How can any company have a position which "can only be filled by H-1B workers when no qualified American — at any wage — can be found to fill the position"?

With a high enough salary, any position can be filled, so unless companies are expected to get into bidding wars and offer multi million dollar salaries to compete for one of the american workers that could fill the position, how can such a policy be enforced? My company hires a lot of H1-B's (typically PhD's from various European countries), and while we pay a good salary, we can't find enough american workers to fill our open positions. If we were willing to pay double or triple the market rate, we could probably entice happily employed candidates to come work for us, but our salary costs are already high, and paying several times market rate would probably drive the company into the ground.

I've been a licensed ham for almost 20 years and don't do HF because I don't find it to be very fun or interesting - making a contact 1000 miles away has lost its allure (to me) in the internet age. I do participate in local disaster drills using VHF/UHF, but am not really interested in HF to get out of the area. Though my club dues do help pay for their HF equipment, and I'm glad that we do have members interested in HF. I can run a VHF/UHF crossband repeater from my car for an unlimited time thanks to solar, but I can't reach much farther than I can see since I don't do HF.

That's the case in any disaster - some traditional communications are working, but not in all areas. Even Satellite has limited capacity, it works when a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand disaster workers are using it, but if a significant fraction of the population start using their satellite phone, the system is going to be overwhelmed. Ham Radio is also capacity constrained, but with many ham radio users being trained in disaster communications, organized health and welfare messages can still be sent out of the disaster area through the limited communication channels.

I was in Hawaii for the 2006 quake that knocked out power on Oahu. The landline system was nearly useless -- took 45 minutes to get a dialtone and even then, it was impossible to make a call (both locally and out of the area). I had DSL for about 45 minutes until my UPS battery ran out, but it was super slow. No voice cellular calls, but could send SMS within the same network (i.e. I could send to other AT&T customers, but not to Sprint and Verizon, and vice versa).

My landlord was worried about his elderly mother 15 miles away and a car accident plus a downed tree had blocked the only entrance/exit from our neighborhood so I ended up riding my bike to his Mom's house to check on her since he couldn't use the phone system to reach her. (turns out she was at her neighbor's house who was having a big BBQ to use up the meat from his fridge before it went bad)

And this was a relatively minor 6.7 earthquake 200 miles away that caused no real physical damage on Oahu, just knocked out the power on the Island. If it were a 7.0+ quake on Oahu, the situation would have been much worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Propylene glycol oxidizes when exposed to air and heat, forming lactic acid.[9][10] If not properly inhibited, this fluid can be very corrosive, so pH buffering agents such as dipotassium phosphate, Protodin and potassium bicarbonate are often added to propylene glycol, to prevent acidic corrosion of metal components.

http://www.amsoil.com/lit/data...

Amsoil Low-Toxicity Propylene Glycol Antifreeze

Composition by Weight:
Total glycols >= 92 percent; Corrosion inhibitors and
antifoamants = 8 percent; Water

Toss a few gallons of water in your trunk before you head to remote locations -- while the propylene glycol in the antifreeze may not kill you, the corrosion inhibitors and other ingredients plus possible oil and combustion product contamination is not going to be great for you.

The only difference between a web hosting company and Amazon is the billing model?

Cheap commodity services was never IBM's forte - they don't want to rent you a $20 virtual server that you maintain yourself, they want to sell you a million dollar mainframe and $10,000 Intel servers that you pay IBM to maintain.

Amazon is squeezing the shipping carriers to lower shipping prices, so don't bet that they lost money on those packages.

What's the difference between cloud storage + computing and "web hosting"? AWS just provides the platform.

If they really wanted to line their pockets, they'd sell them to the black hats.

Blindly disclosing the security holes to the internet at large makes the internet less safe in the short term since the bad guys can exploit the vulnerabilities before the good guys can fix them.

Groupon could hire people themselves to find the vulnerabilities, but they chose not to, instead they offer a bounty for security bugs, which apparently is very cost effective when they don't pay up, so it's a double win - no need to pay money to hire security experts when a community of bug hunters will do the work for a token bounty, and no reason to actually pay the bounty when you can find a technicality (if one out of 30 bugs were released in violation of their guidelines, why aren't they paying their promised bounty for the others?)

They are already smart enough to use shell corporations to do the drilling -- by the time water contamination or triggered earthquakes are discovered, the shell company is long done and a new one has taken its place.

RTFA:

Well yeah, that's kind of what the whole paper is about - the fact that they can analyze cache behavior to detect network and mouse activity on the system.

Is it the same hardware? This implies that it's not identical: The Ubuntu version of the Compute Stick has as a similar CPU -- if the CPU is different, how much of the rest of the chipset is different?

RTFA: