That's possible... but I know that I've fallen over a few times in my life and appeared mostly lifeless. I would have been terribly disgruntled if someone split me open to keep warm (would have ruined my buzz!).
The Tauntaun fell over, but may not have died yet for sometime. Until that time, it would have still produced heat.
If the animal were dead, I'll bet it still would have been better to cut the skin off and wrap Luke up fur-side towards him and goo-side out.
Plus, if it was just until Han got the shelter set up, it probably would have just as good to put Luke next to the beast and not inside it.
My guess is that it would have been much better to leave the tauntaun alive and just snuggle up against it. While it's alive, it will continue to metabolize its fats and produce heat. A dead tauntaun is just a wet gooey blanket.
At best, maybe Han should have shaved off part of the hair so that Luke could get closer to the tauntaun's skin...
Re:Everything is contagious, in the social sense
on
Obesity Contagious?
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· Score: 1
So I've been told. Thanks for the 2nd correction of the day.
Re:Everything is contagious, in the social sense
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 1
I thought we were suposed to uses viruses for computers, and virii for humans. Damn...
Sorry for the crawling skin. I hope you find where it went to - maybe that's where the piercings come in handy - to hold the skin in place?
When I was in the Army, there was a period of time when I was with a group of people, and we pretty much ate the same things, did the same exercises, and had pretty much the same very physical schedule.
Most of us lost weight/fat. But a few of us (like me), actually put on weight - mostly fat.
I can't explain how it happened and it wasn't like I had a hidden supply of candy bars.
I'd wager that we were eating the same caloric intake within +-100 calories, and again, we were running the same 5 miles a day, hiking the same 12, with the same 50 lbs of gear, doing the same hundreds of pushups, situps, etc.
It would be interesting to identify what caused this difference. Is it just metabolism? Could one of these virii be part of the equation?
I know you want to say it's because I'm lazy and can't control my eating. Would I be vindicated in any way if a vaccination/anti-viral happened to help me lose my excess fat?
I'm all for personal accountability - but I sure as hell want to know when the deck is stacked against me. And there's a tool to unstack the deck, I'm all for it.
Re:Everything is contagious, in the social sense
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
While I definitely believe that in humans, the power of suggestion and the placebo effect are quite powerful.
That's why, though, that we do double-blind studies, and tests on animals.
I doubt the animals in the study were susceptible to suggestion - yet the ones with one of the virii did indeed become more obese.
It's interesting that you attribute the desire for a police state with the Democrats.
Haven't you noticed that it's a Republican president that is actively proclaiming the fact that he is spying and evesdropping on Americans domestically? Isn't it the current Republican justice department that is demanding search records from the major search engines? Didn't this same administration just nominate a supreme court justice that openly declares support for the "unitary executive"?
I'm not saying that the Democrats don't have the same impulses. The FBI's Carnivore was developed and deployed during the Clinton administration, for example.
My guess is that anyone "in power" has an inclination to shackle the freedoms of "the people", but I think you're deluding yourself if you believe it's a Democrat or Socialist problem only. Anyone who is the authority is likely to lean towards authoritarianism. It only serves their ends to have you and me squabbling amongst ourselves about left and right.
You can use linux tools as well to accomplish this.
at a very raw level, using dd and gzip to make images of the harddisks.
Another pretty good tool is partimage. I use this myself. You can put images on another drive, or even over a network (I prefer to use NFS, but you can set up a partimage server elsewhere).
It can cause problems if the hardware in not identical. But, I think there is a windows tool called sysprep that helps the image know that it needs to re-search for hardware when it boots up again.
If your partition/disk sizes are different, then make hte partition as small as your smallest disk, and then use ntfsresize in linux to expand the partition back out to the full size of the disk.
This is so much better than re-installing everything every time because you can also install all your software and set things up "just so".
'I'd hate to see something bad happen to your PC,'
Well, getting Vista only means one thing - scrapping my current PC. It's already been made clear that Vista won't run on my computer. Vista doesn't make my computer more secure - it kills it.
I say, "no thanks". My computer works just fine.
Sadly, I won't be shocked at all the idiots waiting outside the stores until midnight when they launch it.
You have to realize, regardless of the topic, there is a slant against good news in the media. Good news is boring and just doesn't sell.
