... this is standard operating procedure, and not just an abuse by this specific law firm.
You're right. This has been going on since the inception of the H1-B program. In 1990, I watched a parade of US citizens interviewing where I worked for an engineering job opening later filled by an H1-B. The opening had also been posted to a bulletin board there with a salary that was about $10k less than a US citizen fresh out of engineering school would have made. Management was annoyed at having to jump through these hoops to obtain the cheap labor.
What is new here is the YouTube factor. The lawyer isn't really sorry his comments were commandeered. He's sorry he and the others got busted on YouTube. This film is an outrage, as is the H1-B program. It takes a film like this to cause a stink. Too bad we didn't have YouTube 17 years ago.
Who thinks this is going to flop? and by flop I mean be nowhere near as successful as the I-pod and probably less successful than the Mac? maybe more successful than the newton?
I use a Mac and an iPod and love both but this doesn't have the same appeal. I like the design of the iPhone and it's software. But I'm repulsed by the notion of breaking a contract and signing a new contract. I'm not very keen on the new contract being with AT&T either. I don't understand why AT&T has exclusivity. So what if Apple would have to make different versions for other providers?
The joke I heard 20 years ago was some guy was trying to get a job with AT&T but they found out his parents were married when he was born and wouldn't hire him.
Based on broadband penetration, South Korea is by far the world's top broadband user with nearly 90% of households online.
Let me make sure I understand this. We're being taxed out th' ass to station troops over there in case that gurkin jerkin' little pompador up north decides to invade them and we got less broadband penetration? Did I miss anything?
"... I can see how an applicant would consider the use of these services, perhaps for some specific reason, or just to clean their google-reputation generally..."
I don't know where all the anti-union rhetoric comes from...
It ultimately comes from corporate spin doctors. Their propaganda machine convinced the masses that the big 3 automakers woes decades ago were due to the unions, a perception widely held to this day. The actual cause was poor design. Detroit designed such horrid vehicles as the Reliant K and the Volare. It didn't matter who built them. Start with a poor design and you'll have a poor product. Neither the workers nor their union had an effective answer to the corporate smear campaign.
Yes, the mob famously made inroads into the Teamsters. Yes, some union members have become violent. When I was in my late teens, I was roughed up by union goons for not joining. I bought into all the antimosity and became one of their harshest critics for a time. Yes, there's corruption. But I find most of these perceived excesses are exagerated.
I've worked as a union member and as "management". I've experienced both perspectives. If anyone doesn't think there's corruption and crooks in management, does Enron, Global Crossing, MCI-World Com, any of those ring a bell? Violence? There's crooks and goons on both sides! The difference is the corporations have the money and them was has, gets. They have a big war chest for propaganda.
Many young people take employee benefits for granted. They seem ignorant of why we have paid holidays(including Labor day), paid sick leave and myriad other benefits. These came about because of unions. Don't take my word for it. Go find out for yourself.
There are positive and negative aspects to both corporations and unions but it's the corporations that have us all by short hairs. Try this little experiment. Publicly lambast unions. See what if any consequences you suffer. Now, try the same with a big corporation, like for instance, Wal*Mart. Think there will be no consequences? You might be in for a surprise the next time you try to change jobs.
Well, take heart anti-union folks. Union membership is in decline. You may not have them to kick around much longer.
I was laid off from a telecommunications company in the 80s. At 4pm, the computers went down. The word wafted around the building like a bad smell that we ought to grab our belongings and go down to the lobby. There we saw 2 tables. One had boxes of white envelopes. The other had boxes of brown envelopes. You stated you name and the people at the tables looked for your name on an envelope. A white envelope meant you stayed. A brown envelope meant you were laid off. Mine was turd brown. That day, 1200 people were let go. Other layoffs of 800, 500 and 300 followed.
I was 28 years old. I found a good job in another state. It was a very stressful time. Overnight, a streak of grey appeared in my hair. It surprised my wife, who noticed it before I did.
C programmers certainly face diminishing prospects but there's a mighty big code base out there. I'm with the guy who posted about 30 year technologies. Unix, shell scripts and C have been mighty durable. I'm sure perl can be lumped in there. No, C isn't the hot skill that it was 20 years ago but there is still some work.
Another poster pointed out that most longtimers learn several languages. I've been thru Fortran (jcl), basic, C, unix shell(bourne, C, korn, bash), perl, java and now ruby. I've never thought it was all that hard to pick up something new. Just try to do something with it that you couldn't do easily with what you were using.
