Your latter point is often ignored as inflation numbers are often taken as undisputed (or at least "what can you do about it") figures. There is tremendous bias in the calculation of inflation, although the BLS has done a great job of fixing this in the last decade or so. Unfortunately historical data will be incomparable because of these frequent revisions. See the Boskin Report for more details.
That equation for the macroeconomy (Quantity Theory of Money) went out of style in the 80s when people realized velocity wasn't a fixed constant, i.e., it only appeared attractive given the small set of data at the time.
There's no way to get around invalid email addresses. Anybody can put in something like [email protected] and it would pass most regex checks. I think the best solution is to just check for an "@" sign and a "." after it.
I think a lot of you are missing the point. I could be wrong but I think the gist of the message is to look at what 40B into ycombinator would mean in terms of value added, employment created, etc. (with the wild assumption that it all scales). His point is to heavily criticize the 40B bailout of GM.
This is only true for the best schools with a decent amount of money. As bloomberg noted in a piece last month, a lot of schools on the cusp are in big trouble financially and depend on tuition to make up the difference. For most of these schools, students making under whatever the line is, don't get full aid like they might at Harvard, MIT, etc.
Also, this only extends to international students at, again, the best schools. When I applied for college several years back, I think it was only five schools that were need-blind to international students (they were also very generous with that aid). There might be more schools that do so now but I can't imagine it's substantially more.
For me, the study of algorithms is cs. Hacking is just a means of implementation. Also, I think it's a huge misconception that algorithms is all about math -- it's about problem solving in general.
As Dijkstra said "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."