So what are dollars backed by? The "full faith and credit" of a government, which can simply poof them into existence. In the case of US Dollars, this has worked reasonably well. In the case of Zimbabwean Dollars, not so much.

Maybe you want to go back to a Gold Standard, where the bills are "backed" by vaults full of metal. Then what is gold backed by? It's turtles all the way down.

UItimately, the only reason Bitcoin has value is the same reason USD, bars of gold, or anything else has "value": because some critical mass of people agree that it does.

To quote Warren Buffet:
"[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head."

I couldn't agree more.

America is in an amazing position where despite our culture's lack of respect for education and academia, and despite the very uneven quality of our K-12 education system, we have many of the world's best universities. Students from all over the world dream of making it into places like Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. And every year, thousands of them do.

Some of the smartest people I've met at Stanford are international students. The thought that they might be forced to go home after they graduate is sad, and the people who think this is desirable strike me as either stupid or profoundly short-sighted.

Worrying about H1Bs because they'll "increase competition for jobs" is false economics. Jobs are not like poker chips, little entities that can be won or lost or "stolen". The job market is not a zero-sum game. Whenever Google hires a brilliant, top-0.1% programmer from China, for example, it results in more jobs for Americans. It creates jobs both directly--that programmer may soon have a few people reporting to him--and indirectly, through all the money he's spending in America and the value he's adding to Google.

We're enormously lucky that people like that want to pull up their roots and move to America in the first place. America's image--it's position as a global hub for innovation and research--is one of its greatest assets. It is certainly not guaranteed to stay that way.

For now, the best and brightest want to be here. I think it's absolutely essential that we take advantage of this as much as possible, for as long as we can.

The leaks don't discredit diplomacy, they simply reveal its normally hidden workings, which are a bit rough around the edges. Not all diplomats are particularly diplomatic.

Of course the gov't has a legitimate interest in keeping certain secrets, but at the same time, letting politicians do things without even telling voters about it--let alone taking responsibility--is always going to be abused.

I wish we took a middle route. For example, things could be classified, but with the requirement that they have to be reevaluated every year. Anything the gov't does should be public as soon as it's safe. Currently, it seems like the path of least resistance is to keep anything that's classified secret indefinitely, which is dangerous and wrong.

If classified docs were actually released in a timely way, the government could build trust--if we knew that foreign policy from five years ago was reasonable, then we could be more confident that whatever is happening in secret today is reasonable. As is, we just found out through Wikileaks that Hillary Clinton ordered the state department to spy on a bunch of European diplomats (steal credit card info, frequent flyer numbers, etc). Not long ago, Wikileaks gave us video of American helicopters machine-gunning a photographer in Baghdad; he had been working for Reuters, and some soldiers mistook his camera for "a weapon".

"Debt for the rest of your life"?

As a wise man once said, you're doing it wrong.

At least at my school, the gov't largely pays for the R&D grad students do. And undergrads, for that matter, since undergrad research opportunities abound. It also has need-blind admission. Tuition is, in fact, less than a third of the cash flow here. You can't take that $50,000/year at face value.

I'm currently majoring in CS at Stanford.

I have to disagree with the idea, often-repeated on Slashdot, that $50k/year for college "isn't worth it". Even with a very mercenary take on it -- just considered future income potential -- based on all my friends who have recently graduated, it's worth it. Some are amortizing their tuition in a very short amount of time, assuming they weren't on financial aid.

If I consider things like the friends I've made and the experiences I couldn't have gotten anywhere else, it's absolutely worth it. Last year, I took a quarter off of school to race across Australia with Stanford's Solar Car Project. That quarter didn't cost any tuition; it did cost me most of my summer income in travel expenses. Summer income I got from a job programming. Also definitely worth it.

Google follows a really interesting pattern. As far as I can tell, all their software is reactive, rather than proactive.

It is the result of saying "Everyone's using X, but it sucks. We can do it better." They then take a very methodical, PhD-oriented approach to solving the problem. A few parts innovation, many parts simple engineering.

Now they have 10000 employees, but the basic formula hasn't changed. Is there software that Google has made that hasn't been a direct response to an existing product?

Why is it that the Westboro Baptist Church gets away with picketing real-life funerals again and again, while this schmuck gets four months for internet douchebaggery? By "picketing", I mean standing there with giant signs that say things like "god hates fags" at the funeral of a dead soldier: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20060121/NEWS/601210405?p=3&tc=pg

The way I see it, free speech comes at a cost: you have to put up with other people saying things that are stupid, offensive, and downright wrong. If you want a right to free speech, you can't have a right not to be offended. Mr. Coss' behavior was certainly wrong, but nobody should serve jail time for posting to a Facebook page.