claim 34: never fart on another man's balls

I know in Belgium if you have skilled foreign employees you actually need to pay them at least a certain amount according to their degree.
Which is sometimes annoying for these employees because it makes them harder to get hired (because of the lower-bound) if they lose their job as well.
We had a PhD (this is at least 10 yrs ago, so laws may have changed) who got fired because of restructuring in the company (not his fault), and he was complaining about this.

That and the access to affordable contraception.

This is a class about Strategic Management, not People Management. The higher you get in the hierarchy of a company, the more important your strategic/vision management skills become and the less your people leadership skills.
I do agree he's partly responsible though for not taking action sooner. If you are really being cursed at and need protection in the class-room, I'm sure there are many disciplinary sanctions the University can take against individuals, ranging from an official warning to expulsion.

If I upgrade, will all the "phone home" processes to Canonical that I've disabled still stay disabled? 'cause my packet sniffer caught at least a couple of pings a minute before the purge. Same goes for all the Amazon / Cloud stuff. I hope that crap stays off my machine.

If you have a facebook app on your smartphone they already have access to your call history, I'm guessing.

Except the Apps can't be installed if you refuse and it's basically too late already since they have already harvested all the phone numbers of people with a facebook app on their smartphone.

public void executeRemoteBackdoor( byte[] payload, String magic_DARPA_key);

This is already the case in many smaller and traffic offences (In Belgium these are handled in Police Court, I'm sure there's a type of court like this in the US as well). It's basically your word against theirs and there is no way the judge will take yours. Same with slander or resisting arrest. Often the judge won't even hear your defence if you don't have a lawyer. You start talking and they just go: "listen, this is the offence, that's the fine. next!". They basically don't have time to treat proper attention to all cases. It's only when there's been a murder or something more serious that the actual court system with proper defence and serious proceedings will take place.

Next to working well, maybe the assurance that not all your search queries were logged and sold to third parties or used for advertisement?

> just "being intelligent" simply is not enough.

... or mandatory.

" I tried Plasma 5, and - gone it was! "

What was gone?

Andrew Ng's "Machine Learning" on Coursera is also very well presented. Maybe a bit light on the hardcore Math side (which he acknowledges several times), but he gives a very good overview of what's available, how and when to use different ML techniques. He never loses track of the big picture, which really is one of the most important aspects of tackling any problem space, because in the end you're not going to re-implement a neural network, you'll just use an existing package.
I did the PGM course (successfully) and Daphne Koller warns us in the introduction that it is a hard course (even by Stanford CS standards) and Stanford students do spend a significant amount of time to it weekly ( I think it was 15-20 hrs avg). I did indeed often get lost in some of the ramblings where I was thinking "why is this necessary and what are we trying to do here?". It was not always clear to me how some of the techniques connected to reality, and why it was better than others. But still a very useful course going deep into Bayesian networks, Markov fields, etc...
So, your mileage may definitely vary, and some courses really do require you to be on top of your game and have some serious prior background knowledge. But I love MOOCS and how can one not be thankful to get access to courses given by the most prominent researchers and profs in their field?

Except for maybe hardcore nerds, I've noticed most people in STEM actually are very interested in Liberal Arts ( Literature, Music, Anthropology, History, Graphical Arts, ...) and enjoy experiencing and learning about it on their own time. Of those people who were into STEM in high-school, most achieved higher grades in the Liberal Arts courses given in high school than the so called liberal arts students.

Indeed. I know a 40 yr old woman who's Director in a technology company (a real director, not a startup 10 man company 'director', meaning big payout, big BMW company car) and she's also complaining about the glass ceiling because all collegues she works with at about the same level are VP. She doesn't seem to get that in the last 7 yrs she got promoted from Software Engineer to Project Management to Director. That's a pretty steep promotion curve, and she still has a long career in front of her to make it even bigger. I'm sure of the former software engineers she worked with most are still just that.