Because that is the law. Paying someone on a H1-B or L1-B visa less than the US rate is prohibited.
I've said this before, but apparently some people still don't get it. The employers still determine both the job title and qualifications.
Here's how you abuse work visas. First, you decide what qualifications you want. Ask for the moon. Ask for the sun and stars. List every possible piece of software or technology the position might use. Ask for 15-20 years experience or a post graduate degree for a junior position. It works well if you vaguely copy your senior grade requirements to the junior grade position. Next, determine what you want to pay. Take the compensation of the employee position you're *actually* trying to fill and subtract the cost of the H1-B visa (typically $10,000). That's your maximum salary. Everything below that is profit. It's ideal if the difference in salary between junior and senior is greater than this amount. Now, post the position with the minimum possible wage that you can reasonably get away with. Leave the posting up for six months, or how ever long it takes to establish that nobody can meet the "requirements" in the US. You can interview anybody who applies, of course, and if anybody talented is dumb enough to accept such an offer then you save the cost of the visa, too!
When nobody applies, you contact your foreign contractor. They're getting a slice of that salary, generally, so you can bet they'll find lots of candidates. I'm certain those contractors will supply resumes listing all the qualifications you might need... whether or not they're actually accurate!
My concern would be developers acquiring a distorted sense of what should be displayed on a single screen. It's bad enough when I have to use my laptop display since it's not a 1k display. I can't even use my netbook anymore since it's 1024x600. Nothing fits on the screen! I'm not looking forward to 4k web pages that still have 5 inch columns of content surrounded by ads.
Is it really too much to ask for people to define their acronyms? I'm a little tired of having to Google an acronym in every story. This one *only* appears in the summary.
Which, from an academic perspective, is pretty cool.
Although we're talking about mathematically scarce numbers that have no intrinsic value, so they only have value because we believe they have value. So they're only non-traditional-fiat in the sense that they're scarce, not that they're artificial. That makes them moderately less appealing than a stock share. The currency is designed to deflate infinitely, too, and has a fixed, regressive production rate to a fixed quantity. And the designer is anonymous, which is totally not suspicious. There's no way he has 100,000 personal bitcoins that he's just waiting to sell off as soon as the price hits some ridiculous level. I mean, that would be like a pyramid scheme!
And it's decentralized... by using peer-to-peer networking to track transactions. Yeah, they just give full access to the world database of bitcoin transactions. That's totally not frightening when the database isn't FDIC insured. And as time progresses, the resources the full clients require only increases. Network latency is already a problem. Should the currency really take off, it's going to take a lot of money to operate a Bitcoin node. Well, perhaps some corporate or government interest will run it. But hey, no central bank!
But even assuming none of those problems happens... why should the average individual use it? To replace PayPal? Sure. Everybody hates PayPal. Other than that, I don't get it. I mean, except for scarcity, what's the real difference to me as a consumer between BitCoin and, say, Microsoft Points? Or WoW gold? Why would I work in exchange for BitCoins instead of USD or Euros other than purely political reasons?
Defamation laws, as far as I see, only cover the negatives, not the positives.
Defamation covers the negatives. Fraud and false advertising covers the positives. If testimonials or endorsements are made then they are regulated. You can't legally advertise a false testimonial.
I, like the vast majority of the US, am neither a shareholder nor employee of Boeing. Explain to me how this costs me a lot of money.
That US$4 billion doesn't just go to a safe at Boeing to rot for the next thousand years.
A portion of it goes to purchasing the materials used to manufacture the airplanes and the necessary maintenance parts for them. Each of these things, when sold, incur sales and export taxes that go to our state and federal governments. The purchases -- some of which come from other US companies -- cause the same effect to them as happens to Boeing.
A portion of it goes to the employees at Boeing, some of which only get jobs because of this contract. Those employees pay taxes on this income, which goes to our state and federal governments. Additionally, those employees go out and purchase things with this money they earn as a direct consequence of this contract, which, again, causes the same kinds of things to happen whenever money moves (taxes, etc.). All those people that had goods purchased from them made more money, too!
