Do janitors institute policies that impede his work? Do cooks? Doubtful. He's being a tad vitriolic but he has a valid point. A lot of functions within most companies are there purely to support the members of staff whose output garners revenue. HR, accounts, IT, Janitors, Cafeteria staff, Receptionists, Admins, Managers are just there to make sure the actual business activity continues as profitably as possible. If any of those groups start making policies that impede the main business activity, they become counter-productive, and provoke vitriolic rants like the one above.
I work in a support role and absolutely agree with what he's saying, though, like you, I hope he doesn't talk like that to I.T. staff in person.
Wow...I would never have imagined that you'd have to pay them a monthly fee to list your item. Especially when they're taking 15% of your sales already. Wow.
I heard there is no Christmas
In the silly Middle East
No trees, no snow, so Santa Claus,
They have different religious beliefs
They believe in Muhammed, and not in our holiday,
And so every December I go to the Middle East and say
Hey there Mr Muslim, Merry Fucking Christmas
Put down that book, the Koran,
And hear some holiday wishes.
In case you haven't noticed it's Jesus' birthday
So get off your heathen Muslim ass and fucking celebrate
The OP's point was that since there aren't: "many efforts to prevent adults from accessing violent content" (your words) that for a company to then try and prevent those same adults from accessing sexual content, by refusing to let it through their certification process, is a bit silly.
Otherwise what was the point of the post? Violence is OK [for adults], but titties aren't [for adults],....
Woohooo! He gets it?!
... regardless of the fact that nobody is even discussing taking away titties _or_ violence from _adults_?
No...he doesn't. Jeebus... Did you read the story? Microsoft refusing to certify the game for use on the XBox360 is stopping Adults from even buying the game. So yeah, that's exactly what is being discussed you cretin.
First, why did he tell them to write a "day" for each step instead of "a multitude of lifetimes" for each step? Second, regretfully, by making the first argument, I'm accepting the bullshit premise that a god actually dictated this fucking story to a bunch of people so they could write it down. I feel dirty.
More likely, someone made this shit up without any divine intervention and decided that hey...even though it's been around longer than I can remember...someone must have made all this stuff. Well, to do that...he'd have to be like...magic or some shit. How long should I say it took him? Well...he is magic...so...2 seconds? Nah, no-one would ever buy that...a day? Hmmm...nah, I'll go with a week, much more believable....
I hate ignorant people. I'm really just at that point this holiday season Slashdot. So much bad news someone cheer me up...please.
Me too new friend! Whenever someone I know tries to claim that Reiki, Numerology, Homeopathy, Astrology or any of those other kinds of bullshit are "real" and that they are "free to believe in it if they want to" so I can just go STFU, I fire up Left 4 Dead 2, bust out a chainsaw, axe or a katana and just go to town on some Zombies. Very very very therapeutic. Try it:)
1)You don't "accidentally" retain sniffed traffic logs of that size, across your entire international operations, for months if not years, "accidentally." See http://gizmodo.com/5671049/google-street-view-cars-collected-emails-and-passwords [gizmodo.com] I mean come on...someone would have noticed the drives filling up, wondered why, etc. These people are supposedly geniuses, right?
Eric: Hey Larry, this D drive is filling up pretty quick. Larry: Huh? Eric: I said the D drive is filling up pretty quick. Larry: It's probably nothing, what are you doing? Eric: Oh, nothing..I was just going to create a new logo for the anniversary of the invention of the potato peeler and I got this message. Larry: What did it say? Eric: I don't remember exactly, I just clicked ok, but it said something about disk-space, and wouldn't let me create my jpeg. Larry: Well did you check the Control Panel? Eric: Yeah, it's saying it's all full... Larry: What? Seriously? I thought we put a 100Gb in there a few months ago? It shouldn't be full. Eric: Well...it is. See? All blue! Larry: Should we delete some of it? Eric: I did, last week, and the week before...maybe it's a virus? Larry: What are all these? Hmmm. They look important...probably Sergey's. Eric:Shit...Sergey. Do you think...shall we tell him? Shall we tell Sergey? Larry: Do you want to tell him? He's going to be super pissed when he finds out you filled the new hard-drive with porn or whatever you did.. Eric:I...Good point. I'll go down to best-buy and get one of those external disk things. What should I get? 200Gb or 300Gb? Larry:I don't know? Just get the biggest one you can, and hurry! It's his turn to use the computer next!! Sergey: Hey guys, what's up? Eric & Larry (together): Nothing!
