It's not syntactically wrong, it's semantically wrong. "peaked" implies that FTC's interest has reached a maximum, and is now declining. "piqued" means FTC's interest has just started. The author clearly meant #2.

The only thing worse than people being illiterate morons is people making up ridiculous excuses for illiteracy.

With all the corrupt and inhumane shit that goes on in the world why do you people attack science based public health measures that have been in use for over half a century and clearly shown to work as advertised? What's the fucking point of protesting one of the few policies that governments get right on a daily basis?

So, you'll be advertising for those Mexicans and Guatemalans whose get up and go has got them to get up and go ... to Canada.

This is government we're talking about here. It's a kickback to the paper, printer, and scanner companies who contributed so much to some campaigns during the last election cycle!

Ah, the Lumber Cartel (There Is No Lumber Cartel)!

unmarked vans inside which poorly trained "agents" with GEDs fiddle with the controls of secret portable xray scanners.

I've no idea what a GED is, nor why you would fiddle with one. "GE Deathrays"?

You really haven't thought this through, have you? Electromagnetic radiation travels in straight lines (unless you've got a magnetic, electric, or gravitational field so strong that it would rip the iron atoms out of your haemoglobin), so your putative "secret portable X-ray scanner would need to take the form of a doorway, with source on one side and a detector on the other side. Yes, you could disguise such as, say, a doorway ; or hide it in a structure which poses as scaffolding that is part of building work. But that rather mitigates against the description of "secret" and "portable".

Back-scatter X-ray ... well, it's not impossible (I've done a little cathodoluminiscence work, which goes a fair way down into the UV) ; I can see that X-rays might backscatter sufficiently to provide useful surface composition data. But you'd need horribly high dose rates, and therefore a lot of batteries to power the thing (again, making it less than "portable", or "secret"). You'd do far better using millimetre to micrometre wavelength radio waves, which do scatter from organic materials quite well. But they don't significantly penetrate skin, so they're not X-rays in either a strict or a lax meaning of the term.

No, it's much more satisfying to rape you until you beg me to forgive your disrespect.

Brave maybe, but the "awesomeness" of blogging about it is likely to backfire. It is unwise to publicly accuse someone of something as serious as attempted rape and not make a formal complaint to police. It's also unwise to blog about it until after the Judge has finished hammering his desk.

For the last couple of decades it's been virtually impossible to start work on a major engineering project without running all sorts of simulations, on the whole it has been a GoodThing(TM). Like engineers, advisers won't go away just because they have new tools, they will simply give more sophisticated advice but no matter what level of technology the advisers use, you need public servants that are not afraid to "speak truth to power". James Hansen is a good example of that type of public servant from the US, however facts alone cannot sway dishonest politicians such as James Inhofe. Where are the people who wanted to charge Clinton with treason for lying about a blow job? - Why aren't they baying for the blood of the habitual liars such as Inhofe who demonstrate on a daily basis they have zero respect for the high office they hold?

It's a very narrow definition of intelligence that assumes it must manifest itself as human like thought. An ants nest is an intelligent and efficient entity in it's own right but it doesn't have any thought processes, ant's themselves are basically mindless automatons, They don't think about the complexities of building nests they just do it, some species such as soldier ants build the ant equivalent of NYC every few days, shifting up to four tons of soil at a time. The octopus is another fine example, obviously a highly intelligent creature (can solve the "screw top lid" puzzle faster than any ape except man) but it's brain is nothing like that of a mammal. It has no left/right hemispheres and the neurons are distributed along it's arms rather than concentrated in a central organ.

Machines can now learn from weakly structured and contradictory data sources such as pages on the net and answer trivia questions better than humans (re: IBM;s Watson). To me this indicates we already have AI that surpasses the logical (left hemisphere) of human intelligence, our right hemisphere is the "in the moment" intelligence that we share with the Octopus, computers simply don't have the scale of sensory input that our right hemisphere thrives on and until they do their "thought processes" will rely on an artificial "right hemisphere" (such as whatever if finds on the internet). That doesn't mean it won't appear to have human like responses, after all most duck hunters know how to imitate a duck.

i wonder could you set one up on the fee tier of amazon web services

"Fee tier" or "free tier"? Whatever ; I'm pretty sure that would violate ToS on several points.

or would it to quickly burn through its bandwidth?

As soon as it gets known about ... you bet it would.

Espionage isn't warfare; it's an alternative.

I may be wrong, but I think 'Espionage' is the French word for 'Spying'

So, it means "carrying out war by means other than war".

Jeez, how's a mega-corp gonna make a buck off that?

And my follow-up question would be: how would you go about finding out? Oh, here's my laptop. Knock yourself out.

Brainteasers for me were never about someone getting the answer right, it's how they work through a problem where they don't know the answer. Yours is a perfectly good answer, and leaves plenty of space to explore how you go about your research. To me, that's far more valuable than someone who has memorized the answer to a brain teaser.

I think before you start giving interviewing advice to corporations, you might want to:
* learn how to spell
* learn grammar rules
* learn capitalization rules
* learn how to organize your thoughts

You have two posts, and I'm unsure what either one is getting at, beyond "test scores are bad" and "interview questions are bad".

But not because Google went about it wrong and screwed up its hiring process.

I've been now through a few hiring processes, have sat on Interviews, decision committees. And while I like to think that my Interviews and candidate ratings were spot-on (I correctly predicted one failure and one early resignation), I'm pretty sure that's just skewed by the small sample size. What I do know is that I went through all kinds of approaches, both as an interviewer and an interviewee. I've done brainteasers, role-playing, decision explanations, code walkthroughs, resume deep-dives, online candidate research, just shooting the breeze, and more. And I haven't found a single thing that strongly correlates with acing the interview or hiring a good worker. Resumes can lie (sometimes subtly), and you'll never find out without hiring a private investigator. Role-playing can confuse people, especially if they're trying to figure out what you're looking for. Brain teasers can be memorized, shooting the breeze can lead to unreasonable judgments (positive or negative), interviewers and interviewees can have a bad day, the other person doesn't like your first name, and a million other things.

Especially when you start talking 10s of thousands of interviews, you're actually looking at so much data, so many influencing variables that I doubt you can find one common variable that stands out from the rest. What I'm concerned about (and that comes partially from being married to someone in HR) is that there is still a drive to find the one process that will automate the hiring process. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist. Well, let me walk that back a tiny bit: there's one thing that will work better than anything else: have the interview done by the best people you have, have them take it seriously, and spend some time on it. But it takes time, is fuzzy, and is entirely reliant on managers knowing who their best people are.

I'm glad to see that Google doesn't think Big Data is the answer to everything. I just hope that this percolates through to the rest of the HR universe. There's much too much of a drive to automate hiring, like performance reviews and firing has been.