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Comment Two instant solutions (Score 1) 248

Two instant solutions:
1) Remove H1B program and replace it with green cards. Most of H1B employees get green cards eventually anyway. If visa holders don't depend on company like they currently do, if they can change jobs at will, they have no reason to accept sub-par offers. One may do an investigation for what money green-card lottery winners work. I really doubt that they work for pennies H1B employees get.
2) As there is more demand than allowed visas, there is some kind of lottery. Instead of lottery, give visas to companies that plan to pay the highest salaries.

Comment Not a surprise (Score 1) 109

I really expected better from someone who studies ethnicity and related DNA. Let's look at some of the examples: Hungarian look like other people from central Europe. Finns look like other people from North Europe. But Ugro-finn people from their native land (Siberia) are actually Mongoloid. Turcic people in Asia are also Mongoloid, but Turks in Turkey look pretty much European. Conclusion: when Hungarians/Turks arrived to Europe, it was actually relatively small number of people* that somehow conquered locals and eventually made them speaking their language.

Another example: distribution of B blood type in Europe isn't related anyhow to ethnic borders (with a notable exception of Basks). Conclusion: ethnicity has no foundation in biology.

Another example: in ancient Balkans, there have lived many nations, well described by Greeks and Romans: Illyrians, Tracians, Dacians, Celts. They have all disappeared long time ago, but there is no mention in history that there was any sort of war, genocide, famine or anything similar that could have annihilated not one but several nations**. Conclusion: entire nations may disappear in process described in the first example.

*) compared to the local population
**) some of them remained, but not in all areas where they originally lived; Celts and Tracians disappeared completely

Comment Re:More Wayland & Vulkan: GOOD (Score 1) 83

Yes, it does make sense, but it is counter-intuitive when you hear that for the first time. Exactly the case you mentioned = compute server runs clients and they attach to the server which is actually my work station. They could have chosen some other wording, no matter that technically X server is indeed a server.

Comment Re:More Wayland & Vulkan: GOOD (Score 1) 83

I was also very skeptical about Wayland advantages, esp. as I considered X to be one of most cool features of Linux/Unix systems. But when you take a look to some details, then you see that it is not so cool. When X was designed, it was designed to draw primitives - lines, fonts. And it was not designed to draw bitmaps. In its current usage, it mostly draws bitmaps, i.e. true rendering is done in applications (using libraries like GTK, KDE, Qt...) while X is just slapping it together. And it does it in a very, very complicate way. Even the network transparency is not done properly. Wayland is way more simple, more suitable to how graphics is used today. It does not have a network layer when not needed; at the same time it brings a layer where you can cut and implement network transparency if you want. X is a dead end.

With the current state of affairs, X is not too useful. For example, there are very few X implementations. I needed a X server* for Windows. There are only two of them that I was able to find - one proprietary Hummingbird's and all others are based on Cygwin. Another example - rendering of fonts depends on the font library on the client's* machine - that should not be if X was used as originally planned.

*) Not to mention the counter-intuitive names for "client" and "server"

Comment Re:Why conceal it? (Score 1) 740

Really? By forcing everybody, regardless of their views on abortion, to pay for the abortions for whoever wants one?

Doing a job of "by forcing everybody to pay for X , regardless of their views on X", is what government does. And X may be a thing like war, education, space exploration, roads, water supply... Abortion is no exception in that sense.

Comment Re:Against an aircraft that first flew in 1974... (Score 1) 170

I don't think the F-35 is useless, but it sure is an INCREDIBLY expensively mediocre aircraft intended to carry excellent (someday) software and sensors.

SAAB's Gripen Switzerland proposal: $3.5B for 22 planes, it is $159M per plane. For an more-or-less an outdated plane. Does F-35 still looks that expensive comparing to this? I don't think so.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 137

If you're on their network, it's fair game.

No, it is legal, but it is not fair. Why are companies so obsessed with spying their employees, and why are you Americans so willing to accept it? Just because company is legally allowed to do something, it does not make it meaningful or acceptable. And what they believe that they could find there? Even if I want to harm them by using smartphone, I'd do it with my private phone and they cannot do anything without court order. Spying peoples phones is just waste of time and good way to make their employees hate them.

Comment Re:This is good because of network nature (Score 1) 250

That is pretty much standard procedure. They have made a conspiracy in order to break the US law, and they have broken USA law. US should bring charges against them in US court. If they don't appear in court, US can ask their extradition. If Germany refuses to do so, USA can make an international warrant for them. First time they leave Germany, the country where they are would arrest them and then USA will have to start a procedure to get them to USA. It takes some time, but it is pretty much standard and established procedure.

Comment Re: Nope (Score 1) 341

i.e. I'm not excusing communism's infamy but "we", the west, didn't smell of roses either.

Yes, but there is one important thing. At first, West had the attitude about right-wing dictators "ok, he's a bastard, but it is our bastard". In ~70thies, West started to take care about human rights. Cynics would say that it was for propaganda reasons, as East was reasonably successful (early success in Space race, various unexpected technical achievements, many ex-colonies that decided to become socialist states...), so the human rights record was the thing where West was able to show its superiority. That led to West/USA not to care too much about various dictators any more, and let them go when their people decided that too much is too much. We don't necessary see it that way because what we all remember is Reagan/Thatcher duo that truly believed that supporting thugs like Pinochet gives them any good. In practice, all it gave them was a chance for liberal media to rightly joke on them.

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