I suspect the posters who are doing so well in IT and Computer Science are out of touch with a lot of graduates in STEM (science, technology, engineering & math) majors including those who are not. I worked my way through much of college and law school, where my original job, set up by a clueless rich fellow, fell through and I ended up working practically full time and walking back and forth to work another 1.5 hours per day. I got the Tsetse Fly Award in the April Fool issue of the paper for logging the most sleep in 8:00 A.M. class and every once in awhile crashed out and slept through a day of classes. I think that was a major reason I missed Law Review and only graduated in the top third of my selective class at a top school, which cut off a lot of opportunities and better paying jobs. You can’t do it today without some special connections and skills. I live across from a second-tier state university and know people with B.S., M/S. and everything but the defense of their dissertations for Ph.D. in computers and other STEM fields, more than one of whom have ended up teaching English in China, and others unemployed in or near their fields and literally flipping burgers. Some were making six-figure incomes until their jobs got off-shored at what would be below minimum wage here and have had to travel across the country to low-pay part-time jobs. I put a lot of them through bankruptcy after they lost their jobs and homes, etc. How do we propose to collect enough taxes to dig out of the national debt pit while driving down the earning capacity, and tax payments, of what used to be much of our middle class? How do you expect these people to make enough to pay off their non-dischargeable student loans and other massive debt? They can’t. Student loans are just one of the next bubbles to burst. Another small problem: Only a very, very small percentage of even the conscientious American students with high intelligence have the specific native intelligence and talent to succeed in STEM and computer fields even when they pay well. Fewer male than female high school grads are going to college because the return just isn’t there. I’m older than most of you and remember when this country went on its big move to push everybody into engineering. I tried, and only MIT was smart enough to turn me down. It sort of worked for awhile. Then we started seeing pages and pages of ads for engineers that said “no aerospace experience need apply.” Age. Etc. discrimination laws are impossible to enforce most of the time and we’re scrapping huge chunks of intelligent younger, much less older, college grads regardless of major. Why do you think almost half of American adults are on some kind of welfare payments, a situation we cannot possibly sustain financially and which destroys everything this country used to stand for.

It's not really a war, just an exercise in looting.

You make sense from what I know of the theories, plural, of language as very partially posted above.

"Not having broken any laws is very unlikely." How universally true. I'm a retired lawyer and if you ever figure out how to go through a typical week, do anything, and not break one or more state and federl criminal laws in the process, it would be a rare occurrence. You can also get, as I did, into terroristic death threats from the authorities, all kinds of legal trouble, by reporting or otherwise trying to get protection and help for a sexually abused child, while the laws requiring reporting such things are filled with rat-holes only a child molester would have written. The State Bar told me I must not report something the statute said I was required to report in one instance, while nobody would investigate the solid evidence in others. If our politicians, of either party, gave a Continental hoot about us, our privacy would be protected by strong, and enforced, federal and state laws, and you would be required to go public with what you know and somebody would be required to notify the victims and deal with this mess. Do you really believe that all these lost, strayed, or stolen computers loaded with the personal, academic, and medical records of 70,000 university students or card holders were not actually instead bought and paid for by the data miners and aggregators who sell such personal information? Mine, loaded with privileged and confidential data about molested children I represented and their molesters, and my file cabinets, were searched twice, and my law office destroyed at what was at least the third burglary by what the Fire Marshal told and showed me was clearly arson but wouldn't list that way for the record, and hte police never even opened a file. I couldn't advise anyone else what to do but, in the situation described, I'd turn the whole mess over to not one but several investigative jo9urnalists anonymously with enough evidence to authenticate it, send a copy to the SEC, FTC, etc.--of course you might have to flee the country, change your name, etc.

Hey, we've solved that problem. We no longer teach half of them to read and write even simple business letters. The pen is only mightier if you know how to use it.

