...if you doubled or quintupled the salary for those positions, you still would not be able to find people capable of doing them? Good qualified engineers would not happily leave their other jobs...
And that solves the overall issue of not enough qualified people how? You can't make a blanket longer by cutting 2 feet off the top and sewing it onto the bottom. Those companies losing people are then going to need to fill those jobs somehow...
...for a 5x bump in salary I'd probably be happy to buy a few extra layers of clothing and move up north.
For a 5x bump in my salary, I'd move to the bloody moon, but it's not going to happen. There's just no way a business is going to pay it's employees 2-5x what competitors are without hemorrhaging money.
What I'm seeing you say here is "We don't want to pay the market price for this labor."
Again, nope. We pay slightly *above* market rates...
What I'm seeing you say here is: "I refuse to work unless I get paid more than the CEO, but I hate brown people so it's their fault"
They are out there, you just don't want to pay for them
1. Increase the offered pay until you get the qualified people you need. This is the best option when you don't have time for training and development.
Nope. We offer slightly better than market rates, and have various other incentive programs to attract talent.
2. Pick the best of those your now rejecting and train them. Many of them would be willing to work for below market rates while in training.
I've actually suggested this to management, and I think it's a good idea, but they don't want to make the investment just to have them leave for somewhere else once they're trained.
They're really only willing to hire senior devs who already know what they're doing.
If established developers are losing their jobs to H-1Bs/TFWs, then there should be enough out there that fit management's bill for us to hire, right? Doesn't seem to be the case though...
First off, Canada doesn't have an H1-B program. We have the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
Thus the reason for my caveat.
Dozens of employees at Canada’s largest bank are losing their jobs to temporary foreign workers, who are in Canada to take over the work of their department.
If that was actually true then either those laid off IT workers AREN'T looking for jobs, or they were replaced because they're not actually competent enough to do the job.
maybe it's because... we get completely out of the field. Change career paths. Retire. Whatever.
In that case then, you're not actually *losing* jobs to temporary foreign workers, are you? Where do you expect businesses to find talent if the only competent, qualified local people out there have decided to leave the field?
...if you're getting people who think that knowing Dreamweaver and Photoshop makes them qualified, then you (or your HR department) obviously have a problem spelling out minimum requirements...
Nope. We don't use recruiting agencies, and our job requirements are anal retentively clear. We still get these people applying anyway. It's not like they actually make it to the interview though...
he correct response would be a massive crackdown on employers who violate the labor laws. Daily raids, random inspections and audits, harsh prison sentences for executives and severe financial penalties...
Yeah, I guess this will "create" jobs for law enforcement, but it's also going to jack the price of fruit at the supermarket and drastically reduce it's availability.
Good if you are fond of fruitless police states, I suppose.
I don't get it. This whole "H1-B is an evil scam!" moral panic seems to me to be just another aspect of the virulent anti-immigration bigotry that has republicans screaming: "They're taking our jobs!" (as if *any* USian is going to pick fruit for less than minimum wage!)
I'm a software engineer at a large multinational, and we've been trying to find qualified candidates for software positions, but we're having a REALLY hard time. There just aren't any qualified people available. This idea that there are competent, qualified STEM people out there who are being denied jobs by the H1-B program just doesn't seem to jive with reality.
Everytime we post job openings, we get *swamped* by applications, so yeah, there are tons of people out there *looking* for STEM jobs. The problem is that the unemployed people applying are deservedly unemployed!. For the most part, it's because they're bloody incompetent - the vast majority fail the interviews despite appearing qualified on their resume. The rest are people who have fundamental misunderstandings of what constitutes "software development": I can't tell you how many people we've had apply for web development jobs who think that knowing DreamWeaver and Photoshop makes them qualified!
For the most part, our new hires are already employed developers making a lateral move from their current employer (for whatever reason).
With respect to other software developers who I know personally, any that I would be comfortable hiring are *already* employed, with good reason. Those software developers who I know personally that are unemployed I wouldn't allow to work on ANY project I was associated with even if they paid me for the privilege!
If H1-Bs are "Taking our jobs!", then *WHERE* in the hell are all the unemployed, competent, software developers this would create? Their absence is suspicious - they just don't seem to be out there.
