... all use an XML config file called the metabase which is quite easy to read...
And you lost all credibility right there. Bloated, insanely bracketed, rambling XML file with 40 letter long tags... easy to read!? Easy to edit!? You gotta be kidding me. It is nothing but a case of fashionable, trendy, pointy-hair managment friendly, corporate-speak buzzword infused useless nonsense.
XML is (on its best days) a markup language intended for embedding formatting parameters in documents, not for every conceivable data or configuration file known to man, just because it allows for insane abuse of the letter "X" in ludicrous acronyms on glossy brochures!
I truly hate these mindless fad followers. Whatever the new and shiny toy they get their paws on is always the "greatest thing ever invented", to be forcibly mis-applied to most ludicrously inapproptiate tasks conceivable, only of course to be abandoned uncermoniously when the next shiny buzzword infested toy appears to the great oohs and aaahs from the marketing drones.
It makes my blood boil when thinking how many times did the rest of us gets stuck with the half-baked kludges left behind like turds by this menace of bloody fashion victims. Awful asshat kludges like XML formatted configuration files.
Err... the GP poster was working with images of patients for a medical journal. Unless of course you are insinuating that getting ones articles printed in an overpriced medical journal in itself constitutes a crime...
Pity you did not go on, for one obvious method of showing the expertise of those "experts" would be to perform their very procedure with a picture of, say, a chicken instead of your buddy's ID, picking of course some morph stage nearer the video footage stills... and presto! The Evil Chicken did it!
Oh yea! Because We, Peers of the Royal Knighthood of Computing Technology 101 could not bear the thought of you the unwashed hoi polloi raising to our Rarefied Heights via the Super Secret, Doubly Unthinkable and Horribly Unspeakably Frightening Ascendance Ritual of Actually Reading Some Shit Concerning What It Is The Fuck That You Are Blabbing On About.
If I were downloading Japanese content, that might change, but they are extremely strict with copyright law when it comes to their own stuff and people have been thrown in jail for downloading AND for sharing japanese movies.
I think you might just be on a wrong system. As far as I know the Japanese do not use BitTorrent in any large numbers, their thing was Winny, and after that got cracked by the cops (sort of) the thing that replaced it is called Share.
Winny and Share are quite sophisticated systems involving FreeNet-style encrypted caches and TOR-style IP address obfuscation built right in by default, probably because of that "sctrictness" you mentioned. BitTorrent although it has better performance on slower links, has none of that.
If your assertion that people are simply "unprepared" for the wholly "reasonable", "job skill relevant" and "completely age non-discriminatory" interview process at Google is true, then I am sure Google has a healthy mix of technical employees which spans accross various age groups, with middle-aged people (good experience at reasonable salary levels) being the bulk of employees...
Right?
Right?!
I do not know what it it is whith all these Google worshippers around here willing to completely destroy their own personal credibility in defense of a emotionless corporate entity which is incapable of having even one singular good thought about its martyrdom-seeking defenders.
Wake up and realize that Google is just another large corporation, like many others were before it, and many others will be after it, with its own unique mountains of follies, mistakes and prejudices of its employees and bosses. Your personal emotional attachment to such an artificial, amoral, sentience-free entity is just making you look sad and silly.
Unless, of course, you hold a good chunk of Google's stock, in which case you are simply duplicitous.
What does that mean? why would/tmp be a mount. And if it's a directory it has to be executable right?
He is talking about the "noexec" option of the "mount" command used to mount/tmp, which most security conscious people do have mounted on a separate partition for a number of reasons.
Er, where in the article did you read that he wasn't hired for not answering stupid questions in his interview?
I was referring to what, apparenly, is a general attitude at Google, of which this latest article is just a sample. Accusations of this sort have been coming out very regularly for years now, in different shapes, forming a steady pattern which at this point makes Google's denials sound rather hollow.
Yet, this is only proof Google has a bad interviewing process, not that it has an age bias. Which does not mean that Google does not have one, it is just not proof of one.
I personally sense that this is a very strong indication of a bias, but you are right that it, in itself, is not a proof. But then if you couple it with other data, like for example the overall breakdown of Google's employees by age, and things start to stink to high heaven.
I think Google is going to have to revise its policy of the "cool kids" running the show in accordance with their party crowd preferences or find itself in serious legal trouble.
Note that this is by no means the first accusation of age discrimination at Google. As a matter of fact there has been a very steady and rather obvious stream of them since the very beginning of Google made by a quite considerable number of people now, all with first-hand experience.
Wouldn't that also mean that a requirement of "10+ years experience" is age discrimination because it prevents a 25-year-old from getting the job?
In a way it is, but that is an artifact of the types of positions for which the "10+ year experience" employees are supposed to be hired. What should occur, and what the Labour Laws are aligned with, is that the "entry level" positions of companies are filled (statistically speaking - exceptions are always possible) with young, bushy-tailed whipper-snappers with next to no experience and the "senior" positions with older farts.
