I disagree completely

I'm a dual citizen .. i'm being looked at. I have a degree in computers and I talk to foreigners ... i'm being looked at. I speak 3 languages ... i'm being looked at. I rarely use any social media - far less than most people hmm.. suspicious ... i'm being looked at. I'm on a site talking about using tor ... i'm being looked at. I used to live in a different country ... i'm being looked at. I have made a political comment about not liking a specific candidate, either over the phone or internet in the last 5 years ... i'm being looked at. I have a higher than normal IQ (above 100) - and i love chemistry ... i'm being looked at. I'm an atheist ... i'm being looked at. I've been tagged in a photo on facebook that was taken on a mobile device and therefor has all the EXIF location data on it letting people know that i was more than 200 miles from where I live... i'm being looked at. I've update my passport in the last 5 years ... i'm being looked at.

Now, once you get over the notion that this is the 1950's and that everyone is in a manila folder with a black and white picture - and that someone is sitting around trying to LITERALLY watch you full time - you can come to understand that the entire country IS being "watched" daily, via electronics, and is being monitored the same way that google (and other search engines) monitor websites. They use spider like software, and every time something "triggers" in their system, your profile gets updated. Think of it like a point system, the more points you have, the more likely you are going to get checked up on. Using the information from Okian Warrior above, you realize that the 1 in 250 chance is scarier than you think. Also, add in that not all 350 million people in the country are being monitored. Take out children under 13 (too low risk), take out old folks who literally can't move, or are senile, or folks in the hospital for long term care (even if only for a week), and that number of people that an analyst needs to check up on drops significantly.

Google is able to index 23+ billion pages (according to some random statistics i found). If google is able to do that the hard way (crawling pages, finding href links, indexing them, hitting all THOSE links), then i'm sure the NSA can do it far easier. Why? Because, according to the surveillance leaks, they already have access to the nicely indexed databases from many/most companies.

Sad thing is ... i'm not even going into tin foil hat mode yet ...

As someone who was a VP of the comp sci group in my highschool years ago, the way we did it was we played games. We met twice a week, once to play starcraft (or other games... usually starcraft) and other games on the computers, the next to discuss coding and logic

Often the logic would be strategies to figure out how the AI worked in games, but then we would talk about breaking through the schools firewalls, key loggers, etc. The Comp Sci teacher actually encouraged us to help him find security flaws for them to fix. After that we decided to try and write our own software for things like keylogging. Eventually we helped each other out with showing the newer kids the answers to some of the advanced AP homework assignments (they weren't in the AP classes). It was actually fun watching 5 people all come up with different but similar answers - then discussing WHY they took that route. Add in the classic "work on the schools webpage" stuff, and we were decently busy all year.

The key was NOT talking about comp sci the whole time, but tying computer science INTO what we were doing. We had a solid 15ish people or so in the group at any given time and the school was average size.

You joke about this, and while it is funny, the parent comment should be taken seriously. I speak three languages fluently and 2 more decent enough to get by. When I hire people, I ignore small spelling and grammar issues - unless there are a LOT of them.

Many people/organizations will "filter" out the bad potential hires based on spelling or grammar. I'm not hiring these people to be the editors of the company... we pay someone ELSE for that job already. I focus on WHAT they wrote, not HOW they wrote it. People make mistakes, especially if English isn't their primary language, and then they should not be automatically turned down for that.

To look at it from a different perspective, I've seen many resumes with zero mistakes, great amount of buzzwords, and a very clean look and feel. I then interviewed those people and found that they were completely full of shit. Professional resume companies - while they can be helpful - can also be extremely annoying because of the BS they load into a resume.

I don't like the question because it's too vague.

Same code (few tweaks) but new LOOK? A GOOD UI/UX person who actually has spent time reading the millions of dollars of research done by big companies like apple, MS, motorola, nike, etc ... creates a design based on original user feedback ... and then gets feedback from a good random sample of users to tweak the new design.

New Code (Aka: Re-Engineer) - Engineers should have first dibs to create a list of current features, outdated features, new technologies, and new capabilities. They should then put their thoughts on paper with basic UI recommendations to show how new features work. THEN and only then should the UI/UX person come in to play and work with the engineers to simplify what the engineers came up with, along with original user feedback, and clean up all the ideas. THEN get the random sample of users for their thoughts on the new design.

Good luck finding a company who does all of that correctly. Most project budgets and timelines won't allow of all of the correct steps.

Imagine how amazing this would be for the porn industry. They could target ad's to you so much easier based on your ... ummm ... big or small hand gestures?

Ohio/Northern Kentucky area schools (jumped between a few schools because I moved a lot). Most were theory heavy (senior year project example: write a solitaire game that plays itself to figure out how often it can't win. no UI, just output results of each game), "fix the problem in code" projects, or lots of on paper stuff. We did do stuff in various languages as well. The C projects were always smaller than that java ones.

