Plenty of finance jobs are ethical. Work for fraud or anti-money laundering (plenty of high-intensity data work there). Or work for risk management and stop the bad guys.

At lots of institutions risk management is a joke (see JPM's CIO blow-up). But at the GOOD ones, risk management has a seat at every table. It's up to YOU to make sure those a**hole traders aren't going to explode the bank and lose their client's money. Not to mention the shareholders.

Seems pretty ethical to me.

If you still feel bad, decide what an "appropriate" amount of money is for yourself, and give the rest to charity every month.

Kickstarter was not originally meant to sell real 'products' as far as I can tell. But they don't turn people away who use it for that purpose. Felix Salmon covered the the 'mission creep' of kickstarter quite well last month on his blog. Actually Felix's blog is a great place for coverage on Kickstarter and the recently-passed JOBS act, which seems awesome on the surface but actually is filled with some quite terrible things.

The bigger risk, however, is on the side of the funder - and that's the risk that the project will get funded, you will spend your money, and you will end up getting nothing in return. For original-concept Kickstarter projects, that's probably OK: you supported the arts by funding an artist, and you hoped to get a memento of that funding, but the reward was just a reward, and not necessarily the main reason you funded the project. For things like bars of soap and iPhone docks, however, the great majority of the funders are thinking of themselves as buying a thing. And they're not properly discounting the very real risk that they will end up with nothing at all.

Is there something similar out there, in google-land or elsewhere?

Expose yourself to as many useful languages as you can. Learn a bit about the (business-wise) useless ones too -- they can still teach you a thing or two. The really important thing to learn in school is the theory of developing systems that work, and doing so as simply and elegantly as possible. Any company worth working for will pick up on that. If you really learned from your CS degree, learning a new language will simply be a study in syntax. For a true nerd, it is easy enough to "master" the nuances of a specific language in your free time; learn as much of the hard stuff in school while you can!

Didn't we already cover this in the original Transformers the Movie??

"Bah-weep-Graaaaagnah wheep ni ni bong"

I still remember the first time I accidentally stumbled onto MUDs (MUSHes in particular) via gopher on CapAccess (a sort of proto-internet service run by the local PBS station in Virginia).

That's when I discovered Transformer: 2005 MUSH. Aaaaaaaaaaand... 13 years later, yeah, I still play. A lot. There's just something about a text-based game that you don't get from this modern fancy-pants MMOs. There, I said it!

tf2005.net 5555 for those that are curious to see one of the longest-running PennMUSH games in existence. :)

I also appreciate all the awesome MUDs being posted here... I think it's time I revisited that particular part of the MU* universe.