End of the line is you are destabilizing your society by pumping ever more arms into it; feelings of insecurity will rise, outbreaks of civil unrest will become more frequent and more violent. This in its turn calls for more policing. I don't say this is a quick process, but it is happening.
I'm not bothering with any of your other arguments because it is obvious we won't agree. So I'll just respond to this one paragraph.
The availability of guns does not increase the likelihood of civil unrest. Just the opposite. During the "Rodney King" riots of Los Angeles (I was living there at the time, so this is first hand knowlege, not something I "heard about") rioters and looters (almost all unarmed, fyi) ran unchecked through much of South Central Los Angeles. One neighboorhood in the middle of the worse damage, however, remained completely untouched. That was because the shop owners armed themselves and patrolled their own neighborhood. Oddly enough, the police (when they finally did bother to show their cowardly asses) tried to get the shop owners to give up their weapons. Fortunately, the shopowners were smart enough to tell the police to piss off.
These shop owners had created an impromptu militia to protect themselves. But not, as you argue the 2nd Amendment is for, to fight the government. They banded together to defend themselves from thieves and treaspassers because the government had abandoned their responsibility. Shooting thieves and treaspassers is not something you can automatically do, as you presumed we can do. It is done as a last resort. Shooting a trespasser is justified if you have a reasonable belief that the person(s) is planning physical violence or property damage.
Now this point is extremely important. Some people will argue that protecting property is not as important as someone's life. The mistake is in believing the property's value is what is important. It's not. The situation is the same whether the property is valued at a million dollars or a single dollar. It is the person's right to live his life in security that is at stake. That is what is being protected.
You can not put a price on a person's life, but a thief has chosen to take his chances by conducting his activities outside the rules of civil society. Society, therefore, has no reason to extend any curtesy to such a person when he is in the act of violating its rules. We do give such a person a minimal amount of warning, however, because we are not barbarians. If the opportunity allows, we will warn the person that failure to cease their activities will result in the use of deadly force. This is what the shopowners did in South Central Los Angeles. I don't remember if they had to actually shoot anyone (I think they fired warning shots), but I have no doubt they would have shot dead anyone who failed to heed their warnings.
The right to keep and bare arms was meant to protect the free state (in combination with the militia), instead you use it to shoot thieves and trespassers. By not being explicit enough on this, your 2nd amendment has caused the untimely death of thousands and thousands of your own citizens.
You seem to think the vaughness was a mistake. You are wrong. It was intentionally worded that way. Something easily realized if you read the various writings of the creators of the Constitution.
We have the right to defend ourselves, something European governments seem to dislike. Your governments would rather see innocent people killed than use force to defend themselves. Take England, for example, not only do they outlaw all guns, but they make it a crime to use force to stop a criminal, even one doing bodily harm to an innocent person. People have been tossed in prison simply for defending themselves. The governments reasoning is weak, that only the government has the right to use force. The result is violent crime in England spiraling out of control. The number of gun crimes in the last few years proves the old saying, "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." I used to think that slogan was a bit reactionary. England has proved me wrong.
I've yet to figure out why you would believe shooting thieves is a bad thing. Are you, perchance, one of those idiot European judges that free criminals for any reason, justifying your actions with, "he was treated badly by society."? We have a few judges like that. They usually don't last very long (except in Berkeley).
if you for one second are going against the constitution of the united states, you are a utter moron.
Excellent retort. Our Constitution is one of the greatest documents written in the history of mankind. It's too bad fucktards like Ashcroft forget their job is to uphold and defend it, not rape it in a zealous fit of witch-hunting.
The constitution is what makes america great. not our money, not our military, not our horrible rock music.
That's pretty much how I explained it to my wife when she moved to this country. At first she thought I was a bit to "religious" about the Constitution, but then she read it and understood why I love the Constitution.
Go ahead and insult our politicians. Hell, we do. Burn our flag, it doesn't bother me one bit. Hate the influence our movies have on your culture (so stop watching them!), but don't be dis-ing the Constitution!
My specialty is software installation. I've written dozens of installers on a multitude of platforms. On the windoze platform, DLL happens for two reasons:
1. No backwards compatibility. All too often, new versions are released that break older programs. Even Microsoft has done this with major DLLs.
2. Stupid installer writers. You're supposed to check the version number of a file before overwriting it. All too often the file is overwritten without regard to the version numbers.
So to overcome these two problems, the smart installer coder would put all the DLLs in a private directory of the application (not in system/system32).
