In short, no, that attitude doesn't have anything to do with degree or certification. It's just as possible to get a four year degree without doing anything outside the basic lines of what it takes to pass the tests, and is, in fact, extremely common. To a prospective employer, the degree says the exact same thing as those certifications: You spent time and money to get a piece of paper that tells them what you should know. Whether you actually know that stuff or not is what the interview is for.
If you spend your time in school doing work on the side, that's great, but that's not some magical thing that happens with every student at a four year school and not with people who get certifications. People are the same at any level of education... you have slackers with PhDs and high school dropouts driving a forklift for $12/hour who read everything they get their hands on to try to learn something.
Quite simple, really. When you're talking to someone in the car, they are also part of the driving experience, and will react to changes on the road... if somebody nearly rams you, the guy in the passenger seat isn't gonna keep talking like nothing happened, while the person on the other end of the phone will.
ob-stereotyping:
BUT WHY MARKET TO PEOPLE WHO ARE JUST GONNA STEAL THE GAMES ANYWAY?!?!?!?
Hey, don't ride my ass. Somebody was gonna say it, and it might as well be somebody who isn't serious
The optimal place for a litterbox is in a mostly-unused room. My parents, for example, keep theirs down in the basement, in a small room that connects the pantry, office, garage, and stairs back to the main floor. You don't spend much time in their, but you pass through it often enough to notice when things need to be taken care of.
Generally, when you quote from someone else's work, such as how the entirety of the submission in this case is quoted from yesterday's Dilbert newsletter, you mention that you're doing it and enclose it in quotation marks.
If there were such a law, there could be no public defenders or district attorneys. Besides, as cynical as it sounds, the legal system does not really work on the basis of 'truth,' it works on the basis of law. The job of the lawyers is to reveal and even sensationalize as much of the truth that's in their favor as possible, while hiding or downplaying what there is that's against them. It balances out, because he's working against another guy doing exactly the same thing.
A few years ago, there was a small store in my home town that sold all sorts of stuff made from old computer parts. 72-pin SIMMs made into ear-rings (Yes, they were paired with same capacity chips... otherwise it'd just be silly), that sort of thing.
My favorite thing there was a lamp with the body and shade made from old mainboards. I just thought it looked cool.
Do you honestly think that encouraging/. readers to procreate is a good thing?
obFamilyGuy: "Seeing as how the two of you will one day bless our home with the pitter patter of sweet little grandchildren as ugly as sin..."
My ex-girlfriend did that once, except she filed them in the basement under a new slab of concrete without the plastic bags. Very thorough, too, as she thoughtfully stored all the cables that were already connected to my computer as well.
Organizing your stuff takes a long time to actually get to the point where you stick with it. What you have to do is analyze the stuff to space ratio and minimize the stuff as best you can to get started:
Start with your desk. As a geek, that's where you spend most of your time anyway, so the rest of the space doesn't really matter. Go through the crap on your desk and figure out what needs to be there. Create a filing system (I use a set of 10 clipboards, 4 notebooks, and a single binder for my critical stuff) and stick with it. The more complicated the better, because you'll start to realize that it's more efficient to just do without than to deal with trying to file the next document you have. Store the system just out of reach of your desk, to make sure you have even less incentive to file it. Also, make sure you have a large garbage can or can easily reach the window (try to get a window on a side of the building that never sees the sun)
Write small. I use a 0.3mm mechanical pencil, and can get between 1500 and 2000 words on a single page of 8.5*11. This helps in two ways: Decreases the number of papers you need for a given document, and makes it much easier to ruin it by dropping Easy Mac on it. To avoid this last problem if necessary, simply make sure to use the filing system mentioned above.
Become an alcoholic. Drink heavily at your desk. The more often you knock a beer over on your stuff, the more often you'll get rid of stuff that you no longer need. Nothing important will be destroyed, because that stuff will be filed as above. Also, if you're plastered, you won't notice how much of a craphole you actually live in.
Moving on from the desk, minimize the space you need in your apartment. As a geek, all you need is your desk, some degree of bookshelf, a futon, and a microwave. If you're an especially talented geek, just pull the futon up to your desk and you can eliminate the need for a chair. Resist the temptation to use the fridge in the kitchen, as you will forget the stuff you put in there until it's too late (as an aside, this fridge can generally be unplugged and used for extra storage for your other stuff. Same with the stove).
