Everytime I see an article that says "Industry X can't find enough workers, people just aren't interested," it makes it sound like there's a worker shortage. What is often left out of the uncritical reporting, especially for entry level jobs, is "...can't find enough workers who will work for the amount the company wants to pay them." It's a free market, if you can't find people, you're not paying enough. Now, if it's for a senior position, then there may be a shortage of people, but that means the company has to inve$t in training. Rarely (except maybe during the 90's) is there an actual labor shortage. Just companies not wanting to pay more for labor.

When I hear people complaining that they can't find skilled people, the part they usually leave off is "I can't find skilled people....for the amount of money I want to pay."
If there's a shortage in the market, then the value goes up, attracting more people, so there shouldn't be a problem in the long term.
The mayor did have a valid point that there's nothing that makes a lawyer worth more respect than a plumber, other than class behaviors.
I'm not sure how much respect of a profession matters in attracting people. Lawyers don't get a lot of respect but many people want to become lawyers for the money. No reason that shouldn't work for plumbers.

This could be bad news for Democrats if the Libertarians tend to vote Republican. Of course, it's not like /. readers are a representative sample of the US voting populace, so this poll is probably worthless anyway.

The article's author is suffering from a major case of self-justification. I've been in this industry for a long time and Microsoft's been known for a lot of things, but innovation was never one of them. Good developer relations? Check. Finding a way acquire/copy good ideas and spread them widely? Check. Aggressive business practices? Check But I remember in the 80's and 90's that all the innovation that was added to Microsoft products was from acquisitions or feature copying from competitors. It was an interesting story about why the MS-tablet didn't take off, but my guess is that the hardware and wireless access hadn't matured yet, not that he got in a spat with the Office VP, who was probably correct in his assessment. Give Apple credit, yes they copied the Macintosh interface idea from Xerox, but they've put in some real innovative human factors improvements since then. MS picks and chooses which innovations to buy from smaller companies, rather than risk their own capital.

I wonder if their data will scale? Is it effected by temperature changes? Humidity changes (especially Gen2 tags)? It's one thing to notice the uniqueness of a few hundred chips, but it a passport database could have billions of entries, or say a database of tagged cash with trillions of entries, would entries still be unique under varying temperature and humidty? Or just mostly unique, like social security numbers? Another way of reducing counterfeiting is to track where the item is supposed to be in a secure database (or secure databases linked by secure communications) and if the tag shows up in an unexpected place, investigate further. In the passport example from the article, if passport X is known to be in the US and its counterfeit tries to be used in France, that should trigger further examination. Of course, this requires all the passport computers to communicate world wide which could be administratively difficult, but probably not a lot more difficult than figuring out which database of response curves to query.

I'd be surprised if this bill goes anywhere but slashdot. It has no cosponsors and Peter King is a Republican in a Democratic house. To be honest, this smells like constituent service - "I'm so upset congressman, can't you do something?" so he makes the old person happy and introduces a bill...