Its kind of hard to list all the prerequisites for everything. Especially since by the time you'd hit AI in any college course, you'd have taken probability and calculus years ago. Do I need to list understanding of the scientific method as a prerequisite for chem 300? The ability to read and write? There is a baseline knowledge you just have to assume- that's why you generally need to take the baseline courses like calc first in college.

What you can't do is take the math out- doing so waters down the course and makes it less usable for those who do have the knowledge, and gives you an incomplete understanding. Far better to have a few drop do to not understanding the math than to not provide the knowledge the course needs to in order to pass them.

Your metric needs improvement too. Cut off the employer part. No employer needs someone to take a MOOC in history, music theory, etc. Yet they exist and people love them. The real metric for success is how many people are able to learn about a field that under other circumstances they never could. Whether they ever use that knowledge, professionally or personally, isn't relevant.

Depends on how you define success. If you define success as being a replacement for college, you're right. They aren't, and likely never will be that. If by success you mean a place where motivated adults can learn about a subject without the costs and commitment of a degree program then they're a rousing success. And that's where the people who start MOOCs went wrong- they were thinking of them as college replacements. Think of them as adult learning at a university level for people who don't plan on making a career out of the knowledge, or for people who want to study a subfield they didn't in college. At that level they work very well. And if someone drops the course its no big deal- they just decided they didn't need it/want it after all.

Records of human civilization go back over 3000 years. Industrial civilization goes back less than 200. A good starting point is the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, the first non-demo steam passenger railway. There were earlier locomotives, but this is the moment the industrial revolution got out of beta and started changing people's lives.

Only in the last 80 years or so has human exploitation of natural resources been able to significantly deplete them. Prior to WWII, human efforts just couldn't make a big dent in the planet. Things have picked up since then.

There are lots of arguments over when we start running out of key resource. But the arguments are over decades, not centuries or millenia. The USGS issues mineral commodity summaries. There are decades of resources left for most minerals, but a lot of things run out within 200 years. Mining lower and lower grade ores requires more and more effort and energy. For many minerals, that's already happened. People once found gold nuggets on the surface of the earth. The deepest gold mine is now 4 miles deep.

For many minerals, the easy to extract ores were used up long ago. Industrial civilization got going based on copper, lead, iron, and coal found in high concentrations on or near the surface. All those resources were mined first, and are gone. You only get one chance at industrial civilization per planet.

Civilization can go on, but it will have to be more bio-based than mining-based. Energy isn't the problem; there are renewable sources of energy. Metals can be recycled, but you lose some every round. It's not clear what this planet will look like in a thousand years. It's clear that a lot of things will be scarcer.

(And no, asteroid mining probably won't help much.)

Right. Especially since, when you're looking at your smartphone, it's looking back at you.

This would be valuable for vehicle driver speech input, which has to reject a lot of noise.

No, what I was pointing out is that as "deregulation" was done where I'm painfully familiar with how it worked out (namely, Montana and California), said "deregulation" was a crock, and did nothing but increase costs for the hapless consumers. And I speculate that absent this bogus "deregulation", alt-energy might have been a lot more cost-competitive -- without raising prices on conventional-fuel energy.

In other words, they're doing exactly the inverse of the occasional U.S. states' so-called "deregulation", which in practice amounted to "sell off all our infrastructure to foreign investors, then buy back the product at an inflated price." Guess Germany figured out this doesn't work so well after all.

As I say above, that "green" energy might not be so expensive in a market that's not been "deregulated" in this fashion.

And another, which I forgot to put in the previous post:

http://4thst8.wordpress.com/20...

Also, cost in the U.S. varies as much as it does in the rest of the world. In California, it's closer to 25c/KWH (nominally it's lower, but you get into a higher rate tier at a level that would power one light bulb, and it goes up from there).... one of the "greenest" states. But the real problem is the so-called deregulation, not the energy source. Absent deregulation (aka "sell all our power generation facilities to foreign investors, who then charge us through the nose") the "green" energy might not wind up being that much more costly to the consumer.

On that note, an opinion piece on Nevada's 'encouragement' for Tesla's new plant:

http://4thst8.wordpress.com/20...

Surely the Android version would be the more appropriate.

Here's the top hits in order for me:

Sherrif's office- http://www.teamdane.com/Securi...

Simply hired- clicking through shows that nothing on the first page of results actually calls the job that- the first results are signal support systems specialist, Sr client support specialist, field technician support specialist, Mac Support Specialist, and a SOX compliance officer.

Another link to Dane County

Another job site, a similar mix of results none of which actually use that title, although these tend to match the word security rather than support specialist

And finally a Cisco cert, for those who still give a shit about such things.

And a glass door salary link which shows two people nationwide using that title both at USAA.

Yeah, made up title.

Ghosting takes minutes. Even doing analysis to figure out what's wrong would take far more than the entire process. And if you really have everything automated to the point it can be done in 15-30 minutes, then there's no human input at all- your job is a script that can run nightly on each machine, with 1 guy to update the files the script pulls.

Sys admin? I'm a programmer. Don't have the temperment to be a sysadmin, I'd be miserable at it. I know exactly what dev ops is, I was in the room when a former boss said they were firing the sys admins and we were all now dev ops. It was a miserable experience all around. And that's exactly what devops is 90% of the time- its taking programmers and sticking them with the support job too. Maybe at some place once it worked differently and they really hired for a specific hybrid role- but don't kid yourself its the majority of the time. Usually its just the programmer who can most be spared from the real coding.

Given the relative densities of gold and water, you might want to reconsider that plan ;^)