That one may have been a bit overly harsh and punitive, but - good! When your own government representatives lie, I see no problem with "throwing the book at them". If you don't want to be under a microscope, don't be in a public office...
I think in fact it would be disingenuous to those *without* a degree to underestimate their own ambitions that way!
It often isn't that these people choose not to get a degree, it is that they are (either for time or money) incapable of getting the degree.
No, I think you totally misunderstood it... I'm saying that those without a degree should not be treated any differently (besides maybe requiring a couple extra years of experience/practical work to make up for the lack of a degree) while you seem to be telling the OP "hire them, you can get them for cheap!" While there are some (usually very conservative/old school) companies that do look for degrees, that's completely not the trend in Silicon Valley these days. Hell, many of the founders never completed theirs, so it's almost ingrained in the culture to go for talent over education. So I'm saying, don't underestimate the earning potential of those people! And it proves out over the years. At least in SV, your pay is largely a combination of the *range* of the position (which can be highly variable) and something that matches/beats an employee's current salary. If you keep settling you will never get the pay increases...
The problem is that unlike highschool, college is not subsidized by taxes, and thus not free to the public good.
This is partly true. Private schools by definition, of course, are not. Though if you are going to Stanford or MIT you are probably going to be able to pay off those student loans quickly enough, anyway. Public schools IMO are the problem. How the hell can a public school charge $13k for tuition (which doesn't even include room and board). Well - we know the answer - because the US is no longer prioritizing education.
You will have to. OR-- you can be deluded, and hire 100% H1Bs.
Which makes a lot of this is fairly academic (again no pun intended) since there is such a shortage of decent SW engineers in the US right now that we are importing as many as allowed from India and China, etc. And those developers will pretty much always have degrees AND be cheaper to hire. Not saying that's necessarily a good thing, but it's the current reality.
In fact, the combination of skyrocketing US tuition and more talent from out of the county means it's really not going to end up being a decision of the company HR or hiring managers, it's going to be up to the US government to fix (whether by fixing tuition or limiting H1Bs). And given the new Republican Congress doesn't give a rat's ass about student debt (they are happy with charging 7% on Federal loans when you can get a freaking mortgage or car loan for 4%), and shrinking H1Bs would seriously harm economic/tech growth in the US in the short/mid term, it's likely that nothing will be done in the near future. Big surprise...
Ok... 400k range UID... haven't seen the 100s of similar/. articles... did you just get out of prison yourself? Maybe caught one too many undersized groupers?
They may incur a fine as well, but no one goes to court or jail usually.
Wouldn't have gone to court or jail if they hadn't knowingly tried to destroy the evidence. Such a stupid move...
If the police tell you to take the bag of cocaine down to the precinct for processing instead of confiscating it and you just happen to lose it somehow, would that be obstruction too?
Well, bad analogy since cocaine trafficking is not a minor crime, but if one of your employees admitted to destroying the evidence on your orders, yes, in fact it *would* be obstruction...
I can't stand Alito, Scalia, Thomas, or the other ultra conservative judges who generally do this exact ridiculously literal interpretation on almost every case. Which is why it's so mind boggling that Kagan and Kennedy would pull that same idiotic overly literal reading (and in this case worse). Hard to say anything other than WTF. The Supreme Court may be as broken as Congress..
Total overreach, and I don't understand why they couldn't have gone with some simpler "destruction of evidence" charge (which I'm sure is still fairly serious and would turn a fine into a prison sentence).
Though if you read TFA he was sentenced to 30 days under a statute that could have given 20 years. The fact is he was ordered to preserve and turn over the evidence of his minor violation and he destroyed it, which was stupid and clearly worse than the original crime. The judge was actually pretty reasonable with the sentence, it was just the prosecutor who picked the wrong statue to prosecute...
20 years is definitely excessive for what they indicate would normally be the equivalent of a minor fine (like a speeding ticket). However, the article goes on to note that he was sentenced to 30 days. I'd still consider that to be excessive myself - but not outrageously so considering it was destruction of evidence, deliberate fraud for financial advantage, as well as likely refusing to comply with a relevant direct request from an appropriate deputized federal officer in the normal course of his duties.
