Another interesting instance of a non-English programming language is Glagol, which is written entirely in Russian.
The most interesting thing about it, as the Wikipedia article describes, is how the Russian words it uses are very different from the words used by Russian programmers nowadays to describe the same concepts. The words in common usage today are often chosen based on how similar they sound to the English equivalent, e.g. operation => operatsiya; function => funktsiya; comment => kommentariy, etc. This is the case despite the fact that a lot of these Russian cognates have somewhat different meanings from their English counterparts.
The words used in Glagol, on the other hand, are much more elegant and more accurately describe the concepts they represent. It's unfortunate that the effects of English being the programming lingua franca include making conversations between Russian programmers more clumsy.
I became a little suspicious when, after having lived in the Czech Republic for over 8 years, today was the first time I've heard of this Kingdom of Wallachia. When I saw that the Wikipedia article on it comprised of a single sentence, I did a bit of research on this Kingdom, which I thought I'd share here.
Firstly, the NY Times gets a few things plain wrong. They claim that the Kingdom of Wallachia is in the north-east of the Czech republic, when it is in fact in the south-east (see official map). Furthermore, they claim that "[Wallachia] became one of the country's biggest tourist attractions", which they've seemed to have pulled right out of their asses, since it is not mentioned in any major Czech tourist sites at all. CzechTourism.com (the "official travel site of the Czech Republic") mentions Wallachia in only one article, without a word about it being a "kingdom" of any kind. It's also suspiciously absent from a list of the most visited tourist destinations on the same site, the list of Czech tourist attractions on IgoUgo, and has a general lack of web presence.
I eventually found the official website for the Kingdom, after searching for its Czech name "Valasské království", and found it to be very lacking in information in English. An interesting reversal of this can be found on the official website of the town Roznov pod Radhostem, where the official Wallachian Kingdom information centre (that also issues passports) is located. While the site has a page on the information centre in English, Polish, German, and French, there is no mention of it on the Czech version of the site.
At about this point, I realised that the Kingdom of Wallachia is even less newsworthy than even Molossia or the Conch Republic, so I stopped wasting my time on it. I suggest Slashdot editors and readers do the same.
Not that I disagree with your point, but "Taken" was released quite a long time ago outside the US, and is already available on DVD where I live (Australia).
I only noticed this fairly rare occurrence when I checked The Daily Show website today, and saw Liam Neeson promoting Taken as an upcoming guest for Thursday, which made me think: didn't I just see a huge "rent Taken now" poster in the Blockbuster window on my way to work?
I wish I could remember the name of this device, but it was essentially a MP3 player with no screen
I just want to point out that when a blind person walks down the street, the last thing they need is music coming out of their headphones, blocking noises from the environment.
Now, if you manage to integrate effective guided GPS navigation for pedestrian walkways into such a device, then you're in business.
Why the hell is this in a science museum? There isn't enough real science for them that they have to have exhibits of sci-fi? Great way to pass off entertainment as education.
Actually, this is a big improvement over the last major exhibition the museum hosted, which was on the life of Princess Diana (see link).
The museum's location within Sydney, despite being near the city centre, is such that it's really difficult to attract foot traffic from wandering tourists, so almost all visitors are people that actually set out with the intention of visiting the museum. This unfortunately means that these "big name" temporary exhibits are really needed to bring in visitors, even if their subject matter strays from the theme of the museum.
For such temporary exhibitions, the museum charges A$20 (for Diana) or A$24 (for Star Wars) on top of the A$10 admission price, but it's really a way for the museum to raise its profile and bring in more people, rather than actually make money. Apparently for the Diana exhibition, the ticket revenue wasn't even enough to cover the full cost of hosting the exhibit.
Editors, please, be more specific when mentioning Georgia, and clarify if you're referring to the country or the state.
To me and most people around me, the title "City In Georgia Planning Virtual World For Civic Interaction" suggests that the article is about an impoverished city in the Caucasus trying to use technology to better preserve its ancient heritage during new architectural developments.
My personal pet peeve is the various OTC pharmaceutical commercials.
One such commercial for either Rolaids or Tums — can't remember which — used the phrase "only [our product] neutralises the acid directly".
What especially interests me, is how does one go about neutralising acid indirectly? Do their competitors offer some sort of bacteria cultures with alkalic excrement? All antacids are just mild bases that raise the pH in your stomach. They're pretty much all equally effective, on par with plain baking soda or heavily diluted sodium hydroxide, which is sold as drain cleaner (yes, the one with the big POISON label on the bottle).
