Yes, but I would still agree with the core thought, which is, America, which thought world about free market, is afraid of loosing its jobs to outsourcing.
You are not a code monkey. You have read TOACP thrice. You love programming in Python. You love networking/sysadmin/build and release stuff. If all the above is true, there is really no value in doing Red hat, cisco or juniper certification. If you love programming, contribute to open source. People will notice you when you work on open source projects. Then by the time you finish college, you might get some consulting work as a freelancer. Once you are get some money doing consulting, try to do some simple paid webapps. You would also be familiar with what people want by that time.
The way cars have monopolised USA and lack of poor public transport infrastructure might provide a huge opportunity for rail road companies. I really hope to see cheap public transport system in USA. Also given lot of public awareness about global warming and reducing oil consumption may be added incentive.
This title says that funding is for secure operating system research. Contents seems like its for making minix better. I am very skeptical about operating system that fixes its bugs. It may become one more multics project. Though micro kernel looks really good in theory, neither minix nor hurd have taken off like linux or FreeBSD
One major factor I think is what we study. We do not have SICP course in comp sci, instead we study C, C++, java. I had not even heard of lisp, till I came across SICP course from Berkeley web casts. Of course I do not think even in US, they teach ROR, but as PG says, startups and latest and greatest of technology comes around places where there are good universities. I am in no way suggesting that places like IITs are not good, but most of Indian IT industry is not from IITs, that reflects in percentage