It's my opinion that services running in parallel with a real life service shouldn't need to use ads online. A good example are newspapers that IMHO should make all their money on the paper version (ads + retail) and offer the online version for free (perhaps with some paper-subscriber-only content) with no ads.
While I agree with the rest of your post, this part got me. Why should a newspaper give away the online version for free? The online version costs them something greater than 0, so by not putting ads there you are asking the subscribers and print advertisers to completely subsidize those that read online without paying. The price of the paper version may have to go up to cover the additional costs. And unless there's a lot of subscriber-only content, a lot of subscribers are going to stop paying for the paper if they can get substantially the same thing online for free. It'd be one thing if they charged you to read the online version, but then again, they charge you for the print version and they still fill that up with ads too.
Sounds like you're just asking for someone else to pay your way for you.
Exactly, and that's the problem. Neither side can seem to understand that one. The left tries to "make the wilderness better" while the right tries to develop it or drill into it or whatever. (No I'm not against all development, far from it)
Yeah, I'm gonna have to go ahead and, ummm, disagree with you there. Those that care about the environment may tend to be conservationists instead of environmentalists, but it's been my experience that most don't care.
Most people do not want a nuclear power plants anywhere near their home... if only for the reason that their very existence devalues one's property considerably.
But the only reason it devalues one's property considerably is because most people do not want a nuclear power plant anywhere near their home. So if the only reason for concern is property value then it wouldn't be a concern if the cycle could be broken. However, I think most people have other concerns (such as safety), be they valid or not.
Someone else already pointed out your obvious mistake in converting cubic meters to cubic millimeters, but that's not the only error...
the total volume of water we are talking about over that vast area with the assumptions I have made is 1.6 mm^3. That is only about.146 grams of water.
Isn't one of the supposed beauties of the metric system that you can deal with powers of 10? So how can it possibly be the case that 1.6 cubic millimeters is equivalent to.146 grams? That would be a factor of 10.9589. Of course, even if we were to use a factor of 10 we'd still be wrong since you again screwed up the conversion due to not working in three dimensions: there are 1000 cubic millimeters in a cubic centimeter, not 10. So if the starting number were really 1.6mm^3 (which it's not as the other poster pointed out), that would equate to 0.0016 grams of water, not 0.16, and certainly not 0.146.
So, combining the original screw-up (which made your number low by a factor of a million) with this one (which made you high by a factor of a hundred), as well as your whacked out mm^3 -> gram conversion (which made you low by 10%), the final answer should be... about 6.8 kJ. Or 6.8 MJ if you want to do it a thousand times in a flight.
But wait, there's more! You're assuming that the temperature of the ice needs only be raised by 1 degree C. The article says it needs to be raised TO 1 or 2 degrees C, but who knows what the starting temperature of an iced-up wing is. But let's say we need to raise it 5 degrees. Now we're up to 34 kJ.
But wait, there's STILL more -- and this one's a biggie! You're (conveniently) ignoring heat of fusion. Remember that from chemistry class? So tack on another 334 joules per gram of water. At 1600 grams, that's another 534kJ every time you fire off this thing, for a grand total of 567kJ per use, or so many megajoules if it's used 1000 times in a flight. Not gonna de-ice a 747 with a D cell anymore, are we?
And just as an aside, 541 meters^2 isn't as big an overestimation as it may seem at first glance, because that is not the "total surface area" of the wings, it is the wing area. You'd need to multiply 541 by 2 to get the total wing surface area, as wings have two sides - you know, a top and a bottom. You may even need to multiply it by a little more than 2 since I'm assuming wing area is just the area of the wing's planform, and not actual surface area which would be higher due to the airfoil shape, but I'm not an aeronautical engineer so I don't know.
Don't post innacurate information
How about your hideously wrong math, does that count as inaccurate information? And what about your hideously wrong spelling of inaccurate?
A short ton (2000 pounds) is a "standard" ton in the US. At least according to Wikipedia, the "standard" ton in the UK is the long ton, which is 2240 pounds. There is no universal standard ton.