Take note of all of your extra space and the stuff you have. Rank it all by how cool it is and by how often you actually play with it. Find a retail store and get all of their old empty boxes you can. Fill these with your stuff, filing it carefully into such unused rooms in the house as the kitchen, bedroom, dining room, and the shower in the bathroom. You really don't need any of these. Organize it all compulsively, making notes of where everything is. Put these notes into the filing system. Resist the urge to get rubbermaid containers, as the next time you burn the popcorn the sprinkler system will come on and relieve you of the storage problem.
How come they can not even design something simple (not easy, but simple as in few functions needed) as a voting machine? How can we ever trust their electronic "smart bombs" and whatnot? And their computer based aeroplanes? And more computer software which has to be tamper-proof and absolutely safe.
This touches the main point of the entire discussion: Smart bombs, computer controlled planes, and such are fully verifiable, whereas the current generation of US electronic voting machines are not. And no amount of testing before the fact can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the result of a vote actually follows the will of the voters.
Also, the issue is not the creation of a trusted voting system, it's the drive for a fully automated no paper-trail corporately-sponsored electronic voting solution. There are far too many people involved who might be pushing a personal agenda to really accomplish this.
Once Internet Explorer is installed, you can go to the Windows Update site by typing http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com into the address bar of Internet Explorer.
If you prefer to use a different Web browser, updates to Windows may be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center."
They do graciously provide a link at the bottom of that page to download the updates manually with another browser. Unfortunately, when looking through the updates, you can only sort by category (drivers, security updates, etc) or by product (WinXP, Office 2000, etc).
Searching by Windows (Security and Updates) gives a list of 50 items, including several cumulative security patches for Win2000 (as opposed to the logical step of only offering the latest one, or possibly the latest two)
Searching by Windows XP gives 366 results, sortable by date, popularity, and title. Sorting by date, finding actual security updates will generally take you to at least the second page. Popularity sort will give you the updates to fix Blaster and other high profile virii/worms quickly, but quickly (within the first ten results) hits floppy boot disks for installation (three of these) and MSN Messenger. Furthermore, with a few exceptions, the security updates refer directly to Microsoft Security Bulletin ####### (without a link to said bulletin), rather than giving information on what service is being patched in the description. Title search uses standard alphabetic sorting, and there is no 'jump to page n' option. Since all of the security patches are listed under 's' for security, this makes it extremely inefficient to find them.
Maybe I'm just lazy, but I find it much easier to deal with IE and be able to check for new security patches in Windows Update than to have to go through every single thing they've come out with in the last week to see if anything needs to be patched.
The tone of the/. article seemed to indicate not that it was a wasteful expenditure, but that it's significant to note that a sizable chunk of capitol was put into a single security measure. YMMV, but to me that speaks volumes about the amount of emphasis they put on corporate security. Is it a major dent in their accounts? No, not by any standards, but any expense that large that can get past the beancounters has to have some serious justification from somewhere.
obMicrosoftBashing: Now if they'd only put that kind of capitol into ensure that I don't have to apply a security patch more than once a fortnight...
We have the engineering and math, but we also have
a) greedy engineers
b) greedy mathematicians
c) greedy materials developers
The more money these three take, the more the funding base has to be increased. With a publicly funded space program such as NASA, it gets extremely hard to ask for tax money. The need to beat the communists in space is gone now, so funding goes down, and mistakes are made. As soon as mistakes start getting made, public faith begins to disappear and it gets much harder to get the funding to fix the problems.
Granted, some mistakes, such as the unit discrepancy in parent's links, are better solved by actually watching what you're doing and possibly adopting set standards within an organization than by throwing money at them, but those mistakes make it much harder to get funding to fix the problems that can be solved with cash.
I've always been of the opinion that the jokes that drag on and on for considerably longer than sanity might dictate are done that way for a reason. Watch Adam West talking about Taffee in 'E Peterbus Unum' It's worth a little laugh, but it drags on until it's not funny, then drags on even longer until it's actually funny again. Same thing with the 'Wasted Talent' when Peter falls and hurts his knee. Then you laugh even harder when he does it again later in the episode.
