In this day and age, in our litigous society, it is possible, even likely, that the company would give no reason (let's say that they wouldn't make an offer until after the check was completed). Otherwise qualified candidates have no idea that they were rejected based on innaccurate information and there's no "Fair Credit Reporting Act" type of legislation (creditors are required to report why you were reject for credit).
To complete the paranoia, it isn't limited to criminal records. Companies routinely do plain old credit and medical background checks. They are not required to report these findings, or even let you rebut them.
You're pretty much screwed. This type of problem can follow you around for years before anyone notices that anything's wrong.
You've reached the voice mail for the MPAA. We were attending the latest wrap party until the wee hours, so we won't be able to litigate until at least 1pm. Maybe. Definitely 2 if I can get Raul to bring me a double decaf mocha latte' supremo. Oh, darn, I've got aroma-therapy at 2... Okay, 3pm. Absolutely by 3. Oh wait [BEEP]
A college degree is, as a very wise PhD once told me, just another union card. It affords you access to employment opportunities. The education you get while you get your "card" is up to you. You can choose to do the least amount of work possible, squander opportunities to learn from others who might be smarter than you, and not make any lifetime friends. Or you can take the precious time when your only "job" is to learn as much as possible from every possible source.
The cost of an education is not directly related to its quality, but the value of the union card (diploma) does have some positive correlation. I went to an Ivy League school, got a middle of the road education and spent, what was back then, the cost of a small McDonald's franchise for the privilege. My brother graduated suma cum laude from UConn, got a top flight education for a fraction of the cost. He has done very, very well. On the other hand, when I was starting out and had no work experience, the degree opened doors. No one gave me anything; I still had to prove my worth before hiring.
Mr. Greenspun is a long-time advocate of a tuition free undergraduate education, and for good reason: Our country is not making enough engineers, not making enough good ones, and we're not learning fast enough. I've used Unix systems since the mid-80's, and the same problems that I encountered then exist today! If civil engineering learned as slowly as the computer "scientists", our bridges would fall down with alarming regularity. No, ArsDigita University is not about getting people jobs or recognizing time serverd with a diploma, it is about creating an intelligent generation of engineers who know enough about our history not to repeat it.
Geez, get real. I'm not a big fan of ORBS, mainly because it is a little too agressive for my taste; I prefer the RBL and company because they have a very rigid process for adding sites to their list. When Paul Vixie set up the RBL, he did it not to stop spam, but to make better system administrators (his words). SPAM is infinitely stoppable if the ISP egineers of the world weren't so overworked by management on other projects which are perceived to be more valuable.
MSN.com was on the RBL for awhile. It too caused an uproar: "Hello, MSN customer support. Yes, we know that your e-mail is bouncing and we're sorry about that. We have nothing to do with it, really. You see there's this tiny 10 person consulting firm in Redwood City..." Yah, right.
For the number of networks that honor ORBS, this will cause AOL great pain, no matter how small the fraction of the total it is. It will alert them to the cost that spam imposes on the rest of the world, and perhaps they will get a clue and invest some more time and money into blocking it. They are not a 600 pound gorilla when it comes to e-mail.
What we need is a Karma manager in the UI. As you get "smarter," you get to see and enjoy more features. The really hard part will be (A) deciding how much karma you get for a specific action, (B) do you get more if you use it more often, diminishing returns, or none at all, and (C) how to weight advanced functions so increased karma will show you the "next" group. Personally, I find it terribly annoying when I have to use a search box in the help system to find a command that I know how to use, but just can't remember where some designer buried it in the UI hierarchy.
Then buy a OneGate box from FreeGate (well, now Tut, but the web site still says FreeGate). It, too, uses FreeBSD, comes in a sleek black 1u package and plugs into the usual suspects of WAN connections. I've used them as corporate web boxes, firewalls, routers, sra & b2b vpn's, mail relays and DNS hosts. The 150 makes a great drop-in home office system. I describe them as putting average sys admins out of work (or at least on to more interesting projects). <disclaimer>I am a former employee and a current stockholder.</disclaimer>
Thank you/. and dnspolicy.net for getting me off of my lazy butt. I crafted this letter and sent it to as many registrars as are listed at InterNIC. Here are the results, as they happen
The recently announced Oxygen Project at MIT refers to the RAW processor as part of its design. The chip will rewrite its internal wiring using logic gates and microcode, compiled in some HLL. Sounds like chips are getting so big that it isn't worth the effort to customized them anymore. Just install FPGAs in everything and change the configurations as needed.
