Very interesting and thoughtful post. I am always amazed to see how many people are thinking in a similar way to mine. Many times it is surprising.
Somewhat in the spirit of your post, i am now trying to promote an idea of a Commfree Day - one day every month to be spent away from media and information technology. I have a post with more explanation about it and will be glad to hear what you and others think about it: http://thinkmacro.wordpress.com/2007/07/08/commfree-day/
Thanks!
I agree the computer should not be the first thing students observe about nature, but rather secondary. If they could take what they’ve observed in nature and try to reproduce it in the computer, that would be a representation of knowledge, but it would be of the student’s knowledge, not of whoever wrote the software. Through this process of constructing a representation of the real world, the students might actually learn something about how nature really works.
@AMS:
What I’m seeing is that each different technology that gets adopted is a small improvement over what came before in terms of robustness. There are some languages that have been around for decades, so called “research languages”, that are sitting on the sidelines, growing old waiting for the mainstream languages to catch up to what they’ve had all along.
I think C#/Java are an improvement over C/C++ in terms of memory management and ease-of-programming, but idiomatically as far as the programmer is concerned, they’re just a little better. For example when I was building web applications in C# I was thankful to be using that, instead of C or C++. I can’t imagine trying to manage the complexity of the kind of apps. I was creating in those languages. Garbage collection definitely saved the day. Still, C# was somewhat inadequate for the complexity I was dealing with.
I think that the reason we keep chasing the technology “du jour” is that fundamentally none of the core problems have been solved. We keep jumping at the next big thing, thinking that it will finally make systems/applications easy to develop. By the time you’re 40 you’ve been through this cycle enough times to know that C#/.NET [insert the latest hot thing here] is really not that much easier than C and a set of good libraries was, or COBOL, or Pascal, or Visual-Whatever, etc.
Not exactly a comment, but this article made me think of this video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5357724162328865131q=go+go+gadget+videototal=450start=0num=10so=0type=searchplindex=3
It’s a public service announcement parody from a series called “Red vs Blue”.
You didn’t count the time you spent doing the following:
Researching motherboards, power supplies, video cards, compatibility, and the like = 40+ hours
Hunting for the best price online for EACH component = 8 hours
Downloading all of the latest drivers = 4 hours
The cost of the OS = $150
So how much did you save again?!?!?
Technology for the sake of technology is bad and all too common. 
There are some places I don’t want to see technology, things that technology/computers can make worse. Voting is at the top of the list.
I have started programming only a decade ago and am into my early twenties and this article does ring a bell. As of now I get totally awestruck by something new coming every few months and keep chasing it till I find something more glamorous to chase.
But this article makes me think, if all this gonna sustain and pay-off later??
Dunno… Still chasing the answer!!
“why not invest in the one technology guaranteed to pay dividends”
One word: COBOL.
50 years and still going. 50 years and still recognizable to its original authors and programmers.