MX records tell you which machines receive mail for a domain. They tell you nothing about who may send mail from that domain. It's perfectly legitimate to have different machines for these functions, and many large senders of mail do so.
Sure. But that doesn't matter in practice. If a large sender wants to send email from a system but not receive email there, he can define an MX record for it that places it last in the priority list and then drop any port 25 connection traffic to it on the floor (no big deal since he's probably doing that anyway). To other senders, his box will appear as if it is unreachable just like all the other MXes that were tried first, and they'll thus behave as they would if the system weren't listed as an MX at all. And the end result is that a little more traffic is generated when all of the real MXes are down: something that should be a very rare event for a large email provider (if it's not rare then they probably get what they deserve).
And to clarify: I am indeed talking about the email address sent in the "MAIL FROM" SMTP command, not the address in the "From:" line in the headers.
With this system, the beauty is that the only people who can send email are those that control their own domain, and nobody can send spoof email without either hacking into someone else's MX or revealing their own domain (since the "MAIL FROM" address is stored in the email's envelope for anyone who cares to see).
The downside is minimal: the average joe uses his ISP's email gateway as usual and is thus unaffected, the big email providers simply have to add their outbound gateways to the bottom of their MX list. The only people who have to do a bit of work are the computer literate individuals who probably run their own domains anyway: they just have to keep their MX records up to date.
The upside is considerable: now SMTP email is kept honest, and no changes to the protocols are required at all.
No, you don't block port 25. At all. You leave it wide open.
Here's what you do instead: you configure all the email servers to take the FROM address specified in the SMTP exchange itself, then look up all the MXes for the domain the FROM address claims to belong to, then compare the actual address the connection is coming from to the list of addresses you just got back. If you don't get a match, you drop the connection right then and there.
End result: anyone who is running their own domain or who is using a legitimate mail server is able to get through, and nobody else is. Suddenly most open relays become totally ineffective. Spammers now have to go to the trouble of acquiring a domain and setting up MX records, and if they don't have a static IP then they'll have to use a dynamic DNS service. End result: killing a spammer is as simple as telling their dynamic DNS service to shut them down.
If there needs to be a way to differentiate between email receivers and email senders, then define a different type of MX record for email senders and do a lookup on them as well.
At place A, you place a massive object in front of a light, and move the object back and forth.
At place B, you set up a light detector and a gravity detector (the means by which one builds the gravity detector is left as an exercise to the reader).
You start off with points A and B really close to each other so you can calibrate your equipment (you need to be able to account for the difference between reading the gravity detector and the light detector). Once you do that, you move the points further apart.
Now, if the speed of gravity is instantaneous, then the phase difference between the signal received by the gravity detector and the signal received by the light detector should change as you move the points away from each other.
If the speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light, then the phase difference between the two signals should always be zero (after accounting for the equipment), no matter what the distance between points A and B.
The relationship between the phase difference and the distance between points A and B will give you a clue as to the speed of gravity versus the speed of light, if that of gravity is finite but different from that of light.
Until Soft Money policy is banned in the US, and all CORPORATE ENTITY DONATIONS to politics in general is banned, and people actually get off of their Sunday football couch and cozy lives to do something about something they believe in, nothing will change.
You don't understand the real problem, do you? Soft money is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
The problem is that the primary source of information people have about the candidates they can vote for is tightly controlled by a small group of very large corporations. Those corporations that don't own the media of course make deals with those that do. More profit for the media corporations that way.
And since the media corporations have their own agendas, on top of the agendas that the corporations they make deals with have, the presentation of the candidates to the public is heavily biased. You'd be a fool to believe differently: the corporations that own the media aren't going to give favorable (if any) exposure to candidates that they or their partners feel they can't "work with".
And so, candidates that would heavily support the rights of individuals at the expense of corporations fade into obscurity before they even get a chance to be seen. And as a result, the general public never learns about them and never votes for them en masse (you can't vote for someone you don't know about, and you're unlikely to vote for someone you know little to nothing about).
The two major parties know this, which is why they pick candidates that the corporations can "work with". And the cycle continues, round and round.
Fixing the soft money problem won't do shit to solve the real problem; the soft money problem is a sham, a distraction. Do you really think a Congressman is swayed by a few thousand dollars? That's what you'd have to believe if you believe that soft money is the problem. But with TV spots costing millions, it just doesn't make sense for a few thousand dollars to make the difference in a congressman's position. There must be something more going on behind the scenes: the deals I described above.
