Given that the newspaper obviously didn't have the staff on hand to develop the new site, I wonder who they outsourced it to - that could explain a few things.
I believe what's being implied here is that Google lied about the vector by which the Chinese gained access, in order to cover up the real (dare I say 'Evil'?) vector.
I'm going to go out on a limb and extrapolate here :
1. Google has a simple interface by which the US Government can do the exact same thing. 2. Chinese Government figured out how to access it. [*] 3. Chinese Government does it, same as the US Government has been doing for a while. 4. Chinese Government access gets discovered. 5. Heard somewhere in Google : 'Oh shit! How do we spin this?' 6. The story we heard gets dreamed up.
[*] - It's entirely possible that the vector by which they learned the keys to access the system were implanted via a Trojan (malware) in a drive-by download in IE, or possibly included in a file emailed to a staffer inside - but I'd say it is more likely that a Chinese employee of Google (whether working in the China office of Google, or an H1-B working in an American Google shop) got access to the codes and sent them up the channel.
As for the business of targeting the human rights activists - that is exactly who the Government fears (and targets) most. Take a look at the interest the US Government gave the Black Panthers in the 60's for an obvious example.
Actually the first airplane to break the speed of sound was the Bell X-1 with Chuck Yeager aboard - and it most definitely did not break apart due to the stress.
Unless I'm mistaken, AV gas is pretty much regular gas with an octane rating of between 105 and 109. It's not nitro-methane or anything special. When I was young and stupid I used to mix it about 50/50 with pump gas in my GSXR-750 and pretend to be a street racer. It didn't make much difference if any - for reasons that are obvious to me now, but back then I wanted to believe.
More and more laptops are being used as mobile desktop replacements. All of my development is being run from a laptop running a full database (DB2), a development version of WebSphere Application Server, plus all the assorted productivity tools (Outlook, Word, FireFox, SoapUI, etc.)
I would be willing to bet that I spend an hour a day (maybe more) waiting on incremental code compilation after I tweak some code in Eclipse - I'm doing it while I watch the effects in the debugger and on the application, and each time I save some code the codebase needs to do an incremental compile and then reinitialize the deployment environment. Granted it's only a minute or two, but if I make 120 similar tweaks in a day, that's two hours.
Two hours per day at my current bill rate is $1500 per week. I'd say it's pretty common.
Hardware starts to die after a certain time (bathtub curve) and for laptops three years is pushing it pretty hard for hard drives and batteries. Batteries are fairly easy to replace, but a hard drive crash on a laptop will cost a company way more in lost work than the cost of a new laptop.
That and at certain points, it's more cost effective to replace a computer with a faster computer - if a computer hardware upgrade means you can make 8 runs of a particular large batch process in the same time it used to take to do 3, and you can sell the proceeds of those extra 5 runs for $200 apiece - that computer pays for itself in one day. Pretty simple math.
I've found that the biggest jump in the past four to six years is when machines (laptops specifically) went from single core to dual core. Where a single core machine clocks when a single process gets busy - a dual core machine keeps on working. But you're right - once you've cleared the SMP hurdle the progress in the last couple of years hasn't been overwhelming notable.
Here's my take on gmail at the office : I don't do personal email from work, as a rule. Pretty simple rule to live by, and I an pretty strict about it. But every once in a while I've got some personal business to attend to, and it's happening in gmail. At 5pm I have two choices : I can pack up after a 9 hour day and go home, do my personal gmail business and then be a regular person the rest of the day, or I can take about 5 minutes to handle my personal biz from my office computer and if that's all it takes, get right back to work and possibly stay there working a few more hours since I have already dealt with whatever it was (personal) that needed my attention.
Strange enough, when my Project Manager sees me in gmail (rarely, but it happens) he doesn't seem to be bothered about it.
It sounds like you aren't working for the Help Desk. I've talked to people from the Help Desk and guess what, they actually are hourly workers with poor benefits that usually get treated like crap. They aren't even considered part of IT, more of a three-level set of gatekeepers that handle scripted issue resolution so the real IT team can focus on the real problems.
In reading the responses in this thread so far, I wonder if the OP is asking the wrong question. Perhaps a better question would have been :
I've been working in the Help Desk for ${duration} and a recent change by management (instituting a new dress code for help desk workers, but not for the rest of IT) reminded me why I spent four years in a university learning software engineering - to be a software engineer. How do I go about making the transition from the help desk into the development and implementation teams at my company?
