Mossadegh was elected to parliament in 1944. The parliament voted him prime minister in 1951, and yes, the Shah appointed him such, just as the queen of England appoints the prime minister in the UK.

No I don't believe everything the CIA says. People can read all sides and all accounts and come to their own conclusions.

I think they neither had 100% failure nor 100% success. You're right, everything didn't go 100% as they wanted. But they did want Mossadegh out and the Shah in, and were successful in that respect.

"I can not remember exactly now, but he either closed the parliament or threatned to close the parliament if they did not give him dictatorial powers." I have no idea what this refers to. The biggest internal struggle I recall was over appointment of chief of staff and war minister, should it be by the prime minister or the shah. Mossadegh did not threaten to close parliament, he threatened to resign, and in fact did resign for a few days until a compromise was hammered out. Parliament almost always backed Mossadegh, so I don't know why he would want it closed down.

I am not sure what was reported in the 1950s, but I think the mainstream US reporting, literature, newspaper and magazine articles on what happened in 1953 are pretty good. This was about 60 years ago, and any motivation to cover up for the Shah started disappearing around 1979.

As far as Mossadegh and dealing with radical Islamists and Feda'ian-e Islam, Mossadegh had so much trouble with radical Islamists they tried to kill him and his deputies, quite apart from any foreign schemes. In fact Hossein Fatemi was severely wounded by them. I also know Mossadegh initially resisted their desire for a hijab law. As far as I know, he resisted this until the coup - but I am not 100% familiar with the matter. If you say he eventually conceded to the law, I suppose it is possible, I don't know the details.

Iran had a secular democracy in 1953. The CIA helped overthrow it and installed a dictatorship. Then the US puppet's security arm, Savak, worked with the CIA to kill off, imprison and exile the left. By the late 1970s, the only independent bodies in Iran were the mullahs, and the informal relationships bazaar merchants formed. Thus when the economy collapsed, and repression intensified, the mullahs and bazaar merchants were at the forefront of the revolution, they were the only independent bodies the CIA had not wrecked.

Then Americans have the gall to stick up their nose and whine about theocracies. Of course, Iran is a secular paradise compared to somewhere like US puppet regime Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, women are not even allowed to drive cars. So why do we hear this theocracy stuff for Iran but not Saudi Arabia? Would it have something to do with the government (which has popular support, and some democratic forms - much, much more than Saudi Arabia) not asking "how high" whenever the powers that be in the US say "jump"? The gall and hypocrisy and rose-colored glasses of imperial-happy Americans seems unlimited, only planes flying into their war-planning pentagon buildings seem to wake them up from their stupor for a short bit.

And this is different than the USA how? Stop and identify statutues, stop and frisk? There is no difference.

Of course it happens. I know people who have been harrassed from at their jobs, arrested and so forth for being against the Vietnam war. The NAACP was illegal in Alabama in the 1950s. Three people were killed (two white, one black) in 1964 in Mississippi for registering voters, with all signs pointing to the sherriff, who had arrested and harrassed them. I know anti-Vietnam war people who were arrested, harrassed at their jobs and so forth. This went from the 1960s to 1970s to 1980s with people against funding the Contras trying to overthrow the elected Nicaraguan government - which turned out to be the majority of Americans.

As far as someone practicing "Judaism" as you call it being harassed, I have to say I take that with a grain of salt. There were and are hundreds of thousands of Jews in Russia, and harassing people who want to go to temple and whatnot - there is no motive to do so, and it is impractical on all fronts. Now the USSR was certainly concerned with Zionist groups, or groups that some might worry put Israel over Russia, just like the US was concerned with groups that they felt put Russia over the US. In fact, the US made the communist party illegal in the 1950s with that as a reason. There is a mountain of evidence for the USSR monitoring Zionist groups. The evidence of Jews who just wanted to go to temple and observe Rosh Hashanah and such being harassed is much more thin. In fact, I'm sure they're harassed in Russia more nowadays, with neo-nazism on the rise with the fall of communism there.

