Nope, wrote it myself, asshole. But thanks!

...and your comment represents the absolutely fundamental misunderstanding that pervades this discussion.

The truth no one wants to hear:

The distinction is no longer the technology or the place, but the person(s) using a capability: the target. In a free society based on the rule of law, it is not the technological capability to do a thing, but the law, that is paramount.

Gone are the days where the US targeted foreign communications on distant shores, or cracked codes used only by our enemies. No one would have questioned the legitimacy of the US and its allies breaking the German or Japanese codes or exploiting enemy communications equipment during WWII. The difference today is that US adversaries -- from terrorists to nation-states -- use many of the same systems, services, networks, operating systems, devices, software, hardware, cloud services, encryption standards, and so on, as Americans and much of the rest of the world. They use iPhones, Windows, Dell servers, Android tablets, Cisco routers, Netgear wireless access points, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Gmail, and so on.

US adversaries now often use the very same technologies we use. The fact that Americans or others also use them does not suddenly or magically mean that no element of the US Intelligence Community should ever target them. When a terrorist in Somalia is using Hotmail or an iPhone instead of a walkie-talkie, that cannot mean we pack our bags and go home. That means that, within clear and specific legal authorities and duly authorized statutory missions of the Intelligence Community, we aggressively pursue any and all possible avenues, within the law, that allow us to intercept and exploit the communications of foreign intelligence targets.

If they are using hand couriers, we target them. If they are using walkie-talkies, we target them. If they are using their own custom methods for protecting their communications, we target them. If they are using HF radios, VSATs, satellite phones, or smoke signals, we target them. If they are using Gmail, Windows, OS X, Facebook, iPhone, Android, SSL, web forums running on Amazon Web Services, etc., we target them -- within clear and specific legal frameworks that govern the way our intelligence agencies operate, including with regard to US Persons.

That doesn't mean it's always perfect; that doesn't mean things are not up for debate; that doesn't mean everyone will agree with every possible legal interpretation; that doesn't mean that some may not fundamentally disagree with the US approach to, e.g., counterterrorism. But the intelligence agencies do not make the rules, and while they may inform issues, they do not define national policy or priorities.

Without the authorities granted by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), the United States cannot target non-US Persons who are foreign intelligence targets if their communications enters, traverses, or otherwise touches the United States, a system within the United States, or, arguably, a system or network operated by a US corporation (i.e., a US Person) anywhere in the world. FAA in particular is almost exclusively focused on non-US Persons outside the US, who now exist in the same global web of digital communications as innocent Americans.

Without FAA, the very same Constitutional protections and warrant requirements reserved for US Persons would extend to foreign nations and foreign terrorists simply by using US networks and services â" whether intentionally or not. Without FAA, an individualized warrant would be required to collect on a foreign intelligence target using, say, Facebook, Gmail, or Yahoo!, or even exclusively foreign providers if their communications happens to enter the United States, as 70% of international internet traffic does. If you do not think there is a problem with this, there might be an even greater and more basic misunderstanding about how foreign SIGINT and cyber activities fundamentally must work.

If you believe NSA should not have these capabilities, what you are saying is that you do not believe the United States should be able to target foreign intelligence targets outside the United States who, by coincidence or by design, ever utilize or enter US systems and services. If you believe the solution is an individualized warrant every time the US wishes to target a foreign adversary using Gmail, then you are advocating the protection of foreign adversaries with the very same legal protections reserved for US citizens -- while turning foreign SIGINT, which is not and never has been subject to those restrictions, on its head.

These are the facts and realities of the situation. Any government capability is imperfect, and any government capability can be abused. But the United States is the only nation on earth which has jammed intelligence capabilities into as sophisticated and extensive a legal framework as we have. When the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress, multiple executive agencies under two diametrically opposite Presidential administrations, armies of lawyers within offices of general counsel and and inspectors general, and federal judges on the very court whose only purpose is to protect the rights of Americans under the law and the Constitution in the context of foreign intelligence collection are all in agreement, then you have the judgment of every mechanism of our free civil society.

Or we could just keep laying our intelligence sources, methods, techniques, and capabilities bare to our enemies.

âMany forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill (1874-1965), Speech in the House of Commons, November 11, 1947

"The necessity of procuring good Intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged â" all that remains for me to add, is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy, Success depends in most Enterprises of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned and promising a favourable issue.â â" George Washington, our nation's first spymaster, in a letter to Colonel Elias Dayton, 26 July 1777

Just make the H1B slot an expiring license (say 5 years). Auction it off at the beginning and allow it to be resold on the open market until it expires. Then you can stop bothering with questions about pay gaps and other nonsense. If there's a $10K per year arbitrage opportunity, the market will quickly sort it out.

We could use the spot price of visas at different maturities as a "yield curve" to see what the predictions are for future technical labor demand and as an indicator for how tight labor demand is right now. Best of all, the visas will be used on rock stars who are actually worth importing rather than being doled out more or less at random.

