This is just a fancy recruitment test

I don't think I've missed the point, as I'm saying the same thing - I just think it's a lousy way to do recruitment. Analogy time: Say you want to hire a sex worker. Here are two methods:

1. Go find one that looks reasonable, initiate a negotiation. If you can find a mutually agreeable rate, hire her, otherwise continue looking for another one.

2. Issue a "challenge" to all sex workers. Declare that every day for the next 30 days, every applicant must give you a free blow job. At the end of the 30 days you will declare a grand "winner", paying the best one $500.

The difference between this analogy and the programmer challenge is that no sex worker would fall for the latter scenario.

You're anthropomorphizing companies. Companies are owned and run by people, and can only perform actions that are driven by human decision makers - the morals, or lack of them, are human qualities by the human decision makers.

The taxi industry is an example of a capitalist economy? Lolz. They're the very epitome of corporatist protectionism.

I am sick of these "challenges" that effectively try get programmers to work for effectively well below market rates. As if we're like children, a "challenge" is supposed to make us set aside months or years of income to work on a really difficult problem that if we had to actually go out and do for a company in the job market, we'd be paid $100K/year or more. I think they probably attract young people who don't understand the value of their own time or skills, or who are more easily lured by childish notions like that it's a "challenge", or some of these types of "challenges" attract good programmers from poor countries who are desperate to become more recognized in the longer term - in that case they may at least get something useful out of it, but still I'd rather see these "challenges" pay at *least* closer to market rates for programming labor. As they say in prostitution and marriage, don't 'give away the goods for free'.

the real reason they'll die is because they can't get a foothold in the mobile market - Google doesn't allow Android devices to be bundled with another browser by default

Which is why Mozilla are trying to make Firefox OS.

Do they have much chance? Probably not, it's a long shot. But I say, worth a shot.

But Firefox was *born out of*, and partly a response to, a monopoly situation where one provider's browser had 95% market share. So I don't think Firefox is going to be killed by another monopoly provider reaching 95% market share - just go back to the sidelines, until Google's increasingly monopolistic practices piss off enough people that momentum develops behind promoting alternatives again.

Funnily enough for some things I find better porn results with Bing. But Google seems to deliver the best results for coding-related queries in general .. it's like a drug, I keep trying to switch to other search providers but end up migrating back to Google.

Mozilla likely don't have a choice in the matter: Once Firefox share sinks below a certain point where Google considers them "irrelevant", Google will drop their agreement like a hot potato anyway. You speak as if Google will just keep paying Mozilla Foundation forever. The purpose of Google paying Mozilla wasn't some noble gesture to help them, it was to deliver the trojan horse that would kill them in the form of the "Install Chrome Now" message that appears on search results delivered to Firefox.

Personally I don't know why everyone is so keen to embrace using products that spy on everything you do and collect profiles on you. I don't like living in a panopticon.

@" If you think hooking you up is cheaper than building an alternative plant" - Ugh, I meant, MORE EXPENSIVE, sorry.

"Hooking up" is the tiniest portion of the cost of a small solar setup such as a home - what's actually happening is the opposite, the home users effectively become a "power plant" and are personally subsidizing the 'power plant production costs' (to the utility's benefit), whereas previously the utility (or taxpayer) were paying for power plant construction cost. The alternative for the power company is not "not hooking you up" - it's "not hooking you up, and then building another huge coal/nuclear/whatever plant" - because in that latter case they're not getting that extra generation capacity, they have to create the capacity to meet the demand. If you think hooking you up is cheaper than building an alternative plant you're mad. Of course one way or another the costs eventually get foisted on the energy consumers.

Selling your product at market prices in order to try increase market share toward levels where economies of scale kick in enough to cover R&D and operational costs, is not "dumping", it's just normal business that basically every company that makes a product does.

If e.g. BMW makes a new model of car, the first sale of that car will be at a loss of hundreds of millions. It requires selling many cars to break even on a new model, and if they don't sell enough of that model in the end, the model is just a normal business failure (there are always going to be products that don't make money) - it doesn't mean BMW must try charge customers billions for each car - they can't, they have to sell cars at market rates.

It's the same for any old widget.

You must be new here. Bad summaries with garden path constructions are part of old slashdot tradition.

Downmodded for posting pure fact. Vested interests?

Mobile phones.

"By the end of 2014, it is forecast that there will be more than 635m mobile subscriptions in sub-Saharan Africa. This is predicted to rise, to about 930m by late 2019, when it is estimated that three in four mobile subscriptions will be internet inclusive. The growth is attributed to the rise of social media, content-rich apps and video content accessed from a new range of smartphones costing less than $50 (£30)" http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

Polygraphs are at best a cheap party trick. They shouldn't be used anywhere near anything to do with law enforcement or anything that has any influence over peoples lives.

The problem is not just the false positives - i.e. people lying, and beating the test - but false negatives - people who fail the test when telling the truth.

Polygraphs are an abomination and should be all destroyed and thrown in the trash.

If only you could print wealth.