Free Republic

An (I/T) H1B who works at my company is returning to India because his visa expired. When one of my peers asked him if he has a job in India yet, the H1B just waved his hand and said, “there are plenty of jobs in India; I am not worried about that.”. It is amazing how far America has fallen.

News Desk: Breaking News! In a condemnable incident, an unidentified low-profile man ripped pages out of a Quran and burnt them outside the proposed Community Center and Mosque near Ground Zero. Even though Pastor of the Florida Church Terry Jones cancelled his plan to burn the Quran due to international pressure and criticism, the unidentified zealot did not bother and set the Quran pages on fire. "If they can burn American flags, I can burn the Quran. Americans should never be afraid to give their opinion", he said. The news was first reported by the New York Daily News. Even...

The July 2010 Dice Report shows that software development skills in general and C# skills in particular are more in demand this year, making Dice's top 10 list of in-demand skills. In addition, Dice reports that there are more open full-time IT positions this year than last year at this time. But the numbers are still a far cry from the number of open positions in July 2008. The July 2010 Dice Report shows that software development skills in general and C# skills in particular are more in demand this year, making Dice's top 10 list of in-demand skills. In...

U.S. To Train 3,000 Offshore IT Workers $22 million, federally-backed program aims to help outsourcers in South Asia become more fluent in areas like Java programming—and the English language. By Paul McDougall, InformationWeek Aug. 3, 2010 URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226500202 Despite President Obama's pledge to retain more hi-tech jobs in the U.S., a federal agency run by a hand-picked Obama appointee has launched a $22 million program to train workers, including 3,000 specialists in IT and related functions, in South Asia. Following their training, the tech workers will be placed with outsourcing vendors in the region that provide offshore IT and business...

Despite President Obama's pledge to retain more hi-tech jobs in the U.S., a federal agency run by a hand-picked Obama appointee has launched a $22 million program to train workers, including 3,000 specialists in IT and related functions, in South Asia.

It gets crazier with each passing day. Today we learned that Obama has proclaimed NASA’s new foremost task is to reach out to the Muslim world and make the Muslim people feel good about their historic contribution to science. As far as actual space flight goes, it seems NASA won’t go into space anymore beyond low Earth orbit, although it may form partnerships with other nations for this purpose.

Sweden has the world's most hooked-up economy, according to a new report from the World Economic Ranking (WEF). Nordic countries all performed well on the list in the WEF Global Information Technology report released on Thursday. Sweden displaced Denmark to rank first on the chart, with the Danes sliding to third place. Other Nordic countries were also in the top 10, with Finland in sixth place and Norway in tenth. Singapore crept closer to the top, moving up from fourth place last year to second place now. Fellow Asian economy Hong Kong was in eighth place, also gaining from 12th...

Intimidation of Foreign Workers Now Aimed at Americans: Facebook, Yahoo, Comcast Drawn In Donna Conroy, Director of Bright Future Jobs and John Doe, the administrator of Endh1b.com named in the suit comment on the New Jersey order, Apex Technology Group vs. John Does. Nuisance lawsuits and threats of legal entanglement, long used by Indian H-1b labor contractors to silence Indian tech workers, have now been aimed at an American tech worker website, endh1b.com, for reposting an Indian H-1B worker's testimony of mistreatment by Apex Technology Group, including a link to an employment contract binding the worker to Apex. Bond agreements...

The US government appears to be loosening its grip on the governance of the Internet, a move welcomed by many. But critics see the government shirking its obligations to support free expression and free trade. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the private corporation that coordinates the technical oversight of the Internet's Domain Name System through a longstanding agreement with the U.S. government, on Wednesday announced a new agreement with US Department of Commerce designed to make Internet governance less unilateral and more open to international input. Questioning NTIA's statutory authority, Auerbach suggests that if NTIA can...

US Government recommends weighing laptop before and after each visit. Senior executives in US IT companies have been advised by the US Government to follow extremely strict policies for visits to China which extend far beyond standard software protection. The policies encourage them to leave their standard IT equipment at home and to buy separate gear only for use in China. Mark Bregman, chief technology officer at security firm Symantec said he left his MacBook Pro behind in the US and took his MacBook Air whenever he flew to China. Bregman said he only ever used the Air in...