As you said, if you're driving a car in the US the police can stop you and ask for ID. You also need ID nowadays to travel on an Amtrak train. The police can and do ask people to show ID and can arrest them if they do not, Google "stop and identify statutes". The police can also stop and search someone and arrest them if they are carrying a nickle bag of marijuana and whatnot, Google "stop and frisk". Why is "comparing that to what the USSR did is just not accurate"? It is the exact same thing.

The hostile west had its military within half of a city in the DDR (and not saying "west" as assuming the west was entirely anti-communist, which is not true, the majority of continential western Europe's working class were communist into the 1970s, just look at election results). It would be like Iran or North Korea's military controlling half of Chicago. You don't think the US would build a wall around that? As far as the regular occurence of people getting shot, between 1976 and 1989, 18 people were killed at the Berlin wall - and I know of know academic peer reviewed paper which says higher. "People" weren't trying to flee to the west, as many moved to the west without problem. It defies reason that the DDR feared several thousand janitors and garbage men and such leaving, the DDR did not. The people who had a lot of red tape were those who got a free college education, free medical school, and upon graduation, immediately wanted to move to West Germany and make a bigger salary as a doctor over there. In east-west talks, the DDR proposed that the west could import such people if someone paid their debts off first, the west refused and wanted the MD's etc. for free. Now you can make of all of this what you will, but most people certainly were not prevented from leaving before they got their free advanced degrees. And as for these regular shootings at the Berlin wall...1976 none, 1977 two, 1978 none, 1979 none. The advanced degree people wanting to leave certainly was a problem in the east, and you can think of it as you want, but you're making the whole thing a lot more hyperbolic than it is. I know many, many, many people in Warsaw Pact countries. who moved to the west or vacationed in Western Europe during the cold war.

We hear a lot about how the DDR and Stasi monitored phone calls and alike. The US government monitors domestic phone calls WAY more then Stasi does, in a much more sophisticated and enveloping form. There have been articles here on the new NSA supercenter in Utah, or the exposures from the San Francisco Room 641A NSA monitoring and so forth. We also know what Nixon and pre and post Nixon monitoring has watched - the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, the anti-Vietnam war movement - the political police, trying to such down opposition. I know some who was a database administrator at an Ivy League college until he retired recently. He was against the Vietnam war and the boss at his company used to get anonymous letters addressed to him, in an attempt to get him fired. Luckily for him, his boss was cool and said he looked down on anonymous mud-slinging. Lawsuits (by others) and FOIA requests later revealed it was the FBI anonymously trying to get him fired from his job. Now in the USSR, Sakharov was harassed for his peacenik stance, yes, but plenty of Americans were as well.

The bottom line is the Warsaw Pact countries DID have some problems, but in the US they were way hyperbolically exaggerated. Also the US was and is doing much the same thing, but these are underplayed and forgotten. Or just considered quantitatively different. Peaceniks like Sakharov were human rights victims in the USSR, but peaceniks in the US who were harrassed in the same manner deserved it.

You seem to be missing the point. I did not say this is a good list of questions, or the main things you need to know on an interview. Booting is just an example, I could ask for detail on other things. I said if I tell someone "Tell me how a Linux system boots in as much detail as you possibly can" and they give an answer like this, they're very likely to get hired. If they say "BIOS runs POST, the bootloader starts, and eventually init runs", then great, you've given me the same answer as the past dozen people.

I could ask about RAID 5. "Striped parity across disks" is what the last dozen people said. They may even know when to use RAID 5 and when to use RAID 10 and why. If someone can go into minute detail explaining how RAID 5 works, that distinguishes them.

"Your questions are ridiculous and you are missing out on highly qualified help". Well, "explain a Linux system boot process in detail" is not a ridiculous question. Explaining that during boot the FFFF:0000 address for BIOS is gathered by adding the address from two registers (If I am recalling correctly) may be part of a ridiculously great answer to the question, but I'm more apt to hire someone who can go into that much detail than someone who can't. I'm not missing out on highly qualified help, I've just talked to a dozen people who said "BIOS runs POST, the bootloader starts, and eventually init runs". The more detail you can give the better. You might not have to go into this much detail, but the point is it is always possible to improve the answer.

"I'm interested in what practical steps I can take to build meaningful skills that an employer can verify, and will find valuable."

I have been on many interviews for Unix sysadmin jobs, and have conducted many, many interviews for Unix sysadmin positions over the years.

