So the doctor told you that the fever was a result of the MMR or did you come up with the diagnosis yourself?
I'm going to ASSuME here that you don't have kids or you really ought to know by now that any competent doctor, upon administering any of the childhood vaccines, will caution a parent that the child may feel lethargic and develop a fever in response to the injection.
Most vaccines are made out of killed virii. They provoke an immune response in the human system. It's what makes them work. The body tries to fight off what is essentially a dead invader. But in the process, it develops antibodies against future infections.
Fever, is part of the body's antiquated immune system. It's caused by our body trying to cook off the invasion. Unfortunately, the bugs learned how to cope with it long ago which is why we don't hesitate to medicate it down with Tylenol.
The real issue for concern out of the childhood vaccines is the suspension solution they are delivered in. This contains preservatives to provide shelf-life and enhance the vaccine's effectiveness since we don't have Just-In-Time medical vaccination infrastructure. Some of the happy ingredients you'll find in common vaccines are formaldehyde (poison) and thimerosal (poison) which breaks down into ethylmercury (poison) and also raw mercury (poison).
Adding to these concerns are the insistence by the AMA to deliver these childhood injections in bulk at early ages. Under the typical immunization schedule, children under 2 years are regularly dosed with 3-4 vaccines, significantly increasing their exposures to the toxic preservatives.
If you want to trust your government and believe that the FDA knows what they are doing and would never lie to you or cover the truth to enhance corporate profits, then you have nothing to worry about. But if you are a student of history or merely read the news on a regular basis, you might wonder if the FDA really has your best interests in mind when they claim that small amounts of these known toxins are just fine for your newborn baby.
But don't mind me. I'm just a raving lunatic father who insisted on reading up on these things and forced our doctor to both delay immunizations as long as possible and space them out over a longer period to reduce the risk to our children. None of my kids turned out autistic which proves absolutely nothing, but then, I wasn't worried about proving a point, I was merely concerned about the well-being of each and every one of my precious offspring.
You assume that the current redistribution of wealth is a good thing. With a 55% estate tax shuffling most of it over to the government... no corrupt power mongers there. Or would you agree that many high power (and therefore wealthy) government types would be the first to benefit from advancements in anti-aging? If so, we would create a class of ultra-powerful, government cronies who refuse to share power and refuse to die. While the rest of us work cradle to grave for our naturally short lives.
Personally, I'd rather have an opportunity to work for wealth and buy what I like, whether it be fast cars or life-extending technologies like antibiotics, cancer treatment or gene therapy.
You're going to have to study and practice it. For starters, buy a book. Second, don't mention the word age or reference their age, not even in the context of their experience. 98 times out of 100 it's harmless, even when you reject the candidate. But there are lawsuit-happy people out there and you're likely to pass them by. Being in the habit of mentioning age in an interview guarantees a lawsuit in your future.
Sticking to their experience, the combo knockout that tends to separate the pack goes like this:
a. what was the significant thing you did while at job X?
b. what skills did you use to do that?
c. can you show me some of that code? Describe the architecture?
d. Wouldn't that have required an algorithm like blah-blah? How did you implement that, specifically?
e. Okay, you don't remember, but how would you do it today?
f. repeat for next job/experience.
Great candidates will engage you and show off what they know. Crappy candidates, the majority, will deflect and dissemble talking about how it was a long time ago, they were only part of a team, they've haven't used that language lately as they've been studying cool-new-language instead.
I particularly love that last excuse, I follow it with, "okay, how would you do this in cool-new-language today?"
The problem with crying wolf over forecasted claims of doom is that we, as a species, are often wrong. Are we seriously going to believe that 1/3rd of amphibians have such a tenuous claim to life that a one degree shift in temperature is causing them to die off? Fine, let them die.
But what if it turns out to be mercury. Or Nitrates? Or perhaps it's just an over abundance of silt in the water. Or maybe its some sort of fungus. Maybe, just maybe, the frogs are the canary for global warming. But my fear is that we're going to mobilize the world to spend trillions on cutting carbon emissions and using heinously expensive alternative sources of energy (while china and the third world laugh and burn more coal than we conserve) all for nothing.
In the end, it will be something we stopped looking for and had no money / resources left to address that will kill us off.
All because we're too arrogant to believe we're wrong and stop asking questions.
Why do you need to take your whole family shopping? Can't you buy your Rice Krispies by yourself?;-) And even if you needed to take the whole family, then you can just take two cars. Mom and kid in the Aptera; dad and kid in the other. The combined 150 mpg is still a LOT better than the average 20mpg SUV.
Spoken like a true single-person with no kids. It's generally frowned upon to leave the little ones unsupervised. From 8-12 years of age you have a window where they might do okay by themselves, but after 12/puberty it's often poor wisdom to leave them unsupervised for other reasons.
So you often need to take them shopping for groceries with you.
As for spending all the cash for two cars rather than taking the hit in mpg, you should really think about the cost per year that fuel represents and how many years you'd need to "save" via higher mpg to justify another car. Back of the envelope for my 16mph SUV to a 300mpg vehicle would be... at least ten years to justify that second $30K car. Twenty if you consider that I'll only get half the savings because I'll be driving two of them.
Which brings up the point of Passenger Miles Per Gallon (pmpg) as a much better way to make comparisons. The 16mpg SUV I mentioned is our only car. It seats eight people. We have seven in our family. Driving our family around nets us 112 pmpg. While a two seater getting 300mpg gets 600pmpg, it's a 6:1 ratio compared to the assumed 19:1 implied by the EPA sticker.
