For me i will always be a noob by one simple fact: my uncle exists. Now since none of you know him this may not mean much to you. so i will state it like this. I once asked him(at the tender age of 15) how many programming languages he knew. He hit 15, shrugged his shoulders and said "i dont know theirs more" If you bought a compaq in the 90's, he built it. By that i mean he programmed all the drivers, BIOS's, and got all the parts talking. Again, in the 90's alone he had around two TB of cracked programs, ranging from 10$ games up to 30k$ software packages. Every mmorpg he has ever played from ultima on up he has made his own bots, and has never been caught. its my sincerest dream that when he dies(he has a sever liver problem unfortunately that i might gain access just to the favorites he has stored, let alone all the rest of the info he has stored away. He knows, off the top of his head any piece of networking gear ever made, and i mean knows it. default settings. which firmware update gave it the best usage, or in some cases, a competitors firmware that worked on it better than their own. He invented a number of useful things or simply had good money saving ideas as well. Like the time he wrote a shell script and got 12 of the people under him fired, because they were now unnecessary it took him a week to program it. Or hey you know how computers dont come with CD's any more? its all just put into a partition on a hard drive? yeah that was him. Anyway its just a slew more of stuff like that. So as far as ive been concerned, since the age of 15, untill i surpass him i am and shall always remain a noob. At least when compared to the actual knowledgeable people.
Then again if i didnt feel that way i wouldnt have signed up here. Anyway like the post. regardless its always a good reminder that at the end of the day none of us are as smart as we think we are, and if we keep an open mind, its far more likely to be filled with something useful.