Profitable companies hire people, unprofitable companies fire people. Take 20-30% away and a lot of profitable companies are not very profitable any more.
Profits go not only into things like dividends, but also into growing the business.
Unless there is something preventing any other company from providing a given service, the company providing that service should be free to refuse to do business with anyone for any reason. If they exclude too many people, then their market-share will dwindle and they will fade into obscurity, and anyone they refuse to do business with will just go somewhere else.
Even if you try to forbid discrimination based on certain characteristics, they can and will find correlated characteristics to use instead. Just let them be open about it so that they can reap the rewards of their preferential behaviour.
Well, the system is already crumbling and falling apart. Just wait for a little longer and both, China and "we", will see mass riots.
Why? Because even to buy the cheapest crap you need money. To have money, you have to have a job. And the jobs are in China. You might see the problem this leads to.
Producing in one area of the planet and selling in the other one does not work in the long run.
Pirated software is not free. There is a time-cost related to finding a reasonably reliable source and a risk-cost related to the chance of getting sued/catching malware.
Reduce the price to the point where it is not worth those costs, and it is cheaper to buy the legitimate product. (there are different price-points for the college student eating ramen and the executive making 100K, but the principle is the same)
On the other hand, if you increase the hassle/problems with DRM past the time and risk costs of pirated software, and then you get to the point where you could not give the thing away.
Actually it can be a very big help. Think of it as an emotional bomb-shelter. A place for you mind and thoughts to turn as opposed to a blind panic that will probably do more damage than good.
Even if God turns out not to exist, the side-effects of faith in the midst of catastrophe are good for both the individual and society.
(just don't let politicians get their hands on that faith, or else you will get man made catastrophes)
Because it causes less stress to the male nerd psyche to imagine it is a guy in trouble and probably about to be killed than to imagine a female in distress that we have no way of helping and will almost certainty die.
When analyzing the situation and trying to determine odds and avenues of escape, seeing in your minds eye a guy who was in a hopeless situation die from things beyond his control is not nearly as traumatic as imagining a woman(or school girl depending on how much animae you watch) killed in a variety of ways by the uncaring forces of nature.
Think of it as a way of maintaining clinical distance from a situation that we have no power to affect. (And if you are on this site and do not automatically try to analyze virtually everything you encounter, then how did you get here anyway?)
But I do not see where this is impacting actual scientific research.
Try publishing a climatology study that does not support AGW and see if you ever get a grant for another study. Politics is always getting in the way of science. Even when 'promoting science'(just ask NASA).
If I pay ten times what you pay in taxes: Will the army defend me from invasion ten times as hard? Will the roads I use get ten times as much service?
While the very rich can lobby the government to get a disproportionate cut of taxed benefits, that is not a direct consequence of the taxes they pay, but instead is a consequence of political corruption.
If I do not get anything more for my taxes, why should I pay more than you do? Why should I pay even a percentage of my income as opposed to a flat rate?
It is not at all fair to charge some people more for the same service. If I wanted to charge more for my services when bought by a protected minority I would end up in jail. Why should the government be entitled to more money from me just because I happen to have more?
A few statistics: (according to 2005 IRS tax data) The top 1% of wage earners pay 39% of all collected income taxes The top 25% of wage earners pay 86% of all collected income taxes The top 50% of wage earners pay 97% of all collected income taxes
This is hardly fair unless you believe that the rich only have money because they took it unfairly from those with less. I personally believe that the poor only stay that way because of poor fiscal decisions and the rich mostly get that way by wise fiscal decisions and hard work.
Your intention to take more(aka punish) those that make wise fiscal decisions will only encourage more people to make poor fiscal decisions and thus make more people poor. If you want to encourage more people to demonstrate fiscal responsibility, then the logical method would be to punish poor fiscal decisions, not reward them.
Since when has anyone even vaguely knowledgeable about security had any illusion that a device is still secure when a hacker has physical control over the device?
I lock my phone so that I have privacy from casual curiosity/pranks, I fully expect that every password I have on the thing will need to be changed as soon as it is stolen.
I'm sure we can generally agree that having cheap and effective health insurance is better than expensive and convoluted health insurance, and any number of other general statements.
But the problem is in the implementation.
This is a website generally frequented by engineering type people. Engineers, by and large, deal with getting those details to work and generally do what they can to be precise in their statements.
