Here in the UK Oxford and Cambridge have entrance exams, and some courses at other universities will require applicants to sit an entrance exam or submit an assignment to gain entrance. These are in addition to the exams sat at the end of secondary education and, certainly in the case of Oxford and Cambridge, owe more to tradition than to any serious requirement for additional assessment.
Here in the UK there are national exams at the end of secondary school (A-Levels in England and Wales, Highers (IIRC) in Scotland) that are set and assessed by national bodies independently of the schools. Papers are graded by independent examiners, usually in a double-blind assessment.
In some subjects these do include course work assessment by the teachers but each year work from a random sample of students are audited to check that the grading by the teacher is in line with national standards. Teachers who tend to grade too high or too low are given feedback (usually copied to their head of department and head teacher) and the work regraded. The size of the sample will depend on the length of experience and how good the teacher has been in past years so experienced teachers who are usually very close will have only a small sample audited but new teachers or teachers who have a record of being off the mark may find every assignment they graded being audited.
Similarly a sample of the independently assessed papers are audited.
It should also be noted that the 'iconic' white ear buds soon made the iPod users an identifiable target for muggers, pick pockets and other thieves who figured why mug someone for what may be a £20 MP3 player with zero trade in value when you can mug someone advertising that they have a £399 iPod that can be traded in for £120 at many high street and backstreet vendors of second hand electronics. As a result many iPod users switched from the 'iconic' white ear buds to more ubiquitous headphones.
Aquiring Novell would also give them some useful material in the network identity/directory/authentication field. Based on some of the workshops I've recently attended that's something Oracle are looking at.
I did the Oracle University 9i DBA track courses (4 courses) a few years ago over a period of 3 months. The first course (SQL at Spring IT training in Birmingham) was on Windows, the next two (Fundamentals 1 and 2 at eXpertise in Leeds and Manchester) were on Redhat and the final one (Tuning at Spring IT in London) was on SuSE. I suspect the OS has more to do with training providor (maybe even the location) than with any moves within Oracle themselves. I don't know about other countries but, here in the UK Oracle themselves rarely run courses themselves, they create courses that can be run on pretty much any OS (although I suspect the Fundamentals courses, at least, are a lot easier to run on a UNIX like OS) and license others to run them. Even courses run on Oracle sites are usually run by external training suppliers. Courses run by Oracle themselves tend to be one or two day workshop type courses, often free, to promote a niche interest technology.
Wages will rise in whichever, currently, 'Third World' country the jobs move to until such time as another region has the combination of a skilled population and low standard (and therefore cost) of living who can be employed for less. At that point the jobs will move on again and the cycle starts over. Eventually the, currently,. 'First World' countries will be the new 'Third World'. In all likelyhood the rate of job migration will increase and the period of time jobs spend in one particular location will decrease as leaders of countries with a low standard of living realise that an easy way to get (short term, at least) economic growth is to throw some money at training up the population in the skills they need to take jobs from another country then run some adverts about how you have a load of highly skilled people who will work for a fraction of the wages of the people currently doing the jobs.
The dominant economic models currently in use (indeed that have been in use for at least the last few hundred years) rely on their being pools of cheap labour that can be exploited to produce goods which are then sold at a huge mark up in more affluent areas. Whether those goods are cotton finished goods, tea or software, the model is the same.
Ruby isn't something I have any real knowledge of (I'm aware it exists, it's got something to do with Rails (whatever they are) and there's been a nuber of articles written about how slow it is), as I mentioned in one of my comments I haven't coded seriously for a while. When I did I mainly used C and before that (when I was at school) BASIC, I took a course in Java but the project I was learning it to be able to work on was cancelled so never got to use it for real (but at least it gave me an introduction to OOP). Now it's mostly SQL, the odd bit of PL/SQL and shell scripting in amongst a lot of general DB admin work. If I ever need Ruby then I'll learn it, there's far too many different programming langauges about (and other work to be done) to learn random langauges in case you need them in the future. Because I learned the fundamentals of programming (in BASIC) it hopefully won't take me as long as it would if I was coming at it fresh.
