In fact, that's true in a lot of developing countries. A lecturer of mine spent a couple of month every year in various UN funded programmes. Even in the 60's, female engineer is not really that uncommon in Indonesia. The situation in China (in early 80's) was similar. He said it was a cultural shock to him (an European worked both in UK and New Zealand as a chemical engineer/ lecturer). I guess in terms of rights, different genders are more equal in the west. In terms of career stereotype, the difference may not be that big.
The other problem is the marketing droids think "windows" is a feature... They assume the technical end users are as computer illiterate as an average joe who insist getting winXXXP on a 10GHz machine for web browsing...
A while ago, a professor in the radio research group was planning to buy a high end network analyser. Something that can operate at 50+GHz, not the ones that monitors the packets in a TCP/IP stream. Latest windows make no difference to a proper embedded system to those researchers.
The professor was upset by one of the specification: using windows 2000. Professor: why is it necessary to use windows? Sales: a feature... that's what the marketing dept told me. Professor: any upgrading/ patching issue. Sales: No worries. I assume a 5 yr upgrading cycle (he suggests us to replace the network analyser probably worths about half a million, when MS terminates the product support for that particular version of windows).
As expected, the professor almost fell from the chair... We are not in a big lab. The old network analyser has served the dept for a good 15 yrs... It just got shifted from radio research => more general research => undergrad teaching... It is really crazy to retire a piece of good equipment (hundreds of thousands of dollar) due to unsupported windows version (v.s. a few hundred dollars)....
At the end, the professor did get that network analyzer. That model was value for money... Just need to put a very restrictive (OpenBSD) firewall between the analyzer and the rest of the network... And the main role of windows is to allow the users to transfer from the analyzer using something similar to FTP...
The problem is trade secret is different from patent. In many industries, there are special skills or designs that had better be left as trade secret. The formula of Coke Cola is one. Trade secret is not like patent: you cannot disclose that to the public at all. Or else, you will lose it... In some other cases, these are simply design issues that you want to avoid your competitor from copying. For example, if you are going to make a budget CPU, you may want to create an impression to your competitor that you need to include a new production line for it... But, in fact, it may simply be disabling some cache...
Although I realise that's a need for the former employer to protect its IP, I am more inline with the German system mentioned in some posts upstairs... If the secret is so critical to Seagate, they should pay for the difference of salary to the former employee esp when no NCA was signed...
Work for a brewer then.... I had spent some time working in a beer brewery. They offered heavily subsidised meals as many workers need to work in shift. Free soft drinks, bread and butter. The canteen only charged for the meat. I typically spent less than a dollar a day.
The even better part is the free beer after working hour. Just pop to the staff bar and help yourself. My coworker told me that it was a pretty standard practice to prevent staff from drinking alcohol illegally during working hour. As expected, you will look like an idiot if you cannot drink.
Yeah. 60wpm is quite ok... Consider the typical human reaction time to be about 0.1 - 0.2 s and the average letter per English word to be 5 letter, 60-120wpm would be as far as a normal person can get... If you can type at 60wpm, another interpretation is your typing is now as fast as your reaction time.... We should be proud of ourselves.
Serious though, I think it makes sense to create something like that for wage slave, kidults etc. A while ago, I saw my friends played Duke Nukem. They were awesome players when they were in university. After they start working, their performance are like 80yo veterans: got lost in a map, tripped into the obvious bomb, even fell in the easy jump.... They desire their retired veteran server.
Talking about the low IPod battery life, I would be interested to know whether it can be improved by playing the music (or audio book) at lower bitrate. Or else, the battery life comparison would more like comparing apple to orange.
Many people pointed out battery life is one important factor. I would say the UI is another one. It is pretty to get a combo mobile/mp3 player right. It is inconveient to include a separate headphone, but dumb to listen to music as if you are talking to someone.
If they can sort both things out, it will be a hot item on the market and I will want one too... Apple's involvement at least gives you some hope that they may get the UI right.
Yeah. You can find 2 visited, 2 incompleted spot over Xizang (Tibet).... The problem is a lot of places are not really accessible geologically. Even helicopter have difficulty to reach....
No worries. In the past, we use something not much better than ROT13. The best one that we got was probably ENIGMA before the computer age. They are pretty robust against the arithmatic ability of human brain.
The currently using ones (public key encryption, DES3 etc) are all developed with silicon computers in mind. While they will become obsolete with quantum computing, I will be surprised if we cannot develop something better by then...
