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Comment Re:The study was flawed (Score 5, Informative) 104

The study compared Neonicotinoids laced pollen to sugar water. Which means it was not a fair comparison. There needs to be a comparison between Neonicotinoids laced pollen and unlaced pollen.

No, the study compared neonicotinoid-laced sugar water with sugar water:

Individual foraging-age worker bumblebees or cohorts of 25 forager honeybees were housed in plastic boxes for 24 h and given access to two types of food tubes: one containing sucrose solution and one containing sucrose solution laced with a specific concentration of the[sic] IMD, TX, or CLO.

(If you follow the "bees prefer nectar laced with neonicotinoids" link in the /. article and then the "the insects tended to eat more of the contaminated food" link from the article you get to after following that link, you can read the paper without going through a paywall.)

So, no, it's not a comparison between neonicotinoid-laced pollen and pollen, but it's also not a comparison between (neonicotinoid-laced) pollen and sugar water.

Comment Re:Personally, I don't think he was talking to Goo (Score 1) 349

I would be pretty shocked if you are even remotely on the right track.

I did over 50 interviews of technical candidates while at Google, and 6 of them were phone screens.

One of them tried this on me, so it definitely happens. Two of them tried the "look things up on the Internet to answer the question" trick.

Personally, I would have had him drive the hour and a half from Boynton Beach to the Miami MarCom office, and interview from there. I don't recruit directly since my pre-Google/pre-Apple/Pre-IBM days, but if you are acting as a recruiter, one of the best gauges of a candidates personality is the front desk person's opinion of them. I can't see a recruiter passing on that information.

Shields should have gone up from the they-contact-you-because-you're-desirable-then-they-phone-screen moment. If they want you, they'll call you in, and if they *really* want you, they'll fly you to Mountain View to get a full team on your interview.

PS: I was 5 minutes late to exactly one of them because the bike I was riding to the building broke down. It would be interesting to hear an explanation of why the recruiter was not on the line with the person at the appointed time, and telling them of the schedule change and asking if it was OK with the candidate. For the on-site I was late for, the last interviewer stayed with the candidate until I got there. At a full 10 minutes of no-show I would have been substituted.

Comment Re:Comcast and Time Warner, a match made in . . . (Score 2) 112

I can't even get past the fact that the TWC - AOL merger was labeled the worst in the entire history of the US and then they went for a second indentical title with Comcast. Who the hell is running things at Time Warner?

Different people from the ones who are running things at Time Warner Cable, as Time Warner Cable was spun off from Time Warner in 2009. (And Time Warner has nothing to do with Time Magazine; that's now a product of Time Inc.)

Comment Re:Correctly incorrect units (Score 2) 172

If they used reasonable numbers of significant figures I wouldn't mind so much. Since the altitude is specified to three significant figures (FL350), how about 10.7 km? The Air New Zealand system only did metric, BTW.

A later flight (Air Canada) had the bilingual in-flight thingy giving U.S.-bastardized units in English, and metric units (with, as usual, too many significant figures) in French.

...laura

Comment Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score 1) 349

"our skills actually create value." But legal skills create money. Most people would choose money over value (would you like $100 in fiat currency or 40 loaves of bread?).

I might go for the 40 loaves of bread, if I could sell them for more than $100.

On the other hand, I might choose a Fiat 500 over either of them.

Comment Re:root = same process (Score 5, Informative) 130

Gatekeeper also isn't "all MacOS X security". There's separate malware detection, and in order to do much of anything the user has to enter their computer account password.

It's a minor part of OS X security, mostly designed to keep casual users from installing stuff outside the apple store.

Yes.

There's also Mandatory Access Controls (MAC Framework) in the kernel itself, and there's BSM secure auditing in the kernel itself, and there's discretionary access controls, such as standard UNIX permissions, and there's POSIX.1e draft (it was never ratified as a standard) ACLs, and then there's whatever malware detection or antivirus protection you've jammed into the kernel as a MAC module via a KEXT, and in the absence of any access controls whatsoever, it's default deny, and then there's code signing, and encrypted pages within executables.