They don't tell you how many people successfully walk their dogs. They talk about the dog that chews the face off some kid.
"Soldiers build school, locals happy" is boring. "Suicide bombers threaten troops" will get many more eyes and ears.
Successful shuttle launch barely gets a nod. Shuttles exploding in the air get days of coverage.
Remember the news is a business and it's job is to sell advertising - and they get the most advertising by getting people to watch. Bad news sells and good news smells. Sadly, it's probably something deeply engrained in the human psyche.
So, I don't consider it anti-American.. it's just anti-good news. And if you know anything, you know that a war is rife with bad news.
I have to admit that I hoped a career-relevant job would be easier to find. But I also have to admit that I chose the MBA over an Engineering degree based on advice from several people. And looking back, it was definitely the right decision. I went into it, though, not really having any clue about what business is about - outside of the IT mindset - and I didn't even even know what I wanted to do.
If you already have an MBA but not the job you want, I suggest the advice I gave above about temping where you'd want to work.
If you don't have an MBA but you want one - your working on what, take some of my advice because use it.
1) Try to zero-in on what you want to do and make sure you pick your program and coursework appropriately. I found out midway that while I did really well with my marketing coursework, I was really turned on by my operations and decision-management classes. That makes sense for me, based on my tech/engineering background - Operations Management is a lot like "Business Engineering".
2) Try to work with the professors that teach the subject you're hot about. I got along well with a marketing prof and he helped set me up with short-term marketing internship. It was a good experience, but I would have been better off getting something that was operations related. Offer to help with their research and maybe there will be some kind of consulting gig they're working on that you can get in on as part of that research.
3) Do whatever you can to start getting work experience in your field - again, through internships, or temping, etc. If you want to be a financial analyst, simply having an MBA focused on Financial Analysis probably won't get you in the door. But if you've been doing some work, either as a temp, or on an internship, you have a much better chance of landing something in your field.
4) Find out if there is any way you can get even unpaid internships/tours at companies you're interested in. We had a girl show up at our office who did a two-week "internship" with us. Her connection was that she was going to a school that one of our team graduated from. We worked hard to get this girl exposed to many parts of the business - marketing, legal, operations, demand planning, etc. Tap any connections you can to get an experience like this. This girl didn't get paid, but she got some valuable exposure to how a business works, and from the work she did for us, we'll definitely recommend her if she applies for one of the formal internships or a permanent job. If one of your profs has a link to a local business (many business profs do), see if they can help leverage you into some kind of unpaid job-shadow during a break from school. The other advantage to this is that you might find that you are very interested in something you hadn't thought of.
5) And Da Biz is right. Especially with an MBA, the quality of the school can make a big difference. I went to a local university because I happened work there. It's a good school, but when I'm in a pool of candidates, my school doesn't stand up so well to Wharton, Sloan, and Kellogg (where my coworkers are from). That doesn't mean my education is inferior. It simply means those other candidates get immediate recognition and "bonus points" based on their school. And, I've heard it directly from an HR person at a large local tech company that they will automatically offer someone from one of those schools up to $20k more for the same job, compared to the school I went to. That's the power of marketing and reputation.
6) And even if you're changing careers, don't completely abandon your previous life. I'm was working to get out of IT. But I find in my current job, I still end up doing some IT-related things that make the job better. This is where I bring value. For example, I have written complex macros that make reports much easier to generate. This is a skill-set that the normal ops analyst does not have and it allows me to streamline my job in ways other ops analysts can't.
Anyay, an MBA is not a meal-ticket. I was unemployed for 4 months, and then worked as a temp for 11 before I made mine pay off.
And yes, good guess, I happen to be working at either Adidas or Nike.
It IS hard. But a good way to get in the door is to temp.
I finally got an MBA, but all my experience was in IT. I wanted to be an operations analyst.
I finally got a foot in the door at large footwear/apparel company - but I had to swallow my pride and go in as an "admin assistant". Sure I could make more in IT, but I didn't want to be in IT any more.
My first job was as an admin assistant and it lasted a month. I got transferred to another part of the company as basically an assistant to an operations analyst. 11 months later, I landed a permanent job, making pretty good money, and working as a supply chain performance analyst. It's a perfect job for me - I'm learning the things I want to learn, and am making great connections for my next job.