If you want people to just agree that you have good general ideas, then try somewhere that has a lower proportion of engineering types.(Facebook and Myspace may work for this)
Here we pick at the details trying to find something that will work.
The definition I have always heard of American Exceptionalism has more to do with a country that is still an infant compared to most others becoming a world leader/dominant power in just a few centuries using the same humans and not having any unique power due to natural resources, but just by giving individuals the power to control their own destinies more than had been possible on a large scale in any other country.
I often find it sad that this freedom that allowed America to be such a remarkable success is being and has been discarded so readily.
Wait, are they suggesting that more social teens are more likely to participate in social and peer-pressured activities? Say it ain't So!
What next? A study that shows that cars with an engine are more likely to be involved in collisions than those with nothing but weeds growing under the hood?
These taxes that were 'avoided' are the taxes for bringing profit home to the US that were made in other countries. Most countries have the same tax rate set in the range of 0-2%. The US has this tax rate at 35%.
If I were to make money over seas and I had to pay 35% to bring it home, I would be tempted to re-invest it over seas as well.
If you want this money to come to the US to be reinvested and help the economy grow, make the US tax rate for these profits similar to that of other places so that it is not worthwhile to do these 'tricks' which really amount to little more than keeping money that was made outside of the US outside of the US to avoid US taxes.
'Our reasons are legitimate, their reasons are excuses, Boo them!'
If you are going to trot out this old argument, at least try to spice it up with some logical arguments as to why their reasons are less valid than yours.
Anything less makes you look like a whiner to anyone who does not already agree with you, and that hardly does anything with regards to convincing others that your side is in the right.
Personally I believe that the reason all of our legislators get paid for what they do is so that they *can* have the time to review and analyze every bill that they are called to vote on. Staffs can be important for this, especially for bills that affect parts of the economy that a given legislator may not understand fully, but I consider voting on a bill that you cannot personally explain to anyone who voted for you as an act of nonfeasance at best and usually misfeasance(in cases where they rely on lobbyists) or even malfeasance(where they accept gifts and don't even bother finding out what the bill does).
If they are not going to spend their time serving us, why should we pay them for that time?
Regardless, the substance of the argument is that firms are supposed to use their ownership of the means of production to compete, which is why cartels are restricted. Workers do not play this role.
Personally, I don't see a lot of difference between the guy who refuses to sell you machine-shop tools, driving you out of business and the union-boss who threatens to black-list any machinist who goes to work for you and thus drives you out of business. Except that the Machinists may *want* to work for him and are being bullied out of it...
Yes, there is a material difference between requiring someone to be a union member in order to gain employment, and requiring them to join the union after a certain period of time in employment.
Really? None wants to hire someone who they will be forced to fire in a couple months, so I would expect union-shops to do their best to obliquely find out if a potential employee would be willing to join a union. It may not be quite legal, but the alternative is to hire-train-fire, and that costs big bucks. This is one of those places there there is a theoretical difference, but no practical difference.
And seriously, you're saying that forcing the employees to join the union is a point in favor of freedom of association? You have an interesting definition of freedom.
Yes, allowing every party to assert who he will associate with and for a final compromise to be reached is precisely freedom of association. Recall that freedom of association includes the freedom to choose for others not to associate with you, just as freedom of speech must imply that you get to choose to you listen to.
The alternative is for the government to step in and instruct particular employees that they may not freely negotiate their associations with their employer.
Sounds to me that the alternative is to allow employees to freely negotiate their associations with their employer only so far as every person they are negotiating for has individually and specifically decided to join the group negotiations. Other wise you are forbidding your union members from associating with non-union members...
What I am not for: (1) Union shops where people have to be part of a union to work. (2) Workers able to set up a union and have the union automatically represent everyone at the employer. (3) Unions restricting geographically where members can work. (4) Unions boycotting an employer because they have non-union labor. (5) Unions able to say all employees must be part of the union.
At a Federal level (maybe you want to live in one of those "right-to-work" states for more union busting), (1) and (5) are strictly illegal: you can only fire someone after a period of time.
(3) and (4) - are you proposing outlawing or just discouraging these? If outlawing, are you saying that it should be illegal for all workers in some business to simultaneously stop working for the given reasons? I'm sure you are not advocating slavery.
(2) is a separate issue dealing with certain legal privileges that the first voted-for union gets, and is essentially antiunion. I can see why you might want to argue against this law.
By the way, will you answer the question of What is "actually happening to the US middle class"?
