It takes a special kind of... well, something, to think that "Right to Work" is good for anyone other than employers. As employer you gain the ability to fire anyone, at anytime, for any reason (up to an including not liking their new haircut or the color of their shirt today), as an employee you gain... the ability to not hand in two weeks notice before you quit? (and you should really do that anyway, to avoid getting a bad reference. It's one of the few things they can legally talk about). Thankfully I work at level now where hiring and firing are controlled by a process (most decent employers in right to work states bind themselves to reasonable hiring and firing procedures to make skilled workers feel reasonably safe about taking jobs with them), but I remember seeing people fired from restaurants and bars I used to work in for essentially nothing. And yes, I have seen the haircut thing really happen.
The real worst is that a lot of those CPU eating flash applications are omnipresent ads. For a long time I resisted using ad blockers. I've run small sites and I know that they really need those fractions of a penny per page view; but after the second or third time that my computer was brought to its knees by the ads on my WoW Guild's website (I usually leave it up to check forums and such), I had to do something.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
It seems to be a popular one. It seems that some people believe it indicates an inborn right amongst all people to posses any weapon (up to and including tanks) that they can afford. Other seem to believe that it implies a right to be armed, but not necessarily a right to any weapon one might chose to own. Still others seem to think it is an abridgeable right, and those guilty of certain types of crimes forfeit it. Others still believe that it implies nothing at all for those who don't happen to be in a "well regulated Militia". I'm not going to go into what I think, but the fact remains that the amendment itself is awful damned vague and a reasonable argument can be made for any of the above. There are other examples, but that's definitely the one that jumps to my mind when people ask about "vague" pieces of the Constitution.
Valid point. I didn't mean to imply that their weren't more clever attempts or that some attempts might succeed. Rather I was saying that in the many case where they *don't* succeed it takes longer to unravel with digital cases.
My favorite was the "Nuclear Option". Remember back when the Republicans controlled both Houses and the Presidency, and the bad Democrats were using filibusters to try to stop some of the laws they most disagreed with? And the Republicans had the great idea for the "Nuclear Option", basically using a procedural vote to remove the filibuster from Senate rules? And they basically bullied the Dems into allowing almost everything they wanted by threatening to take away the little power a minority has? Imagine if they'd done it! They'd be laughing heartily at themselves right now I bet!
Nonono... you don't understand. It's only an activist judiciary when it rules against a Republican stalking horse. If it's in favor of the Republican cause of the month, it's respectful of the Constitution. Like a lot of people around here, I'm not a huge fan or either party, but this particular Republican gambit really irritates me.
OK, so you're an engineer-, what, practically, do think is a better way to do it? Should I sort resumes based on the worst written and only interview those guys? You have twenty resumes sitting in front of you. You can only interview four people. Five guys are obvious technical no-gos, they don't have the experience level you need, aren't programmers, whatever. Fifteen are adequate, ten are looking pretty good. What do you decide based on?
You bring in four of them for interviews. Two are clear technical stand outs and both noted processes or procedures that they considered inadequate. One waited till the end and politely asked you questions designed to point out the problems, and perhaps determine if there was a reason you did it that way. The other passive-aggressively implied that your current team are all idiots. Who do you hire?
I'm not quite sure what else to say. Your implication appears to be that since I'm not a troll in a basement I must not be a skill engineer or technician. If that's your theory, then I'm sorry you've been so badly burned, but I'm not gonna keep arguing the matter.
One difference is, as pointed out in the summary, physical investigations tend to be much faster than computer investigations. Most of the time, whether the case is "real world" or digital, these frame ups get caught. People who do these things tend to do them on the spur of moment and often aren't very smart about it. Unfortunately, while the finger prints on those photos found in your desk might come back in a couple days. Thus showing that your cube-mate was the only person to actually touch them. The forensic analysis of your hard drive might take months, even assuming the person doing it is vaguely competent and likely to notice any red flags.
I'm sure my government employer wouldn't care at all that I encrypted my entire hard drive and won't give them the keys. I'm equally certain that the other 10 or so other employees in the administrator group would never be so dishonest as to misuse their administrative logins while attempting to frame me for a crime I didn't commit. Not that I think my fellow employees would do such a thing, nor that I mistrust them at all really; but if I was concerned there'd be a minimal amount I could do about the situation. even given that I'm an administrator on my own box (which a lot of people aren't in the working world). If the auditing on your system is tight you might be able to prove that you didn't put the images there, but a really intelligent attacker with admin access to your PC could still fake it.