Of course, Microsoft came up with a new system that broke this simple fix. Registered libraries. Instead of using a specified path to get a DLL, you would ask the system to load the DLL (using registry information). The path was no longer considered. One, and only one, version of the DLL was allowed on the system, and there was no feasible way to get around this limitation. Someone came up with a fix. It would have been a major pain to implement and would require cooperation amongst the DLL coders, which isn't about to happen since the lack of cooperation was one of the core problems in the first place.
For a commercial level installer, missing libraries was absolutely unacceptable. My personal rule was to ALWAYS include dependencies in the installer package. This meant the installer was bigger and more complicated, but it guaranteed the application could be successfully installed without the user having to run off to find a missing library. Or did it? No - Microsoft decided that some libraries could not be independently distributed. The only legal means of getting the library was through the official Microsoft installer. And no suprise here, half the time the only official installer for a library was the latest version of Internet Explorer.
Requiring an upgrade to IE is a major problem for large companies. They standardize on specific software and don't allow the users to change it. Requiring a site-wide upgrade of something like IE (or the MDAC package) was not to be taken lightly. Especially when it was dicovered that the required upgrade would break other applications (back to DLL hell).
FYI, when a major customer pays your mid-sized company a couple of million dollars a year in license fees, they can definately tell you they won't upgrade IE. It's our job to come up with a work around. Too bad a measly few million paid to Microsoft wasn't enough to get them to change their ridiculous library polices.
Frame are almost always a bad design decision. I used frames in the past, but got rid of them years ago. Perhaps this patent follie will force others to rewrite their webpages without the horrid frames.
Some donkey biter moderated you down rather unfairly. Your response was true and correct. I guess the fool was a typical Fiskian idiotarian who doesn't like to hear the truth.
Of course, in the idiotarian mindset, the gassing of villages was the direct result of sanctions and had nothing to do with Saddam being a murdering thug.
When the sanctions were in place the United States sent large quantities of food and medicine to help the common Iraqi people. Unfortunately, Saddam just gave the food and medicine to his military. The US decided that subsidizing the Iraqi military was not such a good idea, so the aid packages were terminated. Stop trying to blame the US for killing Iraqi citizens. We didn't do it. Saddam did it.
BTW, using worst-case estimates for civilian casualties in the Iraqi war (aka Three Week War), fewer Iraqi civilians died due to our military intervention than would have been killed by Saddam's murderous regime.
Also, someone tell former weapons inspector Scott Ritter to shut the fuck up. We don't need to hear the opinion of a pedaphile. Especially one that was on Saddam's payroll.
Bought something on rebate from Best Buy. Sent the forms in the very next day. Get a letter back some months later stating I had purchased the item after the rebate period. Seems Best Buy has a habit of forgetting to tell you the rebate period has expired. Thus, I'm screwed out of some money (about $25 if I remember correctly). BTW, I never set foot inside a Best Buy now. Too many bad experiences that border on criminal fraud in my opinion.
More recently I bought a laptop at Office Depot for my wife. It was on sale and had an additional $150 rebate, making it a very good deal. That evening I realized they didn't give me the rebate form. Went back the next day to get it. They look it up and discover the rebate period had expired. No problem, they immediately credit my card for the $150 without hesitation. THAT is how you gain customer loyalty. Since that day, I have bought all my office supplies from them and the occassional computer item.
That was my basic reaction. They ignored me when I pointed out they were pushing cablemodem as a great way to tie your home-office in with your real office and asked, "how can a home-office rely on entertainment only email?"
I dumped cable and went to DSL as soon as the service became available. My next switch will probably be to speakeasy.net as they not only allow servers, they encourage it. Just need to save up the initial fee for the big switch.
aren't you violating the Terms of Service of most residential DSL agreements
I never signed the agreement. Officially, you aren't supposed to run a server. Unofficially (from one of their techies), they don't care as long as you aren't a nuisance.
If you need email you can trust, what's wrong with Hotmail or Yahoo! or any other free mail service?
you should still use your upstream SMTP server for outgoing mail
And what if your upstream provider is unreliable. Back when I had cablemodem with AT&T@Home, the service was so bad I swore to never rely on anyone else for email ever again. Emails sent through their servers had a habit of disappearing or taking months (yes, I said months) to finally arrive at their destination. Complaints resulted in the boilerplate response of "email service is for entertainment purposes only".
