This is a wise move for Israel that I hope will be duplicated all over the world,
Which would really piss off the US intelligence community..... Which in turn is probably one of the Israeli's motives. I bet the CIA gets a small collective panic attack every time they lose track of what the Israelis are upto.
AAAHHHHHHHHH......There is nothing like a good conspiracy theory to start the day!!!!
Not likely since any future ruler of Iraq will have to be a moslem and in Iraq they perform circumcision without anesthesia.... I have yet to meet a spineless corporate type with a discomfort tolerance threshold greater than zero.
I can understand that, for me the feeling out of place as a European in the USA was walking out of the airport terminal , taking a taxi donwtown, and seeing a bunch of african americans drive by in a big brightly painted pickup with some of the loudest rap music I ever heard blasting out of a couple of 1.5m high speakers in the back. You can walk out of any airport terminal in Europe but you will never see anything that colorful.... except maybe in the Balkans but they use tanks instead of pickups.
The next biotech killer app?
on
Home DNA Sequencing
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
What's next, the Fisher Price Cloning kit?
No, its the biotech killer app that will start a civil war in 10-15% (average region dependent) of all households on the planet...
Over the counter, at your local drugstore, genetic paternity tests.......
Whoever markets the first reliable one will be richer than Bill Gates.
So I just violated somebody's patent rights, displayed complete disregard for intellectual property by illegally replicating patented DNA sequences and in so doing brought the economy of the free world a step closer to collapse? And all this by getting my wife pregnant....
uuuh..... ooops......
Define: v. procreated, procreating, procreates v. tr. To beget and conceive (offspring).
I did not mean to offend, I wrote that based on having seen what the pilot of a small aircraft looks like when his body washes ashore after drifting for a while through the North Atlantic in the shreds of his dinghy. It is not a pretty sight I assure you. I also know how easily a routine flight can turn into a disaster. Even when the pilot is a chap who has extensive experience. The point is that that all the experience 97% of pilots have is usually gained in climates much more forgiving than the arctic. Flying in the arctic is a whole school of piloting in onto it self, a single engine aircraft has little place there unless it is hardened for arctic flying and in the high polar region even such hardend single engine machines are a risk to fly never mind a kitplane. Personally I would not attempt to over fly either of the polar region in anything less than a twin engined machine with heavy duty cold climate equipment, a satilte beaccon and well proportioned survival pack. If that guy had run out of fuel before he reached McMurdo I doubt he would have lasted until the rescue chopper arrived even if he had an emergency satilite beacon.
There is a bit of a difference between having an accident in an C-130 hardened for arctic flying and equipped with state of the art surival kits and satilite rescue beacons while flying in the S-Arctic and having an accident while flying something you built in your garage in the S-Arctic. The N-Atlantic, just for example, is full of the bones of people who got the yen to cross an ocean that sports some of the worst weather on the planet in a small Cessna or a small costal sporting yacht and please note that the North Atlantic has a relatively good network of SAR assets and well equpped surface rescue forces and good radar cover. It does not surprise me that the countries that maintain a presence in the S-Arctic are very reluctant to see this kind of thing become popular because rescue assets are not available in the region in nubers even remotely adequate to deal with any sizable influx of daredevil adventurers. The plain fact is that there are alot more people with pilots licenses that have more money than sense, this guy is one of them, and he is bloody lucky to be alive this could easily have ended very differently. The real question here is when do people become culpable for getting them selves in deep trouble even though they should have known better. And this applies especially when rescue workers get killed needlessly while trying to pull these fools out of the shit. It did not happen this time but it does all to often. There is a point when the excuse "Well doooh! He was just trying to have a little fun." begins to wear thin.
This guy has had a deliciously evil series of inspriations. My favorite is the generator that traps a spambot in an (almost) infinite loop and feeds it upto 26^49 totally bogus E-Mail addresses. An even more evil thing to do would be to bounce the spambots through a large network of pages on many different sites carrying only a relatively small number of bogus addresses each. That would make this stunt alot harder for the spammer to detect. This writing more of these traps would make a cool hobby....
Calm down, calm down, spam is not so bad. Why if we eradicate spam just think of all the jobs that would be lost!! All those good people in the electronic mail marketing business (aka. spammers) and the developers that derive a living from anti spam software, the doctors that treat patients who's hearts have begun to give under the constant emotional irritation and anger generated by spam, the drug companies that make their medicine... the list goes on. No spam is an essential component in modern society, it creates jobs, tells us where to look for cheap viagra and it is an invaluabe guide to profitable business opportunities in Nigeria. I ask you sir, how can we live without spam???