I think we have different understandings of the term "Line Oriented". Possibly due to different backgrounds or my faulty memory, I haven't coded 'in anger' for some time (I'm mainly doing SQL scripting, some shell scripting and admin these days). My understanding is that it refers to the program being oriented to a line based input/output device such as a line printer or terminal rather than whether the lines of code are numbered or not.
With GUI based languages it's very easy to get hung up on the look of the interface, with a line oriented language it's not there so there's less distraction from learning the fundementals of the language and, more importantly, of programming. What the article seems to be mourning is the loss of languages without all the added trimmings that distract from the underlying principles.
Consider 'Hello World'. In BASIC that would be:
10 print "Hello world!"
In C it would be something like:
#include <stdio.h> void main () { printf("Hello World!\n"); }
/* Main.java */ package hellowworld; public class Main { public Main() } public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Hello, World!"); } }
or even (this is from a Java tutorial book set for a Java course one of my collegues was doing a couple of years ago) be told to create two files, the first being
/** Main.java */ package greeter2; public class Main { public Main() { public static void main(String[] args) {
then use command line switches to compile both files to a single application. Which of these do you think will be least intimidating to someone just starting out and will give the clearest example to the learner on how to put a line of text on the screen. Also, note that all of these examples are line based, imagine if they also had to learn how to draw a window, and you also need to take into account that the BASIC program can be run directly from the commnd line, in most implementations, where as the rest all require a compilation step.
The languages the author is harking back to aren't languages you're going to write the next competitor to Office with or the next killer console game, they are the languages that will teach you the fundementals that will make it easier for you to write those programs in other languages more suited to the purpose. Shell scripting could ber used to teach the the basics like putting a line of text on the screen) but tend to lack the variable handling and typing of a programming language. Sure, once someone knows the basics of programming and is ready to start writing real world applications, they will need the more advanced features and complexities of modern languages but by that stage they shouldn't be worrying about how to put some text on the screen or add two numbers together. Although, I recall writing some pretty complex apps in BASIC when I was at school (mostly for stats number crunching but I also wrote a simple word processor in Comodore basic on the CBM PET when I was 12).
Stephen
PS Perhaps someone could explain to the lameness filter the concept of source code examples? It doesn't seem to appreciate that they often contain lots of 'junk characters' and short lines.
I agree. A far better solution would be for the parents of poor children to sell their excess children to rich as a foodstuff and use the money thus gained to feed their remaining children. I realise that I am not the first to make such a suggestion.
copying verbatim from dead tree sources, which was fairly common for students when I was in school
At least that way the information has passed through the brain of the student at least once so there is a chance that some of it might stick. If it's a lengthy piece then they might even try to summarise it so they don't get writers cramp. Cut and paste from the web just means it's gone through the clipboard and they don't need to more than give it a quick skim over to check it contains the keywords they think they're looking for.
There's an exercise we had to do in one of my schools that I think is very valuable and could possibly be updated. We were put in a lecture theatre and each handed a book (on a subject we were unlikely to know much if anything about, something about climate and food productiion in sub-Saharan Africa IIRC, about 200 pages plus index &c) working alone we had to answer a series of questions. All the information needed was in the book. Some questions just required looking up the information from one place (e.g. "What was the rainfall in such-and-such an area in 1972?") that could be found via the index whilst others required information from other two or more parts of the book (but could still use the index) to be compared and others required more indepth searching and interpretation. The idea was to get us to learn to use reference books, inparticular use indexes, chapter summaries &c to get the information we needed without having to read a book cover to cover. Perhaps something like that could be used in an Internet environment but rather than "In the books provided..." it could be "Using a search engine of your choice... For each question identify the search engine you used and the URL of the web page(s) you got the information used in your answer from."
A lot of email clients don't ask the recipient if they want to allow the read receipt to be sent, they just send it. It kinda defeats the purpose of the read receipt to allow the recipient of the mail to block it. If I request one then I, presumably, have a reason for wanting to know when you read the mail, blocking it defeats the object and leaves an opening for fraud and abuse.
