and completely wrong. The Stats course was a disaster. Mr. Thrun should stick to advanced level instruction. I owe a lot to Udacity. Some of the courses there are great; a few are stellar. David Evans is magician. Wesley Weimer was stellar. And Steve Huffman did a great job. The classes are only as good as the teachers.

I am a middle aged, self-taught programmer/technologist who dropped out of math way, way too early. There's a ceiling to my ladder of growth in this, and that ceiling is math. I'm making my way through all the math videos on Khan--been at it for a half year or so-- and am starting to see cracks in the ceiling. He's an excellent teacher and there's a vast math playlist there. All this talk about KA's role in replacing/supplementing formal education obscures the concrete reality of there now being an unprecedented resource on-line for learning and self-empowerment. Also, little noted is just how good a teacher Khan really is. He's clear, humble, knowledgeable and very much into providing the intuition in addition to the mechanics. I thank G-d for Khan Academy everyday.

I'm a year long slashdot lurker and have posted 3 or 4 AC comments that didn't work out so much. I just created this account, and my first post is pro ms, so that means that I am being paid by MS to misinform. That out of the way, I do like the latest and greatest tech toys but have held off from tablets, because I want a tablet that extends my laptop into full mobile space. I don't consume entertainment so the current tablets do nothing for me. Mr. Cook's brazenly stupid 'toaster refridgerator' nonsense brought me out of hiding and prompted me to create an account, finally, and post. Most people want tablets to do what their laptop does. They settle for less, but that's what they want, even if they can't articulate it. Apple doesn't want to provide it to them. Apple would have deprived the iphone form MP3 playback capabilty if they could have gotten away with it, but they couldn't get away with it. And the ipod is dead/dying. Apple OS could provide a full fledge computing experience on the tablet, but they do not want to. They actually want not to. So they can sell 2 products. Android OS isn't robust enough to provide the full fledge computing experience. Microsoft, like Apple, can do it. And it doesn't contradict their MO to do so (thought they are so all over the place nowdays trying, I think, to copy Apple that it's hard to know what their MO really is). So now they are coming out with an i86 tablet with a fold up keyboard. Thank G-d, finally. Apple says 'toasters...' I hope Apple fails.