EU grants asylum to Snowden. That would send the message home quite effectively.

Yes, the Israelis routinely spy on their sugar daddy. That attitude is but one of the many reasons that Israel is one of the worlds least popular countries, almost break even with North Korea. I don't think you should use them as an example of why that's OK. Incidentally the USA is less popular than the EU.

There have also been videos of presentations by firms who work in this area that teach companies how not to hire americans (You can google that). If their really was no advantage to hiring H1-B over a US worker, then why would companies go out of their way to disqualify US workers...?

Seriously? Have you ever actually been in a hiring position?

Hiring people is hard, and risky. Even in jobs where the skill set required is very precise and easily measured, as in engineering, there are all kinds of other random factors that can make or break a new hire (personality, lazyness, ability to co-operate, etc). Companies use every trick in the book to try and reduce this risk, most commonly by tapping employees networks to try and find other people who are known quantities, instead of the random walk-ins you get via normal hiring.

So now you have an open position. Maybe it requires specialised skills. Maybe it doesn't exactly require specialised skills, but there's someone who you just know would be the perfect fit for that position. You know they're capable, creative, etc. Only problem - not an American (and for "American" you can also read "European" for an EU based company, etc).

So what do you do? Obviously the "cannot hire an American to do the same work" standard is absurd, you can always hire an American to do any job, they just won't do it as well as the guy you actually want would. But you have to prove you tried. Hence - gaming of the system. The goal of this process is often not to hire just any H1-B because they're cheaper (they have to be paid the same salary or higher, right?), it's often to hire a specific person and this is especially true at the higher job levels.

The simplest solution would be to eliminate the "cannot hire an X" standard which is unenforceable, unmeasurable garbage anyway. Just ensure the salaries are the same, and, longer term, try and convince people that they don't have some kind of right to a well paid job just because they got lucky in the birth lottery. That other guy who is more qualified but has the wrong coloured skin should have a chance too.

Strong understanding of existing and emerging web standards, accessibility (WCAG1/2) and usability.
Familiarity with several JavaScript libraries, including Backbone and JQuery

lolwut, familiarity with some random JavaScript library is required? Dude, start writing your own job ads. It's clear that whoever is churning these out has no clue.

Unfortunately judging from the questions asked in that poll as given further down by Okian Warrior, that confirmation bias would be accurate and reasonable in this case.

(A recent poll asked people if "Ben Ghazi" should be deported for his crimes, and many people said "yes, definitely!". It's easy to lead people into the position you want by framing it in the right way.)

It's ironic that in a post talking about misleading and biased poll questions, you refer to a "recent poll" asking people about Ben Ghazi. The only such "poll" I was able to find boiled down to some random girl on YouTube asking passersby on the beach. As you might expect, most of them were shirtless bro's. Example answer: "come on, we're better than that".

I happen to agree with what you wrote about the Assange poll, especially the second question which is a textbook case of how to produce manipulated polls. In the USA leaking IS a criminal matter so it'd not be surprising if a lot of people wrongly believed Assange had actually broken the law, meaning they couldn't reasonably answer "not a criminal matter". But you shouldn't segue from talking about opinion polls conducted by newspapers to "polls" conducted by some girl on a beachfront for laughs.

Usurper? Seriously? Firstly, Android is by many people's definitions more free than regular desktop Linux because it's licensed under a more permissive license.

Secondly, Android is actually a "desktop" Linux done right, by people who know what they're doing. As a disclaimer, I worked on desktop Linux related projects for years, about a decade ago. I wrote patches for GNOME, for ALSA, for Wine, and I also built an entire packaging and installer framework that tried to abstract out the differences between distributions so people could distribute their own applications without getting stuck into the swamp of distributor packaging (which was and always will be a shit idea). Many other things that I've forgotten about.

It was all a waste of time. Fundamentally, desktop Linux was not designed or built, it evolved organically. Any attempt to bring people together who might have some skill in OS design resulted in endless stupid flamewars and politics (does anyone remember the ridiculous KDE vs freedesktop wars?). The moment the community needed to move beyond the design laid out by the original creators of UNIX it all fell apart and became a mess.

Android is the best of all worlds - it's Free as in Freedom, it's managed centrally by a highly experienced team of computer scientists and OS designers (some of whom came from working on BeOS), the basic design decisions in it are correct - there's no crap whereby every phone manufacturer has to package every end user application. Heck you can see how popular with users it is just to have them distributing the core OS, you can imagine the disaster zone that'd occur if they used the Debian model. There's one audio API, that works. There's one graphics API, that works. It's standardised on one reasonably modern language, which works. No "we have to rewrite this from C++ into C for political reasons" garbage there.

Frankly it's a breath of fresh air and if it eventually wipes out traditional desktop Linux distros, you won't see me shed a tear despite all the work I did.

In fairness, aren't these the guys who were warning about the secret interpretations for years? Not all politicians are cut from the same cloth. The problem here is that they knew the NSA was lying but knew if they blew the whistle (which is their fucking job, being representatives of the people) then they'd go to the slammer. A simple solution would seem to be to pass a law saying that any classified information can be revealed by elected representatives at any time, and doing so automatically declassifies it with no penalty.

Tabarrok is also known for his work on how to fund public goods via non-patent means, in particular his dominant assurance contract form which is a variant of what Kickstarter does.

That's a fair and very insightful point. And I see now by re-reading your original post it was actually the point you were making all along, I just didn't see it.

It's not, actually. There are already asymmetric crypto algorithms which are believed to be quantum-resistant. They are typically based on the hardness of vector problems in n-dimensional integer lattices, or problems that have been proven reducible to such problems such as learning with errors.

Sure, but that sounds like pretty much any business. The idea that one man in a garage can get millions of users overnight thanks to free advertising in an app store is awesome, but it was never going to last and it was never how 99% of businesses are built.

Wow. It's easy to forget that the entire industry of programmable computers is younger than a lot of ordinary people walking around today. It makes me wonder what entirely new industry I might see develop from nothing over my lifetime.

What you're missing is that quite a few APIs get backported to older OS releases. It's less efficient to have apps contain copies of the libraries like that, but it does work. The trend is in this direction e.g. with play services. Obviously you can't backport everything like that, but a lot of the important stuff is (like new map widgets, etc). The difference between ICS and jellybean, API wise, isn't that huge. The big leap was Gingerbread to ICS. So, you really only have to pick between those two. You can just pretend Gingerbread doesn't exist if you like, the market share will still be larger than iPhone.

Except that cheap Android device are still a million years better than the old JavaME feature phones were. If people who buy cheap phones aren't buying your apps, maybe the issue is nobody is selling them a useful enough app? There's certainly an untapped market there. People should see that as an opportunity, not some sign of "weakness".

Heck, I'm an advanced user with plenty of money and the fact is, all the apps I want or could need on Android are free anyway. I bought TuneIn Pro because I listen to net radio a lot and it was worth it. Otherwise the apps I use most frequently are gratis.