A portion of the funds may be kept in reserve for corporate profits or other holdings, but these moneys still do not rot in a safe somewhere. They are invested mutual funds, treasury bills, insurance investments, stocks, bonds, etc. This means even the money that Boeing *doesn't* spend still gets used in the economy by loaning it out to people that need it. Oh, and, of course, any profits here get taxed by the federal government as well.
All those monies that end up in state and federal governments go towards services provided to our nation: funding the army, social security, police, fire departments, transportation departments, education departments. You know, everything that lets us maintain our standard of living. That money doesn't disappear, either. The people working those jobs earn those tax dollars as salary, and spend those tax dollars on materials just like any other business.
This is how economies work: moving money around and creating incremental value, while losing a percentage to taxation. Money doesn't *disappear* unless you literally take it out and burn it or bury it. That US$4 billion purchase probably creates ten times that value in economic power by greasing the wheels of our economy.
Now, the NSA's illegal and abusive policies have cost the US billions in foreign investments, and that means hundreds of millions in tax dollars and hundreds of jobs over a decade or more. It's very difficult to justify a national security policy that significantly impacts your foreign policy and your economic policy.
The last step in making technology cheap enough for everyone is not something fresh out of R&D. It's something established that isn't cheap enough for everyone being refined and perfected and improved upon to suddenly be cheap enough for everyone. IBM and DEC didn't start out with commodity hardware. They made mainframes, then they made minicomputers, and then they made PCs and commodity servers.
This is American technology built with American manufacturing. In this day and age, that alone is exciting. This is electric cars -- not hybrids -- and they don't look like a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe. And the company is working to change nationwide infrastructure as well, and busting up the dealer middlemen that artificially inflate our auto prices. Fuck yes, I'd be happy to give them a tax break. They're actually doing something that might just benefit me as a citizen, a consumer, and an Earthling.
Except then the adopters had gold, which has a number of properties that make it desirable. With digital currency you just have magic numbers some arbitrary authority says are really magic.
No instant effects - Wouldn't secret cards be considered instant?
They're non-optional, so no. It's not that difficult to discern what they likely are, so it's not that difficult to trigger them in the least harmful manner. Playing a mage and they cast a secret? Send in your weakest unit in to trigger it. If it doesn't, well, that eliminates 2 of the 5 Mage secrets, and only 1 of those do you really have to worry about. Besides, only 3 classes even have secrets.
You can completely ignore the defenders board - Don't taunt cards partially prevent this?
Sort of. The issue is that the attacker still decides whether, when, and how the defenders are attacked. With Magic, one of the major strategic elements is that the defender assigns blockers. So the attacker has to consider whether the defender will block, which attackers he will block, and if he has any instants. And even if he didn't have anything before, he might have been sandbagging you. Attacking is risky in Magic. In Hearthstone, it's just something you almost always do.
Most games I've played, it's fairly dangerous to ignore the board and go directly after the hero.
Of course it is. The problem is that the game favors the attacker over strategy, not that you can't misplay. It just makes the game a lot more skill based. That sounds good, until you realize it means that competition will exclude a lot of people, and thus limit popularity (this is why chess is such a small, albiet international, community).
The mechanics of this game are about on par with the Pokemon TCG. The game is extremely lacking in player interaction. There are no instant effects. Attacking players choose to attack defending creatures directly, and can completely ignore the defender's board if they want. The game is like dual solitaire. Once you know the range of possible effects that a deck type can produce, it's fairly trivial to play around. Magic players I've seen streaming this game tend to win about 90% of the games they play, and most say it gets boring and repetitive fairly quickly. About the only time they lose is when they leave Arena and face someone who's invested every waking hour grinding for cards. It's pretty hilarious to watch other streamers coming from non-TCG games trying to play and clearly not planning out very far in advance.
As for the summary's criticism:
[Magic] hasn't actually evolved to make use of technology.
It can't, won't, and shouldn't. Magic is, first and foremost, a paper card game. WotC has stated repeatedly that the online and digital versions of the game exist to promote and supplement the paper game, not replace it. This is the same stance they've taken on D&D video games: they supplement the tabletop game. Their goal is to get players to graduate from playing online to playing the paper games. It's a good thing, too, because the client software for Magic is pretty shitty. It does the rules just fine, but the interface is consistently terrible. If the game weren't so good, it wouldn't be worthwhile. Fortunately, they've finally brought in real outside help to work on it. They brought in the Duels of the Planeswalker people for the current beta and it's terrible, but supposedly the new team consists of better programmers. Historically their problem has been paying peanuts and expecting gold. We'll see if they can get something usable by the time Hearthstone is out of beta.
