You still have to worry about fires in Britain. Maybe not natural ones so much (but surely it's possible for the few remaining forested areas they have to burn), but certainly man-made ones in the cities, or else they wouldn't have firemen.
Oh please. Fires happen everywhere. Are you going to blame people now for living in flammable structures? Cities have fire departments because you don't need a forest and trees to have a fire. Boats have fire-fighting equipment too because they burn as well (yes, even steel-hulled ships). Commercial buildings (the ones made of concrete and steel) have automatic sprinklers to stop fires.
So how exactly do you propose for people to avoid fires?
As for wild animals, I don't know of a lot of areas that don't have any wild animals of some kind, except dense cities (but these are in danger of fire--see the Great Chicago Fire). When I lived in Arizona, right in the middle of the metro area, I had a pack of coyotes living behind my house for a while. Some people in southern California (LA area I believe, maybe SD) were attacked by a mountain lion a while ago.
Oh yeah, back in AZ they had a lot of problems with wildfires, even on the edge of the metro area in the desert. Seems that dry brush and grasses burn really well, and that fire can spread to developed areas nearby. So, you can't live near forests, you can't live near plains, you can't live near deserts, you can't live in big cities, so where the hell can you live where you're safe from fires?
The cook should go free (unless you can prove he's the one who poisoned someone--good luck with that) because he's making minimum wage and if he doesn't keep his job, he starves. What's more, if he calls the health board, he'll never work as a cook in that town again, since business owners always cover for each other. It's the government's job to inspect restaurants, not to rely on people to call them when there's a problem because that won't ever work.
Does the rubber shot work well against polar bears? How about beanbags? Sounds like a good alternative.
Another thing you can do is keep a side-saddle on your shotgun (with a pump-action model). Then, you can have different loads: keep the non-lethal loads in the magazine tube, and keep lethal (buckshot) loads in the side-saddle. So, if you're facing a polar bear, just use the non-lethal loads, and if a human is coming after you, load up the buckshot or even a rifled slug round.
It doesn't seem to hurt most of them. Most people don't pay attention to that kind of thing; they don't care if Facebook got hacked, they'll keep using Facebook anyway.
The difference is that, if you're a cook in some shitty restaurant where they don't keep stuff clean, and someone gets sick and sues the restaurant or the health board investigate, it's the restaurant and its owners who get in trouble, have to pay judgments, lose their food service license, etc. As a cook, you'll probably lose your job when the restaurant goes belly-up, but you can walk down the street to another restaurant and just get another job.
In your stupid world, software developers who are part of a team led by a shitty manager at a shitty company would be held personally liable for software defects, would have multi-million dollar judgments against them, and would never be able to work again after losing their license because of a mistake made by another team member, the boss's poor direction, the QA team's failure to catch the problem, or the upper management's failure to even have a QA team in the first place (they decided to lay off the QA department to save money and get a big bonus).
and in one place where you need to defend yourself (Svalbard, from polar bears) you are handed a shotgun after getting off the plane.
Can't they figure out a better way of defending against polar bears than shotguns? What about bear spray? There aren't many polar bears left in the world. Shotguns are great for defending yourself against people, but for innocent animals we should try to find a better, non-lethal method.
I don't know where you get all this BS. Most doctors work for themselves or for a small group of doctors. Every time I've been to a hospital (and everyone I've ever known has), I got multiple bills, one being from the hospital, and one being from the doctor. Doctors DO NOT work for hospitals.
Restaurant cooks don't have licenses. The restaurants themselves do, but the cooks and other low-level employees do not.
So why are you trying to make the low-level employees bear all the responsibility, instead of their bosses and the corporations they work for?
Software developers are just like line cooks; they have no say in anything, they don't get paid much (compared to the corporation executives), so why should they have to get licenses?
Large earthquakes only hit certain places with sufficient magnitude every few centuries or so. Same goes for volcanoes: the city of Pompeii was probably considered safe too, as it had been there a long time before Vesuvius erupted.
Wrong. Why would anyone want to take on such a job?
Surgeons and lawyers are very different professions: they own their own businesses, they're their own bosses, and they make a ton of money (unless they're in a junior position, but the career goal is to have your own practice, or be a "partner" in a top law firm which is mostly the same thing).
Developers and other software people aren't their own bosses, unless they're contractors. They work for corporations, and are just paid employees, no different from secretaries or janitors. They have zero control over their own work and how they do it: they have to do whatever their boss tells them to. Why should a developer be responsible for something failing when he was directed to write it in a half-ass manner by his boss?