I'm not denigrating your solution per se. It's great for a home PC and I totally recommend it, but from a business perspective it's not going to be horribly effective for most people.
You don't have to move every few years. It's helpful if you can, but hardly necessary. I had to get out of Lafayette, I'll grant you, but I could probably stay here in Huntsville for the rest of my life and do well. My more recent desire to move has more to do with wanting to be on the East Coast than not wanting to be here, or needing to leave to find work. The point was more that you can't stay in your own personal Lafayette, than that you have to keep moving all the time.
Actually I'm a thesis away from a master's degree in computer science from a respected university now, so get off your high horse. I did my time in trenches and used the educational benefits I got to better myself. The ability to speak and write well is not mutually exclusive to being technologically knowledgeable and capable. As to little or no technological bias, apparently you have not read my posting history. I'm mostly Anti-windows and pro-Unix. I use Macs and Linux for everything except gaming. I'm a strong advocate of secure code and spend a good chunk of my day fighting with people to ensure we don't compromise on the important stuff.
There is not direct correlation between socially awkward and competent engineer. Some of the world's best engineers may be socially awkward, but just as many of them are confident well adjusted people who have done well for themselves. You can sell yourself and still be a good engineer. You can be flexible (on some things) and still be a good engineer. Selling yourself isn't lying, it's presenting the truth in the best possible light (I've never lied on a resume). Being flexible isn't compromising on security or usability, it's knowing when you CAN compromise without damaging the project. At some point compromises must be made, or nothing gets released.
But hey, thanks for painting me as some sort of hack who's gotten by on charm and good looks (neither of which I have in any abundance by the way) for the last 12 years. Especially since you don't know me. That's appreciated.
The place itself is still popular, not the medium. The medium only retains enough popularity to keep a relative small number of places in business, but among those who still enjoy it, this place is popular. It's one of the advantages of living in city like New York. In an area with 20 million people, all of whom can get to anywhere in the city fairly trivially on the subway, there's bound to be enough of a market to keep at least a few of any type of business afloat. Thus whenever you have whim to go to an arcade, or find a place to get a "fish pedicure", or entertain virtually any other whim, hobby, or perversion that might strike you: chances are there's a place to do it, and chances are you can get there on the subway.
Double Dead guy is better. Or if you want to keep it low gravity, Hazelnut Brown Nectar. Really most of Rogue's beers are pretty awesome, they're one of the better breweries in the US. Not to say that there aren't beer individual beers out here than any specific Rogue beer; but for overall quality across an entire and very extensive line of brews, Rogue is in the top ten.
Eh... rereading this I'm thinking it implies some stuff I didn't mean. I don't mean to imply you should accept a thousand mile geographic separation from your wife as a matter of course in the IT job market. Our situation was a lot more complex than that when we decided she'd go to Boston. The point of the story was to illustrate the benefits of flexibility, not ruthlessly following the money. Ruthlessly following the money would help you in the IT job market I suppose, but it's not usually the road to happiness. A middle ground is probably the better option:-)
Typically I think that guys isn't trying all that hard. Yes, there is plenty of IT work in the First World. Lots of stuff is pretty hard to outsource (internal IT works best when it's internal), other stuff CAN'T be outsourced (Governments typically want citizens of their countries working for them. I'm a Federal Contractor ATM), and even some of the worst outsourcing offenders are starting to lose their taste for it (When was the last time you talked to Raj^H^H^HBob at Dell?). Does that mean you can go get an MCSE and expect high paying job offers to fall from the trees like in the mid-90's? No. You've gotta be willing to work for it. You've gotta be willing to sell yourself a bit. You've gotta pay attention in English and History classes when the professor is trying to bang some writing skills into your head.
There's a lot of very smart people out there who think that their abilities and intelligence are so manifestly obvious that they should be able to walk into any job in the industry. They're ignoring a lot of realities. For one, while it may be true that you can learn any language or package in the universe after playing with it for an hour, a hiring manager can't know that. He's got 10 or 20 or 100 other guys some of whom already claim to know the stuff he needs, and all he has to judge them on is the 3 or 4 sheets of paper in front of him. For another, despite what you may wish, most IT jobs still involve a fair amount of dealing with humans. That means that communications skills are also important.
Also, like I said, you probably have to be willing to compromise. You can't live in rural Idaho and wonder why no one hires top notch programmers for $45 an hour. If you really want a great job and good money, you have to go where the great jobs and good money are.
