I half agree with this, but it's a conundrum. I'd really prefer a world where you can have more or less whatever you want, as long as you don't infringe on anyone else's freedom or safety with it. You want a 1 watt laser? Fine. You want a 1 kW laser? Fine, too. Unfortunately, there are a lot of grade A dumbasses out there who will blind people or cause car or plane crashes with them. I'm all ears if someone has a solution that lets non-dumbasses do whatever they want without the actual dumbasses causing havoc.
In all seriousness, jackasses doing things like this are why we end up banning things that responsible people should be able to have. Take your pick whether that's laser pointers, alcohol or other intoxicants, guns, or whatever else.
The thing this moron didn't get is not the legal risk to himself, it's the risk to the life and limb of the pilot of the craft and anybody he crashes on. If he's the sort of selfish prick who values his own amusement over the safety of the people in the helicopter/plane/whatever, then yes, throw him in a hole where he can't do any harm, and throw the other 3,699 who are going to do that this year in there with him.
I wonder if you feel that way about bridges or medicine. The answer is the same. You train because mistakes are expensive. If you're building your own toy programs, go ahead and skip the training. Who cares if they don't work? If you're building air traffic control software, then the rest of us would appreciate if you knew what you were doing. Perhaps learn from the all those who came before, made mistakes, and figured out general strategies for not doing it again.
It's actually an interesting question. I've seen plenty of backlash against people who read something and want to apply it, as if practical experience is the only way to learn something. Think about that for a minute. If that's true, the implication is that we can never go beyond what one person can figure out in one lifetime. Nonsense, if you ask me. Billions of people have come before us and learned things. Use them.
Hardly. If you're 40, you're looking at about another 20+ years of working. It's time to think about the last *half* of your career, which I suppose you can call the end if you'd like, but you might just as well think of the first 20 years as just getting started.
Really, you need some sort of objective feedback. Numbers and averages are all well and good, but who are *you*. I've known great 50+ year old coders and many, many incompetent 20 year olds, which really isn't surprising. Those 30 intervening years filter out the bad ones. If you're still doing it at 50, you most likely don't suck.
No, the American system is great if you have insurance, which a large majority of Americans do. In Canada, you all have insurance, and it's hidden inside your tax bill. Your dad also spent years paying off the debt (or pre-paying it), it was simply never itemized and spelled out that way.
You're expressing the dangerous misconception that socializing medicine makes it not cost. It does. It just hides the bill.
Yes, I have a question. Why? Why do they live longer and spend less?
I have friends and extended family in and near Canada. Funny thing is, they DON'T tell me Canada has better health care. What they tell me about are ridiculous waits to get health care. Well, ridiculous to me, anyway. I called Tuesday to make an appointment with a specialist at a top-tier US healthcare provider and was seen within 24 hours. If I needed surgery, which I didn't, thankfully, I know it'd be scheduled just about as soon as I wanted.
Here's the thing about America. We have really, really excellent health care. Yes, it's also expensive and not everyone can afford it, and that's a problem. If we live slightly shorter lives than Canadians, a fact I've not bothered to check, it's far more likely because we're also fat and don't exercise. I ran into a guy I used to work with last night. Haven't seen him in 10 years. He's always been around 100 pounds overweight. I don't know that he doesn't exercise, but given the weight, I doubt it. Since I saw him, he's had two heart attacks and a stroke. US health care didn't cause that, although it did keep him from dying from those events. What could have saved him is dropping the extra pounds 20-30 years ago, but it's too late now.
On a planet where we can't bother to feed people starving on one side with the excess output of the other, yeah, I'd say you're right. We create fat, narcissistic 6-year-olds named Honey Boo Boo while parents elsewhere watch their kids starve.
I have the same experience. Switched from AT&T to Verizon, and I get a lot more dropped calls with Verizon. The myth that Verizon is better is just that.
