The # of remaining active service warheads is surprisingly small. The entire ground-based ICBM fleet is 3 different detachments of 50 missiles each of the Minuteman. They are in MT, WY, and ND.

Each minuteman is fitted with 3 warheads in the 300-500KT range.

So, the entire active-force US ICBM fleet is 450 warheads.

Of course, this does not cover sea-based ICBMs. The numbers here are actually more substantial: there are 14 Ohio class boats in service, each with 24 Trident missiles. A trident can be equipped with between 4 and 12 warheads, depending on warhead type and treaty compliance. So we have at minium, around 1340 individual warheads in our Ohio-class Trident fleet, but if we broke treaty, and also fitted lower yield warheads, it could be in excess of 10,000 warheads.

Finally, there are warheads that are delivered by non-ICBM means. These of course cover the nuclear bombs of the USAF and Navy, the nuclear payloads for the ALCM, Tomahawk, and other intelligent guided munitions, and of course we have very low yield nuclear munitions for howitzers and other "large gun" type systems with ballistic profile for in-theater use.

The point of this is to say that the large spectre of our nuclear deterrant force that most midwestern kids grew up with -- the silo complex in the middle of a field -- has been almost entirely reduced to nothing. 450 warheads, 150 tubes, for the entire US mainland.

I beleive that treaties were harsh on fixed-installatino ICBM deployments and more lenient on sub-based forces, and I think this favored the US tremendously. It also makes good operational focus, since I am sure all of the relevant people in the former USSR know precisely where all of our land based tubes are, and all of them that haven't already launched will be done within the first 30 minutes.

Contrastingly, the Sub fleet's mission is to "Get lost". Nobody knows where they are, but enough of them are in position to fire on moments notice. It doesn't matter how many of the ground tubes are disabled, either before or after the first strike, the sub fleet has enough capacity to end humanity by itself.

I'm currently a software tester at Microsoft, and recently was promoted into the senior band. I'll comment on some of your points, to offer my contrasting experience.

1. this has never happened to me in my career. The spectrum of responses I get from developers are "why are you bothering me with this" to genuine appreciation. I am not discounting your experience, but know that you were probably in a defective org. They exist, but they are not the rule.

2. Nobody questions my competence after working with me. Also, if what you do doesn't impact the product, you definitely shouldn't be getting promoted. One of the factors mentioned in my reviews is the impact I continue to have on features and design decisions.

3. This is somewhat true. The SDET role was unique to Microsoft for a long time, and originally it was basically a ramp-up period to landing a dev job. The idea that a tester would want to continue to test (instead of moving into product development) after showing the competency and value required for several promotions just wasn't something Microsoft ever planned for.

The result is that Microsoft is struggling to define what makes someone clearly a Senior or Principal level contributor in a test role. This is doubly (or quadruply?) true if you are not currently or aiming to be a manager.

4. If it's any consolation, managers lie to other managers, managers lie to developers, and managers lie to PMs also. Management and lying are just part of how it works :)

5. Not true at all in my org. I've had developers buy me lunch before because I was able to help them find bugs we all knew were in there but they couldn't successfully track down.

6. This can certainly happen. Your job (and what makes you stand out from the other testers) are figuring out what to do about it. Do you refactor your tests to better insulate them from that kind of thing in the future? Do you attend or get feedback from dev meetings and offer estimates of test impact to proposed changes? Do you help make the schedule accomodate test constraints? Do you make the case that you need more help, perhaps some vendors to get through things? Do you show how you can deliver the same risk containment with fewer active tests?

The difference between career band N and career band N+1 is expanding the number of hardships you can turn into opportunities to demonstrate personal excellence and deliver team results.

7. So don't do manual testing. __Exploratory__ testing is where the majority of bugs are found, especially in actively developed areas of the product, and for many problem types is the most efficient activity in terms of hours spent vs. defects found. Exploratory testing is also one of the best ways to become domain experts on the product, and makes the automation you write considerably more effective. Read up on "exploratory testing" if you haven't -- it's what people _should_ be doing when someone says "manual" testing. At this point I relegate the definition of "manual testing" to following a script that has been prepared in advance and will not be deviated from. This sort of manual test is something that has enough value to be done more than once but not enough value to be automated (right now).

8. This is probably true. I've interviewed with other companies and they don't quite know what to do with me. Most people don't realize that SDETs were typically developers in their previous careers. I was a UNIX C++ developer prior to working at Microsoft. Seeing "Microsoft" on a resume can help get you noticed but seeing "10 years doing testing" is a hinderance. Like most jobs, you really need a referral or an inside-advocate to get your foot in the door. Once you have an opportunity to talk about what you've actually done with someone who understands software, it's less of a problem.

Personally, it's something I enjoy doing and am good at. There are aspects of the job (and the company) that upset me, but the developers on my team get upset by a lot of the same things.

The world is starting to learn that professional software testing is its own animal, with a different set of competencies.

And don't forget..

BRUTAL LEGEND.

Brutal Legend is one of those games that was always fun, always interesting, always funny. I never wanted it to be over. The setting and the attention and love for the world of music that I grew up with made me so willing to forgive anything about the game that was not awesome. Which is an untestable hypothesis, since everything in the game was extremely awesome.

I would play in the world of Brutal Legend for many more hours (and dollars) if I could.

Like anyone, I'm selective about the events I attend. If there will be people there I would like to see, I'll go. If the interaction becomes uninteresting, tiring, or otherwise unenjoyable, I leave.

