Please mod parent up. Gasland is a documentary on natural gas and completely relevant to this discussion.

It means we are making a difference. If you fight a tyrant, expect the tyrant to fight back. Let's hope for a good fight and may our champion slay the beast in the end.

Precisely. That's exactly what I meant. People only think in terms of desktop support; and even if you can compare that to handymen, IT is far more than desktop support.

Why not? Not to diminish what a handyman does, but most handyman jobs don't require 4 years of college. One of the problems I see, and it's even very present here on /., is that people can't see beyond their own desktops. IT = desktop support. Of course the guy who can help you navigate the intricacies of Outlook knows everything there is to know about computers, right? Well, we don't have handymen design our buildings, do we? We don't have custodians deciding on office ergonomics, do we? I mean, these are two groups of people, handymen and custodians, that know our buildings really really well, a lot better than most of us do. Yet when it comes to designing our offices we turn to engineers and architects. So, nothing wrong comparing support personnel and handymen; but please don't have your support personnel designing your network and deciding which server OS to buy. You might end up with a flat network flooded with broadcast packets from Windows servers and... Oh, wait...

I used to work for a bank where IT started as its own department with a head that reported to the president; then ended up under Finance because the CFO was convinced that IT only cost what it did because the head of IT must be incompetent. Turns out that the CFO really had no grasp of what IT does, cut the budget in half and made it our job to make do with that and drove the department - and the bank - into the ground. I wish I could tell you the organization learned a valuable lesson and this person payed for his mistakes, but the reality is that he went on to a similar position at a much larger bank along with a nice severance package, right before the bank was liquidated when it was decided that the investment to make it competitive again, after years of technological neglect, was not worth the trouble. Better sell the assets.

15 years ago, when I was working as a Systems Analyst at a Brazilian bank that shall remain nameless, it was common knowledge that trading desks all over the country were engaging in this kind of thing. They would create "financial products" tied to World Cup statistics and use all the technology, corporate and individual knowledge at their disposal to try to predict the outcomes and win or lose huge sums of money. Individuals bet with their own money and the corporations they worked for (and who provided the infrastructure for this) tended to look the other way. One such "product" I remember well was the so-called "GDC" ("Gols Da Copa" - Cup Goals) which created a market around the total number of goals to be scored during the World Cup. I knew one trader who payed for his house with his GDC money. Most of the time it was a mostly harmless hobby (if you discount the fact that gambling is illegal in Brazil) but as the World Cup final approached, I was very aware that the resources who were supposed to be working on models of commodities, foreign exchange and other markets did little else than model the World Cup; this included both people and computational resources. I wonder if some of my old colleagues in Brazilian banking ended up finding positions in Wall St.

You mean, kinda like the US is doing trying to change everybody's copyright laws so that the police of all countries will do the MPAA/RIAA's dirty work for them?

"moderated computing." Someone other than you decides what you can and cannot do. Good idea from the point of view of end users, people who really couldn't care less about the technology itself, only what it enables them to do. But terrible idea for the rest of us. How long until general purpose computers become a niche application or a hobby like ham radio? And of course become a "boutique" item costing orders of magnitude more than "consumer" toys?

I expect this is just a scaled up version of the problems I deal with every day. And I'm sure I'm not the only one. Users have grown so dependent on system services and management has grown so apart from the trenches that completely unreasonable expectations are the norm. Where I work for instance it's almost impossible to even *test* backup power and failover mechanisms and procedures because users consider even minor outages in the middle of the night unacceptable and managers either don't have the clout or don't understand the problem well enough to put limits to such expectations. As a result often times the only tests such systems get happen during real emergencies, when they are actually needed. I don't know how, but I feel we should start educating our users and managers better, not to mention being realistic about risks and expectations.

You are correct. But the fact that something is in the Constitution doesn't make it right. The parts of the Brazilian Constitution you quote are, to me, a source of embarrassment. IAAB (I am a Brazilian). Those things have been placed there as a compromise to help shield former members of the military dictatorship from prosecution, for ever. More than that, they is also constantly abused and used to shield corrupt politicians and criminals. Based on those articles, you can obtain a gag order against all media, effectively prohibiting them from exposing facts all Brazilians should have access to. Maybe now that Orkut is causing usage of these articles to be more visible, Brazilians will start realizing there's something wrong with them.

IAAAB. I am also a Brazilian. And I find this very Brazilian. Instead of realizing that there's something wrong with the Constitution and working to change it (or not putting it there in the first place), Brazilians learn to live with such aberrations. The problem is that aberrations in the Constitution are only funny while everybody agrees they are aberrations. The moment somebody takes them seriously, you either get a travesty like this Google ruling or you turn your Constitution into a useless heap of paper. Yes, the judge has a problem understanding how the Internet works. But the Brazilian Constitution, as written, makes Google, Youtube and most social networking illegal. Brazilians need to get a grip and start working for change in the Constitution. If they did, I might even consider moving back to Brazil...

