Failing the development of the language bit, I'm sure they will at least figure out how to outsource, with remote voice interaction. Only a matter of time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_process

On Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems, a zombie process or defunct process is a process that has completed execution but still has an entry in the process table, this entry being still needed to allow the process that started the zombie process to read its exit status. The term zombie process derives from the common definition of zombie--an undead person. In the term's colorful metaphor, the child process has died but has not yet been reaped. [...]

As dictated by the Geneva Conference of 1954, the partition of Vietnam was meant to be only temporary, pending national elections in 1956.
... The President of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, declined to hold elections. This called into question the United States' commitment to democracy in the region, but also raised questions about the legitimacy of any election held in the communist-run North.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed U.S. fears when he wrote that "80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh."[26]

26. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Mandate for Change. Garden City, NJ. Doubleday & Company, 1963, p. 372.

Perhaps you missed the Pentagon Papers:

In 1971, the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the New York Times. The top-secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, commissioned by the Department of Defense, detailed a long series of public deceptions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

"... The real bomb that not only blew open the true history of the war but exposed to full view the hideous nature of every post-World War II U.S. government was the other 4000 pages: the classified documents reproduced as the sources of the study.

... The paperback edition of the excerpts published by The New York Times sold one and a half million copies, "though," Wells argues, "few people actually read it." But the impact, especially of the documents, was astonishing.

Nobody has described this more potently than W. D. Ehrhart, the wounded marine who has since become one of the great poets and writers of nonfiction produced by the war, in a whole chapter of his memoir Passing Time devoted to his reading of the Pentagon Papers:

'Page after page endless page of it. Vile. Immoral. Despicable. Obscene. . . . I'd been a fool, ignorant and naive. A sucker. For such men, I had become a murderer. For such men, I had forfeited my honor, my self-respect, and my humanity. For such men, I had been willing to lay down my life.'"

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/ELLSBERG.htm

AS to what the US did to Vietnam:

No matter how stupefying, the numbers remain important. To narrow the focus to the period between 1965 and 1974 when Lyndon Johnson's and Richard Nixon's administrations bombed North and South Vietnam and conducted search-and-destroy campaigns of attrition, approximately one million Vietnamese civilians were wounded by warfare.[39] Vietnamese civilian deaths numbered around 250,000 in South Vietnam; 65,000 civilians died in the bombing of North Vietnam. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong military casualties comprised approximately 660,000 killed compared to 225,000 South Vietnamese and 50,000 Americans troops. The estimates of North Vietnamese wounded are still in the "countless" category, but roughly 500,000 South Vietnamese and 300,000 American soldiers were wounded between 1965 and 1974.[40]

The Vietnamese countryside, home to an ancient Vietnamese way of life, became the most heavily bombed landscape on earth, having more bombs dropped on it than all countries involved in World War II combined.

http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~epf/1996/vietnam.html

As to Vietnamese wanting their children to be educated in the US - well it is a BIT richer than the little country it devastated, but perhaps they might change their minds if they read the above account of some "education" in the US. This "education" also has some unsurprising gaps regarding Vietnam, as Howard Zinn (author of A People's History of the United States) points out:

"... Vietnam is something that, by the way, is still not taught very well in American schools. I spoke to a group of people in an advanced history class not long ago, a hundred kids, asked them, "How many people here have heard of the My Lai Massacre?" No hand was raised. We are not teaching Vietnam. If we were teaching the history of Vietnam as it should be taught, then the American people, from the start, would have opposed the war, instead of waiting three or four years for a majority of the American people to declare their opposition to the war."

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/16/1338223

One of the reasons I admire Chomsy is that he doesn't go in for sweeping generalizations and gives credit where's it's due (cf. my recent debate with Heathlander over his sweeping generlizations about the media). So your sentence is correct, but an over-simplification.

He does add that the real reason the Vietnam war ended is that elite opinion turned against it, it was too costly and had little prospect of success.