No, I'm not assuming that six months to live means six months. My post was in reply to someone who basically stated that sitting around for six months will cause one to rack up huge amounts of debt. Therefore, it was a given that six months meant six months. My post was independent of the cause of needing to sit around for six months.
The cancer patients doesn't [sic] care whether his/her estate gets that money. If I die from cancer, I want my estate to have plenty of money for my wife and my children.
So increase your life insurance to cover how much those months will cost. It's relatively small potatoes compared to life insurance payouts. My employer gives me, as basic coverage that I don't have to pay for, twice my annual salary. An additional four times my annual pay (so triple the basic coverage) would cost me a whopping $200 a year. Of course I'm young, but hey, Christopher Reeve's wife died of cancer at 44. $200 is a miniscule amount to pay for the peace of mind that I could spend my last days with my family or out doing something I would rather be doing, rather than chained to my desk.
And at the end of the day, I would bet that most children would give up their entire inheritance for just one more day to spend with their lost parent. Money isn't everything.
Yes it would be nice if you could sit around for 6 months. But it is selfish.
If you don't have enough money in savings to sit around for six months, then you've over-extended yourself (or you're poor, but given that this is Slashdot, I'm assuming not). If we were talking about a couple years then you'd have a point, but you should always have at least a several month reserve of money lying around. It may not be cancer or illness that makes you need to use it, it could be a lay-off.
You are *not* flagged simply for depositing $9999.99.
You will likely be flagged if you deposit $9999.99 several times, because it is right under the limit and looks like you're trying to avoid the reporting.
Calgary currently has the only bobsled run in Canada. Before it, Canadians had to train at Lake Placid
And if I recall correctly Lake Placid has one of only two bobsled runs in the US, the other being near Salt Lake City of course. So they're clearly not exactly a hot commidity.
In Georgia, they built an artificial river rapids for the kayaking events.
Actually the '96 events were on a natural river (the Ocoee) that was artificially "enhanced", so it wasn't completely artificial. Northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee (the events were actually held in southeastern Tennessee) are quite rugged, so it would have been ridiculous for them to build a completely artificial course, unless they wanted the events within a few miles of Atlanta. London, on the other hand, does appear to be building a completely artificial venue.
Please tell me you're joking? properly implemented encryption? It was terrible
Actually, the Germans' use of the Enigma was the most terrible part. Operators using their initials as keys, sending messages that were identical (or nearly so, such as form letters) using different keys, sending messages that consisted of nothing but the same letter, etc etc etc.
Enigma had its share of design problems, don't get me wrong. But I would hardly call it terrible, especially given the age of the technology. It would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, to break had the Germans used it properly.
Canada, where hockey reigns supreme, couldn't find a single ice rink, appropriate for speed-skaters to practice on, in the entire country?
Hockey rinks are of vastly different dimensions than a (long-track, at least) speed skating oval. An NHL rink is 200 feet long and 85 feet wide, giving a perimeter of 570 feet or 173m (ignoring rounded corners, so the true length is shorter). Long-track speed skating tracks are 400m. For this reason it is rare to find indoor speed skating ovals; I believe Calgary was the first Olympics where the speed skating was held indoors (I'm not sure about 1984, but the oval in Lake Placid (1980) is outside in front of the high school). Short track could be held on a hockey rink, but then short-track has only been an Olympic medal sport since 1992 (its Olympic debut was as a demonstration sport in Calgary).
Probably as divided over time and space as those incidents. The Cole was in 2000. That's 6 years ago.
So? What does the age of the event have to do with it? Are you saying things would be different now? Well, the Madrid bombing was two years ago, and the London bombings were 7 months ago. Are those recent enough? Because I still don't recall anybody demonstrating in the streets in protest of either of those events. Yet over a cartoon they come out en masse.
You're right, it is injustice. My point in all of this is that while the Muslim community seems to take great offense to their being stereotyped as terrorists, they could do a heck of a lot more than they are to combat that myth. Showing outrage at the terrorist acts themselves, condemning those that commit such acts in the name of Islam, not electing a terrorist organization (which unfortunately goes a long way to dispel the notion that it's all the violent minority), finding a strong leader to stand up to be the voice of the non-militants (an anti bin Laden, if you will). They have allowed some extremists to completely corrupt their religion by using it to perpetrate heinously violent acts. It's time for the silent majority to become not-so-silent.
