"They" in this case is all the people involved between the cabin door of the aircraft and the exit door of the airport.
As a prospective visitor to your country it doesn't matter which official designation "they" have. It only matters what the outcome will be for me.
Whether the extraordinary reduction and enhanced interrogation is done by one arm or another of your government is irrelevant. That it happens is all that matters.
Looks like it's a county-by-county lookup function, crossed with state voting laws. We're building something county-by-county too - difficult locality matching issues.
Note that in some places, county isn't very useful for anything voting-related, and completely useless for down-ballot. Here in NYC, each county contains dozens upon dozens of polling places. And then each of the US House, state senate, state representatives, and city council have oodles of their own non-matching districts that don't match 1-1 with polling places either.
Getting any useful information about down-ballot races when there are thousands of separate races in a single media market is essentially impossible. And that goes doubly for the primaries, which are really the only races that make a difference here.
The iPhone is apparently the phone of choice for photographers, who know what an f stop is. I believe that spec is for them, everyone wants their f/1.2 L lens or whatever. Look at all of Apple's recent iPhone ads; they are all about the photos you can take (if you are willing to re-edit them in Photoshop to remove all the denoise and compression artifacts, which they even mention in the ads with a white-on-white disclaimer).
Small sensors are getting better. I am shocked at how good the image quality is on my RX100 (with a "one inch" sensor; one inch refers to the size of vacuum tube that would contain such a sensor if it were 1960 or something, no dimension is anywhere near one inch). I'm not going to give up 4x5 for it, but it's way better than a phone.
That said, the camera bump is ugly. Why can't they use a telephoto design (your 500mm SLR lens isn't 500mm long, remember).
The photo quality is - strange. It's not truly sharp or clean, especially in the far distance, and there's an odd softness and a hint of waxy sheen to it.
It's a look Nikon used to have ten or so years ago, and to me it suggests over-aggressive noise removal.
To be fair it's very good for a tiny camera, and amazing considering the state of the art ten years ago.
But I wonder if it's starting to fall into uncanny valley: the closer it gets to pro performance, the more obvious it becomes that it's not there yet.
They are, but they will also hit a physical wall at some point (if not already), and you'll continue trading "natural" dynamic range and low noise for software interpolated dynamic range and smoothing, which as others have noted, starts looking like Madame Tussaud's museum.
Then again, if Apple really wanted to impress me with their camera skills they would have to develop a medium format mirrorless digital camera for less than $5k. One can dream, I suppose.
Basically, pixels are so small these days that even tiny amount of camera motion is going to blur a point of light between two pixels. I'm not sure how much that matters, but I think it does. So you can't make the sensors small and increase the detail you get. 20MP is the best you are going to do with full-frame, much less APS-C or 1" or iPhone size. Maybe image stabilization fixes all of this.
I took some photos on an airplane of a lightning storm today with a 1" sensor camera. ISO 5000, .5 second exposure hand-held, and they're pretty sharp. Not portfolio sharp, but good enough for some Internet Points probably. My iPhone did not do well, however. (I tried that first, then realized, hey I have a better camera with me.)
It's a great point from a marketing perspective. Something users don't understand but can pretend too - I need this because it's got a f/1.8 camera, way better than the Samsung f/5.6 [I made that up]. What's super good is that it looks so technical, it looks like something that real cameras have about them too. Marketing fluff, yay.
Just like megapixels. The general public has this notion of "more megapixels is better". They don't understand that there's more to a camera than megapixels: F stops, low light performance, etc. I've actually met people who know 1080p "Full HD" is 1920x1080 but had no idea that it's only two megapixels.
It will perform better than f/2.2 of the old phone. I know several professional photographers who often carry the iPhone when they don't need all their equipment. Its not that hard to take good photos with it, especially with enough light
I agree with the others who have pointed out that you're already successful, don't break it!
That said, don't even consider HR as your first hire. Not even for a second. Their role is to police contracts and resolve issues. You won't have that until you have more people.
Get someone who wants to do the stuff you are tired of doing.
I really don't want to criticize the OP, but as an observation, the question reveals such a deep level of naivety about how to run a company that it bodes very poorly for the transition of this company to same-but-multiple-time-bigger-and-more-profitable.
Step One: talk to a local temp-to-perm agency about computer literate clerical staff or a personal assistant. This lets you defer ALL the HR/payroll/tax issues until much later.
If you can successfully outsource a non-core function, then do so. HR is one of those things that can be successfully outsourced particularly at the small scale.
The only maybe gotcha with outsourcing the HR function is that, while you can outsource the routine tasks (issuing payslips), you can not outsource to an outside firm the legal obligations surrounding employee contracts, employment law, obligations to pay correct payroll taxes, etc.
If you go the route of outsourcing HR, you may wish to consider investing a bit in HR consulting with the aim of educating yourself about employment law in your legal jurisdiction.
Took me awhile to understand what you mean. I calculated inflation in Canada to be $27 today from $17 in 1990 (which was about what I paid then). Of course I pay $10-13 per album now.
I have a Priv, you will like it. You don't sacrifice any Android features (or security updates), and the keyboard is there. I have had it since December and only typed on the touchscreen about 3 times. It is a bit big, but it is the same as any other phone manufacturer makes. I find it is fine in my front pants pocket and it also fits nicely in a shirt pocket.
I run a small company and I absolutely refuse to have an HR department. We're still small enough that this is fairly easy to work around.
My recent hires are all just people I met at events. I'm told by people outside the company that they're all very happy workers.
We do not do technical interviews. We talk casually about past work and what people want to achieve. After hiring we usually find out they have a different skillset and then we find the right tasks to match experience vs. career path.
Knowing this works for my team I would never want to go back to full-time employment at a place with HR ever again. HR has become an insular group of "specialists" who do not deliver value to organizations, and often ruin them IMO.
>I run a small company and I absolutely refuse to have an HR department.
You are my hero. If you ever end up having an HR department you can put in mediocre software developers to do the menial tasks. Most mediocre software developers will out do your average HR drone. For hiring and interviewing use the very best people that you have.
I'm confused. I think of HR as human resources, that is, the folks who manage benefits and paychecks and insurance struggles. How is that related to interviewing new engineers?
If you've got a good mix of developers at various levels of skill I'd say you're doing it correctly then. The problem is the corporate mandates that 100% of employees be ninja/guru/cowboys. It's this mindset that keeps everyone else running around interviewing needlessly.
You might be interested in what is going on in Drupal 8 with regard to pre-caching and a newer (now in core I think) module called BigPipe. It does some of what you describe in PHP in a fairly generic way. AFAIK, you just enable this module and ensure caching is enabled. From that point on, slower assets load when ready so the rest of the site is already visible... like Facebook.
I'm more talking about fast start SPA, not partial content loading strategies. There's a number of utilities that does what Drupal is doing. Turbolinks has been doing what you describe for years (if memory serves) with Rails.
