* Broadly criminalize child pornography, even if the subject only appears to be a child;
I assume "intent" is going to be part of this. How else do you legally distinguish between child porn and pictures of children? FWIW, I recall Britain has a law now against artificial child porn - pictures that have been created via Photoshop.
Either way, it's tempting to get worried about this because no question of intent is explicitly worded, and many IANAL types get worried about anything so subjective, but given there'd be a international outcry if proud parents, owners of stores selling goods aimed at children, etc, suddenly started getting jailed and/or deported due to pictures of people under 21 appearing on their sites, we can be reasonably sure that intent will be a factor in practice.
Not typically in practice. There have been documented cases, although I have no information at hand to reference, where individuals were targetted by vague laws such as these for purely political reasons. Which is the true danger. Sure, not everyone with a picture of their 2yr old in the tub is going to be prosecuted. But if you happen to piss off the "powers that be" in such a way as to provoke a witch hunt - and you happen to have a picture of your 2yr old in the tub - well then Mister! You're a Child Pornographer and gonna do some serious time as some Bubba's wife!
If you use a program for illegal purposes, you are already breaking the law. How is it that changing this to using an illegal program for illegal purposes is such an extremely urgent need that it requires international support.
This is nothing more than the FBI attempting to get around the public's resistance to such laws. If an international treaty is signed, which supercedes US law, they get the power they want by essentially going over the heads of American Citizens.
Since it joined/established international organizations such as WTO, UN, etc that override local/county/state/US law.
The Constitution states "Congress will enact no law..." - doesn't say anything about an international governing body enacting a law that our treaties require us to enfore/obey.
Why do you think so many are upset with these types of organizations - and "globalization" in general?
If you can't understand that money you don't have today, then suddenly have tomorrow is money "comming in" (ie IN COME!) then you should attempt to sound so pompous, arrogant, and rude!
I don't care, nor was I speaking of, the technical details of the inheritence tax! I was simply stating that it is NOT "money taxed twice" as the individual who was taxed originally is dead and therefore NOT paying taxes again on it.
Anyone else who receives it - regardless of what you wish to call it - is receiving assets they did not already own. This would be, in my book, income! This should be taxed just like every other asset one obtains. The fact the rate is different, and on the total estate, is irrellevent.
True the inheritence tax doesn't kick in until the amount inherited is above a certain amount, but the fact remains that the person receiving the inheritence was not previously taxed on it's value. That is my point - it's not taxed twice as the poster had stated. Each recipient is taxed, above that mininum, seperately. It is the person who is taxed, not the money.
Notice I didn't capitalize Income Tax, which is a specific form of tax on income. I merely stated it is considered income to the beneficiery, since they didn't previously own it. Feel free to use whatever teminology you wish, the concept is my point.
"...Inheritance tax is a tax on saved income, income that got taxed. So, it's a weird consumption encourager, and "unfair" in the sense that it is double taxation...."
Money is not taxed - Income is taxed! Say it with me one time... Money is not taxed - Income is taxed!
Example:
John Doe Sr. starts a company and builds an estate worth $4 Billion. He pays income tax on his income as it's earned. He has one son, John Doe Jr.
John Doe Jr. inherits the $4 Billion estate when daddy dies. Junior earns his money through the inheritance. The Inheritence is his income and therefore subject to income tax payments by him.
The fact that Daddy derived income from his business, and Junior derived income from his inheritence is irrelevent! Each of them derived an income - and all income is taxable.
Why don't people understand this? It is basic common sense!
Jeesh! Lay off the caffiene - and re-read for general concept instead of attacking what I stated were examples to prove the point.
The "Society" I speak of is the stable, consumerism that finances corporate revenue. Society in America is stable and prosperous enough that we don't have constant riots and turmoil like that which exist(s/ed) elsewhere in the world. Look back a couple years at Yugoslavia, do you think the ethnic battles taking place produced millionaire entrepreniors? Of course not! The economy there collapsed during that time.
I used the examples of law enforcement, education & healthcare not as an indicator of what rich people use - but for us "common folk" that rely on such to keep us from decaying into rabid ethnic/racial/religious/etc enemies Hell-bent on killing each other.
