1,410 karma · joined April 29, 2009
I hope to one day be remarkable.
MS has licensed their DRM, but they will not license it for use with Moonlight. From my understanding, the licensing they have done has generally for hardware (the NXP chip in the Roku box, for example).
From what I understand, on the iPhone/iPad Netflix uses the DRM built into the device. Since Android phones are built by several different manufacturers there is no uniformity in hardware DRM (and some phones don't have any at all). I imagine that it's easier to get content providers to agree to use hardware DRM than software DRM which further complicates the issue.
However, I think the way raises are calculated needs to be revised. Currently raises are typically some percent of the salary and the range of percentages is fairly narrow (so the disparity remains constant). If instead raises were calculated with the goal of equalizing the salaries of like-performing employees the disparity would fade in a few years.
The problem with this, of course, is that lower paid employees get larger raises, which may seem unfair to the better paid employees. This can be solved by making salaries more transparent.
Although if salaries were more transparent then you probably wouldn't have as many problems in the first place.
The article states that Postgres isn't a meritocracy because the hackers aren't from diverse backgrounds. drblast was attempting to show how this is a logical fallacy - meritocracies aren't ipso facto diverse.
1) written modifications (with signatures) were allowed 2) under Delaware law, conduct or statements could modify a written contract with a signed writing clause
Clearly in this case statements could not modify this contract (as it was explicitly prohibited). However the court ruled that the IM conversation was not a statement but writing.
The court also decided that since Delaware law allows statements to modify a contract (even one that requires signatures), this also applies to written modifications.
While I agree that it's shocking that a contract can be modified so easily without a signature, that's a law that is already on the books. The only precedent that has been set (as far as I can see, IANAL) is that IMs are writing.
I think in practice it's almost impossible to determine if someone is a "good" hire based solely on an interview (regardless of technique). It is possible to determine is someone is a "bad" hire based on an interview however.
Since radians involve irrational numbers I can understand it being more difficult to learn than degrees. However degrees are a completely arbitrary unit that are used for historical reasons.
Getting stuck thinking in degrees hindered my ability to understand trigonometry, and I don't think I'm alone. It is my belief that teaching trig using radians would be less confusing than teaching trig using degrees first, then radians (as was my experience). With degrees there is no direct correlation between 90 degrees and the values of the trig functions which leads to people simply memorizing values. The same is true (to a lesser extent) when using 2 pi.
And in any case, I think using degrees to teach trig is a terrible idea and only causes more confusion later. sin90 = 1 makes no sense, and the fact that that's my first thought when thinking about sin only causes me problems. If I had instead been taught radians first, a lot of stuff would be significantly easier.
According to the article there are two methods used to implement exceptions in C++ - one that has higher overhead when you throw an exception (zero-cost) and one that has higher overhead when you call a function that might throw an exception (setjmp/longjmp).
Unfortunately the author didn't go over the latter method, which would have been more interesting.
If you look at my other post, I linked to a video of a kid who used echolocation. He could distinguish objects - he walked past two garbage cans in the street, and said "Is that a car? clicks his tongue several times No, it's a garbage can."
The video is from when he was 14, he died from cancer at 16.
Ethically I believe this to be equivalent to lending a book/cd/whatever to a friend (this has been done, actually, as a protest/stunt. A guy attempted to sell an mp3 from iTunes on eBay).
>If I download something from someone, am I responsible for verifying the copyright or is it the distributors responsibility?
Distributor, generally. I feel this is similar to receipt of stolen property. In most places you are only liable if you knew it was stolen.
>If someone requests something from my computer, and my computer allows them to have it without my explicit intervention, am I responsible?
Yes, though how responsible you are is debatable. Intent is important but ignorance is rarely a successful defense.
>Am I responsible for distributing a file if someone downloads it after accessing an FTP server I setup using an anonymous account?
Why wouldn't you be?
>What if it required a password?
How is that any different? Or do you mean someone guessed the password?
Of course, most of these answers are just my opinion/speculation. Sometimes the line between "piracy" and "sharing" is blurry which I think is a huge part of the problem. There is (seemingly) no way have one without the other. If I want the ability to lend an ebook to a friend then I must also have the ability to give a copy to my friend. There are some systems in place to attempt to reconcile this, but they are either limited (you can lend it x number of times) or take away some other right (for example, it might take away the right to have a backup copy).
Additionally, this technique would probably work against college students and recent grads.
It can also be hard to quantify the results and the questions will vary wildly between candidates.
Of course none of those obstacles are insurmountable and I think that when this approach works, it probably works better than a more general tech interview.
I've done a lot of interviewing and have been interviewed myself a few times so I think I have a good amount of experience in the process. There are a lot of factors involved in technical interviews which I think a lot of people miss.
Tech interviews are usually only an hour, so the questions have to be short - this often leads to more academic questions, and questions not directly related to the work done at the company.
Interviews only tell you so much. You won't really know much about a candidate until they've been working with you for awhile. As such, many technical interviews are more about weeding out bad candidates than finding good ones.
People embellish, cheat and lie. Just because a resume is impressive doesn't mean the candidate is impressive. Just because they worked on a project doesn't mean they contributed anything worthwhile to it. Most people are honest but will still bend the truth sometimes. It's a lot harder to do that in person.
I like the idea of having a candidate work with the company for a week, but that's not realistic for a majority of cases. Not all companies are going to be able to do this, and neither are all candidates. If a candidate already has a job, asking them to take a week off is asking a lot. I also like the idea of a "homework" assignment. However it's possible for the candidate to cheat. It's also asking a lot of the candidate who may have a job and a family life.
These two approaches heavily favor college students and recent grads.
It's far from a perfect system. However it's reasonable (or so it seems) and is easy for companies to implement.
My reputation/referrals have allowed me to skip parts of the process but never the whole thing (I've skipped phone screenings, for example). I haven't been in the industry as long as you (~6 years) which might have something to do it. Also, you may be well known whereas I am not.
Obviously there are outliers (such as yourself). However I don't think there are any reasonably objective statistics for many of the other qualities you have mentioned.
What are the statistics on the number of men who are pedophiles? Better yet, what are the statistics on the number of male teachers (who are screened before they are hired) who are pedophiles?
If there was only one pedophile in the world, and he happened to be male, you could say that 100% of pedophiles are male and so you should never leave a child alone with a man. But that doesn't make sense, does it?
>Of course it's stupid to label all men as possible predators, but there's another side to it: when a single pedophile can damage literally hundreds of children, who wouldn't have cause for concern?
Concern about pedophiles isn't the other side to this. It's related in so far as our concern about pedophiles has turned into a concern about men in general. The only way it could be the other side would be if the majority of pedophiles are men (probably true) AND if a significant amount of men are pedophiles (I don't think I need to cite any references to say this is absolutely false).
It's pretty easy to have concern about pedophiles without having concern about men working with children. In fact, we already have systems in place for this - all teachers are screened before they are hired, for example.