Or, they could just make their own processors. I believe they have the IP to do so through various acquisitions. And x86 isn't exactly the best instruction set out there efficiency-wise, so they might end up with something cheaper to run (definitely cheaper to build) and better.

Considering its location relative to Florida, I'd say tex-mex is a perfectly valid reason for methane coming out of that hole.

What I find funny here (and on other tech sites) is that up until the moment you talk about H1B, everybody's all for opening up the borders and easing up on illegal immigration. It's all lovey-dovey "let's make them legal so they can pay their taxes" up until the point when they're actually legal and competing for the same jobs as the prevailent occupation as the community. But suddenly, as soon as the topic switches to H1B, it's a chorus of "don't let them in, they're stealing out jobs!"

From my experience with on- and off-shore consulting, the low-skilled jobs are the ones that typically get replaced. These are things from data entry to phone support. Companies that try to send away high skilled jobs tend to get burned by either the lack of talent, or the cost of the equivalent talent (cost accounting both for money and the necessary overall decrease in productivity). Which is to say, for a highly-skilled worker, whether somebody's on a visa or not, they're probably going to cost about the same.

Yes, some companies are switching fully to an on- and off-shore consulting work force. In the past, companies that have attempted this were ultimately forced to bring the majority of their skilled labor back because the talent simply isn't worth the additional hidden costs. Yes, there is talk (and fear, always a lot of fear) that companies will off-shore all of their tech workers. I think if anyone actually tries that, they won't be around for very long. And I'm not terribly sympathetic. There's no reason good people should hold up incompetent management, and the faster the free market gets rid of these companies, the faster more forward-looking businesses can assume their place.

There are, of course, two exceptions to this, that being the government and utilities. In this case, the Senators are investigating a utility. I expect both government and government-permitted monopolies (utilities) to be staffed by U.S. citizens. Even if they're contractors, which they usually are, I think that there is a national security matter at play, and that absolutely cannot be compromised by foreign, non-patrioted workers.

What I'm more concerned about is abuse of employees on a visa. Consulting companies tend to treat their visa-based workers well, but companies that sponsor tend to treat their workers like total shit. That's because companies that sponsor are able to hold that sponsorship over the heads of their sponsored employees. And people want to come here to work, and some of them are willing to do so for almost nothing. When applied in this way, work visas are nothing more than the modern form of indentured servitude. It's a human rights violation in our very own backyards, but because we're so concerned about job-stealing and keeping our jobs here, we can't even see it.

A brain drain from the rest of the world to the U.S. can only be a good thing. Sending menial jobs off shore is also a good thing. Letting tech-adverse companies die is or learn a harsh lesson is also a good thing. The only losers are the ones who can't keep up with the overall rising skill of the tech labor force. And quite frankly, there are plenty of on-premise jobs that simply cannot be outsourced for them too, though it may not necessarily be at the forefront of technology. The only bad thing is the use of having a work visa rather than citizenship to justify abuse. And that ties into a bigger issue of the Rights of non-citizens.

But I get it. People want their cake and to eat it too. Our in-house primary education system has churned out a generation of duds (now ever more than before, and it's only getting worse). We don't have in-house highly skilled workers anymore, just a lot of mediocrity burdened with significant higher-education-caused debt. To you, I apologize. The system deceived you. You shouldn't have gone to college, and never belonged there in the first place. You should have gone to trade school, or just gone straight out into the work force. If you want to take something up with the politicians, that's what you should make them address.

Not visas.

Education.

You just have to reserve a time and show sufficient competency at operating one.

Thank you.

We here at slashdot, being technologically oriented, tend to forget that humans are not computers and don't act in the way that computers might act.

It's a matter of organic vs mechanical, and so many people mistake one for the other, or fail to differentiate between the two, or try to "bridge" the two together, usually with disastrous results (see C++14 and Esperanto).

I think I would keep the physical tab "key" itself but standardize editors to convert it into a certain amount of spaces. Kind of like how IBM standardized ctrl-X/C/V.

Certainly, a good chunk of the ASCII codes below 32 wouldn't be around.

Large birds of prey used to dine on humans regularly. In fact, the largest of their modern cousins are still dangerous to infants and small children today (and I'm not talking about that fake video).

Just because it looks more like a bird than a lizard doesn't make it any less scarier. In fact, because a part of our psyche is attuned towards the danger of very large birds of prey, it may make it more.

There's a bit of that. If they paid well, I'm sure there'd be more candidates.

But working for the government has always been about patriotism and patriotic duty. Nerd types aren't really going to go establish a beachhead, but those among them who wish to protect their country will elect to do so in ways that they can. This is especially true for bright, starry-eyed college grads.

