Well, when I'm asked about my opinion about Windows I always put on a smile and say it's great. The response can be various, mainly if they put their lives on W they like the response, if they don't (this happened once) they nod and smile back knowingly:) Anyway, when one goes to an interview one really should know at least as much about the company one goes to. The preferences of the interviewers are a different topic:)
Although it's not a good idea to begin hiring foreign workers during a recession
That line always has the implied hint that other countries on this planet don't ever hire foreign workforce, which they do, and a lot. Should the US eliminate H1B completely, that wouldn't even be felt, their number is so low (relatively speaking), although in certan fields their number is probably higher than others.
You left out some variations, one of the important ones being
7. My native language is not English but I am fluent in it and one or more other languages
There are quite a lot of (tech and non-tech) people using multiple languages everyday. Still, English will probably remain the most accepted internationally used language, since it's a good common divisor: it's relatively easy to learn and it's fairly easily accessible for everyone.
This and similar "new internet" ideas are always about control, not about "security" in the general meaning. And the question always is who wants that control, and how the power in the hands of the controller would be (mis)used.
"They" don't really care about people's security, but more about what they can do, access and use anonymously. It's been always about that, and not about trying to protect the users.
I'm sure the RIAA and the MPAA would really like such an abomination, NSA and the likes included. I'd say that's a pretty strong lobby.
Also, I'd say we could have a pretty strong hunch how a certain widespread operating system's problems might spring such ideas among those with interest.
Science is not politics or religion. It's not about what you believe, it's about what can be proven. Believing a proof's validity is not a religious issue, it's not about believing it or not, it's about having (or not having) the necessary knowledge to recognize its validity (or invalidity). Ignorant folks spreading "I don't believe them" lines is nothing but a miserable try to spread hysteria.
Uhmm, no ? We need versatility in the games we play, and a complexity that such algorithms can't introduce automatically. Sure, such methods could help in creating some (!) game rules, anything more is beyond speculation.
Well, one day they should start to check whether travellers have genuine patriotic feelings towards the USA, if not, make them disappear. I'd say the unimaginable drop in travellers could persuade them finally that it isn't a good idea to produce ever increasingly humiliating checks.
As to the test at hand, I have a somewhat elevated blood pressure - always had -, I always am nervous when in contact with every kind of security people - I can't help it, I was a kid in a strongly communist country, some feelings can't be easily eradicated -, also on 9/10 times when flying I have to really hurry on airports - since I prefer quick connections to waiting many hours at airport lounges. Combine all of these and I'll be an easy target.
As always, it's not the false positives in themselves that bother me - although I know pretty well how most of the biometric systems work and fail - but the delays and inconveniences such false picks can cause you, from lost flights and luggages to time spent explaining things you shouldn't need to, and so on.
And, at the same time, most of the terrorists will just as easily pass security as they've always have. From the top of my head, let's just say there could be 1 terrorist out of 1million passangers. Knowing the average true positive recognition rates, around 10000 passangers could easily be falsely picked out, while that one terrorist could easily slip through.
Maybe, yet exploitation of people's privacy didn't take long to develop either. For people to give up privacy, they have to have complete trust towards fellow people and towards authority. What do you think the ever raising concern about privacy rights show about that trust ?
Now let's see, they taught us about this problem back when I was a six- or seven-grader (~'90-91, can't recall exactly) as one of the illustrations for backtracking (yes, I know we can do it without backtracking, that was not the point then I guess). Go figure.
Until we'll have batteries that can last 12+ hours of continuous use (average and versatile use, not just stable-mph highway run), I wouldn't ever consider buying an exclusively electric vehicle. Yes, I could buy one for short range rides, and have a hybrid or else for real life distances (I wouldn't even dare to think about how an e.g. 1000+ mile ride - not that unfrequent for me - would be, and how long it would take), but having a gazillion cars is a stupid idea, although I guess car makers would love it.
Well, my first and longest MUD presence was in Holy Mission (the original one) until it slowly died (less and less players). It was a great place, with great people, it was fun to play and to code, I still remember most of the commands. The only game I ever felt close to the old feeling was the baldur's gate and icewind dale series.
MUDs were a good challenge too, I used to know huge parts of the map by heart and I still can recall some places of it. Newbies had large hand-drawn maps and pieces of papers lying around with directions to specific places:)
Most of the time support and ease of handling comes before smallish differences in features - some of which are still debatable, like "floating"/"stashing" changes. Subversion's support in Windows (tortoise, ankh, netbeans, etc.) and in widely used IDEs (netbeans and vs in the lead) is a _very_ strong point.
many people consider Perl's time to have passed and no longer see a reason to use it in any significant project.
