Western Europe, USA, Japan - decision is indeed clear cut as they will blame you for it anyway. It is solely a question of who does it first.
Eastern Europe, Russia, China - you have a WHOLE ONE LEGAL COPY OF OFFICE? Who is the out of his mind person to buy it.
So it is all relative... Same as Microsoft policy to enforcing piracy. I have seen them turn a blind eye too many once you get far enough east. After all, as with all crack dealers - the first dose of is free.
Err... I think you took the example too literally.
That is besides the fact that the original analogy is wrong. What Bruce thinks is that as computing becomes a utility the security needs will decrease.
I hate to disagree. They will remain, probably even increase to match the "it just works" expectations you have for an utility.
Utilities do not have less expenditure on security just because they have become a utility.
Water companies have to deal with mandatory security of the water supply. Gas companies have to deal with mandatory security of the gas grid. Electrical companies need to provide security of the electrical grid. Old style telecommunication companies have some very hefty obligations regarding the availability of their communications in an emergency and have expenditure related to that as well.
Add to this the day-to-day battle with fraud and theft of service. Even without "national minorities" going around and digging out all of your copper cables and selling them for scrap there is a very large expenditure on security in any utility. Granted, it no longer appears as an item on the end-user bill, but it is there none the less. And lots of it.
If it all ends up being folded into the utility fold it may in fact end up being more than now. Everything else aside a utility is obliged to maintain a certain standard of service, hence 100% of Joe Bloggs will be covered by AV and firewall, not 1% like now and so on.
Re:And Yet... You Only Have Yourself to Blame
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 1
Spot on.
After multiple rounds of phone BS during which I was being told that I have "applied for a job in Dublin", while I have agreed to talk solely under the condition that the "D word is not mentioned", after being told that "I have to chose between networking and servers and no straddling fences", while having 10+ years in both I had enough and told them to have a nice day.
Right choice actually, as I now work for a company which does not have an all-encompassing NDA invading into my private life and beyond, I work from home under better conditions and I very happily straddle the fence between network and servers.
Frankly, there are better places to work than Google. By far. And quite a few of them.
Dear coward. First of all, do not be such a coward next time.
I am simply presenting the conditions to which I have been told to agree as preliminary before agreeing to proceed further by the relevant g00gl3dr01d. If I dig through my asterisk voice recordings from that period I may probably even find a recording of some of the conversations (do not remember if I recorded those particular ones or not).
At least this is the situation in my corner of Europe at the moment. No idea if it is any different elsewhere. As far as the historical truths vs gimmicks - they are truths. Just ask anyone with a white hair and a ponytail at an IETF or USENIX. Some of them still remember the times.
No.
While it does some cutting edge work, it is not anything particularly new as far as working methods are concerned:
Google has strict separation between network, servers and development. You are not allowed to straddle fences. In fact this is something you are asked during the interview process long before any NDAs. So if you have a skillset which spans multiple disciplines you are of no interest to them. Based on prolonged and utterly disfunctional dialogue with their recruiters, they want "industry standard" people. Outstanding - maybe, but "industry standard" none the less, which fit exactly the industry standard niches
Google deploys industry standard working methods - current and past:
Own project time, mandatory skills improvement, etc - ATT, Xerox, etc had that 30 years before them. Granted they abandoned it when descending into the outsourcing sweatshop frenzy, but there is nothing new in this. This was the industry standard for a long time until some penny pinching idiots decided to "rationalize" it. Same for many of the other famous gimmicks.
Google operates a more or less strictly on-site shop. So telecommuting, no teleworking, etc. Once again, nothing new, nothing revolutionary, firmly stuck in the past. Half of the Valley (and outside it) is way ahead of it on this one.
Google has some of the attributes which the industry used to have before penny-pinching cretins tried to "rationalize" it. As a result it achieves roughly what the industry used to achieve in those days. In fact less. Just look at the level of innovation coming out of ATT, IBM, Xerox and early Valley companies 30+ years ago per hour human time invested. In everything besides these "blast from the past" attritbutes it is an utterly bog standard corporation. And the primary aim of the NDA is to hide this, not to hide its supersecret achievements.