Except it costs five times as much to build a fission power plant than to build enough wind turbines to produce the same amount of energy. Indeed, the wind turbines will only operate 30% of the time. But means the wind turbines cost 3 / 5 times as much as the fission plant. And that's precisely why everyone is building wind turbines and practically no one is building fission plants...
Except that the fission power industry is more mature and has more in place infrastructure than wind. Even at a slightly higher cost we could build more capacity in a shorter time by building fission reactors rather than wind turbines, simply because of the pre-existing infrastructure investment.
Over the last 25 years we've installed under 100 GW of fission, a period in which we installed 370 GW of wind,
Right, for a combined capacity of 470GW, which would be *higher* had we been building as many fission reactors as we could, instead of irrationally pissing our collective pants over nuclear FUD.
In the long term, renewables are the way to go, but short term? The quickest way to end our fossil fuel dependance is to go nuclear, it's the only way to be sure.
Big and heavy are the two things which are very difficult and thus expensive when you want to throw them into space, even in LEO. The amount of energy required to lift this stuff into orbit will exceed what it can return as power.
...and completely ignoring the idea of building using materials already outside the gravity well, or development of alternative lift methods that are more efficient. Rockets are at best like 70% efficient for lifting loads into orbit (under ideal circumstances, in practice it's lower). You're saying it's *impossible* to *ever* do better? I won't deny it might be difficult to do better, but claiming it's impossible is short-sighted.
Big is irrelevant, heavy is the issue. If you think it will NEVER be possible to build a structure of the appropriate size using less material or lighter material, then we'll just have to disagree. Personally, I think you're ignoring the fact that we can build much larger structures in micro-gravity with much less material because they are under a lot less stress. Just look at how thin and light solar sails are, they cover huge areas with a tiny amount of material.
Physics dictate the size of this thing. Physics will dictate how much power it can transfer, how much it will loose and how much it will have to collect. Physics will dictate how much solar collection area you will need, engineering may be able to approach that someday. Physics will mandate how much energy it will take to get everything necessary into the proper locations.
I don't dispute any of this. I agree.
You will be able to engineer lighter structures, but not smaller ones.
At the risk of repeating myself, size is irrelevant in space. You have all the room you need. Between size and weight, the only relevant issue here is weight, and you've just agreed that we can likely engineer lighter structures.
There is a lower limit on the weight of this structure, regardless of the properties of the materials we can engineer.
Agreed, but neither you nor I are in any position to say what that lower limit is, or assert that that lower limit is absolutely too high to ever be practical.
You might be able to engineer cheaper ways of getting something into orbit, but you cannot change the minimum energy required by physics.
Obviously. I've never claimed you could change the energy requirements for a given mass, but like I've said already, there are ways around that. Like using material which is already up the well, using lighter materials or better construction that uses less material. Using better lift efficiencies, lighter or less material, or eliminating the need to lift stuff out of the well altogether could all go a long way to making it more practical. I'm not saying it IS possible, even with these improvements it might not be; but I AM saying that declaring it impossible now and forever is unwarranted.
Physics is your problem. It defines a system that is so massive that there is no way it ever gets to be cost effective to build...
No, physics is not the problem, it's just one of the constraints on the problem. You can't possibly *know* that the lower limit on mass is too massive to be practical. Unless you can predict the future, new developments in material science could change that in a heartbeat.
...because by my calculations, it will take more energy to create and operate this thing than you can ever hope to recover. That makes it uneconomical too.
Calculations which are based on the constraints of current materials, structural engineering techniques, lift efficiency and the necessity of lifting resources out of a gravity well. Change any one of those things and your calculations are no longer valid. You seem mighty confident that it's impossible to change ANY of them. Me, I'm not so much of an absolutist.
It will NEVER be economically possible to put structures together in orbit that are measured in kilometers,...
I disagree, this is nothing but speculation on your part.
...espically ones that will need to be aligned to tolerances in the micrometers. It's too expensive to get the materials into orbit that would be required to build the transmitting array and it would take too long to assemble and align an array for any useful amount of power to get transferred to the surface.
