The huge number of Russian crash videos that keep popping up on Youtube and other places. They may not be in *every* car, but there sure seem to be a lot of them.
Seriously, Dash Cams are the best defense against scam artists.
Or to prove that you weren't the culprit. Have a look at these videos, taken from my own dashcam in San Jose, CA:
The Youtube page says you're using a dod-tec GS600 dashcam -- are you happy with it? The Amazon page for the camera has mostly 1 star ratings.
I'm looking for a good, relatively inexpensive dash-cam. Something small that I can "set-and-forget" - mount it on the windshield, run 12V power to it and be reasonably confident that it's going to record everything without me needing to check on it or replace SD cards.
I just went through a similar exercise with our 200 disk DVD collection - copied the DVD images to a RAID fileserver (I used ubuntu + ZFS, you could buy something like a Drobo or a ReadyNAS if you don't want to set up your own fileserver - don't skimp on the hardware, you want something solid and reliable). DIsk space is so cheap I didn't even bother compressing the DVD images on the initial copy.
3 or 4 of the DVD's had some copy protection that dvdcopy couldn't handle - I almost got some WIndows software that's supposed to be able to bypass the copy protection, but then I found bittorrent images of the missing movies. I wonder if my ISP is going to report me to the MPAA for pirating movies I already own?
I also keep another offsite backup on a pair of 3TB hard drives that I shuttle back and forth to the office, one is always at home, one is always at the office. I've debated sending a hard drive to Amazon to import into Glacier storage - after paying the transfer fee, for less than $20 month, Amazon will store the movies for me (and all of the rest of my data too - pictures, mp3's, etc).
I took all of the physical DVD's out of their cases as I copied them, and put the DVD's, slipcovers and booklets into some excellent DVD storage binders so I have proof of ownership.
We buy a lot of used DVD's (for what I used to pay for Netflix's DVD by mail subscription, we can buy 2 or 3 used DVD's/month at Amazon - most cost between $3 - $9), so I set up a simple script that my wife can use to copy new DVD's, she just puts in the DVD, and types in the name.
After copying everything I set up a script to use Handbrake to compress the DVD images into smaller files suitable for putting on a tablet, smartphone or laptop. It was nice to have 200 movies to choose from on the plane while traveling over the holidays.
I did the same with my CD's ages ago - back when it took longer to encode an MP3 on my computer than it does to play it back. I haven't bought a physical CD in a long time, so I don't know how long it takes to encode them these days.
So if I install a gas furnace and start hauling tanks in every month (I'm out in the sticks), someone will pay me twice what I'm paying now for heating? Cool. Sign me up.
My parents get their propane tank (500 gallons?) refilled every couple of months in the winter (Northeastern USA, so they have a "real" winter), and including the delivery fees, it's still about 40% cheaper than when they had electric resistance heat. YMMV, of course.
OK. Let me know when you want to install that heat pump, and I'll start bitching about the inefficiency of light bulbs. Until then, they are just as efficient as the electric furnace I can't afford to replace.
There aren't a whole lot of people in your situation where not only is it cold enough year round to need to use the heater, but you have one of the most costly heat sources available -- electric resistance heat.
If you have any top floor ceiling fixtures or wall sconces on outside walls, much of the heat is being conducted out of your house anyway so you're not getting 100% of the waste heat into your house so you could still save some money with more efficient lighting.
A heat pump system can save significant energy - you should talk to an HVAC dealer about systems, tax credits, and financing options, if you really are in a climate where you're using your heat year round, the energy savings could pay for the monthly finance charge and the system could pay for itself within 5 years.
One issue with bicycle lights, especially those popular in North America, is that their reflectors are awful. They spray light everywhere. That's only really useful when mountain biking; when cycling on the road, light sprayed into the air is wasted light, and more powerful lights create a hazard for other cyclists and motorists. A good amount of engineering goes into a proper reflector, like those used on car headlights. There are some bike lights that do it right (Phillips has some), but the ones these LEDs are going to be thrown in first are going to be of the junk variety.