They didn't bypass any of that, and they wouldn't really be able to, even if they were root, because you can't get the Mac port for the kernel virtual address space without jumping through a massive number of hoops (which is why jailbreaking phones is non-trivial, and everyone uses script kiddy tools to do it, instead of jailbreaking from scratch).

And yeah, it's pretty stupid that Gatekeeper or anything else would be running as root and thus be exploitable with the escalated privilege available at install time, since it'd be pretty easy to just have it run as a role-based account, and have the kernel's cooperation, after cryptographic verification of the developer keys at the kernel level. But that doesn't let you bypass "All OS X Security": getting root doesn't really get you nearly 1/10th of the security bypassed (less, if you've installed third party anti-malware KEXTs that refuse to be unloaded except in single user mode during boot as part of an uninstall script, and are therefore always active).

They clearly do not understand the concept of "security in depth".

Comment Personally, I don't think he was talking to Google (Score 5, Interesting) 349

Personally, I don't think he was talking to Google; at least not directly.

He got called by a recruiter, supposedly for Google, who set up a phone interview Looking for C/C++ and Java. Fine. There's an outside chance of Java, either as an Android App developer, or for some server back end crap at a company they purchased. It's unlikely, but it's possible (in 2011, they hired people to work at Google, and then groups decided to offer them, and then you got a choice of usually one of 3 groups... you didn't know what you'd be working on at interview time, and there was no such thing as "hiring for position" unless you were net.famous).

Then he didn't get sent a Google Docs link by the interviewer. You are *always* sent a Google Docs link by the interviewer, unless you are in a city/area where Google has a facility, then you are instead brought in to use the video conferencing at the Google location.

Then he got an interviewer who barely spoke English, and wouldn't take him off speakerphone. That never happens at Google.

The interviewer was 10 minutes late to the call.

Frankly, sir, IMHO, you got played.

You just got man-in-the-middled by an Indian or other foreign person who wanted a job at Google, and got you to ghost his or her phone interview for them, with the help of a "recruiter"/"interviewer" who had you on lousy speakerphone so that they could relay your answers directly via a cell phone to the person Google was actually talking to.

Yes, this happens.

No, savvy technical people generally don't fall for it, because they get an email from Google telling you the schedule, there's a Google Doc URL sent out with an @google.com address, and if you look at the email headers in the email of the schedule, you'll see that they are probably forged, assuming you got one at all.

Congratulations on being played, Mr. Robert Heath.

Comment Re:It's hard to credit the behavioural science cla (Score 1) 198

Which is probably why it's a good idea for the Feds to fund it instead.

Because if the feds fund it, and the research gets actual results we don't already know, Microsoft is going to run out and implement it and make the next version of Windows the same headache for themselves that XP has been turning out to be?

What does it matter *who* funds it, if no one implements anything based on the results (if any) of said research?

Scratch that... I guess it matters to currently unemployed behavioural scientists, although they are likely more concerned*that* it's funded, rather than *who* is funding it...

Comment Correctly incorrect units (Score 1) 172

I just got back from a vacation in Australia, and was annoyed that the in-flight display thingy insisted on displaying everything in "correct" units.

Showing the plane's altitude as 10,668 meters is all well and good, but is missing the point. Even a pilot from New Zealand (I was flying Air New Zealand) would have given the altitude as 35,000 feet. Flight level 350, strictly speaking, but few non-aviators would know what that meant.

Yes, I know they use metric altitudes and flight levels in Russia and China...

...laura

Comment Have to wonder if this has something to do with... (Score 1) 368

Have to wonder if this has something to do with the interposing https phased rollout by Comcast for their CloudFlare based CDN that they use for web acceleration to reduce their peering overhead. It was preventing me from getting to e.g. LinkedIn and Amazon.com for a couple of days, until they had the kinks worked out. I'm told that I was in one of the "early rollout areas".

Obviously, no one complaining about this gives ISP or other useful diagnostic information in their postings, so it's impossible to give them a good technical answer for their problems, since the problem statements are all lacking in technical information.

This may help; I'd suggest a rename, rather than a delete on the cache stuff, though - in case that's not it:

https://support.apple.com/en-u...

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