I'm sorry, but that's a ridiculous argument. So what? Newton was religious. Richard Feynman isn't. Richard Dawkins isn't. Thomas Edison wasn't. Sigmund Freud wasn't. Stephen Hawking isn't. Peter Higgs isn't. James Watson isn't. These people aren't/weren't. So what? People make discoveries and come up with inventions. Some of those people believe in religion, some of them don't. Measuring relgion's impact on progress by naming famous religious scientists/inventors...down that path lies madness.
On the other hand, many murderers, mass murderers even, are/were "highly religious" and of course, in the middle of those two extremes, there are many many many many many many many other people who have made no impact on society whatsoever, doomed to be excluded from the annals of history by their mediocrity who are (or were) "highly religious". You can't just hold up an example of a great scientist who was also religious and say:
"Look! That proves it!!! Human progress is impossible without Religion!!"
I think if you replaced Newton's headstone with a magnet and wrapped his coffin in wire, you'd produce a measurable current every time you did say that.
The "overwhelming majority of human progress" is in the past, due to the fact that the present is still happening and we can't see into the future. Society is becoming more secular. Many countries still have blasphemy laws. Some countries will stone you to death if you criticise a man who's supposedly an emissary of a prophet of a god. How many people were hanged/stoned/shot to death because of their godlessness who might have come up with calculus, or the "law of gravity" or the bagless vacuum cleaner or any one of a number of Really Great Things? How many were excluded from schools/universities because of accidents of birth, or because of their religious beliefs (which is pretty much the same thing).
How many scientists paid lip service to God and religion because it was an established social convention. How many scientists paid lip service to God because the church was giving them money? If you were studying at one of the earliest 12th-14th century(I think) church-run universities would you come out with a heretical theory that suggested that God might not exist? No. No you wouldn't.
When people say "let the market decide" they generally mean, don't intervene and see what happens. In this case, Microsoft is intervening in the market by refusing to certify certain games. The market exists between game developers/publishers and consumers. Saying "let the market decide" means that developers/publishers should be allowed to sell any game they want without MS intervention.
Back on topic, if MS stopped intervening, and let "the market" decide, AO sex games may very well disappear....but there are consumers who go for Japanese Date Sims/Banzai Rape Party 9, so I don't even know anymore. Maybe MS is just playing the "family friendly" card for kudos and the real reason is that "sex games" seem to be completely, universally shit.:)
Indeed, I've seen enough disgustingly mispelled words that if an American spells words correctly albeit in "American", then I couldn't care less.* A good faith effort to communicate well and be understood is there. Spelling and grammar differences *can* be annoying, but they don't harm understanding. It's the idiomatic phrases that are most ripe for misunderstanding anyway:
"I saw a tramp smoking a fag the other day"
Quite impressive the amount of misunderstanding that could come from such a short sentence, right? An English tramp of course, is an American bum. But an American tramp is an English slut. An English bum is an American fanny. And a fag as you should know, is of course a cigarette.)
*Couldn't care less, really, if there's one thing you get right. Please, make it this.
Wow, a completely truthful, serious explanation of what's new in the world of cricket and it's been modded +4 Funny. Maybe it is a silly game after all. Of course, TRWTF is being beaten at a game by the very people we colonised so that we'd have someone to play against.
You forgot about, or intentionally omitted, Northern Ireland, and having done so, you are able to come to the naive conclusion that it's as simple as getting out of Iraq/Afghanistan. Self-governance, peace accords, rafts of "freedom fighters" released from prison early, former leaders of a terrorist organisation allowed seats in government, and still there is conflict in Northern Ireland. The cat's out of the bag. If you stop meddling in Middle Eastern affairs, you won't see a "huge reduction" in terrorism. Not in our lifetimes, or your great-great-grandchildren's. Terrorists worldwide won't suddenly throw their arms down and embrace us in a grand gesture of peace, love and understanding, numbnuts.