Actually, if 30 days was the sentence for knowingly destroying the evidence that would have otherwise resulted in a fine, I'd say it's in NO way excessive. Though I guess the problem with it is not the sentence (which seemed totally reasonable) but the statute that was used to convict, which could actually define the rules for all preservation of "evidence" under Sarbanes-Oxley rules...
Seriously, though, it's not even a matter of Congress misunderstanding the law. It's a matter of the prosecutors (and even more scarily the courts) completely subverting the law through overly literal interpretation.
Though what disturbs me the most about this is that it may be the first non-unanimous Supreme Court decision in my lifetime where I 100% agree with the "conservative judges."
Seems like the prosecutors could have gone with a good old "destruction of evidence" and not had to delve into Sarbanes-Oxley (which while having many good intentions is in so many ways a totally fucked up law that has made billions for a few financial and auditing consulting companies and cost tens of billions for the rest.)
As far a overqualified: I have hired engineers with no BS (no pun intended) but generally they have 2-4 more years of experience than those of equivalent background with a BS (makes sense - same way an MS counts for an extra year and a PhD an extra 3 or so... which also means if you are doing it just to get a better job, PhDs are not in themselves remotely worth it!) I think in fact it would be disingenuous to those *without* a degree to underestimate their own ambitions that way!
Also, we do not pay engineers based on their debt, whether it be student loans, cars, or a mortgage (which dwarfs student loans in the Bay Area), and none have ever brought it up. So that's really a non-issue from a hiring manager's perspective. In fact, that sounds like a borderline discriminatory practice in itself...
My experience is that the A+ talent (and this is not grade inflation - "A+ talent" is the top few percent, max) can command the top salaries pretty much wherever they want. You are talking about the B+ talent. So I suppose I might grudgingly agree IF you are lucky you might be able to find a B+ engineer for a B salary because a few companies with dumb hiring policies passed based on lack of a degree...
Never mind that by the numbers, the actual top A+ talent does not fall into the "Has prestigious 4 year degree!" demographic.
Requiring a degree when a candidate has a provable track record and skills is a stupid, misguided policy. But so is pretending they are inherently superior. There are plenty (almost definitely more "by the numbers") excellent engineers with degrees (though not all CS nor engineering at all).
But you seem to be implying that those without degrees are inherently more qualified, which is just as bad an assumption as implying the opposite.
The best (and really one of the only, other than networking connections) way to differentiate yourself as a new grad is to build something yourself. The thing that usually impresses me the most when interviewing is someone who is passionate about a project of their own, and can both show it off and explain it backwards and forwards.
You want a job as an iOS dev and can demonstrate an app you designed and built singlehandedly? You've got a good shot at getting hired right there... (the other bits are basically verifying your coding is not an awful unorganized hack or a bunch of cut-and-paste, and that you are an otherwise friendly, non-serial killer personality that can work in a team).
Maybe they meant "give seminars on Hot Topic". There is a lot to learn about t-shirt memes, chainmail bras, and candy that turns your tongue black if you want to work at that prestigious mall store.
Given that the answer was "it's not necessarily required any more than in your story about Sweden where you were surprised at the fact anyway", it was a pretty poor attempt at a rhetorical question...
If that's what you think then you missed the point just as badly as the OP. The issue is he clearly just didn't understand what an "inalienable right" is in the first place.
Because the US has a different governmental system than Sweden. It's a Republic made up of semi-independent states, so you are a citizen of a state and the Republic. There are in fact some (though relatively few) local jurisdictions that allow permanent residents to vote. And even registration is up to the state or municipality (for example, North Dakota generally doesn't require registration). So it's really not all that much different in principle, just in implementation.
Registration has a long history in the US, as well. It has been used for good (preventing rampant voter fraud in the late 19th/early 20th century) and evil (disenfranchising minorities in the South with intimidation, unconstitutional financial or literacy requirements). And in fact since the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 it's become a lot easier to register - states are required to allow registration via DMV, libraries, and mail in forms rather than specific county clerk offices, etc. A lot of states let you do it entirely online, now, too, and there are even some states that allow *same day* registration at the polling place, which really isn't significantly different from no-register policies besides a bit of extra paperwork.
So, basically, a lot of the random comments on this thread are total FUD or misinformation based on whiny uneducated opinion. There are most definitely still some issues with voter registration (especially with Republican efforts to disenfranchise minority or poor voters with various and so far mostly unconstitutional state legislation). But it's not nearly as bad as some of the ridiculous comments here pretend.