Ho, lo, and behold. Many people consider that, and many don't. One can use Perl in a dozen of ways in any type of project, one just has to know it enough so as to use it where it's appropriate and not use it for everything like a madman. I've known people who'd use Perl for literally everything, well, god keep us from such people in any kind of project. But, I wouldn't say, even if Perl is so many years old, that it hasn't got it's place. It does, and I still enjoy using it for stuff from time to time.
Sometimes they are good, sometimes bad, they are usually just there to provide a starting point. When I've been asked at times to do such a test, it was always before the actual interview, and provided a base from where they started asking me things. Sometimes it happened that they asked about one of the test questions that I responded to correctly - they wanted to know how much I know about it - and I said, I never used it, then they asked how come I know it then, to which I said I always try to be up to date in other technologies - besides the ones I currently use -, an answer which they actually liked.
I'd say tests are nothing to like or dislike, it's just a part of the process. Other jobs' candidates are asked other things, that's their cross to bear.
I have unlimited dsl for 6 years now (in the EU, central Europe), my peak was ~60 gigabytes, and I usually stay below 30. With some people downloading above 300 per month, I wonder why caps weren't introduced upon you eariler:) Honestly. I can only imagine using up so much bandwidth by downloading isos and movies 24/7, so I'd say cap-ing was really something to be expected.
Not that's what I call real target audience. Without Amarok, kile (at least the last time I checked) and some others, there's no way for me to switch from KDE3. Maybe I'm one stupid prick, but I care more about my applications than the DE and the looks, since it's the apps I use the DE for in the first place.
And about Dolphin... I hated its first plans back in the days, I hated the first versions, and there's still nothing in it that would make me like it more then konqueror. I find it a sorry excuse of a "simplified" file manager [or whatever you might call it] and I wish it vanished from the face of this earth.
I just think you've used the wrong tools. In Linux there's nothing better (convincing me otherwise won't work, I've used everything there is) than Kile, and on Windows Technixcenter seems to be the best option.
I'd say if you really are over writing a few real articles in LaTeX then you should really know enough to be able to deal with 90% of situations. I've written some of them myself, and a dissertation, and I still say I wouldn't change LaTeX (actually the tetex+kile combo) up for anything else that we have today. For scientific papers and articles we simply don't have anything better today.
I'm not convinced that anyone could create such a wysiwyg environment that could reliably replace LaTeX, and I'd stick to "what you type is closer to what you get than anything else you could find out there" and stay with LaTeX (with kile in my case).
I'll say just one thing: most probably those are trying to call these obsolete, who never manage to publish anything. That said, faster publication times should be desirable, but not in any way shall we dismiss these journals so quickly.
maybe someday there will be only one look and feel, regardless of the distribution
Well, there may be a similar look, but I don't suppose there will be a similar feel (i.e. looks can be made similar, but functionality of the different DEs is pretty far from each other), so this is a real no go for all those people who choose their DE because of its features, not just because of its looks. There are some DEs which I'd never consider using, since simply don't provide me those behavioral and functional elements that I came accustomed to have, and I won't pick to use them even if they provide a visual consistency similar to my DEs of choice.
Privacy has many good reasons too. Here by privacy I mean not having to give out any personal details. The best reason for me is mostly, that even to this day no company, no website, no authority, no agency, nobody whatsoever has been fully trustworthy to handle any personal data. Not banks, not gov. agencies, not anybody. So pleas explain, how does somebody like this guy have the guts to come out and say you should trust us with your credit card, id, dr. licence or passport data ?
Besides the untrustability, this raises different issues too. How could they know if the data given is valid, unless they validate it with the respective authorities ? Now guess who'll read your stories.
making people responsible would raise the level of discourse
No. It would act as a filter for certain, and only those kinds of people would remain for those discourses who don't mind the new ways things get handles around there. That, of course, can be seen as a raised level, I'd say it would rather be a considerable reduction of free speech.
But, I guess, this whole process of reducing freedoms and enforcing the borders [not just physical borders] shouldn't come as a surprise these days. Alarming, yes, surprising, not.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, when I'm asked about my opinion about Windows I always put on a smile and say it's great. The response can be various, mainly if they put their lives on W they like the response, if they don't (this happened once) they nod and smile back knowingly :) Anyway, when one goes to an interview one really should know at least as much about the company one goes to. The preferences of the interviewers are a different topic :)
Although it's not a good idea to begin hiring foreign workers during a recession
That line always has the implied hint that other countries on this planet don't ever hire foreign workforce, which they do, and a lot. Should the US eliminate H1B completely, that wouldn't even be felt, their number is so low (relatively speaking), although in certan fields their number is probably higher than others.
