I have not used Prezi that much, but I do not that local software can be used to play the files offline. Some people find it good to create links. I generally use LaTex.

There are a couple of things going on here. First, there are plenty of places a K-12 teacher can go to create content for their class. Some of these resources are pay-for sites, some are free in limited use. For instance Prezi and Pollev can be used for most of what happens in a classroom. In addition, there is nothing stopping a K-12 teacher using something like Moodle to organize content using many different tools. This just insures that MS tools get used. There is nothing wrong with that, there are other sites out there that only use google tools.

Second, is the MOOC portion. To be honest, there is simply not a compelling case for this except in certain cases for K-12. We are not going to be setting 8 year old kids alone with a computer and expect them to learn. Maybe one day, but not with MS tools.

This initiative, however, will probably provide some value to MS and k-12 teachers. For the most part K-12 teachers know how use MS products. The presentations are in powerpoint, which is why they are generally useless, and the worksheets are in word, which is why they are ugly, and the one great part of MS Office, Excel, is so misused that even it does not survive the experience.However, these are the tools that teachers have and packaging them so that students can get experience learning on the computer is valuable.

Of selling books, often below their cost, and providing a secure system(Kindle DRM) for authors to sell e books. While there is certainly a downward pressure on the price of books due to Amazon, the reality is that authors probably sell a hell of lot more books because of Amazon. I do not see how a publisher can complain. After all, if Amazon is not providing a service, they are free to sell physical books through Barnes and Noble, for instance, as well as sell unencumbered e-books through any number of online sources. They can digitally mark each e-book for each customer, and litigate those that resell or otherwise pirate.

I happily go to O'Reilly and pay $40 for a physical and unencumbered PDF copy of a book. What publishers aren't doing is moving with market forces. The value of book is not what it used to be. The average American is not making what was the previous expectation. We are in a deflationary period. Amazon is under pressure to show a better return on investment. They do not have to sell products when the supplier wants excessive value. It is like a restaurant not selling Coca Cola products. SOme don't because Pepsi cuts a better deal.

Transportation is one thing, but another is security and integrity. Australia is a rock island, so it would not be hard to find a place to keep the material sealed, but it is basically a big island. That is going to be, to some degree increasingly under water. Not to mention that western Australia appears to have an increase in tropical cyclone activity over the past five years. Even if this is a cyclical thing and not a product of climate change, one might have to protect the material from the occasional few days of heavy rain, something that does not happen in Nevada.

Agreed, but the needed to do more work. For instance, they compared the Surface to a 13" Macbook Air because they could not get the specs down to an 11" Macbook Air. In fact the 12" Surface is about halfway between the Macbook Airs. The fact it leaves the 13" Macbook in the dust, as all the ad talk has said, is not that relevant.

More often than not, the choice of machine is going to depend on workflow. If you are MS products, then this machine is a good choice. If you are on Google Drive, then an Android tablet probably works best. My days often involves Emacs, LaTex, python, openoffice, and ocassionaly the Apple office suite, so a Macbook works well for me as the GUI interfaces to these are very well worked out.

The challenge for MS is to entice people who are not dedicated to the MS products to buy Surface so they become dedicated to the MS products, as Apple did with Macbook Air and Pro.

This is not going to do it. Corporate is not going to pay double for a surface and keyboard than for a laptop. The average person is not going to pay more for a surface than an 11" Macbook Air or an iPad or the knockoffs.

MS should have the cash and supply chain to build a tablet with keyboard for $600. This is something that people would buy and would put MS back in the spotlight. Of course at this price point, all the OEM people who complain vigorously. Which is the fundamental problem. Is MS a company that sells to consumers, or is it a company that sells to OEM. As long as it focuses on the later at the expense to the former, they will never have decent hardware at a good price.

I am not sure why people buy TV such as this. A good regular TV is under $400 and should last for 5-10 years. The streaming technology, however, is going to change every few years. So it you buy a Tivo, it will run about $300 a year, at which point you can buy another Tivo for $300 to get the new stuff, but not have to buy a new TV. A new roku, fire TV, Apple TV, whatever, can be bought every year for $100 to keep up with hardware changes. Granted, a smart TV is only going cost $100 more, but after a few years you either have to jettison the 'smart' part of buy a whole new TV.

When people tell me they have seen Star Wars(no episode number), and they are too young to have seen it originally in theaters, I ask if they have seen it on VHS. If the answer is no, then they have not seen Star Wars. That is because instead of leaving it as a static piece of culture, like Casablanca, Rocky Horror Picture Show, or Go, with all the warts and other defects, Lucas has managed and 'fixed' it to attract new audiences. Instead of letting the sequels get the new audiences, he very proactively retconned the films. And this is why Star Wars can't be saved. I am sure the new films will make a lot of money. I am sure that many will enjoy it. But unlike Star Trek, which may yet bounce back from Abrams sticky fingers, Star Wars does not have anything resembling such a solid base.

Suppose a EULA stated that as part of the website, the firm had the right, whenever they were in town, to stay at your house and borrow your car, and you would have to put in some hours working for them at the trade show, or doing door to door work, or making appoints with them, all for no pay. If you refuse, you will be taken to court for breech of contract, a civil matter.

Even though there is no specific constitutional case against this, it only says that the government cannot commandeer a citizens place unless in time of war, I am sure that if it made it to higher courts there might be a constitutional discussion. Which is to say that the constitution gives us rights, and those rights are sometime reflected in law, sometimes reflected in the absence of law. For instance, unlike the UK we can't be sued for saying bad things about a corporation. That is a right derived from the US Constitution.