I find it perplexing that a party who claims to be pro-freedom so quickly and aggressively attacked an unalienable right.
"unalienable right"!? is that a right not permitted to ET?
Or do you mean "inalienable right"? Which in not even the most basic definition includes the right to own a gun (that is a *legal* right under the US Constitution).
Though I'm not surprised by your mistake. Your ilk goes back hundreds of years to those who somehow justified slavery while pretending to defend "inalienable rights", that even defined by the American founding fathers stated: "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Yet somehow this was utterly and completely ignored for a significant fraction of the American population at the time of the American Revolutionary War...
Though I suppose you are right, maybe you are just confused and I should not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity...
In every election I have participated in (which is many) in 2 states this has been completely untrue.
You walk in, sign your name and write your address, and get a ballot. You then get a ballot, and you can feel free to turn the entire thing in untouched and are still recorded as having voted.
I don't know much about electronic voting, but (and correct me if I'm wrong) I don't believe you actually have to cast votes any more than on a punch ballot. Why the hell would you want to "misvote"? Just don't vote where you don't want to vote. Don't see the problem.
And seriously, how hard is it to register to vote beforehand? And even if you miss one election because you were a moron and didn't register, it's not like you have to do it in every election. Keep voting and you are automatically registered. If you don't care enough to register or keep voting, frankly who gives a shit about your vote?
Waiting a half hour to buy a ticket?! Have you ever heard of the Internet? You don't even have to print out the ticket any more, you can show the e-ticket on your cell phone.
Just wow. A thread whining about not being able use augmented reality glasses in a theater complaining about standing in line for movie tickets. Online movie tickets isn't even a new thing, it's been around for a decade now.
(not to mention the silliness about 100+ degree heat - you must go to the only movie theater in the US without the usual nuclear powered AC. That's the reason many people actually *go* to the theater in the summer...)
Oh, you have to be kidding me. There may be valid arguments for Google glass but this is not one of them. You can get a cheap pair of glasses for the price of a movie ticket and some popcorn these days.
It's like whining about eliminating your ability to drive because the F1 car in your garage is not street legal.
You are equating socialism with communism ("pinko")? Really?! You'd think with a vested interesting in understanding the governments you'd have learned more by now...
Communism is a joke, there are no actual "Communist" countries. China is a capitalist totalitarianism (and interestingly Russia has basically become that as well, though through a very different path). The US is a capitalist democracy (and calling it socialistic is a joke as well - look to Europe for socialist democracies, some of which are doing pretty damn well).
And while the US may be poorly functioning with its democracy (as in deadlock), I'm still going to stand by a belief that mass idiots electing random idiots is still better than a few idiots telling everyone else what to do and imprisoning those that disagree with them.
And asthma is often a disqualification for military service. I have seen people have asthma attacks just sitting around, if by mentioning simulators are saying you should be piloting drones launching cruise missiles I'm not sure that's the best idea (especially since all of the drone pilots are also *real* trained military pilots).
But I guess I didn't put an important clarification in this post - I was clearer in another one when I said *with no other health issues*. And I only said "1/2 of the kids graduating from high school", so, big deal, you are one of the other 1/2, nothing personal implied, obviously.
Besides, do you *want* to join the Army and get paid $35k a year doing mostly more boring things that I assume you are getting paid multiples of that for more interesting work? (that's an assumption, again, that you are an intelligent technically minded person, apologies if that's not true). If not, then please stop pretending you are being discriminated against for something you have no interest in doing.
I can however benchpress my own weight. Different muscle groups..
Well, if you even know what a benchpress is you are ahead of the game on/. apparently... Any good trainer could get you doing > 20-30 push ups in 2 minutes in a month. Those muscle groups may not start big but they follow the same biological principles as anyone else's:)
Ok replying to myself... but maybe they should think of it this way. $1.5M for one cruise missile that probably takes out a building a a few terrorists. Well, cyber warfare doesn't work like that, you can't just blindly spend on a "hacking program" (despite the promise of Neuromancer;) - the human is actually doing most of the work, so maybe they should be considered a valuable asset...
Slashdot Mirror
That one may have been a bit overly harsh and punitive, but - good! When your own government representatives lie, I see no problem with "throwing the book at them". If you don't want to be under a microscope, don't be in a public office...
