Yep, teachers are just going to keep incorporating new technologies... like blackboards and whiteboards and textbooks and transparencies and TVs and computers and projectors and the internet and laboratory equipment. But kids that can learn on their own will continue to learn on their own, and teachers will be there to try to keep those students engaged and motivated and get the best that they can out of the rest.

I'll check out duolingo, but usually it's relatively difficult for a native speaker to teach their "milk" language to a mature student learning it as a second language. My wife is a native Russian speaker, but she only professionally teaches her other languages (German, Spanish, ESoL) since her knowledge of those is more academic than guttural. Later on when you're ready to try to pick out the nuances of native speakers, then you're much better off doing a full immersion program abroad if you really want to work on fine-tuning your accent and tone and colloquialisms. It's actually pretty silly that many foreign language education programs really insist on hiring native speakers for beginner - intermediate language education.

Eh, we're not going to get rid of teachers. They're just going to have more tools and instructional models at their disposal.

This sounds like a good instructional model. After all, one of the best ways to truly learn a topic is to attempt to teach it to someone else.

I'm pretty sure they're going to find out they still need someone in a "teacher" role to monitor progress, resolve conflicts, keep students motivated, adapt the curriculum to individual students' abilities and learning styles, and so on.

You are absolutely right. And the reason for that is that I am a cheapskate.

Most museums have language saying how much of the membership fee is tax deductible, so you wouldn't be able to deduct a portion of your membership fee that represented the "fair market value" of any merchandise or "admission tickets" that your annual passes represent. But then the bulk of the fee actually goes on to support the operation and is tax deductible. And of course you can simply donate more than the minimum recommended membership amount. But money that goes to a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit is charity as far as the IRS is concerned, so why not include it in your calculation for your charitable giving? It's not like the girl-scout cookies you buy from your neighbors is tax deductible (well, apparently it is if you donate the cookies to someone else).

Anyway, we may all hate playing taxes, but why not take some joy in the tax incentive meta-game?

Word.

I've been pretty happy using python for prototyping, and it's actually fairly fast using a JIT wrapper like pypy. And the C++ bindings are there for when you have to rewrite one of your modules for performance. There's even an interface to Boost and maybe even ASIO if you want to tinker with those for some reason... I played with some Boost libs briefly years ago but found they added too much complexity and got by fine using much cleaner "pure" python modules instead.

Not a complete filesystem-level solution. But I'm pretty happy with KeePass for sensitive stuff.

Using the KeePassX client on Linux, with the .kdb file on Google Drive.
KeePass2Android on our phones. We have a secret key not stored on Google Drive, and a passphrase to unlock that. Haven't had any trouble with the automatic sync of the .kdb back to Google Drive after making any changes.

If encfs works fairly well on Linux, what's stopping you from getting http://linuxonandroid.org/ working on Android and mounting your encfs file in a full Linux chroot environment? Then on Windows just run a Linux VM that exports a Samba share of the unencrypted files.

The other thing I've always done since forever is just use my phone / internet kiosk to VNC+SSH back to my home PC.

"Your mileage may vary" ... just a disclaimer in the way of a bad car analogy that someone else may not necessarily get as much out of the experience as I did while politely implicating that it may have had more to do with their driving style.

Oh, I dunno, I haven't regretted making tax-deductible membership contributions to educational stuff run by our evil government, such as:

* National Parks Annual Pass - usually pays for itself within 4 visits, and always provides the best experiences our country has to offer.

* Science Museum Annual Pass - this is typically a state-funded thing, but the passes often have reciprocity at science centers across the country. Some are more amazing than others, but all are great places to take kids on rainy days.

* Smithsonian Institution - yeah, more useful if you live or visit near the nation's capitol, but these museums house or nation's treasures and make them free for all.

Can't really go wrong with any of these, all are staffed by amazing, capable, motivated, and certainly underpaid US gov't workers. But of course, YMMV.

That's pretty impressive, I always enjoy your posts and hope I'm half as awesome as you when I get to that certain age (though it's not actually that far off nowadays).

What percentage of income do other people spend on directing support to charity? I always feel woefully inadequate since we only do maybe a few hundred dollars per year, which comes out to fractions of a percent of our joint income. OTOH, we feel like we're pretty frugal with money and don't really waste anything... no entertainment budget for movies or Netflix, eat out cheap just a couple of times a week, maybe one vacation per year, and the rest goes to mortgage and utilities and education activities for the kids, as well as some minimal token amount for 401k and 529 savings plans.

I hear Muslims are more or less required to donate something like 5% of their income to charity, so I wonder what that says about my prospects towards society if I'm only puttering around at one tenth of that :P

It's not terribly selfish to be good with money, so you can better help people who are not.

At least max out your employer match contributions to your 401k plan. Then make sure you can get your employer to match your donations to your charities.

If you can itemize deductions, then the money you donate to causes you like will also reduce the money that the IRS gets from you to let Congress fund stuff you don't like, such as wars abroad or corporate welfare or welfare queens or whatever ticks you off. Unfortunately the primary way to be able to itemize your deductions is to have a big mortgage payment on your home, since interest you pay to banks is deductable enough to get you out of standard deduction territory. Pretty sad how entrenched our government is with the financial house of cards.

On the flip side, once you have over $100k in your 401k plan you may be able to take a $50k loan out of it to pay down your home loan if your plan allows it (supposedly not many do but they're out there). Then you pay back the interest to yourself instead of the bank, so it's good for those times when the stock market isn't performing very well.

Also, if you marry a K-12 teacher or you are one you can usually deduct a small amount of classroom supplies from your fed taxes and some states.

Good luck, and keep your tax deductible receipts!