I will be surprised if there is not soon some quiet legislation enacted in the U.S. and the U.K. to effectively kill crowdfunding (eg Kickstarter).

Consider that a typical ownership cut demanded by venture capitalists in California (3000 Sand Hill Road types) is 30 to 50 percent. Kickstarter or Kickstarter clones could do very well just by saying if you (the individual) invest in XYZ and it pans out, you'll get your share of the 10 percent equity slice reserved for investors. So it could be easy for knowledgeable engineers, technicians and scientists to "play" the investment game via Kickstarter, using their insights from work experience, and do pretty well over the long haul. For start up founders, giving up 10% via Kickstarter is hella better than giving up 50% to 3000 Sand Hill Road folks. Why torture yourself trying to impress plump VC guys to give you 10 minutes and take 50% of your future profits, when you can just lay out your idea on Kickstarter and let the subject matter experts vote with their dollars?

Crowdfunding is therefore to the Anglo-Saxon financial elites what the comet was to the dinosaurs.

Therefore it would make sense that chaps such as Mitt Romney and friends are working quietly but very hard on getting crowdfunding outlawed or marginalized. Watch what happens in the next few years. This will of course only accelerate the decline of R&D and technological leadership in the U.S., but for the $$$ elites, that is some future generation's problem.

Dear Dice Holdings, This is getting lame, and utterly predictable. The point of a Facebook funded astroturf campaign is to be *subtle*, not blatant. Get some good K Street lobbyists, they'll tell ya how the game is played.

Vaccines don't really help the root problems of the world's poor. So more children survive a while longer to die of something else, or simply exist and need feeding. Google is doing two HUGE long term things for the world's poor: 1) the Renewables Cheaper Than Coal project. Addressing global warming head-on, and working for affordable energy for all, to give poor societies the juice to join the 21st century 2) Internet for the poorest regions, the blimps that Gates hates, means enlightenment for all, and promotes education for girls -- the latter being the single most effective way to lift people out of poverty. Gates just doesn't get it. Nor do I think he ever will.

I take it that Dice Holdings has a quota, every week a story must appear to support the astroturf campaign wailing about "a shortage of STEM workers in the United States".. Check the box for this week! What will it be next week?

There is no "crisis" in CS education. There is a crisis in the United States for CS graduates keeping their jobs, or remaining in the middle class. This is more astroturf campaign stuff... shame on Dice Holdings.

If one messes around with a Chromebook, and then some Windows 8 type device, the difference is startling (in favor of the Chromebook). Chromebooks out-Apple Apple by just making it easy to do the things most people want to do. The voice recognition is really, really good. Windows makes it surprisingly difficult to do *anything*.

I've been wondering what is up with Slashdot lately, all these fawning articles in support of the astroturf campaign for getting more cheap programmers into the U.S. Despite all evidence to the contrary (good studies by professor Norm Matloff, and quantitative proof at EPI.org) we keep hearing about the horrors of not enough STEM workers.... I just noticed that Slashdot is part of DICE now. Ah..that explains a lot.

Even more than in the U.S., the U.K. has a culture where those with hard skills are dismissed as doing "grunt work." I think it is part of the unfortunate British heritage of class consciousness, where the ruling class was (and is) proud of their lack of domain specific knowledge and their role as management generalists. This has been disastrous for the fortunes of the U.K. in general, but culture is hard to change.

Re: he had clearance, and orders, and trusted access... the U.S. itself insisted in 1945, rightly so, that individuals must listen to their conscience, regardless of their official obligations.

Things that could threaten the ruling elites in the U.S. and U.K. will inevitably have draconian, batshit crazy punishments associated with them. Anything dealing with information security falls under that umbrella. Things that threaten the physical well being of commoners, such as being raped, or beaten, or breathing poisonous air, etc. is of no consequence to the elites in the English-speaking world, and logically will be assigned relatively light punishments. It's a question of scarce resources. If you have your police and detectives chasing violent criminals, inevitably you'll have to scale back the hunt for anyone who could threaten the position of the elites.

Ubuntu and *nix in general has been getting better and better.... and then Windows put a shotgun in its mouth and pulled the trigger, becoming "Windows 8".

Look, I am very sympathetic to the guys in California I worked with. It is wrong that the middle class is being gutted in the United States. Posting here won't help you if you are in the U.S. A lot of paper mail to the senators and representatives might be noticed. You must write!

There are just so many better alternatives out there now. At this point, something like Linux Mint is pretty hard to beat for a typical user.

It was someone else's idea but a good one: U.S. companies should bid for H1b visas in an auction. That would tend to make very clear who really needs what and how badly. It would also, of course, be extremely unflattering to corporate America so it will never happen. Alas, it's easy to see that technical workers will soon be in the position of nursing students in the U.S. What was once a "severe shortage" has become a glut. Whatever is a potential good job for Americans will be washed away by a flood of cheap labor in response to whatever large companies tell the U.S. Congress to do.

I have to grudgingly admire the elites in the U.S. and E.U.

They have acting skills second to none. In Brussels and in Washington, people like Bill Gates and various Wall Street bankers can swear in the most solemn tones to tell nothing but the truth, then look people straight in the eye and plead penury and desperation. Please, please, oh member of the Senate, have a heart, give us just a scrap, maybe another 200K visas. Or a tiny, pitiful trillion dollar bailout for our wee little global investment bank. I don't know what else I can do, I am at my wits end , woe is me, so desperate is my company ...

This is how the game is played at the top levels. Lying with flair and conviction. I can imagine Gates after his testimony to get more visas a few years back, doing a fist bump with one his corporate legal minions. "Nicely played, sir!"