In MA, precedent(s) was (were?) set for enforcing them for, as you mentioned, key employees. If you're the CTO of a company making, let say, algorithms to design perfect donuts, and you quick to go work for Dunkin Donut's secret research facility in Boston, they would enforce it there. If you're just the tech lead for one of their random development team, in theory the judge will take your side.

Especially since MA, with the Boston/Cambridge area, is also quickly becoming another tech hub... so having similar rules to one of the states with the biggest tech hubs is probably not that bad.

At (low ball) 120k-160k for a mediocre unix dev in the big tech centers... you can deal with a lot of shit from Microsoft before hitting that price tag.

Because aside for landline/cable providers (no competition and "revolts" haven't done a thing), and health care (revolt is a daily thing...), things in the US are overall so much cheaper than anywhere else, its a bit hard to complain.

Regardless, you're correct that it goes two ways. The easiest way to see it is in other countries. US beliefs, as well as stereotypes (including negative ones), are being pushed around via the internet. Certain ultra liberal countries have started having abortion debates, when no one had ever questioned it before.

A particularly bad one: I've heard someone call a black person a "slave" as a slur...in a country where pretty much anyone of color is a rich investor immigrant or professional and no history. So not only its racist as hell, but it also doesn't even fit.

The internet is just putting everyone in a melding pot and the lowest common denominator comes out. Since people rarely check facts and have no ability for critical thinking, whatever is loudest and most visible will be the belief of the majority after a while.

People in general are gullible and believe whatever they hear. Being skeptical, double checking facts, looking at references...those are things people don't even think about anymore (well, they never did, its not new).

Schools need to push more on THAT. Teaching people to prove what they say, that its not because everyone says something that its true, and to learn how to separate facts from made up stuff. The rest will follow.

The argument about local workers being displaced aside...its a slap in the face for foreign workers who can't get an H1B and are actually the original target audience for those visas.

I have friends who Canada with credentials up the wazoo, who have been working on TN1 visas for a bit, and want something more permanent. Those are 150-300k/year jobs (lead software engineers and architects) that aren't easy to fill outside of California.

And they have to hit the lottery like anyone else, and more likely than not they won't get their H1B...and so they have to stick with TN or looking for an american to marry =P

Not cool.

Not any more. Providing Windows server 2012 was also part of the announcement. SQL server I'm sure you can install yourself.

Maybe Im blind, but i only see 2008 in the announcement, not 2012.

Write a resume that includes a CS degree at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Cal Tech, whatever...then fill your employment history with Starbucks barista, scratching monkey's backs, picking your nose and for good measure, add a sabbatical as part of your job history too.

You're still gonna get half decent offers if you can pass the phone screen.

The type of degree isn't relevant for a lot of stuff, especially when it comes to immigration or certain employers.

In this case, that employer worked simply with post-secondary years, and counted a master as 6 and PhD as 10. So someone who did 2 bachelors in 6 years was equivalent to someone with a master. What happened before that, or which country or type of degree you had, was irrelevent.

For immigration, its total years of schooling. So how long high school takes in your particular country is relevant. here.

Its dumb, but that's how it works. It just depends who you talk to. My current employer doesn't give a damn and is purely performance based, so without a degree at all I have a higher title (and salary) than some people with PhDs.

I once interviewed for one of the big investment banks (not gonna give a name, but its one of the big evil wall street banks that everyone knows about). That one has the usual silly "4 year degree with 3.0 GPA or we don't even talk to you, no exception, not even if you're a well known superstar in the software world" rule.

I didn't know that, and I only have a 3 year degree (from a country where thats common). I aced the interview as that particular job wasn't even very computer science-ish, and they had been looking for someone for months to fill that position. Then they noticed the little issue of me not having the mandatory degree.

The hiring manager (not someone from an agency, but someone on their payroll) just modified my resume without telling me and passed it over to HR for final signoff. I got hired.

Fast forward a year, they're updating the HRIS system and verifying that all the info is correct. I get an email from HR asking me to confirm that I indeed have a 4 year bachelor with 3.0 GPA from Big Name College XYZ with my boss CCed.

My boss quickly replied, before I had time to go "WTF?!", that I indeed had such a degree.

Needless to say, him and I had a little talk afterward. That was awkward.

You touched the problem. When the CDN servers are inside the ISP's facilities. And often, the owner of the CDN servers is the content provider. So you have a content provider striking a deal with an ISP -directly- to have better service. Since its within the ISP's facilities, of course they're gonna have to pay something. So its gray area.

If CDN providers were their own, neutral, "dumb" entities in between, it wouldn't be an issue, but that's not always the case.

Exactly. People and companies already pay from both side. You pay for incoming and outgoing, the other side pays for incoming and outgoing, and the providers who take that money then pay for peering agreements (if any, often they don't need to pay since those go both ways).

So paying for your outgoing pipe AND paying for the provider that delivers, when that provider is already getting money (or other benefits in lieu of money) for peering, is silly.

When it gets confusing is with CDNs and how those need to be handled...

They're intermediaries because from the customer's point of view (customer in this context being residentials and office), they're behind their ISP. The ISPs deal with them, make deals with them, call them when there's an issue, not you or me.

This is more about the behavior of the community than the content of the game though.