They are "not male". But that doesn't automatically make them female. By evolutionary design, no worker ant ever reproduces. To me, that says genderless. I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong, if you can explain to me what it is that makes them allegedly "female".
As far as I'm concerned, they're all obsolete and irrelevant.
Lets see... remind me how would it affect my quality of life if all of the major networks, and all of the MAFIAA member companies either locked up their content so tight I never got to see it, or went out of business entirely?
Oh, yeah, it wouldn't.
There will be sources of music with or without the RIAA. There will be people willing to buy copies of music with or without DRM. There are plenty of ways to entertain ourselves or communicate stories with or without the television and movie industries.
I really don't give a darn what they do with their content. And I really don't give a darn how they treat their customers. If they piss people off enough, then people will just find something else to do with their time. If they annoy you, just go somewhere else for entertainment.
(The only thing I do care about is the predatory lawsuits based on non-existent evidence-- because that DOES affect people who just ignore them and go someplace else. Though I've never pirated any of their content, I'm probably just as likely as anyone else to get one of their lawsuits...)
About ten years ago, an incident made me aware of the subtle effects of advertising.
I had my first apartment, and I needed a power screwdriver, I forget what for. I went shopping for one, thinking "Oh, I want to get such-and-such a brand, because they're good quality." It wasn't until I was looking at the selection in the hardware store that it occurred to me-- why do I think that brand is of higher than usual quality? It's hardly my area of expertise.
After thinking a while, I remembered that when I was in elementary school, I loved to watch This Old House a lot. And during the same period of time, such-and-such a brand of power tools had a commercial where the This Old House host lauded the brand.
So, at the age of 25, I almost bought a piece of equipment based entirely on advertising I saw when I was eight that I didn't even remember at the time I made the purchasing decision.
(I ended up not buying that day; decided to do some research first in order to get a more trustworthy recommendation than from my eight-year-old self.)
how about you people just learn to obey the fucking law and stop stealing music and movies?
who give a shit what happens to people ho dont give a shit about the content creators.
Ah, so there is no need to make the punishment fit the crime, because you can avoid the punishment by just not doing the crime?
In that case, lets institute a no-appeals death penalty for speeding, jay-walking, minor traffic violations, and late payment of income taxes. After all, who cares what happens to people who break the law?
Also, he was elected for a term, which indicates elections are ahead. While most judges are pretty much re-elected ad-infinitum without so much as a "ho-hum" from the electorate,all it would take is a couple of well-placed commercials and ads touting his prior experiences and current performance (if negative), and he's toast.
Appointed for a term. Not elected.
Judges are not elected, on the theory that [sitting Judge + (Election-year-pandering and/or Campaign-contributions) = really, reallly, bad.]
The electorate can, however, vote out the politician that appointed him in favor of one that promises not to reappoint him at the end of his term, (though I can't think of a case where that actually happened.)
At the very least, "clearing it's neighborhood" should have a more precise meaning, such as: Clearing a ring equivalent to X times it's own diameter of all objects Y% of it's own size or mass. Without some kind of clarification, any dust in a planet's orbital trail could be interpreted to mean the planet hasn't "cleared it's neighborhood".
Or perhaps they do have a more precise definition, and it's just not included in the press releases? If that's the case, they should include it-- the definition would sound less arbitrary that way.
Did you miss the memo on the latest archaeological findings? Man, you must have been living under a rock. Check out some of the news stories and peer reviewed journals on it-- utterly fascinating stuff. They think the Triceratops may even have discovered the Higgs Boson!
Would it be moving quickly enough to have the kinetic energy required to do the kind of damage that was done? Given that it was stationary, it wouldn't be hitting earth at more then terminal velocity, right?
The key question is "stationary with regard to what?".
In the case of the Lagrangian points, the answer is "stationary in regard to the Earth/Moon System", NOT "stationary in regard to a point on the Earth's surface".
(Also, "just terminal velocity" with regard to the distance of either a Lagrangian point or a geosynchronous orbit would still be nothing to sneeze at, and given the "tens of kilometers across", the force of impact would be far from trivial.)
Wait-- you're claiming that under-oath testimony about whether source code was stolen "is not a material matter" in a legal case about who owns the source code?
I'm having a really hard time figuring out how you came to that conclusion.
Sounds like that 101 prof has absorbed more cynicism than is healthy. It's an important nutrient in small doses, but toxic at higher levels. Since people in teaching professions who have accumulated dangerous concentrations of the toxin have been known to transmit it to susceptible students via osmosis, he should probably take a break. That's what sabbaticals are for, right?
