yes, if you want to do fringe things that no one else in the community is interested in, then a community-supported system is a bad choice. surprise!

People tend to focus on surface issues when considering how traditional Higher Education (HE) will relate to Online Education (OE). Things like the concept of lectures, or the character of universities if research and teaching are severed.

But much of the value (and much of an instructor's effort) actually goes toward establishing some measure of competency of the student: a grade. Other comments here have mentioned Honor Code, for instance, but that's not so much a problem as simply an attempt to ensure that a face-to-face course's grading is accurately assigning competence to individuals. for OE, it's even more natural to seek some form of collaborative learning (or outside assistance), especially if the OE course is self-paced. And really, why shouldn't a student simply continue to take the OE course until they are competent (or give up)? In which case, the import of an OE course is mainly in the competency testing - it's certification aspect.

So, is certification the way that traditional HE institutions become relevant to the future where everything is OE?

The point is the new register set. Registers being wider is a happy side-effect, as is greater virtual address space. But the main point of AMD64 is more registers. and it started a sequence of ISA extensions that have dramatically improved compute-bound throughput via SIMD.

as a bit of a strawman, I'm suggesting that we IT people have a moral obligation to get involved in projects like this. sort of the way doctors are obliged to help any patient that presents, regardless of who they are or what they've done.

these sort of megaprojects seem to be self-justifying in some weird way: managers who don't know what they're doing adopt an incredibly conservative attitude toward risk management when any large project is proposed. once that phase-space is entered, it's an upward spiral to oblivion, since the project becomes more and more scary, and gains a kind of management momentum. the event horizon is when it exceeds the fear threshold of the strongest and/or highest-up manager.

a major part of the problem is that these projects happen in a domain where money is funny - a bit made up, subject to arbitrary stretching (or inflation). certainly governments, but certain kinds of businesses, and definitely public institutions. (the higher ed landscape is littered with smoking radioactive craters of failed ERP projects.)

typically these projects are considered internal - improving the business process, and so not really offered for public review. but maybe that shouldn't be the case, at least for branches of government.

there are differences between possessing the means to commit a crime, publicly threatening a crime, and actually committing a crime.

"uttering threats" is broadly defined. so keep your homicidal thoughts entirely to yourself.

no, you are wrong. pretend or rehearsal assault is a serious mental problem. protective over-reaction is just a quantitative issue - not reacting at all, OTOH, would indicate a huge problem with the school.

you can get FBI UCR data yourself and plot it. violent crime peaked in 91/92 and is about half that value now (per-capita - though this normalization doesn't make much difference.) the interesting thing about the UCR data is that most of those numbers are "aggravated assault" - not a happy-fun thing, but the homicide rate is only a tiny fraction of the total. the robbery rate has stayed about half the assult rate since 1990, though before that they tracked closer. rape is also included in the violent-crime total, though it's obviously under-reported.

homicide is probably the metric most relevant to this story. it has indeed fallen dramatically.

no. "nonviolent stress relief" is taking up weightlifting or meditation. virtually shooting people, *real* people, is what we call "rehersal".

in the apple world, it's normal to tune for particular screen pixel-counts. in all of the rest of the world, mobile and not, from the mists of time forward, people simply treat screen size as a parameter. it's called "responsive", and all it means is that your app adjusts parametrically, so you don't have to customize it for every possible screen pixel dimension.

in otherwords, BOFH. PBS thinks it has competent computer people, but doesn't.

the remarkable thing about all this 3d-printed-gun excitement is that it's such a non-story. anyone with minimal motivation and dexterity could always have made their own, better guns. the only news is that a complete clutz can push "print".

so, why don't we control ammo? (actually, we do here in .ca - at least on Ontario, you need a firearms license to buy it.)

someone is making a killing, I think. the purchase cost of these computers should be under $30M total, and less than $3M/year to run.

where do people get their definition of supercomputer? a supercomputer is what you have when your compute needs are so large that they shape the hardware, network, building, power bill. this thing is just a smallish multicore chip, like many others (now and in the past!)

when the mil/gov spend a billion on some software project and it fails, we need to start calling it what it is: fraud perpetrated by consultant/contractors.

it's bad enough when the industry burns 10-50M on an ERP project for a company (or university!), but pretty soon those tens of millions add up to real money. spending a billion should be HARD!

normally, any system on the internet will receive lots of bruteforce ssh scans, using password authentication. I wonder if this botch means that Bad Guys will be scanning with publickey as well. (obviously, the set of known and interesting private keys is much less effective than the usual catalog of common passwords...)