You mean like requiring the holder of the highest office in the land to prove that he is in fact constitutionally eligible for the job?
He is a natural-born citizen; his mother was a US citizen when he was born, and that makes him one, too. He was born in Hawaii, but he could have been born on Mars, and he would still be a natural-born citizen of the USA just like John McCain, or myself, or any of the thousands of kids born to American parents overseas every year.
What I was referring to is our government's routine practice of ignoring the constitution and fighting undeclared wars, promulgating a bogus currency, and funding failed businesses. The birthers are wasting their time on a red herring; there are real issues to contest.
Every "replica" gun must have a orange tip in the USA. That's a law already (Sorry, I can't find a good source).
I wonder how long after this law went into effect, someone painted the tip of a real gun orange so that it wouldn't arouse suspicion when carried in public.
Cause if you eliminated guns, everyone would be the same size and have the same chance of winning a fight, right?
A 200 pound thug who wants to beat the hell out of a 120 pound victim is probably going to succeed. If his target is armed though, it's a very different situation.
There were enough examples of this in Israel that the perps switched tactics. Trying to shoot up a shopping mall became ineffective, since the attacker didn't manage to hurt many people before being shot by several armed civilians. They started using improvised rockets instead, with a range of several miles.
Hypothetical mass murders being an argument for concealed weapons is weak at best.
Most of the time, when a firearm is used for self-defense, it's not even necessary to fire it. Just showing it to the perp tends to make them reconsider.
I've never understood the logic of banning a gun because it looks scary.
It has nothing to do with logic. It's all about politicians pandering to those of their constituents who know exactly squat about guns, and think that a label like "assaut rifle" actually means something. Diane Feinstein does a lot of bragging about how her utter contempt for the second amendment "gets assault rifles off the streets."
Like any other example of plundering the public for the benefit of a special interest, these kids of fees get legislated because the benefit is concentrated, and the burden is diffuse. The recording industry will always pay more in bribes to get this handout than members of the public will pay to prevent it.
the strongest exposure to EMF came from hair dryers, electric shavers and kitchen blenders
Speaking only for myself of course, I'm willing to accept the risk that comes with having electric motors in my vicinity. I like having a refrigerator, a computer printer, a camera with auto-focus, a disk drive, and a vacuum cleaner.
1) What do you hate the most about the language you love the most? 2) If you had an open-ended budget and a staff of five engineers, what problems would you want to solve once and for all? 3) Describe your approach to QA testing/debugging/performance tuning/regression testing. 4) What professional accomplishments are you most proud of? 5) Tell me about something you invented. 6) Tell me about something that you tried to do and failed, and what you did about it.
I'd say that depends on which cert we're talking about. I wouldn't hire an MSCE on a bet, but there are vendors who are serious about the skills of people they endorse as knowing their product.
I've met graduates of American universities who have done exactly the same thing: memorize and regurgitate. I've also met Indian comp sci majors who were among the most imaginative and capable engineers I've ever met.
I've made the mistake of hiring such people, as well. Their Indian university "education" has basically made them able to memorize huge amounts of useless knowledge, without any ability whatsoever to apply it.
Sounds like you're blaming a whole country for your lousy interviewing skills.
Do not give those "programmer" tests that are basically tests on how well you can act as a manual compiler.
Hear, hear!
If I want to know about a candidate's problem solving ability, I ask them to describe how they cracked a tough problem in the past. Good developers all have stories like this, and they're proud of them.
I've learned some very interesting things that way, that I would never have learned if I'd just asked them to jump through hoops by solving brain-teasers on the spot.
BTW, they are, at least back then, a Visual VB shop.
Did you know that before you went in for the interview?
As it happens, I've got a couple of friends at Google who have asked me to come and interview there from time to time, and I've passed because other friends have told me stories like yours about the interview being obnoxious.
From what I hear, the google interview process is what a couple of academics came up with when they started the company, and since they like academic exercises like this, and they want to hire people like themselves, they don't mind missing out on a lot of good developers.
Sooner or later, no moving parts beats moving parts. The magnetic disk makers have done an amazing job so far, but eventually they're going to lose out to solid-state.
Isn't the problem that the economy CAN act in feedback loops?