In the past year, I've done the following to make myself more attractive as a software developer / IT sysadmin : [ ] Learned the proprietary API developed in-house by our software development team [ ] Learned to program in the following languages [ ] Configured my own computer at home with the following operating systems (heavily used within our organization) [ ] Configured my own server at home with the following packages (heavily used within our organization) [ ] Installed the latest version of the following databases on my home server and became familiar with troubleshooting it [ ] Got certified with the following Sun / Microsoft / IBM certs :
If the OP hasn't done any of the above (or anything on par), above and beyond the daily call of ticket fixes from the help desk, and at review time points to his fantastic stats from merely doing his help desk duties - time per ticket, tickets per day, overall 'customer satisfaction' score - then your interpretation of management's 'uniform' suggestion is probably an appropriate reflection of how management actually perceives the Help Desk (hint : at my last company they were referred to as the 'Helpless Desk'.)
If he's that upset about it, have him go through the motions of getting them arrested anyways.
You don't have to commit a crime to be accused of commiting a crime in America. You have to merely be in a situation that reasonably (to law enforcement) looks like you did something against the law. The cops will come down on you and investigate, and they may charge you with the crime, giving you the expensive proposition of defending yourself in front of a judge. You will then pay tens of thousands of dollars to a lawyer to represent you, explain in great detail how the little tiny fine print in the contract somehow absolves you of any guilt, even though you did things that would have landed regular people in jail. And then a decision will be made.
Sucks to be an innocent person charged with a crime he didn't commit, but I assure you it happens. It only takes once and you spend the rest of your life leaving a massive buffer between you and 'questionable' practices that you'll never be questioned again.
Shit. Thanks dude, now I feel old. I've personally owned every device you just mentioned except the 110 baud and the Trailblazer. 300 baud wasn't so bad when your screen was only 25 characters wide.
I can still tell what speed a modem connects just by listening, right up through about 38.4k. I used to be able to tell whether the connect was going to be worth keeping (ie, over 40k) on my 57.6 just by listening.
The job isn't very well paying? Do the math. Even if the part about not paying 1.5x for overtime is true, these people are making the equiv of $40k per year doing life-size Tetris (ie, moving boxes around and packaging them.) And they aren't paying rent - the pre-tax savings to them is another $500 per month (I will be generous and undervalue their monthly rent in a camper, including the associated bills like water and electricity, rent for the lot, etc, at $325 / month).
Take the $11 x 12 hours per day x 6 days per week x 4.33 weeks per month = $3,430 Plus the $500 (pre-tax) free place to live And if the labor laws actually force them to pay 1.5x for OT (it happens, just takes a while) add another $5.5 * 4 hours * 6 days * 4.33 weeks / month = $570 And we're looking at a monthly gross of $4,500, or a gross annual salary equivalent of $54,000.
For entry level grunt work. DAMN!
I'm not saying it's not physically demanding, but still - $54k a year for packing boxes as an 18 year old right out of high school. Your personal responsibility is no larger than that individual transaction, with the negative ramifications being 'fix that order' if you screw up. It took me a four year degree in software engineering and eight years on the job, responsible for the entire company surviving Y2K before I was grossing $54k a year. At 18 years old I wish some heartless company would have offered to abuse me like that.
Science isn't about doing something and getting the expected results. Science is about doing something and when reviewing the results going 'Well that's odd. Guys come here and look at this.' And then discovering something new.
I recognize that you can specify a maximum memory allocation for the JVM, and can specify a minimum starting memory allocation for the JVM - and I appreciate the implications to the garbage collection routines based on the spread between the two.
I have four minor issues (to which I alluded, but never really called out) with this strategy, and over time they cause the statement I made to become fact. a) Even though the JVM only initially allocates the Xms, eventually (and often fairly quickly) it will allocate the Xmx and treat the Xms as merely a goal during a GC. b) I can't say I've ever seen a JVM ever return memory to the OS after allocating a large chunk in order to process a memory intense transaction. c) Hand tuning the memory parameters for a fairly large application with an unknown anticipated workload is a fairly expensive process (labor costs.) What's the next setting used if 256M isn't enough? 512M of course. If that isn't enough? "Crank it up to 768M or throw a full Gig at it, I'm tired of farking with it and I have a backlog of projects to work on." d) And what happens when 512M is sufficient for 99.9% of your workload (including 100% of your test cases) but once a month you get hit with a peak that requires 520M to process? The thing dies a horrifically spectacular death in production, in slow motion, with everybody watching. And you can't reproduce it, because the business req docs didn't include that one case, so you run it through your performance regression tests again for weeks, unable to duplicate the problem. The ability to dynamically allocate (and then de-allocate) an extra 10M of memory to the process just cost weeks of wasted effort on top of a production failure.
