SEN. KENNEDY: Just one additional point. In the H1-B there are provisions in there where they pay a fee into a fund so that they train Americans and upgrade their skills as a part of the H1-B.
Let me just finally ask you this. You've given a number of recommendations on competitiveness and immigration and others, in education. What's your - just if you could summarize your sense of urgency, how much time do we have? I mean, what's the framework, where would you say, as somebody that's obviously thought about this a good deal, has specific recommendations, and is familiar with these forces in other parts of the world, what guidance can you give to us about the sense of urgency? I think for all of us who deal with education think every day that's gone by with a lost child, for a child to lose that opportunity for learning is a day that probably can't be recaptured. There's a sense of urgency in terms of education as years go back and we lose these opportunities. What's your sense just in terms of the country, the competitiveness, and what's happening in other parts of the world?
BILL GATES: Yeah, I think both of these are incredibly urgent issues. Education, because as you say, it takes a long time, and so you've got to get started now improving the teachers and trying out the new incentive systems - even if it's going to take decades, the sooner you get going the better.
In the immigration case it's much more of an acute crisis in that the message is clearly here today that you come to the U.S., go to these great universities, and you go back and not only take your very high paying job, but also all the jobs around it back to another country. And other rich countries are stepping up and showing the flexibility of trying to benefit from the way we're turning these people away. In every way this country benefits by having these very high paid jobs here in this country.
And so if you talk to a student who's in school today, going to graduate in June, they're seeing that they cannot apply until they get their degree, and by the time they get their degree, all those visas are gone. If somebody is here on an H1-B, if you're from India, say, with a bachelor's degree, the current backlog would have you wait decades before you could get a green card, and during that time your family can't work, there are limits in terms of how you can change your job. There was one calculation done that the fastest way you'd get a green card is to have a child who becomes a United States citizen, and then your child sponsors you to become a U.S. citizen, and that's because there's more than 21 years in some of these backlogs.
So, this is an acute crisis. And it's a thing, as you say, there are fees paid, and Microsoft makes no complaint about those fees. We end up paying a lot more to somebody who comes in for these jobs from overseas than we do to somebody domestically. We have every reason - we have 3,000 open jobs right now. We're hiring the people domestically, everyone that we can. In fact, there's a great competition, this wage rate continues to go up, as it should.
And the wage rate for this type of skill set is not that different in other countries. It's escalated very rapidly in India and China. And particularly if you include the tax cost and the infrastructure cost that we pay to support this kid of job in those countries, this is not about saving a ton of money for a top engineer, this is about being able to put them here in this country where the other skill sets around them are the best in the world, and there's not a shortage in those other skill sets. And India and China haven't yet - and it will take them a long time before they're as good at the management, testing, marketing elements that go around those engineers.
So, this is an acute crisis and one that in terms of the taxes these people will pay, the fees that get paid around them is fiscally accretive to the United States immediately in terms of what happens. So, to me it's a very clear one with basically no downside that I can see whatsoever.
Isn't Google doing something very similar with their Google Toolbar? When I search using Google, they record which results/websites I opened and they can improve ranking of those websites. Of course this is biased toward getting feedback for only the top 10 results. Nevertheless I don't see much difference in the proposed algorithms.
One could also ask if bots would be a problem for gaming the Google Toolbar system. If you can game a WikiSearch engine, then you should also be able to game the Google Toolbar, right? Unless those projects do some sort of identity verification, then they will be always exploitable by bots (even with the proposed, random algorithm: imagine WikiSearch with 1,000,000 bots and 1,000 active real users - randomization wouldn't help here, right?)
Citing from the linked article: "Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles to the reviewers, sent extracts of the children's version and Britannica's "book of the year" to others, and in one case, simply stitched together bits from different articles and inserted its own material, passing it off as a single Britannica entry"
So how can I submit my sitemap to Yahoo! and Microsoft/search.live.com? FAQ says something about sending a HTTP request to /ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.y oursite.com%2Fsitemap.xml, but it doesn't say what are searchengine-specific urls to use.
Why people insist on using GFDL? There are projects which are doing just fine with publishing the content under one of CC licenses (WikiTravel) or even putting the content into public domain (Hikipedia).
My wife is in the US on an H4 visa.
She cannot apply for SSN.
You are trying to prevent her from
getting a driving license and driving a car.
I am in the US on an H1-b visa.
I don't have a US citizenship.
You are trying to get my WA driving license
away (you want me to walk to work or what?).
Lukasz
If you are a Turing Machne programmer then other languages offer you nothing that a Turing Machine doesn't.
Come on - it doesn't matter *what* I can do in a given language. Most languages (even functional ones) are equivalent to a Turing Machine (okay so one can argue about execution times, but the question was *what* is possible to program).