All of the stability that results from the government programs like I mentioned are essential to the prosperity of all, including the rich. Nowhere did I mention anything about getting something for free or that "fat cats" should lose money. I'm saying they have a bigger piece of pie to protect, it's gonna cost more to protect it. Common sense. If you insure a Ferrari, are you gonna pay the same rate you would for a Chevy? Hell no! The Ferrari has greater value, so it's premium is going to be greater to match. A wealthy businessman has a greater income to protect, so he's gonna pay a greater premium in taxes to ensure the government keeps the public nice and orderly.
ps - for the record, I'm not a long-hair, pointy-headed, left-wing, liberal freak! I'm a bald, round-headed, moderate who has a grasp on common sense!
OK, calculating with your math, 10% is less than 33%, so taxes are disproportionate. Let's look a little closer:
Poor person makes $12,000/yr - pays $900 in taxes.
Avg person makes $60,000/yr - pays $8,000 in taxes.
Wealthy person $4,000,000/yr - pays $600,000 in taxes.
All three are provided with the same social services - National Security, Police, Hospitals, Education, etc. But the Wealthy person earning far more than the poor or even avg are somehow excused from paying more for those services?
Sorry, I don't buy it! I hate when people take a number like total taxes paid and complain that the richest 10% are paying the majority of it. Of course they are! They're earning more from our society! It's called paying the piper! You want to earn billions of dollars from the current social structure, then be prepared to pay dearly for that structure!
As the author of the email noted - without this tax proportion, the poor would revolt against the rich who would be cheating the system.
(note) the figures used are merely examples, not based upon and direct research.
It appears that you develop the systems you support - that's a whole different ballgame from supporting systems developed by others.
It's the latter that I was referring to. It appears, from the poster's description, that he knows the email system is unreliable, or has end-users who use support for questions best answered by referring to documentation. Also, I'd assume, this situation is beyond his direct control (ie: Management chose the email system and user training). In which case, my statement is still true - no matter how good a job he does, he'll still get the same number of pages due to those issues outside his realm of authority.
Rest assured, I did give my previous employer a chance to fix my situation before leaving. I asked for a simple promotion, in order to qualify for a higher salary which would compensate me for the additional workload. My manager declined, giving me some BS line about waiting a few more months... Right! One of the biggest pleasures of my career was announcing my resignation in a project meeting completely spur of the moment. I had nothing planned, no new job to start, just simply "enough". When asked where I was going next, my reply of "Not sure, haven't got to that detail yet!" was met with the most blank stare I've ever seen! hehe
But back on topic, I can agree that if you create something you should feel compelled to stand by it. I don't feel, however, that it's proper for an employer who doesn't give an IT Admin the authority to implement a robust system, complete with failover and redundency - along with a help desk to filter real IT problems from end user questions, the mandate to support the inferior system 24/7 without appropriate compensation.
Bottom line - if the CFO chose the crappy email system, let him/her get paged at 2am when the system barfs! When I come in the next morning, I'll remind once again why using Product ZYX like I had recommended would have let them sleep as soundly as I did.
I have to completely disagree with the basis of your argument.
Just because the email system may have failures 20 times a week does not necessarily mean the email admin is not doing thier job! The Company as a whole is responsible for that system. If someone up top decided a robust, stable system is too expensive - and purchases instead an instable one, that's the Company's fault - not mine!
I've worked in the past for a rather large company which had a subsidiary purchase a low-end, untested in large-scale environments, instable transaction processing system. It was then my job as the IT person to support it. This thing was a total piece of crap! I recommended multiple architectural changes to it to stabilize it and the vendor who developed it would shoot the idea down. Management sided with the vendor, after all - it was his system, not mine!
You can't possibly tell me that the above situation is an issue with me not doing my job correctly! After 3 months of that crap, I quit in frustration!
I don't care what hospital resident's work, that's not my business. If they're getting screwed, it's up to them to fix things. I'm not going to accept some other industry's curse being placed upon me for the simple reason that they accept it - so I must too.
Finally, if you were stupid enough to provide pager duty during your honeymoon - you deserve the divorce you're probably headed for.
There is a quote I've heard, and vehemently adhere to, although I don't know the originator to give proper credit...
This article states the tech companies are the ones complaining about the boycott. I can understand their perspective completely, it's all about money.
They're spending their hard(ly) earned money developing SDMI watermarks they know will be broken when commerically released. If this turns out to be true, they will lose much much more in the cost of producing compliant products and paying for the "license" to implement it. So if the solution chosen is extremely easy to circumvent, they lose money much quicker than if a relatively difficult to break solution is chosen.
Bottom line, they don't care whether it's dropped or not - they just don't want to spend/lose too much because of it. Whether it's dropped or extremely robust, they come out as winners. If the latter, the RIAA wins too. But in only the former would consumers benefit. Make no mistake, they're looking for you to save them money, that's all.
