Amadou

Department of Labor can crack down on the company for not paying the "prevailing" wage.

That is technically true, but effectively impossible. The DoL simply does not pursue H1B abuses. They do not have the political will nor the budget to even look for them.

There is literally zero budget allocated to "prevailing wage" enforcement. That is a deliberate oversight by congress and has been that way for the 20+ years I've been observing the H1B process. To the best of my knowledge the DoL has only twice ever initiated action for H1B prevailing wage violations and in both cases it was the result of a disgruntled employee tipping them off to a series of violations that were so egregious that the political fallout of ignoring them would have gotten senior bureaucrats fired.

You might also want to read up on how classifications are gamed in order to work around even the very minor risk of prevailing wage violations.

http://www.cringely.com/2012/10/23/what-americans-dont-know-...

The L1 visa program forbids placing the employee at a third party site as part of a labor arrangement. Thus the L1 visa is not applicable to this sort of "training." I'm sure plenty of L1 employers play fast and loose with that rule because there is essentially no formal enforcement mechanism. Nevertheless, H1B is the official visa for that sort of work.

http://www.technologyexecutivesclub.com/Articles/outsourcing...

Your point can not be emphasized enough.

In 2012, all 10 of the top 10 H1B employers were offshore outsourcing companies. http://www.epi.org/blog/top-10-h1b-guestworker-offshore-outs...

In 2013, 50% of all H1B visas went to offshore outsourcers. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2489146/technology-law-...

It is difficult for me to not say anything disparaging about Graham's analsysis of the problem being just "a handful of consulting firms" when it is actually the primary use of H1B visas.

They know it's wrong (by societies/normal people's) standards, but it doesn't violate their own.

Tou keep saying that, but it doesn't mean what you think it means.

Thanks, but I think I will take it as a sign that I should just move on to some other site. The internet is a big place.

You are the second person to bring up sociopaths as if they don't match the definition of evil I wrote above. The thing is, they are the very personification of lacking empathy. They believe that their own welfare is more important than anyone else's. They don't see that as evil, they see it as the way of the world.

imagine that as an engineer on any secret NSA project, being shown real information regarding atrocities that have never been publicised and knowing that you can help to make the world a better place.

Yep. Of course if that engineer had perspective he would have to wonder if there was more to the story than just what he was being shown. It is easy to doubt the people we already think are wrong, the hard thing is to doubt the people we agree with.

with that much information, people will simply not care what everyone else is doing. part of what makes "private" information interesting is its rarity.

That's basically Brin's theory and it is a bad one because it assumes, against all evidence to the contrary, that people will just simply stop looking for ways to judge other people as being inferior.

Where do you find that? Is there some sort of recourse?

I don't think NSA people are evil. They believe that the things they do are for good.

Evil like in the movies doesn't exist. In the real-world evil is simply a lack of perspective (some would call it empathy instead).

No one ever wakes up and decides they want to be a villain. They always have some sort of logic that rationalizes their actions as being reasonable if not outright good. The more they act on that lack of perspective the greater the evil they perpetrate.

I completely agree. I am really tired of that Brin story being constantly cited by people without thinking through the consequences - of which there are many.

One of the biggest is the destruction of creativity. When people know that their actions are under constant surveillance it creates an enormous cognitive load. They have to constantly evaluate everything they do as to how it might appear to a critical observer. The end result is that people will simply stop doing anything that might have a social risk associated with it.

A panopticon society will be a dull, stagnant and repressed society. Think of every little backwards town where everybody knows everybody's business and anyone who steps out of line is ostracized. That is what our entire society will turn into with total surveillance.

There was a shooting at LA just weeks ago.

You mean Paul Anthony Ciancia who was pissed off about all the excessive security and deliberately targeted TSA agents hoping to commit suicide-by-cop?

Lots of less than spectacular events have occurred on soft targets over the past 10 years. Each of those may have easily converted in to a more spectacular attack.

Citing all attacks anywhere as justification for the TSA is a recipe for the unlimited ratcheting up of security. It is an enormous leap in logic to assume somebody with a semi-auto rifle or a crock-pot bomb is capable of getting them past pre-911 airport security and also doing something effective with it once they have. An attack on an airplane is simply too challenging for the vast majority of people to execute.

Yeah, that poll is the one anomaly. Go to your profile and set "showdead" to yes, I think that will let you see all [dead] posts and submissions.

I just looked at your submission history again and even the most recent one "Game industry of Finland" on slideshare is marked [dead].

Looking back through your history, the last 129 submissions are all [dead] it changed right between #129 and #130.

Your #130 was "Startup - Bill Watterson, a cartoonist's advice" which got 192 karma points, but starting with #129 "Brilliant Resource on Typography (practicaltypography.com)" posted one day later, everything is marked [dead].

For anyone who doesn't already know or wouldn't be willing to spend the $100 for Global Entry + PreCheck

These programs are the ultimate sign of just how pointless airport security is. There is simply no way that $100 is even remotely enough money to cover an investigation of any effectiveness whatsoever. It's probably just enough to cover the cost of checking the same lists the TSA already checks on every ticket booked and then adding you to the list of people who get to skip security most of the time.

Those programs are just a way for the TSA to co-opt the ire of the kind of rich and powerful people who might have the political influence to reform the agency. 10 to 1 every member of congress has signed up for Pre-Check. If you believe that the TSA is defending against a real threat, these programs, by their very existence, create a giant gaping hole in the TSA's security. The only reason it hasn't been used to perpetrate an attack is because there is effectively no risk in the first place.

