"Gotcha" questions are not effective at determining problem solving ability. Questions that have more than one means of approach are much more effective. If a question is superficially easy if you know the trick, but impossibly hard without it, then it doesn't offer any benefit to assessing how a person might resolve specification ambiguity, approach the problem's possible pitfalls, and ultimately resolve the issue. Examples of these types of questions include the "detect a loop in a linked list" (tortoise and hare algorithm), "swap two variables without using a third" (XOR or use pointer math), "three light bulbs in a room, three switches outside, you can only enter once" (two on, wait, one off, feel the off bulbs for the warm one).

Slashdot has a time travel machine, as evidenced by the way some posts seem to come from the distant past to reappear in the present. So let's use that and ask the people in 2014 what the elected candidate did to determine if it's worth having them.

Which is bogus, because at least here at Microsoft, those brain teaser questions haven't been used in many years, after it was determined they were ineffective and dumb.

The Size of Things

"Because the Ribbon consolidates the UI into one space, it pushes the document down in the window a bit--giving the illusion of there being less space than there really is."

People are notoriously bad about doing eyeball approximations of size. Our instincts produce results contrary to reality, because we are subjective, not objective observers. It's why you can serve a drink in a tall, skinny glass, and people will assume they are getting more liquid than the same amount served in a short, fat one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Block-chain_and_confirmations

There is no "genuine" versus "stolen". After the thief steals the coins (signs them away to his own hashes), the network would propogate that information and would not allow the original person to sign/sell the coins.

It truly is "The End Of Days"

Your response, was, I hope, "sorry, we can't make out details that small yet"

Most likely, Bing is acquiring clickthrough data from textbox input and pairing it with link click followthrough. That is, Bing watches what people type and what links they click after typing it. Did Google ever try other mechanisms to munge results, such as using an internal search page (i.e. one where it uses some proprietary engine to search, say, a forum) and see if Bing started reporting those results? If so, it would indicate that coming from Google had nothing to do with the mechanism of acquisition, and that it was strictly parsing URL or textbox entries combined with link clickthrough. Implying that Bing's response of "we use a lot of vectors" is the same as saying "we steal stuff from Google, so what" is trolltastic at best, and blatantly misleading at worst.

That was definitely a problem early on. From what I can tell, they fixed it. E.g. http://www.bing.com/search?q=enumdisplaysettings&form=OSDSRC now properly returns the MSDN doc, when it used to give a lot of garbage from other sites.

Are you thick? The first result on Bing for that very query is http://www.frigidaire.com/waterandairfilters

Yes, many people search like that. Rather than making users think like a computer, the search engines are being adapted to understand how humans ask questions. This is a good thing, as it removes a lot of the jargon constructs that have been necessary for so long. By doing so, it allows voice search and similar to work much more fluidly and naturally.

Of course you feel like you have a lot of energy. When you have to pee all the time I'm sure your leg is twitching back and forth like a hyperactive jack russell terrier.

Yes. For historical examples, check out the New Deal and its Supreme Court history.

Why not get 20 friends and get 50Mbps for 17.50 each month? In other words, convince your neighbors to go in with you...

I was putting it in context many could understand. Funny thing is that I was originally going to type "I could go to Germany and practice "mein Deutsch'" but I thought a vacation in the tropics might be more appealing to most.

Then again, this is /., and most here are probably like me - in danger of catching fire in direct sunlight.