People fall under a Gaussian distribution on an interview. A few people know almost nothing (we try to screen them out with phone interviews), a few people knock every question out of the park, and most people are in that big chunk in the middle of the bell curve.

The middle people, where most people are - you're not really sure about. You can tell they kind of know it, but they struggle on a lot of answers. It's hard to distinguish one middle person from another. They can tell you at a basic level what RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 are, but if you ask for more detail they start coming up short. Or maybe they get 0 and 1 mixed up, or don't know what 10 is, or whatever.

Can you explain in detail what a sticky bit is? And how it would work if someone throws different scenarios at you? Or how inode permissions on a directory work given different scenarios? How well can you explain what an inode is? Can you explain in detail a Linux machine booting up? From the reset pin being activated on the processor, to how it gets to BIOS at FFFF:0000h and beyond that? Is the processor running in protected or real mode when that happens? Do you know what kind of electrical signal is sent to that reset pin to boot the system? Can you walk through the bootup in detail up to the init state, and past that?

If you can give good, full answers to questions like these right now, with enough door knocking, you'll definitely get a job. People who know their shit are always in short supply. If you go on an interview, do you miss any questions? Why did you miss them? If you give a full, complete, lucid answer to every technical question on an interview, and do not have an abnormal personality, it would amaze me if you were not hired somewhere over time. A lot of positions are open over time because they can't find people with the knowledge and skills needed to work for a certainly salary in certain conditions.

A little bit of networking helps as well, if you're out there at various tech things, and casually mention you just interviewed for a Linux sysadmin job somewhere, people will know you're looking, and that helps as well.

You want to know how people started so I'll tell you. In the early 1980s I got a 300 baud modem. I began calling Bulletin Boards Systems. One of them was a board with a private section which I gained access to after chatting with the sysop. It had "codez" that I could make free phone calls with.

I got busy in the mid-1980s, but in 1989 I began calling BBS's again. I started calling boards with h/p sections, or totally h/p boards. One one of them I mentioned the dialup to a local university, and what I saw on the various menus I could get to. Someone responded to my post (this person later became the CTO of a company whose worth was in the billions). He gave me the hostname, and a username and password of a SunOS box at the university. I logged in. It was the first Unix I ever logged into.

Anyhow, fast forward to early 1996. I have hacked the account of someone who runs a local ISP, who I dislike. I am reading through his e-mail and various files. One thing I see is his Usenet spool of the local tech job postings. I start reading it, and see an ad for a company. The company is a new ISP which is about to expand from extremely small to slightly bigger. It sounds so small and poor I think I might have a shot. I log back into my legitimate systems, and send an e-mail to the ad placer and say I'm interested in a job. I say I know Unix well (true) and that I complete my college and have a computer science degree (not true). When I meet him, his wife's friend is there, and I happen to know his wife's friend, so that was luck for me as well. So I get hired. The main box is a Linux pre-1 which got upgraded to Linux 1.X on the first week of work. We also purchase a used Sparcstation IPX at a good price.

And it's gone on from there. The most I ever made as a Unix sysadmin was over $90k a year. Although adjusted for inflation, the highest I got in an adjusted for inflation sense is $110k.

Unix administration was really hot in the ISP and dot-com go-go days. Not so much any more. Of course there's jobs out there. People are trying to do more "in the cloud" nowadays so that lessens work to some extent. There really wasn't as much good turnkey web hosting and managed colo and the like in the mid-1990s as there is now, so a lot more people had to roll their own. Or shared virtual servers. I have been doing different stuff in IT lately, I have never even worked with some of the "newer" stuff like blade servers. Not that blade servers are that new any more.

Also be prepared to be chained to your cell phone 24/7 and getting calls at 3AM if there's an outage, even when you're not on the on-call rotation. And then have office gossips and nosybodies complaining you're not in the office at 10AM after you took that two hour call, which almost no one will know about. Or having to deal with old, out of warranty, broken servers that have trouble backing up and keeping their data, with no good recovery plan, which no one cares about until they go down - then the bosses will all crowd your desk every five minutes frantically asking you for a time estimate of when everything will be back to normal. Of course other IT jobs, like development, have a different kind of pressure. In some ways system administration is more preferable, as you can only keep servers up 24 hours a day - developers usually have a mountain of desired features piled on top of their workload.