I like Java, don't get me wrong - coding up front end web based applications in C would be an expensive venture, given the existing base of development tools, environment extensions and developer talent. There would need to be a pretty serious scalability issue (known in advance, by a company on a project with resources to finance it up front) to warrant such an approach - but pre-allocating all the memory an application could ever use (ever!) makes for an environment that doesn't use the hardware to its full capacity, often being very wasteful. And I think that's what the original article was about.
In my opinion the biggest benefit of compiled C code over Java code, particularly in highly dynamic workloads without a known peak load - is that the C code can allocate memory on the fly to expand to meet the needs of the workload, releasing that memory when it has finished the peak. With Java (not sure about C#, but I'm guessing C# also) the implementation team has to decide in advance how much memory the JVM could possibly need in the worst case scenario and pre-allocate that memory at application startup. Since determining the peak resource usage is a bit of a challenge even after hand tuning it manually a few times watching the system monitors, most apps are configured to use way more memory than they actually need ('just in case'.) It doesn't take too many applications configured to run using 256M, 512M or even 1024M - and you've literally sucked down all the memory in your machine and need to add another box.
Perhaps the 1:10 ratio isn't just about the raw code execution performance, but possibly enhanced by the ability to provision more concurrent instances on the same machine. Granted you're still limited by the other factors (database performance, I/O, etc) but if you can process 40 concurrent requests because your machine can run 40 instances of the same handler, vs 10 concurrent instances in an interpreted or VM based language - that's where I see the performance benefit.
If it is that bullshit 1024x600 resolution as all the other netbooks, it's a 12" netbook. If they magically figured out a way to put a higher resolution display in one of these machines, it's "something I will actually buy". Netbooks are fun to play with in the store, but until they manage to get a higher vertical resolution than 600 pixels (what is this, 1989?) I'm going to have to pass, maybe buy another laptop instead (and maybe buy nothing instead - have enough laptops as it is.)
F-14s take a ton of maintenance and spare parts to keep them flying. I think it's somewhere on the order of 50 man hours in maintenance for every hour in the air, and those 50 man hours are generally fixing or replacing hardware. Given that Iran hasn't got a constant feed of spare parts to keep the Tomcat's in the air, I am going to bet they scavenged some planes to keep others flying, recursively, until none were still air-worthy.
The MiG 29s? They can probably buy spare parts for those, no problems.
As fun as it might be to blame Bush Jr for the gutting of the IT jobs, take a look at history and see who was responsible for bumping up the H1B cap from 65000 a year to over 300,000 per year (hint : it rhymes with 'Clinton'.) Over six years that's 2M Americans pushed out of their job by an H1B.
Another interesting nugget - Bush Jr was responsible for bringing it back down to the 65,000 per year number.
Strange enough, this is exactly why I went into the sciences.
All through junior high I wanted to be a school teacher when I grew up. Beginning of my freshman year we went on a field trip to a science lab (Griffith Observatory, IIRC) to meet with the guys in white lab coats, watch them do experiments, get a little hands on fun with the science expo labs - and during the lunch break I was walking outdoors with a few other students, ended up cutting across the parking lot. I remember thinking to myself - damn, they don't have cars like this in the teacher's parking lot. A new (computer) scientist was born that day, because a few scientists drove their sports cars to work that morning.
Want the next generation of scientists to actually pursue science? Pay this generation of scientists enough to be an inspiration. Don't get me started on just how much long term destruction the H1B program is causing on the next generations of American scientists, for this same reason.
Obama : follow the money. If the jobs are there, everything else will fall into place over time.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that the newspaper obviously didn't have the staff on hand to develop the new site, I wonder who they outsourced it to - that could explain a few things.
Hah. I don't believe anything until it's been unequivocally denied.
Where does the money that the government pays the companies come from? Taxes.
Who pays these taxes? The same people being spied on.
So yes. the consumer is paying for the overhead so they can be spied on.
I believe what's being implied here is that Google lied about the vector by which the Chinese gained access, in order to cover up the real (dare I say 'Evil'?) vector.
