Potential employers do make immediate assumptions about an applicant who has a PhD on their CV for sure; however those assumptions are not always as positive as you suggest. When I'd completed my PhD the only jobs for which I could even get an interview were junior developer positions, same as I'd have gotten if I'd just come straight from primary degree to job market. The PhD counted for nothing & was in fact a bit of a sticking point. Interviewers seemed to think that getting a PhD involves sitting on your ass wasting time & that you'd do the same on their dime if they hired you. Of course, that's Ireland for you -- go figure. Not that I'm bitter or anything :D

How do you feel about the censorship & control efforts of countries such as China?

That is to say do you think that too much power & control now lies in the hands of the Internet Service Providers, thereby making it, at least in terms of control if not routing, too centralised & too easily manipulated by the powerful few. I guess this question stems from a viewpoint that it should be somehow democratic & free (as in free speech). Also do you share my pedantic belief that the public Internet should be spelt with a capital 'I'?

Are we so stupid that we are going to start listening to those evil bastards just because they happen to say something with which we can agree? Spare me. Who gives a damn what they think, all their opinions are self-serving (and evil).

Because this one works *well* and does logins/passwords too. Also it works across a lot of browsers. There isn't a good alternative (yet).

Am I the only one who followed this link & found that you'd managed to get the spelling of his name wrong in the search query: this DE Knut guy is some bio/med research type. On the up side I guess I can say that I've heard of both of 'em now.

Yes the system maps the surrounding to sounds, i.e., it is a sonfication system. The big question is: how to effectively and meaningfully map a complex, dynamic visual scene (the immediate world around a person) to sounds such that it makes sense to the listener and communicates useful information? There is a good amount of research to show that, especially those who are blind from birth, have a very distinct and unique perception on the physical world; consequently a mapping that may work for a sighted person may not be any help to a visually impaired user. There have been a number of such systems developed in the past: some based on raster scanning, mapping snapshots of the current scene to a soundscape, and others that attempt to do qualitative analysis of scene images and express these with mappings developed in conjunction with visually impaired users. In all cases the issue is mapping images to sound in such a way as makes sense to a person who has never been able to see.

WTF was I thinking? On reflection this is in extremely bad taste & could be interpreted as racist. It was just a (bad) attempt at a joke. My apologies to anybody who was offended by the above posting.

Hay, I'm Indeen u unsensative klod!

I don't entirely agree with this. I take the view that what I do in a given situation (be it work overtime or whatever) is my choice in that particular situation and any manager that makes the mistake of thinking that I'll always react in the same way every time an issue arises will find out in time that this is not the case. I guess it helps that I don't really care what my co-workers/managers think of me, nor do I feel any pressure to behave like them.

If you have a job to do then do it. I don't think personality traits can be adopted at will to fit in: be yourself, and if you are a jerk, work from home.

To lose one 4G iPhone, Mr. Jobs, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness.

ois@zig:~$ EMACS
-bash: EMACS: command not found
ois@zig:~$ echo $?
127
ois@zig:~$

Did he announce this using twitter?

Okay, apparently everybody hates this Wales guy. At last we agree on something here :o) Seriously the original issue was whether porn has any place on wikipedia. I don't believe it does (& I like porn at least as much as the next guy). Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, isn't it? Do you usually find (what most sane-ish people would deem to be) porn in an encyclopedia? I shouldn't have thought so & I'd have hoped not. It's not as if we are talking about banning porn entirely; the point is to remove it from wikipedia, just like anything else that doesn't serve its objectives of bringing useful information to people should be removed from wikipedia.