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.

I can confirm the resource greediness issues with VS2010. Featurewise, it's really very nice - the code window is great; the tooltip objectbrowser dealie is great. With few exceptions however, e.g. adding references to a project is now loads faster, it generally a sluggish hog compared to VS2008. I would wait for SP1 before putting it on your laptop. That said, all of the above is for versions with the development tools, i.e. using the VS2010 shell with only the Team Foundation Server Client is pretty snappy.

Isn't the increase in volume how Tivo know what are commercials to skip them? If so, isn't this what advertisers would want to do anyways?

Isn't this article about .NET running on Android? Is there going to be a Java or even C/C++ based stock exchange running on people's phones soon? It seems fairly clear that the OP was suggesting quality software of any scale could not be written in .NET.

I am well aware that the London Stock Exchange crash. You must be new to this article. I am not comparing desktop or UI software to a stock exchange. I mention desktop and UI software because the article is about running .NET code on Android and the OP asked if anyone could write stable fast software on .NET. I would say it is fairly safe to say we won't be seeing any stock exchanges running on an Android device any time really soon, in .NET or otherwise, so I assume he wasn't suggesting that since the London Stock Exchange failed, nothing of that scale could be capably achieved on Android in .NET.

These guys for one. Or these folks. And these people. This is supposed to be very good. Also, these guys. Seriously, you could have just said you don't know anything about the capabilities of .NET in the first place. Or you could have just said nothing at all.

I am a developer and I would never want production access and cannot understand why any sane developer would. I do not want there to be any chance that the script I run to clean out the Customers table on the development database could ever be accidentally run on production. Forgetting if it encourages sloppy practices, even if your development practices are excellent, any sane developer would always want to be able to say with absolute certainty that they did nothing to hose production, even mistakenly, because they simply do not have access. It must be the sysads fault.

Um. You're wrong. Even if I didn't distinctly remember it and you don't trust the wiki, other sources say the same.