For broadband in my area I can choose cablemodem or dsl. To get a static ip on dsl requires a jump in the monthly payment that I honestly can't afford at the moment (I'm an unemployed tech worker in the Bay Area, do the math). The rare contract work that I am getting requires email I can trust.
Ok, seems a lot of people are doing remote xwindows. Fair enough. I do it on occassion myself. I still think there is an argument for a version that does not include remote capabilities. Of course, it may not be worth the bother of producing a remoteless version.
I still think my second point is valid, but I suppose the blame lies on the GUI side. I'm very much a proponent of consistency. I hate it when basic functionality is different for every damn program. People argue for flexibility. That's fine. Allow it. But create a standard for the GUI that should be used as the default (out-of-the-box configuration, so to speak).
I went to xwin.org but could not find any type of list of what they hope to achieve. Not a good start for a project. Perhaps they haven't quite got around to posting the list.
Here's what I'd like to see done:
1. Performance. There needs to be some serious performance boosting. Rip out a whole lot of fluff. Honestly, how often do you need remote xwindows? Yes, there is a use for it, but that should be a seperate build altogether.
2. Standardization. Flexibility is nice, but having every damn program do things differently is annoying. It's also a very bad thing if you are trying to break into the mainstream.
3. Easier configuration. It can be a real bitch to get xwindows running properly. Considering the huge amount of differing hardware in the wild, I'm not so sure it would be possible to simplify it too much. Oh, well.
I'm no experts on cell phone technology, so I go by what I've read. It is entirely possible I've missunderstood something along the way. With that disclaimer out of the way...
GSM is a simplier system and is probably cheaper to implement the infrustructer. It's also the standard used in that part of the world.
CDMA is a more advanced system, the infrustructer is more complex, thus more expensive. The new features popping up in cell phones require the CDMA system (or massive changes to GSM??).
Tough call, I'd say. Personally, I prefer investing for the long term, but there's a lot to be said for local standards (globally speaking).
Would a dual standard infrustructure be too expensive to implement?
Who pays for it? If the Iraqi's pay for it (and they should), then let them decide. Hell, they're sitting on 300 trillion dollars worth of oil, so they can afford it. They SHOULD pay for it. However, if American taxpayer's are going to pay for it, then it better be a CDMA system so we can get some of our investment back.
And before anyone jumps on me, I don't care if we don't make a dime from Iraq. Getting rid of that butcher Saddam and his evil offspring is simply the right thing to do.
Next stop, Zimbabwe. Let's get rid of that evil fuck Mugabe.
With Rutker Hauer (I can't spell his name, sorry). I'd bet any amount of money the Doom developers got ideas from this movie, especially the name "BFG".
The U.S. didn't sign the Kyoto treaty because parts of it would violate our Constitution (specifically, the 4th Ammendment). The government CAN'T sign a treaty that violates our Constitution.
They originally said the Linux client would be released in the box along with Windoze and Mac. Since it has taken them 9 months since the original release to get this out the door, they could not, in good faith, believe they had any chance of meeting that deadline.
Step 1. Install the windoze version on a windoze box. step 2. Update the windoze version to 1.29. 18meg download - and it's ssssllllloooowwwww. step 3. Copy a pile of files over to your linux box. It would have been nice for them to include a script to do this for me.
e.g. 'getnwn/path/to/mounted/nwn/directory
I'll write my own. Hmm, maybe I can just install the Linux client into the mounted windows directory and save me the trouble.
step 4. Install SDL if you don't already have it. step 5. Install the NWN Linux client. step 6. Profit!
Started this message when the update to 1.29 was at 8%. Finished this message at 58%. Damn slow.
That's why I would love to see a complete overhaul of the H1-B visa system. I'm not against immigrant works. The US is a great country because over the past 200 years we have taken in anyone willing to work hard and better themselves. Let's give them more incentive.
1. Make H1-B visas transferable (not tied to a specific company) so workers can't get screwed by companies. Also, remove company sponsership of H1-B visas entirely.
2. Make it easier to get to get permanent resident status for an H1-B work after a couple of years, which could lead to citizenship. I believe someone who's spent a few years working here has proven themselves.
3. Tie the number of H1-B visas issued directly to the unemployment rate. The higher the unemployment rate the fewer the visas issued each year. Perhaps refine this by industry. However, no retraction of existing visas when the employment situation gets bad. Just a couple of years ago the tech industry bitched and moaned (and bribed) until the number of visas were increased drastically. No more of that. The unemployment tie-in must be ironclad.