But no company should use age as a criteria, only the experience/skill set and match those to appropriate positions accordingly with the rather common sense rules of workforce.
In fact, an experience requirement could be arguably worse, since nothing actually prevents a 60-year-old applicant from knowing how to write search algorithms, while it's pretty much impossible for a 25-year-old to have 15 years of professional experience.
Not if you tailor your interview specifically to the types of knowledge expected of school kids. An older expert in the field will be unlikely to respond to that sort of assault positively because he will quickly realise what is going on and assume, correctly, that he is not wanted for other, social reasons.
Those questions in an interview isn't about being smart or knowing something. It just shows if you are prepared or not (just like the SATs, GRE etc). "Snot-nosed" college kids don't like those questions either, just their college consolers told them the rules of the game and they came prepared.
Which, of course, would represent the Apex of Stupidity, if it were not, as many people already pointed out, a tool for ensuring that your employees belong to a certain social/age group.
Or to put it another way: this is the equivalent of asking questions about the sexual habits of sea cucumbers, after having put out a word on the University campus that this will be the required "curriculum". Uncritical students, having been indoctrinated in memorizing any odd crap the teachers demand, would simply subject themselves to this kind of treatment. Anyone with any sort of real-life experience would go: WTF?! And subsequently fail the "Interview" for being "unprepared" after having assumed that this must be some sort of a joke because no one with two neurons to rub together would ever consider this being a method of selecting skilled personnel. And the joke is on them, for, of course, this is not a method of selecting skilled personnel. It is a way to expand your circle of "cool kids".
In short, the "rules of the game" are rigged by Google (as they are rigged by the college teachers to their own ends) but unlike that of colleges, Google's "rigging" runs contrary to the Labour Laws. Oops!
Psst. I'm a Software Engineer. We do group interviews at my company so that everyone on the team has a say in who is hired.
Do you wear those snazzy red outfits and wide-brimmed red hats while you grill the hapless victims? Because clearly you do not actually assess any of their technical job skills.
See my other reply regarding the fact that a simple google of "Google interview process" (Oh, the irony) would pretty much have solved the problem. He came unprepared. Anyone of any age could have done the same.
Actually he could not. At least that is the general concensus amongst the older people ever interviewed by Google.
Or to put the lie to the test in a completely different way: what is the age breakdown of all employees at Google? I am sure that this little bit of statisics, which is wholly impossible to obscure by any smoke and mirrors manouvering about the interview processes and any hot air about "being prepared", will become the center-piece of this lawsuit sooner or later. And I am afraid Google will have a really hard time dancing its way out of this wee jam.
Again, you may not like how they are doing things, and that is a very valid opinion... but what does it have to do with "age discrimination" ?
If you emphasize, to the point of absurdity (as many people who were interviewed by Google seem to claim), the types of behaviours associated with young people in school environments (note that experienced people who go "back to school" at older age approach it in quite different manner) then it is pretty much transparent that your intention is to exclude anyone outside your target social category, in this case centered around a certain age group.
There are a LOT of folks who were employed during the boom who really don't have a solid foundation and have no clue about sorting, hashing, etc. Stuff that I consider pretty basic knowledge if you're interviewing to be an engineer. While we don't look for hard code examples from memory, but we do expect that the concepts are there, readily available in memory, and able to be drawn out on a whiteboard. You'd be amazed at how many people can't do that.
The answer to this is of course quite simple: Instead of subjecting them to stress-inducing, memory corrupting Spanish Inquisition style interrogation, you simply give them a task to accomplish, in a controlled environment, which would require all of the necessary skills you seek in your employees. Then you evaluate the results along with them, explaining any points of your displeasure. No possibility of any age-related (or any other) discrimination will be then credibly brought forth by anyone and -- as a bonus -- the people you hire will have a proven ability to accomplish the tasks expected of them. Or is this too far out a solution for all of you pointy-haired Human Resources types out there who can only grok questionaires and checklists?
It's their company, they can do that.
Not if they run afoul of the labour laws (for which we should be all very, very thankful to our predecessors).
You claim they are discriminating based on age because... you can't recite from memory what others could. You may not like that they want you to do so, but that's their choice and criteria.
The point he is making, which I concur with since I too am a rather succesful in the realm of IT member of the older-fart generation, is that the ability to recall useless trivia from memory is not a criterion for selecting useful employees, but a method of screening for "snotty nosed kids" as he put it. Most people with any sort of technical achievments in any scientific discipline or even a craft trade will readilly confirm that an ability to locate information and use it effectively is far more important then memorizing it verbatim, which is what schools are all about (and wrongess of which approach versus its ease of managment for the teachers is another discussion alltogether).
So yes, if that are Google's "choice and criteria" then the lawsuit is quite justified indeed.
One of my friends made sure to cram for about 2 weeks prior to his Amazon interview for this reason. He actually said it was the hardest interview process he ever went through.
