Some parts have shortages and others have a glut. Efforts to solve the shortages often exacerbate the glut leading to resentment and accusations that employers are being dishonest about the shortage.

The whole H1B visa thing always bothered me as an engineer because it seemed pretty obvious it was depressing my wages. Later on in my career I became a manager responsible for hiring and managing engineers. It turns out there is some truth to both sides of this argument. Partially because of immigration and H1B visas there are plenty of medium-skilled engineers to be had. For every opening I have looked to fill there have been plenty of medium-skilled candidates who can be had at just about any price you want to pay (thus they are depressing wages). Highly skilled candidates are very rare, even when you go into the search planning to spend well over 100k.

The problem is that when you manage engineers you quickly realize that a highly-skilled engineer is often worth 10 medium-skilled engineers, and more importantly, can accomplish the tasks that no amount of medium-skilled engineers could ever manage. That's not to say that there isn't a place for medium-skilled engineers. It often works well to have a few highly-skilled engineers on a team with a bunch of medium-skilled engineers. The highly-skilled ones figure out strategy, solve the really hard problems, and provide a skeleton structure for the project that provides the medium-skilled engineers with bite-sized tasks they can accomplish on their own. However, without the highly-skilled engineers you are doomed to failure. It is also imperative that the highly skilled engineers have subject matter expertise in whatever you are working on. There has to be a 'trainer' before you can do any training, and having a team where no one knows anything about what they need to work on is a recipe for failure.

Startups have a particular need for highly-skilled engineers. In a new company there is no structure and only the high-level plan of what needs to be done. In this environment you need almost all highly-skilled engineers with domain-specific knowledge on the team to get the first product ready. No amount of medium-skilled engineers will let you accomplish this. Likewise hiring a bunch of super bright engineers whose background experience is in designing long distance power lines is probably not going to be a winning combination if you are trying to build a revolutionary new scalable map-reduce mega server cluster. They will take years learning the skills needed and rediscovering the mistakes that someone with domain experience would already know to avoid.

It is very important to understand that "highly-skilled" is not closely correlated to schooling by the way - I have met plenty of medium-skilled engineers with master's degrees (and evenPhD's). I have also seen great engineers with only bachelors degrees. (It is worth noting here that there is still some correlation between schooling and skill - there is a greater concentration of highly-skilled engineers with PhDs that I have worked with then among those with only their B.S.). Experience is only loosely correlated as well. You can spot the really good engineers pretty early in their careers. This doesn't mean that an inexperienced but highly talented engineer is worth as much as one with experience and talent, but it does mean that within a few years out of school they are often worth more then the experienced medium-skilled engineer.

Bottom line: the US would be far better off if we could get more highly-skilled engineers. There are so many opportunities (and potential new jobs for all the supporting staff and medium-skilled engineers) that companies (including mine right now) simply cannot pursue because there are not enough of these individuals to staff the efforts. The problem is that there is really no effective way to get these individuals without letting in a lot of additional medium-skilled engineers into the country.

Another way to think of it is this: if you could put all of the people in the world who fell into the top 5% of intelligence into a stadium how many of them would be American?

Answer: not that many (if they were equally distributed it would be only 300m / 7b = 4.2%). If very intelligent people are disproportionately located in America due to some self-selection process it might be as high as 8%. In either case there is much to be gained from letting more of the 96% of people in the top bracket of intelligence into the country.

First off, I highly recommend you read the book "Becoming a Manager" by Linda Hill. It follows the first year experiences of a group of star individual contributors that are promoted to managers and discusses the transformation process they undergo to become managers. Becoming a good manager requires that you change as a person in ways that are hard. Those who do not change end up being bad managers.

