Wait, you've identified a gene sequence for "being a welfare recipient"?
Note that I don't approve of the idea, but how in the heck would this be eugenics? You do know that eugenics has to do with inheritable characteristics, right? http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eugenics
If you sell a Blu-Ray player, and someone compromises your encryption keys, you owe the Blu-Ray Disc Association 40% of your gross profits.
That's not "40% of your gross profits on the player", that's "40% of your gross profits" -- period.
This is why companies are either a member of the BRDA cabal, or they create wholly owned subsidiary C-corps to isolate themselves from liability.
I'm not really seeing Microsoft doing this for the XBox, and I'm not seeing Apple doing it, either. This is in fact the major reason Apple decided against Blu-Ray drives in the Intel MacBook line, and is in fact getting rid of optical media support altogether. I can't see Microsoft being that less smart about things.
You want Blu-Ray? Buy a USB drive with player software.
It's a common occurrence when the back end server sends out the YSOD instead of the content you intended for it to send when you are running buggy ASP.NET code (ASP.NET is a Microsoft web application framework based on Active Server Pages. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASP.NET ).
Generally, you would hire someone who understood overriding the application_error, as was previously suggested by an AC poster in this posting: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2572922&cid=38365514 . In other words, you'd hire someone who could fix the problem, rather than asking Slashdot.
They'd probably also be clueful enough to know that the place to ask for help with Microsoft products is Microsoft, and that they are unlikely to get a lot of love from the Slashdot crowd, who typically avoid work-for-hire coding models that make it difficult to reuse their code later on if they go to work for a different employer. Very few clueful people like to have to solve a given problem more than once.
By flying their plane into Moffett field instead of SJC, they essentially get "free" landing rights and to cause noise pollution w/o creating any offsets.
How 'bout they mitigate their tax evasion and noise pollution by sending the equivalent fees for landing and fines for late landing to the upkeep of SJC airport?
Nah, being the 1% (or maybe the 0.01%), they don't have to bother with rules. Meanwhile the typical SJC flier pays more landing fees (someone has to make up for lost revenue) and they get free noise pollution, without having to pay fines.
99%, wake up, these losers are just taking us all for a ride and with their sweet deal a Moffett, they are the 1%...
Moffet's not a Customs Airport of Entry, so any international flights have to bounce through another airport before landing there. For Moffet, that's generally Oakland. So they'd pay the landing fees there.
Also, they have stronger noise restrictions than SJC:
http://www.aviationreferencedesk.com/airport/SJC/ "NOISE ABATEMENT PROCEDURE: RUNWAY 30L/12R IS PREFERRED ARRIVAL RUNWAY FOR JET AIRCRAFT AND RUNWAY 12L/30R IS THE PREFERRED DEP RUNWAY FOR JET AIRCRAFT. ALL JET AIRCRAFT TAKEOFFS ARE TO BE INITIATED FROM EOR UNLESS DIRECTED OTHERWISE BY AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL TOWER."
If I were designing a drone that was supposed to be uber-top secret, I'd fill it with C-4 and program it to explode if signal was lost after a designated period of time.
Waste of a perfectly good drone full of C4 with a strong target identification signal.
I'd program it to home on the jamming transmitter. Problem solved for the next drone.
Literally. I bought 3TB for $200.00 at Fry's yesterday. You probably have more than 500M of "Angry Birds" on your cell phone.
If the point is to pull the data off your gmail account and not have it stored there (maybe you want to migrate away, maybe, you are trying to get us to design a product for your file hosting service adjuntct to gmail, whatever), fetchmail is a terrible tool, particularly since gmail permits IMAP4 access, and you don't have to worry about decoding headers in precedence order.
In general, if you want to leave the email on your gmail account, and delete only attachments, sorry, but the mail is not stored that way on the gmail server, messages are stored as units, and attachments are not separate things, they are different sections in the same flat file using MIME encoding.
You would have to pull the mail down with IMAP4, process it, and push it back up, again with IMAP4. You would then need to take additional steps via IMAP4 commands to make it not look like newly arrived mail to the gmail server, or you're going to see them all as new messages the next time you log into gmail (basically, after the put, you will need to mark the message read again).
If you additionally use POP3 access, the message IDs as reported by POP3 will change, and since it does its "leave on server" functionality by maintaining a local database of message IDs, it's going to be seen as new email there. There's no getting around that, unless you own the source code to your POP3 client and are willing to do correlation after the put operation on the IMAP4 connection to translate the ID.
