[stcredzero]

An example of a good bit:

"It is not productive to spend an hour learning how to change the font on your computer’s clock. Even if while you’re doing that you’re learning about how computers work, you’re wasting your time and getting somewhere trivial very slowly."

This reminds me of "computer education" programs that just teach how to use MS Word. Yes, this will get you a job, but you'd be learning at a more fundamental level with Squeak eToys. Or some of this:

http://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/edu-sig/

[plinkplonk]

If he said, "It is not productive for me to spend an hour learning how to change the font on my computer’s clock." he would be right.

He makes these sweeping generalizations about what is or is not productive for other people to do. By his definition all the people "tinkering with" open source Linux, Apache, etc would be "non productive" since perfectly good commercial alternatives existed (and still exist) for them.

[stcredzero]

You missed the point. Learning how one particular widget for settings in one particular app is neither very general nor fundamental. Playing around with Morphic and discovering that every UI widget is a little code browser, and using the unified environment to discover robotics, math, and physics on your own is very fundamental.