I too have made the jump into that industry, and I would tell the OP that the key is looking for a position within it that needs the knowledge and analytical thought skills they have already developed. The finance industry is, in many ways, somewhat balkanized - there are developers and architects who speak a totally different language to bankers, accountants and fund managers and they in their turn are dealing with industry regulations that were written by lawyers rather than financial professionals. A good software guy who can learn to be as fluent in the language of business and finance as they are in the language of IT folks is well suited to take on an analysts role, taking business needs and turning them into formal sets of software requirements. Particularly with the current chaotic state of financial regulation in the world economy there's a very high level of churn in the regulations the finance industry is operating under and in-house tool-sets are needing a LOT of updates right now. Software developers and QA folks are fairly common but folks who have the ability to take business logic defined (naturally so) in the language of that business and produce detailed requirements that tell a developer EXACTLY how the code they are writing is to behave are rarer.One just has to remember that one is not actually responsible for coding it any more and stick to telling the dev teams WHAT it must do in sufficient detail that they can properly design HOW it does it :)

Exercise a little google-fu and check out the Best Buy corporate HQ near the Minneapolis/St Paul airport... When they built that it seemed so appropriate and in line with their corporate attitude that they'd be headquartered in a bunch of sandcrawlers. We try to avoid buying from them but if we're running out of options, somebody in the family will always say "well, in the last resort we could go look what the Jawas have got... "

When they started introducing the post-nuke flash-sideways stuff I said to myself "oh $#!+, they are going to do a damn ghost whisperer/jacobs ladder/riverworld saccharine-fest at the end of this."

The series would have stood on its own without the ENTIRE sideways arc and its preachy-teachy allegory. The sideways arc just detracted from the main "really happened" island story. Maybe it wouldnt have if it had actually been an alternate timeline and the writers had come up with an interesting way to recombine them, but the "now you're all dead and its time to go to the light" stuff?

*puke*

Just skip over every single bit of the flash-sides when you watch it on DVD.. That superfluous allegory in the metaphysical swamp just chews the legs off the story and isnt worth your time.

You are very much mistaken about the state of multiple monitor support on Linux.

I probably am, all I know of it is what I've read. I don't have first hand experience with multiple monitors in Linux. I do have first hand experience with the double monitors at work, under Windows. By afternoon, alt-tab stops working. I don't know if thet's Microsoft's fault or the video card's fault, as they're using the software that comes with the card.

When they first installed the second monitor, Windows thought there were three of them. I had to go in and remove a driver to make it work.

I don't believe you. Hardware updates are optional

I had it set to automatic update, and went through hell trying to find out why I couldn't get on the internet. I thought the cat had broken the modem (it was on the floor the morning it broke), the ISP saw the modem and thought it was the network card. I thought maybe a cable, and had I not reinstalled Windows because XP had disabled the software that came with my CD burner, informed me of it with one of those annoying balloons on every boot, and wouldn't let me uninstall it I would have bought a new networks card.

I stopped letting it update automatically after that, of course.

If you load a help option in a Linux program, more often than not it launches your web browser and takes you to a site with some documentation with chapters listed in the ToC but whose contents are "This chapter has not been written yet."

Yes, I've run across that.

THERE IS NO FUCKING EXCUSE for a browser not to follow web standards. If it fails to do so it should be promptly uninstalled. Anyone compelling to do otherwise should be shot. The end.

Well, I DO have a background in genetics and to be honest I probably wouldnt need a sequencing machine to create something evil.

Give me the enzymes and nucleotide stocks, some e coli and some M13 bacteriophage. a couple glass plates and some acrylamide I'm quite capable of sequencing without one, thank you very much!

Not that much sequencing would be required, Monsanto have already done that work and have kindly provided a template with a known target sequence (the gene for the thuringensis toxin) already under the control of a highly active promoter. So lets start our hypothetical experiment with a sample of BT corn.

Ideally we'd look for a single-peptide toxin and recent research has provided a much "better" payload than either ricin or any other plant or bacterially derived peptide toxin and again much of the required preliminary work has already been done. We're going to replace the gene for thuringensis toxin with PRP and make sure, by site directed mutagenesis, which requires the same reagents and skills as sequencing, that as many as possible of the polymorphisms that encourage the refolding of this protein into the PRP-Sc form are present. Sure it will take time and persistence, but the techniques are no challenge.

Theres your upwind "pollen bomb." Mad Corn Disease, anyone?

I am a farmer and I will say I do NOT trust corporate big ag business (nor ag college academia that relies on the same big business for funding and has tame scientists in and out of the same big business) to be self regulating as to safety concerns nor do I trust the governmental regulators because of the revolving door "jobs" aspect that occur. (exactly the same as occurs with Wall Street/Federal Reserve/Treasury/SEC revolving door jobs).

I'm an ex-molecular biologist and I dont trust 'em either. Modern genetic techniques do indeed have the potential to bring tremendous benefits and I'll even go so far as to say the profit motive has a role in driving the deployment of some of those benefits but thats only with the most rigorous and transparent testing and verification. THAT is what we dont have, instead we have regulators willing to take the word of the guys who stand to make a huge pile from a favorable result of the testing. The end result of this will indeed be, as you predict at the end of your comment, that some minor factor which in testing was argued away as insignificant or negligible will become significant when the product is deployed on such scales as are applicable to food production.

I hope we're both wrong, but I dont believe we are.

The paper: http://discovery.csc.ncsu.edu/pubs/ccs09-HookSafe.pdf

And the required Schneier blog post: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/protecting_oss.html

I'm pretty confident in saying that economies of scale have made actual sales of 360's profitably by this point. At least, that's usually the way things work with consoles.

I realize you are not taking this view, but responding to it anyway :)

The only problem is, he could afford it. He spent 75 pounds to get it "chipped." That's the 12% of the price of the 30-40 games he later said he copied, so he could have at least bought 10% of those games (3-4).

My take is that people have decided they want what they want now and if there is an easy and relatively safe way to illegally obtain it - instead of paying for it or saving up and paying for it - they will do it the illegal way. Modding wasn't illegal, AFAIK, but downloading was. And yes, Microsoft lost sales; presumably this guy would have bought games if he wasn't getting them for free, as he did have money to spend on it.

The "no lost sale" argument still implies that it's okay to do something as long as you can't afford to do it. That's the part of the argument that's wrong, IMO. That and there does definitely seem to be a pervading can't-wait feeling. You (and I) wait for the game prices to go down. These kids tell us they "can't" wait and that they don't have anything else to do if they can't play the newest games. Something is wrong there...

so really it's all about the boink applications, I guess...