Also, slightly OT, but hopefully funny enough to warm the mods' cockles: Mitchell & Webb @ 2:35
David Mitchell: I was just going to say that my eye was caught by this whole scandal in America. Robert Webb: Oh, the scandal in America. Yeah, that is interesting. That must be the biggest scandal since Watergategate. Mitchell: Watergategate? Isn't it just Watergate? Webb: No. That would mean it was just about water. No, it was a scandal or "gate", add the suffix "gate", that's what you do with a scandal; involving the Watergate Hotel. So it was called the Watergate scandal, or Watergategate Mitchell: But doesn't the term "gate" meaning scandal, come from Watergate? Webb: What, take the last 4 letters of a previous scandal, or hotel, and add it to all future scandals? That can't be the system.. Mitchell: I think it is. Webb: Well what if there's a scandal about water? What do you call that? Mitchell: Well you'd call it waterga...ah I see what you mean. Aquagate? Webb: It's not great is it?
Fun thing about Cablegate - it came about because of an increased inter-agency sharing of intel. That's more eyes seeing more information. While the obvious intent is to make intel agencies more effective (something Assange aspires to prevent), but it put information in front of more sets of eyes. After Manning's mismanagement of that opportunity, we now have the knee-jerk reaction of clamping down on that information. Less eyes. Less whistleblowers.
And of course, plenty of material for politicians to rabble-rouse with.
Yep, as you say, this is exactly what Julian Assange wants. For "the conspirators" to overreact and make themselves less effective:
This is however, not where Assange’s reasoning leads him. He decides, instead, that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire:
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
Yeah, wah wah. IIRC anyone who has been on a tour of Goonhilly will have a good idea of where the transatlantic cables reach the mainland in Britain. This is all fucking nonsense. Anyone with sufficient motivation already knows all this or can find it out. The targets that everyone is whinging about are not going to be of much use to most terrorists. Terrorists, as we've seen time and again go for soft targets. They go where they can get the most bang for buck (if you'll pardon the expression). E.g. Bombs on the London underground, planes into buildings, IRA bombs in shopping centres and coastal holiday town centres.
I think you may be missing the point, seriously...security by obscurity being preached on/. ?? Did I fall through a wormhole and end up in bizarro world? Did you hear about the IT worker at MI5 who approached a foreign gov. with a bunch of "secrets"? If that kind of Walter Mitty character can end up working for the British Security Services, what are the odds that some similarly greedy a-hole working at one of these civilian facilities has already tried to sell information/uranium? The idea that anyone was relying on the fact that "not many people know how or where Molybdenum-99 is produced" to stop weapons grade uranium from leaving those civilian sites is fucking ridiculous.
[citation needed] Maybe you're right, but this won't happen for a long long time.
Firstly, a degree from a university shows you can apply yourself for 3-5 years and have committed significant time, money and energy to improving your knowledge of your chosen subject. This commitment, and not just "the piece of paper" is why people tend to favour university graduates.
Secondly, 99% of HR positions are *not* held by people who have a university degree in your chosen field. If they have a degree, it's in something completely unrelated to the people they're hiring, so they will favour people with a degree because it's the easiest way to filter out the people who don't know what they're doing. If they start letting through everyone who has the 2 braincells required to lie on a C.V. then the managers trying to fill those positions will end up interviewing people better suited to careers that require only the ability to say "Would you like fries with that?". And if that happens, then guess who gets it in the neck for letting through unsuitable candidates? That's right: H.R. This is why any company big enough to need an HR function will probably never consider a diploma/degree completely irrelevant.
You're right of course, there are many bright, chippy young autodidacts who deserve a job, but you need knowledgeable people in place to tell them apart from the liars and the downright crazies. So you either end up with an HR department who discounts anyone without a degree, or with managers who have to wade through the raw resumé slurry themselves every time they want to hire someone. Almost all half-way houses between those two, e.g. H.R. personnel relaying the managers' questions to the candidates lead to good candidates being dropped or crappy candidates being let through.
