• (disco) in reply to NTW
    NTW:
    But who decides who gets the license? With the way the enterprise IT industry operates, the moron who can't do fizzbuzz but has 35 "certifications" from 6 different vendors will be licensed.

    Doesn't matter. A license is simply a thing that can be revoked. A decent culture of investigating problems and punishing those responsible, along with good rules to make sure those that aren't certified can't work, will convert a weak certification into a strong one. If you want a good example, look at driver's licensing in the US. It's very easy to get one, yet the system work pretty well. On the other end of the spectrum, you can become a Professional Engineer with mostly book knowledge, yet it's still considered one of the most rigorous certifications out there.

  • (disco) in reply to flabdablet
    flabdablet:
    And a digit d at place k in a base-b positional numbering system is constrained to lie in the range 0..b-1.

    Only because it's convenient, and requires the fewest number of unique digit glyphs to express the entire number system that way.

    flabdablet:
    8 is not a valid octal number.

    Only because writing it as 108 requires fewer unique digit glyphs for the entire base-8 number system.

    flabdablet:
    22 is not a valid binary number.

    Only because writing it as 1102 requires fewer unique digit glyphs for the entire base-2 number system.

    flabdablet:
    11111 is not a valid "base-1" number

    Yes, it is.

    flabdablet:
    no numbering system where all the columns are of equal place value is a positional numbering system

    You obviously don't understand what a degenerate case is.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    It gets ugly in combinatorics and permutations. You end up with something akin to a variable base.

  • (disco)
    NTW:
    Oh yeah, only 32,600 deaths in 2014...

    Don't look into the hospital industry, more than 32,600 die there every day.

  • (disco) in reply to flabdablet
    flabdablet:
    And the value of any digit d at place k in a base-b positional numbering system is constrained to lie in the range 0..b-1. In the hypothetical "base 1" system in your last line, all of a b c d and e would therefore have to be zero, as would the overall result.

    8 is not a valid octal number. 22 is not a valid binary number. 11111 is not a valid "base-1" number, because no numbering system where all the columns are of equal place value is a positional numbering system; therefore no such system has a base.

    No, "11111" really is how you use unary. Mathematicians are as bored as computer scientists. They've already thought this all up. It's not a normal positional system. It's one of the bijective number systems.

  • (disco) in reply to Jaime

    Not the same. We regularly give licenses to people to drive around giant steel killing machines. What protection has this license actually provided, aside from being a revenue generator for states? Not to mention the number of folks that drive drunk and unlicensed (over and over again).

    Drivers Licensing is just like the TSA - a jobs program for IQs below 90 and all theater.

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