eoin_murphy

It is. In Germany at least all communications must be encrypted. And often multiple meters will communicate via one gateway.

Though, if someone has the time and technical ability to implement this kind of surveillance then there are probably easier ways to get better info than inferring activity from energy readings.

Thanks for the real numbers. When I was looking the sort of salaries I was being quoted were in the 10000 per month range which is a lot more than what I'm currently on but would actually work out worse once costs are taken into account.

True, they're not that crazy, but when I looked at the higher salary Vs the higher costs it was financially better to stay put. Of course money isn't the only deciding factor but it's not the land of massive opportunity it's sometimes presented as.

That said, if you've got no dependents and you want to stay in mainland Europe, then it's probably a very good choice.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but while salaries are high and taxes are relatively low, general living costs are quite high. Particularly if you have kids and so want a bigger house and good schools.

I've looked at this and the benefits we get from staying in Germany outweigh the extra income earned.

I don't think you're going to get a great response as that's a lot of identifying information you're asking for. Country, Area (optional), years of experience, gross salary and extras is what you really want.

Sorry for the derail, but who are you with in Germany for that deal? All the contracts I've seen start at at least €40.

9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?

I always took this as a criticism of companies where you've got developers who earn multiple thousands per month pecking away at old PC's and squinting at 15" CRT screens. Waiting for 5-10 mins for the OS to startup and > 5 mins to build a project.

This is probably more possible now given the ease with which a fraud can get someone else to do their work for them (I remember a news story doing the rounds of an experienced developer doing all of this and outsourcing all their work to India).

But of course, this isn't new behavior and because we work in a job which is seen as well paid, so fraudsters will try to get something for nothing.

See: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean

Even worse, working on technical debt may be viewed as a negative thing ("if it's working why did you change it?" said the phb).

I've yet to find a code review process beyond a trivial implementation that scaled. The best results I've had were with a rotating buddy system. (Every week/month) you review someone else's code and they yours.

Well, according to this, my house should already be under water. That's what happens when you live below the water level of the neighbouring canal...

To get insight into their budgets.

I have tried one or two services similar to mint in an effort to get more control on budgeting. The typical bank provided online banking interface is like something from 10-15 years years ago with a painful interface and no real facilities to either analyse your income/spending on the site or to easily export data.

The promise of these other services is to scrape at your data, gather it into an easily viewable/filterable format and allow you to group it semantically (i.e. this payment every month is for rent, food, socializing) The idea being that it can automatically analyze the accounts give you more control over your budget.

My experience was that for personal accounts the analysis was no better than I was doing myself and they cannot account correctly for cash withdrawls which kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise. Finally, my bank recently updated their online banking site so that it's just as good as that offered by these external services.

I took this to be less a post about not having a degree but rather, not keeping up with the market. How it's easy to just do the work that's in front of you and not consider how your choices now will affect your career in 10~20~30 years time.

Not having a degree doesn't help finding work (it shouldn't make a difference, but unfortuantely with most HR depts it does) but if the poster had been willing to aggressively work on their career instead of coasting at the "traditional office" the story could be very different.

I've done a few years with a mixture of small company/freelance work myself and I'm back in an enterprise company for the first time in ages and on a purely technical level it's a giant step back. There's huge resistance to changing existing code and/or introducing new technologies. Often with good business reasons (the product is done, it's in production and huge changes are not needed) but if you're on the technical side then you absolutely have to be looking out for your own skills if you ever want to work outside of that company again.

If I was a hiring manager, seeing 10 years at a "traditional" company on a CV with no signs of interest in the field outside of the job would be setting off alarms. I absolutely would rather hire someone with experience and fully developed professional skills than a fresh grad, but the nightmare is that your experienced hire is used to just following their 80 page internal process guide every day and they wouldn't be able to handle any new situations.

There are many countries which prompt for neither prayer nor patriotism. Ireland certainly does not and I don't think the UK does either (certain very religious schools of course may differ).

Not really no. I'm I don't think I spelled it correctly but it's phonetically correct.

