Right, I agree, there may be some ease of use by having it built-in and officially supported, but I think the failure rate of Siri to this point has perhaps rendered that moot. In this case: doesn't work? Join the club, it's failing for many.

To be fair, saying that Siri is better than Android's voice functionality is not really a meaningful comparison of device capability. It is more a comparison of out of the box capability; there are several applications out there, Edwin and Vlingo are free examples, that provide very similar functionality for Android phones. And, of course, that is all Siri is: a 3rd party application for iOS available for some time, that Apple bought and pre-installed on their newer devices and is no longer available for their older devices. It is a marketing approach to convince people of the inherent superiority of the device based on it's bundled software, but not anything to do with actual capability. And that may well have some merit for ease of use, but the rather disappointing failure rate of Siri to date probably mitigates that ease of use.

xkcd reference

By what definition? I provided no definition. But the provision of air is not a cost directly paid by anyone and would be hard to pin down. The costs of providing a university education are explicit and well known and most decidedly not 'free' no matter if the government subsidizes it or not.

While it does sound more positive to say so, and is in the general case is probably the case, it would only be true to say that education is paid by those who have already received it if all those who currently pay to subsidize the formal, government provided education received a formal, government provided education. And in this case, that would be a formal, government provided, university education. It's a quibble, though; what you say is the more likely case.

No, digital education is not new. But are you suggesting that there are no resources involved in providing it? No professors spending time creating the material and reviewing the coursework of the students? No costs of providing the online bandwidth? No costs of providing the student with the tools and environment in which to learn?

I think the grade and the associated credits do matter. Otherwise, Stanford would have some explaining to do as to why they are still charging people for those things.

To be fair, I think it is neat that they are allowing people to view their course material and provide feedback to people attempting to learn the material. In this case this is Computer Science. However, in this case, there are already many existing resources, both offline and online, that can provide people with the ability to learn. The difference here is that some of those same materials are being provided by a renowned university. However, while the knowledge to be gained is not enhanced by that, the marketability of those who do get a grade and credit is.

Correction: In many parts of the world, the costs associated with university level educations provided to students are subsidized by those who are not attending university.

Correction: Free education would be something new, since finding a way to provide education without a cost of resources that could be applied elsewhere would be entirely unheard of.

These are not free courses. The ability to audit these courses is what is free. If you are not a Stanford student, you will receive neither credit nor a grade.

...in my opinion. To me, it seems clear that a good formal education is simply a vetting process. Specifically, a provision of a certification of work completed by an accredited, dispassionate entity. It has very little to do with teaching. Universities expect students to achieve passing grades in their classes regardless of how much or little the professors of those classes are interested in actively teaching versus simply requiring students to cover the material on their own. It also has very little to do with learning. Anyone can learn, say, architecture or mathematics independently of a university. While that is great it, in reality, means very little if there is no one can verify that you did in fact learn it, i.e. no one is going to have you design their building just because you say you know how. While employers or even universities (for advanced degrees) could attempt to verify this knowledge independently, it costs a lot of money and quality of that would be all over the board. However, universities really can't say that students learned the material, either. They can just say that students completed work that should require knowledge of that material. This is why cheating wrecks the system, i.e. it is a way to complete the work without the knowledge.

Universities exist for this verification process and are accredited based on the quality of this verification process. That is, they are not just trying to be greedy or hoard knowledge nor are they trying to provide great environments and contacts and experiences. Rather, when they issue a degree they are signing off on a person. If that person doesn't know what they said the person should, it diminishes the perceived quality of their degree.

The point: it is very difficult, and costly, to provide the same quality of verification with online classes as you can with face to face classes. Cheating becomes a much more prevalent factor. Getting more and more students through the courses increases the likelihood that a false positive will be issued. Evaluating a student's commitment to their education is more difficult when it is impossible to determine how much time the student has spent "in class", i.e. viewing lectures. And more. This is why universities hesitate to go that route.

I think you have missed the point as well. WrongSizeGlass was not saying that Macs are secure because they are less prevalent but rather they are less vulnerable because they are less prevalent. You seem to be conflating the two concepts of vulnerability and security. Vulnerability is the possibility of attack and security is how well such an attack may be thwarted. Attacking more prevalent systems provides a much greater reward of exploit. This makes the most popular operating system far more vulnerable, that is more likely to be attacked, regardless of whether or not it is more or less secure than any other.

The real canard here is what WrongSizeGlass alluded to: the notion that Macs are less vulnerable because they are more secure. They could be more secure, but they are less vulnerable because they are less prevalent.

You have been invited

You, sir, are awesome. I will send an invite to the first to reply to this.

Say, could you pass along an invite to obijuanvaldez rabbit hotmail.com (replacing any animal with @)? That would be cool.

I read the article as well. The summary is completely wrong, but I think you missed something. The law doesn't mean that the information must be stored plaintext somewhere. The law seems to just require that a plaintext password be obtainable by authorities upon demand. That would mean Google or whomever could keep things like passwords encrypted and decrypt when asked.