As someone who never finished college - flunked out of university, twice, but still got about 4 years in, most of them from JuCo - I probably make approximately the same as any college graduate would make who is my age and has my experience. I got in in the mid-90s at a small ISP doing tech support and that was effectively my launching pad for a career in IT. Most of the years in IT it's been as a senior sys/network admin operations-type role.

I am not sure I can honestly and completely say that a college degree would have been worth it for where I am today. It can be difficult to calculate the ROI when you might make only $30-$40K/year to start and have $100-$200k in college debt to pay back (which is what - $800-$1000/mo in loan repayments? At least.). It's an INSANE debt load to have when you haven't even purchased a home and possibly a car yet. And if you go to grad and/or professional school that's another at least 100-200K of debt.

I had only about $8000 to pay down which was manageable when I was making bupkis doing tech. support.

Where it IS beneficial depends on your career path. If you want to end up the Fortune 500/1000-type companies, they have pretty strict codified pathways to management and you pretty much HAVE to have your degree though you'd be surprised that most only care that it is a B.A./B.S. from anywhere school (basically ANY online school or diploma mills like U of Phoenix, Chapman U, etc.) and probably an MBA. If you're really, really lucky your company will pay for at least some of your schooling.

Obviously a place like Google and possibly Facebook wants a B.A./B.S. from a decent college/university. Supposedly your chances are better to get a job there with a degree from Stanford or Berkeley or MIT but clearly not all of their tens of thousands of employees are Ivy League or even top-50 school grads.

And, to be honest, only management is where the serious money is in an F500 company. I'm over 40 now and am only now making what I made over 10 years ago - yes it took that long to claw back from a lay-off from a Bay Area startup, another layoff (that time from a big F500 corporation - at least the severance was good that time!), and getting fired because I was sucking at a job I really hated (and losing our home and filing bankruptcy thrown in there). Chances are best case I'm getting 3-4% per annum increase with maybe a $3000-$4K bonus annually. In short, as a rank-and-file employee I'm just barely keeping up with cost of living increases, especially where I live in the Bay Area. I could go to a San Fran or South Bay company and make $120-$140K probably but then rent is double where I am now, at least, and I'm competing against 4-6 Facebook roomies who are 25 years old.

Where I am today I am pretty "comfortable" but not in any way comfortable financially. If I could make $30-$50k more per year and live here I'd be in good shape. The company is doing well and growing like crazy and has been around over 20 years and is tracking toward a half-billion in sales annually. I am definitely not ready for retirement in roughly 20-25 years as I'm only contributing the minimum to my 401(k). And let's not talk about all the insurance I *should* have - life insurance for me and probably my wife, insurance for my mom's old age, etc. etc.

So... I work little side jobs here and there (I recently had a very good one where I was pulling roughly $1500-$2000/mo additionally down but unfortunately that went away) and am working on big ideas that hopefully I can turn into a viable business. That honestly is the only way I see to finding a pathway to relative financial stability.

All this to say - I would seriously weigh out where you want to be in the next 20-30 years. College is hugely, hugely expensive and if you have the drive to build competencies in valuable technical areas outside a traditional classroom setting and do that throughout your work life you can probably make as much or more than a college graduate would make. If, however, you see yourself heading the traditional pathways to management and envision yourself in a CxO chair where you have a ton of responsibility but you're also making a ton of money then go for college because in all probability it will pay off.

You know there is no universal scientific agreement on when life begins, right? Yes, as a Christian, I realize that there are some Christian groups that that take the extreme point of view that there is NO disagreement - which simply isn't true - and that life begins at the point of conception - but then there's biologists that basically agree with this. Then, there's biologists who don't. The genetic viewpoint of when life begins, for example, who don't believe life begins until we are genetically complete as a human - which is roughly 6 months into gestation.

Anyway, regardless, you'd be wrong to simply dismiss the argument that "life begins at conception" simply because some Christians say this because there are plenty of biologists who fundamentally agree with this perspective as well.

This has to be the second or third pundit I've read thus far that has proclaimed Win8, Surface, and WinRT a "complete and utter failure."

Dude - These products quite literally JUST CAME OUT. And yet, somehow, they have so much insight that they can proclaim that within 2-4 weeks of their introduction, MSFT has totally screwed the pooch this time and it is "dying."

Slow down for a second. No one expected MSFT to do Apple-like business on their tablets. Not like they're going to have people camping out overnight for a Surface. No one, including Microsoft.

It may sound like it but I'm not a slavish MS fan boy. They clearly do a LOT of crap, bu they actually are releasing numerous great products and even if they're disappointing in certain respects in the consumer marketplace - and if you can't hit it into the stratosphere like Apple you apparently can no longer compete, which is absurd - they're still quite successful and deeply entrenched in the corporate and government marketplaces. The Windows Phone is actually quite good but they are playing catch-up after years of Android and iPhones and are a distant, distant third. It doesn't mean the products are bad or that MS is "failing" per se - it just means it's going to take years and years for the Win Phone/WinRT/Win8 application ecosystem to catch up. The Windows Phone could go the way of the Zune (which also was actually quite a good product) but I don't see that happening until Microsoft has put years and years of time and effort into it.

