I received an under graduate and master’s degree from traditional universities. I also received two masters’ degrees through on-line classes. In my opinion programs like edX are the future of education, but on-line degrees are still not regarded with the same level of prestige as those received through traditional education. In part this has been due to questionable practices of some on-line educational institutions. How can this perception be changed and do you have and do you have any plans in that regard?

The cost of college education has been growing at an unsustainable rate. What do you think the underlying cause is and what effect will programs like edX have?

So we added comments to your comments, so now you can comment on your comments.

I got my CS degree in the late 80s and there were only a handful of women in the program. My son is majoring in CS now and I don't think the ratio has really changed the much over the past 25 years. That's just my observations the actual data seems to suggest that it was about 30% when I was in school and it's around 12% now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing.

I'm pretty sure you will find correlation between the Y chromosome and violence.

They aren't putting your entire genome into the database. They only collect 13 specific markers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CODIS). The possibility that one of these markers is tied to a genetic disease is possible as referenced in Wikipedia. What you can determine from the DNA doesn't appear to be any greater than the information available in a photograph. DNA reveals non visible information, but a lot more information can be gleaned from a photograph.

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/03/flash-to-html5-conversion-tool-on-adobe-labs.html

Despite everyone's hatred of Flash, it exists because there was no other way to get that type of functionality on the Web until relatively recently. I remember when FutureSplash came out in 1995 and it was very impressive compared to state of what you could do on the Web at the time. When Macromedia added the programming capability it was even more impressive. However, the time has come to move on to next great thing. Such is the way of technology.

The point of organic farming it to charge more for your crops. Farming is a business.

My wife got a Ph.D. in molecular biology. She did a postdoc and NIH and then started to look for job. She wanted to be a professor at a University. After talking to some of the recruiters at Universities we found out they were getting hundreds of resumes for each position. In addition, the research field is brutal. You constantly struggle for grant money and tenure is pretty much a thing of the past. Universities want you to come in with grants, they take half the money, then they boot you out if you lose your grants. You have to work crazy hours and be good at politics to succeed in science. It's a very stressful environment to be in. Another thing I ran into while doing research was that the number of teaching positions at Universities has gone up about 50% since 1960, however the number of Ph.D.s has gone up 500%. Of course there are commercial research positions as well, but at least in biotech there is a lot of turn over as companies come and go. She has friends that get laid off every couple years and spend six months to a year looking for a new job. There were also a lot of sales jobs where you go around and sell equipment to companies, which she didn't want to do. Do you really want to spend all that time in school to be a sales person? My wife eventually ended up with desk job with Genebank at NIH and no longer does research. Note that she was 31 by the time she got her first real job. That's a lot of time to put into education for not much reward. She is especially annoyed that she will never make as much money as I do in IT even though she has a doctorate degree and I have a master's in CS. We have encouraged our son not to go into science. Of course money may not be your primary motivation, but love of science tends to wane over the years.

I think that is the exact opposite of the approach described. Apple was more of a dictatorship than a democracy.

I thought Oracle owned all the Sun patents.

I'm afraid Google may have reached the tipping point. Companies generally start off with high goals and innovations, but they eventually degenerate into lumbering behemoths who's only goal is to squeeze every last penny out of their customers.

It wasn't shut down for no reason. Someone stole a laptop out of one of their airport offices with their entire customer list including all of their customer's private security information that the system required. Needless to say this resulted in a big privacy scandal and the company got smacked by the government and disappeared.

This is a clasic issue of business ethics and Friedman vs Freeman is typically cited. In "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits" Friedman argues that companies should act in their own self interest and the interest of their share holders. Social issue are only a concern if they are in the self interest of the company. Freeman presents an almost diametrically opposing view in his article "A Stakeholder Theory of the Modern Corporation". Freeman's view is that companies have responsibility to benefit all stakeholders which includes employees, shareholders, vendors, and society in general.

You cannot manage your way to good code. Good developers write good code and bad developers write bad code. At best these processes help you mitigate some of the risk and ensure your requirements are being met. If management spent as much time working on the hiring processes as they do on managing the development process they’d see a much higher return on their investments.