I suppose in the heyday of printed magazines, hyperbole sold copy. Today, it harvests mouse clicks.
I agree that stealing bandwidth is wrong, the punishment certainly does not fit the crime. This type of thing should be a civil infraction, not a felony. People who steal actual physical goods don't even have to face the kinds of penalties this guy potentially could have. When there's a complete disconnect between the severity of punishment and common sense, it causes contempt for the law.
Amen. All kinds of minor offenses have been trumped up into felony status by legislators gone wild. They seem to be engaged in zero-tolerance one-up-manship grandstanding as being tough on crime.
For the past 10 years, I've wondered whether all the people I saw on the road HAD to be physically present at the office every day. Too many managers felt that if they couldn't go around the corner and look in on their workers, they'd goof off. God forbid if they should be home working on home improvements. Now those attitudes are proving so costly, they've become impractical. People still need face time but they do not need to be physically present in the office every day.
Besides saving gasoline, this will also reduce traffic congestion.
My previous boss viewed telecommuting as a supplement rather than a substitute. See, we had flex time. You could stay up as late working as necessary, so long as you were in by 8am. Telecommuting was viewed as "overtime lite". He wanted us to report telecommute time separately from time spent at the office.
Incidentally, with the introduction of RoHS-compliant lead-free solder, you will see this more and more.
... and not just open circuits. The lead free solder promotes the growth of tin whiskers which cause short circuits. If memory serves, this was the cause of the iBook G3 logic board recall.
You're right. I haven't looked much. And at the price Amazon is asking, $100, I ain't likely to order one.
I stand corrected. It was apparently released in rather limited quantities back in '89. I've never seen a copy in a well stocked CD store. His other releases on CD are fairly easy to come by.
From a collector's stand point, vinyls never really faded from popularity. I still have all of my old vinyls...
I wouldn't exactly call myself a collector but my collection started back in the 60's when that's all there was and I bought most of them in the 70's. Some of that stuff will never be released on CD. For example, I'm a Commander Cody fan. His Country Casanova album was only released on vinyl. There are tracks on that album which appear nowhere else. So I keep my turntable.
Did you know that the deadliest mass murder at a school in the US occurred at a school in Michigan where the perpetrator set off bomb planted in the school, then killed himself and many others with a car bomb after rescuers responded to the scene? 45 people died that day, and this was in 1927.
I looked it up: the Bath School disaster. Wow.
That's very interesting. I'd never heard of this incident.
But, the wiki said the guy who did it was in his 50s and was a disgruntled school board member who was angry about property tax. This wasn't a case of some kid getting hold of his dad's gun and shooting up the school.
That being said, I don't think we'll get this settled today. However, I'll give you the satisfcation of knowing that you have sparked my interest in finding out how many kids have shot up schools before and after corporal punishment was banned.
And probably caused just as many big problems as you prevented, due to people generally getting resentful towards people who do physical violence to them. Or were you under the impression that school shootings never happened before Columbine?
I can't say school shootings never happened prior to the early 70s, when corporal punishment was stopped. But if any did, they were mighty rare. I can't remember any.
As for resentments, I got paddled more often than most students because I was the class clown. I didn't feel resentment towards the principal for paddling me. I was ashamed of having been caught or that I used bad judgement.
I was born in the late 50s and grew up in the 60s. There were no computers. TV was black and white. My class was probably the last to be taught to use slide rules in high school.
We played outside. During the peak of the baby boom, there were lots of kids to play with. We'd round up 10 or 12, split up and line up on either side of a creek. We'd throw dirt clods, shoot bottle rockets, throw firecrackers and shoot BB guns (the old, whimpy kind) at each other. One parent gave us shop goggles and several of us carried trash can lids as shields. We escalated to Whamo Wrist Rocket slingshots, homemade catapults, sky rockets and roman candles. We'd play all day. When I'd get home, I was so dirty, my mother made me strip on the screened back porch and make a beeline to the tub. Sometimes people got hurt. I got hurt several times. It never stopped me. What we were doing was basically poor man's paintball.
When we got older, we entertained ourselves with vandalism, model rocketry, homemade explosives and other adventures. Yessir. If a boy does that nowadays, he'll get a cavity search.
I suppose if we'd had Doom and Quake we'd have played those games. But damn if it ain't fun to throw dirt clods.
