What is really needed. Is to outlaw unjust discrimination on basis of education.

You can thank some extraordinarily misguided 'civil rights' lawsuits for this problem. In the past, many employers depended on interviews or 'in house' tests to determine whether a candidate had the proper skills for the job. I can't call up the specific case (must be the ol' alzheimers kicking in) but the rather activist court agreed with the plaintiff that this was racist and businesses were forced to fall back on HS diplomas/college degrees as a questionably more objective measure. This has directly led to requirement inflation for jobs and the cheapening of the value of degrees (both HS and higher) because it was perceived as keeping people out of work to deny them that paperwork... even if they were completely illiterate.

What passes for a liberal arts college degree in the US, right now, is about the equivalent of a HS diploma 50-60 years ago. NOT in the amount or type of knowledge but the general ability to work at a desk more with figures/facts than physical objects. All because of a well-meaning but terrible court decision.

There's still life in the ol' girl but, yes, I agree that this is much like the 'lock in' plans you get from cellphone companies. That said, I'm willing to risk a year's worth of payments. Arguably, this is a very nice perq for people who are in it for the long haul to begin with.

IMO, though, the Pandaren expansion is a lost opportunity: I really think that the game needs a third faction. Us vs. Them gets very old, very fast. Three-cornered fights are much more interesting even if the three sides are basically identical in terms of abilities. Put pandas, YAER (yet another elf race) and maybe two more new races in their own faction and then let the fur fly!

Waitaminit... a union opposing innovation? There must be a mistake in the article somewhere.

Get with it folks, there are NO safe jobs. Safety lies in continually reinventing yourself to meet the constantly changing world. No amount of protests, stupid laws, or even outright attacks can hold back the future for more than a brief time.

Maybe these 'educators' can get retrained to make buggy whips and weave clothing on looms! I'm sure there's a demand there somewhere.

[Two of the previous paragraphs were sarcastic... guess which two!]

Is he's good at campaigning. Nobody has ever disputed that nor has he stopped campaigning since he won. He still sucks at presidenting.

Hear hear! BHO is not a Main Street president; he's not even a Wall Street president; he is and has always been a Madison Avenue president. A slick image, smooth talk and a teleprompter... but will all that get him a second term?

Subject line says it all: the government is notoriously stupid when it comes to picking winning technologies (Helo Solyndra! Hello corn subsidies for ethanol fuels!) but prizes like this always work because they ONLY pay for success. Even if you sweetened the pot to $10M, you could still have around 50 X-prize type competitions instead of a single Solyndra fiasco.

Here's how it works when you don't have the USA Credit Card to use: 1) announce a prize and set a goal that has to be met. 2) researchers/industry/investors get excited because an X-prize winner will almost certainly attract more investment. 3) VCs, universities, businesses invest their own money into research. 4) Eventually a winner meets the stated goal and they (probably including the losers!) now have new technologies to play with.

Minimal expense. Maximum use of the competitors' creativity and drive. Maximum reward. Why do we need to let the feds pay off their campaign contributors with our money?

Science, bah! The answer is obvious: it's spring break in Australia and all the birds are trying to hook up and get drunk. What they should be looking for are tiny, soaked T-shirts.

Windows is so stupidly far ahead of Android and Linux when it comes to sharing rich data between applications

Windows also made the sharing of viruses across applications so easy that nearly anything you access might be infected. Hopefully someone in Redmond remembered this teeny-tiny problem.

I store hydrogen at room temperature all the time. My method is stable, simple and has no possibilities of explosion. The only trick is to get it away from the oxygen molecules when you need to use it.

While some of these designs are brilliant (and I haven't read all of them), what I would want as a poor rural homeowner is expandability and repairability. Sure, you can a cheap/easy from-the-factory solution today but what happens in six months when you need to patch a hole in the wall? To be a truly transformative force, the ideas behind the design should be easy to apply with local materials/labor even if the final cost goes above $1000 eventually.

That's not their target. Look at their acquisition of Kongregate... the real goal is to have a good quality casual gaming device that you don't necessarily have to smear up with fingerprints. My guess is that it will have a circa-2006 GPU/CPU setup. Good enough for WoW mk 1 and anything you see online for free these days (which will be one of their big selling points!)

Further prediction: there will be a big push on Kongregate, et al, to make sure games will work on this new device flawlessly.