This crap isn't going to stop until corporate personhood is thrown out. And I don't think that's ever going to happen: there's no mechanism in the system the way it is right now that could make that possible, no way to get there from here. That's why we in the U.S. are fux0r3d.
Oh, as to the Supreme Court decision,
I told you who read Kuro5hin that this was going to happen. You people who still think that not all branches of government have been bought and paid for by the corporations had better start waking up to reality.
...what if you buy something, thier computer crashes and they have to pull fro ma backup from the previous day? Won't the RFID tag be in the database again?
Nope. This is why the RFID transaction information gets stored at the terminals as well as the main database. At the end of the day, the information in the terminals gets run against the database. Those RFID entries in the terminals that still appear in the database get removed from the database at that time. The terminals can store however many days' worth of transactions you want, because transactions that have already cleared the main database can't be cleared again.
It's not like distributed, redundant databases are that new anymore...
But if that's the case, you can't use the system to track the RFID chips after the sale is complete. You don't want the scanners telling you about the pants the customer bought last week, just the stuff he's buying now.
Nonsense.
What makes you think that the RFID tags are programmed only with some kind of code identifying the type of object being scanned?
The only thing the RFID tag needs to respond with is a unique identifier. As long as all RFID tags differ from one another in this regard, then the system will work.
Why? Because retailers have an inventory control system. So when they receive a shipment of goods, they run the items through the scanner (which reads the RFID tag and, if the RFID doesn't encode a product ID, a UPC label or something like it) and it gets entered into the inventory. When you check out, the item gets deleted from the inventory -- the RFID acts as a unique key into the inventory database. Those items in the scan that don't appear in the inventory don't get rung up.
It means the inventory system has to be very accurate, of course, but the bottom line is that the RFID tag can be used to track you, because its unique ID will be associated with you once you check out. After that, your approximate location will be known whenever you walk into a store. Whether that information will make it into government hands is a different question, of course, but you'd be a fool to ignore that possibility.
Sony, Microsoft, MPAA, RIAA paid good money for the DMCA. If you want it repealed, you need to start contributing to some congressmen. Re-election campaigns don't come cheap, you know.
Re-election campaigns cost as much as the media corporations want them to cost. No more, no less.
Read
this and
this
for a more detailed description of the real problem, and why it's something that can't be solved.
Drat. I keep doing this. Obviously the above should read "However, it would be incorrect to state that companies could then say anything with impunity. After all, even you and I with the full protection of the first amendment can still be sued for defamatory, slanderous, negligent, fraudulent or other tortuous speech of one kind or another."
No, you got it right the first time. The reason is that in the U.S., your probability of winning in court is almost directly proportional to the ratio of the amount of money you can spend versus the amount of money the other side can spend.
Frankly, giving corporations any sort of "personhood" was a mistake of the highest order, and is responsible for incalculable damage to the free society that was once hosted by the United States.
Californa courts have shown themselves willing to enforce anti-trust law, even against the US big giant.
Perhaps. But it seems that nobody has the balls to use them, as the very settlement we're talking about proves. So while what you say may be true, it's also irrelevant.
Databasizing everything (including the filesystem) IS NOT THE ANSWER
And yet, what is the filesystem itself but a very highly structured database anyway?
Look at the direction filesystems have been going. First we had simple filesystems with no directories, that just stored names and content. Then we had more complex filesystems that store directories, names, content, and specific attributes (owner, group, permissions). Then we had even more complex filesystems that stored arbitrary ACLs and metadata (NTFS). Alongside that development we have journalled filesystems that use (horrors!) transaction logs.
Since the filesystem is evolving towards being a full-fledged, transaction-capable database anyway, why not leap over the stuff in the middle and go straight for the gold?
but put yourself in power and tell me what you would do?
Simple: fire the entire INS. All of them. And don't hire any of those morons back.
It's because of the INS that the people who pulled off 9/11 got in to begin with, despite being known terrorists.
The INS lets in terrorists and at the same time makes life difficult to impossible for legitimate people to enter and become U.S. citizens (they regularly "lose" paperwork, "forget" to issue green cards, renewals, etc.).