The Weinstein Episode is among the less offensive (at least of the actually offensive ones, since most are pretty tame by my standards) episodes they made.
The worst moments (in addition to 'Ready, Willing, and Disabled' mentioned in parent) are the end of 'The Son Also Draws' (season 1), where much of the family rattles off a set of stereotypes about Indians (American), Mexicans, Swedes, and Canadians (although they disclaim all but the last one with an old NBC 'The More You Know' ad); 'Dammit Janet' (season 2) where Stewie gets naked at a daycare and climbs in with a little girl; 'And the Wiener Is' (season 3), all about Chris' massive penis. Most of the episodes are just funny, but those are offensive and funny at the same time.
Maybe the censors just didn't like the depiction of Optimus Prime as a Jew.
I like your setup for your children, especially the guidelines for getting to use the computers. If I wind up with kids, I'll have to remember that, rather than the model my parents used with me.
However, the idea of monitoring who your children are talking to is a poor way of judging anything. When I was 15, my closest friend was a woman who was 27, who I met over the internet. That may set off quite a few red flags for parents everywhere (although not so much as a 15 year old girl talking to a 27 year old man), but there was absolutely nothing untoward going on. In fact, my friendship with her was far and away for innocent and innocuous than most of my friendships with people my own age. Had my parents known about this specifically, they may have (tried to) put a stop to it, I don't know. Of course, the age and maturity level of the minor in question is a very important concern.
Furthermore, I was an honor student in high school, now I'm an alcoholic, drug using college student. While I was on staff at summer camp, I had an Eagle Scout 6 years my senior proposition me for sex, and one of the nicest guys I ever knew convinced his girlfriend to get an abortion simply because he didn't want the US Navy to know what he was doing with her, then went on to commit suicide when his next girlfriend had sex with another guy because she followed his belief that sex does not follow love. Moral of the story: Don't assume that because your children are what society says are 'good, upstanding people' that they are actually good, upstanding people.
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In short, no, that attitude doesn't have anything to do with degree or certification. It's just as possible to get a four year degree without doing anything outside the basic lines of what it takes to pass the tests, and is, in fact, extremely common. To a prospective employer, the degree says the exact same thing as those certifications: You spent time and money to get a piece of paper that tells them what you should know. Whether you actually know that stuff or not is what the interview is for.
If you spend your time in school doing work on the side, that's great, but that's not some magical thing that happens with every student at a four year school and not with people who get certifications. People are the same at any level of education... you have slackers with PhDs and high school dropouts driving a forklift for $12/hour who read everything they get their hands on to try to learn something.
To be fair, neither did history class in high school.
Quite simple, really. When you're talking to someone in the car, they are also part of the driving experience, and will react to changes on the road... if somebody nearly rams you, the guy in the passenger seat isn't gonna keep talking like nothing happened, while the person on the other end of the phone will.
ob-stereotyping: BUT WHY MARKET TO PEOPLE WHO ARE JUST GONNA STEAL THE GAMES ANYWAY?!?!?!? Hey, don't ride my ass. Somebody was gonna say it, and it might as well be somebody who isn't serious
Or (and this is scary) if somebody threw enough money around to get 20 electoral votes to switch sides.
The optimal place for a litterbox is in a mostly-unused room. My parents, for example, keep theirs down in the basement, in a small room that connects the pantry, office, garage, and stairs back to the main floor. You don't spend much time in their, but you pass through it often enough to notice when things need to be taken care of.
Generally, when you quote from someone else's work, such as how the entirety of the submission in this case is quoted from yesterday's Dilbert newsletter, you mention that you're doing it and enclose it in quotation marks.
m l/newsletter57.html
Here is the original from which the submission was directly quoted:
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/dnrc/ht
If there were such a law, there could be no public defenders or district attorneys. Besides, as cynical as it sounds, the legal system does not really work on the basis of 'truth,' it works on the basis of law. The job of the lawyers is to reveal and even sensationalize as much of the truth that's in their favor as possible, while hiding or downplaying what there is that's against them. It balances out, because he's working against another guy doing exactly the same thing.
And since it took at least an hour to set up the computer to do this, he can afford one hell of a lunch
A few years ago, there was a small store in my home town that sold all sorts of stuff made from old computer parts. 72-pin SIMMs made into ear-rings (Yes, they were paired with same capacity chips... otherwise it'd just be silly), that sort of thing. My favorite thing there was a lamp with the body and shade made from old mainboards. I just thought it looked cool.