You also realize that if you are ding this for reasons of quasilegality of message contents, those messages aren't really gone, right? People accidentally delete things all the time and want them back, and that same recovery process in that case would be usable in discovery by subpoena for the email provider (there is in fact additional requirements for ISPs under Patriot II to maintain records of sent and received emails for up to two years).
The bottom line here is that you are engaging in a pretty useless exercise here, unless you are trying to hide illegal activity or build a service and have us design it for you. In either case, good luck, you'll be writing a lot of code to get what you want.
So you are saying that's not a problem for open source software packages that make you pay per user?
I did not believe, until today, that someone could come up with a klein-bottle-shaped thought. I bow down to you, sir.
-- Terry
You can put anything on iPhone without a jailbreak
on
Carrier IQ Drama Continues
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· Score: 4, Informative
You can put anything on iPhone without a jailbreak
You just have to pay for a developer's license and enroll your phone.
What you don't get is the ability to to put any software you want on other people's phones by letting them download your application from your web site, you have to go through iTunes for that, and doing that requires Apple to approve your application. But when we get to that point, we've stopped talking about developer freedom and started talking about entrepreneurial freedom, which is something completely different.
PS: iPhones don't come with carrier crap installed; that's one of the reasons Apple didn't initially partner with Verizon; the other two reasons were the Qualcomm patent tax on CDMA hardware, and Verizon not wanting to set up a Visual Voice Mail service that met Apple's requirements.
PPS: All of the projects for running Linux on phones are only going to get somewhere if they break signature verification in the boot loaders, and the baseband software runs on a separate chip, rather than on the same chip as applications. That lets out a lot of smartphones (e.g. anything running a Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU). If they try to go ahead on those phones anyway, men in suits will show up citing the Code of Federal Regulations, 47, Section 2.944 covering Software Defined Radio.
So, you're a foreign intelligence agency, and a "student named "bob wabernacky" is entering your country...
Which of these two things is more suspicious for someone under the age of 30:
(1) He has a facebook account under that name (2) He *doesn't* have a facebook account under that name?...of course if you are stupid enough to have posted pixel identical pictures to both your real and cover profiles, and they've been indexed by image, I guess you lose...
It's called a sit-in. Just like in Greensboro North Carolina and Jackson Mississippi in the 1960's civil rights movement which resulted in desegregation of lunch counters.
Government has just gotten better at sweeping protesters under the rug and stifling media coverage by designating areas away from the target of the protests as "free speech zones".
It's a backhanded way of doing it, but it's pretty clear that what's going on is a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.
I find it ironic that the Tea Party is portrayed as "Right Wing" and the Occupy movement is portrayed as "Left Wing" when both groups have the same goal of throwing corrupt scoundrels out of public office.
I think that characterization has more owed to Sarah Palin seeing a parade and running to get her baton and march in front of it as if she were leading. Ironically, her doing that has protected the Tea Party somewhat under the political shield of a former vice presidential candidate, which has required that they be taken seriously.
You would think that some other savvy politician would take the same approach for the Occupy movement to advance their agenda, as Palin did.
with the Tea Party.
The big use for lots of bandwidth is video, and to get video anywhere close to broadcast time requires a television license, so you might as well just get a television license and not watch the video online at all.
This reminds me of "the Golden Rule" that I try to live by: "Treat others as you would like to be treated."
The first Methane-breathing alien you encounter and treat as you'd like to be treated and place in a reducing Oxygen atmosphere will likely result in an interstellar war.
This leads to things like people with terminal illness being allowed to choose to proactively end their lives, and cryonicists being able to get themselves frozen before their glial cell carcinoma eats all the neuronal connections which encode the information that defines their self, but hey, those are things that should be allowed anyway.
There's no reason these days that a platform dependent client should be used for a game that's this compute non-intensive. Limiting your customer base by requiring a client, and having the client closed so you don't know what the heck is getting permanently installed on your machine are bad things.
I'm pretty much done permanently installing random crap on my machine.
The alternatives are "run in the browser" vs. "open source client". HTML5 wasn't good enough when they first started, but flash was, as demonized as it's been, was. They weren't going to get on an iOS or console platform at the time without a native client distributed via app store or steam. When HTML5 is finally coming on line as good enough, they bail out of the market.