They are our gatekeepers, but in reality they do no such thing. It's an organization that does nothing useful at all that I can see, and I think it's time for it to die.
If you are so worried about people knowing your entertainment habits, then maybe you are watching some stuff that you shouldn't be watching...
Sounds to me like you're volunteering to have government-monitored cameras installed in your home. Right?
No? Then maybe you finally understand the point. And if you don't, then go ahead and get those cameras installed. After that, I can't wait until they throw you into a hole for doing something you thought was okay but that they thought was unacceptable. Maybe then you'll understand.
They want techies fresh out of college, willing to go anywhere, work for any wage, any hours, with the sparkle still in their eyes.
They don't want 15+ years experience in 5 different platforms, 8 languages, database design, applications, systems analysis, or training and documentation backgrounds.
Uh, no.
They want techies fresh out of college, willing to go anywhere, work for any wage, any hours, and who have at least 10 years of experience with the specific hardware and software that they're using. They want people who have 10 years of C# experience and 15 years of Java experience (that those languages haven't even been around that long is irrelevant).
They want it all, and in this very down tech economy they can get away with demanding it.
This is why techies fresh out of college are having just as much of a problem finding work as experienced people. Companies want the impossible, and are just as happy to ask for it, since doing so only works in their favor -- people are eventually willing to work for free for them, so why not?
And that's only the beginning. You think things are bad now? You haven't seen anything yet.
We're headed for a real depression on the scale of the Great Depression, people, and I don't think anything's going to pull us out of it in the near future. It's going to happen because the only major things on the horizon to invest in (biotech and medical) are either highly regulated (and thus have the same future that personal aviation has had) or are morally ambiguous at best, and thus something companies won't touch here in the U.S. due to the political repercussions. Much safer for them to conduct such research and development outside the U.S.
Maybe it's time H1-B haters realized that their job is becoming more of a "commodity" and lose their sense of elitism.
We're not talking about H1-B's. We're not talking about the job becoming a "commodity" while remaining within the same country.
We're talking about the job becoming enough of a "commodity" that it can be, and is, offered in some other country instead of in the U.S.
The difference between moving between states and moving between countries is that you don't have to deal with immigration laws, passports, etc., when moving between states, but you do when moving between countries. And it's moving between countries that would be required for the talent in the U.S. to compete head to head for jobs offered in other countries.
I make $25,000 at my current job, and I have NO problem paying the bills. I even have a little extra to spend every week.
So: you think you'd have no problem paying the bills if you were making $5,000 per year? That's the kind of salary you're competing against when we're talking about companies eliminating jobs here in the U.S. in favor of offering those jobs in other countries. The people who take those jobs do not immigrate into the U.S.: they live in their home country and pay their home country's cost of living.
Think you can compete against that without moving out of the country?
By the way, no one stops you going to India or any other place in the world. But it is your choice not to go there, because that means an 180 degrees turn in your life. I would certainly not go.
What makes you believe that India is any less restrictive about letting people into their country than, say, the U.S.?
My point is that for the market to be truly free, the labor needs to be as mobile as the demand is. No more, no less. That means no immigration laws in a country, no discriminatory practices, etc. But things aren't like that, are they? That's the problem.
Nope. You're wrong. You're not unable to pay rent, just unable to pay rent in a place you'd be happy in. You obviously haven't seen how any H1B Indians live in the US. Their standard of living is low. Very low. They generally don't have cars (try the bus). They live in shithole apartment, 2 or 3 to a bedroom. They make their own food. They are willing to live like that. That is the difference.
You're assuming that we're talking about people in the U.S. competing against H1B's for jobs that are located in the U.S. That's not what we're discussing.
We're talking about companies relocating the jobs themselves to other countries, such as India, where the native labor pool is much cheaper than it is in the U.S. because the cost of living there is so much lower than in the U.S.
I agree that people here should be willing and able to compete against H1Bs for jobs here in the U.S. I think that, while there was some initial reluctance to do that, people now have awakened to the realities of a recessed economy and are more willing to compete.
Why do you deserve that engineering job and not him? If he's willing to do the same job for less than why shouldn't he get it? What makes you special? Oh you're an American.
Yes, he's an American. And as a result, if he were to try to do the same job for less than his Indian counterpart, he would be unable to pay his rent. Hell, he'd probably be unable to pay for his car, much less his apartment.