I thought it was obvious from the first two times I ignored that question that I was not going to. It is like prodding someone for what is "actually happening to the Earth's climate": either you're truly not paying attention, in which case here is not the place to start, or you're trolling.
Well, as someone who lives in one of those "right to work" states and a member of the middle class, everything seems to be going just fine for me.
I hear things are going pretty lousy in primarily union places, such as Detroit. At least Until the decision
I think you can only due a stockholder/owner/partner when a given stockholder holds at least 5% of the stock. Otherwise, they have no real say and so are not responsible for the actions of the company.
You don't suppose there might be a group of extremists that are against the US producing it's own oil do you?
This might be coincidence, but I would look very closely at both events for evidence of terrorist activities(Environmental, Islamic, or perhaps some sort of alliance)
Um, no DRM that works will not force a pirate to buy it, they have enough other games that they can crack, if yours really does stop piracy, then the pirates will just not play it.
The only way to 'force' someone to buy something is to hack into their accounts and steal their money, or use some form of physical threat against them individually(as in police at your door with guns).
And even that may or may not work, but we will soon see with Obamacare...
Many of the 'donations' are actually ads run by third parties, and you cannot stop that with out stepping on Freedom of Speech, and even if you could, any media personality with a bias would still let that bias into their air-time and unbalance things again.
The only REAL solution is for the electorate to educate itself, but that requires action on the part of the general public, so it is unlikely to happen until things gent untenable(Tea Party anyone?)
Apparently you do not know a lot about swords. Melee combat was not cutting off heads and slitting throats, it was disemboweling and maiming. There are a small number of modern weapons that can reasonably compare to slitting someone open and watching their ruptured bowels fall out of them, then letting them lie helpless on the ground to die, but most soldiers today are carrying slug-throwers and by comparison those are pretty quick and clean(hollow-point bullets may not be conventionally 'clean' but if you are hit by one you are dead very quickly and often don't have sensory apparatus intact to feel the extend of what has been done to you)
Sucking someone's lungs out is pretty horrific, but even if they survive the experience, they will be dead in minutes if not sooner. After a battle, there would some times(often?) be wounded still lying in agony in the mud and the filth still in the process of dying the next morning.
War is hell in any time or place, the only reason we may think war is worse now than it was then is because we are ignorant of exactly how bad it was back then.
Just the fact that a majority of the innocent civilians are not being killed, maimed, or enslaved makes this far more merciful than most wars in the past. It may also make this war unwinnable, but it IS more merciful.
Outside of a significant component of an open source project, this seems problematic.
Corporate work is mostly work for hire, so it may or may not be legal for you to take copies of the code you worked on while on the job. Most significant projects are team efforts, and without the parts built by other developers your code does not do much(if it can even compile and run without all of those shared resources that were not exclusively your work)
Even on an open-source project where you have as much access to the source as you like, your code is likely to be interspersed with the code of other developers(unless you wrote the original piece and it was 100% feature complete and bug free).
Sure you can write some code specifically to put in your portfolio, but code written to impress a potential employer, unless written on the spot, is as likely to be exactly as honest and pure as the associated resume.
The best bet would be hiring people that other people in your company have worked with in the past and can vouch for their diligence and skill.
Nah, not a problem at all, I see a name in an email and I know someone of that name works in my company, and I see someone face to face and I know someone who looks like that works at my company. Easy. I just have no links between my image storage system and my name storage system. Sometimes I can just use my image storage system(such as if I see them with a name tag for several weeks), otherwise I have co-workers that I have worked with for years at my small company(less than 30 employees) and I can only guess at their names because they work in a different department.
Also, I don't collect things, so in spite of all of your other accurate descriptions, I must not have Aspergers.
Now if you don't mind, I need to go get a new bookshelf because the one I bought last week is full.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget, corporations are 'people' too.
"Like individuals, corporations must file tax returns every year."
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_States
Profitable companies hire people, unprofitable companies fire people.
Take 20-30% away and a lot of profitable companies are not very profitable any more.
Profits go not only into things like dividends, but also into growing the business.
Unless there is something preventing any other company from providing a given service, the company providing that service should be free to refuse to do business with anyone for any reason.
If they exclude too many people, then their market-share will dwindle and they will fade into obscurity, and anyone they refuse to do business with will just go somewhere else.
Even if you try to forbid discrimination based on certain characteristics, they can and will find correlated characteristics to use instead. Just let them be open about it so that they can reap the rewards of their preferential behaviour.