See above. Your very use of the word "cram" blows away any pretenses about the process of that selection. Ask an accomplished architect or industrial engineer or a world-class surgeon with, say, 30 years of practice what was the last time he or she "crammed" anything.
You are single handedly innovating a new kind of pathetic.
What I find truly pathetic is that these new arrivals on Slashdot (for I can see the trend becoming more and more common recently) think that "moderation" is a tool clearly and obviously (to them anyhow) meant to extend their high-school "popularity contest" mentality into any and all online fora they grace with their presence. I am going to take a wild and unsubstantiated guess and assert that he posted as an AC so that he can troll-rate the post he was replying to. Classy, no?
chroot is not a security tool. Never has been, never will be.
Of course it is not. You can break out of chroots, just like you can break out of virtual machines and just as you can corrupt processes in RAM thus defeating read-only filesystems, which of course renders all of those measures I mentioned only partially useful as security mechanisms. Heck, packet-sniffers have been known to be cracked and turned back on their owners as attack vectors. In fact, those of us who have any clue know rather well that there is no "quick" or "easy" way to achieve security, nor there is a single universal tool that somehow guarantees it. That was the whole point of my little rant. Or did you miss the part about chewing fingernails?
Perhaps when lambsting others you should consider not making yourself look like a tool in the process.
... only for me to go into safemode and remove spyware/virus bloat and fix the computer...
Right.
You mean you actually insinuate that you can guarantee, to any reasonable degree, that upon the completion of your "cleanup" by running your tools from the Windoze "safe mode" the thing does not remain brimming full of fancy rootkits, custom filesystems with whole armadas of trojans in "unused" clusters and the like?!
Oh there! Another MS Windows Quick Cleanup Guy! Watch him skip happily in the forest, free of all care, whistling a happy tune, while the rest of us are chewing our fingernails watching our packet-sniffers report 5 automated attacks every minute on our tripwired virtual machines running in chroots on read-only file systems... Hey Quick Cleanup Guy! Watch for that falling tree! Ouch too late! That had to hurt! Oh well... There! Another Happy Go Lucky MS Windows Quick Cleanup Guy! This one is even more confident in the Super Safe Safety of the Safe Mode! Go Cleanup Guy! But watch for the... never mind! Next!
I guess what they say is true: Ignorance is bliss! (although short lived one, your mileage might vary from short to shorter, dealer may and will sell for more, etc etc)
We are wired as what we are, animals with varying degrees of sentience grafted haphazardly on. In some, the animal part is more prominent then in others, due to vagaries of genetics, environment and what not. So while it is true that we are wired "wrong" for pure, rational, objective intelligence, some would argue that such a thing would make us less "human", whatever that means.
I would just settle for more sentience and less animal in most of the humanity, but this is exceedingly unlikely to occur as there is one crucial factor which plays a pivotal role: no evolutionary pressure. As long as the "intelligence" is at the level that allows procreation it is "sufficient" in modern world for that genome pattern to spread. There are no natural predators or other factors which would offset it. As a matter of fact, the delusional wackos seem (instinctively I presume) bent on propagating as much as possible, demanding polygamy and 5-10 kids per wife, while smarter people see kids as a grave responsibility and usualy have 1 or 2.
W... T... F...
If being an audiophile means having the sort of mindset to remotely accept that as plausible, suddenly I have much less respect for the audiophiles I know.
May I remind you that you are living on a planet where countless hordes torture, maim and murder each other to prove that their omnipotent invisible man in the sky has a longer dick then the other guys', where vast masses prostate themselves before some random idiot because he has pretended to be someone else in a series of moving pictures, where the supposed leaders of various tribes promise the sun and the moon while consistently delivering manure instead, only for themselves or their ideological twins be re-elected, over and over and over, etc and so on.
Oh and it is also a place where one can "buy", "sell" and "steal" large integer numbers.
The unfortunate truth is that most of humanity does not really qualify for the "sapiens" label in "homo sapiens".
I don't mean to be mean, but you can't really say an aircraft flies until it actually gets up off the ground.
I don't mean to be mean, but that is still an insufficient criterion. A ton of bricks will get up off the ground given sufficient amount of explosives underneath but a ton of bricks an "aircraft" does not make.
Population density is a factor in supply and demand. It's simple economics.
Sure. That is why I pointed out that there are significant areas where the population density, wealth of the populace and the demand are very comparable to Japan, and yet the supply is nearly non existant and prices exorbitant. Similar (if not stronger, due to market being ill served) demand forming conditions, very different market results. So factors other then "populatiobn density" are at work in an overriding role. I (and just about anyone who spent 5 minutes looking into this) know exactly what these other factors are: lack of competition.
Furthermore your argument is overly simplistic and fails to take into account that even a well organized telecoms company would have to spread its resources over both densely populated urban areas and rural settlements.