Viva! IAAL. The loophole is that a rule banning pencils does not cover BIC pens, the uses of which both as surgical instruments and as weapons in student revolutions were covered in a revolutionary tract, reproduced and widely published by the DOD, I read in high school long, long ago. They started banning things when I started school in 1945, and I think balls were the only thing not banned by the time I somehow lived to graduate. Geography books are definitely "deadly weapons" under Texas law, where the definition aptly starts with the word "anything." I missed some school after being bashed over the head with one by an older known bully and getting a concussion. There is something about school rules that exempts them from any check on absurdity. Surely this one will be rescinded.

As a retired lawyer, you bet this was a h--y s--t moment! You have no earthly idea how sensitive some of the data we deal with can be. Leaking some of it can get you disbarred. Some it can get you or your client, or a witness, etc., seriously injured or killed. Never mind who’s trying to buy what property through a straw man, my practice very unexpectedly came to involve representation of a number of child and adult survivors of incestuous rape, and some of the perpetrators were officials palmed off on us by both political parties. We traced one nasty piece of malware that got onto our two un-networked computers, a number of program disks, and a large case of data floppies, to our computer repairman whose business had got infected, and neither of our well-known commercial antivirus programs had caught it though ours did afterward, maybe from an update. My favorite security leak was when the city sold the hard drive from the police department’s computer to me for $5.00 at a public sale where I also bought some furniture. What genius replaced and sold that to a defense lawyer, or anyone else, without formatting it first, or at all? We had checked carefully one day to be sure we were locked up tight, only to return the next morning to discover our front door wide open, a new printer cartridge, much of a copier cartridge, and most of a box of paper used up, our computers out of action, and a lot of files on many of the same disks converted to what, long afterward, we learned were WordStar 4, Navy DIF, and other formats we couldn't read or write. Our printer had been disabled by switching DIP switches, etc. The police insisted we had left the door open and that all this was done by heat lightning, and refused, up front when we called, to take a report, but sent their computer man over who did get the computers but not the printer or files running. Heat lightning. Right! Another lawyer’s office called me the next business day and reported a similar burglary with nothing but maybe files taken. Five years later, after the statute of limitations had run, we got the evidence including stolen files and the highly-recommended fired employee perpetrator having taken a locksmith course, etc. Later, the office, on the first floor of an occupied office and apartment building across from City Hall, which all the people with newly changed keys swore we had all made sure was locked, was found unlocked and destroyed by what the Fire Marshal showed and told us was clearly arson set in three different rooms, etc. Our fireproof safe file was damaged and opened. Again, no sign of force. Hiring is one of the worst points of vulnerability. I read on FindLaw where the best known name partner at a certain Silicon Valley firm with clients like HP spent $68,000.00 hiring a secretary and she robbed them blind before getting caught. One of the judges here had hired a thief earlier. One of the lawyers who the worst crook I hired had given as a reference and had recommended told me after the fire, and after we discovered he had known she was a forger and thief, that they knew but that it would have been unethical for them to tell me she was a thief so they hadn’t. Wrong. The Fire Marshal told me she had engaged the “torch” who had burglarized and destroyed my office, and she and I had the only keys to the safe file, but, after showing and telling us it had clearly been arson, as if anyone couldn’t see that, he refused to put that in his report and listed it only as “of suspicious origin.” The police never talked to me and, as far as I know, never made a report on this, either. The DA insisted that it couldn’t be burglary if the door was unlocked, but, even with my office destroyed, it took me only minutes to pull the controlling Texas case that it was. Stealing a case of beer out of the open bed of the sheriff’s pickup truck is felony burglary, too, as a foolish client of mine learned. I know who did what and the obscene reason why, and who helped in the cover-up, but the key witness is terrorized and I have duties to preserve the confidentiality of the incestuously molested client this was about and others and can’t tell what I know much less get the witness to overcome his or her fear and testify. I hate user names and passwords and, as you noted, they’re not that secure. I can never remember the really hard ones, despite all the brilliant suggestions, and everything has one, which also requires you to keep up with which user name and password you and other users use on different sites. We had the same problem with really difficult combination locks. You and your secretary eventually quit using them or leave them around, etc. There must be a practical solution. Big outfits can hire expensive teams of IT security experts, but small businesses can’t.

