But you will care when you realise how slow it's making your Internet connection as it goes off and downloads the first page of every site that linked to from the page you're currently looking at, just in case you click it. That uses a LOT of extra bandwidth and seriously slows down your browsing experience.
Does it cache these pages it downloads? Because if it does, that would generally speed up my browsing experience. Instead of waiting for me to finish reading the current page and click on something from there, it's already loading it while I read? So every time I follow a link it's already in the cache and comes up instantly? Count me in!
You don't have a use for them, so what makes you think someone else will?
The funniest thing about this comment is that it shows up immediately after an anonymous coward listing several things he'd like to do with the old equipment.
If you're not worried about the possibility of someone recovering sensitive data off of them, donate them to some charity...
I'll second that. And, if you are worried about it, wipe the data using something like dban's boot-n-nuke software, then donate to a local charity. I help with one myself, and we always need more hard drives, as a lot of companies will strip 'em out before donating their computers.
Maybe someone there will find a use for them, but don't be surprised if they refuse your tech junk: they won't want to pay the disposal fee either.
True, too, although the equipment described here isn't really "junk". Anything over about 4GB can take an Ubuntu install and still have enough for quite a few documents. A 40GB drive would be welcome almost anywhere. To give some idea of the numbers, right now in the Geeks Without Borders warehouse, we've got about 200 motherboards that are P-3 or better, and only 6 drives that are over 20GB.
I know, from personal experience that that's exactly what happens.
I've gone through submitted resumes for various positions for several companies, starting back in the days when they were printed on paper and sent through the mail.
When you've got 200 resumes and two positions with the same qualifications, a whole lot of them get thrown out right at first. Generally, on a first pass I'll throw out everything that doesn't have the experience or qualifications I'm looking for. Also cut in this first pass is anything with lots of misspellings, bad grammar, profanity, or long rambling explanations of why none of the person's many failures are everybody else's fault.
That'll leave me with, say, a dozen or two. From there, yeah, I'll take maybe the top ten based on "extras", usually experience and anything that shows a willingness to learn or work outside a narrow job definition.
Only after getting to that point do I start to do things like call references or google the name. And, yeah, I always google the names these days. But I'm not looking to get rid of people for having weird hobbies. If you've got pictures of yourself in a fursuit at a sci-fi con, I won't care. If you've got a screed somewhere about how marijuana should be legalized and you love to smoke it yourself and it hasn't hurt your career, no biggee there. Join the 90% of Americans who've done the same. But when I find your blog and see that the sixth company in two years has fired you because "they're nazis who don't approve of" your lifestyle, I'll probably assume that the fault actually lies with you. In that case, yeah, your resume gets moved to the "probably not" folder.
And, yeah, some beliefs will get your resume tossed quicker than others, though even then it's generally how you phrase it. Putting on your web site that you love George W. Bush because he's "the only one with the balls to stand up to America's enemies" will elicit a chuckle, but won't cost you an interview. Explaining somewhere that you hope Obama doesn't win the primary because "at least the Billary would be better than AN IQ 75 LOOOTERZZ!!!!!!" probably will.
Other people will have different criteria, I suppose. If you've got pictures of yourself running around naked at Burning Man, I won't care, but I know other people who will. I found out once I nearly lost out on a job because one of the managers didn't like that I had my D&D world detailed on my web site. (One of my co-workers told me about it later. He pointed out that if the manager looked carefully he might notice that there actually were a few geeks to be found in the computer industry.) Some people probably will freak out enough to toss your resume if they find any reference to drugs or furriness or strange religions. If you want to work for those people, don't put references to it where the whole world can see.
Any, that's just a long-winded way of saying, yes, the original poster was right. Potential employers will look you up. And they will make decisions based on what they find. It may not always be right (especially in the case where a manager won't hire someone of the "wrong" religion or color. It's illegal but almost completely unprovable.) But, if you're one of the 95% who submitted your resume but never got a call back, you will never know why. If you call me and ask, I'll tell you that "the position has been filled", and that's all the explanation you'll ever get. And, really, that's all I *can* tell you at that point. By the time I've gone through the entire process and hired somebody, I will have long since forgotten why I've rejected any particular resume, unless it was something really spectacular.
(And, by the way, every example above was taken from real life).
I agree with the other posters who said to get out now.