This is more like NetApp and other high-end NAS and SAN systems where a facility like this is used for backup. The backup system looks at a snapshot taken at X:00 and backs it up at leisure while the users continue to read/write to the filesystem on top of it. Once the backup is complete you obsolete the checkpoint on which the backup was operating. As a result you have a true backup of the filesystem at point X, not something that spread from X to X+N hours.
This is a killer feature as far as any enterprise is concerned and one of the main reasons people at one point start looking at SANs and NAS-es.
Less seeks is the answer and lower number of address fields, lead bits and trailers. Less seeks - obvious. Adress fields, trailers, lead bits, etc - the entire formatting information on a block is not always error correctable (at least some of it isn't). As a result any deffect in it will immediately flag the sector as defective. Compared to that the data is ECC corrected and the industry is approaching a point where the drives function solely due to the ECC correction capabilities for data. Once upon a time the spec used to have an error code for "data read, but ECC corrrected". I have yet to see a post-2000 drive use this. All read and apply ECC silently.
On another note, it will be entertaining to see how the most cretinous item in the POSIX standards - the du and other disk utilities output evolves after this one. Nothing has pissed me off more than having to use -k all the time to see it in kbytes than the mandated 512b blocks.
So now, after the block size changed how does one comply to this standard? Or they will finally see the light and amend it back to K?
Absolutely. This is not a free energy at all. What I find more interesting is that the system uses the same turbine design as Quiet Revolution turbines. AFAIK this design is still under a couple of patents so they will have to shell out a very sizeable license fee. Pity Quiet Revolution is not public, this would have been a good time to play with its shares.
This will be 20+ patterns just for people of Pakistani descent (20+ different major tribal languages from different language groups). Europe - 20+ more. Ex-Soviet union - 20+ more. That is not counting dialects which quite often affect lip technique more than differences between languages. You gotta be kidding. Just calibrating the damn system to different language groups cost hundreds of millions.
Germans found that out in world war 2 and used it. Apparently, no matter how good you get in a language you use different lip technique from the native speakers. As a result a professional lip reader (or a deaf person trained to lip read) will pick you out right away.
Back on the British topic. Just looking at the 7/7 and 21/7 bombers you have more than 4 different ethnic origins - Somali, Jamaican, Ethiopian and various different tribes originally from Pakistan. Each of these will be using a non-standard lip technique. While it may be possible to get some relatively low reading rate by a professional who has unlimited time to look at the tape, a real-time automated system will fail miserably right away. The only ones it will pick out will be Caucasian whites of English origin (I suspect it will fail on Scots and Welsh) who for some unbeknown to us reason have decided to discuss 7/7 instead of Chelsea vs Arsenal (that will probably be 1-2 people in the whole country anyway).
He is looking at a different market. The current Microsoft obsession is to displace RIM and everyone else from the enterprise market.
Is your cellco or your company sponsoring your phone is irrelevant as far as MSFT is concerned. What they are interested is a sale. The current phone replacement rates in the end-user market keep dropping. The margins there are also not to MSFT's liking so they are not interested in sales there. Not surprisingly they look at enterprise as their main market. The enterprise has been "taking onboard" that mobile workforce thing for 7+ years now and MSFT has failed to deliver. In the meantime RIM showed it to be possible and showed the way to do it. As we all know while MSFT does not innovate it is very good at catch-up. So it will catch-up to RIM sooner or later providing better integration (no wonder Outlook 2007 stopped interfacing to BB), more applications, development tools and other stuff of interest to corps.
If we look from that perspective at the iPhone, it is a failure before it has been launched. It is a closed platform without any of the apps of interest to an enterprise. And considering the current phone replacement rates in the end-user market it is also not going to get very far. And it is also late there because most of the people who wanted an MP3 phone already got one. So all it can aim for will be ipod replacement sales for high end ipods. Which is pittance.
Gawd, I am agreeing with Ballmer... Can't believe it. But he is right as far as this one is concerned.