Well, the system is already crumbling and falling apart. Just wait for a little longer and both, China and "we", will see mass riots.
Why? Because even to buy the cheapest crap you need money. To have money, you have to have a job. And the jobs are in China. You might see the problem this leads to.
Producing in one area of the planet and selling in the other one does not work in the long run.
[The US economy] has been the world's largest national economy since the 1870s and remains the world's largest manufacturer, representing 19% of the world's manufacturing output.
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States
Additional support: additional http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-the-top-manufacturing-countries.htm
http://www.unido.org/index.php?id=7881&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=455&cHash=09cad462f0
http://www.articlealley.com/article_1483022_22.html
China may be getting close, but the US is still he world leader in manufacturing
I always thought that Pinky was the genius and he just humors Brain for entertainment value.(it gets really boring in a mouse cage all day)
Pirated software is not free.
There is a time-cost related to finding a reasonably reliable source and a risk-cost related to the chance of getting sued/catching malware.
Reduce the price to the point where it is not worth those costs, and it is cheaper to buy the legitimate product.
(there are different price-points for the college student eating ramen and the executive making 100K, but the principle is the same)
On the other hand, if you increase the hassle/problems with DRM past the time and risk costs of pirated software, and then you get to the point where you could not give the thing away.
Actually it can be a very big help.
Think of it as an emotional bomb-shelter.
A place for you mind and thoughts to turn as opposed to a blind panic that will probably do more damage than good.
Even if God turns out not to exist, the side-effects of faith in the midst of catastrophe are good for both the individual and society.
(just don't let politicians get their hands on that faith, or else you will get man made catastrophes)
Because it causes less stress to the male nerd psyche to imagine it is a guy in trouble and probably about to be killed than to imagine a female in distress that we have no way of helping and will almost certainty die.
When analyzing the situation and trying to determine odds and avenues of escape, seeing in your minds eye a guy who was in a hopeless situation die from things beyond his control is not nearly as traumatic as imagining a woman(or school girl depending on how much animae you watch) killed in a variety of ways by the uncaring forces of nature.
Think of it as a way of maintaining clinical distance from a situation that we have no power to affect.
(And if you are on this site and do not automatically try to analyze virtually everything you encounter, then how did you get here anyway?)
But I do not see where this is impacting actual scientific research.
Try publishing a climatology study that does not support AGW and see if you ever get a grant for another study.
Politics is always getting in the way of science.
Even when 'promoting science'(just ask NASA).
If I am not mistaken injections that are not performed by a medical professional fall under 'illicit drug use' and affect the rating.
How would you like to see a Bioshock with no EVE or plasmids?
If I pay ten times what you pay in taxes:
Will the army defend me from invasion ten times as hard?
Will the roads I use get ten times as much service?
While the very rich can lobby the government to get a disproportionate cut of taxed benefits, that is not a direct consequence of the taxes they pay, but instead is a consequence of political corruption.
If I do not get anything more for my taxes, why should I pay more than you do?
Why should I pay even a percentage of my income as opposed to a flat rate?
It is not at all fair to charge some people more for the same service.
If I wanted to charge more for my services when bought by a protected minority I would end up in jail.
Why should the government be entitled to more money from me just because I happen to have more?
A few statistics: (according to 2005 IRS tax data)
The top 1% of wage earners pay 39% of all collected income taxes
The top 25% of wage earners pay 86% of all collected income taxes
The top 50% of wage earners pay 97% of all collected income taxes
This is hardly fair unless you believe that the rich only have money because they took it unfairly from those with less.
I personally believe that the poor only stay that way because of poor fiscal decisions and the rich mostly get that way by wise fiscal decisions and hard work.
Your intention to take more(aka punish) those that make wise fiscal decisions will only encourage more people to make poor fiscal decisions and thus make more people poor. If you want to encourage more people to demonstrate fiscal responsibility, then the logical method would be to punish poor fiscal decisions, not reward them.
Since when has anyone even vaguely knowledgeable about security had any illusion that a device is still secure when a hacker has physical control over the device?
I lock my phone so that I have privacy from casual curiosity/pranks, I fully expect that every password I have on the thing will need to be changed as soon as it is stolen.
The devil is in the details.
I'm sure we can generally agree that having cheap and effective health insurance is better than expensive and convoluted health insurance, and any number of other general statements.
But the problem is in the implementation.
This is a website generally frequented by engineering type people.
