No, that's trade school. Only in recent memory has college become a worker-factory, all about providing base-level skills (and most recently, only the facade of those) required to get a job and make money. College that does what you suggest is just an institution to manufacture wage-slaves.

The irony of course is that, as many true geeks will tell you, college is hardly required to get a good job and make lots of money; the richest often have no degree and while I haven't seen actual numbers, I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of top wage-earners have limited college, at most. Those who do attend and complete college (probably the vast majority of them) end up with (at best) mediocre jobs (which, in the U.S, they may have just lost given the current unemployment rate).

Call me an idealist, but college shouldn't be primarily about getting a good job. That may be a happy side benefit, but college should be about higher education - that is, building upon basic skills learned in pre-college education (critical thinking, intermediate mathematics, hard sciences, and fine arts) to refine the person as a human being. College should be an institution where those people with the required talents may learn the skills to transcend the worker-class and obtain the tools needed to accomplish something truly great (be it art or science, or perhaps both). Sadly, a scant few current high-school graduates have even basic math and hard science skills, and no critical thinking or fine arts skills at all, and they graduate college with nothing added. I suggest that the wage-slave mentality you've outlined in your statement is largely to blame.

Um, yeah. They could.

Uh, me, if it avoids being treated like a base criminal. And don't worry, my clients will be paying for any additional cost in time and fuel. I assure you I'm not the only person doing this, BTW. I wonder how much draconian (and meaningless) "security" measures like this have hurt the economy? Oh, right - probably directly proportional to the amount paid out to the various draconian (and meaningless) government agencies and contractors and oversee/implement them.

Unsubstantiated gossip. I host a fairly large network at AWS and the damn Chinese try to brute force it continuously. Fortunately, they're morons; all they do is run dictionary attacks on the login "admin" (which doesn't exist for any protocol on any server I host). If that's the best China can do, we don't have much to worry about.