Scientists say that a species is a species if it can reproduce. In the higher animals, this requires a male and a female of a species. How do scientists determine the cutoff point between when the parents are species A and the children are species B? In order for Species B to be a species, there would have to be two of them, at least in higher animals. This would presumably also mean they would have to be siblings, since it is unlikely that the same mutations would occur simultaneously from two different sets of parents, and these two mutates offspring somehow manage to find each other.
Can it be proven that the two animals of Species B can produce an offspring, while yet not being able to produce an offspring with a species A animal that could then reproduce?
How do they figure out where to draw the line? It's not like the child would have any great observable difference from the parent.
Re:It's an investment into your future
on
The H-1B Swindle
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· Score: 1
10 years ago, the average starting salary for a programmer coming out of college was $36000.
Of course, you were a software engineer. That tends to pay more.
They do outsource to lower income areas. I interviewed with a company that opened up a branch here in Oklahoma City specifically to hire lower waged techie people. Problem is, 1) their benefits package sucked (all of the people I talked to were not even using it because they were on their spouse's plan at another job), 2) they implied that at the end of a project, they would try to put you on another one, but if one was not available, out you go. 3) they paid for 0 vacation or holidays, but there were holidays that the office was closed. 4) They offered me just barely more than I was making at my current job, so, after subtracting the holiday pay and stuff, I would have made less. 5) Their offer was about $20,000 less than the standard wage in Oklahoma City for an equivalent position which included benefits, holidays and vacation.
I think they basically wanted to treat their employees as consultants (in fact, they called their employees employee consultants), so the employee bears all the risk, but they wanted to pay LESS than one normally would for an employee.
I would be happy to e-mail anyone the name of the company if they would like to avoid wasting their time in an interview.
IT people have had huge rises in recent years
You're right. Since 7/2002, I have had a 55% raise in my salary (much of that from switching companies recently), such that I am now at over 36% of the salary I earned in 2000. That's right, I'm making almost 2/5 of what I made in 2000. Let the good times roll!
Paul
Whether glass is a liquid or not is a matter of semantics. For all intents and purposes, for every day use, it can be considered a solid. Not to mention that there are many different ways to make glass and many different additives such that the term "glass" itself would have to be defined before performing any experimentation.
It has been suggested tha the glass in old churches, in cases where they are actually thicker at the bottom, is actually a result of the forming process which was prior to the introduction of the float glass method.
Can we get the slashdot editors to make some script that automatically rejects posts with the phrase "begs the question"? People who know how it should be used don't use at all, so every usage is always wrong.
Important things first: there is no free money for insurance companies. Like I said to the other poster, if you really believe insurance companies get free, riskless money, buy their stock. Or share you insight with investors and start another one to get some of that lovin'. Your point is either absurd or poorly stated, and I hope it's the latter.
Of course they don't get free money. But they do make a great deal of money off of figuring out the risk, factoring in a safety net, spreading it over a huge number of people, and then marking it up a bit to make some money off the top. If they could spread it over an infinite number of people and they have evaluated the risk properly, then it is free money, but of course, there is not an infinite number of people with which to do this.
In order to start an insurance company, you need to have an established amount of paid in capital in case a statistical outlier happens before you get a large enough base. Getting a large enough base is what keeps people from starting insurance companies.
As for me, where the law allows (unfortunately, the government sometimes mandates that you give money to an insurance company for no particular reason), and where I can afford to do so, I self-insure. It sucks when you get a "claim", but the money you save in premiums usually more than makes up for any losses, and you are less likely to get a claim because the lawyers don't look at you and see dollar signs.
Science has not proven that there is not an invisible dude in the sky. I don't think science has even tried.
As a side note, we don't have kings in my country, and Christians are ALL priests, according to the Bible.
But accidents will drive up your rates, and a good history can bring it down.
No, a good history will just make it only go up a little from year to year. A bad history will make it go up a lot from year to year.
Interesting also, that the best case scenario is that your insurance rate does not go up at all at renewal. However, the valuation of your car will have gone down during that year. So effectively, you are STILL paying higher insurance.
On the subject of professional liability insurance: the company I own has it, and holds it on behalf of the employees of my company. If my employees cause harm through their code/circuit design/whathaveyou, my insurance policy pays out. It is up to me whether to discipline my employees. It is up to me to hire good employees. It is up to me to make sure their work is done properly.
