That's a surprising thing about the US. I live in Sydney, Australia, and it used to be, about 30-40 years ago that the inner suburbs were slums, but now its the outer suburbs which are not the best and the inner city is heavily gentrified and absurdly expensive.

Got any links? I particularly can't find Schneier's resignation letter, but would be also curious to read the industrial history you are referring to, since I'm not an American.

Well we had a Mr Whitlam, who abolished junior rates. Not that it's the same thing, but in hindsight it basically meant, untrained juniors were then to get full salary, so why would anyone employ an untrained person when they could get an experienced person for the same pay?

No truer words written. I'm seeing it in Australia, where the government provides loans for tuition, the universities grow with more students, get more money, employ more people, etc, everywhere they want more and more people to come out with a degree. So then you have this ridiculous situation where child care workers are no longer in child care but rather early childhood education and care. The absurd part of it is, people are starting to need to go through training to do something which they may be already perfectly experienced at by virtue of i don't know, but maybe being a mother, just for example.

You also get the situation where doing clerical work, particularly for the government as a public servant/employee, now requires a degree. Doesn't matter what, but a degree is necessary. It beggars belief that they don't care what you studied, but a degree is necessary to do work which requires on the job training.

That's my experience in Australia. I'm a mechanical and mechatronic engineer. My university requires me to complete two 6 month internships to graduate. I've completed all my subject, and one internship. This final internship is proving to be rather obstructive for me graduating. Most places just don't want to look at someone who's fresh out of university, even though I have worked for a manufacturing company (who unfortunately went broke, as many are in Australia at the moment) and was employed for longer than my allotted internship time. For the very few ads, 5 years experience and for the ones which aren't, they'll be larger companies who have some extremely repugnant HR department who manage to narrow a field of applicants into ones who present the best in interviews and that's about it.

I might come off as jaded, but I'm getting rather annoyed. I'm passionate about engineering, I actually enjoy learning but it seems that no one is interested in employing anyone to do actual engineering work. The university has careers expos, and the last one I went to, only had two companies who were interested in consulting work. The others, were either foreign engineering companies who were after technical sales people, like as if I'm going to spend all those years at university, just to become a sales person, and the other mobs were financial institutions such as banks and 'professional services' companies. The logic being that it's easier to train an engineer on business related matters and finance, than a business or economics graduate, maths and problem solving.

I think my best option would be to try to create a start up with acquaintances, but even then, Australia would have to be one of the worst countries in the developed world to do that and probably worse than many developing nations. So my future is probably not going to be one in Australia unless I resign myself to a life of mediocrity.

Certainly in Australia as well. I think the effects are starting to show now, with many engineering industries in serious decline here, namely manufacturing. I read that Germany compels companies to spend money on training employees through a tax concession. That's something which could be of significant benefit in Australia.

I thought I'd check your signature, now that is irony!

As the other posts have shown, CNC is a system for control. 3D printers utilise this same process. The real distinction is between additive and subtractive manufacturing methods. That's unrelated to CNC systems.

Irony is, 3D printing is CNC.

I wouldn't exclude the possibility of microsoft having no direct involvement. The games reviews industry is in broad terms, quite happy to constantly give good reviews. Just look at all the 7/10's they like to give to awful games. The problem is, a lot of reviewers are reliant on publishers for their games to review. If they don't get them, then they have nothing to review, or worse, they have to pay for them. This is why they don't want to give bad reviews to bad games, it even happened with duke nukem forever, where some guy got blasted for putting on twitter that they would be punishing bad reviewers by withholding things.

ars technica wrote an article on how the games industry also loves to wine and dine reviewers, giving an example for one of the modern warfare games, where the reviewers got helicopter joyrides and a stay in a resort. So they don't have to say anything to the reviewers, anyone is smart enough to realise that if they give bad reviews, they can say buh-bye to their perks.

It was gamespot who sacked a reviewer, names Jeff Gerstmann who gave a (justified) bad review of kane & lynch after the website was plastered in advertising for it.

So did machinima do it by themselves, it's probable, as I doubt any of these companies would formally organise something illegal, but there is certainly an incentive for them to do so, an unspoken incentive which they know they will lose if they change their tune. There are so many examples of this, that I think it's the norm or method of operation of the reviews industry.

Probably is! I worked for a company manufacturing hazardous area heaters, in oz, for the oil and gas industry and many places were still using very old systems. Sure, they worked, but it didn't look like they were designed with the idea of a remote attack in mind, as they generally predated the internet.

We all know advertising and product placement can make a big difference and return on investment, so what about including paid for marketing and tv show plugs into the modelling? Nothing can be successful if no one has heard of it.

It could be that once a certain amount of kids are wrapped in cotton wool and not allowed to leave the house, eventually, any others that still are able, won't have anyone to interact with, hence, it just pushes willing kids/parents to socialise online, anyway.

I heard this idea when it comes to vaccines, that even though you might not vaccinate everyone, since just about everyone around someone who may be unvaccinated, will probably be vaccinated, as a result of that, they remain unlikely to contract a contagious illness and are benefiting from the high rate of vaccination. I'm not saying anyone should stop vaccinating at all, but going back to your concern, if your kids friends weren't able to come over or hang out due to their parents lack of permission, there's not much he or you could do about that.