There is a problem with this statement:
I think in fact it would be disingenuous to those *without* a degree to underestimate their own ambitions that way!
It often isn't that these people choose not to get a degree, it is that they are (either for time or money) incapable of getting the degree.
No, I think you totally misunderstood it... I'm saying that those without a degree should not be treated any differently (besides maybe requiring a couple extra years of experience/practical work to make up for the lack of a degree) while you seem to be telling the OP "hire them, you can get them for cheap!" While there are some (usually very conservative/old school) companies that do look for degrees, that's completely not the trend in Silicon Valley these days. Hell, many of the founders never completed theirs, so it's almost ingrained in the culture to go for talent over education. So I'm saying, don't underestimate the earning potential of those people! And it proves out over the years. At least in SV, your pay is largely a combination of the *range* of the position (which can be highly variable) and something that matches/beats an employee's current salary. If you keep settling you will never get the pay increases...
The problem is that unlike highschool, college is not subsidized by taxes, and thus not free to the public good.
This is partly true. Private schools by definition, of course, are not. Though if you are going to Stanford or MIT you are probably going to be able to pay off those student loans quickly enough, anyway. Public schools IMO are the problem. How the hell can a public school charge $13k for tuition (which doesn't even include room and board). Well - we know the answer - because the US is no longer prioritizing education.
You will have to. OR-- you can be deluded, and hire 100% H1Bs.
Which makes a lot of this is fairly academic (again no pun intended) since there is such a shortage of decent SW engineers in the US right now that we are importing as many as allowed from India and China, etc. And those developers will pretty much always have degrees AND be cheaper to hire. Not saying that's necessarily a good thing, but it's the current reality.
In fact, the combination of skyrocketing US tuition and more talent from out of the county means it's really not going to end up being a decision of the company HR or hiring managers, it's going to be up to the US government to fix (whether by fixing tuition or limiting H1Bs). And given the new Republican Congress doesn't give a rat's ass about student debt (they are happy with charging 7% on Federal loans when you can get a freaking mortgage or car loan for 4%), and shrinking H1Bs would seriously harm economic/tech growth in the US in the short/mid term, it's likely that nothing will be done in the near future. Big surprise...
Ok... 400k range UID... haven't seen the 100s of similar /. articles... did you just get out of prison yourself? Maybe caught one too many undersized groupers?
They may incur a fine as well, but no one goes to court or jail usually.
Wouldn't have gone to court or jail if they hadn't knowingly tried to destroy the evidence. Such a stupid move...
If the police tell you to take the bag of cocaine down to the precinct for processing instead of confiscating it and you just happen to lose it somehow, would that be obstruction too?
Well, bad analogy since cocaine trafficking is not a minor crime, but if one of your employees admitted to destroying the evidence on your orders, yes, in fact it *would* be obstruction...
I can't stand Alito, Scalia, Thomas, or the other ultra conservative judges who generally do this exact ridiculously literal interpretation on almost every case. Which is why it's so mind boggling that Kagan and Kennedy would pull that same idiotic overly literal reading (and in this case worse). Hard to say anything other than WTF. The Supreme Court may be as broken as Congress..
Total overreach, and I don't understand why they couldn't have gone with some simpler "destruction of evidence" charge (which I'm sure is still fairly serious and would turn a fine into a prison sentence).
Though if you read TFA he was sentenced to 30 days under a statute that could have given 20 years. The fact is he was ordered to preserve and turn over the evidence of his minor violation and he destroyed it, which was stupid and clearly worse than the original crime. The judge was actually pretty reasonable with the sentence, it was just the prosecutor who picked the wrong statue to prosecute...
20 years is definitely excessive for what they indicate would normally be the equivalent of a minor fine (like a speeding ticket). However, the article goes on to note that he was sentenced to 30 days. I'd still consider that to be excessive myself - but not outrageously so considering it was destruction of evidence, deliberate fraud for financial advantage, as well as likely refusing to comply with a relevant direct request from an appropriate deputized federal officer in the normal course of his duties.
Actually, if 30 days was the sentence for knowingly destroying the evidence that would have otherwise resulted in a fine, I'd say it's in NO way excessive. Though I guess the problem with it is not the sentence (which seemed totally reasonable) but the statute that was used to convict, which could actually define the rules for all preservation of "evidence" under Sarbanes-Oxley rules...
