The coffin had to be lowered multiple times before the scanner could find it, and a warning to place ALL items in the bagging area appeared on George's digital tombstone, requiring a customer-service representative from the funeral home to enter an override code. George's widow further complicated things by leaving the cemetery without taking her receipt.

I have two kids. My oldest taught himself to read when he was four years old by following along as we read to him. Halfway through the first Harry Potter novel, he took the book away from us and said "you're going too slow." He finished it by the end of the week. Yet when he got to Kindergarten, the class reading instructor said he was behind the other kids because he couldn't link letters with sounds. Kah for K and Dih for D were beyond him. We did some experimenting at home and realized that he was a "whole word" reader by nature/choice. He'd been following our fingers as they pointed at every word and memorizing the shapes of the words. "Reparo" was simply a glyph to him, associated with the sound of someone fixing a pair of glasses.

Despite every effort by the school system to "cure" him of his preferred method of reading, he still does it to this day.

My other kid loved sounding words out. To him, it was a game. He would look for the longest word on a page and painstakingly (at first) go through every letter until he had it figured out. Then he'd use that word a million times- because it was fun. The schools were just switching over to the three-cue method when he went in, and it killed him to skip a word or look at the picture. In his mind, it seemed like cheating. We basically told him to go along with whatever the teacher said and we'll all read to each other at home.

They both ended up reading at college level well before leaving elementary school.

My point is, every kid is going to be different not only in how they CAN learn but in how they WANT to learn. A good teacher recognizes both and tailors the instruction to the students' needs. That way, a kid who learns math visually gets visual-based materials and instruction. And a kid who learns math algorithmically gets rote and procedural materials and instructions. Trying to force one method on all students is guaranteed to end up in a significant amount of failure.

The real measure in these cases is a Pass/Fail checkbox that tells a prospective employer that the candidate is willing to comply with dehumanizing procedures in order to get a job.

Companies don't want candidates who have the kind of confidence and sense of self-worth that makes them able to refuse these types of hiring techniques. They want someone who will do what they're told, when they're told to do it, no matter how demeaning or unreasonable it is. The kind of person who refuses this test is much more likely to leave the company when it institutes an abusive policy or tolerates harassment in the workplace.

The AI aspect of these interviews is irrelevant. The important piece of information gleaned is "did the candidate take the test/sit for the interview/etc.?" If yes, you know that they'll accept that salary freeze or work three extra hours after clocking out or tear their back to shreds making that manufacturing quota.

My dad once told me "A company will never treat you better than when they're trying to get you to come work for them." Asking for an AI video interview, making you take a "personality assessment test," drug tests, and things like that are basically enormous red flags telling you to stay away from that company.

Where have I heard that before... Something about an antenna maybe?

You weren't holding it right!

If the tests were that simple, I might agree with you. Unfortunately some are not. I got halfway through one before deciding it was total and utter shiat, and this is the sort of questions they asked:

You Must Choose One:
( ) It's OK to steal a little bit from your employer, as long as you really need the money
( ) If I caught one of my fellow employees stealing and it turned out he had a sick child that needed an expensive operation, I wouldn't turn him in
( ) People who steal deserve to be put in jail for life
( ) It's OK for people to steal if they're smart enough to get away with it

Obviously that's not a real example, but the point is EVERY question was like this. They were a series of negative statements that you had to choose the least bad from, and none of them were "least enough" that you could laugh them off and say you didn't really feel like that. Stealing was covered, but there were other subjects as well. Imagine an entry where you had to choose between four answers, each of which made you look like a racist. That kind of thing.

I bailed on the quiz AND the company, but the only theory I could come up with is that maybe they held on to those answers in case you ever got in a dispute with them. And then depending on what the dispute was about, they could go back to the relevant question and tell the judge (or more likely, "independent" arbitrator) "See, he says right here that he thinks the world would be a better place if there was only one race in it. He probably means HIS race, that horrible nasty bigot. How can he claim to have witnessed discrimination if he's a blatant racist himself?" Or something like that.

The first time I was faced with one of those things, I called up the recruiter and asked if it was actually mandatory. He was floored- no one had ever asked that before. He asked some questions, and the answer came back that "yes, it's mandatory." I gave him the standard "thank you for your kind consideration, but I am no longer interested in the position..." and that was that.

These days, I don't even bother doing that. As soon as one of those assessments come up or they tell me that they want to schedule an automated video interview, I simply ghost them. A company like that doesn't deserve a response. They aren't looking for people who can justify their reasons for not taking those tests. They're looking for people who are COMPLIANT. Those tests weed out independent and willful candidates. There isn't a company in the world- at least none that I'd want to work for- that wants an employee who feels empowered enough to tell them to fuck off.