My wife and I have relatively new Sprint HTC EVO Android-based smart phones. My wife has downloaded a lot of apps, nothing that looks suspicious, reads a lot of Email newsletters, and uses hers to send and exchange GMail Email, etc. With limited vision, I do all my newsletters, Email, etc. on this desktop except I have read some news etc., and received some mail from her etc., on my cell phone. We're both suddenly getting both messages and mail from unknown sources that is spam, some highly objectionable, some signed with unrecognizable handles, some simply undecipherable gibberish not all of which is in English characters or recognizable and may be Chinese or whatever, . Our phones have both also started switching, changing home page apps, placing calls without being touched and to people in our directories but not last person called, etc. Our primary concern is that we both use our phones for privileged and confidential medical, legal, etc. matters, and our people lists contain doctors and friends with whom we have privileged and confidential relationships and some very sensitive confidential information. Both phones are on the federal Do Not Call list, though that is usually not necessarily for cell phones. Sprint is not happy hearing from us again. Please keep us posted on this including, but not limited to, effective defenses as they are developed. By the way, most sites I know don't cover Android apps for legal and other things and this is the only site on which I have found two wanrings now about Android malware. Where can I find best malware, security, legal and other research, adn other apps for Android? Also, several of the available free and cheap Android apps I don't really want on my cell phone, which has limited battery life, but would really like ot have on my MS Windows desktop, and there are some my wife would like on her laptop. I'm sure there must be a way to do that but can't figure out how. Any suggestions.

Prof. Martin got this right. I'll put this more bluntly. I have experience as a criminal defense lawyer, a crime victim including armed robberies, burglaries, and illegal searches of privileged and confidential paper and computer client files, and civil rights crimes under color of law, represented an awful lot of child and adult survivors of mostly incestuous child sexual abuse, some of it, and other sex offenses, committed by politicians and officials palmed off on us by both political parties, and trying to get various authorities to shut down wide open drug dealerships the police admitted knowing about, which led to such searches and state and federal civil rights crimes. I cannot imagine how the California Court of Appeals got this so wrong and hope the decision is overturned on appeal. Your cell phone, your computer, your USB flash drive, and your ISP, off-site backup service, etc.'s records from these, are the modern equivalent of the Founders' roll-top desks and their journals in their saddlebags. If they really had enough to make a search of the subject's cell phone "reasonable" under the 4th Amendment's guarantee--not grant--of fundamental natural human rights, they could apply for a search warrant, only rarely denied, but apparently didn't. The so-called "war on drugs," or whatever the Obama Administration is calling that this week, is a sham and a scam. You don't have to look beyond the DEA Web site to see that everyone knows we have been and still are losing, and the money, like a lot of the rest of the federal budget, is going into the politicians' and officials’ pockets. With several of us neighbors, and uniformed police, having witnessed the buying and selling of crack cocaine on this block across the street from a state university and in plain sight of a police station, I went all the way up the chain from local to county to state to federal DEA to the White House Drug Czar’s office, under both parties, and every one of them refused to act. After nearly two years, I finally got Building Inspection to close it down. The argument that eroding First and Fourth Amendment and other fundamental rights to privacy implicated by such searches is either reasonable or right on the theory that it might tend to help fight this fake "war" is specious circular reasoning and an outright lie. We started to go off course when the Supreme Court was persuaded to hold that your bank’s copy of your checking account records, which reveal your religious, political, medical, and other relationships, were not yours to control and you had no standing to object to their rummaging through them without a warrant. We went farther down that wrong road with holdings that upheld laws that allowed police officers complete and unreviewable discretion to take your wife or daughter to jail, where the could be strip-searched, and maybe body-cavity searched, if that was standard practice, but issue a summons to somebody else, for a traffic violation, conviction of which carried no jail time as a penalty, or, for that matter, for a million-dollar embezzlement or insider trading scam. And we went completely off into the swamp with a Supreme Court holding that the officers’ motive and intent in anything they did that could arguably be brought within the outer range of their authority, tested solely against their version of what they saw or heard, was irrelevant and could not be questioned in criminal or civil court. It’s almost impossible to win a federal civil rights case if the officer says he didn’t know or think what he did was unreasonable, such as if smart phones were new technology. There are other cases where they have erred the other way. Don’t kid yourself that the honest person has nothing to fear from this erosion of privacy. The now-familiar warning that “Anything you say can, and will, be used against you in a court of law,” is all too true in practice, whether you are innocent or guilty. There is something practically everybody would do almost anything to avoid having published. Unfortunately, the hardest thing to do in a civil or criminal case is to get your client to shut up, especially if he happens to be another lawyer. Just about everything, including your or your daughter’s abortion can usually be dug into in pretrial discovery in most personal-injury or many other cases. My cell phone, like my computer and off-site backup service, contain, for example, information, some of which is, and some is not, legally privileged and confidential, but disclosure of which the average person would consider outrageous, about old clients’ and friends’ experiences including being raped, my wife’s and my doctors and medical histories, nobody else’s business, their views on sensitive issues, and whether or not they have told me things that could get them seriously injured or killed. With access to your smart phone or laptop computer, I can steal your identity, or frame you for child pornography, and no police officer or politician will ever get busted for this, or most of their other crimes.