It's true that you can't teach people who have decided they don't care. But if someone has reached the conclusion that no one cares about learning, or that everyone stops caring at a certain age, that person needs to take a breather and chill out for a while. seriously.
Yup. I used to think they were just plain incompetent. But they're only incompetent in areas that they don't care about (e.g. evacuating New Orleans, helping Katrina victims, making sure soldiers have body armor, etc) not in the things they do care about (giving no-bid contracts to their good buddies, shredding the constitution, avoiding consequences for their actions, skillfully manipulating a large segment of the American populace).
What I wish someone working at one of these places had done would be to slip code in that checks to see if this is the actual election and not a test (by date and time, for instance. Maybe hacking the hardware with a radio link to an atomic clock) that would adjust all votes so that the precentages stay the same, but votes are added to give a slight plurality to someone who can't legally be president, and would never get elected if s/he could.
Then, the day of the election, results would come back, say, 29% Republican, 31% Democratic, 1% Green, 2% Libertarian-- and 37% as write-ins for "Sadam Hussien".
That would get the attention of people who's eyes glaze over when when experts try to explain what the problem is.
This should be causing the black hole to lose energy then, because you can't accelerate matter to high speeds without putting energy into it, and that energy has to come from somewhere.
The black hole is losing energy because of this. Just like you lose energy by absent-mindedly tapping your fingers on a table-top. But in both cases, it's not enough energy for either you or the black hole to notice unless it's kept up for eons.
Also TFA refers to this as a "tremendous particle accelerators". Is it busy creating Higgs bosons then?
That's the $25,000 question, isn't it? Particle physicists would LOVE to be able to set up their detectors alongside this thing and find out.
I was trying to figure out why laywers get a bad rap when clearly there are good apples and bad in every profession.
I think that it's because in other professions, the bad apples have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, either by trumpeting their own lack of ethics or by making their profession as a whole look unethical. (Sure, there are always a few cases of someone in a position of power getting a personal buzz out of flaunting what they can get away with, but they don't gain anything professionally from it.)
Except for laywers. As long as they stay enough within the letter of the law to avoid truely harmful sanctions, a bad-apple lawyer that flaunts his or her lack of ethics will attract (likely highly profitable) clients looking for a lawyer with a lack of ethics. And by perpetuating the idea that "that's just what lawyers are like", they gain the business of the nieve people who just go with the most visible advertisement, because they don't know that there are better options.
So lawyers get a bad rap because unlike other professions, the image of the sleazy lawyer is being encouraged by memebers of their own profession. Thus anyone who takes the most obnoxiously visible members of a group as representative, and doesn't look for any hidden agenda in the message that they are sending, is going to think poorly of the legal profession as a whole.
I don't pirate music. I also don't buy CD's. Why would I, when I can buy just the songs that I want, and thus pay less total for a better collection? Also, your average CD costs what these days? $17? (I'ts been a while since I checked.)
For $17 I can get:
* One CD. Of which I probably don't care about a third of the songs, and only really strongly like a quarter of them. OR
* Two DVDs. With the move, extras, interviews, etc. OR
* 17 individual songs, all of which I really like OR
* Several movie or game rentals OR
* five or so used books. Hours and hours of reading. OR
*...
Without even looking at the possibility of pirating, what possible motive could I possibly have for walking into a music store and buying a CD?
except in once-in-several-years case of a truely excellent CD, of which I like almost all of the songs on it a lot, and they're not all available for purchase in MP3 form. This has happend to me exactly once in the last five years-- and I couldn't even get the CD in the US, either via a local record store or via Amazon or such. Had to order it directly from the overseas producer. S&H cost more than the darned CD-- but I don't regret it. It's a phenomenal piece of work. Gotta love internet radio-- I'd have never even ever heard of the band if I were limited to traditional chanels.
The other exception is that I'll occationally buy a CD from a local band when they're hawking them at their shows.
But even though I don't pirate, and I love music, why in the world would I want to drop a yuppy-food-stamp on a CD of widely available music?
Your business may face ruin, but I highly doubt that priacy is a major factor in that.
I read two kids (or, "young adult") books once, forever ago, that dealt with this issue. I don't even know if they're still in print: "The Moon and the Face", and "Moonflash". Long story short, an insatiably curious girl from a technologically primitive culture with no contact with the outside world discovers that her people share the planet with a civilization that has developed interplanetary travel (and who study her own culture while staying hidden), who likewise discover that that at least one other planet in their solar system contains alien intelligent life, and then stumble into (literally) an a civilization that has developed interstellar travel.
