Unions are an incredibly poor way to control abusive employer tactics unless workers in the bargaining unit are basically fungible -- and knowledge workers are not. A much better approach would be something like an online exchange for H-1B job postings, where US-based employees can register their interest for a job opening (along with their current and/or target salary) and see whether the job eventually goes to someone with permanent work authorization in the US and what the salary is, and perhaps see an anonymized summary of the eventual hire's qualifications relative to the posting's requirements. This would give employees most of the information necessary to (decide whether to) file a complaint either with immigration authorities or in court.

Hey, working 60+ hours per week is a bona fide occupational qualification for some jobs! These immigrants are just filling jobs that Americans don't want to do.

Another problem is that these companies tend to tailor H-1B job requirement statements to particular foreign candidates in such a way that essentially every US-based candidate who might see the posting would not qualify or would ignore it (for example, because of that pay disparity or the work week or other conditions listed in the job description).

No, but the first one will turn out to be a cheap knockoff with out of date hardware that only gets a tenth of the advertised resolution and fails to work when it's cloudy outside.

Also the user manual will be so bad, they won't figure out how to use it until 2045.

>> The argument could also be made that it was the United States leading the persecution of Germany after WWI,

Excuse me? You have a source on that one?

>> There may be problems with socialism, but it's a better alternative than laissez faire capitalism.

Source? Because I don't see it based on the last 100 years. Can you point out positives that aren't just taking shots at whatever it is you don't like about the USA? Because I've noticed that most "socialists" are merely socially retarded individuals who have no concept of how normal people think and live their lives.

So, they decide FOR THEM how they should think and live their lives; then they urge them to do it. When that doesn't work they try to destroy the alternatives. When that doesn't work then they penalize the behavior they don't like. When that doesn't work, they coerce using the full weight of the government.

ALL liberal/socialist/communistic movements follow this same pattern.

But with access to the source code, it's easily possible to verify that the binary supplied corresponds to the source.

That's how we know that TrueCrypt has no "binary" backdoors - we just try different combinations of compiling, noting the differences, until we find the one that Cisco used. If we never find the exact combination, the differences between a "known good" compile of the original source and the final binary make the amount of code to blind-check almost negligible in comparison.

It's when people DON'T provide source that you should be suspicious, or when you can't get close to their source providing their binary.

Pretty much, yeah. Though I don't actually get to grow a beard unless I'm either on leave or deployed overseas, so I guess you got me there.

Of course, if you had a functional sense of humour you would have realized that my "manliness" comment was tongue-in-cheek. The fact that I do cut down trees with an axe and light them up with a blowtorch is just an amusing coincidence.

Sure, just go ahead and deny my experiences. Next you'll try to tell me that I deserved it because I was wearing a kilt. Victim blaming is always popular, especially when the victim is male.

I've never denied the evidence. You may have me confused with a strawman you constructed. If you're going to argue with him, why address your response to me?

Plus, laws differ depending on your jurisdiction.

When I was a kid, we had cassette tapes. We could easily copy music from the radio, and give it to a teacher to play in assembly. It still did not mean that when it came time to review music licensing, the school could avoid paying for doing so.

In fact, copyright licensing of music in schools (especially hymns, for some reason) is one of the most draconian applications of law that I've seen. But that doesn't forgo the schools obligations to properly license it - back then, or now. And, yes, schools that I work in have been threatened with lawsuits for doing things like playing a brief excerpt of a hit single of the day in an end-of-term assembly.

I refuse to allow a school I work in to be sued for something so petty, and be forced to pay over money to record companies (or photographers, or software programmers, or whatever) that's better spent educating children. Applying extra filters costs no more than applying legally-required filters anyway. Licensing of school software is one of the easiest things to fall foul of.... oh, this is a free download, can we just install it everywhere? No. Oh, this is a CD I got in my cornflakes that I'd like the kids to all use? Tough. Licensing says no.

Schools get sued for this. I'm not making it up. It's not *my* pettiness. Hell, some of the largest companies are getting sued for using a photograph from the Internet without permission in their advertising etc. - this is a symptom of people NOT being taught about copyright law when they are in school, and being taught that Google Images is "free". Of course you can find properly-licensed images with Google Images. What you can't do is enforce that setting side-wide through a URL-modifying filter (like you can with SafeSearch).

I'm stopping your kid's school getting sued for 10 x damages for wilfull infringement of copyright and having to pay thousands that would be better spent on, say, computers or properly licensed software or books or teachers, than being paid to some random guy on Tumblr who's had his image pinched and gets bitchy about it.

Assuming a completely unwilling and unaroused victim, yes, I very much suspect it would be. However, feminists and victim-advocacy groups have spent the last couple decades telling us that "rape is rape" and that they're all equally bad, so it would be a bit hypocritical for them to now start screaming "BUT WE HAVE IT WORSE!".

