abhimishra

PERM regulations are also quite lax in MANY ways, and companies abuse this in order to be able to hire at a lower wage.

For example, labor certification (to determine that there is a labor shortage that requires outside talent) is very easy to game: they can run 2 Sunday newspaper ads in the local newspaper to satisfy the primary labor cert requirement: http://tinyurl.com/czhop2f

How many people have newspaper subscriptions anymore, and how many tech workers look for jobs in the newspaper?

It's also easy to game prevailing wage requirements by conducting surveys yourself or playing with the subjective terms of the law regarding 'comparable skillsets' etc

I can confirm that this sort of thing is prevalent across the board.

False: http://www.snopes.com/computer/program/stroustrup.asp

> If the objective is to create well-rounded, cross-disciplinary citizens, then no, that is a horrible idea.

Why is it that everyone thinks a STEM education means you are automatically not well-rounded or cross-disciplinary? There are universities with STEM programs that mitigate this problem successfully by creating the right requirements for the degree.

As an example, the requirements for breadth were FAR more stringent at my university for technical fields than for the humanities/social sciences. The 'science' breadth requirement for a humanities major could be satisfied by first-semester courses like the introductory Nutritional Science course, but the breadth requirements for technical majors required that students end up taking at least a couple 3rd/4th year courses in liberal arts fields (which in turn had lower-level prerequisites, naturally). This resulted in the inverse problem from my POV, whereby the majors generally assumed to create well-rounded students actually failed to do so.

Furthermore, being well-rounded is a lot more than what you study in college IMO. A well-rounded citizen has to continually invest in 'upkeep' that earns them that label. The most well-rounded folks I know read throughout their life (often across a broad set of topics), continually invest in their education on their own time through this reading, keep up on current-events, and so forth. I don't see a lack of liberal arts education precluding these activities or any other activities that might contribute to being well-rounded.

> And why can't someone get both a liberal arts education and a "practical" education?

I generally agree that this would be ideal, but it is also constrained by how much money we have as a society. Remember - you and I are contributing our own funds indirectly to subsidize this same education, and it is certainly not cheap these days (see other comments on cost of education). The trick of course is to strike the right balance and realize a good return on that educational investment. Personally, I can see value in something like a Minor in a field that is completely different than one's Major, but I don't see the benefit being much greater if one were to get two full degrees.

Perhaps you aren't suggesting exactly this, but I don't understand the commonly-held view that those in technical majors don't have a 'broad education'. Most people I've known in technical majors have as broad an education as any liberal-arts major I know. I personally feel that even in the absence of breadth requirements (which at my university are non-trivial), most of my classmates would be as well-educated as they are now, simply because they have the ability to read and absorb information.

Students who go to college and get a liberal-arts education often don't retain their major-specific knowledge once they move into the job market and into a role that has nothing to do with what they studied. What they are supposed to retain though, is learning- and critical-thinking skills that make them better at various jobs than someone who did not go to college at all. And that same learning- and critical-thinking ability is something technical majors also develop quite well - hence I don't see a liberal arts education as having a monopoly on developing 'generalists' or really providing any advantage in that regard.

Naturally this is also a problem of efficient allocation. I think there is value in the knowledge produced by every field - however we require different levels of supply for different skills/knowledge - and I would further argue that this variation in demand for skills has always existed throughout human history. Since society is both funding education and creating this demand, it makes sense to me that we meet that demand partly by creating the correct supply of variously-educated citizens.

Mindmaze was a favorite of mine in my younger days; I'm glad to see it revived. This is just for my nostalgic needs, but I'd love to see the original music here :P

The new UI seems to waste a lot of the screen with whitespace, to the point where I feel like it is an unintended bug (this is in the 'Expanded' view)...and it seems like you can no longer resize anything on the page?

To an extent, yes. An example I ran into earlier - if you ask Siri to remind you of something on certain days, it will make an assumption about when to start that recurring reminder (based on how you word your request). I was then curious as to whether an interactive conversation would work, and said 'No, start it tomorrow instead' and it replied pretty naturally, affirming that she would have the reminder start tomorrow instead.