Engineers, by and large, deal with getting those details to work and generally do what they can to be precise in their statements.
If you want people to just agree that you have good general ideas, then try somewhere that has a lower proportion of engineering types.(Facebook and Myspace may work for this)
Here we pick at the details trying to find something that will work.
The definition I have always heard of American Exceptionalism has more to do with a country that is still an infant compared to most others becoming a world leader/dominant power in just a few centuries using the same humans and not having any unique power due to natural resources, but just by giving individuals the power to control their own destinies more than had been possible on a large scale in any other country.
I often find it sad that this freedom that allowed America to be such a remarkable success is being and has been discarded so readily.
...and if they call more than 3x in one month you can press charges for harassment...
Hell, if that was true half the debt collectors out there would be out of business. In a past life, I had some calling three times a day.
That only works because so many people are accustomed to reacting like sheep and don't know their rights.
A number of financial talk-show hosts decry the illegal practices that debt collectors use because the people they use them on don't know any better.
Oddly enough the people who take time to know their rights and responsibilities also tend to be the type who keep their bills mostly up to date...
Wait, are they suggesting that more social teens are more likely to participate in social and peer-pressured activities?
Say it ain't So!
What next?
A study that shows that cars with an engine are more likely to be involved in collisions than those with nothing but weeds growing under the hood?
These taxes that were 'avoided' are the taxes for bringing profit home to the US that were made in other countries.
Most countries have the same tax rate set in the range of 0-2%. The US has this tax rate at 35%.
If I were to make money over seas and I had to pay 35% to bring it home, I would be tempted to re-invest it over seas as well.
If you want this money to come to the US to be reinvested and help the economy grow, make the US tax rate for these profits similar to that of other places so that it is not worthwhile to do these 'tricks' which really amount to little more than keeping money that was made outside of the US outside of the US to avoid US taxes.
'Our reasons are legitimate, their reasons are excuses, Boo them!'
If you are going to trot out this old argument, at least try to spice it up with some logical arguments as to why their reasons are less valid than yours.
Anything less makes you look like a whiner to anyone who does not already agree with you, and that hardly does anything with regards to convincing others that your side is in the right.
Personally I believe that the reason all of our legislators get paid for what they do is so that they *can* have the time to review and analyze every bill that they are called to vote on.
Staffs can be important for this, especially for bills that affect parts of the economy that a given legislator may not understand fully, but I consider voting on a bill that you cannot personally explain to anyone who voted for you as an act of nonfeasance at best and usually misfeasance(in cases where they rely on lobbyists) or even malfeasance(where they accept gifts and don't even bother finding out what the bill does).
If they are not going to spend their time serving us, why should we pay them for that time?
Regardless, the substance of the argument is that firms are supposed to use their ownership of the means of production to compete, which is why cartels are restricted. Workers do not play this role.
Personally, I don't see a lot of difference between the guy who refuses to sell you machine-shop tools, driving you out of business and the union-boss who threatens to black-list any machinist who goes to work for you and thus drives you out of business.
Except that the Machinists may *want* to work for him and are being bullied out of it...
Yes, there is a material difference between requiring someone to be a union member in order to gain employment, and requiring them to join the union after a certain period of time in employment.
Really?
None wants to hire someone who they will be forced to fire in a couple months, so I would expect union-shops to do their best to obliquely find out if a potential employee would be willing to join a union. It may not be quite legal, but the alternative is to hire-train-fire, and that costs big bucks.
This is one of those places there there is a theoretical difference, but no practical difference.
And seriously, you're saying that forcing the employees to join the union is a point in favor of freedom of association? You have an interesting definition of freedom.
Yes, allowing every party to assert who he will associate with and for a final compromise to be reached is precisely freedom of association. Recall that freedom of association includes the freedom to choose for others not to associate with you, just as freedom of speech must imply that you get to choose to you listen to.
The alternative is for the government to step in and instruct particular employees that they may not freely negotiate their associations with their employer.
Sounds to me that the alternative is to allow employees to freely negotiate their associations with their employer only so far as every person they are negotiating for has individually and specifically decided to join the group negotiations.
Other wise you are forbidding your union members from associating with non-union members...
What I am not for: (1) Union shops where people have to be part of a union to work. (2) Workers able to set up a union and have the union automatically represent everyone at the employer. (3) Unions restricting geographically where members can work. (4) Unions boycotting an employer because they have non-union labor. (5) Unions able to say all employees must be part of the union.