One problem I have not seen mentioned here is that the number and percentage of male high school graduates even applying much less graudating from college is dropping like a rock. But it takes an average of 14 years to break even on a college degree and you have to pay off your student loans much earlier and before you start making any money from your degree. I live across the street from a state university and this is serious both for the universities and for the future of families. Does anybody wonder why so many of our doctors are coming from third-world countries like Pakistan. 23% of juniors at the state university here recently failed the easy Junior Level Essay Exam, among much other evidence that the public schools are still turning out bright students who are functionally illiterate and can't balance a checkbook. When the U. S. is 23rd in English proficiency at that point in education, what do you expect? Students whose parents could pay full price and make nice donations to the college have always had an easier time getting in than those of us who had to win scholarships. But this seems to be getting worse, especially as the non-dischargable debt burden to get through college and professional school has spiraled into numbers that even many lawyers, etc., will never be able to pay off much less pay on schedule. Most college grads' salaries, in real, constant-dollar terms, have been stagnant or falling since about 1973. Public junior colleges start from vacant fields, 30-40 miles from public universities. with a plant investment that exceeds what my highly rated private alma mater founded in 1787 lists as its total endowment and assets. The rate of more and more luxurious building replacement here, and new building at another similar state university where I used to live in Pennsylvania, are staggering. Administrative costs are way higher than in my day. Salaries are up but not that high except for the political positions, including CEO, fund-raisers, and athletics.

