First, participating in general education classes is in no way a waste of time. Practicing and learning skills and knowledge in an array of topics is always beneficial and has a greater impact on an individuals effectiveness and ability to interact and collaborate within a society, within groups, and with other individuals. And whether or not your high school education covered the same topics it is unlikely the teachers and material will be identical and unlike many technical courses the general education classes can often provide new perspective and insight simply because you are learning from a different teacher and different book.

Second, if you truly do want a CS degree then stop wasting time trying to figure out how to work your way around the general education requirements and just take the damn classes. The time you spend taking these classes is a drop in the bucket compared to the probable amount of time you have to live and work in a career and hopefully even go back later and take more classes to expand your knowledge, experience, and perspective. It always astounds me when I see intelligent people who have the opportunity but waste precious years not getting an advanced education and usually it is due to the most minuscule barriers such as "I don't want to take the general ed classes, they are a waste of my time".

Just do it.

I would concur on Javascript. No need to buy or learn a complex IDE, easy to learn and use like BASIC with the ability to print lines without complex GUI concepts, and just about any laptop or PC with a web browser and a basic text editor is ready to go.

What a crock of shit. Occam's razor suggests your just a brain dead ideological twit.

Labor unions in the United States have been decimated over the past 30 to 40 years and on top of record low participation in unions the unionization of the information technology field is virtually non-existent.*

With almost non-existent union participation in the IT field the problems with incompetence obviously has no relation to unionization. On top of the reality that I suspect points out a completely fictitious anecdote in your post is the irony that the competent workers in the field are screwed over by the companies they work for and unionization would provide them with the bargaining power to end some of the exploitation.

I have seen how capable system administrators are burned out with over burdening and are lured into carrying a fancy geek gadget cell phone as some type of a bonus when in fact it is a trick to get more work out of the capable admins for no increase in pay when in fact these corporations just need to break down and hire more people to cover the work load AND pay the capable employees what they are worth.

* Computer and mathematical occupations 2010 union membership = 4%
    Professional and technical services 2010 union membership = 1.4%

We're already paying roughly $10 a phone for all the media codec licenses; MP3, h.264, etc (none of which I actually use on my current phone), but paying Microsoft an extra $5 feels dirty.

It should feel dirty, even though you are not using them at least you did receive a usable codec for your media licensing fee, you wont get jack from Microsoft for the $5 fee.

It seems that they are saying that Google took Microsofts idea and implemented it better.

On top of that, Microsoft needs to have a major developer purge because they must have IP leaks. Android was developed and released before WP7. Or perhaps Google has their own black ops men who stare at goats using paranormal techniques to suck the IP out of Microsoft remotely.

it's because HTC chose to sign the deal

I did not see any details on how this came about. If HTC approached Microsoft with the desire to enter into an agreement then it is due to HTC's decision. If Microsoft approached HTC and threatened them with massive litigation costs and threats of injunctions that would halt sales of their products in the United States then it is due to Microsoft threatening HTC and a business decision was made that ideologically is bad.

And yes HTC could have fought back if Microsoft was threatening a lawsuit, but when you get mugged at gun point and hand over your wallet instead of taking a bullet it doesn't mean that you willingly gave your wallet to the mugger and therefore the mugger is innocent. It means that you know ideologically what the mugger is asking for is immoral but your ideals will provide you with no value if you are dead.

The licensing deals some signed with The SCO Group is a bit trickier. The SCO Group was blowing smoke and after the first few months this became clear to virtually everyone. Unfortunately The SCO Group did have significant financial backing thanks to Microsoft and Sun so there was a minute probability that those who were approached aggressively would have been hit with a lawsuit their small business could not afford if they did not buy some of the bogus linux licenses.

Ayn Rand's exasperatingly long novel was never as current, I gotta say.

I have some bad news for you, that boring novel, its fiction, fake, made up, phony, etc. Its not real.

1)
a. no EPA super fund clean up projects at abandoned uranium mining sites
b. no nuclear waste

the free market at best provides the cheapest short term high margin solution to a problem

FTFY

Free market business in the United States is based on 3 month plans, anything beyond that is too risky. And with that mindset business selects the cheapest solution with the highest margin with complete disregard for long term impacts. And in the worse case scenario, the 3 month cheap ass solution results in long term liabilities that exceed equity, they file bankruptcy and everyone walks away with their gains and lets the tax payer or local community clean up the mess left behind.

Somebody posted a link to the plans in a comment below....

http://www.tonopahsolar.com/pdfs/Tonopah_Crescent_Dunes_POD_2009_11_23.pdf

They will be utilizing a hybrid cooling system so the water consumption and usage will be in the range of a gas fired plant.

It will be a 110 Megawatt facility and the plans expect total water consumption of 600 Acre Feet per year. Assuming only an 80% utilization rate that would be around 253 gallons / MWh as compared to around 500 gallons / MWh for coal and nuclear and 200 gallons / MWh for gas.

it takes twice as much water (per kwh) to run as a normal power plant

Definitely an issue for Nevada, however, air cooling and hybrid cooling systems that reduce water consumption by 50% to 85% have already been studied. Either option would bring water consumption inline or lower than coal fired plants and possibly even in the range of gas fired plants.

http://www.quora.com/Solar-Towers/How-much-water-for-evaporative-cooling-do-solar-thermal-power-generators-need-per-watt-hour-generated

I guess we'll have to wait for the design details before we know if they go for the low capital cost water cooling option or the low water consumption air or hybrid cooling option.

Nevada will have no problem selling power to California. In state power generation is not always consumed in state, intrastate power transmission is very common.

Instead of replacing power plants before they degrade, the NRC expects maintenance to do what it can't.

Maintaining a power plant versus decommissioning is not an NRC decision, it is a corporate decision based on profitability. The NRC is not forcing any corporation to operate nuclear power plants, they are monitoring operations to reduce the probability of a catastrophic incident. Any corporation that tears down a 37 year old power generation facility to build a new one because the cooling system was not properly inspected and maintained will not be in business very long.

The far far bigger problem is continuing to use early reactor designs past their end of life!

Power plants are not cars, they are not maintained like a car and operational life span is not measured like a car.

Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant - 37 years
Glen Canyon Dam - 44 years
Hoover Dam - 74 years

We should have continued building and updating designs over the last 30 or 40 years, but anti-nuclear nuts have left us all pretty damn screwed.

New designs are in fact available but are irrelevant. The decision to close an older power generation facility falls to a business decision or regulation decision. A corporation is in business to profit, they will run a nuclear power plant into the ground if it is more profitable than investing in alternative power generation. And from my experience with machinery, investment and corporate planning in U.S. businesses they refuse to think long term, 3 year planning is an eternity for U.S. business planning let alone 3 decades.

And when you consider the length of time that radioactive contamination impacts mining areas, refinery areas, waste areas and the rare, but obviously not impossible, catastrophic power plant incident it is debatable who is the nut job, the people who are armed with reality and have an issue or those who ignore reality and continually pound their finger on their theoretical plans and designs.

But if it makes you feel better to ignore reality and blame everything on anti-nuclear nuts then knock yourself out. Like it or not these issues with old facilities are going to be a long term issue whether corporations build new facilities or not. And if they do not properly maintain and operate the uranium mining operations, the refineries, the waste facilities or the power generation facilities for the new facilities in the same way they have operated poorly in the past then this will continue to be an issue for any new designs when they have reached what in your opinion is their end of life but for the corporation it is still profitable.