Why do you call state sales taxes "new"? They've been around a long time. Its only that recently people have started not paying them.
That's highly inaccurate. Many people live on the no-income-tax side of borders and drive over the border to shop in their no-sales-tax neighbors. For example, there is a huge economy based on this principle right at the Washington/Oregon border. The same principle applies to a lesser extent to differential sales tax near tax region borders.
Enforcement on collection of these taxes is pretty lax, and is generally down to the person doing it themselves, which doesn't happen unless you are pretty scrupulous (yes, I've paid use tax for big ticket items).
This seems to me to be an opportunity for the state to hire more people in order to collect use tax. If there is that much revenue out there to be collected, it's worth spending a fraction of it on creating jobs for people to act as collectors. If there's not that much revenue, a small amount of revenue siphoned off as an unfunded mandate on small businesses expected to act in loco as your tax collector is definitely NOT going to help the stumbling economy right itself.
In general, there are literally tens of thousands of different sales tax zones in the U.S., incorporating state, county, city, and special economic zone taxes and exemptions. The only people who think it's a good idea for a company to have to collect and remit taxes to all these varied authorities are the varied authorities themselves, and the people selling the databases of tax rates and remittance addresses and procedures.
Personally, if I had a company that was selling over the Internet, and a given state/county/municipality tried to enforce collections as an unfunded mandate on me, I'd simply stop selling in that region. My response to customer complaints would be that they live in a region which made it impossible for me to do business with them, and that they should perhaps move somewhere else.
Practically, even when such taxes are collected by brick-and-mortar stores, people in the zones who are making a big ticket purchase are willing to drive 15 minutes to another jurisdiction to save the city sales tax on their purchase. I know people who have flown across the country to buy cars, then driven back, with the rationale that the difference in the sales tax was enough to pay for their flight, a couple of nice nights out, and the gas and motels and restaurants for the trip back (plus they get to see the world's largest ball of twine or the Grand Canyon, or whatever Americana floats their boat).
Property tax increases have their growth rate capped by prop 13, they are not themselves capped.
When a property is sold, the value is assessed, and the tax rate set, so change in property ownership tends to raise the taxes on the property being sold, well in excess of the normal growth rate cap.
The failure in this scenario is that, as a corporate owner, like the Kaiser family, at the time prop 13 passed, they took all of their properties and incorporated a separate holding company for each one of them. When they want to sell the property, they instead sell the holding company, and the ownership on the property remains the same (the same holding company owns it), and therefore falls under the growth rate cap.
Thus individual property taxes go up, and commercial property taxes do not.
If you are buying a house in California, it's probably worth checking out zoning and corporate ownership over a period of several years compared to increases in the non-capped property assessment over the same period of time, and decide whether you will make more money off selling a property without a drastically increased property tax from a change of ownership, but with mortgage deductions, vs. selling a company which owns a property with a relatively low tax rate which will stay relatively low for the new owner of the corporation. You might be better off creating your own holding company, like the big players do.
My personal take on this would be to have prop 13 not apply to commercial properties, which was a very late amendment to the proposition in order to enable exactly this kind of corporate ownership loophole for commercial properties.
Long time, no see. Tell Jesus M. "Hi" if you still talk to him... I have to come clean and tell you I work at Google now; I was hired in there after quitting Apple.
This whole thread has been pretty bogus.
The first this that's wrong about it is that Google doesn't use brain teasers in interviews. You have to write down what you talked to the candidate about briefly so that follow-on interviewers can switch tack and not ask the same question, and then you go back to your desk and often spend as much time writing up your interview as you did actually interviewing. If you asked something stupid like "why are man hole covers round?" or some other trick question, or a riddle, you'd be scrubbed from the interview rotation until you had gone through training again.
The primary reason for a formal education is not that you have learned anything that you couldn't have learned on your own, it's so that you share a common language with your coworkers and can talk about complex topics using the same terminology, and you and they can understand each other.
The reason for giving coding problems or similar problem solving questions is to gauge how you think about solving a problem. In general, it's to tell whether or not you have critical thinking skills. The ability to engage in critical thinking is frequently a skill most people don't acquire without a logic class and/or some hard science classes in something like physics. Testing and evaluation generally require some ability in statistics, also something most people do not learn until they've had a college course in the subject.