Pot, meet kettle. Beheading video, meet Abu Gharib pictures.
The reaction of much of the United States to Abu Ghraib was outrage. Compared to, say, the Palestinian reaction to the September 11 attacks (yes, I invoked 9/11, at the risk of sounding like a stereotypical flag-waving American). You do recall the images of thousands of them celebrating in the streets, don't you? It's incidents like that that show that the cleaning up of their own house has a long, long way to go, and it's not due to biased coverage by the reviled media. The fact that the aforementioned Palestinians overwhelmingly elected a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel is proof of that.
From your other post: One of the chief reasons they are upset is that the pictures strengthen and play on the very prejudice they've been trying to get rid off [sic] for a long while now, namely muslim == terrorist.
And so in reaction to that, they burn some embassies? Further reinforcing the impression that Muslim==terrorist. What a self-defeating reaction. Further, the Danish cartoons were relatively mild compared to some of the anti-Israeli cartoons that come out of the Arab world (a google search on this topic reveals plenty of results showing what I mean). As for the vast majority of the protests being peaceful, I'm sure they were. But I'd guess that the vast majority of the citizens of Los Angeles didn't participate in the 1992 race riots, either. Did the media do wrong by focusing so heavily on those? Unfortunately, as in everything else, it only takes a few bad people to ruin it for everyone else.
Moreover, if Muslims are so upset over a cartoon that furthers the Muslim==terrorist prejudice, then where is the outrage when Muslims actually commit terrorist acts in the name of Islam, the ultimate furtherance of that prejudice! Dozens of suicide bombings in Israel, the USS Cole, African embassy bombings, Sept 11, the Madrid train bombing, the bombings in London. Where is the outrage at all those? All these have done far more to further the Muslim==terrorist notion than any cartoon ever could. Why is it ok for Muslims to actually be terrorists, but when someone in the west points out this fact (yes, it's a fact - some Muslims are terrorists), it's a cause for mass uprising? And worse, as I said before, the only people out in the streets on 9/11 were not expressing outrage, they were celebrating! Utterly hypocritical.
I agree with you, both sides have abundant reasons to hate each other, but you came across more as a Muslim apologist than anything else.
even if my parents wanted to send money my way, i wouldn't accept it. then again, thevalue of my life isn't tied to things.
Who said you had to buy "things" with the money they're sending? Why not use it to support yourself (in the food and shelter sense of the phrase) while doing things that add value to your life? For example, I love to hike. What would I do if somebody was going to give me a trust fund? I'd stop working and go hiking. I certainly wouldn't blow it on a McMansion or a giant TV or any other "things".
This certainly isn't to disagree with the rest of your post. Just trying to point out that not all money must be spent keeping ahead of the Joneses.
Yes it can. I've had it happen. And after a while of getting shot down, you begin to not want to bother spending the time to write up a formal, yet ultimately worthless, document.
Write a proposal, CC it to their boss.
I don't know about your situation, but a lot of folks don't appreciate it when people go over their heads.
Uhhh... if it's so much crap, why are you interested in having a copy of your own? Or even renting it to begin with? Your argument is B.S., but then you're a troll so what do I expect.
Funny? Clearly the mods didn't RTFA, since that's what happened - the home was erroneously valued at $400 million (not $8M as the OP said, nor $800M as the summary said), and the tax bill was $8 million.
If I'd been fired for playing a game at lunchtime you can bet I'd be hiring a solicitor right now. Well, as soon as I finish this level...
Except that New York is an employment-at-will state. Your employer may fire you or you may quit at any time, with or without notice (*), for any reason, or for no reason at all (unless of course the reason is something otherwise prohibited, which is basically only age/sex/race/whatever discrimination). Employment contracts notwithstanding, of course, but I'll go out on a limb and say that a person in this guy's position wouldn't have a contract.
