>They go to charge it and get an "account closed"...
Interesting. How is that different from, say, using a card that they stole from your wallet, exactly? How can it be anything other than the exact same crime?
"The logic behind this is painfully simple; if you are requesting credit from multiple companies in a short time frame you are probably a credit risk. It's also a possible indicator of identity theft."
It's also an indicator that you are comparison shopping, which takes this into the realm of anticompetitive activity, as well as being anti-consumer.
>He's right that using people with inherent unequal rights to do labor is a popular solution...
If you look into it carefully, you may discover that the employment of illegal aliens for labor is, while common, far less common that certain people would have you believe.
Because this is, by its very nature, an undocumented phenomenon, people with an interest in its exaggeration find it quite easy to do so.
I invite you to consider something: It is astronomically less expensive to live at a subsistence level in Mexico than it is in the US.
There is an impression being created, out of broad cloth, that the US/Mexico border has people *pouring* in. Meanwhile, people who have actually worked on relief efforts will tell you that it is rare to actually find someone crossing the border. Yes, it happens. But far, far more people come across the border just by showing their Mexican drivers license at the checkpoint, just to go shopping in Nogales or Tucson, more people do that in an hour than hike through the desert in a year.
>>No, it actually makes our food and housing industries possible.
>I am intensely uncomfortable with the morality in that statement: that it is acceptable to have a separate group of people > being paid less than minimum wage in order to make living easier for the rest of the country.
He didn't say "easier", he said "possible", which implies that people would literally starve and be homeless.
"If every Programming major tried to do that, most would fail to find anything."
If I'm looking for the cream of the crop, though, it's an indicator. Having been there myself, I know of many, many areas where people try hard to find skilled and motivated undergrads, are willing to pay reasonably well, and yet have great difficulty finding people.
"I do agree that they should have SOMETHING to show for their time in college, though, even if it's a small game or pointless program."
When I've interviewed (mostly interns) from my own school, I *know* what they should have done, and in most cases, what professors they should have had, and I can evaluate certain choices they made, if they are at the junior or senior level.
It's not really a value judgement, but I perceive it differently if someone took the track that included a course in ML and Ruby, a course in high-performance/parallell computing, the automata course and an additional, grad-level algorithms analysis. (This says "actually wanted to be a Computer Scientist", which suggests a passion for the trade.) Other tracks are equally respectable, but some of them say "chose the major in order to become an Income Maximizer").
I enjoy meeting (and working with) the people who took as much math and physics as they possibly could, and who took the CS classes aimed at the hardcore nerd. But then, I'm a hardcore nerd myself, so I'm biased.
In any case, it will be a long time before I'm on the hiring side of the table again. I've gone back into research (Hydrology and Water Conservation. I live in the desert, and this is a pretty interesting field with a surprising amount of computer programming work involved.) This is a whole new gig for me, so wish me luck! I'm pretty happy to be out of the corporate world for once.
Anyone who has seriously studied cancer, would hardly frame this kind of thing in terms of the prospect of "curing" cancer. The idea in the article sounds interesting, but it is clearly being framed in a way to provoke an audience to become outraged at the idea of "patenting the cure for cancer."
Shirley there are researchers here on slashdot who have worked in cancer, who are rolling their eyes about now, in fact, I have an extended family member who is a PI on a long standing cancer research project and I can't wait to hear their take. I suspect this is old news among people in the cancer research community, but I'll have to wait for the school year to start before I can ask. I won't even forward an article with the title "Cancer Cure Patented", come on!
"Real degrees, from real colleges in CS take 4-5. 3 if you're taking a shitload of classes per semester."
People who haven't been through it, sometimes do not even seem to understand what CS or Engineering majors *do* to get those degrees. For instance, they don't understand the magnitude of university math and physics. They don't realize how much work goes into theory stuff like discrete math and algorithms and automata, or even understand how much they don't know. They go as far as to dismiss all the theory as useless (after all THEY haven't needed it!) And let's don't even talk about capstone courses, and the amount of work and discipline needed to get through one of those.