And by the way, I never would have gotten the job I have now if I had just applied from the "outside". It's all about getting in the door and then busting your ass to make a name for yourself.
If there's a company you want to work for, find out who they temp through, and work your way in. It's not glamorous, but it works!
To keep things clean, once I build up my windows system, I then boot into linux and use partimage. I end up with a nice 2 or 3 GB image of everything just the way I like it. To make things easier, I set up "my documents" on another drive or partition.
If anything goes wrong, or every 6 months or so, I just re-dump that image onto my computer, and everything's fresh and brand new.
"Here - throw away a bunch of these incoming resumes for me, will you? I don't want a stack of 75 to look at. I want 10."
The problem is, it's not a matter of reducing 75 to 10. For a job I just applied for in my company (and did not get, even though I temped in the position for 10 months), there were more than 5000 applicants.
Let's assume my boss had nothing else to do. How much time should he look at each resume to determine the potential of the applicant? 1 minute? That's 83 hours - or more than 2 solid weeks of work. He has to rely on HR to thin the herd.
Now here's the rub. The company doesn't need to hire the best possible candidate every time to be successful. They'll typically do pretty well if they manage to hire one of the best - even if that person was not the best of the entire field. That person will be "good enough".
So, assume from that 5000, HR first culls out 90% of the applications and carefully considers the remaining 500. Here, based on some kind of scoring system, you have what would most likely be the "A" students. They carefully go through that 500 and narrow it down and eventually make screening calls. When they're done, they hand of a sheaf of 50 applicants. These are the top 1%, or the "A+" students. These are the ones my boss goes through to decide who he'll interview.
Now, of course, in that process you more than likely weeded out some people are extremely qualified, but somehow didn't score as well. In fact, some of those weeded out might be better than some that you left in. But overall, you have a very strong class of candidates to work from. Any one of them is highly qualified and has a good potential to do a good job. It's now up to my boss to work through those candidates and try to find the one that fits best with the organization.
Again, he may have never had a chance to see that "perfect" candidate that got screened out, but he'll most likely end up with someone who's pretty darned good and will still excel in the job.
It would take "perfect information" to find out precisely who, out of those 5000 applicants is the very best. But, the cost of getting perfect information goes up exponentially as you try to zero in on that figure.
So in the end, you have to weigh how much more it costs to use more rigorous screening of those 5000 candidates and compare it to the return you expect to get with the current process. If you have spend another $100,000 to get a deeper level of analysis (maybe phone-screen all 5000 applicants), is there a good chance that the different applicant you end up will make up that $100,000 difference to your company?
It's a trade-off. How much do you invest in the process compared to the return. If you already get a really good return, what is the real incentive to expend a lot more effort?
Of course, from a job-hunter point of view, I hate automated scoring systems that dump me out of the running. But fortunately for me, while my boss did not hire me, he did strongly recommend me to someone else who did hire me.
If you really want into a big corporation, find back-door ways in, like temping. Having personal recommendations and people specifically requesting you as a candidate trumps the automated scoring systems.
I don't think any reasonable person would expect this to replace a degree from Stanford.
I agree. But for those of us who can't afford Stanford, or for some other reason can't go, this would be a great way to augment the education we are getting somewhere else... or to serve as refresher for courses taken years ago.
I personally can't wait to start listening to some of this material.
Of course, many motherboards have a USB connection where you can plug a slot-based set of USB outlets. If you're already opening the case, that's all you need.
And USB, I think, is only 4 wires... if the plug is epoxied, just open the case and hotwire your own outlet.
Somone else already mentioned installing a 2nd harddrive to copy data. And one could also install a $20 USB/Firewire card in one of the PCI slots.
That leaves filling the whole computer with epoxy. Great, you've turned your PC into a commodore 64. I hope you don't have to fix it!
People just have to accept that if a person has physical access to the machine, they can compromise it.
Most people who filed for bankruptcy before the law still qualify under the new law. It just costs them more to do it now. The idea that there are rich people running around getting bankruptcies to get out of their debts is mostly a myth (except, of course, for large corporations like Enron, United, Delta, etc.). Most middle class people who file for bankruptcy do so because of catastrophic medical bills that outstrip their insurance and their assets.