Huh?! In anything resembling a "free" market existed -- free of kleptocratic oligopolies that is -- there would be dozens of small, specialist communication vendors catering to dense population areas but not the rural ones, and vice versa, cooperating with each other via sane public standards set and enforced with an iron fist by regulatory bodies, thus ensuring that a downtown customer of a vendor in a large city has no trouble communicating with a farm-dweller in a rural area served by a completely different, local company. Different markets require different vendors to serve them. A "well organized giant ass telecom" is not a solution to any of these problems. In fact its size and the incestous intermingling of its portfolio of greed, arrogance, archaic, proprietary, incompatible technologies with protective, corrupted governmental bureaucracies, which the "telecoms" usualy represent, is the very core of the problem.
Don't assume though that just because your useless corporate pigs use it as an excuse, it automatically makes it a lie.
See above. You got it backwards. It is because that is an (apparently effecive) boldfaced lie, the useless corporate pigs automatically use it.
Finally, population density, and a relatively compact geography (almost the entire population lives in about 20% of the land, due to the fact that the other 80% is highly mountainous) means that mobile phone infrastructure (for example, 3G coverage), fibre-based internet etc. can be deployed much more quickly and effectively than in a country like the U.S.
Please do not propagate this bold-faced lie of the North American telecom oligopolies.
If this were true, the major cities of the US and Canada, which have (in some areas) large numbers of relatively affluent individuals congregated in densities to rival Japan, would enjoy similiar levels of service in those areas, while the poor service would be restricted to the outlying areas. This of course is not the case because the true reason for the abysmal state of affairs in North America is the lack of any sort of meaningful competition between entrenched pigopolies, who instead of being prosecuted by local governmental officials on anti-trust crusades, are backed by government, complete with handouts for "Fiber to every home!" initiatives (in 1990's) to the tune of many billions of dollars, for which no one seems to be able to account today. This, naturally, being due to the larger problem of wholesale corruption of government by large business in our corner of the world.
What really gets my goat is that these con-artists have so little respect for their "customers" ("marks" is more like it) and the general public that they would even try such an audacious lie, which requires the victim to have near zero of even most rudamentary analytical skills or even most basic knowledge of geography.
And of course, all the arguments you made can be applied to GMail as well. Google really crossed a line when they decided to use email content as a source of advertising information.
Absolutely. People who farm out their whole corporate flow of communications and/or deeply personal stuff to third parties ("Because, like, its free!!") are probably the very same crowd who helps out all those Nigerian Princesses with getting their dad's money out of the country, or who buy all those penis extenders advertised in every second spam missive.
If there is one bright side, maybe all this in-your-face "we know what you're saying" will promote the common use of public-key technology. Then again, it probably won't.
See above. My money is on the formation of the Porcine Aviation Association just days before what you described occuring.
Not to mention all the "Think Of The Children!! The Terrorists/Communists/Pedophiles/Pirates/SpaceAliens Are Coming To Get Us All!!!" hysteria which would inevietably occur when various power-hungry demagogues discover that they can't "inspect" everybody else's email for conformance with their particular flavour of frothing hate of everything unlike their own reflection, at will.
I really don't buy this argument. It seems like FSF has been riding linux's coattails ever since Linus made the mistake of choosing the GPL over a *good* open source license.
But of course! Had he done so, Linux would be now where BSD is.... oh wait.
You see, your silly argument is exceptionally so because someone very much like Linus did precisely that and so there is actual empirical evidence to marvel at!
Anyway, last time I checked the parts of "GPL ideology" that weren't contained in open source software were just RMS hero worship and some communist abhorrence towards the idea of making money.
You haven't been checking too closely, obviously. RMS could disappear from the face of the planet tommorrow and the FSF ideology of granting freedom to all users of software would remain. And of course the "communist abhorrence towards money" is a figment of your feverish imagination. GPL crowd only opposes "making money" if it conflicts with the freedoms of the users of the software. Many a GPL distro charges very good money (see RedHat for example) for their stuff and you won't hear a peep about this from RMS or anyone else in the GPL community.
zOMG! Robber Baronez and Jews taking over the world some peoples is getting richez an we hates them! IS NOT FAIR. cry cry cry
WTF?! Jews?! When did I mention any Jews?! Is this some sort of "Chewbaka Defense" manouver?! Next thing you will be trotting out the Holocaust and calling me an anti-semite...
You keep saying Libertarian, yet I'm actually an anarchist.;)
Same... err... different pile.
Great efforts of various greed mongers resulted in adoption of the term "Libertarian" to somehow mean something "better" then those silly, old-fashioned, "commie", passe Anarchists, at least in the so-called "Mainstream Media". But the general idea is the same: get rid of "Teh Evil Gubmnt!!!" for it gets in the way of "individual achievement" or Anarcho-syndicate Communes or what not.
