The core problem for the US government, and whichever of the many branches that is taking responsibility for this or that part of the government's cyber infrastructure, is a lack of pervasive talent among the staff. In order to attract talented staff, it is essential to have a very transparent mission and vision for an organization. Is the US government really committed to securing the infrastructure?

I think your premise is incorrect: evaluating teachers is actually very difficult to do. I think that one way to sum up the challenge is that teacher's don't have a "boss" in the way of most other professions. Consider, for example, in higher ed where a faculty member may have something that amounts to a dotted line to an administrative dean. That dean may have 50 or more faculty under them, with no intervening layers of management. This is obviously untenable by design. One could go on and talk about the dynamics of student evals, department chairs, and student learning outcomes. For the sake of brevity, I'll just say that evaluating a profession that is as much an art as a science is rather difficult. I'm hopeful MET comes up with a good model.

I think it would be most helpful if you covered the entire field of computer science and the IT profession in general. As you said, a lot of kids have a distorted perception of what it may mean to be in the field, and it is important to flesh those things out a bit. Also, talk about your passion for what you do: perhaps the technical challenges you face, the joy of working with technology, etc. You could cover all these things in about 10 minutes, and open for another 10 for questions.

Incidentally, I did recently pay for a subscription to the Economist. It is a reasonable rate for quality, and I get both a print and digital version. The digital version is DRM-free, shall we say, and I can access it anywhere and in anyway that I want.

I have struggled mightily to resist paying the high rate and absurd model (pay more for access on the ipad? Seriously?) that the Times charges. I've tried to find other news sources that compare in depth, editorial insight, and quality independent reporting. Everything I've used to date has been half as good at best. I haven't caved yet, but I can see it coming on the horizon...

Any organization as large as the US military is going to make mistakes and have breaches. Hopefully, they are identifying breaches on a regular basis, because such events are likely frequent occurrences. What is most troubling about this is that this is a fairly significant breach of a critical strategic asset. After all, the greatest vulnerability of automated war machines is the ability of the enemy to compromise those machines. This sort of event is bound to happen, prevention isn't going to work every time, but how the military responds to events like this is an important indicator of overall capabilities.

At the end of the day, at some point, those in power need to recognize that IT security is both a pervasive issue throughout the organization and a critical military asset for future operations. We couldn't fight wars of the past with IT, but wars of the future will certainly have an IT component. A distinct branch of service is needed.

I always find that the best way to give advice is to repeat back what people say. You said: "This would make a massive difference to my life." Is that true? If so, then the decision is obvious. In that vein, I would interpret your loyalty question as an emotional one: you are attached to where you work, you have put a lot of time and effort into your work. You are very proud of what you have accomplished and what you know. Those are all good things, but going back to the massive difference in your life, it sounds like it is time to move on. That's a good thing.

I think this is a bit extreme.

Of all the resumes I read (incidentally probably several hundred over the last few months) it is about 1:3 when you see individuals who have spent their entire career around similar type fields. The majority of folks that I see have pretty varied experience. Now, if we look a couple of generations back, I think you are right: people who retired in the 1990s were more likely to stay in one field/company/industry for the whole of their lives. For the past 15 years, I've seen the opposite. In fact, what I see a lot is folks who jump from one type of job to another with such frequency that I tend to worry about how much actual experience has been accumulated.

Very sad to read this news. Michael was a visionary with a strong drive and passion. He wasn't always a fan of the latest technology, but digitizing books was always his top priority. I hope the project continues forward with renewed vigor, it is an incredibly important effort. Consider that without something like Project Gutenberg, digital libraries in the 21st century may not be free, open, and public.

A fair sentiment, but if $2 trillion dollars amounts to a quibble, how could the US debt situation overall be a "meltdown"? Sure, the US debt is a significant problem, as is the lack of economic growth. Both of those problems can and do co-exist. Similarly, our ratings agencies are past their prime and highly problematic. It is hard to deny that our ratings agencies provided the means to the 2008 collapse, and it would not be without irony that these same agencies are creating a problem anew.

The slashdot commenting system is an excellent example of a model towards this solution.

Users will always self-select to what interests them: we can't, and shouldn't, stop that. But taking the example of political news, what we can do with a reasoned comment system like /. is create some semblance of debate -- imperfect and problematic -- but far superior to what we currently see on news websites. The NY Times has done a decent job of this actually. Not a system as good as /., where users have a bit more investment in sticking around and not trolling since modding is done by the community and sticks with you, as opposed to the invisible hand system of the NY Times.

Hence what is, at times, the tragedy of prodigies: their inability to successfully fail.

I think the author is missing the point of modern systems administration. I wonder what the average number of servers a system administrator manages today, versus ten years ago? I would guess it has increased by a factor of around 10, particularly with the rise the 1U commodity servers, virtualization, etc. Sysadmins just don't have the time to treat our OS like a zen garden. The OS, especially with modern *nix, has become a kind of commodity, while the bulk of system admin work has moved to a higher levels of application management, systems integration, etc.

This is where I think the author fails most prominently, by implying that sysadmins who simply re-image (a claim that is a straw man) are somehow not as sophisticated and nuanced. Consider instead that they may be working at a higher, more complex level. This whole argument reminds me of the old debates System V admins would have with the rising Linux admins: this notion that package management was for weenies who don't "understand" the intricacies of dependency resolution. I remember incredibly excruciating debates where these folks would insist that spending hours resolving dependency hell was "good" for the craft because, after all, you should know and configure every last component on your system! God forbid it is done automatically for you, with literally tens of packages being installed with somewhat perfunctory knowledge, so that you could move onwards to accomplish the actual task at hand.

Sorry, sysadmin's don't have time for nostalgia. Save the sob stories of a bygone era for an industry that isn't based on constant change.

Curious. Couldn't find a recent publication, but here is an article from 2006 with the same title and subject. http://tanzanite.chem.psu.edu/pdfs/806_Optoelectronics%20Reprint.pdf

Parent and gp provide good advice. One more thing: while impressing people has benefits, the main focus of any presentation should be to convey valuable information and engage your audience at a high level.