4. When issued an H1-B visa, the worker is given a temporary visa (3 months? 6 months?) to enter the country and find a job. Can't find one in the specified time? Tough shit. Go home. You may reapply for a new work visa in one year.
5. If an H1-B worker finds himself unemployed (shit happens) due to layoffs, give him a decent amount of time to find a new job. I'm not such a bastard that I would kick someone out the day after their employer went bankrupt.
I'm sure my suggestions could use some refinement. I'm also sure they would never be considered by our congress-critters.
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I'm not bothering with any of your other arguments because it is obvious we won't agree. So I'll just respond to this one paragraph.
The availability of guns does not increase the likelihood of civil unrest. Just the opposite. During the "Rodney King" riots of Los Angeles (I was living there at the time, so this is first hand knowlege, not something I "heard about") rioters and looters (almost all unarmed, fyi) ran unchecked through much of South Central Los Angeles. One neighboorhood in the middle of the worse damage, however, remained completely untouched. That was because the shop owners armed themselves and patrolled their own neighborhood. Oddly enough, the police (when they finally did bother to show their cowardly asses) tried to get the shop owners to give up their weapons. Fortunately, the shopowners were smart enough to tell the police to piss off.
These shop owners had created an impromptu militia to protect themselves. But not, as you argue the 2nd Amendment is for, to fight the government. They banded together to defend themselves from thieves and treaspassers because the government had abandoned their responsibility. Shooting thieves and treaspassers is not something you can automatically do, as you presumed we can do. It is done as a last resort. Shooting a trespasser is justified if you have a reasonable belief that the person(s) is planning physical violence or property damage.
Now this point is extremely important. Some people will argue that protecting property is not as important as someone's life. The mistake is in believing the property's value is what is important. It's not. The situation is the same whether the property is valued at a million dollars or a single dollar. It is the person's right to live his life in security that is at stake. That is what is being protected.
You can not put a price on a person's life, but a thief has chosen to take his chances by conducting his activities outside the rules of civil society. Society, therefore, has no reason to extend any curtesy to such a person when he is in the act of violating its rules. We do give such a person a minimal amount of warning, however, because we are not barbarians. If the opportunity allows, we will warn the person that failure to cease their activities will result in the use of deadly force. This is what the shopowners did in South Central Los Angeles. I don't remember if they had to actually shoot anyone (I think they fired warning shots), but I have no doubt they would have shot dead anyone who failed to heed their warnings.
You seem to think the vaughness was a mistake. You are wrong. It was intentionally worded that way. Something easily realized if you read the various writings of the creators of the Constitution.
We have the right to defend ourselves, something European governments seem to dislike. Your governments would rather see innocent people killed than use force to defend themselves. Take England, for example, not only do they outlaw all guns, but they make it a crime to use force to stop a criminal, even one doing bodily harm to an innocent person. People have been tossed in prison simply for defending themselves. The governments reasoning is weak, that only the government has the right to use force. The result is violent crime in England spiraling out of control. The number of gun crimes in the last few years proves the old saying, "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." I used to think that slogan was a bit reactionary. England has proved me wrong.
I've yet to figure out why you would believe shooting thieves is a bad thing. Are you, perchance, one of those idiot European judges that free criminals for any reason, justifying your actions with, "he was treated badly by society."? We have a few judges like that. They usually don't last very long (except in Berkeley).
Excellent retort. Our Constitution is one of the greatest documents written in the history of mankind. It's too bad fucktards like Ashcroft forget their job is to uphold and defend it, not rape it in a zealous fit of witch-hunting.
That's pretty much how I explained it to my wife when she moved to this country. At first she thought I was a bit to "religious" about the Constitution, but then she read it and understood why I love the Constitution.Go ahead and insult our politicians. Hell, we do. Burn our flag, it doesn't bother me one bit. Hate the influence our movies have on your culture (so stop watching them!), but don't be dis-ing the Constitution!
That's true. To measure human loss you need to use communism. 100 million murdered by communism so far.
My specialty is software installation. I've written dozens of installers on a multitude of platforms. On the windoze platform, DLL happens for two reasons:
1. No backwards compatibility. All too often, new versions are released that break older programs. Even Microsoft has done this with major DLLs.
2. Stupid installer writers. You're supposed to check the version number of a file before overwriting it. All too often the file is overwritten without regard to the version numbers.
So to overcome these two problems, the smart installer coder would put all the DLLs in a private directory of the application (not in system/system32).