Some workplaces have showers exactly to encourage this sort of thing. A good many don't, of course, but mine does. They get used multiple times a day as people either bike in or go for a run during lunch. Not my thing, but I think it's pretty cool that they're available.
Noise cancelling headphones suck. I have a pair of the Shure SE530s in-ear headphones and find that they're an almost impervious wall against outside sounds. I loooove them. They don't do noise cancellation at all, they're simple a good pair of earplugs with really, really good speakers in them. I've never been remotely impressed with over the ear solutions as far as noise isolation goes.
It's very easy to say that, but I stronly suspect if you're ever a month from being on the street with your kids, you'd cough up those passwords in a second if it's what it took to land the job.
That's exactly why I support laws banning the practice. People will bluster on internet forums like this about how they'll NEVER give out their passwords. Real people in real life don't always have a choice. Or put another way, the only choice they have makes giving up things they shouldn't have to look reasonable.
This is one of those things that sounds like a good idea, but isn't.
Here's why.
There is probably real and tangible damage that would occur if someone disclosed confidential information on your company. There may or may not be if they disclose their social media profile information to you. It's really not for YOU to assign a value to THEIR resources any more than it is for THEM to assign value to YOURS.
Your test is also not one of backbone at all, but one of perceived value and desperation. As I said, you may be asking them to give up something they don't value, so they don't mind doing it. Not just perceived, but actual, in many cases. I have older relatives whose facebook profiles are barren. They almost never log in and have 8 friends who also almost never log in. They could post their login and password to the world and not actually lose anything. You may also be interviewing someone who desperately needs to bring some money in to keep a roof over their heads or feed their kids. Everyone has a backbone when the cost of stiffening it is low. Everyone has a point when they have to bend. I will NOT give you my facebook password...unless it's the difference between my kids eating or not. I will NOT give up my right to free speech...but I might shut up now and speak later if you're going to shoot me.
That's actually why laws like this are good. Asking people who really need a job for information you shouldn't is implicitly coercive.
Don't play games like this with people. You turn interviews not into true tests of what people are made of, but a silly multilevel thinking exercise where I have to figure out if you're just some jerk who doesn't respect my privacy, or someone who thinks *I* should and is just testing me. Understand that your candidates don't have a way to know which of those people you are.
1) Money isn't actually used up when we build things. The money goes into the hands of the people who build them, the people who create the materials in them, etc. None of the money will actually leave the planet.
2) I'd rather spend a trillion dollars doing this than spend a trillion dollars fighting wars we don't need to fight.
It's really time this silly myth dies. Do you really think people are shelling out $40,000 to $200,000 and giving up 4 years of their lives because they just don't feel educated enough? I know the educational purists out there will never accept this, but it's true. Sorry, guys. Perhaps once going to university was what the elite class did so they could have learned discussions in their smoking jackets, but nearly all of us these days get a degree because it vastly improves your earning potential.
When somebody asks you for legal advice on Slashdot, you're supposed to give it in the form of a car analogy. In case you hadn't noticed, simply having an account on Slashdot qualifies you as a legal expert, especially on IP issues. No legal training? No problem!
All the people who have ever lived on the earth would fit in a 1 mile by 1 mile by 1 mile cube. That cube would fit in the grand canyon. Now think about how big the ocean is. The amount of water locked up in people is a literal drop in the bucket.
Do you truly not understand the tremendous logical fallacy you're making here? I'm saying some A (words that sound like threats) are not B (actual threats). You are turning that on its head and saying "A, therefore not B?!?" Actually, worse, you're saying "A, therefore not C (there is no murder in real life)".
You're attempt to counter is completely divorced from anything I said.
What you're unwilling to understand is that words can have multiple meanings. Just yesterday I heard the words "Kill that guy!". A violent threat, right? Nah. It was a kid playing a video game, the "guy" a collection of pixels, and "kill" didn't involve taking anyone's or anything's life. People engage in hyperbole. People speak in idioms. Insisting on parsing everything everyone says as being literal is rather stupid when it's demonstrably true that people often express a desire or intent to do things that they don't actually have a desire or intent to do.