Now, the NSA has lost even that candidate pool.

Sorry. Developers and engineers have a long memory, by trade. Microsoft doesn't get a free pass just because of a change in the top guy. They don't get their slate wiped clean just because they replaced one person at the very top. Yes, that's asking for a lot.

Microsoft is going to have to do a lot more goodwill gathering to even break even with the negatives from the shit they've pulled in the past. Hell, they just did it again, with Windows RT, though it's not as big of a deal because everybody learned their lessons from PlaysForSure and then again from Windows Phone 7.

Embrace Extend Extinguish may no longer be Microsoft modus operandii, but until they prove they're serious about playing nice with everyone else, everyone will still be guarded. And no, "open sourcing" .NET doesn't count as playing nice if there are strings attached, so this particular act nets them 0 goodwill points as it were.

It's like if Sun had opened up Java in anything other than a GPL- or MIT-derived license, or any other company that "open sources" something but actually has strings attached to the license (like TiVo). They wouldn't be scoring any points either. The difference is that TiVo started from a position of slightly positive (or neutral at worst). Microsoft is starting at the very extreme negative end.

So it's filled with dollar signs and completely unreadable?

No. That's why we're constantly looking for more information about it.

Yes, dark matter and dark energy are convenient constructs to make our existing models fit.

When they find data that doesn't fit the constructs, then scientists have two choices:
1) Change the constructs
2) Change the model.

They're usually going to choose #1 because Occum's Razor prefers #1. They won't go with #2 until there's a sufficient body of evidence that the constructs are completely wrong. Until then, it's just going to be more tweaking and retweaking of the constructs.

Now, when I say "they", I don't mean scientists as a body. Usually, it's just one guy pushing a wild theory that gains traction over time with more evidence and more calculations.

But this is science. It's normally iterative, not revolutionary. Except when the data calls for it.

Flatly, as opposed to that wavy underline that word processors and web browsers use when you've mispelt a word or committed a grammatical sin.

Even if they're not proactively attacking these malicious internet actors, the least the NSA could do is offer to restore the data from the latest copy in their vaults. Part of computer security is backups, and if they're going to be snooping on your data anyway, they might as well bill it as an automatic backup service.

But they can't even do that much.

There's life and then there's intelligent life.

I'm sure life is out there somewhere. Might even be in other parts of our solar system, completely undetected.

Intelligent life, on the other hand, may not be so easy to come by. For starters, intelligent life requires a certain level of sophistication in the life form. I.e., you can't have intelligent life without a certain level of complexity. Even something as "dumb" as a roundworm is incredibly complex.

Complexity requires stability. Imagine being bombarded by quasars and blasted by supernova. Life is very possible in that environment, but it would be equally difficult for any life form to organize into something more complex than bits of matter capable of replication.

However, on the flip side, life itself requires energy, and energy density. That is, the larger the life form, the greater the energy is necessary to sustain it. Not to mention, energy density is needed for the life form to do complex things. In the most extreme of such cases (humans post-industrial revolution), several billion years of stored energy is necessary to get one sentient creature into a position where it can send information into space. But even in the simple cases, a certain energy density is needed just to maintain the complexity that was built up. Note the number of extinctions before post-industrial revolution humans walked the Earth. Without the necessary energy density, complex life would never recover from each extinction event, instead become less complex over time.

So intelligent life requires a balance of energy (chaos) and stability (order). Which means, based on entropy, that the density of life in the universe over time probably resembles a bell curve. We humans are chronologically located at a spot where the curve has risen above the complexity threshold.

I personally believe (well, calculated based on some estimations) the universe itself is entering the rising portion of the bell curve (entering in the geological timescale sense), where life on Earth is more or less among the first waves of complex life. Which is why we're finding little to nothing out there. As two billion years worth of stored energy is needed to just get us to the moon, and not very many other planets would have had two billion years worth of time to do both store energy and develop complex life, life as complex as us is probably very, very rare at the moment. But, as we're just entering the golden age, in some billions of years, we'll probably see more and more intelligent creatures out there. That will last until the bell curve starts curving downwards, likely in several hundreds of billions of years where energy density has gotten too low for complex life to grow intelligent, which will last for multiple billion years until the universe simply doesn't have enough energy to sustain life itself. But that's probably on a multi-trillion-year timescale.

And on a similar, more depressing vein, whatever life comes after humans on Earth, it will likely be hundreds of millions of years, if not billions of years before there's enough energy for that organism to go through a similar industrial revolution and arrive in space. So for Earth (which probably will no longer be hospitable by that time), we're probably as advanced an organism as the planet will ever see.