Slashdot Mirror
Do janitors institute policies that impede his work? Do cooks? Doubtful. He's being a tad vitriolic but he has a valid point. A lot of functions within most companies are there purely to support the members of staff whose output garners revenue. HR, accounts, IT, Janitors, Cafeteria staff, Receptionists, Admins, Managers are just there to make sure the actual business activity continues as profitably as possible. If any of those groups start making policies that impede the main business activity, they become counter-productive, and provoke vitriolic rants like the one above.
I work in a support role and absolutely agree with what he's saying, though, like you, I hope he doesn't talk like that to I.T. staff in person.
(2) A partial but simple solution: Do comparisons on volatile variables only.
Hope this has been enlightening!
Wow...I would never have imagined that you'd have to pay them a monthly fee to list your item. Especially when they're taking 15% of your sales already. Wow.
"But the crux of the matter was, the simpler the approximation, the more we could associate ourselves in that role,"
Peanuts(...)
No. Really!
But one Christmas character indeed comes from a marketing campaign of that time: It's Rudolph the Rednoosed Reindeer.
Is that the version where Santa comes a little too late on that foggy Christmas Eve to find a depressed Rudolph has already hung himself? ;)
I heard there is no Christmas
In the silly Middle East
No trees, no snow, so Santa Claus,
They have different religious beliefs
They believe in Muhammed, and not in our holiday,
And so every December I go to the Middle East and say
Hey there Mr Muslim, Merry Fucking Christmas
Put down that book, the Koran,
And hear some holiday wishes.
In case you haven't noticed it's Jesus' birthday
So get off your heathen Muslim ass and fucking celebrate
The OP's point was that since there aren't: "many efforts to prevent adults from accessing violent content" (your words) that for a company to then try and prevent those same adults from accessing sexual content, by refusing to let it through their certification process, is a bit silly.
Otherwise what was the point of the post? Violence is OK [for adults], but titties aren't [for adults],....
Woohooo! He gets it?!
No...he doesn't. Jeebus... Did you read the story? Microsoft refusing to certify the game for use on the XBox360 is stopping Adults from even buying the game. So yeah, that's exactly what is being discussed you cretin.
No, not at all, I was trying to point out how ridiculous it is for either camp to do so, but admittedly, I didn't state that explicitly...mea culpa.
First, why did he tell them to write a "day" for each step instead of "a multitude of lifetimes" for each step? Second, regretfully, by making the first argument, I'm accepting the bullshit premise that a god actually dictated this fucking story to a bunch of people so they could write it down. I feel dirty.
More likely, someone made this shit up without any divine intervention and decided that hey...even though it's been around longer than I can remember...someone must have made all this stuff. Well, to do that...he'd have to be like...magic or some shit. How long should I say it took him? Well...he is magic...so...2 seconds? Nah, no-one would ever buy that...a day? Hmmm...nah, I'll go with a week, much more believable....
I hate ignorant people. I'm really just at that point this holiday season Slashdot. So much bad news someone cheer me up...please.
Me too new friend! Whenever someone I know tries to claim that Reiki, Numerology, Homeopathy, Astrology or any of those other kinds of bullshit are "real" and that they are "free to believe in it if they want to" so I can just go STFU, I fire up Left 4 Dead 2, bust out a chainsaw, axe or a katana and just go to town on some Zombies. Very very very therapeutic. Try it :)
1)You don't "accidentally" retain sniffed traffic logs of that size, across your entire international operations, for months if not years, "accidentally." See http://gizmodo.com/5671049/google-street-view-cars-collected-emails-and-passwords [gizmodo.com] I mean come on...someone would have noticed the drives filling up, wondered why, etc. These people are supposedly geniuses, right?
Eric: Hey Larry, this D drive is filling up pretty quick.
Larry: Huh?
Eric: I said the D drive is filling up pretty quick.
Larry: It's probably nothing, what are you doing?
Eric: Oh, nothing..I was just going to create a new logo for the anniversary of the invention of the potato peeler and I got this message.
Larry: What did it say?
Eric: I don't remember exactly, I just clicked ok, but it said something about disk-space, and wouldn't let me create my jpeg.
Larry: Well did you check the Control Panel?
Eric: Yeah, it's saying it's all full...