Every single one of these objections are engineering problems. Tolerances? Find better sync algorithms, better materials with less "give" in the relevant properties etc... Too expensive to get materials into orbit? Work on more efficient transport mechanisms, more efficient use of materials, or develop better/lighter materials to use, or use material from the moon, asteroids or comets etc... that you don't need to lift up a well. Assembly and alignment issues? Again, just a matter of better engineering, better assembly methods, better tools for more accurate alignment etc... ALL of your relevant objections are only obstacles to our CURRENT technology and can be addressed via innovation and engineering.
Saying these issues can NEVER be addressed is pure hubris.
You cannot make smaller arrays because of the physics involved and no amount of engineering or technology can change this.
So what? We don't need to make them smaller. The size of the arrays are only an obstacle because of current engineering constraints.
The costs are HUGE and the payoff is nowhere near enough to justify it, and that will never change.
Costs and payoffs change *all the time*! Saying these things are fixed and "that's that" is just plain silly. History is full of ideas that were once deemed "impossible" for reasons of costs and payoffs, yet became practical later with better methods and materials. Airplanes and the analytical engine; just to name two.
...will not work on an industrial scale at any reasonable distance for a price anybody can afford. Why? The structures required are HUGE, literally kilometers in size, both in space and on the ground and this size is driven by the physics.
"reasonable distance for a price anybody can afford"? You keep watering down your definition of practical. So it's only practical if you can have one today, in your garage? You know that we build structures of this magnitude already, right? Space telescopes, particle accelerators... etc
Building such structures, while conceivable and possible, is VERY expensive and VER"Y time consuming, especially in space. (Lots of money) X (Lots of time) = Never going to happen.
The building of these structures, in terms of materials and time, is precisely the engineering problem I was referring to, so this just confirms what I already said. Sure, it may be time consuming and expensive NOW, but reducing the material costs and construction time isn't a physics problem, it's entirely an engineering one. The physics are already proven.
Not practical NOW, no. But your statement was that this type of thing would NEVER be practical, and as far as I can see, all of your objections are simply engineering problems, the concept and theory is solid and has been proven in the lab and experimental implementations.
The only issue is in refinement of methods and equipment, which as I said, is just an engineering issue, so your NEVER modal qualifier is simply false.
Magnetic and electric fields though air/vacuum is another. Power transfer may be possible, but the amount of losses means it will never be practical unless you have HUGE amounts of power to waste.
Not true. Microwave power transfer with rectennas can have efficiencies up to 90% or so...
You don't go there for an education, you go to make "contacts".
It's basically just a papermill for rich kids to buy degrees, and you expect them to be educated? LOL - the whole reason they're buying a degree from a legacy school in the first place is so they don't have to do any work.
... I thought you were saying to put this other bacterium in the water supply to kill off this one, which sounded a little insane.
Putting *enough* Mimivirus (which is a virus, not a bacteria) into the water supply to kill off ALL N. fowleri amoebas WOULD be insane. Mimivirus is already present to a certain level in the same environments as N. fowleri though, so it's already in the water supply, just hopefully not in enough quantities to infect people...
... if the chances of the brain eating amoeba was 1 in a million, but the chances of the pneumonia infecting you was 1 in 10?
You are missing the point completely. Like I said previously, you would only try this on people who are ALREADY SYMPTOMATIC. Once you've developed N. fowleri infection symptoms (e.g. Primary Amebic Meningoencephalitis (PAM)) what the chances were of you developing those symptoms to start with is pretty fucking irrelevant.
Once you are symptomatic, your chances of dying are pretty close to 100%. Whatever the fatality rate of pneumonia is, it certainly isn't 100%, and even if Mimivirus can actually cause Pneumonia, it isn't going to do so 100% of the time.
Let's say the death rate from contracting pneumonia is something insane like 50%, and the chance of contracting pneumonia from Mimivirus is *guaranteed* (100%). EVEN under those (way over estimated circumstances), if Mimivirus were effective at killing N. fowleri, you've upped your survivability from 0% to 50%.
Pneumonia on the other hand has a much higher death count.
Sure, but you'd only be trying this on people who are *already* symptomatic for N. Fowleri infection, at that point the base rate is irrelevant.
Yeah, pneumonia is nasty, but it isn't 100% fatal. Besides, the link between Mimivirus and pneumonia is only speculative, Mimivirus might not cause pneumonia at all.