The reason for things like linked list problems is that many people who do the minimal effort curve to graduate with a CS degree never learn anything about memory layout or how pointers work, and without understanding that, you have no hope of understanding what it is your compiler is doing to your source code, or what it's like to try to handle 200,000 transactions instead of 120,000 in the same interval, without throwing additional hardware at the problem. Yeah, you can look up how a linked list works, if you needed one, or just #include and use the macros, but if you can't write one from scratch, not only is it likely you don't know how things aren't laid out in memory, you've just spoiled the interviewers follow-on questions where you get asked to modify the algorithm to get different behaviours out of it.
The candidate qualification problem is something that was inevitable when the accreditation standards change from "Programming in C" to "Database concepts using C (please learn C on your own)", and the dearth of systems where you had to care about such things because you were working without a net. I have another younger friend who is of the calibre of our generation, Michael Steil, who is an absolute C64 fanatic. He learned what we learned, but it was because he grew up in Germany with old computers with limited memory and no memory protection to save him from himself. Just like we did.
It's an unfortunate fact in our industry that we went through a period of time often referred to as "the dot com bubble", when thousands of CS students were hired before they could really learn any of the above, just to get a warm body to fill a cubicle so that the VCs would part with the next round of funding between step 2 and ??? before "profit!" was going to happen. A lot of these people are regretting it now, or they are heading back to school to get the paper credentials that will act as their latter day union card.
So a good resume or even the right sheepskin is not as good as a demonstration of actual problem solving skills, or an ability to communicate with other people who have those skills, and with whom you are going to need to be able to collaborate effectively. There are plenty of people left over from "the dot bomb" with glowing resumes based on being cubicle warmers, and neither you nor I would hire them.
I would say it's incredibly hard to cram for an interview, any i
Those BWR reactors were new and modern at the time they went online.
At the time they went on line... by which you mean "approximately half a century ago, the first two of which went on line prior to the first moon landing, when Lyndon Johnson was president of the US". Right?
We went from horse drawn carriages to landing on the moon in about the same amount of time the Fukishima BWR designs have been around; are you seriously claiming we haven't been able to design better reactors in that amount of time?
The lack of total biodiversity is one of the reasons why the biosphere 2 project failed so miserably.
It was actually because of the uncured concrete sequestering all the CO2 as Calcium Carbonate, resulting in dropping Oxygen. During the second mission, they sealed the concrete, as they should have done initially, but members of the first mission intentionally vandalized the second.
and by the way, why is that show on so often? I swear, every other week they play it..
Because it's a series. It has 27 episodes so far. And no, I don't watch it.
Higglety, piggelty, Erich Von Daniken Tells of green men who come from afar; next he'll be telling us Extraterrestrials landed in Dallas to murder J.R.
They are not only accessible to the rich. They are also accessible to the intelligent, thanks to scholarships.
Most people are getting college degrees for the wrong reason in any case; one of my faculty advisors put it best: diplomas are the modern version of a union card.
I see lots of people getting degrees in things they have no interest in, and no passion for, in order to follow the money (or where they think the money is, which is often not the same thing). Historically, this has resulted in a lot of bad doctors; around 2000, it resulted in a lot of bad programmers, and it's currently tilted toward resulting in a lot of bad lawyers. Whatever ends up being the next big ticket field, expect that 4 years later there will be a lot of bad whatevers, waving their shiny new union cards and giving the people who actually have a passion for the field a bad name.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, you've identified a gene sequence for "being a welfare recipient"?
Note that I don't approve of the idea, but how in the heck would this be eugenics? You do know that eugenics has to do with inheritable characteristics, right?
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eugenics
-- Terry
At least give credit where it belongs for the idea that that is a bad metric:
-2000 lines of code
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt
-- Terry
If you sell a Blu-Ray player, and someone compromises your encryption keys, you owe the Blu-Ray Disc Association 40% of your gross profits.
That's not "40% of your gross profits on the player", that's "40% of your gross profits" -- period.
This is why companies are either a member of the BRDA cabal, or they create wholly owned subsidiary C-corps to isolate themselves from liability.
I'm not really seeing Microsoft doing this for the XBox, and I'm not seeing Apple doing it, either. This is in fact the major reason Apple decided against Blu-Ray drives in the Intel MacBook line, and is in fact getting rid of optical media support altogether. I can't see Microsoft being that less smart about things.