The cost of living in the U.S. is much higher than it is in India. That's why his Indian counterpart can get away with being paid so much less. It has nothing to do with what the guy in the U.S. is unwilling to do and everything to do with what he's unable to do.
There is a huge injustice in all this: companies are able to shop around and find the cheapest source of labor worldwide, but the labor is not allowed to move in response to the shifting demand. So the person you're responding to can't move to India to take advantage of the greater demand for talent there. Despite his years of training and experience, he can't offer his services competitively because immigration laws of other countries prevent him from doing so, just as immigration laws in the U.S. prevent many from attempting to satisfy the demand for labor in the U.S. (not that there's much of that right now).
For the "global economy" to truly work, people must be able to move as easily as the demand for labor does.
How can this be legal? This kind of action is basically violating the settlement. Can someone explain, please?
Since when has Microsoft ever cared about any of these "settlements"? They'll do whatever they damned well please until someone literally points a gun to their heads and tells them to stop or die. Since nobody (certainly not the U.S. government) seems to have both the ability and the cajones to do that, we can expect them to continue to violate these "settlements" into the far future.
Think about it: If some lowlife shot your husband, wife, or child wouldn't you suddenly find yourself gung-ho for gun control, irregardless of your present political beliefs.
No, I'd suddenly find myself gung-ho for a gun so I could track down and shoot the bastard that did that in the kneecaps and other vital, but nonlethal, regions, so that he would be in permanent pain and would never be able to do any such thing to anyone else again.
The Library of Congress has no say in who the Department of Justice pursues for violations of the DMCA, nor are the courts required to listen to what the Library of Congress has to say about the DMCA.
In other words, it looks to me like all this effort is completely irrelevant and merely a way of wasting the dissenters' time. The Library of Congress can decide anything they want about the DMCA and where the limits on its power should be: it won't make a damned bit of difference out here in the real world.
Re:Would it have been so hard to say...
on
Bochs 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
They did say that... by posting a link to the Bochs website.
Jesus, people, read the goddamn links before you go off and criticize the editors for omitting important information.
Re:Whatever happened to smart advertising?
on
Next-Gen Pop-up Ads
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Whatever happened to smart advertising? It doesn't seem to exist. Perhaps it existed at one time, but I don't think it exists anymore. The reason it doesn't exist anymore is because advertisers are morons. The advertising companies are run by morons. This is obvious because only a moron would believe that the effectiveness of an advertisement is directly proportional to it annoyance factor and little else.
Only a moron would believe that the clickthrough rate of an advertisement is the proper way to measure its effectiveness, when the real measure is how many people buy a product from the company as a result of the ad.
Measuring that is hard, but the advertisers are idiots, so they don't know how to do the hard stuff, don't have the brains to figure it out, and aren't interested in doing the hard stuff in any case.
I have no respect for the advertising industry at all, if you haven't figured that out by now.:-)
There is choice. You choose what you do. If enough people say "no", the answer is "no".
If enough of the right people say "no", then the answer is "no". Those people aren't you or me, they're the people who run large corporations.
Read this for why things are the way they are and why I believe there's no way out.
You're right about the fact that choice exists, but you're wrong about the notion that the choice is always meaningful. What good have I done if I rock the boat and get myself thrown in jail as a political prisoner, forgotten and alone? Your choices are meaningful only to the degree that they have any real effect on the problem at hand.
You can believe that it's the effort that counts and that the results don't really matter if you wish, but you're living in fantasyland if that's what you think. In the real world, results are the only thing that matter in the end, because they're the only thing that have a real effect on people.
Oh, one other thing: you can't choose freedom for your children if, as a result of your choices, you've become a political prisoner for life (or, perhaps worse, executed as a political dissenter) before you even have children. And furthermore, it does no good to "choose freedom for your children" if in doing so the police state takes your entire family away and either locks them away or executes them. We're not there yet here in the U.S. But we will be, if things continue as they have been.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. But that doesn't matter in practice. If a large sender wants to send email from a system but not receive email there, he can define an MX record for it that places it last in the priority list and then drop any port 25 connection traffic to it on the floor (no big deal since he's probably doing that anyway). To other senders, his box will appear as if it is unreachable just like all the other MXes that were tried first, and they'll thus behave as they would if the system weren't listed as an MX at all. And the end result is that a little more traffic is generated when all of the real MXes are down: something that should be a very rare event for a large email provider (if it's not rare then they probably get what they deserve).