If someone turns on read receipt request for a mail they're sending to everyone in the corporation then that's their problem, the read receipt will almost certainly be a lot smaller than the original mail so it will just constitute a learning experience for them.
But at least when they are trying to blame their failure on your not communicating with them you can produce the email and the read reciept. Saved my ass a few times that way. There's been a few 'collegues' where I've been tempted to add to the signature block something like "Please note that as this was sent by email with read reciept turned on I have evidence that I sent it and you recieved it. Later denials of this will therefore not work.".
NYT Editor: Hey, we just got all this information about some people the Brits have arrested. It's a big story. Are we OK to print it? Legal Counsel: Hmmmmmmmm. You're OK in the US and most of the world but if you publish this in the UK before the trial then the defense might be able to claim you predjudiced the jury,they might be able to get the suspects off even if they're guilty. Could be bad publicity for you if that happens. Might be safer if you didn't publish it in the UK. NYT Editor: OK, thanks.
OK, I'm guessing (albeit based on having consulted lawyers quite a lot of late due to some issues where I work around setting up a subsidiary and tranfering staff). But my version is at least as valid as your's.
As to why the majority on/. seem fine with it, possibly they have the same interpretation as me. That or they think that UK law should be applied to the US!:-)
So I guess talking about cases where country X thinks its laws should be applied to websites in country Y isn't appropriate?
This isn't about the UK applying it's laws in the US. This is about a newspaper choosing to respect the laws of the UK in relation to it's presence (physical and virtual) in that country. I'd be suprised if this was the first time it's been done, at least in so far as dead tree editions, it just hit the news this time because of the technological twist of using code for targeting advertising to hide an article from a geographuical area.
From what I gather it's not a ban on reporting of the case, it's not even a ban, specifically. One of the factors of the guarantee of a fair trial in British law (in US law as well I believe) is that the press cannot publish anything that might predjudice a potential juror for or against an accused when/where that potential juror might read it. That is why jurors on cases likely to make the news are secluded and cut off from the press from when they're selected till when they're released. Suppose that you were accused of a crime and the jury in your case had been subjected to weeks of publicity linking you with every crime and wrong doing going, how fair a trial do you think that you would get? I'm sure that once the jury are selected and secluded the flood gates will open.
I'm not sure but I first started hearing it around the time that.Net started to appear so I'd guess there's some sort of connection. I'm not a developer anymore myself (I started out as a C developer but I'm more of a DBA + UNIX admin + Project Management type now ) but I work with them. I have heard 'framework' used in relation to C, C++, Delphi, Python and PERL a lot of late. Sometimes it seems to be in the context of a library but also it seems to be used in the context of a template.
To pick up a point I've noticed mentioned or alluded to in a number of comments, the difference between a new and experienced programmer. The main difference I'd expect to see is that a new programmer would probably be very narrow focused (great depth of knowledge but not much breadth) whilst an experienced programmer would probably not have the depth of knowledge (we forget the stuff we don't use) but much more breadth. Depending on the sort of environment you expect them to work in you'll hire one or the other. If you want a code monkey who'll write mathematically perfect code in isolation to precise specs then you hire the straight out of university person, if you want someone who will produce working code to business requirements then you go for the grey hair.
My favourite question to ask at an interview runs something like this:
Me: Things can sometimes get a bit stressful here, you need a good sense of humour to get through it. Would you say you have a good sense of humour?
Them: Yes.
Me: Tell us a joke then.
I'm usually the techie interviewer and leave this till last so it comes in at the end of a long line of techie and problem solving questions. The question has one purpose and one purpose only, to see how they react to something coming totally out of the blue and having to quickly change mental gears. Although not supposed to be user facing, we're server support, we sometimes have to deal with users who have even less clue than any I've met elsewhere (you know that urban legend about a call about a broken coffee cup holder, it's not just an urban legend, I have taken that call, gone out and found a broken CD tray with a pool of coffee beneath it) but demanding beyond belief. Diplomacy can be as vital as technical knowledge (we work in a highly political environment (both small p and capital P, we're a local council) where the person on the other end of the phone probably has the authority to sack you or plays golf with someone who has the authority to sack you). We need someone who can handle that.