I have a very nice German made B&M bike light that has a very sharp cutoff to keep light on the road. The only problem is that there's very little light available above the road so it doesn't illuminate street signs or any reflectors above waist high (which is a problem since the bike path I frequent has a number of dark wood posts with reflectors mounted about 4 feet off the ground - I can barely see the reflectors when using only the B&M lamp. But since I supplement with a helmet mounted light, it's not much of a problem, but it is a weakness of having a reflector with a sharp cutoff.
If banning guns will cut down on crime, this is absolute proof that banning I-Phones and I-Pads will also reduce crime. At the very least I-product owners need to have background checks and get registed and licenced to carry them. Also I-Pad 2s should be outright banned. Who in their right mind actually needs and I-Pad 2? The retina display isn't that much better and all it is doing is fuleing a crime wave.
Challenge: Tell me why my post is wrong, but banning gus is right. LOL
Because no one can walk into a crowded public place and kill a dozen people with an iPhone or iPad? Though I suppose you might be able to take down one or two slow moving people with a strike to the head with an iPad.
If you have a better idea, please elaborate. For some reason completely oblivious to you, preparation against catastrophic events costs money.
Preparation against catastrophic events? So these satellites are able to turn back the storm, and prevent damage?
You seem to be confusing preparation with prevention. And part of preparation includes warning people before the storm strikes so they can protect their property and evacuate safely.
Sure, it could be ported and rewritten, but why have a $100/hour finance professional spend time learning a new macro language and rewriting and validating his old functions/macros for a new spreadsheet platform?
That's why you hire on some bright kid off the street for $10/hour part time to port it to the new macro language.
In a few hours, you have your ported macros, and you only need the newer shinier spreadsheet program.
And the $100/hour finance guy still has to validate the work and ensure that it's working as expected - he's not going to present numbers to the board of directors based on what some $10/hour kid did. And it's going to take more than "A few hours" - you'd be surprised at some of the corporate finance spreadsheets out there - some are pages upon pages of linked numbers with obscure calculations that have been refined over time. And when he wants to tweak it, he either needs to hire a new $10/hour kid to do the work, or sit down and learn the new system.
Your argument sounds kind of like the CIO that says "Hey, I've been reading a lot about dotNet and I think we ought to port our code over from Java to dotNet - we just need to hire a few $10/hour coders to do it, right? Then we'll be running on this shiny new platform, despite the fact that it was running fine before." The actual coding itself is a small part of the overall project - architecture, design and validation are all much harder.
So I should spend several hundred dollars per year per person on something I don't really need. Gotcha!
Well no, if you don't need it, then don't get it -- but if you can make your employees more productive by spending a few dollars on the office suite that has become a standard, you should probably do that. Your office probably spends more on "free" coffee than the cost of MS Office Suite purchased under a volume license.
In reality, the few bits of MS Office that Open/Libre Office doesnt to are very obscure, Virtually all experienced users of any of the office products would have to use help for far more widely used features.
Regardless of whether or not that's true, it doesn't help you when you're at a job interview for a job that has MS Office as one of the job requirements when you have vast LibreOffice experience, but the other 5 guys competing for the job have MS Office experience.
Sure, the differences may mostly be a matter of syntax and looking up function in the help file, but unless you have some specific skills needed for the job, why would the employer hire the guy without the experience they are looking for? The same could be said about programming languages "Oh, Perl and Java are pretty much the same, it's just a matter of syntax and looking up a few things in Help." But I still wouldn't hire a Perl developer for a Java position.
Actually, most corporate finance types have to get someone else to help them use ANY formula in any spreadsheet - they are too lazy (aka "busy") to READ the help for themselves.
I don't think it's fair to make that generalization - many corporate finance types are very good at Excel. My previous finance director sat in a demo for an expensive new forecasting tool, and he proved in real-time that the numbers output from the tool were not correct, he had downloaded the demo dataset and built a spreadsheet as the demo progressed, and his numbers didn't match up. It turns out that the dataset used in the demo was not complete.
And he's not some young kid right out of college - he's old enough to have made the transition from paper to spreadsheets back when his spreadsheet software was Supercalc running on CP/M.
so what is the harm in putting fake BA / BS on there if you have all the real skills needed and just need to put BA / BS to get past HR?
