In addition to the lost productivity, increased uncertainty, 3 points off GDP growth (estimate by Macroeconomic Advisers), there's also the plain old bill of $24 billion in shutdown and startup cost.

In Slashdot money, that would have built about 4 Large Hadron Colliders including fully funding the experiments; or about 1.5 ITERs.

Agarwal liked that line so much, he used it in the answer to two questions about the future of lecturers. But let's be real here. Online news has not been good for journalists. Arguably it has been good for the public in terms of access to journalism or journalism quality; these are debatable notions that I don't want to get into.

But without a doubt journalists have been layed off in droves, salaries have fallen, and careers especially at the low end have ended. Just look at what has happened to local newspapers. Even the premier papers like the NYT have fallen on hard times.

So maybe MOOCs are a good idea. Maybe they'll make education more accessible, cheaper, meritocratic, higher quality, etc. Let's talk about that. But let us not pretend that it isn't very bad news for all but the very top tier of instructors, and perhaps even bad news for them. Pointing this out is not a sufficient argument against MOOCs. All sorts of job fields have been made obsolete by technology.

I dislike the spin of pretending this is good news for instructors though.

This article, like many others, misses an important point. Even if colleges hold their total expenditures to the rate of inflation, state support has been declining dramatically over the past decades. As a consequences students are picking up a greater share of the total expenditures through tuition. Clearly that will result in tuition rising at a rate faster than inflation.

If you want to attack wasteful college expenditures, which is a worthwhile topic, you must focus on total expenditures per unit of size (student, degree, credit hour, whatever). Looking at only the part of the expenditure financed by tuition is highly misleading. Unless we're talking about for-profit colleges. Those are sucking the lifeblood out of college-bound youth. Just look at the per degree debt levels of college loans that go to for-profits. "Among all bachelor's degree recipients, median debt was about $7,960 at public four-year institutions, $17,040 at private not-for-profit four-year institutions, and $31,190 at for-profit institutions." [http://www.asa.org/policy/resources/stats/]

Correction to two posts above:

1. Not every nuclear nation reserves the right to a pre-emptive strike. Russia for example has a no-first-use policy. The U.S. on the other hand changed to a more aggressive stance under Bush II, where it may use ("mini") nukes to attack targets not reachable by conventional weapons.

2. N.K. has quit the armistice with an effective date of March 11. So ever so technically we'll be back to an active war.

Mental note: Toshiba laptops are now worth less because the manuals will be harder to come by.

I would hope the leaker would be smart enough not to leak this email. Presumably it was leaked somewhere else since it was sent to a large number of employees.

iPads in the classroom can be a great tool. But here's the thing. You have to plan for it before adoption.

Projection: AirPlay, HDMI, or VGA?
Documents: KeyNote, Quicktime, PDF; or maybe go to something less prepared and more on the fly. It can be neat to have a blackboard in your hand that projects on the screen.
Storage: Internal cloud, iBooks/iTunes for education where you can create your own courses with files, Moodle.

etc, etc. And only after you've worked these things out, you then beta-test by having a few tech savvy instructors run courses with them. Collect feedback. Discuss. Revise.

For the love of gods, don't just buy a bunch of hardware, hand it to people, and tell them to go educate. How's that supposed to work?

Not an ancient Olympic Game, but from 1900 until 1920 Tug of War was an official event. That seems like a fun event I'd like to see return.

And there'll be nothing wrong with the company as it won't exist in the near future.

Don't they realize that the more often they change the ruleset the more often players have to spend money buying new books?

Oh...

"Flying Coffin." Interesting nickname. In my home country it was called the Widow Maker. Erich Hartmann, the highest-scoring fighter ace in the history of air warfare, called it fundamentally flawed and unfit for service. Lockheed's money caused his superiors to force him into early retirement. 115 German pilots were killed in non-combat missions while piloting the F104.

Ohhhh, poor AT&T. Your regulator has some teeth and is preserving the bit of competition that still exists in wireless? We all feel so very very bad for you.

After all these years, I still consider the WRT54GL to be the best wireless router for home use. I don't know if that's impressive or sad.

Consider giving Tomato a spin for firmware. Very user friendly, especially for slightly advanced uses like bridging.

Bald-faced lie. Sorry, I'll stop now.

Everybody's a critic, including myself. So you're about to have to read some strong responses. But please keep in that, IMHO, there's still no place on the Web like Slashdot. So thank you for keeping it together, warts and all.