The thing about H1B; it's not necessarily cheaper to hire them. What they represent is a workforce that can't complain about salary, can't leave your employ, can't offend you in any way - or the hard work is wasted, you can sack them, and they are instantly deported. Hot diggety, you've got indentured servants! No-lip super service with a smile. A gentile sort of slavery, without the actual chains.

Worked fine for them the last 25 years. No doubt a raise in the number of H1B visa/indentured servants permitted into the US is on the table soon.

Seems to me like they picked something random that they could measure, and are then trying to generalize it to be something that matters for work. I'm not seeing how the ability to "recall other stimuli" is a test for productivity. I would think it would be more along the lines of "generate a bunch of code."

I find that music helps me for certain things. Normally I don't listen to music at work, unless it is noisy or I just feel like it. My headphones generally sit on my desk except when I'm using them for work, like editing video.

However for some tasks, music seems to help focus me. Design type tasks would be like that. Most recent was when I ported the website for my parents store over to a new shop platform. I had to redo a lot of the HTML, redesign the layout to work with the store widgets and so on. I put on headphones, queued up music, and slammed it out in like 4 hours in the middle of the night.

I didn't need to block out noise, I was up visiting them, in their guest room, in the the middle of the night. They were sleeping, nobody was around to bother me. However the music helped focus me, helped me slam the task out.

First person shooters are another area. My friends tell me I play noticeably better when I listen to music in the background.

Nope. MBAs are running the companies. It's rule by con artists who pretend to know more than economists, engineers, sociologists and politicians. They are creating a world without a functioning middle class - a feature, not a bug.

They are looking for under-29, preferably under-25, recently graduated PhDs with 15 years experience in _______, _______, ________, and _____________, dress like bankers, require no training, and will work 60+ hours a week for about fourteen dollars an hour. As independent contractors. From India. With visas that make them essentially voiceless indentured servants. In Bismark, North Dakota.

Not their fault that the talent pool is so limited.

I got to do a lot of cool things as a kid but looking back at them the reason it was possible was my family had a reasonable bit of money. It wasn't all that cheap. Even simple things like a day at the museum that is like $50 for two kids and an adult, never mind food or any extras. That is amusing and educational, but for one day max, and realistically you probably don't stay all day. Well $50 will nearly get you a video game (most are $60 these days). Less used or on sale on Steam or something. That can entertain you for days on end.

So if a family doesn't have much money, it isn't hard to see why they'd choose games over museum visits, even if they understand it would be better educationally.

Hell I am setting up our labs (at a university) for a summer program for high school and middle school students right now. Cool summer engineering academy thing. Looks like it would be pretty fun and educational for geek type kids. However, it costs money. I don't know the details, that isn't my area, but only people who can pay, probably a fair bit (couple hundred is my guess) can get in.

To do well in IT you just have to have a certain problem solving ability. I don't think it is something that can be taught, or at least I can't tell you how to teach it. It isn't about knowing a lot about computers, it is about being able to process novel problems and find solutions to them, expediently preferably.

That's what we look for when we hire students (I do IT work for a university). Finding students with experience is hard since, well, they are students of course they don't have experience and that aside the kind of things we do, almost nobody has experience with. That's ok, what we are really after is someone who is good with problem solving, particularly the kind of problem solving you need for computers.

I've encountered more than a few people who are not very qualified/competent in IT. We've hired a few people since I've worked here and I've sat on their hiring board (the IT manager, my boss, usually has 4 other technical people with him on the board for interviews). The only people in interviews already made it past HR's resume filtering, and then were the best resume's from the bunch we got. Still, many have been totally unqualified and it becomes readily apparent in the interview process.

There are numerous requirements for something to be a contract in US law and the EULA fails a number of them. The biggest is contracts have to happen before the exchange of goods/money. They can't be ex post facto. So if a company requires you to sign a contract before you buy the software, that's a real contract. An EULA that you are introduced to after the sale, not a contract.

Easy to see here at work too. I work for a state university so they are very big on the "only approved people can sign contracts for the university" thing. Any contract has to go through the contracts office and be approved by the lawyers. EULAs? They tell us don't worry just click through. In other words, they are confident the EULAs don't bind us to shit. If they though they did, we'd have to get them all approved.

Scan to e-mail is nothing new. I'm simply stating that paper in paper out at both locations would be nice over IP.

I don't see what he and his attorneys hoped to gain from fighting the extradition. The merit of the case in Sweden is another matter, but that isn't something an extradition court will decide. They don't try the case, they just decide if the request for extradition is a legal one, meets the standards for whatever agreement there is with said nation and so on.

In the case of the UK and Sweden there's a pretty strong extradition treaty so there really wasn't any way there's be another outcome.

Even if he managed to stop it on a technicality of something like the prosecutor not being the right person to be able to request the extradition, Sweden would just go and make a more formal request through their ambassador.

Among countries with strong extradition treaties about the only time it gets denied is if it is a crime they just don't extradite for (minor crimes are often things that they won't) or if the punishment isn't something they'll allow. That has happened with the US and Canada. Canada won't extradite for capital crimes, they aren't ok with the death penalty. So the US has to agree not to seek it, and then the extradition will go ahead.

It really has gotten to the point of rather silly. He's going to have to go and face the charges in Sweden. If they'll stick is a whole different matter, but that is up to the Swedish courts. You don't get to just run to another country and hide from criminal charges, particularly in Europe. What with a bunch of countries near each other and fairly easy borders, they understand the importance of such things.

I'm really not sure what they were going for, other than just a delaying tactic.