And to clarify: I am indeed talking about the email address sent in the "MAIL FROM" SMTP command, not the address in the "From:" line in the headers.
With this system, the beauty is that the only people who can send email are those that control their own domain, and nobody can send spoof email without either hacking into someone else's MX or revealing their own domain (since the "MAIL FROM" address is stored in the email's envelope for anyone who cares to see).
The downside is minimal: the average joe uses his ISP's email gateway as usual and is thus unaffected, the big email providers simply have to add their outbound gateways to the bottom of their MX list. The only people who have to do a bit of work are the computer literate individuals who probably run their own domains anyway: they just have to keep their MX records up to date.
The upside is considerable: now SMTP email is kept honest, and no changes to the protocols are required at all.
Here's what you do instead: you configure all the email servers to take the FROM address specified in the SMTP exchange itself, then look up all the MXes for the domain the FROM address claims to belong to, then compare the actual address the connection is coming from to the list of addresses you just got back. If you don't get a match, you drop the connection right then and there.
End result: anyone who is running their own domain or who is using a legitimate mail server is able to get through, and nobody else is. Suddenly most open relays become totally ineffective. Spammers now have to go to the trouble of acquiring a domain and setting up MX records, and if they don't have a static IP then they'll have to use a dynamic DNS service. End result: killing a spammer is as simple as telling their dynamic DNS service to shut them down.
If there needs to be a way to differentiate between email receivers and email senders, then define a different type of MX record for email senders and do a lookup on them as well.
Thoughts?
Here's the experiment you really want to perform:
At place A, you place a massive object in front of a light, and move the object back and forth.
At place B, you set up a light detector and a gravity detector (the means by which one builds the gravity detector is left as an exercise to the reader).
You start off with points A and B really close to each other so you can calibrate your equipment (you need to be able to account for the difference between reading the gravity detector and the light detector). Once you do that, you move the points further apart.
Now, if the speed of gravity is instantaneous, then the phase difference between the signal received by the gravity detector and the signal received by the light detector should change as you move the points away from each other.
If the speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light, then the phase difference between the two signals should always be zero (after accounting for the equipment), no matter what the distance between points A and B.
The relationship between the phase difference and the distance between points A and B will give you a clue as to the speed of gravity versus the speed of light, if that of gravity is finite but different from that of light.
That's nice. Too bad revolution, at least in a country with an even moderately capable military, really isn't possible these days.
You don't understand the real problem, do you? Soft money is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
The problem is that the primary source of information people have about the candidates they can vote for is tightly controlled by a small group of very large corporations. Those corporations that don't own the media of course make deals with those that do. More profit for the media corporations that way.
And since the media corporations have their own agendas, on top of the agendas that the corporations they make deals with have, the presentation of the candidates to the public is heavily biased. You'd be a fool to believe differently: the corporations that own the media aren't going to give favorable (if any) exposure to candidates that they or their partners feel they can't "work with".
And so, candidates that would heavily support the rights of individuals at the expense of corporations fade into obscurity before they even get a chance to be seen. And as a result, the general public never learns about them and never votes for them en masse (you can't vote for someone you don't know about, and you're unlikely to vote for someone you know little to nothing about).
The two major parties know this, which is why they pick candidates that the corporations can "work with". And the cycle continues, round and round.
Fixing the soft money problem won't do shit to solve the real problem; the soft money problem is a sham, a distraction. Do you really think a Congressman is swayed by a few thousand dollars? That's what you'd have to believe if you believe that soft money is the problem. But with TV spots costing millions, it just doesn't make sense for a few thousand dollars to make the difference in a congressman's position. There must be something more going on behind the scenes: the deals I described above.
This crap isn't going to stop until corporate personhood is thrown out. And I don't think that's ever going to happen: there's no mechanism in the system the way it is right now that could make that possible, no way to get there from here. That's why we in the U.S. are fux0r3d.
Oh, as to the Supreme Court decision, I told you who read Kuro5hin that this was going to happen. You people who still think that not all branches of government have been bought and paid for by the corporations had better start waking up to reality.