SELinux has a higher administrative burden. Mounting/,/boot,/usr,/usr/share,/usr/local,/var, and/tmp all with 'ro', 'noexec', 'nodev', etc. as appropriate means you prevent many types of attacks and you don't have to write a custom SELinux policy, and maintain it, and debug all the issues. Increased granularity = increased complexity. Options in mount = KISS.
You really think cronyism is a new thing? You know that the exact same things happened when the robber barons ruled, right? Local government is just as susceptible to corruption as Federal. Besides, this is at the state level.
And there is the problem. People pay hundreds or thousands for a computer and still want to treat it as an appliance like their toaster. Why should I give a shit about their safety if they don't give a shit about it?
Yes, I'm sure auto mechanics, carpenters, doctors, soldiers, and farmers all think the same thing when they get up to do their daily work.
The fact is, all people need medicine, not just those who are experts. All people need homes, not just those that can build them. All people need their vehicles repaired, not just those who can do it themselves. All people need their nation defended, not just those who can devote their life to it. All people need food, not just those with the means to produce their own. And, yes, all people need computers, not just those who are experts.
We experts have jobs because we're supposed to help these other people. Having a skill doesn't make you special. It just makes you useful. Being useful doesn't give you the right to be an asshole.
It will take time for the competition in the marketplace to drive prices down. Insurers have been so used to their "take it or leave it" bullshit that they actually have no idea what people want or how they can remain solvent or what prices actually should be. Try again in a year.
There will invariably be problems with the new ACA law. Insurance companies will find loopholes that will need to be sealed by the legislature. Insurance companies will ignore the law until they are taken to court by the government for not obeying the law. It will take time, but it will get better.
Think of ACA as Vista. It's shit, and it's worse than XP in a lot of cases, but it made it possible to make Windows 7 which was a major accomplishment. Now we just have to make sure congress doesn't think we want our insurance to work like our smartphones....
Query optimizers don't maintain code. Joins are easier to read, easier to modify, and easier to reuse than subqueries. Why? Joins separate relational mapping information from selection criteria. Subqueries jumble everything together and take hours to decode anything more complex than "select * from table where field = 'value'". Nevermind that subqueries don't scale to really complicated joins. If you don't get used to joining with the join statement, you don't know how to pull the data you want when you need it.
I don't even want to think about what this would look like using subqueries: SELECT s.email "E-Mail",
rtrim(s.last_name) + ', ' + rtrim(s.first_name) + ' ' + rtrim(coalesce(s.middle_name,'')) "Staff Name",
ms.building "Building",
mss.start_period "Period",
rtrim(ms.course) + '-' + cast(ms.course_section as varchar) "Course",
ms.description "Description",
rtrim(c.code) + ' - ' + rtrim(c.description) "Category" FROM mr_gb_asmt a inner join mrtb_gb_category c
on a.district = c.district
and a.category = c.code inner join schd_ms_session mss
on a.district = mss.district
and a.section_key = mss.section_key
and a.course_session = mss.course_session inner join schd_ms_mp msmp
on mss.district = msmp.district
and mss.section_key = msmp.section_key
and mss.course_session = msmp.course_session inner join schd_ms ms
on mss.district = ms.district
and mss.section_key = ms.section_key inner join reg_staff s
on mss.district = s.district
and mss.primary_staff_id = s.staff_id inner join reg_mp_dates mpd
on ms.district = mpd.district
and ms.building = mpd.building
and ms.school_year = mpd.school_year
and ms.track = mpd.track
and msmp.marking_period = mpd.marking_period
and a.due_date between mpd.start_date and mpd.end_date WHERE ms.district = @district
and ms.school_year = @school_year
and msmp.marking_period = @marking_period
and a.extra_credit in ('A','T')
Slashdot Mirror
See? It's easy! Anybody with an electrical engineering degree can do it!