Financially, I'd far rather have one car to buy, maintain, and fuel than a fleet of four cars to transport my family around. Practically, lacking four licensed drivers in our household, we kinda need to have one big car rather than multiple smaller ones. Quite often, one of the parents is busy working and the other parent has to drive everyone else somewhere. Emotionally, I enjoy the company of my wife and kids when we drive somewhere together... while we could trade kids between two or more cars, I would never be able to drive with my wife. The multi-car approach seems kinda idiotic when you start thinking about the impact, but it tends to be the suggestion from those who have never felt the negative effects of their ideology.
Hearing loss is a result of accumulated exposure to high decibels. Most headphones do nothing but provide additional decibels to the cacophony of our environment. Typical listeners just crank up the volume to achieve the signal to noise ratio that they desire.
If we're not cancelling out the unwanted decibels, then 98% of the human customers will turn the volume up, adding to the noise and creating scenarios where they damage their hearing. Since hearing damage is imperceptible as it occurs and gradual over time, most people are incapable of associating the loss with the behavior.
Sound isolating headphones allow high signal to noise ratios at lower volumes and the majority of people will naturally find low levels comfortable when using them. Without training, even. Unfortunately, we have this culture that discourages cutting one's self off from the audible environment; you might get hit by a car, for instance. What a crock of short-sighted advice that turned out to be.
Personally, I find that Etymotics or other in-ear isolators are great for high noise environments like the plane, train or trying to work at home when my kids are playing in my "office". But for more subdued environments like the workplace I prefer my Sony MDR-V6s as they are more comfortable for longer periods.
Years ago, after one of my kids trashed my first pair of V6 headphones, I replaced them with the MDR-V600 thinking same, bigger, better! Not quite. As it turns out, the can on the 600s is perforated and allows outside noise to travel right through. This causes higher volumes to be tolerable and even necessary while leaving me frustrated because my train of thought keeps getting interrupted by outside conversation... leading to higher volumes.
It's important to find a set of headphones that drown out or substantially dampen external noise. You'll appreciate the quiet and your ears will thank you as you get older.
The technical solution has been around for a long time, the trick is making it socially acceptable.
You do realize that the only reason the Republicans voted this down was that it was too restrictive on the Fed and Treasury, right?
This is yet another one of those votes where both parties showed how against the US Citizen they really are. Unless you were all for giving Paulson a blank check with no strings attached, I don't understand why you're so hip to be a Republican.
I'm already paying $70 for the residential 6/1Mbps line. Business starts at $100, plus $200-300 install fee. Plus it's still Comcast so I may still be subject to usage and rate limits.
No, it means that __users__ running bulk transfers are lower priority than other users who don't use their network much. They're discriminating by cable modem, not by traffic type, port or connection.
I experienced something like this last year with Comcast, as soon as I turned on a torrent, ANY TORRENT, my latency would rise from 25ms to 3000ms over then next 30 seconds. And after killing the torrent, latency would return to 25ms in another 30 seconds. Even with torrents running at very low d/l and u/l speeds, it would happen. It sucked. My wife would start bitching about the web being slow within minutes of turning on a torrent d/l. SSH to work became impossible. The effect was that I could only torrent late at night while people were sleeping.
Maybe that's what Comcast wants, but it's NOT what I pay for.
It will be interesting to see if these low priority packet queues will have any sort of wait threshold or if they'll just sit until the congestion clears. For heavy users, things could come to a stop. For heavy, ignorant users, this will generate calls to Comcastic support.
Since they're effectively saying stay under the 80% d/l and 70% u/l to avoid their QoS delays, I'd like my subscription fee reduced by 25%.
That's not likely to happen.
And there is no other game in my town.
Just another lesson and reason to run from Comcast whenever and wherever possible.
Not quite. If your QoS on your line is set to higher priority, then when a congestion event is reached, all your packets wait until lower priority packets clear the queue. That could be indefinitely... or at least until the congestion level clears.
Given Comcast's reputation for overselling and under provisioning, this could be a death sentence for indiscriminate torrent users.
What is the difference between an Apple and a Pear?! You have Ten seconds to answer! Go!
The answer you get will differ depending on whether the respondent is a consumer of apples and pears, a grower, a packager, a distributor, a reseller, or a genetic researcher. On the surface, it is a useless question.
However, if you ask the question enough times of enough different candidates, you begin to learn how to cast people into one of the above professions based on the answer they provide. If you are looking for a genetic research scientist, that question, and the answers it produces would be very useful indeed.
The volume of applicants for my open positions who lie or exaggerate during the process is staggering. I've been hiring in IT for over ten years now and it's been a constant. People try to put their "best foot forward" but in practice put eight or nine feet forward. The hiring manager who doesn't verify some or most of the claimed skills ends up overpaying for talent that is better suited for a different position.
While I sympathize that most "tests" are poorly designed and questionably interpreted, I'm always concerned about a prospective employer with too easy a screening process.
The screens I use consist of resume review, email questionaire, phone and in-person. Each stage eliminates over 50% of the applicants. If I dropped any particular stage, I would double the time I spend filtering with a negative impact on quality.
Possibly of even more importance, the screening steps tell a story that for far too many candidates unravels under closer scrutiny. A candidate who claims several years experience with X on their resume and answers questions regarding X very well in email... shouldn't appear ignorant about X on the phone, but it happens. I've even had people do well on the phone only to unravel when asked questions about X during the on-site interview.