How is it smartass to question the ability of people who can't discern the difference between markup/typesetting and a programming language?
Sure, my second question to those who failed the first has a certain amount of snark to it, but would you really want to hire someone who truly doesn't understand the difference?
...I will pull out iteration and conditionals in HTML*...
Well, now you are going to have to prove it. Just for clarity, I'll provide you some context, and the criteria I was using. This was back in the late '90s, early aughts, so it was before the advent or wide adoption of DHTML, AJAX, HTML 5 etc... The answer had to be pure HTML4: no javascript, no css, no plugins, no activeX etc...
If anyone had actually been able to write a for loop or an if branch with those criteria, I would have been impressed and hired them on the spot.
According to this 2008 biomed paper: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1..., Naegleria fowleri is likely vulnerable to Mimivirus (possibly Mamavirus too?) infection.
Given that Naegleria fowleri is close to 100% fatal, why not try infecting the Naegleria fowleri infection with Mimivirus?
Mimivirus is only speciously associated with Pneumonia in humans, and Pneumonia has a much better survivability rate. Worst case scenario it does nothing and the patient dies (which was going to happen anyways), best case scenario the Mimivirus kills Naegleria fowleri and the patient survives with no pathology. Middle road scenario, the Mimivirus kills Naegleria fowleri, the patient survives but has Pneumonia.
Personally, I would choose having a bout of Pneumonia over having my brain eaten by an amoeba any day.
Slashdot Mirror
Major economics fail here.
Nope.
...if you doubled or quintupled the salary for those positions, you still would not be able to find people capable of doing them? Good qualified engineers would not happily leave their other jobs...
And that solves the overall issue of not enough qualified people how? You can't make a blanket longer by cutting 2 feet off the top and sewing it onto the bottom. Those companies losing people are then going to need to fill those jobs somehow...
For a 5x bump in my salary, I'd move to the bloody moon, but it's not going to happen. There's just no way a business is going to pay it's employees 2-5x what competitors are without hemorrhaging money.
What I'm seeing you say here is "We don't want to pay the market price for this labor."
Again, nope. We pay slightly *above* market rates...
What I'm seeing you say here is: "I refuse to work unless I get paid more than the CEO, but I hate brown people so it's their fault"
They are out there, you just don't want to pay for them
1. Increase the offered pay until you get the qualified people you need. This is the best option when you don't have time for training and development.
Nope. We offer slightly better than market rates, and have various other incentive programs to attract talent.
2. Pick the best of those your now rejecting and train them. Many of them would be willing to work for below market rates while in training.
I've actually suggested this to management, and I think it's a good idea, but they don't want to make the investment just to have them leave for somewhere else once they're trained.
They're really only willing to hire senior devs who already know what they're doing.
If established developers are losing their jobs to H-1Bs/TFWs, then there should be enough out there that fit management's bill for us to hire, right? Doesn't seem to be the case though...
First off, Canada doesn't have an H1-B program. We have the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
Thus the reason for my caveat.
Dozens of employees at Canada’s largest bank are losing their jobs to temporary foreign workers, who are in Canada to take over the work of their department.
If that was actually true then either those laid off IT workers AREN'T looking for jobs, or they were replaced because they're not actually competent enough to do the job.
maybe it's because ... we get completely out of the field. Change career paths. Retire. Whatever.
In that case then, you're not actually *losing* jobs to temporary foreign workers, are you? Where do you expect businesses to find talent if the only competent, qualified local people out there have decided to leave the field?
...if you're getting people who think that knowing Dreamweaver and Photoshop makes them qualified, then you (or your HR department) obviously have a problem spelling out minimum requirements...
Nope. We don't use recruiting agencies, and our job requirements are anal retentively clear. We still get these people applying anyway. It's not like they actually make it to the interview though...
he correct response would be a massive crackdown on employers who violate the labor laws. Daily raids, random inspections and audits, harsh prison sentences for executives and severe financial penalties...
Yeah, I guess this will "create" jobs for law enforcement, but it's also going to jack the price of fruit at the supermarket and drastically reduce it's availability.
Good if you are fond of fruitless police states, I suppose.
Caveat: I'm Canadian.
