My associates is in Computer Science: Networking and even college Algebra didn't transfer. In no way can you tell me that college algebra (which is taught to the standards of accreditation) is somehow different. Your assumption of an Associates is a bit skewed. Basic classes exist across the divide of schools that need to be met so you can give a degree. The University I went to however is not obligated to take credits form any other school.

Though yes, my associates degree was about being able to actually do a job. It was much more practical and hands on then my university education, but still taught everything I've learned in 'CS' classes that the university offers.

I've been keeping my eye on the job market, at least for my area, for the last five years. Which is how long it's been since I lost my good job, as a network admin, and have had to scramble to fill the gap. I spent an entire year being told I was overqualified, to much experience, or underqualified, not having a bachelors degree, for the small number of positions available. In the end with nothing coming up I did what made the most sense and went back to school for a bachelors degree as that was something I got told every time they decided I was underqualified.

To start like almost always happens no credits carried over from my associates degree to my bachelors degree, so I've had to start from scratch. I haven't really learned much of anything I hadn't before during this process and if anything some of my technical skills have withered from not being used. I took a student employee job with the IT department at the university, because at least they were happy to have someone competent but as a student employee I have a fixed wage at minimum wage and no more than 15 hours of work per week. It looked like I might get a full time job with them last year when one of the admins left, but the powers that be decided their was no money to replace a person who had been paid from a specific grant (so they wanted to free up that money to go elsewhere while the grant still calls for that position to be paid). It's my last year here and I now have five years of looking at the market.

The market in my region has been stagnant. A few companies are hiring in my region, but with questions about whether you are on an H1b or not and sky high requirements for those positions... I know I'm not the one they want. If I apply anyways I get near instant feedback they I'm not qualified for their position even when I meet all the stated requirements. I would move, but I simply can't afford that and most companies don't seem interested in talking to me if I don't live within a hundred miles of them. Even that isn't a perfect fix anyways... Their seems to be a half a dozen US cities with insane amounts of IT industry activity, about 30 with sustained IT activity, and the rest of the top 100 cities (one of which I live by) are anemic for IT and always have been. I could never seriously afford to live in any of those cities so many of us in IT work in: San Fransisco, Seattle, Austin, etc. I wouldn't be hired by Google or the others anyways, they prefer fresh young talent and I'm in my mid-30s now.

I'm looking into non-traditional computer related fields, because that is pretty much my last hope to have something when I'm done.

He's hardly alone. Where I live we didn't have broadband 10 years ago. It was 2006 when Time Warner put in cable broadband in my area with a 5mb/500k speed. Later Verizon added DSL with a 1.5mb/500k speed. in 2010/2001 TW upped or connections to 20mb/1mb as they upgraded their basic equipment to DOSCIS 3.

His experience and mine are far more typical of 90% of the US then yours is. I live within 30 miles of one of the top 100 largest cities in the US and the whole region around us doesn't have a single broadband option beyond TW's 20mb/1mb plan and they only cover 5 cities/towns in a region with hundreds of thousands of people. My aunt lives just outside of a town around here and her only broadband option is a cellular hotspot from Verzon.

Just an FYI the providers covering this region include:
TW @ 20mb/1mb
Cablevision @ 5mb/1mb
Verizon @ 1.5mb/500k
Cellular through the big names (Though don't chose Sprint their network skips towns locally)
Satellite Service

Banks, companies, and the government all want to offer more and more online, but the companies providing internet connectivity are happy to tell us to suck it and not provide matching service to our needs. Verizon specifically was handed gobs of cash from my state for 15 years to role out broadband and three years ago it came to a head where they just told my state government we weren't worth the investment which is why we didn't have broadband 15 years later. My state of course did diddly to them even though they had taken our tax payer money and run with it.

I"m in the dumb phone camp as well and thinking about it while by law I'm mandated to have insurance... The last thing my insurance paid out for was some glass fixer after a rock came up off the road and took a sliver out of it. That was over 5 years ago and I have to go back another 7 or 8 years past that since I've had any other issues they have paid out for. Yet... I pay $80/month and have been for at least a decade... So I've paid them at least $9600 over a decade and basically cost them nothing... I'm so getting shafted from that deal...

While DSL can be fine, all to often the big names in DSL in the US offer service like 1.5 mb down and .5 or .6 mb up and those can be near useless with many modern sites. Worse is that is the highest speeds the offer, most users will see somewhat less. I have Time Warner cable and get 20 mb/1 mb, but my neighbors who use Verizon use 1.5 mb/0.6 mb connections and the comparison is just a joke. More ironic is that Verizon charges just $5 less for that than I pay...