Anyway, unless Apple opens the iPhone to applications (with some certification if needed) it is totally dead.
Instead of watching Comedy Central you should actually watch the news.
And on the news Ivan Slavkov has been completely exonerated and reinstated as a member of the International Olympic Comitee. After all his behaviour strictly adheres to the standards of this venerable institution and he is a shining example of how this institution functions and how the decisions in it have always been taken, are taken and will be taken for the forseable future.
The thermometers and thermostats contain liquid mercury. The old standard safety rules for handling liquid mercury were that if you need to deal with it you must keep sulfur around (if you do not, you deserve all you can get). A good dusting with sulfur, followed by going down to the local coffee shop for it to react was usually enough to take care of it. Even in extremely hot weather if you are fast enough the quantity that escapes in the air as vapour and goes all over the place is relatively low.
CFLs contain mercury which has already been vapourised. It immediately goes everywhere. You cannot get rid of it by anything short of stripping all walls, ceilings, floor followed by replastering and redecorating the room completely.
One of the reasons why I prefer to telecommute. If you are really stuck on something, there is nothing better than sitting for 5-10 minutes in front of the fish tank or taking the dog for a walk. Clears brain blocks outright. And as you clearly pointed out in the office this is at the mercy of the current PHB. That is, if you have the place to accommodate them in the first place. Most of the UK does not have it. Open plan country...
In addition to that IBM has done a relatively good job to ensure that porting applications is a breeze, especially to-from linux. It used to be the case where migration from Solaris to linux and back was the easiest. IMO, nowdays, AIX has overtaken it in that respect.
In addition to that, if Qantas does not have sufficiently good application level fallback and has to rely on the hardware being rock solid, AIX is another obvious choice. You get clearly better MTB compared to a PC based server under Linux. Everything else aside you have working hardware monitoring and management which under linux is still a problem. Add to that some noises IBM is making about binary compatibility and you get a fairly compelling deal for a large company which runs a lot of custom software (which I bet was initially written for a mainframe and expects the hardware + OS to have 99.95+ year round availability).
No need. Cable goes through Hawaii anyway and is under part American ownership by surprise surprise AT&T. Which we all know does not bend over to NSA and USA govt at their slightest whim even on internal in-the USA communications. Cough... Cough...
In the UK, in same nursery as my kid when he was 3 there was at least one case of Rickets worse than anything I have seen in the 3rd world. Locally born, locally grown.
The really disgusting point here is that the nursery in question was running the daycare for a UK health trust so the child was a child of UK healthcare professional.
All symptoms - skull deformity, chest deformity and O-legs so pronounced that a small dog could jump through between the knees when the child was standing straight with heels together.
And that is not the only one I have seen in the UK (though clearly the worst one).
I agree with you regarding the presense of D in the diet, but there is an important point here - when taken in its normal form it requires activation by UV in the skin. Only formula milk contains preactivated D (aka D3). Even most vitamin supplements contain the non-active form. In order for it to be activated one should get at least 35 mins unhindered (no cream) summer sun per day in UK lattitudes (on average for a caucasian white, adjust up for a darker skin). Currently, the schools and nurseries splat kids with factor 32+ and do not allow them out without it (and/or mandate long trousers and long sleeve in the summer months). As a result, how much vitamin D you have taken in food is irrelevant, it is not getting activated.
You also forgot to add that besides a number of major cancers Vitamin D defficiency also has clear links to obesity as well. Its defficiency in childhood results in soft tissue growth overtaking bone development and very quickly going down the fat kid spiral. Nearly every obese kid aged 7-14 has classic X legs which are a clear indication that he/she has gone through vitamin D defficiency at some point in their life (usually past the age of 2, earlier results in O-shape). For every 1 person the "Dip your child into factor 40 cream" cretins save from skin cancer tens will die of other vitamin D defficiency related illnesses.
Just look at Australia. It was the first to go into the "hide in the shade" overdrive and we constantly get Australian studies quoted about the dangers of sun onto us (without any corrections for the fact that the numbers should be corrected for different lattitudes). It now is the world leader in obesity overtaking the US.
