...assuming it works, doesn't require the entire GDP of multiple nations, and a timescale that would put trees to shame, let alone humans.

Here's the funny part: in your haste to make a snark, you forget something: Humans can certainly alter clime - on a micro scale. Whether or not they can do it on a macro scale (let alone global) within any sort of sane time frame is a whole different (and honestly open) debate.

Seriously - the two biggest (ab)users of the H1B system are Tata and Infosys... and they're both Indian corporations.

{rant}I guess in fairness to Obama, he managed to screw both blue and white-collar workers in one fell swoop...{/rant}

Anyone know the lobbyist money trail for this bit of it, or can I safely guess Microsoft, Apple, Google, Intel, etc... ?

That's true even outside of the Bay area.

Here in PDX, I've worked in boiler rooms, for amoral shitheaded corporations, clueless startups, and similar places. I lost count of how many interviews I would suddenly walk out of due to a strong sense that the place is completely wrong to work for.

I've finally found a place where the folks running the show actually give a damn about their employees, and are willing to prove it in spades. It's a non-profit org, but damn it feels good to go home every day...

It depends... Zynga was run by an amoral asswipe (Mr. Pincus) for quite awhile. It took the fading of games like Farmville and Yoville with no real viable replacement from them, coupled with the arrival of new shinies to distract their customers (e.g. Angry Birds, Candy Crush Saga, and similar crap) before they were cut down to size.

I guess what I'm saying is that it takes a public and/or industry willing to both pay attention to the company's doings and a willingness to do something about it. See also the demise of SCO viz. Darl McBride.

...and at another company which did the same thing, except this time it's your head on the chopping block (even if it isn't your fault.)

Saw that happen to an IT director once. It was messy, to say the least...

If the power goes out in your company building, odds are perfect that your users are going to be sitting in front of dark workstations long before the UPS gives out and the servers shut down. ;) Same with most general IT outage situations... if a patch borks your 'doze servers, it's likely going to bork your 'doze workstations. If your Internet/WAN is dead, it's going to affect your users too. Unless your users are all remote and on VPN, a local problem is going to affect your users in more ways than just the IT infrastructure.

Contrast that with the cloud, where you have all of your users just sitting around, surfing Facebook/Etsy/Whatever (err, Slashdot?) and twiddling their thumbs while some dudes off in CloudLand figure out what broke.

Another point: a local break in any competent IT infrastructure will likely be fixed much faster, the executives will get their updates sooner, and there's no information/communications gap - everyone knows what's going on as it is found (instead of waiting for some opaque-as-fuck tidbit of info that's first been spun-all-to-hell by some cloud company's PR department, then filtered through a battery of company lawyers to avoid having to pay up over any SLA breaches).

It's relative: I averaged something like 60ms pings, while everyone else had 20-30ms pings (DSL was still fairly new back then). Not like I was roughing it at 250+ like in the old modem days.

TBH, I did radio/wireless internet for 4-5 years, back in the early 00's. It was pretty rock-solid, with perhaps one instance of trouble due to weather (during a full-on blizzard... the link dropped packets on occasion, but that was about it. My house antenna was 34 miles away from the ISP's antenna, which was just barely within the 35 mile range.

Only real issue I had was with the lag, which made it rough for FPS gaming, though doable.

Agreed. That said, on those grounds, not a peep would have made it to the media.

Anecdotes mean nothing, and here's why: My wife's favorite t-shirt has an almost-nude Bettie Page in full dominatrix gear, and she happily wore it to work when we first met (albeit she's not a physicist or in academia, but she does work in the tech realm.) The difference? She's completely secure in her self-image, and in her femininity - enough that she doesn't give a damn about what some guy wears.

What group - militant feministas who are so insecure in their self-image that they have to lash out at the planet? In all honesty, fuck them. I get the whole professional attire business, but I refuse to attenuate my life or attire out of fear that I might somehow offend the perpetually-offended.

If the group you refer to is simply 'women in general'? Sorry, but that group is way too damned diverse to be put into a container, and the dude's shirt wasn't pornographic, so what the hell?

30 years ago, you would be absolutely correct.

Today is a different story, as movies are no longer confined to obtaining theater owners' blessings. Even 10 years ago, movies like Equilibrium and {insert your favorite anime here} would happily gain widespread viewing and acceptance without ever seeing the inside of a movie theater. In fact, I daresay that movie theaters are going the way of the dinosaur, especially in the age of VOD and the Internet (most notably Netflix).

Sure the MPAA can ruin lives... by over-stepping their charter and chasing copyright ghosts. However, the MPAA's original charter and mission was to rate movies, and nothing more.

Sadly, you're right.

I look at this from my POV, where I see pin-up pages run by women (and some awesome artwork of the same style drawn-up by women), women all across Facebook who happily wax nostalgic about the whole genre (retro, rockabilly, pin-up, you-name-it), and I saw the shirt in the same light. Hell, the shirt was designed by a woman, and given to him as a gift.

But no... we have some overwrought bitter old hags who got their crusty old uteri all knotted up because a --gasp-- man was wearing that shirt. Cue the spineless bureaucrats who fear for their careers, and you have some poor bastard who has to tear-up in front of a camera begging forgiveness and estrogen from the now-smug aforementioned hags.

It's feminists like that which explains why we cannot have nice things.

As a blanket statement, I disagree vehemently. See also NIS (WRT healthcare rationing), overburdening the taxpayer, the insane EU rules governing everything from gasoline to what constitutes an actual croissant, etc.

Note that private companies are not an end-all be-all answer either. Both government and private corporations are limited in what they can do well. In the case of the article, I suspect a non-profit organization would serve the purpose better (ironically, see also the MPAA's original role as to ratings).

There's a huge difference between a private contract you willingly enter into, and a government edict that you are forced into and cannot opt out of.

"Business has a very limited range of things that they do as well or better than the public at large ... - business action beyond that range invariably becomes incompetent, expensive, dangerous, or worse.", and

I agree, and my agreement to your point does not invalidate what I wrote. ;)

Wow - you leave your sense of humor at home today, or are you still pissed about the way Measure 92 went down? ;)