Speaking from the perspective of the "self-taught" IT Professional, these tests have been a good thing. Helping headhunters and would-be employers to understand "No, I don't have a degree, but I'm highly competent" was a very difficult thing until these persons/companies developed a way to measure that competence.
On the flip side, I knew many college grads and MCSE's that new little to nothing about real-world IT work. I place this blame mainly on the many "MCSE" schools that sprang up. These schools often (but not always) taught students how to pass a test. This, unfortunately, is what lead hiring parties to test even the college grads.
If Bin Laden actually helped and/or planned these attacks, these interviews would most likely show nothing, he's not that dumb.
If he didn't have anything to do with it, they are the interviews of the wrong person. Albeit his denial makes sense, but the American public will need a new face to focus on before accepting this.
I am a software developer, and I grew up in Mesquite, TX (Home of id Software). The company would not exist today had it not been for the efforts of file sharing. Hundreds if not thousands of disks copied among friends to share this amazing game. BBS's spanning the Big-D list all had file sections devoted to Wolfenstien, and later Doom. Granted the program was handed out as shareware, but it's not the distribution of files that leads to piracy, it's the crack of the key mechanism. Developers understood this then,
Hollenshead , from the article:
"what they say is one thing, but what they do is another. When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I'm talking 99 per cent of the content is illicitly trading copyrighted property, they'll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit. You can make philosophical arguments that are difficult to debate, but at the same time you're just sort of ignoring the enormity of the problem."
Does he seriously think that hardware vendors shoulder the responsibility of stopping software from working? Hardware vendors have added so many new security features to PC's in recent years, but in the end it is MY COMPUTER. I choose what to run, what to download, and how to use that PC. DRM-like technologies have a history of being used to content providers to limit legal use of a product. As such any hardware-level solutions will not be received warmly, therefore decrease sales.
DRM, as is with speeding, will always be a cat and mouse game of technology. Lasers and scanners will continue to 1-up each other, but don't expect the car maker to slow the car down.
Not that this was very unexpected. While many of us held high hopes that person(s) responsible for illegal activity would actually be held accountable, it seems like that's not the way the U.S. works anymore. I would think this sets a precedent; now one can argue that changing laws grants them retroactive immunity.
I've told my wife for years we eventually will need to move the the U.K.. Looks like that just got a little closer.
I spent a couple years reviving old Dell Inspiron P2&3's, and I have to say that this OS has been the greatest thing since sliced bread. Extremely fast, lightweight, well supported with drivers, it has it all. Now with Wine 1.0 being released there's very little argument not to try this Linux brew. If you're not into Linux might I suggest grabbing your XP key with Jellybean and installing TinyXP or a similar stripped down version. Often you can get everything you need out of these versions save a few enterprise or development perks.
Last, but not least, spending the money on a really fast USB thumb drive and throwing your swap/page file onto the drive can give a real performance boost. I will most likely get flamed for this suggestion, however in my experience it works.
Google and other knowledge repositories no more make us stupid than a library does. It has, however, tremendously cut the amount of work required to acquire knowledge. As brought up by OzRoy above it seems every technology gets it's turn under this gun. What people quoting this fail to understand is that this time is somewhat offset by the amount of due diligence required to verify knowledge that is obtained. With TV society held true to journalistic practices in this regard. Through that we were able to somewhat deter the effect. Google, however, is based on popular opinion. Wikipedia, again popular opinion. Perhaps society has lost respect for these practices due to the abuse of it's trust by old media, but the saying holds true that one should always "check their sources".
In hind sight of this it would also seem that we have built a system which favors those already well-versed in their subject. Mis-information is often not only duplicated, but presented along side harder to find factual information. This means to teach our students to learn, we must first teach them discernment.
Google has not made us stupid. It has instead changed the tools necessary and way we learn. It's up to the individual to keep up.