Let me tell an anecdote: I had a good job in Lafayette, LA. I got laid off. Lafayette is not typically a place where there are good IT jobs and I knew it. I plastered my resume all over, and applied for jobs in location that seemed reasonable. Four months later I was working in Huntsville. Now here recently, my wife had to move to Boston. She couldn't find a job here. So I decided I'd find a job in Boston and follow her. Six or eight months went by without a bite. So I opened it up and went for "somewhere in the Northeast, reasonably close to Boston". Within a month I had an offer in DC.
Moral of the story: Go where the jobs are. Some people will reply to this with some variation on: "I have kids, a house, a sick auntie, etc". That's fine. You have your priorities. Don't complain that there's no IT work in the First World. Complain that the circumstances of your life make it difficult for you to seek IT work.
P.S. If you're curious, I took the job in DC and turned in my resignation in Huntsville. Then the company in Huntsville counter-offered with a 15% raise. It wasn't quite as much as the company in DC was offering, but it's a lot cheaper to live in Huntsville. So now I still live in Huntsville, but I can afford to fly to Boston more often. Not the happiest ending ever, but not awful either.
Where is "here"? I'm just curious. I've never had a hard time finding a job. I was out of work for four months recently, at the height of the recession, granted; but four months is hardly forever. Realistically, considering that everyone was looking for work at the time, I expected it to be much worse. What skill sets do you have? Where are you looking? Are you willing to relocate? I had to relocate to take this job, which sucked, but they paid for the move. When you write resumes and cover letters do you use capitalization and proper punctuation, or are they written like your post? I'm not a Grammar Nazi on Internet forums, and I certainly don't care how you express yourself here; but if you write the same way in business correspondence I wouldn't hire you.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not knocking you. These are legitimate questions. When you send a resume to a business, yours is doubtless one of at least ten they see. I've hired people for entry and mid-career level IT jobs, and I've never received fewer than 10 or 12 applicants for a given job. I've received as many as 30, but that was before the recession; I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that jobs get dozens or hundred of applicants now.
When I have 12 resumes and cover letters in front of me, and I'm looking to weed it down to 4 for interviews I'm looking at a lot of things, but a couple stand out:
1) What can you do that others can't? If your resumes basically says: "I can program in Java" or "I can fix Windows" chances are that you're staying in the pile. If you've got good experience, let it speak for you (really speak for you, not 6 jobs worth of "and then I programmed Java again for x industries"). If you're just starting out, give me an idea of your skills beyond "program Java". Tell me about how you "have in depth understanding of CS fundamentals that will allow you to pick up new skills and tools quickly" (that's nearly word for word from my resume when I was just starting out). Make yourself sound as awesome as you can without actually lying.
2) Quality of the writing. Yes, it matters. If it's between you and a guy who has most of the same qualifications; and your resume is barely intelligible, guess who's getting an interview. I've been known to drop even technically more qualified candidates for people with communication skills. I'm expecting these people to communicated with users, other techs, vendors, in a couple cases even government officials. Being able to write and speak is important.
Of course being familiar with a specific technology or having a particular skill, or whatever can matter too; but really it's about laying out what skills and experience make you awesome, and doing so in a literate, readable way. If your location is really awful, get out. You don't have to live in New York or Silicon Valley to get good work in technical fields, but some places are better than others. I'm in Huntsville, AL right now. Not my preferred home, but there's plenty of work here and the cost of living is reasonable.
Stand out, be flexible, and make your resume the one that the guy with the checkbook wants to hire. It's taken me pretty far for a guy with a BA in History who started as phone in tech support on Windows boxes for just above minimum wage 12 years ago.
He is extremely likely to continue to get raises well past what his mother makes. It's not certain of course, he could die tomorrow, never having gotten a raise, but if he manages his career with any level of skill at all he will get raises and promotions as time goes on. My income has more than doubled since I first started in this industry and that was only 12 years or so ago. Not to mention that I had a 2 year interruption for a deployment to Iraq. Not to mention that if he started teaching now, he wouldn't be making anything like what his mother (and himself in his development job) is making.
It's also worth pointing out that the job security, once touted as one of the few true advantages of going into education, no longer exists. In the last several years many school districts have laid off a lot of teachers.