Maybe you would never cheat on an interview to get a job, but there are many, many other people who do it actively.
Before you dismiss prospective employers for daring to ask you to take a test, consider who your peer group will be at the employer that does not.
Finally, the very act of asking you to take a test can be viewed as a personality test. Based on experience and experiments, we've determined that most who refuse to submit to our questions and interview process are not the best team players and would not do well in our environment anyway.
Ultimately, you need to decide who you want to work for. If you balk at the "hello" that a test represents, are you really gaining enough information about that employer to make the right decision? Do they make an interesting product? Is their business plan solid and likely to survive? Do they have a strong team you can learn from? Is their management style compatible with your working habits? Is their compensation sufficient? Do they have opportunities for your career growth?
If you can tell all that by the act of asking you to take a test, congrats, you're doing pretty well.
Disclaimer: None of this is meant to support standard tests given by recruiting agencies. Recruiters suck.
I've done this for 50% of the candidates that got far enough along to earn an offer of employment in the past year. I'm increasing that frequency because the time spent is worth it. Most of the time I find nothing. Sometimes, I find the typical crap. They like dogs. They vacationed in ______ last summer. Got married recently, whatever.
The thing that will kill a candidate's chances is how different they are from the employers expectation of normal.
Like the guy who maintained several websites raving about the lunacy of his ex-wife, ex-employer, detailing lawsuits between him and each of those. Copied pictures of threat letters he had received because... he was taking some pretty hard stances with unpopular and disturbing positions. It was like peering into the mind of a psychopath. I've employed psychotics in the past. I once got woken up at 3am by an ex-employee who was about to go shoot his neighbors. I don't do psychotic.
If it's facebook, drinking, partying, whatever... I guess it depends on whether or not you are applying for a position with the FBI or a hip software start-up. If your mom would be okay with the details you reveal online, chances are so would most of your employers.
While I understand the need for secrecy due to corruption sending brute squads to people who voted for the wrong candidate... secrecy also conveniently allows for corruption of the vote since there is no way to audit a vote back to an individual who can say, "no, I didn't vote for that person." It also allows for multiple votes from a single participant since you cannot analyze votes and determine if the sources are unique or duplicated.
I believe this makes democracy a bit impossible in the long run.
Personally, I prefer voting to be public, open and auditable. If we get to the point that dictators are shooting people with the wrong opinion, it would be good to know... it might actually reinstate proper support for the second amendment.
A carpenter becomes well known for his excellent chairs. He is approached by a salesman who offers to duplicate these chairs in a factory and sell them all over the world. The carpenter agrees to this plan when told that he will receive $1 for each chair sold. And of course, he can continue making chairs by hand for people who want a more personal performance.
Years go by, the carpenter makes some money, but realizes that the salesman is making millions for doing virtually nothing.
Then one day, someone figures out how to make identical copies of his chair and posts plans for it on the Internet. Now anyone with a saw and some wood can make a perfect copy of the chair. Those who don't have the time can still buy it from the salesman or pay a bit more to get one from the carpenter.
The chair made by the carpenter is like a rock concert.
The chair from the salesman is a CD.
The chair you make yourself is a digital copy from the Internet.
There is no way this would be considered wrong, illegal or immoral if we were actually talking about some chair design like an Adirondack or even some fancier newer design like an aeron. Nor would providing plans for others to make copies be considered illegal since there is no loss to the carpenter. His inventory is not short, his supply stock is not depleted.
But the salesman would be pissed, because his revenue is dependent on need and achieved with virtually no effort on his part. Now, there is less need through no effort on the part of the consumer. This is direct competition so the natural response is to petition the government to make this illegal and protect his business.
We have a long history of protecting businesses through regulation. It's anti-competitive, anti-consumer, tends to create monopolies and is basically a bunch of corrupt politicians taking money from thieves who would like the barn doors left open.
The only way to hasten the demise of an organization like the RIAA and its member companies is to stop buying content that you can either copy yourself or acquire directly from the artist. Support your artists, go to their concerts and if they sell direct, buy their albums. But we need to stop buying anything distributed through the channel and starve these guys until the music distribution model becomes more like chair design and construction.
Speaking as a Hiring Manager...
on
Should IT Unionize?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
First, I RTFA:
"How much do you think your employer really values your work when they think they can just ship it off to India or China?" asks WashTech director of communications Rennie Sawade. "The union is trying to stand up for your right to be able to work in America and have a job."
Let's be very clear about this, while you have a right to work in America as well as a right to seek work, quit work, work well or work poorly, even a right to not work at all, you do not have a right to have a job.
Arguing that you have a right to a job is tantamount to arguing that you have a right to force someone to pay you regardless of your qualifications, skills, effort or quality of work.
Secondly, lets talk about incentives.
I used to work in Washington State and ran into a few people who were interested in this WashTech thing. I didn't meet ALL of them, so please don't be offended when I say that those I met were easily in the lower 50% competency bracket. Unionizing has always been about leveling the field. Providing equal or more equal pay and benefits to the lesser capable at the expense of the more capable. I suppose that is a good thing if you are in the lower half or even lower two-thirds since no-one can be accurately placed on a sliding scale. But it's not a good thing if you are at the top of your field.