Because when you get past the phone screen and HR does a background check, when they discover you've lied about the degree, you're not ever going to get a job there? Regardless of your skills, I can't imagine any hiring manager ignoring your deception - if you're willing to lie to get an interview, how much can they trust you?
If you really think you have the skills for the job and don't think you'll make it past HR, then you'll need to use networking to make sure you get your resume in front of the hiring manager. That's why it's important to never burn bridges, you never know when a former colleague or boss can help you get your foot in the door somewhere else.
If they hire you before discovering the deception, you could be immediately terminated, and depending on what state you're in and what you signed when you filled out the application for employment, they could sue to recover damages.
You're asking an H.R. person to think. That's way too over optimistic.
It's not so much that the HR screener can't think, but he's got 100 resumes in his inbox and he has to screen them quickly and skillset is a quick way to weed out resumes. HR doesn't have unlimited time to screen resumes and call up each candidate to assess their proficiency with the toolset. If the hiring manager says "We need someone with Excel experience", you're going to end up on the "screened out" pile because there are 30 other resumes in the pile that *do* have Excel experience.
Write your resume cover letter with this in mind - screening candidates is hard to do and many more candidates are screened out than screened in.
Personally, I use Open Office and I don't see the point in spending money on Microsoft Office. The vast majority of the population uses maybe 20% of its functionality.
Also, if you did need to learn Excel or Word for your job and you consider that a big deal in the slightest...I weep for you (or the idiot in HR).
I think it's more of a problem when you're interviewing and you have vast OpenOffice experience and say that you think it wouldn't take long to pick up MS Office, but you're competing against a guy who has vast MS Office experience and can immediately jump in and use the toolset they are already using. Sure, you could learn MS Office, but the other guy already knows and is using it.
It's just like if you're applying for a developer job in a Ruby shop -- you may have years of Perl experience and feel that you could quickly pick up Ruby, but when you're interviewing against a guy that's spent the past 2 years doing nothing but Ruby, you lose.
"Because LibreOffice doesn't do everything MS Office does?"
I keep hearing this, but I never see a list of the "10%" that MS Office can do that Libreoffice cannot. Plus, how many items on this 10% list are actually used by 90% of the MS Office users, including Google employees???
Show me the list!
Here are a few examples of financial functions in MS Office that aren't in Google Docs:
I didn't look to see if Google has the same functionality in a different function, nor do I know enough about the functions to know if a trivial formula can recreate the functionality in Google.
I don't know how frequently these are used, but if the finance director can't open the forecasting spreadsheet that he's used for 5 years because one of these functions is missing, he's going to demand MS Office. At least, that's what happened in my last company when we tried to see if we could save money by moving away from MS -- the Finance department couldn't open any of the spreadsheets they used in their day to day work.
Ever heard of LibreOffice? If you claim you're unable to write "powerful macros" in any of these languages, then it is you who is the "idiot".
I don't think the problem is so much writing new Macros, but in rewriting all of the tried-and-true macros and formulas that the Finance exec has been using for the past decade. Sure, it could be ported and rewritten, but why have a $100/hour finance professional spend time learning a new macro language and rewriting and validating his old functions/macros for a new spreadsheet platform? It only takes a few hours of wasted work to pay for MS Office.
I would have assumed that if they had to use any Office Suite, that they would have chosen LibreOffice over MS Office! My question to Google, is Why Not???
Because LibreOffice doesn't do everything MS Office does?
Google already has an office suite that does a lot of what MS Office does (i.e. Google Docs), why would they add in another office suite that gets them 90% of the way to MS Office functionality when they can just use MS Office and get 100% of what they are looking for.
I'm sure LibreOffice does some things that MS Office can't do, but few people are using those things, but people expect their Office Suite to work like MS Office - at my last job, I couldn't even open the corporate expense reporting spreadsheet in LibreOffice (Finance had macros that would extract the data from approved expense reports and enter into their accounting system). I'm sure if could have been ported over, but it just wasn't worth the effort since MS Office was the "corporate standard".
"... he didn't want to use anything, so we didn't."
She could have used the 'morning after' pill. Or gone on 'the pill' and made him wait 2 weeks. The problem with condoms isn't just their availability at the time of the sexual act.