I don't get it. This whole "H1-B is an evil scam!" moral panic seems to me to be just another aspect of the virulent anti-immigration bigotry that has republicans screaming: "They're taking our jobs!" (as if *any* USian is going to pick fruit for less than minimum wage!)
I'm a software engineer at a large multinational, and we've been trying to find qualified candidates for software positions, but we're having a REALLY hard time. There just aren't any qualified people available. This idea that there are competent, qualified STEM people out there who are being denied jobs by the H1-B program just doesn't seem to jive with reality.
Everytime we post job openings, we get *swamped* by applications, so yeah, there are tons of people out there *looking* for STEM jobs. The problem is that the unemployed people applying are deservedly unemployed!. For the most part, it's because they're bloody incompetent - the vast majority fail the interviews despite appearing qualified on their resume. The rest are people who have fundamental misunderstandings of what constitutes "software development": I can't tell you how many people we've had apply for web development jobs who think that knowing DreamWeaver and Photoshop makes them qualified!
For the most part, our new hires are already employed developers making a lateral move from their current employer (for whatever reason).
With respect to other software developers who I know personally, any that I would be comfortable hiring are *already* employed, with good reason. Those software developers who I know personally that are unemployed I wouldn't allow to work on ANY project I was associated with even if they paid me for the privilege!
If H1-Bs are "Taking our jobs!", then *WHERE* in the hell are all the unemployed, competent, software developers this would create? Their absence is suspicious - they just don't seem to be out there.
Fox News?
Except it costs five times as much to build a fission power plant than to build enough wind turbines to produce the same amount of energy. Indeed, the wind turbines will only operate 30% of the time. But means the wind turbines cost 3 / 5 times as much as the fission plant. And that's precisely why everyone is building wind turbines and practically no one is building fission plants...
Except that the fission power industry is more mature and has more in place infrastructure than wind. Even at a slightly higher cost we could build more capacity in a shorter time by building fission reactors rather than wind turbines, simply because of the pre-existing infrastructure investment.
Over the last 25 years we've installed under 100 GW of fission, a period in which we installed 370 GW of wind,
Right, for a combined capacity of 470GW, which would be *higher* had we been building as many fission reactors as we could, instead of irrationally pissing our collective pants over nuclear FUD.
In the long term, renewables are the way to go, but short term? The quickest way to end our fossil fuel dependance is to go nuclear, it's the only way to be sure.
...more practical if they can be made to work, things like Fusion power.
Or, you know, we could just build more practical power plants that already work, things like Fission power.
Big and heavy are the two things which are very difficult and thus expensive when you want to throw them into space, even in LEO. The amount of energy required to lift this stuff into orbit will exceed what it can return as power.
...and completely ignoring the idea of building using materials already outside the gravity well, or development of alternative lift methods that are more efficient. Rockets are at best like 70% efficient for lifting loads into orbit (under ideal circumstances, in practice it's lower). You're saying it's *impossible* to *ever* do better? I won't deny it might be difficult to do better, but claiming it's impossible is short-sighted.
Big is irrelevant, heavy is the issue. If you think it will NEVER be possible to build a structure of the appropriate size using less material or lighter material, then we'll just have to disagree. Personally, I think you're ignoring the fact that we can build much larger structures in micro-gravity with much less material because they are under a lot less stress. Just look at how thin and light solar sails are, they cover huge areas with a tiny amount of material.
Physics dictate the size of this thing. Physics will dictate how much power it can transfer, how much it will loose and how much it will have to collect. Physics will dictate how much solar collection area you will need, engineering may be able to approach that someday. Physics will mandate how much energy it will take to get everything necessary into the proper locations.
I don't dispute any of this. I agree.
You will be able to engineer lighter structures, but not smaller ones.
At the risk of repeating myself, size is irrelevant in space. You have all the room you need. Between size and weight, the only relevant issue here is weight, and you've just agreed that we can likely engineer lighter structures.
There is a lower limit on the weight of this structure, regardless of the properties of the materials we can engineer.
Agreed, but neither you nor I are in any position to say what that lower limit is, or assert that that lower limit is absolutely too high to ever be practical.
You might be able to engineer cheaper ways of getting something into orbit, but you cannot change the minimum energy required by physics.