These incentives are all wrong. They encourage solidarity to the union and your peers, not the business or the underlying profit motive that makes your paycheck possible. They encourage seniority rather than excellence. This is the death knell for businesses even though it can take generations. We are witnessing the effects now in the way Detroit is losing to Japan. If you don't understand why a healthy business environment and support for the profit motive are important to your employment options then please stop reading now and go mark some other post as funny, the rest of this is beyond you.
Thirdly, lets talk about hiring.
I don't know why corporate lobbyists are fighting for H1B visas so hard. It cannot be about the volume of candidates because I have no trouble finding a volume of non-H1B people to apply for my open positions. It also cannot be about quality of candidates because I don't see the H1B applicants as any better (or worse) than the standard US Citizen candidate. I also don't see Unions protecting us against H1B candidates or offshoring taking "our jobs." There are financial costs to H1B hiring that level the salary with US workers. There are also stability costs... will their visa be renewed or will you have to replace them in a few years after they've gotten up to speed? Offshoring is also immune to Union protection. If anything, a Union threatening an employer will chase all the jobs overseas rather than none. Companies go offshore because cash is tight and their goals are big (and they're run by inexperienced management that hasn't been burned sufficiently by offshore teams). Sure some jobs can be compartmentalized or are documented well enough to be regimented and executed by offshore teams... but are those really the jobs you want to fight for? Do you WANT to work in textiles or a call center where you just follow a script? Are those the jobs you want to fight to keep in the USA?
When I'm hiring, I look for the most capable candidate with the best experience and attitude that I can find. I pay handsomely to retain this person because I want those skills and don't want to have to settle for second rate. You, as a free American, have a right to acquire those skills. In other words, you won't be forced into a gymnast training camp at a young age because your body type is right for it and the olympics are coming. You have a right to educate yourself. The Internet is a sufficient tool, you don't need a college degree, you just need motive, time, the web and a cheap computer to play on.
If you bust your ass and become highly skilled/knowledgeable in a desired field (choose wisely) then you can be c
The idea was that the label rocket scientist was a complement. It's a way of acknowledging that someone has been trained or gifted with the ability to comprehend such a complex subject.
But as with most things, if you can do it, it's not that hard. Tedious, maybe, but not hard.
Whether the Saturn V was the biggest kludge ever or the most elegant way of getting to the moon is irrelevant. After fifty years of space program development, hearing that the best funded space team in the history of mankind has to throw a ton of weight on their pig to help it fly is just a fucking shame.
Aren't ground-to-orbit vehicles really sensitive to weight? Shouldn't the design be about minimizing weight vs. compensating for shit by throwing an extra ton of dampers onboard?
Fact that there is to much f*cked up perl code, shows that it is an inferior language.
That's like claiming Chess is an inferior game to tic-tac-toe because there are more weak players than strong ones.
If your goal is to create a language that any average employee can use, bravo. If your goal is to identify the better language for accomplishing some task, I think you are evaluating the wrong criteria.
Ordinary Americans... scratch that, HUMANS do not know enough about any subject to make an informed decision on any topic.
We have a society of specialists. The majority of people become professional, skilled or knowledgeable about one thing and one thing only. Whether that be burger flipping, repairing cars, deciphering legalese, matching symptoms against accumulated knowledge of disease, analyzing economic trends, etc... the majority of people, taken as an average, make decisions based on hearsay, feeling and what they've read in the media.
To expect a person to make an informed decision about any random topic is like expecting to win at roulette most of the time.
it is stupid. He's demonstrating the naivete you come to expect (as a hiring manager) from people who haven't had very many jobs or haven't been fired/laid-off at all or very often.
He is assuming that Nintendo will always take care of him. Not provable, despite historic trends.
He is assuming that his creative genius will last the remainder of his life and will also be in demand. Again, not provable. Accidents, illness, economy, etc.
He is assuming that his salary/equity share is sufficient and he is failing to exploit the fact that his contributions are more critical than those of others. Naive.
Companies love employing such workers. It's great for the bottom line and you know that you can always afford to pay them more whenever they get the itch to leave.
I'm sure they could just change everyone's pay to $6.55, but I'm also certain that Schwartzie's order said they would receive back pay after the budget is passed. And not only back-pay, but their salary would return to normal.
How are they going to keep track of the original salary and missing wages for 200,000 employees?
What is probably needed is an exception handling routine, in COBOL. And that gives them an excuse to stall for fifty months while the budget gets passed.
Arnold should just cut their pay permanently to $6.55 and not worry about tracking old salaries.
We have kids, so I've seen a LOT of this between the movies, Xbox games, CDs, etc. I tried the commercial dr-fix-it products and found they were weak at best and only useful for removing the faintest of scratches.
What I did, which carries some risk (with great power...) was go to my local Home Depot/Lowes and purchase:
After putting the buffing wheels on the grinder, I took one of my worst discs which was scratched beyond belief. I think the kids left it on a table covered with sand and then sat on it and moved it about.
Anyway, start with the low-density pad and some plastic polish. Only buff a section for one or two seconds at a time, keep rotating the disc. Make the buffer scrub from center to the outside edge. If the low-density doesn't work, try the high-density pad. Put the plastic polish/rouge stick against the wheel for a second and then work the disc around.
Once you think you've gotten the worst of the scratches out, finish off with the low-density wheel and the plastic polish. Wipe clean with a soft cloth and water if necessary.
I've restored 50 or 60 games and movies this way. Takes 5 - 20 minutes depending on damage.
