Actually, depending on the advanced degree she goes for, she should be able to get the school to pay her - acting as a teaching assistant or research assistant is usually nets free tuition and a stipend. Not much of one, but still.

With regard to what people did wrong - they usually listened to their elders who insisted that they HAD to go to college ever since they set foot into 1st grade and filled their heads with visions of gloom and doom, catfood sandwiches and living in cardboard boxes if they didn't go to school. It's no surprise that many young people find it extremely difficult to make sound financial decisions and solid plans for what seems to be a very distant time when they've spent their entire lives being told horror stories about what will happen if they don't do this. I have a very hard time blaming the young people who internalized the endless advice they were given when they act on that advice.

Part of the solution is to quit overemphasizing college where it isn't necessary. Another part of it is for parents to actually be better parents - sounds like you did fine, but a lot of parents take their kids as an opportunity to compensate for their own failings and push them to the point where the kids behave even more irrationally than the norm.

Oh, and another part is to put a cap on what an institution that accepts ANY federal money in the form of grants, tax breaks or backed student loans and grants can actually charge for tuition. Tie the cap to the minimum wage, perhaps - something like 50% of the pre-tax earnings from a 20hr/week job at minimum wage per year. If a university can't figure out how to keep the lights on when charging ~4k/student/year JUST for tuition (let 'em charge whatever they want for housing, so long as it isn't required that students live in campus housing), something has gone off the rails.

You underestimate my laziness.

After a decade of only knowing Nano/pico I'm picking up Vi because I'm too lazy to install it on FreeBSD.

Oh, and furthermore:

If conditions 1 and 2 above are actually true (I personally think it's racist/sexist bullshit, but those are arguments people trot out on the regular): 2 candidates being equal means to me that the white male candidate must be exceptionally lazy. After else, if whites and males are both socially and biologically more suited to working in the field in general, how then could a white male manage to not do a better job given equal education and experience?

The answer has to be either that white men aren't actually better or more suited to doing this stuff than other races or women OR that if they are, in this particular case, the white male candidate must either be defective or lazy.

I'll say it:

All other things (education, experience, interview, etc.) being equal or close enough between two candidates, one of them being a white male and the other being someone in a racial or gender minority class, yeah, I'm going to hire the person in the racial or gender minority class.

It isn't for a metric - it's because, all other things being equal as you stipulated, a person from a class not normally found in the field is likely going to have had to overcome obstacles and challenges on the way there that the other candidate has not.
Let's look at some reasons why the minority candidate who is otherwise equal to the non-minority candidate is the better pick:

1) In every single discussion of diversity in tech on Slashdot, people will trot out REASONS why minorities don't do well in tech: Black people don't do well because they get called out by their friends and families for acting white if they go to school. Women don't because they get called out by other women for being in such a nerdy profession. Etc. etc. etc. If that is true, then yes, I want the candidate who has demonstrated persistence and determination in the face of hostility. They will be use to adversity and overcoming it, and as a hiring manager I will want that in a candidate.

2) In every single discussion of diversity in tech on Slashdot, people will trot out BIOTRUTHS about women and minorities and why they are not well represented in tech. If that's true, then yes, I absolutely want the candidate who is exceptional and defies their biology to have somehow managed to be equal to the non-minority candidate. There's more potential for them to be exceptional in other ways, and as a hiring manager, I want exceptional people.

3) If everything else is equal, why NOT hire the candidate who will also improve an arbitrary metric? As a hiring manager, I want to not have to have people crawling up my ass telling me to do things just so the team looks better, and this would reduce one more thing people could crawl up my ass about.

So yeah, unless you're a fucking idiot, hire the atypical candidate when they are literally close enough to equal that flipping a coin would be the only "fair" way to determine who to hire. Duh?

Matlab is a dead end if you use it for statistics.

Matlab is not a dead end if you use it for a ton of other stuff that there are toolboxes for.

I've used matlab at work for almost a decade and never come close to using it for something R was good at.

We had a deal - those creating works get a period of time to capitalize on those works, after which they go into the public domain, and in exchange for those works being given over to the public, the public agrees to not violate that copyright without facing penalties.

Most works are no longer being given over to the public domain, therefore it's absurd to punish people for pirating them - a contract has to offer something to both sides.

WRT to software piracy (specifically games) - DRM put the nail in that coffin for me. When it became easier to install torrented, cracked games on release day than it did to install legally purchased software, I gave up giving a shit.

That said, contribute to open source (either funds or assistance), and definitely support projects where there isn't an obvious profit motive just the creation of neat tricks.

I won't even dignify "patriotism" with more than a laugh.

Can't pay a competitive wage. Can't offer benefits remotely close to what private employers will offer. Lose a ton of personal autonomy from matters trivial (no 420) to absolutely vital (Wanna move to a different state? Nope. Wanna quit? Nope. Wanna change jobs? Nope.) Be beholden to whatever high-functioning sociopaths make it through our joke of an electoral season.

Oh, you might get to play with some cool toys that you might not have access to as a civilian, I guess. And those who don't have any skills to start with might get some training out of it, though, to be honest, if you're old enough to join a service like this and you aren't at least somewhat self-taught already, you're probably not actually going to ever be good enough to be more effective than "the enemy" at what they will want you to do. You'd get a few competent journeymen out of it, I guess.

If your Xmas was ruined by not being able to play computer games maybe you should find more hobbies.

Xbox down? Go out side.

I remember when the iPhone was released and people said the same thing.

Google is sitting on a mountain of IP for both projects. Some companies look a bit beyond next quarter's results.

I wish I could go into my job. Do something once and get paid for it forever.

You've still sold a user a book. They still have your book. They just skipped by the scanning every page part.

Which is why it is relevant that the movie came out in 2009. After time they settle. Unless you're going to argue that "Shawshank Redemption" is just living on studio PR?

Perhaps if everyone else thought the movie was good your nieces and nephew just have bad taste. It was also a great book and highly rated by teachers.

You might want to use a different example for your first one:

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs has 7.0/10 on IMDB (after 5 years), got an 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, 66 on MetaCritic (with an average user score of 7.6),

It was a good movie.

"This is the End" was also pretty good with a 6.9/83%/67/7.1 (respectively).

DS9 was great with the philosophical questions.

I wish we'd explore more into the quadrants than "lets reset the clock and start over"

I remember his first year when it was a 'hoax'. Then the next year he went all in and made it real. As ugly as his website should be I hope some version exists in archive.org, he's been a christmas tradition since early 2000s when I first heard about him on Fark or Slashdot.

The point isn't the number of lights he has. The point is how interactive his site has always at least seemed to be.