Clearly we need to crack down on these, 'Academics'. Their exploits and antics are getting out of hand.

(you should see the tee-shirt!)

Ditto for me, my wife, and my two daughters. All told that is 7 laptops in the last decade and all of them are still working. My niece has one we retired and I gave another to a needy High-School student.

Did you know that only about 5% of the average house is actually load bearing? The rest is just fluff. Why are we wasting so much valuable material in houses?

I would remove all the adds; along with the content paid for by them. Watch as they struggle with no google, no hulu, no yahoo, no porn....

For me it is a little from column 'A' and a little from column 'B'.

I think I am beyond the 'Retirement Event Horizon' for the US population (I'm in my late 40's with two high-school aged kids). Not having an income will not be an option for me. On the other hand, I never intend to stop being interested in the world and productive for my community. So, while it would be nice to have the option not to work, I doubt I would ever take that option.

My brother teaches in a district just outside Portland Oregon. My sister-in-law teaches in a district inside the Portland Metropolitan Area and my sister teaches in a suburb of Portland. Each describe very different experiences. My brother's school feeds over half the students 2 meals a day, provides clothing for 1 out of 5 students and requires a police 'resource officer' to be on site at all times for the safety of students and staff. My sister-in-law buys art supplies for her classroom to that students can each do their own art projects and are not forced into every project being a 'team expression'. Her school does not need to maintain a clothing supply and only feeds 1 out of 3 students in the morning meal program. My sister has parents donating materials to her school and volunteering to assist in extra-curricular projects.

My brother's school has the largest of the three student populations, my sister-in-law the second largest and my sister's school is the smallest, at about half the size of my sister-in-laws school.

I am certain that if the teaching staff were really good, and the curriculum superb, they would still fail to produce enough functional IT professionals given the social hurdles that the majority of their students face.

It seems to me our schools do less in the way of teaching critical thinking than they did in the past. I would advocate starting teaching critical thinking in 4th or 5th grade. Don't get me wrong, there is a certain amount of critical thinking teaching happening, but not in a concerted and organized manner such as reading and math. (IMHO) A formal base of critical thinking will make programming a much more natural process for most students.

I may be dense, but it seems the number of people you can serve per km of infrastructure you have to install might effect cost.

According to Wikipedia:

• US: 34.2 people/km^2
• UK: 255.6 people/km^2
• SK: 501.1 people/km^2

I am not a big fan of US telco's, but I think the numbers listed clearly indicate that the markets for the three listed countries are dramatically different.

Is this a sister study to the one finding that %80 of Americans don't trust research? %40 of Americans believe God created the earth on May 18th 2012 when Facebook made its Initial Public Offering.

Exactly! I can't believe they missed this in their primary list of options. (Editors of Slashdot... I am very disappointed.)

My ISP is a locally owned and operated company. They work closely with local telcos and do their best to protect our local community from the more harmful moves of the non-local telcos. I feel sorry for those who do not have a local choice.