Larry: What? Seriously? I thought we put a 100Gb in there a few months ago? It shouldn't be full.
Eric: Well...it is. See? All blue!
Larry: Should we delete some of it?
Eric: I did, last week, and the week before...maybe it's a virus?
Larry: What are all these? Hmmm. They look important...probably Sergey's.
Eric:Shit...Sergey. Do you think...shall we tell him? Shall we tell Sergey?
Larry: Do you want to tell him? He's going to be super pissed when he finds out you filled the new hard-drive with porn or whatever you did..
Eric: I...Good point. I'll go down to best-buy and get one of those external disk things. What should I get? 200Gb or 300Gb?
Larry:I don't know? Just get the biggest one you can, and hurry! It's his turn to use the computer next!!
Sergey: Hey guys, what's up?
Eric & Larry (together): Nothing!
End Scene.
On the other hand, many murderers, mass murderers even, are/were "highly religious" and of course, in the middle of those two extremes, there are many many many many many many many other people who have made no impact on society whatsoever, doomed to be excluded from the annals of history by their mediocrity who are (or were) "highly religious". You can't just hold up an example of a great scientist who was also religious and say:
"Look! That proves it!!! Human progress is impossible without Religion!!"
I think if you replaced Newton's headstone with a magnet and wrapped his coffin in wire, you'd produce a measurable current every time you did say that.
The "overwhelming majority of human progress" is in the past, due to the fact that the present is still happening and we can't see into the future. Society is becoming more secular. Many countries still have blasphemy laws. Some countries will stone you to death if you criticise a man who's supposedly an emissary of a prophet of a god. How many people were hanged/stoned/shot to death because of their godlessness who might have come up with calculus, or the "law of gravity" or the bagless vacuum cleaner or any one of a number of Really Great Things? How many were excluded from schools/universities because of accidents of birth, or because of their religious beliefs (which is pretty much the same thing).
How many scientists paid lip service to God and religion because it was an established social convention. How many scientists paid lip service to God because the church was giving them money? If you were studying at one of the earliest 12th-14th century(I think) church-run universities would you come out with a heretical theory that suggested that God might not exist? No. No you wouldn't.
When people say "let the market decide" they generally mean, don't intervene and see what happens. In this case, Microsoft is intervening in the market by refusing to certify certain games. The market exists between game developers/publishers and consumers. Saying "let the market decide" means that developers/publishers should be allowed to sell any game they want without MS intervention.
:)
Back on topic, if MS stopped intervening, and let "the market" decide, AO sex games may very well disappear....but there are consumers who go for Japanese Date Sims/Banzai Rape Party 9, so I don't even know anymore. Maybe MS is just playing the "family friendly" card for kudos and the real reason is that "sex games" seem to be completely, universally shit.
"I saw a tramp smoking a fag the other day"
Quite impressive the amount of misunderstanding that could come from such a short sentence, right? An English tramp of course, is an American bum. But an American tramp is an English slut. An English bum is an American fanny. And a fag as you should know, is of course a cigarette.) * Couldn't care less, really, if there's one thing you get right. Please, make it this.
You raise an interesting point, but since Frenchmen are indistinguishable from monkeys, I'm not sure that counts. ;)
Wow, a completely truthful, serious explanation of what's new in the world of cricket and it's been modded +4 Funny. Maybe it is a silly game after all. Of course, TRWTF is being beaten at a game by the very people we colonised so that we'd have someone to play against.
Hope you're fit...talking like that you're in line for an ass-whoopin'.
You forgot about, or intentionally omitted, Northern Ireland, and having done so, you are able to come to the naive conclusion that it's as simple as getting out of Iraq/Afghanistan. Self-governance, peace accords, rafts of "freedom fighters" released from prison early, former leaders of a terrorist organisation allowed seats in government, and still there is conflict in Northern Ireland. The cat's out of the bag. If you stop meddling in Middle Eastern affairs, you won't see a "huge reduction" in terrorism. Not in our lifetimes, or your great-great-grandchildren's. Terrorists worldwide won't suddenly throw their arms down and embrace us in a grand gesture of peace, love and understanding, numbnuts.
We're already winning the war on Snow here in New Zealand.