It's unsurprising their steady movement to being an OEM has been a difficult and unpleasant one for their long-entrenched Windows OEMs. Given the very, very long relationship they've had the PC OEM hardware world it's not terribly unusual that they would react unfavorably to what Microsoft is doing.

Yes, tablets and smartphones are taking over the world - from a certain perspective - but the fact is that almost all real work gets done on either a Windows- or OSX-based laptop or desktop- STILL. Things are fundamentally shifting away from laptops and desktops for casual browsing, Facebooking, emailing, IMming, etc. etc. happening on mobile or tablet devices now - but, having said that, it's clear they're not just going to disappear overnight and it's clear more powerful PC-type devices aren't going to be disappearing just because some mouthy pundit thinks so.

Uh, no it's not, dummy. He's not moaning the loss of business class, at all, and therefore the "entire post" is not about about moaning the loss of business class, at all. Read again then complain, if you dare.

Can't you read or is a monkey typing for you?

Do airline crews really go in and out of airports 3,4,5 times a day? I'd think the vast majority of their days would be going between planes or waiting and therefore they are almost staying inside the security zone. Only time I'd think they leave is to either go home in their home airport or go to the hotel. Either way that only means they've entered an airport security checkpoint once that day, same as the people they're shuttling around. Unless you have air crew that are determined to always leave airport terminals during extended layovers between flights or they just really, really want to go somewhere other than the airport for food (not a bad idea, of course), then I can't see why they'd leave the airport all that much during their typical workday.

.... the Nintendo DS became a non-starter for me. My middle "hyper-active" child destroyed 2 Nintendo DSes then after a Craigslist buy of a used DS went badly - the screen was broken - I had had enough of the overhead of the DS. I would find the cartridges all over the house and each new game was typically $35-$45 a pop (yes I know there are used games that can be had much more cheaply and there's also the flash drive attachment) but the fact was my kids were always losing the carts and/or simply breaking the DS much too easily.

I was almost ready to get a new DS for my eldest child at Costco when I scanned over to the iPod Touch for another $30 or so and it occurred to me it was ultimately way, way cheaper to own the iPod and just use the free app store games - and the occasional $0.99 game as a "treat." I practically started a trend with my friends and relatives as suddenly all their kids had iPod touches after that.

Now roughly 3 years later the Touch is still around - unbroken! - and we never lose games, pay only a buck here or there when we want a bit nicer game, and those paid games are stored in iTunes so we never lose them regardless. The iPod Touch just seems a whole lot sturdier too, if only because it doesn't have a swiveling base. Overall, for a family when you want your kids to have a road trip gadget, the iPod Touch is a way saner and ultimately less expensive choice - not to mention your kids can also have videos and music on the same device, which is also a huge win for those long road trips.

As someone who was once essentially an agnostic and and felt then very much as you do now I can tell you that you really are all in a fuss over nothing.

The "Religious Right" is a bogeyman created by liberals of the Reagan era to give some shape to the Jerry Falwells/Moral Majority-esque as an artificial construct to knock down and to give further clarity to the position of everything liberals are not.

In any case the notion that the religious right is a significant cultural force to be reckoned with is simply false. James Dobson, et. al. have never been kingmakers. They have influence within an ever-diminishing percentage of Americans that identify themselves as Christians in more than name only - less than 15% by my estimation and various statistics that get tossed around estimating how many Americans regularly attend church. Of that percentage fewer still live in what might remotely be called a committed Christian lifestyle - i.e., regularly studying their Bible and praying and living their lives and raising their children in as disciplined a manner as humanly possible, that is, as close to the truly sacrificial model of living that Christ exemplified. Church going Christians often go out of a sense of tradition, obligation, or simply to look proper in their community (esp. in the South).

America is very much a post-Christian society - perhaps not so much as Europe certainly, but definitely post-Christian - but we have this kind of artificial sheen of propriety, derived mainly from propped-up memes like the "Religious Right," which is ironically perpetuated vis-a-vis liberals convinced that there really is someone out there who wants to tear down their freedom to be liberal and godless.

There is no such problem, no fundamental lack of full intellectual freedom on every academic and personal level and in fact the academy is quite invested against the idea that Christians are a cultural and social force of import in our nation. Those that are writing books decrying the "Religious Right" so they can bulk out their CV and make sure they get published occasionally.

If you don't believe me, fine, but just look at abortion if you don't. If even half of America was truly Christian, Roe v. Wade would never have stood this long. The hue and cry would have been so outrageous that Congress would have been unable to ignore its constituency and an amendment or law would have been created to reverse it. But clearly Americans - including "Christian" Americans - want legalized abortion.