It is proudly followed by surprise surprise - UK which has taken all AU studies and is applying them blindly despite being at way further from the Equator. It is quite funny, every time I get some "scary" number quoted I ask the origin and it ends up being Australia from the height of the Ozone hole period. In the UK there is a further complicating factor - GP incompetence. None of the UK GPs and health visitors carries out the standard checks for rachitis on children. Further to this, if you ask them they tell you not to worry. If a child in the age 3-18 months get an abnormal hair loss, they tell you to go get special shampoo for him instead of running blood tests (which the rest of EU does).
Many ISPs have a policy not to notify you what they have done and some are not allowed by law (data protection and privacy legislations). So the lack of responce does not mean a thing. Personally I would have preferred that all hook it up into their ticketing system so users get a reply, but some of them still run ticketing on primitive crap that does not have an Email interface (like one well known "best ISP for 200X" in the UK).
I would rather tolerate David Brent compared to a pathological liar with acute nasoanal interfacing tendencies as the sole means of career advancement.
First and foremeost: read the CV in advance, do every single background check you can and at the first lie - show him the door. Which is valid for any interview anyway. Not just management. A person who is happy to lie in your face in an interview is not someone you would like to work with.
AFAIK the kid is in a state where it is beyond the possibility of psychological. Seriously bad case. AFAIK, he did not know in any of the cases when it is turned on and off. I am saying AFAIK, because I did not do it myself - I was only supplying the equipment. No idea if they have a microwave, would not be surprised if they do not.
I know a number of people who can notice wifi (in the b,g range) including some very bad cases. Seems to be hereditary as well - I know at least one case where a father and son both can hear a constant "winding-up" buzz from WiFi. In the son's case it is so bad that no WiFi access point can be anywhere close to him (he is autistic and just turning wifi a few rooms across hits him out flat). My first thought was that it is infra or ultrasound overspill from the power supply which is another well known one and generally more common. So after cycling through 7+ APs of different brands we went through all possible power supplies including running HostAP on a laptop. Same story. Wifi on - father hears buzzzzzz and the poor kid is spaced out. End of the day they got Devolo ethernet power bridge adapters instead.
So do not just discard that. It is a well known phenomenon. While quite rare, it exists and some people really cannot stand it.
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Which country?
Western Europe, USA, Japan - decision is indeed clear cut as they will blame you for it anyway. It is solely a question of who does it first.
Eastern Europe, Russia, China - you have a WHOLE ONE LEGAL COPY OF OFFICE? Who is the out of his mind person to buy it.
So it is all relative... Same as Microsoft policy to enforcing piracy. I have seen them turn a blind eye too many once you get far enough east. After all, as with all crack dealers - the first dose of is free.
Err... I think you took the example too literally.
That is besides the fact that the original analogy is wrong. What Bruce thinks is that as computing becomes a utility the security needs will decrease.
I hate to disagree. They will remain, probably even increase to match the "it just works" expectations you have for an utility.
Utilities do not have less expenditure on security just because they have become a utility.
Water companies have to deal with mandatory security of the water supply. Gas companies have to deal with mandatory security of the gas grid. Electrical companies need to provide security of the electrical grid. Old style telecommunication companies have some very hefty obligations regarding the availability of their communications in an emergency and have expenditure related to that as well.
Add to this the day-to-day battle with fraud and theft of service. Even without "national minorities" going around and digging out all of your copper cables and selling them for scrap there is a very large expenditure on security in any utility. Granted, it no longer appears as an item on the end-user bill, but it is there none the less. And lots of it.
If it all ends up being folded into the utility fold it may in fact end up being more than now. Everything else aside a utility is obliged to maintain a certain standard of service, hence 100% of Joe Bloggs will be covered by AV and firewall, not 1% like now and so on.
Spot on.
After multiple rounds of phone BS during which I was being told that I have "applied for a job in Dublin", while I have agreed to talk solely under the condition that the "D word is not mentioned", after being told that "I have to chose between networking and servers and no straddling fences", while having 10+ years in both I had enough and told them to have a nice day.
