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Biotech

Submission + - Choosing a primary care physician

Submitted by Harmonious Botch
Harmonious Botch writes: I'm switching medical plans, and need to choose a primary care physician. I figure that slashdotters switch jobs — and thus medical plans — more often than the average person, and I also assume that they understand the science behind the medicine better than the average person. So, I'm asking slashdot how to do it.

First, of course, I checked google for questions to ask the candidate, and got obvious ones like "how long in practice", and an amazingly large number of lame ones like "what hours is your office open" and "do you have parking". WTF?? There seems to be many copies of one industry standard set of questions out there, and that set of questions is nearly worthless — almost as if it were designed to conceal incompetence.

I need questions to ask a physician so I can determine if he really knows his stuff. I'm inclined to start with "do you believe in astrology" to weed out the scientifically illiterate, but even that allows a dishonest one to see through my intentions and lie.

( BTW, if anybody has personal experience with Blue Cross of California in northern LA, any particular pro or con recomendations would be appreciated. )

Thanks to all contributors.
Communications

Submission + - Why do people tolerate false advertising? (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
DA-MAN
DA-MAN writes: "Why is it that we, in the US, tolerate deliberate false advertising? ISP's advertise unlimited use or don't advertise limits, yet they get away with it. Mobile carriers claim to give unlimited mobile to mobile, never stating that they really mean mobile to mobile within the same network. Why is it that we allow companies to redefine "unlimited" and so forth?"
Spam

Submission + - What do you do when a botnet spams you to death? 1

Submitted by
micromuncher
micromuncher writes: "A month ago I was a happy IT geek. I host my own web site and email server (and have been for over 10 years), and I had been running MDaemon (v7) successfully for four years. A low percentage of spam reached my desktop, though admittedly its gone from a few a day a couple years ago to about twenty now, but then something bad happened. I had measures in place to rudely disconnect spammers; fail on no RDNS, fail on no MX records, and use several spam filters to weed out spam. But the trouble came, from what I can tell, when a non-existant email account got into a botnet — and from what I can tell — its huge. Even though my connections were throttled, I received so many requests, and something odd about the requests, it crashed my mail server. So I flipped on tarpitting and the like, and set my timeouts short, and throttle tight... and I still got crushed. All of the originating servers were passing through the spam filters. Most of them were passing through RBLs. I tried to find information on current spam outbreaks; and I didn't find much useful. I contacted my mail server vendor, and they suggested I fork out the money for an upgrade (that I did), that had the feature of a "bait account". But I'm still getting overloaded by spam (though I am not crashing as far as I can tell.) So my questions to the world; how the heck do you monitor spam outbreaks? What are the most effective measures for dealing with botnets (where all the senders seem legit)? And what the heck can you do to stick it to the foul scum who either advertise through this fraud, or facilitate it?"
Businesses

Submission + - Open source friendly employee agreement?

Submitted by bmarklein
bmarklein writes: I'm a startup founder & first-time CEO with an engineering background. I'm working with a law firm and they've given me their standard "Employee Proprietary Information and Inventions Agreement". Anyone who does work for the company will have to sign this. It's absolutely necessary to have an agreement like this to make it clear that the company has legal rights to the work performed by an employee, but the version I have, like every other one I've seen in the past, seems overreaching to me. It defines an "invention" as almost anything one might have created, and then lays claim to all inventions conceived while employed by the company.

I plan on looking for engineers who have made significant open source contributions. I'd like to make clear that they're free to continue working on open source projects. Has anyone seen language in an agreement like this that attempts to do this? I plan on asking my attorney but I suspect they may not have something on hand, so examples would be very helpful.
Software

Submission + - How to break into the software development field? 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: A relative recently graduated with a bachelors in comp-sci. After several months of emailing resumes for software development positions at the rate of several per day, he has yet to find a job. Ideally he'd like to be a Java developer, but would accept any position in the software development field. His problem is that he has no experience as a software developer, and it seems everyone wants a senior programmer and no one wants to hire an entry level programmer. He did co-op while in university, but it was a tech support position and employers seem to disregard it, if they're gonna hire you as a software developer they only care about software development experience. They also don't care that he's been using Java (and several other langs) for at least 4 years, they specifically demand industry experience — academic experience doesn't count to them.

If you recently found an entry level job with no experience, how did you do it? If you are a hiring manager or recruiter, what advice would you give to someone in his position? I'm at a loss of what to tell him, as he seems to be doing everything right but still can't find a job. I often hear that there's a shortage of programmers, so what's going on? If it makes any difference, he lives in Ontario, and is willing to move anywhere in the province (even Toronto if he really has to *shudder*).
Programming

Submission + - Programming exercises for learning new languages

Submitted by pinkfloydhomer
pinkfloydhomer writes: When learning a new programming language or library framework, I find that the most effective method is to work on a real project. The project shouldn't be too big or advanced of course, but it shouldn't be a toy project either.

I usually write a small game or something like that. But of course, that doesn't necessarily take me through the entire language or framework. I think several different kinds of projects would be needed for that. Maybe one focusing on graphics, one focusing on networking, one focusing on database access, etc.

