It would not make it impossible. It merely would make it about as risky as attempting to cross an ocean in the 1600s. A risk that was acceptable back then and should be acceptable to any people that actually want to get somewhere today.

Brain teasers are not good hiring criteria. However, when you encounter them in a job interview, that does not mean they (or your answer) are meant as such criteria. Good simple criteria for hiring people simply do not exist; people aren't themselves during job interview, they have probably prepared it and thereby skew the outcome.

Therefore everything that's said and done during a job interview, whether it is a discussion about your previous projects, some brain teasers or talking through some code the applicant wrote (or did not write:)), is irrelevant. It's all just bullshit to get the conversation going. Once this conversation has taken long enough for the potential employer to get a good gut-feeling about the applicant, the interview is done.

While some facts may be checked beforehand (references, education etc.), there's really not much more to go on for the employer than that gut-feeling. When brain teasers help to develop that gut-feeling, they can be a great tool for judging applicants.

However, when hiring people, I never use brain teasers. What I do is let them discuss a piece of code. I don't care whether they wrote it or not (or whether it is crap code I wrote myself:-)), I don't even care if it is good code or not and I don't care in what language it is. What I do care about is what the applicant has to tell about it. What would they change, what do they like or dislike, why did they choose this piece of code, which decisions do they _not_ understand etc. etc.

While hiring new people is always a gamble, simply discussing a piece of code engineer to engineer is probably the closest you can get to objectively judging an applicant.

Bullshit. Europe has the exact opposite: a law that makes laws that make SIM locks illegal illegal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock#Belgium

What projections?

All we have is the IPCC claiming "if these things, about which we are certain enough, happen, the climate will change about this fast." However, this does not include the vast amount of things they were not certain enough about to take into account in their official reports. IPCC gives us the lower bound based on things everybody agrees about. We should expect the climate to change much faster than this very safe lower bound and that's exactly what is happening with this glacier, with the arctic ice cover and with methane leaking out of permafrost.

I read only books by Michel Houellebecq. I think his view on the world matches that of the average /. reader perfectly.

What is the wavelength of this laser? And were do I buy glasses? Thanks.

Catholics? Really? Damn. Not too long ago, those hypocrites said the pagan christmas tree should not be in a christian home. The vatican has not put up a christmas tree until 1982. And now they are using it as a "weapon" and half the world considers the christmas tree to be a christian symbol. It Is Not! :P

That's what I'd say if I'd led the world to believe I brought back lots of rocks from the moon while they were in fact little moonturtles that simply escaped from my lab.

There are two ways in which a user can "escape" from your application, namely through the windowmanager and through keyboards shortcuts handled by X or the operating system. Since everybody can choose their own windowmanager, the only solution is to replace it with your application which will then run fullscreen. Exiting the application should logout the user in order to revive their own windowmanager. Many windowmanagers have a --replace option; you should mimic that.

The other escape is VT switching using the CTRL+ALT+Fx keys. This thread provides some startiong points on how to achieve that:

http://old.nabble.com/How-to-disable-ctrl-alt-Fn--td14994350.html

Hope that helps. You'll never get it totally secure as long as the users are using their own accounts; as long as they can run other processes than yours, they can do whatever they want.

EmpeLOL;]