It's a bit silly to claim that "most of the world" does it that way, since, well, that's patently false, unless you'd (erroneously) consider the US to be most of the world.

But your other point is still valid; since the Nexus One is primarily offered in the US right now, most of the potential N1 buyers are likely from the US... and since the operators in the US almost universally cover support for the phones, it *is* reasonable to believe that most N1 owners would expect support for it to come from T-Mobile.

I don't really know anything about software modems, so I won't comment on that, but the release of documentation by AMD was hugely useful to the open source radeon driver.

Except that all of the major desktop video players now -- except nvidia -- have either open sourced their drivers or provided full (as far as we know) specifications for their hardware. Nvidia is the last holdout, and hasn't sued Intel or AMD for infringing on any of their patents.

So, maybe they are indeed violating someone else's patents, but considering that you yourself claim that "everyone" in the industry violates the others' patents, there's obviously an opportunity for cross-licensing, just like lots of other competing companies do.

If it's still true that nvidia is violating someone else's patents, I have little sympathy for them. In that case, they're essentially breaking the law, and hiding that fact.

If the majority of people in government are incompetent, then the government is incompetent.

Yes, because if someone was harassing me in real life to the point that I had to get a restraining order, the absolute first thing I'd think of is my Facebook account.

Somehow I think not.

The bottom line is that someone was ordered not to engage in any form of contact, but, instead of following that order, decided to do so anyway, knowing full well what they were doing. The medium of contact is irrelevant. Intent is king when considering protective order violations. While the defendant is expected to avoid contact with the restrained (e.g., don't go to their place of work to instigate contact), they're not required to go out of their way to make it difficult for the restrained to contact them.

Nowadays there's a privacy setting to determine who's allowed to poke you, but it probably still defaults to "Everyone" unless you explicitly change it.

In addition to what the other reply said, it also isn't certain that the stats post-doc was always making decisions based on the statistics. Just like anyone else, his decisions were undoubtedly influenced to some degree by emotions, sometimes not so much, sometimes strongly.

And even if you *are* going by the stats, there's always the human element, and the fact that you're playing against other people who have their own different strengths and faults. Unless everyone around the table is a computer, you can't expect to always play well based solely on the math.

Well, he still has Score:1 (30% underrated) so his message has been deemed at least as useful as a non-AC comment that hasn't received any moderation at all. Regardless, aside from the questionable nature of his assertion that you can "just do a $1MM project with a few minutes of explanation," I agree for the most part with the rest of what he says. You can think that's sad... and I can think you're wrong. Whatever, no skin off my back.

Of course they do. But that's why you ask them to describe some of the things they've done, in detail, and ask probing questions about why they did it, how they did certain things, and problems they had. If they can't, then maybe they're lying. If they can, then either they're telling the truth, or they're exceptional liars.

If their spare-time coding also includes contributions to open source, take notes: it should be pretty easy to check up on after the interview since those kinds of things are usually pretty public.

If that were the case, experience wouldn't mean squat during a software engineering interview. I've done a few interviews as the interviewer, and I wouldn't even consider an applicant who codes poorly, especially when there are so many people who are already more than competent. If they are just lacking experience, that's fine, if the position isn't too advanced. But if they're actually bad coders... no, sorry, but they're just going to be a burden. It's pretty tough to judge a person's ability to improve in a 45-60 minute interview.

While that's certainly applicable for some jobs, many employers may not find that so useful. I wouldn't say I've interviewed for tons of coding jobs, but I've never had anything approaching a "basic coding aptitude test." The interview questions were usually coding-related, and yes, I've written code on whiteboards during interviews, but most of them are more about critical thinking and problem solving than basic coding ability.

Yes, and people with children seem to always believe they know better, too.

Hey, it's your choice to have kids and spend all your free time interacting with them. If that works for you, more power to you.

But maybe that doesn't work for everyone? And maybe that's ok too?