The best response I ever had from a candidate to the question was from a female candidate who blinked twice and proceeded to tell us the sort of joke that, if told by a male member of staff, would result in a swift sacking for sexual harrassment (it was one of the "Why do women have legs?" jokes). Fortunately she'd done a really good interview overall so we (the panel was me, a woman from HR and a manager (another woman)) could hire her.
The rest of the IT people are probably touchy and grouchy because the intern is taking too damn long to do even simple jobs and spends all their time talking to the users when they should be moving on to the next task. Plus management has just dumped another 4 man weeks of extra project work per week on them because they've got an intern to pick up the day-to-day work.
Plus for the residents it's just a short period of their career and they know it. After a few years of 80 hours days they know they will move on to the next phase of their career where they will be paid more to work shorter hours. Indeed, often the more they are paid the less hours they will work.
For us it's an ongoing period with no expected end other than death or unemployment, the former actually seeming preferable at times as at least that way you won't have to get up every morning to bust a gut trying to find a job where you will probably have to work more hours for less money.
They did. I was an accident, abortion wasn't an option due my mother's beliefs (and wasn't particularly safe at that time either). They never let an opportunity to tell me I wasn't wanted pass unsiezed.
Every presciption I've had for about the last 15 years has been in two parts. The prescription itself and the repeat slip, the repeat slip has the same details as the prescription itself so should be as verfiable as the original prescription. I do agree that it wouldn't be too hard to fake a letter, or even fake a prescription.
I caught a bit of a press conference on the news during my lunch break. They stated that they had found explosives and a mixture of assembled and paritially assembled bombs.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the UK Oxford and Cambridge have entrance exams, and some courses at other universities will require applicants to sit an entrance exam or submit an assignment to gain entrance. These are in addition to the exams sat at the end of secondary education and, certainly in the case of Oxford and Cambridge, owe more to tradition than to any serious requirement for additional assessment.
Here in the UK there are national exams at the end of secondary school (A-Levels in England and Wales, Highers (IIRC) in Scotland) that are set and assessed by national bodies independently of the schools. Papers are graded by independent examiners, usually in a double-blind assessment. In some subjects these do include course work assessment by the teachers but each year work from a random sample of students are audited to check that the grading by the teacher is in line with national standards. Teachers who tend to grade too high or too low are given feedback (usually copied to their head of department and head teacher) and the work regraded. The size of the sample will depend on the length of experience and how good the teacher has been in past years so experienced teachers who are usually very close will have only a small sample audited but new teachers or teachers who have a record of being off the mark may find every assignment they graded being audited. Similarly a sample of the independently assessed papers are audited.
It should also be noted that the 'iconic' white ear buds soon made the iPod users an identifiable target for muggers, pick pockets and other thieves who figured why mug someone for what may be a £20 MP3 player with zero trade in value when you can mug someone advertising that they have a £399 iPod that can be traded in for £120 at many high street and backstreet vendors of second hand electronics. As a result many iPod users switched from the 'iconic' white ear buds to more ubiquitous headphones.
Aquiring Novell would also give them some useful material in the network identity/directory/authentication field. Based on some of the workshops I've recently attended that's something Oracle are looking at.
I did the Oracle University 9i DBA track courses (4 courses) a few years ago over a period of 3 months. The first course (SQL at Spring IT training in Birmingham) was on Windows, the next two (Fundamentals 1 and 2 at eXpertise in Leeds and Manchester) were on Redhat and the final one (Tuning at Spring IT in London) was on SuSE. I suspect the OS has more to do with training providor (maybe even the location) than with any moves within Oracle themselves. I don't know about other countries but, here in the UK Oracle themselves rarely run courses themselves, they create courses that can be run on pretty much any OS (although I suspect the Fundamentals courses, at least, are a lot easier to run on a UNIX like OS) and license others to run them. Even courses run on Oracle sites are usually run by external training suppliers. Courses run by Oracle themselves tend to be one or two day workshop type courses, often free, to promote a niche interest technology.