Because the people who hire web developers are not the ones who are hurt when the web developers' products fail; the users (visitors to the website) are the ones who suffer. The customers are not the same as the users.
The customers (web site owners) aren't going to care when they hire a crappy developer and his code results in someone's credit-card info getting released, or identity being stolen; the website operator isn't hurt by these things, so they don't care. There's no disincentive to hiring crappy developers.
Sure you aren't thinking of George Orwell? Can't have anyone getting scared about the government with some dystopian fiction, after all. Sounds like terrorism to me!
Not a chance that'll happen. In America, we like bullies, and we make fun of people who are their victims. Just look at what happens every time a bullying incidents develops to the point that some poor kid kills him/herself. Americans worship assholes. We might say a few nice-sounding words against bullies once in a while, but we'll never do anything to actually fix the problem, nor will we ever hold bullies accountable for their behavior.
It's just like how we worship sociopathic business owners, and defend thier unethical and even dangerous behavior, and anyone who complains about them is blackballed in the industry. Whistleblowers (for instance, people who go to the government to stop a business owner whose practices will get someone killed through negligence) are seen as "rats", and will never get another job.
American here. Only the educated people here have probably even heard the word "mutton", and most of them probably don't know what it is either; at best, they probably think it's some kind of dish served in England. And no one here has ever heard of "hoggett"; this thread is in fact the first time I've heard of it.
what the hell is a technical interview and how should it be structured anyway?
At a basic level, a "technical interview" (as opposed to a "behavioral interview") is one where the candidate is asked technical questions related to the job he'll be doing.
Honestly, I don't see what the problem with them is, as long as you don't take it too far. I had to help hire some contractors in a previous job, and what I saw was that there were a fair number of candidates out there who completely lied on their resumes, so technical questions were essential for weeding out the total liars. I made up extremely easy questions; to test if someone actually knew anything about C++, I'd ask them to explain what a "class" is. A bunch of people who claimed to be C++ "experts" couldn't answer that question. I never saw any point to asking anything more involved than that, or maybe some extremely basic syntax question ("write a for loop") just to see if they've even programmed in that language before.
A new economic system would be nice, but no one's invented such a system yet which would prevent corruption or mindless entities from having power. It's a fantasy. Karl Marx tried inventing a new system, but that was a complete disaster, and wasn't any better than the system he was trying to replace, and instead was worse in most ways.
I don't see how it's hard to measure "asshole": do they get along with their coworkers, or does everyone hate them? Yes, that does mean it's a bit of a popularity contest, but if everyone in a team hates one guy, for whatever reason, how do you expect this team to get along well and produce good work if you leave the guy there? I suppose in an extreme case maybe the rest of the team sucks and the hated one is the only productive member, but that should be fairly easy to spot if that's the case, and if so, you need to fire the whole team (except him) and hire new people; but that's a very extreme and unlikely case.
You're a moron. There's a lot more to NJ than stinky Newark and Elizabeth and those areas. Maybe if you had bothered to travel 10 or more miles west of there, you'd see that it's not like that at all, just like all of Manhattan doesn't look like Harlem or all of NY doesn't look like the Bronx.
Absolutely. Moreover if said blogger (and bloggers in general) were to have the honour to delete comments, not on the basis of disagreeing with their author's sentiments, but on the basis that they are inflammatory or simply stupid, we may have a situations where "censorship" actually aids information flow.
Exactly, which is why in this case we use a different word with a totally different connotation: "moderation". Lots of people prefer moderated forums because the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher. As long as there's plenty of choice (or the freedom to start your own competing forum if you like), "censorship" (with its negative connotations) isn't the right word IMO. There's also another term: "editorial control". Just like newspapers pick and choose which letters to the editor they publish, forum owners have a right to do the same.
Yep, telecommuting can work out really great that way. However, it seems to me that such jobs are becoming more rare. It wasn't that long ago that Yahoo's new CEO Meyer banned all telecommuting in the company.
The problems seems to be that no one bothers to make media that actually lasts very long any more. Sure, 15 years ago, CD-Rs were very high-quality, so the ones you burned way back then still read just fine. But try that with anything available in a store now.
So even if this new media is technically capable of a long lifetime and archival quality, after what we've seen with CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, many of us are rightfully skeptical that the media producers would make anything that good to be used with this new system.
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You still have to worry about fires in Britain. Maybe not natural ones so much (but surely it's possible for the few remaining forested areas they have to burn), but certainly man-made ones in the cities, or else they wouldn't have firemen.
