That wasn't my experience. Once they started putting ads in the web client, they were more than happy to keep hosting an email address for you.

Most everyone had highschool chemistry, and that's not the reason why they know that chewing medical pills is bad. They know it's bad because at one point some authority figure would have told them not to, and the instructions on the bottle would say to do otherwise.

True, but how many cooks do you know are also good at chemistry. I suspect that the majority of cooks, who prepare the foods you eat, if they were any good at chemistry would not be cooks, because they'd be doing something else. While some really advanced chefs will make use of things they learned in chemistry, the vast majority do not. So the schools could stop teaching chemistry, leave it for college and those who want to be chemists, and the skills of the cooks out there will not change.

But given how new programming is, and how pervasive computers are, if everyone had a little bit more understanding of programming, it could have a huge impact on society.

Many students really struggle with the concept of variables in math for years. And after all that they think of post-arithmetic math as something that is useless because they will never use/apply it in anyway. But if a year was spent on programming - tell the kids that they get a year free of math - in between arithmetic and algebra, when it comes time to teach algebra, the kids will already get a lot of the concepts that they struggle with now, and will be able to see how to make use of it. They will probably take what they learn in algebra and *gasp* apply it to what they've been programming.

I agree that there should be a division between computer science and software engineering, but given that most Universities don't make that split, we can't expect the politicians to do so either. As ideal as teaching the science of computing without computers is, only a very select few can wrap their minds around that. I know for myself that it took a few iterations of learning the concept in the class room, tinkering around with a program, and begin dazed and confused in class again before I really started to get it. Without the tinkering step, I don't think I ever would have.

They're not going for more Turing award winners, they're going for more people being able to understand CS and possibly do CS. Their goal isn't more genius's, their goal is just ... more.

Do you really think that not teaching a subject to kids will get more of them to learn it?

That would lead to chaos as society's fabric unwound and everything broke down. How could you suggest such a thing? Why don't you think of the children?

Greece has a military? It's possible that they weren't asked to make these changes because they may not have done much good? If they would have done good, and Greece have done them, it would have gotten the other countries off of their back. Wouldn't Greeks have liked that better; balancing their budget, and doing it in a way that wasn't advised to them?

I'm not assuming that. Regardless of what you think about the issue that's the reality on the ground. A location gets hit by a hurricane, news stories float around about people who have lost everything, there's a public swelling of support, and before we know it the government is in the insurance business. It's happened with coast lines, it happened with fire insurance in LA/Hollywood, it happens in many, many places. Most people can't be cold hearted basterds enough to realize that in certain situations, helping people rebuild their lives creates dependency problems. And since we're in a democracy, that's the reality on the ground.

Because when inevitable destruction occurs to the beach property, you'll get an interview on TV and sob and whine about how much you love your house which was just destroyed, and then my tax payer dollars have to be invested in reconstructing the house that's in a dangerous place to build. That's why the government should stop the building of houses in dangerous areas.