I can't. Not even close (unless I limit bittorrent to next to nothing for download speed). It depends on where in the US you're located.

I agree wholeheartedly, his treatment was horrible.

I can't help but think there's a lot more to the story though that he's probably not even aware of.

A lot of different agencies/people were involved in trying to stop him from something. What that was, who knows? Even if any of those agencies had no concept of a budget, that's still a lot of individual people and time thrown at a suspected problem. Someone went so far as to search his apartment while he was away. For what?

It'd be nice if all these agencies had to be accountable for their actions, documenting everything they did along the way. But they're not, and until they are, stuff like this is going to continue.

As an IT consultant, I'm willing to bet that you also cart around a case/keyboard. That's really no different than a netbook.

With a keyboard, it really doesn't matter what the OS is. They all function admirably enough to get work done. But if you're relying solely on the on-screen keyboard, you're probably not nearly as productive as you think you are.

You're thinking of thinkgeek.com.

Joking, but I wouldn't be surprised to see something like that in their store at some point. I'm amazed they're still in business.

Try hanging out in some of the language-learning forums sometime. Many, many self-diagnosed Asperger's people hand out in them.

For some reason, they think that appearing to have Asperger's gives them an edge in how others view their intelligence and ease in learning foreign languages.

"Ooh! Hey look! I'm just like Daniel Tammet. I must have Asperger's."

Has the common core standard even been finalized yet? According to one of the links in TFS it hasn't. I suppose it could be by 2014, but knowing the bureaucracy involved in both the standard itself and the LAUSD, I have my doubts.

I don't miss being in that profession at all. The money was great, but it got to a point that it wasn't enough to compensate for all the 24/7 shit I put up with.

And it's been happening in rural America forever.

My mailbox is a quarter of a mile away from my house. I have no problem taking a walk to get it. As it is, I don't go every day, because all my bills are paid online. Every single bill. So the only time I need to go to the mailbox is when I know I'll be receiving something. All the junk mail gets tossed. Any large packages go through UPS or FedEx.

In the winter I'll sometimes slap on some skis and trek to the mailbox, if I haven't gotten the chance to get the road plowed yet (it happens somewhat frequently in Northern Wisconsin in the winter). Add to the fact that AARP tells me I'm a senior citizen.

We've become a nation of lazy fat asses that can't think or do anything for ourselves.

If you go back to my original post, I wasn't upset at not receiving a certificate. I learned quite a bit from the course. The point I was trying to make was that if I had paid money to take a class for credit, only to be shut out by a technical issue that was clearly the fault of Coursera/U of Toronto policies, I would have been out of luck. I also posited whether the percentage of the no-pass rate for UCSJ/Udacity could have had anything to do with technical issues.

The article isn't specific as to *why* the percentage was what it was.

I don't have the link handy at the moment, but the Coursera failure made news in the Canadian press at the time. The course I took wasn't for transferable credit, so I wasn't out any money, just time.

Regardless, you can't put a failure like that on the student. It rested squarely on the shoulders of Coursera and the U of Toronto for its policies.

Yeah, see, that's the problem right there. That's not the answer. Making sure that technical issues aren't a problem is key for any of these MOOCs to work, whether it's Udacity, Coursera, edX or any other platform, particularly if it's for real, transferable college credit.

Telling people to "just take it again" because the platform fucked up is just going to drive students elsewhere.

I completed a course through Coursera from the University of Toronto. It was a good course, and I enjoyed it. Learned a lot from the course. In the final week of the course (it wasn't a free-for-all - I had to register for the course and complete it, with tests every week, during and eight week period set but the U of Toronoto), there was an exam that would make up 50 percent of my total grade. Coursera completely fell over that final week, and I wasn't able to gain access to the test until two days after the course deadline. So there went an otherwise good grade. They wouldn't allow any tests to be taken after the deadline, regardless of technical issues.

I had spent a total of around 40-45 hours with the course, 20 of those hours were video lectures that needed to be watched, the rest was study time. Even though all I would get from the course was a certificate of completion, I felt cheated and like I'd wasted a lot of my time for what was otherwise a good course.

Would I take another course? Maybe, but I know that if I were studying for transferable college credit, I would have been seriously pissed.

I wonder how much of the non-pass rate was due to issues other than actual class material in Udacity's case.

I couple years ago I bought an Acer Aspire One with Win7 loaded on it, but if I walk into a big box store, I only see Samsungs and Acer C7s (which are just rebadged netbooks from a year ago).

In many cases, they're not even "text versions" of the voice track - they're paraphrases of what's being spoken, using completely different words. I've seen some professionally done subtitling (as well as fan-created) that even changes the meaning of what's being said.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding... I get this feature with Gnome3/Gnome Shell, although I installed an extension to get a better version of it, called Workspace Navigator. It actually provides a better overview than Gnome2 did for me. If I forget what's where, I just hit the super key and can see what's running on each virtual desktop.

Truthfully, I like the idea of having extensions. I only install the functionality I need. I also like that I don't have to deal with Compiz in Gnome Shell. While it was fine with earlier versions of Ubuntu, the version of Compiz that ships with Ubuntu (at least with 12.04) is really garbage.