If you like looking like a whiny, hypocritical moron, be my guest. I take it that you concede that illegal immigration is in fact a crime, and that you didn't read far enough into my earlier comment to see where I explained that, because you haven't done a thing to rebut either of those. I'm not going to use soft words to save the feelings of someone who is a lazy, useful idiot or worse.

Very true. So when that happens to me, is that because of the matriarchy trying to keep my manliness in check?

Because that's what we do when people are wrong?

I've noticed when people bring up the idea that the holocaust never happened, they get 100% complete denial and blame the messenger. Hrm ... I wonder why.

Nobody is denying that the problem exists. That's the kind of absurd strawman that always ends up derailing these discussions. What people are telling you is that:

1. Everyone gets harassed at some point. You don't see me going around talking about what an unsafe environment comicon is just because some chick grabbed my ass.
2. Problems caused by a small subset of individuals should be dealt with INDIVIDUALLY, rather than by writing long-winded articles about how the whole system is horrible. Only an idiot attacks an entire community over the actions of a few individuals. We usually call that "bigotry".

Because it's insignificant. I've caught more flack for having a slow connection than most women catch for being women. I've seen far more men bending over backwards to help "women in tech" than I've seen trying to tear them down. Men tend to be far more cruel and destructive towards each other than they do with women. If harassment in the tech community is a problem then it's a problem for everyone, and it's absolutely ridiculous to single out women as being some special class of victim.

That's feminism for you in a nutshell. The "skepchick" website rose to fame in no small part thanks to putting out a (artistic-ish) nude calendar of their members, and encouraging male adoration. Then once they had enough of a following, they decided it was now misogynistic for men to comment on their appearance or think of them in a sexual way. Lots of women have gained prominence by using their sexuality to their advantage, only to later go on long-winded rants about how nobody should be "objectifying" them.

The Irish were, by far, the majority in Ireland. Additionally, Ireland is fairly separate from Great Britian (the island) and there was no question of forcing the British out of their own homeland.

And of course, the British are *still* there. In Northern Ireland.

If anything, the Palestinians are already "independent" of Israeli rule, the majority Palestinian areas are part of the Palestinian state, like the majority Irish are in control of the Irish state.

So, Palestine is already "there". Most of the Irish stopped fighting after they got what Palestine has now. The Irish government, for the most part, didn't try and claim Northern Ireland as part of their "ancestral homeland" for very long. The IRA groups did, but they were never properly representative of the Irish. If anything, the Irish did what I would hope the Palestinians do today... took their independence and did what they could with it.

Independence isn't the Palestinian's problem. It's that they keep getting interfered with by Israel on one side, and their "friends" in the Muslim world, on the other. They need to stand up and stop doing what is pissing off the majority of Israelis, and then stand up to their so-called friends, and refuse to be their proxy soldiers anymore.

Oh, geeze, don't let a feminist hear you say that! Every time someone suggests women maybe aren't suitable to being firefighters or combat soldiers, the wymins go apeshit.

According to the newest stats, not really that much more often than men are abused or raped by women. Domestic violence cases split almost 50/50. Sexual violence victims are still mostly women, but men come in very close behind now that we've stopped defining "rape" in a way that makes it impossible for women to be rapists.

And men being abused by men ... holy shit. If we took your approach, every man in the world should be "more sensitive to the imiplicit or explicit threats of violence", to the point where we'd pee our pants as soon as another man looked at us funny.

Difference is, men don't try to justify freaking out and overreacting by pointing to statistics. And neither do most women, for that matter; the ones who do are just a very loud minority.

If Israel grabs the land of the Palestinians, they have to actually deal with the Palestinians.

What made most of the annexations possible is that war caused Palestinians to become refugees and they left. While it wasn't entirely voluntary, due to fear, it was a situation that opened up a considerable amount of now-Israeli territory to be further colonized without having to forcibly remove large numbers of people.

The Palestinians have nowhere else to go. If Israel wants their land, they need to take the Palestinians too. Does that mean apartheid or something in Israel? Perhaps it does. They also had apartheid in South Africa, once upon a time, but I am not sure it would come to that.

I don't think Israel truly wants the Territories. It would threaten the Jewish majority. What allows the Israelis to take more land is the wars that push people out of it and in that sense, the Palestinians are playing into the hands of either Israel or their "benefactors" in Iran or the Arab countries, who are more interested in attacking Israel by proxy to maintain the popularity of their own regimes.

I don't suggest that the Palestinians leave, although I wouldn't personally stay, but all they have to do is not go anywhere. They just need to stop indiscriminate civilian attacks. They can take defensive actions inside their borders, just stop the civilian attacks. The world will tire quickly of the Israeli army and air force mowing down people who are truly only defending themselves, if that even happens.