Or to just to get more creative where and how they look for qualified candidates or how they advertise positions.

For example:
A company I work with has had exactly one other woman apply for an engineering position in the last 2 years I've been affiliated with the company. A few people have brought this up and said "there just aren't any women out there!"

I had been directly recruited by a friend, so I never saw the materials we use to recruit. I decided to take a look. A lot of things were mentioned in the ads and in the site's listing: there's a video game room! Team members often go out for drinks after work! We've done bowling nights! We work hard and we play hard!"

Zero mention of available day care. Zero mention of a culture that promotes "family first" (aka "getting home at a reasonable hour"). Zero mention of a soft policy of avoiding crunch time (release when it's ready, not based on an arbitrary date). Zero mention of the fact that most of the engineers were married with kids, and often brought their kids to work.

We changed the materials to more accurately portray us as a family-friendly workplace rather than a binge drinker's paradise. Lo and behold, we began getting resumes from qualified women, several of whom said that they'd seen our ads before but didn't even apply because they didn't think the place would be a fit.

Further: our recruiters would only go to meet-ups that were centered around our specific technologies/platforms, and those meet-ups were either overwhelmingly or exclusively attended by men. I suggested our recruiters seek out meet-ups for working women, women in science and engineering, etc. Shockingly, several very well qualified women were coming in to interview as a result.

Point I'm making here is that there are ways to get different kinds of people to be interested in your workplace that don't sacrifice quality. If you don't think there's a way to get more diverse candidates in the door without sacrificing quality, the problem is that you're not creative enough.

Guy I used to work with was active in a number of men's rights activist groups and was always bitching about how his ex-wife was given full custody of their kids during the divorce, how the system is rigged against men, and how women are crushing "good men" like him and all that. One day at work he LOST HIS FUCKING MIND because he was informed his wages would be garnished for not paying child support. "Why should I have to pay when she has the kids?"

Well, it turns out that his wife filed for divorce and full custody after:
- She found "erotic literature" on their shared computer that featured a father training his pre-teen daughters to have sex
- When she confronted him about it, he didn't deny that the stories were his, but in fact said that this was a "healthy outlet" for thoughts and urges he had
- He refused to go to therapy to talk about the fact that he needed a "healthy outlet" that featured him vicariously raping his kids

When he was going off he said the only thing he did wrong was admitting that he wrote the stories and that he should have lied instead so that "bitches" didn't twist his words around to make him look like he wanted to fuck his kids.

You posted an anecdote with - let's not be intellectually dishonest here - the goal of encouraging people to draw broader conclusions about an entire class of people (that the readers do not belong to) based on the actions of one irrational individual. And, judging by the fact that you got modded up as "insightful" it seems to have worked.

I posted my anecdote, but I'm quite willing to bet that those same readers are going to be unwilling to apply that same broad brush to a class of people that they do belong to.

What one should take away from these two anecdotes is that there exist some people who are, for lack of a more precise term, fucking morons. Sometimes they use flowery rhetoric about causes or their rights to dress up their stupidity or awfulness, but that shouldn't be taken as an excuse to dismiss the causes those people purport to advocate, especially just because the cause happens to be one that the reader doesn't particularly endorse.

It's really easy for people to lump together entire classes of people they don't belong to - and it's perfectly natural to do so! But the best people recognize that the world is more complex than that, and they fight their nature.

That it runs TF2 well isn't saying much. That wasn't very intense when it came out and it is very old. TF2 runs great on integrated Intel cards. Try a game that is a heavier hitter, and uses more modern API calls. Then you'll see issues.

Se what you are really saying is "A problem can be fixed by throwing enough hardware at it." Your GPU and CPU are unimaginably powerful compared to what was available in 2007. So of course it runs well, it could be running at 25% efficiency and still run well because your monitor's scan rate is the limiting factor.

However that's not so easy to do with new games that push the envelope. You can't just throw tons of hardware at them because they are already pushing the high end hardware that is out. So efficiency matters. If the driver is slow, you are going to have poor performance.

Further there is the issue of crashing. AMD drivers seem to have a tendency to 'asplode when you start throwing some of the new features at them. These features are there for a reason, they allow greater detail, more efficient rendering, new visuals, etc. If you can't support them, then that's an issue.

If you want a real test, fire up Metro Last Light Redux, see how that works.

"Oh that's an old version, we aren't going to patch the bug." Really? That's an acceptable response that something that's 3 years old is too old to patch? But somehow, taking 100 days to patch a product that's 5 years old (in 7's case) is too long? Much easier to deal with patch issues if you just declare you only support the latest greatest and require everyone to upgrade all the time, no matter the issues.

MS's response is particularly understandable given the complexity of doing regression testing on the wide variety of hardware, software, and patch sets the patch might need to be applied against. If they released it and it caused issues, well then people would cry even more about how shitty they were for not testing it.

I think you are right about the mud slinging/political office: What with Chrome books Google now wishes to directly attack MS. They want to make Windows look bad, and thus make their own product look good by comparison. This isn't motivated by being a good citizen, it is motivated by something else.

For that matter one can get all conspiracy theorist and say maybe they chose their reporting date knowing MS's patch cycle to try and create just such a situation.