The books were definitely not hard sci-fi, but there were some interesting ideas presented (or so it seemed to me when I was 13) IIRC, one of the main themes seems to be the idea that perhaps a less technological culture isn't as fragile when presented with a more technological civilization than we tend to assume..
And really-- has any culture in our world ever been destroyed merely by contact with a more technologically advanced culture's ideas? Every example I can think of where a culture has been devastated by contact with another involved either military conquest or economic colonialism or both-- not just the exchange of knowledge, ideas, and views of the world.
The thing is--
It would have been a heck of a lot more difficult to successfully pull off a faked moon landing, and keep it secret (especially without the Soviets calling us on it quite loudly) than it was to actually go to the moon.
Looking something up in wikipedia is like asking your friend who took an undergraduate course in it last semseter for info on the topic. It's likely to be reasonably accurate much of the time, and should give you some ideas of where to look for more thorogh information, but it's not citable and shouldn't be relied on for anything where accuracy is important. It's a very helpful resource for what it is.
The answer isn't doing away with Wikipedia. If people are blindly trusting ANY resource, THAT is the root problem. We need to do more to teach information literacy, how to evaluate the reliability of sources, and the importance of using multiple sources.
Teaching critical thinking skills is more important than it has ever been. Trying to hide inaccurate information from people is just shirking this responsibility. People will have inaccurate information thrown at them whether they are looking for information or not. There is no substitute for solid critial thinking.
Yes, I've been wondering if we will recognize the singularity when it arrives.
I'm going to say no. Who's to say it hasn't come and gone already? Multiple times, even?
What would a bilogially-equivalent-to-modern-humans pre-agrigarian homo sapien think of modern daily life? How about a resident of ancient Babylon, or of medeval Europe?
Hundreds of people with thousands of geographic miles between them are participating in this conversation. I can converse instantly with sound, and even video, with anyone almost anywhere in the world. I travel down the highway at 70mph-- not only without thinking that there's anything incredible about this, but annoyed that I'm forced to go "so slow". I can read the front page news as it appeared minuites ago in countires all over the world. The corner convenience store a block from where I live has food from all over the world, and dishes from at least a hundred cultures. I can bring it home and cook it in minuites, without a fire. The temperature of my home only varies by about 15 degrees farinheight even between seasonal extremes of over a hundred degrees outside. Humans have been to the moon. I can see close up photographs of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn whenever I like.
How is this not ALREADY the far side of the so-called "singularity"?
Considering approximately 5% of Physicists in the Unites States are religious I dont think they considered it a religous question.
By "religious question", they mean, "according to our current understanding of the laws of physics, it is impossible, even in theory, to generate a falsifiable hypothosis about what happened before the big bang. Therefore, any discussion of what happened 'before' cannot be scientific, and hence is religions/philisophical discussion, not science".
TFA is about some folks claiming "actually, we DO have a hypothosis that is, at least in theory, falifiable".
"Science" is about studying things that are measurable, empirical, and/or falsifiable, whether one beleives that's ALL there is in the universe or not. "Religion" includes things that are not always empirical and falsifiable, and that cannot, even in theory, be scientifically tested. "Philosophy" includes all of the above and then some.
Whether something is or is not science, and whether something is or is not real, are two seperate questions-- whether or not one feels both questions have the same answer.
The question presumes that the current system is the best of all possible systems, and that the only adjustment that needs to be made is for someone, somwhere, to pay more.
Even in the (unlikely) event that this turned out to be the case, it would still not be valid or helpul to assume it a priori, thus heading off all discussion of options other than "A" or "B".
Help Desk is a Customer Service position requiring a basic level of technical competence & teachability, NOT a tech position requiring only a basic level of people skills. This is especially true when the Help Desk person is dealing primarily with people with minimal to no technical skills.
The job should go to someone who likes people-- and who may not want an IT career per se, but does enjoy tinkering around with the stuff a little and learning a little bit about it. It should not go to a tech wizard who just wants to drudge through it so that he can get promoted to a position where he hopes he won't have to deal with another human being ever again.
People skills are more fundamental to the job than technical skills. (and no, I'm not a help-desk person. I like people, but not enough to be able to deal with being interrupted by them every ten minutes all day long.)
I can't speak for the US, but I can state that in South Africa... The area of the market that DOES have a shortage, however, and a really massive one at that, is the Tester and Test Analyst side. We are struggling to get even halfway decent people.