Also, slightly OT, but hopefully funny enough to warm the mods' cockles: Mitchell & Webb @ 2:35
David Mitchell: I was just going to say that my eye was caught by this whole scandal in America.
Robert Webb: Oh, the scandal in America. Yeah, that is interesting. That must be the biggest scandal since Watergategate.
Mitchell: Watergategate? Isn't it just Watergate?
Webb: No. That would mean it was just about water. No, it was a scandal or "gate", add the suffix "gate", that's what you do with a scandal; involving the Watergate Hotel. So it was called the Watergate scandal, or Watergategate
Mitchell: But doesn't the term "gate" meaning scandal, come from Watergate?
Webb: What, take the last 4 letters of a previous scandal, or hotel, and add it to all future scandals? That can't be the system..
Mitchell: I think it is.
Webb: Well what if there's a scandal about water? What do you call that?
Mitchell: Well you'd call it waterga...ah I see what you mean. Aquagate?
Webb: It's not great is it?
Back on topic: I fully support Snowgate.
(snip)
Fun thing about Cablegate - it came about because of an increased inter-agency sharing of intel. That's more eyes seeing more information. While the obvious intent is to make intel agencies more effective (something Assange aspires to prevent), but it put information in front of more sets of eyes. After Manning's mismanagement of that opportunity, we now have the knee-jerk reaction of clamping down on that information. Less eyes. Less whistleblowers.
And of course, plenty of material for politicians to rabble-rouse with.
Yep, as you say, this is exactly what Julian Assange wants. For "the conspirators" to overreact and make themselves less effective:
This is however, not where Assange’s reasoning leads him. He decides, instead, that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire:
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
I'm froms News News Yorks and I likes the ways youse thinks.
Yeah, wah wah. IIRC anyone who has been on a tour of Goonhilly will have a good idea of where the transatlantic cables reach the mainland in Britain. This is all fucking nonsense. Anyone with sufficient motivation already knows all this or can find it out. The targets that everyone is whinging about are not going to be of much use to most terrorists. Terrorists, as we've seen time and again go for soft targets. They go where they can get the most bang for buck (if you'll pardon the expression). E.g. Bombs on the London underground, planes into buildings, IRA bombs in shopping centres and coastal holiday town centres.
I think you may be missing the point, seriously...security by obscurity being preached on /. ?? Did I fall through a wormhole and end up in bizarro world? Did you hear about the IT worker at MI5 who approached a foreign gov. with a bunch of "secrets"? If that kind of Walter Mitty character can end up working for the British Security Services, what are the odds that some similarly greedy a-hole working at one of these civilian facilities has already tried to sell information/uranium? The idea that anyone was relying on the fact that "not many people know how or where Molybdenum-99 is produced" to stop weapons grade uranium from leaving those civilian sites is fucking ridiculous.
Diploma is slowly becoming irrelevant.
[citation needed] Maybe you're right, but this won't happen for a long long time.
Firstly, a degree from a university shows you can apply yourself for 3-5 years and have committed significant time, money and energy to improving your knowledge of your chosen subject. This commitment, and not just "the piece of paper" is why people tend to favour university graduates.
Secondly, 99% of HR positions are *not* held by people who have a university degree in your chosen field. If they have a degree, it's in something completely unrelated to the people they're hiring, so they will favour people with a degree because it's the easiest way to filter out the people who don't know what they're doing. If they start letting through everyone who has the 2 braincells required to lie on a C.V. then the managers trying to fill those positions will end up interviewing people better suited to careers that require only the ability to say "Would you like fries with that?". And if that happens, then guess who gets it in the neck for letting through unsuitable candidates? That's right: H.R. This is why any company big enough to need an HR function will probably never consider a diploma/degree completely irrelevant.
You're right of course, there are many bright, chippy young autodidacts who deserve a job, but you need knowledgeable people in place to tell them apart from the liars and the downright crazies. So you either end up with an HR department who discounts anyone without a degree, or with managers who have to wade through the raw resumé slurry themselves every time they want to hire someone. Almost all half-way houses between those two, e.g. H.R. personnel relaying the managers' questions to the candidates lead to good candidates being dropped or crappy candidates being let through.