I'm going to go out on a limb and extrapolate here :
1. Google has a simple interface by which the US Government can do the exact same thing.
2. Chinese Government figured out how to access it. [*]
3. Chinese Government does it, same as the US Government has been doing for a while.
4. Chinese Government access gets discovered.
5. Heard somewhere in Google : 'Oh shit! How do we spin this?'
6. The story we heard gets dreamed up.
[*] - It's entirely possible that the vector by which they learned the keys to access the system were implanted via a Trojan (malware) in a drive-by download in IE, or possibly included in a file emailed to a staffer inside - but I'd say it is more likely that a Chinese employee of Google (whether working in the China office of Google, or an H1-B working in an American Google shop) got access to the codes and sent them up the channel.
As for the business of targeting the human rights activists - that is exactly who the Government fears (and targets) most. Take a look at the interest the US Government gave the Black Panthers in the 60's for an obvious example.
Actually the first airplane to break the speed of sound was the Bell X-1 with Chuck Yeager aboard - and it most definitely did not break apart due to the stress.
Unless I'm mistaken, AV gas is pretty much regular gas with an octane rating of between 105 and 109. It's not nitro-methane or anything special.
When I was young and stupid I used to mix it about 50/50 with pump gas in my GSXR-750 and pretend to be a street racer. It didn't make much difference if any - for reasons that are obvious to me now, but back then I wanted to believe.
More and more laptops are being used as mobile desktop replacements. All of my development is being run from a laptop running a full database (DB2), a development version of WebSphere Application Server, plus all the assorted productivity tools (Outlook, Word, FireFox, SoapUI, etc.)
I would be willing to bet that I spend an hour a day (maybe more) waiting on incremental code compilation after I tweak some code in Eclipse - I'm doing it while I watch the effects in the debugger and on the application, and each time I save some code the codebase needs to do an incremental compile and then reinitialize the deployment environment. Granted it's only a minute or two, but if I make 120 similar tweaks in a day, that's two hours.
Two hours per day at my current bill rate is $1500 per week. I'd say it's pretty common.
Hardware starts to die after a certain time (bathtub curve) and for laptops three years is pushing it pretty hard for hard drives and batteries. Batteries are fairly easy to replace, but a hard drive crash on a laptop will cost a company way more in lost work than the cost of a new laptop.
That and at certain points, it's more cost effective to replace a computer with a faster computer - if a computer hardware upgrade means you can make 8 runs of a particular large batch process in the same time it used to take to do 3, and you can sell the proceeds of those extra 5 runs for $200 apiece - that computer pays for itself in one day. Pretty simple math.
I've found that the biggest jump in the past four to six years is when machines (laptops specifically) went from single core to dual core. Where a single core machine clocks when a single process gets busy - a dual core machine keeps on working. But you're right - once you've cleared the SMP hurdle the progress in the last couple of years hasn't been overwhelming notable.
I really can't imagine any man desperate enough to screw a toaster
You're new here, aren't you?
Here's my take on gmail at the office :
I don't do personal email from work, as a rule. Pretty simple rule to live by, and I an pretty strict about it. But every once in a while I've got some personal business to attend to, and it's happening in gmail. At 5pm I have two choices : I can pack up after a 9 hour day and go home, do my personal gmail business and then be a regular person the rest of the day, or I can take about 5 minutes to handle my personal biz from my office computer and if that's all it takes, get right back to work and possibly stay there working a few more hours since I have already dealt with whatever it was (personal) that needed my attention.
Strange enough, when my Project Manager sees me in gmail (rarely, but it happens) he doesn't seem to be bothered about it.
It sounds like you aren't working for the Help Desk. I've talked to people from the Help Desk and guess what, they actually are hourly workers with poor benefits that usually get treated like crap. They aren't even considered part of IT, more of a three-level set of gatekeepers that handle scripted issue resolution so the real IT team can focus on the real problems.
In reading the responses in this thread so far, I wonder if the OP is asking the wrong question.
Perhaps a better question would have been :
I've been working in the Help Desk for ${duration} and a recent change by management (instituting a new dress code for help desk workers, but not for the rest of IT) reminded me why I spent four years in a university learning software engineering - to be a software engineer. How do I go about making the transition from the help desk into the development and implementation teams at my company?