Before you mod this down as a TROLL please ask your self: Whould you know sarcasm if it bit you in the backside?
If ever there was a case for open source this is it. Democracy is not democracy without transparency. For Diebold to deny the public the right to know how its votes are counted and how secure the process is by keeping its source closed is inexcusable.....
"the code, which Diebold refuses to allow the public to audit, was discovered unencrypted on a publicly accessible Diebold Internet FTP (file transfer protocol) site.
.... uuuuhhh, oops my bad!, they are open source after all.
But all fun aside, at least it can now be said to have been officially confirmed that one of the numerous things DMCA will not protect you against is your own stupidity and incopetence.
No not really, the parties behind the S-African reactor are the same ones as were behind the Hamm-Uentrop fiasco, which by the way is only 13 years old. And the Germans at least have significantly scaled down their interest in the technology. By the time construction started Hamm-Uentrop drew on 20+ years of research and testing. Even so took 3 times as long to build as planned, it went way ahead of budget and due to amont other things fuel handling problems never functioned 100% reliably. So if the S-African reactor is based on German PB-reactor technology which has not evolved much since Hamm Uentrop due to lack of funding I rather think these people are trying to restart development of a troubled technology in a place where they think resistance will be weaker. They are betting the S-Africans will allow them to do something that would have the Europeans picketing by the thousands at the construction site faster that you can say "pebble bed".
This technology has been around for at least 30 years. The Germans even built an example pebble bed reactor at Hamm-Uentrop which has led to the technology being heavily criticized by enviromentalists. Normally I would be hesitant to swallow raw what enviromentalists feed onto the internet, especially the religiously fanatical German anti nuclear lobby, but in this case their claims are reenforced by the fact that their opinions of pebble bed reactors are shared by the German state who shut the Hamm-Uentrop plant down in 1989 after the management covered up serious problems with the reactor. The whole affair has led the People of Hamm-Uentrop to start a citizens group which among other things aims to start an Information exchange with the people of South so that the Africans can take into account the German experiences before one of these things gets built in their back yard. Feel free to call this a troll but with so many people singing the "See!! I told you nuclear is safe" psalm here I figured the other side of the coin deserved a mention.
"' Not entirely sure what OS licensing has to do with music piracy."
Their grand inquisitor must have done some thinking while he was polishing his instruments of torture and figured that slipping a mention of unrelated blasphemous acts of software development into a story about a court case against three musical hretics is swatting two files in a single stroke
The point of researching these things is to not get caught with your pants down when someone else invents it.
Developing Doomsday viruses is not a way to defend against the other guys bioweapons since these are likely to be radically different from yours. There must be thousands of different ways of producing a doomsday virus that the even the best brains in the USA have not thought of. The best proof of this is the semi official "Ohhh'ing and Ahhh'ing" that comes out of the military community every time the world gets a glimpse into the innovative little horror Russia's bioweapons program has thrown up. If the USA was really intent on ONLY defending it self against this sort of thing and NOT interested in using it either as an instrument of blackmail or actually as a weapon against its periceved enemies the effort would not be to develop new viruses. The emphasis would be on sending CIA agents out to steal the enemies new doomsday viruses and develop vaccines to protect against them. The alternative is of course the "Old Israeli way", keep a vigilant eye on the bastards and then once in a while you send in a couple of guys to laser designate the bastards Bioweapons facilites while a squadron of F-16's drops a few sticks of 2000lb Paveway PGM's on the labs before they ever start to deliver results. Personally I advocate the latter method.
I'll ditch windows when someone comes up with an OS that supports ALL the applications and games I currently run, and is faster or has some other 'thing' that would be beneficial to me.
This did exactly that for me, of course the downside is that you have to shell out a thick wad of cash. These Wine ports are nice if you are doing relatively light-weight stuff but as soon as you are working on a major website or a 100mb+ sized Photoshop document with a few dozen layers it is crash city. I prefer native software any day which is why I bought a Mac. That having been said this sort of software will certainly help generate Linux converts since it will more than do the trick for most people.