I can think of three off the top of my head, though none of them would care if you told people you work for them (so long as you didn't provide details of the work), so it must be another one.:-P
No, teachers are undervalued at 20-35K to start, and any halfway decent programmer or qualified sys admin can do better. You misunderstood what he wrote. That was his point, when teachers make so little, and computer types of all stripes make so relatively much, there is little incentive for computer types to become teachers. Are there computer types with salaries lower than a teacher? Probably, but if they have a degree (which is a minimum requirement to teach in nearly every US district) chances are they either won't be making so little for long, or aren't very good at computers (thus if they do start teaching, they simply continue the cycle).
Quite possibly. Hard to say for sure without knowing more of course, but it seems to me that this could be a very economical method of transportation. The helium is doing a lot of the work, and it seems to me that at least a percentage of the power needs could be provided by solar. The thing will spend a lot of it's time above the clouds. Air produces much less friction that water, so you can probably move a lot faster with less energy that a ship, and since the lift is provided by the helium you don't have the massive acceleration requirements of a conventional fixed wing plane. Planes waste a lot of energy just keeping aloft, which wouldn't be a problem here. I doubt you could carry as much as a container ship or train, but you could almost certainly carry a LOT more than a cargo plane.
Seems to me that while this would probably not replace conventional shipping, it could fill a niche between conventional ground/water transport shipping and current air shipping. A cheap, reliable way to ship faster than ground, but not as fast as conventional air. It'd be great for agricultural products, get stuff to the market fresher but at a similar cost?
I think the big questions here are what the power requirements are and what the maximum realistic cargo capacity is. It seems to me (I'm not a expert of course) that the helium is probably a contained system barring problems. You shouldn't really have to add helium unless there is a leak (and there a appear to be systems that can regulate those to some extent). The electrical power could be provided by solar (the whole top of the thing could be a flexible solar panel of some sort), so that could run the pumps that keep the helium equalized and keep instrumentation and crew power live. You'd want batteries and a generator system in case of solar failure of course. The main power requirement would be locomotion. This is where I break down. I have no idea what the locomotive system is, or how much power it uses to achieve what kind of speed.
I'm not saying that this *would* be an efficient, cheap, way to transport cargo... just that I can't see any really good reason it wouldn't be. Not to mention, as TFA points out, that these could go places that currently are very hard to get cargo to, probably a lot cheaper and maybe safer than current methods. A couple of these would be great from making deliveries to that lab down in Antarctica I'm thinking. It's currently a major project to get people and supplies down there because of the ice.
That's not even close to a valid comparison. For one thing, the plane can fly, or at least glide, without fuel. It won't be smooth, but you can get a plane down (at least a lot them), with no fuel at all. For another, there's nearly always more than one fuel tank in a plane, so in the event one is ruptured there's still enough power to fly the plane. For yet another, the fuel is kept in a hardened, insulted tank, not a thin rubber material. Also, the fuel is not nearly as easy to incinerate are hydrogen. I could keep this up for quite a while.
Not to mention the detail where the hydrogen: whether burning, exploding, or miraculously transforming into wine, is holding the damned airship up. Even if it were possible to safely redirect the force of the heat and explosive energy of the hydrogen going up, the airship would crash from lack of lift. The temperature it burns at or the force of its explosiveness is almost immaterial to whether it's a good idea to try to keep a machine in the air using highly flammable gas.
Beyond that, NSA is the classifying authority in and of themselves. They can declassify documents on their own authority if they feel the documents no longer require the protection. Of course they rarely chose to do this, but they legally can. Mostly you're right though, the automatic declassification after 25 years is probably how 99.9% of declassification happen.
Also interesting and relevant is that a Navajo to Japanese dictionary wouldn't help. The Code Talkers used a code within a code, with their language being only the first layer. They also used a combination of standard military/intelligence community "talking code" (basically obscuring the meaning of phrases by referring to code words instead of places, people, or operations), and the simple fact that they had to reinterpret the language to include all the modern warfare technology and techniques they were imparting, to make most of the Code Talk incomprehensible to even native Navajo speakers. While not Code Talkers were ever captured alive, a number of regular Navajo troops were, and none could ever decode the signals Japanese intelligence forced them to listen to.
The Navajo that originally developed the Code Talk were clever on a number of levels. It really was a nearly perfect code. The only way to decode it would be to find a fluent speaker of the language (rare as Hell outside the tribe) who also happened to be an expert on codes and decoding messages (practically unheard of outside of the Code Talkers themselves).
