While I totally agree with you, I don't think that: "1000 -Use a packet sniffer to learn about the network requests your computer does to your favorite game server." Is an easy thing to do. The first time I learned networking, packet encapsulation, protocols and so on, it took me a while to get the concepts. It's only after a few years of CS studying that I got fluent in wireshark (if that's even possible).

This is a list of hard things to do from a beginner, freshman, perspective. But they are also highly necessary if you want to work on fun stuff later on.

A sysadmin who doesn't understand pools of threads will go nowhere, same goes for a developpers who doesn't know what database replication implies.