I'm sorry, but where I'm from, personal attacks of the nature you made warrant a trip to the nearest alley where I could beat your face in.
And yes, Czech Republic and their socialist ways were just great, I'll take big government over the free market any day.
If you want to argue about liberal vs. conservative economics, or the ethical issues in computer piracy, maybe you should find another thread. Slashdot is full of people more than willing to discuss those issues with you. And I know this isn't Wikipedia, but it's generally a good idea to refrain from personal attacks (unless you're clearly joking and it's really funny).
Anybody with half a brain would be on a capped plan or have some bandwidth monitoring. If you did your research before signing your lease you could have ADSL2+ from a non-Telstra ISP and be filling it with bittorrents. You didn't think to ask where the phone was?
The first 3G capped plan offered in Australia was introduces by Vodafone a few months ago. Three still doesn't offer capped 3G plans to this day. Yes, perhaps I could have used some sort of software bandwidth monitoring, but we hadn't gone over the cap for the previous 6 months, so I didn't think it was necessary. The $360 bill was an example of how dearly you pay for mistakes like that when you're on a 3G plan.
I'm sure that when you're looking for a place to live in rural South Australia, you have the luxury of "asking where the phone was" and having the answer to that question be a factor in your decision process. Things are quite a bit different in Sydney (and AFAIK, other major Aussie cities). Last time I was looking for a place to live in Sydney, I was applying and being rejected from 3 different places every week for 2 months before I found a place. Things like this are not uncommon. I have personally counted over 75 people at one of the house inspections I went to in Enmore. When your rental agent tells you he's found a place you can actually have, the only question you have the luxury to ask is "can I afford it".
Your choice. Perhaps the rent was cheaper for a reason?
Sure, if you consider $270/week for a 1-bedroom cheap.
Perhaps your girlfriend should buy her doggie porn instead of steal it.
That was uncalled for.
All I'm whinging about is the, as you put it, "bastard phone company". It's a bit ridiculous that a house in the middle of Sydney wouldn't have a phone line, while the outback seems to be getting all the attention. Not to mention the overpriced ADSL plans the Aussies who do have a hard line get to choose from. When I lived in the Czech Republic, the main telco was a nationalised monopoly, and still provided better service and rates than Telstra (even with the purchasing power parity difference taken into account).
I suggest you cool it. Australia is probably the best place I've ever lived, and I've lived in quite a few places. House prices, Telstra, and its distance from the rest of the world are its only disadvantages really. I guess its inhabitants could also use a bit less defensiveness.
At least he's lucky enough to even have a home line. I live 20 min away by foot (or 5 min by bus) from Sydney CBD (Central Business District), and my house isn't even wired for a phone line. The house in the middle of a heavily residential area (Glebe), it's not too old or new, and it's got 3 floors with 3 one- or two-bedroom apartments on each floor.
Telstra demands $700 to connect the house to the phone line, and neither the landlord nor the tenants will cough up the money. Hence I'm stuck with a wireless HSDPA (3G) plan from Three, which is $20 a month for a 2 GB download+upload cap. One day, my girlfriend left LimeWire open on her laptop when she left for work in the morning; that month we had a $360 bill. I thank $deity every day for unlimited Internet at uni and ImageShack's Torrent Drive.
The Internet situation in Australia truly is atrocious. I have no doubt that the OP had a better experience out in the outback. It seems that all the plans the government has been proposing put the sheep farmer's interests first. I guess they need to track their flock via GPS or something.
Actually, after watching the video again just to make sure, I believe it is you who is mistaken.
Proving that you tried to find an American worker to fill a position before hiring a foreign worker is not a requirement for an H-1B visa. It is only a requirement for a green card, which is what the video is about.
The only requirement for an H-1B besides the usual paperwork and fees, is proving that that the H-1B worker will be paid the prevailing wage for the particular position. Now, if you want to talk about companies purposefully describing a position as having lower required skills and duties than the position actually entails, so that it falls into a lower prevailing wage bracket, then hiring H-1Bs at a lower wage than Americans, that's a different issue. In fact, that is one of the specific types of fraud that TFA is concerned with. But again, the video in question has nothing to do with it.