Before the law went into effect, there was a big increase in bankruptcy filings, followed by a drop. It's now creeping back up to "normal" levels.
This was just a give-away to the banks, who give-away tons of money to politicians.
If your balances are always 0, you'll get no history as a borrower or making payments. It's a way for the system to fuck you.
Just like closing your unused accounts lowers your score by increasing your balance/avail credit ratio.
I personally think any institution that uses a scoring system to rate you should be required to give you the exact details of how that system works. You should be able to take your credit report and generate your own score to verify the score they have generated. With as many errors as there are in credit reports (and the kludgy system for getting them fixed), can anyone have any faith that they've been scored correctly?
It's a system designed to screw those with moderate resources out of as many of those resources as possible.
I'm thankful for my credit union, that's for sure.
I couldn't find it eaisly on google, but I remember a recent article about college law professors reading standard credit card offers/agreements. They all came up with different interpretations from the agreements.
That's pretty sad when legal experts can't even agree on what they say.
I think because singing "Happy Fuckday to You" just isn't very family-friendly, when you get down to it.
Only in puritanical societies is sex a family un-friendly thing. Sex is the reason we have families. Without it, there's no offspring, and no families. It's ironic that people will adopt such deep close-mindedness that the very thing that is reponsible for their existence is deemed dirty and unworthy of being discussed in a family.
It's that mind-bending lack clear thinking that makes me an x-xtian.
Why they celebrate birthdays and not conception days (they're so adamant at trying to control non-believers definitions of "life"). [sic]
Which is the more dramatic occasion?
Well, coming from an x-Christian position, I would say that the moment the soul enters the body (conception) is vastly more dramatic and important than the moment that body passes through a vagina. What could be more important than that moment that God gives you your soul? The date of birth is pretty much an irrelevant incedent - or it should be.
That is, if you really believe in all that *stuff*. And of course, for this crowd, any part of their body passing through a vagina for a second time will surely rank as the most dramatic moment of their life.
Slashdot Mirror
That's possible... but I know that I've fallen over a few times in my life and appeared mostly lifeless. I would have been terribly disgruntled if someone split me open to keep warm (would have ruined my buzz!).
The Tauntaun fell over, but may not have died yet for sometime. Until that time, it would have still produced heat.
If the animal were dead, I'll bet it still would have been better to cut the skin off and wrap Luke up fur-side towards him and goo-side out.
Plus, if it was just until Han got the shelter set up, it probably would have just as good to put Luke next to the beast and not inside it.
My guess is that it would have been much better to leave the tauntaun alive and just snuggle up against it. While it's alive, it will continue to metabolize its fats and produce heat. A dead tauntaun is just a wet gooey blanket.
At best, maybe Han should have shaved off part of the hair so that Luke could get closer to the tauntaun's skin...
So I've been told. Thanks for the 2nd correction of the day.
I thought we were suposed to uses viruses for computers, and virii for humans. Damn...
Sorry for the crawling skin. I hope you find where it went to - maybe that's where the piercings come in handy - to hold the skin in place?
Here's an interesting situation.
When I was in the Army, there was a period of time when I was with a group of people, and we pretty much ate the same things, did the same exercises, and had pretty much the same very physical schedule.
Most of us lost weight/fat. But a few of us (like me), actually put on weight - mostly fat.
I can't explain how it happened and it wasn't like I had a hidden supply of candy bars.
I'd wager that we were eating the same caloric intake within +-100 calories, and again, we were running the same 5 miles a day, hiking the same 12, with the same 50 lbs of gear, doing the same hundreds of pushups, situps, etc.
It would be interesting to identify what caused this difference. Is it just metabolism? Could one of these virii be part of the equation?
I know you want to say it's because I'm lazy and can't control my eating. Would I be vindicated in any way if a vaccination/anti-viral happened to help me lose my excess fat?
I'm all for personal accountability - but I sure as hell want to know when the deck is stacked against me. And there's a tool to unstack the deck, I'm all for it.
While I definitely believe that in humans, the power of suggestion and the placebo effect are quite powerful.
That's why, though, that we do double-blind studies, and tests on animals.
I doubt the animals in the study were susceptible to suggestion - yet the ones with one of the virii did indeed become more obese.
It's interesting that you attribute the desire for a police state with the Democrats.