Do you honestly think that encouraging /. readers to procreate is a good thing?
obFamilyGuy: "Seeing as how the two of you will one day bless our home with the pitter patter of sweet little grandchildren as ugly as sin..."
My ex-girlfriend did that once, except she filed them in the basement under a new slab of concrete without the plastic bags. Very thorough, too, as she thoughtfully stored all the cables that were already connected to my computer as well.
Organizing your stuff takes a long time to actually get to the point where you stick with it. What you have to do is analyze the stuff to space ratio and minimize the stuff as best you can to get started:
Start with your desk. As a geek, that's where you spend most of your time anyway, so the rest of the space doesn't really matter. Go through the crap on your desk and figure out what needs to be there. Create a filing system (I use a set of 10 clipboards, 4 notebooks, and a single binder for my critical stuff) and stick with it. The more complicated the better, because you'll start to realize that it's more efficient to just do without than to deal with trying to file the next document you have. Store the system just out of reach of your desk, to make sure you have even less incentive to file it. Also, make sure you have a large garbage can or can easily reach the window (try to get a window on a side of the building that never sees the sun)
Write small. I use a 0.3mm mechanical pencil, and can get between 1500 and 2000 words on a single page of 8.5*11. This helps in two ways: Decreases the number of papers you need for a given document, and makes it much easier to ruin it by dropping Easy Mac on it. To avoid this last problem if necessary, simply make sure to use the filing system mentioned above.
Become an alcoholic. Drink heavily at your desk. The more often you knock a beer over on your stuff, the more often you'll get rid of stuff that you no longer need. Nothing important will be destroyed, because that stuff will be filed as above. Also, if you're plastered, you won't notice how much of a craphole you actually live in.
Moving on from the desk, minimize the space you need in your apartment. As a geek, all you need is your desk, some degree of bookshelf, a futon, and a microwave. If you're an especially talented geek, just pull the futon up to your desk and you can eliminate the need for a chair. Resist the temptation to use the fridge in the kitchen, as you will forget the stuff you put in there until it's too late (as an aside, this fridge can generally be unplugged and used for extra storage for your other stuff. Same with the stove).
Take note of all of your extra space and the stuff you have. Rank it all by how cool it is and by how often you actually play with it. Find a retail store and get all of their old empty boxes you can. Fill these with your stuff, filing it carefully into such unused rooms in the house as the kitchen, bedroom, dining room, and the shower in the bathroom. You really don't need any of these. Organize it all compulsively, making notes of where everything is. Put these notes into the filing system. Resist the urge to get rubbermaid containers, as the next time you burn the popcorn the sprinkler system will come on and relieve you of the storage problem.
This touches the main point of the entire discussion: Smart bombs, computer controlled planes, and such are fully verifiable, whereas the current generation of US electronic voting machines are not. And no amount of testing before the fact can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the result of a vote actually follows the will of the voters.
Also, the issue is not the creation of a trusted voting system, it's the drive for a fully automated no paper-trail corporately-sponsored electronic voting solution. There are far too many people involved who might be pushing a personal agenda to really accomplish this.
Answer here.
Basically, it's an official report from a company/government meant to be released to the customers/public.
Going to the Windows update server (windowsupdate.microsoft.com) using Mozilla comes up with the following page:
" Thank you for your interest in Windows Update
Windows Update is the online extension of Windows that helps you get the most out of your computer.
You need to be running a version of Internet Explorer 5 or higher in order to use Windows Update.
Download the latest version of Internet Explorer
Once Internet Explorer is installed, you can go to the Windows Update site by typing http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com into the address bar of Internet Explorer.
If you prefer to use a different Web browser, updates to Windows may be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center."
They do graciously provide a link at the bottom of that page to download the updates manually with another browser. Unfortunately, when looking through the updates, you can only sort by category (drivers, security updates, etc) or by product (WinXP, Office 2000, etc).