What you do not understand, and no one really understands until they do it, is that being a good manager is very hard. Management is like multi-dimensional chess. As a spectator you almost never understand what is going on. You can see the results, and recognize that one person did a decent job while another person did a poor job, but you have no idea what it took to make it happen (even if you had a front-row seat as an employee). As an engineer I was generally critical of management when it was bad and indifferent to it when it was good. Now I look at my company's senior and executive leadership and am in awe of how they manage to do what they do. The difference is that I now know a little of what it takes to achieve results and recognize how much skill it takes.

Management is also like running a machine with a million switches and levers where none of them give the same result twice. The fact that you have so little awareness of this is a bad omen for your chances of becoming a good manager. Project management experience is good, but is really only about 10% of what is needed to be good at management.

Oh, and the reason that people who have been managers are worth more is pretty simple once you realize how hard it is: People that have a track record of doing a half-way decent job at management have already learned far more then you can imagine even needing to know.

Nice calculations, but they ignore two facts: 1 - the LightSquared frequency is actually pretty far from the GPS frequency (10s of MHz), so the filtering challenge is not as bad as you make it out to be. 2 - Military spec GPS devices have no problems nor do they suffer reduced sensitivity, if someone is already doing it then it definitely can be done.

More like 15x to 30x expensive. Aerial fiber runs $3 to $7 a foot, underground is $80 to $150 a foot. Renting existing duct is somewhere in between but generally closer to the underground cost. Underground ducts tend to be in bad shape and require lots of repair work. By the time you complete it your total cost ends up less then digging new but much more than an aerial run.

I have done work installing fiber plant. It isn't easy, seldom quick, and very expensive. You soon discover that there are dozens of petty city bureaucrats who want you to grovel before their awesomeness before they will let you proceed. Even the most beneficial projects garner objections from NIMBYs who are convinced that having a pencil-thick fiber optic cable pass their house will be the End of Civilization. I could go on, but to say the least my experience has greatly reduced my annoyance at the high cost of cable. Every government agency has their proboscis in the wallet of a fixed plant operator looking to suck up funds for their department.

This calculation ignores the curvature of the earth even though UTM is in meters. The poster still needs to implement the 'Great Circle' formula. I would think this would be relatively straightforward to add it as a stored proceedure in PostgreSQL.

There have not been any significant cuts in funding at any level. The issue is that the funding has not risen as fast as college expenditures so that a much smaller percentage of the cost is born by students in the form of tuition. See this link for more details (http://www.highereducation.org/reports/losing_ground/ar2.shtml). It is very common to hear people decrying 'cuts' when there is no such thing going on. The issue is purely one of uncontrolled rising costs full stop.

You are perfectly correct that the extra money is not spent on faculty salary costs. In fact, overall costs for faculty have been slightly declining due to the widespread use of adjunct professors who make very little and have no benefits. So if prices are rising much faster then inflation and the money isn't going to the average professor where is it going?

My guess is campus upgrades (somewhat offset by donations), administration salaries, sports - all of which have been growing like gangbusters at nearly any university you observe. At big universities the sports programs may actually be money-makers, but smaller universities loose money on them. It is also worth noting the rise of 'superstar' professors that make salaries well into the six figures (200k to 400k) and are especially prevalent in law schools.

Mod this comment up, it is spot-on.

If you follow the wireless industry for a while you see this is a repeat pattern: "Hmm, no one is using the spectrum near what my device will use so I can save a few cents by leaving out the receive filter!"

Garmin has been caught with their pants down and has been desperately trying to spin this as being LightSquared's fault.

Mod this comment up. Even if HTC became the dominate Android manufacturer Google would still be cherry picking the profits through their control of the Android app store.

WebOS is a very nice platform with an reasonable selection of *good* apps (1,500 apps might not sound like much compared to 50,000 but if the 1,500 include most of the very popular options you can still have a great experience). The Palm hardware was terrible - always a year behind what the rest of the industry was selling. HTC makes solid cutting edge hardware. I would love to run WebOS on a phone as well built as my EVO 3D.

Evidence of gastrointestinal problems from the MMR vaccine from the link in the main post: http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13164&page=115 RTFA! Everyone acknowledges this point, the . Seriously, you have a massive negative emotional response to evidence. Are you ok? Idiot.