Haven't you noticed that it's a Republican president that is actively proclaiming the fact that he is spying and evesdropping on Americans domestically? Isn't it the current Republican justice department that is demanding search records from the major search engines? Didn't this same administration just nominate a supreme court justice that openly declares support for the "unitary executive"?
I'm not saying that the Democrats don't have the same impulses. The FBI's Carnivore was developed and deployed during the Clinton administration, for example.
My guess is that anyone "in power" has an inclination to shackle the freedoms of "the people", but I think you're deluding yourself if you believe it's a Democrat or Socialist problem only. Anyone who is the authority is likely to lean towards authoritarianism. It only serves their ends to have you and me squabbling amongst ourselves about left and right.
You can use linux tools as well to accomplish this.
at a very raw level, using dd and gzip to make images of the harddisks.
Another pretty good tool is partimage. I use this myself. You can put images on another drive, or even over a network (I prefer to use NFS, but you can set up a partimage server elsewhere).
It can cause problems if the hardware in not identical. But, I think there is a windows tool called sysprep that helps the image know that it needs to re-search for hardware when it boots up again.
If your partition/disk sizes are different, then make hte partition as small as your smallest disk, and then use ntfsresize in linux to expand the partition back out to the full size of the disk.
This is so much better than re-installing everything every time because you can also install all your software and set things up "just so".
'I'd hate to see something bad happen to your PC,'
Well, getting Vista only means one thing - scrapping my current PC. It's already been made clear that Vista won't run on my computer. Vista doesn't make my computer more secure - it kills it.
I say, "no thanks". My computer works just fine.
Sadly, I won't be shocked at all the idiots waiting outside the stores until midnight when they launch it.
In fact, we HAVE taken away the freedom of the presses we didn't like:
In Iraq, CPA, L. Paul Bremmer III, close newspaper, Al Hawza.
I don't know about the quality of thefileroom, but Bremer admits this same incident in his book, "My Year in Iraq".
You have to realize, regardless of the topic, there is a slant against good news in the media. Good news is boring and just doesn't sell.
They don't tell you how many people successfully walk their dogs. They talk about the dog that chews the face off some kid.
"Soldiers build school, locals happy" is boring. "Suicide bombers threaten troops" will get many more eyes and ears.
Successful shuttle launch barely gets a nod. Shuttles exploding in the air get days of coverage.
Remember the news is a business and it's job is to sell advertising - and they get the most advertising by getting people to watch. Bad news sells and good news smells. Sadly, it's probably something deeply engrained in the human psyche.
So, I don't consider it anti-American.. it's just anti-good news. And if you know anything, you know that a war is rife with bad news.
I have to admit that I hoped a career-relevant job would be easier to find. But I also have to admit that I chose the MBA over an Engineering degree based on advice from several people. And looking back, it was definitely the right decision. I went into it, though, not really having any clue about what business is about - outside of the IT mindset - and I didn't even even know what I wanted to do.
If you already have an MBA but not the job you want, I suggest the advice I gave above about temping where you'd want to work.
If you don't have an MBA but you want one - your working on what, take some of my advice because use it.
1) Try to zero-in on what you want to do and make sure you pick your program and coursework appropriately. I found out midway that while I did really well with my marketing coursework, I was really turned on by my operations and decision-management classes. That makes sense for me, based on my tech/engineering background - Operations Management is a lot like "Business Engineering".
2) Try to work with the professors that teach the subject you're hot about. I got along well with a marketing prof and he helped set me up with short-term marketing internship. It was a good experience, but I would have been better off getting something that was operations related. Offer to help with their research and maybe there will be some kind of consulting gig they're working on that you can get in on as part of that research.
3) Do whatever you can to start getting work experience in your field - again, through internships, or temping, etc. If you want to be a financial analyst, simply having an MBA focused on Financial Analysis probably won't get you in the door. But if you've been doing some work, either as a temp, or on an internship, you have a much better chance of landing something in your field.
4) Find out if there is any way you can get even unpaid internships/tours at companies you're interested in. We had a girl show up at our office who did a two-week "internship" with us. Her connection was that she was going to a school that one of our team graduated from. We worked hard to get this girl exposed to many parts of the business - marketing, legal, operations, demand planning, etc. Tap any connections you can to get an experience like this. This girl didn't get paid, but she got some valuable exposure to how a business works, and from the work she did for us, we'll definitely recommend her if she applies for one of the formal internships or a permanent job. If one of your profs has a link to a local business (many business profs do), see if they can help leverage you into some kind of unpaid job-shadow during a break from school. The other advantage to this is that you might find that you are very interested in something you hadn't thought of.