True, the 1-Click shopping was announced and implemented on the day Steve Jobs gave his keynote address at the MacExpo conference in Europe.
Implying this as the cause of Apple's stock devaluation is pretty ignorant as well. There was a slump in computer sales in general last quarter, causing many companies earnings reports to come in under expectations. Why this fact triggered the massive drop in Apple's stock but not so for other stocks like Intel and Dell is the mystery.
Perhaps an excessively large number of shares were owned by/. whiners?
OK, on the Internet in general, I can ignore ads, or even block banner ads via several methods. Email, I can filter out mindless SPAM and other miscellany as I choose.
This system, however, appears to go much further than that. The logos and ads are NOT blockable, and apparently the email system doesn't (yet?) support filtering. Also, they claim they will use the ability to automatically email (SPAM) students of specific studies on a regular basis.
This to me would be a HUGE deal! If I were a student, trying to get by on Financial Aid & Parent contributions, I can see a large risk of my studies being hampered by the commercial inundation. If I were the parent of a student, paying my hard earned money to finance my childs education, I'd be absolutely irate that the students are being coopted to increase the schools profits (reducing expenses while maintaining static revenue increases the bottom line profit).
I would expect the focus of a students "eyes" be directed exclusively towards academics by the school, with liesure activities usually tending to themselves. By further exploiting the "commercial value" of students, I'd have to feel the adminstration of the school is not concerned enough about their purpose for being. Definately lowers my rating of the school, and I'd be damned if I were going send my child to such a place - not on my dime!
I started college in 1985, after a year and a half, I got a fulltime job working for one of my professor's brother. I switched to evening classes at the time and continued for another year. Beyond that, I haven't been back to further my degree past the AS level because I can't justify the expense.
If I were going to change fields, then I would probably return to full time classes in the new field I choose.
I've gained far more knowledge via 15 years of working than I ever would have persuing a Masters degree. I have no regrets about my choices, other than the occasional social aspect (coworkers speaking of their college days which I can barely relate too).
When you purchase any recordable media: analog tape, digital tape (DAT/DLT), CD-R, CD-RW, VHS, etc - you pay a small surcharge set by congress to compensate copyright holders for casual infringment. This was the basic compromise when cassette tapes were introduced, and has been expanded each time a new media format has hit the market. If a consumer can record audio or video material onto it, you pay when you purchase the blank media.
It is for this reason alone, that I justify my personal use of Napster and the like. I am a musician myself, and since I have to pay extra for blank media when I'm recording my own copyrighted material, then I feel I have the right to copy the MPAA/RIAA's copyrighted material. Since they receive compensation in the form of these surcharges, my duplication is not piracy or any other negative connotating verbage!
The point is that not only the "desktop" - be it Gnome, Helix-Gnome, KDE, etc - but also the applications running on it need a consistent user experience.
Although "skins" are the trendy thing these days, there are many more elements to the user experience than title bars, scroll bars, and other widgets. Keyboard bindings, mouse behaviour, dialog content and layout, etc. All of these things combined make the entire system - OS, Desktop, Applications - consistent. Once you use and get used to one app, then others are that much easier to take on.
This is the issue that is not being addressed. The GNOME & KDE folks, and any others so inclined, should issue standard design principles stating how applications should behave by default (consitent with one another). Of course, the flexibility allowing advanced users to bypass or reassign (some/most of) the defaults will be needed as well for those who spend more time playing with their systems then using them.
You are correct, in that the judge did not "outlaw Napster". However, MP3's are not outlawed either, whether the songs are copyrighted or not (although technically every piece of music is copyrighted by it's author by default unless the rights are explicitly transferred).
Since MP3's are lossy copies of the original work, they are not "exact duplicates", which if distributed for commercial gain would be Illegal. The complaint the RIAA has is that they are better than broadcast radio, cassette recordings, etc. So they use the term "near perfect copies" to imply they are also a violation of copyright. There is no such thing as "near perfect"! They are either perfect, or not. Since they are not, and additionally not being distributed for commercial gain, then they are not Illegal material.
Not that I'm an expert in AD, but close with NDS - Please remember that NDS is a "true" distributed database. The problems caused be the your example are correct, I've experienced that too. AD, however, is not really as robust as NDS. I'm not sure that this issue would be seen in an AD environment (too many others, I suppose). With AD being just a layer placed on top of old LM Domains, I just think there would be ways around this type of problem.