Not all schools are equally tough. But in some of them, *very* smart people who actually put in a *lot* of effort, still C's. I got a C in Vector Calc, which crushed me, until I realized that nearly half the people in that class literally failed. I've seen people in higher CS and Math courses getting religion after, say, making a 52% on a final exam where 51% would be a "D" and 52% was a "C" -- and I'm NOT talking about slackers or unintelligent people here!
To my mind, this is really the risk of trying a university degree. The chances of failing are *high*. Some people can afford to re-take a class or two, but for others it's do-or-die.
Oh well, I've retreated to the white tower myself after (mumble) years in the industry. I now work in research as a professional staffer in a university. I'm not a professor, but I look like one, have an office that looks like one, and I might take this as a hint that I need to do a Ph.D. (One of the few really good perks of the job, is free tuition, which if you and your spouse both take advantage of it, is like a $30-50,000 bonus... shhhh... don't tell anybody:-)
Oh well, I rant. Back on topic, when I was in industry, I did make hiring decisions. A person with a junior college degree would pass muster for my part, as long as he could actually demonstrate that he could do the work. Experience is everything there. Catch-22, I realize. But even your 20-something person coming straight out of university should have 2 or 3 years of *something* that can be designated as experience. Come on, you were on a college campus and you managed to not work in the lab, or doing web programming for some department, or even some kind of directed research? I don't care about your *grades*, I want to see the game you designed, or whatever.
>This to me is a clear indication that something seriously messed up inside Google HR right now.
A recruiter for Google called me over the winter break, while I happened to be looking for work. I found and accepted another job before I even knew they had called me. I'm trying to decide exactly how to tell them, so as not to burn the bridge.
I noticed you pointed out your GPA. I've found, from being on the hiring side of the table, that people who think their academic stuff is important enough to talk about, don't tend to have a whole lot *else* to talk about. Maybe that's because you're young and straight out of school. But most people who are looking to hire you, want to know what you *can do*, which is not necessarily related to "how" or even "what" you did in school. I'm not belittling your education, don't get me wrong -- I work in academic research now myself and the university is my life these days. I'm just hoping to share a tiny bit of insight.
"This is the start of a trend, that if unchecked, will ultimately result in bankruptcy of this overpriced POS."
If that opinion is in your head, whether you say it out loud or not, you probably telegraph it unconsciously during the interview. I've had an interview where I knew for a fact that the company was running out of money, was losing one of its biggest accounts, and that things weren't looking so good. I tried to be upbeat and positive, but it turns out that I did a poor job of hiding my real feelings (that is, knowing the truth about the dead-endedness of that job.)
I've also interviewed at places where senior developers don't get to program, they are forced into management roles. Once, I actually said what I thought about that. (I would try to use my management authority to create a technical ladder so that senior developers can do career development *as developers* without ever doing management aside from maybe project management.) Wrong thing to say, I guess, but I don't want a programming job where I have to give up programming. What's the point of all these (many) years I've spent learning to program?
Would you hire Yo Yo Ma into your orchestra and then tell him he's been playing the cello too long, he needs to move on??? (That's exactly how I perceieve this "must move to management" theory, and yes, that example was chosen to illustrate the approximate level where I consider my skills to be -- I'm good enough that I am comfortable telling people exactly what I think, even in job interviews.)
How would anyone be *forced* to use the GPLv3? There was nothing wrong with the original GPL, and there is nothing to stop someone from using it. There is certainly nothing to force a person to change his license from the original GPL to anything else.
"And burning who knows how much gasoline in order to physically transport an object across the country that weighs something around 2 grams is not irresponsible?"
Did your postman tell you that your mail comes on its own plane and its own truck, just for you?
>What he wrote back was completely dismissive, saying he didn't think he'd left anything TOO valuable on there.
Maybe he was hoping you'd take the bait...
>We came THIS close to writing or calling his clients to let them know just how much respect he had for their personal identifying >information.
That could have exposed you to liability. Remember, a breach of privilege is one "wrong." But you were going to do something else "wrong.", which was to make use of privileged information that you recognized fully well for what it was. The laywer might have had some explaining to do, but then, so might you -- two wrongs don't make a right...
>Incidentally, with hard disks being so cheap these days, I wouldn't do this - I'd toast that disk if it contained any classified info.