Seriously, though, it's not even a matter of Congress misunderstanding the law. It's a matter of the prosecutors (and even more scarily the courts) completely subverting the law through overly literal interpretation.
Though what disturbs me the most about this is that it may be the first non-unanimous Supreme Court decision in my lifetime where I 100% agree with the "conservative judges."
Seems like the prosecutors could have gone with a good old "destruction of evidence" and not had to delve into Sarbanes-Oxley (which while having many good intentions is in so many ways a totally fucked up law that has made billions for a few financial and auditing consulting companies and cost tens of billions for the rest.)
I still disagree with the numbers overall.
As far a overqualified: I have hired engineers with no BS (no pun intended) but generally they have 2-4 more years of experience than those of equivalent background with a BS (makes sense - same way an MS counts for an extra year and a PhD an extra 3 or so... which also means if you are doing it just to get a better job, PhDs are not in themselves remotely worth it!) I think in fact it would be disingenuous to those *without* a degree to underestimate their own ambitions that way!
Also, we do not pay engineers based on their debt, whether it be student loans, cars, or a mortgage (which dwarfs student loans in the Bay Area), and none have ever brought it up. So that's really a non-issue from a hiring manager's perspective. In fact, that sounds like a borderline discriminatory practice in itself...
My experience is that the A+ talent (and this is not grade inflation - "A+ talent" is the top few percent, max) can command the top salaries pretty much wherever they want. You are talking about the B+ talent. So I suppose I might grudgingly agree IF you are lucky you might be able to find a B+ engineer for a B salary because a few companies with dumb hiring policies passed based on lack of a degree...
Never mind that by the numbers, the actual top A+ talent does not fall into the "Has prestigious 4 year degree!" demographic.
Requiring a degree when a candidate has a provable track record and skills is a stupid, misguided policy. But so is pretending they are inherently superior. There are plenty (almost definitely more "by the numbers") excellent engineers with degrees (though not all CS nor engineering at all).
But you seem to be implying that those without degrees are inherently more qualified, which is just as bad an assumption as implying the opposite.
The best (and really one of the only, other than networking connections) way to differentiate yourself as a new grad is to build something yourself. The thing that usually impresses me the most when interviewing is someone who is passionate about a project of their own, and can both show it off and explain it backwards and forwards.
You want a job as an iOS dev and can demonstrate an app you designed and built singlehandedly? You've got a good shot at getting hired right there... (the other bits are basically verifying your coding is not an awful unorganized hack or a bunch of cut-and-paste, and that you are an otherwise friendly, non-serial killer personality that can work in a team).
Maybe they meant "give seminars on Hot Topic". There is a lot to learn about t-shirt memes, chainmail bras, and candy that turns your tongue black if you want to work at that prestigious mall store.
I lost out on a job because I didn't have experience with Windows XP Server.
No, you really didn't lose out on that one.
If anything, the system worked as it should and saved you a lot of misery.
Given that the answer was "it's not necessarily required any more than in your story about Sweden where you were surprised at the fact anyway", it was a pretty poor attempt at a rhetorical question...
If that's what you think then you missed the point just as badly as the OP. The issue is he clearly just didn't understand what an "inalienable right" is in the first place.
Why is voter registration even required?
Because the US has a different governmental system than Sweden. It's a Republic made up of semi-independent states, so you are a citizen of a state and the Republic. There are in fact some (though relatively few) local jurisdictions that allow permanent residents to vote. And even registration is up to the state or municipality (for example, North Dakota generally doesn't require registration). So it's really not all that much different in principle, just in implementation.
Registration has a long history in the US, as well. It has been used for good (preventing rampant voter fraud in the late 19th/early 20th century) and evil (disenfranchising minorities in the South with intimidation, unconstitutional financial or literacy requirements). And in fact since the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 it's become a lot easier to register - states are required to allow registration via DMV, libraries, and mail in forms rather than specific county clerk offices, etc. A lot of states let you do it entirely online, now, too, and there are even some states that allow *same day* registration at the polling place, which really isn't significantly different from no-register policies besides a bit of extra paperwork.
So, basically, a lot of the random comments on this thread are total FUD or misinformation based on whiny uneducated opinion. There are most definitely still some issues with voter registration (especially with Republican efforts to disenfranchise minority or poor voters with various and so far mostly unconstitutional state legislation). But it's not nearly as bad as some of the ridiculous comments here pretend.
