"Have you quit beating your wife yet?" has an implied premise, which is that you are currently beating your wife

Similarly, "So you're saying TSA doesn't do a good job? Then tell me how many buildings terrorists have flown airplanes into recently. Name one!" has an implied premise that the TSA is responsible for the number airplanes flown into buildings.

I don't think the US opened that box. Organized crime has been deploying malware against individuals and organizations for years. I've been seeing stories on Slashdot about "Chinese Hackers" breeching US governmental and corporate networks for years. With Stuxnet and Flame the US has merely taken what everyone was already doing and done it better.

Study part-time (you can fit one or two courses a semester around a full-time job without too much pain) for whatever degree fits best for high level system administration (it's not, or shouldn't, be Computer Science). Put that degree on your resume, with the projected completion date in the future--if you're worried, put a bullet point underneath stating that it's a degree in progress. This will get you past quick filter passes which throw out resumes that have no undergrad degree.

Anyone who is looking at these resumes closely enough to notice the undergrad isn't actually completed yet will likely be more interested in work experience than in education, so you're okay on that front. Once you get to the interview you can spin it as a positive: you're qualified to do the job based on past experience, and you're sufficiently ambitious to get the degree anyway to 'round out your skillset', or however you want to phrase it.

Heh, good point. I stand corrected :P

Indeed. I imagine sitting at your desk reading Slashdot and thinking up low-quality snarky comments is quite demanding. You have truly earned your pay today.

The ending sucked though :P

Exceptional teachers, and a well-behaved class. My girlfriend is a teacher who has taught at several different schools in my area, and she raves about the difference having a well behaved class can make. With a well-behaved class, she can do all kinds of engaging activities and crafts (she teaches Grade 1). She can't do that with a poorly-behaved class because they would take that opportunity for freedom and creative thinking and waste it drawings guns, knives, penises, swear words, and insults directed at other students.

This isn't meant as a rebuttal to you, but to all those posters (and there are many) who peddle conspiracy theories about how the education system is, by design, preparing students to be obedient factory workers. There are good, practical reasons why teachers have strict expectations regarding behaviour, and it's not because they're trying to crush little Johny's spirit. It's because in actual fact, little Johny is an unrepentant brat who's disrupting the 20-30 other kids in his class who might want to learn.

But I digress. More prep time will help too :P

Agreed. This was an article with many low points, but I think the following two excerpts highlight the flawed reasoning quite well:

This article is missing even a gesture towards explaining why "the infrastructure" should be responsible for security while developers create their masterpeices, and boils down to mere whining: "Security isn't fun so someone else should do it for me!" Perhaps the worst part is that there is a good argument to be made that the OS and hardware should take of security, and a fundamental limit to how much security they can offer; the blog author just doesn't make it. Having the OS plug a given security hole once is more efficient than having each application duplicate the effort of plugging the hole. On the other hand, security is necessarily a trade-off for functionality, so the only fully secure application is one with no permission to do anything.

Reread my post. I clicked through and read the article before posting my comment.

No you didn't. As the summary contains no actual information, you filled it in with your own prejudices and preconceptions, no doubt because you are not in the habit of reading things carefully. cf My first point.

What is this supposed to prove? Of course you "still" understand it after having read the full article, unless you think people habitually lose all knowledge of their previous experiences after sleeping for eight hours.

Ha! cf My first point again.

cf My second point.

What do you do that's so prestigious and intellectually demanding?

You know, I read the summary without understanding it, and just clicked through to read the article, but only after reading your comment did I realize just how little sense the summary really made.

It starts off talking about a nobody who did something that is apparently so trivial that it can be outdone by 20 lines of code. You might think that the following sentence will answer at least one of the questions raised by this sentence: Who is Steve Hanov? What is A/B testing? What do Steve's 20 lines of code do? But you'd be wrong.

Because the next sentence jumps to a topic whose banality and seeming irrelevance to the matter at hand defies belief. Three coloured buttons, one of which 'outperformed' the others, with nary a hint as to what these buttons do, or how one can outperform the others.

The third sentence appears to pick up where the first left off. Why don't people use the A/B testing method? Or are we talking about the three coloured buttons method?

The final sentence is a tour-de-force of disjointed confusion. It skips from machine learning algorithms that haven't been discussed, to tools with unknown purpose, to the design of something which was never specified.

It's like the summary is some kind of abstract art installation whose purpose is to be as uninformative as possible. It is literally the opposite of informative: Not only does it provide no information, it raises questions which you can't even be sure relate to the purported topic at hand, because you don't know what the topic at hand is.

It is either a bizarrely confused summary or one of the most artful trolls ever to grace Slashdot's front page

The title and summary are poorly worded, even for Slashdot. From the bill:

Specifying that only historical data may be used is one thing. Explicitly dileniating the time used for extrapolation, as well as the method used for extrapolation is quite another. The real point of contention is that sea level rise is exponential, not linear, at least according to the Scientific American blog posting.

Dictionaries are not authoritative, but style guides are even less so. A style guide is merely someone's opinion as to what is clear and/or aesthetically pleasing. Much to the dismay of many with strong opinions about how language should be used, myself included, the concept of correct language is mostly just a lie we tell to children to avoid having to explain the ugly truth: that no two people have exactly the same mental schema of English, and that we're just trying to make sure they line up well enough that we can understand one another.

First, 'electronic gifting' is not a gerund. A gerund is the '-ing' form of a verb used as a noun. 'Electronic gifting' is pretty clearly an adverb and a verb. Second, the ability of a verb to serve as a noun, and vice versa, is so widespread in English, is so fundamental to how the language works, that I can't imagine why you people keep bringing this up. Go look at a list of common verbs or nouns in English and see how many are also a noun or verb

Here is a search of the ACL Anthology for Speech recognition. As you can see, the term is widely used by actual computer scientists. Linguistic Audio Parsing, by contrast, is a term you coined just now.

Converting speech to text does have some drawbacks, but it has many advantages as well. First among these is the ability to apply the vast amount of work which has been put into parsing and understanding text. Furthermore, there's no need to lose the additional information carried by tone and other speech patterns, you can simply annotate the text you produce with tags denoting, for example, sarcasm. The actual problem with translating speech to text then applying the usual sentence parsing algorithms is that spoken text and written text actually have distinct grammars. They are like different dialects of the same language.

Your error was not "parse" vs "recognize"; it was "speech" vs "text". Watson deals with text, not with speech. Parsing speech is quite difficult--it would require entirely different algorithms from what Watson already uses, introducing additional computation time and additional errors. The difference is not at all trivial.