Oh please. Fires happen everywhere. Are you going to blame people now for living in flammable structures? Cities have fire departments because you don't need a forest and trees to have a fire. Boats have fire-fighting equipment too because they burn as well (yes, even steel-hulled ships). Commercial buildings (the ones made of concrete and steel) have automatic sprinklers to stop fires.
So how exactly do you propose for people to avoid fires?
As for wild animals, I don't know of a lot of areas that don't have any wild animals of some kind, except dense cities (but these are in danger of fire--see the Great Chicago Fire). When I lived in Arizona, right in the middle of the metro area, I had a pack of coyotes living behind my house for a while. Some people in southern California (LA area I believe, maybe SD) were attacked by a mountain lion a while ago.
Oh yeah, back in AZ they had a lot of problems with wildfires, even on the edge of the metro area in the desert. Seems that dry brush and grasses burn really well, and that fire can spread to developed areas nearby. So, you can't live near forests, you can't live near plains, you can't live near deserts, you can't live in big cities, so where the hell can you live where you're safe from fires?
The cook should go free (unless you can prove he's the one who poisoned someone--good luck with that) because he's making minimum wage and if he doesn't keep his job, he starves. What's more, if he calls the health board, he'll never work as a cook in that town again, since business owners always cover for each other. It's the government's job to inspect restaurants, not to rely on people to call them when there's a problem because that won't ever work.
Does the rubber shot work well against polar bears? How about beanbags? Sounds like a good alternative.
Another thing you can do is keep a side-saddle on your shotgun (with a pump-action model). Then, you can have different loads: keep the non-lethal loads in the magazine tube, and keep lethal (buckshot) loads in the side-saddle. So, if you're facing a polar bear, just use the non-lethal loads, and if a human is coming after you, load up the buckshot or even a rifled slug round.
It doesn't seem to hurt most of them. Most people don't pay attention to that kind of thing; they don't care if Facebook got hacked, they'll keep using Facebook anyway.
The difference is that, if you're a cook in some shitty restaurant where they don't keep stuff clean, and someone gets sick and sues the restaurant or the health board investigate, it's the restaurant and its owners who get in trouble, have to pay judgments, lose their food service license, etc. As a cook, you'll probably lose your job when the restaurant goes belly-up, but you can walk down the street to another restaurant and just get another job.
In your stupid world, software developers who are part of a team led by a shitty manager at a shitty company would be held personally liable for software defects, would have multi-million dollar judgments against them, and would never be able to work again after losing their license because of a mistake made by another team member, the boss's poor direction, the QA team's failure to catch the problem, or the upper management's failure to even have a QA team in the first place (they decided to lay off the QA department to save money and get a big bonus).
and in one place where you need to defend yourself (Svalbard, from polar bears) you are handed a shotgun after getting off the plane.
Can't they figure out a better way of defending against polar bears than shotguns? What about bear spray? There aren't many polar bears left in the world. Shotguns are great for defending yourself against people, but for innocent animals we should try to find a better, non-lethal method.
Smart sociopaths are good at that kind of thing. So are compulsive liars, and lawyers.
I don't know where you get all this BS. Most doctors work for themselves or for a small group of doctors. Every time I've been to a hospital (and everyone I've ever known has), I got multiple bills, one being from the hospital, and one being from the doctor. Doctors DO NOT work for hospitals.
Restaurant cooks don't have licenses. The restaurants themselves do, but the cooks and other low-level employees do not.
So why are you trying to make the low-level employees bear all the responsibility, instead of their bosses and the corporations they work for?
Software developers are just like line cooks; they have no say in anything, they don't get paid much (compared to the corporation executives), so why should they have to get licenses?
Large earthquakes only hit certain places with sufficient magnitude every few centuries or so. Same goes for volcanoes: the city of Pompeii was probably considered safe too, as it had been there a long time before Vesuvius erupted.
Wrong. Why would anyone want to take on such a job?
Surgeons and lawyers are very different professions: they own their own businesses, they're their own bosses, and they make a ton of money (unless they're in a junior position, but the career goal is to have your own practice, or be a "partner" in a top law firm which is mostly the same thing).
Developers and other software people aren't their own bosses, unless they're contractors. They work for corporations, and are just paid employees, no different from secretaries or janitors. They have zero control over their own work and how they do it: they have to do whatever their boss tells them to. Why should a developer be responsible for something failing when he was directed to write it in a half-ass manner by his boss?