(*) At least in New York, conditions can be tacked on to "with or without notice" that act as incentives to employees to provide notice. For example, it's somewhat common to have a policy that says that employees will only be paid for unused vacation if they provide two weeks notice before quitting; if you just up and leave one day, you forfeit that money. My employer just instituted this policy.
Don't even get me started on interviewers who ask you to quote the documentation. ("What method do you call to set the text of a label?" WTF kind of question is that? Go read the documentation if you don't know! That's what it's for!)
I have mixed feelings on this one. For one thing it depends on how obscure the function is, and how often one would expect to use it in the job in question. In the example you cited, if you claim to have Java (I'm assuming Java since you said "method") GUI experience and are interviewing for a job involving Java GUI coding, you'd damn well better know what method to call to set the text of a label. An experienced programmer would have a complete GUI all coded up while you're still looking up the API calls to create a window. On the other hand, do I care if you could turn off double-buffering in Swing without consulting the API docs? No.
In addition to this depth of knowledge of the API in certain specific areas, breadth of knowledge (even at a shallow level) is important too. Using Java as an example again, if I asked you to use a map-based data structure that also keeps track of the order in which values were inserted into the map, there'd be two ways to go about it: create a subclass of HashMap which uses a backing List, or (the correct answer) just use LinkedHashMap.
Yes I know there's a lot more to programming than memorizing an API. But knowledge of an API is a reasonable indicator of a person's level of experience with a language, and does have an effect on productivity. At the same time, a good programmer will pick up a new API or a new language pretty quickly. As I said at the beginning, I have mixed feelings about this, but I don't think it's the taboo interview question you assert.
Slashdot Mirror
It's my opinion that services running in parallel with a real life service shouldn't need to use ads online. A good example are newspapers that IMHO should make all their money on the paper version (ads + retail) and offer the online version for free (perhaps with some paper-subscriber-only content) with no ads.
While I agree with the rest of your post, this part got me. Why should a newspaper give away the online version for free? The online version costs them something greater than 0, so by not putting ads there you are asking the subscribers and print advertisers to completely subsidize those that read online without paying. The price of the paper version may have to go up to cover the additional costs. And unless there's a lot of subscriber-only content, a lot of subscribers are going to stop paying for the paper if they can get substantially the same thing online for free. It'd be one thing if they charged you to read the online version, but then again, they charge you for the print version and they still fill that up with ads too.
Sounds like you're just asking for someone else to pay your way for you.
Best way to conserve land is leave it alone..
Exactly, and that's the problem. Neither side can seem to understand that one. The left tries to "make the wilderness better" while the right tries to develop it or drill into it or whatever. (No I'm not against all development, far from it)
while conservatives tend to be conservationists
Yeah, I'm gonna have to go ahead and, ummm, disagree with you there. Those that care about the environment may tend to be conservationists instead of environmentalists, but it's been my experience that most don't care.
Most people do not want a nuclear power plants anywhere near their home... if only for the reason that their very existence devalues one's property considerably.
But the only reason it devalues one's property considerably is because most people do not want a nuclear power plant anywhere near their home. So if the only reason for concern is property value then it wouldn't be a concern if the cycle could be broken. However, I think most people have other concerns (such as safety), be they valid or not.
Someone else already pointed out your obvious mistake in converting cubic meters to cubic millimeters, but that's not the only error...
.146 grams of water.
.146 grams? That would be a factor of 10.9589. Of course, even if we were to use a factor of 10 we'd still be wrong since you again screwed up the conversion due to not working in three dimensions: there are 1000 cubic millimeters in a cubic centimeter, not 10. So if the starting number were really 1.6mm^3 (which it's not as the other poster pointed out), that would equate to 0.0016 grams of water, not 0.16, and certainly not 0.146.
the total volume of water we are talking about over that vast area with the assumptions I have made is 1.6 mm^3. That is only about
Isn't one of the supposed beauties of the metric system that you can deal with powers of 10? So how can it possibly be the case that 1.6 cubic millimeters is equivalent to
So, combining the original screw-up (which made your number low by a factor of a million) with this one (which made you high by a factor of a hundred), as well as your whacked out mm^3 -> gram conversion (which made you low by 10%), the final answer should be... about 6.8 kJ. Or 6.8 MJ if you want to do it a thousand times in a flight.