I've said this before, but apparently some people still don't get it. The employers still determine both the job title and qualifications.
Here's how you abuse work visas. First, you decide what qualifications you want. Ask for the moon. Ask for the sun and stars. List every possible piece of software or technology the position might use. Ask for 15-20 years experience or a post graduate degree for a junior position. It works well if you vaguely copy your senior grade requirements to the junior grade position. Next, determine what you want to pay. Take the compensation of the employee position you're *actually* trying to fill and subtract the cost of the H1-B visa (typically $10,000). That's your maximum salary. Everything below that is profit. It's ideal if the difference in salary between junior and senior is greater than this amount. Now, post the position with the minimum possible wage that you can reasonably get away with. Leave the posting up for six months, or how ever long it takes to establish that nobody can meet the "requirements" in the US. You can interview anybody who applies, of course, and if anybody talented is dumb enough to accept such an offer then you save the cost of the visa, too!
When nobody applies, you contact your foreign contractor. They're getting a slice of that salary, generally, so you can bet they'll find lots of candidates. I'm certain those contractors will supply resumes listing all the qualifications you might need... whether or not they're actually accurate!
But the private sector can always do it better! The Libertarians say so!
My concern would be developers acquiring a distorted sense of what should be displayed on a single screen. It's bad enough when I have to use my laptop display since it's not a 1k display. I can't even use my netbook anymore since it's 1024x600. Nothing fits on the screen! I'm not looking forward to 4k web pages that still have 5 inch columns of content surrounded by ads.
Oh, for "-1, Used subject line as first line of comment".
MOOC = Massive Open Online Course
Is it really too much to ask for people to define their acronyms? I'm a little tired of having to Google an acronym in every story. This one *only* appears in the summary.
Which, from an academic perspective, is pretty cool.
Although we're talking about mathematically scarce numbers that have no intrinsic value, so they only have value because we believe they have value. So they're only non-traditional-fiat in the sense that they're scarce, not that they're artificial. That makes them moderately less appealing than a stock share. The currency is designed to deflate infinitely, too, and has a fixed, regressive production rate to a fixed quantity. And the designer is anonymous, which is totally not suspicious. There's no way he has 100,000 personal bitcoins that he's just waiting to sell off as soon as the price hits some ridiculous level. I mean, that would be like a pyramid scheme!
And it's decentralized... by using peer-to-peer networking to track transactions. Yeah, they just give full access to the world database of bitcoin transactions. That's totally not frightening when the database isn't FDIC insured. And as time progresses, the resources the full clients require only increases. Network latency is already a problem. Should the currency really take off, it's going to take a lot of money to operate a Bitcoin node. Well, perhaps some corporate or government interest will run it. But hey, no central bank!
But even assuming none of those problems happens... why should the average individual use it? To replace PayPal? Sure. Everybody hates PayPal. Other than that, I don't get it. I mean, except for scarcity, what's the real difference to me as a consumer between BitCoin and, say, Microsoft Points? Or WoW gold? Why would I work in exchange for BitCoins instead of USD or Euros other than purely political reasons?
Defamation covers the negatives. Fraud and false advertising covers the positives. If testimonials or endorsements are made then they are regulated. You can't legally advertise a false testimonial.
With enough Perl, all eyes are bleeding.
That US$4 billion doesn't just go to a safe at Boeing to rot for the next thousand years.
A portion of it goes to purchasing the materials used to manufacture the airplanes and the necessary maintenance parts for them. Each of these things, when sold, incur sales and export taxes that go to our state and federal governments. The purchases -- some of which come from other US companies -- cause the same effect to them as happens to Boeing.
A portion of it goes to the employees at Boeing, some of which only get jobs because of this contract. Those employees pay taxes on this income, which goes to our state and federal governments. Additionally, those employees go out and purchase things with this money they earn as a direct consequence of this contract, which, again, causes the same kinds of things to happen whenever money moves (taxes, etc.). All those people that had goods purchased from them made more money, too!
A portion of the funds may be kept in reserve for corporate profits or other holdings, but these moneys still do not rot in a safe somewhere. They are invested mutual funds, treasury bills, insurance investments, stocks, bonds, etc. This means even the money that Boeing *doesn't* spend still gets used in the economy by loaning it out to people that need it. Oh, and, of course, any profits here get taxed by the federal government as well.