Iran had a secular democracy back in 1953. The west, especially England and the US, and overthrew it with a dictatorship, much more ruthless than the present government.

As the left was the great fear, the dictatorship jailed, (effectively) exiled and killed the left. When the people overthrew the foreign-backed government, the only power left in the country were the mullahs, and bazaar shop keepers, and that is who is in control now.

Harvard only began admitting women in 1999, although the first openings of that were in the 1960s. It's amusing to see westerners, who were just invading Iraq and torturing and forcing Abu Ghraib detainees to masturbate on camera, are now all sanctimonious about how Iranian universities are preparing classes. Iran is a paradise of academic freedom for women compared to US ally Saudi Arabia, why don't we hear about that? And why all the concern about women's studies in Iran, something Americans can do nothing about because the US doesn't even have diplomatic relations with Iran, at the same time the US is stepping up pressure on Iran on other fronts? The US is who overthrew Iran's secular democracy in 1953, then the CIA worked with the Savak to wipe out the left. Now they complain the mullahs have too much control over the universities. No Slashdot headlines about women's education in Saudi Arabia. Women can't even drive in Saudi Arabia, where's the noise about that? As there is none, it's clear this is just more propaganda as the war drums are being beaten. As smug, hypocritical, imperialist westerners stick their fingers into the Middle East, torture their people in prisons like Abu Ghraib, kill off and take over new land in the West Bank with US funds - you can be sure the inevitable 9/11s will come in response, as some people will always resist imperialism and foreign tyranny.

Certainly it is true that if you tell someone something, they can always tell someone else, so the safest way for something not to get out is to keep completely quiet about it. On the other hand...

Plenty of small groups of people have done a lot of stuff without any problems, and with everyone keeping quiet about it. This goes from hackers to cells of the Irish Republican Army. There are also many instances of one person getting caught, having extreme pressure, even torture, applied to them and them keeping their mouths shut. The leader of the French resistance, Jean Moulin, died while the Nazis were trying to torture him for information. Certainly there are instances of rats and turncoats, but you generalize it to "your friends will rat you out in a heartbeat if it give them any advantage. Don't think for a second that any friend of your is loyal to you. Anyone can be bought, some can be bought for a lot less than others." This ignores all those who over the centuries have faced life imprisonment, torture, death and have kept silent. Ethel Rosenberg was promised eventual freedom if she testified against her husband - instead she chose to stay silent and went to the electric chair, leaving her children orphans.

From hacking groups, to insurgents fighting a foreign invader, similar mistakes have been made over time. One is trusting too many people. Sabu busted five other people. That means there was a group of minimally six people working together. History shows this is far too large a group to be working together on something like this. In a cell network, four is usually the largest number of people working together. If the network is paranoid about turncoats and infiltration, the cell size is often three people. Having to only worry about two other people is much more comforting about having to worry about five other people. Plus you can be more sure they are reliable type people, you have a closer relationship that would make people second-guess turning etc.

There are other factors as well. These people let Sabu know enough about them to get them arrested, but they (AFAIK) never met him. It's a lot easier to turn against faceless people behind keyboards then friends you have met and spend time with. Then there's the question of what they're doing. It's a lot easier for someone to turn against people for say randomly crashing web sites (not saying they did this) then comrades fighting an invasion of your country by the Germans, or English, or whoever. People are more willing to sacrifice when a higher cause is involved, randomly crash web sites is not a higher cause. Then finally, there is how much the government is interested in finding people to turn, and how much pressure they are going to bear on people. It's easier to keep quiet and do a year in jail than twenty years in jail. Also Sabu's children or foster children are brought up - it is obviously easier to do time for someone without kids, then someone who will be worrying about supporting kids. Of course, this is something Sabu should have thought of before he began committing crimes, but a dumbass criminal turned rat like him obviously doesn't do much thinking.

It is true when you are working with other people, even reliable seeming people, you can never be entirely sure how they will react under pressure. But to say "anyone can be bought", "will rat you out in a heartbeat" etc. is just not true, there are plenty of counter-examples of this, including hackers in the US.

