fatman · HackerTrans

há 10 anosdiscuss

It doesn't. The experiment could have been done by the dad and his daughter on their own without a single form. Its when the school and their lawyers get involved. The cynic in me wants to point out that the paperwork exercise might be the part that best prepares the young student for an actual career in science or engineering.

fatman

há 11 anosdiscuss

Maybe it's my white privilege talking, but I don't see the racial angle here. Would "Corporations" be any less inclined to appropriate and profit from the creations of white teens? Would the moral wrong of the taking be any less egregious? Sometimes bad behavior directed at minorities is just generally bad behavior and not racism.

fatman

há 11 anosdiscuss

Because I'm a stubborn ass who'd rather suffer a freeloader than hand in an incomplete assignment. In hindsight, I guess I should have finished the project and explained the division of labor.

fatman

há 11 anosdiscuss

Seems like a good a time as any to break out my favorite anti-MBA story.

I took a Masters CS class some time ago, and for our final class project, not knowing anyone else in the class, I got lumped in the "leftover" group with a working engineer and a Wharton MBA student. We meet up the day before the project is due to integrate each of our individual pieces together into a final submission and the MBA candidate shows up empty handed. Turns out he had spent his time trying to "schmooze" the answers/code out of the professor and the TA, who, to their credit, had stood firm. Guess who spent that entire night writing that dolt's portion of the project from scratch.

fatman

há 11 anosdiscuss

It's funny - the only two businesses that have made me use the EMV features on my card are the locally owned butcher shop down the street and Wal-Mart.

fatman

há 11 anosdiscuss

I think this was Larry Lessig's position at one point. I think it's a a nice, practical solution that acknowledges that copyright is a political animal - let Disney keep Mickey forever, but the public gets everything of a lesser order of magnitude in value faster.

fatman

há 11 anosdiscuss

Shhhhh... Don't broadcast your flouting of your state's Use Tax like that!

fatman

há 11 anosdiscuss

You don't need a lawyer pro-bono, just one on contingency. If you can survive the motion to dismiss at the outset, you've now entered discovery, and BigCo will now start incurring bigtime legal costs. Settlement offers will be forthcoming. Litigation isn't about winning in the courtroom, it's about inflicting pain until someone says "uncle". (Patent litigation often goes further because the stakes are so high. Your five-figure breach of contract suit, not so much.)

fatman

há 11 anosdiscuss

Wow. It's no surprise that rms lacks empathy or social grace, but I'm kind of shocked one man's availability could single-handedly delay a release of a project like emacs. What if the poor chap had got hit by a bus?

fatman

há 12 anosdiscuss

Nuremburg was an exception to the general rule that you couldn't prosecute soldiers for carrying out the orders of their superiors - establishing that the mass genocide of innocent people crosses a line. However, the torture of a handful of active enemy participants might not.

fatman

há 12 anosdiscuss

I wouldn't expect a business school professor, JD or not, to have any clue about state consumer protection law.

I would expect an MBA to bluster on in an area in which he was clearly out of his depth.

fatman

há 12 anosdiscuss

IAL, and I could imagine this fee getting upheld in at least a few US jurisdictions (with the right judge), leaving consumers to rely solely on the Streisand effect to get satisfaction.

The classic notion of a contract as an expression of the compromises forged in a battle between two sophisticated, represented parties has been replaced by overlawyering, boilerplate, and clickwrap.

http://abovethelaw.com/2010/06/do-lawyers-actaully-read-boil... (Judge Posner is perhaps the most acclaimed US jurist not on the Supreme Court - a "Law and Economics" pioneer who can roughly be described as libertarian)

What's the solution? Hold consumers responsible for every detail of wordy documents they didn't have the time to read, much less negotiate? Make companies bear the costs of every complaint - real, imagined, or fraudlent - a consumer can dream up? Companies can be cheap and sneaky, and consumers can be petty, stubborn, and stupid.

fatman

há 12 anosdiscuss

That's an awful lot of detail from a event with no surviving witnesses.

fatman

há 12 anosdiscuss

Sounds promising. Calories in, calories out - the rest is just noise.

fatman

há 12 anosdiscuss

Or, what if the interviewer explicitly challenged the interviewee to come up with an interview coding challenge? And perhaps even worked the challenge, with the interviewee hinting, helping, and evaluating? Maybe it would be a good way to demonstrate complete command of a subject, or the ability to think on one's feet, or even to evaluate the candidate as a teacher/leader of younger developers?

fatman

há 12 anosdiscuss

What would happen if an interviewee 'flipped the script' - gave the interviewer a coding challenge? Maybe under the guise of assessing the skill level of his potential co-workers? Is there any way an interviewer takes the bait?

fatman

há 12 anosdiscuss

This has always baffled me. Is coding the only technical skill?

It's especially bewildering when a company seeks a software engineer with expertise in a highly technical domain and populates the interview primarily with programming questions. If they can find the subject matter expert who also happens to be a master software craftsman, congrats to them, but I'm guessing that person doesn't come along very often.

(Maybe I'm bitter, but with the level of skill in computer vision I can demonstrate, don't you think you can teach me your programming nits in short order?)

fatman

há 12 anosdiscuss

How do you get that doctor's prescription in the US?

fatman

há 12 anosdiscuss

What about Nicotine? Back in college and for a few years afterward, I used to put in a big fat dip (or chew) for all/late-nighters to help me buckle down, focus, and stay alert. I stopped for all the standard health reasons, but I find that caffeine is only about 2/3 as good.

fatman

há 13 anosdiscuss

I feel the same way about ad blockers as I do about skipping commercials with the DVR - my purchasing decisions are almost never influenced by ads, so why would I bother watching them? I'm just afraid that someday, even without DVR's and Adblockers, companies will figure out that I'm not buying their crap and stop offering me free TV shows and websites, ads or no.

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