Alternatively, I have a team of 4 developers (including me) and our hr person is basically just a part time employee that processes payroll. I have neither the time or the aptitude to spend days trawling through LinkedIn or whatever you think I should be doing with my time instead of building my product. However I have a reasonable amount of cash and I'm willing to pay someone else to do the web trawling.

In an ideal world, absolutely. Certainly, most of the best candidates I've interviewed were people I've interviewed from hackernews. However, the worst CVs were also from there. In my experience, you want to give yourself the best openings to get the right candidate and that means recommendations, meet ups, hackernews and recruiters.

Any project that starts with hiring 17 people will probably never get delivered. A lot of these kind of postings, at least where I live (London), are for contract bodies at banks, which is generally well-paid but incredibly boring maintenance work, so take that or leave it

One of the problems with your theory that you should be able to build a large team from recommendations is this though. I have a team of 3 other people. They are the best people I have worked with over the last 3 or 4 years - that is why I brought them in. Who are they going to have worked with in that period that is outside of the same group? You need a way of bringing in new blood

That doesn't show you what you think it does.

Running a correlation on the numbers you gave (table 3) gives a correlation of -0.08 on gun ownership to total murders and -0.09 on gun ownerships to gun murders.

The first table (gun deaths) also includes suicides. This has an extremely high correlation with gun ownership (+0.69).

So no, gun violence is usually LOWER in areas with high gun ownership rates according to your own source. Please stop lying.

Did you make these statistics up? They are completely different from the ones listed on wikipedia above.

He's also at a university ranked ~200th in the world so he started with a lie right from the off.

Try being a cossack in the Soviet Union and then tell me what the difference is.

You realise, of course, that the Shah was the one that was put in power by the British and US agencies? The guy that did the modernising? The Iranian revolution was a counter to that by the local hardliners it wasn't engineered by the CIA.

This chart is thoroughly misleading, at least from my perspective. I live in the UK and my taxation is as follows:

Marginal Income Tax (includes National Insurance which is our Social Security) - 62%
Student Loan (which thankfully I have nearly paid off) - 10%
Sales tax - 20%

That means, assuming I spend 30% of my income on stuff I'm paying 78p in tax on every additional pound I earn.

That's well over twice the number suggested in the chart.

As a note, my US colleagues (who actually earn significantly more than me) pay less than half the effective tax rate that I do.

Only 3 screens? Awww http://i.imgur.com/slP7Eje.jpg

Since 1996 Australia's homicide rate has decreased by 39%. So far so good, maybe banning guns does work! However, since 1996 USA's homicide rate has decreased by 40%. That btw, is without banning guns, as I'm sure you're aware.

100 children die every year in the US from guns (your source) and there are 310 million guns in the US.

700 children die every year in the US from swimming pools (source: CDC) and there are less than 10 million pools in the US.

Clearly therefore, a swimming pool is 217 times or 21600% more dangerous than a gun! A swimming pool also has no real crime prevention use!

Demonstrably, we must ban swimming pools long before we even talk about banning guns. I hope you will write to your congressman immediately, and demand the immediate banning swimming pools. It's easy for them to do, swimming pools don't even have constitutional protection!

Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children?!?!!

His 2:1 is also not from Sussex University as he claimed (which is a reasonably reputable establishment) but from the University of brighton according to his own [a href=http://www.scorpioncomputerservices.com/Press%20Coverage/media3.gif]source[/a]. This is an ex-polytechnic - the equivalent of a community college in the US.

Its the difference between proper nouns and and improper nouns. The "the" indicates that your referring to a specific instance of a word that is not specific. It has nothing to do with the differing uses of Netherlands (where you are actually getting confused between the normal use of Holland and the Netherlands). Netherlands means low countries. The Netherlands is a specific use (the Kingdom of Netherlands). You don't say "the France" despite the existence of French Guiana do you?

Its not a hugely complicated grammatical construct, but it seems a little harsh to judge someones English, given that you, an English speaker natively, don't know the correct reasoning/application

That's not bad, I've seen worse, but I do this sort of thing professionally. You could streamline that down hugely just by working through it with a flow chart, maybe using references. Most of the vlookups are duplicated serveral times. Vlookups are also less efficient (and less useful) than match/offset combos. I bet right now I could break that down into four or five cells and have it running 100x faster. You guys should hire someone to do this professionally if this is the kind of thing that gets used for important calculations.

I'm not sure where this came from. Speaking as an oil trader, the spike was entirely the result of Boehner's speech offering a temporary debt increase. I do have several twitter feeds open to guage news sentiment, but the IDF's isnt one of them. Did the Israelis find a ton of oil i was otherwise unaware of?

50% tax is acceptable? OK lets run with that on the average income. Social security is 4.2%. State income tax is somewhere greater than 5% for the average income, depending on state. So right now, we are at a 60% tax merely on income. The average income is 36 thousand. That means you are taking home roughly $14400, on average. As a comparison, the poverty line is currently at a net income of 16k. So you have just have put the average American in poverty! Definitely mention that in your campaign speeches, I'd vote for you.

Perhaps you should think of the society in terms of a corporation: a company which raises prices past the point that its customers can pay will see itself bankrupt and broken in the very short term