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It takes a special kind of... well, something, to think that "Right to Work" is good for anyone other than employers. As employer you gain the ability to fire anyone, at anytime, for any reason (up to an including not liking their new haircut or the color of their shirt today), as an employee you gain... the ability to not hand in two weeks notice before you quit? (and you should really do that anyway, to avoid getting a bad reference. It's one of the few things they can legally talk about). Thankfully I work at level now where hiring and firing are controlled by a process (most decent employers in right to work states bind themselves to reasonable hiring and firing procedures to make skilled workers feel reasonably safe about taking jobs with them), but I remember seeing people fired from restaurants and bars I used to work in for essentially nothing. And yes, I have seen the haircut thing really happen.
The real worst is that a lot of those CPU eating flash applications are omnipresent ads. For a long time I resisted using ad blockers. I've run small sites and I know that they really need those fractions of a penny per page view; but after the second or third time that my computer was brought to its knees by the ads on my WoW Guild's website (I usually leave it up to check forums and such), I had to do something.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
It seems to be a popular one. It seems that some people believe it indicates an inborn right amongst all people to posses any weapon (up to and including tanks) that they can afford. Other seem to believe that it implies a right to be armed, but not necessarily a right to any weapon one might chose to own. Still others seem to think it is an abridgeable right, and those guilty of certain types of crimes forfeit it. Others still believe that it implies nothing at all for those who don't happen to be in a "well regulated Militia". I'm not going to go into what I think, but the fact remains that the amendment itself is awful damned vague and a reasonable argument can be made for any of the above. There are other examples, but that's definitely the one that jumps to my mind when people ask about "vague" pieces of the Constitution.
Valid point. I didn't mean to imply that their weren't more clever attempts or that some attempts might succeed. Rather I was saying that in the many case where they *don't* succeed it takes longer to unravel with digital cases.
My favorite was the "Nuclear Option". Remember back when the Republicans controlled both Houses and the Presidency, and the bad Democrats were using filibusters to try to stop some of the laws they most disagreed with? And the Republicans had the great idea for the "Nuclear Option", basically using a procedural vote to remove the filibuster from Senate rules? And they basically bullied the Dems into allowing almost everything they wanted by threatening to take away the little power a minority has? Imagine if they'd done it! They'd be laughing heartily at themselves right now I bet!
Nonono... you don't understand. It's only an activist judiciary when it rules against a Republican stalking horse. If it's in favor of the Republican cause of the month, it's respectful of the Constitution. Like a lot of people around here, I'm not a huge fan or either party, but this particular Republican gambit really irritates me.
OK, so you're an engineer-, what, practically, do think is a better way to do it? Should I sort resumes based on the worst written and only interview those guys? You have twenty resumes sitting in front of you. You can only interview four people. Five guys are obvious technical no-gos, they don't have the experience level you need, aren't programmers, whatever. Fifteen are adequate, ten are looking pretty good. What do you decide based on?
You bring in four of them for interviews. Two are clear technical stand outs and both noted processes or procedures that they considered inadequate. One waited till the end and politely asked you questions designed to point out the problems, and perhaps determine if there was a reason you did it that way. The other passive-aggressively implied that your current team are all idiots. Who do you hire?
I'm not quite sure what else to say. Your implication appears to be that since I'm not a troll in a basement I must not be a skill engineer or technician. If that's your theory, then I'm sorry you've been so badly burned, but I'm not gonna keep arguing the matter.
One difference is, as pointed out in the summary, physical investigations tend to be much faster than computer investigations. Most of the time, whether the case is "real world" or digital, these frame ups get caught. People who do these things tend to do them on the spur of moment and often aren't very smart about it. Unfortunately, while the finger prints on those photos found in your desk might come back in a couple days. Thus showing that your cube-mate was the only person to actually touch them. The forensic analysis of your hard drive might take months, even assuming the person doing it is vaguely competent and likely to notice any red flags.
I'm sure my government employer wouldn't care at all that I encrypted my entire hard drive and won't give them the keys. I'm equally certain that the other 10 or so other employees in the administrator group would never be so dishonest as to misuse their administrative logins while attempting to frame me for a crime I didn't commit. Not that I think my fellow employees would do such a thing, nor that I mistrust them at all really; but if I was concerned there'd be a minimal amount I could do about the situation. even given that I'm an administrator on my own box (which a lot of people aren't in the working world). If the auditing on your system is tight you might be able to prove that you didn't put the images there, but a really intelligent attacker with admin access to your PC could still fake it.