WARNING: push too hard or move too slowly and the surface of the polycarbonate will overheat and TEAR. You cannot fix a torn surface, that disc is now trash.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to ASSuME here that you don't have kids or you really ought to know by now that any competent doctor, upon administering any of the childhood vaccines, will caution a parent that the child may feel lethargic and develop a fever in response to the injection.
Most vaccines are made out of killed virii. They provoke an immune response in the human system. It's what makes them work. The body tries to fight off what is essentially a dead invader. But in the process, it develops antibodies against future infections.
Fever, is part of the body's antiquated immune system. It's caused by our body trying to cook off the invasion. Unfortunately, the bugs learned how to cope with it long ago which is why we don't hesitate to medicate it down with Tylenol.
The real issue for concern out of the childhood vaccines is the suspension solution they are delivered in. This contains preservatives to provide shelf-life and enhance the vaccine's effectiveness since we don't have Just-In-Time medical vaccination infrastructure. Some of the happy ingredients you'll find in common vaccines are formaldehyde (poison) and thimerosal (poison) which breaks down into ethylmercury (poison) and also raw mercury (poison).
Adding to these concerns are the insistence by the AMA to deliver these childhood injections in bulk at early ages. Under the typical immunization schedule, children under 2 years are regularly dosed with 3-4 vaccines, significantly increasing their exposures to the toxic preservatives.
If you want to trust your government and believe that the FDA knows what they are doing and would never lie to you or cover the truth to enhance corporate profits, then you have nothing to worry about. But if you are a student of history or merely read the news on a regular basis, you might wonder if the FDA really has your best interests in mind when they claim that small amounts of these known toxins are just fine for your newborn baby.
But don't mind me. I'm just a raving lunatic father who insisted on reading up on these things and forced our doctor to both delay immunizations as long as possible and space them out over a longer period to reduce the risk to our children. None of my kids turned out autistic which proves absolutely nothing, but then, I wasn't worried about proving a point, I was merely concerned about the well-being of each and every one of my precious offspring.
You assume that the current redistribution of wealth is a good thing. With a 55% estate tax shuffling most of it over to the government... no corrupt power mongers there. Or would you agree that many high power (and therefore wealthy) government types would be the first to benefit from advancements in anti-aging? If so, we would create a class of ultra-powerful, government cronies who refuse to share power and refuse to die. While the rest of us work cradle to grave for our naturally short lives.
Personally, I'd rather have an opportunity to work for wealth and buy what I like, whether it be fast cars or life-extending technologies like antibiotics, cancer treatment or gene therapy.
You're going to have to study and practice it. For starters, buy a book. Second, don't mention the word age or reference their age, not even in the context of their experience. 98 times out of 100 it's harmless, even when you reject the candidate. But there are lawsuit-happy people out there and you're likely to pass them by. Being in the habit of mentioning age in an interview guarantees a lawsuit in your future.
Sticking to their experience, the combo knockout that tends to separate the pack goes like this:
a. what was the significant thing you did while at job X?
b. what skills did you use to do that?
c. can you show me some of that code? Describe the architecture?
d. Wouldn't that have required an algorithm like blah-blah? How did you implement that, specifically?
e. Okay, you don't remember, but how would you do it today?
f. repeat for next job/experience.
Great candidates will engage you and show off what they know. Crappy candidates, the majority, will deflect and dissemble talking about how it was a long time ago, they were only part of a team, they've haven't used that language lately as they've been studying cool-new-language instead.
I particularly love that last excuse, I follow it with, "okay, how would you do this in cool-new-language today?"
There is no need to bring age into it.
The problem with crying wolf over forecasted claims of doom is that we, as a species, are often wrong. Are we seriously going to believe that 1/3rd of amphibians have such a tenuous claim to life that a one degree shift in temperature is causing them to die off? Fine, let them die.
But what if it turns out to be mercury. Or Nitrates? Or perhaps it's just an over abundance of silt in the water. Or maybe its some sort of fungus. Maybe, just maybe, the frogs are the canary for global warming. But my fear is that we're going to mobilize the world to spend trillions on cutting carbon emissions and using heinously expensive alternative sources of energy (while china and the third world laugh and burn more coal than we conserve) all for nothing.
In the end, it will be something we stopped looking for and had no money / resources left to address that will kill us off.
All because we're too arrogant to believe we're wrong and stop asking questions.
Spoken like a true single-person with no kids. It's generally frowned upon to leave the little ones unsupervised. From 8-12 years of age you have a window where they might do okay by themselves, but after 12/puberty it's often poor wisdom to leave them unsupervised for other reasons.
So you often need to take them shopping for groceries with you.
As for spending all the cash for two cars rather than taking the hit in mpg, you should really think about the cost per year that fuel represents and how many years you'd need to "save" via higher mpg to justify another car. Back of the envelope for my 16mph SUV to a 300mpg vehicle would be... at least ten years to justify that second $30K car. Twenty if you consider that I'll only get half the savings because I'll be driving two of them.
Which brings up the point of Passenger Miles Per Gallon (pmpg) as a much better way to make comparisons. The 16mpg SUV I mentioned is our only car. It seats eight people. We have seven in our family. Driving our family around nets us 112 pmpg. While a two seater getting 300mpg gets 600pmpg, it's a 6:1 ratio compared to the assumed 19:1 implied by the EPA sticker.
