>I think that IT is far from a mature discipline. In fact I do not believe that government or business has a clear understanding of IT. Add to that IT does not understand itself. Gee, this is a fun profession!

Yeah, IT is still evolving crazily and unpredictably. There were many times in the 90s when I really wished I'd focused my education *solely* on IT, rather than dual Math/Stats & IT degrees. But *now* is NOT one of those times...I prefer IT work, but at the moment my math skills are more in demand, (or close to it, anyway), than IT skills.

>By the way the last time I did research on unemployment by job sector as defined and reported by Bureau of Labor Statistics, it seems that the Bush Administration ran out of funds so dropped the report. That was around November of last year?

Yeah, that was when Bush & Congress failed to pass any federal budgets except for "Defense Dept" (or maybe "Offense Dept" is now a more accurate term :-) So we had to cut way back on some of our data collection, and still haven't entirely caught up.

And yep, that way of de-classifying unemployed after a time doesn't make a lot of sense - though it does get hard to track people when unemployment runs out, that's a legit issue that my agency has spent much time trying to resolve and measure.