I know that in the past, top secret Air Force data destruction at least involved literally incinerating disks (hard drives!) to ashes. Crosscut shredder was sufficient for floppy discs.
My dad (like me) looked like a "white guy" -- but he was 1/8 Cherokee, had grown up on a reservation, and was raised in a fairly traditional way in a time of dire poverty -- in the 1930s, Indians didn't exactly have the best opportunities.
Eventually he had a business where, from time to time, one of his workers would accuse him of being racist, assuming this charge would resonate a certain way, only to learn that they had deeply insulted their (soon-to-be-former) boss. My dad had a card with a Dawes Roll number instead of a Social Security number, and he had lived through a time of *extreme* poverty and *extreme* racism against him. He really didn't respond well at all to people who would claim he made any decision on a racial basis, which they assumed he did "because he was white."
>We are all white native-english speakers. Racism? Perhaps.
Aren't you the one who brought it up? If you were in Atlanta Georgia and you had no black people on your staff, I would be suspicious. If you were in Scottsdale Arizona, I would be surprised to see a black person on your staff, but would not be surprised to see people of Mexican or Navajo descent.
>if I were the only white guy in a team of asian-heritage coders, I would fully expect the same sort of treatment.
I would expect (and give) respect. But then, I'm get along quite well with Chinese people, at least. I know how to act when I get invited for dinner and mah jong:-)
>when your in an environment
Use caution when criticizing the communication skills of others.
>As someone already said, try TP-LINK. Pretty much everything they sell should be supported.
Good to know. However, a quick check of the TP-Link website yields the following results:
A search for "Linux" just pops up an error message.
A check of the specs neither gives information about the chipset used, nor information on any operating system except "Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP"
Most interesting is the fact that they *do* specify Linux compatability on their wired cards!
If I wanted one card for myself, I might be persuaded to buy one (provided I could return it with no questions asked), and take that risk. What I've seen on the TP-LINK website so far, is just another representation of the exact same problem that started this thread. How do I *know* it will work? How do I know the *next* one I order will *also* work?
Don't get me wrong -- "jamar0303 said it was a good bet" would be enough for *me* to try it for myself, and I do appreciate the tip. For example, I'd like to know if this one works: http://www.tp-link.com/products/product_spe.asp?id =5
It came as a surprise to me that these usb wi-fi radios draw nearly a half amp.
So, SMC cards are linux-compatable then? Is that what you just said? I was hoping to be able to go to the SMC product site, and get a list of devices for which there is linux support. They don't have that, so I picked a PCI 802.11/b/g card, only to find there is no linux driver for it, and to find nothing at all to indicate what chipset it is based on. Would you stake your reputation on a retailer knowing something about the device that isn't on the company's website? This is just another example of the difficulty in speccing linux for any application that requires wireless networking. And in today's world, wireless networking isn't exactly some luxury add-on. It's actually a candidate for "the killer app of the century."
"I will make a sworn deposition or affadavit with my attorney present at the interview, and will answer any questions at that time which my attorney agrees I am obligated to answer."
A deposition is acceptable as evidence in the Supreme Court, with far less gray area for admissibility than a polygraph test. If anyone who wants to give you a polygraph test inists on it when you offer a deposition, I would assume they have a clandestine motive.
>Nobody know about the new MRI based lie detectors?
People die because there are waiting lists and prohibitive costs for MRI, yet we have no problem getting one if we want to show someone is lying about smoking pot?
Slashdot Mirror
>Note that you have to really really make sure you've done everything you can to stop the merchant first.
Why is that? And on whom is the burden of proof that you did everything possible?
>They go to charge it and get an "account closed"...
Interesting. How is that different from, say, using a card that they stole from your wallet, exactly?
How can it be anything other than the exact same crime?
"The logic behind this is painfully simple; if you are requesting credit from multiple companies in a short time frame you are probably a credit risk. It's also a possible indicator of identity theft."
It's also an indicator that you are comparison shopping, which takes this into the realm of anticompetitive activity, as well as being anti-consumer.
>It has been over 20 years, and guess what, they still don't get business from me.....
File in the US Court of Claims for triple damages, with compound interest.
>He's right that using people with inherent unequal rights to do labor is a popular solution...
