I dislike the whole mechanism of the stock market as much as the next guy; but theoretically, at least, it DOES serve a social purpose: The shareholder invests in a company, giving it the capital to expand its business. This is presumably good for the economy, and society as a whole.

Fine, but only the initial sale of stock to the very first investors actually delivers capital to the company (company itself is selling to the investors). No trade from investor to investor results in more capital to the company--at that point it's just gambling, and the existence of the shares no longer serves any social purpose.

Require an investor to purchase shares directly from the company and hold them forever, and you'd have a different stock market.

That would make as much sense as roasting realtors over an open fire to send a message to homeowners...owning real estate leads to death - thears.

My car remote is in the 315 MHZ range and would be impacted by this.

Impacted? Like a tooth? I think you meant "affected". /Sorry, my pet peeve.

You've made my point for me better than I could.

It may not have been your intention to review Dairy Queen, but the above rant reads an awful lot like many (most) user-generated reviews out there. It was a nit-picky anecdote, which told the reader nothing about the quality of the food, the price, the setting, etc. Just one person's isolated bad experience with the restaurant owner. I give it a 99% chance that if I happen to walk into that Dairy Queen, I won't even know who the manager, let alone have an altercation with him.

Most "one star" amateur online reviews are grumpy customers who want to stick it to the man for some perceived slight against them, not honest comprehensive assessments of the business and product. Most "five star" amateur online reviews are simply fans who personally like the business reviewed. Neither really give me an idea of what the business will be like.

What's important is what the reader's experience will be, not what the writer's experience was. An amateur reviewer will tell me why they loved or hated something. A professional reviewer will tell me why I will love or hate it.

User-generated reviews are useful for when you need the aggregate opinion of people who, in general, do not know anything about what they are reviewing. In other words, they're nearly useless.

To put it another way for Slashdotters:

Think of the last code change you made. Put that change up for a public code review and invite everyone (programmers, non-programmers, 80 year old grandmas, etc.) to comment on it. Let's say 95% of the commenters don't know how to program (and you have no way of knowing which reviews come from them). How good/actionable do you think that aggregate code review will be? Well, the same is true for restaurants, books, insurance, basically anything that can be reviewed online by unqualified reviewers.

You'll get as much value from a restaurant review from someone who has no professional restaurant review credentials as you will from a code review from someone who has no professional programming credentials.

the facebook home page doesn't even validate

LOL nor does:

• Apple's, 2 Errors, 1 warning(s)
• Amazon's, 458 Errors, 142 warning(s)
• Google's, 23 Errors, 3 warning(s)
• Yahoo's, 187 Errors, 8 warning(s)
• Youtube's, 65 Errors, 5 warning(s)
• Wikipedia's, 59 Errors, 29 warning(s)
• eBay's, 537 Errors, 28 warning(s)
• MSN's, 33 Errors, 2 warning(s)

... which means what about the company?

HR on the other hand likes to scan, read and prcoess resumes and in 90% of all cases they have no idea what anything in the resume means. For instance I know most HR personal don't know what the IEEE is. Now you would think that the HR of an engineering company might understand the name of the biggest engineering group in the world. They also don't understand keywords like FPGA ,VHDL, Matlab etc... Basically HR is a big department who's sole job is to spin tires in mud and progress no where well pissing off the rest of the company.

Yea, but I bet they know how to use words like "personnel", "whose" and "while".

I was all eager to read the article and nod in disgust at Facebook's incompetence, but after reading a bit, I have to say, "Grow up, crybaby!"

Do you have many candidates that know three months in advance their available timeslots? Do you expect all these timeslots to remain reserved for the three months, until the interview is finally scheduled?

Boo hoo hoo! It's called living life as an adult. Sorry you're used to not having to plan future commitments. If the interview is so important, keep your day open, kid!

My interview was finally scheduled three weekdays in advance, leaving me in fact one day to prepare, because I've already had plans for the other weekday and the weekend. Do you have many candidates who can prepare for a CS exam in one day? Or do you expect them to be ready to abandon their plans at zero notice?

Boo hoo hoo! If preparing for the interview is so important to you, cancel your precious "plans". How is their HR supposed to know you have a keg stand to appear at over the weekend?

In the one day that I've had available, I've been reading up like mad, and still obviously I couldn't prepare as well as I'd like to. The feeling of coming to a CS exam unprepared builds up the lack of confidence during the interview, and contributes to the stress -- as if the stress from the important interview itself wasn't enough.

Boo hoo hoo! I don't know my shit like I should, so I'm going to have to "cram" instead and try to sound smarter than I am! This is really stressful and hurts my feelings!!

Then comes the punch: the coding exercise during my interview didn’t involve any intricate algorithms or data structures, none at all, just robust coding. Exhausted and stressed by the rushed preparation, turning out useless, I was so perplexed -- as if I’ve not only come to an exam unprepared, but after all to a wrong exam.

Boo hoo hoo! I couldn't guess what my interviewer would ask me, which is sooooo unfair, and I wasted a lot of time trying to fool them!

He would have gotten far fewer years in prison simply breaking in to their houses and snapping the pictures himself in person.

If I get into your E-mail, I have access to every web site you use, because they all use E-mail based password reset functions. I'll just change all your passwords and confirm the change using your 0wned E-mail account.

Well, at least those desktop background PNGs are beautiful. What about the window manager?

On one of my previous projects, I recall throwing a little party (in my own mind) the day I was finally able to eradicate the last "Q" from the codebase. Since then, I've sworn an oath to the universe to never again use a C++ library that has to have their own string class. It's almost 2013. If your C++ library doesn't play seamlessly with STL strings and containers, please do the world a favor and erase your repository.

The GP poster is justifying the ban with the argument "you don't know there won't be any problems". This is an unreasonable hurdle, since it's true for nearly anything you might bring aboard. This puts the burden on the opposer of the ban to prove that for any given item, there are zero potential problems.

If it really made sense to ban things because "you don't know there won't be any problems", why don't we ban shoes, food, umbrellas, eyeglasses, and pencils? Because you don't know with 100% certainty that any of those items won't cause problems. Better be safe than sorry!

As far as tech goes, the only company that seems to care about your educational credentials or grades is Google, and maybe the defense guys / government contractors. The rest will hire you if you can at least spell C++.