Of course, Microsoft came up with a new system that broke this simple fix. Registered libraries. Instead of using a specified path to get a DLL, you would ask the system to load the DLL (using registry information). The path was no longer considered. One, and only one, version of the DLL was allowed on the system, and there was no feasible way to get around this limitation. Someone came up with a fix. It would have been a major pain to implement and would require cooperation amongst the DLL coders, which isn't about to happen since the lack of cooperation was one of the core problems in the first place.
For a commercial level installer, missing libraries was absolutely unacceptable. My personal rule was to ALWAYS include dependencies in the installer package. This meant the installer was bigger and more complicated, but it guaranteed the application could be successfully installed without the user having to run off to find a missing library. Or did it? No - Microsoft decided that some libraries could not be independently distributed. The only legal means of getting the library was through the official Microsoft installer. And no suprise here, half the time the only official installer for a library was the latest version of Internet Explorer.
Requiring an upgrade to IE is a major problem for large companies. They standardize on specific software and don't allow the users to change it. Requiring a site-wide upgrade of something like IE (or the MDAC package) was not to be taken lightly. Especially when it was dicovered that the required upgrade would break other applications (back to DLL hell).
FYI, when a major customer pays your mid-sized company a couple of million dollars a year in license fees, they can definately tell you they won't upgrade IE. It's our job to come up with a work around. Too bad a measly few million paid to Microsoft wasn't enough to get them to change their ridiculous library polices.
Frame are almost always a bad design decision. I used frames in the past, but got rid of them years ago. Perhaps this patent follie will force others to rewrite their webpages without the horrid frames.
Some donkey biter moderated you down rather unfairly. Your response was true and correct. I guess the fool was a typical Fiskian idiotarian who doesn't like to hear the truth.
Of course, in the idiotarian mindset, the gassing of villages was the direct result of sanctions and had nothing to do with Saddam being a murdering thug.
When the sanctions were in place the United States sent large quantities of food and medicine to help the common Iraqi people. Unfortunately, Saddam just gave the food and medicine to his military. The US decided that subsidizing the Iraqi military was not such a good idea, so the aid packages were terminated. Stop trying to blame the US for killing Iraqi citizens. We didn't do it. Saddam did it.
BTW, using worst-case estimates for civilian casualties in the Iraqi war (aka Three Week War), fewer Iraqi civilians died due to our military intervention than would have been killed by Saddam's murderous regime.
Also, someone tell former weapons inspector Scott Ritter to shut the fuck up. We don't need to hear the opinion of a pedaphile. Especially one that was on Saddam's payroll.
Not that 9mm rounds cost all that much, but I'll be going through a bucket of those a week until I find and eliminate the last living spammer.
Bought something on rebate from Best Buy. Sent the forms in the very next day. Get a letter back some months later stating I had purchased the item after the rebate period. Seems Best Buy has a habit of forgetting to tell you the rebate period has expired. Thus, I'm screwed out of some money (about $25 if I remember correctly). BTW, I never set foot inside a Best Buy now. Too many bad experiences that border on criminal fraud in my opinion.
More recently I bought a laptop at Office Depot for my wife. It was on sale and had an additional $150 rebate, making it a very good deal. That evening I realized they didn't give me the rebate form. Went back the next day to get it. They look it up and discover the rebate period had expired. No problem, they immediately credit my card for the $150 without hesitation. THAT is how you gain customer loyalty. Since that day, I have bought all my office supplies from them and the occassional computer item.
That was my basic reaction. They ignored me when I pointed out they were pushing cablemodem as a great way to tie your home-office in with your real office and asked, "how can a home-office rely on entertainment only email?"
I dumped cable and went to DSL as soon as the service became available. My next switch will probably be to speakeasy.net as they not only allow servers, they encourage it. Just need to save up the initial fee for the big switch.
Ok, seems a lot of people are doing remote xwindows. Fair enough. I do it on occassion myself. I still think there is an argument for a version that does not include remote capabilities. Of course, it may not be worth the bother of producing a remoteless version.
I still think my second point is valid, but I suppose the blame lies on the GUI side. I'm very much a proponent of consistency. I hate it when basic functionality is different for every damn program. People argue for flexibility. That's fine. Allow it. But create a standard for the GUI that should be used as the default (out-of-the-box configuration, so to speak).
I went to xwin.org but could not find any type of list of what they hope to achieve. Not a good start for a project. Perhaps they haven't quite got around to posting the list.
Here's what I'd like to see done:
1. Performance. There needs to be some serious performance boosting. Rip out a whole lot of fluff. Honestly, how often do you need remote xwindows? Yes, there is a use for it, but that should be a seperate build altogether.
