Hi, Why all that pessimism from sunny Australia? Don't tell me that it's realism, because nobody can flawlessly predict things that will happen the next years, let alone the next decades. I'm 51 years old, made my living in the IT for the last 6 years and now currently unemployed. So I'm sitting home, just doing what one of you two said: learning from books and testing that with my own machines. In the morning I take the dog to the beach and when he's running, I'm thinking about Oracle and what I could test out. It works fine for me; I now do things I couldn't imagine 6 months ago. I see that the possibilities for work are (very) slowly getting better and I think that end of this year I will have work again. Mind me, maybe not as good paying as I was used to, but money is not all. For the outsourcing problems: I think one day the governments of the US and Europe will realize, that if they want to be able to understand their own (defense??) systems, it will be necessary to learn Chinese or Urdu. The moment they understand that a part of our security is completely dependant on some third world country, it will be the end of outsourcing. In my eyes the situation has gone already to far. The west is throwing its possibility to organize, to make money, to keep the upper position away with this outsourcing; it should better be called 'making the west dependant'. (remember the oil crisis?) Rob Zijlstra in Happy Holland. ------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -- Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------