Stephen
Wages will rise in whichever, currently, 'Third World' country the jobs move to until such time as another region has the combination of a skilled population and low standard (and therefore cost) of living who can be employed for less. At that point the jobs will move on again and the cycle starts over. Eventually the, currently,. 'First World' countries will be the new 'Third World'. In all likelyhood the rate of job migration will increase and the period of time jobs spend in one particular location will decrease as leaders of countries with a low standard of living realise that an easy way to get (short term, at least) economic growth is to throw some money at training up the population in the skills they need to take jobs from another country then run some adverts about how you have a load of highly skilled people who will work for a fraction of the wages of the people currently doing the jobs.
The dominant economic models currently in use (indeed that have been in use for at least the last few hundred years) rely on their being pools of cheap labour that can be exploited to produce goods which are then sold at a huge mark up in more affluent areas. Whether those goods are cotton finished goods, tea or software, the model is the same.
Stephen
Ruby isn't something I have any real knowledge of (I'm aware it exists, it's got something to do with Rails (whatever they are) and there's been a nuber of articles written about how slow it is), as I mentioned in one of my comments I haven't coded seriously for a while. When I did I mainly used C and before that (when I was at school) BASIC, I took a course in Java but the project I was learning it to be able to work on was cancelled so never got to use it for real (but at least it gave me an introduction to OOP). Now it's mostly SQL, the odd bit of PL/SQL and shell scripting in amongst a lot of general DB admin work. If I ever need Ruby then I'll learn it, there's far too many different programming langauges about (and other work to be done) to learn random langauges in case you need them in the future. Because I learned the fundamentals of programming (in BASIC) it hopefully won't take me as long as it would if I was coming at it fresh.
Stephen
I think we have different understandings of the term "Line Oriented". Possibly due to different backgrounds or my faulty memory, I haven't coded 'in anger' for some time (I'm mainly doing SQL scripting, some shell scripting and admin these days). My understanding is that it refers to the program being oriented to a line based input/output device such as a line printer or terminal rather than whether the lines of code are numbered or not.
Stephen
With GUI based languages it's very easy to get hung up on the look of the interface, with a line oriented language it's not there so there's less distraction from learning the fundementals of the language and, more importantly, of programming. What the article seems to be mourning is the loss of languages without all the added trimmings that distract from the underlying principles.
Consider 'Hello World'. In BASIC that would be:In C it would be something like:in C++ you're looking atAnd in Java you use something like or even (this is from a Java tutorial book set for a Java course one of my collegues was doing a couple of years ago) be told to create two files, the first being and the second being then use command line switches to compile both files to a single application. Which of these do you think will be least intimidating to someone just starting out and will give the clearest example to the learner on how to put a line of text on the screen. Also, note that all of these examples are line based, imagine if they also had to learn how to draw a window, and you also need to take into account that the BASIC program can be run directly from the commnd line, in most implementations, where as the rest all require a compilation step.The languages the author is harking back to aren't languages you're going to write the next competitor to Office with or the next killer console game, they are the languages that will teach you the fundementals that will make it easier for you to write those programs in other languages more suited to the purpose. Shell scripting could ber used to teach the the basics like putting a line of text on the screen) but tend to lack the variable handling and typing of a programming language. Sure, once someone knows the basics of programming and is ready to start writing real world applications, they will need the more advanced features and complexities of modern languages but by that stage they shouldn't be worrying about how to put some text on the screen or add two numbers together. Although, I recall writing some pretty complex apps in BASIC when I was at school (mostly for stats number crunching but I also wrote a simple word processor in Comodore basic on the CBM PET when I was 12).