Some truth in this but if you do it right you can provide financial aid, both grants and loans, to needy students without driving up the cost of higher education. My private undergraduate alma matter, highly rated, had an endowment, after nearly 200 years when I was there, equal to the plant investment of one of the newer public junior colleges here, and provided most of the cost to me in grants and some loans. One of my economics professors got to talking about their lower pay than their collegues with similar education in the business world. I weighed in with a question concerning different tangible and intangible benefits and drawbacks and his free choice to teach there, as a straight problem in economic choices and the economic and non-economic considerations thereof, which, in economic terms, rather delicately called him on this. Thinking back on it, and some advice to pursue an academic career, which I would have considered more if I had the hindsight of a career in private law practice I do now, it does offer a pretty attractive work-life balance in many respects. A lot of it has to do with values and temperaments. He realized and conceded I had a point and certainly never retaliated. Incidentally, I would rate him as one of the more conservative members of the economics faculty. The bubble in academic pricing didn't really begin to inflate until after that, my best guess being about 1974 when, after the Arab Oil Embargo shock, and the incomes of most college graduates and the purely economic value of a college education stagnated and started to drop. I know a number of professors, instructors, etc., and have taught one small college course and been a guest lecturer in some other classes. Posters here seem to have had, or thought they had, professors more conservative than those I had in a private undergraduate college, a highly-rated private law school, and an extra summer session at a highly-rated state law school, and certainly more conservative than my one sister ever had any of at Penn State. All the propagandizing I remember was from the liberal side. My four siblings graduated from top-tier state universities. My younger wife attended some junior college and other courses, took most of her work and graduated from the second-tier state university here, and took some graduate courses at two other state universities. None of them reported any brainwashing or indoctrination from the conservative side, but, from first and second grade on up, we've had teachers who insisted thatour other tachers were ignorant idiots. Some, with and without doctorates, were. I have also lived most of my life in college and state university towns, for diverse reasons, and conservative professors are scarce in most fields including the social sciences. As for rambling off into personal viewpoints, etc., most of what I remember of value from public schools in east Texas and Pennsylvania, in the lab school at Penn State and public school in another state university town, came up when the teachers set aside the often dumbed down and insipid written lesson plans and talked ot us out of their professional and life experience. We got more of this beneficial impartation of experience and wisdom out of class in college and law school. My experience talking about political and economic, and many other, subjects with many high school and college students. One recent conversation with a seemingly bright and interested junior level journalism major transferring from a major junior college was far from unique in revealing that she had never actually read and studied the First Amendment, much less essential writings about its drafting and interpretation, and could not name four of the five rights guaranteed thereby, but thought certain language was in the text that isn't. Way too many bright students, born here to English-speaking parents, have been allowed to go through public school and graduate without becoming functionally literate in English. I learned to write essays and research papers in sixth grade in east Texas and these kids came ot work for me as high school seniors and had never composed a simple business letter--and those were the bright ones we hired. You should have met the others. Awhile back, 23% of juniors at the state university here could not pass the required Junior Level Essay Exam. I think that figure has improved but I recently took a writing critique program and everyone noted the low English proficiency even of those for whom English is their native and only language, much less others.

I had a client who, before she got busted, had a good color copier that I couldn't have afforded and assume she stole. She wold print up duplicates of stolen checks and had a group of people fan out and pass them. I had another famous con man client earlier one of whose scams was selling memberships in the Mafia; nobody ever complained and I always wondered what happened the first time one of those marks tried to use that in Chicago. What I don't understand is how you can print a scanner as distinguished from running in ours ahead of the real one. How does this work? Don't they have to be connected to something? I guess all the real experts on SD know but I don't. None of my computer geek buddies will even teach me to hack into the local university and change grades or issue degrees, or into the big banks, the IRS, or the White House. Where on SD or some other site can I get the instructions for this so I can make a little tax-free cash on the side?

Oh, come, now, I saw plenty of coverage of the union people physically taking over the capitol of Wisconsin. Not only was this not suppressed, their Republican opposition wanted people to see this resort to force by the unions and their left-wing allies after they couldn't win the argument at te ballot box or in the legislature by logical persuasion. I also saw a few pictures of the damage the mob did and left for the state to clean up at considerable expense. In my law school days, while working for an entity funded by the liberal Ford Foundation, part of my job was to monitor and collect mainstream print media coverage of litigation and other activities on a major issue. I noted an article in the liberal New York Times about a large demonstration having occurred in a location that just happened to be right outside my window and also across from where I lived. The rub was that it never happened, then or ever. I had, in fact, walked through the location several times during this alleged demonstration for other, routine, purposes. There wasn't even a poster about this alleged demonstration, which I would have attended as part of my job. We never found anyone on campus who ever heard of it except from the alleged news article. When i lived in western Pennsylvania, earlier, the media didn't cover the union thugs beating people up for trying to carry their own television sets and other packagers home from stores against they were striking. I'm more than a little suspicious of the liberal establishment media when it comes to such issues. As for coverage of the Tea Party, we keep hearing of racist influence and signs but nobody shows pictures of them or even gives the same account of what they allegedly said. I've seen one picture of one racist sign and heard of one or two racist shouts but no credible evidence that anybody with any real connection to, or authority in, the Tea Party even knew about or could control this. I've worked appearances by Presidents and we had people assigned to cover up obscene signs planted in the crowd by our opponents to get TV exposure and make our people look bad but not normal heckling which our candidates. handled.