All those monies that end up in state and federal governments go towards services provided to our nation: funding the army, social security, police, fire departments, transportation departments, education departments. You know, everything that lets us maintain our standard of living. That money doesn't disappear, either. The people working those jobs earn those tax dollars as salary, and spend those tax dollars on materials just like any other business.
This is how economies work: moving money around and creating incremental value, while losing a percentage to taxation. Money doesn't *disappear* unless you literally take it out and burn it or bury it. That US$4 billion purchase probably creates ten times that value in economic power by greasing the wheels of our economy.
Now, the NSA's illegal and abusive policies have cost the US billions in foreign investments, and that means hundreds of millions in tax dollars and hundreds of jobs over a decade or more. It's very difficult to justify a national security policy that significantly impacts your foreign policy and your economic policy.
The last step in making technology cheap enough for everyone is not something fresh out of R&D. It's something established that isn't cheap enough for everyone being refined and perfected and improved upon to suddenly be cheap enough for everyone. IBM and DEC didn't start out with commodity hardware. They made mainframes, then they made minicomputers, and then they made PCs and commodity servers.
This is American technology built with American manufacturing. In this day and age, that alone is exciting. This is electric cars -- not hybrids -- and they don't look like a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe. And the company is working to change nationwide infrastructure as well, and busting up the dealer middlemen that artificially inflate our auto prices. Fuck yes, I'd be happy to give them a tax break. They're actually doing something that might just benefit me as a citizen, a consumer, and an Earthling.
Except the WWW didn't exist a decade before 1994.
The Internet might have, but the World Wide Web did not. The WWW was conceived and proposed between 1989 and 1991.
Ah, Christ, you mean we have another 20 years of this shit before someone fixes it?
Except then the adopters had gold, which has a number of properties that make it desirable. With digital currency you just have magic numbers some arbitrary authority says are really magic.
See, there's your problem. You're conflating slang with teenagers. Slang isn't moronic. Teenagers are.
My guess is the mystery insulator material is beeswax. At least, the temperatures are about right, it's non-toxic, and doesn't oxidize AFAIK.
They're non-optional, so no. It's not that difficult to discern what they likely are, so it's not that difficult to trigger them in the least harmful manner. Playing a mage and they cast a secret? Send in your weakest unit in to trigger it. If it doesn't, well, that eliminates 2 of the 5 Mage secrets, and only 1 of those do you really have to worry about. Besides, only 3 classes even have secrets.
Sort of. The issue is that the attacker still decides whether, when, and how the defenders are attacked. With Magic, one of the major strategic elements is that the defender assigns blockers. So the attacker has to consider whether the defender will block, which attackers he will block, and if he has any instants. And even if he didn't have anything before, he might have been sandbagging you. Attacking is risky in Magic. In Hearthstone, it's just something you almost always do.
Of course it is. The problem is that the game favors the attacker over strategy, not that you can't misplay. It just makes the game a lot more skill based. That sounds good, until you realize it means that competition will exclude a lot of people, and thus limit popularity (this is why chess is such a small, albiet international, community).
The mechanics of this game are about on par with the Pokemon TCG. The game is extremely lacking in player interaction. There are no instant effects. Attacking players choose to attack defending creatures directly, and can completely ignore the defender's board if they want. The game is like dual solitaire. Once you know the range of possible effects that a deck type can produce, it's fairly trivial to play around. Magic players I've seen streaming this game tend to win about 90% of the games they play, and most say it gets boring and repetitive fairly quickly. About the only time they lose is when they leave Arena and face someone who's invested every waking hour grinding for cards. It's pretty hilarious to watch other streamers coming from non-TCG games trying to play and clearly not planning out very far in advance.
As for the summary's criticism:
It can't, won't, and shouldn't. Magic is, first and foremost, a paper card game. WotC has stated repeatedly that the online and digital versions of the game exist to promote and supplement the paper game, not replace it. This is the same stance they've taken on D&D video games: they supplement the tabletop game. Their goal is to get players to graduate from playing online to playing the paper games. It's a good thing, too, because the client software for Magic is pretty shitty. It does the rules just fine, but the interface is consistently terrible. If the game weren't so good, it wouldn't be worthwhile. Fortunately, they've finally brought in real outside help to work on it. They brought in the Duels of the Planeswalker people for the current beta and it's terrible, but supposedly the new team consists of better programmers. Historically their problem has been paying peanuts and expecting gold. We'll see if they can get something usable by the time Hearthstone is out of beta.