Sure, there were other contraceptive options that she could have used, but she didn't, even though she knew where babies came from, and knew what her options were. Which is the point I was trying to make - despite plenty of education and availability of birth control, they chose to use nothing.
Note that the availability of the "morning after pill" and birth control pills to minors without parental consent depends on the state.
Horny teenagers have been in existence for about as long as teenagers have existed. There also isn't any, to my knowledge, reversible sterilization where the initial sterilization has a reasonable certainty it will be successful and the reversal has an equal chance to be reversed.
Hey look! Someone has a "solution" to our economic problems that involves forced sterilization. How novel and original.
Come out my testicles or my kids' gonads with your reversible sterilization tweezers and I'll give you an irreversible brain injury.
I think it's more likely that it would be injectable or implantable birth control. No tweezers needed, and fully reversible by discontinuing the treatment.
Mandatory reversible sterilization of all children when they turn 12 years of age. Then let them undergo the procedure for free to reverse it after age 21 if they choose to do so. I will bet you that 90% will prefer to not have kids. Keeping young teens from ruining their lives by having kids is important, teens will hump like rabbits, it's in their nature. Lets not let them ruin their lives because a bunch of backwater uneducated hillbillies wont let the government give out birth control and educated kids in the use of birth control.
You do realize that if 90% of the population is sterile, then the remaining 10% would have to have no less than 10 kids each (not per family, mind you, per person, one for each person not having kids +1 for themselves, and extras since some will die young) merely to sustain the existing population? Yeah, that sounds like a fantastic idea... if you want your country to collapse in 20 years or so.
Besides which: forced government sterilization... for serious? Have you read A Brave New World? That's not meant as a guidebook, you know.
With robots/automation taking over much of the menial labor (and economic development), then what's wrong with reducing the population of the USA from 300 million to 30 million over the next 50 - 60 years? If population grown continues as it is, the population of the USA will double over the next 50 years - does your town have room to house twice as many people as it does now? Can our farms feed them? Do we have enough energy to transport them and keep them warm? I don't know what the limit is or what the "optimal" level is.
Society doesn't need to follow A Brave New World to reduce population growth. We can either do it ourselves or let nature take care of it -- it'll be less painful to do it ourselves.
Oddly enough, I think I find the idea of mandatory parenting classes/standards more disturbing then mandatory contraception. I shutter to think what kind of standards boards might exist to decide what 'proper' parenting might be. Family law is a pretty horrible domain, and I have seen all sorts of things used as examples of why one parent or another should not have custody including 'improper' sexuality, religion, political allegiance, hobbies, career, relationship structures, lifestyle.. and the idea that such standanders could potentially leak in to deciding if you can even have a kid in the first place is kinda chilling.
My wife works at a subsidized (i.e. low income) preschool and you'd be surprised how few parents actually know how to parent. They do offer parenting classes (optional, but encouraged), and they don't touch on any of the controversial issues you're worried about, but cover basics like diapering, feeding/nutrition, what do to when the baby cries, how to cope when the baby won't stop crying, when to seek health care, other outside resources for help with parenting, etc. Yet every year, they still have to call child protective services to investigate at least one family due to child abuse, malnutrition, etc.
Parenting in modern society is not instinctive, is not always passed down from mother to child, and there are many skills that can be taught without offending most people's ideals (there will always be the fringe that object to any mention of breast feeding versus formula, corporal punishment, etc).
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Who says there are dashcams in every Russian car?
The huge number of Russian crash videos that keep popping up on Youtube and other places. They may not be in *every* car, but there sure seem to be a lot of them.
Seriously, Dash Cams are the best defense against scam artists.
Or to prove that you weren't the culprit. Have a look at these videos, taken from my own dashcam in San Jose, CA:
The Youtube page says you're using a dod-tec GS600 dashcam -- are you happy with it? The Amazon page for the camera has mostly 1 star ratings.
I'm looking for a good, relatively inexpensive dash-cam. Something small that I can "set-and-forget" - mount it on the windshield, run 12V power to it and be reasonably confident that it's going to record everything without me needing to check on it or replace SD cards.