As people have already pointed out in the first reply that linked to that video, it is completely irrelevant to the discussion. The video talks about the tactics used by companies to prove they could not find an American worker for a position they want to give to a foreigner. However, they are only required to do this for green card applications, not H-1Bs.
Also, as previously mentioned, when put into the context of the green card application process, the tactics outlined in the video, even though they sound shady and outrageous, make perfect sense. After all, when you as an employer want an established employee to continue working for your company and want to help them get a green card so they can stay in the country, you already have the particular worker in mind. Thus, the last thing you want to do is go out in search of someone else who can do his or her job, which is what immigration requires you to do.
In fact, not a lot of firms will actually bother with the lengthy and expensive green card application procedure (which they are burdened with, not the employee). If you ask most legal immigrants, they will tell you that it is usually much easier to stay for years on the H-1B until you eventually win the Diversity Lottery (if you're lucky enough to be from a country that qualifies), or marry an American.
I myself, having experiencing the horrid immigration system in the US firsthand, after completing a bachelor's degree in a fairly prestigious university in the US (none of the Bangalore Institute of Technology, or mail-order degree crap), decided to move to Australia instead, which has welcomed me with open arms. Here, anyone who speaks good English, is young, and has desirable skills, has a clear path to citizenship. Canada has very similar policies as well.
I should emphasise that the ability to speak English plays a major role in determining your eligibility to emigrate into Australia. Not only is there a pretty high minimum score and significant additional "points" for those who get higher scores, the test itself, IELTS, is one of the best tests I've ever had to take. It certainly beats the TOEFL required for the US hands down. The IELTS is scored in 4 categories: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and the lowest score you manage to get is the one used by immigration to assess you. Thus, even if you perform well in reading and listening, unless you can get your point across clearly in an essay or in a conversation, you are screwed. Also note that your conversation (for the speaking test) will always be held with a native English speaker. One of my favourite minor tidbits about the test was the fact that in the listening test, they purposefully use recordings of people speaking with a wide variety of native English accents (i.e. British Received Pronounciation, Broad Australian, Southern, etc).
On the other hand, illegal immigration is not nearly as large an issue for Canada and Australia as it is for the US. I suspect that it is the grouping of legal and illegal immigration in American minds that has caused the US immigration policies to become so decrepit.
That story sounds worthy of NotAlwaysRight.com. I think you should definitely post it there.
In case you're not familiar with the site, it's a great collection of stories (just dialogues, actually) about stupid/funny/difficult customers told by service industry workers.
Anyone else seeing Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan as blank areas with no towns or roads in Google Maps? The change happened sometime in the last few hours.
Umm...WRONG!
As someone who was born and raised in Armenia and often visits Google Maps to see if the map data or satellite imagery has been updated, I can definitively say that throughout the entire existence of Google Maps, all three Transcaucasian republics have always been blank with no road and city data.
I'm sick of hearing people say that Americans are losing jobs due to foreigners with H1-Bs willing to work for less. That is utter nonsense. To be eligible for an H1-B visa, your employer must pay you the "prevailing wage" for that position in that geographical region. If you look up the prevailing wage database, you'll see that those wages are on the high side, and foreigners often have problems finding a job that pays enough for them to qualify for an H1-B.
This increase in the validity period of the OPT (Optional Practical Training) from 12 to 29 months is one of the best things to happen to the US immigration system in a long time. Previously, as a foreign student, you would graduate around May, get your OPT, start working, and within a couple of months you'd know if your employer was willing to sponsor your H1-B (remember, it's a lot of hassle for the employer, since they have to fill in all the paperwork and pay all the hefty fees). If they are, you have to wait until April of next year, which is when H1-B applications can be sent, and IF (and that's a very very big if) you were lucky enough to be approved, your visa would be given to you in October. However, since you're on your OPT, which expires in May, you have to leave the country and twiddle your thumbs until you can come back in October and resume working.
Now don't forget that you're not very likely to get your H1-B on your first try, so if after you've left the US in May you find out that your application was rejected, you have to plead with your employer to keep your application active, so that if it's approved next year, you can come back next October and resume your job (after a 1.5 year break). As you can clearly see, this is not a very good system.
With the extension of the OPT's duration to 29 months, new graduates will now be able to stay in the US and work until the October that comes 2 years after their graduation in May; i.e. this gives them exactly enough time to be able to apply for the H1-B twice, and not have to leave the country and interrupt their employment if it's approved.