I think it would be a tremendous blow to software development if every developer suddenly had to start carrying this insurance, which 1.) is very expensive. About $5,000 for my small company. And 2.) Is nearly impossible to obtain without an established track record. At the very least it could cost 2 or 3 times as much for someone with no experience.
Actually, $5,000 is reasonably cheap compared with medical malpractice. But the only reason it is relatively cheap is because no one ever actually sues over it. It is just free money for the insurance companies. If people/companies do ever start suing over professional liability, the premiums will undoubtedly skyrocket.
Occam's Razor: "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything".
This does not help your cause.
I don't see how the presence of these people is supposed to be an affront to Christianity. I, for one, think that either a) a small group of people was isolated on the island, and a few of them had a genetic disorder that spread throughout the limited gene pool, or b) a small group of people were banished from a tribe because they exhibited the signs of this genetic abnormality, and could only interbreed with each other.
In no way does the presence of these people test my faith.
Science teaches creationism, it just doesn't believe in a divine creator. To simplify, all of the matter in the universe existed in a single point, a singularity, then there was a big bang, and then there was the universe.
Exactly what part of the Christian faith does science disprove? I personally am not afraid of science and welcome scientific study, because it continues to prove the Bible correct.
I personally don't believe in a 6,000 year old Earth, but then, my Bible doesn't seem to require that either.
I also don't believe that man descended from an apelike creature, however, from what I've read of genetics it seems fairly likely that an apelike creature could eventually descend from man.
When I was new to the web, I had all kinds of crazy ads on my site, but even then I only allowed static html that was maintained on my server and under my control. Also, I displayed only one ad per page, randomly, and it was always at the bottom.
The only ads from which I have ever made money is from amazon so far, and it hasn't been nearly enough to pay the hosting bill. Of course, I only get about 7000 hits a day, and apparently only about 20 of them click on amazon, and only about once every week does somebody actually buy something.
Earlier this year, I added Adsense, which also doesn't make enough to pay the hosting bill, but pays about as well as Amazon. I like the fact that the ads are context sensitive, even though at times, the ads displayed wind up being my competition. I understand you can tailor that somewhat, but I haven't gone in to configure it.
I hate ads when I am not looking for ads, but when they are in context, I enjoy them. For example, I enjoy looking at all the fine Car Stereo ads in Car Stereo Review. However, since 99% or more of the ads on the internet are completely out of context, I find them highly distatsteful.
I especially hate when I can't view the content of a site because my spyware tells me that somebody is trying to send "Avenue A" and I tell it to block it. You would think that big name sites would try to avoid allowing advertisers to send malicious content, but I guess not. Isn't that right, Yahoo!, Google, etc.
Did you know that you can be banned from those forums if you use a line consisting of more than three characters to separate your posts from your signature?
Could be worse. E-mail only lets you use two characters, but at least you can repeat one of them if you're careful to do it in the right order.
Paul
Depends what you are doing. $60 may be the top side for programming, but database administration and datawarehousing usually pay a lot more than that. On the other hand, I've been offered Oracle DBA contracts where the highest they would go is $30 an hour corp-to-corp. Yeah right. Good luck enticing someone away from a full time job with benefits that pays $75k a year for a no benefits contract that might pay $60k a year if it lasts that long.
Many of these lowball contract rates are offered to me by people with Indian sounding names whose companies are probably billing out at $120 an hour and then want to pay someone $30 an hour to actually do the work.
Make your own contacts. Don't work with the ripoff contract houses unless they are willing to pay you at least 85% of the actual billed rate corp-to-corp, or at least 65% W2.
Paul
I wen through all of this stuff when I was an independent contractor. Now I am working full time again, but I still run my consulting company. My wife officially owns the company, mostly to avoid any anticompete issues that might come up, although my full time job is in a different industry.
Now, I basically provide payroll and other insurance services to people who want to be independent, but don't want the hassle of incorporating or dealing with the paperwork, insurance, and so forth. I do a little work in finding contracts, but mostly I let the people who work for me find their own gigs, and I do the administrative stuff of setting up the contract with the proposed client, handling their insurance requirements, and so forth. Some clients require professional liability insurance, which is expensive as heck, and can be hard if not impossible to get with no track record.