But wait, there's more! You're assuming that the temperature of the ice needs only be raised by 1 degree C. The article says it needs to be raised TO 1 or 2 degrees C, but who knows what the starting temperature of an iced-up wing is. But let's say we need to raise it 5 degrees. Now we're up to 34 kJ.
But wait, there's STILL more -- and this one's a biggie! You're (conveniently) ignoring heat of fusion. Remember that from chemistry class? So tack on another 334 joules per gram of water. At 1600 grams, that's another 534kJ every time you fire off this thing, for a grand total of 567kJ per use, or so many megajoules if it's used 1000 times in a flight. Not gonna de-ice a 747 with a D cell anymore, are we?
And just as an aside, 541 meters^2 isn't as big an overestimation as it may seem at first glance, because that is not the "total surface area" of the wings, it is the wing area. You'd need to multiply 541 by 2 to get the total wing surface area, as wings have two sides - you know, a top and a bottom. You may even need to multiply it by a little more than 2 since I'm assuming wing area is just the area of the wing's planform, and not actual surface area which would be higher due to the airfoil shape, but I'm not an aeronautical engineer so I don't know.
Don't post innacurate information
How about your hideously wrong math, does that count as inaccurate information? And what about your hideously wrong spelling of inaccurate?
A short ton (2000 pounds) is a "standard" ton in the US. At least according to Wikipedia, the "standard" ton in the UK is the long ton, which is 2240 pounds. There is no universal standard ton.
And here I was hoping I would never have to read another article by JonKatz...
(For those too lazy to click the links, the Wired article was by Jon Katz. And for those who don't know who that is, read here.)
Think of it as a simple scheme, aimed at preventing us from making the same mistake twice
;-)
I think you're forgetting about this little thing called World War II
"Six months to live" means six months.
No, I'm not assuming that six months to live means six months. My post was in reply to someone who basically stated that sitting around for six months will cause one to rack up huge amounts of debt. Therefore, it was a given that six months meant six months. My post was independent of the cause of needing to sit around for six months.
The cancer patients doesn't [sic] care whether his/her estate gets that money. If I die from cancer, I want my estate to have plenty of money for my wife and my children.
So increase your life insurance to cover how much those months will cost. It's relatively small potatoes compared to life insurance payouts. My employer gives me, as basic coverage that I don't have to pay for, twice my annual salary. An additional four times my annual pay (so triple the basic coverage) would cost me a whopping $200 a year. Of course I'm young, but hey, Christopher Reeve's wife died of cancer at 44. $200 is a miniscule amount to pay for the peace of mind that I could spend my last days with my family or out doing something I would rather be doing, rather than chained to my desk.
And at the end of the day, I would bet that most children would give up their entire inheritance for just one more day to spend with their lost parent. Money isn't everything.
Yes it would be nice if you could sit around for 6 months. But it is selfish.
If you don't have enough money in savings to sit around for six months, then you've over-extended yourself (or you're poor, but given that this is Slashdot, I'm assuming not). If we were talking about a couple years then you'd have a point, but you should always have at least a several month reserve of money lying around. It may not be cancer or illness that makes you need to use it, it could be a lay-off.
http://snopes.com/autos/law/ticket.asp
You are *not* flagged simply for depositing $9999.99.
You will likely be flagged if you deposit $9999.99 several times, because it is right under the limit and looks like you're trying to avoid the reporting.
Calgary currently has the only bobsled run in Canada. Before it, Canadians had to train at Lake Placid
And if I recall correctly Lake Placid has one of only two bobsled runs in the US, the other being near Salt Lake City of course. So they're clearly not exactly a hot commidity.
In Georgia, they built an artificial river rapids for the kayaking events.