In the past year, I've done the following to make myself more attractive as a software developer / IT sysadmin :
[ ] Learned the proprietary API developed in-house by our software development team
[ ] Learned to program in the following languages
[ ] Configured my own computer at home with the following operating systems (heavily used within our organization)
[ ] Configured my own server at home with the following packages (heavily used within our organization)
[ ] Installed the latest version of the following databases on my home server and became familiar with troubleshooting it
[ ] Got certified with the following Sun / Microsoft / IBM certs :
If the OP hasn't done any of the above (or anything on par), above and beyond the daily call of ticket fixes from the help desk, and at review time points to his fantastic stats from merely doing his help desk duties - time per ticket, tickets per day, overall 'customer satisfaction' score - then your interpretation of management's 'uniform' suggestion is probably an appropriate reflection of how management actually perceives the Help Desk (hint : at my last company they were referred to as the 'Helpless Desk'.)
It appears this discussion may devolve into a KB vs. KiB, MB vs. MiB discussion.
I'll check back in a while just in case.
If he's that upset about it, have him go through the motions of getting them arrested anyways.
You don't have to commit a crime to be accused of commiting a crime in America. You have to merely be in a situation that reasonably (to law enforcement) looks like you did something against the law. The cops will come down on you and investigate, and they may charge you with the crime, giving you the expensive proposition of defending yourself in front of a judge. You will then pay tens of thousands of dollars to a lawyer to represent you, explain in great detail how the little tiny fine print in the contract somehow absolves you of any guilt, even though you did things that would have landed regular people in jail. And then a decision will be made.
Sucks to be an innocent person charged with a crime he didn't commit, but I assure you it happens. It only takes once and you spend the rest of your life leaving a massive buffer between you and 'questionable' practices that you'll never be questioned again.
Shit. Thanks dude, now I feel old. I've personally owned every device you just mentioned except the 110 baud and the Trailblazer.
300 baud wasn't so bad when your screen was only 25 characters wide.
I can still tell what speed a modem connects just by listening, right up through about 38.4k. I used to be able to tell whether the connect was going to be worth keeping (ie, over 40k) on my 57.6 just by listening.
The job isn't very well paying?
Do the math. Even if the part about not paying 1.5x for overtime is true, these people are making the equiv of $40k per year doing life-size Tetris (ie, moving boxes around and packaging them.) And they aren't paying rent - the pre-tax savings to them is another $500 per month (I will be generous and undervalue their monthly rent in a camper, including the associated bills like water and electricity, rent for the lot, etc, at $325 / month).
Take the $11 x 12 hours per day x 6 days per week x 4.33 weeks per month = $3,430
Plus the $500 (pre-tax) free place to live
And if the labor laws actually force them to pay 1.5x for OT (it happens, just takes a while) add another $5.5 * 4 hours * 6 days * 4.33 weeks / month = $570
And we're looking at a monthly gross of $4,500, or a gross annual salary equivalent of $54,000.
For entry level grunt work. DAMN!
I'm not saying it's not physically demanding, but still - $54k a year for packing boxes as an 18 year old right out of high school. Your personal responsibility is no larger than that individual transaction, with the negative ramifications being 'fix that order' if you screw up. It took me a four year degree in software engineering and eight years on the job, responsible for the entire company surviving Y2K before I was grossing $54k a year. At 18 years old I wish some heartless company would have offered to abuse me like that.
I also don't remember Hitler being the head of a Jewish fraternal organization.
He was Camp Director for a few years, as I recall.
Science isn't about doing something and getting the expected results. Science is about doing something and when reviewing the results going 'Well that's odd. Guys come here and look at this.' And then discovering something new.
I recognize that you can specify a maximum memory allocation for the JVM, and can specify a minimum starting memory allocation for the JVM - and I appreciate the implications to the garbage collection routines based on the spread between the two.
I have four minor issues (to which I alluded, but never really called out) with this strategy, and over time they cause the statement I made to become fact.
a) Even though the JVM only initially allocates the Xms, eventually (and often fairly quickly) it will allocate the Xmx and treat the Xms as merely a goal during a GC.
b) I can't say I've ever seen a JVM ever return memory to the OS after allocating a large chunk in order to process a memory intense transaction.
c) Hand tuning the memory parameters for a fairly large application with an unknown anticipated workload is a fairly expensive process (labor costs.) What's the next setting used if 256M isn't enough? 512M of course. If that isn't enough? "Crank it up to 768M or throw a full Gig at it, I'm tired of farking with it and I have a backlog of projects to work on."
d) And what happens when 512M is sufficient for 99.9% of your workload (including 100% of your test cases) but once a month you get hit with a peak that requires 520M to process? The thing dies a horrifically spectacular death in production, in slow motion, with everybody watching. And you can't reproduce it, because the business req docs didn't include that one case, so you run it through your performance regression tests again for weeks, unable to duplicate the problem. The ability to dynamically allocate (and then de-allocate) an extra 10M of memory to the process just cost weeks of wasted effort on top of a production failure.