Because my employees do all the technical work, and even mostly find their own contracts, I take a very small percentage. I have worked through subcontractors that took 20% on a corp-to-corp basis, where they were assuming no risk, withholding no taxes, and paying no insurance. I've seen other companies that took a 50% cut. Insane.
My company has an SEP. We don't have health right now because all of our contractors have retired with pensions that include health coverage. But we could get health.
For anyone looking to get into contracting, but not wanting to have to go through the hassle, I would recommend you look for a company that offers services like this. Some staffing or HR companies might offer similar services if you ask.
Umm, so where did the life from outer space come from? Or has it just always existed, even though the universe in which it lives has not always existed?
Looking for a job fresh out of college in this economy is the pits.
It beats looking for a job when you are not fresh out of college and trying to get paid based on your experience.
Companies these days are willing to pay half the salary for someone who is halfway capable of doing a job. I liken this to buying a boat that is half price but is capable of making it only halfway across the ocean.
The reason there are so many bad managers is because they started out as bad IT people. Your company is a screwed up company, so the good IT people are kept in IT, while the bad IT people are the only ones with hope of promotion to management. Therefore your company is upside down in that the worse you are at work in general, the more money you make and the higher your position.
Your company is doomed to failure.
But take heart, most other companies are also doomed to failure.
If you don't spend the money, you are not going to have a menial retirement savings. The people who are going to have no retirement savings are the ones who spend the money as soon as it comes in, or before in most cases.
That's horrible. Why waste a perfectly good sick day going to the doctor, when you could sit in bed recuperating? Also, you may not be well enough to drive. And further, you would have to pay a copay to have your doctor tell you to go home and get some rest, then you would have to pay the full $100 or so doctor bill when your insurance decides not to cover it.
Yuck. My previous company put in those white noise generators. Let me just say, the answer to a noisy environment is not to introduce more noise. UNLESS, they are introducing phase reversed noise sampled in real time from the current noise, which IS possible, if you are willing to spend the money on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Scientists say that a species is a species if it can reproduce. In the higher animals, this requires a male and a female of a species. How do scientists determine the cutoff point between when the parents are species A and the children are species B? In order for Species B to be a species, there would have to be two of them, at least in higher animals. This would presumably also mean they would have to be siblings, since it is unlikely that the same mutations would occur simultaneously from two different sets of parents, and these two mutates offspring somehow manage to find each other.
Can it be proven that the two animals of Species B can produce an offspring, while yet not being able to produce an offspring with a species A animal that could then reproduce?
How do they figure out where to draw the line? It's not like the child would have any great observable difference from the parent.
10 years ago, the average starting salary for a programmer coming out of college was $36000.
Of course, you were a software engineer. That tends to pay more.
They do outsource to lower income areas. I interviewed with a company that opened up a branch here in Oklahoma City specifically to hire lower waged techie people. Problem is, 1) their benefits package sucked (all of the people I talked to were not even using it because they were on their spouse's plan at another job), 2) they implied that at the end of a project, they would try to put you on another one, but if one was not available, out you go. 3) they paid for 0 vacation or holidays, but there were holidays that the office was closed. 4) They offered me just barely more than I was making at my current job, so, after subtracting the holiday pay and stuff, I would have made less. 5) Their offer was about $20,000 less than the standard wage in Oklahoma City for an equivalent position which included benefits, holidays and vacation.
I think they basically wanted to treat their employees as consultants (in fact, they called their employees employee consultants), so the employee bears all the risk, but they wanted to pay LESS than one normally would for an employee.
I would be happy to e-mail anyone the name of the company if they would like to avoid wasting their time in an interview.
IT people have had huge rises in recent years
You're right. Since 7/2002, I have had a 55% raise in my salary (much of that from switching companies recently), such that I am now at over 36% of the salary I earned in 2000. That's right, I'm making almost 2/5 of what I made in 2000. Let the good times roll! Paul
Whether glass is a liquid or not is a matter of semantics. For all intents and purposes, for every day use, it can be considered a solid. Not to mention that there are many different ways to make glass and many different additives such that the term "glass" itself would have to be defined before performing any experimentation.
