Even if you think university will teach you absolutely nothing, you've got a one-time offer from society that we're going to subsidize anything you do for the next four years and not have any expectation that you'll work for a living during that time. This offer is essentially only good once. Take it.

That said, you can learn an awful lot from school. You say it is tedious -- that suggests to me you're underchallenged. Have you tried learning a foreign language yet? Like, really learning a foreign language, rather than learning to say "Yo quiero una cerveza" like I assume your high school Spanish has taught you? It is incredibly rewarding, in all possible senses of the term rewarding, and you'll never get a better opportunity than the next four years. (Dedicated instructors, plenty of time not occupied by the demands of job and family, social push to complete studies, possibility of study abroad bankrolled by someone else and unrestricted by visa concerns, etc etc etc...)

You can also learn quite a bit about programming during college, even if actually doing it is a much better teacher. (Although, again, we're subsidizing all your activities for four years -- you show up for 3 hours of classes 5 days a week, the rest of the time is yours, program as much as you want to program.)

Incidentally, I hate to sound like An Official Adult, but just trust me on this one: the job market for young Americans sucks right now, and you absolutely do not want to be facing it without a degree. Degrees are not just for boring megacorps coding Blub: even cool companies which code Lisp look for people who can carry tasks to completion, and not possessing a degree when we hand them out like candy on Halloween suggests "I am insufficiently motivated to do clearly beneficial things when they require non-trivial amounts of actual work. Please employ me -- you will find me excellent at everything you assign me to do, provided none of it is actual work."

This describes how someone got ahead within a big company. It's not surprising you have to do perverse things to win in an environment dominated by politics. But that is not the only playing field. The most successful startup founders all seem to be pretty genuine-- tough, definitely, but not jerks.

> How is it that Apple is set to revolutionize all of computing within a few weeks with its iPad?

Can we cut down on the hype a bit, please?

Whether the ipad is fad, fashion or revolutionary remains to be seen.

Apples track record of late is very impressive but this is extrapolation without any basis in fact.

It is difficult, especially for politicians, to talk about injustice, accidents, the death of children and innocents, in terms of acceptable loss. It sounds callous. One wants to do better. But if we are to live in a society with basic freedoms, it is exactly what is needed.

Intuitively we know this. Setting speed limits to a universal 5 MPH and rigidly enforcing the rule is close to what would be needed to reduce traffic fatalities to zero. But most people love their freedom and mobility. They look at the risk of a fatal accident with the rules as they are and say it's acceptable. And when someone beats the odds and has one, we don't generally blame the laws. We say it's a tragic accident, which is a way of saying an acceptable risk has been realized for someone.

We should think the same way about a great many things. Things like aircraft bombing or child abduction are horrific, but low risk. The horror makes us incorrectly disregard the fact that the risk is low--possibly low enough, even, to be acceptable.

The problem is compounded by the political and human need to do something. Even if the risk is acceptably low and cannot be meaningfully reduced without draconian measures, people feel the need to bring it down by one means or another. So they do things that don't help. For show. For comfort. Out of confusion.

A bit of mathematical clarity and a willingness to label things mere accidents would be helpful. Considering the many men willing to give their lives in wars throughout history to secure better lives for their descendants, it would be a shame if we threw it all away for fear of a few accidental deaths per year. Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, the difficult thing about preserving freedom is that one must be willing to accept some low level of evil without doing anything legal to stop it.

A classic sociopath as defined by the Gervais Principle: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...