Despite the pissing wars, I don't think it's that anyone is looking to 'create conflict', since I'm betting most people who respected Ritchie also respected Jobs. Rather, I'm guessing it's that everyone who is making statements similar to Pike's sees a 'hardcore scientist guy' ignored next to a 'well-marketed guy', and they are very uncomfortable with that (despite the fact that both of them were more than the stereotypes I'm calling out here).

As for the argument you are calling 'tired', I respectfully disagree. Certainly we use a lot of things whose inventors we don't know - but Ritchie's work was remarkable in that it was fundamentally deeply technical (in a way that is appreciable to hardcore CS folks), extremely wide in scope (in a way that affects people from every walk of life), and recent-enough to warrant more attention from today's society.

As for media - is it really OK for media (and by extension, society) to ignore a person with that kind of impact? I personally feel it shouldn't be culturally acceptable because that breeds a society where hard-science and scientists are not in the public consciousness (ahead of, for example, many random celebrities). Ultimately, the effect of that is more systemic IMHO (few scientists in politics, lots of politicians who can freely ignore science, reduced funding for fundamental scientific research, and so forth).

Agree. Leaving aside the obvious issue with the fiscal (in)ability of the parents to care and support for a large number of children, I can't help but view something like this as grossly irresponsible just in terms of population growth, sustainability, and related facets.

This post seems to miss the point - obviously some of the commands that were less-visible or non-existent earlier would not show up on the telemetry data, but can still be important to surface in a redesign of the UI.

The newly-added buttons on the ribbon are there to address the most-requested features (by actual customers) as well as some of the missing features users most-often go to third-party plug-ins for, per the actual blog post from the Windows 8 Engineering Blog.

As for whether the UI is stream-lined or not - while simplification has its place, it is not always a good thing. The OSX Finder is surprisingly devoid of things even basic users can find useful - in many cases it isn't easy to find the appropriate menu option or shortcut to perform these actions - personally I think it goes too far by way of simplification.

It is good to make computers easy-to-understand - but by attempting to remove the learning curve COMPLETELY you can also damage the productivity a computer can provide. The sweetspot, of course, is somewhere in the middle.

The 'more likely' statistics provided are a somewhat deceptive attempt to paint a particular picture - until the raw numbers are provided, it is basically meaningless.

I don't even think it needs to be a switch. The actual bill that was brought up in the Senate doesn't explicitly say 'kill switch' anywhere. In reality a call from someone in the government to a few people who work at large ISPs/backbones would be enough, since they would just comply. We saw this happen recently with Wikileaks, after all....

Ugh - the OS update mess is the main reason why I don't have an Android phone and why I don't recommend them to my non-tech friends (with the exception of stock Android phones).

If there was a serious security vulnerability in one version of the software, would users be stuck waiting six months (or possibly forever) to get a patch?

Is this thing actually fully-unlocked if you get it with a T-Mobile contract?

The FAQ that Best Buy put out was pretty ambiguous. I called Best Buy's dedicated Nexus S helpline to clarify that, and they were basically useless.

I've been using OSX and Win 7 for the last several months but I was pleasantly surprised by how nice the experience in Ubuntu 10.10 has been.

On my laptop that runs it, I did not have to once manually configure anything. No command-line magic, no struggling to get random things working, zip. It all just worked.

The experience has been very fluid, with notifications floating down along the right side, update notifications from Synaptic, etc. I am not a Linux fanboy by any stretch, but for once it isn't completely off the mark to say that Linux is catching up in the consumer space.

I tested this notion out recently when a (non-tech) friend wanted to use my laptop for something and did not even realize that he was using Linux.

This paragraph is hilarious: "The theme for next year’s commemoration will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age."

Everyone here realizes that businesses exist to make profits. That isn't something anyone here is in the dark about - our point is more that with all channels that enable free speech going through SOME business intermediary (in this case Amazon), there are few places left to actually exercise that right when everyone just falls back on the catch-all excuse of profits or appeasing investors.

Also, you are making quite the assumption when you say "...in a country that isn't negatively impacted by the leaks."