Posted again because Slashdot didn't give me the opportunity to log in before posting like it used to do...

I find it ironic that those who are most critical of Dr. Wakefield seldom actually understand the claims he made. It is also puzzling to observe how many 'Wakefield has been debunked!' statements are trumpeted about studies that don't even evaluate his specific claims. To be clear, Wakefield postulated two separate but related theories regarding the MMR vaccine and autism:

1 - The MMR vaccine increases the incidence of severe gastrointestinal disorders in very young children.

2 - Severe gastrointestinal disorders in very young children (2.5yrs) increase the likelyhood that they will develop an autistic disorder.

Autism is a spectrum of symptoms, not a specific disease. We do not know what causes it, and it may well be influenced by a variety of different causes. Claiming to have discovered one possible cause does not automatically mean that every, or perhaps even most, cases were related to the identified cause. I read through the section of the NAP book that addresses the issue of MMR and autism and they completely fail to discuss the Wakefield's actual theories. In fact, they even mention to two studies (not by Wakefield) that show a link between MMR and gastrointestinal disorders (theory 1) but make no attempt to discuss or evaluate the second theory. Whatever Wakefield's failings the fact remains that his first theory has independent corroborating evidence and his second theory has never been evaluated independently. The tar-and-feathering he received will insure that the second theory will not be seriously evaluated for a very long time.

It is entirely possible that Wakefield's theory is correct for some subset, perhaps as small as 1%-5%, of the existing autistic population. Anyone who has read about autism will have encountered the stories of children who had both gastrointestinal problems and autism and improved when eating very strict diets (no dairy, gluten, bananas, etc). These cases represent a very small subset of the total population and their risk factor may well have been much higher from the MMR vaccine then the average population. The overall risk of MMR may be too small to detect in the general population but still be fairly high for the specific subgroup that has a family history of gastrointestinal issues.

What do I take from this? Well my wife and her family have a history of gastrointestinal problems. We decided that in light of the evidence that MMR increases the onset of gastrointestinal disorders in very young children that the risk was not worth taking. Instead, we had our daughter vaccinated for each of the three diseases independently when she was five (the Measles vaccine by itself has not been associated with increased gastrointestinal distorders). This was not a 'religious' response, it was a carefully-reasoned and appropriate measure based on the available evidence.

What is truly bordering on religious (and not in a good way) is the passionate and shrill denouncement of this very reasonable and evidence based theory due to the fear that it will be misunderstood by the general population. The truth is still the truth even if you put your fingers in your ears and shout 'la la la I can't hear you!' at the top of your lungs when someone speaks it.

Idiot.

I am a PE and have done hundreds of RF emissions studies on wireless facilities, including rooftop installations like the one you describe. My initial thought is that twenty feet would be an unusually small distance between the antennas and your window. It may very well be much larger then that (50' or more is more likely - and would have much lower emission levels) but seems closer due to the perspective of the surrounding panoramic view. If it were truly only 20', and the building hosted antenna arrays from many wireless carriers (and FM transmitters), then there is a very slight possibility that the levels in your apartment could be near the public exposure limit. This situation is quite unlikely however. Most wireless carriers have an independent RF emissions study performed on rooftop installations that include measurements of the pre-existing antennas, so if you reached the right person and were persuasive enough you might be able to get them to share that with you (very unlikely). Another poster recommended a cheap meter. I'm not convinced of their accuracy, but you could give it a try if it worries you. Someone else mentioned low-E glass and correctly stated that it blocks a significant amount of RF energy. If you have low-e glass then even 20' away would mean your apartment is below the public exposure limit.

The FCC limit for the 2.4GHz band is on EIRP (essentially Tx output power * antenna gain), not on Tx output power alone. Adding a high-gain antenna or boosting the Tx output power can both push you over the legal limit of 100mW EIRP.