An attack on an airplane is simply too challenging for the vast majority of people to execute. Is it impossible? No, but almost nothing is impossible.

I don't think you are making the point you intend to make - the very fact that pulling off a successful attack is inherently difficult is what stops those people, not any security agency.

Same thing with attacks anywhere else. For example: The Times Square bomber couldn't even build a working bomb despite two college degrees and the 2007 London & Glasgow Airport bombers couldn't figure it out either, for their swan song they put propane tanks in their jeep cherokee, lit themselves on fire and drove into a barricade in front of the airport, despite one of them having a doctor's education.

In all of its existence, the TSA has never detained someone who was later convicted on terrorism charges, despite the vast lowering of the standard of evidence for such charges since 9/11. The fact that we've seen so few attacks on "softer" targets (roughly 3 civilians have been killed in islamic-extremist attacks on US soil since 9/11) means that the size of the actual threat is practically zero - including the fools.

--off topic

I see that all of your HN story submissions are marked [dead] as soon as you submit them. Do you know why that is happening to you? It started happening to me a couple of days ago without any explanation.

You left out the biggest problem with the Post Office - it is often closed when you have the free time to go there.

I've been using private mailbox services for nearly 2 decades now and they have it all over the USPS PO. 24-hour package pickup. They throw away junkmail for you. They will text you when you have a package. They can accept shipments from any carrier - USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc.

They will forward mail in batches to another address, say you moved out of state but still want your old address to keep working for another 6 months. If you file a change-of-address form with the USPS they sell that info to anybody with a couple of dollars (like your college alumni association and any other charity you ever donated to). Some will even open your mail for you, scan it and email it to you.

Plus, the address looks like an apartment but it is not your home address - so telling someone where to mail you doesn't also tell them where you live.

Nothing is secure from the start. Everything has bugs.

Sure, all aspects of programming are subject to bugs. My concern with the site is an apparent lack of design for security. Admittedly the linked article only talks about symptoms, I'm inferring poor design from a previous article which said the developers put security at the bottom of the list of priorities.

I don't see "having the crap beat out it in production" as a good strategy here

Absolutely. The people who will pay the price for that design philosophy are not the ones making the decision to use that design philosophy.

It really doesn't matter if poor security engineering is the common case, we should expect better from a modern system with the budget of a federal project and the legal requirement that we use it.

Yep. Hence the constant stream of security issues.

I don't have the reference handy, but I recall an article from this past Summer that said the designers of the site had put security on the back-burner. Their plan was to get the system working and worry about security afterwards.

That really alarmed me. Being more than a little involved with security implementations over the last decade, the #1 rule is that you can't tack-on security afterwards. If you try, it will be fragile and ultimately ineffective. You absolutely must design with security as a major requirement from the start.

So, I am not surprised to see this report, it lines up exactly with what I've been expecting since Summer.

The article mentions the State Secrets Privilege as a reason the government can get away without judicial oversight by claiming national security interests.

It is worth noting that the case which established the judicial concept of the state secrets privilege after a ruling by the SCOTUS turned out to be 100% corrupt. When the documents were declassified 40 years later it was discovered that they did contain evidence of wrong-doing by the military but had only the most tenuous claim to national security ("an aircraft capable of dropping bombs").

So the entire doctrine in use here has been one big fraud from the very start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Reynolds#Subs...

Totally unrelated to this topic...

Do you know why your submissions are all marked [dead]? Mine started to do that a couple of days ago and I'm trying to figure out why. Looking at your submission history it looks like it is permanent for you.

Your monitor's electronics may be doing more processing at 30Hz (like frame-doubling) than at 60Hz thus adding latency that is not inherent in the lower refresh rate.

I used the T221 at 30Hz in a multi-monitor system with the other two monitors at 60Hz. I could drag a window so it straddled the 30Hz monitor and a 60Hz monitor. The DPI was severely mismatched so it wasn't very useful to straddle like that, but movement across the monitors was not obnoxious, not terribly fluid, but not annoying either.

I'm sure different people have different tolerances for latency, but I tend to think my tolerance is pretty low.

(A) Horrible is a vast overstatement. Unless you need calibrated color, it is fine.

(2) Being too large is relative, my 30" 2560x1600 quickly became normal sized. For the additional pixels the additional inches of a 39" seems about right.

(iii) HDMI at 30Hz is just fine for anything but gaming. I used to have an IBM T221 that also ran at 30Hz and it was no problem at all for text and video. Some people expect there will be mouse lag, there wasn't.

It has been widely speculated that the customs form that they pass out on the airplane en route to the USA is not about stopping bad guys but about getting them to lie on official paperwork so that there is a documented crime to cite as a reason to deport/jail them.

With the 39" Seiki 4K "tv" at less than $500 shipped, the $3,500 pricing level on the Dells seems excessive. I'm certain the Dells are better monitors, but are they 700% better? If Seiki revs their model line-up to include display-port, all these official monitors will really be in trouble.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DOPGO2G

Looks like you could completely neutralize it with a hefty bag dropped over the top.

It's not a choice you are given for proprietary desktops. New features are almost always the domain of point releases. The linux distros have just decoupled that so you know what you are missing if you wait.