An example comes to mind: I was recently helping a new friend celebrate his birthday. I was an outsider and knew only the host; I had only met a handful of the other guests before and only knew "of" them. We were having a good time for several hours. Eventually, some other guests who had already been out drinking showed up. One woman in particular was especially loud, boisterous, and uninteresting. She singlehandledly stopped the interactions that had been happening by yelling over people with inane bullshit, and started having a pity-party and was attempting to land a guilt-trip on the host by complaining about how she hadn't been invited.

I am not sure if this was the natural inclination of this woman, or if this was amplified greatly via the alcohol, or if she felt that the expectation of someone at a party is to simply be loud and boisterous. I concede that there are certainly gatherings and times when that is appropriate, and I've played that role at times, but it seems tacky to me if you play that card and the crowd isn't enjoying it and yet you persist.

There's no reason to change the mood of a group of people who are already visibly enjoying themselves.

So, with interesting conversation having effectively been squelched, I left shortly thereafter.

There were many occasions in college when the point in the evening came when people were ready to stop "generally" socializing and get down to the serious business of smoking pot. That was always my cue to leave, as I had no interest in that sort of activity.

Like I said: my time is too valuable to me to spend it in situations I am not enjoying and don't have other reasons to be enduring.

Why?

There are a lot of structural assumptions people make about schooling that are worth questioning. People advocate for public school not because it is especially good, but because it has become the "default". Similarly, people advocate for pervasive university attendance not out of some considered viewpoint, but because it has become the "default".

K-12 and now university "education" are now seen as little more than social conditioning and workforce cog training.

If your personal goals don't involve being a well oiled cog in somebody else's machine, what is the value proposition of the typical American educational experience?

I won't even get into the fact that you carry a gun around with you everywhere.

I live in one of the safest places in the US. If you asked me why I carry it, I'd tell you plainly "incase I need to shoot somebody". My expectations of ever doing so are effectively zero.

The reasons I carry are manifold
1) because I can
2) because gun ownership is upsetting to politicians and small-minded people
3) because at different points in US history, and today in different areas of the country, daily gun carrying was/is simply part of normal life -- not something controversial or to be feared.

I think most people should carry most of the time, and re-create a culture of pervasive, responsible, respctable, gun ownership.

An aside: Until 1934, any child in the US could buy a machine gun from the sears catalog. Should society be focusing on making it hard for kids to get guns, or hard to be a low-quality kid?

Oh yay, honorable criticism from an anon!

Having the skills to cope with conflict is entirely different from having the desire to deal with people who create conflict unnecessarily and who are unable to express their differences without resorting to passive-aggressive behavior, yelling, or physical violence.

I'm married, after all. I know plenty about conflict and about resolving it. Sadly, I didn't learn much of what I needed until _after_ I got married. Luckily I am patient and a quick study, and not too proud to be above reading books about having healthy relationships, etc.

So my problem isn't with conflict, or with differences of opinion, or any such general thing. My preference is simply not to be subjected to the poor social habits of others, especially those I have no personal investment in.

The reason this type of comment tends to be warmly received on slashdot is that slashdot has a skewed intelligence distribution of readership. Intelligent people tend to have trouble relating in "normal" school settings, and so what I've written is perhaps more edgy or black and white than words others might choose for themselves, but inside of many geeks there is some leftover sense that the childhood they experienced had moments of profound injustice, and rather than blindly accepting that these moments were "crucial and necessary lessons", we wonder, if there was truly any value to said lesson, if it could have been shared in a less malicious way?

There are people who need to be abused or hurt over and over to understand that a certain behavior is a poor choice. And then there are others who can learn after just one experience, and yet still others who can intuitively understand that something will be unpleasant without having to experience it first.

If there are some sort of social dynamics lessons that kids should learn, there's no reason to assume that all kids need to learn them the same way (which is the public school model of _all_ learning).

But the "social conditioning" line of argument is so poisonous that I reject it out of hand in my original post. That entire argument seems to be that children should learn to deal with being abused, and that public school is the best place for this to happen.

While I agree that public school is the best place for children to experience being abused, I stand by my original claim that I'd rather teach my children that they don't need to accept abuse.

I was publicly schooled my entire life.

Homeschooling didn't make me this way - public schools did. And not bad public schools - the best in town. We moved many times in my childhood to navigate the maze of finding "the best" public schools.

Homeschooling might have prevented me from being this way; I might not have been surrounded by such shitty people (especially the school staffs) until I was mature enough to deal with situations more constructively.

So that blows the other unspoken assumption here out of the water.

Specifically, people who criticize homeschool and defend public school always bring up points or tests or criteria that public schools have never met. Public schools do not ensure that kids are "well adjusted", "educated", "happy", "meeting requirements", etc. They ensure exactly none of thsoe things.

So, when people who criticize homeschool bring up these topics, they do so based on their own prejudces and biases, not based on some objective standard.

Correct.

This is a short and extremely informative read on the history and motivations of public schooling. The story goes back at least as far as Calvinists and the Prussians.

http://mises.org/document/2689/

The socialization schools provide is being with people you don't like day-in day-out. That's a real life skill.

I took a different approach.

I chose to work my ass off, outside of school, learning all I could about computers, because I found them fascinating.

This has put me in a social and financial position where I am never with people I don't like.

I used my intellect and drive -- attributes that are hated in public schools -- to create and acquire wealth. I then used that wealth to change "real life" to fit my preferences.