As for these kids going on shooting rampages, it just didn't happen back then. The reason was no kid ever got that far out of line. If you acted up, you got your ass beat. The punishment was swift and sure. Today I see kids testing and pushing the limits of what they can get by with. Back then, you didn't have to push very far before you got your ass beat. If we'd continued corporal punishment in the schoiols, Columbine and all the other shootings probably wouldn't have happened because we'd have taken care of little problems before they became big problems.
Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword.
on
The End for Vonage?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
At least patents give the little guy a chance.
Not much of one. It's expensive to enforce patents. The little guy will find himself out-lawyered when he takes on a mega-corp for infringement and he will not have as big a war chest as the mega-corp. So the mega-corp can outrun him and outgun him in court.
We should be safe from death threats and other sexual attacks and stuff, especially from other bloggers." seems like classic blogonarcissism. That's just how the Internet is, even for low-low-level blogocelebrati.
True. But at the same time, it is illegal in most parts of the the US to communicate threats verbally or in writing. From what I've been able to gather, it sounds like a crime has been committed. This is probably another situation in which law enforcement hasn't caught up with the technology. And, that may never happen. Indeed, as some have pointed out, the cure may be worse than the disease.
The govt may also be concerned about staving off a surge of TVs being disposed of. Even if affordable HDTVs become available, there will be people with TVs that can be used if they have a converter box. This is admittedly a secondary concern but one worth considering.
Ah, spring must be just around the corner. I can tell when Bill Gates goes whining to congress for more H1-Bs. In a couple months, he'll whine about how the US isn't graduating enough engineers and programmers. Then he'll point to news stories about him decrying the lack of qualified US citizens and say, "See. We need more H1-Bs." As more H1-Bs flood the job market, wages fall and demand for US citizens falls. These are demanding curricula and historically, enrollments have tracked demand for graduates. The students understand this.
One poster repeated the claim which has been touted by many, including Bill Gates, that if we don't import these workers, the jobs will be outsourced. What difference does it make?
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. This has been going on since the inception of the H1-B program. In 1990, I watched a parade of US citizens interviewing where I worked for an engineering job opening later filled by an H1-B. The opening had also been posted to a bulletin board there with a salary that was about $10k less than a US citizen fresh out of engineering school would have made. Management was annoyed at having to jump through these hoops to obtain the cheap labor.
What is new here is the YouTube factor. The lawyer isn't really sorry his comments were commandeered. He's sorry he and the others got busted on YouTube. This film is an outrage, as is the H1-B program. It takes a film like this to cause a stink. Too bad we didn't have YouTube 17 years ago.
bastard: n. 1. a fatherless child.
Actually, bastards have a father. Bastards are children born out of wedlock.
Who thinks this is going to flop? and by flop I mean be nowhere near as successful as the I-pod and probably less successful than the Mac? maybe more successful than the newton?
I use a Mac and an iPod and love both but this doesn't have the same appeal. I like the design of the iPhone and it's software. But I'm repulsed by the notion of breaking a contract and signing a new contract. I'm not very keen on the new contract being with AT&T either. I don't understand why AT&T has exclusivity. So what if Apple would have to make different versions for other providers?
The joke I heard 20 years ago was some guy was trying to get a job with AT&T but they found out his parents were married when he was born and wouldn't hire him.
Based on broadband penetration, South Korea is by far the world's top broadband user with nearly 90% of households online.
Let me make sure I understand this. We're being taxed out th' ass to station troops over there in case that gurkin jerkin' little pompador up north decides to invade them and we got less broadband penetration? Did I miss anything?
"... I can see how an applicant would consider the use of these services, perhaps for some specific reason, or just to clean their google-reputation generally
Yeah, a sort of reputation laundering
I don't know where all the anti-union rhetoric comes from
It ultimately comes from corporate spin doctors. Their propaganda machine convinced the masses that the big 3 automakers woes decades ago were due to the unions, a perception widely held to this day. The actual cause was poor design. Detroit designed such horrid vehicles as the Reliant K and the Volare. It didn't matter who built them. Start with a poor design and you'll have a poor product. Neither the workers nor their union had an effective answer to the corporate smear campaign.
Yes, the mob famously made inroads into the Teamsters. Yes, some union members have become violent. When I was in my late teens, I was roughed up by union goons for not joining. I bought into all the antimosity and became one of their harshest critics for a time. Yes, there's corruption. But I find most of these perceived excesses are exagerated.
