Seems appropriate to dig this account out of hibernation now. I was one of the early editors here, from 1998 or so. Worked with Roblimo for years. Very decent guy, did a good job of lending an adult presence to the group that was sorely needed. I'm sad to see him go.

I am a manager with a major software company. In the last four months I have interviewed almost a hundred candiates for various positions that we have been looking to fill for some time now. There is a very strong market for true IT professionals. The dot com heydey caused a number of people who had no business in the IT profession to get high paying jobs and now those people are having a hard time finding new work.
If you are a true IT professional, willing to work hard, passionate about what you do, and continually improve your skills, I don't think you will have a problem finding a job in the forseeable future. One of the largest problems is that a computer science degree does not prepare indiviuals for work in the IT field. So here are my recommendations.
1. Get a degree in something besudes computer science. I.e. another engineering field, with minors in finance, business, or marketing. This will give you a wider range of skills for employers and provide you flexibility if you are unable to find a job.
2. Train yourself in IT on your own. I can almost garuntee if you have certifications in Java, .NET, etc. when you graduate from school, you will be head and shoulders above the rest.
3. Get real world experience. Often, 1 year of part time work can prepare you better than 4 years of classwork. This doesn't mean you don't have to have a college degree, but the point is to be better prepared than the others.

All in all, if you are not willing to put in the hard work to be an IT Professional you won't find a job. If you are willing to put in the hard work, and develop a wide range of skills, you should have the foundations for a succesful career.

They're not directly equivalent. REM stands for "roentgen equivalent man", which is to say, it's Roentgen modified by a factor which accounts for how much dose an actual human would absorb. The absorbed dose differs depending on the type of radiation involved. If we assume that the radiation involved is mostly gamma, the modifying factor is "1", so this would be equivalent to 81.6 microrem/hour.

As a general idea of how much radiation this is, background radiation in many parts of the United States is about 10 microroentgen/hour. So this is about 8 times higher than average background radiation. If you live in an area at a high elevation (less air above you to block the sun and cosmic rays) or in an area with a lot of granite or other naturally radioactive rock, your dose will be higher. The dose being recorded by that counter is actually on a par with living in Denver (high, granite-y).

Of course, that counter may not be recording anything like the highest dose in the area.