5) And Da Biz is right. Especially with an MBA, the quality of the school can make a big difference. I went to a local university because I happened work there. It's a good school, but when I'm in a pool of candidates, my school doesn't stand up so well to Wharton, Sloan, and Kellogg (where my coworkers are from). That doesn't mean my education is inferior. It simply means those other candidates get immediate recognition and "bonus points" based on their school. And, I've heard it directly from an HR person at a large local tech company that they will automatically offer someone from one of those schools up to $20k more for the same job, compared to the school I went to. That's the power of marketing and reputation.
6) And even if you're changing careers, don't completely abandon your previous life. I'm was working to get out of IT. But I find in my current job, I still end up doing some IT-related things that make the job better. This is where I bring value. For example, I have written complex macros that make reports much easier to generate. This is a skill-set that the normal ops analyst does not have and it allows me to streamline my job in ways other ops analysts can't.
Anyay, an MBA is not a meal-ticket. I was unemployed for 4 months, and then worked as a temp for 11 before I made mine pay off.
And yes, good guess, I happen to be working at either Adidas or Nike.
It IS hard. But a good way to get in the door is to temp.
I finally got an MBA, but all my experience was in IT. I wanted to be an operations analyst.
I finally got a foot in the door at large footwear/apparel company - but I had to swallow my pride and go in as an "admin assistant". Sure I could make more in IT, but I didn't want to be in IT any more.
My first job was as an admin assistant and it lasted a month. I got transferred to another part of the company as basically an assistant to an operations analyst. 11 months later, I landed a permanent job, making pretty good money, and working as a supply chain performance analyst. It's a perfect job for me - I'm learning the things I want to learn, and am making great connections for my next job.
And by the way, I never would have gotten the job I have now if I had just applied from the "outside". It's all about getting in the door and then busting your ass to make a name for yourself.
If there's a company you want to work for, find out who they temp through, and work your way in. It's not glamorous, but it works!
To keep things clean, once I build up my windows system, I then boot into linux and use partimage. I end up with a nice 2 or 3 GB image of everything just the way I like it. To make things easier, I set up "my documents" on another drive or partition.
If anything goes wrong, or every 6 months or so, I just re-dump that image onto my computer, and everything's fresh and brand new.
That's why I boot into BBC-LNX (bootable business card linux), and do a:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1M
Give it a few minutes and the drive is wiped enough for a clean install.
Put yourself in your Senator's shoes. One industry lobbyist offers you a line of cocaine from between some Hollywood starlet's tits.
Man, I gotta find a way to become a senator!
Eye-wash stations?
"Here - throw away a bunch of these incoming resumes for me, will you? I don't want a stack of 75 to look at. I want 10."
The problem is, it's not a matter of reducing 75 to 10. For a job I just applied for in my company (and did not get, even though I temped in the position for 10 months), there were more than 5000 applicants.
Let's assume my boss had nothing else to do. How much time should he look at each resume to determine the potential of the applicant? 1 minute? That's 83 hours - or more than 2 solid weeks of work. He has to rely on HR to thin the herd.
Now here's the rub. The company doesn't need to hire the best possible candidate every time to be successful. They'll typically do pretty well if they manage to hire one of the best - even if that person was not the best of the entire field. That person will be "good enough".
So, assume from that 5000, HR first culls out 90% of the applications and carefully considers the remaining 500. Here, based on some kind of scoring system, you have what would most likely be the "A" students. They carefully go through that 500 and narrow it down and eventually make screening calls. When they're done, they hand of a sheaf of 50 applicants. These are the top 1%, or the "A+" students. These are the ones my boss goes through to decide who he'll interview.
Now, of course, in that process you more than likely weeded out some people are extremely qualified, but somehow didn't score as well. In fact, some of those weeded out might be better than some that you left in. But overall, you have a very strong class of candidates to work from. Any one of them is highly qualified and has a good potential to do a good job. It's now up to my boss to work through those candidates and try to find the one that fits best with the organization.
