Lemme look... on the vortex container (you know, where all the dirt swirls around), it says "US Mobius Glass, 4th dimension containment division. Certified for virtual particles only."

That help any?

You have not refuted any point I made.

What is the energy level of a cubic foot of space exactly 1 light year past the furthest star on a line directly away from us that is still technically in Andromeda? Presuming you could supply that information (you can't) can you assure me that said cubic foot is in no way contributing to the particular flux of a cubic foot of space one light year the other way? (you can't.)

So the delusion you're carrying around that you know what's going on and are able to definitively say so in such a way as to pooh-pooh my questions is unmasked, and all your complaints resolve to nothing.

I'll be blunt: There are NO "biggest results" in astrophysics that can answer those questions. Consequently, any answers you claim to have in that regard are, at best, evidence-free supposition.

In theory, an H-1B worker is someone who has specialized knowledge not available among US citizens.

A few more years of tech people being unemployable, no one will prepare for tech work here (Why study for an unemployable specialty? Why hire instructors for a course with no students? For that matter, see any courses on buggy whip manufacture?), and the above will go from theory to actuality. If we're going to fix it, we're going to have to fix it now. Otherwise... catastrophe.

And I'm pretty sure that actually means "catastrophe."

but then the cost of living is a lot less in India.

So is the quality of life. We'd like to avoid that.

There are two paths: We degrade our QoL opportunities to rice/noodles/curry+hovel, or they increase their QoL to steaks+home+car+retirement. Either path can be taken, or both with a meeting somewhere in between.

Right now, though, because they have access to our economy for marketing -- selling skill and product -- but they are not operating in our economy for cost of manufacture/labor, we simply cannot compete. Either we break the cycle or this will destroy the rest of our economy just as it has already eviscerated various high profile sectors: rare earths, copper mining, electronics, cars, engineering work, monitors/televisions/displays, pretty much anything China makes, etc.

At this point, the best -- as in, most effective and sure to work -- option is to completely deny foreign access to our economy so we can rebuild. But in order to do that, all those free-market idealists will have to admit they were wrong. And like most things of every class of issue, people really don't like to do that. So probably what you're witnessing here is a complete economic collapse in the making, one that can only be diverted by a major paradigm shift, such as full conversion to an economy of plenty. Robots everywhere, money no longer used to represent work because work doesn't matter, AI, etc. Unfortunately, that looks far enough off, and we're already far enough down the path of economic collapse, that we're not likely to catch such a shift before we shit ourselves and fall in it, economically speaking. At which point, about 1% of the US will move elsewhere, and the rest of us will fight -- most likely literally -- over whatever remains.

Free trade was a nice idea. But it wasn't a good idea.

It's a tough problem to fix. If we come down too hard on companies for hiring guest workers, they'll often open off shore offices.

It's simple (not the same as easy) to fix. (1) Raise trade barriers. (2) If you're in the US, you bank in the US, you invest in the US, you use US materials, you hire US workers, you buy US manufacturing equipment and tooling, and you sell to the US market. (3) If you're not in the US, you don't get to sell to the US market. Period. So if company A moves out of the US, company B will simply take over the market company A abandoned.

We have the resources, we have the workers, and we have the market. What we have to stop doing is bleeding work into other economies, while expecting our standard of living, which was based on our economy, to be retained. We cannot do that while economic systems we have no control over are low-balling the cost of our consumables.

So we either lower our standard of living so we can become employable (doubtful); or go without (that's happening... many of us are unemployable at practical wages); or we develop our job market in the same economic context as we develop our consumables market.

That last is what I'm suggesting. If we do not do that, then until other country's standards of living rise to the standards of ours, we will continue to bleed jobs and prosperity in their direction. Equalization can occur in two ways: Our standard of living can drop to rice+hovel, or their standard of living can rise to house+car+retirement. Presently we are 100% engaged in the former, with no sign whatsoever of being able to get free of the fall. There's little to no sign of the latter.

If we do do that, then we can keep the barriers one way until our economy stabilizes again, and then when it does, drop them just far enough that foreign countries have access to our markets at our prices for items we also sell (only those. If we don't make the item, they can't sell it here. That way, if our market wants it, we get a fair crack at manufacturing it.) In this way, they can compete on quality and style, instead of the economic leverage a piss-poor underclass gives them.

They also have the option to take the higher earnings for their products back and spin up their economies. They probably won't, and frankly, it shouldn't matter to us if they do -- but the opportunity would be there. Give the peasants something to revolt over.

Can you think of an instance where you would actually want the capabilities this machine claims to offer?

Yes. Yes, I can. Let's use this as the new transport mechanism for congresspersons. What a problem-solver!

Mine is similar; however, I've come to the conclusion that it's not the language itself, it is the use of incredibly inefficient building blocks from elsewhere. If you don't do that, you can do pretty well in c++. Personally, I have little use for most c++ idioms; what OO I find useful is generally better handled directly.

So called 'positive rights' are entitlements that require that governments strips rights from some people in order to provide those 'free' entitlements to others.

Agreed. However, this not a bad thing in and of itself. By stripping you of the right to arbitrarily murder me, they give me the right to not be arbitrarily murdered. And vice-versa. I call that a complete win.