Unfortunately many believe as the parent does that we only have very limited rights. This is why corporations feel comfortable about limited the average persons access to the courts. This is why we are afraid to speak our mind online when we get bad service or a bad product, when we have no problem doing the same thing in other public forums.

The private sector does not have special powers to destroy our right as humans and citizens. They cannot make us literal slaves just because we sign a contract. They should not be able to limit my speech or actions into perpetuity just because we make a single transaction. This is the problem with binding long term non compete agreements. As long as I agree to accept payment for my work, then I am subject to the reasonable restrictions of the person paying me. To say that until I die the person who used to pay me have total control over my actions is not reasonable.

A lot of this has to do with following instructions and the availability of expertise. When I was very young i had no problems running basic programs on the teletype. When I learned FORTRAN, yes the error messages were cryptic, but after a semester I could get it running. I could not manually link now to save my life, but back then it was no big deal to hook into the IMSL library. By the time I got to college, i could diagnose almost any common error just by looking at the message. Most of the time, if there were hundred error messages, for instance, it was because of mistype variables in the function call. I find that people mistake the reason we write 'hello world' programs. It is not to test the language, but to test the ability to compile, link, and run code on a platform. I remember well the first time my friends and I got an account on a Cray. It took us a day to figure out what to do. There was no one to call, as very few people have such expertise. Again, it is not just a matter of simple tools, but a critical mass of people who know how to use the tools and can help others. OTOH, one can make the tools as simple as possible, but it won't change the nature of people. That is, most people don't really have a good grasp of cause and effect. It is like people tailgating on the highway. We know that an accident will at some point occur, but people without such a concept of cause and effect do not. This is why I think programming is of such pedagogical value. It teaches students cause and effect. It teaches students that there are rules that if followed will lead to predictable results. Something like python can reduce the pain of compiling and running, but nothing can reduce the pain of trying to solve a problem if one thinks that rules are arbitrary.

First, when a kid is in the roll of the student, there is not much expectation of privacy. There is an limitation to those who are allowed to invade the privacy, but it is not like a 15 year old kid who surfs p0rn can complain to his parents of the school that they violated his privacy by spying on him, even if he bought the phone and pays the bill.

This is obviously an exaggeration, but the point is the same. If a student is working on an assignment, she is always observed to make sure for on task behavior, or to make sure the process is correct. The computer is no different. One problem with computer as a educator is that many students don't really know how to use it as tool. They only know how to use it as game. It is the difference between a pencil as a tool to complete a worksheet, or a pencil as toy to throw or use to play sword fighting. Both are legitimate uses of a pencil, in the proper circumstances, and kids need to be taught to use it as the former for typical educational purposes.

So depending on how the data is used the age of the student, it is perfectly reasonable, even beneficial, for software to be monitoring the students behavior. The act of monitoring, just like in the classroom, can positively effect the students behavior. Likewise, constantly monitoring the use and effectiveness of the material is called formative assessment, which is not only beneficial but also required if you are going to give a student the unique educational experience that everyone seems to be clamoring for.

So this is not necessarily like Disney tracking every move of the six year old children. If this is a legitimate educational service, and they violate the privacy of students, even if the students are over 13 years old(and Disney is free to do whatever they want with 13 year old children), they are in violation of federal laws protecting the privacy of students. This does not mean they cannot collect data, it just means they are limited in how they can use it, and who can see it.

Obviously. I have few issues with my machines that are remotely managed, and appreciate the ease that policies can be managed. However, it is not a perfect system and did recently have a machine go down because an error occurred during such an update. Any machine I have that is managed this way either is not used for real work, or is backed up constantly under the assumption that it will be unusable at any minute.

merchants from worries of fraudulent chargebacks,

What keeps merchants from excessive fraudulent chargebacks is providing a clearly defined product or service, with a clearly defined return policy, and good customer service.

Bitpay is a US company and as such is under US laws. You can bet that at some point someone will spoof a payment through bitpay at a clueless retailer, sue Bitpay, and Bitpay will sue the retailer. It could even be a fraudulent suit, but if the security measures are not there to insure that bitcoins are secure, and accounts are not accidentally wiped out, lawsuits will happen. And we have seen with Mt Gox that even though bitcoins are supposed to be decentralized, it is still subject to a single point of failure.

Remember when Paypal promised the same thing. A secure way to pay an untrusted party for goods and services, better than a credit card? Remember how Paypal prevented access to seller accounts if the buyer complained? Did not seem so good of a deal then, did it?

pretty much. Or hire more gay men. Or just accept the misogynistic nature of places like this in the northwest and provide furnished apartments.

I would add an old book, Composite/Structured design. It is an old idea, but I have seen cases where people still have learned to keep data structures out of the code that operates on those data structures. If one is using a heavily OO development tool, this happens automatically. Of course, those who use such tool therefore never learn how to design so that the two are kept apart purposefully.

Also if you are a C++ program, the original K&R C book is a good read of how to keep things simple.

Both of these are short books, with a high ROI.

It is interesting that so many call this 'pseudo science.' Black holes fell out equations, and we really don't know if black holes exist or are at the center of galaxies. All we know is that if we assume black holes exists and are described as the math predicts, many things do fall into place consistent with these predictions.

But black holes have issues and have caused many more questions than answered. Some observations are consistent with the mathematics, but the math leads to some confusing conclusions. Other things come out of the math, and the only reason we dismiss them is that data is not consistent with the predictions. If there is data consistent with predictions, then such things at least deserve the consideration that black holes have received.