Being a really good Tester or Test Analyst requires all of the skill of other IT positions, with (at least in the U.S., in my experience) half of the pay, and none of the respect. Very few of the people capable of being excellent Test Analysts have much motivation to do so.
(Back when I was in Test Analysis, I had a boss tell me straight up that while my performance was excellent, since Testing was not a "revenue generating" position, he saw no need to pay me anything near what the "revenue-generating" IT positions at the company were paid. I'm no longer at that company, and since then, I've had a strong bias towards making sure I'm in a "revenue generating" position. Things work much better for me this way. And companies wonder why it's hard to find quality Test people...)
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Then what makes them female?
They are "not male". But that doesn't automatically make them female. By evolutionary design, no worker ant ever reproduces. To me, that says genderless. I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong, if you can explain to me what it is that makes them allegedly "female".
No, only the queen is female.
The worker ants don't reproduce-- they are genderless.
As far as I'm concerned, they're all obsolete and irrelevant.
Lets see... remind me how would it affect my quality of life if all of the major networks, and all of the MAFIAA member companies either locked up their content so tight I never got to see it, or went out of business entirely?
Oh, yeah, it wouldn't.
There will be sources of music with or without the RIAA. There will be people willing to buy copies of music with or without DRM. There are plenty of ways to entertain ourselves or communicate stories with or without the television and movie industries.
I really don't give a darn what they do with their content. And I really don't give a darn how they treat their customers. If they piss people off enough, then people will just find something else to do with their time. If they annoy you, just go somewhere else for entertainment.
(The only thing I do care about is the predatory lawsuits based on non-existent evidence-- because that DOES affect people who just ignore them and go someplace else. Though I've never pirated any of their content, I'm probably just as likely as anyone else to get one of their lawsuits...)
About ten years ago, an incident made me aware of the subtle effects of advertising.
I had my first apartment, and I needed a power screwdriver, I forget what for. I went shopping for one, thinking "Oh, I want to get such-and-such a brand, because they're good quality." It wasn't until I was looking at the selection in the hardware store that it occurred to me-- why do I think that brand is of higher than usual quality? It's hardly my area of expertise.
After thinking a while, I remembered that when I was in elementary school, I loved to watch This Old House a lot. And during the same period of time, such-and-such a brand of power tools had a commercial where the This Old House host lauded the brand.
So, at the age of 25, I almost bought a piece of equipment based entirely on advertising I saw when I was eight that I didn't even remember at the time I made the purchasing decision.
(I ended up not buying that day; decided to do some research first in order to get a more trustworthy recommendation than from my eight-year-old self.)
Ah, so there is no need to make the punishment fit the crime, because you can avoid the punishment by just not doing the crime?
In that case, lets institute a no-appeals death penalty for speeding, jay-walking, minor traffic violations, and late payment of income taxes. After all, who cares what happens to people who break the law?
Appointed for a term. Not elected.
Judges are not elected, on the theory that [sitting Judge + (Election-year-pandering and/or Campaign-contributions) = really, reallly, bad.]
The electorate can, however, vote out the politician that appointed him in favor of one that promises not to reappoint him at the end of his term, (though I can't think of a case where that actually happened.)
At the very least, "clearing it's neighborhood" should have a more precise meaning, such as: Clearing a ring equivalent to X times it's own diameter of all objects Y% of it's own size or mass. Without some kind of clarification, any dust in a planet's orbital trail could be interpreted to mean the planet hasn't "cleared it's neighborhood".
Or perhaps they do have a more precise definition, and it's just not included in the press releases? If that's the case, they should include it-- the definition would sound less arbitrary that way.
Did you miss the memo on the latest archaeological findings? Man, you must have been living under a rock. Check out some of the news stories and peer reviewed journals on it-- utterly fascinating stuff. They think the Triceratops may even have discovered the Higgs Boson!
The key question is "stationary with regard to what?".
In the case of the Lagrangian points, the answer is "stationary in regard to the Earth/Moon System", NOT "stationary in regard to a point on the Earth's surface".
(Also, "just terminal velocity" with regard to the distance of either a Lagrangian point or a geosynchronous orbit would still be nothing to sneeze at, and given the "tens of kilometers across", the force of impact would be far from trivial.)
Wait-- you're claiming that under-oath testimony about whether source code was stolen "is not a material matter" in a legal case about who owns the source code?
I'm having a really hard time figuring out how you came to that conclusion.
Thank you.