And for the latest-and-greatest software tech, like Ruby and Python
I always feel the greatest urge to eat my degrees when I hear any language being called "software tech" and the likes.
You left out some variations, one of the important ones being
7. My native language is not English but I am fluent in it and one or more other languages
There are quite a lot of (tech and non-tech) people using multiple languages everyday. Still, English will probably remain the most accepted internationally used language, since it's a good common divisor: it's relatively easy to learn and it's fairly easily accessible for everyone.
This and similar "new internet" ideas are always about control, not about "security" in the general meaning. And the question always is who wants that control, and how the power in the hands of the controller would be (mis)used.
"They" don't really care about people's security, but more about what they can do, access and use anonymously. It's been always about that, and not about trying to protect the users.
I'm sure the RIAA and the MPAA would really like such an abomination, NSA and the likes included. I'd say that's a pretty strong lobby.
Also, I'd say we could have a pretty strong hunch how a certain widespread operating system's problems might spring such ideas among those with interest.
better assurance
Science is not politics or religion. It's not about what you believe, it's about what can be proven. Believing a proof's validity is not a religious issue, it's not about believing it or not, it's about having (or not having) the necessary knowledge to recognize its validity (or invalidity). Ignorant folks spreading "I don't believe them" lines is nothing but a miserable try to spread hysteria.
Perhaps this has a future in game design
Uhmm, no ? We need versatility in the games we play, and a complexity that such algorithms can't introduce automatically. Sure, such methods could help in creating some (!) game rules, anything more is beyond speculation.
Actually, mass will only have weight in a gravitational field, where indeed more mass means more weight. Otherwise, more mass only means more inertia.
Well, one day they should start to check whether travellers have genuine patriotic feelings towards the USA, if not, make them disappear. I'd say the unimaginable drop in travellers could persuade them finally that it isn't a good idea to produce ever increasingly humiliating checks.
As to the test at hand, I have a somewhat elevated blood pressure - always had -, I always am nervous when in contact with every kind of security people - I can't help it, I was a kid in a strongly communist country, some feelings can't be easily eradicated -, also on 9/10 times when flying I have to really hurry on airports - since I prefer quick connections to waiting many hours at airport lounges. Combine all of these and I'll be an easy target.
As always, it's not the false positives in themselves that bother me - although I know pretty well how most of the biometric systems work and fail - but the delays and inconveniences such false picks can cause you, from lost flights and luggages to time spent explaining things you shouldn't need to, and so on.
And, at the same time, most of the terrorists will just as easily pass security as they've always have. From the top of my head, let's just say there could be 1 terrorist out of 1million passangers. Knowing the average true positive recognition rates, around 10000 passangers could easily be falsely picked out, while that one terrorist could easily slip through.
privacy rights are a relatively recent phenomenon
Maybe, yet exploitation of people's privacy didn't take long to develop either. For people to give up privacy, they have to have complete trust towards fellow people and towards authority. What do you think the ever raising concern about privacy rights show about that trust ?
Now let's see, they taught us about this problem back when I was a six- or seven-grader (~'90-91, can't recall exactly) as one of the illustrations for backtracking (yes, I know we can do it without backtracking, that was not the point then I guess). Go figure.
Until we'll have batteries that can last 12+ hours of continuous use (average and versatile use, not just stable-mph highway run), I wouldn't ever consider buying an exclusively electric vehicle. Yes, I could buy one for short range rides, and have a hybrid or else for real life distances (I wouldn't even dare to think about how an e.g. 1000+ mile ride - not that unfrequent for me - would be, and how long it would take), but having a gazillion cars is a stupid idea, although I guess car makers would love it.
"Error Beep" to confirm proper operation. After years of conditioning, it drives me nuts
No sane being ever leaves the "Beep" driver enabled and the "Sound scheme" on anything else than "No Sounds".
Well, my first and longest MUD presence was in Holy Mission (the original one) until it slowly died (less and less players). It was a great place, with great people, it was fun to play and to code, I still remember most of the commands. The only game I ever felt close to the old feeling was the baldur's gate and icewind dale series.