This is Congressman Eugene Green (HT to an e-mailer), Democrat from Texas, telling the world that if you're not from his District, you're not welcome at his future town hall meetings -- oh, and how he'll enforce his new rule (bold is his):

U.S. IT providers continue to push jobs offshore, while Indian firms work to refine the amount of work they complete overseas. Although Congress may force the Indian firms to hire more Americans -- and Indian companies have been telling investors that they may have to indeed do that -- the change won't likely affect the overall trend and the shift in jobs outside the U.S. Okay, so where are U.S. jobs going? What's the data show? Data prepared by Everest Group Inc., a research and outsourcing consulting firm, shows in broad brush fashion the shift of jobs overseas by some...

WASHINGTON -- Federal agencies are facing a severe shortage of computer specialists, even as a growing wave of coordinated cyberattacks against the government poses potential national security risks, a private study found.

One of the challenges of working in the IT field is staying on top of emerging technologies - while letting go of those that are becoming obsolete. This Global Knowledge article lists 10 areas that are fading into obscurity. There are some things in life, like good manners, that never go out of style. And there are other things, like clothing styles, that fall in and out of fashion. But when an IT skill falls out of favor, it rarely ever comes back. Here’s our list of 10 dying IT skills. If any of these skills is your main expertise,...

U.S. citizens have a brand-new tool to gauge how well their government is performing -- at least, when it comes to IT. Cringely says it's about time. Want to know exactly where all those ducats you reluctantly turned over to our Uncle in Washington are going? Things just got a little clearer today, at least in terms of our tech taxes. Today at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City, federal tech czar Vivek Kundra unveiled the new IT Dashboard at USAspending.gov, which shows you exactly where all those sawbucks are flowing, in dollar amounts that could make you...

A powerful new film, The Stoning of Soraya M., is calling public attention to the Islamic practice of stoning adulterers in a way that only Hollywood can; while at least eight women await death by stoning in Iran today, none of their cases have drawn any significant protests from human rights organizations, and Western governments have remained largely indifferent. With a genocidally inclined nuclear Iran looming on the international stage, the victimization of women by Islamic laws prescribing stoning for adultery and other sexual crimes may seem to be the least of our worries. The Stoning of Soraya M., however,...

Tech layoffs will continue through year-end, survey says. The real impact of the nearly $800 billion stimulus package on shrinking IT employment remains in the future, despite President Obama's plan, announced today, to expedite hiring of some 600,000 people over the next 100 days. Many of the jobs in this summer boost will be aimed at the construction and education fields and at young people. Meanwhile, the forecast for the next six months is for more tech sector layoffs, according to a new survey. Of the 1,900 technology recruiters and hiring managers queried about the tech labor market by jobs...

CurtMonash writes "The Indianapolis Star reports that Tuesday Morning, Methodist Hospital turned away patients in ambulances, for the first time in its 100-plus history. Why? Because the electronic health records (EHR) system had gone down the prior afternoon — due to a power surge — and the backlog of paperwork was no longer tolerable. If you think about that story, it has a couple of disturbing aspects. Clearly the investment in or design of high availability, surge protection, etc. were sadly lacking. But even leaving that aside — why do problems with paperwork make it necessary to turn away patients?...

The last five years have taught me that I bring only three skills to the anti-jihad movement. The first is a knack for writing propaganda. By “propaganda” I do not mean the 20th-century version as practiced by the Nazis, the Soviets, the New Deal, and other huge and repressive state enterprises. I use the word in its original sense, which was derived via the Romance languages from the Latin verb propagare, “to cause to increase or spread, as of a plant”. In the 18th century it referred to the work of a committee of cardinals (congregatio de propaganda fide, “the...

May 13th, 2009 China's 'secure' OS Kylin - a threat to U.S offensive cyber capabilities? Posted by Dancho Danchev @ 6:23 am Categories: Browsers, Complex Attacks, Governments, Hackers, Kernel-level Exploits... Tags: China, Operating System, Operating Systems, Linux, Software... Picture a cyber warfare arms race where the participating countries have spent years of building offensive cyber warfare capabilities by exploiting the monoculture on one another’s IT infrastructure. Suddenly, one of the countries starts migrating to a hardened operating system of its own, and by integrating it on systems managing the critical infrastructure it successfully undermines the offensive cyber warfare capabilities developed...