One more point I wanted to make is: keep in mind that #1 isn't just about contracting work overseas. Think of all the fast food restaurants, farm workers, janitorial services, all the work that even many private companies contract out. The difference is that when the government contracts it out, those salaries move from the public employee pool to the private employee pool for the purposes of these types of salary comparisons. When a private company contracts out janitorial services, those salaries are still part of the same pool.

Interesting question. If the basis for your statement that "federal jobs require so much more skill and education than private sector jobs", is the difference in average salary, then my hunch is that #1 is the dominant factor here.

You motivated me to go find some data, and I did find a CBO report which says that the government is generous relative to public sector for lower-paid workers but actually pays less than private sector for higher paid, higher education positions:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/01/chart-day-federal-government-pay-vs-private-sector-pay

The biggest difference in the CBO study is 36% (federal employees w/ no more than high school education make that much more). I think based on this, it is pretty likely that distribution of job types has to play a big factor. Unfortunately though, the CBO report groups people by education, years of work experience, etc, as well as "Occupation". There isn't a good way to compare the actual work done; so it is possible that federal organizations hire more overqualified people to do the same job relative to private companies.

The main point I wanted to make was that the USA Today article is meaningless, and you can't make any inference about the generosity of federal compensation from average compensation.

If anyone knows where to find similar studies for state and local government as well as federal, I'd like to see it. We did start out talking about Illinois.

The fact that government jobs are more immune to recession is almost certainly true; and more immune to shocks is a good thing, not bad.

As far as pay competitiveness, that article doesn't show anything but average salaries. It doesn't control for the types of jobs. The quote in the article says it:
"Public employee unions say the compensation gap reflects the increasingly high level of skill and education required for most federal jobs and the government contracting out lower-paid jobs to the private sector in recent years."
" 'The data are not useful for a direct public-private pay comparison,' says Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union."

Average salary for Google employees is probably a lot higher than average salary for Wal-mart. It doesn't mean that google pays more than the market rate. They hire for different positions.

If new hires are promised ANY additional benefit, that will affect their decision to take the job on the margin, relative to other jobs. The employer offering the benefit will, all else equal, be able to hire the same employees for a lower salary. Unless there is some other factor at work here distorting market forces.

Very few government employees can vote themselves raises. Like, 535. The rest are hired by a manager, who was hired by a manager, who, eventually, was appointed by the president or congress.

If the government is really paying greater than market rates and not getting above average employees for those positions, then government agencies need to look at their hiring practices; but let's not get carried away.

It amazes me how many people on /. think it's cool to just drop pensions which employees have been paying into, and promised return on, for a long time. This is a commitment made by the employer, the same as any corporate pension program, and it should be paid at least until the state of Illinois declares bankruptcy.

Unfortunately, 3D printer materials are generally not very strong, and have very poor dimensional stability at warmer temperatures. A 3D printed version of most vacuum parts would not last long, I suspect. That said, some things can be printed as fully functional parts, and even if it isn't good for a long term part, quick prototyping with a 3D printer is amazing. And making that available to more people, and cheaper, is great.

I think 3D print materials are something like $0.30/gram (and a little less for the support material which gets thrown out); add to that printer time and it could be a while before distributing parts via 3D printer can compete with, say, injection molding if you are distributing significant quantities of the same part.

I suppose printed parts will get better with time. There are companies out there that make very good parts with SLS quickly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_sintering); you can even SLS titanium.

If this is some kind of joke that I'm missing, then I apologize. But if you are serious...then try googling first. The Russians did this a long time ago. AFAIK, NASA never attempted a lander though. Venera 13, in 1982, lasted about 2 hours before giving up the ghost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera

The RTF format doesn't support macros or any sort of scripting. Some RTF parsers are still vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks due to bugs in that particular software, so even with no embedded scripting in the RTF format arbitrary code can be executed as the parsing process.

As far as the need, I think macros in office products are justified. It's probably less useful in a document, but there are some very useful purposes for a macro in a spreadsheet. The key is, those macros need to be controlled to work in a limited sandbox (in the same way that javascript executing in a browser does). The problem comes when people fail to maintain the sandbox, either by poor choices or through bugs.

This can be easily remedied with a two key system, where the IT department maintains a key/password pair in addition to the user. I'm pretty sure PGP, for example, supports this.

The median age according to the 2010 census is 37.5 years, so by any reasonable definition of "elderly", the elderly are a minority.
http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf (pg5)

I can definitely second learning assembly. In my sophmore year of college, I borrowed an AVR (8-bit RISC processor) development board from one of the labs in my school, and learned to program it in assembly. Prior to this, I didn't have a real understanding of what the compiler did, or how my code was actually executed. Learning assembly was really a computing revelation for me.

Admittedly, I am an EE and generally work at a lower hardware level than I think the poster is imagining, but I think it is worth while none the less. My suggestion is take a simple 8-bit processor (AVRs are great! Check out avrfreaks.net) and get a $50 dev board (or even simulator), and learn on that. If you try to do assembly on an x86, I think you will be overwhelmed.

Of course, even doing embedded systems, I don't write anything in assembly (I use C or C++, some C# and perl for PC side things). And you certainly won't either. But understanding it makes you see the code you are writing differently. Plus, its often useful when debugging to be able to view and understand the disassembly (OK, this doesn't apply so much for something like C# or java).

A few years ago, I didn't think I would ever say this, but I love C# for all of the PC utility applications I tend to write. You are right, many languages like this are not particularly run-time efficient, but they are fast, easy, and powerful for development.