If you look into it carefully, you may discover that the employment of illegal aliens for labor is, while common, far less common that certain people would have you believe.
Because this is, by its very nature, an undocumented phenomenon, people with an interest in its exaggeration find it quite easy to do so.
I invite you to consider something: It is astronomically less expensive to live at a subsistence level in Mexico than it is in the US.
There is an impression being created, out of broad cloth, that the US/Mexico border has people *pouring* in. Meanwhile, people who have actually worked on relief efforts will tell you that it is rare to actually find someone crossing the border. Yes, it happens. But far, far more people come across the border just by showing their Mexican drivers license at the checkpoint, just to go shopping in Nogales or Tucson, more people do that in an hour than hike through the desert in a year.
*Anybody* with a zone can add host records for YouTube. But you knew that.
>>No, it actually makes our food and housing industries possible.
>I am intensely uncomfortable with the morality in that statement: that it is acceptable to have a separate group of people
> being paid less than minimum wage in order to make living easier for the rest of the country.
He didn't say "easier", he said "possible", which implies that people would literally starve and be homeless.
>Drunk drivers always try and justify their reasoning with some higher purpose for taking the risk.
Higher purpose? I've seen that justification be as simple as "it's 12 minutes before the liquor store closes, we have to hurry."
"If every Programming major tried to do that, most would fail to find anything."
If I'm looking for the cream of the crop, though, it's an indicator. Having been there myself, I know of many, many areas where people try hard to find skilled and motivated undergrads, are willing to pay reasonably well, and yet have great difficulty finding people.
"I do agree that they should have SOMETHING to show for their time in college, though, even if it's a small game or pointless program."
When I've interviewed (mostly interns) from my own school, I *know* what they should have done, and in most cases, what professors they should have had, and I can evaluate certain choices they made, if they are at the junior or senior level.
It's not really a value judgement, but I perceive it differently if someone took the track that included a course in ML and Ruby, a course in high-performance/parallell computing, the automata course and an additional, grad-level algorithms analysis. (This says "actually wanted to be a Computer Scientist", which suggests a passion for the trade.) Other tracks are equally respectable, but some of them say "chose the major in order to become an Income Maximizer").
I enjoy meeting (and working with) the people who took as much math and physics as they possibly could, and who took the CS classes aimed at the hardcore nerd. But then, I'm a hardcore nerd myself, so I'm biased.
In any case, it will be a long time before I'm on the hiring side of the table again. I've gone back into research (Hydrology and Water Conservation. I live in the desert, and this is a pretty interesting field with a surprising amount of computer programming work involved.) This is a whole new gig for me, so wish me luck! I'm pretty happy to be out of the corporate world for once.
Anyone who has seriously studied cancer, would hardly frame this kind of thing in terms of the prospect of "curing" cancer.
The idea in the article sounds interesting, but it is clearly being framed in a way to provoke an audience to become outraged at the idea of "patenting the cure for cancer."
Shirley there are researchers here on slashdot who have worked in cancer, who are rolling their eyes about now, in fact, I have an extended family member who is a PI on a long standing cancer research project and I can't wait to hear their take. I suspect this is old news among people in the cancer research community, but I'll have to wait for the school year to start before I can ask. I won't even forward an article with the title "Cancer Cure Patented", come on!
"Real degrees, from real colleges in CS take 4-5. 3 if you're taking a shitload of classes per semester."
:-)
People who haven't been through it, sometimes do not even seem to understand what CS or Engineering majors *do* to get those degrees. For instance, they don't understand the magnitude of university math and physics. They don't realize how much work goes into theory stuff like discrete math and algorithms and automata, or even understand how much they don't know. They go as far as to dismiss all the theory as useless (after all THEY haven't needed it!) And let's don't even talk about capstone courses, and the amount of work and discipline needed to get through one of those.
Not all schools are equally tough. But in some of them, *very* smart people who actually put in a *lot* of effort, still C's. I got a C in Vector Calc, which crushed me, until I realized that nearly half the people in that class literally failed. I've seen people in higher CS and Math courses getting religion after, say, making a 52% on a final exam where 51% would be a "D" and 52% was a "C" -- and I'm NOT talking about slackers or unintelligent people here!