For one thing you are right Sun is not in trouble solely and allcompletely because of their lack of interest in Linux. A large part of their troubles came about because they neglected to develop their hardware energetically enough and the same goes for Solaris. IBM has overtaken Sun in both departments. If you compare the effort of doing things in AIX to accomplishing the same task in Solaris it typically takes longer under Solaris because it has the magagability and user friendlyness of Slackware Linux.
On the other hand it is a fact that Sun could have profited from Linux. Linux is progressively becoming more capable of functioning on larger and larger machines and while everybody else decided that if you cant beat them join the Linux band waggon Sun's response was half hearted. This has led to alot of people who used to use or develop for Solaris going for the competitors Linux based solution rather than be locked in Sun's proprietary software/hardware enviroment where every move you make costs you a license fee.
That is more or less true. While I would not quite support your account of the performance difference it is definately the case that Sun stuck its thumb up its *** some years ago while IBM put some serious effort into AIX and Linux and that is now paying off for IBM. I operate both Sun runnign the obligatory Solaris and IBM hardware runnign both AIX and Suse Linux and I have to say the IBM machines are better designed. I can fit about twice as many IBM machines into the same space as I would Sun machines. As for hardware functionality what is coming from IBM like the Regatta line looks even better than what we already have. Especially with the ability to partition a single CPU to run multiple OS instances.
That is true, speed is not everything alot depends on what you are doing and what how easy/comfortable doing it is on the system of your choice. I recently switched from a PC-laptop to a PowerBook lap top and it was not because of the blistering speed, it is because of:
The quality of the built in hardware.
The ergonomic design of the machine.
The operating system.
Of course I could get more or less the same out of a high end PC "Centrino" laptop on points 1 and 2. But even then the PC-laptop often ends up weighing more than the Mac and even when this is not the case I end up paying about the same for a decently engineered PC-laptop as a Mac. On point 3 there is really no comparisons and I am not prepared to negotiate here since I am extremely tired of Windows. I want a UNIX/UNIX-like desktop OS. It is impossible to find a mainstream UNIX/UNIX-like desktop system than works as perfectly on a PC-laptop as OS.X does on the PowerBook. The only thing that gets close is Linux, usually with a lot of work, and I am not prepared to sink a week+ into getting my laptop up and running. Linux may one day get to the point were we have a decent selection of Linux certified high end PC-laptops but until those start growing on trees I will buy Mac.
... was based on tracking all manner of radiation emitted by the Stealth aircraft it self such as IFF, Nav radar, Communications etc... I was not aware of it using cellphone network radiation. Of course the Pentagon is claiming Tamara is crap but then they would having spent multiple billions on stealth. In reality the performance of both radar-stealth and systems like Tamara have been hyped up by ignorant TV journalists beyond what they can deliver.
if there's any place where eccentricity is tolerated, or promoted even, it's academia.
That is true enough although one sometimes wonders if they are not too fond of it? There are some forms of academic eccentricity that I will find distasteful.
"The only creature on the planet Earth (little blue thing 3'rd from the sun) that its inhabitants regard as more pathetic than a computer virus author."
They will definetly be the second up against the wall when the revolution comes.
This is true, my brother in law decided to get a new job and got the idea to move into locomotive maintenance (he's a truck mechanic). He called up a number of train operators in the UK and was told at every turn that they don't train people any more, he should go to Virgin trains (apparently the only ones in the UK who still train/educate personnel), complete their training course and then when his contract with Virgin expires they would be happy to hire him. So in summary the training program of every train operator in the UK consists of poaching the people trained/educated by the few haples idiots in the corporate community (in this case Virgin trains) who still still live up to their obligation to provide their field of industry with a new crop of trained professionals. This attitude is pretty typical for much of Europe, of course I dont know how things are in the United States but I can't imagine they are much different. Companies are screaming for:
- Experienced personnel
They are not:
- Providing training programmes
- Entry level jobs
Apparently the overhead involved in training new personnel or hiring somebody with less than a minimum of 5 years experience is too great for this to be a viable option for modern European companies. Just getting an engineering degree is insufficient. They only ray of sunshie here is that they are prepared to hire you, even if you are not especially experienced, if you have a set of cetificates the length of your arm. Unfortunately most certificates are obscenely expensive to get, they are slightly less obscenely expensive to maintain and in Germany at least, where I used to work, many companies seem to expect you to pay for your vast portfolio of obscenely expensive certificates out of your own pocket and to do the studying on your own time. And with all of this plus the ever present danger of being dropped like hot potato (ie getting your ass fired) every time one of the CO's feel in a mood to draw the magic cost cutting sword from its stone and go on a crusade, they expect you to be loyal to the company. It kind of makes me glad that after 6 months of being unemployed I finally found a job with one of those haples idiot companies that will still hire people with limited experience.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a wise move for Israel that I hope will be duplicated all over the world,
Which would really piss off the US intelligence community..... Which in turn is probably one of the Israeli's motives. I bet the CIA gets a small collective panic attack every time they lose track of what the Israelis are upto.