Actually the '96 events were on a natural river (the Ocoee) that was artificially "enhanced", so it wasn't completely artificial. Northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee (the events were actually held in southeastern Tennessee) are quite rugged, so it would have been ridiculous for them to build a completely artificial course, unless they wanted the events within a few miles of Atlanta. London, on the other hand, does appear to be building a completely artificial venue.
Please tell me you're joking? properly implemented encryption? It was terrible
Actually, the Germans' use of the Enigma was the most terrible part. Operators using their initials as keys, sending messages that were identical (or nearly so, such as form letters) using different keys, sending messages that consisted of nothing but the same letter, etc etc etc.
Enigma had its share of design problems, don't get me wrong. But I would hardly call it terrible, especially given the age of the technology. It would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, to break had the Germans used it properly.
I'll go with the Swedes, 3-2...
Damn... Maybe you should go buy a lotto ticket.
Canada, where hockey reigns supreme, couldn't find a single ice rink, appropriate for speed-skaters to practice on, in the entire country?
Hockey rinks are of vastly different dimensions than a (long-track, at least) speed skating oval. An NHL rink is 200 feet long and 85 feet wide, giving a perimeter of 570 feet or 173m (ignoring rounded corners, so the true length is shorter). Long-track speed skating tracks are 400m. For this reason it is rare to find indoor speed skating ovals; I believe Calgary was the first Olympics where the speed skating was held indoors (I'm not sure about 1984, but the oval in Lake Placid (1980) is outside in front of the high school). Short track could be held on a hockey rink, but then short-track has only been an Olympic medal sport since 1992 (its Olympic debut was as a demonstration sport in Calgary).
Yes, and I do also remember that those very images were debunked as archive footage two days later. Do you?
No, in fact I don't remember that.
Probably as divided over time and space as those incidents. The Cole was in 2000. That's 6 years ago.
So? What does the age of the event have to do with it? Are you saying things would be different now? Well, the Madrid bombing was two years ago, and the London bombings were 7 months ago. Are those recent enough? Because I still don't recall anybody demonstrating in the streets in protest of either of those events. Yet over a cartoon they come out en masse.
You're right, it is injustice. My point in all of this is that while the Muslim community seems to take great offense to their being stereotyped as terrorists, they could do a heck of a lot more than they are to combat that myth. Showing outrage at the terrorist acts themselves, condemning those that commit such acts in the name of Islam, not electing a terrorist organization (which unfortunately goes a long way to dispel the notion that it's all the violent minority), finding a strong leader to stand up to be the voice of the non-militants (an anti bin Laden, if you will). They have allowed some extremists to completely corrupt their religion by using it to perpetrate heinously violent acts. It's time for the silent majority to become not-so-silent.
Pot, meet kettle. Beheading video, meet Abu Gharib pictures.
The reaction of much of the United States to Abu Ghraib was outrage. Compared to, say, the Palestinian reaction to the September 11 attacks (yes, I invoked 9/11, at the risk of sounding like a stereotypical flag-waving American). You do recall the images of thousands of them celebrating in the streets, don't you? It's incidents like that that show that the cleaning up of their own house has a long, long way to go, and it's not due to biased coverage by the reviled media. The fact that the aforementioned Palestinians overwhelmingly elected a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel is proof of that.
From your other post:
One of the chief reasons they are upset is that the pictures strengthen and play on the very prejudice they've been trying to get rid off [sic] for a long while now, namely muslim == terrorist.
And so in reaction to that, they burn some embassies? Further reinforcing the impression that Muslim==terrorist. What a self-defeating reaction. Further, the Danish cartoons were relatively mild compared to some of the anti-Israeli cartoons that come out of the Arab world (a google search on this topic reveals plenty of results showing what I mean). As for the vast majority of the protests being peaceful, I'm sure they were. But I'd guess that the vast majority of the citizens of Los Angeles didn't participate in the 1992 race riots, either. Did the media do wrong by focusing so heavily on those? Unfortunately, as in everything else, it only takes a few bad people to ruin it for everyone else.