No, those feedbacks are how we gain information about where resources should go. If savings are scarce, interest rates should rise, which makes borrowers more careful about what they try to finance, and also gets people to save more. The cheaper a loan is, the less consideration and due diligence will be put into deciding whether to borrow or lend money.
Deflation is the boogy-man here.
That's another fallacy. Think about what happens if you have a deflationary environment: you can save money and come out ahead. Borrowers don't like deflation of course, because they'd have to pay back money in the future that was worth more than what they borrowed.
We're in the midst of both inflationary and deflationary events right now. The Fed inflated like crazy under Greenspan and Bernanke, and a lot of credit was leveraged up on top of that. Also, the Bush/Paulson bailout and the porkulus bill were both a huge dose of inflation, which is being partially offset by huge credit balances evaporating as insolvent financial institutions and real estate development organizations go belly-up.
. Inflation of currency means the bankers' savings account shrink. Right?
No, the savings accounts belong to the depositors, not the banks. Inflation helps the banks because they get to lend out currency that was created out of thin air, and charge interest for it. If the banks could only lend out the deposits they held, then inflation would hurt banks like it hurts everyone else.
I guess I need to go read google.
Economics in One Lessonby Henry Hazlitt is a good place to start. See chapter 23 for a discussion of inflation.
Murray Rothbard also wrote a comprehensive explanation of money, credit, and how fractional reserve banking works. Look him up at mises.org.
BTW, you're very good at regurgitating the party line. Maybe if you keep it up long enough, the Swedish bankers will give you a prize like they gave Krugman.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they banned it because they prohibit any language interpreters. What anyone wants to do with those interpreters is beside the point.
-jcr
You mean like requiring the holder of the highest office in the land to prove that he is in fact constitutionally eligible for the job?
He is a natural-born citizen; his mother was a US citizen when he was born, and that makes him one, too. He was born in Hawaii, but he could have been born on Mars, and he would still be a natural-born citizen of the USA just like John McCain, or myself, or any of the thousands of kids born to American parents overseas every year.
What I was referring to is our government's routine practice of ignoring the constitution and fighting undeclared wars, promulgating a bogus currency, and funding failed businesses. The birthers are wasting their time on a red herring; there are real issues to contest.
-jcr
Hey, get off the fence, will you? How do you really feel?
-jcr
I'd like to see US law applied in the USA.
-jcr
Every "replica" gun must have a orange tip in the USA. That's a law already (Sorry, I can't find a good source).
I wonder how long after this law went into effect, someone painted the tip of a real gun orange so that it wouldn't arouse suspicion when carried in public.
-jcr
That's a big gun
-jcr
There is absolutely no need for them
Cause if you eliminated guns, everyone would be the same size and have the same chance of winning a fight, right?
A 200 pound thug who wants to beat the hell out of a 120 pound victim is probably going to succeed. If his target is armed though, it's a very different situation.
-jcr
Do you have an example of this?
There were enough examples of this in Israel that the perps switched tactics. Trying to shoot up a shopping mall became ineffective, since the attacker didn't manage to hurt many people before being shot by several armed civilians. They started using improvised rockets instead, with a range of several miles.
Hypothetical mass murders being an argument for concealed weapons is weak at best.
Most of the time, when a firearm is used for self-defense, it's not even necessary to fire it. Just showing it to the perp tends to make them reconsider.
-jcr
I've never understood the logic of banning a gun because it looks scary.
It has nothing to do with logic. It's all about politicians pandering to those of their constituents who know exactly squat about guns, and think that a label like "assaut rifle" actually means something. Diane Feinstein does a lot of bragging about how her utter contempt for the second amendment "gets assault rifles off the streets."
-jcr
Like any other example of plundering the public for the benefit of a special interest, these kids of fees get legislated because the benefit is concentrated, and the burden is diffuse. The recording industry will always pay more in bribes to get this handout than members of the public will pay to prevent it.
-jcr
the strongest exposure to EMF came from hair dryers, electric shavers and kitchen blenders
Speaking only for myself of course, I'm willing to accept the risk that comes with having electric motors in my vicinity. I like having a refrigerator, a computer printer, a camera with auto-focus, a disk drive, and a vacuum cleaner.
-jcr
You're hired.
Also, anyone who asks the GP "what's the encoding of that string?" In this day and age, you can't assume that 1 byte == 1 character anymore.