AAAHHHHHHHHH......There is nothing like a good conspiracy theory to start the day!!!!
"Darl McBride leader of Iraq..."
Not likely since any future ruler of Iraq will have to be a moslem and in Iraq they perform circumcision without anesthesia.... I have yet to meet a spineless corporate type with a discomfort tolerance threshold greater than zero.
I can understand that, for me the feeling out of place as a European in the USA was walking out of the airport terminal , taking a taxi donwtown, and seeing a bunch of african americans drive by in a big brightly painted pickup with some of the loudest rap music I ever heard blasting out of a couple of 1.5m high speakers in the back. You can walk out of any airport terminal in Europe but you will never see anything that colorful .... except maybe in the Balkans but they use tanks instead of pickups.
What's next, the Fisher Price Cloning kit?
...
No, its the biotech killer app that will start a civil war in 10-15% (average region dependent) of all households on the planet
Over the counter, at your local drugstore, genetic paternity tests.......
Whoever markets the first reliable one will be richer than Bill Gates.
The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.
- Attibuted to the blind Syrian poet Abul'-Ala' al-Ma'arri (973-1057)
So I just violated somebody's patent rights, displayed complete disregard for intellectual property by illegally replicating patented DNA sequences and in so doing brought the economy of the free world a step closer to collapse? And all this by getting my wife pregnant....
..... ooops ......
uuuh
Define:
v. procreated, procreating, procreates
v. tr.
To beget and conceive (offspring).
To produce or create; originate.
I did not mean to offend, I wrote that based on having seen what the pilot of a small aircraft looks like when his body washes ashore after drifting for a while through the North Atlantic in the shreds of his dinghy. It is not a pretty sight I assure you. I also know how easily a routine flight can turn into a disaster. Even when the pilot is a chap who has extensive experience. The point is that that all the experience 97% of pilots have is usually gained in climates much more forgiving than the arctic. Flying in the arctic is a whole school of piloting in onto it self, a single engine aircraft has little place there unless it is hardened for arctic flying and in the high polar region even such hardend single engine machines are a risk to fly never mind a kitplane. Personally I would not attempt to over fly either of the polar region in anything less than a twin engined machine with heavy duty cold climate equipment, a satilte beaccon and well proportioned survival pack. If that guy had run out of fuel before he reached McMurdo I doubt he would have lasted until the rescue chopper arrived even if he had an emergency satilite beacon.
There is a bit of a difference between having an accident in an C-130 hardened for arctic flying and equipped with state of the art surival kits and satilite rescue beacons while flying in the S-Arctic and having an accident while flying something you built in your garage in the S-Arctic. The N-Atlantic, just for example, is full of the bones of people who got the yen to cross an ocean that sports some of the worst weather on the planet in a small Cessna or a small costal sporting yacht and please note that the North Atlantic has a relatively good network of SAR assets and well equpped surface rescue forces and good radar cover. It does not surprise me that the countries that maintain a presence in the S-Arctic are very reluctant to see this kind of thing become popular because rescue assets are not available in the region in nubers even remotely adequate to deal with any sizable influx of daredevil adventurers. The plain fact is that there are alot more people with pilots licenses that have more money than sense, this guy is one of them, and he is bloody lucky to be alive this could easily have ended very differently. The real question here is when do people become culpable for getting them selves in deep trouble even though they should have known better. And this applies especially when rescue workers get killed needlessly while trying to pull these fools out of the shit. It did not happen this time but it does all to often. There is a point when the excuse "Well doooh! He was just trying to have a little fun." begins to wear thin.
4) hacked into the place that determines if there is war or not
Phew!!! One shudders to think what would have happened if Saddam Hussein had known this back in March, "Operation Canadian freedom" ????
