As someone who grew up in the Texas school system, I'm happy to report you're woefully misinformed.

I live on the border of Texas and Louisiana. Kennedy is a 16+ hour drive for me, and the closest of the four locations.

Johnson and Kennedy should have been obvious to anyone. The Smithsonian as well. And LA just makes sense if you want to put one out west. Yay for politics!

Actually, my work experience DID teach me the OSI model. Back when I was getting on-the-job training on networking, a network admin whose degree was in geography (he had no IT education in college, and only got any degree because it was required for promotion) made it a point to teach me the OSI model because its concepts are necessary learning if you're going to do much with managed switches.

Yes, there are a lot of people in IT who cut corners and use dirty fixes to make things work quickly. It's been my experience that those people are just as likely as not to be college graduates. Look at the number of college students who consider cheating to be an acceptable method of passing. They cut corners all the time.

I've seen too many incompetent college graduates to let a degree sway my perception of someone. I assume everyone is an idiot until they prove otherwise :)

Theory and framework aren't exclusive to university. In fact, especially as IT goes, they are informed primarily by those in the working world. I've fired college graduates because they couldn't deliver, the same as that those who scraped a CCNA.

I know this, but how does one type that accent without the letter? (hint: I don't see anything between your first set of parentheses).

Also, my joke seems to have fallen flat.

I did go to school, just not Harvard. A year in university before dropping out and going to work, then three more semesters at other schools before deciding I was right to stay away.

Not to mention the incessant use of Latin by people who spend far too much time arguing on the internet. Some people seem to think that the use of Latin somehow validates their point.

One does not need to learn a foreign language to learn critical thinking. For that matter, the history of critical thinking is optional. CT is a process; knowing how that process was developed might help in understanding it, but it can be executed without any history as it can be arrived at independently of that history.

"Can place ' above e in resume" seems like a useful bullet point.

Did you learn that in college?

I think the whole thing speaks volumes to the disconnect between academia and reality. While an education in the high points of historical philosophy might be of limited use, much of that is pure nonsense intended to filter out undesirable applicants who, while quite capable of learning and performing, lack the "breeding" to be accepted. It was a great way to ensure that only like-minded people got degrees and continued the cycle.

Colleges have gotten a lot better in the past century, but they still spend a lot of time making sure you think how they want you to think, or at least can pretend to.

Disclaimer: I'm a college opt-out who was accepted to Harvard but didn't go (I applied just because I could). I decided there was a better way into the real world that the bullshit you have to endure at university. Take that how you want.

In online FPS, what you might call rubber banding is the effect felt when you're scrambling around a corner only to be shot by someone with a 150 ping and the server drags you back due to their latency. It's a phenomenon I first saw in Counter-Strike after a major netcode update and I quickly dubbed it "bungie bullets". I encountered situations where I saw myself run into cover half a dozen times, only to be dragged back out into the line of fire and be shot by the same lagging player again.

Now I don't want the poor guy with a 150 ping to never get a hit just because his ISP sucks. It's probably not his fault. But I've seen a number of games "correct" my position on the map so that the guy who is more than 1/10th of a second behind me can get his hit. It doesn't happen in all games so I know it's not the only way to resolve ping differences.

I don't think you should be able to own a gene, but YOUR particular combination of genes is so unlikely to happen again that it can be considered unique. Each person should own their own genetic combination, and any use of that combination or a derivative of it for profit should entitle that person to a share of the profits.

There's solid reasoning behind protecting a patent on GM lab animals. I'm no geneticist, but I would assume that there is a significant investment involved in splicing human genes into a rat in such a way that they will reliably develop early onset AD. If they aren't able to profit from that investment, you remove one very useful motive in developing such things.

That said, there's got to be a point at which we say "okay, so you made another GM rat with human genes. The process for this is well-established and all you did was repeat something that's been done dozens of times before."

A fair compromise might be to adjust time limits on patents according to their topic. Genetic patents using existing genes should not be protected as long as a truly engineered/synthetic gene (I've not heard of any actually existing, but it's only a matter of time).

After reading TFA, it sounds to me like the issue isn't with the use of the gene, but with the use of genetically modified rats, which should be protected under the same laws as GM crops. The article indicates the patent is actually on the "mouse models" and not the gene itself.

Not defending the suit, just playing trolls' advocate for a moment.