I suppose this depends on your perspective. Admission rates at Harvard/Stanford/MIT are around 6%; Cornell, Duke and the like 15%; Baylor, Georgia Tech, U Mich around 40%. Those are all great schools and offer great educations. The marginal benefit from attending Stanford (#4) over Cornell (#15) or Baylor (#70) is pretty negligible, and I would put all those schools in the "top tier," and 40% admission rate is not even one-very selective.

Most of those schools don't treat their own MOOCs the same way they treat their residential classes (ie, don't offer credit for them). Those that are experimenting with online courses for credit, or even online degrees, do so as a separate track from their MOOCs. Online classes serve a difference audience with different goals than residential instruction.

No, that's exactly the point. Vast numbers of kids spend their first couple of years "growing up." Some of them fail miserably, most of them muddle through fairly well, and some of them excel. What company can afford to take the risk hiring an untrained person, without even a 'track record' of trainability, when that kid may decide he'd rather spend lunch drinking beers?

College isn't supposed to be job training - you may get some skills that are useful in a job, but the point is not to teach you how to be a junior programmer at Microsoft. College, especially residential college, is life-training: how do you balance your freedom to do bong hits all day with your responsibility to pay rent? How do you balance your desire to post /. with your employer's desire that you accomplish tasks? How do you get stuff done when your teacher/manager is a clueless moron? What kinds of tasks/problems do you enjoy?

If you've figure that out by the time you're 18, you're truly exceptional. Not special-snowflake exceptional, but Bill Gates exceptional. College, and even a job, are likely to hold you back. Unfortunately, many people think they are Bill Gates, when they are only a special snowflake.

Not everyone in the audience can tell the difference between good acting and poor acting. They say, if the story is good, the audience won't notice that Hamlet is wearing a digital watch. Same goes for acting talent.

There are many flavors of "Religious Freedom Law,"but at least the Indiana law applies to the employees as well as the businesses. So, Joe's lawnmower service may refuse people on the basis of religion at the policy level, but Joe, the employee of Starbuck's, may also refuse to serve people on the basis of his personal beliefs. The law is intended to prevent Starbuck's from firing Joe for his expression of personal religious freedom.

The first line of defense is the stop sign. The second line of defense is the guards yelling "Stop!" The third line of defense is a gate. The fourth line of defense, in this case, was a pair of parked police cars that the SUV (reportedly) rammed through.

Guards discharging their weapons was decidedly not the "first line of defense." I'm not sure what else could reasonably have been done in short enough time, to stop a vehicle with demonstrated willingness to perpetrate violence, but ramming through the parked cars seems like pretty good justification for extreme measures.

The historical database of license plate sightings is a terrific source of circumstantial evidence against people suspected of wrongdoing.

eg: your wife turns up dead. You renewed her life insurance policy a month ago. Three weeks ago, your car made several visits to "the bad part of town," possibly while you were at a murder-for-hire meeting. Nevermind that your insurance policy renews every February, and that a water main break diverted your commute.

Many things look suspicious once suspicion is upon you: the concern with a vast trove of location and communication history is that it is more likely to be twisted to make an honest man look corrupt than it is to find a criminal before he acts.

We're talking about a state law here, which presumably represents the general will of the people of the state. If Indiana puts up border signs saying "Welcome to Indiana, Gays may be refused service" it doesn't really matter whether 90%, 1%, or 0% of businesses actually do so - putting it in the law declares it a value of the people of the state.

Orthogonal issues: this is not about stocking a particular product, this is about making a product equally available to any person. If the clothing store refuses to fit you until you pledge devotion to Allah, or if the best coffee shop in town demands you kiss a copperhead snake before you place your order, then maybe you'd have a complaint.

If you really want to push the coffee-tea analogy, would you take a large, diverse group of friends to a coffee shop that explicitly refuses to serve tea, knowing that some of your friends prefer tea? I suspect you would find a different shop/state that is more willing to accommodate your group. You might even tell the store owner that you're sad you couldn't bring your party to his place, but for the discrimination against tea.

