So men don't have to take care of a family?

How would you like your son/daughter who you have encouraged to try and participate in the linux kernel be abused at his/her first try. Do you think they would continue past that? What if they happened to have a real talent at programming and this experience made them choose something else?

This is just like arguing that in a non-digital world, if you don't like someone's contribution or work, beat them up. Survival of the fittest.. keep beating people up until "they get better". Get out of your basement and try this out in person. The physical pain you will feel is quite similar to the mental one bullied people feel. You're also strongly discouraging people from starting to contribute - no one is perfect, people make mistakes and correct them and keep getting better. If you demoralize a person who's coming up to speed, you will lose some very good contributors. You might say you don't care - eventually you will.. when all that's left are thick skinned megalomaniacs. Such people can rarely work productively in a cooperative manner.

If you insist on living in the city of San Francisco (or in the downtown areas of other cities in the Bay Area), you're going to have a tiny house and a terrible commute.. that's true for any mid to large city - worldwide. I've lived in the Bay Area for close to 15 years. I choose to live in the suburbs and I get to have a large enough house with plenty of space for my kids to play in the backyard with very easy access to schools and a very reasonable commute. For each his/her own. If you like life in the country or in a village or in remote areas or in the middle of nowhere, you can certainly get larger properties - maybe not a great commute (in general). Life in and around a city has its own benefits - the lifestyle is very appealing to a lot of people, and for this, they choose to pay a price.

Where have you looked? Where I work (Bay Area, CA), there are many many top notch developers/Architects educated in India. Personally, I think education is up to individuals.. no one can force it on a person. If one intends to learn, they can do so regardless of the quality of facilities. Independent thinking is a reflection of society.. free societies will have more independent thinkers.

Severe forms of depression are treated using ECT.. one of the effects of which is to wipe out (some) memory.

Schools needs for relevant content from the internet is fairly limited. Moreover, most of the content in question is static. This is the perfect place to deploy a forward proxy cache like squid.. this can reduce the need for expensive fat pipes to the internet.

If only we had politicians who didn't treat public service as just another venue for business. Education is a very long term investment. Also, politicians have very little to gain by ensuring a well educated populace. Educated masses are far more difficult to brainwash and fool..

I don't understand why we pay so much for cable TV and then have advertisements forced down our throats. Like you mention, this is fine with free TV.. I can deal with advertisements subsidizing my subscription. Sure, the content providers, infrastructure providers etc. all have to get their return, however, each of them cannot be milking the consumer separately.. they have to share revenue from viewership in a way that doesn't make this ridiculously expensive. When this happens, consumers will actively look for cheaper ways to get this (hence the proliferation of internet based viewership - in many cases, this leads to piracy). Make things affordable and fair and consumers will gravitate towards such services. Anyways.. its just over-the-air free broadcasts for me.. that's free and I can deal with ads for that...

Actually a lot of intensive tasks today are highly parallelizable.. for example network stacks. OSes changes will definitely help when they are able to identify the distances between processing units and memory... I'm currently working on such projects and have seen the limitations due to lack of NUMA on systems with multiple CPUs, advantages of allowing CPUs to access "local" memory and reducing page access contention. The main problems seems to be that once you have more than one CPU, for any workload that has high memory access, your bottleneck is most likely going to be the memory controller.