It is like using references, I have learned that if a company asks for them, they are idiots. Nobody EVER calls them and if they do they are basically saying "I have no clue from interviewing how good this guy is, so I got to ask someone else". Stellar performance right there!
The solution is relatively simple, see job interviews as a two way process. They are interviewing you BUT you are ALSO interviewing them. And gosh darnit, you can reject THEM as an employer!?! Shocking ain't it.
When I read a site like clients from hell, (not linking because it has an annoying nag script) I can't help but feel that a lot of the time all the problems could have been avoided if the complainer had just said at the interview "you are an idiot, I am not going to work for you".
If you spend sometime in your field you should know the warning flags. If a client/employer for instance is looking for a lead developer, the existing code base is a pile of steaming shit such as you have only seen in every single job before where the existing lead had to finally admit he needed an extra hand (translation: needed to be taken outside and shot for the good of humanity). If they are looking for a replacement team for the software project, the existing code doesn't (exist that is, what is there is maybe some scripts that on some days, does something but nobody knows what). If they are considering a rewrite, the servers are on fire and the the sys admin has slaughtered the entire office and is sniping from the rooftop.
You get to regonize the signs after a while. Does the boss spent the entire interview bitching about what gone wrong before? Translation: He is to busy still raging and hasn't yet learned from the mistake which was HIS, for hiring the wrong people.
There is no handover period because the previous guy already left? Translation: Make a sentence with rats, ships, sinking. Question: Do you want to come on board? Consideration: At least the ship is rat free.
If the ship is on fire and they are haggling over budget with the fire-fighters, translation: they spend all their money on flammable lifeboats and have nothing left for you. Another form of this is if they talk about how much money already has been sunk into the project and/or whining about recovering investment. Fact of life: money sunk into a project that has failed is lost, deal with it. A projects worth is NOT measured by how much money has been lost on it.
And hey, you can ignore all of this and think YOU are going to be the perfect employee who can deal with idiots... and I will point to you and say "this guy is going to be on a rooftop someday, sniping at the police while chewing on someone's leg". Either that... or... you are one of them... got an MBA?
So you think that competition in the market is effective if the competition is totally useless and unused?
Competition in the market is about HEALTHY competition, strong rivals competing. Not one towering giant and a whimpering mouse. Google right now has an effective search monopoly NOT because it is only player but because its competition is feeble.
Are you also so delusional that you think a hobby garage turning out 3 roadsters per year is competition against say Ford? No. Volkswagen is competition against Ford (and car nuts, if they are the same company, I don't give a fuck).
Android is competition against iOS. WP is competition against neither. OSX is competition against Windows, ReactOS isn't.
Competition in the market is about forcing the companies to react and adapt to each other. A giant does not react or adapt to an ant. Neither does it step on it, it is just completely oblivious to it. That is NOT what competition is about. Or I am competing against Uwe Boll. I do the mile at least once a day. Those trips to the fridge add up and it might take me a couple of hours but hey, I am competing!
I always forget the url for downloading firefox. So I can then use firefox to download chrome. And from chrome opera. That I use because I got a note on "Opera Link" on how to setup lynx. From which I can read my gopher page on how to arrange the ethernet wires on my tongue to consume the raw data directly into my brain that runs DOS 1.0.
Ah! Well sit down youngster and let me tell you a tale of when dinosaurs ruled the earth, the likes of which you do not see today. Ancient Behemoths as AOL, Compuserve and Yahoo. They lived in an eco system so rich in investment that web companies could grow to companies of unusual size in the swamp of private equity. They existed by new rules, profit was bad, you had to make losses but not any losses, you had to make losses per trade but promise you would make it up in bulk! The new companies traded in paper shares, showering them around and using them to buy each other up and make even bigger companies. Golden times that were never going to end.
But the power of the old economy could not be denied. Investors ran out of money and started to demand profits and when none was to be found, companies went up for sale and sold for a fraction of their worth, if at all. Infrastructures build on Sun crashed while Intel powered desktop servers took over. Those that had grown rich were now food for leaner faster moving predators who feasted on the remains of the behemoths that came before. It was the greatest economic collapse the world had ever seen. And a billions totally failed to notice any real impact as if the sudden collapse of the future of thousands of web companies had no real effect whatsoever.
It was called the crash... and man has grown wiser since then, long gone are the days that a company that has never made a profit, nor makes a product for which there is a need, nor has a business plan to make a profit before the next ice age can go to the stock market and collect a billion in investment at a cost of half a billion in money it doesn't have. No sir. Not possible! Because the market is wise and all seeing.
The gold fetishist believe gold has value, no matter what. It doesn't. Examples are for instance the holocaust, people ended up selling small fortunes of gold just to survive or even just to eat. The end of time of dreamers who think that once the government collapses, their gold horde will be any safer then a bank account, forget that when Mad Max becomes real, gold has no value.
THIS is why Fallout uses bottle caps. NOT because of anything to do with bottle caps, just to show value is without meaning. People value whatever they value. And I got food and you don't I am not going to give you my food in exchange for your gold because that would leave me holding no food and only worthless gold.
VALUE is ALWAYS what someone ELSE is willing to give up in exchange for it. Take the value of a dollar bill. How much sex does it buy? It can vary from woman to woman and even from moment to moment and from buyer to buyer. Or for something slashdot readers are more familiar with, how about a softdrink from the exact same factory? Can vary from 35 cents to 2.50 with in a few hundred meters (chinese toko to convention hall).
Bitcoins trade is one person selling and another person buying. The more such traders happen, the more you get an average price. But I am going to bet that if I showed up and wanted to sell a BILLION bitcoins in one go, the average price would not apply. Same as if the US tried to sell all its gold at once.