I've worked as a union member and as "management". I've experienced both perspectives. If anyone doesn't think there's corruption and crooks in management, does Enron, Global Crossing, MCI-World Com, any of those ring a bell? Violence? There's crooks and goons on both sides! The difference is the corporations have the money and them was has, gets. They have a big war chest for propaganda.
Many young people take employee benefits for granted. They seem ignorant of why we have paid holidays(including Labor day), paid sick leave and myriad other benefits. These came about because of unions. Don't take my word for it. Go find out for yourself.
There are positive and negative aspects to both corporations and unions but it's the corporations that have us all by short hairs. Try this little experiment. Publicly lambast unions. See what if any consequences you suffer. Now, try the same with a big corporation, like for instance, Wal*Mart. Think there will be no consequences? You might be in for a surprise the next time you try to change jobs.
Well, take heart anti-union folks. Union membership is in decline. You may not have them to kick around much longer.
I was laid off from a telecommunications company in the 80s. At 4pm, the computers went down. The word wafted around the building like a bad smell that we ought to grab our belongings and go down to the lobby. There we saw 2 tables. One had boxes of white envelopes. The other had boxes of brown envelopes. You stated you name and the people at the tables looked for your name on an envelope. A white envelope meant you stayed. A brown envelope meant you were laid off. Mine was turd brown. That day, 1200 people were let go. Other layoffs of 800, 500 and 300 followed.
I was 28 years old. I found a good job in another state. It was a very stressful time. Overnight, a streak of grey appeared in my hair. It surprised my wife, who noticed it before I did.
C programmers certainly face diminishing prospects but there's a mighty big code base out there. I'm with the guy who posted about 30 year technologies. Unix, shell scripts and C have been mighty durable. I'm sure perl can be lumped in there. No, C isn't the hot skill that it was 20 years ago but there is still some work.
Another poster pointed out that most longtimers learn several languages. I've been thru Fortran (jcl), basic, C, unix shell(bourne, C, korn, bash), perl, java and now ruby. I've never thought it was all that hard to pick up something new. Just try to do something with it that you couldn't do easily with what you were using.
I suppose in the heyday of printed magazines, hyperbole sold copy. Today, it harvests mouse clicks.
I agree that stealing bandwidth is wrong, the punishment certainly does not fit the crime. This type of thing should be a civil infraction, not a felony. People who steal actual physical goods don't even have to face the kinds of penalties this guy potentially could have. When there's a complete disconnect between the severity of punishment and common sense, it causes contempt for the law.
Amen. All kinds of minor offenses have been trumped up into felony status by legislators gone wild. They seem to be engaged in zero-tolerance one-up-manship grandstanding as being tough on crime.
This would basically ruin both CC and the RIAA.
Yeah. Let them eat their seed corn. Gobble it up boys.
For the past 10 years, I've wondered whether all the people I saw on the road HAD to be physically present at the office every day. Too many managers felt that if they couldn't go around the corner and look in on their workers, they'd goof off. God forbid if they should be home working on home improvements. Now those attitudes are proving so costly, they've become impractical. People still need face time but they do not need to be physically present in the office every day.
Besides saving gasoline, this will also reduce traffic congestion.
Put some REAL indicators on these products.
Pilot Lamps/Jewels
My previous boss viewed telecommuting as a supplement rather than a substitute. See, we had flex time. You could stay up as late working as necessary, so long as you were in by 8am. Telecommuting was viewed as "overtime lite". He wanted us to report telecommute time separately from time spent at the office.
Incidentally, with the introduction of RoHS-compliant lead-free solder, you will see this more and more.
"One study cited in the article states that by 2012, 40% of women now working in IT will leave for careers with more flexible hours."
So let me guess, we need more H1-B visas, right?
You're right. I haven't looked much. And at the price Amazon is asking, $100, I ain't likely to order one.
I stand corrected. It was apparently released in rather limited quantities back in '89. I've never seen a copy in a well stocked CD store. His other releases on CD are fairly easy to come by.
From a collector's stand point, vinyls never really faded from popularity. I still have all of my old vinyls
I wouldn't exactly call myself a collector but my collection started back in the 60's when that's all there was and I bought most of them in the 70's. Some of that stuff will never be released on CD. For example, I'm a Commander Cody fan. His Country Casanova album was only released on vinyl. There are tracks on that album which appear nowhere else. So I keep my turntable.
