From the source article it sounds like the students go through online materials for 2 weeks then take an online quiz. There doesn't appear to be any real hands-on anywhere. How many of us know "bootcampers" like John Doe, CISSP CCNA OMG WTF BBQ, that passed a test but couldn't work their way around anything they are certified in? CyberPatriot (also a US Cyber Challenge competition) has been providing real hands on competitions to high school students for the past three years.

That would be an interesting insight, if you just paid a guy to build a house and that was that. In my world, however, I get hand cramps signing a horde of legal mumbo jumbo that says I get my house when I put the cash on the table. The same is not true for paying a guy to write some code.

s/people's passwords/girls phone numbers/; 'two types' applies in all aspects of life :P

I've been out of the military for a year and a half now. I left because I wanted to expand network security wise and the military would not let me do that. You can't treat the military's attitude towards geeks as a single attitude, however. It depends on who your divo is. My division officer was a non-technical person with a "my way or the highway" attitude. To him, network security was not an important issue for a ship command. His reason was that there is a NOC firewall between the ships and the shore connection, and that nobody would ever penetrate that firewall. Therefore, there was no need to "waste time" with network security except for 1 week out of the year during the required red team/blue team exercises. I have friends on other ships with almost a completely opposite situation. So, it all depends on who exactly you work under.

There are current MATC students running Ubuntu posting in the comments in the original article. The cut and dry here is this woman is either lazy, or just not up to par for a technical college.

People like this seem to be selectively blind to the usefulness of great ideas and new technology in an attempt to keep a stranglehold on their "back in my day" ways of doing things. With any luck they'll be arrested in some foreign country and have no one to converse with. 'Cept for a large man named Cheryl who loves "physical human interaction".

I was also in the service and know how bad the mail system is. The mail is handled by regular people like you, me and the guy or gal reading this post. Integrity is not a requirement to join the rate that handles mail, and I recall several incidents every deployment where PS's were actually stealing electronics from the mail. There's no way to prove they were actually received, except for documentation kept by the PS's, who if stealing your electronics would not be quick to document it.

Guess I should have read the replies first, lol. Yeah, this guy just stuck his foot in his mouth.

"in my day, we had to die for our principles" So seeing as how your still alive to post that reply, we can determine "in your day" you had no principles and never stood up for anything. And newsflash, this is MY day. Your era was over a long time ago, gramps...

Or, you can email them telling them why you wont play them game, then pirate it and play it anyway. Then you get the best of both worlds.