Agree in principle, but your representative counts are way, way off. The 435 limit was set in 1911 for the 63rd Congress, and followed that up in 1929 with the "Permanent Apportionment Act", because they couldn't get their shit together and fulfill one of their obligations (which was to properly re-apportion, including ADDING OR SUBTRACTING seats based on the census results). Kinda like today - you had members of Congress playing the anti-immigrant card as hard as they could, and in the process, really broke things for us a hundred years later.

Anyway, the US population after the 1910 census was a bit over 92 million (92,228,496) giving a population to representative of ~212k. If we were to maintain even a remotely similar representation, we would be looking at a HoR with ~1456 members, with the least populous state (Wyoming) having 2 representatives - which is, interestingly enough, directly in line with Madison's original Bill of Rights proposal for Article the First, which explicitly set the minimum number of reps per state at 2 after crossing the 30k per rep line, and setting 30k per rep as the hard line for the number of representatives in the HoR (which would have today's HoR be 10,300 and change)

Hell - I'd be okay with setting the reps per population to, on average, be roughly equivalent to smallest state population divided by 2, until such time as that's back up to, say, 350k, after which it becomes divisible by +1. That would mean that, should Wyoming's population reach 700k, we would, instead of dividing their population by 2 to get the population per rep (and the total number of reps from there). This would allow for the HoR to increase in membership still relatively infrequently, but unlikely to stay static for a century as it has, largely due to incompetence.

Except YOU ARE WRONG.

That was almost precisely the intention of the proponents of the New Jersey Plan prior to its combination, in modified form, with the Virginia Plan, also modified, to form the Great Compromise. The entire point of the Senate was to provide a check against large population state representation, and force the rest of the Congress to actually listen to the needs of the smaller states.

You, and everyone else bitching about the makeup of the US Congress and specifically the senate, need to go back and retake middle school civics.

The Senate, at the country's inception, WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE POPULARLY ELECTED.

You have a bicameral legislature - the House of Representatives, who's members are popularly elected by the residents of the states, and the Senate - who's membership was, until the horrific fuck up that is the 17th Amendment was passed shortly after the turn of the 20th century, selected by the legislatures of the states to represent their interests in crafting national law - and SPECIFICALLY to prevent large states, like California, New York, Florida, and Texas today; New York and Pennsylvania in 1789, from running roughshod over the interests and needs of the smaller states. So yes, the Senate makeup IS DELIBERATELY set up to fuck over the large population states, because they are able to fuck over the small states in the House of Representatives.

Welcome to basic civics.

If you want to fix the Senate, repeal the 17th.

The digital front in Portland, ME is about 110 miles south of you in Boston. Might be able to find something in Concord or Manchester (NH), but those are also pretty hefty commutes from Portland.

Honestly - if you can bootstrap it, start something up. Write apps, do SOMETHING in addition to pounding pavement. A year 'vacation' can be overlooked if you took the effort to keep your skills up to date, and can prove it.

Yes, really. You're not their target employee.

Former military enlistees getting out after the enlistment are their target demographic. That, or you get into a company on the commercial side and talk them into dealing with getting you a clearance so you can work on the good stuff.

This is pretty much =exactly= what I did.

I pointed out that this law will have a negative impact on millions of IT workers in the US, at a time when we can least afford to be fucking the one major industry that seems to be doing well.

I'm waiting on a response, but essentially told them that if they vote for this law, I will actively engage in getting them voted out of office.

Fuckers.

There are positions out there.

Most of the folks that are hiring Hadoop and HBase folks are doing it on the sly.

It's how I got my current job :)

There already exist tools/frameworks to work with Hadoop and HBase using SQL :)

I'm not at all surprised by this, actually.

In my experience, there is a significant percentage (IME, most, but others may differ) of businesses that rely on Best Buy for hardware replacements. They see additional hardware lying around as a waste, and will not keep spares handy.

I can EASILY see this happening. EASILY.

*looks in his datacenter*
Ext3 is ubiquitous.... EXT4 is comin'. VERY few of the others around...

Most of our folks are customer facing and =have= to have a personality to get past our interview process.

I've recommended not extending offers to prospects because of personality dissonance despite having the technical chops.

True enough. I'm a bit irritated with myself that I hadn't purchased a couple just as a 'savings' plan :(

Their full-time economist isn't all that great.

Honestly, the market is continuing to succeed in SPITE of him, not because of him.

I can haz ISKies?

I generally make about 50mil a day, mostly through PI. If I actually tried, I could make a ton more. Heh. People who complain about making ISK in EVE are clueless - you don't have to live in Null or grind missions to make that kind of dough, either.