Because the people who hire web developers are not the ones who are hurt when the web developers' products fail; the users (visitors to the website) are the ones who suffer. The customers are not the same as the users.
The customers (web site owners) aren't going to care when they hire a crappy developer and his code results in someone's credit-card info getting released, or identity being stolen; the website operator isn't hurt by these things, so they don't care. There's no disincentive to hiring crappy developers.
Yes, I knew about that, I was just pointing out that another guy with a sorta-similar-sounding name might be demonized by these people as well.
Sure you aren't thinking of George Orwell? Can't have anyone getting scared about the government with some dystopian fiction, after all. Sounds like terrorism to me!
Not a chance that'll happen. In America, we like bullies, and we make fun of people who are their victims. Just look at what happens every time a bullying incidents develops to the point that some poor kid kills him/herself. Americans worship assholes. We might say a few nice-sounding words against bullies once in a while, but we'll never do anything to actually fix the problem, nor will we ever hold bullies accountable for their behavior.
It's just like how we worship sociopathic business owners, and defend thier unethical and even dangerous behavior, and anyone who complains about them is blackballed in the industry. Whistleblowers (for instance, people who go to the government to stop a business owner whose practices will get someone killed through negligence) are seen as "rats", and will never get another job.
American here. Only the educated people here have probably even heard the word "mutton", and most of them probably don't know what it is either; at best, they probably think it's some kind of dish served in England. And no one here has ever heard of "hoggett"; this thread is in fact the first time I've heard of it.
There's several candidates: Yahoo, Symantec, Nokia, and of course Facebook and EA as other people mentioned.
what the hell is a technical interview and how should it be structured anyway?
At a basic level, a "technical interview" (as opposed to a "behavioral interview") is one where the candidate is asked technical questions related to the job he'll be doing.
Honestly, I don't see what the problem with them is, as long as you don't take it too far. I had to help hire some contractors in a previous job, and what I saw was that there were a fair number of candidates out there who completely lied on their resumes, so technical questions were essential for weeding out the total liars. I made up extremely easy questions; to test if someone actually knew anything about C++, I'd ask them to explain what a "class" is. A bunch of people who claimed to be C++ "experts" couldn't answer that question. I never saw any point to asking anything more involved than that, or maybe some extremely basic syntax question ("write a for loop") just to see if they've even programmed in that language before.
A new economic system would be nice, but no one's invented such a system yet which would prevent corruption or mindless entities from having power. It's a fantasy. Karl Marx tried inventing a new system, but that was a complete disaster, and wasn't any better than the system he was trying to replace, and instead was worse in most ways.
I don't see how it's hard to measure "asshole": do they get along with their coworkers, or does everyone hate them? Yes, that does mean it's a bit of a popularity contest, but if everyone in a team hates one guy, for whatever reason, how do you expect this team to get along well and produce good work if you leave the guy there? I suppose in an extreme case maybe the rest of the team sucks and the hated one is the only productive member, but that should be fairly easy to spot if that's the case, and if so, you need to fire the whole team (except him) and hire new people; but that's a very extreme and unlikely case.
You're a moron. There's a lot more to NJ than stinky Newark and Elizabeth and those areas. Maybe if you had bothered to travel 10 or more miles west of there, you'd see that it's not like that at all, just like all of Manhattan doesn't look like Harlem or all of NY doesn't look like the Bronx.
Absolutely. Moreover if said blogger (and bloggers in general) were to have the honour to delete comments, not on the basis of disagreeing with their author's sentiments, but on the basis that they are inflammatory or simply stupid, we may have a situations where "censorship" actually aids information flow.
Exactly, which is why in this case we use a different word with a totally different connotation: "moderation". Lots of people prefer moderated forums because the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher. As long as there's plenty of choice (or the freedom to start your own competing forum if you like), "censorship" (with its negative connotations) isn't the right word IMO. There's also another term: "editorial control". Just like newspapers pick and choose which letters to the editor they publish, forum owners have a right to do the same.
Yep, telecommuting can work out really great that way. However, it seems to me that such jobs are becoming more rare. It wasn't that long ago that Yahoo's new CEO Meyer banned all telecommuting in the company.
The problems seems to be that no one bothers to make media that actually lasts very long any more. Sure, 15 years ago, CD-Rs were very high-quality, so the ones you burned way back then still read just fine. But try that with anything available in a store now.
So even if this new media is technically capable of a long lifetime and archival quality, after what we've seen with CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, many of us are rightfully skeptical that the media producers would make anything that good to be used with this new system.