-jcr
Back in my days as a bench technician, we referred to that as a NED (noise emitting diode).
-jcr
1) What do you hate the most about the language you love the most?
2) If you had an open-ended budget and a staff of five engineers, what problems would you want to solve once and for all?
3) Describe your approach to QA testing/debugging/performance tuning/regression testing.
4) What professional accomplishments are you most proud of?
5) Tell me about something you invented.
6) Tell me about something that you tried to do and failed, and what you did about it.
certifications are almost worse than useless.
I'd say that depends on which cert we're talking about. I wouldn't hire an MSCE on a bet, but there are vendors who are serious about the skills of people they endorse as knowing their product.
-jcr
Bigoted much?
I've met graduates of American universities who have done exactly the same thing: memorize and regurgitate. I've also met Indian comp sci majors who were among the most imaginative and capable engineers I've ever met.
I've made the mistake of hiring such people, as well. Their Indian university "education" has basically made them able to memorize huge amounts of useless knowledge, without any ability whatsoever to apply it.
Sounds like you're blaming a whole country for your lousy interviewing skills.
-jcr
Do not give those "programmer" tests that are basically tests on how well you can act as a manual compiler.
Hear, hear!
If I want to know about a candidate's problem solving ability, I ask them to describe how they cracked a tough problem in the past. Good developers all have stories like this, and they're proud of them.
I've learned some very interesting things that way, that I would never have learned if I'd just asked them to jump through hoops by solving brain-teasers on the spot.
BTW, they are, at least back then, a Visual VB shop.
Did you know that before you went in for the interview?
-jcr
As it happens, I've got a couple of friends at Google who have asked me to come and interview there from time to time, and I've passed because other friends have told me stories like yours about the interview being obnoxious.
From what I hear, the google interview process is what a couple of academics came up with when they started the company, and since they like academic exercises like this, and they want to hire people like themselves, they don't mind missing out on a lot of good developers.
-jcr
Random I/O is essentially uncacheable.
I'm sure that would come as a great surprise to anyone who ever implemented a virtual memory system.
-jcr
I really don't want to contemplate having my boot volume on a USB device.
-jcr
Sooner or later, no moving parts beats moving parts. The magnetic disk makers have done an amazing job so far, but eventually they're going to lose out to solid-state.
-jcr
Isn't the problem that the economy CAN act in feedback loops?
No, those feedbacks are how we gain information about where resources should go. If savings are scarce, interest rates should rise, which makes borrowers more careful about what they try to finance, and also gets people to save more. The cheaper a loan is, the less consideration and due diligence will be put into deciding whether to borrow or lend money.
Deflation is the boogy-man here.
That's another fallacy. Think about what happens if you have a deflationary environment: you can save money and come out ahead. Borrowers don't like deflation of course, because they'd have to pay back money in the future that was worth more than what they borrowed.
We're in the midst of both inflationary and deflationary events right now. The Fed inflated like crazy under Greenspan and Bernanke, and a lot of credit was leveraged up on top of that. Also, the Bush/Paulson bailout and the porkulus bill were both a huge dose of inflation, which is being partially offset by huge credit balances evaporating as insolvent financial institutions and real estate development organizations go belly-up.
-jcr
. Inflation of currency means the bankers' savings account shrink. Right?
No, the savings accounts belong to the depositors, not the banks. Inflation helps the banks because they get to lend out currency that was created out of thin air, and charge interest for it. If the banks could only lend out the deposits they held, then inflation would hurt banks like it hurts everyone else.
I guess I need to go read google.
Economics in One Lessonby Henry Hazlitt is a good place to start. See chapter 23 for a discussion of inflation.
Murray Rothbard also wrote a comprehensive explanation of money, credit, and how fractional reserve banking works. Look him up at mises.org.
-jcr
BTW, you're very good at regurgitating the party line. Maybe if you keep it up long enough, the Swedish bankers will give you a prize like they gave Krugman.
-jcr
I'm getting tired of correcting misinformed opinions fueled by impractical ideologies
That's my line, sunshine. Keynes sold castles in the air.
The Federal Reserve System had been established to prevent what actually happened.
Bullshit. The Fed was established to do precisely what it has done: loot the wealth of the country by inflating the currency. 96% and counting.
-jcr