Not sure if troll....

A company can most certainly adhere to basic safety standards instead of sacrificing a bunch of lives for profit in places where the safety standards are not legally mandated.

In this particular case, an organization owned and operated by a bunch of 1%ers wrecked the lives of numerous poverty-stricken workers and their families through gross negligence. And they are unlikely to suffer impactful financial consequences as a result.

Some of the available techniques are trivial, others less so, but there are a number of methods that I would consider reasonable to accomplish. I would consider TRS abuse, VOIP spoofing, and utilizing a spoofing service to be trivial.

Partial list of submerged human activity:

Doggerland was a rather large land area containing a not-insignificant amount of human activity, which now lies under the north sea.

Sundaland is another large landmass that is now submerged, with an unknown but suspected to be significant quantity of past human activity.

Coquer Cave off the coast of France is an interesting site, containing paleolithic cave paintings that can only be reached by diving.

The Black Sea is hypothesized to have expanded in the past, covering an unknown quantity of human archaeological material. The extent and suddenness of the expansion are currently subject to debate.

The original peopling of the Americas has been hypothesized to have been impacted by a coastal migration route, but much of the archaeological evidence (if it exists) for this hypothesis is currently under water.

Beringia itself, suspected to be the cradle of the Native American peoples, is now partially submerged under the Bering strait.

This is a good one. Stolen phones are quite useful for this kind of activity.

Well, Wikipedia lists exactly three methods of spoofing caller ID specifically.

One interesting technique is to use (abuse) TRS.

If you are interested in actually learning more about such techniques I would suggest typing "call spoofing" into your favorite search engine.

There are other technical and non-technical methods that, as you pedantically noted, do not actually hide the source of the call, but render that information unhelpful. Pre-paid "burner" cell phones are an obvious and popular choice for many circumstances where anonymous calling is desired, and in many cases payphones can also be used with relative anonymity.

Short answer - no.

A longer, more speculative answer can be found here.

Generally people don't call in swattings from their home phones. There are numerous methods of spoofing or obfuscating the source of a phone call.

That's like asking if a mechanical engineer can do plumbing.

Short answer - I'm sure he could, though it would take him a while to become an expert at plumbing. The mechanical engineer could, in theory, design a plumbing system.

In the same way, system administrators and network engineers and other IT personnel are experts at the particular system that they work with. Those systems were designed by "theory CS people"...

I agree that many IT disciplines are more analogous to a skilled trade than a scientific or academic discipline. These career paths would benefit from a structured apprenticeship program, and in some cases unionization.

However, the group of institutions consisting of ITT, DeVry, and "others" (UofPhoenix, Virginia College, Strayer, etc.) are not even a part of the answer.

This category of institutions are private, for-profit "vocational" schools. They are predatory companies that have extremely high tuition for very poor educational value. Their admissions requirements are dubious, essentially consisting of "can you pay your tuition".

Their business model is built around sucking as much money from their students as possible. In some cases they encourage their students to take out private, high-interest loans to pay tuition. A large portion of their students are also GI-bill students, whose education is paid for by the military.

This group of institutions as a whole has a 3-year federal student loan default rate of 21.8% - about 60% higher than public institutions at 13%. This does not reflect the default rate on private loans, which in the case of ITT tech might be as high as 60%. The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is currently suing ITT tech for predatory lending practices.

You can check the official, per-school 2-year federal student loan default rates here.

Also, these institutions are not accredited in the same way that legitimate universities and colleges are, and their credits will NOT be accepted by most legitimate institutions, or even among each other.

TL;DR - stay away from the private, for-profit vocational schools. You will, without a doubt, receive a better education for dramatically less cost at your local community college - also, many credits that you earn at a community college can be applied towards a bachelor's degree at a legitimate university in the future.

I have held my current job (I am also in the US) for about 2.5 years, and in that time we've seen 3 non-disaster caused blackouts. I work in an office park in a small city.

We have seen around 10 service-provider outages impacting WAN, internet, or both. At least 1 of these outages was caused by a major disaster.

We have had 1 internal issue that could be characterized as a "major, crippling IT outage."

Keep in mind these comments are all anecdotal, as are yours. I do agree with your premise that IT systems seem to experience significant outages somewhat more frequently than utilities do. I would explain this by noting that IT infrastructure is generally a little more complex than utility infrastructure (though usually on a dramatically smaller scale), with less reliable hardware and significantly more frequent changes.

Because even pervasive corruption is, in all but the most extreme cases, not worth turning your homeland into a bloodbath.

I see. Since all the hubs would be part of the same collision domain the effect would be virtually identical to plugging one of the hubs into itself.

One thing that boggles the mind - what year was this that an 18-building campus network still had MULTIPLE hubs??

Is that a fancy way of saying that he plugged a hub into itself...?

WGU is essentially a vocational school that is accredited to award bachelor's and master's degrees - which, as you say, is what many people need. Most of their IT degrees do not cover any computer science to speak of, and they don't pretend to. Their degrees are "Bachelor's of Science in Information Technology" with various concentrations - network administration, network design and management, security, etc.

WGU hasn't released the program guide for their new "software development" degree yet, but their current "Software concentration" degree is very light on theory, and contains several practical IT certifications. I expect the software development degree will be a variant of this.

You're just not going to get a strong "computer science" degree at a cheap online school. In my opinion this isn't much of an issue, since most IT career paths really just require a vocational education anyway. Most people don't really care about CS theory (and most don't really need to) - they just want skills that are applicable to a job.

Western Governor's University and Excelsior (both non-profit) are the best online options, especially if you want self-paced. They are both very cost-effective and regionally accredited. You should check out the details of the programs that each offers to see if they provide what you want. I know WGU's IT programs are very solid, but I'm not sure about their software development options. I know they just recently added a Software Development concentration option for a Bachelor's degree, but the program guide hasn't been posted yet so I'm not sure of the exact courses offered.

If you end up getting your bachelor's, Georgia Tech now offers their well-respected MS in CS degree online. The admissions requirements are stricter than the online-only schools, but not too onerous.

If you don't really want a degree, but would like some formal training, Stanford and MIT both have strong no-credit open course ware offerings - they also have paid-for online certificate programs.