If you are afraid that due to outsourcing and H1B you won't be able to find a job or you won't be able to find a job paying a fair wage, you either aren't very good at your job or you work in a commodity position where the value of "barely adequate" performance is not substantially different than the value of "really good" performance. Consider a career change, or consider trying to skill up.

This isn't to shit on people or anything - just a reality check. If you can be easily replaced AND don't have anything that would make you in-demand, the burden is on you to become more competitive (or find your own path), not economic protectionism.

Frankly, I'd be pretty disappointed in myself if I were in a position where despite all the advantages I've had in my live and all the opportunities that have been afforded me simply based on where I was born, didn't manage to perform well enough to be considered of more overall value to various employers than someone from a far less privileged background. It would mean I, personally, failed somewhere.

By "kept so busy at home" you mean "engaging in productive trade", right?

Because it certainly wouldn't make any sense to suggest that bombing them, for example, is "keeping them busy" in any materially useful sense, since we have overwhelming empirical data that bombing and any other form of military assault has the primary result of engendering resistance.

Furthermore, "at home" is Belgium for the people involved in this action, and "at home" was France for the blasphemophobes who murdered the blasphemers of Charlie Hebdo.

You are right that this is an asymmetric war, but you don't seem aware that that requires tactics very different from bombing or other military action in many cases. Limited military assaults can serve definite purposes, as the case of ISIS shows, but the real war won't be won on the battlefield any more than the war against the Soviets was won on the battlefield.

In fact, there not being a battlefield in any conventional sense was a requirement for winning against the Soviets. Even setting aside the problem of nuclear weapons, if we had met the Soviets on the battlefield we can say with near certainty that the population would have rallied 'round the commisars, and the Soviet Empire would have never fallen.

As such, our tactical response to Islamists should be primarily--but not exclusively--non-military. It should be economic, political, satirical, even poetical: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...

It took hundreds of years for Christians to let go of blasphemophobia. It may take as long for Muslims to let go of theirs. We should be in this for the long haul, and while we should be willing to kill and die now and then, if anyone suggests those should be the primary activities involved, they are simply expressing a profound ignorance of humans, and history, and warfare (both its costs and its effectiveness, which bellicose emotionalists often get wrong.)

So is it an example, or a joke?

If it's an example, what is it an example of?

If it's a joke, then it's in spectacularly poor taste.

"Ha ha some blasphemophobes have just murdered some blasphemers, let's talk about how funny it is to beat up people who insult your deeply held beliefs."

Blasphemophobia kills, and it's time we started calling it out and saying it is never appropriate to meet blasphemy with violence of any kind: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=...

To say otherwise is to be one of those people who claim, "Michael Brown was a bad kid so really, we shouldn't be too hard on the cop who shot him down on the street, because hey, the cop thought that black kid was like an unstoppable demon. Wouldn't you shoot an unarmed man under those circumstances?"

Likewise, "Hey, you'd punch someone out who insulted your mother, wouldn't you? So can't you understand just a little bit how someone could be so angry you insulted their religious beliefs that they'd plan and execute the murder of twelve people who had never done any physical harm to anyone?"

Same lame excuses. Same lame apologetics.

You implied your "SSL key signer" has your private key which is not the case as it would be royally stupid.

Aldrin is a hero, the hoaxer is a very annoying moron. While technically that shouldn't matter, justice should be truly blind, it isn't. Nobody wanted to find Aldrin guilty of any wrong doing, so any plausible explanation was taken to make sure he got off.

Yeah, they better teach about these techniques if you really think SSL works by handing out your private keys.

I am all for legalizing cannabis. I have no interest in legalising heroine, crack, meth, PCP, etc. I'd rather abusers spend time in jail than around me and mine. We have to draw a line somewhere, and crossing that line is how the black market makes money. Taking away that line altogether is akin to anarchy.

I'm talking about large pension plans. My employer (a university) has one of those. It is mandatory, they simply withhold part of your salary (and match it dollar for dollar) as a condition of your employment. If you work to retirement, it then pays out a defined benefit monthly, which is taxable. If you do not, you can roll it over to an IRA or other account, which can vary int terms of tax liability.

However while you work there, you don't report it, other than a check box that says you are participating in an employer retirement program. You have no access to the money, there's no provision for loans or anything, so it does not count as a gain of any sort. So even though you are having a sizable chunk invested on your behalf (12% of your salary matched so 24% total) it doesn't count as an investment that would need any schedule of reporting because you aren't actually investing it, just paying in to a defined benefit plan.

Ya it looks like a good choice as well. Either of them are cheaper and better than Turbotax :P.

What I mean is some places still offer defined benefit pensions. Those are investments, but they don't count as a normal investment does for tax purposes. You don't report on them or their value since you have no access to the money during your term of employment. So no need for a form for that.

Not what they should be doing, but the IRS doesn't seem to care much to go after people for it. I can see it too, given that usually you'd end up close to even. While the money you charge is income, you can deduct the space used, expenses, etc, etc. As such I doubt there is a lot of extra taxes to be had for people with roommates and so the IRS doesn't do much in the way of enforcement.