I find it perplexing that a party who claims to be pro-freedom so quickly and aggressively attacked an unalienable right.
"unalienable right"!? is that a right not permitted to ET?
Or do you mean "inalienable right"? Which in not even the most basic definition includes the right to own a gun (that is a *legal* right under the US Constitution).
Though I'm not surprised by your mistake. Your ilk goes back hundreds of years to those who somehow justified slavery while pretending to defend "inalienable rights", that even defined by the American founding fathers stated: "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Yet somehow this was utterly and completely ignored for a significant fraction of the American population at the time of the American Revolutionary War...
Though I suppose you are right, maybe you are just confused and I should not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity...
In every election I have participated in (which is many) in 2 states this has been completely untrue.
You walk in, sign your name and write your address, and get a ballot. You then get a ballot, and you can feel free to turn the entire thing in untouched and are still recorded as having voted.
I don't know much about electronic voting, but (and correct me if I'm wrong) I don't believe you actually have to cast votes any more than on a punch ballot. Why the hell would you want to "misvote"? Just don't vote where you don't want to vote. Don't see the problem.
And seriously, how hard is it to register to vote beforehand? And even if you miss one election because you were a moron and didn't register, it's not like you have to do it in every election. Keep voting and you are automatically registered. If you don't care enough to register or keep voting, frankly who gives a shit about your vote?
Waiting a half hour to buy a ticket?! Have you ever heard of the Internet? You don't even have to print out the ticket any more, you can show the e-ticket on your cell phone.
Just wow. A thread whining about not being able use augmented reality glasses in a theater complaining about standing in line for movie tickets. Online movie tickets isn't even a new thing, it's been around for a decade now.
(not to mention the silliness about 100+ degree heat - you must go to the only movie theater in the US without the usual nuclear powered AC. That's the reason many people actually *go* to the theater in the summer...)
Oh, you have to be kidding me. There may be valid arguments for Google glass but this is not one of them. You can get a cheap pair of glasses for the price of a movie ticket and some popcorn these days.
It's like whining about eliminating your ability to drive because the F1 car in your garage is not street legal.
Record the recorder, maybe, but not record the movie. Federal Copyright law still trumps state law on that front...
You are equating socialism with communism ("pinko")? Really?! You'd think with a vested interesting in understanding the governments you'd have learned more by now...
Communism is a joke, there are no actual "Communist" countries. China is a capitalist totalitarianism (and interestingly Russia has basically become that as well, though through a very different path). The US is a capitalist democracy (and calling it socialistic is a joke as well - look to Europe for socialist democracies, some of which are doing pretty damn well).
And while the US may be poorly functioning with its democracy (as in deadlock), I'm still going to stand by a belief that mass idiots electing random idiots is still better than a few idiots telling everyone else what to do and imprisoning those that disagree with them.
And asthma is often a disqualification for military service. I have seen people have asthma attacks just sitting around, if by mentioning simulators are saying you should be piloting drones launching cruise missiles I'm not sure that's the best idea (especially since all of the drone pilots are also *real* trained military pilots).
But I guess I didn't put an important clarification in this post - I was clearer in another one when I said *with no other health issues*. And I only said "1/2 of the kids graduating from high school", so, big deal, you are one of the other 1/2, nothing personal implied, obviously.
Besides, do you *want* to join the Army and get paid $35k a year doing mostly more boring things that I assume you are getting paid multiples of that for more interesting work? (that's an assumption, again, that you are an intelligent technically minded person, apologies if that's not true). If not, then please stop pretending you are being discriminated against for something you have no interest in doing.
I can however benchpress my own weight. Different muscle groups..
Well, if you even know what a benchpress is you are ahead of the game on /. apparently... Any good trainer could get you doing > 20-30 push ups in 2 minutes in a month. Those muscle groups may not start big but they follow the same biological principles as anyone else's :)
Ok replying to myself... but maybe they should think of it this way. $1.5M for one cruise missile that probably takes out a building a a few terrorists. Well, cyber warfare doesn't work like that, you can't just blindly spend on a "hacking program" (despite the promise of Neuromancer ;) - the human is actually doing most of the work, so maybe they should be considered a valuable asset...