Right choice actually, as I now work for a company which does not have an all-encompassing NDA invading into my private life and beyond, I work from home under better conditions and I very happily straddle the fence between network and servers.
Frankly, there are better places to work than Google. By far. And quite a few of them.
Dear coward. First of all, do not be such a coward next time.
I am simply presenting the conditions to which I have been told to agree as preliminary before agreeing to proceed further by the relevant g00gl3dr01d. If I dig through my asterisk voice recordings from that period I may probably even find a recording of some of the conversations (do not remember if I recorded those particular ones or not).
At least this is the situation in my corner of Europe at the moment. No idea if it is any different elsewhere. As far as the historical truths vs gimmicks - they are truths. Just ask anyone with a white hair and a ponytail at an IETF or USENIX. Some of them still remember the times.
No. While it does some cutting edge work, it is not anything particularly new as far as working methods are concerned:
Google has some of the attributes which the industry used to have before penny-pinching cretins tried to "rationalize" it. As a result it achieves roughly what the industry used to achieve in those days. In fact less. Just look at the level of innovation coming out of ATT, IBM, Xerox and early Valley companies 30+ years ago per hour human time invested. In everything besides these "blast from the past" attritbutes it is an utterly bog standard corporation. And the primary aim of the NDA is to hide this, not to hide its supersecret achievements.
And now follows news at 11.
Is the internet devolving or this is just my impression? Routing protocols? Redundancy? Multipath anyone?
Not quite.
This is more like NetApp and other high-end NAS and SAN systems where a facility like this is used for backup. The backup system looks at a snapshot taken at X:00 and backs it up at leisure while the users continue to read/write to the filesystem on top of it. Once the backup is complete you obsolete the checkpoint on which the backup was operating. As a result you have a true backup of the filesystem at point X, not something that spread from X to X+N hours.
This is a killer feature as far as any enterprise is concerned and one of the main reasons people at one point start looking at SANs and NAS-es.
Less seeks is the answer and lower number of address fields, lead bits and trailers. Less seeks - obvious. Adress fields, trailers, lead bits, etc - the entire formatting information on a block is not always error correctable (at least some of it isn't). As a result any deffect in it will immediately flag the sector as defective. Compared to that the data is ECC corrected and the industry is approaching a point where the drives function solely due to the ECC correction capabilities for data. Once upon a time the spec used to have an error code for "data read, but ECC corrrected". I have yet to see a post-2000 drive use this. All read and apply ECC silently.
On another note, it will be entertaining to see how the most cretinous item in the POSIX standards - the du and other disk utilities output evolves after this one. Nothing has pissed me off more than having to use -k all the time to see it in kbytes than the mandated 512b blocks.
So now, after the block size changed how does one comply to this standard? Or they will finally see the light and amend it back to K?
Absolutely. This is not a free energy at all. What I find more interesting is that the system uses the same turbine design as Quiet Revolution turbines. AFAIK this design is still under a couple of patents so they will have to shell out a very sizeable license fee. Pity Quiet Revolution is not public, this would have been a good time to play with its shares.
This will be 20+ patterns just for people of Pakistani descent (20+ different major tribal languages from different language groups). Europe - 20+ more. Ex-Soviet union - 20+ more. That is not counting dialects which quite often affect lip technique more than differences between languages. You gotta be kidding. Just calibrating the damn system to different language groups cost hundreds of millions.
And it will still not recognise them.
Germans found that out in world war 2 and used it. Apparently, no matter how good you get in a language you use different lip technique from the native speakers. As a result a professional lip reader (or a deaf person trained to lip read) will pick you out right away.
Back on the British topic. Just looking at the 7/7 and 21/7 bombers you have more than 4 different ethnic origins - Somali, Jamaican, Ethiopian and various different tribes originally from Pakistan. Each of these will be using a non-standard lip technique. While it may be possible to get some relatively low reading rate by a professional who has unlimited time to look at the tape, a real-time automated system will fail miserably right away. The only ones it will pick out will be Caucasian whites of English origin (I suspect it will fail on Scots and Welsh) who for some unbeknown to us reason have decided to discuss 7/7 instead of Chelsea vs Arsenal (that will probably be 1-2 people in the whole country anyway).