Searching by Windows (Security and Updates) gives a list of 50 items, including several cumulative security patches for Win2000 (as opposed to the logical step of only offering the latest one, or possibly the latest two)
Searching by Windows XP gives 366 results, sortable by date, popularity, and title. Sorting by date, finding actual security updates will generally take you to at least the second page. Popularity sort will give you the updates to fix Blaster and other high profile virii/worms quickly, but quickly (within the first ten results) hits floppy boot disks for installation (three of these) and MSN Messenger. Furthermore, with a few exceptions, the security updates refer directly to Microsoft Security Bulletin ####### (without a link to said bulletin), rather than giving information on what service is being patched in the description. Title search uses standard alphabetic sorting, and there is no 'jump to page n' option. Since all of the security patches are listed under 's' for security, this makes it extremely inefficient to find them.
Maybe I'm just lazy, but I find it much easier to deal with IE and be able to check for new security patches in Windows Update than to have to go through every single thing they've come out with in the last week to see if anything needs to be patched.
The tone of the /. article seemed to indicate not that it was a wasteful expenditure, but that it's significant to note that a sizable chunk of capitol was put into a single security measure. YMMV, but to me that speaks volumes about the amount of emphasis they put on corporate security. Is it a major dent in their accounts? No, not by any standards, but any expense that large that can get past the beancounters has to have some serious justification from somewhere.
obMicrosoftBashing: Now if they'd only put that kind of capitol into ensure that I don't have to apply a security patch more than once a fortnight...
We have the engineering and math, but we also have a) greedy engineers b) greedy mathematicians c) greedy materials developers The more money these three take, the more the funding base has to be increased. With a publicly funded space program such as NASA, it gets extremely hard to ask for tax money. The need to beat the communists in space is gone now, so funding goes down, and mistakes are made. As soon as mistakes start getting made, public faith begins to disappear and it gets much harder to get the funding to fix the problems. Granted, some mistakes, such as the unit discrepancy in parent's links, are better solved by actually watching what you're doing and possibly adopting set standards within an organization than by throwing money at them, but those mistakes make it much harder to get funding to fix the problems that can be solved with cash.
I've always been of the opinion that the jokes that drag on and on for considerably longer than sanity might dictate are done that way for a reason. Watch Adam West talking about Taffee in 'E Peterbus Unum' It's worth a little laugh, but it drags on until it's not funny, then drags on even longer until it's actually funny again. Same thing with the 'Wasted Talent' when Peter falls and hurts his knee. Then you laugh even harder when he does it again later in the episode.
The Weinstein Episode is among the less offensive (at least of the actually offensive ones, since most are pretty tame by my standards) episodes they made. The worst moments (in addition to 'Ready, Willing, and Disabled' mentioned in parent) are the end of 'The Son Also Draws' (season 1), where much of the family rattles off a set of stereotypes about Indians (American), Mexicans, Swedes, and Canadians (although they disclaim all but the last one with an old NBC 'The More You Know' ad); 'Dammit Janet' (season 2) where Stewie gets naked at a daycare and climbs in with a little girl; 'And the Wiener Is' (season 3), all about Chris' massive penis. Most of the episodes are just funny, but those are offensive and funny at the same time. Maybe the censors just didn't like the depiction of Optimus Prime as a Jew.
I like your setup for your children, especially the guidelines for getting to use the computers. If I wind up with kids, I'll have to remember that, rather than the model my parents used with me. However, the idea of monitoring who your children are talking to is a poor way of judging anything. When I was 15, my closest friend was a woman who was 27, who I met over the internet. That may set off quite a few red flags for parents everywhere (although not so much as a 15 year old girl talking to a 27 year old man), but there was absolutely nothing untoward going on. In fact, my friendship with her was far and away for innocent and innocuous than most of my friendships with people my own age. Had my parents known about this specifically, they may have (tried to) put a stop to it, I don't know. Of course, the age and maturity level of the minor in question is a very important concern. Furthermore, I was an honor student in high school, now I'm an alcoholic, drug using college student. While I was on staff at summer camp, I had an Eagle Scout 6 years my senior proposition me for sex, and one of the nicest guys I ever knew convinced his girlfriend to get an abortion simply because he didn't want the US Navy to know what he was doing with her, then went on to commit suicide when his next girlfriend had sex with another guy because she followed his belief that sex does not follow love. Moral of the story: Don't assume that because your children are what society says are 'good, upstanding people' that they are actually good, upstanding people.