Sure we may be graduating more STEM students, but I really hate when studies like this assume all students of a given field are equally talented. I'd say my university had a good CS program, but maybe 1/3 of our CS majors would get hired at top tech companies (Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft, etc) and get those really high salaries.
At the end of the day it's much easier to import top talent to fill the gap than to cultivate more of it in the U.S. Some companies like HackerSchool are popping up to address this need, but there's a long way to go.
Since drug war/prison system/militarized police keeps popping up on HN, I'd highly recommend anyone very interested in learning more about how this came to be to watch the documentary "The House I Live In."
It's an excellent explanation of how drug laws and being "tough" on crime have led to skyrocketing incarceration rates, trigger happy cops, and broken communities.
Snapchat was really asking for this to happen, with exposing usernames publicly at snapchat.com/<username> and showing subsequent top friends. What was the rationale of doing that vs keeping it all inside the app?
I really don't understand this outrage about the NSA (allegedly I know, but let's be serious) hacking Chinese targets. That's their job. The Chinese, through hacking, have obtained highly classified information about our most advanced weapons systems. They've stolen critical information about the F-35, AEGIS radar, not to mention hacking US companies to steal their intellectual property.
The internet open, free, etc but the world is still defined by borders and national interest. Nations have always needed to collect intel to inform their decision making and they've employed spies to do it. It just so happens the medium that the NSA operates in is the digital one, with their spies sitting in a big black building in Virginia instead of being some James Bond style agent.
Is there any significant trend of people leaving academia for the tech world? I spent 4 years grinding away on cancer drug development. Between the billions of dollars it takes to commercialize such drugs and the single digit percentage that actually advance from human trials to clinical use, I wondered if the work I was doing was not going to be put to good use.
More importantly, I didn't feel like I was learning every day. Much of the work is absurdly repetitive.
I started learning how to build web applications and found it more mentally rewarding... but what are the ramifications of that for research? It's incredibly important but not seen as very exciting these days.
I really hope that dev kits for the next gen consoles don't continue to be so expensive. If I own the console, I should be able to develop on it.
I don't think Sony and Microsoft are unaware that small indie developed games have been flooding the App Store. That being said, Apple has sold 410 million iOS devices and has paid developers $5.5B (2012 numbers).
Apple makes an absurd amount of money from hardware, while Microsoft and Sony sell their consoles at losses and need to make money back from software.
Here's a pretty cool video demonstration of its on tablets and TVs use prior to acquisition:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2i01vGsbOk