I'm not denigrating your solution per se. It's great for a home PC and I totally recommend it, but from a business perspective it's not going to be horribly effective for most people.
You don't have to move every few years. It's helpful if you can, but hardly necessary. I had to get out of Lafayette, I'll grant you, but I could probably stay here in Huntsville for the rest of my life and do well. My more recent desire to move has more to do with wanting to be on the East Coast than not wanting to be here, or needing to leave to find work. The point was more that you can't stay in your own personal Lafayette, than that you have to keep moving all the time.
Actually I'm a thesis away from a master's degree in computer science from a respected university now, so get off your high horse. I did my time in trenches and used the educational benefits I got to better myself. The ability to speak and write well is not mutually exclusive to being technologically knowledgeable and capable. As to little or no technological bias, apparently you have not read my posting history. I'm mostly Anti-windows and pro-Unix. I use Macs and Linux for everything except gaming. I'm a strong advocate of secure code and spend a good chunk of my day fighting with people to ensure we don't compromise on the important stuff.
There is not direct correlation between socially awkward and competent engineer. Some of the world's best engineers may be socially awkward, but just as many of them are confident well adjusted people who have done well for themselves. You can sell yourself and still be a good engineer. You can be flexible (on some things) and still be a good engineer. Selling yourself isn't lying, it's presenting the truth in the best possible light (I've never lied on a resume). Being flexible isn't compromising on security or usability, it's knowing when you CAN compromise without damaging the project. At some point compromises must be made, or nothing gets released.
But hey, thanks for painting me as some sort of hack who's gotten by on charm and good looks (neither of which I have in any abundance by the way) for the last 12 years. Especially since you don't know me. That's appreciated.
The place itself is still popular, not the medium. The medium only retains enough popularity to keep a relative small number of places in business, but among those who still enjoy it, this place is popular. It's one of the advantages of living in city like New York. In an area with 20 million people, all of whom can get to anywhere in the city fairly trivially on the subway, there's bound to be enough of a market to keep at least a few of any type of business afloat. Thus whenever you have whim to go to an arcade, or find a place to get a "fish pedicure", or entertain virtually any other whim, hobby, or perversion that might strike you: chances are there's a place to do it, and chances are you can get there on the subway.
Double Dead guy is better. Or if you want to keep it low gravity, Hazelnut Brown Nectar. Really most of Rogue's beers are pretty awesome, they're one of the better breweries in the US. Not to say that there aren't beer individual beers out here than any specific Rogue beer; but for overall quality across an entire and very extensive line of brews, Rogue is in the top ten.
Eh... rereading this I'm thinking it implies some stuff I didn't mean. I don't mean to imply you should accept a thousand mile geographic separation from your wife as a matter of course in the IT job market. Our situation was a lot more complex than that when we decided she'd go to Boston. The point of the story was to illustrate the benefits of flexibility, not ruthlessly following the money. Ruthlessly following the money would help you in the IT job market I suppose, but it's not usually the road to happiness. A middle ground is probably the better option :-)
Typically I think that guys isn't trying all that hard. Yes, there is plenty of IT work in the First World. Lots of stuff is pretty hard to outsource (internal IT works best when it's internal), other stuff CAN'T be outsourced (Governments typically want citizens of their countries working for them. I'm a Federal Contractor ATM), and even some of the worst outsourcing offenders are starting to lose their taste for it (When was the last time you talked to Raj^H^H^HBob at Dell?). Does that mean you can go get an MCSE and expect high paying job offers to fall from the trees like in the mid-90's? No. You've gotta be willing to work for it. You've gotta be willing to sell yourself a bit. You've gotta pay attention in English and History classes when the professor is trying to bang some writing skills into your head.
There's a lot of very smart people out there who think that their abilities and intelligence are so manifestly obvious that they should be able to walk into any job in the industry. They're ignoring a lot of realities. For one, while it may be true that you can learn any language or package in the universe after playing with it for an hour, a hiring manager can't know that. He's got 10 or 20 or 100 other guys some of whom already claim to know the stuff he needs, and all he has to judge them on is the 3 or 4 sheets of paper in front of him. For another, despite what you may wish, most IT jobs still involve a fair amount of dealing with humans. That means that communications skills are also important.
Also, like I said, you probably have to be willing to compromise. You can't live in rural Idaho and wonder why no one hires top notch programmers for $45 an hour. If you really want a great job and good money, you have to go where the great jobs and good money are.