The worst thing you can do is to start off with your new employer by delaying your start date.
Three weeks is more than enough to be professional about it all, even if the company you're currently at does not reciprocate.
Go to HR and report the manager who threatened you. Ask for clarification: "Is this standard company policy? Are you going to allow it?" Most likely, they will speak to the manager and tell him to back off. Even if HR encourages this sort of behavior normally, they'll likely discourage it in the case of the person who confronts them on it. If they don't encourage it, then you're doing the company a favor by reporting the manager.
This is a common misconception based on not understanding how the income tax structure works.
There's no such thing as getting more money by being in a lower tax bracket.
Income tax is graduated. That is, the portion of your paycheck that is below a certain amount is already being taxed at the lower percentage. Only the part of your paycheck above the cutoff amounts are taxed at the higher percentage.
I haven't seen any mention of the vice principal who brought the charges in the first place.
True, he was just a fuckhead, not a corrupt criminally greedy fuckhead, but still, what kind of person presses criminal charges against someone for making fun of them on myspace? Is this guy still employed by the school? And, if so, why?
Double-jeopardy doesn't apply to someone found guilty. Re-trying them would probably be the same as if they filed an appeal, which happens all the time. Even for those who actually were guilty of something, the sentence will likely be found to far outweigh what's appropriate for the crime.
Also, I believe that a judge is immune to prosecution for actions undertaken as a judge. However, courts may rule that accepting bribes to damage children for his own profit may be outside the scope of this duties, thus opening him to civil liability.
Of course, IANAL, so this is just a (semi-educated) guess, not a legal opinion.
That seems awfully unlikely. Even if none at all were going on, there are some kids who would claim it was, if for no better reason than to fuck with the administrators, or even just to get attention.
And the percentage of kids who would make something like that up is probably higher among those that end up getting sent to a juvenile detention facility than among the general populace.
To go five years without even a single accusation (even if it's proven false) makes me think that complaints are simply ignored and no records kept.
1. PA Child Care should be shut down. If their business model depends on crooked judges, their business model is wrong.
2. Now every single case that ended with juveniles sentenced there should be reviewed. (Looks like they're only looking at the one judge's 5000 cases. They need to look at all of them.) The former judge should be billed for all expenses.
3. Whoever paid the bribes, and whoever authorized them, and whoever knew about this business model and kept quiet, also need to be tried.
4. An appropriate punishment would be a month in jail for every month spent in the facility for every inmate he wrongfully sent there.
Not always. In Eugene, Oregon, for instance, much of the parking is contracted out to a company called Diamond, which has the authority to issue tickets. These tickets have no phone numbers on them, though they do include an address to mail your payment to. There seems to be no way of contesting the tickets, either, which was annoying a while back when I got a ticket about a minute before the time had expired.
The first thing I did was to put it in the microwave.
We are still supposed to do that to all our mail, right? To protect against anthrax? (Are we still living in fear of that? It's hard to keep up sometimes.)
Surely Homeland Security can't be upset at us for doing what they told us to do!
Well, I can't speak for the Christians who believe the number, but the reason the atheists "latch onto" it is because there are a significant number of people in this country (the US) who keep pushing to have it taught in place of science.
If it weren't for the fact that they are actually often successful, we probably wouldn't make fun of them any more than any other wacky beliefs like the "lizard people at the center of the earth" folks, or the "aliens took me for an anal probe" people, or the Scientologists.
Slashdot has a subscription service if you're interested. The key advantage is being able to see stories before they go live. (Which lets you compose your thoughts and post them in a well-formed manner
For those who haven't read it, it's about a group of people who, to protest the concept of working together for the common good of the group instead of their own self-interest by... uh... getting together and putting aside their own self-interest to work together for the common good of their group.
The book divides the world into producers and non-producers (aka "looters"). Producers are defined as those who own companies, including the main character who inherited a railroad from her father. Non-producers are all those people who don't own companies, but just work for them. Sometimes a producer will work for a company for a short time before founding his own. But they're still producers, because everybody in the world of the novel is divided facilely into one of these two groups, and everybody knows what group they're in, and what group everybody else is in.
