It doesn't matter how you save if you get a degree in a field that doesn't pay much... and went to a private school. Of course, the damage is increased even more if you came from a low-income family and didn't qualify for many scholarships.

Considering that Gates dropped out of college and went on to great success, he may be one of the people who benefits more from information than social education. I've met several people like this -- they can read a text and extrapolate/use that information immediately on their own. Most people, I think, aren't that type, though, and so benefit from a traditional education at all levels.

Seriously, what's the point? I'm not saying it's pointless, but if the goal is to learn more about technology, why programming? Unless you're actually going to use it somehow, it's going to be a tremendous pain in the butt to learn and retain all these new ideas. Even if you do learn a bit about programming, there are always going to be professionals out there that can do it faster, more efficiently, and more securely than you can -- and if it's something for a business, you should probably be going with them.

If all you want to do is learn more about technology, subscribing to Popular Mechanics and reading it every month would be a good place to start. Or even just reading Slashdot every day.

If the goal is to learn more about computers, then it would probably be a lot more practical to learn about hardware than programming. Learn what the different basic parts of a computer are, what they look like, what types there are, how to replace them... that kind of stuff.

For a car analogy, instead of learning about the software that makes your car work, you should be learning about how to change the fluids and diagnose simple problems, check the tire tread... that kind of stuff.

What nation wants to spend money to send people up into space to clean up after what's essentially other people's garbage? There's no immediate gain, so nobody's going to do it.

No, it's used as a noun, just like when you say "That American is very tall." "Japanese" can be used in that sense, though, yes, it does come across sounding a bit provincial or offensive, just as if you were to say "that Oriental." But then again, that's the standard in some countries -- for example, in Britain.

It's worth noting that you can use "Japanese" as a noun in other contexts as well -- for example, "Japanese has complex grammar."

You mean:

A trolls B
B sues A for libel/slander/defamation

OR

A trolls B
B sues A for trademark/copyright infringement

Even more than the word itself, consider the combination of letters, since it's a URL. For example, anything with the pattern *sex* would be filtered, whether it was actually a word or not -- consider "expertsexchange.com" or something.

Wouldn't it be equally as likely that, say, people who are driven to achieve do better in WoW /and/ real life? Actually, I find that MORE likely than the idea that WoW makes lazy people goal-oriented and gives them a personal drive...

I don't see how this is early, if you look at the record of the modern Doctor Who franchise. Paul McGannis lasted all of one TV movie; Christopher Eccleston lasted for one year, and then David Tennant lasted for three. So Matt Smith at two would hardly be "early" -- just sooner than Tennant. Also, as pointed out before, The Sun is hardly the most reliable source.

I've never heard them called "graphic calculators" -- that sounds almost like an eggcorn to me. I've always heard them referred to as "graphing calculators," for their ability to draw graphs.

What about the educational aspect of it? I played the crap out of the Oregon Trail and enjoyed it when I was a kid. It seems to me that you could do the same thing in a different setting -- say, captaining a ship across the Atlantic in the Age of Sail, or even from Earth to Mars. Put the kid in charge of outfitting his ship with radiation shielding, balancing between fuel/engineering tools/plants/dried food/vitamin supplements, and let him go. I would play the hell out of a game like that, too... and it would be both relevant AND informative!

I think it does matter; anything from North Korea or China would hit its target far before missiles from America.

Uh, a turtle is a pretty common animal and the kanji really isn't that complex. It's also in a fair number of surnames, when you're definitely not going to replace it with "kamei." I mean, look at some of the other ones they added -- , which is in probably 80% of the surnames in the nation, , which is also in huge number of surnames as well as several prefectures... and a bunch of other equally common ones. These are things that should be in the curriculum.

I live in Japan and I've talked to Japanese teachers about this; I've also seen the kanji they're adding. It's not "because of computers" or "because they need computers to write kanji" -- the kanji they took out are very, very rarely used, with one being an archaic form of measurement equal to around 350 grams or something. A lot of the kanji they added are kanji that ARE common-use kanji as a matter of fact, just not officially. Many of the ones they added are simple ones that show up in a ton of names. Another example is the kanji for "turtle" -- something that comes up often enough that you'd think it would have been in the original set to begin with. It's not some gigantic "Oh god nobody speaks our language and everyone's stuck on computers" deal; it's just MEXT updating their "official" set to reflect the changing times and vocabulary... and fix some mistakes from the past.

People forgetting how to write kanji due to always using cell phones or computers IS a problem, but unrelated to the update to the Joyo Kanji.

Google makes its own mobile platform (Android) and is working on another for general computing (Google Web OS), so it only makes sense that they'd move away from a closed, proprietary platform like Windows. If there are any Mac OS X machines, I'd imagine those are being migrated to something else as well... though some people may get clearance for software like Photoshop or Final Cut Pro.

Even for testing/development, they can just run virtual machines.