So please give your suggestions for small-but-not-too-small projects that will be instructive to do to learn a new language or framework.
Businesses

Submission + - Dealing with recruiters and other opportunities?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I'm currently in an unstable situation. My job could disappear within the next 15 days or so due to downsizing. So I started looking for a new job. I got more than I asked for and the market seems to be really good at the moment. I'm currently working with one recruiting firm even though I think recruiters can be jackals sometimes. One of the opportunities I interviewed with from the recruiter looks like they're going to bite. I also have another opportunity that also could come through as well but it's one that I found and it could possibly be better. However I won't find out for another two weeks about that opportunity. The recruiter is insisting that I drop all other opportunities if the company he's representing wants to hire me. I for one would like to keep it to see what kind of deal I would get. If I accept the job from the recruiter, give my two week notification and within that two week period I'm given a better offer from the other job that I found. Will I be forced to keep the recruiters job? When do recruiters get paid their fee? Will I be liable in any legal way for the recruiter losing his payday? How do you deal with recruiters who insist that you drop all other opportunities? How would you deal with a situation where you were offered a better deal for a job that wasn't from the recruiter?
Linux Business

Submission + - Is it Time for a Patent War?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With the state of current patent laws, and Microsoft's refusal to disclose which patents it views linux as violating, is it time for the lawyers in both camps to suite up? Linux has some rather hefty portfolios (ibm, sony, redhat) behind it, and it's likely the fallout would benefit open source. Regardless of which side wins a large amount of patents would be ruled invalid, and it is likely that a re-evaluaton of US patient law would be triggered. What does the Slashdot community think of a legal showdown? Isn't this why groups like the OpenInventionNetwork were formed?
Censorship

Submission + - Was this arrest video edited? 1

Submitted by RCulpepper
RCulpepper writes: This video is YouTube's most-viewed for the week. It shows a Hot Springs, Arkansas police officer arresting six teenagers for skateboarding, with a degree of force that appears excessive for the crime committed (the officer, among other things, puts a 16 year old girl in a headlock). The uncut record of the incident is split into two videos here and here. The city paper is circling the wagons and holding out the possibility that these videos have themselves been edited interstitially and that the girl had jumped on the police officer's back before he put her in a headlock. This seems implausible to me, but I'm not an expert. Unless the protectors of the town's image accept that the video is a true record, the officer's likely to get off scot free. What do you think, Slashdot?
Movies

Submission + - Has America lost it's Geekyness?

Submitted by gurps_npc
gurps_npc writes: Today, the Harry Potter movie premiered. But I can't see it yet, because I don't live in Japan. As you can tell in this Reuters article, it won't show up in America for two more weeks. The same thing happened with the Transformer movie.

Has America lost touch with it's geekyness? Why didn't these movies open in LA, or NYC first?

Is this just one more sign that America has 'jumped the shark', forgoing the geeky science for the 'cool' religion (or worse, for nothing at all?) It was not even India. I could see premiering in India, it is a larger country, with a strong movie culture, that speaks English pretty well. But why are American movies Premiering in Japan?
Programming

Submission + - What is an "average" user?

Submitted by
rueger
rueger writes: "I'm working with a medium sized non-profit with several hundred members. We make extensive use of web resources and discussion lists. Our challenge is figuring out what level of support an "average" user needs. We like to to package help and support in ways that a actually teach end users to be self sufficient, but are struggling to decide how far that goes.

We're trying to establish a minimum skills and knowledge level that it is assumed that end users will have. Some are obvious — knowing how to surf the web in a browser and click on links. Knowing how to write and reply to e-mail. Word and Excel.

What we find though is that some things which we assume are widely known — like using CTRL-click to choose multiple items in a list — are a mystery to many users. As well, there are some people who for whatever reason just can't understand written instructions. And others who simply freeze when presented with a screen full of things that they have never seen before.

Right now we're bouncing between beginner level detail for the truly unskilled, and complaints from more experienced users that the instructions are "too long." In extreme cases we wind up phoning people and walking them though how to use our web based discussion lists. (Which admittedly are using a software package that sucks.)

So my question is: what are the minimum skills that are assumed for an "average" end user?"
Software

Journal Journal: What makes an open source project thrive? 3

Journal by Zarf

Why, for example, is MySQL a big business now and not PostgreSQL? What makes on project succeed where another starves out? What makes Ubuntu the new wonder kind and Gentoo a fading star? What happened to RedHat and the spot light? Why does one project capture our attention and another fade into obscurity? Is it only technical superiority? Is it all about marketing? Is it politics? Is it community?

I don't know, I'm asking.
Businesses

Submission + - Royalties for embedded Linux based products

Submitted by demiurg
demiurg writes: Is it technically possible to collect royalties for Linux based embedded product ? I'm not talking about Microsoft/Novell/SCO/etc, the company in question does not claim to have any patents on Linux code — they just created an embedded product based on Linux and are selling it for a fixed price + royalties. I believe that while it may be perfectly legal, it simply won't work because after the first copy is sold, anybody will be free to redistribute it anyway they want, with or without paying royalties to that company. Is that correct ? Any links to relevant discussions, etc ?
Portables

Submission + - Are laptop batteries the next "printer ink"

Submitted by Quixote
Quixote writes: Sometime back I bought a Dell Inspiron laptop because Dell was offering a very good deal on it. A few weeks after the warranty expired, the battery suddenly died. It was as if the battery was non-existent: the laptop would shutdown if unplugged even if the battery had been in the laptop the whole time. When plugged in, the battery charging light would keep flashing. This seemed quite puzzling, since just days before this, the battery used to give me a good 2 hours or so of use.

Searching around on the web to see if the flashing lights meant anything, I came across this page. It seems like lots of people have been reporting the same symptoms: just after the warranty expires, the battery mysteriously "dies". Even the Dell forums are replete with posts from unhappy users.

The solution from Dell is: buy a new battery. But they aren't cheap: a Dell one runs you about $100.

I know I should have known better than buying a Dell (cue the "Dude!" jokes). But this begs a bigger question: is this legal (it certainly doesn't seem ethical)? How many of these (working) batteries end up in the landfill? Have laptop batteries become the next "printer ink", forcing us to keep buying new ones?

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