Let me tell an anecdote: I had a good job in Lafayette, LA. I got laid off. Lafayette is not typically a place where there are good IT jobs and I knew it. I plastered my resume all over, and applied for jobs in location that seemed reasonable. Four months later I was working in Huntsville. Now here recently, my wife had to move to Boston. She couldn't find a job here. So I decided I'd find a job in Boston and follow her. Six or eight months went by without a bite. So I opened it up and went for "somewhere in the Northeast, reasonably close to Boston". Within a month I had an offer in DC.
Moral of the story: Go where the jobs are. Some people will reply to this with some variation on: "I have kids, a house, a sick auntie, etc". That's fine. You have your priorities. Don't complain that there's no IT work in the First World. Complain that the circumstances of your life make it difficult for you to seek IT work.
P.S. If you're curious, I took the job in DC and turned in my resignation in Huntsville. Then the company in Huntsville counter-offered with a 15% raise. It wasn't quite as much as the company in DC was offering, but it's a lot cheaper to live in Huntsville. So now I still live in Huntsville, but I can afford to fly to Boston more often. Not the happiest ending ever, but not awful either.
Where is "here"? I'm just curious. I've never had a hard time finding a job. I was out of work for four months recently, at the height of the recession, granted; but four months is hardly forever. Realistically, considering that everyone was looking for work at the time, I expected it to be much worse. What skill sets do you have? Where are you looking? Are you willing to relocate? I had to relocate to take this job, which sucked, but they paid for the move. When you write resumes and cover letters do you use capitalization and proper punctuation, or are they written like your post? I'm not a Grammar Nazi on Internet forums, and I certainly don't care how you express yourself here; but if you write the same way in business correspondence I wouldn't hire you.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not knocking you. These are legitimate questions. When you send a resume to a business, yours is doubtless one of at least ten they see. I've hired people for entry and mid-career level IT jobs, and I've never received fewer than 10 or 12 applicants for a given job. I've received as many as 30, but that was before the recession; I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that jobs get dozens or hundred of applicants now.
When I have 12 resumes and cover letters in front of me, and I'm looking to weed it down to 4 for interviews I'm looking at a lot of things, but a couple stand out:
1) What can you do that others can't? If your resumes basically says: "I can program in Java" or "I can fix Windows" chances are that you're staying in the pile. If you've got good experience, let it speak for you (really speak for you, not 6 jobs worth of "and then I programmed Java again for x industries"). If you're just starting out, give me an idea of your skills beyond "program Java". Tell me about how you "have in depth understanding of CS fundamentals that will allow you to pick up new skills and tools quickly" (that's nearly word for word from my resume when I was just starting out). Make yourself sound as awesome as you can without actually lying.
2) Quality of the writing. Yes, it matters. If it's between you and a guy who has most of the same qualifications; and your resume is barely intelligible, guess who's getting an interview. I've been known to drop even technically more qualified candidates for people with communication skills. I'm expecting these people to communicated with users, other techs, vendors, in a couple cases even government officials. Being able to write and speak is important.
Of course being familiar with a specific technology or having a particular skill, or whatever can matter too; but really it's about laying out what skills and experience make you awesome, and doing so in a literate, readable way. If your location is really awful, get out. You don't have to live in New York or Silicon Valley to get good work in technical fields, but some places are better than others. I'm in Huntsville, AL right now. Not my preferred home, but there's plenty of work here and the cost of living is reasonable.
Stand out, be flexible, and make your resume the one that the guy with the checkbook wants to hire. It's taken me pretty far for a guy with a BA in History who started as phone in tech support on Windows boxes for just above minimum wage 12 years ago.
He is extremely likely to continue to get raises well past what his mother makes. It's not certain of course, he could die tomorrow, never having gotten a raise, but if he manages his career with any level of skill at all he will get raises and promotions as time goes on. My income has more than doubled since I first started in this industry and that was only 12 years or so ago. Not to mention that I had a 2 year interruption for a deployment to Iraq. Not to mention that if he started teaching now, he wouldn't be making anything like what his mother (and himself in his development job) is making.
It's also worth pointing out that the job security, once touted as one of the few true advantages of going into education, no longer exists. In the last several years many school districts have laid off a lot of teachers.
