You may not realise that speech recognisers need training data. And there is no data like more data. A year ago someone from Google told me that they trained their recogniser on 1000 hours of voice searches. If every utterance is a couple of seconds long, that's a lot of recordings. When you do a voice search, you can select from a number of recognition hypotheses. This is how they get transcribed data.

They also need to train on your voice specifically before you get decent recognition performance. I found that after a while my phone became surprisingly good at decoding my speech. I do agree the privacy aspect is a concern, but in this case at least you benefit personally from Google storing your data.

I'm doing my PhD on speech recognition. I think (and hope!) it's neither dead nor fully developed. Currently, changes of environment screw speech recognisers up. Different speakers, background noise... A trick that I heard has been used for subtitling television broadcasts is to have someone re-speak the words (which is not that hard). You could play the audio recordings on your headphones while repeating them into a microphone. If you're in a quiet room and the recogniser is trained on your voice, that may get you most of the way. You'll still want to correct transcriptions manually.

I don't know of any good trained open-source speech recognisers. There are open-source back-ends like Sphinx or HTK (which I sort of work on) but you need massive transcribed training corpora to train a speech recogniser. This is expensive which I guess is why open-source speech recognition hasn't taken off. In the speech recognition group at my university, most people use Linux, and I don't think anyone actually uses a speech recogniser in their daily work.

Let me guess. Your world is constrained to North-America?

In countries like the Netherlands and Germany, there are three or four different tracks for students aged 12-18. Around 15% follow the "pre-university" track in the Netherlands. It worked well for me, for exactly the reasons you give.

I don't know where you get your idea of social justice from. Social justice would be to mix rich and poor in a classroom.

Combining of C++ and Python works really smoothly with Boost.Python. C++ objects can look and feel like Python objects, and vice versa.

You may be one of these people who pay attention to the facts. However, many Americans at the time didn't, and believed that Saddam was behind the attacks. See this article in Political Science and Politics, 2004.