Oddly enough the people who you would call "the evil free market capitalist robber barons" were very involved in government, and had law written to suit them.
Which was a part of the problem then, just like the corporates doing so is a part of the problem now. And the reason for both is a faulty governance mechanism which is not resilliant enough to such attempts at corruption. Which means that a better, more robust system of democratic governance has to be implemented.
Thus government facilitates their robbery.
No, corrupt crooks and thieves "facilitate" robberies. They can be found as frequently in government as in business and everywhere else. There is nothing unique about crooks and power-mad psychopaths corrupting any organization they manage to infiltrate, from various organized religions, political parties, companies, all the way down to PTA meetings and Homeowner Associations... or Anarchist Syndicates.
Again, you shoot yourself in the foot as the very example you give is an example of why government control of business does not work.
Err, no, it is an example of how not to attempt to control business. There are many, many other ways.
Monopolies can not exist without government because government is the only one that can legally force you to do something.
This, of course, is utter bullshit. It is a Holy Dictum of Libertarian Dogma and not anything even remotely resembling an empirical fact. I already pointed out many other ways in which monopolies can and did form in real life. You have to get off this idiotic one-track "Gubmnt is teh Source of all Evil!!!" broken record. Or better yet, take a hammer, bang yourself on the head with it until you pass out, after which you will have a first-hand, visible (on your forehead - if you aimed right) proof of evil outside of the realm of governments.
When I talk about force, I'm talking about the governments ability to hold a gun to your head and shoot you if you do not comply.
Yes, of course, after you redefine force to mean what you want it to mean ("Tah Evil Gubmnt!!!"), then everything else falls into place....
Never you mind that a garden variety thug can also hold a gun to one's head, or that indentured servitude can be accomplished merely under a threat of death from starvation or exposure to elements, or denial of medical care to one's sick children etc and so on.
And if you persist in this stupidity of "defining" force as exclusively a gun in a hand of a policeman or a soldier (but not a warlord's mercenary - go figure!), then I wish upon you that you experience one of the other kinds of "free choices" I just described. Perheaps you will get wiser before your ass rots away in some ditch.
Your an idiot if you look at force as driving 30 minutes o
Slashdot Mirror
And you lost all credibility right there. Bloated, insanely bracketed, rambling XML file with 40 letter long tags ... easy to read!? Easy to edit!? You gotta be kidding me. It is nothing but a case of fashionable, trendy, pointy-hair managment friendly, corporate-speak buzzword infused useless nonsense.
XML is (on its best days) a markup language intended for embedding formatting parameters in documents, not for every conceivable data or configuration file known to man, just because it allows for insane abuse of the letter "X" in ludicrous acronyms on glossy brochures!
I truly hate these mindless fad followers. Whatever the new and shiny toy they get their paws on is always the "greatest thing ever invented", to be forcibly mis-applied to most ludicrously inapproptiate tasks conceivable, only of course to be abandoned uncermoniously when the next shiny buzzword infested toy appears to the great oohs and aaahs from the marketing drones.
It makes my blood boil when thinking how many times did the rest of us gets stuck with the half-baked kludges left behind like turds by this menace of bloody fashion victims. Awful asshat kludges like XML formatted configuration files.
Err ... the GP poster was working with images of patients for a medical journal. Unless of course you are insinuating that getting ones articles printed in an overpriced medical journal in itself constitutes a crime ...
Pity you did not go on, for one obvious method of showing the expertise of those "experts" would be to perform their very procedure with a picture of, say, a chicken instead of your buddy's ID, picking of course some morph stage nearer the video footage stills ... and presto! The Evil Chicken did it!
Sigh. The stuff of legal legends.
Oh yea! Because We, Peers of the Royal Knighthood of Computing Technology 101 could not bear the thought of you the unwashed hoi polloi raising to our Rarefied Heights via the Super Secret, Doubly Unthinkable and Horribly Unspeakably Frightening Ascendance Ritual of Actually Reading Some Shit Concerning What It Is The Fuck That You Are Blabbing On About.
Us Lordly Elitist Us.
I think you might just be on a wrong system. As far as I know the Japanese do not use BitTorrent in any large numbers, their thing was Winny, and after that got cracked by the cops (sort of) the thing that replaced it is called Share.
Winny and Share are quite sophisticated systems involving FreeNet-style encrypted caches and TOR-style IP address obfuscation built right in by default, probably because of that "sctrictness" you mentioned. BitTorrent although it has better performance on slower links, has none of that.
If your assertion that people are simply "unprepared" for the wholly "reasonable", "job skill relevant" and "completely age non-discriminatory" interview process at Google is true, then I am sure Google has a healthy mix of technical employees which spans accross various age groups, with middle-aged people (good experience at reasonable salary levels) being the bulk of employees ...
Right?
Right?!
I do not know what it it is whith all these Google worshippers around here willing to completely destroy their own personal credibility in defense of a emotionless corporate entity which is incapable of having even one singular good thought about its martyrdom-seeking defenders.
