Correct. On this we agree.

Relative to other major metropolitan areas it is; especially if you're married and want to live in the suburbs. There ar plenty of homes in the 2-3K range within reasonable commuting distance.

The vulnerability is for those that don't want to return but eventually get a green card. The "Do this or I pull your visa threat" is very real for them; and they would generally be the lower level cheap IT labor pool people, not someone with very valuable and specialized experience that a company wants to keep.

You may not like it but it sure isn't sleazy. It's no different than buying a plot of land and holding on to it hoping someone will want to build on it. People seem to think because "it's the internet" that different rules need to apply and normal activities somehow are no longer relevant.

He simply looked at some property, decided some would be valuable some day and bought them before someone else did. The next person could have simply said,"Gee xyz.com is used, I'll use something else" instead of buying a more generic name. More to your point, what if a someone comes up with a really good idea for a business only to discover someone else already has a really good generic domain and is using it for some mundane activity such as a daily quote? They're standing in the way of commerce as well; but that's the disadvantage of being the second guy to a plot of land.

Except you cannot trademark generic terms except when it is used in some unique way beyond the normal use. Even so, trademarking sex.com and other generic domains and putting on a web site would probably qualify its use in commerce.

Nah, been here since before eternal September. It's the late arrivers who are pissed at those who got there first and grabbed the good land. Same story, different century.

It's a perfectly legitimate thing to do. It's no different than someone buying apiece of land hoping it will be valuable some day. He got there first and bought it so when someone comes around and wants i they have to pay for it. That's different than, as you point out, registering trademarks and holding the domain hostage. The first is a legitimate form of speculation and the latter simple extortion.

A few points:

The markup made the 3rd offense only punishable by up to 5 years in jail, along with a fine; thus saving some poor criminal the ignominy of, when asked by other lifers what they're in for, saying "wearing spandex in public three times..."

The sponsor seemed to be more upset over people wearing spandex and speedos, and stated that wearing beige spandex could be considered public indecency. He was upset over some bikers who rode nude through his town and this was his response.

The bill was tabled by the judiciary committee so it's pretty much dead; which is normal for much of the wing nut inspired legislation that gets brought up in state legislatures. if you think Congress is a clown show wait to you see a state legislature in action. Wing nut legislators introduce all kinds of wacky bills either out of their own beliefs or in response to wing nut voters in their district. It gets introduced, the legislator gives a floor speech to an empty chamber, and the bill dies quietly in committee and perhaps gets a few lines in the local news or nationally on a slow day.

I don't quite think that is the case. Often someone knows nothing about an event and the movie "educates" them about the event and is assumed to be historically accurate. As a result, people assume they know about an event when in fact they're view is incorrect. It's not so much ignorance as miseducation.

The problem is not that movies ignore historical facts or change them to make a compelling movie; it's people assume the movie is accurate and the movies e version becomes fact to many people.

True. Religion is a convenient excuse, for some, to do whatever they want to do in order to get rich or gain power. In the case of the Dey, he underestimated the willingness of the United States to take action.

Once you have the name and supplier getting the supplier to provide information you want is not that big of a step. You can let most people use a VPN without problems and let suppliers make money; in exchange they provide you with what you want or lose the income stream.

There is a great divide between ambition and reality. That slide represents the ambition of every intelligence agency everywhere. Achieving it is another story.

The thing is to separate the creative or skilled form the rote. That's what robots do in manufacturing, with a few skilled workers and machines replacing lots of manual labor. There is no reason that much software creation won't follow the same model. There already are libraries and other tools that remove the need to custom craft code, using automation to build programs is simply a next step. Rather than a bunch of low level coders writing code, more skilled coders will use automation to craft solutions and build their own code where the automated code doesn't do the job. Automation will change the skill set and role of the programmer, much as robot manufacturing has done. Low skilled labor intensive jobs will move to to lower cost locations; textile manufacturing did that and programming has started doing that with offshoring of work.

You are already seeing that at he GP level where an NP is replacing an MD as the main caregiver; mainly because an NP makes 2/3 of what a GP does. A GP essentially treats symptoms and if they go away you're cured; the real value is in the GP or NP knowing when to send you to a specialist. It's bit more complicated than simply looking at test results, however since things such as physical characteristics, odors, twitches, etc require observation and possibly questioning beyond mere test results and that is where a human is still better than a machine. Humans can also detect something that is not part of the original complaint by observation as well, which is why you see a pairing of machine skills with human skills.

I think it is more like "don't think because you learned a reasonably valuable skill that that skill can't be devalued through, or replaced by, automation." It's a pattern that has repeated itself throughout history as machines replaced human labor.

I also think that is a more likely scenario. Many programming jobs are little more than glorified assembly line work where some basic stock code is adapted to a specific job. That's why a lot of it is outsourced since it really doesn't require a sophisticated level of skill, merely the ability to generate the same stuff over and over. The real code writing, as you point out, still will require skills humans possess. In some ways, it's how manufacturing is returning to the US. Instead of an assembly line full of people you have a bunch of robots overseen by a much more skilled technician.

As for the newspaper articles case, that is a bit different. There, good enough and cheap beats out better and more expensive. In such cases, humans will be replaced by machines. That's why we have those damed "Touch 1 for ..." systems instead of a human answering the phone. It also means that many devices, once they reach a certain level of good enough will see less and less improvement and thus less demand for programmers.