As a hiring manager, my focus is whether or not the applicant is able to do well in the position. I've never really concerned myself with the online presence of the applicant. I look at rummaging around in google to check out an applicant as more or less equivalent to hiring an investigator to do a background check. The fact that googling is easier and cheaper than hiring an investigator does not change the motive for doing so.

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An exception would be if the applicant links to his professional online presence in the CV. Then I would use that as I would any other information on the CV. However the presence on the web does not make the information different than having the same information on the CV.

If I were hiring for a sensitive position where a background check is warranted, then I would do a real background check.

But if no background check is required, why go poking around in someone's private life.

Target has already made that decision for me --- they do not allow me to use their website.

Target's website refuses entry for those customers who do not have tracking cookies enabled. It is Target's choice, not the customers'.

Yeah, preventing customers from walking through the main entrance and buy things is always a good thing for a store to do.

Some sites block you if you do not allow their cookies unfettered access. One example is target.com (the department store). You cannot get past the home page unless you open up your browser to all the cookies they want to place on your disk. It doesn't make sense for a store to prevent customers from using their website to shop.

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Target needs to re-evaluate their purpose for having a website - do they want to use the website to place cookies on peoples' disks? Or does target want to use the website to sell merchandise?

:)

You need to do double-blind testing to see whether you are really bothered by the LED flicker, or you just think you are bothered by the flicker.

Perhaps it has increasingly started to bug you because you are becoming increasingly aware of it, and not vice versa.

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It is a common marketing ploy to create a perceived problem, then magically have a product available for sale that just happens to assuage that newly perceived problem.

and your point is?

With the ever-increasing price of tickets, using revenue as a judge of "record-breaking" is grossly inaccurate, as it erroneously compares unequal ticket prices and ignores the effect of inflation over the years.

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It would be more accurate (though still not completely accurate) to use the number of tickets sold as the basis for judging whether all-time records have been broken.

Also take a look at

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WHITElist = good

BLACKlist = bad

Instead of trying to put the label of political correctness on the attempts to rid software of racial bias, why not just rid software of racial bias?

It really would be a lot easier than to engage in an artificial political battle.

Why are you surprised at the bigotry here on /. ? Just look at the E3 thread posted a few hours ago.

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Male-dominant sexism, and the rejection of anything 'different,' seems to be actively encouraged in the gaming industry, the customers of which I suspect make up a large part of the /. audience.

... even more so than some of the egregiously bigoted comments I've been reading on this thread.

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A few years ago I was looking for genealogy software. One of my requirements was the need to handle a F-F marriage with kids in the family. Fortunately, The Master Genealogist was up to the task. Amazingly, there were few choices that met an important requirement that I had.

Windows XP's looming retirement won't shake PC business out of sales funk

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I have gone from 8 computers running Windows back in the Windows 2000 days, to two computers running Windows and four computers running FreeBSD and two computer running OpenBSD. The Windows computers are all notebook clients, while the BSD boxes are the servers. I've stayed with Windows for clients because I have not seen any real desktop alternative available. Ubuntu was a fore-runner, but that distribution has since gone bad. I am using BSD's for the servers because, well, they just work.

As I mentioned, those profit levels are new to EDD. The Xbox had been a loss-leader for Microsoft, only recently becoming profitable.

It always amazes me how many people actually think that the Xbox is a highly profitable endeavor for Microsoft. While it has turned profitable recently, the Entertainment & Devices Division (where XBox is accounted for) is only mildly profitable. Nowhere near the profit rate of Microsoft's enterprise and desktop cash-cows. It is a stretch to call the Xbox a fiscal "success", at best one could now say it is not "money-losing". It is highly unlikely that Microsoft could expand the revenues and margins of EDD into a company-sustaining business.