Wake up and realize that Google is just another large corporation, like many others were before it, and many others will be after it, with its own unique mountains of follies, mistakes and prejudices of its employees and bosses. Your personal emotional attachment to such an artificial, amoral, sentience-free entity is just making you look sad and silly.
Unless, of course, you hold a good chunk of Google's stock, in which case you are simply duplicitous.
He is talking about the "noexec" option of the "mount" command used to mount /tmp, which most security conscious people do have mounted on a separate partition for a number of reasons.
I was referring to what, apparenly, is a general attitude at Google, of which this latest article is just a sample. Accusations of this sort have been coming out very regularly for years now, in different shapes, forming a steady pattern which at this point makes Google's denials sound rather hollow.
I personally sense that this is a very strong indication of a bias, but you are right that it, in itself, is not a proof. But then if you couple it with other data, like for example the overall breakdown of Google's employees by age, and things start to stink to high heaven.
I think Google is going to have to revise its policy of the "cool kids" running the show in accordance with their party crowd preferences or find itself in serious legal trouble.
Note that this is by no means the first accusation of age discrimination at Google. As a matter of fact there has been a very steady and rather obvious stream of them since the very beginning of Google made by a quite considerable number of people now, all with first-hand experience.
In a way it is, but that is an artifact of the types of positions for which the "10+ year experience" employees are supposed to be hired. What should occur, and what the Labour Laws are aligned with, is that the "entry level" positions of companies are filled (statistically speaking - exceptions are always possible) with young, bushy-tailed whipper-snappers with next to no experience and the "senior" positions with older farts.
But no company should use age as a criteria, only the experience/skill set and match those to appropriate positions accordingly with the rather common sense rules of workforce.
Not if you tailor your interview specifically to the types of knowledge expected of school kids. An older expert in the field will be unlikely to respond to that sort of assault positively because he will quickly realise what is going on and assume, correctly, that he is not wanted for other, social reasons.
Which, of course, would represent the Apex of Stupidity, if it were not, as many people already pointed out, a tool for ensuring that your employees belong to a certain social/age group.
Or to put it another way: this is the equivalent of asking questions about the sexual habits of sea cucumbers, after having put out a word on the University campus that this will be the required "curriculum". Uncritical students, having been indoctrinated in memorizing any odd crap the teachers demand, would simply subject themselves to this kind of treatment. Anyone with any sort of real-life experience would go: WTF?! And subsequently fail the "Interview" for being "unprepared" after having assumed that this must be some sort of a joke because no one with two neurons to rub together would ever consider this being a method of selecting skilled personnel. And the joke is on them, for, of course, this is not a method of selecting skilled personnel. It is a way to expand your circle of "cool kids".
In short, the "rules of the game" are rigged by Google (as they are rigged by the college teachers to their own ends) but unlike that of colleges, Google's "rigging" runs contrary to the Labour Laws. Oops!
Do you wear those snazzy red outfits and wide-brimmed red hats while you grill the hapless victims? Because clearly you do not actually assess any of their technical job skills.
Actually he could not. At least that is the general concensus amongst the older people ever interviewed by Google.
Or to put the lie to the test in a completely different way: what is the age breakdown of all employees at Google? I am sure that this little bit of statisics, which is wholly impossible to obscure by any smoke and mirrors manouvering about the interview processes and any hot air about "being prepared", will become the center-piece of this lawsuit sooner or later. And I am afraid Google will have a really hard time dancing its way out of this wee jam.
If you emphasize, to the point of absurdity (as many people who were interviewed by Google seem to claim), the types of behaviours associated with young people in school environments (note that experienced people who go "back to school" at older age approach it in quite different manner) then it is pretty much transparent that your intention is to exclude anyone outside your target social category, in this case centered around a certain age group.
The answer to this is of course quite simple: Instead of subjecting them to stress-inducing, memory corrupting Spanish Inquisition style interrogation, you simply give them a task to accomplish, in a controlled environment, which would require all of the necessary skills you seek in your employees. Then you evaluate the results along with them, explaining any points of your displeasure. No possibility of any age-related (or any other) discrimination will be then credibly brought forth by anyone and -- as a bonus -- the people you hire will have a proven ability to accomplish the tasks expected of them. Or is this too far out a solution for all of you pointy-haired Human Resources types out there who can only grok questionaires and checklists?
Not if they run afoul of the labour laws (for which we should be all very, very thankful to our predecessors).
The point he is making, which I concur with since I too am a rather succesful in the realm of IT member of the older-fart generation, is that the ability to recall useless trivia from memory is not a criterion for selecting useful employees, but a method of screening for "snotty nosed kids" as he put it. Most people with any sort of technical achievments in any scientific discipline or even a craft trade will readilly confirm that an ability to locate information and use it effectively is far more important then memorizing it verbatim, which is what schools are all about (and wrongess of which approach versus its ease of managment for the teachers is another discussion alltogether).