No, you don't assume. You use your observational powers to determine whether, when people say things like this online, they're serious. If they usually are, you infer this is a likely to be a real threat. If they very rarely are, you infer it's unlikely to be one. Perhaps you start investigating the guy to figure out if he's the rare one who wasn't just blowing off steam, trolling, or the bajillion other ways people say stupid things online. It's possible that happened. Maybe the police went to the guy's house and there's more to this story than "said something stupid online while legally owning guns". Hard to say with the info in TFA.
It was an actionable threat. Remember that big war we had back then?
Good point, though. Sometimes threats are reasonable. The US might very reasonably tell people that if they storm our embassies, bad things are going to happen to them. That's a perfectly reasonable threat of real world violence.
There's nothing wrong with them trying to make money. There's just also nothing wrong with us getting ticked off by it and some fraction of us choosing not to buy one as a result.
I don't assume you're lying. I won't retell the story as I have on/. already, but I was ruled guilty of something like disobeying a traffic control device. Ok, I will retell the short version. There was road construction, my exit was coming up, and when I came to a big gap in the cones, I thought that was where you were supposed to go to get on the exit. The exit was getting close to the point I was afraid I was about to miss it. There was a state trooper sitting right on the shoulder. I saw the state trooper, drove through the big gap, and instantly got pulled over. I could write it all off as a misunderstanding except for the trooper lying through her teeth and claiming the gap was WAY smaller than it really was, and that I was OBVIOUSLY breaking the law. Because, you know, I'm the sort of moron who would do that with a state trooper sitting right there. The trooper's smirk at me as I was ruled guilty sealed the deal. She was lying and she knew it.
Like someone said on here recently, we have a legal system, not a justice system. At least it was just a traffic ticket.
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I half agree with this, but it's a conundrum. I'd really prefer a world where you can have more or less whatever you want, as long as you don't infringe on anyone else's freedom or safety with it. You want a 1 watt laser? Fine. You want a 1 kW laser? Fine, too. Unfortunately, there are a lot of grade A dumbasses out there who will blind people or cause car or plane crashes with them. I'm all ears if someone has a solution that lets non-dumbasses do whatever they want without the actual dumbasses causing havoc.
This is why we can't have nice things.
In all seriousness, jackasses doing things like this are why we end up banning things that responsible people should be able to have. Take your pick whether that's laser pointers, alcohol or other intoxicants, guns, or whatever else.
The thing this moron didn't get is not the legal risk to himself, it's the risk to the life and limb of the pilot of the craft and anybody he crashes on. If he's the sort of selfish prick who values his own amusement over the safety of the people in the helicopter/plane/whatever, then yes, throw him in a hole where he can't do any harm, and throw the other 3,699 who are going to do that this year in there with him.
I wonder if you feel that way about bridges or medicine. The answer is the same. You train because mistakes are expensive. If you're building your own toy programs, go ahead and skip the training. Who cares if they don't work? If you're building air traffic control software, then the rest of us would appreciate if you knew what you were doing. Perhaps learn from the all those who came before, made mistakes, and figured out general strategies for not doing it again.
It's actually an interesting question. I've seen plenty of backlash against people who read something and want to apply it, as if practical experience is the only way to learn something. Think about that for a minute. If that's true, the implication is that we can never go beyond what one person can figure out in one lifetime. Nonsense, if you ask me. Billions of people have come before us and learned things. Use them.
Hardly. If you're 40, you're looking at about another 20+ years of working. It's time to think about the last *half* of your career, which I suppose you can call the end if you'd like, but you might just as well think of the first 20 years as just getting started.
Really, you need some sort of objective feedback. Numbers and averages are all well and good, but who are *you*. I've known great 50+ year old coders and many, many incompetent 20 year olds, which really isn't surprising. Those 30 intervening years filter out the bad ones. If you're still doing it at 50, you most likely don't suck.
