Back in graduate school I made a proof of concept vending machine whose goal was to be able to vend beer within the local council's licensing laws.

It was a combination of the early smartcards (8k), biometrics and micropayments.

The idea is a person would register showing proof of age, have their thumb print scanned, and purchase electronic 'tokens' which were then loaded into the smartcard with the user's print. To buy a beer, the user would insert the card, validate the print - the server would then authorise beer dispension based on time/day (local licensing laws) and if the user had a token (a digital hash value).

We did a proof of concept, but my lasting regret is a) i never published and b) i didn't get sponsorship from Guinness.

A mixed blessing I suspect.

Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is professors aren't hired for their teaching ability, or even their English as a First Language skills.

Profs are hired because of the potential for additional funding through research. Many pawn off the actual teaching to their life bonded serfs (PhD students).

When I was a grad student my prof (and a lot of others) saw the lectures as a distraction to their "real work" (research).

Furthermore, given that profs are 'evaluated' by their schools by the number of papers published (and in what journals) and the amount of funding they can bring in, there is little to no motivation to teach.

Thankfully, there are a few out there who love teaching, but the rest, it's a necessary evil.

I would prefer that software vendors be held accountable for their products. Every other industry is.

Though this is what former Cyber Security Czar Richard Clarke said at Blackhat in Vegas around 2003, and well... look what happened to his career after that.

I'm the IT security director for an international company (35+ countries). We have a variety of user / developer and security requirements.

We do not give our developers local admin on there workstations. However, we do give them VMs to develop on. This way, if they screw something up (which happens a LOT), they can go back a snapshot or two and fix things.

Incidentally, the test environments have very restricted security permissions - they have to be able to run on the federal desktop core configuration - so we encounter a lot bugs because developers insist on running their app with admin rights.

if we could train developers better, and have IT admins that understand both sides of the issues - things get better. It works pretty well for my company.

Actually, FreeBSD DOES run on some microwaves. There is a list of compatible hardware.

It is the OS of choice for odd appliances.

On November 27, 2006 the U.S. Copyright office granted the following exception to the DMCA:

5. Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network. [ http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2006/ ]

Unfortunately, this exception (like all exceptions to the DMCA) only last for 3 years.

To date, there has been no extension granted, which means on November 28 2009, it will become illegal again.

I too am 39 and just made this same decision.

I've been a techie my whole career - even have a DEFCON championship under my belt. But I've noticed that despite having actual technical street cred, the very senior management start to look at the old techies as expensive and 'past their prime.' With exception of a few companies that have 'fellowship' type of tracks for the tech folks, management is the best future.

Besides, as it was pointed out, having a manager who actually understand what the techies are telling him/her is a great bonus. The language gap between geek and suit hasn't been crossed by many.

I would also recommend trying to take some basic leadership classes as well. The 'management' portion is pretty simple for a techie, it's the 'people' portion that always gets us. There is a lot one can learn about conflict resolution and leadership from these classes. Remember, most of us became geeks because we don't like dealing with people.

Now you can deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to.

"Do you know string theory?"

"No, I'm a frayed knot."

This post does illustrate the classic right vs. wrong approach to the office.

The young tech guy feels he is right because he knows technology.

The boss feels his is right because he is... well.. the boss.

Guess who wins?

Arguing with your boss is like arguing with a woman. Even if you win, you still lose.

I too used the floopies back in 1995. I learned a lot of interesting thing... like you had to manually configure some addressing issues in 'shadow memory' in order to get my token ring card to work.

I used latex to write my thesis in vi (sorry emacs peoples).

yep, we had to type uphill both ways in those days. We fought each other with sticks to obtain extra carriage returns.