You want Blu-Ray? Buy a USB drive with player software.
-- Terry
FYI: YSOD = yellow screen of d
It's a common occurrence when the back end server sends out the YSOD instead of the content you intended for it to send when you are running buggy ASP.NET code (ASP.NET is a Microsoft web application framework based on Active Server Pages. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASP.NET ).
Generally, you would hire someone who understood overriding the application_error, as was previously suggested by an AC poster in this posting: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2572922&cid=38365514 . In other words, you'd hire someone who could fix the problem, rather than asking Slashdot.
They'd probably also be clueful enough to know that the place to ask for help with Microsoft products is Microsoft, and that they are unlikely to get a lot of love from the Slashdot crowd, who typically avoid work-for-hire coding models that make it difficult to reuse their code later on if they go to work for a different employer. Very few clueful people like to have to solve a given problem more than once.
-- Terry
Larry Ellison, is that you?
Re:what about their fair share of taxes and fees?
By flying their plane into Moffett field instead of SJC, they essentially get "free" landing rights and to cause noise pollution w/o creating any offsets.
How 'bout they mitigate their tax evasion and noise pollution by sending the equivalent fees for landing and fines for late landing to the upkeep of SJC airport?
Nah, being the 1% (or maybe the 0.01%), they don't have to bother with rules. Meanwhile the typical SJC flier pays more landing fees (someone has to make up for lost revenue) and they get free noise pollution, without having to pay fines.
99%, wake up, these losers are just taking us all for a ride and with their sweet deal a Moffett, they are the 1%...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison#Private_jet ...it sure sounds like sour grapes over the noise ordinance and fines for violating it.
Moffet's not a Customs Airport of Entry, so any international flights have to bounce through another airport before landing there. For Moffet, that's generally Oakland. So they'd pay the landing fees there.
Also, they have stronger noise restrictions than SJC:
Moffet:
http://www.aviationreferencedesk.com/airport/NUQ/
"NS ABTMT - NO JET DEP RUNWAY 14L/R BTN HRS OF 0700-1300Z++."
Mineta::
http://www.aviationreferencedesk.com/airport/SJC/
"NOISE ABATEMENT PROCEDURE: RUNWAY 30L/12R IS PREFERRED ARRIVAL RUNWAY FOR JET AIRCRAFT AND RUNWAY 12L/30R IS THE PREFERRED DEP RUNWAY FOR JET AIRCRAFT. ALL JET AIRCRAFT TAKEOFFS ARE TO BE INITIATED FROM EOR UNLESS DIRECTED OTHERWISE BY AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL TOWER."
-- Terry
If I were designing a drone that was supposed to be uber-top secret, I'd fill it with C-4 and program it to explode if signal was lost after a designated period of time.
Waste of a perfectly good drone full of C4 with a strong target identification signal.
I'd program it to home on the jamming transmitter. Problem solved for the next drone.
-- Terry
Obviously Apple is holding it wrong...
Front surfaces that are not black or clear
The screen on the Galaxy tab is on the back.
-- Terry
You are talking about $0.035 in storage costs
Literally. I bought 3TB for $200.00 at Fry's yesterday. You probably have more than 500M of "Angry Birds" on your cell phone.
If the point is to pull the data off your gmail account and not have it stored there (maybe you want to migrate away, maybe, you are trying to get us to design a product for your file hosting service adjuntct to gmail, whatever), fetchmail is a terrible tool, particularly since gmail permits IMAP4 access, and you don't have to worry about decoding headers in precedence order.
In general, if you want to leave the email on your gmail account, and delete only attachments, sorry, but the mail is not stored that way on the gmail server, messages are stored as units, and attachments are not separate things, they are different sections in the same flat file using MIME encoding.
You would have to pull the mail down with IMAP4, process it, and push it back up, again with IMAP4. You would then need to take additional steps via IMAP4 commands to make it not look like newly arrived mail to the gmail server, or you're going to see them all as new messages the next time you log into gmail (basically, after the put, you will need to mark the message read again).
If you additionally use POP3 access, the message IDs as reported by POP3 will change, and since it does its "leave on server" functionality by maintaining a local database of message IDs, it's going to be seen as new email there. There's no getting around that, unless you own the source code to your POP3 client and are willing to do correlation after the put operation on the IMAP4 connection to translate the ID.