"Mar yea" would be a dismissive description meaning something like "..as if" or ".. not!"

Capital Gains Tax: I'm not a tax lawyer but there's good advice here: http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/money_and_tax/tax/capit...

Morale wise, again I don't know. I'm currently out in India but when I left 6 months ago there was (I think) a sense of just shrugging the shoulders and getting on with life. At this point, more scandals, bailouts & controversies would just be adding to the pile. People will complain but there won't be any kind of mass movement in protest. We voted out the political party who were in power during the boom years and I see now that they're back to the second most popular party in the country.

I know a lot of young, very talented people don't see a future for themselves in the country, don't see the point in trying to fix a very conservative system and just leaving (this would be why we have a relatively low unemployment rate compared to say, Spain).

The only way we'll roll those rates back is if the EU forces the changes. The public aren't angry with companies or multinationals. They're angry with private banks, a government which made private debt public on the insistence of the EU and with the EU which is forcing extreme hardship to repay other EU banks. Please note, I'm not saying the people or the Irish government is not culpable for the current crisis - particularly the banking regulator - but rather just trying to outline what the public see as being the problem.

Gaelic is compulsory for both primary and secondary school which means that almost everyone will study it between the ages of 5 and 16 (minimum school leaving age). It says something about our approach that all but a very small minority of school leavers are effectively unable to hold a conversation in the language.

It's been compulsory since the formation of the Irish state during that time the percentage of actual spoken Irish (as well as general Irish comprehension) has continually dropped. Given that the actual aim of this was to promote the language I think it's safe to say it's been an unmitigated disaster.

My personal take on this (I went to an all Irish primary school so I was fluent) is that there's two factors here:

1 - The way it's taught is absolutely terrible. There's a focus on the grammar and structure of the language rather than actually speaking it. This means that students associate it with memorizing genitive and dative cases which is pretty boring. This means the student don't like it. Some of those students grow up to be the teachers, and they've got a negative attitude to the language. Wash, rinse repeat for 90 years and you get to where we are now.

2 - There's no economic incentive to learn the language. Unless you're living in a gaeltacht (nearly all in very rural areas) you're almost never actually going to be able to use it. It's not present in any other country and apart from having conversations which foreigners can't understand, isn't useful. There are reasons to learn it but they're cultural or academic rather than practical.

There are signs of regrowth with more and more all Irish schools popping up but my impression is that it's become a middle class status symbol to be able to speak the language so we'll see what happens there. There's also been discussion about reforming the syllabus to split it into conversational Irish (compulsory) and 'academic' Irish (optional)

As for dealing with the government, you're permitted (not obligated) to conduct all of your business with officials through Irish and demand that they do the same with you. We have two versions of our constitution, one in Irish and one in English. In the case of any discrepancies, the Irish one takes precedence.

B'fhéidir go fuair siad mórchuid aireagaid lena chuir isteach ann? Street-cred mar yea.

That and they probably just got a huge grant for putting their first translation in Irish...

But yes, the tax laws in Ireland are incredibly generous, if you're a corporation. I say this as a person just falling into the top tax bracket which means that while most of my wages are taxed at 21% or so (closer to 25%), any bonuses or future wage increases will be taxed at over 50% (once all the levies etc. have been counted in). And there's also the awareness that a significant percentage of that goes towards repaying bondholders in Anglo Irish bank or towards public services who refuse to restructure or update 50 year old work practices. (sorry, rant over)

There is also the fact that it's an English speaking country with a pool of relatively highly educated employees who are used to dealing with American businesses. Wages are relatively low compared to the US or England (well, London anyway) and you can have the best and brightest of Europe can relocate with no visa issues (once you can convince them to relocate to a rainy island in the North Atlantic)

It's dehumanizing because the targets are painted as one-dimensional figures to be "eliminated" not a people who have been killed. See paragraph 3 in the linked post

I'm not saying they're not justified in doing what they're doing (that's a whole other 70+ year conversation) but this is the same as any other propaganda to 'other' the enemy.