As another Kiwi, I sometimes think we should get over the "Number 8 wire" mentality* if we really want to develop our high tech industry. A clever trick may have helped us to get over the difficult times in the past, or brought a decent living for the few founders of various tech companies.
But, we cannot create an industrial base from just ingenuity. It involves a lot of teamwork, planning and support. These are boring and difficult work. The spectacular success of the semiconductor industry in Taiwan and Telecommunication gear in Scandinavian countries in the last two decades are admired by many. But, there is no coincident: both value education very high. The university graduate level in New Zealand, esp in tech area, is not exactly high in OECD. And, many NZ employers in the tech industry today still consider ME/MSc as over-qualified... We got to ask ourselves, "are we prepared?" before cheering upon every minor success. (For the guys behind the detector project, good on you, keep your good work going.)
*For non New Zealander/.er, "Number 8 wire" refers to kiwi ingenuity. It is the spirit to solve problem on hand with minimal resources using some clever tricks. I can say Bruce Simpson (the DIY cruise missile guy is a prime modern day example). While all these ideas are cool, they cannot carry us very far. These are not breakthroughs, but cool imitations....
Cell phone detector has already been around... Whether cinema, university, prison etc decide to use it is another matter... It is cool to see young students designing those thing. But, the product is around for a while and it is not really that expensive (click the third photo, the price is about 150 UK pound, about $270). Already quite affordable for the institute who want to install them...
The industrial guy who is mentoring the students exaggerates the price of rival product a bit (he said it is at least 350 UK pound), and ignored some cost. For example, to support the secondary student, the local university/ govt dept may not be hesitated to pay some cash to buy a bare board. To make a customer product, you need to have a decent case. Just the plastic mould can be a few thousand dollars... And, a real company need to pay their engineers. We all know we are not that cheap. My guess is they have not lowered the unit cost revolutionally. It is more like hobbyist vs commercial product...
It sounds cool to catch the students who cheat in the exam... But, in practice, it won't work esp in university. (Prison is another story)... Say, you are running an exam in a big lecture hall. Can you make sure there is no valid user around. The univeristy visitor may have one, the gardener mowing the lawn outside may have one, the courier may have one. Every single outsider walks near the lecture hall will signal a false alarm....
If I go to a company and I see "How to Win Friends and Influence People", "Who Moved My Cheese","The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" or "Managment for Dummies"
on a desk I know that it is not a place I want to work.
IMO, it really depends on whether those books are on a desk or on the desk. Just take engineers/ programmers as an example, most don't have very strong business/ communication skills. Admitting and trying to improve is a correct attitude. If those books are on the senior management's desk, then maybe that's a problem...
The analysis can be applied to those "technology for dummy" books. It is perfectly okay in say, the CEO, CFO to have a read on the topic. Let's be realistic, many of them are dummies in the specific technology. How many of them can overcome their ego to just learn more of the basics?
Rape of Nanking is a forgotten Holocaust. The Japanese Government is reluctant to give a formal apology to the Rape of Nanking or the invasion to China herself. South Korean government received their long overdue apology just before the 2002 World Cup Soccer, co-organised by Japan/ Korea.
Some historians claimed that the lost of China to communism (and many other related problems) was the direct consequence of the Japanese Invasion. A whole generation of more educated/modernised officiers with the Chiang Kai-shek government got slaughtered between 7/7/1937 (the attack of Peking) to 13/12/137 (the fall of Nanking). The level of corruption in China got rampant after WW2 and thus triggered the shift towards communism....
The Japanese Emperor and the wartime cabinet should feel lucky as the atomic bomb was not directed towards them. At the end of the day, many Hiroshima and Nagasaki civilians are innocents.
Same in UK and China. Any Franch/ USSR example?
on
Atomic Veterans Speak Out
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I suppose the same kind of thing happened to British, French, Russian and Chinese troops in similar circumstances
I can recall cases that involved British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers. Last year, there was a documentary about the nuclear test happened in Australia. While Australia herself is nuclear weapon free, it was being used as a testing ground for the British test program... Some veterans were exposed to high radiation doses because of wind shift, miscalculated yield and reasons like that. In theory, the commanders could just place the film badges and dosimeters. But, the military planner at that time really wanted to stretch that a bit further. From memory, PLA did the same thing after the first Chinese atomic test in 1964. Some troops were ordered to drive/ march across the ground zero after some precalculated "safety hours"....
The Cold War was a crazy time in human history Well, we might be committing something equally ridiculous right now without realising that... I am quite sure the situation is the same in France and USSR. Any example?