Obviously. I've never claimed you could change the energy requirements for a given mass, but like I've said already, there are ways around that. Like using material which is already up the well, using lighter materials or better construction that uses less material. Using better lift efficiencies, lighter or less material, or eliminating the need to lift stuff out of the well altogether could all go a long way to making it more practical. I'm not saying it IS possible, even with these improvements it might not be; but I AM saying that declaring it impossible now and forever is unwarranted.
Physics is your problem. It defines a system that is so massive that there is no way it ever gets to be cost effective to build...
No, physics is not the problem, it's just one of the constraints on the problem. You can't possibly *know* that the lower limit on mass is too massive to be practical. Unless you can predict the future, new developments in material science could change that in a heartbeat.
...because by my calculations, it will take more energy to create and operate this thing than you can ever hope to recover. That makes it uneconomical too.
Calculations which are based on the constraints of current materials, structural engineering techniques, lift efficiency and the necessity of lifting resources out of a gravity well. Change any one of those things and your calculations are no longer valid. You seem mighty confident that it's impossible to change ANY of them. Me, I'm not so much of an absolutist.
With
You are engaged in wishful thinking.
Maybe, but you keep repeatedly missing the point.
It will NEVER be economically possible to put structures together in orbit that are measured in kilometers,...
I disagree, this is nothing but speculation on your part.
...espically ones that will need to be aligned to tolerances in the micrometers. It's too expensive to get the materials into orbit that would be required to build the transmitting array and it would take too long to assemble and align an array for any useful amount of power to get transferred to the surface.
Every single one of these objections are engineering problems. Tolerances? Find better sync algorithms, better materials with less "give" in the relevant properties etc... Too expensive to get materials into orbit? Work on more efficient transport mechanisms, more efficient use of materials, or develop better/lighter materials to use, or use material from the moon, asteroids or comets etc... that you don't need to lift up a well. Assembly and alignment issues? Again, just a matter of better engineering, better assembly methods, better tools for more accurate alignment etc... ALL of your relevant objections are only obstacles to our CURRENT technology and can be addressed via innovation and engineering.
Saying these issues can NEVER be addressed is pure hubris.
You cannot make smaller arrays because of the physics involved and no amount of engineering or technology can change this.
So what? We don't need to make them smaller. The size of the arrays are only an obstacle because of current engineering constraints.
The costs are HUGE and the payoff is nowhere near enough to justify it, and that will never change.
Costs and payoffs change *all the time*! Saying these things are fixed and "that's that" is just plain silly. History is full of ideas that were once deemed "impossible" for reasons of costs and payoffs, yet became practical later with better methods and materials. Airplanes and the analytical engine; just to name two.
...will not work on an industrial scale at any reasonable distance for a price anybody can afford. Why? The structures required are HUGE, literally kilometers in size, both in space and on the ground and this size is driven by the physics.
"reasonable distance for a price anybody can afford"? You keep watering down your definition of practical. So it's only practical if you can have one today, in your garage? You know that we build structures of this magnitude already, right? Space telescopes, particle accelerators... etc
Building such structures, while conceivable and possible, is VERY expensive and VER"Y time consuming, especially in space. (Lots of money) X (Lots of time) = Never going to happen.
The building of these structures, in terms of materials and time, is precisely the engineering problem I was referring to, so this just confirms what I already said. Sure, it may be time consuming and expensive NOW, but reducing the material costs and construction time isn't a physics problem, it's entirely an engineering one. The physics are already proven.
Not practical NOW, no. But your statement was that this type of thing would NEVER be practical, and as far as I can see, all of your objections are simply engineering problems, the concept and theory is solid and has been proven in the lab and experimental implementations.
The only issue is in refinement of methods and equipment, which as I said, is just an engineering issue, so your NEVER modal qualifier is simply false.
Magnetic and electric fields though air/vacuum is another. Power transfer may be possible, but the amount of losses means it will never be practical unless you have HUGE amounts of power to waste.
Not true. Microwave power transfer with rectennas can have efficiencies up to 90% or so...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"...U.S. websites will lose US$21.8 billion in ad revenue this year due to ad blockers..."
It's funny how there's no way I could care less about this.
You don't go there for an education, you go to make "contacts".
Isn't that also true of prison?