H1B fees and legal expenses are not cheap, nor is paying international relocation expenses for a candidate and his/her family, so we're certainly not saving money by hiring H1B's.

You just described the alternative of paying enough to make your total package competitive as being too expensive. It sounds like you're saving money by that any reasonable definition, even after the government and lawyers take their share. If it wasn't cheaper than raising your pay rates, you wouldn't be doing it.

That being said, I'm willing to grant that a company that hires PhD level people is much more likely to run into a real hard limit when it comes to finding subject matter experts, and they're the types of operations that the H1B system is supposed to work for on paper. If we did the sensible thing and auctioned off H1B slots and allowed them to be resold on an open market, those are probably the types of companies that would buy them.

s/kept/put/

In 1953 they had a democratically elected, very westernized government. The US and UK staged a coup when that government wasn't generous enough with "our" oil.

Worked out about as well as all our other efforts to tell the rest of the world how to run their countries.

I dunno, maybe they'll get nukes and the warmongers will have to find another country to bomb?

Or, who knows, maybe we could get attacked by Saudi-sponsored terrorists again?

What's good for Disney is good for America. Or at any rate, good for the Americans who matter.

I recently read that Southern California Edison replaced its whole 500-strong IT staff with H1Bs. However, details are scarce. Several US senators have called for an investigation, but the feds are refusing on the grounds that no one hurt by it filed a complaint.

The US economy is screwed anyway. The H1B saga is just one more issue in the decades-long trend of converting the economy into shareholders and people who flip burgers for shareholders. Once the rich have skimmed all the cream, they'll go find another country to screw - or at least one that actually makes stuff they can buy with their winnings.

In my experience, upper management's views on who is easily replaceable don't usually conform very well to reality.

An earlier version of this general effort used language that would forbid reference to models in policymaking.

Presumably written by some clown club that doesn't know that models are what science produces. They were transparently trying to outlaw use of the computer models that climate science relies so heavily on. (And other branches of science, but climate science is the branch that's driving corruption^w campaign donations right now.)

I'd agree with this, but for better or worse, going to a university provides not just an education but a credential. What other people do may not really affect my education as long as they're not being disruptive, but if my university graduates a bunch of people who clearly didn't learn anything, it erodes the value of the credential. Having an engineering degree from a school that has a reputation for graduating engineers who can't do basic algebra is barely better than having no degree at all when it comes to getting your resume noticed. Allowing a university with a decent reputation to turn into a diploma mill does a major disservice to all of your alumni.

It's really too bad he didn't hang in there until the end and give legitimate supportable F grades to most of the class while showing good faith by giving appropriate grades to decent students. Getting an F that sticks stings a lot more than making news while your professor melts down and having your grade adjusted by the university.

I'd love to see a world where professors hand out failing grades more liberally. I got really sick of seeing cheaters and whiners get their way when I was in college.

I'm wondering what percentage of the price of a basket of strawberries is the labor to pick them. Assume that a good picker can pick, say, an average of 30 strawberries a minute if you include the time it takes to empty baskets and walk around to different rows of plants. What does that work out to in human touch time per basket? I'm thinking the cost of that basket is land, shipping, fertilizer, varous capital, and various labor. It seems like far too much is made of the harvesting effort just because it's the most visible and probably the most physically taxing.

How does it fit with Facebook's business model? Not sure. But if I were facebook, I'd be very concerned about my business model going away if there's an unpredictable shift in peoples' preferences WRT social networking. It seems like a lot of eggs to have in that one basket even though network effects are on their side right now. If I was sitting on a ridiculous amount of money with that one narrow business model, I'd be diversifying left and right. Maybe not at the $2B for Oculus pricepoint, but I'd be doing something like it.

I've converted over to diet for the same reason. I used to hate diet soda as a kid, but as I've gotten older the slightly lighter finish without the lingering sugar glaze in my mouth is something I prefer. I drink soda rarely enough that it wouldn't matter from a calorie count perspective.

The Diet Coke / Mentos guys said that after much research on which sodas produced the best fountain for the dollar, they went with the diet version for the easy cleanup because the regular stuff left a lot more residue.

As a friend of mine who lost a ton of weight says when anybody asks, "It's all just math." They start going into types of foods an this and that and he cuts them of. "Just math. The hard parts are knowing how many calories you need and actually knowing how many calories are in what you're eating. Once you've done that it's just a daily budget."

I think a lot of people seem to see diet drinks as negative calories instead of zero and it throws off their whole estimate. But the biggest problem is that they're eyeballing it and estimating how many calories they've eaten rather than really getting good numbers and keeping track. Study after study shows that people who estimate their calorie intake for the day are way off. You can't figure out calorie intake by using how guilty you feel about the whole pacakge as your metric.