Again, he may have never had a chance to see that "perfect" candidate that got screened out, but he'll most likely end up with someone who's pretty darned good and will still excel in the job.
It would take "perfect information" to find out precisely who, out of those 5000 applicants is the very best. But, the cost of getting perfect information goes up exponentially as you try to zero in on that figure.
So in the end, you have to weigh how much more it costs to use more rigorous screening of those 5000 candidates and compare it to the return you expect to get with the current process. If you have spend another $100,000 to get a deeper level of analysis (maybe phone-screen all 5000 applicants), is there a good chance that the different applicant you end up will make up that $100,000 difference to your company?
It's a trade-off. How much do you invest in the process compared to the return. If you already get a really good return, what is the real incentive to expend a lot more effort?
Of course, from a job-hunter point of view, I hate automated scoring systems that dump me out of the running. But fortunately for me, while my boss did not hire me, he did strongly recommend me to someone else who did hire me.
If you really want into a big corporation, find back-door ways in, like temping. Having personal recommendations and people specifically requesting you as a candidate trumps the automated scoring systems.
I don't think any reasonable person would expect this to replace a degree from Stanford.
I agree. But for those of us who can't afford Stanford, or for some other reason can't go, this would be a great way to augment the education we are getting somewhere else... or to serve as refresher for courses taken years ago.
I personally can't wait to start listening to some of this material.
Of course, many motherboards have a USB connection where you can plug a slot-based set of USB outlets. If you're already opening the case, that's all you need.
And USB, I think, is only 4 wires... if the plug is epoxied, just open the case and hotwire your own outlet.
Somone else already mentioned installing a 2nd harddrive to copy data. And one could also install a $20 USB/Firewire card in one of the PCI slots.
That leaves filling the whole computer with epoxy. Great, you've turned your PC into a commodore 64. I hope you don't have to fix it!
People just have to accept that if a person has physical access to the machine, they can compromise it.
Most people who filed for bankruptcy before the law still qualify under the new law. It just costs them more to do it now. The idea that there are rich people running around getting bankruptcies to get out of their debts is mostly a myth (except, of course, for large corporations like Enron, United, Delta, etc.). Most middle class people who file for bankruptcy do so because of catastrophic medical bills that outstrip their insurance and their assets.
Before the law went into effect, there was a big increase in bankruptcy filings, followed by a drop. It's now creeping back up to "normal" levels.
This was just a give-away to the banks, who give-away tons of money to politicians.
If your balances are always 0, you'll get no history as a borrower or making payments. It's a way for the system to fuck you.
Just like closing your unused accounts lowers your score by increasing your balance/avail credit ratio.
I personally think any institution that uses a scoring system to rate you should be required to give you the exact details of how that system works. You should be able to take your credit report and generate your own score to verify the score they have generated. With as many errors as there are in credit reports (and the kludgy system for getting them fixed), can anyone have any faith that they've been scored correctly?
It's a system designed to screw those with moderate resources out of as many of those resources as possible.
I'm thankful for my credit union, that's for sure.
I couldn't find it eaisly on google, but I remember a recent article about college law professors reading standard credit card offers/agreements. They all came up with different interpretations from the agreements.
That's pretty sad when legal experts can't even agree on what they say.
I think because singing "Happy Fuckday to You" just isn't very family-friendly, when you get down to it.
Only in puritanical societies is sex a family un-friendly thing. Sex is the reason we have families. Without it, there's no offspring, and no families. It's ironic that people will adopt such deep close-mindedness that the very thing that is reponsible for their existence is deemed dirty and unworthy of being discussed in a family.
It's that mind-bending lack clear thinking that makes me an x-xtian.
Why they celebrate birthdays and not conception days (they're so adamant at trying to control non-believers definitions of "life"). [sic]
Which is the more dramatic occasion?
Well, coming from an x-Christian position, I would say that the moment the soul enters the body (conception) is vastly more dramatic and important than the moment that body passes through a vagina. What could be more important than that moment that God gives you your soul? The date of birth is pretty much an irrelevant incedent - or it should be.
That is, if you really believe in all that *stuff*. And of course, for this crowd, any part of their body passing through a vagina for a second time will surely rank as the most dramatic moment of their life.