I just went through a similar exercise with our 200 disk DVD collection - copied the DVD images to a RAID fileserver (I used ubuntu + ZFS, you could buy something like a Drobo or a ReadyNAS if you don't want to set up your own fileserver - don't skimp on the hardware, you want something solid and reliable). DIsk space is so cheap I didn't even bother compressing the DVD images on the initial copy.
3 or 4 of the DVD's had some copy protection that dvdcopy couldn't handle - I almost got some WIndows software that's supposed to be able to bypass the copy protection, but then I found bittorrent images of the missing movies. I wonder if my ISP is going to report me to the MPAA for pirating movies I already own?
I also keep another offsite backup on a pair of 3TB hard drives that I shuttle back and forth to the office, one is always at home, one is always at the office. I've debated sending a hard drive to Amazon to import into Glacier storage - after paying the transfer fee, for less than $20 month, Amazon will store the movies for me (and all of the rest of my data too - pictures, mp3's, etc).
I took all of the physical DVD's out of their cases as I copied them, and put the DVD's, slipcovers and booklets into some excellent DVD storage binders so I have proof of ownership.
We buy a lot of used DVD's (for what I used to pay for Netflix's DVD by mail subscription, we can buy 2 or 3 used DVD's/month at Amazon - most cost between $3 - $9), so I set up a simple script that my wife can use to copy new DVD's, she just puts in the DVD, and types in the name.
After copying everything I set up a script to use Handbrake to compress the DVD images into smaller files suitable for putting on a tablet, smartphone or laptop. It was nice to have 200 movies to choose from on the plane while traveling over the holidays.
I did the same with my CD's ages ago - back when it took longer to encode an MP3 on my computer than it does to play it back. I haven't bought a physical CD in a long time, so I don't know how long it takes to encode them these days.
So if I install a gas furnace and start hauling tanks in every month (I'm out in the sticks), someone will pay me twice what I'm paying now for heating? Cool. Sign me up.
My parents get their propane tank (500 gallons?) refilled every couple of months in the winter (Northeastern USA, so they have a "real" winter), and including the delivery fees, it's still about 40% cheaper than when they had electric resistance heat. YMMV, of course.
OK. Let me know when you want to install that heat pump, and I'll start bitching about the inefficiency of light bulbs. Until then, they are just as efficient as the electric furnace I can't afford to replace.
There aren't a whole lot of people in your situation where not only is it cold enough year round to need to use the heater, but you have one of the most costly heat sources available -- electric resistance heat.
If you have any top floor ceiling fixtures or wall sconces on outside walls, much of the heat is being conducted out of your house anyway so you're not getting 100% of the waste heat into your house so you could still save some money with more efficient lighting.
A heat pump system can save significant energy - you should talk to an HVAC dealer about systems, tax credits, and financing options, if you really are in a climate where you're using your heat year round, the energy savings could pay for the monthly finance charge and the system could pay for itself within 5 years.
One issue with bicycle lights, especially those popular in North America, is that their reflectors are awful. They spray light everywhere. That's only really useful when mountain biking; when cycling on the road, light sprayed into the air is wasted light, and more powerful lights create a hazard for other cyclists and motorists. A good amount of engineering goes into a proper reflector, like those used on car headlights. There are some bike lights that do it right (Phillips has some), but the ones these LEDs are going to be thrown in first are going to be of the junk variety.
I have a very nice German made B&M bike light that has a very sharp cutoff to keep light on the road. The only problem is that there's very little light available above the road so it doesn't illuminate street signs or any reflectors above waist high (which is a problem since the bike path I frequent has a number of dark wood posts with reflectors mounted about 4 feet off the ground - I can barely see the reflectors when using only the B&M lamp. But since I supplement with a helmet mounted light, it's not much of a problem, but it is a weakness of having a reflector with a sharp cutoff.
Get your blinding fucking light off the sidewalk.
signed,
A pedestrian coming the other way
kthxbai
I think you'll find that the cyclists that ride on sidewalks don't have lights. Or reflectors.
If banning guns will cut down on crime, this is absolute proof that banning I-Phones and I-Pads will also reduce crime. At the very least I-product owners need to have background checks and get registed and licenced to carry them. Also I-Pad 2s should be outright banned. Who in their right mind actually needs and I-Pad 2? The retina display isn't that much better and all it is doing is fuleing a crime wave.
