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Comment Re:Occam's Razor (Score 1) 741

Exceptional people go to these schools. That's why the high achievers tend to come from those schools.

Yes and no. I would imagine that if you could define "exceptional people" empirically and then correlate "high achiever" to them and the schools they attend, you would still get a disproportionate number of people from the "elite" schools such as Harvard and Princeton (as a Harvard grad, I balk at the inclusion of Yale on principle).

These days, especially with a weak job market, who you know is just as important (or in many cases, more important) than who you are -- at least for getting your foot in the door. As people at these "elite" schools are already in a disproportionate number of high-level jobs, you are more likely to have a contact that will get you in the door.

I've seen this first hand. I had a friend that went to a state school for college -- he was very much my equal or superior (and his resume reflected that), yet because my resume had "Harvard" on it and his didn't, there were a few cases where I got called for an interview but he did not.

Comment Re:A Whole Bunch (Score 1) 256

And it stores passwords as cleartext

But at least if you type in your password into a comment, it replaces it with asterisks when anyone else views the comment. For example, my password is ***********. When I post this, it will appear as aterisks to you, but to me I can still see the password in the comment.

Comment Re:sounds like Zucky's "FaceMash" program (Score 1) 140

More like Facebook itself.

Zuckerberg scraped all the photos from the Harvard directories when he first launched facebook... without consent of course.

You are confusing FaceMash, which did do this, with "TheFacebook" (later just "Facebook"), which did not. The two, aside from both being created by Zuckerberg and both including the word "Face" in the name, are not related. Everything that was on the site when facebook launched was provided by the actual students.

Comment Re:Okay, hold on a minute. (Score 1) 184

While the term "habitable" doesn't necessarily have a scientific definition in this case, I'm pretty sure the use of the word "habitable" when talking about exoplanets is to refer to the possibility that life could exist as-is on the planet -- not that humans could go and terraform the planet to live on it. A "habitable" planet is one that could potentially harbor extra-terrestrial life (as we know it). You could argue that pretty much any planet could be considered "habitable" by your definition, as it is likely we would eventually acquire technology that would let us settle in nearly any environment.

Comment Re:Queue endless discussion on allowing add-ons... (Score 1, Offtopic) 284

d'oh...that should have read:

And here comes the endless 500 post thread on how [Browser X] shouldn't allow [Add-on Y] to install without [User doing Z].

This then ends up becoming a debate on operating system security and rights management and 100 other completely unrelated topics.

Oh, and vi is better.

Comment Re:Jimmy Wins (Score 1) 219

History gradually reduces all events to accomplishments by one person. In a hundred years or so, it will take effort to find out that there was a person named Crick involved.

Clark (of Louis and Clark fame) would probably disagree with you there...

It really just matters how it is popularized -- I've never heard Louis or Clark discussed separately, just as I've never heard anything about Watson without mentioning Crick (although Franklin is the loser in that one), so they will probably stay in the consciousness indefinitely, or at least as long as we're talking about them.

The fact that Wales is often discussed without mentioning Sanger at this point will likely lead to him being completely forgotten in a general sense associated with Wikipedia.

Comment Re:Soon, no more call centers (Score 1) 220

That's funny, because I called Cablevision the other day to resolve an issue where my cable modem wasn't getting an IP address assigned to it, and I was routed to a completely automated system. The beginning line was "You may ask to speak to an agent at any time, but they will be following the same script that I will be following." I gave it about 3 minutes through the script before I moved to the agent because I figured I could get escalated to a tech faster with a real person than a scripted machine.

Comment Re:When do they get the question? (Score 2) 220

Also, unless I'm mistaken, one doesn't have to wait for the entire question to be read. You can jump in early if you think you know the answer.

You are mistaken. You cannot buzz in until Trebek has finished reading the question. One of the reasons that Ken Jennings was so successful is because he had the timing down perfectly such that he was reliably the first one to buzz in when he knew the answer.

Comment Re:Respect (Score 1) 450

That's like stealing a car and then donating it to CarsForKids.

As someone who has heard their ad on the radio at least 100 times, that's KarsForKids with a K. It's also one of the most annoying radio ads I've ever heard, although the fact that I'm posting this indicates it's also a successful ad.

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