The point I was illustrating is that these folks were unable/lacked the confidence to try to insert the DOS Installation Diskette and boot, then replace diskette with #2 when prompted, then replace diskette with #3 when prompted, then remove the last diskette and press any key to reboot.
How much easier could this have been?
That NT != DOS is irrelivent, it is it's successor and I think some history would have been part of the curriculum. I have attended one single MS certification based class - and I left midway due to the lack of content. Taking a class or set of classes and passing tests does not make a qualified admin. The fact that out of 5 seperate people, none would even attempt to exert some effort to try, to me suggested that since it wasn't covered in their training - it wasn't worth knowing.
If the 5 of them are any indication of the mentality MCSE's have in whole or in part - then I would be loath to trust any of them to run MY enterprise-based systems. The article stated that the Meta Group "expert" wouldn't trust Linux administrators with his systems - I was demonstrating a humorous (now, not at the time I can tell you), but sad example of why I felt the opposite.
/disclaimer
I am NOT stating that ALL MCSE's are this inept. This is just a factual example of five individuals behaviour. I just illustrates the ridiculousness of the relative quote in the posted article. At least I have a realworld example of MCSE's I wouldn't trust, the person quoted in the article didn't even provide that.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume "intent" is going to be part of this. How else do you legally distinguish between child porn and pictures of children? FWIW, I recall Britain has a law now against artificial child porn - pictures that have been created via Photoshop.
Either way, it's tempting to get worried about this because no question of intent is explicitly worded, and many IANAL types get worried about anything so subjective, but given there'd be a international outcry if proud parents, owners of stores selling goods aimed at children, etc, suddenly started getting jailed and/or deported due to pictures of people under 21 appearing on their sites, we can be reasonably sure that intent will be a factor in practice.
Not typically in practice. There have been documented cases, although I have no information at hand to reference, where individuals were targetted by vague laws such as these for purely political reasons. Which is the true danger. Sure, not everyone with a picture of their 2yr old in the tub is going to be prosecuted. But if you happen to piss off the "powers that be" in such a way as to provoke a witch hunt - and you happen to have a picture of your 2yr old in the tub - well then Mister! You're a Child Pornographer and gonna do some serious time as some Bubba's wife!
This is nothing more than the FBI attempting to get around the public's resistance to such laws. If an international treaty is signed, which supercedes US law, they get the power they want by essentially going over the heads of American Citizens.
The Constitution states "Congress will enact no law..." - doesn't say anything about an international governing body enacting a law that our treaties require us to enfore/obey.
Why do you think so many are upset with these types of organizations - and "globalization" in general?
I don't care, nor was I speaking of, the technical details of the inheritence tax! I was simply stating that it is NOT "money taxed twice" as the individual who was taxed originally is dead and therefore NOT paying taxes again on it.
Anyone else who receives it - regardless of what you wish to call it - is receiving assets they did not already own. This would be, in my book, income! This should be taxed just like every other asset one obtains. The fact the rate is different, and on the total estate, is irrellevent.
The good news, we'd be on the same side of that argument! ;-)
True the inheritence tax doesn't kick in until the amount inherited is above a certain amount, but the fact remains that the person receiving the inheritence was not previously taxed on it's value. That is my point - it's not taxed twice as the poster had stated. Each recipient is taxed, above that mininum, seperately. It is the person who is taxed, not the money.
Notice I didn't capitalize Income Tax, which is a specific form of tax on income. I merely stated it is considered income to the beneficiery, since they didn't previously own it. Feel free to use whatever teminology you wish, the concept is my point.
Money is not taxed - Income is taxed! Say it with me one time... Money is not taxed - Income is taxed!
Example:
John Doe Sr. starts a company and builds an estate worth $4 Billion. He pays income tax on his income as it's earned. He has one son, John Doe Jr.
John Doe Jr. inherits the $4 Billion estate when daddy dies. Junior earns his money through the inheritance. The Inheritence is his income and therefore subject to income tax payments by him.
The fact that Daddy derived income from his business, and Junior derived income from his inheritence is irrelevent! Each of them derived an income - and all income is taxable.
Why don't people understand this? It is basic common sense!
The "Society" I speak of is the stable, consumerism that finances corporate revenue. Society in America is stable and prosperous enough that we don't have constant riots and turmoil like that which exist(s/ed) elsewhere in the world. Look back a couple years at Yugoslavia, do you think the ethnic battles taking place produced millionaire entrepreniors? Of course not! The economy there collapsed during that time.