Challenge: Tell me why my post is wrong, but banning gus is right.
LOL
Because no one can walk into a crowded public place and kill a dozen people with an iPhone or iPad? Though I suppose you might be able to take down one or two slow moving people with a strike to the head with an iPad.
Furthermore, your iPod can save your live by stopping a bullet: http://www.gadgetcrunch.net/2007/04/06/ipod-stops-bullet-saves-soldiers-life-in-iraq/
If you have a better idea, please elaborate. For some reason completely oblivious to you, preparation against catastrophic events costs money.
Preparation against catastrophic events?
So these satellites are able to turn back the storm, and prevent damage?
You seem to be confusing preparation with prevention. And part of preparation includes warning people before the storm strikes so they can protect their property and evacuate safely.
Sure, it could be ported and rewritten, but why have a $100/hour finance professional spend time learning a new macro language and rewriting and validating his old functions/macros for a new spreadsheet platform?
That's why you hire on some bright kid off the street for $10/hour part time to port it to the new macro language.
In a few hours, you have your ported macros, and you only need the newer shinier spreadsheet program.
And the $100/hour finance guy still has to validate the work and ensure that it's working as expected - he's not going to present numbers to the board of directors based on what some $10/hour kid did. And it's going to take more than "A few hours" - you'd be surprised at some of the corporate finance spreadsheets out there - some are pages upon pages of linked numbers with obscure calculations that have been refined over time. And when he wants to tweak it, he either needs to hire a new $10/hour kid to do the work, or sit down and learn the new system.
Your argument sounds kind of like the CIO that says "Hey, I've been reading a lot about dotNet and I think we ought to port our code over from Java to dotNet - we just need to hire a few $10/hour coders to do it, right? Then we'll be running on this shiny new platform, despite the fact that it was running fine before." The actual coding itself is a small part of the overall project - architecture, design and validation are all much harder.
I was comparing MS Office to LibreOffice, NOT Google Docs! Read what I wrote.
Or, you know, you could compare yourself. As an Libreoffice user you should have the documentation at your fingertips.
I grabbed one at random, and it looks like OSSFPRICE() is not in LIbreOffice.
...China Inc. can first fuck all these corporations and then run away with their decades of R&D data.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/rsa-hacked/
So because RSA was hacked, we shouldn't use Microsoft software?
It's a good thing that no Open source software has ever been hacked.
So I should spend several hundred dollars per year per person on something I don't really need. Gotcha!
Well no, if you don't need it, then don't get it -- but if you can make your employees more productive by spending a few dollars on the office suite that has become a standard, you should probably do that. Your office probably spends more on "free" coffee than the cost of MS Office Suite purchased under a volume license.
In reality, the few bits of MS Office that Open/Libre Office doesnt to are very obscure, Virtually all experienced users of any of the office products would have to use help for far more widely used features.
Regardless of whether or not that's true, it doesn't help you when you're at a job interview for a job that has MS Office as one of the job requirements when you have vast LibreOffice experience, but the other 5 guys competing for the job have MS Office experience.
Sure, the differences may mostly be a matter of syntax and looking up function in the help file, but unless you have some specific skills needed for the job, why would the employer hire the guy without the experience they are looking for? The same could be said about programming languages "Oh, Perl and Java are pretty much the same, it's just a matter of syntax and looking up a few things in Help." But I still wouldn't hire a Perl developer for a Java position.
Actually, most corporate finance types have to get someone else to help them use ANY formula in any spreadsheet - they are too lazy (aka "busy") to READ the help for themselves.
I don't think it's fair to make that generalization - many corporate finance types are very good at Excel. My previous finance director sat in a demo for an expensive new forecasting tool, and he proved in real-time that the numbers output from the tool were not correct, he had downloaded the demo dataset and built a spreadsheet as the demo progressed, and his numbers didn't match up. It turns out that the dataset used in the demo was not complete.
And he's not some young kid right out of college - he's old enough to have made the transition from paper to spreadsheets back when his spreadsheet software was Supercalc running on CP/M.
so what is the harm in putting fake BA / BS on there if you have all the real skills needed and just need to put BA / BS to get past HR?