Financially, I'd far rather have one car to buy, maintain, and fuel than a fleet of four cars to transport my family around. Practically, lacking four licensed drivers in our household, we kinda need to have one big car rather than multiple smaller ones. Quite often, one of the parents is busy working and the other parent has to drive everyone else somewhere. Emotionally, I enjoy the company of my wife and kids when we drive somewhere together... while we could trade kids between two or more cars, I would never be able to drive with my wife. The multi-car approach seems kinda idiotic when you start thinking about the impact, but it tends to be the suggestion from those who have never felt the negative effects of their ideology.
Noise Reduction / Isolation is the ONLY solution.
Hearing loss is a result of accumulated exposure to high decibels. Most headphones do nothing but provide additional decibels to the cacophony of our environment. Typical listeners just crank up the volume to achieve the signal to noise ratio that they desire.
If we're not cancelling out the unwanted decibels, then 98% of the human customers will turn the volume up, adding to the noise and creating scenarios where they damage their hearing. Since hearing damage is imperceptible as it occurs and gradual over time, most people are incapable of associating the loss with the behavior.
Sound isolating headphones allow high signal to noise ratios at lower volumes and the majority of people will naturally find low levels comfortable when using them. Without training, even. Unfortunately, we have this culture that discourages cutting one's self off from the audible environment; you might get hit by a car, for instance. What a crock of short-sighted advice that turned out to be.
Personally, I find that Etymotics or other in-ear isolators are great for high noise environments like the plane, train or trying to work at home when my kids are playing in my "office". But for more subdued environments like the workplace I prefer my Sony MDR-V6s as they are more comfortable for longer periods.
Years ago, after one of my kids trashed my first pair of V6 headphones, I replaced them with the MDR-V600 thinking same, bigger, better! Not quite. As it turns out, the can on the 600s is perforated and allows outside noise to travel right through. This causes higher volumes to be tolerable and even necessary while leaving me frustrated because my train of thought keeps getting interrupted by outside conversation... leading to higher volumes.
It's important to find a set of headphones that drown out or substantially dampen external noise. You'll appreciate the quiet and your ears will thank you as you get older.
The technical solution has been around for a long time, the trick is making it socially acceptable.
You do realize that the only reason the Republicans voted this down was that it was too restrictive on the Fed and Treasury, right?
This is yet another one of those votes where both parties showed how against the US Citizen they really are. Unless you were all for giving Paulson a blank check with no strings attached, I don't understand why you're so hip to be a Republican.
I'm already paying $70 for the residential 6/1Mbps line. Business starts at $100, plus $200-300 install fee. Plus it's still Comcast so I may still be subject to usage and rate limits.
I need a new ISP in my area.
No, it means that __users__ running bulk transfers are lower priority than other users who don't use their network much. They're discriminating by cable modem, not by traffic type, port or connection.
I experienced something like this last year with Comcast, as soon as I turned on a torrent, ANY TORRENT, my latency would rise from 25ms to 3000ms over then next 30 seconds. And after killing the torrent, latency would return to 25ms in another 30 seconds. Even with torrents running at very low d/l and u/l speeds, it would happen. It sucked. My wife would start bitching about the web being slow within minutes of turning on a torrent d/l. SSH to work became impossible. The effect was that I could only torrent late at night while people were sleeping.
Maybe that's what Comcast wants, but it's NOT what I pay for.
It will be interesting to see if these low priority packet queues will have any sort of wait threshold or if they'll just sit until the congestion clears. For heavy users, things could come to a stop. For heavy, ignorant users, this will generate calls to Comcastic support.
Since they're effectively saying stay under the 80% d/l and 70% u/l to avoid their QoS delays, I'd like my subscription fee reduced by 25%.
That's not likely to happen.
And there is no other game in my town.
Just another lesson and reason to run from Comcast whenever and wherever possible.
Not quite. If your QoS on your line is set to higher priority, then when a congestion event is reached, all your packets wait until lower priority packets clear the queue. That could be indefinitely... or at least until the congestion level clears.
Given Comcast's reputation for overselling and under provisioning, this could be a death sentence for indiscriminate torrent users.
The answer you get will differ depending on whether the respondent is a consumer of apples and pears, a grower, a packager, a distributor, a reseller, or a genetic researcher. On the surface, it is a useless question.
However, if you ask the question enough times of enough different candidates, you begin to learn how to cast people into one of the above professions based on the answer they provide. If you are looking for a genetic research scientist, that question, and the answers it produces would be very useful indeed.
The volume of applicants for my open positions who lie or exaggerate during the process is staggering. I've been hiring in IT for over ten years now and it's been a constant. People try to put their "best foot forward" but in practice put eight or nine feet forward. The hiring manager who doesn't verify some or most of the claimed skills ends up overpaying for talent that is better suited for a different position.
While I sympathize that most "tests" are poorly designed and questionably interpreted, I'm always concerned about a prospective employer with too easy a screening process.
The screens I use consist of resume review, email questionaire, phone and in-person. Each stage eliminates over 50% of the applicants. If I dropped any particular stage, I would double the time I spend filtering with a negative impact on quality.
Possibly of even more importance, the screening steps tell a story that for far too many candidates unravels under closer scrutiny. A candidate who claims several years experience with X on their resume and answers questions regarding X very well in email... shouldn't appear ignorant about X on the phone, but it happens. I've even had people do well on the phone only to unravel when asked questions about X during the on-site interview.
Maybe you would never cheat on an interview to get a job, but there are many, many other people who do it actively.
