And even you are understating the matter.

I once represented the general manager of the biggest one of those in town on another matter.

Breakeven is on sale: the down payment is set to what they paid at auction. They sell, collect a few payments, repo, sell again . . .

Their idea of a good car is one they get to sell 3 or 4 times.

hawk, esq.

Actually, here in Norway last year we became the first country in Europe and NATO to introduce gender-neutral conscription. It was quite amusing to see how first those opposing it was accused of feminism by grabbing all the perks but not doing the same duties of being a citizen. Then as the public opinion turned those in favor were accused of feminism by disregarding the differences between the sexes and weakening our military through physically less able women, like they were only there to fill a gender equality quota. If you didn't want military service you were a feminist, if you wanted military service you were a feminist. Go figure.

I think we made the right choice though, whether you're male or female if you're young and fit you're certainly "good enough" for military service. We're not training people for the elite specials division here, most of them will go into our version of the National Guard and have one or two refresher sessions a year, just enough to remind people what end to shoot the bad guys with. And there's plenty jobs in a modern military that takes more brains than brawn. Yes, I know carrying equipment and supplies still matters but the type of service should go by physical requirements, there'll be something for everyone.

At the bottom of a gravity well? Check. Ages of warning that an attack is incoming? Check. Horribly fragile base where any crack in your pressure dome will kill you? Check. Something tells me the moon will be as militarily relevant to a battle of earth as control of the ocean floors. If you want to get spectacular, I'd rather go out to the asteroid belt and find a suitably big rock (read: not a dino killer, not just a light show) you could aim at earth. The timing had better be just right though, if you're off by just a matter of hours that crater might end up on the wrong side of the planet. Bonus points for drilling into and blowing it up at a suitable distance, it'll do more damage as buckshot.

>Relatively few people pick up a masters on their way to a doctorate.

Highly dependent upon field. In mine (economics), the masters is a sidestep. In others, its the norm.

And at some schools, there is a payment to the school for each master's awarded, so they're handed out along the way . . /

hawk

read the archives of alt.folklore.computers for great examples of some of these.

Swapping registers (in a two register + ALU architecture ) used to be a common one; you'll find an answer that was a step faster than the "correct" answer by using XOR in there.

My favorite, though, was handing the candidate a piece of convoluted code and asking what it did.

"Hopefully, it got the author fired." :)

hawk

As a first year college student hired after high school in a startup, I had a real eye opener when the person they brought in after me--with a MS in CS--couldn't, well, do much (they'd called me back after I left).

I finally had to take a stack of cards to manually demonstrate a bubble sort. No, I'm not defending or advocating bubble sorts. With an MS, he just plain didn't understand the concept.

His output roughly quadrupled once I was around (he wasn't around much longer).

And I've seen it in other areas. I have a Ph.D. in Economics and and statistics as well as a law degree, and I've met people in both who can function their way through the classes and dissertation, but just plain can't do anything useful in the fields.

hawk, j.d., ph.d., esq.

I always ask something completely and utterly off the wall or irrelevant when interviewing someone, just to see how he reacts to the unexpected. I'm not concerned with the answer; I just want to see how the person reacts to the unexpected.

I also instruct, "call before sending resume" in the ad, just to screen for ability to follow basic instructions (at least 75% fail at this rate).

hawk

Couldn't you just as well say "Fantasy is about considering and exploring the human ramifications when certain aspects of reality are changed"? If you don't care about the science, you're just using sci-fi as window dressing to take you somewhere else, like Avatar is essentially Dances with Wolves with a ton of fancy gadgetry. You can do a historic war movie like 300 or contemporary one like Enemy at the Gates or a futuristic one like Independence Day and it's often the same story of a desperate stand against overwhelming forces with everything in the balance. For that matter, so could many of the great battle scenes in LotR that don't deal with the ring. It's only occasionally the science is an essential plot item and rarer still that it has any real scientific substance. In Star Trek, they just say "beam me up, Scotty" and you're back on the Enterprise, it might just as well have been Gandalf throwing a teleportation spell. That essentially just makes it futuristic fantasy, with sufficiently advanced technology to make it indistinguishable from magic.

That reads both ways:
a) You've gotten the highest formal accreditation anyone in the field can have. That means you're able to get into jobs that others can't.
b) The flipside is, that, all-in-all, those jobs are wide and far between, at least on global scale.

Think of the PhD as the last cog to get the machine working. The other cogs still have to be there. You have to move in to an area where PhDs are sought after and where they have their place. The webshop in a 30000 people town is not where you want to put your rank to use - you have to leave that "comfort-zone" behind. If you haven't built a network yet, you better get starting now. Or maybe you *have* built a network, but aren't aware of it. What are your college buddies doing? Is there no vector there to get into a field?