What is the discipline of the capital markets? At the end of 1999, Warren Buffett, who had been investing successfully for four decades, was being lambasted for not buying dot-coms and having as good a year as some other companies. Of course, this all went to nothing a few months later. He is known for being out-of-step with the markets, focusing on the long term, not going with the newest trend, not splitting his stock. As he has been so successful over four decades, he can get away with it.

So what companies have been under market discipline? In 2001 the #5 company on the Fortune 500, Enron, was shown to be a complete fraud, top to bottom. Countrywide Financial and Washington Mutual made subprime loans to people who would never be able to pay them back, in a manner that encouraged this (no money down, monthly loan payment rockets up after a year or two).

Other than the markets wanting to have gotten a piece of Facebook earlier, I don't really see any indication of what would have been differently if it was under "market discipline". If overeager suckers wanted to overpay for Facebook initially, it's a bonus for Facebook, and a loss for the market buyers undisciplined enough to know what a stock is worth.

If you watch the documentary "Born Rich", you realize there these 1%ers who inherit there money, these heirs who control almost all of the capital - they need things to parasite off of. There's always a massive of shortage of viable businesses for them to glom off of. Facebook is private and they whine about how they can't stick their snouts in the trough, and suck off of the people actually working and building businesses. Microsoft, Google, Facebook - most of the successful founders know to put off the IPO, because it's only a way for the 1% parasites to grab a majority stake of the company, and be parasites off of those doing the work. That's why founders postpone it so long.

Most modern Americans are unaware of the worldwide ideological debates of the early 20th century, and thus they miss the boat on what psychohistory obviously is. From a variety of things, including knowing Asimov's involvement with the Futurians in the 1930s, it's obvious that psychohistory is a parody of the Marxist conception of historical materialism. In fact, to anyone familiar with Marxian historical materialism, it is incredibly easy to see that this is what is made reference to by psychohistory in the book - although in the book the technique has been further developed. I've always felt the Mule was a reference to charismatic leaders like Hitler and Mussolini - ugly at close view, but with the ability to persuade large masses of people nonetheless, something which Marx did not foresee. That's just my interpretation though, it's not completely clear. I think that Hari Seldon is a Karl Marx figure is even more of a sure bet than the Mule possibility. To people who don't know the ideas of the Futurians, or the ideological ideas within the milieu of left-wing Jewish intellectual circles in New York City in the 1930s, I think it is easy to miss a lot of the references being made.

Exactly. I'm not sure why the new Slashdot heads are on an "anarchists hate science" kick. A similar story was posted a month ago.

The scare headline in the blurb is "violence by self-described anarchists against scientists or scientific establishments". Then we read the story and see this happened not to a scientist, but to a business executive. "Scientific establishment" conjures up people in white lab coats studying the Higgs boson, the person shot was head of a military contractor. He was head of a company that made weapons that kill people. None of this is mentioned.

I mean, this is straight propaganda. The guy is a business executive for Finmeccanica, which makes guns, tanks, nuclear stuff, and that sort of thing. He lives by the sword, and got a bullet in his leg - maybe a bullet made by his company. What does Slashdot say - "violence by self-described anarchists against scientists or scientific establishments".

If people are so concerned about violence against nuclear establishments, the US and Israel unleashed Stuxnet against Iran's nuclear program. A program the U.S. has endorsed in the past. Nuclear scientists in Iran have not been shot in the leg but actually killed by foreign intelligence services, probably Israel. We see multiple outraged headlines on Slashdot when some nuclear executive for an Italian military contractor is shot in the leg, why don't we see outraged headlines about the Iranian nuclear scientists who are being assassinated?

I have been hearing all this hype about how innovative online classes are, how this will change teaching, how we might not have colleges any more because it is so revolutionary. I am a little skeptical of the hyperbole of the "future of education" as the blurb puts it.

I have watched videos on Youtube etc. to try to learn things. Sometimes the videos are not explicitly meant to be educational - Walt Mossberg interviewing some tech guy for All Things Digital can be more educational than a classroom lecture sometimes.

Sometimes they are meant to be educational. The videos I've watched have been in two categories. The first type is a company like Google has someone on stage with a Powerpoint explaining one of their newest APIs. The second type is a video of a professor in front of a classroom explaining some math or computer science concept.