2. Standardization. Flexibility is nice, but having every damn program do things differently is annoying. It's also a very bad thing if you are trying to break into the mainstream.
3. Easier configuration. It can be a real bitch to get xwindows running properly. Considering the huge amount of differing hardware in the wild, I'm not so sure it would be possible to simplify it too much. Oh, well.
My 2 cents.
You definately need an up-to-date nvidia driver. I couldn't get it to run until I upgraded.
I'll never understand the idiotarians who are so quick to denouce Washington and support evil mass murderers.
I'm no experts on cell phone technology, so I go by what I've read. It is entirely possible I've missunderstood something along the way. With that disclaimer out of the way...
GSM is a simplier system and is probably cheaper to implement the infrustructer. It's also the standard used in that part of the world.
CDMA is a more advanced system, the infrustructer is more complex, thus more expensive. The new features popping up in cell phones require the CDMA system (or massive changes to GSM??).
Tough call, I'd say. Personally, I prefer investing for the long term, but there's a lot to be said for local standards (globally speaking).
Would a dual standard infrustructure be too expensive to implement?
Who pays for it? If the Iraqi's pay for it (and they should), then let them decide. Hell, they're sitting on 300 trillion dollars worth of oil, so they can afford it. They SHOULD pay for it. However, if American taxpayer's are going to pay for it, then it better be a CDMA system so we can get some of our investment back.
And before anyone jumps on me, I don't care if we don't make a dime from Iraq. Getting rid of that butcher Saddam and his evil offspring is simply the right thing to do.
Next stop, Zimbabwe. Let's get rid of that evil fuck Mugabe.
With Rutker Hauer (I can't spell his name, sorry). I'd bet any amount of money the Doom developers got ideas from this movie, especially the name "BFG".
Part of the Kyoto treaty allows for the searching of private private property at any time, without warning, and without cause.
I suggest you read it.
The U.S. didn't sign the Kyoto treaty because parts of it would violate our Constitution (specifically, the 4th Ammendment). The government CAN'T sign a treaty that violates our Constitution.
They originally said the Linux client would be released in the box along with Windoze and Mac. Since it has taken them 9 months since the original release to get this out the door, they could not, in good faith, believe they had any chance of meeting that deadline.
BTW, sucks to run a Mac, don't it. hehe
Step 1. Install the windoze version on a windoze box.
/path/to/mounted/nwn/directory
step 2. Update the windoze version to 1.29. 18meg download - and it's ssssllllloooowwwww.
step 3. Copy a pile of files over to your linux box. It would have been nice for them to include a script to do this for me.
e.g. 'getnwn
I'll write my own. Hmm, maybe I can just install the Linux client into the mounted windows directory and save me the trouble.
step 4. Install SDL if you don't already have it.
step 5. Install the NWN Linux client.
step 6. Profit!
Started this message when the update to 1.29 was at 8%. Finished this message at 58%. Damn slow.
That's why I would love to see a complete overhaul of the H1-B visa system. I'm not against immigrant works. The US is a great country because over the past 200 years we have taken in anyone willing to work hard and better themselves. Let's give them more incentive.
1. Make H1-B visas transferable (not tied to a specific company) so workers can't get screwed by companies. Also, remove company sponsership of H1-B visas entirely.
2. Make it easier to get to get permanent resident status for an H1-B work after a couple of years, which could lead to citizenship. I believe someone who's spent a few years working here has proven themselves.
3. Tie the number of H1-B visas issued directly to the unemployment rate. The higher the unemployment rate the fewer the visas issued each year. Perhaps refine this by industry. However, no retraction of existing visas when the employment situation gets bad. Just a couple of years ago the tech industry bitched and moaned (and bribed) until the number of visas were increased drastically. No more of that. The unemployment tie-in must be ironclad.
4. When issued an H1-B visa, the worker is given a temporary visa (3 months? 6 months?) to enter the country and find a job. Can't find one in the specified time? Tough shit. Go home. You may reapply for a new work visa in one year.
5. If an H1-B worker finds himself unemployed (shit happens) due to layoffs, give him a decent amount of time to find a new job. I'm not such a bastard that I would kick someone out the day after their employer went bankrupt.
I'm sure my suggestions could use some refinement. I'm also sure they would never be considered by our congress-critters.
My, what a powerful and eloquent retort.
Listen, Fucktard (to use your own words), MSDE is not free. It is included with other products which you must purchase.