I interpret "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" as being something that might have been said by Karl Marx. The original article doesn't really go into the context of the court case, but it is intereting that this came from Texas which conjures up images of rugged individualism.

The flaw in your logic is that the H1B visa has hard time leaving for another job. The biggest hurdle is that if an H1B visa holder changes job, he has to restart to long and drawn out process for getting a green card. That means that the visa holder cannot participate in the job market, so if he is underpaid or overworked or whatever he cannot change jobs as easily as a citizen. This, of course, distorts the labor market both for the H1B visa holder and for citizens.

If you are going to argue for free markets, H1B visas should not be used as an example of markets working.

I saw this report and blogged about it yesterday (shameless plus: click on the link in my sig to read it). Basically my opinion is that if Verizon gets the iPhone then this could kill Android.

I never had wisdom teeth so I guess I am out of luck, too. Funny thing is that I never had any wisdom either, so go figure.

When they catch the people who did this, they should be forced to listen to those vuvuzelas at high volume until their ears bleed. That'll teach 'em.

They copied this idea from _Law and Order_.

Funny you should say that, because I was just thinking today that the company I work for (big multinational) has about 4000 people in the Information Technology group, but it seems like only about 40 actually do any coding. The rest of us are architects, business analysts, testers, project managers, etc, who tell the 40 how to do their job.

Maybe 40 is an exaggeration but it isn't off by much!

Seems like the article focuses on the interface layer (hence the name "The State of Mapping API's). However, I think the hard work is the collection of the underlying map data. One of the more interesting projects is the OpenStreetMap project where map data is crowdsourced.

I think it is a fine line. On the one hand, you want to teach something that is useful for the students, regardless of where they end up. However, you don't want it to be too specific as to make what they learn obsolete in 5 years.

Personally, I think there are two directions you can go. First, you use a pre-CS syllabus where you teach programming basics like bits and bytes. Second way is that you can use a syllabus where you stress computers for non-CS people which might include the Internet, file systems, etc.

I think the general syllabus that they have chosen with stressing free and open source products really doesn't accomplish either of these goals. If you are aiming for the pre-CS philosophy, the basics are technology-agnostic and it should stress theory over specific platforms at least at the begining.

If you are aiming for a general computer awareness type of class, then while open source is all good, it unfortunately doesn't apply to 99.9% of the real world. If anything, the class should be more a survey of the existing tools. For instance, if there is a section on using browsers to access the internet, then the class should touch upon all of the existing ones, maybe pointing out pros and cons, with the acknowledgement that Internet Explorer is, for better or worse, the dominant browser. Not even touching upon non-open source products which happen to be prevalent creates a serious blind spot on the student's education. It is akin to not even mentioning evolution in biology because of religious biases.

Now some of the open source people might grouse at this suggestion. However, if you are looking to gain mind-share, isn't it better to do so by comparing open source to non-open source and let the chips fall where they may, rather than by just ignoring the non-open source and hope that they go away?

There can only be one...