Actually ModelSim (now Questa) does run under Linux, very well, and I use it every day.

Uh, no! They are correctly referring to 450mm *wafers*. 450 mm or about 17.7 inch diameter *wafers*. Not line width wafer diameter. This represents a roughly 125% increase in area over current 300mm wafers, and since the marginal cost of processing a 450mm wafer over a 300mm wafer is no where near 125% (it's mostly in the cost of the newer machinery) TSMC will be able to significantly decrease the cost of their products and so will companies like NVidia, ATI, Broadcom and Qualcomm (NOT Apple they don't make chips at TSMC yet). We Americans may not be great at using the SI system but at least we know what where talking about.

No it's called supply and demand. I promise you that you'll find plenty of people doing what ever job you want if you just pay them accordingly. If we paid tech workers (or fruit pickers or teachers or whatever job you want) what we apparently pay investment bankers or CEOs or what we used to pay lawyers you'd be able to find as many as you need. People seem to want the free market but then complain when the free market responds by informing them that they need to pay more than they want to for a particular resource. The market is telling that employer that smart people capable of doing the job they want done can get better compensated in a different field. Why should we distort the market for any particular field?
    Let me pick on Bill Gates who has testified before congress on this issue (partly cause it's just fun). He has said that Microsoft can't find enough people here with the skills they need. That's not true, there is a whole company here called Apple (and Google and yadda yadda yadda) that have all the skilled workers Microsoft needs. However Microsoft is unwilling to pay them enough to lure them away. That's the market at work, it's has decided that the most productive place to put it's skilled workers, *for a given wage* is a variety of companies. Microsoft's complaint isn't really that it can't find enough workers locally, it's just that it doesn't want to pay what's required to do so, and so what it wants to do is artificially increase the supply of workers by importing them so that the price on the demand curve shift lower.
    Finally to answer the question originally posed. I'd make it a requirement that H1B type migrants be paid in the top 5 percentile (or pick your own high figure) for the job they are taking. That gives the employers incentive to find a worker here and the market will work out the rest.

In many places in the US if an ambulance comes for you, you will get charged. I see stories all the time about people who didn't pay the fire insurance/protection bill in their jurisdiction and the fire department comes and watches their house burn down without lifting a finger. Traditionally a copyright or patent holder was granted a government privilege but they were required to pay for the enforcement. They were required to find the infringers and bring court cases and recover damages. Now they want to shift the cost of their business onto tax payers and the general public and this is what I object to. (I apologize for ending this sentence with a preposition.)

When you say cheaper, are you including the inevitable cost associated with the eventual security problems like this? Then you aren't not really doing a fair cost benefit analyses are you? You're just pushing your costs off onto the rest of us in the form of inevitable regulations need to protect the "critical infrastructure" Internet because of your stupid implementation. Of course it's cheaper, it's always cheaper to make someone else pay.

Actually that isn't true. Andrew Jackson paid off the national debt.

But their random occurrence shouldn't be a flag. These aren't random events. You have a group of people taught by the same people, and likely helping each other study. Their answers on an exam aren't statistically uncorrrelated and treating them as if they were is wrong.

This is not true. Domestic law does still apply to US citizens outside the US. You still have to pay taxes. You are still entitled to 4th amendment protections of your conversations and property from US agents abroad. FBI agents abroad can't simply search you because you aren't on US soil. If you commit murder while abroad or violate a federal law you can still be tried for it at home. The reason you can be searched at the border is that the Federal Government was explicitly granted the power to raise and levy customs in the constitution Article I section 8.1 (thank you US Constitution iPhone App). Meaning taxes on goods brought into or out of the country. It is considered inherent in that power that the government should be able to search you and your property as you enter and leave the country to levy those taxes and prevent importation of contraband. My questions is, if you're looking for contraband you shouldn't get a blanket exception to search through things that can't contain it. You aren't going to find marijuana in my laptop hard drive. So why do you get the right to troll through it? I don't agree with it, but that's in essence the legal rational. If you want to fight it you gotta explain why why that reasoning is wrong or shouldn't apply.

As much as I wish it weren't the case, Apple owns virtually none of the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industry. Which is basically the industry that builds software to help engineers design PCB circuit boards and chips or FPGAs.

Perhaps, but if I can give somebody a wad of cash and they'd go off and do it, it hardly qualifies as novel now does it?

No, you miss the issue. If I buy a computer then I bought it and everything that comes on it. If Microsoft wants to impose conditions after the sale that's bullshit. However, for the sake of argument, lets assume that I agree to do things their way. *By their own terms* if I don't agree to the EULA I am entitled to a refund and I need only tell the original manufacturer. If the Manufacturer doesn't like that then they should take that up with Microsoft or stop selling the bundle. The people who need to grow up are the manufacturers. They knew the terms are there and if they thought it was going to be a problem or didn't like it they could have done something about it. It's too late for them to cry now and not follow through.