Some of the stupid interviewing criteria that my colleagues and me [sic] had to deal with boggles my mind.

Ahh, reminds me of the Angry Aussie and his response to pointless interview questions:

For instance, there was the putz I had to see this week who thought he was being really clever. It seems as though someone gave him the book of Microsoft interview questions and he was eager to show off his new "knowledge". This style of interviewing gives you abstract questions that have no relationship whatsoever to the work you'll be doing. Or to the real world.

Proponents say they're trying to see how creatively you can think. Normal humans say it's a waste of time.

For the random people that use Orkut like others use Facebook, it really is not a lot of time to figure out what to do with potentially gigabytes of information. That holds particularly true for anyone that is not technically savvy.

How long does it take to slide over to Google Takeout and download all of your data?

A few minutes? An hour?

When Goog crushed Wave, I downloaded all my stuff in a matter of minutes. Couldn't really do much with it, but it lowered my White Hot Rage down to Red.

1. 1. Rewrite your code
2. 2. Fix all the bugs you introduced that didn't exist in the original
3. 3. (and ongoing) Run into all the edge cases that were discovered and solved years ago in the original code.
4. 4. Spend tons of manhours and tie up your talent pool rewriting just to get where you are now instead of adding new features.
5. 5. Embrace your FAIL

"A 2.0 MW wind turbine would generate 6.12 GWh per year, assuming a 35% capacity factor."

Right in the fucking source paper. They don't even have that as an argument...

Unfortunately, it's a fairly standard business tactic.

Corp X has assets and debts. They sell the assets to Corp Y, which includes products, staff, equipment, etc. Corp X holds the debts. Wen they declare bankruptcy, there's no way to recover the debt, so it's gone.

Corp Y may be operating in the same office, with the same people at the same desks, doing the same jobs. The only real difference is that employee paychecks now say the new name, as does all new marketing materials and letterhead.

So what about the people owed money from Corp X? They get nothing. Or if they're lucky there's something left and they'll get pennies on the dollar.

Sometimes it's done for the right reasons, and they will work out deals with those owed. For examine (if I read the article right), 2600 is owed $100K. That may be broken up to $10K/mo over 10 months, or $1K/mo over 100 months. In the end, they get their money. Unfortunately when they already have high dollar events scheduled, it hurts.

Of course, because of ... Betteridge's law of headlines.

I guess I'm weird. I use text editors.

On the server(s) or dev boxes, I use vim for anything.

When I'm on a Windows desktop, I use UltraEdit. I don't use most of the extra functionality, but the brace matching lines are nice. I could almost do just as well with notepad.

I have to pay more attention to what I'm doing, but I end up writing better code than I see churned out by a lot of people with overly helpful IDEs.

A while back, I was thinking about how to to make an ultra-long range drone. Like something I could send off on a mission, and expect it to come back on it's own later on. One of the ideas, if it were battery powered, was to instruct it to land on or near power lines. That would have been a nightmare to figure out though.

To be stealthy, it would need to fly around 5K to 10K feet. It wouldn't be able to approach ground level, except in uninhabited areas. There's no way you'd get a map of all the high tension power lines in the world, and I don't know of any method of detecting them miles away. Well, other than Hollywood magic methods, which unfortunately don't translate well to the real world. :)

To land on power lines or on the connecting towers, it would have to hover, which is battery expensive. Automatically picking an arbitrary landing spot isn't exactly easy. Once you're parked close to the power lines (like on them, or on the towers) inductive loops could handle farming electricity without human intervention or needing to deploy charging mats.

In the end, I gave up on the idea. I don't really have a reason to make one. If I did, and it worked, I'd have all the lovely three-letter-agencies knocking on my door to have a chat over a nice cup of tea.

Maybe "nice" would be optional in their opinion, and cup of tea would be room temp water in an interrogation room. Either way.

The alternative I would like to see would be to forbid the company from doing business for a time equivalent of what the prison sentence would be.

Imagine if the US wasn't bought and paid for? If an oil company poisoned the gulf like what happened with the Deepwater Horizon (11 dead and massive damage to the fishing industry and the environment), the US government would simply pull its charter and be done with it: that company would cease to exist.

All the other corporations would thereafter straighten up and fly right, lest the same thing happen to them. (Or they would try to buy the government and defang it like it is now).

He must be a pretty shite lawyer. (Hopefully he isn't a criminal defense lawyer, because then he really IS a shite lawyer.)

FTFA:

What a dumb-bumble-fark. He deserves to burn for bragging/taunting the cops.

Rules for Talking to Cops

ONE

Don't talk to cops, except what you are legally required to say (you must ID yourself, to whatever extent your state's laws specify)

TWO

The only thing that should come out of your piehole from the time your are arrested (especialy during any "post-arrest 'let's get the suspect to incriminate himself' interview") are the words: "I wish to remain silent and I want a lawyer."

TREE

STFU until you get a lawyer

FOUR

Remember that Everything you say will be used to burn you. Cops can lie and get away with it, and if you lie to a cop, you're fried. Do not believe anything they say, and don't try to talk your way out of it because you'll lose.

NaN

Getting (and following) legal advice from random people on the internets is about the stupidest thing you could do.

Hello there! :)

A bus is a lot bigger than a car, with a lot less margin for error. I have a city bus that's converted to be a RV. All that extra space beside a car becomes pretty much non-existent. According to the FHWA, lanes are 9 to 12 feet wide. My bus is 8.5 feet wide, so on a narrow road, that gives me 3 inches on either side on a local road, along the 40 foot length of it.

The last drive I took it for a drive, I cruised down a 6 lane "local" road, with 9' lanes. It was like threading a needle with giant steel elephant, and people get stupid around large vehicles. Sure, it can stop on a dime, as long as that dime is the size of a Buick.

Bus passengers tend to be more annoying too. They tend to argue, just because they can.

The "don't talk to the driver" rule is mostly there so the driver can say "Go away, I'm driving." I've had plenty of bus drivers that like some idle conversation. I'm not asking how to get to some obscure place, or demand that they take the bus off-route to drop them off, so they like talking to me. :)

Passengers scream a lot more about perceived threats too. :) They may see something out of the corner of their eyes (or directly in their line of sight). The person on the other end of a phone call rarely sees your driving hazards.

Broadband rectifying antennas aren't anything new really, sure the background RF from towers, other sources is quite significant, and most experts would point out that you can't power a bluetooth chipset on a few microwatts of harvested power - but you could use it to charge a capacitor and periodically power the chipset. An update every 30 seconds instead of continuous monitoring of an item still works for me. The only problem with making the tag so small is you don't have much space to make an antenna for longer wavelengths.

It sounds like the formula for an urban legend.

Take a little bit of truth. Just enough to be believable. Build up that truth with whatever lies you can tie to it, get enough suckers to believe it, and you'll have the next Snopes entry.

I could build an inductive receiver. Given enough time, it could charge a small battery. Believers will see "enough time" as being minutes or hours. People analyzing it will see it's really centuries. The whole time, I never lied. I just let their misconceptions carry it along.