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Comment Re:Start your own cert organization. (Score 1) 444

Personally, I would only rely on a certification to get you the interview. After that, it is entirely up to you to sell your value to the organization and articulate that you are not merely a paper-tiger who tests well. So, your certs are valuable, if only to get you that interview.

Now to be sure, there are those orgs that will get tunnel vision on the resume and presume you actually have the real-life skills to back up your certs without doing their due-diligence when hiring. There are risks working for those orgs that usually become glaringly apparent when your team/group is under pressure on a difficult project.

Comment Re:Im a man with no emotions (Score 1) 105

I haven't seen skies like this since my teenaged years, camping in the Big Bend NP under a cloudless, new moon.

The sensation you get when seeing more stars than sky is something that must be experienced fist hand. Pictures rarely seem to do it justice.

I can't wait to see their faces when my children get to experience it!

Comment Re:You mean that cell phone store? (Score 0) 413

Not only do they need to look at inventory, I think they will also need to address employees. Without someone who can approach the role of an "Elmer" in the shop -- or someone who can at least knowledgeably field *general* electronics questions -- good luck attracting enthusiasts and growing the market

I couldn't pass a Radio-Shack back in the day; back when they had a fair selection of DIY stuff where you could browse around for project ideas. They've certainly lost that "ham-shack" luster over the years and I doubt they can return because it would appear they've been outflanked by the internet.

My sense of nostalgia wishes them well, but I just don't hold out much hope for them. Sadly, I think they might be better off losing the expense of their brick & mortar storefronts and moving strictly to the web.

Comment Re:omg (Score 0) 350

So basically what you are telling all of us is that instead of substance, you reply with dick jokes because you are so intellectually dishonest, you can't even acknowledge the obvious point amiga3D was making? That "green" vehicles will quite likely always lose when they collide with nearly anything that has more mass like a normal sized car, an SUV, a guard-rail or perhaps even a dog-house? Whatever -- at least you probably feel smugly good about yourself, and that's what's important, right?

Comment Re:Obligatory stat (Score 0) 350

Or how about: Hundreds die from accidental electrocution each year. And yet you knowingly & willingly accept those deaths rather than give up your little porn box (and your TV, blu-ray, lava-lamp, etc...)

What? Same logic, right? Anyone who uses electricity is complicit in the "massive number" of accidental electrocutions every year, right?

Comment Re:You free speech defenders (Score 0) 411

And if I grab a street corner in a nearby village and start announcing that the radiation has been contained and the plant is hiring laborers for clean-up efforts at $attractive/hour and applications will only be accepted in person at the plant by noon next Wednesday?

Though not all will take the bait, some might rush to the plant and contaminate themselves. Do I shoulder any responsibility for what may occur beyond their stupidity & gullibility? Could I (should I) get away with claiming freedom of speech?

Comment Re:The threat is way overblown... (Score 0) 290

I know plenty of federal workers, and believe me, most of them are not like your local DMV stereotype. You may disagree about the government doing certain kinds of work, but the majority of federal workers I know seem to work at least as hard as their private industry counterparts.

I also know plenty of federal workers. And considering the massive, ever growing head-count in the federal workforce, the 800,000 figure might be *low* for the "DMV Stereo-Types". Now, to be fair, I work with (or try to get them working, as the case may be) federal employees on a weekly basis. I know full well there are great people working for Uncle-Sugar. But there are also a *SIGNIFICANT* number of dead-weight, unionized, ass-hats that are wastes of tax-payer money, as well as wastes of DNA. Folks who should absolutely be given the axe, but can't be fired - seemingly because they've somehow been fortunate not to have been caught committing a felony in the workplace (or whatever it takes to actually fire them). I would even go as far as estimating the ratio of producers to leechers is worse in the fed sector than in the commercial sector. Likely because the fed sector does not have to produce anything, nor turn a profit. All they *HAVE* to do is be polite, and even that's too much of a challenge for some of them.

But yes, it is absolutely true there are some good folks working for the govt.

Comment Re:Different kind of change (Score 1) 140

I imagine if you replaced all those dots & symbols with a single image of a guy riding a bike, that morphs into a giraffe riding a bike, I would think you would be able to easily detect the change as it happens, whether moving or not. It just seems to me that the "busy-ness" of the image with the closely packed dots & symbols creates clutter that the brain resorts to simplifying what the eyes are viewing -- just another optical illusion. If the image were simplified and not so crowded & busy, would the illusion still occur?

To me it's not much different than watching wheel spokes appear to turn backwards when they reach a certain speed. This doesn't seem too terribly significant to me. Meh...

Piracy

Call of Duty: Black Ops the Most Pirated Game of the Year 5

Torrentfreak reports that after calculating download frequency for pirated copies of popular video games, Call of Duty: Black Ops has won the dubious honor of being the most pirated game of 2010. The PC version of the game was torrented roughly 4,270,000 times, and the Xbox 360 version was downloaded an additional 930,000 times. (The most pirated Wii game was Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Dante's Inferno somehow managed to accrue the most downloads of Xbox 360 games.) Fortunately for Activision, the game has still made over $1 billion in sales, and its 20,000,000+ players have racked up over 600,000,000 man-hours of play time since the game's launch in early November.

Comment Re:Weve seen that argument before (Score 1) 1066

Firearm misuse has nothing to do with the point I was making. Also, certainly you *can* live your whole life enjoying "art" without illegally copying digital media. You just have to choose whether you will abide by the DRM protections or become a scofflaw and evade DRM to copy protected media (presuming you can't enjoy "art" without copying it, DRM'd or not).

The point still stands. Over-bearing DRM is as misguided and fraught with unintended consequences as over-bearing gun-control and mainly serves to either provide advantages to scofflaws and/or create criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens.

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