SELinux has a higher administrative burden. Mounting /, /boot, /usr, /usr/share, /usr/local, /var, and /tmp all with 'ro', 'noexec', 'nodev', etc. as appropriate means you prevent many types of attacks and you don't have to write a custom SELinux policy, and maintain it, and debug all the issues. Increased granularity = increased complexity. Options in mount = KISS.
This is a civil trial. Perjury is a criminal offense, and prosecution must be brought by the state.
You really think cronyism is a new thing? You know that the exact same things happened when the robber barons ruled, right? Local government is just as susceptible to corruption as Federal. Besides, this is at the state level.
Yes, I'm sure auto mechanics, carpenters, doctors, soldiers, and farmers all think the same thing when they get up to do their daily work.
The fact is, all people need medicine, not just those who are experts. All people need homes, not just those that can build them. All people need their vehicles repaired, not just those who can do it themselves. All people need their nation defended, not just those who can devote their life to it. All people need food, not just those with the means to produce their own. And, yes, all people need computers, not just those who are experts.
We experts have jobs because we're supposed to help these other people. Having a skill doesn't make you special. It just makes you useful. Being useful doesn't give you the right to be an asshole.
It will take time for the competition in the marketplace to drive prices down. Insurers have been so used to their "take it or leave it" bullshit that they actually have no idea what people want or how they can remain solvent or what prices actually should be. Try again in a year.
There will invariably be problems with the new ACA law. Insurance companies will find loopholes that will need to be sealed by the legislature. Insurance companies will ignore the law until they are taken to court by the government for not obeying the law. It will take time, but it will get better.
Think of ACA as Vista. It's shit, and it's worse than XP in a lot of cases, but it made it possible to make Windows 7 which was a major accomplishment. Now we just have to make sure congress doesn't think we want our insurance to work like our smartphones....
Query optimizers don't maintain code. Joins are easier to read, easier to modify, and easier to reuse than subqueries. Why? Joins separate relational mapping information from selection criteria. Subqueries jumble everything together and take hours to decode anything more complex than "select * from table where field = 'value'". Nevermind that subqueries don't scale to really complicated joins. If you don't get used to joining with the join statement, you don't know how to pull the data you want when you need it.
I don't even want to think about what this would look like using subqueries:
SELECT s.email "E-Mail",
rtrim(s.last_name) + ', ' + rtrim(s.first_name) + ' ' + rtrim(coalesce(s.middle_name,'')) "Staff Name",
ms.building "Building",
mss.start_period "Period",
rtrim(ms.course) + '-' + cast(ms.course_section as varchar) "Course",
ms.description "Description",
rtrim(c.code) + ' - ' + rtrim(c.description) "Category"
FROM mr_gb_asmt a
inner join mrtb_gb_category c
on a.district = c.district
and a.category = c.code
inner join schd_ms_session mss
on a.district = mss.district
and a.section_key = mss.section_key
and a.course_session = mss.course_session
inner join schd_ms_mp msmp
on mss.district = msmp.district
and mss.section_key = msmp.section_key
and mss.course_session = msmp.course_session
inner join schd_ms ms
on mss.district = ms.district
and mss.section_key = ms.section_key
inner join reg_staff s
on mss.district = s.district
and mss.primary_staff_id = s.staff_id
inner join reg_mp_dates mpd
on ms.district = mpd.district
and ms.building = mpd.building
and ms.school_year = mpd.school_year
and ms.track = mpd.track
and msmp.marking_period = mpd.marking_period
and a.due_date between mpd.start_date and mpd.end_date
WHERE ms.district = @district
and ms.school_year = @school_year
and msmp.marking_period = @marking_period
and a.extra_credit in ('A','T')
20X seems to be a fairly normal rate of spam based on what I've seen at the organizations I've worked for, with spikes up to about 40X.