There is some truth is that H1-B influx puts a damp in job hunting. But, from experience, if a programmer feels constantly threatened by that influx to the point of seeing his salary (or even employment opportunities) nosediving, I would question said's person's skills.

The real good engineers in India either come here already in scholarships or transition very quickly from H1-B to resident status. And these are not the majority. The bulk of H1-B are just average/below average (with a good chunk being just atrocious coders) with very little work experience (most of it limited to web development), facing cultural barriers in communication and delivery of work.

This is not a diss or intended as an insult to them. It is just a function of many things that affect their society (and I suspect that the quality of work will improve over the decades.)

If you (the generic "you") are threatened by that, by the current quality of work presented by offshore/H1-B teams, then you are replaceable and possibly not that great at software/IT. Don't blame them. Blame your skills.

If you know your shit well, you will have no shortage of $$$ and work. That is a fact. Do the type of work that cannot be easily offshored/replaced/commoditized, and you will be fine.

Bingo. This was my #1 reason I forego the idea of relocating from SoFla to the Valley. One thing that I would add is that said programmer in Tampa can buy a *real* house in a decent school district as a head-of -household with with a stay-at-home spouse. In San Francisco, forget it. The equivalent programmer could only afford a whole in a wall, or have to have his/her spouse work in the same field just to be able to buy a *real* house in a good school district.

Denver, Dallas or Seattle are much better options to relocate, money-wise.

Barring voting and access to booze, smokes and pr0n, I didn't know that children had less rights than adults. Who knew?

It shouldn't. The individuals along the chain of command and supervision that committed the murder should be tried in civil court, and the corporation should be tried for damages in civil court if the corporation is found to have fostered a system that permitted the crime to occur in the first place.

Acme. You do not need corporate personhood to sue Acme.

If the "corporation" is a single-person entity that is not incorporated for limited liability, that's your option (and one would ask why you would order a million dollar of widgets from said commercial entity.)

Any intelligent business entity would never entered into a contract under such conditions. Also, contracts spell out responsibilities (who pays what and how much when defaulting a contract), in a document enforced by the law.

And under some conditions, the individual can be sued in a criminal court of law if he/she is found to have not acted in good faith.

If the company is a single-person entity, yeah, pretty much. If it is a LLC, then you go after the corp's asset. And if it is a corporation, you go after the corporation's assets.

You do not need corporate personhood. It is a stupid American legal aberration. How the hell do you think developed countries like Japan or Germany that do not have such a notion handle violation of contracts or trials against corporations?

We were able to do that without that legal shenanigans (just like other countries do).

1. False dichotomy.

2. A better suggestion would be to sue individuals on whose behalf, by virtue of negligence or criminality, a corporation became liable for debts and crimes (specially crimes.)

But hey, you can ignore #2 and embrace #1 if that's your thing.

It is slashdot. Everyone here is an expert at bashing crap they don't know :/

As a former engineer at a defense contractor, I can say this: you cannot VPN to internal networks vetted for cleared work (aka "secured labs". In fact, you cannot even connected to secured labs from within an internal network. You have to physically walk in into a secured lab from where to connect to a secured network (where you have to sign in, sign out, and leave all electronic gadgets behind.) You cannot VPN nor work from home when you work on classified stuff. You need to be on-site on a partitioned network infrastructure.

And once there, that secured network has only access to resources specific to designated projects on a 'need-to-know' basis, and only for work at or below a given security level.

Meaning, a secret-level lab cannot access resources from a top-secret project, and/or top-secret lab A designated to work on project X cannot access resources allocated on secret lab B designated for project Y if projects A and Y are unrelated or firewalled even though lab A has greater clearance than lab B.

You cannot even print in many of these labs. Any information that must be transmitted from one lab to another is permitted only by a IA officer that is not assigned to any project and whose only work is to enforce the firewalls. And when that information is permitted is via encrypted devices carried by hand (sometimes we refer to those as sneaker nets.) These labs are physically separated down to the wire (and sometimes backup power generators.)

Nothing of the above can 100% prevent leakage due to stupidity or ulterior motives. But to assume that clients machine simply connect to a fileserver on a sec lab, that is just nonsense. It can happen due to malice or stupidity (I mean, anything not forbidden by physics or mathematics is possible). But that is not the general case, and as a result, you cannot simply presume it as a matter of fact.