Yes. "Freedom of religion" does not contain any qualifiers. Your religion doesn't have to have a specific number of adherents, it doesn't have to have a long and glorious history, it doesn't have to have won wars against any other religion. It only has to be a set of beliefs or principles you take on faith. Those beliefs can change every 20 seconds, based on communication from from $DEITY, personal revelation, or direction of wind. "Freedom of religion" means that Catholicism is just as valid, and has exactly the same privileges as Quakerism, Sikhism, Jedism, or Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. Just because you believe your One True Faith does not negate my One True Faith.

It's worth pointing out that "Freedom of Religion" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. The courts have frequently found that the needs and safety of secular society trump religious practice. Perhaps most notably, faiths that support polygamy may not have multiple bondings recognized as marriage. Even snake-handling is illegal in many states.

Yes. Google's power over advertisers lies in Google's exclusive access to user information. Advertisers pay Google to figure out who would be good recipients of advertising, based on the belief that Google can identify those people better than the advertiser. If Google sells its collection of user data, then the advertiser will be able to make that determination for itself, and Google loses its main advantage over other ad-distribution networks. You do not sell the goose that lays golden eggs.

The point of failure is usually the stud that holds the bolt. In typical US, wood-frame construction, this is a 2x4, with the bolt centered, leaving really just about 3 cm of pine wood holding the door closed. "Kick the door down" is also a euphemism for any form of forced entry, most likely a 40 (one man)-100 (two man) pound battering ram.

Why not talk to them via bullhorn or phone without even approaching the house? It's going to take at least 15 minutes to assemble and deploy a SWAT team - don't you think any killing the guy has started will be done by then?

If you start with negotiation, you have at least some chance to let the adrenalin run out, get people thinking rationally about consequences, let the first pangs of guilt emerge. If you start with shocking and overwhelming force, you pretty much guarantee someone's going to get hurt. Police are supposed to be trained to deescalate situations. They may carry tools required to respond to an escalation, but they're supposed to be distinguishable from a lynch mob by their ability to remain calm and bring about peaceful resolutions. Failure of this training results in shooting of unarmed crazy people.

Depends on your environment. In my area, the crawl space is often used for all mechanicals - HVAC, water heater, electrical service, even the whole-house vacuum. It makes running new lines really easy, with no tearing open of walls, not unlike an upside-down dropped ceiling. A central store of media files that can be distributed through the house is much more attractive than separate HTPCs for every room. One relatively beefy HTPC, capable of transcoding multiple media files for playback on low-power, fanless frontends is likewise very attractive. Especially if "crawl space" means a 3-4' high space between the slab and the floor of a house on a hill.

The only thing I'd recommend to OP is rack mounting on posts hanging from the floor joists - ie, suspend the system as far above the floor as possible. Water heaters and HVAC are designed to resist a little water/flooding - computers aren't. Dust is likely still to be a problem, but you can wrap the whole thing in a bag filter to cut that down.

This is particularly true for spoken English vs written English. In spoken English, intonation and body language contribute to communication, eg bad vs bad. You're expected to fill in missing/garbled words from context. Written English is an attempt to encode all of that information.

So, sure, sloppy spelling, poor grammar, and homophone substitution may be understandable to your close friends. That makes it more of a code language or private language, and there's plenty of times where we like to share private, insider conversations. If you actually want to communicate with everyone, you have to use the parent language - step back from the Southern drawl or the Scots brogue and speak Common.

But a basic black, $10 timex was boring. Swatch made cheap ($20), crap watches that came in different colors. With 'funky' designs. People paid for swatches twice what they were worth because they had an off-center stripe on the face. And then someone realized that you could wear two, three, or even four swatches on one arm!

When the swatch guy gets up and tells you that iWatch has the potential to crush swiss watchmaking, he's talking about fashion, not function.