Obviously from the title, I believe in creation. However, I do not believe that the teaching of my beliefs is the place of a school. This holds true for science's "beliefs" as well. Evolution is still a theory, and has not been proven to be fact YET. As such, it should not be taught in schools. I think the better path to take on this is that the study of human origin has no place at all in schools YET. Let us first find the 100% factual truth, if it can be found.
Cable is required to sell competitors advertising time.
Would it be fair if cable were to purposefully degrade only these commercials, even in the name of network management?
Would it be fair for cable operators to degrade channels because they don't agree with the content of the channel (as opposed to dropping the channel, which they obviously have the right to do). This would most likely result in lawsuits for damages incurred by said channel.
Perhaps as these types of media become cheap enough we will all be able to run our own media with the GMail-esk mantra "Never delete data again!". But seriously, Data Recovery exists through a flaw(?) in old media types. If I delete something, I want it gone. If I want to get it again, or insure it from loss, I should make backup.
This is all well and good until FBI/NSA/DHS decides to install rootkits on every media type we buy... that'll be the day.
You're thinking is sound, but what differs here is that they're not describing a collapse so much as a change in the dimension. Assuming that a universe expands out increasing in the number of dimensions similar to a bubble expanding in space, those dimesions are lost in a collapse. This flip's effect could be oversimply personified like having the pyramids show up next to the statue of liberty on Mars, an object could appear beside itself in 3-deminsional space, and the entiretly of a single atom's travels/existance would be visible at one instant.
Ever seen the worms that live in that net in the tree in your back yard? Imagine the universe suddenly becoming that.
Though I'm not great with the advanced formulas in this paper, I'd like to understand if I'm coming to the right conclusions based on the assumptions in this paper. It seems to suggest that the acceleration the universe is experiencing and "dark matter" are actually a product of the gravity created by the mass in the rest of time. Also, that we are in a 5-dimensional universe, the 4th being time, and the 5th I cannot discern.
Also, if the 5th dimension is a time dimension, and our natural ability to sense time is based on the energy in our brains moving/experiencing the changes, when the 4th dimension flips would not now said energy continue to flow across a much larger brain and continue to experience, but all time said creature was assembled?
Your theory is correct. I'm surprised this "bug" is still around. Back in Lotus days one of the coders, a friend of mine, decided to extend the floating point by converting the numbers to strings and doing manual math with the numbers. This lead to a strange bug where 1+2+3+4-4-3-2-1=.0000000000000001.... Months later Excel popped up with the same bug. Looks like some of this old code is still lurking around.
Firstly, thanks for the info cdn-programmer. I know nothing of the chemistry of fuels, so I appreciate you sharing in such detail.
Secondly, I agree with your C02 position. If people seriously wanted to eliminate C02 they'd plant more. Instead we look for labs to fix it... hard work scares 'em away every time.
I'm going to go a bit off main topic, but I swear, I'm interested in your mind...
Now that I understand that Gasoline - C = H2 (basically), and having read this article Carbon Based Paper, could this "paper" be used to contain H2 fuel effectively? The article states that water causes it to break down, but I don't have the knowledge to determine if it's the H2 thats the problem.
I think it's a bit early to call a judgement call here. The article mentions that the bacterium can be altered to make sulfer-free crude, so there's obvously the potential to make a cleaner gasoline/fuel by eliminating or "refining" the refinery process (See EPA Tier 2). Perhaps if anyone could shed light on the necessity of carbon in gasoline? If it's not necessary, this could be a path to a carbon negative(?) fuel system.
Reading the end of this article, a goal has been set by the U.S. Department of Energy to replace 30% of our petroleum. Without deviating too far from the subject, can anyone shed some light on this? Does "current petroleum use" me crude oil or refined fuels? The phrase "fuels from renewable biological sources" points out that this doesn't just mean gasoline, but I'd like to know more about this goal. Links to DoE sources would be appreciated.
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Please see my Firehose post for the accurate quote:
I must reply here that my original post has been editied. It continued:
"Does the business sector truely see the value in their IT departments, or are they just telling us what we want to hear again."