I should mention that this is undergrad, not a masters or phd. Still, i jumped between a few different schools and it all seemed to be the same.

I don't think i've seen school code that ever made it past 1,000-2,000 lines of code

My last few projects were in the 100,000+ lines of code range (multiple employees)

Regardless of school code being good or bad, it's easy to write good code when you have clear business rules for needs to get done and you only have to write something small

You think the government isn't already tapping in and getting everything they want? You think the government can't "shut down" the internet in US/Canada by strong arming the tiny group of companies that own most of the lines?

Of the two viable options (current system vs government run system), i'd take the government one where we know they're wiretapping anyways, but at least we get much better connections, for much cheaper. The government option is MUCH closer to a "free market" option where small ISP's can actually start up and get the same price / access to backbones (price per gig) that the current big players would also pay. Otherwise, the barrier to entry is too damn high for anyone to really compete with the very few big companies.

It's very lightweight/fast so things that often hit the server side with ajax calls benefit. Example: gmail checks for updates every few seconds and then uses javascript to update the gmail interface without refreshing. That's a good example of where node.js work well.

New tech seems to be paying well. As a person that keeps up to date on a lot of technologies, I've worked from networking, to coding, to security, and now full time DBA. The pay is good for what I do since I stick to newer "hot" technologies (or smaller unique high pay one-off jobs).

I am currently working in a fortune 50 company for the last year, and IMO - I can tell you that the reason that "tech" people are not getting more money is because, quite literally, 30-50% of the staff is off shore people trying to get green cards. And I am not talking about small number of people. Instead of just offshoring things, people are bringing offshore workers in locally to say that they don't offshore their work. The local foreign workforce, along with fresh-out-of-school types, are doing all the "old timer" jobs like java development, xml parsing, db2 and mssql work. The high pay people are now team leads, architects, or using new fangled technologies like nosql, and html5, and python (not perl for command line), and all of those other "brand new" technologies to the industry. (note the sarcasm with "new fangled technologies").

Add a bunch of people who are EXCITED to get paid $30,000 to the workforce ... and it brings the average down

Are you willing to move somewhere new? If not, consulting is the best route to go.

Do you have your heart set on continuing to program? You mention PL/SQL - PostgreSQL experts are in great demand now and are replacing oracle jobs all over the place. Few people have a LOT of experience, so being able to just claim that you've installed it locally (hint: install it locally on a unix server), and being able to do PL/SQL, you have a good chance of getting SOMETHING in that field.

Do you plan on working more of a "corporate" job - aka: Big company to move up in? In that sense, i can see why your age would be a problem. Instead, take up android development. If you can get ANYTHING published, you will be in extremely high demand all over the country for java based android developers. You would also have a much higher chance of being able to telecommute or work from home full time. Either way, having long time java skills will still give you a shoe in to many android shops.

Final recommendation - if you want to continue writing code and can't find anything, I would recommend taking up javascript and HTML. You can always work from home, PHP/Python/Ruby are pretty easy to learn, BUT you can keep using c# and java as well. There are a LOT of web jobs available all over.

As for a+ / network+ ... both are pretty useless in my opinion. Security+ i've seen a few people give a nod of acknowledgement, but that's pretty much it.

As for WHERE to get jobs: www.dice.com and www.craigslist.com are my two recommendations for finding something. Otherwise register yourself with a tech recruiter like teksystems or accenture. They make money by finding you jobs, AND they will sometimes bypass the interview portion with the official company they are trying to place you in, or they might only do phone interviews - that should help keep your age a little more hush hush while going through the interview portion.

HAVE? This is the future... Can't i just BE my own authentication device?

What about a 2 tiered copyright system?
1. A "Development" phase copyright. This could last for UP TO 5 years on its own
2. A "Production" or "Industry" phase copyright. A full 5 years once a company starts to make money on the product

Basically, If you first register a copyright for development, you can have up to 5 years to develop that. If you only spend 2 years on development, then that's it. At the point of first sale, a full 5 year copyright would begin.

The goal here is that a company who failed (on their own terms while in development), won't have a copyright on something that would screw up the market over the long term. If they had a good idea, but their company died, the idea should be passed on for others to use no?

Thoughts?

Most everyone I know associates "HTML5" to be the bundled package of pre-made functions/rendering engines from browsers that let you use do interesting things with CSS3, javascript, as well as the new markup language tags. This includes things like the "canvas". According to the doctype on HTML5 pages... the markup language is just called "html".

Radius of earth = ~3959 mi

13,000 mph / 3,959 mi = a little over 3 times around earth per hour

In metric: about 20,900 kmh / 6,378 km

Half hour in the air = a little over 1.5 times around earth. Nice! I wonder what the speed up / slow down times are to hit Mach 20.