Makes a lot of sense to me. Not as much as the superb Australian immigration system (except for the way they treat refugees), but still a move in the right direction.
I find the following line from the article interesting:
Analysts believe Apple may still have time to modify the iPhone to tighten its locks before the phone is launched in Europe.
Since some European countries, such as Finland, do not allow the sale of phones that are locked to a provider, and many of the other countries have regulations that require operators to unlock the phones they sell on request, or after a certain (usually pretty short) amount of time, wouldn't Apple need to use the time they have to loosen rather than tighten their locks?
Wonder why they never hooked it up to Internet Options. Probably because they included a tool in the Windows 2000 Professional Resource Kit (don't know about XP), which I think was called "Quick Links", that allows you to set up address bar keyword searching in IE 6 (don't know about 7), and they want you to buy the kit.
No, we wouldn't. I guarantee that I could manage hundreds of portfolios and not make money on any of them. Actually, if you could guarantee that you can manage hundreds of potrfolios that do not make any money, you guarantee by definition that you can manage hundreds of portfolios that will all make money.
You would just short sell those same stocks instead of buying them (assuming commisions are negligible and that you're not trading penny stocks that can't be short sold)
Remember, if you know a stock is going to go down, you can make money just as easily as when you know it will go up. Short selling is available to any customer with a margin account (which usually just requires a minimum of $2,000 in funds) on most brokerages.
Try using TestDisk (it's OSS) for MBR/partition table recovery. Worked perfectly for me when the Debian installer screwed up my MBR. And in the future, just unplug your secondary drive during OS installation, then plug it back in once you get the system running.
In case you're curious how the Debian installer could've screwed up like that: I was installing Debian on a laptop hard drive (from a laptop that didn't have floppy, CD, or network), which I plugged in to my primary IDE channel and set as master. My main hard drive, which was on the same channel was also set as master, but the BIOS didn't detect it, so I figured it was inaccessible and didn't bother to unplug it. When the installer wrote the MBR to the laptop hard drive, it also managed to write the same one on my main drive as well. So now I had an 80GB drive with 5 NTFS and FAT32 partitions being read as a 320MB drive with a linux swap and linux ext3 partition. I made a temp install of Win2000 on my secondary HD and tried to recover it with a number of commercial partition table recovery tools, but none of them got the partitions right. Then I tried TestDisk, which detected all the partitions correctly and got my system running again. Moral of the story: always unplug things when you don't want them messed up.
Slashdot Mirror
Another interesting instance of a non-English programming language is Glagol, which is written entirely in Russian.
The most interesting thing about it, as the Wikipedia article describes, is how the Russian words it uses are very different from the words used by Russian programmers nowadays to describe the same concepts. The words in common usage today are often chosen based on how similar they sound to the English equivalent, e.g. operation => operatsiya; function => funktsiya; comment => kommentariy, etc. This is the case despite the fact that a lot of these Russian cognates have somewhat different meanings from their English counterparts.
The words used in Glagol, on the other hand, are much more elegant and more accurately describe the concepts they represent. It's unfortunate that the effects of English being the programming lingua franca include making conversations between Russian programmers more clumsy.
I think some really expensive stuff might actually sell more because it is expensive - caviar anyone?
Veblen goods is the term you're looking for.
I became a little suspicious when, after having lived in the Czech Republic for over 8 years, today was the first time I've heard of this Kingdom of Wallachia. When I saw that the Wikipedia article on it comprised of a single sentence, I did a bit of research on this Kingdom, which I thought I'd share here.
Firstly, the NY Times gets a few things plain wrong. They claim that the Kingdom of Wallachia is in the north-east of the Czech republic, when it is in fact in the south-east (see official map). Furthermore, they claim that "[Wallachia] became one of the country's biggest tourist attractions", which they've seemed to have pulled right out of their asses, since it is not mentioned in any major Czech tourist sites at all. CzechTourism.com (the "official travel site of the Czech Republic") mentions Wallachia in only one article, without a word about it being a "kingdom" of any kind. It's also suspiciously absent from a list of the most visited tourist destinations on the same site, the list of Czech tourist attractions on IgoUgo, and has a general lack of web presence.
I eventually found the official website for the Kingdom, after searching for its Czech name "Valasské království", and found it to be very lacking in information in English. An interesting reversal of this can be found on the official website of the town Roznov pod Radhostem, where the official Wallachian Kingdom information centre (that also issues passports) is located. While the site has a page on the information centre in English, Polish, German, and French, there is no mention of it on the Czech version of the site.