I had a recruiter tell me something once, and it's stuck with me for decades: A company will never treat you better than they do when they're trying to get you to come work for them. If you're treated like shit as a candidate, it's a virtual certainty that you'll be treated like shit as an employee.

Dudes who creep on post-pubescent but under 18 girls are pedophiles.
Folks who hate gay people but aren't even slightly afraid of them are homophobes.
People use the word "anymore" in place of the word "currently," anymore.

And apparently, now "crypto" means "funky internet money," not cryptographic keys, or a prefix to the word "jew" meaning "pretending not to be one."

I do lots of similar work when generating test data. It's pretty common to have libraries for things like "make up a plausible address" or "randomly generate a credit card number." Extreme cases can generate whole narratives, even intentionally injecting spelling and grammar errors at varying rates in order to fool packages that use lexical analysis to detect robot text.

The work that spammers have done attempting to fool email filters is probably directly applicable to this effort.

It hasn't been about whether evolution is true or false for a very long time. It's about whose team you're on and how many points they're up by in the third quarter. Texans can't help themselves. They have to pick a side, and when they do they support it all the way.

Go to any small town in East Texas on a Friday night in September. Around 7PM, folks start streaming out of their houses and heading to stadiums whose size rivals that of some colleges' playing fields. They're there to rally their team on, violently if necessary.

Texans choose sides in ALL aspects of their lives. Ford vs. Chevy. Big Mac vs. the Whopper. Citizens vs. Illegals. Cattlemen vs. Farmers. Evolution vs. Creationism. Whatever the issue, no matter how weighty or how trivial, Texans can figure out a way to polarize it and turn it into a contest. And if it has team jerseys, all the better.

In some ways, this is Texas' greatest strength - that its citizens are willing to stake everything on the team they support, win, lose, or draw. In other ways, the stubborn unwillingness to give up, even in the face of overwhelming strength or indisputable argument can lead to, well I think we all remember the Alamo.

People tend to think of the idea of "teaching the controversy" as an insidious effort to get religion's foot in the door. In fact, it's one of the most amazing things that Team Texas Religion has ever done- offer a compromise. For a Texan to even admit that the other side's point of view EXISTS is jaw-droppingly astounding. To offer to teach it alongside their own is nothing short of miraculous.

The only way to resolve this conflict is to understand Texas and embrace its stubborn, contentious, headstrong culture. Ignoring it will only make the issue worse. The sooner people realize this, the better off we'll all be. Texas, as much as we hate to admit it East of the Mississippi, isn't all that different from the rest of the country.

Pick a fun and innovative project for the whole group to participate in. That way, people will have a reason to come back every week.

The project should be:
1. Fun - but not necessarily a game. Fun to compy geeks means "has interesting puzzles to solve"
2. Innovative - do something new. Invent something that nobody has done before.
3. Important - do something that matters.
4. Focused. Don't try to create the Ultimate Framework of Everything. It will take too long, and people will become bored and leave.
5. Achievable - Target a ten-to-sixteen week completion time, with no more than an hour to an hour and a half contribution per member per week.
6. Easily chunk-able. Pick something that can be planned together, then dealt out to members to investigate/design/create individual pieces.
7. Lends itself to collaboration. Pair programming, get-togethers to investigate alternatives, etc. Anything to keep members connected and engaged.
8. Has clearly defined roles that can be assigned team-wise. Bob and Jeff, you'll be the web team. Julie and Frank, you'll be the architecture team. And so on.

If you pick the right project, people will be engaged and excited, and they can take pride in contributing something to the global community.

Metro Metro Metro! That's what the media is focusing on, but it's not the real reason Windows 8 failed.

W-8 failed because Microsoft thought they'd be able to screw their developers the way that Apple's been screwing iOS developers since day one. Going full walled-garden for the Metro UI while at the same time effectively forcing developers to abandon Silverlight and Flash due to concerns about long-term viability meant there really was no compelling reason for a developer to bother with Windows 8. My company, a manufacturer of population-based analytical software that runs on a massively-parallel database, basically abandoned Windows as a development platform. In the middle of a product cycle.

Those MSDN/Visual Studio/Team Foundation/etc. licenses will never happen. Now, at great expense and risk, we've decided to go down the HTML5+Javascript path for the front end. It sucks. It sucks so badly that there's not a person in the shop who doesn't want to abandon the project altogether. But at least it will be portable if it ever gets built. It'll take two years longer than it would have if Microsoft hadn't screwed us over, but that's the price of doing business I guess. (The JBOSS backend is painful too, but not to the degree that an HTML5/Javascript front-end is.)

Yet, all that could have been avoided if Microsoft hadn't hit the Greed button and tried to force the Metro UI down its developers' throats. We have no confidence in Microsoft EVER being a viable development platform again. Not when key components could be pulled out from under us just because they want to impose a UI tax.