In the case of what many like to stuff in the same bag as "entitlements", the rights being stripped are fractional portions of income, and the rights being enabled are, quite often, the difference between life and death or suffering and no suffering, or disease transmission and no disease transmission. I tend to regard those entitlements as entirely worth my loss of right to my income. Others do not share my interest in the general well-being of the public. Debate ensues.

It is not always clear that such rights-trading by force as government fiat is inherently bad. Some rights-trading is no doubt bad.

For instance, part of my right to my income is being traded for bombing and otherwise harming foreigners for the sole purpose of subsidizing the MIC (extend their right to a cushy income), and I am dubious that an adequate defense could be made for this kind of thing.

Net Neutrality is an entitlement, where people are trying to use force of government to strip rights from individual ISPs to shape their traffic on their networks the way they see fit.

When an operation - electricity, communications, water supply, networks - consumes some portion of an inherently limited domain, and that operation is critical to the good fortunes of the public, then we may need to regulate what those given the opportunity to provide services in said limited spaces can do.

The FCC regulates how wide and splattery a transmitted signal can be. This is an appropriate act of guarding the use of a privileged, limited resource for the benefit of the public, though it inherently limits the rights of the transmitting party. The PUC regulates prices charged for fuel. This is an appropriate act of guarding a limited, privileged resource for the benefit of the public, though is inherently limits the rights of the fuel provider. And so on.

This is what makes the debate legitimate, and the potential application of limits / restrictions legitimate. Bandwidth providers are players in such a limited space. If they want to do something where they are not critical to the public good, and therefore responsible for the public good, and therefore held to limits designed to address the public good, then they should be in another business.

The denialists will still come up with an alternate interpretation of cherry-picked data from some crackpot blog, to prove you wrong.

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Yes, I do. Because we have no such evidence; we can't make the measurements it would take to get said evidence.

You are confusing assumption with evidence. They are not the same.

The same data has been used to claim men landed on the moon, and that the moon landing was a hoax. Therefore all data related to the moon landing should then be ignored. As it's proven flawed on both counts.

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There are two types of efficiency here.

The first is up front design efficiency. The time it takes to develop the code. This could be impacted by a combination of a poor c/c++ programmer and a decision to use it. You pay for this loss of efficiency once, if indeed it is a loss (likely it would not be much or any of a loss if the c/c++ programmer is competent.)

The second is execution efficiency, that cost that is paid every time someone uses the facility. Here, using c/c++ can (should, again with a competent programmer) provide a much faster response time with all the benefits that accrue from that, and these benefits will be gained again and again, every time someone uses the facility. As compared to, for instance, Perl or Python.

You can consider client-side execution, but if you choose to use it, you're locking out many potential visitors who will not be able to use your pages. There are huge numbers of devices out there that are old and/or small, and they simply don't do client-side stuff. Even knowing your site is targeting "only" owners of, say, IE, doesn't justify such a choice; because in the real world, people won't always have IE in their pocket. If someone can't browse your site at lunch with whatever is in their pocket, the odds of them coming back later -- much less buying / participating now -- drop precipitously.

Part of the job is to determine what kind of traffic could be encountered, while knowing the capacity of the hardware you have available, and then figuring out which efficiency you're better of going after.

If your web site serves one person in the organization, and they only check in once a day, then if Python is fast enough on your desk, its fast enough on their desk, too, at least if it doesn't impact the site's ability to do its other tasks, like serving WAN customers. But if your thing is WAN facing, and could potentially see any number of customers up to the max the server can handle, then you'd best consider execution time efficiency before you consider up-front development time efficiency (and again, if you hire a competent c/c++ programmer, there probably won't be a huge difference. Even less if they have already done this for you once or twice.

Make your websites a PDF file.

What you're doing here is making sure that a whole raft of smaller/older devices won't be able to display your pages. Which is exactly the same thing as intentionally reducing the customer base of your client.

You want PDF printables? Put a link to a static PDF version on any HTML web page the user might actually WANT in PDF form. HTML pages should be in either HTML, HTML+CSS, HTML+CGI, or HTML+CSS+CGI. HTML and HTML+CGI produce the best quality -- most usable -- pages. Use of *any* other technology cuts off some number of smaller and/or older clients at the knees, but of those technologies, pure front-facing PDF would be difficult to beat for complete failure of a website to show up for the person trying to look at it.

If you think an indication of when someone joined slashdot (/. UID) gives you a reliable insight into how old they are, or how long they've been doing technical work, or what technical work they can do, you are one thoroughly deluded human being.

Gaia is living, breathing, self stabilizing organism. Gaia actively maintains optimum conditions for live to thrive. If the sun fluctuates hotter, Gaia will keep us cool. If the sun fluctuates cooler, Gaia will keep us warm. We have released two quadrillion pounds (2,000,000,000,000,000) of CO2 into the atmosphere and the laws of physics say that will trap heat.... and Gaia will.... umm I dunno... but Gaia will do it's super-smart-Gaia-thing to to actively counter it and keep us in a loving protective embrace of shielded stability. If we have a nuclear war, Gaia will cleanse the environment and protect us from that nasty radiation-stuff. Gaia loves all life, gaia loves us and protects us. Gaia loves broadway shows and long walks on the beach. Gaia has profiles on eHarmony.com and JDate.com.

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