Speaking from the perspective of the "self-taught" IT Professional, these tests have been a good thing. Helping headhunters and would-be employers to understand "No, I don't have a degree, but I'm highly competent" was a very difficult thing until these persons/companies developed a way to measure that competence.
On the flip side, I knew many college grads and MCSE's that new little to nothing about real-world IT work. I place this blame mainly on the many "MCSE" schools that sprang up. These schools often (but not always) taught students how to pass a test. This, unfortunately, is what lead hiring parties to test even the college grads.
If Bin Laden actually helped and/or planned these attacks, these interviews would most likely show nothing, he's not that dumb. If he didn't have anything to do with it, they are the interviews of the wrong person. Albeit his denial makes sense, but the American public will need a new face to focus on before accepting this.
I am a software developer, and I grew up in Mesquite, TX (Home of id Software). The company would not exist today had it not been for the efforts of file sharing. Hundreds if not thousands of disks copied among friends to share this amazing game. BBS's spanning the Big-D list all had file sections devoted to Wolfenstien, and later Doom. Granted the program was handed out as shareware, but it's not the distribution of files that leads to piracy, it's the crack of the key mechanism. Developers understood this then,
Hollenshead , from the article: "what they say is one thing, but what they do is another. When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I'm talking 99 per cent of the content is illicitly trading copyrighted property, they'll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit. You can make philosophical arguments that are difficult to debate, but at the same time you're just sort of ignoring the enormity of the problem."
Does he seriously think that hardware vendors shoulder the responsibility of stopping software from working? Hardware vendors have added so many new security features to PC's in recent years, but in the end it is MY COMPUTER. I choose what to run, what to download, and how to use that PC. DRM-like technologies have a history of being used to content providers to limit legal use of a product. As such any hardware-level solutions will not be received warmly, therefore decrease sales.
DRM, as is with speeding, will always be a cat and mouse game of technology. Lasers and scanners will continue to 1-up each other, but don't expect the car maker to slow the car down.
Not that this was very unexpected. While many of us held high hopes that person(s) responsible for illegal activity would actually be held accountable, it seems like that's not the way the U.S. works anymore. I would think this sets a precedent; now one can argue that changing laws grants them retroactive immunity.
I've told my wife for years we eventually will need to move the the U.K.. Looks like that just got a little closer.
I spent a couple years reviving old Dell Inspiron P2&3's, and I have to say that this OS has been the greatest thing since sliced bread. Extremely fast, lightweight, well supported with drivers, it has it all. Now with Wine 1.0 being released there's very little argument not to try this Linux brew. If you're not into Linux might I suggest grabbing your XP key with Jellybean and installing TinyXP or a similar stripped down version. Often you can get everything you need out of these versions save a few enterprise or development perks.
Last, but not least, spending the money on a really fast USB thumb drive and throwing your swap/page file onto the drive can give a real performance boost. I will most likely get flamed for this suggestion, however in my experience it works.
Google and other knowledge repositories no more make us stupid than a library does. It has, however, tremendously cut the amount of work required to acquire knowledge. As brought up by OzRoy above it seems every technology gets it's turn under this gun. What people quoting this fail to understand is that this time is somewhat offset by the amount of due diligence required to verify knowledge that is obtained. With TV society held true to journalistic practices in this regard. Through that we were able to somewhat deter the effect. Google, however, is based on popular opinion. Wikipedia, again popular opinion. Perhaps society has lost respect for these practices due to the abuse of it's trust by old media, but the saying holds true that one should always "check their sources".
In hind sight of this it would also seem that we have built a system which favors those already well-versed in their subject. Mis-information is often not only duplicated, but presented along side harder to find factual information. This means to teach our students to learn, we must first teach them discernment.
Google has not made us stupid. It has instead changed the tools necessary and way we learn. It's up to the individual to keep up.