Sounds like that 101 prof has absorbed more cynicism than is healthy. It's an important nutrient in small doses, but toxic at higher levels. Since people in teaching professions who have accumulated dangerous concentrations of the toxin have been known to transmit it to susceptible students via osmosis, he should probably take a break. That's what sabbaticals are for, right?
It's true that you can't teach people who have decided they don't care. But if someone has reached the conclusion that no one cares about learning, or that everyone stops caring at a certain age, that person needs to take a breather and chill out for a while. seriously.
Yup. I used to think they were just plain incompetent. But they're only incompetent in areas that they don't care about (e.g. evacuating New Orleans, helping Katrina victims, making sure soldiers have body armor, etc) not in the things they do care about (giving no-bid contracts to their good buddies, shredding the constitution, avoiding consequences for their actions, skillfully manipulating a large segment of the American populace).
What I wish someone working at one of these places had done would be to slip code in that checks to see if this is the actual election and not a test (by date and time, for instance. Maybe hacking the hardware with a radio link to an atomic clock) that would adjust all votes so that the precentages stay the same, but votes are added to give a slight plurality to someone who can't legally be president, and would never get elected if s/he could.
Then, the day of the election, results would come back, say, 29% Republican, 31% Democratic, 1% Green, 2% Libertarian-- and 37% as write-ins for "Sadam Hussien".
That would get the attention of people who's eyes glaze over when when experts try to explain what the problem is.
The black hole is losing energy because of this. Just like you lose energy by absent-mindedly tapping your fingers on a table-top. But in both cases, it's not enough energy for either you or the black hole to notice unless it's kept up for eons.
Also TFA refers to this as a "tremendous particle accelerators". Is it busy creating Higgs bosons then?That's the $25,000 question, isn't it? Particle physicists would LOVE to be able to set up their detectors alongside this thing and find out.
I was trying to figure out why laywers get a bad rap when clearly there are good apples and bad in every profession.
I think that it's because in other professions, the bad apples have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, either by trumpeting their own lack of ethics or by making their profession as a whole look unethical. (Sure, there are always a few cases of someone in a position of power getting a personal buzz out of flaunting what they can get away with, but they don't gain anything professionally from it.)
Except for laywers. As long as they stay enough within the letter of the law to avoid truely harmful sanctions, a bad-apple lawyer that flaunts his or her lack of ethics will attract (likely highly profitable) clients looking for a lawyer with a lack of ethics. And by perpetuating the idea that "that's just what lawyers are like", they gain the business of the nieve people who just go with the most visible advertisement, because they don't know that there are better options.
So lawyers get a bad rap because unlike other professions, the image of the sleazy lawyer is being encouraged by memebers of their own profession. Thus anyone who takes the most obnoxiously visible members of a group as representative, and doesn't look for any hidden agenda in the message that they are sending, is going to think poorly of the legal profession as a whole.
Without even looking at the possibility of pirating, what possible motive could I possibly have for walking into a music store and buying a CD?
except in once-in-several-years case of a truely excellent CD, of which I like almost all of the songs on it a lot, and they're not all available for purchase in MP3 form. This has happend to me exactly once in the last five years-- and I couldn't even get the CD in the US, either via a local record store or via Amazon or such. Had to order it directly from the overseas producer. S&H cost more than the darned CD-- but I don't regret it. It's a phenomenal piece of work. Gotta love internet radio-- I'd have never even ever heard of the band if I were limited to traditional chanels.
The other exception is that I'll occationally buy a CD from a local band when they're hawking them at their shows.
But even though I don't pirate, and I love music, why in the world would I want to drop a yuppy-food-stamp on a CD of widely available music?
Your business may face ruin, but I highly doubt that priacy is a major factor in that.
I read two kids (or, "young adult") books once, forever ago, that dealt with this issue. I don't even know if they're still in print: "The Moon and the Face", and "Moonflash". Long story short, an insatiably curious girl from a technologically primitive culture with no contact with the outside world discovers that her people share the planet with a civilization that has developed interplanetary travel (and who study her own culture while staying hidden), who likewise discover that that at least one other planet in their solar system contains alien intelligent life, and then stumble into (literally) an a civilization that has developed interstellar travel.
The books were definitely not hard sci-fi, but there were some interesting ideas presented (or so it seemed to me when I was 13) IIRC, one of the main themes seems to be the idea that perhaps a less technological culture isn't as fragile when presented with a more technological civilization than we tend to assume. .
