I office in the middle of a headhunter firm right now, and I just finished having lunch with one a couple days ago where she talked to me about their business. Here is the summary:

1) They just match your name and experience against a request from a client -- it's all keyword search all the time.
2) Skip the cover letter, it wastes their time -- just a 'I'm looking for work in these areas' will do fine, thank you
3) E-mailing the Resume is the way to go, there are well established processes to get your e-mail in the system
4) Send out resumes to as many recruiters as you can stomach -- companies frequently just use one recruiter, so you need to make sure that you fulfill the breadth side of the equation by getting onto as many databases as possible.
5) Recruiters hate hard questions and anomalies and prefer no hassle. This is probably why your resume is getting edited, even though it's an unethical thing to do.

Okay, so all that said, I would recommend you:

a) Make something useful sounding that you can say you've been doing in your non-work time, like an open source project, or a website catering to charities who want to learn about technology, or whatever. You can then gloss your layoff time at the end, saying "when I am not working, I volunteer with ... or build this cool ". This is the ethical version of lying on your resume

b) Complain to the recruiter's boss, but don't expect to get anywhere.

c) Think like a swinger man -- the more the merrier! Get out there and find 30 tech recruiters. They certainly aren't more committed to you than that.

This story can be summarized: JWZ Wins. Big Time.

I'm impressed, I didn't expect he'd get this kind of leverage.

There are a few technical pieces missing from the comments here, and this story is still definitely developing. From Cyanogen's twitter feed today: "This is about proprietary device drivers and not Google at this point. These drivers are not redistributable."

This is a nice reminder that there's likely no building a usable phone room without infringing on some agreements. I do not expect this to change in the near future; what this means is that a sort of 'merge' or 'overwrite' or patch system will need to be put in place for people modding their phones.

This will take a little time to build would be my guess, but isn't insurmountable; I think the complexity of building such a thing should fit inside of the typical hacker attention span that's been piqued right now.

The most practical solution probably won't get you many friends, commodore64_love. I think that the original question asker wants to, you know, have people who like and appreciate him at his art-oriented school.

Since you seem like a black and white sort of dude, I'll say it in nerdish black and white: refusing to participate in social 'gifting' if you are not an alpha male guarantees that you will drop to the bottom of the social pecking order. Most non-outcast-y people get this intuitively, and it's one reason they have more friends. Outcasts can learn to do this, along with other social niceties and reintegrate, if they choose to.

Or, they can, you know, keep their laptops to themselves.

If it sounds harsh, sorry. I'm just trying to engage with you on the level and tone you did. Maybe it will help your social life.

For a number of years I've wanted a slashdot greasemonkey extension called something like "slashback" which would restrict all comments to people with UID lower than your own, thus returning slashdot to the same user community that got you to sign up in the first place.

I tear up a little just thinking about it, of course not enough to actually write such a thing.

Maybe next year, Taco? And, please keep the achievements, I love them! I'll come back tomorrow and be logged in, I promise!

You are a geek. I assume therefore that you understand how to write queries in SQL which combine data for you in interesting ways, like say select sum(winnings) from roulette_betting_table group by betting_strategy;

Pivot Tables let stupid people do that in excel.

You could probably use Pivot Tables to count how many of your friends are K++ in the geek code or better, I suppose, if you kept them in an excel spreadsheet.

So, I guess the upshot is: don't bet on roulette? Pick up a book on SQL? Maybe you need some more geeky friends, or you could add "aspiring" to your geek appellation.

Oops, this is slashdot, and I responded in kind. What I meant to say is: "Don't be deliberately stupid, it gives geeks a bad name. Pivot Tables are useful to finance people and others who want to combine and analyze financial data in Excel."