Slashdot Mirror
In this day and age, in our litigous society, it is possible, even likely, that the company would give no reason (let's say that they wouldn't make an offer until after the check was completed). Otherwise qualified candidates have no idea that they were rejected based on innaccurate information and there's no "Fair Credit Reporting Act" type of legislation (creditors are required to report why you were reject for credit).
To complete the paranoia, it isn't limited to criminal records. Companies routinely do plain old credit and medical background checks. They are not required to report these findings, or even let you rebut them.
You're pretty much screwed. This type of problem can follow you around for years before anyone notices that anything's wrong.
You've reached the voice mail for the MPAA. We were attending the latest wrap party until the wee hours, so we won't be able to litigate until at least 1pm. Maybe. Definitely 2 if I can get Raul to bring me a double decaf mocha latte' supremo. Oh, darn, I've got aroma-therapy at 2... Okay, 3pm. Absolutely by 3. Oh wait [BEEP]
The cost of an education is not directly related to its quality, but the value of the union card (diploma) does have some positive correlation. I went to an Ivy League school, got a middle of the road education and spent, what was back then, the cost of a small McDonald's franchise for the privilege. My brother graduated suma cum laude from UConn, got a top flight education for a fraction of the cost. He has done very, very well. On the other hand, when I was starting out and had no work experience, the degree opened doors. No one gave me anything; I still had to prove my worth before hiring.
Mr. Greenspun is a long-time advocate of a tuition free undergraduate education, and for good reason: Our country is not making enough engineers, not making enough good ones, and we're not learning fast enough. I've used Unix systems since the mid-80's, and the same problems that I encountered then exist today! If civil engineering learned as slowly as the computer "scientists", our bridges would fall down with alarming regularity. No, ArsDigita University is not about getting people jobs or recognizing time serverd with a diploma, it is about creating an intelligent generation of engineers who know enough about our history not to repeat it.
MSN.com was on the RBL for awhile. It too caused an uproar: "Hello, MSN customer support. Yes, we know that your e-mail is bouncing and we're sorry about that. We have nothing to do with it, really. You see there's this tiny 10 person consulting firm in Redwood City..." Yah, right.
For the number of networks that honor ORBS, this will cause AOL great pain, no matter how small the fraction of the total it is. It will alert them to the cost that spam imposes on the rest of the world, and perhaps they will get a clue and invest some more time and money into blocking it. They are not a 600 pound gorilla when it comes to e-mail.
15 million listings, big Oracle databases, lots of hits
What we need is a Karma manager in the UI. As you get "smarter," you get to see and enjoy more features. The really hard part will be (A) deciding how much karma you get for a specific action, (B) do you get more if you use it more often, diminishing returns, or none at all, and (C) how to weight advanced functions so increased karma will show you the "next" group. Personally, I find it terribly annoying when I have to use a search box in the help system to find a command that I know how to use, but just can't remember where some designer buried it in the UI hierarchy.
Then buy a OneGate box from FreeGate (well, now Tut, but the web site still says FreeGate). It, too, uses FreeBSD, comes in a sleek black 1u package and plugs into the usual suspects of WAN connections. I've used them as corporate web boxes, firewalls, routers, sra & b2b vpn's, mail relays and DNS hosts. The 150 makes a great drop-in home office system. I describe them as putting average sys admins out of work (or at least on to more interesting projects). <disclaimer>I am a former employee and a current stockholder.</disclaimer>
Thank you /. and dnspolicy.net for getting me off of my lazy butt. I crafted this letter and sent it to as many registrars as are listed at InterNIC. Here are the results, as they happen
last week there as talk about Bruce Schneier's article "Key Finding" Attacks and Publicity Attacks. Newspapers. I guess neither M. Kaspersky doesn't read /.
The recently announced Oxygen Project at MIT refers to the RAW processor as part of its design. The chip will rewrite its internal wiring using logic gates and microcode, compiled in some HLL. Sounds like chips are getting so big that it isn't worth the effort to customized them anymore. Just install FPGAs in everything and change the configurations as needed.