You can transfer an H1-B, but the employer who currently holds it has to approve the transfer. The employer holding it can refuse to perform a transfer, and prevent the operation.

The law you refer to assumes cooperation between the parties.

It's occasionally found for some companies to basically hold "H1-B" and "Green Card Application" hostages to work at lower wages. I've worked at a couple of companies which I later found out employed this tactic, and I've seen several contracting agencies that contract for work, H1-B in workers, and then take up to 70% "commission" on the contract wages on top of everything else.

This makes no sense. Why would an employer want a permanent resident instead of an H1B? A permanent resident can quit and go work elsewhere, and is no better than hiring a US citizen. But an H1B visa is tied to a specific company, so if they quit their job, or are fired, they are sent back to where they came from, at their own expense. As an employer, I love H1Bs, because I can make them work long hours on tight deadlines, and if they complain I can threaten to send them back to Bangalore. Also, since H1Bs have to be paid the same as US citizens, I can use them as an excuse to hold down salaries across the board. If a US citizen employee starts whining about wanting a raise, I can tell him that if I give him a raise, I will be legally required to give the same raise to all of the H1Bs, and since there isn't enough money in the budget for that, it mean no raise for you! Heh, heh.

With many of these odd job descriptions you speak of, I suspect many of them are cases where said company has already identified the specific individual they want to get an H-1B visa for. So this is essentially a copy of their unique resume. They just need to publicly post the job to fulfill a legal requirement before they can get them the visa.

What is wrong with these people? Are they unaware that such has been proposed time and again by past luminaries? Predicted dates come and pass and we are as yet not in any danger. This points to the fact that we have failed to comprehend the nature of both consciousness and survivalism.

These machines will not magically become ANYTHING that we do not tell them to become - including dangerous to us. The real fear is, by what date are dumb people going to THINK machines need these functions......

Ever heard of neural networks? Machine learning? Here is a course [coursera.org] given Andrew Ng at Stanford. Watch the intro video, and you will see, amongst other things an autonomous helicopter that was taught, not programmed but taught to do an inverted takeoff. This stuff is already real.

...is that there is a complex ecosystem of micro-organisms that are breaking down the plastic into lesser components that we aren't looking for? I mean, there is a LOT about the ocean we don't yet understand. I mean, we know more about our solar system than we know about the entirety of the ocean ecosystem. That's not to say that the plastic BELONGS there or that we shouldn't be trying to reduce our uses for plastics - just that perhaps we aren't finding them in their entirety because there is some natural processes at work beyond fish consumption.

But Apple has an ace up its sleeve, in the form of patents for a set of headphones with 'one or more integrated physiological sensors' designed to help users keep track of their body stats.

put it another way, has any evidence been uncovered of a backdoor of this type? Or is the absence of evidence just more confirmation of secret backdoors?

Mobile malware => android malware. The mobile hacking tools profiled earlier this week and assumed to be in play here only work on android and jailbreaked ios. All ios malware in existence relies on users to break their own security first, using tools that come from shadowy overseas orgs. Whaaa? I was haxored? No shit Sherlock. Consider this before choosing your next ankle tracker.

It’s a toy and a fashion statement. Some people will have fun with it, a lot of people will think it’s stupid, a handful of people will actually find it fills a legitimate need they had but lets not try to invent reasons we need one.

Patents were created as a means to mitigate that specific problem. If you have no alternative to solve the free rider problem that is better than a well executed patent system (our current one is not well executed), then your argument is a non-starter.

In accordance with the original definition of the term "patent", patents are intended to facilitate and encourage disclosure of innovations into the public domain for the common good. If inventors did not have the legal protection of patents, in many cases, they might prefer or tend to keep their inventions secret.[citation needed] Awarding patents generally makes the details of new technology publicly available, for exploitation by anyone after the patent expires, or for further improvement by other inventors. Furthermore, when a patent's term has expired, the public record ensures that the patentee's invention is not lost to humanity.[29][specify]

The fact of the matter is that there are far too many people who want faculty positions compared to the number of available positions. I quote directly from our university president, "I can get professors anywhere."

False. I am an assistant professor in mathematics at one of the top universities in the world. Many associate professors here do not have tenure and have no hope of ever receiving tenure. They certainly have not been "guaranteed their salary for life". They can be fired at any moment.

And they don't make "well north of 10K dollars a month". In fact, if you look at the statistics online

http://ams.org/notices/201406/rnoti-p611.pdf

you'll see that the tenure-track assistant professors at large public universities make around 83K per year on average. The assistant professors who aren't tenure-track make even less, of course.

To the non-US citizen anti gun troll: In the US we own arms to protect our families from thugs, and to remind our government that they work for us, not the other way around.