Indeed, that is our experience (at a university) as well.

Students taking online courses through the university are expected to be as proficient as the regular students - if they aren't we need to fail them or employers lose faith in our degrees.

If you already have a degree (or most of a degree) and a job then online courses can be a great way to augment your skillset, even if you never do the the homework watching the lectures will tell you a lot of stuff you'll need to look up and learn if a particular type of problem arises.

But actually relying on online open courses as the basis of your credentials is still problematic, and likely will always be. University degrees are in large part a trust relationship between employers and universities - our job isn't to train you for a specific job, but if you get a degree with an 80% average in computer science you should be reasonably proficient in computer science. If we let you buy your degree, or have your friends take your tests for you or the like then we may as well be some corrupt institution no one has ever heard of in Bangladesh or Nigeria.

Honestly, I suspect BT figured they could get everything they actually want from him for free from his security blog or with occasional contracts, particularly if he's willing to take up an academic or otherwise similarly public gig where his main work and discussion all ends up public anyway.

He can probably make a lot more money running around collecting speaking fees than BT would want to pay him.

Yes but he's actually an american.

Beta is beta. they've said before they intend to support AMD, but the first gen of hardware is all nVIDIA.

By suing any company that accepts it in transactions as being in breach of their patent. The same way Newegg just got patent trolled by a company claiming a patent on (part of) public key cryptography. Oh you were using an implementation of our patent? You're going to get sued.

No of course not. That's idiotic.

You can't make money or a business model without potential customers and you can't get potential customers for a product they don't know exists and don't even know what would be, and asking for money up front will just drive them away. You build underlying technology and solutions first, then figure out how to make money. If you want to do it the MBA way go invest in a radio station. The rest of us are trying to define new markets.

Lots of what other people have said is good.

Ask legal what framework you should be working under, and what laws and compliance are going to be required as part of doing your job. You aren't really sure what your personal obligations are in this regard, because you understand that there are regulations but you aren't sure who is responsible for implementing what exactly, and you've gotten conflicting or confused responses from your superiors.

There seem to be some problems with the cooling paste installed on a lot of cards as well, causing them to overheat and ramp themselves down.

WW2 started in 1939 in europe, but I think you've got the right idea.

Was there some significant event, not necessarily in 2003 but some number of years earlier that effected everyone but the netherlands, denmark and the UK, could they have the same effect but mask it with different immigration policies? Denmark and the netherlands were both occupied by germany, the UK was bombed, but the netherlands and denmark should not be much worse off than France, belgium, or Norway for example.

In 2002 the euro came into being - well that would explain 12 countries but not all of them if it had a one year lag effect.

But there's a lot of years there that could point to some systematic problem. Maybe windows XP and the proliferation of wide speed internet made people more sedentary and the economic crisis in 2009 had them all out protesting (exercise!) but then the protesting stopped, and this is actually a by product of the internet. It gets worse as more people get better internet and run around less.

Maybe we've got a change in smoking or health rules or counting procedures or immigration laws that completely messes with things.

I'm not by the way discounting a 'something to do with WW2' effect, (or WW1 for that matter), but there needs to be something different about the countries in question. The collection of possibilities is quite large.

Post docs are holding positions until you get a faculty position. If you need/want to build a better research history because your PhD resulted in publication delays or issues (mine is facing issues with being able to publish when I'd like because it's a collaboration, so my publication list with the PhD is shorter than normal and a post doc would be a chance to publish the stuff from my PhD that was delayed and do some more).

But in many cases computer scientists don't need to do post docs, nor do engineers. You can get an entry level faculty position at a smaller school. If you're in physics though, you're not getting a faculty unless you've done a couple of years as a post doc because everyone else has done a post doc.

Where I am graduates about 15-20 PhD's a year, about 1-2 a year will do a post doc, the remainder end up splitting between industry-academia about 75%-25% ish, but that's comp sci. The physics programme (program, take your pick), is about 70/30 academia/industry basically all the academia ones have to do post docs.

I did some cisco and microsoft certifications in highschool.... more than 15 years ago. Not for credit.

They were super useful in terms of getting summer jobs, and some practical IT experience so that even if you don't intend to be an IT guy you aren't completely clueless about how all of this shit works. It's not like universities do a great job of telling students what IT resources are available to them or how to use them. It's all well and good to have free access to piles of software (either to use or through academic licensing) but most of the time students, even CS or software engineering students, have no idea what any of the corporate stuff is or could do for them until after they've done their co-op and are ready to graduate.

Being able to go into a lab as a grad student, and know enough about IT to know what the hell ITS was even offering (if only to know vaguely what all these things do) was hugely helpful. Most people have no idea at all, and knowing a bit about networking and hardware and various software options made a lot of difference throughout my years.

And be thrown in jail for violating sanctions rules. Brilliant.

Moving money between places that allow it is easy, moving money to places that don't allow it isn't challenging for the fun of it, it's hard because there are laws in place about moving money in and out of countries. If you're moving money out of somewhere that doesn't allow it, or money into somewhere under sanctions you're going to find yourself in a world of trouble.

The only saving grace is that a flight from LIsbon to Warsaw (which is about the extreme edge of a flight within the EU) is only 3.5 hours. Most of the time you're not going to be stuck listening to someone loudly talking in a language you don't speak for more than a couple of hours.

Where there is money to be made, there will be people willing to take the risk.

Especially when your 3 biggest competitors would suddenly be two companies long established in the console market (Sony and Nintendo), who both have significant revenue they can operate with, and your other competitor is the guy you just bought the division from - Microsoft, and Windows, who ultimately control most of the underlying technology you rely on.

Unless sony or Nintendo wanted to buy it no one with much sense would want to buy the Xbox division. I can't really see Sony or Nintendo wanting it other than to shut it down.