:)
MUDs were a good challenge too, I used to know huge parts of the map by heart and I still can recall some places of it. Newbies had large hand-drawn maps and pieces of papers lying around with directions to specific places
Most of the time support and ease of handling comes before smallish differences in features - some of which are still debatable, like "floating"/"stashing" changes. Subversion's support in Windows (tortoise, ankh, netbeans, etc.) and in widely used IDEs (netbeans and vs in the lead) is a _very_ strong point.
many people consider Perl's time to have passed and no longer see a reason to use it in any significant project.
Ho, lo, and behold. Many people consider that, and many don't. One can use Perl in a dozen of ways in any type of project, one just has to know it enough so as to use it where it's appropriate and not use it for everything like a madman. I've known people who'd use Perl for literally everything, well, god keep us from such people in any kind of project. But, I wouldn't say, even if Perl is so many years old, that it hasn't got it's place. It does, and I still enjoy using it for stuff from time to time.
How the hell, insightful, when citing netcraft ? :P
So now computer geeks will turn into car geeks too, and kids will admire the ones who'll be able to hack the key lockdowns in their cars :)
Sometimes they are good, sometimes bad, they are usually just there to provide a starting point. When I've been asked at times to do such a test, it was always before the actual interview, and provided a base from where they started asking me things. Sometimes it happened that they asked about one of the test questions that I responded to correctly - they wanted to know how much I know about it - and I said, I never used it, then they asked how come I know it then, to which I said I always try to be up to date in other technologies - besides the ones I currently use -, an answer which they actually liked.
I'd say tests are nothing to like or dislike, it's just a part of the process. Other jobs' candidates are asked other things, that's their cross to bear.
I have unlimited dsl for 6 years now (in the EU, central Europe), my peak was ~60 gigabytes, and I usually stay below 30. With some people downloading above 300 per month, I wonder why caps weren't introduced upon you eariler :) Honestly. I can only imagine using up so much bandwidth by downloading isos and movies 24/7, so I'd say cap-ing was really something to be expected.
I'm hard pressed to think of anything missing
Not that's what I call real target audience. Without Amarok, kile (at least the last time I checked) and some others, there's no way for me to switch from KDE3. Maybe I'm one stupid prick, but I care more about my applications than the DE and the looks, since it's the apps I use the DE for in the first place.
And about Dolphin... I hated its first plans back in the days, I hated the first versions, and there's still nothing in it that would make me like it more then konqueror. I find it a sorry excuse of a "simplified" file manager [or whatever you might call it] and I wish it vanished from the face of this earth.
I just think you've used the wrong tools. In Linux there's nothing better (convincing me otherwise won't work, I've used everything there is) than Kile, and on Windows Technixcenter seems to be the best option.
I'd say if you really are over writing a few real articles in LaTeX then you should really know enough to be able to deal with 90% of situations. I've written some of them myself, and a dissertation, and I still say I wouldn't change LaTeX (actually the tetex+kile combo) up for anything else that we have today. For scientific papers and articles we simply don't have anything better today.
I'm not convinced that anyone could create such a wysiwyg environment that could reliably replace LaTeX, and I'd stick to "what you type is closer to what you get than anything else you could find out there" and stay with LaTeX (with kile in my case).
I'll say just one thing: most probably those are trying to call these obsolete, who never manage to publish anything. That said, faster publication times should be desirable, but not in any way shall we dismiss these journals so quickly.
maybe someday there will be only one look and feel, regardless of the distribution
Well, there may be a similar look, but I don't suppose there will be a similar feel (i.e. looks can be made similar, but functionality of the different DEs is pretty far from each other), so this is a real no go for all those people who choose their DE because of its features, not just because of its looks. There are some DEs which I'd never consider using, since simply don't provide me those behavioral and functional elements that I came accustomed to have, and I won't pick to use them even if they provide a visual consistency similar to my DEs of choice.
Privacy has many good reasons too. Here by privacy I mean not having to give out any personal details. The best reason for me is mostly, that even to this day no company, no website, no authority, no agency, nobody whatsoever has been fully trustworthy to handle any personal data. Not banks, not gov. agencies, not anybody. So pleas explain, how does somebody like this guy have the guts to come out and say you should trust us with your credit card, id, dr. licence or passport data ?
Besides the untrustability, this raises different issues too. How could they know if the data given is valid, unless they validate it with the respective authorities ? Now guess who'll read your stories.
making people responsible would raise the level of discourse
No. It would act as a filter for certain, and only those kinds of people would remain for those discourses who don't mind the new ways things get handles around there. That, of course, can be seen as a raised level, I'd say it would rather be a considerable reduction of free speech.
But, I guess, this whole process of reducing freedoms and enforcing the borders [not just physical borders] shouldn't come as a surprise these days. Alarming, yes, surprising, not.