Your mileage may vary. In the case of Google explaining an API, or the professor, many times they have a thick foreign accent. Google is a little better about this then some random professor's class, but not always. Then there's the question about how good of a teacher they are. Yes, they may know the API or math/CS concept in and out, they may have even wrote or discovered it, how good are they at explaining the concept to layman students? Often they have little capacity to do this.

Video is not magic. If a smart person who understands the topic and can also write clearly writes a textbook or manual explaining a math/CS concept or some API, this is often far, far more helpful than some videotape of some professor with a thick foreign accent who is not good at explaining things.

And case in point is Thrun himself! Videotapes of him are streams of sentences like "I haff a-bout an hou-ER too doo thees" (I have about an hour to do this) in his German accent which I struggle a little bit to understand. I'd probably better understand what he is trying to teach if he wrote it down.

In the 1980s, Abelson and Sussman up at MIT made videotapes of their lectures on the structure and interpretation of computer programs. Then going back to the 15th century with Gutenberg's Latin textbooks. Yes it's nice that we have lectures on Youtube now, but the "future of education" sounds a little bit like hyperbole to me. The important thing it seems to me is to find a native speaker of your language, who understands the topic thoroughly, and who can communicate it clearly, who puts it together for you. Then whatever form they take - online lecture, classroom lecture, book - whatever - is helpful. A well-written book or clear and thought out classroom lecture beats an online lecture. I can always ask the professor after class if I don't understand something. I can't watch Sussman's 1980s lecture and then ask him what cons does in LISP (although I guess I could e-mail him).

I worked in IT at one of the larger investment banks for a bit.

At somewhere like Apple or Google, IT is everything. Or a lot. At an investment bank it is nothing - the investment bankers and sales people are the entire focus. You can argue about how important IT is there, but these are institutions with tons of money to burn, and if they make a mistake, the US taxpayer will always bail them out. That's the thing, they have a ton of money. I have seen insane things go on in terms of technical time bombs waiting to go off. But they have so much money, they can throw money at any problem and it will be fixed. IT is treated like garbage I would say. I think it's insane people would work there in IT over a long period of time. Where I worked, almost everyone who did not leave of their own accord was pushed out - they can people all the time, especially when the market dips. Then again, it is such a big industry, sometimes people find a good spot which seems like a sinecure, and it is not so bad. But some people who think they found a sinecure one day find out they were wrong. It can be a good experience to work at a place like this for a year or two, and it looks good on a resume, anyone who stays for a long time I think is crazy, and their personality always seems to me to change, they seem unhappy. Look how nervous you seem in your post, it does not seem the post of a content, happy person. You're at a company at the apex of world financial power, yet they make you feel insecure. You're one of the workers doing all the work that creates that wealth for them, but they seek to make you feel like a disposable peon. You are a disposable peon.

Anyhow, your age works against you. People are smart enough to not say any age discrimination stuff, but I've been forced to pass over extremely qualified candidates more or less because (unsaid) they were old, had a family they would have to spend time with, might stick up for themselves etc.

If you want to stay in finance, connections are everything. When the cuts come, and they always do, the managers will get together and decide who stays and who goes. Are any of the decision makers going to fight for you? Aside from this, keeping in touch with people when they move to other companies is important, especially when you're looking for work. The stupidest thing you can do is stick your head down and do a good job for sixty hours a week. No one gives a shit - at all. If you think the vultures running your company care, if you think your manager's manager cares, you are a complete fool. Politicking is everything in places like that. As far as consulting, usually these places want to deal with consulting companies, so you have to get to know the project managers and such at consulting companies. This is not hard to do - the project managers want to have a good relationship with hired staff at the company, they want their consultants supported and to get more business, they know you can always be the one who is bumped to team lead or manager.

Also, if you're not chasing the brass ring where you are there is NO reason for you to be there. Your goal should be to be either a managing director in IT (which there are very few of, because the bank considers IT a backroom joke) or in the elite architecture/engineering team. Why would someone kill themselves at these places otherwise, other than to get the experience and resume blurb for a year or two?