You also realize that if you are ding this for reasons of quasilegality of message contents, those messages aren't really gone, right? People accidentally delete things all the time and want them back, and that same recovery process in that case would be usable in discovery by subpoena for the email provider (there is in fact additional requirements for ISPs under Patriot II to maintain records of sent and received emails for up to two years).
The bottom line here is that you are engaging in a pretty useless exercise here, unless you are trying to hide illegal activity or build a service and have us design it for you. In either case, good luck, you'll be writing a lot of code to get what you want.
-- Terry
You insensitive clod!
He lives in a place where, if a power line is balanced at the top of a tall pole and falls off, they bury the damn thing and it never happens again.
Too bad that's not the U.S....
-- Terry
So you are saying that's not a problem for open source software packages that make you pay per user?
I did not believe, until today, that someone could come up with a klein-bottle-shaped thought. I bow down to you, sir.
-- Terry
You can put anything on iPhone without a jailbreak
You just have to pay for a developer's license and enroll your phone.
What you don't get is the ability to to put any software you want on other people's phones by letting them download your application from your web site, you have to go through iTunes for that, and doing that requires Apple to approve your application. But when we get to that point, we've stopped talking about developer freedom and started talking about entrepreneurial freedom, which is something completely different.
PS: iPhones don't come with carrier crap installed; that's one of the reasons Apple didn't initially partner with Verizon; the other two reasons were the Qualcomm patent tax on CDMA hardware, and Verizon not wanting to set up a Visual Voice Mail service that met Apple's requirements.
PPS: All of the projects for running Linux on phones are only going to get somewhere if they break signature verification in the boot loaders, and the baseband software runs on a separate chip, rather than on the same chip as applications. That lets out a lot of smartphones (e.g. anything running a Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU). If they try to go ahead on those phones anyway, men in suits will show up citing the Code of Federal Regulations, 47, Section 2.944 covering Software Defined Radio.
-- Terry
All this recruitment tool will do is attract aspies.
And do we really want aspies with responsibility for national security?
Definitely. definitely.
I'm an excellent driver.
Uh oh, fifteen minutes to Judge Wapner.
-- Terry
So, you're a foreign intelligence agency, and a "student named "bob wabernacky" is entering your country...
Which of these two things is more suspicious for someone under the age of 30:
(1) He has a facebook account under that name ...of course if you are stupid enough to have posted pixel identical pictures to both your real and cover profiles, and they've been indexed by image, I guess you lose...
(2) He *doesn't* have a facebook account under that name?
-- Terry
If only his had been done before... Oh, it has. It's called "asl".
http://opensource.apple.com/source/syslog/syslog-132/
-- Terry
Occupying *is* peaceful protest
It's called a sit-in. Just like in Greensboro North Carolina and Jackson Mississippi in the 1960's civil rights movement which resulted in desegregation of lunch counters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_sit-ins
Government has just gotten better at sweeping protesters under the rug and stifling media coverage by designating areas away from the target of the protests as "free speech zones".
It's a backhanded way of doing it, but it's pretty clear that what's going on is a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.
I find it ironic that the Tea Party is portrayed as "Right Wing" and the Occupy movement is portrayed as "Left Wing" when both groups have the same goal of throwing corrupt scoundrels out of public office.
I think that characterization has more owed to Sarah Palin seeing a parade and running to get her baton and march in front of it as if she were leading. Ironically, her doing that has protected the Tea Party somewhat under the political shield of a former vice presidential candidate, which has required that they be taken seriously.
You would think that some other savvy politician would take the same approach for the Occupy movement to advance their agenda, as Palin did.
with the Tea Party.
-- Terry
The big use for lots of bandwidth is video, and to get video anywhere close to broadcast time requires a television license, so you might as well just get a television license and not watch the video online at all.
-- Terry
Good luck with that golden rule thing...
This reminds me of "the Golden Rule" that I try to live by: "Treat others as you would like to be treated."
The first Methane-breathing alien you encounter and treat as you'd like to be treated and place in a reducing Oxygen atmosphere will likely result in an interstellar war.
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/MetalawInterstellarRelations.htm ...or in simple terms: Do unto others as they would have you do unto them".
This leads to things like people with terminal illness being allowed to choose to proactively end their lives, and cryonicists being able to get themselves frozen before their glial cell carcinoma eats all the neuronal connections which encode the information that defines their self, but hey, those are things that should be allowed anyway.
