioning block of code already in production was being deleted due to changes in business requirements, a comment should be inserted at or near the point of deletion, which mentions that some code was deleted and the original code can be found in version x.xx, and preferably a phrase saying what it did.
However, if the code was not yet released to the production system, or was being deleted because it's buggy, it was acceptable to simply delete it without leaving a comment (if somebody needed to research an old bug they could look in the bug tracker, which would show which version of the code last had the bug, so there was no need to mention the bug-deletion in the code).
Read the article. The bigger-brained guppies were smarter in the tests they were given.
Because you'd be free to use other people's older music to make derivative works.
But in reality, being able to claim "It's made by Cisco" is the reason they DON'T get fired or demoted.
Guatemala wants to deport him to Belize, but he is a US citizen. Instead of trying to stay in Guatemala, I would think he has a better chance of convincing them to return him to the US (at his expense, due to the greater distance compared to Belize) than of being allowed to stay in Guatemala.
But I see no sign that he's trying to go back to the US. Did he surrender his US citizenship?
I was referring to going back to the US from Guatamela. Once he's in Guatemala, he could either seek to get on a plane to the US like a regular passenger, or ask Guatemala to deport him to the US at his own expense.
If Belize is a problem for him, why doesn't he move back to the US? He still has his US citizenship, and Guatemala will seek to deport him to the US.
How can he have a valid asylum claim if his country of citizenship isn't giving him a problem? Or is he going to claim that the US will extradite him to Belize?
"What is the reasoning behind it being illegal to sell your non-vital organs? Is it to prevent people from being coerced into it under the guise of a legitimate transaction?"
Years ago in India when selling kidneys was legal, many people actually were coerced into selling their kidneys. Sometimes the coercion was by family members, other times by the kidney brokers who would get a cut of the transaction.
This particular case is aggravated by the age of the donor (seller), a 17 year old minor.
"Always wondered why this was the case. You'd think if this venue was opened up, there would be more organs going where they are needed without requiring the donor first have a nasty case of death."
Or it could actually decrease the available supply if people who would have otherwise donated out of kindness start demanding more and more money, making the transplants more unaffordable. And some people staying out of it altogether because they're disgusted with the coercion and corruption.
If you make it standard procedure to ask for an account number, the customers will ensure that the number is known to the individuals who call for support.