12 Aug 2009
Will Your Credit Report Disqualify You For a Job?

I've run into this craziness before, and must ask again How Has It Come to This? What in the world does my credit report have to do with my ability to do work? Could bad credit be a distraction? Certainly - but so could an obsession with orchid growing or Harley-Davidson's. There is still such a thing as a personal life, but we'd better be defending the concept while we can, because it appears to be going the way of the dodo rather rapidly.

Two companies that fired workers and rejected job applicants based on background checks, without informing those people of their rights, have settled with the FTC for $77,000 in civil penalties. Most experts we talked to think this case is just the tip of the iceberg. The companies — Quality Terminal Services and Rail Terminal Services — were charged with violating provisions of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires employers to get permission to look at individual credit reports. If you don't get a job because of information in your report, the employer must show you the report and tell you how to get a copy from the consumer reporting company. There is no charge for the report if you request it within 60 days of getting notice that you did not get a job.

(link) [Slashdot]

07:29 /Politics | 1 comment | permanent link

Geek Humor

This will probably only be of interest to my programming reader, but I certainly found it amusing ....

I was trying to fill in data in a DirectShow stream coming off a a input pin, and attempting to cast the bitmap information to a VIDEOINFOHEADER2 as opposed to a plain VIDEOINFOHEADER to see if I could get better aspect ratio information. The pin stream is filled by DirectShow, of course, and VIDEOINFOHEADER2 is a bit larger than VIDEOINFOHEADER. The cast didn't look right, so I figured it was wrong, but what to my amazement did I find filling the space beyond where VIDEOINFOHEADER would've ended? I found a filled buffer, of course, with repeated integers: 3131961357.

Use a handy hex converter to see why I about fell out of my chair laughing ... guess I can't use videoinfoheader2 there, after all!

07:23 /Humor | 1 comment | permanent link