To my mind, this is really the risk of trying a university degree. The chances of failing are *high*. Some people can afford to re-take a class or two, but for others it's do-or-die.
Oh well, I've retreated to the white tower myself after (mumble) years in the industry. I now work in research as a professional staffer in a university. I'm not a professor, but I look like one, have an office that looks like one, and I might take this as a hint that I need to do a Ph.D. (One of the few really good perks of the job, is free tuition, which if you and your spouse both take advantage of it, is like a $30-50,000 bonus... shhhh... don't tell anybody
Oh well, I rant. Back on topic, when I was in industry, I did make hiring decisions. A person with a junior college degree would pass muster for my part, as long as he could actually demonstrate that he could do the work. Experience is everything there. Catch-22, I realize. But even your 20-something person coming straight out of university should have 2 or 3 years of *something* that can be designated as experience. Come on, you were on a college campus and you managed to not work in the lab, or doing web programming for some department, or even some kind of directed research? I don't care about your *grades*, I want to see the game you designed, or whatever.
>This to me is a clear indication that something seriously messed up inside Google HR right now.
A recruiter for Google called me over the winter break, while I happened to be looking for work. I found and accepted another job before I even knew they had called me. I'm trying to decide exactly how to tell them, so as not to burn the bridge.
I noticed you pointed out your GPA. I've found, from being on the hiring side of the table, that people who think their academic stuff is important enough to talk about, don't tend to have a whole lot *else* to talk about. Maybe that's because you're young and straight out of school. But most people who are looking to hire you, want to know what you *can do*, which is not necessarily related to "how" or even "what" you did in school. I'm not belittling your education, don't get me wrong -- I work in academic research now myself and the university is my life these days. I'm just hoping to share a tiny bit of insight.
"This is the start of a trend, that if unchecked, will ultimately result in bankruptcy of this overpriced POS."
If that opinion is in your head, whether you say it out loud or not, you probably telegraph it unconsciously during the interview. I've had an interview where I knew for a fact that the company was running out of money, was losing one of its biggest accounts, and that things weren't looking so good. I tried to be upbeat and positive, but it turns out that I did a poor job of hiding my real feelings (that is, knowing the truth about the dead-endedness of that job.)
I've also interviewed at places where senior developers don't get to program, they are forced into management roles. Once, I actually said what I thought about that. (I would try to use my management authority to create a technical ladder so that senior developers can do career development *as developers* without ever doing management aside from maybe project management.) Wrong thing to say, I guess, but I don't want a programming job where I have to give up programming. What's the point of all these (many) years I've spent learning to program?
Would you hire Yo Yo Ma into your orchestra and then tell him he's been playing the cello too long, he needs to move on??? (That's exactly how I perceieve this "must move to management" theory, and yes, that example was chosen to illustrate the approximate level where I consider my skills to be -- I'm good enough that I am comfortable telling people exactly what I think, even in job interviews.)
How would anyone be *forced* to use the GPLv3? There was nothing wrong with the original GPL, and there is nothing to stop someone from using it. There is certainly nothing to force a person to change his license from the original GPL to anything else.
>It could last from a persons teens, into middle age, with no repeats...
It took me that long to read all the books, although I could have done without "Throne."
"And burning who knows how much gasoline in order to physically transport an object across the country that weighs something around 2 grams is not irresponsible?"
Did your postman tell you that your mail comes on its own plane and its own truck, just for you?
>What he wrote back was completely dismissive, saying he didn't think he'd left anything TOO valuable on there.
Maybe he was hoping you'd take the bait...
>We came THIS close to writing or calling his clients to let them know just how much respect he had for their personal identifying
>information.
That could have exposed you to liability. Remember, a breach of privilege is one "wrong." But you were going to do something else "wrong.", which was to make use of privileged information that you recognized fully well for what it was. The laywer might have had some explaining to do, but then, so might you -- two wrongs don't make a right...
>I already have one that works universally well for virtually all disks, both solid-state and magnetic. I call it a 'hammer'.
I dispose of CDR/DVDR by clamping them on the drill press and putting a few holes in them.
>Incidentally, with hard disks being so cheap these days, I wouldn't do this - I'd toast that disk if it contained any classified info.