I don't have a Mac to run it on... So it's kind of out by default... If Apple ever wanted to go the OS as software for sale route, then it would be... At least for me.

You need a tutorial to use a gun? A safety, a fire rate selector (on guns that are pretty much illegal here in the US), and a trigger is to complex? Heck the last firearms I've seen could even be disassembled by anyone who thought about it for a few minutes...

Lol, maybe where you live... I live in the middle of nowhere in PA. People don't hire people to mow their lawns... Hell the 'economic recovery' never came here, the unemployment rate is still crazy high and the support system for people without jobs has basically broken. I have a job, but it's part time and minimum wage, though it is basically 'in my field' which is sort of a plus. I'm considered lucky where I live to even have that. Some of my neighbors finally got jobs working manual labor jobs at a food processing plant recently and where immensely happy with that. However all my skills are of a technical nature and like almost everyone else here that plant brought people from elsewhere in to run their technical systems without ever looking for local talent.

Anyways... Mowing some yards isn't an option. Thanks for that suggestion from on high though.

As the original question poster...

It has less to do with copyright infringement (even though I don't want to run the risk of being sued for it), but the simple crazy amount of hurdles to do it with Adobe products. The last time I looked into it was(because I'd lost physical copies of the disks for the old master suite work had bought me and I'd had to do all the editing at home as my work PC at the time was a meager Celeron cpu with barely 1 GB of ram, which was no match for my home system with a dual core Athlon cpu running twice as fast and 4 GB of ram and multiple HDDs. However I guess I was stupid and had actually taken the disks back to work to store them, so when I rebuilt that PC I lost the Master Suite install... Looking online the sheer hoops to pirate a copy (permanently making sure it couldn't phone home, replacing certain files after install, the chance that it just refuses to work even after jumping through the hoops) was enough that I didn't go through with it.

I haven't needed the power of Premiere since then... Well until now. But I doubt jumping through a ton of hoops has changed, Adobe is fanatical about piracy (even though in a lot of cases it helps them in the long run).

Well as the one who originally posted this...

My personal project is very simple. I have raw H.264 compliant 1980x1024 (@ 30 fps) video from the camcorder I use and I don't even need to do much if any editing of the video itself currently. The biggest things I do need right now are: Ability to add a title screen to the beginning of a video (and probably and ending screen as well), occasional text overlays, and enhancing audio gain (for when the gain ended up being to low to hear over ambient sound). I am also arguing whether I should combine two videos of 18-24 minutes each into a single video with a transition or leave them separate. Right now the only one likely to view the video in question are people I know online (because online is twenty times easier than making a bunch of discs for people and hoping their DVD/Blueray player can even play the video in question).

Before I ever touched Premiere I had used Pinnacles video editing software nearly a decade ago... But I've always wanted to replace shelling out a ton of money for video editing. It seems like their should be some solid solution to the need to edit video on a PC after years and years of people doing this that is not expensive or not so expensive, but limited...

Anyways... I thought Slashdot might be able to give me some things to look at and I have found a few things to take a look at from peoples suggestions. It's also pointed out how many failures are out there as well...

I'll add that this was the case at around 6:30 AM EST when I was getting ready. The TW comment says "As of 6am ET services were largely restored", so it may be DNS was just the only thing left not working when I was still at home.

I am on Time Warner at home and when I got up this morning I found I couldn't check my email like I do every morning. I spent a bit of time on it trying to figure out what they had done to the connection and found I could not connect to their DNS servers, but I could connect to remote IPs and even trace route them just fine.

I had to head into work, so I didn't stay to actually call them... But I'm hardly surprised if they have screwed up their DNS. I had changed my DNS settings to use Google's DNS servers for a long time because theirs had issues. More recently I rebuilt my PC and I hadn't changed the settings again so they still use Time Warner's DHCP settings to pull DNS server settings.

Just the other day we had a story about how american tech companies only want the top 1-10% of available tech workers in the US and everyone else they hire is a visa worker... This suggests that maybe 1 in 10 STEM workers in the US actually can get a job in the US in tech... So for the love of god we need more women to enter this often dead end field why? So more women can remain unemployed, underemployed, and otherwise in debt?

As fundamental as computers are today I can sort of understand a certain level of computer competency/literacy is probably a good thing... But this drive to force more women into STEM seems a bit silly to me... If they want to sure, if not that's fine....

I know tons of female doctors... Most recent my doctor is a woman and the one before that was a man who had a female intern who I saw more than him. Women tend to like medicine in general, but while they are found equally in nursing and as doctors men are rarely nurses. A lot of this goes to society. Men are distrusted in occupations like nursing, teaching (elementary mostly), and secretarial fields. All fields long dominated by women because they were the only jobs available for women.