This, my friends, is the main reason why I left my native country. I have pissed off many of my compatriots by saying this, and I will say it again: recent statistics are not only meaningless, they are also the result of the previous administration, not the current one.

My fellow Brazilians, put down your flags. Stop dancing for a minute. You may be growing more than almost anybody but China. You seem to have found a shitload of oil in your shores. You will be hosting both the Olympics and the World Cup in the next few years. The 10% of your people who constitute the elite can finally afford new, modern cars. The 90% of your miserably poor, suffering, underfed, uneducated masses can finally afford basic plumbing outside major cities. Obama has called your president "the guy." But consider this:

- You shouldn't compare your economic growth to China's, unless you want millions of salaried slaves doing nothing but work from cradle to grave

- You should be too happy about your new found oil, unless you like what you see (wealth distribution even worse than yours, religious and political extremism, terrorism, etc) in countries that went down that road before like most of the Middle East and your neighbor Venezuela.

- Sports and international events are but temporary glory - just ask the no-longer-existing Soviet Union

- Notice that Obama didn't even invite you to the latest international talks; and when your president showed up there, uninvited, he was thoroughly ignored. - Ask your elites if their shiny new cars are worth living behind bars in luxury condos, if their annual trips to Disney World are worth the kidnappings, if their smuggled iPads are worth the rape of their daughters.

- Your poor are probably better off with some plumbing, but ask them if this is enough or if they also want access to health care, nice safe houses, access to a college education.

My fellow Brazilians, please learn something. You have a basic flaw in your principles. Learn about what freedom actually means; learn that it must include freedom of speech. I know it's a big leap for you, but try to understand that a judge or a celebrity do not merit immediate and automatic compliance. That the opposite is actually closer to the truth. It would be relatively easy to repeal your laws of contempt of authority and the rest of that rubbish; but repealing a law means nothing if the spirit of the law is in the spirit of the people. My fellow Brazilians, you must abandon the colonial ages, leave behind values meant for 17th century Portugal, and join the twentieth century at last. When you've done that you can start aspiring for the twenty-first.

Thank you.

That might be true, but as an H1B worker myself, and I realize I can only speak for myself, I can say a) I am not from India; b) I make exactly as much as my American coworkers; c) I don't feel my employer treats me unfairly in any way.

I do agree with the basic unfairness of some features of the program. I really don't like living with the constant possibility that I might have to leave the country on short notice. I am not "afraid to be sent back"; it just makes basic things like planning my future, thinking about retirement, even finding a good school for my child (who happens to be an American citizen by the way) that much harder. I also don't like it that I really don't have a lot of leverage when it comes to discussing promotions and raises, although so far my employer has treated me no different than any of my colleagues.

It must be said though that I knew what the rules were when I got into it. If I don't like the rules I am free to leave at any moment. I don't care much what people's preconceived notions about "not knowing their rights in our country" are, to quote someone up the thread. The fact is that I, and I suspect most of my fellow H1B holders, are sophisticated enough to be able to learn how to live in a foreign country. If any of us chooses not to invest the time to understand the country, its laws and its culture, that's their problem. So say what you will about reforming the system but please be aware that I knew exactly what I was getting into; I am free to leave at any time; I am upholding my side of the bargain; and I expect the U.S. government to uphold their side. Please do not speak on my behalf. I don't want the rules of the game to change before the game is over. Or I want a say in how those rules get changed. Anything less would be extremely unfair.

Now, you are certainly free to complain on your own behalf. If you feel strongly about the H1B program, by all means go learn all you can about it and do everything the law allows you to do to change what you don't like. Just don't say you have *my* interests in mind when you do it.

I agree with you in principle. However there is something to be said for the "cultural integration" process. As an immigrant myself I can tell you there are many many reasons why someone would want to live in a different country. Money may be the most common, but I'm not even sure of that.

In my case, there is very little difference in quality of life. I used to own a consultancy business in the "old country" and I was making a lot more money than I do now in the U.S. The fact that cost of life is cheaper here makes up for the difference, somewhat.

My reason to come here was an affinity and an appreciation for basic principles. Call my corny but my reasons to want to stay here are two: the U.S. Constitution and the willingness of its people to take that seriously.

People, including my compatriots, who come here for the big house and the big car; and then bring with them an attitude of "legal relativism," of "it's OK so long as you don't get caught," of "everybody's doing it so I'd be a fool for not doing it", offend me. They are the reason why I left my country in the first place. It's not "immigrant mentality." It's admiring a culture, wanting to be part of it and putting in the effort to make that happen. It makes me protective of that culture.

If a culture is worth abandoning your country for, it's worth defending. Even from your former countrymen.