Agreed, the quality has a long way to go. I've signed up for three or four online courses but the only one I completed was an excellent, well-polished and complete introduction to MongoDB (not exactly a college-level course, but very well presented). A video classroom needs to be even better than a personal classroom and so far the average product quality is decidedly subpar.

Dude, this is Slashdot, people here will never ever agree that getting an education can help your career. Around here, the mythology is that super-genius programmers don't need any education at all, and anyone who isn't a super-genius programmer can go to hell because they don't fit into the mythology.

As for me, my name-brand expensive education was hands-down the cheapest cost-per-value thing I've ever purchased by a long shot.

I agree. Although I wouldn't want economic interests to decide every immigration case, it seems to me that America should be greedily hoarding the smartest people in the world by offering them a ticket into our culture, paid for by attending a major university, excelling there, and working in the field afterwards. Why the hell would we give them our top-notch education and then afterwards not let them stick around to grow our economy? Sure, many foreign students will want to return home and help their homelands, and that's nice and all, but in the marketplace of nations I think we should be grabbing all the talent we can get our hands on.

If we don't do that we will be doomed to export our brightest candidates leading to a talent drain and resulting in a washed-up nation of uneducated pasty-white assholes. Well, I guess that's the Republican agenda so maybe it's not surprising.

Whenever I've asked a PhD who I met how they "advanced human knowledge of the field", they have giggled at my naiveté. Based on a number of those experiences, I now take that requirement as not at all literal. Some PhDs advance the field; most don't.

I've long heard suicide described as the only action which is illegal to attempt, but not to succeed at. The reason attempted suicide is illegal is because society judges that only a mentally ill person would do it, so we use criminal law as a wedge to force a person to get help. Obviously this is at odds with euthanasia so society has been discussing that for a generation or more.

Oh, goodness no, if they deleted the Geocities data then they did a laudable favor to future generations. I had a Geocities site, it was stupid, and if it's totally gone then I'm glad.

That's a good answer, thank you, but I still have to wonder:

an immediate termination of your work contract, you'd lose your severance, and the first 6 weeks of unemployment help

What I really meant is what happens when an employee wants to leave for a new job. In that case, of course termination of the work contract is what you want, you wouldn't be getting any severance because you are quitting not getting fired, and you don't qualify for unemployment because you are going to a new job.

That leaves two things: the black mark of contract breach (a fair point) and legal liability (definitely a fair point). How often do people get sued? Would employers prefer to have the new employee they want, or prefer am employee that cleaves to severance periods?

Is MS Word in a browser inherently better or just different?

If it's the same in every way except that it's inside a browser, then it's inherently better.

Webapps have pushed usability a good 20 years back.

In 2005, webapps had pushed usability back about 15 years but had pushed accessibility forward about fifty years. That was the tradeoff. In 2013, webapps have pushed usability back about 10 years, and maintain that fifty years of accessibility. In 2020, they will have pushed usability back zero, and we'll still have that fifty years. Not all new technology is 100% as good as old technology in every single way; typically it is better in some ways, less good in other ways, and improves over time.

Do you mean a website?

Nope, that's not what it means. Do you really not know that? Are you sure you belong on Slashdot? I mean, you're welcome to hang out and we'll try to educate you but you could help yourself get up to speed by looking up terms you don't understand before asking about them.

Back in the day, the web was a fast, simple, stateless request/response document retrieval system.

You forgot "and useless for anything but looking at plain text documents". On today's web, almost nobody ever looks at a plain text document, so it strikes me as pretty silly to pine for that web.

Do you have any complaints about it that don't boil down to "I hate dynamic languages" or "classes are the one true way to do oop".

Maybe he does, but he doesn't need any, because those two reasons are more than enough.

Maybe we're talking about different things, but

How is your install base not ALSO zero?

It's not also zero because one hundred million people (more, actually) don't have to install any software to run your app. The software required, a web browser, is already installed on their computer. If you make a smartphone app or a desktop application users have to install your app to run it.

It's not typical because most people are interchangeable. Even we programmers (if that is also what you do) are interchangeable. Sure, I know my work and the code better than a new guy would, but my boss would have no problem finding another Java jockey.

People who aren't interchangeable have the word "necessary" or "essential" in their employment contract -- as in "this employee is necessary for business operations". I don't have either of those words in mine, nor do most people who have employment contracts, and a large majority of workers don't have employment contracts at all.

Only a half a percent or so of workers are not interchangeable. Not everyone can fit into that half a percent so I think it's a little disingenuous to tell people to fix that within themselves.

I don't understand the hypothetical situation you describe. You did quit. Why would they need to fire you or try to lie to say you quit?