Specifically, states like California are now trying to reclassify temporary employees as permanent in order to collect additional tax revenue. This happened with Apple before, and they also now have a 6 month rule. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Microsoft is particularly sensitive to the issue, given that it was a lawsuit against them that triggered the whole idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

So this has nothing to do with the laid off employees (unless they are laying off contractors first, which is pretty common, if they can).

This is unconstitutional under the fourth amendment.

There is no difference between this type of search and a Writ of Assistance, which is precisely one of the reasons that the U.S. Constitutions Fourth Amendment was written.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

"...vindication of Gov. Jerry Brown's..."

Great reason right there to not pick California.

How's that high speed rail construction project that was voted down by Californians 3 times with a large enough margin that it's a pretty clear shout of "Hell No!" each of the times it was vote on, that Jerry Brown is going ahead with anyway, working out?

Is it still taking place in a corridor where land is cheap because there's no place to get on or off the damn thing that has any significant population that would constitute the target ridership?

Is it still taking place in an era with no water to support future development potential, because all that water is being shipped down to Los Angeles, which is too lazy to build actual catchement, and just runs all their water off into the ocean, and is too lazy/cheap to build desalination plants powered by the waste heat from Diablo Canyon (which they'd prefer to have shut down, even though it's a zero carbon emission power plant)?

The man is a freaking public policy nightmare spendthrift, not to mention that Texas has no income tax; what moron would build a factory in California? Elon was just being nice when he didn't categorically rule it out when asked.

Basic economics should also tell you that certain jobs have a value ceiling, and above that ceiling, you either go without, or you find someone willing to work at or below the value ceiling.

We used to have kids employed part time by businesses to do things like police the trash in the parking lot, wash down sidewalks, and so on. But the value to the business is not worth what they'd have to pay in order to get the job done, and so now there is trash in parking lots, and crappy sidewalks, and you contract someone to come in once a week or so with a strew sweeper, because it's cheaper than hiring a junior high/middle school or high school teenager at an adult wage to do the work. Unless you have the "family business/employ your kid for whatever you want" loophole, a lot of that stuff just doesn't get done.

For technical stuff, you either get the equivalent of a migrant farm worker, or day laborer from home depot, and you either get an H1-B to make it legal, or you contract it out to a third party to make it legal, in the same way that a lot of farm workers, or the guys hanging out in the Home Depot aren't legal (and are paid under the table). But what you don't do is hire someone in at a wage higher than the value of the work to the company. You stay at or below the value ceiling at all times, or you might as well be flushing money down the toilet, since your business is not going to make it.

...that Nokia engineers have historically built products no one wants to buy, while Xbox engineers make game consoles that people actually buy.

I suppose we could retask the former Nokia engineers with making game consoles no one wants to buy, instead of phones no one wants to buy.

But frankly, Microsoft has already announced that 12,500, or roughly 70% of the 18,000 people being laid off, are primarily factory workers assembling dumb phones and feature phones, which are both low margin, and selling poorly, and they are predominantly not employed in the U.S. anyway.

The remaining 5,500 people are redundancies of the kind you get when you smash a 127,000 employee company together with a 90,000 employee company to get a 217,000 employee company, and then decide that 2.5% of them are duplicate effort which is not necessary.

Only the employed ones.

The problem with web applications - and the intrinsic problem of abstraction of the complexity that's solved by historical runtime environments that the OP likes, is that the render is independent. The whole article the other day about the Google device lab:

http://mobile.slashdot.org/sto...

Completely and totally underscores the fact that markup and rendering are separate from each other, and that the system doing the markup has to understand, and either have variant code that it outputs so that it renders the same in as many browsers as possible -- or you need an entire device lab, because you've given up on solving the problem, and are willing to employ someone other than a "Normal Human" (per the current article) in order to chip away on a per device basis, until you exhaustively cover all possibilities.

The separation on the render is the problem with the web, as a platform, and it's why it's * not* "a platform", it's "N back ends * M browsers" number of platforms.

