Who the heck pays for a movie ticket to play angry birds.

Parents for one.

I like certains of films (provided they're good) that are aimed at kids. Things like quite a lot of Pixar (Toy Story 3, Ratatouille, etc), Wreck it Ralph, and heck, the recent Muppets, that kind of thing. The sort of film which is simply really good, suitable for kids, but has much of it squarely aimed at the adult adience, and not in a euphemistic way.

There are plenty of really stupid parents who seem incapable of realising that such films have merit. So they take the kids and because it's a "kids film" it must be below them (Oh, the irony!) so they spend the entire bloody film checking faceook, playing some game or whatever.

I assume they do this too at the bad kids films too.

Or are you saying that IT staff / firemen / doctors should never go to movies?

If they're incapable of acting like dickheads then yes.

Back in previous days, they had pagers and could discretely check them without annoying anyone. Prior to that they stayed at home.

These days phones are more than capable of giving different vibration alerts from different callers. Heck, my old Nokia dumbphone 10 years ago could do that. If they are unable to set that up or unable to find someone to set it up for them then yes, they should stick at home, or find a different job if they really MUST go to the cinema.

Oh, and round here on-call firemen don't generally go to the cinema, they hang around the firestation so they can get going within seconds if required.

Just because you have a job which sounds important (and really, IT staff? Lives are at stake?) doesn't give you the right to trample over everyone else for your own entertainment.

Moron.

Touche.

You are claiming it's petty and silly?

Perhaps you should learn some anatomy. Go and read a book on how the eye works, and about the psychology and psycho-psyicality of vision.

You will rapidly come to the conclusion that the human visual system is exceptionally adept at giving very high priority to unexpected motion in the peripheral vision. This is an entirely autonomous response and is therefore almost impossible to suppress.

The main problem is simply that people seem incapable of thinking outside their own pivate little world to see how their actions might affect others. You are aparently one of those.

(you would be crazy to install a non supported Linux distribution on a ... development machine)

No, I strongly disagree.

You should be able to smash up your development machine with a hammer now, and be back up and running in a few hours. I've run all sorts of stuff as development machines, including distros far out of support for various reasons, and others like Arch which are totally bleeding edge.

Also, hardware aside, I've never screwed up a developement machine so badly that I couldn't put off fiing it until a convenient time. That includes accidently killing an ubuntu upgrade part way through.

Workstations can and should be very quick to replace and also not too heavily tied to a single install. It helps that everything I develop comes with configure scripts now. Makes it much easier for me to rebuild a working machine and makes it nice and easy for my customers to deploy on a fixed system or noew hardware.

Hotbot - at the time, it was the one one could configure the most to try and tune the search. it grew up within Lycos and at the times of the first dot com buble also had a webmail aggregate, and other services.

the problem with the proposal that you've created is that if the phone is hacked then any number of one-off closed accounts can be created and transferred from your "actual bank account". what this tells us is that the actual problem is the concept of trying to use a general-purpose processor which is capable of running unverifiably-complex general-purpose software as a method of payment. it.... just.... doesn't.... add... up.

what's the very next article right here on slashdot? an article about how the inventor of PGP cannot properly implement ZRTP, a security application for smart phones. clinkle - starting from scratch - on a payment system for smart phones, making it a high-profile target. this is going to end well.

I'm in Silicon Valley. I want to live in Nevada, far enough from the neighbors that I can't hear their HIFIs in the daytime or see their lights at night.

I want to live in Nevada so much that I built a house there - a few miles over the state line near Lake Topaz. Fully paid for. Marvelous view. Good neighbors. Also rabbits (jack and cottontail), quail, coyotes, deer, antelope, bobcats, cougars, and black bears. Gun laws are a lot different there, and I have a Nevada CCW that's also valid in many other states due to reciprocity (though not in CA).

For the Town House near work I also moved across the bay from Palo Alto. Just off the other end of the bridge, for less than I was paying in rent in Palo, I was able to BUY a two-story four-bedroom with 7,000+square feet of yard and remodel it. 200A electric service (two 20A circuits to each room for starters). Satellite TV and Cat 5E everywhere. (Only running 100M at the moment but I hear that with house-sized runs you can get away with 5e for gigabit Ethernet.) The yard is now a garden and orchard. We get most of our veggies from it - and our eggs. We were also on the Bay Friendly Garden Tour last year.

They tell me the city here on the Back Bay has a gang problem. But for several blocks around our house it doesn't. It's much like in Palo Alto (where the burglars worked their way down Loma Verde street and skipped only two houses - ours and the retired cop two doors down). It seems the crooks don't like to bother NRA instructors, and the wife's "Ducks Unlimited" sticker tells them she can hit a spot the size of a duck (or a human heart) with a shotgun, from 50 yards, even if it is flying at the time. B-)

Of course NV has no such crime issues. Even machine guns are legal there. B-)

Move to a SF or Oakland? By preference? You've GOT to be kidding.

For a few months I am consulting in San Jose and driving from Berkeley. I can't wait for all of those folks to move to the cities and get off the roads! Typical commute is 1.5 hours to drive no more than 49 miles. Even getting on the road at 6 AM doesn't beat the traffic.

DoSpacingLikeWord95

How does that work again?

There have also been videos of presentations by firms who work in this area that teach companies how not to hire americans (You can google that). If their really was no advantage to hiring H1-B over a US worker, then why would companies go out of their way to disqualify US workers...?

Seriously? Have you ever actually been in a hiring position?

Hiring people is hard, and risky. Even in jobs where the skill set required is very precise and easily measured, as in engineering, there are all kinds of other random factors that can make or break a new hire (personality, lazyness, ability to co-operate, etc). Companies use every trick in the book to try and reduce this risk, most commonly by tapping employees networks to try and find other people who are known quantities, instead of the random walk-ins you get via normal hiring.

So now you have an open position. Maybe it requires specialised skills. Maybe it doesn't exactly require specialised skills, but there's someone who you just know would be the perfect fit for that position. You know they're capable, creative, etc. Only problem - not an American (and for "American" you can also read "European" for an EU based company, etc).

So what do you do? Obviously the "cannot hire an American to do the same work" standard is absurd, you can always hire an American to do any job, they just won't do it as well as the guy you actually want would. But you have to prove you tried. Hence - gaming of the system. The goal of this process is often not to hire just any H1-B because they're cheaper (they have to be paid the same salary or higher, right?), it's often to hire a specific person and this is especially true at the higher job levels.

The simplest solution would be to eliminate the "cannot hire an X" standard which is unenforceable, unmeasurable garbage anyway. Just ensure the salaries are the same, and, longer term, try and convince people that they don't have some kind of right to a well paid job just because they got lucky in the birth lottery. That other guy who is more qualified but has the wrong coloured skin should have a chance too.

Strong understanding of existing and emerging web standards, accessibility (WCAG1/2) and usability.
Familiarity with several JavaScript libraries, including Backbone and JQuery

lolwut, familiarity with some random JavaScript library is required? Dude, start writing your own job ads. It's clear that whoever is churning these out has no clue.

Unfortunately judging from the questions asked in that poll as given further down by Okian Warrior, that confirmation bias would be accurate and reasonable in this case.