So, how little power are we talking? With the flushless toilets I see more of, I wondered what sort of power could be generated from the 98.6F urine against the porcelain and concrete wall behind it (or incoming water lines for sink/flushables). Figured there was some cistern below with a boyant liquid topper that could sit for a while and give heat. Gives a new meaning to 'trickle charge'.

I always thought it was Taxachusetts (Homer taught me that)

The first half of comments were all about personality, socializing, and tricks. Above all you need to be trustworthy. If someone asks you about X and you have a rough idea, tell them you think zzz, but you would need to look into it since it has been a while or you aren't sure or whatever. Make sure you DO look into it and follow up, especially if you find out you were wrong. If I hear you say something in a factual tone, I need to trust it as if I had done the validation myself or it is useless. Did you run tests, validate your numbers with a good scientific method, etc? If you are repeating something you read on a blog, don't repeat it as fact until you are sure of it. One slip up where your facts get iffy and I suddenly won't trust anything you say for a long time and will re-validate myself until you start telling me your facts and your methods in the same breath.

Yeah, just like no one understands that the candy button in the Windows7 taskbar is the 'Start' button without it being labelled 'Start'. Oh wait... I agree that it was really confusing, but I think it was also an understandable mistake -- I'm surprised it didn't show up in usability testing but maybe it was just a missing task (or the people in the usability study were trying to impress)

I'm pretty overweight and while I try to exercise we're only talking about 30min, 3 times a week if I'm lucky. I am in no way 'physically fit' and my BMI blows. I still hit 55 bpm every time I give blood (which is about every 60 days or however frequently it comes up for my next give), regardless of my blood pressure (which does go up when I don't exercise for a long time). tying heart rate to how healthy I am is bunk.

The numbers they put in the article seem like bullshit. Elementary school in Taiwan for my wife was 8-5 (1hr break for lunch). In high school (inc. junior high) you had to be in for quizzes by 7:20 and from 5-5:30 there were often extra review sessions or quizzes. Then kids usually go to 'cram school' (basically tutoring, but it is a huge business there and once everyone is doing it, it becomes less optional if you want to do well in school) from 6-8 or 6-8:30. So, the article says they have more days in school per year, and from my wife's personal experience she was in official school from 7:20-5:30 (which is more than here) and then in cram school until 7 or 8... I think it is a joke they try to make the argument that our kids are in school longer than asian countries and try to call out Taiwan as one of those.

That weird line+dot isn't just a visualization. Get your mouse close to it to see some relevant info pulled from the page at that location.

Isn't that "beauty lies in the cockles of the beholder" or "beauty lies to the beholder to escape its paralyzing glare"? Oh, eyes of the beholder, that's it.

You don't have to elevate for a self-only install provided the developer made the installer correctly. As long as you aren't writing to common areas like programFiles, you are free to install to the user's profile folders without requiring admin elevation.

That doesn't really consider that Microsoft is still hiring in some areas. I'd imagine the net 'loss' would be closer to 2-3k

good for you. I'm incredibly stupid I guess, and yet got a job directly out of college (when all my classmates couldn't get them, or were getting them yanked after being 'hired' because of economy problems at that time). Job fairs matter - meet people in person.

You need to dump those frozen assets immediately and get some more liquidity into your glass! If you look closely, you'll see those assets are almost under water as-is, so now is a good time for you to cash them in until the financial markets thaw.

Man, you have some piss-poor performance metrics, or you have an office of superstars where 'bottom 10%' really should be meaningless. Are you measuring lines of code or something horrible like that? All the people I've met in my various jobs that were rated in the bottom 10% always got there by requiring constant hand holding, failing to meet goals they themselves set, failing to learn or grow, or failing in any number of other ways. Not everyone in the bottom 10% is some magical coder that just "doesn't fit into boxy corporate values".

Yes, sometimes low performers add value, like doing some repetative crap work that you haven't automated yet. Firing them does put a strain on you to pick up whatever they actually were getting done. That doesn't mean you can't absorb their work, or automate them out of existence now that you have more of an incentive to do so. If you are firing too many people and can't absorb the X% of work they were doing, then of course you'll have problems. Yes, sometimes low performers are actually essential to the process and your performance metrics are way off. No, that doesn't meant that "Engineers with the lowest rated performance usually get that rating because they are thorough, methodical and diligent"

So? I pay for my LaunchCast service through Yahoo which has over 13000 of my ratings on songs/artists/albums now. I got an email in December saying they sold off their radio station, would no longer offer customized stations, and were shuttering it as of Feb 09. My three mails to their support (which they closed down before the announcement) asking for a simple dump of my data was met with form-letter replies about how lucky I am that they sold to a bigger company for 'my benefit' and how I'll still have all those great pre-set stations. LaunchCast was the only thing I've used and liked out of Yahoo -- teaches me to give them a chance. Now I hope they wither and die (yes, I already scraped their website for my ratings, but their poor site reliability meant I needed a huge number of delays and retries to do it)