At a Federal level (maybe you want to live in one of those "right-to-work" states for more union busting), (1) and (5) are strictly illegal: you can only fire someone after a period of time.
(3) and (4) - are you proposing outlawing or just discouraging these? If outlawing, are you saying that it should be illegal for all workers in some business to simultaneously stop working for the given reasons? I'm sure you are not advocating slavery.
(2) is a separate issue dealing with certain legal privileges that the first voted-for union gets, and is essentially antiunion. I can see why you might want to argue against this law.
By the way, will you answer the question of What is "actually happening to the US middle class"?
I thought it was obvious from the first two times I ignored that question that I was not going to. It is like prodding someone for what is "actually happening to the Earth's climate": either you're truly not paying attention, in which case here is not the place to start, or you're trolling.
Well, as someone who lives in one of those "right to work" states and a member of the middle class, everything seems to be going just fine for me.
I hear things are going pretty lousy in primarily union places, such as Detroit. At least Until the decision
I think you can only due a stockholder/owner/partner when a given stockholder holds at least 5% of the stock.
Otherwise, they have no real say and so are not responsible for the actions of the company.
You don't suppose there might be a group of extremists that are against the US producing it's own oil do you?
This might be coincidence, but I would look very closely at both events for evidence of terrorist activities(Environmental, Islamic, or perhaps some sort of alliance)
Um, no DRM that works will not force a pirate to buy it, they have enough other games that they can crack, if yours really does stop piracy, then the pirates will just not play it.
The only way to 'force' someone to buy something is to hack into their accounts and steal their money, or use some form of physical threat against them individually(as in police at your door with guns).
And even that may or may not work, but we will soon see with Obamacare...
Many of the 'donations' are actually ads run by third parties, and you cannot stop that with out stepping on Freedom of Speech, and even if you could, any media personality with a bias would still let that bias into their air-time and unbalance things again.
The only REAL solution is for the electorate to educate itself, but that requires action on the part of the general public, so it is unlikely to happen until things gent untenable(Tea Party anyone?)
Apparently you do not know a lot about swords. Melee combat was not cutting off heads and slitting throats, it was disemboweling and maiming.
There are a small number of modern weapons that can reasonably compare to slitting someone open and watching their ruptured bowels fall out of them, then letting them lie helpless on the ground to die, but most soldiers today are carrying slug-throwers and by comparison those are pretty quick and clean(hollow-point bullets may not be conventionally 'clean' but if you are hit by one you are dead very quickly and often don't have sensory apparatus intact to feel the extend of what has been done to you)
Sucking someone's lungs out is pretty horrific, but even if they survive the experience, they will be dead in minutes if not sooner.
After a battle, there would some times(often?) be wounded still lying in agony in the mud and the filth still in the process of dying the next morning.
War is hell in any time or place, the only reason we may think war is worse now than it was then is because we are ignorant of exactly how bad it was back then.
Just the fact that a majority of the innocent civilians are not being killed, maimed, or enslaved makes this far more merciful than most wars in the past.
It may also make this war unwinnable, but it IS more merciful.
Outside of a significant component of an open source project, this seems problematic.
Corporate work is mostly work for hire, so it may or may not be legal for you to take copies of the code you worked on while on the job.
Most significant projects are team efforts, and without the parts built by other developers your code does not do much(if it can even compile and run without all of those shared resources that were not exclusively your work)
Even on an open-source project where you have as much access to the source as you like, your code is likely to be interspersed with the code of other developers(unless you wrote the original piece and it was 100% feature complete and bug free).
Sure you can write some code specifically to put in your portfolio, but code written to impress a potential employer, unless written on the spot, is as likely to be exactly as honest and pure as the associated resume.
The best bet would be hiring people that other people in your company have worked with in the past and can vouch for their diligence and skill.
Nah, not a problem at all, I see a name in an email and I know someone of that name works in my company, and I see someone face to face and I know someone who looks like that works at my company. Easy.
I just have no links between my image storage system and my name storage system.
Sometimes I can just use my image storage system(such as if I see them with a name tag for several weeks), otherwise I have co-workers that I have worked with for years at my small company(less than 30 employees) and I can only guess at their names because they work in a different department.
Also, I don't collect things, so in spite of all of your other accurate descriptions, I must not have Aspergers.
Now if you don't mind, I need to go get a new bookshelf because the one I bought last week is full.