A few years in the software business with good coworkers has taught me enough about requirements gathering to be effectively "un-outsourceable". I learned how to help people communicate exactly what they want, and that need is not going away in my lifetime.

Meanwhile, the top engineering schools in India are churning out a surplus of people that can make widgets just as good as us for half the price. Are you really sure that the skillset from that engineering degree isn't more easily outsourced?

This.

Plus, if you're a bright young kid, which looks better to you:

1. get some random liberal arts degree and party through college, while playing with computers a little bit on your free time, then get a good-paying job slapping together PHP, OR
2. struggle through all of college, never have time for friends, face the risk of a nervous breakdown, then hunt for some aerodynamics job that would force you to relocate, if you could even get it -- after all, your competition is some baby boomer that has 30 years of experience in the field

I'll take the parties and PHP scripting, thank you very much.

I just say, "I make software." Yes, it's vague, but so is my job -- one day I am fixing a bug, another day I'm ironing out requirements, another day I'm writing tests, but all of it is to support one goal: to make software.

That was certainly true when both the cost of distribution and the cost of soliciting funds were high, but between the web/YouTube and Kickstarter, both are getting much cheaper. The patronage/gift economy is driving some pretty quality work from some of my friends. Moreover, the social status of creating a popular work is often more of a driver for new pop art than monetary reward (which, even in popular art forms such as rock music, ends up to be pretty low, even for successful artists).

I had a friend that was a professional game tester, and he hated it. This article pretty much sums it up.

This is sort of how I learned. I was 8 years old when somebody showed me qBasic on the family's 386. It changed my world. My first three years of programming were animated ASCII stick figures, simple story games ("You see a spaceship. Do you want to use missiles or lasers?"), and very basic graphics (like string art using line functions). I had a tacit sense of many programming concepts before I was able to define them.

When I got to traditional computer science courses in college, I realized that they're typically taught the other way around: here's a definition, THEN here are some examples and related puzzles. That's a great format for an academic paper, but it's not exactly "joy of learning" material.

Actually, per capita deaths by war were far less in the past ten years than in quite possibly all of recorded history.

There is no question among people in education that inspiring students leads to better outcomes. But as an administrator or policy maker, what strategies would you (or rather, could you) implement to cause more inspiration?

The same insanity that allows SAP to prosper while creating terrible software: enterprise contracts.

We all use technology to replace bodily functions. For over twelve thousand years, we have been using cooking technology to replace the work our digestive systems previously had to do. We use clothing technology to replace the work our fur once did. We used art and writing, then the printing press, then the copy machine, and now computers to replace much of the work our brains once did.

Think about how you feel when you step into your car and turn on the ignition -- the car suddenly becomes part of you. If another car collides with yours, you say, "They hit me" and not "They hit my car." And now, with phones connecting to the Internet and identity becoming so important online, I certainly feel like I've lost a part of myself when someone else is playing with my phone, as if they tore out one of my limbs to do a puppet show.

On the contrary, taking sides is exactly what the Op/Ed section of the paper is for.

Human *language* is inefficient, indirect, and generally lacks precision when used. Human *voice*, however, contains an amazing smorgasbord of information that you process in far more ways than you may be aware of. Every subconscious adjustment in pitch, timbre, and rhythm lets us communicate our feelings about the situation at hand without having to pick the perfect word. It's just there. We are still "discovering" all the meanings that we otherwise automatically interpret from these voices.

Whoa, pause! If a food is "Any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for the body," are you sure sugar is food? 0-calorie sugar substitutes are consumed for the same reason sugar is often consumed: to enjoy a pleasant sensation in your mouth. Sure, sugar is not a drug, but maybe we need a new term or category to describe something we consume solely for pleasure, but isn't a drug.

This. Many school districts actually refuse to collect social security numbers, and even those that do often will refuse to report them to state reporting systems for fear of mis-handling data.

You can hear it from 80 miles away, though you can't see much detail. You might get a pretty good vantage from Titusville or the other suburb-y places near the space center. There's lots of beach-front on the Indialantic within five miles of the launchpad.