You got it. I applied for a job in Canada recently and it was stated on the application under no uncertain terms that Canadian citizens would be given preference.

I have a relative who works as a researcher for a major drug company. She had to move laterally in the company after they announced they were moving all new drug discovery work to China.

As a senior Computer Science PhD student, this has me worried. I also know of a few recent American CS graduates that have gone to China to work as researchers for a particular American software company because that company's US research offices weren't hiring. I still know plenty of other graduates who had no difficulty finding research positions in the US, but it seems that a few major players are shifting their work to Asia. Hopefully the rest won't follow.

So they drag these guys from halfway around the world to try them in my backyard (I live 30 miles from Norfolk, where the Eastern District court is). The Eastern District is also notorious for patent suits. In that article, the newspaper claims it's the speediness that attracts these cases, but I'm guessing it's the likelihood of getting a jury packed with current and former military members who favor harsh punishments for trivial infractions.

We've also had our share of Somali pirates and a few Guantanamo prisoners tried here.

I remember traveling to Europe in the late 90s and being shocked to see police in the Paris subways with assault rifles. Until that point, I had never seen that at any US city, only regular uniformed police. Fast forward 15 years, and you see paramilitary police everywhere in the US.

The articles I've read about this don't specifically say as to how much aggregation Facebook will provide. I'm guessing that it would be a really coarse grained distribution of Facebook users' opinions and no different than the level of granularity most other political polls provide. However, if they provide breakdowns on very fine grained age ranges, geographic regions, ethnicity, gender, political views, etc, identifying specific people may be possible. I recall a similar study done with aggregated Facebook data by Harvard researchers where third parties using the data were able to identify some of the individuals.

Overall, I think this is mostly FUD. The only thing that makes this different than traditional surveys is that Facebook users don't have a choice as to whether or not they participate, but when it comes to Facebook, user choice seems to be the exception, not the rule.

Every time I go to the airport.

Hopefully, you're right: once younger generations who grew up with digital media and the internet rise to positions of power, the rules will change and the insanity will ease. That said, I have a lawyer friend under 30 who ran for office in his state legislature and he is just as willfully ignorant about technology issues as the Senate and House champions of SOPA/PIPA. That doesn't give me much hope for the future.

For awhile, I worked in one state while living in another, which got weird with income tax. In the case of income tax, most states have reciprocity agreements where wages earned in one state are exempt from taxation in the resident state. With sales taxes, there isn't any reciprocity agreement, but if there was, in the GP's example, he would pay Washington sales tax and be exempt from Indiana.

Unfortunately, the publisher holding the copyright/controlling dissemination is the status quo. As I see it, change is only going to come from within, with researchers and institutions turning up the heat on publishers or starting their own open publications. Some of these changes are happening, with some schools and disciplines shifting towards open access policies. However, based on the current bill and the SOPA fiasco, I don't think legislators can be counted on to do the right thing when it comes to open access on taxpayer-funded research and the effects of technological advances on copyright.

You don't seem to understand the wording of the bill. Federal agencies are barred from mandating open access policies -- in the context of TFA they are talking about funding bodies like the NIH which award grant money to other institutions who perform the research. This leaves the institutions receiving the grant money, usually universities which aren't attached to the federal government, free to do as they please. Lastly, publishers accept copyright waivers all the time, and some schools, like Princeton, mandate that you submit one if the publisher wants to claim copyright. Some Commonwealth countries, like Australia, claim copyright on all publications their universities produce and submit these waivers with each publication.

With this bill, the feds paying out the grants (NIH, NSF, DARPA, etc.) can't mandate the openness, but the research institutions and the researchers can do it themselves. There have already been a few discussions on here about some of the better known US schools mandating that all research be published in open conferences/journals. At the last conference I attended, there was a business meeting where it was discussed that we can (and should) attach copyright waivers to the standard ACM copyright form so that we retain copyright of our work and are free to distribute it.

If the age of Slashdot readers followed a Gaussian distribution, then the mean and median would be the same. I doubt this is the case.

At this point, we're talking preferences and willingness to pay, not actual infrastructure and overhead costs. You seem to be perfectly content with current wireless prices, but I'm not. You really think wireless is 100 times more costly to the carrier than wired? Like texting, they're charging that much because they can get away with it. I have the cheapest dumbphone I could find with texting blocked and won't be buying a smartphone until the pricing structure is more reasonable.

The citations may not be fair but the GPs argument is still valid: blaming data hogs is just an excuse. We can even use the above numbers as an upper bound. Even if the construction and maintenance of wireless networks were 100 times as expensive as their wired counterparts, the cost still isn't justified. Yes, wireless networking certainly has its challenges, a lossy medium with limited throughput being one of them, but it certainly doesn't justify the current US pricing structure. Why must we pay for blocks of data instead of only what we use? Why is texting charged separately and at a much higher rate than data?

Too bad they don't do this. Such as: $x for the first 0-200MB, $y for the next 200MB-1GB, and $z for $1GB and up, where $x > $y > $z. That way everyone is encouraged to use only what they need instead of like the current plans, where users are encouraged to use as close to the maximum possible. With graduated fees per megabyte, the heavy users still have to pay the maximum possible for all tiers below them but no matter the user, the marginal cost for a megabyte will never be some insane amount like it is if you go over your limit in the current plans.