One of my favorite scenes is where John Galt meets the group of politicians who, of course, want him to come back to produce for their society, which is falling apart because, as mentioned above, all the "producers" have left, leaving only normal people. The politicians, of course, are aware that they are mere normal people and thus can't run a society, but they still want to be in charge. They actually say this in the book "We still want to be in charge, but we need you to come back to tell us what to do."
My other favorite is when the main character meets the guy who's turned pirate. He steals the tax money that was immorally taken from the "producers" and gives it back to them. He explains that he does this because he hates Robin Hood, and that's why he's doing exactly the same thing he's said to have done.
The philosophy is a little bit like Nietzsche's concept of the Superman, only based on innate category rather than merit, and watered down and simplified for a less educated audience.
Fans of the book, of course, tend to believe they are in the "producers" category, regardless of what they've actually produced. This is reinforced in Fountainhead, which spends the first hundred pages or so explaining that the real reason the main character, a brilliant and handsome young architect, can't sell his work isn't because nobody wants it, but because those in charge are afraid that if they let his genius show people won't want their work anymore. (So you can see the appeal it holds, especially to adolescents.)
What about the part where he promised to help stabilize Iraq?
He stabilized Iraq?
A million civilians dead. Infrastructure in ruins. 4 million displaced refugees?
This, to you, is stable?
What about where he promised we'd see no new terrorist attacks on American soil?
There've been quite a few terrorist attacks on American soil during his term. Though, most of them weren't labeled by the administration as such. And none as big as 9/11. But, throughout the last couple hundred years, we've only had a big terrorist attack every 10-20 years or so. Bush claiming credit for not having a second one during his term is as credible as my claiming credit for keeping the tigers out of Hillsboro.
Also, in all that time, the Bush people were the only ones who found it necessary to go completely apeshit over it. (Well, unless you count Harper's Ferry, but there were other issues there...)
When mine did a few weeks ago, it turned out to be because it updated itself to XP Service Pack 3. Removing XP3, and installing the "critical security updates" as per Microsoft's tech support document on the subject, fixed the problem and got everything working back the way it was originally.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it cache these pages it downloads? Because if it does, that would generally speed up my browsing experience. Instead of waiting for me to finish reading the current page and click on something from there, it's already loading it while I read? So every time I follow a link it's already in the cache and comes up instantly? Count me in!
The funniest thing about this comment is that it shows up immediately after an anonymous coward listing several things he'd like to do with the old equipment.
I'll second that. And, if you are worried about it, wipe the data using something like dban's boot-n-nuke software, then donate to a local charity. I help with one myself, and we always need more hard drives, as a lot of companies will strip 'em out before donating their computers.
True, too, although the equipment described here isn't really "junk". Anything over about 4GB can take an Ubuntu install and still have enough for quite a few documents. A 40GB drive would be welcome almost anywhere. To give some idea of the numbers, right now in the Geeks Without Borders warehouse, we've got about 200 motherboards that are P-3 or better, and only 6 drives that are over 20GB.
Who the hell modded this "overrated"?
I know, from personal experience that that's exactly what happens.
I've gone through submitted resumes for various positions for several companies, starting back in the days when they were printed on paper and sent through the mail.
When you've got 200 resumes and two positions with the same qualifications, a whole lot of them get thrown out right at first. Generally, on a first pass I'll throw out everything that doesn't have the experience or qualifications I'm looking for. Also cut in this first pass is anything with lots of misspellings, bad grammar, profanity, or long rambling explanations of why none of the person's many failures are everybody else's fault.
That'll leave me with, say, a dozen or two. From there, yeah, I'll take maybe the top ten based on "extras", usually experience and anything that shows a willingness to learn or work outside a narrow job definition.
Only after getting to that point do I start to do things like call references or google the name. And, yeah, I always google the names these days. But I'm not looking to get rid of people for having weird hobbies. If you've got pictures of yourself in a fursuit at a sci-fi con, I won't care. If you've got a screed somewhere about how marijuana should be legalized and you love to smoke it yourself and it hasn't hurt your career, no biggee there. Join the 90% of Americans who've done the same. But when I find your blog and see that the sixth company in two years has fired you because "they're nazis who don't approve of" your lifestyle, I'll probably assume that the fault actually lies with you. In that case, yeah, your resume gets moved to the "probably not" folder.