So yes, if that are Google's "choice and criteria" then the lawsuit is quite justified indeed.
See above. Your very use of the word "cram" blows away any pretenses about the process of that selection. Ask an accomplished architect or industrial engineer or a world-class surgeon with, say, 30 years of practice what was the last time he or she "crammed" anything.
What I find truly pathetic is that these new arrivals on Slashdot (for I can see the trend becoming more and more common recently) think that "moderation" is a tool clearly and obviously (to them anyhow) meant to extend their high-school "popularity contest" mentality into any and all online fora they grace with their presence. I am going to take a wild and unsubstantiated guess and assert that he posted as an AC so that he can troll-rate the post he was replying to. Classy, no?
Of course it is not. You can break out of chroots, just like you can break out of virtual machines and just as you can corrupt processes in RAM thus defeating read-only filesystems, which of course renders all of those measures I mentioned only partially useful as security mechanisms. Heck, packet-sniffers have been known to be cracked and turned back on their owners as attack vectors. In fact, those of us who have any clue know rather well that there is no "quick" or "easy" way to achieve security, nor there is a single universal tool that somehow guarantees it. That was the whole point of my little rant. Or did you miss the part about chewing fingernails?
I was being funny you humorless turkey.
Right.
You mean you actually insinuate that you can guarantee, to any reasonable degree, that upon the completion of your "cleanup" by running your tools from the Windoze "safe mode" the thing does not remain brimming full of fancy rootkits, custom filesystems with whole armadas of trojans in "unused" clusters and the like?!
Oh there! Another MS Windows Quick Cleanup Guy! Watch him skip happily in the forest, free of all care, whistling a happy tune, while the rest of us are chewing our fingernails watching our packet-sniffers report 5 automated attacks every minute on our tripwired virtual machines running in chroots on read-only file systems ... Hey Quick Cleanup Guy! Watch for that falling tree! Ouch too late! That had to hurt! Oh well... There! Another Happy Go Lucky MS Windows Quick Cleanup Guy! This one is even more confident in the Super Safe Safety of the Safe Mode! Go Cleanup Guy! But watch for the ... never mind! Next!
I guess what they say is true: Ignorance is bliss! (although short lived one, your mileage might vary from short to shorter, dealer may and will sell for more, etc etc)
We are wired as what we are, animals with varying degrees of sentience grafted haphazardly on. In some, the animal part is more prominent then in others, due to vagaries of genetics, environment and what not. So while it is true that we are wired "wrong" for pure, rational, objective intelligence, some would argue that such a thing would make us less "human", whatever that means.
I would just settle for more sentience and less animal in most of the humanity, but this is exceedingly unlikely to occur as there is one crucial factor which plays a pivotal role: no evolutionary pressure. As long as the "intelligence" is at the level that allows procreation it is "sufficient" in modern world for that genome pattern to spread. There are no natural predators or other factors which would offset it. As a matter of fact, the delusional wackos seem (instinctively I presume) bent on propagating as much as possible, demanding polygamy and 5-10 kids per wife, while smarter people see kids as a grave responsibility and usualy have 1 or 2.
May I remind you that you are living on a planet where countless hordes torture, maim and murder each other to prove that their omnipotent invisible man in the sky has a longer dick then the other guys', where vast masses prostate themselves before some random idiot because he has pretended to be someone else in a series of moving pictures, where the supposed leaders of various tribes promise the sun and the moon while consistently delivering manure instead, only for themselves or their ideological twins be re-elected, over and over and over, etc and so on.
Oh and it is also a place where one can "buy", "sell" and "steal" large integer numbers.
The unfortunate truth is that most of humanity does not really qualify for the "sapiens" label in "homo sapiens".
I don't mean to be mean, but that is still an insufficient criterion. A ton of bricks will get up off the ground given sufficient amount of explosives underneath but a ton of bricks an "aircraft" does not make.
Sure. That is why I pointed out that there are significant areas where the population density, wealth of the populace and the demand are very comparable to Japan, and yet the supply is nearly non existant and prices exorbitant. Similar (if not stronger, due to market being ill served) demand forming conditions, very different market results. So factors other then "populatiobn density" are at work in an overriding role. I (and just about anyone who spent 5 minutes looking into this) know exactly what these other factors are: lack of competition.
Huh?! In anything resembling a "free" market existed -- free of kleptocratic oligopolies that is -- there would be dozens of small, specialist communication vendors catering to dense population areas but not the rural ones, and vice versa, cooperating with each other via sane public standards set and enforced with an iron fist by regulatory bodies, thus ensuring that a downtown customer of a vendor in a large city has no trouble communicating with a farm-dweller in a rural area served by a completely different, local company. Different markets require different vendors to serve them. A "well organized giant ass telecom" is not a solution to any of these problems. In fact its size and the incestous intermingling of its portfolio of greed, arrogance, archaic, proprietary, incompatible technologies with protective, corrupted governmental bureaucracies, which the "telecoms" usualy represent, is the very core of the problem.