I like Java, don't get me wrong - coding up front end web based applications in C would be an expensive venture, given the existing base of development tools, environment extensions and developer talent. There would need to be a pretty serious scalability issue (known in advance, by a company on a project with resources to finance it up front) to warrant such an approach - but pre-allocating all the memory an application could ever use (ever!) makes for an environment that doesn't use the hardware to its full capacity, often being very wasteful. And I think that's what the original article was about.
In my opinion the biggest benefit of compiled C code over Java code, particularly in highly dynamic workloads without a known peak load - is that the C code can allocate memory on the fly to expand to meet the needs of the workload, releasing that memory when it has finished the peak. With Java (not sure about C#, but I'm guessing C# also) the implementation team has to decide in advance how much memory the JVM could possibly need in the worst case scenario and pre-allocate that memory at application startup. Since determining the peak resource usage is a bit of a challenge even after hand tuning it manually a few times watching the system monitors, most apps are configured to use way more memory than they actually need ('just in case'.) It doesn't take too many applications configured to run using 256M, 512M or even 1024M - and you've literally sucked down all the memory in your machine and need to add another box.
Perhaps the 1:10 ratio isn't just about the raw code execution performance, but possibly enhanced by the ability to provision more concurrent instances on the same machine. Granted you're still limited by the other factors (database performance, I/O, etc) but if you can process 40 concurrent requests because your machine can run 40 instances of the same handler, vs 10 concurrent instances in an interpreted or VM based language - that's where I see the performance benefit.
Depends on resolution.
If it is that bullshit 1024x600 resolution as all the other netbooks, it's a 12" netbook. If they magically figured out a way to put a higher resolution display in one of these machines, it's "something I will actually buy". Netbooks are fun to play with in the store, but until they manage to get a higher vertical resolution than 600 pixels (what is this, 1989?) I'm going to have to pass, maybe buy another laptop instead (and maybe buy nothing instead - have enough laptops as it is.)
If he runs, he's Taliban.
If he doesn't run, he's well disciplined Taliban.
About Iran's birds :
F-14s take a ton of maintenance and spare parts to keep them flying. I think it's somewhere on the order of 50 man hours in maintenance for every hour in the air, and those 50 man hours are generally fixing or replacing hardware. Given that Iran hasn't got a constant feed of spare parts to keep the Tomcat's in the air, I am going to bet they scavenged some planes to keep others flying, recursively, until none were still air-worthy.
The MiG 29s? They can probably buy spare parts for those, no problems.
Read Neal Stephen's Snow Crash. I believe it was originally intended to be fiction, but I'm not sure how much longer it will stay fiction.
As fun as it might be to blame Bush Jr for the gutting of the IT jobs, take a look at history and see who was responsible for bumping up the H1B cap from 65000 a year to over 300,000 per year (hint : it rhymes with 'Clinton'.) Over six years that's 2M Americans pushed out of their job by an H1B.
Another interesting nugget - Bush Jr was responsible for bringing it back down to the 65,000 per year number.
Other than that - I completely agree.
Strange enough, this is exactly why I went into the sciences.
All through junior high I wanted to be a school teacher when I grew up. Beginning of my freshman year we went on a field trip to a science lab (Griffith Observatory, IIRC) to meet with the guys in white lab coats, watch them do experiments, get a little hands on fun with the science expo labs - and during the lunch break I was walking outdoors with a few other students, ended up cutting across the parking lot. I remember thinking to myself - damn, they don't have cars like this in the teacher's parking lot. A new (computer) scientist was born that day, because a few scientists drove their sports cars to work that morning.
Want the next generation of scientists to actually pursue science? Pay this generation of scientists enough to be an inspiration.
Don't get me started on just how much long term destruction the H1B program is causing on the next generations of American scientists, for this same reason.
Obama : follow the money. If the jobs are there, everything else will fall into place over time.