You want a certification for a good career? Certified HVAC Technician.

Yeah? Which frequency? Which protocol?

The unfortunate things about these radio transponders is that they come in all shapes and sizes. Trying to tell them apart from a mobile phone or a wifi hotspot is not an easy task. Locating radio signals are great when they are incredibly powerful and transmitted from one location (e.g. Pirate Radio), but not so good if you're equipment is within the licensed ISM bands and behaving correctly.

Worse still you could be looking for something that looks no different to a mobile phone in a world where everyone has a mobile phone. You can buy the transmitter / receiver pair in pretty much any frequency combination. Being illegal is no barrier in this case evidently given the decision to fly at high altitude near an airport.

Well, it is possible for someone to do something we don't like because they disagree with us. It's possible to respect such a person in a way you can't respect someone who lets money trump his principles. There's literally nothing some people won't do for money.

Just because *some* or even *most* profit is reasonable, doesn't mean all profit is reasonable.

The term "profiteer" is used for people who put profit above a higher ethical claim; for example a citizen selling arms to an enemy during wartime. It's not that profit per se is unreasonable, but that the citizen has a higher duty of loyalty to his country than to his profits. Likewise people who profit by helping governments undermine civil liberties can reasonably be called "profiteers".

The issue isn't *that* we dislike them. It's *why* we dislike them that makes them profiteers.

Keep in mind that the guy was probably told that he was replacing you because you were incompetent and had a bad work attitude. That's what some of them are told, they're here because of the low technical skills and poor work ethic of American workers. So why should he listen to your opinion?

Another thing to consider is that your replacement may come from a culture which is not as egalitarian as yours, and at the moment your status was pretty low. In America a junior programmer fresh out of school can tell a senior engineer with twenty years experience he's full of shit, and that's something we admire. But in other cultures accepting this kind of behavior is seen as weakness. I've dealt with this first hand. I once had to take over a troubled programming team full of H1Bs (not my choice, we inherited the team) that had been shipping really bad code. It turned out to be full of terrific talent, only the lead programmer was incompetent.

So the banker molestation murder cults get away with their crimes. Not sure if a good or bad thing.

I bet if you had some quiet reflection and thought carefully about it, you could figure out whether or not child molestation & murder is a good or bad thing.

Unless you are somewhere down the sociopathy spectrum, in which case you might not.

Remember, you only need cameras covering where the "little passages" enter and exit. You don't need 100% coverage to cover 100% the people.

Well, there's that too. If there's an impoundment with houses on it some resident will have stocked it. But there's still no diversity; they're stocking it with the descendents of hatchery fish.

Meanwhile here in New England, the alewives' natural range, shad and alewives are so endangered it's illegal to take one except in a few larger rivers. The springtime herring run are largely gone, along with the massive influx of marine nutrients they brought to fresh waters.

One of the things that always mystified me growing up fishing here was the incredible uniformity of freshwater fish species across water bodies with very little geographic connection. New England is dotted with thousands of small ponds, and they all have more or less the same fish. Even tiny little ponds of a few acres with no major tributaries and only seasonal outlets will have bluegill, yellow perch, and probably a few black bass lurking somewhere and reportedly some pike or muskellenge. How did they get there? And why aren't fish like bluegill from different watersheds distinctive, the way the finches Darwin found in different Galapagos islands were different? Surely natural dispersion of these fish across the whole region would have taken thousands of years.

I was recently reading about the history of dams in the US, and got the answer. In the late 1800s inland fisheries across the country were collapsing because of dam building for powering mills, so the federal government set about restocking ponds and streams across the country. The scale must have been mind boggling, because you can find the same fish in tiny, isolated ponds that don't show up except on detailed topographical maps. Even the neighbors seem scarcely aware of these ponds, but at some point maybe a hundred years ago the federal government planted fish there.

Looked at one way it was an astonishingly successful effort. There's almost no body of water in New England larger than a persistent puddle where a competent angler will catch *nothing*. And there are ponds not ten miles from Boston I can be certain of catching a half dozen crappie in a day and one or two largemouth bass -- certainly not trophy size, but enough to put up a game fight. But I often wonder what was in these waters before we crashed and rebooted the fish populations.

My point is that you're trying to simply the complete identity into one document that can ultimately be easily forged.

What do you want to know about me?

My name and age? My passport and drivers licence show that.
My residential address? My drivers licence and council statements show that.
That I'm a valid owner of a property in that council? Any photo ID such as University ID card + council statement shows that.
My medicare status? That's a separate card and then any photo ID will verify that further.

Why distill everything down to one number when there's no need to?

And yet that is exactly how it happens.

While I agree in principle, I would consider the nature of a felony and its relevance to the job. For example I wouldn't hire someone convicted of embezzlement for a job where he has access to sensitive financial data, no matter how long ago that offense was. I would tend to overlook certain drug related charges because of the long history of overzealous prosecution of "drug offenses" in this country.

I'd also consider the amount of time since the offense, particularly for offenses committed by people when they were in their teens. Research shows that many peoples' brains don't develop impulse control until they are out of their teen years. At thirty they're almost literally different people than they were at 16. And I would strongly discount misdemeanors that occurred a long time ago.

But hiring someone with a criminal record, or not hiring someone because of that record -- that's not an easy decision, nor should it be. As a hiring manager you have a responsibility to society, certainly. But you have other responsibilities, to your employer, customers, and coworkers that you have to honor as well. You should try to make a decision that is as fair as possible to everyone affected, and sometimes the candidate may come up holding the short stick, which is too bad.

I don't think criminal record should be used as an automatic screen, that's just lazy. As a manager I'm paid *not* to be lazy, and to make good decisions, so that's what I should do.

So then wouldn't it be Cisco that is brazen?

I was in the supermarket just today and at the deli "grab and go" there were packages of cheese slices labelled "LOL American Cheese".

My immediate reaction was "I don't get it."

Not snobbish, just different. The idea of tolerating people who like different things seems to never have caught on.