I look at job descriptions from all over the world, and it's the same everywhere. For short-term contracting gigs, it usually makes sense. For a permanent employee, it doesn't. Smarter would be to simply describe the tasks of the position, and let the candidates figure out for themselves if they can hack it. Problem is, this basically means that HR can't even pretend to contribute anything meaningful to the process. Ergo, it won't happen.

these are the same police who claim that it is illegal for a citizen to make a private video recording of police doing their public job in a public place?

1) Some new naval warship on its shakedown cruise had to be towed back to San Diego because its Microsoft OS bluescreened.

2) When NASA's shuttle engines were being tested, two of them blew up on the test stand. Some programmer neglected to factor in the fact that a large butterfly valve takes time to close. He issued the command to start closing at the time it should have been completely closed, and boom!, no more engine.

"For the past 30 years every Republican president has increased the debt while every Democrat has decreased it."

Sounds good, but a closer look at the cited page shows that in the last 30 years there has only been one Democratic president, and we all know Clinton was just lucky to have presided over the superbubble. Furthermore, for six of his eight years both the House and Senate had Republican majorities. Remember, the President cannot spend a dime -- only Congress can do that.

Going back to the beginning of the table in 1945, the results are more mixed.

The other major deficiency is the huge list of bugs. Try working on anything non-trivial and you'll quickly come up with problems.

The only thing you have to know is that the manufacturers purposely make it difficult to refill their cartridges. This proves that their ink is simply way overpriced, and all the marketing hot air in the world will not explain away that fact.

I recently built a trivial database application using Base. I stumbled over more bugs than you can shake a stick at, especially with report builder. Despite the bugs, report builder is still better than the catatonic alternative. And no matter how I screw up my SQL, I always get the same, utterly unhelpful, error message. If OO were anywhere close to being done experienced people wouldn't have to redesign simple projects to work around bugs.