And I know I'm not alone. I've heard the same story, read the same story, watched the same story unfold all over the internet.

Microsoft used to field the best damn development and application platform in the industry, hands down. It still does, actually. But unfortunately, I can't risk using it. And because of that fact, there's very little chance that I'll ever bother considering it in future efforts.

And THAT's why Windows 8 failed and any attempt to revive it will fail as well.

Seriously, a general-purpose computer science degree will serve you well. You just won't see it right away. I just finished writing an interpreter- something I had only done in college 25 years ago. I constantly bump into subjects that I took in college and would be utterly unfamiliar with had I not taken the "rip out the guts and figure out how these compu-thingies really work" courses. You might not learn exactly the thing you need right out of school, but what you will gain is a deep insight into what computers do and how they do it. And that will help immensely if you make them your career.

The average payment to the state from a DUI prosecution is something around $10K when all the fines and such are tallied up. There's the initial fine, court fee, mandatory driver re-education course fee, court-mandated counselling fees, fees that allow first-time offenders to be "rehabilitated" (woo-hoo! just $2,500 for total absolution!), fees for un-suspending a license, fees for re-taking a drivers' license road test ($250 to drunk drivers, $30 for everybody else), rental of a mandatory in-vehicle breathalyzer, installation charge for mandatory in-vehicle breathalyzer, de-installation charge for mandatory in-vehicle breathalyzer, fees for complaining about fees, fees for posting about fees on slashdot, and the list goes on.

If you allow driverless cars to ferry drunks home, the state loses all of that tasty munchable sweet sweet cash. Which is why you will certainly be able to be cited for DUI even when the UI is doing the D'ing.

The only good thing about this story is that maybe non-techie people will realize that when you let the OS vendor dictate what you can do with the hardware you bought to run their product on, they will ALWAYS use that ability against you.

Consoles, Apple, and now Windows- how many times do we have to learn the same lesson?

I was self-taught. I started out in jr. high school on 30cps clacky terminals dialed into M.E.C.C. (anybody else in here know what that acronym expands to?)

But then I went on to get a CS degree with EE "concentration" (kinda like a minor but not as much work). The EE work was not trivial- I took 4-level courses on things like signal processing, vsld, semi-conductors, etc. etc.

As a result, I graduated knowing three things:
1. What a computer can DO
2. HOW it does what it can do
3. How to MAKE it do what it can do.
In other words, I understood computers soup to nuts (or thought I did- I still had a lot to learn). When diagnosing a problem or architecting a solution, I think holistically. The phrase I've been frequently accused of over-using is "Silicon to Glass," meaning from the silicon in the chips all the way to the glass screen of the computer monitor and everything in between.

To an employer, this probably doesn't mean squat. They're looking for Skill XYZ. And when they hire you for Skill XYZ, they really have no intention of using you for anything else for the entire time you are with them.

To me, it means everything because while I'm working for an employer and utilizing Skill XYZ, I'm also looking for opportunities to learn Skill ABC and apply it to my current responsibilities. And then Skill ABC goes on my resume.

As a result, my resume looks impossibly broad, with real, working, got-paid-for experience in a diverse range of disciplines, from large-scale (many thousands of nodes) network design, telecommunications, database architecture and application design (I've designed systems that earn $100M/year). Not only that, I've spread out vertically as well, working in as many industries as technologies.

The thing I ALWAYS credit is my CS degree. Without that intimate understanding of what's going on inside the systems and software that I create and use, I would be simply (as another poster put it) responding to interfaces, not utilizing skills.

What freaks me out is how a large majority of my co-workers are one-trick ponies. They know how to code Informatica data integration mappings. Or they know how to write Perl scripts. Or they know how to create SQL Server databases and monitor their performance. Maybe they have a minor secondary skill, but that's usually it. I always ask that type of person if they have a CS degree- I've never had one reply "yes." Turn that around, and when I find that a co-worker has a CS degree, it doesn't really matter what we originally hired him or her for- if a job needs doing, that person will either apply existing knowledge to the problem or immediately go about acquiring the required knowledge from whatever sources are available- and if nothing exists at the time, they will CREATE the tool that solves the problem. Because a CS degree is just that: a set of "tools in the tool belt" that can be taken out at need- and some of those tools are designed specifically to create other tools. Self-taught folk are fine, but I've never found one with the breadth and depth of understanding that you get even from a newly-minted CS grad.

When I'm hiring, I'll take a CS grad with diploma still dripping ink over a "expert" in some tool or technology ANY day. Because the former has demonstrated the capability of picking up any tool and applying it (or making his own), but the latter has only shown the ability to use one.