Obviously from the title, I believe in creation. However, I do not believe that the teaching of my beliefs is the place of a school. This holds true for science's "beliefs" as well. Evolution is still a theory, and has not been proven to be fact YET. As such, it should not be taught in schools. I think the better path to take on this is that the study of human origin has no place at all in schools YET. Let us first find the 100% factual truth, if it can be found.
Here's a relevant analogy:
Cable is required to sell competitors advertising time.
Would it be fair if cable were to purposefully degrade only these commercials, even in the name of network management?
Would it be fair for cable operators to degrade channels because they don't agree with the content of the channel (as opposed to dropping the channel, which they obviously have the right to do). This would most likely result in lawsuits for damages incurred by said channel.
Perhaps as these types of media become cheap enough we will all be able to run our own media with the GMail-esk mantra "Never delete data again!". But seriously, Data Recovery exists through a flaw(?) in old media types. If I delete something, I want it gone. If I want to get it again, or insure it from loss, I should make backup. This is all well and good until FBI/NSA/DHS decides to install rootkits on every media type we buy... that'll be the day.
You're thinking is sound, but what differs here is that they're not describing a collapse so much as a change in the dimension. Assuming that a universe expands out increasing in the number of dimensions similar to a bubble expanding in space, those dimesions are lost in a collapse. This flip's effect could be oversimply personified like having the pyramids show up next to the statue of liberty on Mars, an object could appear beside itself in 3-deminsional space, and the entiretly of a single atom's travels/existance would be visible at one instant.
Ever seen the worms that live in that net in the tree in your back yard? Imagine the universe suddenly becoming that.
Though I'm not great with the advanced formulas in this paper, I'd like to understand if I'm coming to the right conclusions based on the assumptions in this paper. It seems to suggest that the acceleration the universe is experiencing and "dark matter" are actually a product of the gravity created by the mass in the rest of time. Also, that we are in a 5-dimensional universe, the 4th being time, and the 5th I cannot discern.
Also, if the 5th dimension is a time dimension, and our natural ability to sense time is based on the energy in our brains moving/experiencing the changes, when the 4th dimension flips would not now said energy continue to flow across a much larger brain and continue to experience, but all time said creature was assembled?
Your theory is correct. I'm surprised this "bug" is still around. Back in Lotus days one of the coders, a friend of mine, decided to extend the floating point by converting the numbers to strings and doing manual math with the numbers. This lead to a strange bug where 1+2+3+4-4-3-2-1=.0000000000000001.... Months later Excel popped up with the same bug. Looks like some of this old code is still lurking around.
Firstly, thanks for the info cdn-programmer. I know nothing of the chemistry of fuels, so I appreciate you sharing in such detail.
Secondly, I agree with your C02 position. If people seriously wanted to eliminate C02 they'd plant more. Instead we look for labs to fix it... hard work scares 'em away every time.
I'm going to go a bit off main topic, but I swear, I'm interested in your mind...
Now that I understand that Gasoline - C = H2 (basically), and having read this article Carbon Based Paper, could this "paper" be used to contain H2 fuel effectively? The article states that water causes it to break down, but I don't have the knowledge to determine if it's the H2 thats the problem.
Thanks
I think it's a bit early to call a judgement call here. The article mentions that the bacterium can be altered to make sulfer-free crude, so there's obvously the potential to make a cleaner gasoline/fuel by eliminating or "refining" the refinery process (See EPA Tier 2). Perhaps if anyone could shed light on the necessity of carbon in gasoline? If it's not necessary, this could be a path to a carbon negative(?) fuel system.
Reading the end of this article, a goal has been set by the U.S. Department of Energy to replace 30% of our petroleum. Without deviating too far from the subject, can anyone shed some light on this? Does "current petroleum use" me crude oil or refined fuels? The phrase "fuels from renewable biological sources" points out that this doesn't just mean gasoline, but I'd like to know more about this goal. Links to DoE sources would be appreciated.
Thanks
Dodged that bullet.