Harsh. Tell a student to do Linux from scratch, he will find it intimidating. I assume most failed in the first few attempts, back when they was no video option. Show him a video of it once, he will find it much less intimidating. Video has its place.

Another thing is: you need "good written instructions", as you say. Not everyone can write good instructions. But just about anyone can show. Creating install videos does not require as much skill because a lot of information is informally and implicitly encoded in the demo.

> Perhaps if you can't appreciate a mathematical subject as it is presented in its dry text form, then it isn't something you are likely to ever understand

I dunno. I find animations of mathematical concepts to be quite effective in communicating the intuition behind them, much better than text.

Perhaps, you just haven't seen good use of multimedia.

> I think one of the problems with the video format is that it entices you into being passive

I prefer videos over lectures. The reason is that I can pause them, replay them, for technical stuff, try things out.

You might say: Well, you can do that with a book. For me, the lecture uses a more approachable language than the more formal format of the book (good for further exploration and lookups). A video demonstration is just more compact and more effective because it is multi-modal, than the full description in text.

> because the three forms crowd each other out.

In a well-done presentation, they are complementary... multi-modal.

I find the MOOC format very suitable for my needs and I have consumed dozens. The lecture is a very different format from a book and is intended for very different purposes. Like most people, I prefer lectures to begin with and move to books for further detail.

> requires to watch the complete segment before realising it was not what I was looking for.

Videos are not meant for piece meal consumption, for stuff you already know... more or less... and are of course not intended for information lookup, if that is how you have been using them. You don't attend a classroom to look for stuff. An online course is no different. You attend it when you make a full commitment to learn a topic as defined by the lecturer.

What I don't understand is: How is your problem with MOOCs any different from any Distance Education lecture delivery, Great Lectures or simply classroom format (with a large enough audience where you cannot interrupt the Prof to ask questions). You could say: just read the book for all of those as well. Do you just dislike lectures in general? Would you say that Feynman lectures are a waste of time when you could have simply read a book?

I am not looking for guesswork or assumptions, just data. Indeed.com says that mobile devs are paid 100K based on the jobs advertised with them. I wanted to know how much independent devs were making when they were doing it alone. Perhaps, there is no data available for it yet. I do know that part-time devs don't make very much from anecdotes; but most seemed content as they regarded it as a supplemental income.

> When most mobile developers make 1/5th or 1/10th minimum wage

Are you quoting any particular study? I was wondering how much an independent mobile developer, working alone, fulltime, makes on average, per month.

> the open source presentation software situation is pretty disappointing at the moment, and giving presentations is a pretty critical part of the job.

How so? How is Impress that disappointing? Academics are not marketers. They don't care about bells and whistles in their presentations. I got through my PhD just fine with black on white slides with no effects whatsoever. Content is king. Even PDF presentations are sufficient. The open source presentation solutions may not be top of the line, but they are certainly adequate.

Indeed. Going by cumulative CO2 emissions since industrialization, US + EU contributed the bulk of the load (US + EU - 51%, China - 9%, India – 3%). So, by the logic of DigiShaman logic, and I fully agree with it when taken in a nation-state sense, the bulk of the burden must be borne by wealthy elite: Citizens of US and EU.

First, it is a question of what the right thing to do is for the planet. It's not a question of doing the opposite of what the rich say. Second, all the rich are not for carbon taxes. Like everyone else, some are for it, some are against it.

Fine, bow to no man, I'm with that (and I get the carbon comedy of the recent climate conference). But do you bow to rationality?... given that the current scientific consensus is that we ought to be burning less carbon? Also, the rich will be the last to be effected by global warming. The poorest of the poor will be first effected, you and I will be next, the uber rich will be the last effected.

> rest of us having to cut back on our resource usage

Right. That's the point of it. Resource conservation... across all humans... you and I included. You have a problem because it is not socialism?!!

> The treatment consists of tricking someone into thinking they're going to get better. Occasionally, this will psychosomatically heal them.

A Homeopath does not believe that he is giving a placebo. He is not trying to get psychosomatic effects. He actually believes and argues that his medicine is chemically working.

Also, occasionally healing something just not make it a medicine. That just accounts for margin of error in probability theory.

If we use your logic and standards of evidence, every superstitious practice on disease ever devised qualifies as medicine.

Its just a polite way of saying it does not work. Also, logically, "no more effective than a placebo" does not necessarily mean: as effective as a placebo.

In that case, the product will just flop. There is no way you can tell the mass market to "Try Dramamine". A small enthusiast community will put up with a lot, but that will hardly provide the critical mass it needs.

This is really a communal conflict, rather than a religious conflict. But then again, that is the case with a few other so-called religious conflicts today.

Even with these riots, it is still difficult to paint Buddhism or Buddha as hostile. The rioters are not at all drawing from any religious teachings. In case of Abrahamic religions, the perps can quote scripture as justification. I don't think there is anything similar in Buddhism.

To add to what others wrote about his coming back, it should also be noted that he was a prince and an heir to the throne. It wasn't as if he abandoned his wife and child to destitution. Add to the fact that ancient and medieval royal marriages were nothing like today's.

Yes, but I would argue that Windows was not heavy even back then. In my tests, XP consumed a little less than 60 MB of RAM with unnecessary services turned off. In 2000, Linux certainly consumed less than that, but mainstream Linux desktops got more heavy than that fairly quickly. Most average Windows users had sluggish desktops because they had too many programs that put themselves in startup, rather than with the Win OS itself being bloated or sluggish. Vista did become a bloat, which was an exception rather than the norm. Win 7 quickly corrected that.

I am not arguing with the point that Linux can be as bloated as Windows or more. My KDE desktop is certainly not more responsive than my Windows boot. I am just saying that this is not a new thing.

And it was always the case that regardless of how much better Linux got with hardware support, Windows generally had it better.