If it's not fair that a foreigner can come here and take my job - what about people from other states? Why can someone from Idaho move to Ca and compete with me. There should be a quota on out of state workers and they should pay a payroll tax to work in Ca.

You have as much right to move to Idaho as someone from Idaho has to come to California. This isn't the case internationally.

All of the plans assume additional costs for H1Bs - we're just arguing about how to impose them.

If it's cheaper for Google to do all their stuff in India, they will.

When you owe 850% of your GDP it doesn't really matter if you nationalize them or not - your country is screwed.

What about 350%? (USA)

That number seems to be inaccurate. The Treasury Direct website http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np states that the total U.S. public debt is: 10,943,838,929,434.92 (~11 trillion dollars). The U.S. GDP is close to 14 trillion dollars, making the debt somewhat less than 100%. I'm not sure where that 350% figure comes from.

I think it is debt owned by banks not national debt.

Depends if you spent the money you borrowed on Nukes or Herring :-)

The interesting story is how mobile operators manage to charge more for sending 160bytes of data than they do for a call. And who was the genius that created the $Bn SMS business out of some spare capacity left in the GSM spec as a debugging feature.

Well, SMS is win-win from that perspective really. Sure, the 160 bytes of data costs 10 cents, which is a little crazy, but 160 characters replace a conversation that might last two minutes or more, with greetings and small-talk and such. Text is more efficient than speech for conveying information, and the social conventions around SMS make it even more so.

So consumers save money by sending a 10-cent SMS instead of making a 20-cent phone call.

I don't know where you live, but here in the states, an SMS costs 20 cents, for both the sender and the recipient, netting 40 cents for each message... It's a fucking scam that the clueless people put up with because they just don't care...

Interestingly when roaming in Europe, T-mobile charge me 40p/SMS and 20p/MMS. It is actually cheaper* for me to write down what I want to say by hand, take a photo of it, and send that than it for me to tap out an SMS!

Why is this? Well it suggests to me that they want to encourage people off the old SMS infrastructure, possibly due to capacity or manageability issues, and shift them onto the much newer GPRS/3G/whatever network.

* Yes I know you can send text by MMS and I have an E71 so typing isn't a chore anyway.

No - they know most people are going to use SMS and want to gauge them for a s much money as possible. The SMS infrastructure is fantastic (for them), they use a spare 140bytes in a message the phone is going to send to the tower as part of a 'I'm still here' message anyway - and then charge you 40p for it!

Or they could do some actual work and charge me 20p for it! Why charge less for more data? There must be a reason.

Here (Ireland) it's pretty typical for phone plans to come with all sms free, or at a low price, such as 3c a text. Even on the worst available plans you might pay 9c per sms (and only the sender pays).

I would assume they aren't - QT is owned by Nokia so they can afford to give QT away for free just for market share. Riverbank computing (makers of PyQT) is a one man band with bills to pay (it is availabel under the GPL). But if they don't then someone is going to start a community project to produce the swig wrappers themselves.

Having said that - perhaps Nokia might buy Riverbank to keep pyqt going, or Riverbank might feel they can support themselves on consulting/support contracts with a larger installed base of an LGPL pyqt?

>While I agree, that H-1B should be used to bring really >skilled people in It is becoming impossible to do academic collaborations with the US - you can't send postdocs/professors to work on US telescopes, particle accelerators etc because they can't get H1B visas. Initially this is great, other coutries part fund the projects but only americans can work on them. the trouble is that the next round of instruments won't be in the US, Cern was built in Switzerland for this reason, ITER is in France.

That's terrible. Those researchers should be able to get visas easily.

However, I disagree with the notion that we should solve this problem by just awarding more visas. Doesn't it strike you as strange (and genuinely horrible) that universities can't get visas while outsourcing companies are gobbling up these visas by the tens of thousands? Doesn't it strike you as strange that Microsoft claims it can't bring in super high paid developers because we've hit the visa cap, yet some of these visas have been going to firms that pay the "critical worker that couldn't be found in the US" $12/hr? (sorry, no cite on that, I heard it in an interview with Ron Hira, a professor of public policy... I'll try to dig it up).

The H1B lobby loves the example you gave, because they get to claim that the H1B detractors are "opposed to letting researchers into the US for innovative collaborations." Uh, no. We've taken hundreds of thousands, maybe even over a million H1B workers into the US (the dept of labor doesn't keep exact numbers). Maybe one of these visas could have gone to the researcher, rather than some average dude who read the Oracle manual?

This program is in desperate need of a fix, no question about that. But to me, fixing it by just removing the cap, or setting an extremely high cap, is unacceptable. I don't need a fire hose to blow out my birthday candles.

It's even becoming hard to hold academic conferences in the USA. You can't be sure that invited speakers from countries other than Europe/Japan will be allowed in.

Then there are the cases of people being arrested for speaking at computer security conferences, people working on eg. stem cell research outside the USA are worried that they might be next.

Like flash? How long has it taken to get working flash on Intel-linux?

It would only be an illegal monopoly, like MSFT, if they charged customers for all ads even those placed elsewhere and charged customers less if they promised never to advertise anywhere else.

The article title is poor - it should really be oldest indo-european language words found. There are dialect words for 1,2,3 etc in England that are considerably older than English (the people or the language).