This separation is the same mistake that was made when window management was separated from X windows, such that you didn't get the same look and feel on all applications based on having a particular X Terminal/X Server on which the render took place. In other words, the primitives were too primitive, and you ended up drawing boxes and lines and patterns, instead of "pop up menus" and "menu bards" and "dialog boxes".

What the OP in this article is bemoaning as being missing is a self-enforcing emergent property of the design decision to separate rendering from markup, and to separate markup from UI logic, and separate business logic from everything else. It's why web services are so complicated, and why they are so fragile.

The only thing that ever came close to dealing with the issue overall, at a high level, was WebObjects, and even then, it didn't try to do it in a way that was renderer/backend/middleware/security model/web server agnostic.

So again, I'm going to say that web services isn't a *platform* in the traditional sense of a computer running one of half a dozen 80x24 block mode terminals to front end a COBOL program was a platform, and that anyone who thinks it is ... is an idiot. At best, they are engaging in wishful thinking, if they think Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and other vendors of these things are going to settle on a common programming paradigm, and turn themselves into commodities, which would result in about 1/6th the revenue they're getting today.

About as great a job as they are doing emulating a company that makes cell phones and tablets.

Clearly, you have never built a fission device, if you think you could get that many of them out of 640kg of even weapons grade Plutonium. You need to probably go back and read "The Curve of Binding Energy" and recalculate the neutron numbers to determine critical mass, assuming a pareto optimal design, because you are more than a bit high with "100"...

You could build a lot of dirty bombs with something like that, but you are likely better off just robbing a radiomedicine unit at a large research hospital to get the materials, or stealing a truck out of a fast food restaurant in Mexico City...

I call BS on EMACS...

You can't "And Constantly Swapping" unless it's running on a machine with virtual memory and swapping implemented.

The web is not a runtime environment.

The reason you can't use TurboPascal is because web pages run in the browser virtual machine, and TurboPascal code runs in the TurboPascal runtime environment linked into the native code TurboPascal application.

You could target TurboPascal to NACL/PiNACL in Chrome as a target runtime environment, but effectively to run it, you'd be doing a JavaScript call into a JavaScript extension that then ran as native code in a sandbox within Chome. You'd, as a result, lose most of the TurboPascal runtime libraries supplied by the compiler vendor, and you'd lose all third party libraries and components, if the third parties weren't willing to port them (I assume you realize that you don't have all the Photoshop plugins on Windows that are available on Mac, right?).

Web languages, n the other hand, are predominantly for programming code on a server to generate markup, which is then interpreted by the browser to render output, or they are intended to run in a really limited environment in the browser itself, usually as unextended JavaScript (and, in the case of things like iPad/iPhone/etc., they are *definitely* NOT extended, since a UIView extension is not allowed under the terms and conditions for interpreting web content, since it's a huge security hole that's easily exploited with a DNS hijack).

Basically, if you are thinking your browser is a "platform", or you are thinking "the web" is "a platform" in the traditional programming sense, as the OP obvious is, then you are an idiot.

Better add DARPA and Jon Postel as codefendants. I hear they came up with this thing called TCP/IP, which aids and abets people like Tor putting together anonymous networks in the first place; it's a clear case of collusion...

Bonus Points: I hear DARPA has deep pockets...

Most companies producing devices with browsers are pretty ass about providing working simulators/emulators for the hardware.

This is OK for one company, like Google or Roxio, to deal with supporting a lot of platforms with all sorts of physical differences from there being no hardware standard for Android devices to which vendors have to adhere, but ... it's not going to address the underlying problem, just because you can make the render device variant with less effort.

"Welcome to the Blackberry video rental site! ... where everyone is tall and thin, because we don't believe in 4:5 or 16:9 aspect ratios!"

"Top Learning Language" ...OR... "Top Teaching Language"?

Do we have some great metrics as to how well people taught in Python actually *learn*? You know, for things like memory allocation, pointers, and so on?