I can think of three off the top of my head, though none of them would care if you told people you work for them (so long as you didn't provide details of the work), so it must be another one. :-P
No, teachers are undervalued at 20-35K to start, and any halfway decent programmer or qualified sys admin can do better. You misunderstood what he wrote. That was his point, when teachers make so little, and computer types of all stripes make so relatively much, there is little incentive for computer types to become teachers. Are there computer types with salaries lower than a teacher? Probably, but if they have a degree (which is a minimum requirement to teach in nearly every US district) chances are they either won't be making so little for long, or aren't very good at computers (thus if they do start teaching, they simply continue the cycle).
Quite possibly. Hard to say for sure without knowing more of course, but it seems to me that this could be a very economical method of transportation. The helium is doing a lot of the work, and it seems to me that at least a percentage of the power needs could be provided by solar. The thing will spend a lot of it's time above the clouds. Air produces much less friction that water, so you can probably move a lot faster with less energy that a ship, and since the lift is provided by the helium you don't have the massive acceleration requirements of a conventional fixed wing plane. Planes waste a lot of energy just keeping aloft, which wouldn't be a problem here. I doubt you could carry as much as a container ship or train, but you could almost certainly carry a LOT more than a cargo plane.
Seems to me that while this would probably not replace conventional shipping, it could fill a niche between conventional ground/water transport shipping and current air shipping. A cheap, reliable way to ship faster than ground, but not as fast as conventional air. It'd be great for agricultural products, get stuff to the market fresher but at a similar cost?
I think the big questions here are what the power requirements are and what the maximum realistic cargo capacity is. It seems to me (I'm not a expert of course) that the helium is probably a contained system barring problems. You shouldn't really have to add helium unless there is a leak (and there a appear to be systems that can regulate those to some extent). The electrical power could be provided by solar (the whole top of the thing could be a flexible solar panel of some sort), so that could run the pumps that keep the helium equalized and keep instrumentation and crew power live. You'd want batteries and a generator system in case of solar failure of course. The main power requirement would be locomotion. This is where I break down. I have no idea what the locomotive system is, or how much power it uses to achieve what kind of speed.
I'm not saying that this *would* be an efficient, cheap, way to transport cargo... just that I can't see any really good reason it wouldn't be. Not to mention, as TFA points out, that these could go places that currently are very hard to get cargo to, probably a lot cheaper and maybe safer than current methods. A couple of these would be great from making deliveries to that lab down in Antarctica I'm thinking. It's currently a major project to get people and supplies down there because of the ice.
That's not even close to a valid comparison. For one thing, the plane can fly, or at least glide, without fuel. It won't be smooth, but you can get a plane down (at least a lot them), with no fuel at all. For another, there's nearly always more than one fuel tank in a plane, so in the event one is ruptured there's still enough power to fly the plane. For yet another, the fuel is kept in a hardened, insulted tank, not a thin rubber material. Also, the fuel is not nearly as easy to incinerate are hydrogen. I could keep this up for quite a while.
Not to mention the detail where the hydrogen: whether burning, exploding, or miraculously transforming into wine, is holding the damned airship up. Even if it were possible to safely redirect the force of the heat and explosive energy of the hydrogen going up, the airship would crash from lack of lift. The temperature it burns at or the force of its explosiveness is almost immaterial to whether it's a good idea to try to keep a machine in the air using highly flammable gas.
If the stories further up are true, it looks like converted Motel because it is ;-)
Beyond that, NSA is the classifying authority in and of themselves. They can declassify documents on their own authority if they feel the documents no longer require the protection. Of course they rarely chose to do this, but they legally can. Mostly you're right though, the automatic declassification after 25 years is probably how 99.9% of declassification happen.
Also interesting and relevant is that a Navajo to Japanese dictionary wouldn't help. The Code Talkers used a code within a code, with their language being only the first layer. They also used a combination of standard military/intelligence community "talking code" (basically obscuring the meaning of phrases by referring to code words instead of places, people, or operations), and the simple fact that they had to reinterpret the language to include all the modern warfare technology and techniques they were imparting, to make most of the Code Talk incomprehensible to even native Navajo speakers. While not Code Talkers were ever captured alive, a number of regular Navajo troops were, and none could ever decode the signals Japanese intelligence forced them to listen to.
The Navajo that originally developed the Code Talk were clever on a number of levels. It really was a nearly perfect code. The only way to decode it would be to find a fluent speaker of the language (rare as Hell outside the tribe) who also happened to be an expert on codes and decoding messages (practically unheard of outside of the Code Talkers themselves).