And, yeah, some beliefs will get your resume tossed quicker than others, though even then it's generally how you phrase it. Putting on your web site that you love George W. Bush because he's "the only one with the balls to stand up to America's enemies" will elicit a chuckle, but won't cost you an interview. Explaining somewhere that you hope Obama doesn't win the primary because "at least the Billary would be better than AN IQ 75 LOOOTERZZ!!!!!!" probably will.
Other people will have different criteria, I suppose. If you've got pictures of yourself running around naked at Burning Man, I won't care, but I know other people who will. I found out once I nearly lost out on a job because one of the managers didn't like that I had my D&D world detailed on my web site. (One of my co-workers told me about it later. He pointed out that if the manager looked carefully he might notice that there actually were a few geeks to be found in the computer industry.) Some people probably will freak out enough to toss your resume if they find any reference to drugs or furriness or strange religions. If you want to work for those people, don't put references to it where the whole world can see.
Any, that's just a long-winded way of saying, yes, the original poster was right. Potential employers will look you up. And they will make decisions based on what they find. It may not always be right (especially in the case where a manager won't hire someone of the "wrong" religion or color. It's illegal but almost completely unprovable.) But, if you're one of the 95% who submitted your resume but never got a call back, you will never know why. If you call me and ask, I'll tell you that "the position has been filled", and that's all the explanation you'll ever get. And, really, that's all I *can* tell you at that point. By the time I've gone through the entire process and hired somebody, I will have long since forgotten why I've rejected any particular resume, unless it was something really spectacular.
(And, by the way, every example above was taken from real life).
We toppled the government of Saudi Arabia?
When did that happen?
By that count, Book wasn't crew either. He was a paying passenger.
Yes, it's a good thing you don't go around mentioning your sexual orientation in public posts...
I agree with the other posters who said to get out now.
The worst thing you can do is to start off with your new employer by delaying your start date.
Three weeks is more than enough to be professional about it all, even if the company you're currently at does not reciprocate.
Go to HR and report the manager who threatened you. Ask for clarification: "Is this standard company policy? Are you going to allow it?" Most likely, they will speak to the manager and tell him to back off. Even if HR encourages this sort of behavior normally, they'll likely discourage it in the case of the person who confronts them on it. If they don't encourage it, then you're doing the company a favor by reporting the manager.
No it didn't.
This is a common misconception based on not understanding how the income tax structure works.
There's no such thing as getting more money by being in a lower tax bracket.
Income tax is graduated. That is, the portion of your paycheck that is below a certain amount is already being taxed at the lower percentage. Only the part of your paycheck above the cutoff amounts are taxed at the higher percentage.
I fully agree with you that we need lots of good clean energy as soon as possible.
I do not, however, share your apparent belief that therefore we should not be planning for the future.
We need renewable energy now. We will need even more energy 30-40 years from now.
I haven't seen any mention of the vice principal who brought the charges in the first place.
True, he was just a fuckhead, not a corrupt criminally greedy fuckhead, but still, what kind of person presses criminal charges against someone for making fun of them on myspace? Is this guy still employed by the school? And, if so, why?
Double-jeopardy doesn't apply to someone found guilty. Re-trying them would probably be the same as if they filed an appeal, which happens all the time. Even for those who actually were guilty of something, the sentence will likely be found to far outweigh what's appropriate for the crime.
Also, I believe that a judge is immune to prosecution for actions undertaken as a judge. However, courts may rule that accepting bribes to damage children for his own profit may be outside the scope of this duties, thus opening him to civil liability.
Of course, IANAL, so this is just a (semi-educated) guess, not a legal opinion.
Not even an allegation of abuse?
That seems awfully unlikely. Even if none at all were going on, there are some kids who would claim it was, if for no better reason than to fuck with the administrators, or even just to get attention.
And the percentage of kids who would make something like that up is probably higher among those that end up getting sent to a juvenile detention facility than among the general populace.
To go five years without even a single accusation (even if it's proven false) makes me think that complaints are simply ignored and no records kept.
1. PA Child Care should be shut down. If their business model depends on crooked judges, their business model is wrong.
2. Now every single case that ended with juveniles sentenced there should be reviewed. (Looks like they're only looking at the one judge's 5000 cases. They need to look at all of them.) The former judge should be billed for all expenses.
3. Whoever paid the bribes, and whoever authorized them, and whoever knew about this business model and kept quiet, also need to be tried.