Did you know that the deadliest mass murder at a school in the US occurred at a school in Michigan where the perpetrator set off bomb planted in the school, then killed himself and many others with a car bomb after rescuers responded to the scene? 45 people died that day, and this was in 1927.
I looked it up: the Bath School disaster. Wow.
That's very interesting. I'd never heard of this incident.
But, the wiki said the guy who did it was in his 50s and was a disgruntled school board member who was angry about property tax. This wasn't a case of some kid getting hold of his dad's gun and shooting up the school.
That being said, I don't think we'll get this settled today. However, I'll give you the satisfcation of knowing that you have sparked my interest in finding out how many kids have shot up schools before and after corporal punishment was banned.
And probably caused just as many big problems as you prevented, due to people generally getting resentful towards people who do physical violence to them. Or were you under the impression that school shootings never happened before Columbine?
I can't say school shootings never happened prior to the early 70s, when corporal punishment was stopped. But if any did, they were mighty rare. I can't remember any.
As for resentments, I got paddled more often than most students because I was the class clown. I didn't feel resentment towards the principal for paddling me. I was ashamed of having been caught or that I used bad judgement.
I was born in the late 50s and grew up in the 60s. There were no computers. TV was black and white. My class was probably the last to be taught to use slide rules in high school.
We played outside. During the peak of the baby boom, there were lots of kids to play with. We'd round up 10 or 12, split up and line up on either side of a creek. We'd throw dirt clods, shoot bottle rockets, throw firecrackers and shoot BB guns (the old, whimpy kind) at each other. One parent gave us shop goggles and several of us carried trash can lids as shields. We escalated to Whamo Wrist Rocket slingshots, homemade catapults, sky rockets and roman candles. We'd play all day. When I'd get home, I was so dirty, my mother made me strip on the screened back porch and make a beeline to the tub. Sometimes people got hurt. I got hurt several times. It never stopped me. What we were doing was basically poor man's paintball.
When we got older, we entertained ourselves with vandalism, model rocketry, homemade explosives and other adventures. Yessir. If a boy does that nowadays, he'll get a cavity search.
I suppose if we'd had Doom and Quake we'd have played those games. But damn if it ain't fun to throw dirt clods.
As for these kids going on shooting rampages, it just didn't happen back then. The reason was no kid ever got that far out of line. If you acted up, you got your ass beat. The punishment was swift and sure. Today I see kids testing and pushing the limits of what they can get by with. Back then, you didn't have to push very far before you got your ass beat. If we'd continued corporal punishment in the schoiols, Columbine and all the other shootings probably wouldn't have happened because we'd have taken care of little problems before they became big problems.
At least patents give the little guy a chance.
Not much of one. It's expensive to enforce patents. The little guy will find himself out-lawyered when he takes on a mega-corp for infringement and he will not have as big a war chest as the mega-corp. So the mega-corp can outrun him and outgun him in court.
We should be safe from death threats and other sexual attacks and stuff, especially from other bloggers." seems like classic blogonarcissism. That's just how the Internet is, even for low-low-level blogocelebrati.
True. But at the same time, it is illegal in most parts of the the US to communicate threats verbally or in writing. From what I've been able to gather, it sounds like a crime has been committed. This is probably another situation in which law enforcement hasn't caught up with the technology. And, that may never happen. Indeed, as some have pointed out, the cure may be worse than the disease.
The govt may also be concerned about staving off a surge of TVs being disposed of. Even if affordable HDTVs become available, there will be people with TVs that can be used if they have a converter box. This is admittedly a secondary concern but one worth considering.
Ah, spring must be just around the corner. I can tell when Bill Gates goes whining to congress for more H1-Bs. In a couple months, he'll whine about how the US isn't graduating enough engineers and programmers. Then he'll point to news stories about him decrying the lack of qualified US citizens and say, "See. We need more H1-Bs." As more H1-Bs flood the job market, wages fall and demand for US citizens falls. These are demanding curricula and historically, enrollments have tracked demand for graduates. The students understand this.
One poster repeated the claim which has been touted by many, including Bill Gates, that if we don't import these workers, the jobs will be outsourced. What difference does it make?
I've got to admit, though, I feel a little disloyal at this point.
Why? Do you think they're loyal to you? If you think that, you've got another thought comin'.