"perhaps a college scholarship program would better serve the needs of inner city youths."
Poor, especially minority students in the US have almost zero problems with college education costs. There are ample scholarship opportunities; and state schools provide especially excellent educational options at near zero cost even for middle-class students. (Not a critique, that's great!)
Focusing on getting more students to *go to college* and *be prepared for college* when they get there I think is more appropriate. (Black male college graduation rates are about 1/3 [this true largely across colleges - form elites to ... less elite and even at traditionally black colleges. Focusing on education before college is critical!)
http://www.jbhe.com/features/5...

"You could repair a lot of run down buildings with 100 million." Since buildings are what educate children and motivate them to be invested in academics? It's easy to criticize someone for spending money on people who try to diagnose a problem as opposed to "just fixing" it. Guess what: order is important -- you need to understand the problem *before* fixing it. I'm sure like all big problems it seems obvious -- but it's not. That's why there are no examples of people consistently fixing educational failure. Critique away. But you're not actually helping.

Oh please. Like a major religion's never mistakenly subtracted the wrong Planck constant from a radiation background before. There are reasons that angel-pin partial repose ratios were so contentious you know. :/

You realize that the VAST majority of Harvard students aren't rich. Harvard, MIT, and similar caliber schools have the/among the best financial aid packages in the US and completely need-blind acceptance policies -- partly because they don't make their money on student fees, but from grants, etc.

To all of those who are bemoaning the hiring of less costly non-American workers over USAers: unless you have an actual argument that involves value to the company and not just an appeal to nationalism you're not going to have any luck. Question: what gives the most value to a company: US citz or foreign hires? If the latter: then you're just asking for corporate funded welfare. If the former (as some have intimated): then where's the data? Lots of people (many actually quite smart) look at these issues. Where's the data that older or domestic hires give more value for the companies dollar? (And no: whether or not CEO's, etc. are overpaid isn't relevant. Even if they are, paying them less wouldn't change the value difference between a foreign or domestic hire. My opinion: hire as many foreigners as companies want, *but* give them an easy route to full citizenship. This country is made stronger by bringing in bright and hard working citizens. I'm happy to invite them here.)

Sounds... like the same things we've been doing with designer viruses for decades. Unless they've got additional material they've developed to facilitate direct transmission of DNA from one cell to another or mastered a process whereby continual production can be done without threat to the host or in a manner that can be easily extinguished I don't see what it is that they've added other than a term "Bi-Fi" (which is a cute term, I admit). Not knocking on the idea, it's just not clear what's new about it.

Let's not forget Mathematica (my personal favorite) and Lab View (used for programming National Instruments cards, but soms people start using it as a general programming language because that's what they know -- visual interface, more like circuit design, quite interesting actually).