We've got enough of those really tall guys working in my company to make a decent pickup basketball team. Those guys are working in marketing and engineering. I asked a couple of them about their basketball skills; one couldn't make the college team. The other played a few years with his school then realized he was not physically talented enough to advance. That's despite being seven feet tall. People don't realize that professional basketball players (or any kind of high level professionals) are the top tier of the top tier. Those 1% of the 1% are the people you hear about in the news.

If US government is serious about defending the international principle of non-use for chemical weapons, the best thing for America to do is refer details of the violation to the International Criminal Court. And press for war crimes charges against the responsible officials.

It took a magnitude 9 earthquake plus a 14 meter tsunami to damage those old GE design reactors. And they haven't lost containment. Yet. That increases my confidence in atomic power. Sure, there's a horrible mess that has to be cleaned up. But the plant design WORKED. If this was a Russian Chernobyl-style design, reactor parts would be scattered all over the countryside.

YES an Internet kill switch is EXACTLY what we need.

We want one to isolate US networks from external attacks. Like the type we expect to get from China. Russian botnets are the source of most of the spam and worm attacks.

Have you any idea what a Stuxnet type of attack can do to the American power grid / pipeline systems / water systems?

Just ask people in Belarus or Georgia if they'd like to have had a way to isolate from the internet when the hard rain came down on them...

And I look around and wonder "how did we ever get rated as a top company?" My training (scale 0 - 10) = 2, New equipment = 2, career growth = 3. All I can say is if this is the way it is in one of the highest rated firms in the world, I feel sorry for everyone else. My guess is these listings are just another popularity contest. Some firms think its important to win, so they make the effort to be on the list.

The best way to deal with this "company reference" stuff is the old fashioned way. Ask people you respect in the soon to be former employer who are familiar with your work and skills to write a letter of reference. On company letterhead.

Of course you'd prefer your direct manager to write a LOR for you. Ask him / her.

These letters belong to you. You can present them with your resume to prospective employers. They are much easier to track than contact or personal reference information. They are always fresh. Any company will only confirm employment these days. You need to provide the endorsements of employment yourself.

This incident happened 10/26/2006 - Did you people just hear about it?