Nope. This is why the RFID transaction information gets stored at the terminals as well as the main database. At the end of the day, the information in the terminals gets run against the database. Those RFID entries in the terminals that still appear in the database get removed from the database at that time. The terminals can store however many days' worth of transactions you want, because transactions that have already cleared the main database can't be cleared again.
It's not like distributed, redundant databases are that new anymore...
Nonsense.
What makes you think that the RFID tags are programmed only with some kind of code identifying the type of object being scanned?
The only thing the RFID tag needs to respond with is a unique identifier. As long as all RFID tags differ from one another in this regard, then the system will work.
Why? Because retailers have an inventory control system. So when they receive a shipment of goods, they run the items through the scanner (which reads the RFID tag and, if the RFID doesn't encode a product ID, a UPC label or something like it) and it gets entered into the inventory. When you check out, the item gets deleted from the inventory -- the RFID acts as a unique key into the inventory database. Those items in the scan that don't appear in the inventory don't get rung up.
It means the inventory system has to be very accurate, of course, but the bottom line is that the RFID tag can be used to track you, because its unique ID will be associated with you once you check out. After that, your approximate location will be known whenever you walk into a store. Whether that information will make it into government hands is a different question, of course, but you'd be a fool to ignore that possibility.
Re-election campaigns cost as much as the media corporations want them to cost. No more, no less.
Read this and this for a more detailed description of the real problem, and why it's something that can't be solved.
No, you got it right the first time. The reason is that in the U.S., your probability of winning in court is almost directly proportional to the ratio of the amount of money you can spend versus the amount of money the other side can spend.
Frankly, giving corporations any sort of "personhood" was a mistake of the highest order, and is responsible for incalculable damage to the free society that was once hosted by the United States.
Perhaps. But it seems that nobody has the balls to use them, as the very settlement we're talking about proves. So while what you say may be true, it's also irrelevant.
And yet, what is the filesystem itself but a very highly structured database anyway?
Look at the direction filesystems have been going. First we had simple filesystems with no directories, that just stored names and content. Then we had more complex filesystems that store directories, names, content, and specific attributes (owner, group, permissions). Then we had even more complex filesystems that stored arbitrary ACLs and metadata (NTFS). Alongside that development we have journalled filesystems that use (horrors!) transaction logs.
Since the filesystem is evolving towards being a full-fledged, transaction-capable database anyway, why not leap over the stuff in the middle and go straight for the gold?
Simple: fire the entire INS. All of them. And don't hire any of those morons back.
It's because of the INS that the people who pulled off 9/11 got in to begin with, despite being known terrorists.
The INS lets in terrorists and at the same time makes life difficult to impossible for legitimate people to enter and become U.S. citizens (they regularly "lose" paperwork, "forget" to issue green cards, renewals, etc.).
They are our gatekeepers, but in reality they do no such thing. It's an organization that does nothing useful at all that I can see, and I think it's time for it to die.
Sounds to me like you're volunteering to have government-monitored cameras installed in your home. Right?
No? Then maybe you finally understand the point. And if you don't, then go ahead and get those cameras installed. After that, I can't wait until they throw you into a hole for doing something you thought was okay but that they thought was unacceptable. Maybe then you'll understand.
Uh, no.
They want techies fresh out of college, willing to go anywhere, work for any wage, any hours, and who have at least 10 years of experience with the specific hardware and software that they're using. They want people who have 10 years of C# experience and 15 years of Java experience (that those languages haven't even been around that long is irrelevant).
They want it all, and in this very down tech economy they can get away with demanding it.
This is why techies fresh out of college are having just as much of a problem finding work as experienced people. Companies want the impossible, and are just as happy to ask for it, since doing so only works in their favor -- people are eventually willing to work for free for them, so why not?
And that's only the beginning. You think things are bad now? You haven't seen anything yet.
We're headed for a real depression on the scale of the Great Depression, people, and I don't think anything's going to pull us out of it in the near future. It's going to happen because the only major things on the horizon to invest in (biotech and medical) are either highly regulated (and thus have the same future that personal aviation has had) or are morally ambiguous at best, and thus something companies won't touch here in the U.S. due to the political repercussions. Much safer for them to conduct such research and development outside the U.S.
We're not talking about H1-B's. We're not talking about the job becoming a "commodity" while remaining within the same country.
We're talking about the job becoming enough of a "commodity" that it can be, and is, offered in some other country instead of in the U.S.
