I suspect the revenue savings/increase is the difference between keeping you employed there and, say, renting Office 360 (and yes, they'll happily provide enterprise-scale mail for a corporation, for a price.) No real work required to come to that conclusion.

...and that's part of your problem, right there... Cali ain't cheap to live in.

Also, consider that the jobs you've listed (geek shop technician, web dev, small business IT, etc) are low-paying almost by design.

A bit of advice, and I promise it's being delivered kindly: Don't rely on your degree to get you anywhere. Instead, find out which jobs pay worth a damn, then get the skills and experience needed to pursue those positions.

Question: *when* and *where* was this?

I mean, my very first junior sysadmin job paid around $15/hr - but that was in Arkansas, during the early 1990's. The former was legendary for low cost-of-living/low-wages, and the latter accounts for inflation betwixt then and now.

Pretty sure that nowadays, in any decently tech-savvy city, you're not going to find a job in tech that pays less than $15/hr... well, unless you're an intern who got a shit assignment.

Kids certainly won't read them, and most wouldn't know what to do with them... c'mon, we're talking teenagers here.

Things have been changing for awhile: when I was in high school, we wrote code in C and FORTRAN, and even dabbled a bit with the old Hollerith code (think "punchcards"). On the plus side, we had Apple ][ e's and a very early version of (I think?) Word Perfect... it's was *all* CLI though, so it's not like we had much in the way of graphics.

Agreed.

I would much prefer that a few long-discarded courses come back from the dead. Logic and Rhetoric stand out primarily among them; the former to help create better devs and sysadmins, the latter to help them better communicate needs and ideas to the PHB crowd. A little bit of philosophy couldn't hurt either, since anything to force kids to develop and use their own sense of creativity is rather vital IMHO.

...what sibling said. Anything can be trojanized, and it's turtles all the way down if you're proposing that by simply using a different application (or suite/kernel/VM/whatever thereof).

In all seriousness, PuTTY is a quick and dirty way of getting a working SSH shell on a Windows box. For the greybeards (like myself), it's also a quick and kick-ass means of plugging an old laptop into a serial port on the back of a Sun/HPUX/IBM-PPC box.

It's a self-contained executable that you can keep on a geek stick. No dependencies, no lengthy installation bullshit like Cygwin, no muss, no fuss. It just works.

In fact, I still keep a copy on my phone just in case, in spite of the fact that I typically use a MacBook Pro nowadays (OSX has a working *nix shell that I can open Terminal with and SSH from all day long, tab the hell out of, have customized nine ways from Sunday for local Git coloring, pre-hooks, branch awareness, etc). That said, I use PuTTY when I find myself stuck with a 'doze box (usually when having to show a 'doze user something on a *nix box from his machine), or when I find myself in a datacenter with only a shitty old laptop and no other useful means of getting some RS-232 love (because let's face it, HyperTerminal sucks donkey balls).

This, right here.

Seriously - entertainment and flight controls on subnets that are reachable from each other? What the hell was the engineering team drinking/snorting/smoking/shooting that day?

I'm thinking that due to the lack of an emergency TCTO* , and lack of any corroborating evidence (seriously, you'd think a pilot would notify *somebody* if his airplane did something way out of the ordinary like that, even if to report bad wind turbulence/shear/whatever as a warning to ATC and other pilots in the same path)?

Yeah... not so sure the FBI's assertion holds that much water. Awaiting more evidence and/or corroboration on that one.

* Time Compliance Technical Order - at least that's what the USAF used to call it. Dunno what they call it nowadays in the civilian world.

Of course, to be fair it likely didn't help that the current administration decided to yank nearly all US troops out of the country before the job was done, either.

No matter your feelings or opinions on how the war began or was handled during the Bush administration, you cannot deny that finishing it properly should have been a top priority no matter who started it. Consider, if the allies had withdrawn from Germany that soon after WWII, the Nazis (or a derivative group thereof) would have arisen once more, and Germany would likely still be a mess today. Instead, post-WWII the allies (for better or worse) kept occupation for years on end, slowly passing control, then autonomy, then self-defense, etc to the post-war German government ( well, governments, as we did have two of them for the longest time thanks to the USSR.)

Why this wasn't done properly in Iraq is a serious head-scratcher, especially given that Iraq was indeed an artificial country (thanks, England!), and doubly so because of the regional culture plus pre-existing secular tensions. It would have been a long, expensive road, but it was certainly at least doable.

Incidentally, it probably didn't help that Syria went straight to hell in recent years, either - or that Iran has been working like hell behind the scenes to keep things unstable. But to be honest, those only serve as stronger arguments for keeping treasure and troops committed towards reconstruction in Iraq (and maybe a bit of that towards keeping Iran's little activities clamped down as hard as possible).

Long story short: anyone who tries to place the blame for the mess on any one person or political party is an idiot. There's plenty of blame to go around on this one...

Wait - you assume that government contract payouts are the "full price", when in reality they are often inflated no matter how you try to construct the bidding process (...because Uncle Sugar can pay it, that's why).

You're confusing something: there is a difference between poverty due to bad circumstance (or due to poor choices), and poverty due to higher artificial barriers raised by government edict (even if unintentional.)

Err, wrong metric. Waaay wrong metric.

gas + car payment + mandatory insurance + maintenance (e.g. tires, oil change, brakes, rare-but-occasional repairs) is a *lot* more than 1% of a typical lower-class person's budget. Hell, I own my vehicles, make a six-figure salary, and *my* monthly transportation costs are still over 1% of my post-tax income.

Even if the impoverished dude walked to the train station and took that to work, he'd still shell out over $60/mo. for a MAX pass here in Portland, and he would have to take home well over $6k/mo post-tax (~$90k/yr or so) before transportation represented only 1% of his budget.

Problem is, you'd end up screwing over the poor - that is, all the people who cannot afford a Prius or similar hybrid/electric vehicle. It would also jack up the price of nearly anything that is transported over the roads... again hitting the poor the hardest of all.

Good point, but there is a corner case: transit buses wouldn't pay those costs in your algorithm either, and yet they operate at a loss as well.

Overall though, Uber's drivers and their subsequent tax-paying activity do bear the costs, even if the company itself does not.

One would hope this would be the case, but the BSA has been operating under similar conditions for decades now...

Well, similar-enough, anyway. The BSA would use the same mechanisms - demand that a victim company submit to an expensive audit/"true-up" session, and would then start litigation if ignored or refused.