No, the American system is great if you have insurance, which a large majority of Americans do. In Canada, you all have insurance, and it's hidden inside your tax bill. Your dad also spent years paying off the debt (or pre-paying it), it was simply never itemized and spelled out that way.
You're expressing the dangerous misconception that socializing medicine makes it not cost. It does. It just hides the bill.
Yes, I have a question. Why? Why do they live longer and spend less?
I have friends and extended family in and near Canada. Funny thing is, they DON'T tell me Canada has better health care. What they tell me about are ridiculous waits to get health care. Well, ridiculous to me, anyway. I called Tuesday to make an appointment with a specialist at a top-tier US healthcare provider and was seen within 24 hours. If I needed surgery, which I didn't, thankfully, I know it'd be scheduled just about as soon as I wanted.
Here's the thing about America. We have really, really excellent health care. Yes, it's also expensive and not everyone can afford it, and that's a problem. If we live slightly shorter lives than Canadians, a fact I've not bothered to check, it's far more likely because we're also fat and don't exercise. I ran into a guy I used to work with last night. Haven't seen him in 10 years. He's always been around 100 pounds overweight. I don't know that he doesn't exercise, but given the weight, I doubt it. Since I saw him, he's had two heart attacks and a stroke. US health care didn't cause that, although it did keep him from dying from those events. What could have saved him is dropping the extra pounds 20-30 years ago, but it's too late now.
On a planet where we can't bother to feed people starving on one side with the excess output of the other, yeah, I'd say you're right. We create fat, narcissistic 6-year-olds named Honey Boo Boo while parents elsewhere watch their kids starve.
This civilization thing...we're doing it wrong.
I have the same experience. Switched from AT&T to Verizon, and I get a lot more dropped calls with Verizon. The myth that Verizon is better is just that.
Some workplaces have showers exactly to encourage this sort of thing. A good many don't, of course, but mine does. They get used multiple times a day as people either bike in or go for a run during lunch. Not my thing, but I think it's pretty cool that they're available.
Noise cancelling headphones suck. I have a pair of the Shure SE530s in-ear headphones and find that they're an almost impervious wall against outside sounds. I loooove them. They don't do noise cancellation at all, they're simple a good pair of earplugs with really, really good speakers in them. I've never been remotely impressed with over the ear solutions as far as noise isolation goes.
It's very easy to say that, but I stronly suspect if you're ever a month from being on the street with your kids, you'd cough up those passwords in a second if it's what it took to land the job.
That's exactly why I support laws banning the practice. People will bluster on internet forums like this about how they'll NEVER give out their passwords. Real people in real life don't always have a choice. Or put another way, the only choice they have makes giving up things they shouldn't have to look reasonable.
This is one of those things that sounds like a good idea, but isn't.
Here's why.
There is probably real and tangible damage that would occur if someone disclosed confidential information on your company. There may or may not be if they disclose their social media profile information to you. It's really not for YOU to assign a value to THEIR resources any more than it is for THEM to assign value to YOURS.
Your test is also not one of backbone at all, but one of perceived value and desperation. As I said, you may be asking them to give up something they don't value, so they don't mind doing it. Not just perceived, but actual, in many cases. I have older relatives whose facebook profiles are barren. They almost never log in and have 8 friends who also almost never log in. They could post their login and password to the world and not actually lose anything. You may also be interviewing someone who desperately needs to bring some money in to keep a roof over their heads or feed their kids. Everyone has a backbone when the cost of stiffening it is low. Everyone has a point when they have to bend. I will NOT give you my facebook password...unless it's the difference between my kids eating or not. I will NOT give up my right to free speech...but I might shut up now and speak later if you're going to shoot me.
That's actually why laws like this are good. Asking people who really need a job for information you shouldn't is implicitly coercive.