Old people still want their privacy. This type of system only work if the patient essentially loses his/her conscious but not mobility, e.g. in later stage of Alzheimer.
About 15 years ago, my family was involved in the search of my mother's 90yo grandma. Great grandma preferred to live at home despite her illness. She left home at midnight after everyone went to bed... My uncle notified the relatives to launch for a search. It was a puzzle to us. We knew she must be around doing something that she thought sensible...
At the end, we found her sitting on the pavement outside a bank. She was fairly confused by her illness at that stage. Words were limited, something along the line of "lazybone, open so late. I want 'cheung fan*'..." From our understanding, she thought it was about breakfast time (note: it was indeed midnight) so she wandered around the street for a nice cafe. The bank was in fact located at the site of a former cafe... But, that cafe had been demolished in the second World War.... The tracking device would be a great help to us...
* 'cheung fan' is a special breakfast food in my hometown.
Just return from Kevin Warwick's (the cyborg guy from University of Reading) public lecture a few hours ago...
In his 1998 experiment, a 100-element probe was attached to the medial nerve (??) of his left hand (sorry, biologist/ MDs, I don't know the correct terms. I am an engineer who research on the mechantronic side of robot...), which has about ten thousand cell axons. The connection is kind of random. A learning process was involved so that Kevin can sensor and control using the new connections...
In a nutshell, connecting the one million retinal ganglion cell axon in optic nerve is a bit beyond the current state of art, as stated in the parent article....
I don't see the sonic boom is that much of a problem... But, aerodynamically, I don't know why 2.5khm/hr muzzle velocity is sufficient.
Here is my reasoning: (from the PDF document) conventional gun system: muzzle velocity 1.5 km/hr, range 50 miles first generation of railgun: muzzle velcocity 2.5 km/hr, range 250 miles, Mach 5.0 (1.6 km/hr) at impact.
I assume the old shell decelerate to 0 km/hr at impact. In other words, speed drops by 1.5km/hr in 50 miles. For the rail gun round, the speed drops by mererly 0.9km/hr in 250 miles. It does not sound right to me. My mechanical engineering 101 knowlege suggested that the drag is proportional to the square of the velocity. (the drag) R=0.5*D*rho*A*v^2, where D is the shape paramter, rho is the air density, A is the cross section area and v is the velocity.
At start, the drag of railgun round will be (2.5/1.5)^2, about 3 times of that of a shell... Of course, they will try to make the railgun rounds aerodynamically smooth, so did the conventionaly shells. Unless the railgun round spend most of the time at extremely high altitude, I don't see why it works.
so that's why they're here. Similarly important historical documents were sometimes posted anonymously, great literature has been written anonymously or under psuedonyms, and great web
One of the most famous in history: the "deep throat". Now, someone can demand "deep throat" to identify himself....
My observation (mainly to the Asian communities, but probably holds true for the rest) is the guys who hold the a lot of certs (MCSE,CCNA,A+....)/degree (multiple master of whatever management) are mediocre, in terms of both technical and people skill. Getting through a pile of these things is a good indication the candidate has an attitude to climb up the ladder. But, on the other hand, they just want to do that all by the book. Creativity, novelty, real initiative, crisis management etc are not their strength.
Let's talk about the other bunch, some sysadmin (engineer, accountant or whatever professional) get no futher accreditation after the most essential one. They tend to run towards two extremes: extremely keen on the job and the certs are too easy for them to take that seriously; extremely lazy and don't want to do anything....
Really that's mediocre vs extremes. C{E/F/I/T}Os pick whatever you like depending on what you need.
If you don't care about the deliberate corruption of the well established CD standard. That's your choice.
But, if you really like the music/the band but hate the protection, then you should buy two copies. Buy one and return one. The music company will realise something wrong if the customers can boast the return rate somehow to double-digit.
In many cases, personal character rather than the environment is what determines the success of a person. I can see whoever reading this forum is the lucky top x% in the world. Social ranking, information and acesss to information etc are much more mobile than most...
I remember there was a slashdot link a while ago about the achievement of those who graduated from the top elite private US colleges and those who have the desire and ability, but cannot due to financial, family or whatever reason many years down the track... The results was quite a surprise... Basically, both group of them are top archievers. Much better than those who don't attempt at all...
Bear in mind, many bright people around the world (even in some smaller and not so advanced developed countries) got stuck in local college which may not be as good as the state university that you mentioned... A lot of them cannot attend universities at all. However, many still strive in the professional that they chosen. It should be a good lesson for many of us to think about.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the way they said it makes me think about one of those communist "joke" that the prisoner's family needed to pay for bullet fee....