The difference between moving between states and moving between countries is that you don't have to deal with immigration laws, passports, etc., when moving between states, but you do when moving between countries. And it's moving between countries that would be required for the talent in the U.S. to compete head to head for jobs offered in other countries.
So: you think you'd have no problem paying the bills if you were making $5,000 per year? That's the kind of salary you're competing against when we're talking about companies eliminating jobs here in the U.S. in favor of offering those jobs in other countries. The people who take those jobs do not immigrate into the U.S.: they live in their home country and pay their home country's cost of living.
Think you can compete against that without moving out of the country?
What makes you believe that India is any less restrictive about letting people into their country than, say, the U.S.?
My point is that for the market to be truly free, the labor needs to be as mobile as the demand is. No more, no less. That means no immigration laws in a country, no discriminatory practices, etc. But things aren't like that, are they? That's the problem.
You're assuming that we're talking about people in the U.S. competing against H1B's for jobs that are located in the U.S. That's not what we're discussing.
We're talking about companies relocating the jobs themselves to other countries, such as India, where the native labor pool is much cheaper than it is in the U.S. because the cost of living there is so much lower than in the U.S.
I agree that people here should be willing and able to compete against H1Bs for jobs here in the U.S. I think that, while there was some initial reluctance to do that, people now have awakened to the realities of a recessed economy and are more willing to compete.
Yes, he's an American. And as a result, if he were to try to do the same job for less than his Indian counterpart, he would be unable to pay his rent. Hell, he'd probably be unable to pay for his car, much less his apartment.
The cost of living in the U.S. is much higher than it is in India. That's why his Indian counterpart can get away with being paid so much less. It has nothing to do with what the guy in the U.S. is unwilling to do and everything to do with what he's unable to do.
There is a huge injustice in all this: companies are able to shop around and find the cheapest source of labor worldwide, but the labor is not allowed to move in response to the shifting demand. So the person you're responding to can't move to India to take advantage of the greater demand for talent there. Despite his years of training and experience, he can't offer his services competitively because immigration laws of other countries prevent him from doing so, just as immigration laws in the U.S. prevent many from attempting to satisfy the demand for labor in the U.S. (not that there's much of that right now).
For the "global economy" to truly work, people must be able to move as easily as the demand for labor does.
Since when has Microsoft ever cared about any of these "settlements"? They'll do whatever they damned well please until someone literally points a gun to their heads and tells them to stop or die. Since nobody (certainly not the U.S. government) seems to have both the ability and the cajones to do that, we can expect them to continue to violate these "settlements" into the far future.
No, I'd suddenly find myself gung-ho for a gun so I could track down and shoot the bastard that did that in the kneecaps and other vital, but nonlethal, regions, so that he would be in permanent pain and would never be able to do any such thing to anyone else again.
In other words, it looks to me like all this effort is completely irrelevant and merely a way of wasting the dissenters' time. The Library of Congress can decide anything they want about the DMCA and where the limits on its power should be: it won't make a damned bit of difference out here in the real world.
Jesus, people, read the goddamn links before you go off and criticize the editors for omitting important information.
Measuring that is hard, but the advertisers are idiots, so they don't know how to do the hard stuff, don't have the brains to figure it out, and aren't interested in doing the hard stuff in any case.
I have no respect for the advertising industry at all, if you haven't figured that out by now. :-)
If enough of the right people say "no", then the answer is "no". Those people aren't you or me, they're the people who run large corporations.
Read this for why things are the way they are and why I believe there's no way out.
You're right about the fact that choice exists, but you're wrong about the notion that the choice is always meaningful. What good have I done if I rock the boat and get myself thrown in jail as a political prisoner, forgotten and alone? Your choices are meaningful only to the degree that they have any real effect on the problem at hand.
You can believe that it's the effort that counts and that the results don't really matter if you wish, but you're living in fantasyland if that's what you think. In the real world, results are the only thing that matter in the end, because they're the only thing that have a real effect on people.
Oh, one other thing: you can't choose freedom for your children if, as a result of your choices, you've become a political prisoner for life (or, perhaps worse, executed as a political dissenter) before you even have children. And furthermore, it does no good to "choose freedom for your children" if in doing so the police state takes your entire family away and either locks them away or executes them. We're not there yet here in the U.S. But we will be, if things continue as they have been.