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After four years of trying, I’ve finally gotten it through my thick head that I will not get a job—and if you go to graduate school, neither will you.

I got my masters between 2005-2007. Before that I had done two internships (while getting my undergrad) and then worked a year without school. When I went back to school my employer completely paid for my masters of science in computer science and, actually, I worked forty hours a week the whole time I was going to school full time. Doctorates are a completely different animal. I wanted to do one and yet the two professors who were interested in me said I would have to quit working my job. No deal, I've been working at least a 20 hour a week job since I was 13 and I think I would go insane now if I didn't have a full time job. And before you ask, academia is a lot of work but it is not a job.

A lot of these complaints in this article (though well written and entertaining surprise surprise) are indicative of anyone who takes a career in an entertainment world to the final resting place. What? You think the second trombonist for the Milwaukee Symphony is a bad trombone player? And when he travels to Kansas for an audition and is rejected because some insider got the lead, he's not upset that he's structured his whole life around trombone playing? No, he just picked an entertainment profession which means Pareto Law would be the best possible outcome and you're likely going to be a starving artist. There's just not enough revenue to spread around and when there is it is highly concentrated to a few individuals.

This is why STEM is pressed so hard and fascist leadership in China actually dictates how many STEM graduates their universities will pump out. I don't want that here in the states, what I want is realistic expectations set and delivered to prospective students about what employment rates look like and where the payout in the endgame lies. Don't confuse me some sort of dream crusher rubbing one out to telling people that their passion is a sideshow in the game of life but rather just a realist with production of goods and services in mind.

This story actually sounds positive compared to my friends who got lit undergrad degrees and then went out into the world to use them. My close friend from high school first got a job proof reading SEC filings that had already gone public. He would proof them all night long and then they would go out as updates -- that nobody would ever read. Then after feeling like he was doing nothing, he started delivering pizzas and did that for six years before he finally landed a great job. What job would that be? Well, he works as one of the state's tax collectors who calls people up. He's a genuinely nice guy and has a very friendly voice and talks about tax solutions to people who owe the state money. And he never took a math or accounting course and he does very little writing in his job. That is the reality of a lit degree.

From the sound of this author's research, she could probably get into natural language parsing fairly easily ... she understands orders of logic so may be able to learn some of the more friendly computer languages.

Reading, writing, making music, painting, playing games are all things that I super love to do. But they're just a side thing to something else that I'm good at that is much more productive and tangible to society.

If I remember right there was a company called Proquest http://www.proquest.com/ that already offered what google is trying to do.

Google is starting to infringe on a couple of companies that already do this kind of thing but they charge for the service. This is exactly what companies like Lexis-Nexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com/?a=g and ProQuest, http://proquest.com/ do as their significant business model. Add to the "search all the old news" the ability to email you a daily report of keyword searches anywhere in your choice of selectable data sources and you have put them out of business. The significant difference is ProQuest built their business on all of the archived dissertations and Thesis of American colleges and Lexis-Nexis built their business on archiving legal andrnment proceedings but both have expanded into newpapers, magazines and TV broadcasts.

As I understand it, when a full text content provider republishes copyright-free works, they copyright their newly bundled publication. So I can't, say, go in to ProQuest Historical Newspapers and download everything and host it providing free access. Further reproduction is prohibited. (But how you can prove you took *their* republished text is another issue I suppose.)

It's why a search for "Alice in Wonderland" in Google Books gets you only a few pages, while Project Gutenberg delivers the whole text. The books in Google (for the copyright-free text) are for copyrighted books (or presentations, rather).

A lot of organizations have made money off of reproducing copyright-free materials. You can reprint government documents (US federal ones are usually copyright-free) and re-sell them, for example. The publisher of the 9-11 report (available freely online, not that it was widely advertised as such) got a real "royalty-free windfall" from the bestseller.

Full text of original articles:

1. August 1992 article
2. December 1994 article

Full text of original articles:

1. August 1992 article
2. December 1994 article