Keep your feet and hands inside the ride at all times

[Richard Fiero]

" . . . It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these 
three curves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long. "

Come on. They never diverged.

http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pkt/2000/msg02796.html
Eisenhower, a conventional war warrior, who had an old soldier's distaste for
the new technology and the new scholastics, whose entire career was built with
his inability to complete a whole sentence, had Malcom C. Moos, his speech
writer, to come up with the eloquent and catchy term: "military/industrial
complex."  Eisenhower was confronted with a new and dangerous phase of the
arms race.

Under the page
http://www.nsa.gov/programs/employ/index.html
are two frames:

http://www.nsa.gov/programs/employ/science.html
Keep your feet and hands inside the ride at all times
It's been said that the systems environment we offer is a 
veritable fantasyland for computer science, with vast networks 
that manipulate huge volumes of data and accomplish information 
analysis at mind-boggling speeds.
Consider acres of hardware
software years ahead of current commercial technology
microprocessor-based advances
over-the-horizon supercomputers
leading-edge activities in programming, signals (including 
analog control), GUI's, AI, neural nets, information security, 
the design and implementation of encryption algorithms, and far beyond.
Just as multi-directional as our technical setting is the work 
we do in two major areas: development and support.

http://www.nsa.gov/programs/employ/engine.html
Ingenious early and often
When your passion for creativity and ingenuity is exceptionally 
strong, the breakthroughs come early and often. This describes 
the nature of our technical engineering environment. Our early 
interest in cryptanalytic research, for instance, resulted in 
our being one of the inventors of the computer. Our efforts in 
advancing flexible storage capabilities led to the development 
of the tape cassette. Our groundbreaking development of 
integrated circuits is legendary. This trend is even stronger 
today. What does this mean for your NSA career? Everything.