Because when you get past the phone screen and HR does a background check, when they discover you've lied about the degree, you're not ever going to get a job there? Regardless of your skills, I can't imagine any hiring manager ignoring your deception - if you're willing to lie to get an interview, how much can they trust you?
If you really think you have the skills for the job and don't think you'll make it past HR, then you'll need to use networking to make sure you get your resume in front of the hiring manager. That's why it's important to never burn bridges, you never know when a former colleague or boss can help you get your foot in the door somewhere else.
If they hire you before discovering the deception, you could be immediately terminated, and depending on what state you're in and what you signed when you filled out the application for employment, they could sue to recover damages.
You're asking an H.R. person to think. That's way too over optimistic.
It's not so much that the HR screener can't think, but he's got 100 resumes in his inbox and he has to screen them quickly and skillset is a quick way to weed out resumes. HR doesn't have unlimited time to screen resumes and call up each candidate to assess their proficiency with the toolset. If the hiring manager says "We need someone with Excel experience", you're going to end up on the "screened out" pile because there are 30 other resumes in the pile that *do* have Excel experience.
Write your resume cover letter with this in mind - screening candidates is hard to do and many more candidates are screened out than screened in.
Personally, I use Open Office and I don't see the point in spending money on Microsoft Office. The vast majority of the population uses maybe 20% of its functionality.
Also, if you did need to learn Excel or Word for your job and you consider that a big deal in the slightest...I weep for you (or the idiot in HR).
I think it's more of a problem when you're interviewing and you have vast OpenOffice experience and say that you think it wouldn't take long to pick up MS Office, but you're competing against a guy who has vast MS Office experience and can immediately jump in and use the toolset they are already using. Sure, you could learn MS Office, but the other guy already knows and is using it.
It's just like if you're applying for a developer job in a Ruby shop -- you may have years of Perl experience and feel that you could quickly pick up Ruby, but when you're interviewing against a guy that's spent the past 2 years doing nothing but Ruby, you lose.
"Because LibreOffice doesn't do everything MS Office does?"
I keep hearing this, but I never see a list of the "10%" that MS Office can do that Libreoffice cannot. Plus, how many items on this 10% list are actually used by 90% of the MS Office users, including Google employees???
Show me the list!
Here are a few examples of financial functions in MS Office that aren't in Google Docs:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-functions-by-category-HP010079186.aspx?CTT=3#BMfinancial_functions
https://support.google.com/drive/bin/static.py?hl=en&topic=25273&page=table.cs&tab=1240288
AMORDEGRC()
AMORLINC()
ISPMT()
OSSFPRICE()
ODDFYIELD()
ODDLPRICE()
ODDLYIELD()
VDB()
YIELDMAT()
I didn't look to see if Google has the same functionality in a different function, nor do I know enough about the functions to know if a trivial formula can recreate the functionality in Google.
I don't know how frequently these are used, but if the finance director can't open the forecasting spreadsheet that he's used for 5 years because one of these functions is missing, he's going to demand MS Office. At least, that's what happened in my last company when we tried to see if we could save money by moving away from MS -- the Finance department couldn't open any of the spreadsheets they used in their day to day work.
Ever heard of LibreOffice? If you claim you're unable to write "powerful macros" in any of these languages, then it is you who is the "idiot".
I don't think the problem is so much writing new Macros, but in rewriting all of the tried-and-true macros and formulas that the Finance exec has been using for the past decade. Sure, it could be ported and rewritten, but why have a $100/hour finance professional spend time learning a new macro language and rewriting and validating his old functions/macros for a new spreadsheet platform? It only takes a few hours of wasted work to pay for MS Office.
I would have assumed that if they had to use any Office Suite, that they would have chosen LibreOffice over MS Office! My question to Google, is Why Not???
Because LibreOffice doesn't do everything MS Office does?
Google already has an office suite that does a lot of what MS Office does (i.e. Google Docs), why would they add in another office suite that gets them 90% of the way to MS Office functionality when they can just use MS Office and get 100% of what they are looking for.