Stephen
PS Perhaps someone could explain to the lameness filter the concept of source code examples? It doesn't seem to appreciate that they often contain lots of 'junk characters' and short lines.
I agree. A far better solution would be for the parents of poor children to sell their excess children to rich as a foodstuff and use the money thus gained to feed their remaining children. I realise that I am not the first to make such a suggestion.
Stephen
At least that way the information has passed through the brain of the student at least once so there is a chance that some of it might stick. If it's a lengthy piece then they might even try to summarise it so they don't get writers cramp. Cut and paste from the web just means it's gone through the clipboard and they don't need to more than give it a quick skim over to check it contains the keywords they think they're looking for.
There's an exercise we had to do in one of my schools that I think is very valuable and could possibly be updated. We were put in a lecture theatre and each handed a book (on a subject we were unlikely to know much if anything about, something about climate and food productiion in sub-Saharan Africa IIRC, about 200 pages plus index &c) working alone we had to answer a series of questions. All the information needed was in the book. Some questions just required looking up the information from one place (e.g. "What was the rainfall in such-and-such an area in 1972?") that could be found via the index whilst others required information from other two or more parts of the book (but could still use the index) to be compared and others required more indepth searching and interpretation. The idea was to get us to learn to use reference books, inparticular use indexes, chapter summaries &c to get the information we needed without having to read a book cover to cover. Perhaps something like that could be used in an Internet environment but rather than "In the books provided..." it could be "Using a search engine of your choice... For each question identify the search engine you used and the URL of the web page(s) you got the information used in your answer from."
Stephen
A lot of email clients don't ask the recipient if they want to allow the read receipt to be sent, they just send it. It kinda defeats the purpose of the read receipt to allow the recipient of the mail to block it. If I request one then I, presumably, have a reason for wanting to know when you read the mail, blocking it defeats the object and leaves an opening for fraud and abuse.
If someone turns on read receipt request for a mail they're sending to everyone in the corporation then that's their problem, the read receipt will almost certainly be a lot smaller than the original mail so it will just constitute a learning experience for them.
Stephen
But at least when they are trying to blame their failure on your not communicating with them you can produce the email and the read reciept. Saved my ass a few times that way. There's been a few 'collegues' where I've been tempted to add to the signature block something like "Please note that as this was sent by email with read reciept turned on I have evidence that I sent it and you recieved it. Later denials of this will therefore not work.".
Stephen
Have you told them that?
Stephen
Or the conversation might have gone more like:
NYT Editor: Hey, we just got all this information about some people the Brits have arrested. It's a big story. Are we OK to print it?
Legal Counsel: Hmmmmmmmm. You're OK in the US and most of the world but if you publish this in the UK before the trial then the defense might be able to claim you predjudiced the jury,they might be able to get the suspects off even if they're guilty. Could be bad publicity for you if that happens. Might be safer if you didn't publish it in the UK.
NYT Editor: OK, thanks.
OK, I'm guessing (albeit based on having consulted lawyers quite a lot of late due to some issues where I work around setting up a subsidiary and tranfering staff). But my version is at least as valid as your's.
As to why the majority on /. seem fine with it, possibly they have the same interpretation as me. That or they think that UK law should be applied to the US! :-)
Stephen
This isn't about the UK applying it's laws in the US. This is about a newspaper choosing to respect the laws of the UK in relation to it's presence (physical and virtual) in that country. I'd be suprised if this was the first time it's been done, at least in so far as dead tree editions, it just hit the news this time because of the technological twist of using code for targeting advertising to hide an article from a geographuical area.
Stephen
From what I gather it's not a ban on reporting of the case, it's not even a ban, specifically. One of the factors of the guarantee of a fair trial in British law (in US law as well I believe) is that the press cannot publish anything that might predjudice a potential juror for or against an accused when/where that potential juror might read it. That is why jurors on cases likely to make the news are secluded and cut off from the press from when they're selected till when they're released. Suppose that you were accused of a crime and the jury in your case had been subjected to weeks of publicity linking you with every crime and wrong doing going, how fair a trial do you think that you would get? I'm sure that once the jury are selected and secluded the flood gates will open.