In fact, that's true in a lot of developing countries. A lecturer of mine spent a couple of month every year in various UN funded programmes. Even in the 60's, female engineer is not really that uncommon in Indonesia. The situation in China (in early 80's) was similar. He said it was a cultural shock to him (an European worked both in UK and New Zealand as a chemical engineer/ lecturer). I guess in terms of rights, different genders are more equal in the west. In terms of career stereotype, the difference may not be that big.
The other problem is the marketing droids think "windows" is a feature... They assume the technical end users are as computer illiterate as an average joe who insist getting winXXXP on a 10GHz machine for web browsing...
A while ago, a professor in the radio research group was planning to buy a high end network analyser. Something that can operate at 50+GHz, not the ones that monitors the packets in a TCP/IP stream. Latest windows make no difference to a proper embedded system to those researchers.
The professor was upset by one of the specification: using windows 2000.
Professor: why is it necessary to use windows?
Sales: a feature... that's what the marketing dept told me.
Professor: any upgrading/ patching issue.
Sales: No worries. I assume a 5 yr upgrading cycle (he suggests us to replace the network analyser probably worths about half a million, when MS terminates the product support for that particular version of windows).
As expected, the professor almost fell from the chair... We are not in a big lab. The old network analyser has served the dept for a good 15 yrs... It just got shifted from radio research => more general research => undergrad teaching... It is really crazy to retire a piece of good equipment (hundreds of thousands of dollar) due to unsupported windows version (v.s. a few hundred dollars)....
At the end, the professor did get that network analyzer. That model was value for money... Just need to put a very restrictive (OpenBSD) firewall between the analyzer and the rest of the network... And the main role of windows is to allow the users to transfer from the analyzer using something similar to FTP...
The problem is trade secret is different from patent. In many industries, there are special skills or designs that had better be left as trade secret. The formula of Coke Cola is one. Trade secret is not like patent: you cannot disclose that to the public at all. Or else, you will lose it... In some other cases, these are simply design issues that you want to avoid your competitor from copying. For example, if you are going to make a budget CPU, you may want to create an impression to your competitor that you need to include a new production line for it... But, in fact, it may simply be disabling some cache...
Although I realise that's a need for the former employer to protect its IP, I am more inline with the German system mentioned in some posts upstairs... If the secret is so critical to Seagate, they should pay for the difference of salary to the former employee esp when no NCA was signed...
Work for a brewer then.... I had spent some time working in a beer brewery. They offered heavily subsidised meals as many workers need to work in shift. Free soft drinks, bread and butter. The canteen only charged for the meat. I typically spent less than a dollar a day.
The even better part is the free beer after working hour. Just pop to the staff bar and help yourself. My coworker told me that it was a pretty standard practice to prevent staff from drinking alcohol illegally during working hour. As expected, you will look like an idiot if you cannot drink.
Yeah. 60wpm is quite ok... Consider the typical human reaction time to be about 0.1 - 0.2 s and the average letter per English word to be 5 letter, 60-120wpm would be as far as a normal person can get ... If you can type at 60wpm, another interpretation is your typing is now as fast as your reaction time.... We should be proud of ourselves.
Make a R18 server then :-)
Serious though, I think it makes sense to create something like that for wage slave, kidults etc. A while ago, I saw my friends played Duke Nukem. They were awesome players when they were in university. After they start working, their performance are like 80yo veterans: got lost in a map, tripped into the obvious bomb, even fell in the easy jump.... They desire their retired veteran server.
Talking about the low IPod battery life, I would be interested to know whether it can be improved by playing the music (or audio book) at lower bitrate. Or else, the battery life comparison would more like comparing apple to orange.
Anyone has some comparison results available?
Many people pointed out battery life is one important factor. I would say the UI is another one. It is pretty to get a combo mobile/mp3 player right. It is inconveient to include a separate headphone, but dumb to listen to music as if you are talking to someone.
If they can sort both things out, it will be a hot item on the market and I will want one too... Apple's involvement at least gives you some hope that they may get the UI right.
Yeah. You can find 2 visited, 2 incompleted spot over Xizang (Tibet).... The problem is a lot of places are not really accessible geologically. Even helicopter have difficulty to reach....
No worries. In the past, we use something not much better than ROT13. The best one that we got was probably ENIGMA before the computer age. They are pretty robust against the arithmatic ability of human brain.
