Free Republic

The tech-bus protest isn’t just a San Francisco thing anymore. This week, the anti-gentrification act of blocking a private shuttle full of high-paid tech workers spread to Seattle, where a handful of buses carrying Microsoft employees were stopped by demonstrators. The protest was chronicled by local Tweeps and community websites.

New tech industries start small but can grow into permanent, billion-dollar slices of infrastructure. Sometimes that seems to happen overnight — like with smartphones. And sometimes it takes years — like with the dumbphones that grew like mold from the mid-1990s through the late 2000s. And now, for example, the prevalence of smart mobile devices has spurred the mobile app industry, an entirely new piece of infrastructure which supports thousands of companies and billions of dollars in sales. There is a discussion going on over on Quora about which industries are poised to gain the next $1 billion. We pulled...

Should education and experience always command a high salary? It seems reasonable to think so — yet older employees with advanced degrees may lack the specialized skills needed to satisfy rapidly changing market demand. In perhaps no field is this more true than the tech industry. I recently conducted an e-mail interview with Norm Matloff, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who believes there is widespread age discrimination in the tech industry. (His busy schedule made it impossible to get Matloff on the phone.) In particular, Matloff contends that the tech industry has manufactured a false talent shortage...

December 21, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Five years ago, some unemployed IT workers in Connecticut formed an advocacy group to fight against the H-1B and L-1 visa programs. The group's strategy was old-fashioned for the Internet Age, relying on face-to-face lobbying to reach out to federal lawmakers. And the group, called The Organization for the Rights of American Workers (TORAW), was successful in getting visa-reform legislation introduced in Congress. But now TORAW is disbanding, according to John Bauman, president of the Meriden, Conn.-based group. Bauman said this week that he has made 16 trips to Washington this year and met with...

STEPS were taken by a distributor for Apple Computers to ensure that Israeli-made parts do not enter Bahrain after an Israeli-made battery was discovered by a customer in an old Apple Computer model.Apple Centre manager Asif Mohammed Irfan said the battery powers the calendar and clock of an old Apple G4 model but added that he didn’t believe that it was sold in large numbers.“We were not aware that the computer contained anything made in Israel. We, in turn, informed our Dubai-based suppliers Arab Business Machines who were very displeased with the discovery,” he said.“They have taken up the matter...