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Comment Re:She's a communist (Score 1) 213

by llirik (#62019039) Attached to: Centrist Dems Sink Biden's Nominee for Top Bank Regulator
To be fair, she was born in 1966, she started her studies in MSU around in 1984 and studied through difficult times when USSR was transforming and starting to break up, but most government institutions including higher education still operated in old regime. She didn't have whole lot of choice. If she was interested in economics whatever she actually studied would have to be dressed up in Marx/Lenin terms. The fact that she is from poor family, small town Kazakhstan (according to wikipedia) and managed to get Lenin Scholarship, tells us she was most likely a brilliant and hard working student. A lot of immigrants from ex-USSR are staunch anti-communists, but yes a lot are nostalgic of USSR. I have no idea who she is and what her political stance is, just asking to take this part of history with big helping of salt.

Comment Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score 2, Interesting) 612

by llirik (#26622919) Attached to: Microsoft Says H-1B Workers Among Those Losing Jobs
That's bogus.

I used to be an H1B holder, and one day decided to switch employer and start working for startup. The visa transfer application has been filed, I quit my job and moved to startup, without waiting for application to be approved (which is legal, as transfer considered to be pure formality). Few months later my transfer application gets refused on the grounds that startup doesn't seem to have profits and may fire me. Thank you very much Department of Labor for firing me out of fear that my employer may fire me.

One can argue that its my fault, and I had to wait for transfer to get approved, but that's not the point. I knew that I was taking a risk, and was prepared, but to get refusal on such grounds? That's pretty lame.

Anyways, getting back on topic. Suppose I were the best developer in the company and in rough times company had to downsize, but they would like to keep me and get rid of some slackers, however some legislation wouldn't allow them to do so, so they have to fire me. I pack my stuff move back home, and then economy picks up, there is shortage of qualified people in US, and US companies start to bombard me with offers. Do you honestly believe I would go there again?

It is very shortsighted policy, you are risking to alienate the most qualified people. Way to go.

Another argument against it -- it is pretty much unenforcible. What will business do? They'll just create new entity and move all H1B holders they would like to keep to that new entity. Oh, big brother patches this loophole? Fine. They'll create an independent "consultancy" business and move all H1B holders there, and hire them as consultants. I am sure there are thousand tricks to work around such restrictions.
Editorial

The Player Is and Is Not the Character 152

Posted by Soulskill from the i-agree-and-disagree dept.
Jill Duffy writes "GameCareerGuide has posted an intellectual article about video games which argues there is no such thing as 'breaking the fourth wall' in games. Written by Matthew Weise, a lead game designer for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, the article considers the complex relationship between video game players and characters. Weise says that, unlike in theater and film, video games don't ever really break the fourth wall, as it were, because in games, there is no wall. Players are always tethered to the technology, and the player is always just as much the main character as not the main character. Weise looks at both modern experimental games, like Mirror's Edge, as well as old classics, like Sonic the Hedgehog, to defend his point. He writes, 'Both avatars and the technological devices we use to control them are never simply in one reality. They are inherently liminal entities, contributing to a mindset that we, as players, exist in two realities at once. It's just as natural for a player to say, "I defeated that boss," as it is to say, "Snake defeated that boss," since Snake is and is not the player at the same time. It is likewise natural for a player to say, "I punched an enemy soldier," when in reality, she punched no one. All she did was press a button.'"
The Almighty Buck

Bandwidth Use In MMOs 188

Posted by Soulskill from the more-always-more dept.
Massively is running a story about bandwidth costs for MMOs and other virtual worlds. It's based on a post at the BBC on the same subject which references a traffic analysis (PDF) done for World of Warcraft. Quoting: "If you're an average user on capped access, the odds are you have roughly 20Gbytes per month to allocate among all of your Internet usage (it varies depending on just where you are). For you, sucking back (for example) a 2GB World of Warcraft patch isn't something you can just do. It's something you have to plan for — and quite often you have to plan for in the following month. Even a 500MB download has to be handled with caution. MMOGs as a rule don't use a whole lot of bandwidth in actual operation. However, the quantity definitely rises in busy areas with lots of players, where there are large numbers of mobs, or on raids, and takes quite a much larger jump if you're using voice as well."

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