THAT is how easy value can change. Very few things have any intrinisic value whatsoever. What is the value of water to someone living near a lake? The value of food to a farmer with a bountiful harvest? Want proof, read up on changing eating habbits. Like pigeons, peasant food, flying rats or fine dining?
The hardest thing to accept in life after death is that value is fleeting.
Your example works but there is a next level. NEW WORDS!
The Japanese have a way of dealing with new words. AN ENTIRE FUCKING NEW ALPHABET! Forget just learning Kanji (Chinese pictorgrams) Japanese students have two more alphabets to learn (Kana) hiragana and katakana, one for japanese stuff and the other for sound and foreign words. Oh and EITHER one of them is larger then the western alphabets even the really screwy ones with lots dots and slashes messing up perfectly fine letters.
Whooo!
And forget about different breeds of cats. How do you signal a list of cats? Two different icons combined? In language I only need to add an s to the word, with icons you just doubled the number of needed icons. How about extinct cat breeds? What is the icon for extinct? A dinosaur? Then what icon do I use for a dinosaur? A skeleton, then how do I signal a dead cat vs an extinct breed? You would need an infinite number of pictographs to express anything complex.
Oh wait, I GET IT, Flow charts. They are graphical... AND they tend to contain lots of text because there is just ONE database symbol so how do I make it clear one is the relational database and the other a key value store? With WORDS because the makers of flowchart programs knew LANGUAGE is more expressive and more versatile, so they created a dozen symbols and relied on TEXT to clarify them.
And it is not that you couldn't create a graphical interface for a programming language. But what about extensions? With a text library I can just add it to my text code and use it. With a graphical programming language any extension needs far more work, not just downloading a text file but an entire library with new pictographs and detailing how they can be used.
A new programming language is already hard enough to develop and get from idea to a usable product. With a text language, all the focus can be on the compiler, text editors exist very old ones can be used. But for a graphical programming tool, you first need to create a complete graphical tool before you can start using it. It is just far more work. Want me to proof it? Create a graphical config tool for for instance samba that supports EACH and EVERY option in full detail. Compare the amount of work needed for that vs sudo vim
That is the final problem... who is going to make it? Where is the market? You are looking at a tool that costs far more to develop then a conventional IDE, is less flexible, less up-to-date, less extensible for an audience that can't be bothered or isn't intelligent enough to handle text coding.
I can think of several myth buster episodes in which they build a remote controlled car.
This is REALLY nothing new.
As for using a tablet, you can buy toy helicopters to control from your iphone at any toystore.
Nothing about this is new or exciting. It is a slashvertisement and not a very good one.
If the NSA did have this control over the internet that you seem to think they have, how come you are discussing it?
Quoting JFK on honesty and openness in government. Maybe you should study some history.
Oooh, what a trustworthy source! Nobody rich is wasting their time on slashdot.
Now excuse me while I go back to my orgy with super models.
Farmers know this, every gone past a field of corn and seen sign declaring the corn not to be fit for human consumption? It is not because 1 person stealing corn does so much damage, but a 100 people? And not all of them will take just 1 corn or care about how they trample a dozen stalks to get the one they want.
In my youth if you were to late at the station to buy a ticket, you could buy one in the train, no problem all part of the service. Assholes like in this story ruined that because they would take a seat and then when checked would say they didn't have time to buy a ticket. Since you are not always checked you could often ride for free. So they changed the law, no more tickets sold by conductors (and fuck you if you are incapable of operating the machine) and a standard fine of 35 euro's no matter what. ALL because SOME assholes abused the system.
My 15kg foldable bike has 5kg of locks on it, because some people just can't keep their paws to themselves.
It is NOT about ONE guy stealing 5 cents of current, it is about the idea of taking something that doesn't belong to you.
Do you own a petrol car? Is there a lock on petrol cap? There didn't use to be one. Used to be it was just a ordinary cap anyone could open. Then assholes started to siphon gas wherever they could and locks became after market essentials and finally standard issue.
This kind of issue is nothing new, as said, farmers know it well, from corn to apples. 1 thief is not so bad, a thousand, and you got nothing left. If you cycle a lot, you will know that SOME people will put a tap out on hot days for passerby's to cool off and refill their water bottles. This usually lasts UNTIL an asshole comes by and totally abuses the situation by leaving a mess.
The person from the story is described as a habitual offender, he didn't just run out of power and decided to recharge his car without asking from a public socket, he does it as a matter of routine while he has no reason to assume it is okay. He is an asshole who takes and gives nothing.
If he walked into the office and made a single copy each day, would people claim that was okay? If he walked into the school to take a dump each day without asking, would that be acceptable?
And ten to one all the libertards defending this guy would shoot you in the face for daring to read a map by the light streaming out of their house.
And I think the guy was in the wrong. He can easily charge his car at home like everyone else. I just think this AC doesn't know what socialism and communism really means. It most certainly does NOT mean, grab whatever you can from public resources. Rather the opposite in fact.
You keep argueing your point even when a normal person would have realized by now he had none.
The socket was made available to VISITORS of the school to charge LAPTOPS. NOT for outsiders to charge their car.
THE VERY fact that you need a switch inside the house shows you how vile your world view is. If people just kept their paws of other peoples property you wouldn't need the switch. AND then, if someone's car ran down, saw your socket, they could charge their car, put a tenner in your mailbox with a thank you note and drive home.
Which is the better world to live in? Yours or mine? Yours were everything needs a lock or mine were you can trust people not to abuse everything?
So simple yet "TheCarp" just doesn't get it. Ten to one HE is an asshole to who takes everything he can get.
"Survey says..." -- Richard Dawson, weenie, on "Family Feud"