Sure, if you want to meet contacts that can teach you "how to get caught".
That would be like if the only contacts you got from going to Harvard were serial entrepreneurial failures who are bankrupt.
The competent criminals you actually want for contacts don't get caught.
Harvard's a *legacy* school!
You don't go there for an education, you go to make "contacts".
It's basically just a papermill for rich kids to buy degrees, and you expect them to be educated? LOL - the whole reason they're buying a degree from a legacy school in the first place is so they don't have to do any work.
... yeah they should probably be encouraged into a non-armed position.
LOL "encouraged"
How about a tool to predict which officers are most likely to commit unjustified shootings of civilians?
Then we can fire them pre-emptively BEFORE they murder innocent people!
LOL - an even better tool for script kiddies than "SWATing".
They'll be "MinorityReporting" people in no time!
Sure. IE 5 through Whatever EOL of IE is had "conditional comments"...
...which, not being part of the standard, would not count as "pure HTML4", but nice try! :)
Just had to throw some snark back!
LOL, np. I firmly believe in "don't dish it out if you can't take it". Snark away!
... I thought you were saying to put this other bacterium in the water supply to kill off this one, which sounded a little insane.
Putting *enough* Mimivirus (which is a virus, not a bacteria) into the water supply to kill off ALL N. fowleri amoebas WOULD be insane. Mimivirus is already present to a certain level in the same environments as N. fowleri though, so it's already in the water supply, just hopefully not in enough quantities to infect people...
... if the chances of the brain eating amoeba was 1 in a million, but the chances of the pneumonia infecting you was 1 in 10?
You are missing the point completely. Like I said previously, you would only try this on people who are ALREADY SYMPTOMATIC. Once you've developed N. fowleri infection symptoms (e.g. Primary Amebic Meningoencephalitis (PAM)) what the chances were of you developing those symptoms to start with is pretty fucking irrelevant.
Once you are symptomatic, your chances of dying are pretty close to 100%. Whatever the fatality rate of pneumonia is, it certainly isn't 100%, and even if Mimivirus can actually cause Pneumonia, it isn't going to do so 100% of the time.
Let's say the death rate from contracting pneumonia is something insane like 50%, and the chance of contracting pneumonia from Mimivirus is *guaranteed* (100%). EVEN under those (way over estimated circumstances), if Mimivirus were effective at killing N. fowleri, you've upped your survivability from 0% to 50%.
Pneumonia on the other hand has a much higher death count.
Sure, but you'd only be trying this on people who are *already* symptomatic for N. Fowleri infection, at that point the base rate is irrelevant.
Yeah, pneumonia is nasty, but it isn't 100% fatal. Besides, the link between Mimivirus and pneumonia is only speculative, Mimivirus might not cause pneumonia at all.
...if you're going to be that smartass,...
How is it smartass to question the ability of people who can't discern the difference between markup/typesetting and a programming language?
Sure, my second question to those who failed the first has a certain amount of snark to it, but would you really want to hire someone who truly doesn't understand the difference?
...I will pull out iteration and conditionals in HTML*...
Well, now you are going to have to prove it. Just for clarity, I'll provide you some context, and the criteria I was using. This was back in the late '90s, early aughts, so it was before the advent or wide adoption of DHTML, AJAX, HTML 5 etc... The answer had to be pure HTML4: no javascript, no css, no plugins, no activeX etc...
If anyone had actually been able to write a for loop or an if branch with those criteria, I would have been impressed and hired them on the spot.
I await your submission.
According to this 2008 biomed paper: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1..., Naegleria fowleri is likely vulnerable to Mimivirus (possibly Mamavirus too?) infection.
Given that Naegleria fowleri is close to 100% fatal, why not try infecting the Naegleria fowleri infection with Mimivirus?
Mimivirus is only speciously associated with Pneumonia in humans, and Pneumonia has a much better survivability rate. Worst case scenario it does nothing and the patient dies (which was going to happen anyways), best case scenario the Mimivirus kills Naegleria fowleri and the patient survives with no pathology. Middle road scenario, the Mimivirus kills Naegleria fowleri, the patient survives but has Pneumonia.
Personally, I would choose having a bout of Pneumonia over having my brain eaten by an amoeba any day.