I also had a TRS-80 Color Computer as a young child. I mostly played games on it, but my father apparently did actual work on it as well. I can't imagine how much it cost him (he didn't make much money), but his willingness to spend that money fundamentally altered the course of my life. The TRS-80 was the first computer I ever used, and it sparked a passion for technology that's still with me today.

It's a joke. It means the time between release and the first "expansion pack".

He became locked in his car and ate himself to death. Very tragic.

If it's obvious to everyone that a company has problems, the worst possible thing a CEO can do is say everything is fine, because it makes everyone think he's out of touch or not interested in fixing what's wrong. A good CEO would acknowledge the problems and present a high-level plan for fixing them. Whistling past the graveyard just makes things worse.

You laugh, but if I hadn't used that method I never would have known that my bank relocated to Russia.

This all sounds like bad news, but on the bright side there won't be any reduction in the chocolate ration this year.

I just bought a new computer with DDR3 in it yesterday.

That's it, I'm going to get a job at the TSA.

The type of "reimplementing" Google is alleged to have done has always been illegal unless the license terms of the software said otherwise. Had Google done a clean room reimplementation then they would have been in the clear, but instead they allegedly lifted code directly from Oracle's (copyrighted) APIs and used it without a license.

Many (most/all?) of the other languages mentioned have highly permissive licenses that expressly allow the sort of thing Google did. In many cases, the copyrighted portion of the language is little more than a set of standards to be followed, with the actual method for following those standards left up to whoever wants to write a compiler/interpreter for it.. Java has a much more restrictive license and always has, even when it was owned by Sun. Sun just didn't bother going after these sorts of suits. Of course, they didn't have the most powerful Internet company in the world making billions of dollars off a reimplementation of their code, either, at least not until they were already hemmorhaging money too fast to do anything about it.

That sounds good in theory, but I don't think it would work in practice. If you're in the middle or lower classes, you don't tend to have the time to waste pursuing an education for its own sake. Instead, you need to concentrate on doing something that will make money when you're finished. So, even if you had an interest in this University concept, you probably wouldn't go because you know that you would be wasting several years of your life with nothing marketable to show for it.

The general upshot of this would be your working classes would have to pay for their schooling anyway, and the idle rich who have the ability to spend several years of their life doing something that isn't economically productive would get a free liberal arts education. This would only serve to deepen the divide between the very rich and everyone else.

The problem with nursing is two-fold: One, it became the big thing like you said and too many people got into it all at once. Two, people got into the wrong kind of nursing. The reason nursing was projected to (and probably still will) face such a shortage is because of all of the baby boomers retiring and needing care. However, it turns out that most people really don't want to work in geriatrics. When I was going back to school a couple of years ago, I would ask nursing students what they wanted to do after they graduated. The majority wanted to do obstetrics (delivering babies), despite our declining birth rate. Almost none of them wanted anything to do with geriatrics.

Except that most employers will immediately round-file your application if you show up on a sex offender registry at all. They rarely go through the effort of finding out the details.

Or "Dumbledore is gay".

If we start reporting on how the violence in Mexico is impacting the United States, then people might want to actually do something about it, and we can't have that.

One of the big reasons Spaceport America was built there was because it's right next to White Sands Missile Range, which is a vast area of land used by the military to test things like missiles (hence the name). Even if something goes wrong after the spacecraft has left the missile range, there's still a huge swath of lightly populated land before you get anywhere near a major city. By the time it got anywhere close to Houston or Dallas, assuming the flight path even takes it anywhere near them, there would have been plenty of time to abort and most of the fuel would have already been spent.