As far as getting a job, it is like this: there is a bell curve. Most people are in the middle. You are probably in the middle. Most interviews are looking for people on the right end of the curve. When you go on a technical interview, do you miss questions? I've interviewed dozens, maybe hundreds of people. People on the right side of the bell curve can answer mostly everything I throw at them - 99 out of 100 questions. A few people are on the left side and know very little. Most people are in the middle, you can tell they kind of know it, and could probably do the job, but you're not sure, and you just interviewed 10 people just like them. So being on the right side of that bell curve helps. Especially with hot skills. Stuff like mobile is hot right now, believe me, someone who is on the right side of the iOS knowledge bell curve, or even Android knowledge bell curve is NOT unemployed right now. On the contrary, companies are knocking down their door trying to hire them despite the economy or whatever. But does someone like you with a financial job which takes a lot of time, a family and so forth have the time to not only learn that stuff a little, but master it like some kid who was doing it through his college CS classes, and is now three years out of college writing iOS apps? Probably not. But people who really know their shit in other domains are being looked for as well - server side Java people etc.

Then there's side projects and income. Do you have your own web site or mobile app or whatever that brings in revenue? Do you do consulting on the side? Most of the smart people I know do. You might say you don't have the time. Well then - you're fucked. You have to sit in your current job and worry about whether you'll be canned or not as the economy gets worse. You'll then be a 40 year old with a family, in an economic recession which may hit finance hard, in an economic system where IT people are not wanted much past 40. Yes there's exceptions, but people on the right side of the needed skill curve are always an exception.

Everyone has their own political opinions, as does Jimmy Wales. He used to run a mailing list devoted to Ayn Rand. Speaking of Wikipedia and conservative economist Friedrich Hayek, Wales has said "Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project. One can't understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek." Thus, his opinions on politics, and what used to be called political economy, have bearing on Wikipedia's structure.

Of course, a project which gets large enough can't be run as an absolute dictatorship, or it falls apart (or everyone moved on to a split). The official Wikipedia explanation page for the 2005 Elections is laughable. First of all, if you read the mailing lists and Wikipedia posts, Jimbo didn't even want a binding election, he wanted to appoint everyone himself. There was such resistance to this he backed off. Then fanatical Point of View pusher JayJG ran in the 2005 election for the Arbitration Committee. By any measure, he lost the election, partly due to such an overwhelming number of no votes, because so many people thought he lacked fair-mindedness and balance. So Jimbo ignored the election votes and appointed JayJG to the Arbitration Committee. Because they were ideological allies. This is all glossed over in the official entry on the elections above.

Nowadays, it probably seems silly to have been so involved in it, but when Larry Sanger's Wikipedia came out (another person thrown under the bus by Jimbo, once Sanger's Wikipedia idea started taking off, Wales took over and tried to write Sanger out of history) it had a lot of potential. So much of what happened is despite Wales, not because of him. I think it could have been even better, but it was not meant to be, not in this iteration of the wiki encyclopedia idea any how.

Speaking of neutral point of view, the recognized systemic bias etc., let's take a look at the opening two paragraphs of the Abu Nidal biography and see if sounds encyclopedic or not:

"Abu Nidal...born Sabri Khalil al-Banna...was the founder of Fatah–The Revolutionary Council. At the height of his power in the 1970s and 1980s, Abu Nidal, or "father of [the] struggle," was widely regarded as the most ruthless of the Palestinian political leaders. He told Der Spiegel in a rare interview in 1985: 'I am the evil spirit which moves around only at night causing ... nightmares.' Part of the secular Palestinian rejectionist front, so called because they reject proposals for a peaceful settlement with Israel, the ANO was formed after a split in 1974 between Abu Nidal and Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)...Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal's biographer, wrote of the attacks that their 'random cruelty marked them as typical Abu Nidal operations.'"

I doubt even Haaretz would publish something like this. Yet it's an encyclopedia entry on Wikipedia. Whether you like Nidal or not, this is not neutral and encyclopedic writing. If you don't think this is biased or unencyclopedic enough, it gets worse as the article goes on. And there are worse examples, this one just comes to my mind. If your answer is "It's Wikipedia, just change it yourself", you've missed the point of this post. Go to Wikipedia Review to really get an answer to that question.