I agree absolutely. There are individuals and groups out there drumming up controversy whenever they can, whatever their motives are.

I didn't mean to compare the two in terms of which was ok, I was just pointing out that saying " Most Palestinians probably don't read english anyways." doesn't mean they won't be aware of it regardless of whether or not they are the "intended" audience

It may be for domestic consumption but there are plenty of Palestinians who do speak English and I'm pretty sure at least some of them are on Twitter. After all, if a Danish cartoon in a newspaper can set off riots in countries where it is not published then I'm sure public posts on a very popular website will get some coverage.

Regardless of how the Palestinians react to it, it does just seem a very dehumanized way of approaching a conflict where actual real people are dying.

As a developer, with a good few years of experience behind me (admittedly in non-startup areas like insurance and equity plans), who's actively looked to move to Singapore I've found it quite hard to find any jobs that didn't fall into either the entry level code monkey (MUST KNOW HTML & XHTML) or the high level investment banking sector.

Really good local talent will probably drift towards the latter and startup's just can't compete with those sort of salaries. I imagine it's the same issue with New York.

As with all good jobs, startup positions are never really advertised openly. And if they are, they're not there for long.

It seems to me as an outsider as well that any kind of physical activity is generally looked down. Not absolutely but more in a 'if you don't have to, why would you' way.

Plus, it's so hot most of the time that any serious aerobic activity is difficult to maintain.

We're looking for mid to senior level C# developers in Chennai, India. No Remote I'm afraid.

We are a small company with ambitious plans to disrupt the equity management space targetting companies ranging in size from garage startups to multinationals. We work in small teams of up to 5 employees across a range of projects and there's no shortage of interesting problems.

We're using a MS development stack incorporating SQL Server 2008, .Net 4.0 and ASP.NET MVC 3 (we will move to 4 once it comes out). We run as close to an agile development process as we can and we feel you can never have too many unit tests.

For more contact emurphy@globalshares.com

Technically, it is not VAT Free. It's rather that the rate of VAT is 0%.

Effectively the same I know...

Except the chisel, which is a screwdriver.

I was going to reply with a comment. But one of the most Important things to realise as a programmer is that your program is not unique and most likely someone smarter has spent longer on crafting a much better solution . Here's a full post with a comprehensive answer.

http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html

An even more important requirement is realising when your solution is better and being able to explain exactly why.

My personal fear with emails to clients and co-workers is instead of

Regards, Eoin Murphy

typing

Retards, Eoin Murphy

Insulting, simple to do (g-t keys right next to each other) and the spell checker wouldn't catch it.

As regards the danger words; if you find that your're typing a lot of them, it may be a good idea to reconsider your career choices.

I went to UCC. While it's a fine university, with a lot of history and high aspirations, it's also quite small (approx 15000 students) with a small staff. And in all these types of situations, if either has any political pull with the higher ups the whole thing can get blown out of proportion very quickly.

If Dylan Evans produced this paper with the sole purpose of harassing (of which he has been cleared) or offending the woman then they should go after him for wasting university time/money on pointless research.

If it is a legitimate paper and it was appropriate for him to show it to the woman, but she was offended by descriptions of bat fellatio then you've got to wonder what she's doing in the dept. of medicine? I'm sure there are far more offensive things out there and I would hate to have a researcher unwilling to look at those topics just because they're offensive to their sensibilities.

If it is a legitimate paper but it was not appropriate for him to show it to her (i.e. she expressed no interest in it and it's not part of her job) then you've got to question his motives. Was it just a "passing the dirty joke email around the office" type scenario, or was it "hey look at this interesting results I found" type scenario.

Regardless, he will now probably have to move universities as most institutions don't like their dirty laundry being aired in public (assuming it was he who made all of this public)

This the same BCA who sued a science journalist for pointing out that their claims didn't seem to have scientific proof. More at the excellent badscience blog:

http://www.badscience.net/2010/04/british-chiropractic-assoc...