What I think matters is how easy it is to program something in haskell, lisp, python, c, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
SEN. KENNEDY: Just one additional point. In the H1-B there are provisions in there where they pay a fee into a fund so that they train Americans and upgrade their skills as a part of the H1-B. Let me just finally ask you this. You've given a number of recommendations on competitiveness and immigration and others, in education. What's your - just if you could summarize your sense of urgency, how much time do we have? I mean, what's the framework, where would you say, as somebody that's obviously thought about this a good deal, has specific recommendations, and is familiar with these forces in other parts of the world, what guidance can you give to us about the sense of urgency? I think for all of us who deal with education think every day that's gone by with a lost child, for a child to lose that opportunity for learning is a day that probably can't be recaptured. There's a sense of urgency in terms of education as years go back and we lose these opportunities. What's your sense just in terms of the country, the competitiveness, and what's happening in other parts of the world?
BILL GATES: Yeah, I think both of these are incredibly urgent issues. Education, because as you say, it takes a long time, and so you've got to get started now improving the teachers and trying out the new incentive systems - even if it's going to take decades, the sooner you get going the better.
In the immigration case it's much more of an acute crisis in that the message is clearly here today that you come to the U.S., go to these great universities, and you go back and not only take your very high paying job, but also all the jobs around it back to another country. And other rich countries are stepping up and showing the flexibility of trying to benefit from the way we're turning these people away. In every way this country benefits by having these very high paid jobs here in this country.
And so if you talk to a student who's in school today, going to graduate in June, they're seeing that they cannot apply until they get their degree, and by the time they get their degree, all those visas are gone. If somebody is here on an H1-B, if you're from India, say, with a bachelor's degree, the current backlog would have you wait decades before you could get a green card, and during that time your family can't work, there are limits in terms of how you can change your job. There was one calculation done that the fastest way you'd get a green card is to have a child who becomes a United States citizen, and then your child sponsors you to become a U.S. citizen, and that's because there's more than 21 years in some of these backlogs.
So, this is an acute crisis. And it's a thing, as you say, there are fees paid, and Microsoft makes no complaint about those fees. We end up paying a lot more to somebody who comes in for these jobs from overseas than we do to somebody domestically. We have every reason - we have 3,000 open jobs right now. We're hiring the people domestically, everyone that we can. In fact, there's a great competition, this wage rate continues to go up, as it should.
And the wage rate for this type of skill set is not that different in other countries. It's escalated very rapidly in India and China. And particularly if you include the tax cost and the infrastructure cost that we pay to support this kid of job in those countries, this is not about saving a ton of money for a top engineer, this is about being able to put them here in this country where the other skill sets around them are the best in the world, and there's not a shortage in those other skill sets. And India and China haven't yet - and it will take them a long time before they're as good at the management, testing, marketing elements that go around those engineers.
So, this is an acute crisis and one that in terms of the taxes these people will pay, the fees that get paid around them is fiscally accretive to the United States immediately in terms of what happens. So, to me it's a very clear one with basically no downside that I can see whatsoever.
Isn't Google doing something very similar with their Google Toolbar? When I search using Google, they record which results/websites I opened and they can improve ranking of those websites. Of course this is biased toward getting feedback for only the top 10 results. Nevertheless I don't see much difference in the proposed algorithms.
One could also ask if bots would be a problem for gaming the Google Toolbar system. If you can game a WikiSearch engine, then you should also be able to game the Google Toolbar, right? Unless those projects do some sort of identity verification, then they will be always exploitable by bots (even with the proposed, random algorithm: imagine WikiSearch with 1,000,000 bots and 1,000 active real users - randomization wouldn't help here, right?)
Lukasz
http://www.hikipedia.com/ - a free database of hiking trails built by the hiking community
Nature magazine cooked Wikipedia study: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/23/britannica _wikipedia_nature_study/
Citing from the linked article: "Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles to the reviewers, sent extracts of the children's version and Britannica's "book of the year" to others, and in one case, simply stitched together bits from different articles and inserted its own material, passing it off as a single Britannica entry"
Lukasz
http://www.hikipedia.com/ - a free database of hiking trails
So how can I submit my sitemap to Yahoo! and Microsoft/search.live.com? FAQ says something about sending a HTTP request to /ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.y oursite.com%2Fsitemap.xml, but it doesn't say what are searchengine-specific urls to use.
Lukasz
Hikipedia - free database of hiking trails
Why people insist on using GFDL? There are projects which are doing just fine with publishing the content under one of CC licenses (WikiTravel) or even putting the content into public domain (Hikipedia).
LukaszTheir experiment was not complete - you can see that a hard disk was on top of the box, not immersed in the oil.
My wife is in the US on an H4 visa. She cannot apply for SSN. You are trying to prevent her from getting a driving license and driving a car. I am in the US on an H1-b visa. I don't have a US citizenship. You are trying to get my WA driving license away (you want me to walk to work or what?). Lukasz
Come on - it doesn't matter *what* I can do in a given language. Most languages (even functional ones) are equivalent to a Turing Machine (okay so one can argue about execution times, but the question was *what* is possible to program).
What I think matters is how easy it is to program something in haskell, lisp, python, c, etc.