dandv

This is a powerful introduction of Silent Circle's encrypted communication services. Aggressive and visionary.

https://blog.silentcircle.com/why-are-we-competing-with-phon...

You can massively fuck with stores trying to track people, and infect their databases with fake MAC addresses, using Pry-Fi - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.chainfire.p...

I wanted to nominate myself but didn't have enough helpful flag. Which makes sense, because I DON'T ABUSE FLAGS.

Very cool!

> Don't like US immigration? Good, don't emigrate to the US. Once enough people do this that it starts to affect the US GDP I'm sure there will be some change.

No, there won't be much change, because those who make and enforce the laws are completely different from those affected by them.

No Customs & Border Protection officer will suffer personally if high-skilled immigrants don't (re)enter the US. And they can't change the laws anyway.

One of the main USCIS Service Centers, which processes Green Card applications, is in Nebraska. That's about as removed from where immigration happens as you can get.

Vlad, good points.

Just a minor correction, the H-1B cap has been filled every years since 2003, at least.

http://redbus2us.com/h1b-visa-cap-reach-dates-for-fy-2004-20...

(which needs an update for FY2012 - the cap was reached last week)

To begin with, the Startup Visa Act has seen no movement in Congress since its introduction in Congress on March 14. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s112-565. COICA and SOPA have received much more attention.

According to the proposed bill, S.565, to obtain and keep a startup visa (valid for 2 years), an entrepreneur must:

a) obtain $100k from a qualified investor, and during the following 2 years, must create 5 or more new full-time jobs in the United States for people other than his immediate family, raise $500k or more in capital, and generate $500k or more in revenue, OR

b) have an unexpired H1-B visa -- this already excludes foreign startups, OR

c) have a controlling interest in a foreign company that generated $100k or more in revenue from sales in the US, and create in the next 2 years 3 or more full-time jobs in the US for people other than their immediate family, raise $100k or more in capital, and generate $100k or more in revenue.

There are further restrictions on qualified investors: a) qualified super angel investors must be US citizens b) qualified venture capitalists must be based in the US and have more than $10M in capital

Blueseed makes it significantly easier for foreign-based startups to work in close proximity to Silicon Valley by not placing restrictions on the source of their funds, the revenue they must generate, or the number of jobs they must create.

Startups out there might not want to take the risk that Startup Visa won’t pass, or that it will pass in a form that’s inadequate for their needs (e.g. a permanent requirement for more than X employees would force a startup out of the country if they temporarily are force to lay off people and now only have X-1 employees; similarly, a permanent requirement for a certain level of funding could also hurt a startup).

Secondly, according to the Startup Visa bill proposal press release (http://www.webcitation.org/627BU0HxF), to accommodate this new type of visa, adjustments would be made to the existing EB-5 visa, which grants visas to foreign nationals who invest $1 million towards the creation of 10 jobs:

  Under a new EB-6 category, a visa would be granted to the innovative entrepreneur
  with intellectual capital, instead of a wealthy foreign investor who is in a
  position to buy a visa. The legislation [S.565] transfers an allotment of the
  yearly 9,940 EB-5 visas, of which only 4,191 visas were used in FY 2009, to be
  granted under the new EB-6 category.
  *The creation of new visas is not authorized in this bill.* [emphasis in original]

So any unused EB-5 visas could be transformed into startup friendly visas. In other words, the startup visas would compete with the investor visas for a limited pool of visas.

Also, given the government inertia typical of these matters (e.g. the Comprehensive Immigration Reform has been stalling since 2006), by the time (if) immigration regulations become lax enough, we will have franchised away from the "foreign nationals" business models.

Finally, we’re creating a space so compelling that even if you’re a company without any visa issues, you still want to be onboard Blueseed because it’s going to be the most awesome space in Silicon Valley. The #1 most common country that startups who've filled out Survey of Interest are from is the US.

I hope this answers your question.

I really wish the media included links to the FAQs for both Blueseed and Seasteading.

http://blueseed.co/faq.html

http://www.seasteading.org/about-seasteading/frequently-aske...

Correct. This is also detailed at http://blueseed.co/faq.html#visa

By comparison, the US granted 3.8 million business visas in 2010, vs. only 117,000 H-1Bs. (Note that H-1B visas don't let you work for your own startup.)

Much. There are no visa requirements to enter the ship.

See http://blueseed.co/faq.html#visa for more details.

Funny how one of the most common objections, pirates, is also the most easily refuted (and of course, an FAQ - http://seasteading.org/about-seasteading/frequently-asked-qu...)

Think of the other direction - if you can't go on land (actually you can, but let's assume you couldn't), then folks from Silicon Valley can visit the ship. Project managers can sync periodically with developers on the ship, fellow developers can be sent on the ship for training sessions etc.

Working in your own country just doesn't seem to produce the amount of innovation that happens in Silicon Valley. Otherwise, we should be able to see lots of successful geographically-distributed startups made of software developers who use teleconferencing and other online tools. While that does happen with many open-source projects, it doesn't seem to work as well for commercial ventures.

Why might that happen? A hypothesis I find interesting is that face-to-face contact increases trust, which is a crucial aspect for a startup. Oft-cited piece of research that support this are Dahl and Pedersen, 2004 - "Knowledge flows through informal contacts in industrial clusters" (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733304...), and "Building Trust: A Matter of Proximity?" (Bruneel, 2007, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1064201).

It's very common to see these criticisms brought against Perl: it's line noise, a write-only language, only useful for scripting, dead and so on.

Thankfully, they are all unfounded.

While scripting has been the use case in the '90s, Perl is nowadays used for a variety of tasks, including complex desktop applications such as the Perl IDE (screenshots), web application frameworks (Catalyst), bioinformatics (extensively), content management systems (e.g. WebGUI), hierarchical wikis (MojoMojo) etc. and powers very large websites (IMDB, Magazines.com, BBC, Amazon.com, LiveJournal, Ticketmaster, Craigslist etc.).

More at http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Perl_vs_Java#Common_criticisms

Sites using Catalyst: http://www.catalystsites.org/sites/all and http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/wiki/SitesRunningCatalyst

Here's a Catalyst screencast on how to quickly create a form: http://letsgetdugg.com/view/Catalyst_with_FormBuilder_screen...

Also, there's a WikiVS entry on Catalyst vs. Rails: http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Catalyst_vs_Ruby_on_Rails