Don't play games like this with people. You turn interviews not into true tests of what people are made of, but a silly multilevel thinking exercise where I have to figure out if you're just some jerk who doesn't respect my privacy, or someone who thinks *I* should and is just testing me. Understand that your candidates don't have a way to know which of those people you are.
So, the UN should have jurisdiction, then? You don't think people only access social media sites from your country, do you?
1) Money isn't actually used up when we build things. The money goes into the hands of the people who build them, the people who create the materials in them, etc. None of the money will actually leave the planet.
2) I'd rather spend a trillion dollars doing this than spend a trillion dollars fighting wars we don't need to fight.
It's really time this silly myth dies. Do you really think people are shelling out $40,000 to $200,000 and giving up 4 years of their lives because they just don't feel educated enough? I know the educational purists out there will never accept this, but it's true. Sorry, guys. Perhaps once going to university was what the elite class did so they could have learned discussions in their smoking jackets, but nearly all of us these days get a degree because it vastly improves your earning potential.
FTFY.
I'm not afraid. I'm hopeful it would eject 80%.
All the people who have ever lived on the earth would fit in a 1 mile by 1 mile by 1 mile cube. That cube would fit in the grand canyon. Now think about how big the ocean is. The amount of water locked up in people is a literal drop in the bucket.
Do you truly not understand the tremendous logical fallacy you're making here? I'm saying some A (words that sound like threats) are not B (actual threats). You are turning that on its head and saying "A, therefore not B?!?" Actually, worse, you're saying "A, therefore not C (there is no murder in real life)".
You're attempt to counter is completely divorced from anything I said.
What you're unwilling to understand is that words can have multiple meanings. Just yesterday I heard the words "Kill that guy!". A violent threat, right? Nah. It was a kid playing a video game, the "guy" a collection of pixels, and "kill" didn't involve taking anyone's or anything's life. People engage in hyperbole. People speak in idioms. Insisting on parsing everything everyone says as being literal is rather stupid when it's demonstrably true that people often express a desire or intent to do things that they don't actually have a desire or intent to do.
No, you don't assume. You use your observational powers to determine whether, when people say things like this online, they're serious. If they usually are, you infer this is a likely to be a real threat. If they very rarely are, you infer it's unlikely to be one. Perhaps you start investigating the guy to figure out if he's the rare one who wasn't just blowing off steam, trolling, or the bajillion other ways people say stupid things online. It's possible that happened. Maybe the police went to the guy's house and there's more to this story than "said something stupid online while legally owning guns". Hard to say with the info in TFA.
It was an actionable threat. Remember that big war we had back then?
Good point, though. Sometimes threats are reasonable. The US might very reasonably tell people that if they storm our embassies, bad things are going to happen to them. That's a perfectly reasonable threat of real world violence.
There's nothing wrong with them trying to make money. There's just also nothing wrong with us getting ticked off by it and some fraction of us choosing not to buy one as a result.
I don't assume you're lying. I won't retell the story as I have on /. already, but I was ruled guilty of something like disobeying a traffic control device. Ok, I will retell the short version. There was road construction, my exit was coming up, and when I came to a big gap in the cones, I thought that was where you were supposed to go to get on the exit. The exit was getting close to the point I was afraid I was about to miss it. There was a state trooper sitting right on the shoulder. I saw the state trooper, drove through the big gap, and instantly got pulled over. I could write it all off as a misunderstanding except for the trooper lying through her teeth and claiming the gap was WAY smaller than it really was, and that I was OBVIOUSLY breaking the law. Because, you know, I'm the sort of moron who would do that with a state trooper sitting right there. The trooper's smirk at me as I was ruled guilty sealed the deal. She was lying and she knew it.
Like someone said on here recently, we have a legal system, not a justice system. At least it was just a traffic ticket.
Speeding tickets here are as low as $15.
"Court costs" are a total BS $130 or so, though. As if the cost of disposing of my case in 2 minutes actually costs that.