Stephen
I'm not sure but I first started hearing it around the time that .Net started to appear so I'd guess there's some sort of connection. I'm not a developer anymore myself (I started out as a C developer but I'm more of a DBA + UNIX admin + Project Management type now ) but I work with them. I have heard 'framework' used in relation to C, C++, Delphi, Python and PERL a lot of late. Sometimes it seems to be in the context of a library but also it seems to be used in the context of a template.
To pick up a point I've noticed mentioned or alluded to in a number of comments, the difference between a new and experienced programmer. The main difference I'd expect to see is that a new programmer would probably be very narrow focused (great depth of knowledge but not much breadth) whilst an experienced programmer would probably not have the depth of knowledge (we forget the stuff we don't use) but much more breadth. Depending on the sort of environment you expect them to work in you'll hire one or the other. If you want a code monkey who'll write mathematically perfect code in isolation to precise specs then you hire the straight out of university person, if you want someone who will produce working code to business requirements then you go for the grey hair.
Stephen
My favourite question to ask at an interview runs something like this:
Me: Things can sometimes get a bit stressful here, you need a good sense of humour to get through it. Would you say you have a good sense of humour?
Them: Yes.
Me: Tell us a joke then.
I'm usually the techie interviewer and leave this till last so it comes in at the end of a long line of techie and problem solving questions. The question has one purpose and one purpose only, to see how they react to something coming totally out of the blue and having to quickly change mental gears. Although not supposed to be user facing, we're server support, we sometimes have to deal with users who have even less clue than any I've met elsewhere (you know that urban legend about a call about a broken coffee cup holder, it's not just an urban legend, I have taken that call, gone out and found a broken CD tray with a pool of coffee beneath it) but demanding beyond belief. Diplomacy can be as vital as technical knowledge (we work in a highly political environment (both small p and capital P, we're a local council) where the person on the other end of the phone probably has the authority to sack you or plays golf with someone who has the authority to sack you). We need someone who can handle that.
The best response I ever had from a candidate to the question was from a female candidate who blinked twice and proceeded to tell us the sort of joke that, if told by a male member of staff, would result in a swift sacking for sexual harrassment (it was one of the "Why do women have legs?" jokes). Fortunately she'd done a really good interview overall so we (the panel was me, a woman from HR and a manager (another woman)) could hire her.
Stephen
The rest of the IT people are probably touchy and grouchy because the intern is taking too damn long to do even simple jobs and spends all their time talking to the users when they should be moving on to the next task. Plus management has just dumped another 4 man weeks of extra project work per week on them because they've got an intern to pick up the day-to-day work.
Stephen
Plus for the residents it's just a short period of their career and they know it. After a few years of 80 hours days they know they will move on to the next phase of their career where they will be paid more to work shorter hours. Indeed, often the more they are paid the less hours they will work.
For us it's an ongoing period with no expected end other than death or unemployment, the former actually seeming preferable at times as at least that way you won't have to get up every morning to bust a gut trying to find a job where you will probably have to work more hours for less money.
Stephen
I prefer: "Never let the plane take you someplace your mind didn't get five minutes ago"
Stephen
They did. I was an accident, abortion wasn't an option due my mother's beliefs (and wasn't particularly safe at that time either). They never let an opportunity to tell me I wasn't wanted pass unsiezed.
Stephen
Or just duct tape their mouth shut and put them in a dog costume then ship them in the hold.
Stephen
PS I don't like children
PPS Actually doing the above may be illegal, check with the airline first
Every presciption I've had for about the last 15 years has been in two parts. The prescription itself and the repeat slip, the repeat slip has the same details as the prescription itself so should be as verfiable as the original prescription. I do agree that it wouldn't be too hard to fake a letter, or even fake a prescription.
Stephen
I caught a bit of a press conference on the news during my lunch break. They stated that they had found explosives and a mixture of assembled and paritially assembled bombs.
Stephen