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posted by takyon on Friday July 17 2015, @08:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the brb-printing-diploma dept.

We often discuss the merit (or necessity) of having a formal degree in technology. This story is another installment in that debate:

The Department of the Interior's computer systems played a major role in the breach of systems belonging to the Office of Personnel Management, and DOI officials were called before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday to answer questions about the over 3,000 vulnerabilities in agency systems discovered in a penetration test run by Interior's Inspector General office. But there was one unexpected revelation during the hearing: a key Interior technology official who had access to sensitive systems for over five years had lied about his education, submitting falsified college transcripts produced by an online service.

The official, Faisal Ahmed, was assistant director of the Interior's Office of Law Enforcement and Security from 2007 to 2013, heading its Technology division. He claimed to have a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and a master's degree in technology management from the University of Central Florida—but he never attended either of those schools. He resigned from his position at Interior when the fraudulent claim was exposed by a representative of the University of Central Florida's alumni association, who discovered he had never attended the school after Ahmed accepted and then suddenly deleted a connection with her on LinkedIn.

TFA emphasizes the falsification he did of his credentials, but there seems to be heavy insinuation that lack of degree = lack of ability.


Official Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1) by mechanicjay on Saturday July 18 2015, @02:28PM

    I'm not a hardcore programmer, but I do a decent share of small web apps. I do have a CS degree. I have never heard of this, but my reaction was "really"?

    It took me 10 minutes, pre-coffee on a sunday morning in python. It would have been 5 minutes, but I haven't touched python in about a year and was tripped up a little by syntax

    for x in range(1,101):
       fizz = ""
       buzz = ""
       if x % 3 == 0:
            fizz = "fizz"
       if  x % 5 == 0:
            buzz = "buzz"

       if fizz=="fizz" or buzz=="buzz":
            fizzbuzz = fizz+buzz
            print fizzbuzz
       else:
            print x

    It only uses 3 variables, but mostly importantly, it calculates the modulus for each number for 3 and 5 only once. I could see this being where people fall down the rabbit hole here, trying to find and if/else logic block to cover all cases. That's where it gets hard and computationally inefficient.

    --
    My VMS box beat up your Windows box.