The currently using ones (public key encryption, DES3 etc) are all developed with silicon computers in mind. While they will become obsolete with quantum computing, I will be surprised if we cannot develop something better by then...
As another Kiwi, I sometimes think we should get over the "Number 8 wire" mentality* if we really want to develop our high tech industry. A clever trick may have helped us to get over the difficult times in the past, or brought a decent living for the few founders of various tech companies.
/.er, "Number 8 wire" refers to kiwi ingenuity. It is the spirit to solve problem on hand with minimal resources using some clever tricks. I can say Bruce Simpson (the DIY cruise missile guy is a prime modern day example). While all these ideas are cool, they cannot carry us very far. These are not breakthroughs, but cool imitations....
But, we cannot create an industrial base from just ingenuity. It involves a lot of teamwork, planning and support. These are boring and difficult work. The spectacular success of the semiconductor industry in Taiwan and Telecommunication gear in Scandinavian countries in the last two decades are admired by many. But, there is no coincident: both value education very high. The university graduate level in New Zealand, esp in tech area, is not exactly high in OECD. And, many NZ employers in the tech industry today still consider ME/MSc as over-qualified... We got to ask ourselves, "are we prepared?" before cheering upon every minor success. (For the guys behind the detector project, good on you, keep your good work going.)
*For non New Zealander
Oops the link does not show up in the last post.
Here is the link to the $270 cell phone detector
Cell phone detector has already been around... Whether cinema, university, prison etc decide to use it is another matter... It is cool to see young students designing those thing. But, the product is around for a while and it is
not really that expensive (click the third photo, the price is about 150 UK pound, about $270). Already quite affordable for the institute who want to install them...
The industrial guy who is mentoring the students exaggerates the price of rival product a bit (he said it is at least 350 UK pound), and ignored some cost. For example, to support the secondary student, the local university/ govt dept may not be hesitated to pay some cash to buy a bare board. To make a customer product, you need to have a decent case. Just the plastic mould can be a few thousand dollars... And, a real company need to pay their engineers. We all know we are not that cheap. My guess is they have not lowered the unit cost revolutionally. It is more like hobbyist vs commercial product...
It sounds cool to catch the students who cheat in the exam... But, in practice, it won't work esp in university. (Prison is another story)... Say, you are running an exam in a big lecture hall. Can you make sure there is no valid user around. The univeristy visitor may have one, the gardener mowing the lawn outside may have one, the courier may have one. Every single outsider walks near the lecture hall will signal a false alarm....
IMO, it really depends on whether those books are on a desk or on the desk. Just take engineers/ programmers as an example, most don't have very strong business/ communication skills. Admitting and trying to improve is a correct attitude. If those books are on the senior management's desk, then maybe that's a problem...
The analysis can be applied to those "technology for dummy" books. It is perfectly okay in say, the CEO, CFO to have a read on the topic. Let's be realistic, many of them are dummies in the specific technology. How many of them can overcome their ego to just learn more of the basics?
Rape of Nanking is a forgotten Holocaust. The Japanese Government is reluctant to give a formal apology to the Rape of Nanking or the invasion to China herself. South Korean government received their long overdue apology just before the 2002 World Cup Soccer, co-organised by Japan/ Korea.
Some historians claimed that the lost of China to communism (and many other related problems) was the direct consequence of the Japanese Invasion. A whole generation of more educated/modernised officiers with the Chiang Kai-shek government got slaughtered between 7/7/1937 (the attack of Peking) to 13/12/137 (the fall of Nanking). The level of corruption in China got rampant after WW2 and thus triggered the shift towards communism....
The Japanese Emperor and the wartime cabinet should feel lucky as the atomic bomb was not directed towards them. At the end of the day, many Hiroshima and Nagasaki civilians are innocents.
I can recall cases that involved British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers. Last year, there was a documentary about the nuclear test happened in Australia. While Australia herself is nuclear weapon free, it was being used as a testing ground for the British test program... Some veterans were exposed to high radiation doses because of wind shift, miscalculated yield and reasons like that. In theory, the commanders could just place the film badges and dosimeters. But, the military planner at that time really wanted to stretch that a bit further. From memory, PLA did the same thing after the first Chinese atomic test in 1964. Some troops were ordered to drive/ march across the ground zero after some precalculated "safety hours"....
The Cold War was a crazy time in human history Well, we might be committing something equally ridiculous right now without realising that... I am quite sure the situation is the same in France and USSR. Any example?