"In fact, he says it has significantly changed the country, and he clearly implies, here and in many other writings, that the movements of the 60's and 70's were seminal in enabling the protests of today."

Yes, of course he would acknowledge that; but he's more inclined to give credit to recent and current youth and sees it as more of a continuing process; not just heroes of the 60s changing everything.

"He simply says here that they were late in beginning. True. They (we) were inventing the damned process, and no one could (or wanted to) believe that we really would bomb a half million Cambodians to  death, for the poorest of reasons, ---and then lie about it. Then, there was no public precedent to look at to massively act. Yes, there were other US atrocities, other mass actions and movements, the labor movement chief among them--but who read about that in school?"

Yes, it WAS very late, shockingly so in retrospect, and I think the draft focused the mind of many young people.

I think you realised "we were inventing the damn process" went a bit far, and I'm glad to see you give a brief mention to earlier dissent and protest - and these earlier dissenters didn't learn about it in school either. It goes back a long way, e.g. the English, French and American revolutions, opposition to WWI, widespread socialist and communist movements in the 1930s, even in the US, etc. Cf Chomsky:

'I think this goes back 400 years, to the history of British democracy,' he says. 'Go back to the 17th century, when the first democratic revolution [after the English Civil War] was crushed - the establishment were scared. They were very scared, because the rabble was coming out and speaking openly and challenging them, these 'men of best quality', and it was by no means clear that they were going to be crushed. Well, they were, but the problem remained.

http://www.paulkingsnorth.net/noam.html

There's an important  geographical aspect as well as the historical one, Chomsky:

"He meant, he explains, by way of a history lesson, that today's movement is more promising in terms of furthering the interests of real people (rather than political ideologues) than any of the old 'Workers Internationals' - the global gatherings of the left which helped lay the foundations for twentieth century socialism. 'The primary theme of the left and the workers movements, from their modern origins,' he says, 'has been globalisation. That's why every union is called an international ... the First International [held in London in 1864] was promising, but it was narrow. It was primarily European workers ... furthermore it was killed, mainly by Marx, because it was getting out of hand - it was getting too democratic, starting to respond to the wishes of a majority of the participants, and Marx didn't like that. The Second International [which began in 1889 in Paris] was very broad, and social democratic - but it was still European, and it was killed by the Second World War. The Third [in Moscow, from the 1930] was just an outlet for Bolshevik propaganda, and the Fourth International was Trotskyite - so there's never been anything that's realised the initial hopes.'

And does today's movement do that? 'Well, this one is different. For one thing it originated in the South - there's a reason why the World Social Forum is in Porto Alegre and not in London. This movement originated in the South, but then it developed a level of international solidarity which is quite new. Still Southern-based, but bringing in significant sectors of more developed societies, so it has an international scale that none of the 'Internationals' ever had. It's also much broader - it's not a working men's association, it has participants from all parts of life, with different interests but common aspirations ... and it's growing. And it's serious. There has never been an international movement of peoples' organisations with anything remotely like the geographical scale, the diversity and participation, the range of interests and concerns ... there has never been anything like this. It's a genuine peoples movement.' »
Ibid.

"The point of the piece is to illustrate a fundamental (and frightening) shift in education, not just in the US, but worldwide, I think."

Yes, but I was disagreeing with  your follow-up comment in which you said:

"The dialog on Viet Nam was pretty rich and vigorous, and it led to action, much of which was very important in ending a war as obscene as this one. Compare that period with the response of young people today- or non-response. Weird, when you consider that it will be their asses that get shot up- an idiot can see a massive military involvement coming."

And you weren't saying that they protest but it's not covered, as you now imply:

"... and a just dumbfounding absence of any mention of campus protest today, by comparison. Remember, ---a story untold is a memory hole."

As I said, Chomsky has correctly pointed out that it's just not true that there's less protest now - there's more, and the 60s generation can't take all the credit for it. There are still young people who read outside the set curricula and, as he also points out (see above), many of them are in the South.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.