The labor market has to be the overwhelming factor, I have to think.  Another way to reduce illegal immigration would be to make it faster, easier to migrate legally. Despite what anti-immigrantion activists want us to believe, there's no "back-of-the-line" to get your papers, so until we reform that process, people will be forced to take dangerous, risky journeys to come to the States.

A new study from the Pew Hispanic Center finds that illegal immigration is down. Annual inflow between 2007 and 2009 was roughly two-thirds less than between 2000 and 2005, report Pew authors Jeffrey Passel and D'Vera Cohn. Furthermore, "the most marked decline in the population of unauthorized immigrants has been among those who come from Latin American countries other than Mexico."

Illegal Immigration Has Declined: Why?

Fascinating details about how the NYTimes interactive team built 3 online features for the 2010 World Cup and how they solved some of the challenges faced.  The live match tracker is an interesting exercise in ingesting data real-time from multiple sources and also re-distributing it to thousands (millions?) of clients.

As the Sports department planned its live-blogging strategy, staff in Graphics and Interactive News started thinking about what sorts of interactive features would best complement live game coverage.

Behind the Scenes of a Live World Cup - NYTimes.com

While trying to submit a patch to a drupal project, I ran into a problem creating a unified diff that could be suspected.  It turns out that the way I was using the built in Subversion diff tool in NetBeans wasn't the way to go.  Now, on the command line, I'm used to doing a "svn diff myfile.php > myfile.patch" to have a useable patch with the latest changes to a file.  In NetBeans, I was thinking the same way, calling up a diff and then saving the output as a patch file - but that omitted crucial information like the name of the file to patch.

After hunting through the menus for a bit, I found the Export Diff Patch option in the Team menu.  This is what you should use to create a unified patch that other developers can use. If you have the focus on a single file, it will generate a patch for just that file.  If you click on a directory in your project and then create a patch it will include all changes for that folder.