At about this point, I realised that the Kingdom of Wallachia is even less newsworthy than even Molossia or the Conch Republic, so I stopped wasting my time on it. I suggest Slashdot editors and readers do the same.
Not that I disagree with your point, but "Taken" was released quite a long time ago outside the US, and is already available on DVD where I live (Australia).
I only noticed this fairly rare occurrence when I checked The Daily Show website today, and saw Liam Neeson promoting Taken as an upcoming guest for Thursday, which made me think: didn't I just see a huge "rent Taken now" poster in the Blockbuster window on my way to work?
I wish I could remember the name of this device, but it was essentially a MP3 player with no screen
I just want to point out that when a blind person walks down the street, the last thing they need is music coming out of their headphones, blocking noises from the environment.
Now, if you manage to integrate effective guided GPS navigation for pedestrian walkways into such a device, then you're in business.
Why the hell is this in a science museum? There isn't enough real science for them that they have to have exhibits of sci-fi? Great way to pass off entertainment as education.
Actually, this is a big improvement over the last major exhibition the museum hosted, which was on the life of Princess Diana (see link).
The museum's location within Sydney, despite being near the city centre, is such that it's really difficult to attract foot traffic from wandering tourists, so almost all visitors are people that actually set out with the intention of visiting the museum. This unfortunately means that these "big name" temporary exhibits are really needed to bring in visitors, even if their subject matter strays from the theme of the museum.
For such temporary exhibitions, the museum charges A$20 (for Diana) or A$24 (for Star Wars) on top of the A$10 admission price, but it's really a way for the museum to raise its profile and bring in more people, rather than actually make money. Apparently for the Diana exhibition, the ticket revenue wasn't even enough to cover the full cost of hosting the exhibit.
Editors, please, be more specific when mentioning Georgia, and clarify if you're referring to the country or the state.
To me and most people around me, the title "City In Georgia Planning Virtual World For Civic Interaction" suggests that the article is about an impoverished city in the Caucasus trying to use technology to better preserve its ancient heritage during new architectural developments.
My personal pet peeve is the various OTC pharmaceutical commercials.
One such commercial for either Rolaids or Tums — can't remember which — used the phrase "only [our product] neutralises the acid directly".
What especially interests me, is how does one go about neutralising acid indirectly? Do their competitors offer some sort of bacteria cultures with alkalic excrement? All antacids are just mild bases that raise the pH in your stomach. They're pretty much all equally effective, on par with plain baking soda or heavily diluted sodium hydroxide, which is sold as drain cleaner (yes, the one with the big POISON label on the bottle).
Do not expect anything you hear in an ad to be remotely true, apart fom "product XYZ exists".
Does this rule also apply to Duke Nukem Forever trailers?
And yes, Czech Republic and their socialist ways were just great, I'll take big government over the free market any day.
If you want to argue about liberal vs. conservative economics, or the ethical issues in computer piracy, maybe you should find another thread. Slashdot is full of people more than willing to discuss those issues with you. And I know this isn't Wikipedia, but it's generally a good idea to refrain from personal attacks (unless you're clearly joking and it's really funny).
Anybody with half a brain would be on a capped plan or have some bandwidth monitoring. If you did your research before signing your lease you could have ADSL2+ from a non-Telstra ISP and be filling it with bittorrents. You didn't think to ask where the phone was?
The first 3G capped plan offered in Australia was introduces by Vodafone a few months ago. Three still doesn't offer capped 3G plans to this day. Yes, perhaps I could have used some sort of software bandwidth monitoring, but we hadn't gone over the cap for the previous 6 months, so I didn't think it was necessary. The $360 bill was an example of how dearly you pay for mistakes like that when you're on a 3G plan.
I'm sure that when you're looking for a place to live in rural South Australia, you have the luxury of "asking where the phone was" and having the answer to that question be a factor in your decision process. Things are quite a bit different in Sydney (and AFAIK, other major Aussie cities). Last time I was looking for a place to live in Sydney, I was applying and being rejected from 3 different places every week for 2 months before I found a place. Things like this are not uncommon. I have personally counted over 75 people at one of the house inspections I went to in Enmore. When your rental agent tells you he's found a place you can actually have, the only question you have the luxury to ask is "can I afford it".
Sure, if you consider $270/week for a 1-bedroom cheap.