I'm sure LibreOffice does some things that MS Office can't do, but few people are using those things, but people expect their Office Suite to work like MS Office - at my last job, I couldn't even open the corporate expense reporting spreadsheet in LibreOffice (Finance had macros that would extract the data from approved expense reports and enter into their accounting system). I'm sure if could have been ported over, but it just wasn't worth the effort since MS Office was the "corporate standard".
"... he didn't want to use anything, so we didn't."
She could have used the 'morning after' pill. Or gone on 'the pill' and made him wait 2 weeks. The problem with condoms isn't just their availability at the time of the sexual act.
Sure, there were other contraceptive options that she could have used, but she didn't, even though she knew where babies came from, and knew what her options were. Which is the point I was trying to make - despite plenty of education and availability of birth control, they chose to use nothing.
Note that the availability of the "morning after pill" and birth control pills to minors without parental consent depends on the state.
Horny teenagers have been in existence for about as long as teenagers have existed. There also isn't any, to my knowledge, reversible sterilization where the initial sterilization has a reasonable certainty it will be successful and the reversal has an equal chance to be reversed.
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/health-topics/birth-control/birth-control-shot-depo-provera-4242.htm
99% effective when used as directed (one shot every 12 weeks), wears off and allows pregnancy after 6 - 10 months of no injections.
Hey look! Someone has a "solution" to our economic problems that involves forced sterilization. How novel and original.
Come out my testicles or my kids' gonads with your reversible sterilization tweezers and I'll give you an irreversible brain injury.
I think it's more likely that it would be injectable or implantable birth control. No tweezers needed, and fully reversible by discontinuing the treatment.
Mandatory reversible sterilization of all children when they turn 12 years of age. Then let them undergo the procedure for free to reverse it after age 21 if they choose to do so. I will bet you that 90% will prefer to not have kids. Keeping young teens from ruining their lives by having kids is important, teens will hump like rabbits, it's in their nature. Lets not let them ruin their lives because a bunch of backwater uneducated hillbillies wont let the government give out birth control and educated kids in the use of birth control.
You do realize that if 90% of the population is sterile, then the remaining 10% would have to have no less than 10 kids each (not per family, mind you, per person, one for each person not having kids +1 for themselves, and extras since some will die young) merely to sustain the existing population? Yeah, that sounds like a fantastic idea... if you want your country to collapse in 20 years or so.
Besides which: forced government sterilization... for serious? Have you read A Brave New World? That's not meant as a guidebook, you know.
With robots/automation taking over much of the menial labor (and economic development), then what's wrong with reducing the population of the USA from 300 million to 30 million over the next 50 - 60 years? If population grown continues as it is, the population of the USA will double over the next 50 years - does your town have room to house twice as many people as it does now? Can our farms feed them? Do we have enough energy to transport them and keep them warm? I don't know what the limit is or what the "optimal" level is.
Society doesn't need to follow A Brave New World to reduce population growth. We can either do it ourselves or let nature take care of it -- it'll be less painful to do it ourselves.
Oddly enough, I think I find the idea of mandatory parenting classes/standards more disturbing then mandatory contraception. I shutter to think what kind of standards boards might exist to decide what 'proper' parenting might be. Family law is a pretty horrible domain, and I have seen all sorts of things used as examples of why one parent or another should not have custody including 'improper' sexuality, religion, political allegiance, hobbies, career, relationship structures, lifestyle.. and the idea that such standanders could potentially leak in to deciding if you can even have a kid in the first place is kinda chilling.
My wife works at a subsidized (i.e. low income) preschool and you'd be surprised how few parents actually know how to parent. They do offer parenting classes (optional, but encouraged), and they don't touch on any of the controversial issues you're worried about, but cover basics like diapering, feeding/nutrition, what do to when the baby cries, how to cope when the baby won't stop crying, when to seek health care, other outside resources for help with parenting, etc. Yet every year, they still have to call child protective services to investigate at least one family due to child abuse, malnutrition, etc.
Parenting in modern society is not instinctive, is not always passed down from mother to child, and there are many skills that can be taught without offending most people's ideals (there will always be the fringe that object to any mention of breast feeding versus formula, corporal punishment, etc).