and it often destroys them.

You take a human being in its early formative years and put it at the center of one of the most depraved, amoral industries on the planet and see what happens. (Entertainment more amoral than, say, Big Oil or Big Tobacco? Yes. Most industries pollute our environment and our bodies, but the entertainment industry destroys our minds and with it, our ability to deal with the other problems.)

The lucky ones, like Drew Barrymore, get into rehab and end up as functional human beings.

The unlucky ones, like Dana Plato, Lindsay Lohan, the Olsen Twins, and a zillion other minors made into stars, flame out spectacularly and become fodder for tabloids and tasteless jokes.

Jackson was accused of being a child molester. Fortunately for the rest of us, our definition of "molesting" is pretty narrow because otherwise, we'd all be in the dock.

Carol rocks my world with her fearless ink.

Anything you want! It's the place where dreams come true! There are no limits to what you can become!

Presented with this view, most kids decide they want to be rich and/or famous. Pop stars, sports heroes, movie stars. The clever ones will figure out that you're more likely to get rich as an investment banker or hedge fund manager.

None of these things require science. You only realize that these options are not realistic once you're grown up and finished high school, which is to say when you've already opted out of basic science education.

America (and Canada) is falling behind because we lie to our children about their prospects in life. We tell them to stay in school but make no distinction between studying science and math at Cornell and studying screenwriting at USC.

Okay, first off, she had better hope she wins that suit because you're right--the very fact that she's very loudly and publicly sued her old school is going to make her look very bad to potential employers, regardless of what would have happened otherwise.

But I have to say, this is not an entirely un-crazy thing to do in principle. The thing is, we live in an economy that (even before the recession/collapse) was constantly forcing people out of stable, good-paying employment and into ever more competitive and cutthroat job hunts. The clear brutality of this system, where people are thrown overboard to goose some manager's stock options, is something that was tolerated.

One of the ways it was made tolerable was to bombard everyone with the idea that their unemployment/underemployment was their own fault. "You're not being competitive enough." "You're stuck in Old Economy thinking." "See this guy over here, he lost his job and he buckled down and now he's a millionaire. If he can do it, so can you." And, the big one: "You need more education."

So we're told from day one that more education is the key. So a bunch of diploma mills come along offering education--by definition, to uneducated people. They have little or no capacity to critically evaluate these things. Advertising is created by specialists in manipulating people. People want jobs, it's the prerequisite to being able to think about anything else, and here comes an ad campaign designed to convince you that The Diploma Mill Institute is your ticket to employment. (A common part of the advertising is something like, "95% of our graduates are employed within six months of graduating.")

Then, when you graduate, it turns out it's not a ticket to employment after all. I can see her frustration. And if she's an idiot for thinking that her 2.7 GPA from a diploma mill should entitle her to work NOW, well, that's at least partly a failure of the primary- and secondary-education systems she came out of.

No harm, no foul, no use of the active voice.

does it become okay to drag these motherfuckers out into the street by their hair, shoot them in the neck and put their death rattles on YouTube?

but the cloud computing idea sounds crazy to me.

Having your data stored far away, at the end of lines of limited capacity (big, but limited) is like building your cities where everything you need is ten or twenty kilometers down the road.

It works fine in principle, until you find out that everyone else who otherwise would have had access to whatever locally, now has to use that limited infrastructure to get where they're going. Then you find that no matter what you're trying to do, you're stuck in traffic and everything goes slower. You build more and more infrastructure but all it does is create more demand and the whole system is perpetually choked.

"But what about the internet," you ask? Yeah, what about it? I find that no matter how fast my modem is and how fast a connection I get, it always seems to get slower in a year or two. That's because faster connections encourage people to pour more crap down them, watching TV online and all that. Then you're bullied into buying new hardware, buying faster connections etc. just to keep everyone else's traffic from completely freezing you out.