No.
He is looking at a different market. The current Microsoft obsession is to displace RIM and everyone else from the enterprise market.
Is your cellco or your company sponsoring your phone is irrelevant as far as MSFT is concerned. What they are interested is a sale. The current phone replacement rates in the end-user market keep dropping. The margins there are also not to MSFT's liking so they are not interested in sales there. Not surprisingly they look at enterprise as their main market. The enterprise has been "taking onboard" that mobile workforce thing for 7+ years now and MSFT has failed to deliver. In the meantime RIM showed it to be possible and showed the way to do it. As we all know while MSFT does not innovate it is very good at catch-up. So it will catch-up to RIM sooner or later providing better integration (no wonder Outlook 2007 stopped interfacing to BB), more applications, development tools and other stuff of interest to corps.
If we look from that perspective at the iPhone, it is a failure before it has been launched. It is a closed platform without any of the apps of interest to an enterprise. And considering the current phone replacement rates in the end-user market it is also not going to get very far. And it is also late there because most of the people who wanted an MP3 phone already got one. So all it can aim for will be ipod replacement sales for high end ipods. Which is pittance.
Gawd, I am agreeing with Ballmer... Can't believe it. But he is right as far as this one is concerned.
Anyway, unless Apple opens the iPhone to applications (with some certification if needed) it is totally dead.
You have been watching the Wrong channel(TM).
Instead of watching Comedy Central you should actually watch the news.
And on the news Ivan Slavkov has been completely exonerated and reinstated as a member of the International Olympic Comitee. After all his behaviour strictly adheres to the standards of this venerable institution and he is a shining example of how this institution functions and how the decisions in it have always been taken, are taken and will be taken for the forseable future.
You forgot the most important one: 'Think twice before paying any of the so called "search optimisation consultants"'.
In what form though?
The thermometers and thermostats contain liquid mercury. The old standard safety rules for handling liquid mercury were that if you need to deal with it you must keep sulfur around (if you do not, you deserve all you can get). A good dusting with sulfur, followed by going down to the local coffee shop for it to react was usually enough to take care of it. Even in extremely hot weather if you are fast enough the quantity that escapes in the air as vapour and goes all over the place is relatively low.
CFLs contain mercury which has already been vapourised. It immediately goes everywhere. You cannot get rid of it by anything short of stripping all walls, ceilings, floor followed by replastering and redecorating the room completely.
I think the tagline logo for patents should now be changed. All you can eat is over.
One of the reasons why I prefer to telecommute. If you are really stuck on something, there is nothing better than sitting for 5-10 minutes in front of the fish tank or taking the dog for a walk. Clears brain blocks outright. And as you clearly pointed out in the office this is at the mercy of the current PHB. That is, if you have the place to accommodate them in the first place. Most of the UK does not have it. Open plan country...
In addition to that IBM has done a relatively good job to ensure that porting applications is a breeze, especially to-from linux. It used to be the case where migration from Solaris to linux and back was the easiest. IMO, nowdays, AIX has overtaken it in that respect.
In addition to that, if Qantas does not have sufficiently good application level fallback and has to rely on the hardware being rock solid, AIX is another obvious choice. You get clearly better MTB compared to a PC based server under Linux. Everything else aside you have working hardware monitoring and management which under linux is still a problem. Add to that some noises IBM is making about binary compatibility and you get a fairly compelling deal for a large company which runs a lot of custom software (which I bet was initially written for a mainframe and expects the hardware + OS to have 99.95+ year round availability).
No need. Cable goes through Hawaii anyway and is under part American ownership by surprise surprise AT&T. Which we all know does not bend over to NSA and USA govt at their slightest whim even on internal in-the USA communications. Cough... Cough...
Disagree.
