(in your view) have on the cost of a four year degree in the next 20 years? I am not speaking directly in context of Khan academy - but online courses in general at universities - as well.

Traditionally, the cost of a course is divided between the limited physically present students. With the advent of online universities and courses, that cost can be divided across students across many geographical boundaries. A student in his parent's basement in Malawi could theoretically take a Political Science course at Stanford. This has many advantages:

a) Universities can educate more students per semester per course - so they bring in more revenue.
b) Students don't have to pay for room and board - so it reduces the direct burden on the students.
c) Deserving students can take courses without having to go through the hell of getting a US visa.

For degrees (like Computer Science) that don't need much laboratory work (that you need to be physically present for), it seems to me that the cost of education should actually start to come down drastically with online courses - but I know I am missing something and big education is going to work hard to keep the fees up.

I use windows live sync to synchronize one main folder (to rule them all) across all my machines. Then, from one of the machines, I periodically dump that folder onto a NAS. On the NAS I have a script running that does snapshot backups (like time machine) of that folder. Losing data from an accidental delete is far more likely than a hard drive crashing.

The only disadvantage is that the machine that dumps to my NAS has to be at home on my local LAN.

I am thinking of trying out Synology's DSM 4.0: http://www.synology.com/dsm/index.php?lang=enu

If it claims to do what they say it does, it should be like my own dropbox in the cloud. Then I can sync my one main folder across all my machines and my NAS. This eliminates the need for windows live sync - and I don't have to be at home to dump data to the NAS. I can also setup a script to make periodic snapshots of the folder. The only issue is currently the synology only has windows clients - and all my machines are macs... so I am still waiting to pull the trigger.

...on adding actually useful features like built-in HD tele-presence (integrated with skype and/or google talk).

3D is a fad that, to me, adds very little value to the tv watching experience. Many noted movie critics have already called for the death of 3D. For instance:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/04/30/why-i-hate-3-d-and-you-should-too.html

...specifically Bahrain, and they are now replacing their roundabouts with traffic light squares...

Roundabouts get specifically confusing when there are three lanes. The tricky part is say you want to take the left (third) exit at a three lane roundabout. You have to start out in the innermost lane, because that is the left lane, and then after you cross the first and second exit, you have to move into the right most lane. Now this is hard to do while you are driving around in a circle. People can't even change lanes safely on a straight road. Also, other people on the roundabout are playing the same musical chairs with the lanes to get off on their respective exits and there are some possible deadlock situations.

Also, in Bahrain when people take a driving test, the roundabout is one of the most dreaded parts. Its right up there with parallel parking.

I personally think Americans need to work on making roads safer not cheaper and faster.

Asking the slashdot community what wifi security protocol they employ for their home wireless network. I would be interested to see how many people are not on some variant of WPA2.

What I was trying to say was that the UI looks like crap over VNC.

If you try it, you will notice small dots all over the screen. Here is one example screenshot I found: http://www.vigneras.name/pierre/wp/wp-content/uploads/screenshot5.png

Natively, I find the KDE4 UI very nice. A little futuristic, but nice. On older systems it runs slow. To me, the UI improvements from 3.5.X to KDE4 are not worth the loss of critical features like being able to run on old hardware, and being able to run out of the box over VNC.

because KDE4's new graphical UI (plasma is it?) is CPU intensive and does not run smoothly on old hardware - which is where I usually install linux on.

oh, that and the fact that you cant run a vncserver on kde 4, because once again the graphical UI, looks like crap: http://forum.kde.org/brainstorm.php#idea90400_page1

...probably have a universal remote. What xbmc really needs is just a USB receiver. I wonder if they sell that receiver separately.

Also, from a hardware design perspective that receiver looks rather small. I think you would want to build this to have a very wide IR receiving angle. I would be interested in seeing this thing get tested in the real world.

Even with this remote, you may or may not be able to turn off/on your xbmc system from it. That depends on your motherboard/BIOS/processor.

I think, what XBMC really needs is official hardware, with a built in RF, IR receiver.

I am already there.

ps3buntu...

1) Every piece of data you sync has to _also_ be synced online. So, then you're restricted to the amount of online storage you pay for.
What if you want to sync tonnes of storage between computer(s), and only sync a small amount of stuff online. This is not supported in dropbox, and I don't think ever will be because marketing won't want it to change. Today I use Windows live sync (or live mesh) for this purpose and it works.

2) The last time I checked, you could only sync one folder. The drop box folder. They cannot sync multiple folders: http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=5088
This is just lame. I don't think people would like to change their backup directory structure to comply with dropbox's basic/naive/bad design decisions.

because KDE 4.X was _not_ designed to work over VNC: http://forum.kde.org/brainstorm.php#idea90400