This guy has had a deliciously evil series of inspriations. My favorite is the generator that traps a spambot in an (almost) infinite loop and feeds it upto 26^49 totally bogus E-Mail addresses. An even more evil thing to do would be to bounce the spambots through a large network of pages on many different sites carrying only a relatively small number of bogus addresses each. That would make this stunt alot harder for the spammer to detect. This writing more of these traps would make a cool hobby....
Calm down, calm down, spam is not so bad. Why if we eradicate spam just think of all the jobs that would be lost!! All those good people in the electronic mail marketing business (aka. spammers) and the developers that derive a living from anti spam software, the doctors that treat patients who's hearts have begun to give under the constant emotional irritation and anger generated by spam, the drug companies that make their medicine... the list goes on. No spam is an essential component in modern society, it creates jobs, tells us where to look for cheap viagra and it is an invaluabe guide to profitable business opportunities in Nigeria. I ask you sir, how can we live without spam???
Before you mod this down as a TROLL please ask your self:
Whould you know sarcasm if it bit you in the backside?
If ever there was a case for open source this is it. Democracy is not democracy without transparency. For Diebold to deny the public the right to know how its votes are counted and how secure the process is by keeping its source closed is inexcusable.....
.... uuuuhhh, oops my bad!, they are open source after all.
"the code, which Diebold refuses to allow the public to audit, was discovered unencrypted on a publicly accessible Diebold Internet FTP (file transfer protocol) site.
But all fun aside, at least it can now be said to have been officially confirmed that one of the numerous things DMCA will not protect you against is your own stupidity and incopetence.
I bet Arafat would just love it if Israel Open Source'd the construction specs for its A-Bombs under a GNU license ....
No not really, the parties behind the S-African reactor are the same ones as were behind the Hamm-Uentrop fiasco, which by the way is only 13 years old. And the Germans at least have significantly scaled down their interest in the technology. By the time construction started Hamm-Uentrop drew on 20+ years of research and testing. Even so took 3 times as long to build as planned, it went way ahead of budget and due to amont other things fuel handling problems never functioned 100% reliably. So if the S-African reactor is based on German PB-reactor technology which has not evolved much since Hamm Uentrop due to lack of funding I rather think these people are trying to restart development of a troubled technology in a place where they think resistance will be weaker. They are betting the S-Africans will allow them to do something that would have the Europeans picketing by the thousands at the construction site faster that you can say "pebble bed".
This technology has been around for at least 30 years. The Germans even built an example pebble bed reactor at Hamm-Uentrop which has led to the technology being heavily criticized by enviromentalists. Normally I would be hesitant to swallow raw what enviromentalists feed onto the internet, especially the religiously fanatical German anti nuclear lobby, but in this case their claims are reenforced by the fact that their opinions of pebble bed reactors are shared by the German state who shut the Hamm-Uentrop plant down in 1989 after the management covered up serious problems with the reactor. The whole affair has led the People of Hamm-Uentrop to start a citizens group which among other things aims to start an Information exchange with the people of South so that the Africans can take into account the German experiences before one of these things gets built in their back yard. Feel free to call this a troll but with so many people singing the "See!! I told you nuclear is safe" psalm here I figured the other side of the coin deserved a mention.
"' Not entirely sure what OS licensing has to do with music piracy."
Their grand inquisitor must have done some thinking while he was polishing his instruments of torture and figured that slipping a mention of unrelated blasphemous acts of software development into a story about a court case against three musical hretics is swatting two files in a single stroke
The point of researching these things is to not get caught with your pants down when someone else invents it.
Developing Doomsday viruses is not a way to defend against the other guys bioweapons since these are likely to be radically different from yours. There must be thousands of different ways of producing a doomsday virus that the even the best brains in the USA have not thought of. The best proof of this is the semi official "Ohhh'ing and Ahhh'ing" that comes out of the military community every time the world gets a glimpse into the innovative little horror Russia's bioweapons program has thrown up. If the USA was really intent on ONLY defending it self against this sort of thing and NOT interested in using it either as an instrument of blackmail or actually as a weapon against its periceved enemies the effort would not be to develop new viruses. The emphasis would be on sending CIA agents out to steal the enemies new doomsday viruses and develop vaccines to protect against them. The alternative is of course the "Old Israeli way", keep a vigilant eye on the bastards and then once in a while you send in a couple of guys to laser designate the bastards Bioweapons facilites while a squadron of F-16's drops a few sticks of 2000lb Paveway PGM's on the labs before they ever start to deliver results. Personally I advocate the latter method.