In the UK, in same nursery as my kid when he was 3 there was at least one case of Rickets worse than anything I have seen in the 3rd world. Locally born, locally grown.
The really disgusting point here is that the nursery in question was running the daycare for a UK health trust so the child was a child of UK healthcare professional.
All symptoms - skull deformity, chest deformity and O-legs so pronounced that a small dog could jump through between the knees when the child was standing straight with heels together.
And that is not the only one I have seen in the UK (though clearly the worst one).
I agree with you regarding the presense of D in the diet, but there is an important point here - when taken in its normal form it requires activation by UV in the skin. Only formula milk contains preactivated D (aka D3). Even most vitamin supplements contain the non-active form. In order for it to be activated one should get at least 35 mins unhindered (no cream) summer sun per day in UK lattitudes (on average for a caucasian white, adjust up for a darker skin). Currently, the schools and nurseries splat kids with factor 32+ and do not allow them out without it (and/or mandate long trousers and long sleeve in the summer months). As a result, how much vitamin D you have taken in food is irrelevant, it is not getting activated.
Yep.
You also forgot to add that besides a number of major cancers Vitamin D defficiency also has clear links to obesity as well. Its defficiency in childhood results in soft tissue growth overtaking bone development and very quickly going down the fat kid spiral. Nearly every obese kid aged 7-14 has classic X legs which are a clear indication that he/she has gone through vitamin D defficiency at some point in their life (usually past the age of 2, earlier results in O-shape). For every 1 person the "Dip your child into factor 40 cream" cretins save from skin cancer tens will die of other vitamin D defficiency related illnesses.
Just look at Australia. It was the first to go into the "hide in the shade" overdrive and we constantly get Australian studies quoted about the dangers of sun onto us (without any corrections for the fact that the numbers should be corrected for different lattitudes). It now is the world leader in obesity overtaking the US.
It is proudly followed by surprise surprise - UK which has taken all AU studies and is applying them blindly despite being at way further from the Equator. It is quite funny, every time I get some "scary" number quoted I ask the origin and it ends up being Australia from the height of the Ozone hole period. In the UK there is a further complicating factor - GP incompetence. None of the UK GPs and health visitors carries out the standard checks for rachitis on children. Further to this, if you ask them they tell you not to worry. If a child in the age 3-18 months get an abnormal hair loss, they tell you to go get special shampoo for him instead of running blood tests (which the rest of EU does).
Many ISPs have a policy not to notify you what they have done and some are not allowed by law (data protection and privacy legislations). So the lack of responce does not mean a thing. Personally I would have preferred that all hook it up into their ticketing system so users get a reply, but some of them still run ticketing on primitive crap that does not have an Email interface (like one well known "best ISP for 200X" in the UK).
I would rather tolerate David Brent compared to a pathological liar with acute nasoanal interfacing tendencies as the sole means of career advancement.
First and foremeost: read the CV in advance, do every single background check you can and at the first lie - show him the door. Which is valid for any interview anyway. Not just management. A person who is happy to lie in your face in an interview is not someone you would like to work with.
AFAIK the kid is in a state where it is beyond the possibility of psychological. Seriously bad case. AFAIK, he did not know in any of the cases when it is turned on and off. I am saying AFAIK, because I did not do it myself - I was only supplying the equipment. No idea if they have a microwave, would not be surprised if they do not.
I know a number of people who can notice wifi (in the b,g range) including some very bad cases. Seems to be hereditary as well - I know at least one case where a father and son both can hear a constant "winding-up" buzz from WiFi. In the son's case it is so bad that no WiFi access point can be anywhere close to him (he is autistic and just turning wifi a few rooms across hits him out flat). My first thought was that it is infra or ultrasound overspill from the power supply which is another well known one and generally more common. So after cycling through 7+ APs of different brands we went through all possible power supplies including running HostAP on a laptop. Same story. Wifi on - father hears buzzzzzz and the poor kid is spaced out. End of the day they got Devolo ethernet power bridge adapters instead.
So do not just discard that. It is a well known phenomenon. While quite rare, it exists and some people really cannot stand it.