-- Terry
The windows/mac client killed it for me
There's no reason these days that a platform dependent client should be used for a game that's this compute non-intensive. Limiting your customer base by requiring a client, and having the client closed so you don't know what the heck is getting permanently installed on your machine are bad things.
I'm pretty much done permanently installing random crap on my machine.
The alternatives are "run in the browser" vs. "open source client". HTML5 wasn't good enough when they first started, but flash was, as demonized as it's been, was. They weren't going to get on an iOS or console platform at the time without a native client distributed via app store or steam. When HTML5 is finally coming on line as good enough, they bail out of the market.
-- Terry
People not paying use taxes
Why do you call state sales taxes "new"? They've been around a long time. Its only that recently people have started not paying them.
That's highly inaccurate. Many people live on the no-income-tax side of borders and drive over the border to shop in their no-sales-tax neighbors. For example, there is a huge economy based on this principle right at the Washington/Oregon border. The same principle applies to a lesser extent to differential sales tax near tax region borders.
Enforcement on collection of these taxes is pretty lax, and is generally down to the person doing it themselves, which doesn't happen unless you are pretty scrupulous (yes, I've paid use tax for big ticket items).
This seems to me to be an opportunity for the state to hire more people in order to collect use tax. If there is that much revenue out there to be collected, it's worth spending a fraction of it on creating jobs for people to act as collectors. If there's not that much revenue, a small amount of revenue siphoned off as an unfunded mandate on small businesses expected to act in loco as your tax collector is definitely NOT going to help the stumbling economy right itself.
In general, there are literally tens of thousands of different sales tax zones in the U.S., incorporating state, county, city, and special economic zone taxes and exemptions. The only people who think it's a good idea for a company to have to collect and remit taxes to all these varied authorities are the varied authorities themselves, and the people selling the databases of tax rates and remittance addresses and procedures.
Personally, if I had a company that was selling over the Internet, and a given state/county/municipality tried to enforce collections as an unfunded mandate on me, I'd simply stop selling in that region. My response to customer complaints would be that they live in a region which made it impossible for me to do business with them, and that they should perhaps move somewhere else.
Practically, even when such taxes are collected by brick-and-mortar stores, people in the zones who are making a big ticket purchase are willing to drive 15 minutes to another jurisdiction to save the city sales tax on their purchase. I know people who have flown across the country to buy cars, then driven back, with the rationale that the difference in the sales tax was enough to pay for their flight, a couple of nice nights out, and the gas and motels and restaurants for the trip back (plus they get to see the world's largest ball of twine or the Grand Canyon, or whatever Americana floats their boat).
-- Terry
Property tax increases have their growth rate capped by prop 13, they are not themselves capped.
When a property is sold, the value is assessed, and the tax rate set, so change in property ownership tends to raise the taxes on the property being sold, well in excess of the normal growth rate cap.
The failure in this scenario is that, as a corporate owner, like the Kaiser family, at the time prop 13 passed, they took all of their properties and incorporated a separate holding company for each one of them. When they want to sell the property, they instead sell the holding company, and the ownership on the property remains the same (the same holding company owns it), and therefore falls under the growth rate cap.
Thus individual property taxes go up, and commercial property taxes do not.
If you are buying a house in California, it's probably worth checking out zoning and corporate ownership over a period of several years compared to increases in the non-capped property assessment over the same period of time, and decide whether you will make more money off selling a property without a drastically increased property tax from a change of ownership, but with mortgage deductions, vs. selling a company which owns a property with a relatively low tax rate which will stay relatively low for the new owner of the corporation. You might be better off creating your own holding company, like the big players do.
My personal take on this would be to have prop 13 not apply to commercial properties, which was a very late amendment to the proposition in order to enable exactly this kind of corporate ownership loophole for commercial properties.
-- Terry
Hi John;
Long time, no see. Tell Jesus M. "Hi" if you still talk to him... I have to come clean and tell you I work at Google now; I was hired in there after quitting Apple.
This whole thread has been pretty bogus.
The first this that's wrong about it is that Google doesn't use brain teasers in interviews. You have to write down what you talked to the candidate about briefly so that follow-on interviewers can switch tack and not ask the same question, and then you go back to your desk and often spend as much time writing up your interview as you did actually interviewing. If you asked something stupid like "why are man hole covers round?" or some other trick question, or a riddle, you'd be scrubbed from the interview rotation until you had gone through training again.
