They have to be paid prevailing wage. Which is pretty easy to thwart. In particular when it's H1-B contractors. There are a lot of shell company games happening in that area that resulting in the workers getting paid very little. One of the interesting provisions in the H1-B expansion bill was a cap on the number (by percentage) of the H1-B workers in a company (30-40% of total employees). I'm dubious that the provision will make it to the final bill.

I consult as a programmer. I work for large corporations and mid-cap companies. When I stated a LONG time ago it was pretty common to see college hires and interns in programming departments. Interns are extremely rare, and I haven't seen a college hire in a programming team in 6 years. Companies would rather hire "experienced" off-shore programmers. So the only pressure there is on wages is off-shore.

Since the quality of off-shore work is a bit suspect I make a lot of money (almost certainly too much) as the lead/architect that's keeping things together. If companies want to stop paying people like me too much money they should be hiring young (cheap) workers to put downward pressure on wages. That doesn't happen because it's seen as easier to just go off-shore.

That's not to say all off-shore programmers are bad. There are several eastern European/ec-Russian block states that produce high quality code. They happen to cost about 2X the wages of India Off-shore and carry some IP Protection baggage.

You have to match the technology for what you're doing. The article makes some valid points (fail-over on write), but it's a bit dramatic about others (performance in particular). But like anything in high performance computing you really have to understand what's happening. That's in particularly true about how Mongo uses memory.

We successfully used it to report election results (national to local across the US, millions of updates) for several organizations simultaneously. This is a site that handles billions of hits. I saw a fantastic demonstration for DNA sequencing research. They ran it head to head against several other conventional databases. It was an application that didn't need a high volume of writes and Mongo happened to be a good low-effort fit for them.

Is Mongo right for everything? No way. But it's dramatic to say it's not fit for any task because it can and has been used in several high performance applications.

Can't do it yourself, then get partners. Set up an equity agreement.

As far as tech this is no longer new territory. Create server images for a cloud host such as AWS or Rackspace. Bring them up or down with Chef. Concerned about Database? Figure out if you really need a relational database. If not look at a high performance NoQL DB or something that is more or less always in Memory (such as Mongo).

Yeah, that's fairly outdated thinking. Speed isn't derived by the language anymore. It's the execution that counts. Java Compiles down to op-code, which is run in the JVM. The JVM has decades worth of run-time optimizations. The majority of large scale web sites are written in Java.

Hey, ever heard of Hadoop. You know the large scale Map-reduce framework based on Google's technology that sorts terabyte and petabyte of data? Java.

I was just visting with the good folks at the local Python users group. Nice folks, but the when I dug into where the actual jobs are it was clear Python was not a bread winner by a long shot. Most of them were using only Python when they were bidding out the work and the client had no input into the language to use. That tended to be side gigs. The 9-to-5 work was usually Java or .Net.

Python certainly has it's great points, but so do a dozen of so does Groovy, Clojure, Ruby and Scala. I know a lot of folks using Python to help manage their cloud deploys. But the actual applications tend to be written in Java or a language that's going to compile to Java Optcode. Like Jython.

According to the city of Austin the only "deal" google got was priority permit handling. So yeah, man up AT&T.

Boeing pays a Washington State Business and Occupation tax of 0.002904. That tax is offset by various credits such as computer hardware and software, property taxes on new buildings, and pre-production development expenses (i.e. wages) on new jets. At some point Washington will be about $200K per airplane.

One of the problems in the mobile app space is the number of folks who fancied themselves good at CSS and some JavaScript framework and parlayed that into a creating some pretty weak sauce mobile apps. There's way too many folks like that in the market place, and frankly they need to be culled.

I will make this point, Apps often need to talk to something. You should understand the ecosystem end to end. If you can pop a web service up on a cloud instance, and feed that into your mobile app you will be a very valuable player on a team. That may mean learning one of the Java VM languages (Java, Groovy, JRuby, Clojure, Scala, Jython, etc.) or one of the Microsoft .Net/CLI languages C#, etc. Personally I've found there to be way more work and money on the JVM side of the equation. The trendy languages also tend to run in the JVM space, so it's easier to stay cutting edge.

I would not recommend staking your career on things like PHP. They work. They are popular in certain circles. But large companies are usually JVM or .Net.

Because upstream traffic doesn't actually cost all that much. Google doesn't have competitive reasons to make their service inferior. That is to say Google is more likely to enter into peering and co-location agreements with companies that cable may avoid (Netflix, various Video CDNs like Limelight). Netflix for instance is going to be a superior experience on Google because Google is willing to directly interconnect.

In the grand scheme of things last mile infrastructure is where the majority of the cost is contained. That includes hardware costs, right of way costs and labor. Cable generally costs more because they have a lot of legacy costs.

For instance most cable companies are still very filter heavy. Meaning to change or configure services means a slew of special purpose filters are added and removed to provision the service. This will eventually go away as analog is removed from the network, but there's still a ton of technical debt built into those cable networks.

That closes the loop on what I noticed about the Chinese in Singapore hating the Japanese. I actually witnessed a shop keeper play dumb with a Japanese trying to buy something using Engrish. Old Japanese guy stormed out in frustration. I go to buy something, no problem, he explained the other guy was Japanese.

I don't know if I would choose Malaysia or Singapore though. Both are kind of strict countries if you run afoul of the local powers that be. Fun to visit, not so much on the living there. I'd hit up Belize. Nice locals, cheap and only 1 hour plane ride to Miami if the shit goes down.

The Anon OP is quite right. The things that make fruits healthy are the dietary fibers that are totally removed from most juices. While natural fruit sugars are digested in different ways from HFCS it's still essentially drinking sugar water. Now, if we're talking about some sort of smoothie where the all the fiber is intact more or less you might have a point.

Mayo Clinic Recommends no more than 4 to 6 oz of 100% fruit juice for young children.

Gitmo, nah. But they did document their trespassing. They have a scene where they are shown lying to a cop which might be a bigger crime than the trespassing.

Wish I had some mod points because this is spot on.

Subsidies are pretty much gone, but the issue is the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) has rules that can go wrong. It requires the refineries to consume a certain amount of alternative fuels. Each year they ratchet up the bio-mass, cellulosic and other "advanced" fuels. One would assume to wein the nation off petroleum. One of the problems you run into is what happens when there is a draught (like in 2012). You end up with a bunch of regulations created the year before that have unexpected effects on corn market. Such as having yields so low it forced 37% of the corn on the Chicago board was required to go to ethanol producers. Thus jacked prices that were already high. Even worse, the Ethanol producers don't want market corn. They want corn from inside their corn shadow they can attest the real quality of. They do not trust corn sold by the railcar on the open market.

All that being said, plenty of distillers would like to get out of corn. You can convert corn based to cellulose base with an added pre-stage. But the capital isn't there, and the way things are right now there's a lot of money to be made by keeping the system going as-is.

Most media options are done in flash. Any type of subscription based service that runs in the browser is flash because there is no standard. And it's going to stay that way so long as Microsoft is going to be a dick and insist everyone else uses their tech for secure streaming.