"calling this 'collateral murder' is not appropriate and borders on criminal in itself."

You sound like a Vatican spokesman saying the Pope's hard done by, and ignoring all the child rape.

This is the dumbest thing I've read in a while. So you're basically telling anyone that is in the field to drop what they are doing, retrain for a new field where virtually none of the college credits they currently have will do jack for them...pushing them further into debt all because IYO health care is the wave of the future.

People in the IT field are closer to the BIOtech field than medical health care. Talk about brain drain...telling a bunch of bright people to stop what they are doing so they can service others. Do you honestly want that a**hole that took your phone call at tech support to be responsible for the care of your mom or dad when they get older? Customer service is a joke in the IT field for a reason...personality does not mix well with others. And your solution is to have them all jump on the medical band wagon?

Same with me- just trying to hang in there at this point. In an effort to get more hours working on a project that is viewed by consulting company management as "non-billable hours", have even offered to cut my hourly just to get more hours.

And the stress level on my billable project is way up, as Fortune 500 company expects 40 hours worth of work a week on a project that I'm limited to only billing 20 hours a week on. I'm being stubborn on that one though- sooner or later they'll notice that I'm only hitting 1 deadline in 5 and ask why.

If that is really an Israeli soldier than the iconography is a dog tag. In addition, it's connected to his neck with a steel chain which is covered with a "cheap black cord". All combat soldiers cover the steel chain so that it wont reflect light and give away their position in battle.

From the listing for the job I now hold (emphasis mine):

The company uses a lot of open-source projects in their work. Being familiar with the open-source community (especially the self-managed, team-oriented development and the community-driven support system) is practically required for the job.

This is what happens when you stop looking for just a "typical corporate IT department" and start looking for actually decent jobs. With no previous paid employment, I'm starting at a salary roughly equal to the average given by the linked search. You may now be astounded.

Let me adjust that to be "some of them hate us because of HOW we control a portion of the world's money and cultural trends".

And you call this a MINOR fuckup!? A minor fuck up is a jeep overturning, a flight deck operator missing something on a checklist, or a grunt getting pissed and taking a swing at a local. This has passed that threshold and had entered into the realm of major fuckups. Furthermore, only countries that deploy their military abroad (the term for this used to be "war") make these fuckups. When was the last time that Peru slaughtered foreign civvies?

Maybe you would be claiming a 128 without smoking...

... and wouldn't be writing sentences like that.

Someone else explain the concept of 'average', I'm going out for a pick...

Can you surf the web on your wristwatch? Can you have instantaneous voice conversations with people across the country / world with your wristwatch? Can you set reminders, play games or listen to music on your wrist watch? There have been so many comments saying that people would never give up their good old wristwatch and go out to buy a phone in order to tell the time... Are so many people missing the point of the article? I don't own a phone to tell me the time. But I don't wear a wristwatch because I already have a device on me that serves this purpose while doing many other useful things. I think that phones are great for combining many of the common things we do on a daily basis. I don't use it a huge amount, and thus can get up to a week before I need to recharge the battery, which isn't a terrible task. Yes, if I had a wristwatch, I wouldn't have to charge it weekly, but since I'm going to have to own a phone regardless, and charge it weekly regardless, where's the downside in the fact that it tells the time, so I have no need of a watch? On the wall of my living room there's a clock, on my desk there's a phone with display and my computer to tell me the time, along with a wall clock.

Machine code is what you get if you take the assembly and run it through an assembler to produce code that the computer can understand. The computer can then execute it. It is not human readable unless you've memorized which opcodes correspond to which assembly keywords.

I don't know, I'm sure there's someone out there who has actually memorized it. I wrote machine code for a Z-80 Timex-Sinclair back in the early eighties, as there were no assemblers for that machine I knew of. I had to write the assembly, then translate it byte by byte, looking up the opcodes by hand, then test each small module before stitching them together.

I only did it a couple of times as it was very tedious, and only when I needed blazing speed, but I was pretty proud when I wrote a "battle tanks" game that ran fast enough on its 1 mHz processor that I had to put NOP loops init to slow it down somewhat. It was quite a challenge and a learning experience, but I'm sure someone smarter than me could breeze through it.

Of course, the Z-80 was a primitive processor that wasn't anywhere near as complex as an x86. I'm pretty sure it would be impossible for me to do with a modern processor (and I'm not nearly as patient as I used to be), but like I said, someone smarter than me could accomplish it, maybe even considering it trivial.

I fail to see why it's can't be used for "real work." Just do your compiles on a remote google-hosted developer box with 12 CPUs. I'm sure your compiles will be much faster. As far as internet availability, let's not forget white spaces internet, which Google also has a hand in.

My BA flight to Nairobi was heaven compared to my experiences with other airlines, but my luggage was lost at Heathrow. YMMV, just like with any corporation you deal with, especially in an industry as messed up as air travel. Not that I'd ever downplay the miraculous powers of a strong whisky...

Let's say the hardware DOES cost $150. I think over the lifetime of the hardware they can more than recoup the cost. I think it's in the realm of possibility to get $10 add revenue per month per user. That includes search revenue and adds splashed all over everything. They get their money back after 15 months. Let's say the average lifetime of the hardware is 2 years, they make money after a while. Of course, they make money sooner as the hardware gets cheaper.

Blaming the DoE, standardized tests and zero tolerance for education failure is like blaming extra paper cups for the bankruptcy of Enron. It might contribute, but it isn't the big problem.

There are tons of other countries with bigger standardized tests, even less tolerance and bigger departments of education with more heavy-handed bureaucracy that produce way more scientists per capita. Look at any east Asian country, for instance.

The big problem is really obvious. It's the quality of teachers. And it's not that the teachers are bad per se, it's that they're unmotivated to do better. Teacher's unions make it so that you get paid on years on the job and tenure, not how well you teach. Decoupling rewards with results in this way has been the single worst decision in education in this country.

Look at most charter schools. They flourish. Why? Because the teachers are motivated to teach well, not just do well until they get to tenure status.

...when should we throw our end-of-the-world parties?

I did, too. And they didn't have a discussion page like wikipedia ;)

Seriously, though... it's true. Kids today appear to be interested primarily in wast^H^H^H^Hspending their time playing Halo 3 or CoD... they aren't even curious about how the game works, let alone curious about "boring science" stuff. I grew up more similar to how you described. Scientific-ish family, there were random books that were pretty interesting to read if you were "taught" to be curious about things and ask questions. If you were taught that life was being a vegetable in front of your favorite entertainment - computer games, TV, movies, or what - why would you want to "waste" your time being curious about condensation instead of gaining valuable xbox points(!!!1).

It seems that "entertainment" has begun to replace curiosity. As long as we're entertained, we don't care about intellectual stimulus, don't ask about how things work. Just "eat."

And even our entertainment seems to be going that direction. Seems that stories about respectful human beings working hard in life just isn't "fun to watch" anymore. They'd rather watch J. Lopez fall down.