Perhaps your girlfriend should buy her doggie porn instead of steal it.
That was uncalled for.
All I'm whinging about is the, as you put it, "bastard phone company". It's a bit ridiculous that a house in the middle of Sydney wouldn't have a phone line, while the outback seems to be getting all the attention. Not to mention the overpriced ADSL plans the Aussies who do have a hard line get to choose from. When I lived in the Czech Republic, the main telco was a nationalised monopoly, and still provided better service and rates than Telstra (even with the purchasing power parity difference taken into account).
I suggest you cool it. Australia is probably the best place I've ever lived, and I've lived in quite a few places. House prices, Telstra, and its distance from the rest of the world are its only disadvantages really. I guess its inhabitants could also use a bit less defensiveness.
At least he's lucky enough to even have a home line. I live 20 min away by foot (or 5 min by bus) from Sydney CBD (Central Business District), and my house isn't even wired for a phone line. The house in the middle of a heavily residential area (Glebe), it's not too old or new, and it's got 3 floors with 3 one- or two-bedroom apartments on each floor.
Telstra demands $700 to connect the house to the phone line, and neither the landlord nor the tenants will cough up the money. Hence I'm stuck with a wireless HSDPA (3G) plan from Three, which is $20 a month for a 2 GB download+upload cap. One day, my girlfriend left LimeWire open on her laptop when she left for work in the morning; that month we had a $360 bill. I thank $deity every day for unlimited Internet at uni and ImageShack's Torrent Drive.
The Internet situation in Australia truly is atrocious. I have no doubt that the OP had a better experience out in the outback. It seems that all the plans the government has been proposing put the sheep farmer's interests first. I guess they need to track their flock via GPS or something.
Actually, after watching the video again just to make sure, I believe it is you who is mistaken.
Proving that you tried to find an American worker to fill a position before hiring a foreign worker is not a requirement for an H-1B visa. It is only a requirement for a green card, which is what the video is about.
The only requirement for an H-1B besides the usual paperwork and fees, is proving that that the H-1B worker will be paid the prevailing wage for the particular position. Now, if you want to talk about companies purposefully describing a position as having lower required skills and duties than the position actually entails, so that it falls into a lower prevailing wage bracket, then hiring H-1Bs at a lower wage than Americans, that's a different issue. In fact, that is one of the specific types of fraud that TFA is concerned with. But again, the video in question has nothing to do with it.
As people have already pointed out in the first reply that linked to that video, it is completely irrelevant to the discussion. The video talks about the tactics used by companies to prove they could not find an American worker for a position they want to give to a foreigner. However, they are only required to do this for green card applications, not H-1Bs.
Also, as previously mentioned, when put into the context of the green card application process, the tactics outlined in the video, even though they sound shady and outrageous, make perfect sense. After all, when you as an employer want an established employee to continue working for your company and want to help them get a green card so they can stay in the country, you already have the particular worker in mind. Thus, the last thing you want to do is go out in search of someone else who can do his or her job, which is what immigration requires you to do.
In fact, not a lot of firms will actually bother with the lengthy and expensive green card application procedure (which they are burdened with, not the employee). If you ask most legal immigrants, they will tell you that it is usually much easier to stay for years on the H-1B until you eventually win the Diversity Lottery (if you're lucky enough to be from a country that qualifies), or marry an American.
I myself, having experiencing the horrid immigration system in the US firsthand, after completing a bachelor's degree in a fairly prestigious university in the US (none of the Bangalore Institute of Technology, or mail-order degree crap), decided to move to Australia instead, which has welcomed me with open arms. Here, anyone who speaks good English, is young, and has desirable skills, has a clear path to citizenship. Canada has very similar policies as well.
I should emphasise that the ability to speak English plays a major role in determining your eligibility to emigrate into Australia. Not only is there a pretty high minimum score and significant additional "points" for those who get higher scores, the test itself, IELTS, is one of the best tests I've ever had to take. It certainly beats the TOEFL required for the US hands down. The IELTS is scored in 4 categories: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and the lowest score you manage to get is the one used by immigration to assess you. Thus, even if you perform well in reading and listening, unless you can get your point across clearly in an essay or in a conversation, you are screwed. Also note that your conversation (for the speaking test) will always be held with a native English speaker. One of my favourite minor tidbits about the test was the fact that in the listening test, they purposefully use recordings of people speaking with a wide variety of native English accents (i.e. British Received Pronounciation, Broad Australian, Southern, etc).
