pleaides isnt nukes, its nasa. airplanes and weather.
the others some are nukes some are open unclassified uses.
noaa/nsf/etc

once you buy it its no longer their device, its your device
and should be able to do with it as you please.
however there are non consumer friendly laws that
got bought that prohibit this concept...

It actually can.
I did this very thing some 25+ years ago now.
though my highschool was paying for my community college
at the time. The was pre-AP classes and this was their version.

It was a very useful thing to do community college before
I went on to a real university. not for everyone but
it was like a halfway program for higher education.

strictly "programming" is becoming a blue collar job these days.
but if you find a profession that you like that needs programming
skills in addition to its normal requirements you can do great.
myself I went to school to engineering (aerospace), that needs
a lot of programming as all we do is write code.
So its applied programming if you will which tends to be
a lot more useful in the real world then just a programming
degree.

http://www.entourageedge.com/devices/entourage-edge.html

there is such a beast that got shown at CES this week, looked to be like a letter sized ereader with watcom
tablet underneath on one half and a android based netbook on the other. opened like a portfolio
was $500. cant remember the name of it though. was geared toward the academia market. looked fabulous.
though apple may do something useful in a few weeks as well...

it has cut down tremendously on the spam claiming to be from my domains.
any other benefit I am unaware of.

This is not so much a "data center" as it is going to be a generic compute resource.
Given the computer modeling and simulations that NASA needs to do to support its
"space" missions this kind of thing is very much related to its core mission statements.

They are allowed to view any future sale of a DRM infested product as a rental/lease.
Im all for this. However my price point of renting vs buying something is 1/10th
the current asking price. I will always go for the unencumbered cd route
if I want to buy music. though if the band themselves offers .wav files I would
buy those as well.

for computer science I would say yes rice is a better option.
do undergrad there, save the money, then go on to master and postdoc
at either stanford or MIT.

it wasnt an email but I did leave this saying on my whiteboard when I left one job. it was however in klingon.