Before you dismiss prospective employers for daring to ask you to take a test, consider who your peer group will be at the employer that does not.
Finally, the very act of asking you to take a test can be viewed as a personality test. Based on experience and experiments, we've determined that most who refuse to submit to our questions and interview process are not the best team players and would not do well in our environment anyway.
Ultimately, you need to decide who you want to work for. If you balk at the "hello" that a test represents, are you really gaining enough information about that employer to make the right decision? Do they make an interesting product? Is their business plan solid and likely to survive? Do they have a strong team you can learn from? Is their management style compatible with your working habits? Is their compensation sufficient? Do they have opportunities for your career growth?
If you can tell all that by the act of asking you to take a test, congrats, you're doing pretty well.
Disclaimer: None of this is meant to support standard tests given by recruiting agencies. Recruiters suck.
I've done this for 50% of the candidates that got far enough along to earn an offer of employment in the past year. I'm increasing that frequency because the time spent is worth it. Most of the time I find nothing. Sometimes, I find the typical crap. They like dogs. They vacationed in ______ last summer. Got married recently, whatever.
The thing that will kill a candidate's chances is how different they are from the employers expectation of normal.
Like the guy who maintained several websites raving about the lunacy of his ex-wife, ex-employer, detailing lawsuits between him and each of those. Copied pictures of threat letters he had received because ... he was taking some pretty hard stances with unpopular and disturbing positions. It was like peering into the mind of a psychopath. I've employed psychotics in the past. I once got woken up at 3am by an ex-employee who was about to go shoot his neighbors. I don't do psychotic.
If it's facebook, drinking, partying, whatever... I guess it depends on whether or not you are applying for a position with the FBI or a hip software start-up. If your mom would be okay with the details you reveal online, chances are so would most of your employers.
While I understand the need for secrecy due to corruption sending brute squads to people who voted for the wrong candidate... secrecy also conveniently allows for corruption of the vote since there is no way to audit a vote back to an individual who can say, "no, I didn't vote for that person." It also allows for multiple votes from a single participant since you cannot analyze votes and determine if the sources are unique or duplicated.
I believe this makes democracy a bit impossible in the long run.
Personally, I prefer voting to be public, open and auditable. If we get to the point that dictators are shooting people with the wrong opinion, it would be good to know... it might actually reinstate proper support for the second amendment.
Here's an analogy:
A carpenter becomes well known for his excellent chairs. He is approached by a salesman who offers to duplicate these chairs in a factory and sell them all over the world. The carpenter agrees to this plan when told that he will receive $1 for each chair sold. And of course, he can continue making chairs by hand for people who want a more personal performance.
Years go by, the carpenter makes some money, but realizes that the salesman is making millions for doing virtually nothing.
Then one day, someone figures out how to make identical copies of his chair and posts plans for it on the Internet. Now anyone with a saw and some wood can make a perfect copy of the chair. Those who don't have the time can still buy it from the salesman or pay a bit more to get one from the carpenter.
The chair made by the carpenter is like a rock concert.
The chair from the salesman is a CD.
The chair you make yourself is a digital copy from the Internet.
There is no way this would be considered wrong, illegal or immoral if we were actually talking about some chair design like an Adirondack or even some fancier newer design like an aeron. Nor would providing plans for others to make copies be considered illegal since there is no loss to the carpenter. His inventory is not short, his supply stock is not depleted.
But the salesman would be pissed, because his revenue is dependent on need and achieved with virtually no effort on his part. Now, there is less need through no effort on the part of the consumer. This is direct competition so the natural response is to petition the government to make this illegal and protect his business.
We have a long history of protecting businesses through regulation. It's anti-competitive, anti-consumer, tends to create monopolies and is basically a bunch of corrupt politicians taking money from thieves who would like the barn doors left open.
The only way to hasten the demise of an organization like the RIAA and its member companies is to stop buying content that you can either copy yourself or acquire directly from the artist. Support your artists, go to their concerts and if they sell direct, buy their albums. But we need to stop buying anything distributed through the channel and starve these guys until the music distribution model becomes more like chair design and construction.
First, I RTFA:
Let's be very clear about this, while you have a right to work in America as well as a right to seek work, quit work, work well or work poorly, even a right to not work at all, you do not have a right to have a job.
Arguing that you have a right to a job is tantamount to arguing that you have a right to force someone to pay you regardless of your qualifications, skills, effort or quality of work.
Secondly, lets talk about incentives.
I used to work in Washington State and ran into a few people who were interested in this WashTech thing. I didn't meet ALL of them, so please don't be offended when I say that those I met were easily in the lower 50% competency bracket. Unionizing has always been about leveling the field. Providing equal or more equal pay and benefits to the lesser capable at the expense of the more capable. I suppose that is a good thing if you are in the lower half or even lower two-thirds since no-one can be accurately placed on a sliding scale. But it's not a good thing if you are at the top of your field.
These incentives are all wrong. They encourage solidarity to the union and your peers, not the business or the underlying profit motive that makes your paycheck possible. They encourage seniority rather than excellence. This is the death knell for businesses even though it can take generations. We are witnessing the effects now in the way Detroit is losing to Japan. If you don't understand why a healthy business environment and support for the profit motive are important to your employment options then please stop reading now and go mark some other post as funny, the rest of this is beyond you.
Thirdly, lets talk about hiring.