On the other hand, illegal immigration is not nearly as large an issue for Canada and Australia as it is for the US. I suspect that it is the grouping of legal and illegal immigration in American minds that has caused the US immigration policies to become so decrepit.
That story sounds worthy of NotAlwaysRight.com. I think you should definitely post it there.
In case you're not familiar with the site, it's a great collection of stories (just dialogues, actually) about stupid/funny/difficult customers told by service industry workers.
Anyone notice Stallman reprising his monkeyboy antics on the I'm a PC site?
I couldn't find a way to link to the video directly, but he's on the leftmost column, second from the top.
Anyone else seeing Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan as blank areas with no towns or roads in Google Maps? The change happened sometime in the last few hours.
Umm...WRONG!
As someone who was born and raised in Armenia and often visits Google Maps to see if the map data or satellite imagery has been updated, I can definitively say that throughout the entire existence of Google Maps, all three Transcaucasian republics have always been blank with no road and city data.
I'm sick of hearing people say that Americans are losing jobs due to foreigners with H1-Bs willing to work for less. That is utter nonsense. To be eligible for an H1-B visa, your employer must pay you the "prevailing wage" for that position in that geographical region. If you look up the prevailing wage database, you'll see that those wages are on the high side, and foreigners often have problems finding a job that pays enough for them to qualify for an H1-B.
This increase in the validity period of the OPT (Optional Practical Training) from 12 to 29 months is one of the best things to happen to the US immigration system in a long time. Previously, as a foreign student, you would graduate around May, get your OPT, start working, and within a couple of months you'd know if your employer was willing to sponsor your H1-B (remember, it's a lot of hassle for the employer, since they have to fill in all the paperwork and pay all the hefty fees). If they are, you have to wait until April of next year, which is when H1-B applications can be sent, and IF (and that's a very very big if) you were lucky enough to be approved, your visa would be given to you in October. However, since you're on your OPT, which expires in May, you have to leave the country and twiddle your thumbs until you can come back in October and resume working.
Now don't forget that you're not very likely to get your H1-B on your first try, so if after you've left the US in May you find out that your application was rejected, you have to plead with your employer to keep your application active, so that if it's approved next year, you can come back next October and resume your job (after a 1.5 year break). As you can clearly see, this is not a very good system.
With the extension of the OPT's duration to 29 months, new graduates will now be able to stay in the US and work until the October that comes 2 years after their graduation in May; i.e. this gives them exactly enough time to be able to apply for the H1-B twice, and not have to leave the country and interrupt their employment if it's approved.
Makes a lot of sense to me. Not as much as the superb Australian immigration system (except for the way they treat refugees), but still a move in the right direction.
Actually, the full term is "Jack of all trades, master of none, though ofttimes better than master of one".
C _master_of_none
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_all_trades%2
Hyponatremia is the word you're looking for.
You would just short sell those same stocks instead of buying them (assuming commisions are negligible and that you're not trading penny stocks that can't be short sold)
Remember, if you know a stock is going to go down, you can make money just as easily as when you know it will go up. Short selling is available to any customer with a margin account (which usually just requires a minimum of $2,000 in funds) on most brokerages.
Are we to understand that Slashdot has been Slashdotted?
Try using TestDisk (it's OSS) for MBR/partition table recovery. Worked perfectly for me when the Debian installer screwed up my MBR. And in the future, just unplug your secondary drive during OS installation, then plug it back in once you get the system running.
In case you're curious how the Debian installer could've screwed up like that: I was installing Debian on a laptop hard drive (from a laptop that didn't have floppy, CD, or network), which I plugged in to my primary IDE channel and set as master. My main hard drive, which was on the same channel was also set as master, but the BIOS didn't detect it, so I figured it was inaccessible and didn't bother to unplug it. When the installer wrote the MBR to the laptop hard drive, it also managed to write the same one on my main drive as well. So now I had an 80GB drive with 5 NTFS and FAT32 partitions being read as a 320MB drive with a linux swap and linux ext3 partition. I made a temp install of Win2000 on my secondary HD and tried to recover it with a number of commercial partition table recovery tools, but none of them got the partitions right. Then I tried TestDisk, which detected all the partitions correctly and got my system running again. Moral of the story: always unplug things when you don't want them messed up.
Hope this helps.