Mix the C++ experience in when pointing out your PhD. I all honesty, you'd be stupid if you don't combine your pratical C++ skills with your academic PhD-stuff from here on out. There is tons of neat stuff all over the planet. Scientific work, embedded, big data, financial (obscene amounts of money to be made in those last two).

And if you don't know what you want to do and where you want to do it, go apply for an internship at Google or some other famous scary company. No joke. Go there. Who knows, maybe you're a team-lead in 6 months on some new Android lib they're cooking up. If they ask you why you want to intern with a PhD, say you don't know what you want but you'd like to find out. That's how I got my job in the gaming industry. I had my back against the wall and started applying for jobs all over the country. BAM - 4 weeks later inet gamedev paradise with a very neat project that went on for two years and was specifically designed to burn massive sums of money. Or at least so it felt. The reference I got out of that job is worth a masters degree and serves me till this very day.

Or maybe you want to get more into algorythms and DB stuff - go find a company or scientific project that deals with such problems and ask to join - if only as an intern for a few weeks.

And someone else pointed it out already too:
Get a professional company to write your resume and a recruiter or an agent to help you find a job. That, or just call and ask to talk to the PM of the job for hire because you "want to find out if it makes sense to apply". Your application will most likely end up in the stack or bin with all the others, only it will be on top, because your a PhD. ... People want to see and talk to the people they're supposed to work with - that goes especially if your not a designated expert in a field.

And last but not least - if you are an expert or want to become one, there's another two options:
Freelance or own company. Think about it.

Good luck.

You forgot young earth creationists, probably the most popular conspiracy theory around. Evolution, geology, paleoclimatology, dendrochronology, astronomy, radiocarbon dating, fossil record and probably a dozen other sciences I forget all a hoax. A false flag operation by either god himself as a test of faith or the devil playing tricks, you don't have to go to the 1% nutters - who mostly lack sanity - to find total rejection of evidence, science and logic.

With TPB mainly running on magnet links, it's not even that it's a hash of pointers to content these days. Even the actual pointers have gone off-site, which reduces the bandwidth by 99%. My guess is TPB actually serves up more ads than content, if you count bytes.

So? It's still inconvenient because now you're stuck in a manual process that they will eventually get around to when you want to play right now. I've done something similar when a game without warning refused to activate - granted, I'd been playing with WINE settings and uninstalled/reinstalled quite a few times but this was Friday afternoon. A few hours later and no reply, I said fuck it and downloaded a cracked version off TPB. Support came back to me on Monday and started asking questions about why I'd used so many activations, I just sent back a reply basically saying I've found a permanent solution so go fish. Okay so fraud prevention is a bit more valid reason but it still doesn't fix the immediate problem.

We've had this discussion many times before here on /. with regards to Linux, no matter how many valid reasons there is for "CANTFIX" problems ranging from crap Linux support, undocumented formats and hardware, "embrace extend extinguish" incompatibility and lockout users don't care. This doesn't work, give me something that works. I must admit my tolerance has grown extremely slim, when you know that there's a not-so-legal alternative that always works flawlessly it really doesn't take much before I say "screw this, I'll get it from TPB. Heck, I still download GoT even though I pay for HBO Nordic.

So if you're primarily a scientist there to do zero-g experiments on the ISS, are you still an astronaut? Why, because you're a professional - but not really in space flight? If we ever get to airplane-like conditions, is the steward(ess) an astronaut, is it like the crew? Or do you have to actually have a part in flying the spaceship, like is the cook on a big sailboat a sailor? Not that it really matters, but...

Real zero-g (not Vomit Comet or theme park rides) would be pretty damn cool. Right now I'm looking at SpaceX and I really don't see a good reason why Dragon doesn't take more than 7 passengers, it seems they have plenty space and it's supposed to be able to return 2500kg of pressurized cargo, so from what I can tell they should be able to put more like 20 people in that cabin if they stack the seats nicely. It's $140m/flight so that'd bring it down to $7 million and that's for a genuine LEO flight. If they're just going for 101km with a supersized capsule I'm guessing the rocket is good for shooting up 140 people at a time at $1 million/seat.

Sure if you disregard the Cold War, the thousands of warheads pointed at each other and the Cuban missile crisis then there was no military benefit. NASA was the velvet glove around the iron fist but I think everyone except you saw what the real message was: "Our rocket technology is so advanced, don't you f*cking try anything." The moon is of course of no military significance, but the Apollo program was.

The alternative would have been a military program under the DoD, but pushing those kinds of amounts into the military budget would look aggressive and militant. Instead they got all the essential technology, plenty opportunity to show off and talk to the media, good old-fashioned heroes, honoring the great visions of a dead president and all under a formally civilian authority. The drive was the military need, the moon was just a convenient rallying flag.