I don't know why corporate lobbyists are fighting for H1B visas so hard. It cannot be about the volume of candidates because I have no trouble finding a volume of non-H1B people to apply for my open positions. It also cannot be about quality of candidates because I don't see the H1B applicants as any better (or worse) than the standard US Citizen candidate. I also don't see Unions protecting us against H1B candidates or offshoring taking "our jobs." There are financial costs to H1B hiring that level the salary with US workers. There are also stability costs... will their visa be renewed or will you have to replace them in a few years after they've gotten up to speed? Offshoring is also immune to Union protection. If anything, a Union threatening an employer will chase all the jobs overseas rather than none. Companies go offshore because cash is tight and their goals are big (and they're run by inexperienced management that hasn't been burned sufficiently by offshore teams). Sure some jobs can be compartmentalized or are documented well enough to be regimented and executed by offshore teams... but are those really the jobs you want to fight for? Do you WANT to work in textiles or a call center where you just follow a script? Are those the jobs you want to fight to keep in the USA?
When I'm hiring, I look for the most capable candidate with the best experience and attitude that I can find. I pay handsomely to retain this person because I want those skills and don't want to have to settle for second rate. You, as a free American, have a right to acquire those skills. In other words, you won't be forced into a gymnast training camp at a young age because your body type is right for it and the olympics are coming. You have a right to educate yourself. The Internet is a sufficient tool, you don't need a college degree, you just need motive, time, the web and a cheap computer to play on.
If you bust your ass and become highly skilled/knowledgeable in a desired field (choose wisely) then you can be c
Of course not, your UID is too damn high.
Extremely hard for idiots, you mean.
The idea was that the label rocket scientist was a complement. It's a way of acknowledging that someone has been trained or gifted with the ability to comprehend such a complex subject.
But as with most things, if you can do it, it's not that hard. Tedious, maybe, but not hard.
Whether the Saturn V was the biggest kludge ever or the most elegant way of getting to the moon is irrelevant. After fifty years of space program development, hearing that the best funded space team in the history of mankind has to throw a ton of weight on their pig to help it fly is just a fucking shame.
First thing to my mind: WTF?
Aren't ground-to-orbit vehicles really sensitive to weight? Shouldn't the design be about minimizing weight vs. compensating for shit by throwing an extra ton of dampers onboard?
Fact that there is to much f*cked up perl code, shows that it is an inferior language.
That's like claiming Chess is an inferior game to tic-tac-toe because there are more weak players than strong ones.
If your goal is to create a language that any average employee can use, bravo. If your goal is to identify the better language for accomplishing some task, I think you are evaluating the wrong criteria.
Ordinary Americans... scratch that, HUMANS do not know enough about any subject to make an informed decision on any topic.
We have a society of specialists. The majority of people become professional, skilled or knowledgeable about one thing and one thing only. Whether that be burger flipping, repairing cars, deciphering legalese, matching symptoms against accumulated knowledge of disease, analyzing economic trends, etc... the majority of people, taken as an average, make decisions based on hearsay, feeling and what they've read in the media.
To expect a person to make an informed decision about any random topic is like expecting to win at roulette most of the time.
it is stupid. He's demonstrating the naivete you come to expect (as a hiring manager) from people who haven't had very many jobs or haven't been fired/laid-off at all or very often.
He is assuming that Nintendo will always take care of him. Not provable, despite historic trends.
He is assuming that his creative genius will last the remainder of his life and will also be in demand. Again, not provable. Accidents, illness, economy, etc.
He is assuming that his salary/equity share is sufficient and he is failing to exploit the fact that his contributions are more critical than those of others. Naive.
Companies love employing such workers. It's great for the bottom line and you know that you can always afford to pay them more whenever they get the itch to leave.
No, they're stalling.
I'm sure they could just change everyone's pay to $6.55, but I'm also certain that Schwartzie's order said they would receive back pay after the budget is passed. And not only back-pay, but their salary would return to normal.
How are they going to keep track of the original salary and missing wages for 200,000 employees?
What is probably needed is an exception handling routine, in COBOL. And that gives them an excuse to stall for fifty months while the budget gets passed.
Arnold should just cut their pay permanently to $6.55 and not worry about tracking old salaries.
We have kids, so I've seen a LOT of this between the movies, Xbox games, CDs, etc. I tried the commercial dr-fix-it products and found they were weak at best and only useful for removing the faintest of scratches.
What I did, which carries some risk (with great power...) was go to my local Home Depot/Lowes and purchase:
* bench grinder ($35)
* buffing wheels, high/low density ($20)
* plastic rouge paste ($5)
* plastic polish paste ($5)
After putting the buffing wheels on the grinder, I took one of my worst discs which was scratched beyond belief. I think the kids left it on a table covered with sand and then sat on it and moved it about.
Anyway, start with the low-density pad and some plastic polish. Only buff a section for one or two seconds at a time, keep rotating the disc. Make the buffer scrub from center to the outside edge. If the low-density doesn't work, try the high-density pad. Put the plastic polish/rouge stick against the wheel for a second and then work the disc around.
Once you think you've gotten the worst of the scratches out, finish off with the low-density wheel and the plastic polish. Wipe clean with a soft cloth and water if necessary.
I've restored 50 or 60 games and movies this way. Takes 5 - 20 minutes depending on damage.
WARNING: push too hard or move too slowly and the surface of the polycarbonate will overheat and TEAR. You cannot fix a torn surface, that disc is now trash.
Good luck.