One thing that continually throws me is the whole, "more school, especially more college!" idea. The skills that have actually put me in interesting situations

One thing that continually throws me is the whole, "more school, especially more college!" idea. The skills that have actually put me in interesting situations, like serious brain machine interface research or a startup doing quantitative methods for human resources, had nothing to do with school. At least for me, I'd have been much better suited for an "apprenticeship" rather than having just having to tolerate classes as a distraction to the lab, where I learned about Kalman filters and intricacies of neuronal tuning in a kind of learn-it-by-yesterday-as-needed setup from the people who were actually writing the papers. Given the amount of ADD we have as a culture, training hackers with an emphasis on "you as an individual can create things that have the potential to become forces of nature with only a cheap computer and some knowledge" and deep familiarity with the internet (irc? google-fu?) seems to be the best way to graduate world class engineers. You won't get middle American teenagers to sit down and study like Chinese students will; but that's fine. Our hackers will end up just as knowledgeable as theirs, and maybe more creative. EDIT: One more thing: we need to drill home that "post things to share with your friends for free!" is neither a business model nor a KILLERAPP!!111oneoneone. We need to inspire kids to go after the next big problems, and not just fill them up with hype and dreams, but actually give them the technical abilities to do it.