The primary reason for a formal education is not that you have learned anything that you couldn't have learned on your own, it's so that you share a common language with your coworkers and can talk about complex topics using the same terminology, and you and they can understand each other.
The reason for giving coding problems or similar problem solving questions is to gauge how you think about solving a problem. In general, it's to tell whether or not you have critical thinking skills. The ability to engage in critical thinking is frequently a skill most people don't acquire without a logic class and/or some hard science classes in something like physics. Testing and evaluation generally require some ability in statistics, also something most people do not learn until they've had a college course in the subject.
The reason for things like linked list problems is that many people who do the minimal effort curve to graduate with a CS degree never learn anything about memory layout or how pointers work, and without understanding that, you have no hope of understanding what it is your compiler is doing to your source code, or what it's like to try to handle 200,000 transactions instead of 120,000 in the same interval, without throwing additional hardware at the problem. Yeah, you can look up how a linked list works, if you needed one, or just #include and use the macros, but if you can't write one from scratch, not only is it likely you don't know how things aren't laid out in memory, you've just spoiled the interviewers follow-on questions where you get asked to modify the algorithm to get different behaviours out of it.
The candidate qualification problem is something that was inevitable when the accreditation standards change from "Programming in C" to "Database concepts using C (please learn C on your own)", and the dearth of systems where you had to care about such things because you were working without a net. I have another younger friend who is of the calibre of our generation, Michael Steil, who is an absolute C64 fanatic. He learned what we learned, but it was because he grew up in Germany with old computers with limited memory and no memory protection to save him from himself. Just like we did.
It's an unfortunate fact in our industry that we went through a period of time often referred to as "the dot com bubble", when thousands of CS students were hired before they could really learn any of the above, just to get a warm body to fill a cubicle so that the VCs would part with the next round of funding between step 2 and ??? before "profit!" was going to happen. A lot of these people are regretting it now, or they are heading back to school to get the paper credentials that will act as their latter day union card.
So a good resume or even the right sheepskin is not as good as a demonstration of actual problem solving skills, or an ability to communicate with other people who have those skills, and with whom you are going to need to be able to collaborate effectively. There are plenty of people left over from "the dot bomb" with glowing resumes based on being cubicle warmers, and neither you nor I would hire them.
I would say it's incredibly hard to cram for an interview, any i
Those BWR reactors were new and modern at the time they went online.
At the time they went on line... by which you mean "approximately half a century ago, the first two of which went on line prior to the first moon landing, when Lyndon Johnson was president of the US". Right?
We went from horse drawn carriages to landing on the moon in about the same amount of time the Fukishima BWR designs have been around; are you seriously claiming we haven't been able to design better reactors in that amount of time?
-- Terry
Biosphere 2 failures: biodiversity not a cause
The lack of total biodiversity is one of the reasons why the biosphere 2 project failed so miserably.
It was actually because of the uncured concrete sequestering all the CO2 as Calcium Carbonate, resulting in dropping Oxygen. During the second mission, they sealed the concrete, as they should have done initially, but members of the first mission intentionally vandalized the second.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
Also... when they pulled Jane Poynter out for the hand surgery, they snuck supplies back in with her:
http://doney.net/aroundaz/biosphere2.htm
-- Terry
and by the way, why is that show on so often? I swear, every other week they play it..
Because it's a series. It has 27 episodes so far. And no, I don't watch it.
Higglety, piggelty,
Erich Von Daniken
Tells of green men
who come from afar;
next he'll be telling us
Extraterrestrials
landed in Dallas
to murder J.R.
-- Terry
They are not only accessible to the rich. They are also accessible to the intelligent, thanks to scholarships.
Most people are getting college degrees for the wrong reason in any case; one of my faculty advisors put it best: diplomas are the modern version of a union card.
I see lots of people getting degrees in things they have no interest in, and no passion for, in order to follow the money (or where they think the money is, which is often not the same thing). Historically, this has resulted in a lot of bad doctors; around 2000, it resulted in a lot of bad programmers, and it's currently tilted toward resulting in a lot of bad lawyers. Whatever ends up being the next big ticket field, expect that 4 years later there will be a lot of bad whatevers, waving their shiny new union cards and giving the people who actually have a passion for the field a bad name.
-- Terry