I'll ditch windows when someone comes up with an OS that supports ALL the applications and games I currently run, and is faster or has some other 'thing' that would be beneficial to me.
This did exactly that for me, of course the downside is that you have to shell out a thick wad of cash. These Wine ports are nice if you are doing relatively light-weight stuff but as soon as you are working on a major website or a 100mb+ sized Photoshop document with a few dozen layers it is crash city. I prefer native software any day which is why I bought a Mac. That having been said this sort of software will certainly help generate Linux converts since it will more than do the trick for most people.
For one thing you are right Sun is not in trouble solely and allcompletely because of their lack of interest in Linux. A large part of their troubles came about because they neglected to develop their hardware energetically enough and the same goes for Solaris. IBM has overtaken Sun in both departments. If you compare the effort of doing things in AIX to accomplishing the same task in Solaris it typically takes longer under Solaris because it has the magagability and user friendlyness of Slackware Linux.
On the other hand it is a fact that Sun could have profited from Linux. Linux is progressively becoming more capable of functioning on larger and larger machines and while everybody else decided that if you cant beat them join the Linux band waggon Sun's response was half hearted. This has led to alot of people who used to use or develop for Solaris going for the competitors Linux based solution rather than be locked in Sun's proprietary software/hardware enviroment where every move you make costs you a license fee.
That is more or less true. While I would not quite support your account of the performance difference it is definately the case that Sun stuck its thumb up its *** some years ago while IBM put some serious effort into AIX and Linux and that is now paying off for IBM. I operate both Sun runnign the obligatory Solaris and IBM hardware runnign both AIX and Suse Linux and I have to say the IBM machines are better designed. I can fit about twice as many IBM machines into the same space as I would Sun machines. As for hardware functionality what is coming from IBM like the Regatta line looks even better than what we already have. Especially with the ability to partition a single CPU to run multiple OS instances.
Of course I could get more or less the same out of a high end PC "Centrino" laptop on points 1 and 2. But even then the PC-laptop often ends up weighing more than the Mac and even when this is not the case I end up paying about the same for a decently engineered PC-laptop as a Mac. On point 3 there is really no comparisons and I am not prepared to negotiate here since I am extremely tired of Windows. I want a UNIX/UNIX-like desktop OS. It is impossible to find a mainstream UNIX/UNIX-like desktop system than works as perfectly on a PC-laptop as OS.X does on the PowerBook. The only thing that gets close is Linux, usually with a lot of work, and I am not prepared to sink a week+ into getting my laptop up and running. Linux may one day get to the point were we have a decent selection of Linux certified high end PC-laptops but until those start growing on trees I will buy Mac.
... was based on tracking all manner of radiation emitted by the Stealth aircraft it self such as IFF, Nav radar, Communications etc... I was not aware of it using cellphone network radiation. Of course the Pentagon is claiming Tamara is crap but then they would having spent multiple billions on stealth. In reality the performance of both radar-stealth and systems like Tamara have been hyped up by ignorant TV journalists beyond what they can deliver.
if there's any place where eccentricity is tolerated, or promoted even, it's academia.
That is true enough although one sometimes wonders if they are not too fond of it? There are some forms of academic eccentricity that I will find distasteful.
...defines a Counter-Strike cheater as:
"The only creature on the planet Earth (little blue thing 3'rd from the sun) that its inhabitants regard as more pathetic than a computer virus author."
They will definetly be the second up against the wall when the revolution comes.
- Experienced personnel
They are not:
- Providing training programmes
- Entry level jobs
Apparently the overhead involved in training new personnel or hiring somebody with less than a minimum of 5 years experience is too great for this to be a viable option for modern European companies. Just getting an engineering degree is insufficient. They only ray of sunshie here is that they are prepared to hire you, even if you are not especially experienced, if you have a set of cetificates the length of your arm. Unfortunately most certificates are obscenely expensive to get, they are slightly less obscenely expensive to maintain and in Germany at least, where I used to work, many companies seem to expect you to pay for your vast portfolio of obscenely expensive certificates out of your own pocket and to do the studying on your own time. And with all of this plus the ever present danger of being dropped like hot potato (ie getting your ass fired) every time one of the CO's feel in a mood to draw the magic cost cutting sword from its stone and go on a crusade, they expect you to be loyal to the company. It kind of makes me glad that after 6 months of being unemployed I finally found a job with one of those haples idiot companies that will still hire people with limited experience.Have karma will burn it!