If I can design and build terminators I want more than 55K!

The obstetrician that delivered my first child used to be an accountant; he wore rubber boots to every appointment and had very entertaining and fluffy eyebrows; He entered medical school at 45; He'll work until the day he keels over but now he really loves what he does where as bean counting was nice it wasn't his true calling. The average career change for each person in the workforce these days is somewhere between 3 and 5 and there is now so much overlap with technology that what you do today may not be what you do 10 years from now. PhD's open doors to opportunities but experience and contacts determine the rest; it's like the old saying. A good Lawyer knows the Law; a Great Lawyer knows the Judge. MS degrees are kind of a stepping stone to either a PhD or a new career path. There are also MPhill's, DPhills and Taught Doctorates (Directors of Operations often have them). That bieng said Stanford and Coursearea have free stuff; no really Machine leanring courses are free.

http://www.openmint.net/masdar-city-green-living-experiment Masdar is the worlds first attempt at a completely energy neutral city.

In my high school (yes I am not a dinasaur) I took the QNX challenge; (bootable 1.44MB floppy anyone with OS and Broswer and nifty vector graphics?); Impressed the Hell out of the Computers Teacher; I later learned he was an EX IBM senior VP whom had consulted for a number of years and teaching was just what he enjoyed in his retirement. That was on "Donated" Pentium 75's from Digital with a whopping 16MB of ram. In my hometown we have a charity called "Computers for Schools" all government hardware at end of lease / lifecycle is donated. Microsoft also donates licenses; it's really up to the school to determine what to run on the hardware; that decision lies with the Board / Teachers here.

When using DES or a similar broken algorithm to secure communications you subject yourself to the the weaknesses of that algorithm. DES has been broken since the advent of the Core 2 from Intel or the FX series from AMD. Basically as Moore's Law pushes computing power ever further it also obsoletes weaker encryption algorithms. This is true for all crypto systems that are based on the use of the Discrete Logarithim Problem; It's based on the fact that it's difficult to compute large prime numbers. (ie; NP-Hard) now I'm generalizing here; 56-bit DES is a BAD idea; where possible when implmenting WPA2 use 128-bit AES (at a minimum) and use mutual 802.1x based certificates and a Full PKI for both the user and system accounts and preferably use secure tokens for their certs as well. What this means for you as a user? Well fire up wireshark / backtrack on your WiFi and submit your PCAP of a MS-CHAP handshake to find out; if it's insecure his tool will verify that notion; if it's secure his tool will tell you that you have chosen well.

We should thank William Gibson once more.

You do realize this is all due to the new form of prohibition right? You can legalize everything all you want in Mexico but the market being Supplied is to the north. Until it's legal on both sides of the border, violence will be an issue.

They outsource a LOT of their labor, if your an engineer you can make upwards of $2000 /day doing work for various telecoms.

1. Fabricate an Icon 2. Market Said Icon 3. Move all manufacturing of said Icon to the lowest (and therefore dirtiest place) on the planet. We don't manufacture anything in North America anymore because we have environmental regulations that cost billions of dollars to comply with; china has some regulations but it's always cheaper to bribe the party member than pay the bill. I wonder if the Chinese people know they are poising their own back yard? that's why we have said expensive regulations.

Does Illinois have a king or a prince yet? That's got a nice ring to it "King of Illinois!"..... :P