I used the examples of law enforcement, education & healthcare not as an indicator of what rich people use - but for us "common folk" that rely on such to keep us from decaying into rabid ethnic/racial/religious/etc enemies Hell-bent on killing each other.
All of the stability that results from the government programs like I mentioned are essential to the prosperity of all, including the rich. Nowhere did I mention anything about getting something for free or that "fat cats" should lose money. I'm saying they have a bigger piece of pie to protect, it's gonna cost more to protect it. Common sense. If you insure a Ferrari, are you gonna pay the same rate you would for a Chevy? Hell no! The Ferrari has greater value, so it's premium is going to be greater to match. A wealthy businessman has a greater income to protect, so he's gonna pay a greater premium in taxes to ensure the government keeps the public nice and orderly.
ps - for the record, I'm not a long-hair, pointy-headed, left-wing, liberal freak! I'm a bald, round-headed, moderate who has a grasp on common sense!
Poor person makes $12,000/yr - pays $900 in taxes.
Avg person makes $60,000/yr - pays $8,000 in taxes.
Wealthy person $4,000,000/yr - pays $600,000 in taxes.
All three are provided with the same social services - National Security, Police, Hospitals, Education, etc. But the Wealthy person earning far more than the poor or even avg are somehow excused from paying more for those services?
Sorry, I don't buy it! I hate when people take a number like total taxes paid and complain that the richest 10% are paying the majority of it. Of course they are! They're earning more from our society! It's called paying the piper! You want to earn billions of dollars from the current social structure, then be prepared to pay dearly for that structure!
As the author of the email noted - without this tax proportion, the poor would revolt against the rich who would be cheating the system.
(note) the figures used are merely examples, not based upon and direct research.
It's the latter that I was referring to. It appears, from the poster's description, that he knows the email system is unreliable, or has end-users who use support for questions best answered by referring to documentation. Also, I'd assume, this situation is beyond his direct control (ie: Management chose the email system and user training). In which case, my statement is still true - no matter how good a job he does, he'll still get the same number of pages due to those issues outside his realm of authority.
Rest assured, I did give my previous employer a chance to fix my situation before leaving. I asked for a simple promotion, in order to qualify for a higher salary which would compensate me for the additional workload. My manager declined, giving me some BS line about waiting a few more months... Right! One of the biggest pleasures of my career was announcing my resignation in a project meeting completely spur of the moment. I had nothing planned, no new job to start, just simply "enough". When asked where I was going next, my reply of "Not sure, haven't got to that detail yet!" was met with the most blank stare I've ever seen! hehe
But back on topic, I can agree that if you create something you should feel compelled to stand by it. I don't feel, however, that it's proper for an employer who doesn't give an IT Admin the authority to implement a robust system, complete with failover and redundency - along with a help desk to filter real IT problems from end user questions, the mandate to support the inferior system 24/7 without appropriate compensation.
Bottom line - if the CFO chose the crappy email system, let him/her get paged at 2am when the system barfs! When I come in the next morning, I'll remind once again why using Product ZYX like I had recommended would have let them sleep as soundly as I did.
Just because the email system may have failures 20 times a week does not necessarily mean the email admin is not doing thier job! The Company as a whole is responsible for that system. If someone up top decided a robust, stable system is too expensive - and purchases instead an instable one, that's the Company's fault - not mine!
I've worked in the past for a rather large company which had a subsidiary purchase a low-end, untested in large-scale environments, instable transaction processing system. It was then my job as the IT person to support it. This thing was a total piece of crap! I recommended multiple architectural changes to it to stabilize it and the vendor who developed it would shoot the idea down. Management sided with the vendor, after all - it was his system, not mine!
You can't possibly tell me that the above situation is an issue with me not doing my job correctly! After 3 months of that crap, I quit in frustration!
I don't care what hospital resident's work, that's not my business. If they're getting screwed, it's up to them to fix things. I'm not going to accept some other industry's curse being placed upon me for the simple reason that they accept it - so I must too.
Finally, if you were stupid enough to provide pager duty during your honeymoon - you deserve the divorce you're probably headed for.
There is a quote I've heard, and vehemently adhere to, although I don't know the originator to give proper credit...
I work to live, not live to work
/begin Phantom Menace ref
That main page picture is of it "naked"! It's parts are showing!
/end ref
;-P
They're spending their hard(ly) earned money developing SDMI watermarks they know will be broken when commerically released. If this turns out to be true, they will lose much much more in the cost of producing compliant products and paying for the "license" to implement it. So if the solution chosen is extremely easy to circumvent, they lose money much quicker than if a relatively difficult to break solution is chosen.