I know that in the past, top secret Air Force data destruction at least involved literally incinerating disks (hard drives!) to ashes. Crosscut shredder was sufficient for floppy discs.
On the "race card:"
My dad (like me) looked like a "white guy" -- but he was 1/8 Cherokee, had grown up on a reservation, and was raised in a fairly traditional way in a time of dire poverty -- in the 1930s, Indians didn't exactly have the best opportunities.
Eventually he had a business where, from time to time, one of his workers would accuse him of being racist, assuming this charge would resonate a certain way, only to learn that they had deeply insulted their (soon-to-be-former) boss. My dad had a card with a Dawes Roll number instead of a Social Security number, and he had lived through a time of *extreme* poverty and *extreme* racism against him. He really didn't respond well at all to people who would claim he made any decision on a racial basis, which they assumed he did "because he was white."
>We are all white native-english speakers. Racism? Perhaps.
:-)
Aren't you the one who brought it up? If you were in Atlanta Georgia and you had no black people on your staff, I would be suspicious. If you were in Scottsdale Arizona, I would be surprised to see a black person on your staff, but would not be surprised to see people of Mexican or Navajo descent.
>if I were the only white guy in a team of asian-heritage coders, I would fully expect the same sort of treatment.
I would expect (and give) respect. But then, I'm get along quite well with Chinese people, at least. I know how to act when I get invited for dinner and mah jong
>when your in an environment
Use caution when criticizing the communication skills of others.
>As someone already said, try TP-LINK. Pretty much everything they sell should be supported.
Good to know. However, a quick check of the TP-Link website yields the following results:
A search for "Linux" just pops up an error message.
A check of the specs neither gives information about the chipset used, nor information on any operating system except
"Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP"
Most interesting is the fact that they *do* specify Linux compatability on their wired cards!
If I wanted one card for myself, I might be persuaded to buy one (provided I could return it with no questions asked), and take that risk. What I've seen on the TP-LINK website so far, is just another representation of the exact same problem that started this thread.
How do I *know* it will work? How do I know the *next* one I order will *also* work?
Don't get me wrong -- "jamar0303 said it was a good bet" would be enough for *me* to try it for myself, and I do appreciate the tip.
For example, I'd like to know if this one works: http://www.tp-link.com/products/product_spe.asp?i
It came as a surprise to me that these usb wi-fi radios draw nearly a half amp.
>find a Linux-friendly vendor (good luck on that).
This thread could have ended with one post, had anyone simply shared a name, url, phone number of such a vendor.
I would *love* to be able to call someone and say "I need an 802.11b/g PCI card with a chipset known not to be unsupported."
I don't really think I'm asking for much here.
>If you're online, just google the model number and add something like "linux", "ubuntu" or "gentoo" to the query.
If you find one that way, where is the assurance that the next one you order is the same? Burned by this already in a big way.
> Also, often on Newegg if you look through the comments someone will say if it works on Linux or not.
Good to know, but again, I myself made such comments on a Linksys device, only to have the *device* change.
I guess these are two problems: 1. obtaining a supportable device, and 2. repeatably obtaining the same device.
So, SMC cards are linux-compatable then? Is that what you just said? I was hoping to be able to go to the SMC product site, and get a list of devices for which there is linux support. They don't have that, so I picked a PCI 802.11/b/g card, only to find there is no linux driver for it, and to find nothing at all to indicate what chipset it is based on. Would you stake your reputation on a retailer knowing something about the device that isn't on the company's website? This is just another example of the difficulty in speccing linux for any application that requires wireless networking. And in today's world, wireless networking isn't exactly some luxury add-on. It's actually a candidate for "the killer app of the century."
"I will make a sworn deposition or affadavit with my attorney present at the interview, and will answer any questions at that time which my attorney agrees I am obligated to answer."
A deposition is acceptable as evidence in the Supreme Court, with far less gray area for admissibility than a polygraph test. If anyone who wants to give you a polygraph test inists on it when you offer a deposition, I would assume they have a clandestine motive.
>Nobody know about the new MRI based lie detectors?
People die because there are waiting lists and prohibitive costs for MRI, yet we have no problem
getting one if we want to show someone is lying about smoking pot?