The low-tech kind. When learning Russian I was able to memorize a new wordlist (40-50 words) in 10-20 minutes after having written them all out on flash cards. The writing itself was a major part of the learning process. As for retention once learned, a lot of practice is really the only way. Reading out loud is actually fairly helpful, and conversation is the very best.

Maybe my brain has been drained, too, but, if all the educated people are leaving the US, wouldn't that be a good old regular brain drain and not a reverse brain drain?

...is to use the md5 sum (expressed in sexagesimal, of course) of the MAC address of the secondary NIC, prepended with an "n" for legibility. Simple, logical, and useful.

...in the middle of summer with a broken air conditioner and a RAID whose power supply kept beeping loudly because it was sensitive to the fluctuations in voltage provided by our loud diesel generator parked just outside. I was coding up an interface to an Access '97 database on stripped down Win2k running on a very dirty laptop (mud made from the very fine dust I was breathing combined with the sweat dripping off my fingers would occasionally cause a key to stop working) in Perl using OLE, with *no* internet access and little documentation. Funny thing was, I actually was having a pretty good time.

That's one of the cool things about virtual machines: physical addresses in a VM are, in fact, virtual addresses. And anyways, I'm not sure about Xen and friends, but vmware has its own BIOS and own SMM code, and taking control of one VM's SMM (which none of these exploits can do, so it's a moot point) wouldn't affect the rest of of the host system at all.

for those who don't want to RTFA: http://www.cdsmodel.com/

I've dropped out of college six or so times (depends on how you count) and still don't have a degree. Nevertheless I'm holding a very technical and highly challenging and enjoyable programming position and absolutely no one I work with cares in the least about my interrupted education. What they do care about is my technical ability and I wouldn't have been hired if I hadn't been able to impress the engineers I interviewed with.

That said, the company I work for isn't too large, and I was referred by a friend, so I was able to clear the first hurdle of just getting noticed. It's unfortunate, but with larger companies especially, a decidedly non-technical person (or an equivalent SQL query) will be reviewing your resume and will only be looking for certain magic keywords. My advice is to make sure you're solid technically (which you should be anyways), then either try at smaller companies where you're more likely to be noticed, or impress someone and have them bring your resume in. There are, I'm sure, other ways to go about this, but that's my experience. Good luck.