4. An appropriate punishment would be a month in jail for every month spent in the facility for every inmate he wrongfully sent there.
5. No profit.
Malaria.
40 years ago, if you got it, you could guarantee it would resurface every 3-10 years for the rest of your life.
Now, it can be fully cured.
Craigslist.
Item: Free camera. Used.
Location: On various public utility poles in Cambridge. You uninstall it, it's yours.
The problem there is that most modern jet craft move faster than your average office building.
Threats from Paramount's legal department.
They claim copyright on the word "transport" and all derivations thereof.
Not always.
In Eugene, Oregon, for instance, much of the parking is contracted out to a company called Diamond, which has the authority to issue tickets.
These tickets have no phone numbers on them, though they do include an address to mail your payment to.
There seems to be no way of contesting the tickets, either, which was annoying a while back when I got a ticket about a minute before the time had expired.
The first thing I did was to put it in the microwave.
We are still supposed to do that to all our mail, right? To protect against anthrax? (Are we still living in fear of that? It's hard to keep up sometimes.)
Surely Homeland Security can't be upset at us for doing what they told us to do!
Well, I can't speak for the Christians who believe the number, but the reason the atheists "latch onto" it is because there are a significant number of people in this country (the US) who keep pushing to have it taught in place of science.
If it weren't for the fact that they are actually often successful, we probably wouldn't make fun of them any more than any other wacky beliefs like the "lizard people at the center of the earth" folks, or the "aliens took me for an anal probe" people, or the Scientologists.
See - now I know you're just making stuff up.
Compose thoughts?
Post them in a well-formed manner?
On Slashdot??!
Yay! One of my favorite books!
For those who haven't read it, it's about a group of people who, to protest the concept of working together for the common good of the group instead of their own self-interest by... uh... getting together and putting aside their own self-interest to work together for the common good of their group.
The book divides the world into producers and non-producers (aka "looters"). Producers are defined as those who own companies, including the main character who inherited a railroad from her father. Non-producers are all those people who don't own companies, but just work for them. Sometimes a producer will work for a company for a short time before founding his own. But they're still producers, because everybody in the world of the novel is divided facilely into one of these two groups, and everybody knows what group they're in, and what group everybody else is in.
One of my favorite scenes is where John Galt meets the group of politicians who, of course, want him to come back to produce for their society, which is falling apart because, as mentioned above, all the "producers" have left, leaving only normal people. The politicians, of course, are aware that they are mere normal people and thus can't run a society, but they still want to be in charge. They actually say this in the book "We still want to be in charge, but we need you to come back to tell us what to do."
My other favorite is when the main character meets the guy who's turned pirate. He steals the tax money that was immorally taken from the "producers" and gives it back to them. He explains that he does this because he hates Robin Hood, and that's why he's doing exactly the same thing he's said to have done.
The philosophy is a little bit like Nietzsche's concept of the Superman, only based on innate category rather than merit, and watered down and simplified for a less educated audience.
Fans of the book, of course, tend to believe they are in the "producers" category, regardless of what they've actually produced. This is reinforced in Fountainhead, which spends the first hundred pages or so explaining that the real reason the main character, a brilliant and handsome young architect, can't sell his work isn't because nobody wants it, but because those in charge are afraid that if they let his genius show people won't want their work anymore. (So you can see the appeal it holds, especially to adolescents.)
Not a single one of those was referred to as a "Terrorist Attack" on Fox "news".
Therefore, he will not be aware of them.
He stabilized Iraq?
A million civilians dead. Infrastructure in ruins. 4 million displaced refugees?
This, to you, is stable?
There've been quite a few terrorist attacks on American soil during his term. Though, most of them weren't labeled by the administration as such. And none as big as 9/11. But, throughout the last couple hundred years, we've only had a big terrorist attack every 10-20 years or so. Bush claiming credit for not having a second one during his term is as credible as my claiming credit for keeping the tigers out of Hillsboro.
Also, in all that time, the Bush people were the only ones who found it necessary to go completely apeshit over it. (Well, unless you count Harper's Ferry, but there were other issues there...)
When mine did a few weeks ago, it turned out to be because it updated itself to XP Service Pack 3.
Removing XP3, and installing the "critical security updates" as per Microsoft's tech support document on the subject, fixed the problem and got everything working back the way it was originally.