Bottom line, they don't care whether it's dropped or not - they just don't want to spend/lose too much because of it. Whether it's dropped or extremely robust, they come out as winners. If the latter, the RIAA wins too. But in only the former would consumers benefit. Make no mistake, they're looking for you to save them money, that's all.
Implying this as the cause of Apple's stock devaluation is pretty ignorant as well. There was a slump in computer sales in general last quarter, causing many companies earnings reports to come in under expectations. Why this fact triggered the massive drop in Apple's stock but not so for other stocks like Intel and Dell is the mystery.
Perhaps an excessively large number of shares were owned by /. whiners?
there goes my karma... oh well ;-P
This system, however, appears to go much further than that. The logos and ads are NOT blockable, and apparently the email system doesn't (yet?) support filtering. Also, they claim they will use the ability to automatically email (SPAM) students of specific studies on a regular basis.
This to me would be a HUGE deal! If I were a student, trying to get by on Financial Aid & Parent contributions, I can see a large risk of my studies being hampered by the commercial inundation. If I were the parent of a student, paying my hard earned money to finance my childs education, I'd be absolutely irate that the students are being coopted to increase the schools profits (reducing expenses while maintaining static revenue increases the bottom line profit).
I would expect the focus of a students "eyes" be directed exclusively towards academics by the school, with liesure activities usually tending to themselves. By further exploiting the "commercial value" of students, I'd have to feel the adminstration of the school is not concerned enough about their purpose for being. Definately lowers my rating of the school, and I'd be damned if I were going send my child to such a place - not on my dime!
If I were going to change fields, then I would probably return to full time classes in the new field I choose.
I've gained far more knowledge via 15 years of working than I ever would have persuing a Masters degree. I have no regrets about my choices, other than the occasional social aspect (coworkers speaking of their college days which I can barely relate too).
It is for this reason alone, that I justify my personal use of Napster and the like. I am a musician myself, and since I have to pay extra for blank media when I'm recording my own copyrighted material, then I feel I have the right to copy the MPAA/RIAA's copyrighted material. Since they receive compensation in the form of these surcharges, my duplication is not piracy or any other negative connotating verbage!
Although "skins" are the trendy thing these days, there are many more elements to the user experience than title bars, scroll bars, and other widgets. Keyboard bindings, mouse behaviour, dialog content and layout, etc. All of these things combined make the entire system - OS, Desktop, Applications - consistent. Once you use and get used to one app, then others are that much easier to take on.
This is the issue that is not being addressed. The GNOME & KDE folks, and any others so inclined, should issue standard design principles stating how applications should behave by default (consitent with one another). Of course, the flexibility allowing advanced users to bypass or reassign (some/most of) the defaults will be needed as well for those who spend more time playing with their systems then using them.
Since MP3's are lossy copies of the original work, they are not "exact duplicates", which if distributed for commercial gain would be Illegal. The complaint the RIAA has is that they are better than broadcast radio, cassette recordings, etc. So they use the term "near perfect copies" to imply they are also a violation of copyright. There is no such thing as "near perfect"! They are either perfect, or not. Since they are not, and additionally not being distributed for commercial gain, then they are not Illegal material.
The point I was illustrating is that these folks were unable/lacked the confidence to try to insert the DOS Installation Diskette and boot, then replace diskette with #2 when prompted, then replace diskette with #3 when prompted, then remove the last diskette and press any key to reboot.
How much easier could this have been?
That NT != DOS is irrelivent, it is it's successor and I think some history would have been part of the curriculum. I have attended one single MS certification based class - and I left midway due to the lack of content. Taking a class or set of classes and passing tests does not make a qualified admin. The fact that out of 5 seperate people, none would even attempt to exert some effort to try, to me suggested that since it wasn't covered in their training - it wasn't worth knowing.
If the 5 of them are any indication of the mentality MCSE's have in whole or in part - then I would be loath to trust any of them to run MY enterprise-based systems. The article stated that the Meta Group "expert" wouldn't trust Linux administrators with his systems - I was demonstrating a humorous (now, not at the time I can tell you), but sad example of why I felt the opposite.
/disclaimer
I am NOT stating that ALL MCSE's are this inept. This is just a factual example of five individuals behaviour. I just illustrates the ridiculousness of the relative quote in the posted article. At least I have a realworld example of MCSE's I wouldn't trust, the person quoted in the article didn't even provide that.
/end disclaimer
LOL! Umm.... did I mention I don't work there anymore? hehe