And really-- has any culture in our world ever been destroyed merely by contact with a more technologically advanced culture's ideas? Every example I can think of where a culture has been devastated by contact with another involved either military conquest or economic colonialism or both-- not just the exchange of knowledge, ideas, and views of the world.
The thing is-- It would have been a heck of a lot more difficult to successfully pull off a faked moon landing, and keep it secret (especially without the Soviets calling us on it quite loudly) than it was to actually go to the moon.
Looking something up in wikipedia is like asking your friend who took an undergraduate course in it last semseter for info on the topic. It's likely to be reasonably accurate much of the time, and should give you some ideas of where to look for more thorogh information, but it's not citable and shouldn't be relied on for anything where accuracy is important. It's a very helpful resource for what it is.
The answer isn't doing away with Wikipedia. If people are blindly trusting ANY resource, THAT is the root problem. We need to do more to teach information literacy, how to evaluate the reliability of sources, and the importance of using multiple sources.
Teaching critical thinking skills is more important than it has ever been. Trying to hide inaccurate information from people is just shirking this responsibility. People will have inaccurate information thrown at them whether they are looking for information or not. There is no substitute for solid critial thinking.
I'm going to say no. Who's to say it hasn't come and gone already? Multiple times, even?
What would a bilogially-equivalent-to-modern-humans pre-agrigarian homo sapien think of modern daily life? How about a resident of ancient Babylon, or of medeval Europe?
Hundreds of people with thousands of geographic miles between them are participating in this conversation. I can converse instantly with sound, and even video, with anyone almost anywhere in the world. I travel down the highway at 70mph-- not only without thinking that there's anything incredible about this, but annoyed that I'm forced to go "so slow". I can read the front page news as it appeared minuites ago in countires all over the world. The corner convenience store a block from where I live has food from all over the world, and dishes from at least a hundred cultures. I can bring it home and cook it in minuites, without a fire. The temperature of my home only varies by about 15 degrees farinheight even between seasonal extremes of over a hundred degrees outside. Humans have been to the moon. I can see close up photographs of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn whenever I like.
How is this not ALREADY the far side of the so-called "singularity"?
By "religious question", they mean, "according to our current understanding of the laws of physics, it is impossible, even in theory, to generate a falsifiable hypothosis about what happened before the big bang. Therefore, any discussion of what happened 'before' cannot be scientific, and hence is religions/philisophical discussion, not science".
TFA is about some folks claiming "actually, we DO have a hypothosis that is, at least in theory, falifiable".
"Science" is about studying things that are measurable, empirical, and/or falsifiable, whether one beleives that's ALL there is in the universe or not. "Religion" includes things that are not always empirical and falsifiable, and that cannot, even in theory, be scientifically tested. "Philosophy" includes all of the above and then some.
Whether something is or is not science, and whether something is or is not real, are two seperate questions-- whether or not one feels both questions have the same answer.
The question presumes that the current system is the best of all possible systems, and that the only adjustment that needs to be made is for someone, somwhere, to pay more.
Even in the (unlikely) event that this turned out to be the case, it would still not be valid or helpul to assume it a priori, thus heading off all discussion of options other than "A" or "B".
"The remains are between 900 and 2,900 years old and align with Homo sapiens..."
That has to be a typo. Did they miss the word "thousand" before the word "years" perhaps?
Regarding the Undead of #6...
Help Desk is a Customer Service position requiring a basic level of technical competence & teachability, NOT a tech position requiring only a basic level of people skills. This is especially true when the Help Desk person is dealing primarily with people with minimal to no technical skills.
The job should go to someone who likes people-- and who may not want an IT career per se, but does enjoy tinkering around with the stuff a little and learning a little bit about it. It should not go to a tech wizard who just wants to drudge through it so that he can get promoted to a position where he hopes he won't have to deal with another human being ever again.
People skills are more fundamental to the job than technical skills. (and no, I'm not a help-desk person. I like people, but not enough to be able to deal with being interrupted by them every ten minutes all day long.)
Being a really good Tester or Test Analyst requires all of the skill of other IT positions, with (at least in the U.S., in my experience) half of the pay, and none of the respect. Very few of the people capable of being excellent Test Analysts have much motivation to do so.
(Back when I was in Test Analysis, I had a boss tell me straight up that while my performance was excellent, since Testing was not a "revenue generating" position, he saw no need to pay me anything near what the "revenue-generating" IT positions at the company were paid. I'm no longer at that company, and since then, I've had a strong bias towards making sure I'm in a "revenue generating" position. Things work much better for me this way. And companies wonder why it's hard to find quality Test people...)