I think Slashdot hit rock bottom, not to mention 180 degrees off topic, on this one. Trying to figure out how to mod this down but my first try didn't work. The author's pending Ph.D. seems like a parody of the proliferation of useless degrees issued by colleges and universities these days, and may be a tip-off that this is a put-on. Or maybe it's an extreme advertisement for some current or actuallyh proposed amusement ride. The appeal of a lot of these seems to be some illusion of danger. I've been on some big ones at Six Flags etc. and far and away the scariest ride I've ever been on was a little portable one at the county fair. Now what someone might do with this is hook up with Al Gore and the rest of those who talk about reducing the population of the world by a third and maybe you can get a big government grant or loan from Obama or Rick Perry, blow the money on riotous living, go broke, and do it again. who are Suicide happens to be one of the things upon which I have become an expert in my life and career. It is almost always an irrational act. People I know who have somehow survived having shot themselves in the head, taken cyanide, staken 2 poerful sleeping pills with alcohol, hung himself off a railroad trestle with 20' of new rope that broke, etc., much less had their attempts interrupted unexpectedly, are glad they didn't die. I've been with a dozen people who were suffering suicidal depression and not one of them agreed that any of the others should die even when they thought they should. These included teachers, lawyers, bankers, pharmacists, and other smart and educated people, and people lI consider valuable. I'd rather be governed by a lot of the people I knew who had been psych hospital patients for suicidal depression than by a lot of the politicians of both parties I know. I've represented young pre-school kids on up who have attempted suicide and know of completed suicides as young as 8 or 9. A school superintendent showed us figures for suicides, suicide attempts, and other life-threatening behaviors among school kids, and the percentage who had attempted and those who had seriously contemplated suicide were both shocking. After dropping, the rate among yhoung people is moving significantly back upward. Experts I have good reason to believe are right argue convincingly that the decision whether they would kill themselves if things got bad enough in their eyes is often made at about age four or five, too young to comprehend death or the significance of life, and then kill themselves later when triggered by some event back to the ego state of a hurt four year old Child. Almost always, to quote one of the leading professional experts in America, "Treatment and therapy, not suicide, is indicated." This is not something people should be encouraging.

I'm a believer in free enterprise a la Adam Smith. Most people who profess to believe in free enterprise have never actually read either Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or his writings on ethics, just as too many Keynsians do not appear ever to have actually read his key writings. Smith was suspicious of, among other things, spendthrift trusts and very large business enterprises with the power to set their own prices or "drive down the cost." You have to wonder how and why the supposedly well educated, experienced, business geniuses who end up on the boards of directors of such major corporations, among others, so often ignore the basic principles and lessons of business management and make mistakes that would get a branch manager in Podunk fired, not to mention how their commercial and investment bankers, likewise supposedly business geniuses, their consultants, their legal counsel, key stockholders, etc., don't call them to account before they provide the latest in a seemingly endless supply of business stories characterized by "How the [actually or allegedly] best and brightest blew it." They teach some of these cases in business school. There are actually a finite number of definable mistakes that cause most of the severe damage, disaster, and destruction in business, and somebody on these boards, or their professional outside consultants and advisers, should at least stick their neck up every once in awhile and point out that they are in danger of making one, and how to avoid it. I once read the report of the examination of a substantial bank in a major metropolitan market that said, for example, "This bank's weak and self-serving board and management has repeatedly been warned to stop . . . " Nine of the ten largest banks in that key market managed to go broke. You have to work hard at it, and violate several principles of sound business, much less banking, that any freshman knew and the members of their boards and senior management knew or should have known, to do that. You can't make money indefinitely as a pig. I think one of the real problems is the institutionalized matter of "expectations" and short horizons for these.