Moreover, if Muslims are so upset over a cartoon that furthers the Muslim==terrorist prejudice, then where is the outrage when Muslims actually commit terrorist acts in the name of Islam, the ultimate furtherance of that prejudice! Dozens of suicide bombings in Israel, the USS Cole, African embassy bombings, Sept 11, the Madrid train bombing, the bombings in London. Where is the outrage at all those? All these have done far more to further the Muslim==terrorist notion than any cartoon ever could. Why is it ok for Muslims to actually be terrorists, but when someone in the west points out this fact (yes, it's a fact - some Muslims are terrorists), it's a cause for mass uprising? And worse, as I said before, the only people out in the streets on 9/11 were not expressing outrage, they were celebrating! Utterly hypocritical.
I agree with you, both sides have abundant reasons to hate each other, but you came across more as a Muslim apologist than anything else.
even if my parents wanted to send money my way, i wouldn't accept it. then again, thevalue of my life isn't tied to things.
Who said you had to buy "things" with the money they're sending? Why not use it to support yourself (in the food and shelter sense of the phrase) while doing things that add value to your life? For example, I love to hike. What would I do if somebody was going to give me a trust fund? I'd stop working and go hiking. I certainly wouldn't blow it on a McMansion or a giant TV or any other "things".
This certainly isn't to disagree with the rest of your post. Just trying to point out that not all money must be spent keeping ahead of the Joneses.
A written document can't be ignored.
Yes it can. I've had it happen. And after a while of getting shot down, you begin to not want to bother spending the time to write up a formal, yet ultimately worthless, document.
Write a proposal, CC it to their boss.
I don't know about your situation, but a lot of folks don't appreciate it when people go over their heads.
I wanted to learn how to do it on linux.
And once you learned, you stopped doing it, right? Oh, wait...
Uhhh... if it's so much crap, why are you interested in having a copy of your own? Or even renting it to begin with? Your argument is B.S., but then you're a troll so what do I expect.
Funny? Clearly the mods didn't RTFA, since that's what happened - the home was erroneously valued at $400 million (not $8M as the OP said, nor $800M as the summary said), and the tax bill was $8 million.
If I'd been fired for playing a game at lunchtime you can bet I'd be hiring a solicitor right now. Well, as soon as I finish this level...
Except that New York is an employment-at-will state. Your employer may fire you or you may quit at any time, with or without notice (*), for any reason, or for no reason at all (unless of course the reason is something otherwise prohibited, which is basically only age/sex/race/whatever discrimination). Employment contracts notwithstanding, of course, but I'll go out on a limb and say that a person in this guy's position wouldn't have a contract.
(*) At least in New York, conditions can be tacked on to "with or without notice" that act as incentives to employees to provide notice. For example, it's somewhat common to have a policy that says that employees will only be paid for unused vacation if they provide two weeks notice before quitting; if you just up and leave one day, you forfeit that money. My employer just instituted this policy.
Don't even get me started on interviewers who ask you to quote the documentation. ("What method do you call to set the text of a label?" WTF kind of question is that? Go read the documentation if you don't know! That's what it's for!)
I have mixed feelings on this one. For one thing it depends on how obscure the function is, and how often one would expect to use it in the job in question. In the example you cited, if you claim to have Java (I'm assuming Java since you said "method") GUI experience and are interviewing for a job involving Java GUI coding, you'd damn well better know what method to call to set the text of a label. An experienced programmer would have a complete GUI all coded up while you're still looking up the API calls to create a window. On the other hand, do I care if you could turn off double-buffering in Swing without consulting the API docs? No.
In addition to this depth of knowledge of the API in certain specific areas, breadth of knowledge (even at a shallow level) is important too. Using Java as an example again, if I asked you to use a map-based data structure that also keeps track of the order in which values were inserted into the map, there'd be two ways to go about it: create a subclass of HashMap which uses a backing List, or (the correct answer) just use LinkedHashMap.
Yes I know there's a lot more to programming than memorizing an API. But knowledge of an API is a reasonable indicator of a person's level of experience with a language, and does have an effect on productivity. At the same time, a good programmer will pick up a new API or a new language pretty quickly. As I said at the beginning, I have mixed feelings about this, but I don't think it's the taboo interview question you assert.