The service is still in beta, too -- I would hope they rationalize the pricing (especially for first-party games) by the time they end the beta. Personally, I can't see myself paying these rates ever -- I have a perfectly functional PS3 that I still use more than my PS4, and I somewhere have a PS2 for all my really old disc games.

Does India have anything like the US Constitution's requirement for due process of law before someone is punished? It is conceivable for the government to ban the collection or publication of national security information, with the burden on the collector/publisher to figure out whether they have done so. This would be a recipe for arbitrary enforcement and unjust outcomes, but similar schemes have been implemented in the past -- between restaurant reviews and search engines, recent European cases provide examples for comparison and contrast of laws that are only really decidable with hindsight or by judicial dictate.

You did not answer any of my questions. Did you just want to highlight that India seems to be whining about Google instead of trying to work with them?

North Korea makes it extremely hard to get map information! Face recognition algorithms sometimes go awry! A power plant is shown with similar resolution to neighboring buildings! News at 11!

At least 15 of the 25 places on the list you link to are closed to the general public, several others might be (not clear from quick Google searches), and several appear to have high-quality satellite imagery now. It is not surprising that Google blurs out places that governments intentionally make it hard to see. This is perhaps even a good idea by default for military installations and high-level government buildings, with exceptions to be made for plausible allegations of malfeasance or abuse of authority.

The government body trying to protect its turf from competition did not cite any privacy issues, either. It cited security issues, which of course it could not describe in detail because security.

Did Google specifically solicit information about defense installations, perhaps as a particular example of hospitals or restaurants? If not, did Google have any way to know which information about which installations is considered secret? (Obviously, the government would never publish such a list for general consumption, because that would both reveal the data that they want to protect and distinguish the sensitive data from information that they consider non-sensitive.) Did Google republish this data, or is the perceived offense merely that Google has the data?

Verizon does not advertise unlimited bandwidth. They advertise(d) unlimited data usage -- and in this case, "unlimited" is read to mean "no artificial [or carrier-imposed] caps", not "no caps at all" or even "LTE everywhere".

To clarify, both sentences in the first paragraph of my earlier comment were sarcastic. Working that many hours per week might be a BFOQ in rare instances of personal service work, and maybe (I personally doubt it) some operations jobs, but there is no way it would be accepted as a BFOQ for a development job.

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).

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.

And I wish you luck in learning to read more than the first sentence of a comment before you fire off an utterly wrong response to it, you moron.

EPIC is not trying to stop the government from using this system -- they are trying to get information about the system, presumably so that they can decide whether to try to rein in the system (via political or judicial means) to protect civil rights. Why oppose that, indeed?

DoofusOfDeath and AHuxley make good points as well. Some modern advocacy groups (like the Cato Institute) claim that open immigration can coexist with a welfare state, but even the studies they write admit that low-skilled immigrants consume more social spending than they pay in taxes, that welfare spending does not go down due to higher levels of immigration[1], and that working-class citizens are the hardest hit due to open immigration policies.

[1]- Unsurprisingly, political leanings explain most of the differences in welfare spending between US states, and Cato's study this year did not try to control for that at all. Illegal immigrants and non-permanent aliens are barred from collecting almost any kind of welfare. Even permanent residents are barred from collecting most welfare for five years. Naturalized citizens, of course, can collect the same kinds of welfare that other citizens can collect -- but these are typically the most motivated and skilled immigrants, and have less need of wealth transfers.

With no borders, when you break the laws of the City of Entrope, the City of Entrope Police will hunt you down to the end of the earth if the mayor tells them to. There is no reason for them to stop short of that. Does that sound good to you?

With no political borders, the only possibly stable equilibria are anarchy and uniform world government, and I am deeply skeptical that either would actually be stable. Which one of those do you prefer?

Bless your heart, CaptainEuphemism: I know you are not the sharpest tool in the shed, so I will spell out why clueful people still call them illegal immigrants rather than "undocumented" immigrants and reserve "unaccompanied minor" for kids who fly on planes without their parents.

Entering the US other than in a time and place authorized by immigration officers is punishable by up to six months in jail under 8 USC 1325, as is using forged paperwork to enter. However, in most cases, it does not make sense to lock someone up -- and have US taxpayers pay their room and board -- for any longer than necessary, so we deport them quickly rather than sending them to prison and *then* deporting them.

Illegal immigrants (or unauthorized aliens, if you prefer the statutory term) get a "free ride" home if the executive branch thinks they are likely to break the law further by trying to stay after the final order of removal. The Immigration and Nationality Act is written as if Congress assumed illegal immigrants would -- for some unfathomable reason -- pay their own way out of the country after getting that final order of removal.

I'll cut you a deal, AC: Microsoft gets a new allotment of H-1B visa sponsorships if they promise to only use them to bring workers who have jobs with Microsoft subsidiaries (as of some fixed day in the past) to the US, and consent to meaningful oversight to ensure they keep that promise. If they don't want to make that promise, I will infer they mostly want to fire people with decent-paying jobs (which I hear is the usual case in Finland, especially for tech workers) in favor of low-paid, almost captive labor.