I wholeheartedly agree. The schooling system was set up more than 60 years ago. Any social system instituted by man is time limited. With time, people (because we're intelligent) try to maximize the benefits while minimizing the effort, and this compromises the system.
Sixty years ago, finishing high-school was a major accomplishment, opening lots of opportunities. One went to college because he/she wanted to learn stuff which will be useful on his/her voyage to the frontiers of human knowledge. Intellectual curiosity is the main motivating factor for this kind of people.
College education today assumes the same role that high-school education had 60 years ago, and it's NOT because there's more stuff that has to be learned. (I think 12 years of education is more than enough to keep the world spinning. We're just doing it wrong, but that's another story. Paul Lockheart's Mathematician's Lament is a great read on this subject, feel lucky on Google).
The question is, what will provide today what colleges provided 60 years ago?
I don't mean to sound catastrophic. Top-class research is being done today as well. It's just that we're making things unnecessarily hard for everybody.
We've had nothing but problems with ActiveMQ and we've been using it for 4-5 year now. We've been slow on making the decision to move to a different open source implementation because it is difficult to test this kind of software. I mean, ActiveMQ appears to work fine in tests, but in production, lock-ups and storage leaks happen on monthy basis. We need simple functionality, peristent queues in their simplest form. HornetQ seems like a good candidate. I'd appreciate if anyone could share their experience with it.
With Emacs(w/paredit)+SLIME you would be doing "interactive development" which is really a fundamentally different and better way of using Lisp. I cannot recommend it enough.
What you're actually paying for is the final version in PDF which will be released in March 2009, and in the meantime, until it becomes available, you're getting all the betas.