There was the skynet factory with young versions of the terminator.

amazing fantasies

The $300K a year full professor at a top college . Of course that takes 12 years of elementary schooling 10+ years of college and grad school, and another 7 years of stressful tenure work to reach that plateau. Universities have used this exclusivity to charge costs that rise much faster than general inflation. And this is being threatened now by new educational technology.

In many of these cases its being an expert in computers and something lese like finance or geophysics that gives an edge. A large fraction of my classmates from the 1970s and 1980s are in software, but did not major in computers. Its dual dmain knowledge that helped them.

Although nearly everyone I know has not realized that fear. If they have the money and health, some travel more. Some volunteer at museums or park management. Some audit classes. Some write open source software.

I've heard some complain they've are too busy and have taken on too much.

My software collegues in Houston average this salary according to professional society surverys. I make a less to live in a more interesting place.

The NSA-leaker claimed to have had gigs in this range even though he never formally completed high school or college. having a TS rating helps.

I was just looking at the 2012/2013 MIT career stats with a quarter of the MIT grads entering financial services, investment banking or consulting. You get to stay on the east coast and make lots of money. I would find the work boring.

$200K job without only a GED (high school equivalency). Home in Hawaii. I am impressed. story

They will be ruthless. May not James Bond type assassinations anymore, but years in jails and courts as Manning, Assange and dozens of Anonymous have learned.

Hackers did not not want develop on closed systems like DEC VMS with its deep levels of security. That was very painful for the few months i had to wrok with that. Now we are paying for this.

Harvard dropouts started MicroSoft and Facebook. Stanford/grads dropouts started CISCO, Yahoo, Google, HP ... I dont see MIT with an "elephant" for all its bravado.

Which probably frowned upon by the Amish. "Easy money" makes it hard to stay close to God.

It will be so easy to date from the poisonous chemicals and radiactivity, You figure up to a century earlier we didnt have all these chemicals. And a more than a century hence we will have finished cleaning up our pigsty.

The idea is to look for bightenings in the Kepler data rather than dimmings. Solar storms can masquerade as brightenings. But they may have a different shaped time history than lensing. And storms should occur more than once.

I asked the Kepler Principal Investigator about micro-lensing in a talk she gave five years ago, but she dismissed it. But Ihave seen other news articles talk about this possibility. We could look for these ourselves by downloading Kepler data.

Micro-lensing has found the 3rd most number of planets after the doppler-shift and transit methods. #4 is direct imaging of "warm" planets in IR. Micro-lensing has the least bias toward large-close planets of the three methods.