See above. You got it backwards. It is because that is an (apparently effecive) boldfaced lie, the useless corporate pigs automatically use it.
Please do not propagate this bold-faced lie of the North American telecom oligopolies.
If this were true, the major cities of the US and Canada, which have (in some areas) large numbers of relatively affluent individuals congregated in densities to rival Japan, would enjoy similiar levels of service in those areas, while the poor service would be restricted to the outlying areas. This of course is not the case because the true reason for the abysmal state of affairs in North America is the lack of any sort of meaningful competition between entrenched pigopolies, who instead of being prosecuted by local governmental officials on anti-trust crusades, are backed by government, complete with handouts for "Fiber to every home!" initiatives (in 1990's) to the tune of many billions of dollars, for which no one seems to be able to account today. This, naturally, being due to the larger problem of wholesale corruption of government by large business in our corner of the world.
What really gets my goat is that these con-artists have so little respect for their "customers" ("marks" is more like it) and the general public that they would even try such an audacious lie, which requires the victim to have near zero of even most rudamentary analytical skills or even most basic knowledge of geography.
Absolutely. People who farm out their whole corporate flow of communications and/or deeply personal stuff to third parties ("Because, like, its free!!") are probably the very same crowd who helps out all those Nigerian Princesses with getting their dad's money out of the country, or who buy all those penis extenders advertised in every second spam missive.
See above. My money is on the formation of the Porcine Aviation Association just days before what you described occuring.
Not to mention all the "Think Of The Children!! The Terrorists/Communists/Pedophiles/Pirates/SpaceAliens Are Coming To Get Us All!!!" hysteria which would inevietably occur when various power-hungry demagogues discover that they can't "inspect" everybody else's email for conformance with their particular flavour of frothing hate of everything unlike their own reflection, at will.
But of course! Had he done so, Linux would be now where BSD is .... oh wait.
You see, your silly argument is exceptionally so because someone very much like Linus did precisely that and so there is actual empirical evidence to marvel at!
You haven't been checking too closely, obviously. RMS could disappear from the face of the planet tommorrow and the FSF ideology of granting freedom to all users of software would remain. And of course the "communist abhorrence towards money" is a figment of your feverish imagination. GPL crowd only opposes "making money" if it conflicts with the freedoms of the users of the software. Many a GPL distro charges very good money (see RedHat for example) for their stuff and you won't hear a peep about this from RMS or anyone else in the GPL community.
WTF?! Jews?! When did I mention any Jews?! Is this some sort of "Chewbaka Defense" manouver?! Next thing you will be trotting out the Holocaust and calling me an anti-semite ...
Same ... err ... different pile.
Great efforts of various greed mongers resulted in adoption of the term "Libertarian" to somehow mean something "better" then those silly, old-fashioned, "commie", passe Anarchists, at least in the so-called "Mainstream Media". But the general idea is the same: get rid of "Teh Evil Gubmnt!!!" for it gets in the way of "individual achievement" or Anarcho-syndicate Communes or what not.
Which was a part of the problem then, just like the corporates doing so is a part of the problem now. And the reason for both is a faulty governance mechanism which is not resilliant enough to such attempts at corruption. Which means that a better, more robust system of democratic governance has to be implemented.
No, corrupt crooks and thieves "facilitate" robberies. They can be found as frequently in government as in business and everywhere else. There is nothing unique about crooks and power-mad psychopaths corrupting any organization they manage to infiltrate, from various organized religions, political parties, companies, all the way down to PTA meetings and Homeowner Associations ... or Anarchist Syndicates.
Err, no, it is an example of how not to attempt to control business. There are many, many other ways.
This, of course, is utter bullshit. It is a Holy Dictum of Libertarian Dogma and not anything even remotely resembling an empirical fact. I already pointed out many other ways in which monopolies can and did form in real life. You have to get off this idiotic one-track "Gubmnt is teh Source of all Evil!!!" broken record. Or better yet, take a hammer, bang yourself on the head with it until you pass out, after which you will have a first-hand, visible (on your forehead - if you aimed right) proof of evil outside of the realm of governments.
Yes, of course, after you redefine force to mean what you want it to mean ("Tah Evil Gubmnt!!!"), then everything else falls into place ....
Never you mind that a garden variety thug can also hold a gun to one's head, or that indentured servitude can be accomplished merely under a threat of death from starvation or exposure to elements, or denial of medical care to one's sick children etc and so on.
And if you persist in this stupidity of "defining" force as exclusively a gun in a hand of a policeman or a soldier (but not a warlord's mercenary - go figure!), then I wish upon you that you experience one of the other kinds of "free choices" I just described. Perheaps you will get wiser before your ass rots away in some ditch.