Avoid technologies that don't easily transfer to other technologies; VB is hellishly rough for being a bit of a dead end, albeit terrifically useful at what it does. Leverage the .NET part of your resume, and spend a few months learning C#. It's not terrible, and will make you a better VB developer at the very least. At the most, you can pivot out, and do a wider variety of tasks - for better pay - in C# than in VB.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I moved here three years ago looking at staying 10-20 years. So far, so good. We have a thriving tech community, a low cost of living, and low crime. Due to this being the steel making capital of the world 100 years ago, we have a lot of old and awesome cultural institutions much larger than would be expected of a city of this size, but houses cost next to nothing compared to larger cities. We're in the middle of a natural resources boom; we export quite a bit of energy. We sit at the junction of three rivers, and west of a mountain range; we rarely have droughts. Winters are reasonably mild. Summers are reasonably mild. There's an enormous education center here. Healthcare is great. And we certainly have jobs, as well. Take a look at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, the Software Engineering Institute, and the National Robotics Engineering Consortium; pghtech.org lists quite a bit more. Education, medicine, finance and software tend to be the dominant industries here, which are (not coincidentally) more recession-proof than most. Best small city I know.

The technology doesn't work. Five seconds win a nail file rendered it useless. 100 rounds at a practice range *also* render it useless. It simply does not work; it was proposed as a roundabout way of banning guns entirely. From the side, revolvers also don't leave casings at a crime scene. At best, it's going to alter gun sales, but not slow them.

(Digs) SPSS seemed to be hugely used around NIH/Bethesda, if it helps. Tossed your resume into the system here at work as well, can't hurt. :-)

Keeping up with your profession and keeping your skills recent doesn't take a whole lotta time; call it a five hour a week investment that's the difference between "having trouble finding work" and "can quickly find work in any major city in the world". If that's an hour a day after work, it's arguably a pretty good spend of an hour of time. On the managerial front, I've met very, very few managers who worked a 40-hour workweek; they're not doing managing outside the office, but they're certainly stuck *in* the office more than most. Or, for white collar jobs, the 40-hour workweek is often a myth; 45-50 seems the absolute norm in America.

Science degrees are rough, honestly; many of the physics majors I've met have wound up doing math or software.

I assumed you were talking about "glut of unemployed factory workers". My bad. Where is there a glut of unemployed software engineers? To be fair, "years of language X" isn't a great sign; "years of languages X, Y, and Z, with nonprofessional experience in A, B and C" is *much* more likely to find work.

The glut of people have the wrong skills, and can't always be retrained, and certainly can't finish training now. H1-B visas don't go to unskilled laborers; the temporary visas go to people who have the skills we need, and have them now, and are likely to gain *more* skills in the future.

Junk degrees in college are an issue here, and they aren't helping much of anyone. College loans are available to all, but they're not quite enough to pay for a top-tier engineering school. College loans are available to all, but they subsidize comparative medieval literature majors just the same as electrical engineers. We need more of certain professions, but we aren't actively helping people go into those professions any more than a random pick on a dartboard. We also explain to high school students "you can do anything!", when in the real world, some careers are *enormously* harder to pursue than others.

Temporary, no. Permanent, yes. We should be stapling green cards to every engineering degree with a 3.0 average granted by an accredited US university. We don't have enough highly skilled folks to fill these jobs, and these jobs are leaving and not coming back. If a company in America wants to hire you to do work for more than the average *household* income in America, and it's not a profession with a lack of job openings, we should be doing our best to convince you to become a permanent citizen. Average household income is under $50k, FWIW.

Gun control can be about control, but often, is about a kneejerk reaction to something people just aren't familiar with. I grew up (in America) in a fairly rural area. Long guns were commonplace. Pistols were a bit odd, but not a problem. I moved to a large city, and guns are viewed as a completely different thing there, some for good reasons, some not for good reasons. Dunno. Much like most problems, it's an issue of communication and spin, and not an actual issue. Much like most problems in America, I'd blame the media.

I'd believe guns kill people if gun bans in other countries had successfully reduced crime, instead of just changing it. The majority (2/3rds) of gun deaths in the US are suicides. We'd be most successful reducing *deaths* by having better support for depressed people, for instance.

The United States has more guns than people. If the guns were causing the crime, we'd live in a post-apocalypse already.

I'm late on this one, and haven't posted in awhile, but this is probably worth chiming in on. (Posted above anonymously, just replying in full here.) I chatted with him after the fair, and also chatted with his parents for awhile. He understood the theory behind and around his work, and by all accounts did the work himself; this wasn't a parent doing it for him. What he did is likely going to save lives. I also had a chance to talk to Nicholas Schiefer, who did a project called Apodura; better search of short content based on markov chain modelling. He also very much understood what he had done, how it worked, what some of the pitfalls were, and what he might do on it next. Or, in short, at least at the level of winner/runner-up, they've done the work themselves, and are phenomenally advanced students. If you have experience in the target field - which the judges do! - it should be *very* evident which students have done the work, which students have done the work with assistance from a university lab, and which students are essentially parroting knowledge that a parent handed to them. Students that do phenomenal work on their own and can speak intelligently about that to a subject matter expert, I'd certainly give the benefit of the doubt.

First Slashdot response in maybe five years here. Wow, that chart is misleading. My girlfriend bought a 3G from an Apple store. Support died in her SECOND year. It's not "years since initial release" that counts; it's "years since last unit sold retail", which is *enormously* more telling. Apple sucks at this, while all of the Android devices I know have gotten 2+ years support from last retail date.