I like the way you think: I also think I am a lot smarter than the four FTC commissioners and one year they spent investigating this could be better spent for the issue at hands drinking bear and chasing cheeks like I do.

Perhaps you should remember that Google has the patent on PageRank and it has still until 2020 to go, and that might answer why does Google have a monopoly on search and does it have a monopoly on search.

It won't work because there is no money to be made in it. Who will invest into development of this? And even if a group of enthusiasts will spend their time to implement something like that, implementation is the least of the problems. Who will spend millions promoting altruistic system where you don't own anything and can't sell anything? Solve this problem and options will follow...

you'd have to go with round phones with rectangular edges from now on buddy

monopoly is not about lock-in's friend, it's about one company serving all the searches on the web, and yes, you can abuse this position without lock-ins, just hide more competitive competitor's hits in your search results to drive traffic to your sites and stifle the competitor's... you don't like the monopoly you can always go to competitors -- true of any monopoly except .... there are no suitable competitors, that's why it is called monopoly

Pardon my ignorance, but can you sue a foreign national in a local small claims court???

I thought you were going to say "...and your phone is dead..." there for a moment...

I rolled up my twitter project and left half a year ago, if you are a twitter developer, I suggest you do the same...

I think what we are seeing now is an entire generation being taken hostage by mega-corps on the scale not imagined by any anti-monopoly legislators: all search goes through goolge, all email is on hotmail/gmail, all friends are in facebook - however you look at it it's fucked.

On the other hand, the answer is obvious - don't like facebook rules don't use it, thankfully there are alternatives now - go to diaspora and tell all your friends to do the same. Or better yet quit it all together - not being able to push another nonsense update or spend an evening peeking into the lives of your friends is not a life threatening condition. And what is it with having your dirty laundry hanging in front of the entire world as the so called "timeline" anyway? Do a weekly gettogethers and look at the photos there - as people did it before - a lot better...

I think it just means that the people did not really have a moral position on the issue, if when asked to review their altered answers they did not realize the substitution

why don't you read the cited article: he uses sample of size 1 to discuss the quality of that 1 course; nowhere he really tries to talk about online classes in general -- do your homework

This is wrong. The post's name is Udacity Statistics 101. He says

And that's what he concludes:

Somehow online education had become a religion for some and any critique of such is taken as a spit in the face... get real, the system "school-college-university-employment" is not going to change any time soon, and no university is going to implode because of youtube. If I want to hire a CS specialist, I wouldn't give a damn about that you learned your stuff by watching videos from Khan Academy or Udacity in your free time -- if you wanted to learn something on your own there had been tons of reading materials around for decades. in fact if you went for a chewed down stuff on youtube instead of a good textbook I'd strike you down right away... If I can't look at your real skills in practice, I'll take a certification from a known authority -- and that's where the "universities" come in... that's how the world works... but it's all just about this new shiny toy for you now, but face it - the world will continue grinding its gears the way it is for a long time ahead

Jee, why don't just have the students read the darn textbook? or is it all about technology these days, even if it is like trying to stuff a chicken pie via your poop-hole???

The original post was not about online courses but about "Introduction to Statistics" by founder Sebastian Thrun at Udacity, how it was awful, and how with the explosion of money being poured in Khan Academy and alikes this becomes the main stream of the "university education". The issue is not about online vs. real courses, but about online courses by bad teachers advertised and sold to the new generation as the modern age's education panacea.

I've myself taken courses from coursera, and even though they are heavily watered down to the level I don't personally like, being given by respective experts from real universities leaves important footprint. Mass-selling "lectures" by self-installed "educators" in a "silicon value startup" manner is a recipe for disaster...

Where this leads down the road should be quite clear

Just try to stick to making updates that DO NOT (and I mean it!) break old features. Then each new desktop will be slightly better than the previous one by simple continuity, no need for rocket science...