It has been suggested tha the glass in old churches, in cases where they are actually thicker at the bottom, is actually a result of the forming process which was prior to the introduction of the float glass method.
Can we get the slashdot editors to make some script that automatically rejects posts with the phrase "begs the question"? People who know how it should be used don't use at all, so every usage is always wrong.
Important things first: there is no free money for insurance companies. Like I said to the other poster, if you really believe insurance companies get free, riskless money, buy their stock. Or share you insight with investors and start another one to get some of that lovin'. Your point is either absurd or poorly stated, and I hope it's the latter.
Of course they don't get free money. But they do make a great deal of money off of figuring out the risk, factoring in a safety net, spreading it over a huge number of people, and then marking it up a bit to make some money off the top. If they could spread it over an infinite number of people and they have evaluated the risk properly, then it is free money, but of course, there is not an infinite number of people with which to do this.
In order to start an insurance company, you need to have an established amount of paid in capital in case a statistical outlier happens before you get a large enough base. Getting a large enough base is what keeps people from starting insurance companies.
As for me, where the law allows (unfortunately, the government sometimes mandates that you give money to an insurance company for no particular reason), and where I can afford to do so, I self-insure. It sucks when you get a "claim", but the money you save in premiums usually more than makes up for any losses, and you are less likely to get a claim because the lawyers don't look at you and see dollar signs.
Science has not proven that there is not an invisible dude in the sky. I don't think science has even tried.
As a side note, we don't have kings in my country, and Christians are ALL priests, according to the Bible.
But accidents will drive up your rates, and a good history can bring it down.
No, a good history will just make it only go up a little from year to year. A bad history will make it go up a lot from year to year.
Interesting also, that the best case scenario is that your insurance rate does not go up at all at renewal. However, the valuation of your car will have gone down during that year. So effectively, you are STILL paying higher insurance.
On the subject of professional liability insurance: the company I own has it, and holds it on behalf of the employees of my company. If my employees cause harm through their code/circuit design/whathaveyou, my insurance policy pays out. It is up to me whether to discipline my employees. It is up to me to hire good employees. It is up to me to make sure their work is done properly.
I think it would be a tremendous blow to software development if every developer suddenly had to start carrying this insurance, which 1.) is very expensive. About $5,000 for my small company. And 2.) Is nearly impossible to obtain without an established track record. At the very least it could cost 2 or 3 times as much for someone with no experience.
Actually, $5,000 is reasonably cheap compared with medical malpractice. But the only reason it is relatively cheap is because no one ever actually sues over it. It is just free money for the insurance companies. If people/companies do ever start suing over professional liability, the premiums will undoubtedly skyrocket.
Then how do they know how old the strata are? By the fossils in it?
Occam's Razor: "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything".
This does not help your cause.
I don't see how the presence of these people is supposed to be an affront to Christianity. I, for one, think that either a) a small group of people was isolated on the island, and a few of them had a genetic disorder that spread throughout the limited gene pool, or b) a small group of people were banished from a tribe because they exhibited the signs of this genetic abnormality, and could only interbreed with each other.
In no way does the presence of these people test my faith.
Science teaches creationism, it just doesn't believe in a divine creator. To simplify, all of the matter in the universe existed in a single point, a singularity, then there was a big bang, and then there was the universe.
Exactly what part of the Christian faith does science disprove? I personally am not afraid of science and welcome scientific study, because it continues to prove the Bible correct.
I personally don't believe in a 6,000 year old Earth, but then, my Bible doesn't seem to require that either.
I also don't believe that man descended from an apelike creature, however, from what I've read of genetics it seems fairly likely that an apelike creature could eventually descend from man.
When I was new to the web, I had all kinds of crazy ads on my site, but even then I only allowed static html that was maintained on my server and under my control. Also, I displayed only one ad per page, randomly, and it was always at the bottom.
The only ads from which I have ever made money is from amazon so far, and it hasn't been nearly enough to pay the hosting bill. Of course, I only get about 7000 hits a day, and apparently only about 20 of them click on amazon, and only about once every week does somebody actually buy something.
Earlier this year, I added Adsense, which also doesn't make enough to pay the hosting bill, but pays about as well as Amazon. I like the fact that the ads are context sensitive, even though at times, the ads displayed wind up being my competition. I understand you can tailor that somewhat, but I haven't gone in to configure it.
