Many of these comments place H1B's as a target of their wrath. I have never experienced this to be the case, but I also don't like to go around blaming immigrants for problems I created for myself. I have seen (and benefited from!) a job posting being specifically opened for me, exactly, to fulfill some corporate requirements.

I think the people that bash H1B's and internal posts are on to something. These super specific requirements are to reject someone (Americans & external applications described above.) I disagree that this tends to be on the basis of citizenship, but I'm sure that does happen. What I saw was super specific requirements used for was a way to reject someone you didn't really want to work with, because they were basically unpleasant, but probably technically competent. I imagine that this actually classification fits into a large portion of the slashdot community, with the negativity I read in the majority of comments on pretty much every post. At the places I worked as an employee, it was a lot "easier" (in terms of not getting sued, and rejecting someone) to possibly allow them to interview if they seemed technical competent, and then reject them based on an unrealistic, wish-list of skills, as opposed to rejecting them because they kept complaining, or for some other (politically incorrect/illegal/lawsuit-prone) reason.

It is very, very, VERY difficult to fire someone in the United States. Even in "right to work" states, employers have a lot of fear about lawsuits and other employment related issues. I took the independent contractor route, and it is BY FAR easier for me to score clients than it any of the multi-phase, tons of telephone, and in-person, interviews required to be an employee. Wouldn't you want to be extra careful on the hiring side, if the firing side is going to be difficult? As a contractor, if someone doesn't like me, I'm gone in an instant! Between this, and being able to ramp-up / ramp-down my time, it's a way more flexible agreement than permanent employment, and I find marketing myself as a contractor to be much more pleasant than the four or five times I marketed myself as a technical employee.

I hope you find this useful, entertaining, and not too offensive.

      -Brian J. Stinar-

The main thing holding back HTTPS is advertisements. Browsers (especially IE) complain if your encrypted page includes unencrypted content (like iframes served from a a third party ad server) and rightly so. Google can get away with it because they serve their own ads, and Wikipedia doesn't have any ads. Arstechnica ran an article a few years back describing the reasons why they couldn't switch to HTTPS by default, but most of it boils down the fact that they can't get rid of the third party content in their pages.

Dude, they reverted your posts because what you posted was flat-out wrong, not because they are shills. You stated that Dan Pulcrano owns backpage.com, but he doesn't own it, operate it, or have any direct control over what goes on it. His newspaper does business with it, but that is a far cry from what you actually posted.

Sure, my main point was that you need to take time to dispute this with credit agencies, which will be much easier to do as soon as you learn about the fraudulent charges than later on. Taking the GP's attitude of "it's the banks problem not mine, they can deal with it" will just make your problems worse.

That said, I've known a handfull people who have disputed fraudulent reports in their credit history. All of them were successfull in getting the fraudulent reports either removed or marked as such. However, the ones that had good credit scores before this happened ended up with scores that were lower than before, even after "successfully" disputing the fraudulent reports. One of them ended up with a score so low, he couldn't get a car loan from anywhere; not those "we finance everyone" dealerships, not the credit union he previously had gotten a loan through and never missed a payment, no one. He ended up having to get his parents to co-sign a loan, and is still rebuilding his credit.

These people didn't look into suing the credit agencies, however I imagine it's harder to win a libel/defamation dispute over an opaque rating number than incorrect factual statements, which the credit agencies did correct.

It works for the purposes of avoiding paying that bill, but it doesn't avoid having your credit score being completely ruined.

Like it or not, this is your problem, if you ever want to take out a loan ever again, and the sooner you deal with it the sooner you can start rebuilding your credit.

Just to be clear, since the link isn't: this isn't a real time-lapse video of Cassini flying as the movie shows. It is an artificial flyby made using images that Cassini has taken, and then manipulating them to create the appearance of changing perspective. Some of it is pretty realistic while others parts are are not (like having all the moons so big and close together in one shot). Still really cool.

No, it's not like what you are describing at all. Verizon will not install FiOS in Boston, period. They don't like the regulatory/tax structure there, so they won't build-out FiOS there, regardless of whether you are willing to pay to get the last mile installed. But they will use the city as a backdrop when advertizing FiOS.

No, however large parts of the website were interfaces to services provided by the USDA which require people working to fulfill. Since this was about saving money, it wouldn't make sense to spend a bunch of it figuring out what parts of the website was just static information that could be left up, and which parts were not applicable during the shutdown and needed to be replaced with a static message, and then making all those modifications. Then there is the security issue - do you really want the government running hundreds of websites with no one to maintain them, in circumstances that they haven't encountered before (queues filling up with no-one to process requests). Easier to just take the whole thing down and replace it with a simple locked-down static message.

Who will pay for this? Since the article did not mention, I assume that will be the owners of these companies. Unless California starts paying me for development, it's going to be kind of slow to add the ($_POSTED['state'] == 'CA' && $_POSTED['age] 18) { bunch of code...} to the sites I work on....

Okay, the headline was somewhat misleading, but does anyone on this site even read the summary anymore, or have we devolved to commenting based only on the headlines?

Half the posts here are about whether Doubleclick is the lesser of the two evils, but the guy doesn't work at Doubleclick any more, and Doubleclick isn't involved in the lawsuit in any way shape or form. This is like saying "Yay Paypal" because of what Elon Musk is doing with Space-X.

So you bought brand new hardware, and expected it to work with an OS/drivers that entered feature freeze almost a year ago, and which was released slightly before the hardware was? I'm sorry, but that is no one's fault but your own. Haswell works fine in distros that were released after the hardware was. Even Debian Testing has Haswell support (as of a week or so ago).

Moral of the story is, you can't help stupid people, but you can *force them to vote....

At home it's nearly 100% open source (just video card driver is proprietary, and that's changing with my new computer). At work it's split 3-ways pretty evenly between open source, internally written and proprietary software. The proprietary applications I use at work are:
BeyondCompare (much better than any other diff program I have ever used),
Matlab (I use Octave at home, but use our Matlab site license at work to ensure better compatibility),
Intel C++ compiler, because it generates faster code (especially on the few Itanium machines we still have around),
FogBugz (So much nicer than bugzilla)
MS Windows/Outlook/Office (because I'm required to)

Code on GitHub is no different from comments on slashdot or images on Flicker any other website in that regard. All the posts are covered by copyright, which is held by the original poster. All the sites have TOS which state that the poster gives the site permission to reproduce the content. Furthermore, even if the user didn't read the TOS, they intentionally made the posts knowing full well it would be republished (that is the entire reason for posting on any of those sites), so they have already given implied consent.

Where the difference comes into play is making it clear what third parties can do with the content. Flicker gets this right by assuming all rights reserved unless otherwise specified, while up to now GitHub has been putting their heads in the sand. This is a disservice to all their users as it makes the site far less usefull, but it isn't really a legal liability for GitHub itself.

Most 3rd party DVRs and VCRs these days have IR output capability, so they can change the channel on the cable box and then record the output. You still have to use the cable box as a tuner, but you can record using anything after that.