Bingo. Amazon has been hiring people with sec. clearance for quite some time. These DoD clouds are not stuff deployed on typical heroku or AWS, but cloud infrastructure deployed on secured facilities.

I blame the term "the cloud", too amorphous of a term to mean just about anything.

That is stupid. The same can be said for disgruntled employees. When we are talking contractors in a DoD setting, we are not talking about Infosys handing over work to someone overseas, but:

1. a bunch of US Citizens of different technical backgrounds already with sufficient clearance,
2. that works for a defense contractor,
3. for a very specific project
4. under non-negotiable guidelines of security
5. AT facilities physically vetted for the necessary clearance

Nothing on that list will prevent someone from leaking stuff out to the interweeds, but to presume that under those conditions there is a 99% change of that (as you said), that is just nonsense.

I did not include the link in an attempt to provide statistics.

No, I won't. This shit is clear as daylight. I have lived in the flesh. People "see it" or they "don't see it."

We could extend that statement to say if the statement "Jim Crow laws are bad" weren't clear in the past, we wouldn't have needed a whole goddamned Civil Right Movement to make the case for it.

For something like this, with so much evidence that had been published in so many years, "clear" is firmly in the eye of the beholder.

You see it or you don't. I am not going to debate you, and if that gives *you* the impression of winning the point, go ahead and do your victory dance.

No. It is about race, in a significant number of cases. Just look at the statistics of people open carrying (or people getting shot at). Hell, just look at the statistics of how people are treated by "the law" per race where some groups *get harsher* penalties for the same goddamned crime.

And since we are on John Crawford's case (RIP), let's look at the Walmart video just released:

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/breaking-video-finally-released-cops-shooting-man-toy-gun-wal-mart/

In the specific case of John Crawford (RIP), the poor guy that got shot down while carrying a toy gun to the cash register, he didn't do anything of the above in bold. Nothing in his fucking attitude indicated he was a treat.

The, OTH, you have white militia pointing rifles at federal agents at the Cliven Bundy stand-off on April 2014, with photographs clearly identifying those threatening federal agents with deadly force, and have you seen any one of them arrested?

Crawford might or might not have been shot at the way was due to his race, but there is a clear distinction in attitude and partial/subjective enforcement of the law that still crosses racial lines (Militia at the Bundy's ranch for example.)

Seriously, what the hell? A major setback from what? From superstition? Did we have anything better before Aristotelian science? That many of Aristotle's predictions turned out to be false (heavier objects fall faster) is not an indictment on his work or body of knowledge. Without Aristotle and the likes of him during their time, we wouldn't have science as we know today.

Seriously, the author might have a point, but that point is purely accidental. He has no clue what he is talking about.

I would find it very hard to believe radiation of such magnitude could be generated from a core and sterilize the galaxy on its way out. But then again, I'm not an Astrophysicist :)

You would also like to read Niven's "Protector" if you haven't, and how sentient life actually evolved in a radiated home world near the core.

Ideally it is, and there are jobs like that. But other times, there are not. You might have to work on a product whose schedule reacts to external events (new merger, new competitor). And I'm referring to very large projects with development plans in terms of years. So, things occur. Eventually things stabilize, or we jump ship to another job. Rinse and repeat.

Never said I was proud. It's just a matter of fact.

We change hobbies. I used to dance salsa with my wife. No more. So we change hobbies. Indoor hobbies, hobbies with our kids (the things we must do with them.) And so on. Once you have kids, there is no time for hobbies compared to when we were single. And yet, when I was single, I could pursue my hobbies while still working long hours.

As a single person, you can do whatever you want with very little spare time. Which is why I said to the OP not to make his work his passion.

See, 45-50 hours is the norm in software for grunt work. And if its 50-55 when you are trying to climb the tech lead ladder. I could just stick to a true 9-5, but that pretty much guarantees I (or anyone for that matter) will be the Milton guy from Office Space.

In the end, we have priorities and goals and we adjust our hobbies, work hours and passions accordingly. And in a field where continuous technical and professional growth requires going beyond the 9-5, you cannot make work your passion (if you want to maintain your sanity.)