I hate ads when I am not looking for ads, but when they are in context, I enjoy them. For example, I enjoy looking at all the fine Car Stereo ads in Car Stereo Review. However, since 99% or more of the ads on the internet are completely out of context, I find them highly distatsteful.
I especially hate when I can't view the content of a site because my spyware tells me that somebody is trying to send "Avenue A" and I tell it to block it. You would think that big name sites would try to avoid allowing advertisers to send malicious content, but I guess not. Isn't that right, Yahoo!, Google, etc.
Did you know that you can be banned from those forums if you use a line consisting of more than three characters to separate your posts from your signature?
Could be worse. E-mail only lets you use two characters, but at least you can repeat one of them if you're careful to do it in the right order. Paul
Depends what you are doing. $60 may be the top side for programming, but database administration and datawarehousing usually pay a lot more than that. On the other hand, I've been offered Oracle DBA contracts where the highest they would go is $30 an hour corp-to-corp. Yeah right. Good luck enticing someone away from a full time job with benefits that pays $75k a year for a no benefits contract that might pay $60k a year if it lasts that long.
Many of these lowball contract rates are offered to me by people with Indian sounding names whose companies are probably billing out at $120 an hour and then want to pay someone $30 an hour to actually do the work.
Make your own contacts. Don't work with the ripoff contract houses unless they are willing to pay you at least 85% of the actual billed rate corp-to-corp, or at least 65% W2. Paul
I wen through all of this stuff when I was an independent contractor. Now I am working full time again, but I still run my consulting company. My wife officially owns the company, mostly to avoid any anticompete issues that might come up, although my full time job is in a different industry.
Now, I basically provide payroll and other insurance services to people who want to be independent, but don't want the hassle of incorporating or dealing with the paperwork, insurance, and so forth. I do a little work in finding contracts, but mostly I let the people who work for me find their own gigs, and I do the administrative stuff of setting up the contract with the proposed client, handling their insurance requirements, and so forth. Some clients require professional liability insurance, which is expensive as heck, and can be hard if not impossible to get with no track record.
Because my employees do all the technical work, and even mostly find their own contracts, I take a very small percentage. I have worked through subcontractors that took 20% on a corp-to-corp basis, where they were assuming no risk, withholding no taxes, and paying no insurance. I've seen other companies that took a 50% cut. Insane.
My company has an SEP. We don't have health right now because all of our contractors have retired with pensions that include health coverage. But we could get health.
For anyone looking to get into contracting, but not wanting to have to go through the hassle, I would recommend you look for a company that offers services like this. Some staffing or HR companies might offer similar services if you ask.
Umm, so where did the life from outer space come from? Or has it just always existed, even though the universe in which it lives has not always existed?
Looking for a job fresh out of college in this economy is the pits.
It beats looking for a job when you are not fresh out of college and trying to get paid based on your experience.
Companies these days are willing to pay half the salary for someone who is halfway capable of doing a job. I liken this to buying a boat that is half price but is capable of making it only halfway across the ocean.
The reason there are so many bad managers is because they started out as bad IT people. Your company is a screwed up company, so the good IT people are kept in IT, while the bad IT people are the only ones with hope of promotion to management. Therefore your company is upside down in that the worse you are at work in general, the more money you make and the higher your position.
Your company is doomed to failure.
But take heart, most other companies are also doomed to failure.
If you don't spend the money, you are not going to have a menial retirement savings. The people who are going to have no retirement savings are the ones who spend the money as soon as it comes in, or before in most cases.
My pastor once said "No one has every said on their deathbed that if they had it all to do over again, that they would spend more time at work."
That's horrible. Why waste a perfectly good sick day going to the doctor, when you could sit in bed recuperating? Also, you may not be well enough to drive. And further, you would have to pay a copay to have your doctor tell you to go home and get some rest, then you would have to pay the full $100 or so doctor bill when your insurance decides not to cover it.
Yuck. My previous company put in those white noise generators. Let me just say, the answer to a noisy environment is not to introduce more noise. UNLESS, they are introducing phase reversed noise sampled in real time from the current noise, which IS possible, if you are willing to spend the money on it.