And what will it do to people on those small boats, or if fired at a manned aerial vehicle? What kind of horrific injuries will occur that I won't be seeing on CNN,
For starters: Permanent blindness.
Unfortunately, the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons only bans weapons specifically designed and deployed to permanently blind people, not weapons that blind as a side-effect.
One problem with a "consumption tax" is that you have several generations that have spent their lives trying to accumulate enough to support them in their old age while the government sucked them dry with income taxes and inflation.
Now that the productive portions of their lives are running out, switching to a consumption tax lets the government loot them AGAIN on what they managed to save despite the previous blood-sucking.
$2/year an American is less than I'm about to go spend on lunch, saying its not worth it implies a general misunderstanding of the scope of the US economy and a disregard for fellow human beings suffering from these conditions [Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy].
And if the government does ENOUGH stuff at $2/person/project, pretty soon you can't afford lunch - or a place to live, or a way to get to work, or medical care if you DO get Alzheimer's or epilepsy,
Further, government projects are NOTORIOUSLY less effective - and often drastically counter-productive - than virtually any other approach to doing practically ANYTHING. I'd expect this project to work the same way - dumping much of the money down the bureaucratic and crony ratholes while putting researchers to work on questions chosen by non-experts. (For an extreme example, consider the effect of Lysenkoism on genetics research in the USSR.)
(Note, by the way, that they weren't talking about spending that $2/year/man-woman-or-child on a project to cure or prevent those conditions. They were holding out improved "UNDERSTANDING" them as a possible side-benefit of their tiny project - which is directed at the normal functioning of the brain, not biochemical and biomechanical pathologies degrading it. It was marketing puffery, not the actual target of the project.)
Some (MANY!) people are more concerned with social acceptance than self-determination.
Politicians and news media use this to "lead" them by creating the illusion that other people are thinking or doing what the "leaders" want them to think or do, with the implied threat of ostracization and loss of social-network support if they fail to conform.
The progressive movement as a whole, political factions on most parts of the political map, ethnic groups and other "communities", and religions (mainstream and "cult") are particularly noted for this.
If you weren't informed about it, how are you supposed to know that they are the good guys . . . ?
You shouldn't know,and you're supposed to treat them like the bad guys.
How do you know that their machines haven't been hacked, and that ALL of the penetration attempts are actually tests?
If you talked to them on a phone rather than face-to-face at THEIR office (or even then), how do you know the person you talked to is actually a security guy or I.T. administrator at the hospital and not a freelance cracker, identity thief, spy, or even an assassin going after a patient? If somebody cracked, say, an VoIP. phone system, they could intercept your complaints and tell you it was standard operating procedure and to ignore such attacks.
Even if they are what they claim to be and ALL the attacks are from them, by telling you it's just a test, you should ignore it, and continuing to "test" you, they've just TOLD YOU TO IGNORE ATTACKS. If you do, you FAIL.
IMHO (IANAL) you MUST attempt to halt the attacks and treat them as real or you are in violation of HIPAA.
My expectation is that this will be used for political infighting, much like the genocide it purports to try to head off.
The "crowd" will include activists for one (or more) sides of contentious political disputes, who will feed the database with typical word choices of their enemies, in the hope of branding them as potential genocide perpetrators. The result will be a produce far more false positives than true ones (if it produces any of the latter at all).
Indeed, the very phrase "hate speech" is such a faction-specific term. It is used by the US left wing to attempt to suppress politically incorrect free speech - especially politicall speech - of those with whom they disagree.
For an example of what I'm talking about, look at the Southern Poverty Law Center's pronouncements - including especially their advice to law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security that displaying bumper stickers supporting Ron Paul during the presidential primary, or any of a number of other pro-Constitution or Tea Party political position messages, was a sign that the driver was a terrorist.
If there's a shortage of H-1B visas (meaning there are times you can't obtain one no matter how much you're willing to pay), they should be put up for auction and sold to the highest bidder so everyone who wants one badly enough can get one.
(Presuming it's the sponsor who's bidding...)
Then give the money bid by the winner:
- to the worker
- in addition to the "at least prevailing wage" salary
- when he leaves the country.
That would go a long way toward both eliminating the pay disparity (so H1Bs would be used mainly for talent that's REALLY hard to find, rather than just expensive) and encouraging the workers to actually leave after a while. B-)
Most of what is wrong with H1B could be fixed if the politicians actions matched their rhetoric
Most of what is wrong with everything the government touches could be fixed if the politicians actions matched their rhetoric.
But yeah, if you had to listen to the techs or business people on this one, the techs are probably telling it straight: they're being screwed.
I hear that, lately, it's not just been manual laborers and techies that have bumped-by-a-H1B-worker problems. Now managers, salsemen, clericals, and a host of other categories are getting hit. If true, that might raise the pressure on Congress a bunch.
Hey Congress, just keep doing what you've been doing. Fantastic job thus far, can't wait to see the results next quarter.
Too bad a candidate has to be a citizen for the past 7 years (for the House) or 9 years (for the Senate) to be elected to Congress. B-)
I didn't see this mentioned, but the sponsoring company has to [...] show that the visa candidate is going to be paid a salary at or above the "prevailing wage".
The sponsors already work around that. They give the poor sap a job title and description for position with a "prevailing wage" far lower than the work they're actually assigned.
I wonder if a law making it a federal offense to assign, pay for, or allow the performance of work outside the job description on the application would be a game-changer? B-)
If you are an unemployed techy type
Any bets whether they'll remember to turn out the lights as they leave?
Like ALL of them? B-)
An eye for an eye leaves one man with one eye, and we know already that in the land of the blind, the one-eye'd man is king.
By the way: "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" was really about avoiding escalating vendettas by limiting retaliation (official or otherwise) to no more than the original offense.
Draconian punishments for copyright violation (or allegations of it) seem to be a textbook case of what the prescription was about. If the massive escalation on the institutional side led to substantial retaliation against those administering it, resulting in an escalatory spiral, that would be unsurprising.
Who the [...] came up with that dumb word [kilomile]?
Probably a techie, used to using prefixes to indicate power of ten scaling factors when talking about large or small counts or measurements.
But it's a perfectly valid construction. Quantities measured in non-metric units can also be expressed in base 10.
Assuming you CAN count in base 10, of course. B-)
Running an open DNS resolver isn't itself always a problem, but it looks like people are enabling neither source address verification nor rate limiting.
One has to wonder if this is caused by negligence,
...
Also, one has to wonder if it's negligence by the person installing the resolver, or by the person distributing the resolver.
What are the default values for source address verification and rate limiting? If having them both disabled is a problem, at least ONE of them should be on by default, requiring it to be explicitly DISabled by the user, and the config file should have a warning about WHY it's on/even there.
If the default configuration is vulnerable you can't expect a whole user population to ALL figure out ALL the fine details and tweak the configuration into safety the FIRST TIME and EVERY TIME. It should be safe (if crippled) out of the box and a warning obvious during the process of changing it to be less safe.
Colony collapse has ALREADY been explained by pesticides, specifically a pesticide made by Bayer AG.
Really? That's interesting.
I was under the impression that it was most likely caused by the relaxation of import restrictions on bees into the US from areas which had significant bee diseases and parasites which were not (yet) present in the US. From what I hear these occurred shortly (like a couple years) before the "collapse" phenomenon was noticed.
I'll have to see if I can find the claims and research reports you refer to. (Citations from you would be nice.)
Old programmers never die, they just become managers.
