Not really. They no longer try to jack up your rates, instead they tack on a new "service fee". So your bill still goes up, but by calling it a "surcharge", it's within the existing contract scope and does not invalidate the contract terms. AT&T did this recently.

Instead of all this creation of new Frankenplants, why not just use termites. They seem to have no problem breaking down lignin at lower temperatures, and it doesn't required monkeying around with plant genes.

:/ swing and a miss...

1 - Bangalore is not in Asia.

2 - Saying US workers are lazy goes far beyond myth into the realm of demonstrably blatant falsehood.

3 - "nationalistic outrage" has nothing to do with it. But dealing with cheap labor sold as talented but demonstrating below acceptable levels of competence, spending time fixing all this crap because management won't pay what actual skilled developers demand, while depressing my salary to the point that I'm taking on side jobs and working 12 hours a day to keep up with increasing costs and then being told I'm lazy - yea, that generates a bit of outrage.

And yet their output is still just as high in quantity and orders of magnitude higher in quality than anything that comes out of your 14-hour-day Bangalore sweatshop. I have to use 5 of those guys to do the work of 1 American developer, and it's still not a deal, because it has to be sent back 5 or 6 times for fixes just to reach the level of "barely acceptable".

You're still doing business in the US because there are still idiots that thing they're getting a deal. Boeing sure learned their lesson after their Dreamliner got grounded when the steaming pile of crap that HCL delivered was so bad they had to hire a whole new set of American developers to fix it. And yet, incredibly, after multiple failed projects like that which required total re-write to fix, HCL is somehow still getting work.

According to the site - "h1bwage.com is the online wage library for h1b prevailing wage determinations, and the disclosure databases for other programs."

So it's referencing the standard salaries for positions, and/or the H1B application statements of companies applying for the visas. It in no way reflects what the hired workers actually earn, and is not intended to. Salaries are always "negotiable".

I suspect that some of those figures are what the consulting firm is charging to place one of those working in another company - so the company is paying that amount for the person, but the consulting firm is taking a good portion of it off the top before they actually pay the worker.

Riiiight. Because wage inflation is such a huge problem in the US. Oh, wait, actually, the US has exactly the opposite problem.

It's not - how on earth did you get that idea? The rules say it's supposed to cost the same, but in practice the H1B worker is much cheaper for the vast majority of companies that use them.

Your spelling is atroscious.

Interesting - you seem to be saying that the doctor lost his medical license (a pretty egregious penalty for a flawed study) because the media misinterpreted it. That seems pretty odd, but I don't really know the story, and far be it from me to be thrown in with the lizard people like you have done to the GP.

But you never addressed his basis, which is that every possibility from vaccines to food supplies to public policies and clearly old or flawed science being used to promote nutritional advice are being dismissed out-of-hand as simply not possible. That perhaps the drug-company paid-for FDA and the Monsanto-controlled Department of Agriculture really are not going to allow anyone to shed any suspicion upon the corporations that they work for, and an anomalous rise in autism has nothing to do with the lifestyle they promote.

We know that the standard bureaucratic processes often fail the public from stories like Lorenzo's oil, the Dallas Buyer's Club, and we are just starting to recognize that the people warning about wheat gluten may not be crackpots after all.

Naturally. In fact, you don't even need to be a target. Maybe their target attempted to hack one of your computers, that puts you into the pool of computers being swept up in one of these broad warrants. So your honeypot now gets you an obstruction of justice charge, and you were never even suspected of a crime.

That's not a Microsoft account problem, though, that's a "you put some data on the Internet" problem.

Yes it will - I've done so (on Windows 8.1, anyway). You don't need a Microsoft account to use it at all, only if you want a "cloud-stored" notebook. You can store notebooks on local storage or network shares, too.

Most, true. OneNote, however, allows you to store on a local drive, a network share, or your own web site (although I believe the web site option only works with Sharepoint - but then Microsoft tries to sell Sharepoint with EVERYTHING.

Gee, thanks, Mr. Nadella.