With exception to the nnARM guy, who wrote an ARM7 clone in VHDL...
l
http://www.us.design-reuse.com/news/news277.htm
Old people still want their privacy. This type of system only work if the patient essentially loses his/her conscious but not mobility, e.g. in later stage of Alzheimer.
About 15 years ago, my family was involved in the search of my mother's 90yo grandma. Great grandma preferred to live at home despite her illness. She left home at midnight after everyone went to bed... My uncle notified the relatives to launch for a search. It was a puzzle to us. We knew she must be around doing something that she thought sensible...
At the end, we found her sitting on the pavement outside a bank. She was fairly confused by her illness at that stage. Words were limited, something along the line of "lazybone, open so late. I want 'cheung fan*'..." From our understanding, she thought it was about breakfast time (note: it was indeed midnight) so she wandered around the street for a nice cafe. The bank was in fact located at the site of a former cafe... But, that cafe had been demolished in the second World War.... The tracking device would be a great help to us...
* 'cheung fan' is a special breakfast food in my hometown.
Just return from Kevin Warwick's (the cyborg guy from University of Reading) public lecture a few hours ago...
In his 1998 experiment, a 100-element probe was attached to the medial nerve (??) of his left hand (sorry, biologist/ MDs, I don't know the correct terms. I am an engineer who research on the mechantronic side of robot...), which has about ten thousand cell axons. The connection is kind of random. A learning process was involved so that Kevin can sensor and control using the new connections...
In a nutshell, connecting the one million retinal ganglion cell axon in optic nerve is a bit beyond the current state of art, as stated in the parent article....
I don't see the sonic boom is that much of a problem... But, aerodynamically, I don't know why 2.5khm/hr muzzle velocity is sufficient.
Here is my reasoning:
(from the PDF document)
conventional gun system: muzzle velocity 1.5 km/hr, range 50 miles
first generation of railgun: muzzle velcocity 2.5 km/hr, range 250 miles, Mach 5.0 (1.6 km/hr) at impact.
I assume the old shell decelerate to 0 km/hr at impact. In other words, speed drops by 1.5km/hr in 50 miles. For the rail gun round, the speed drops by mererly 0.9km/hr in 250 miles. It does not sound right to me. My mechanical engineering 101 knowlege suggested that the drag is proportional to the square of the velocity.
(the drag) R=0.5*D*rho*A*v^2, where D is the shape paramter, rho is the air density, A is the cross section area and v is the velocity.
At start, the drag of railgun round will be (2.5/1.5)^2, about 3 times of that of a shell... Of course, they will try to make the railgun rounds aerodynamically smooth, so did the conventionaly shells. Unless the railgun round spend most of the time at extremely high altitude, I don't see why it works.
One of the most famous in history: the "deep throat". Now, someone can demand "deep throat" to identify himself....
My observation (mainly to the Asian communities, but probably holds true for the rest) is the guys who hold the a lot of certs (MCSE,CCNA,A+....) /degree (multiple master of whatever management) are mediocre, in terms of both technical and people skill. Getting through a pile of these things is a good indication the candidate has an attitude to climb up the ladder. But, on the other hand, they just want to do that all by the book. Creativity, novelty, real initiative, crisis management etc are not their strength.
Let's talk about the other bunch, some sysadmin (engineer, accountant or whatever professional) get no futher accreditation after the most essential one. They tend to run towards two extremes: extremely keen on the job and the certs are too easy for them to take that seriously; extremely lazy and don't want to do anything....
Really that's mediocre vs extremes. C{E/F/I/T}Os pick whatever you like depending on what you need.
If you don't care about the deliberate corruption of the well established CD standard. That's your choice.
But, if you really like the music/the band but hate the protection, then you should buy two copies. Buy one and return one. The music company will realise something wrong if the customers can boast the return rate somehow to double-digit.
In many cases, personal character rather than the environment is what determines the success of a person. I can see whoever reading this forum is the lucky top x% in the world. Social ranking, information and acesss to information etc are much more mobile than most...
I remember there was a slashdot link a while ago about the achievement of those who graduated from the top elite private US colleges and those who have the desire and ability, but cannot due to financial, family or whatever reason many years down the track... The results was quite a surprise... Basically, both group of them are top archievers. Much better than those who don't attempt at all...
Bear in mind, many bright people around the world (even in some smaller and not so advanced developed countries) got stuck in local college which may not be as good as the state university that you mentioned... A lot of them cannot attend universities at all. However, many still strive in the professional that they chosen. It should be a good lesson for many of us to think about.