I would probably feel comfortable having you and the people you describe work on parts of the system. I think the smartest people in the world at the true nerds. The ones that slave away on something because they want to. These people have a true passion to create something new, or improve the things that they've already produced because it's good to keep improving until it's perfect. I don't care what profession you're in, these people exist everywhere.

I'm not quite the person you describe, but one of the things I learned from my father was that when you do something, you take the time to do it right. People often wonder why I put so much effort into fixing things, and to some degree maybe there's a bit of a joke going around that I'm just some crazy nerd. At the end of the day, as much as I feel like I'm not getting a lot of respect from the people around me, these people never seem to stop calling on me when something goes wrong with anything. Maybe I keep doing it because I enjoy the feeling I get when these people are so happy when they get their stuff fixed, but the other part is that I simply enjoy the feeling of knowing that I can fix damn near anything and can usually end up making things better than when they were brand new.

Why was the set left in the desert? Was the film crew asked to leave it, or could they just be bothered to spend money removing their trash when they were finished shooting?

Wouldn't it have made sense to just develop Windows RT as an internal product? In the event that x86 market is no longer profitable and ARM takes off, they've got something ready to go, and all the time be figuring a way to emulate existing x86 apps so people can continue to use everything they know transparently until people have had time to make a full (workforce/home) transition.

At the present time they can continue to market their "Surface PRO" as the x86 tablet with compatibility for everything, and you're never stuck with a $900 million dollar write off in unsold hardware that people don't want.

"If you've ever worked with fifth graders, it's pretty obvious which ones will never be on the academic the track or the one just "below" it."

When I was in 5th grade (well pretty much up until about grade 10), I was the person you just identified with that statement. There were a few teachers that saw something in me, and I listened to them when they took the time to talk to me, but for the most part, I think my teachers thought I was a slacker, a troublemaker, a delinquent, etc. I never did well academically, always just barely passing.

I'm in medical school now.

Perhaps I am an exception to the rule, but there are kids in that grade 5 class that might just do something special.

I agree that perhaps the current education system could use an overhaul though. Somehow everyone has to get a degree now. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself, because having an educated population is really important. There are so many kinds of intelligence though, and so many kinds of absolutely necessary jobs that require skills that you're not going to get from a university or college degree.

I've always liked it when a product was released free for non-commercial use, and a low price for commercial use. Since this is targeted at people in graphics design, you've got people that just like to design for fun, and people that make a living out of it. Give it away to people to play around with, and if they decide it can help them in some type of commercial venture, you're there for them with a product they're already familiar with.

Assuming you could get $20 per DIMM, you're looking at $10,000. Not to make it sound that isn't a lot of money, but when you consider that a company has 500 4GB sticks of RAM they can't use, you have to assume that this is (likely) a pretty big company, and $10,000 is probably not all that much in their total IT budget. Even if you forget about the potential benefit a donation like this could bring to the community that they currently operate in, think about how much more value they could get from the PR of donating to a good cause.

High school is where you learn the basics of how to read, write, and do some basic math. Really, that's all I would *expect* anyone to get out of high school. Everything else is an added bonus, and it's good to have options. In my high school, students were required to take science courses every year, but you had a choice. You could take "general science", biology, chemistry, physics, or computer science. If you did not have an interest in taking sciences, the "general science" course was provided to teach you some very basic principles from all of the subjects, without ever going into the depth that the other courses did. I did computer science and physics. For some reason chemistry was just WAY over my head, and being forced to take it back then may have totally turned me off of it forever. Ten years after graduating from high school, and 3 years after graduating from university with a BA in psychology, I went back to school and took a "high school equivalent" chemistry class. I then proceeded to take first year chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry, cell biology, microbiology, physiology, and physics. A couple of years later, I'm now typing this message from the library in medical school.