Probably gross stupidity. Could be people tried to swallow the 9V battery because it was tingly and it got lodged in their throat, or maybe they didn't understand the concept of a 9V battery and instead tested a 9mm handgun with their tongue. All things that have 9 in the name are the same, right? =)

Gun nuts can be scientists too. Or scientists are so myopic that they didn't know that was already a word. Could go either way, but it's cool to see new things like this still being discovered.

Why haven't we heard about this from the Department of Homeland Security? What are they hiding?

It's just a matter of time before al queda gets its hand on this methane bomb. $60 trillion is just the kind of impact they'd like to unleash on us heathens and infidels.

Companies that hire Infosys do it for empire building. What better way to increase costs and headcount, while reducing productivity and effectiveness? Why have 5 people making $80-120k when you can have 50 making $30-40k (with a substantial overhead paid to Infosys), doing 10-25% of the work?

Failing to deliver justifies increased budgets next year. It's retarded and expensive, but empire building is very common in large organizations.

There are several hundred components and solder connections on any piece of hardware, any one of which could cause intermittent problems. The testing can be done as part of the assembly process, but that doesn't mean there are people in the factory who have the background and time to troubleshoot problems with any particular product.

Most things today are designed to be field replaceable units - the whole thing gets replaced if it's not working. A $10k product may have hardware that costs $50, so it's easy to replace the faulty unit and not worry about diagnosis or repair.

Replying to undo errant mod.

Anyone know of cases where this happens?

If the nail is made of copper, insulated, run through the wall and connected to the external antenna port on the wireless device?

Yet less-technical-admins are the inevitable result of outsourcing, so there's a lot of them out there.

Version control for system configuration is a great tool for figuring out what has changed over time. Teaching less technical people how to use basic svn commands is easy. 10-20 minutes of training and a one page doc of the 4 commands they'll ever use is all it takes.

Anything that I didn't document on the cheat sheet is my responsibility. Matching the skill set to the task has provided a lot of benefits over the years, yet I've never had to deal with a corrupted or messy repository.

Even easier - instead of washing hands or using alcohol based sanitizers constantly, causing the skin to dry out, crack and make the doctor/nurse more susceptible, make sure they wear new gloves with each patient. Switching gloves takes no more time than washing hands, and if there's enough different colors all over the place, it would be pretty obvious if one doctor saw 5 patients wearing blue, blue, blue blue and blue gloves. This also has the benefit that it's really easy to tie proximity card tracking with image recognition for color.

Being a good programmer is a matter of being a good fit for the role you're performing. If you have expertise in other areas and can use programming to apply that knowledge in a way that the computer can do the work that people do now, you'll never run out of automation work. Look around you at things people do by passing around spreadsheets or pieces of paper. Can you write tools to make that data flow easier?

I'm don't like telemarketing, spam, junk mail, etc. However, several years ago I got a job where I helped develop a team to implement a data warehouse for direct mail marketing. Knowing some of the traits of these scum up front helped me understand the business needs of the marketing people. I also learned a few things on how to get suppressed from such marketing as well as ways to poison data collected for such a purpose. The people I was working for saw the business value in not marketing to people who don't want the product - a viewpoint I could completely agree with. Just because you don't like something, doesn't mean you can't help someone do that thing in a more responsible and less annoying manner.

When I interview programmers, how they analyze and solve problems is far more likely to get them hired than what tools they have experience in. If they can solve a problem in their favorite language easily, I don't mind if they don't have as much experience as I'd like in the language we're using for a particular project.

It generates noise that could be interpreted as a radio signal. The whole text of that and the following entry (both related to jamming):

5 – Jamming of and confusing of electronic communication using the ordinary water-lifting
dynamo fitted with a 30-meter copper pole.

6 – Jamming of and confusing of electronic communication using old equipment and
keeping them 24-hour running because of their strong frequencies and it is possible using
simple ideas of deception of equipment to attract the electronic waves devices similar to
that used by the Yugoslav army when they used the microwave (oven) in attracting and
confusing the NATO missiles fitted with electromagnetic searching devices.

This seems like a technical solution to a non-technical problem. Why not just pay people to hunt these guys down? Set high fines for illegal logging and use some of that money to pay rewards. That would provide small rewards to people who turn in the sustenance level loggers, and big rewards for large operations. A few reports of people getting $50k for reporting a big logging operation would create a lot of interest in stopping these people. Statistically, which approach is more likely to generate useful reports of illegal logging?

Looks Asian? That's a tan, which is what you get when you do nothing but lay in the sun.

Look at the with rolls of fat - he's clearly an American. KFC missed an obvious product placement opportunity when that movie was made.

When I'm hiring for positions that are paying high salaries, I want to know the person is just as good (or better) in front of a computer as they are at interviewing and sounding smart. A simple programming exercise can confirm that the person is good with computers, not just as BS'ing their way through interviews.

It's disappointing how many applicants will fail such a simple demonstration of their claimed skills. Likewise, if someone thinks a short demonstration is beneath them, I don't want to work with them. Every job has some crap that just needs to be done, even if its a waste of everyone's time. If they haven't learned the "do it and move on" philosophy, they're going to be hard to work with. I've worked with people who will spend days arguing against doing 20 minutes of work - I'm definitely not going to hire people like that.

The programming exercise can be useful when there's many ways to solve the problem. I specifically use one that, depending on the person's approach, could run in linear or exponential time based on the number of input records. In either case, I know that they gravitate towards efficient solutions or can have a followup discussion on what they would do differently in input data size were larger and execution time were more critical. In either case, it tells me something useful about the candidate and shows how comfortable they are in front of a computer. It's amazing how many people will apply for senior positions who act like the computer is an evil and frightening black box.