>> Unfortunately the devices are not actually on a network

So...it's not a networking issue?

>> do you not have to go back and it take the class over again for credit?

Yes, you do, but the typical pattern seemed to be to stick with an audited course for six weeks or so (the "trial period"), decide you want to take it for real next semester, and then buckle down on your real courses for the rest of the semester.

From TFA: "Generating primes with special properties can be computationally burdensome, so many implementations use fixed or standardized Diffie-Hellman parameters. "

Yeesh.

>> schools be willing to deal with higher MOOC failure rates, and allow large numbers of students to try — and possibly drop or fail — AP CS without economic or academic consequences?

This used to be called "auditing" a course. It's pretty rare to do today, but when college was affordable it used to be a way to try out a course and an instructor before you committed academic consequences.

>> Whatever their faults, the prequels make it plain that a decadent Republic and Jedi Order were ready to be shoved over a cliff

They also make it plain that a decadent Republic and Jedi Order were better than the alternative. :)

>> Run by women in STEM careers, running pure FreeBSD.

On Beowulf clusters.

>> laws frequently leave citizens facing a monopoly or duopoly with no recourse, so the FCC abolished them

Um...how many cable network providers do YOU have where you live? Does ANYONE have three (3) or more?

Ah...the "respectively." However, I think that's just part of the last answer, so I'll update this to:

But what, exactly, does this mean? no
Does it mean that we're seeing the "edge" of the Universe? no
Does it mean that there's nothing to see, farther back beyond it? yes, respectively
Does it mean that, as time goes on, we're going to be able to see farther back in time and space? (no response)

Personally, I like his "what, exactly, does this mean" answer: it would have avoided a lot of religious wars. :)

I thought the political message of Star Wars was clear: a powerful executive gradually demonizes, marginalizes, ignores and then disbands a representative body, while using force to intimidate and even kill anyone who resists or speaks against the central government.

Now where could we find a parallel....hmmm...

>> I love driving.

Yeah...could you pick me up and drop me off at work everyday? That would be gre..at.

>> IBM wasn't undone by the platform, they were undone by the CLONES running the platform.

IBM wasn't "undone" - period. Instead, the termination of its consumer-facing foray allowed it to tighten its grip on the short and curlies of the far more profitable corporate world, and even gave it a "PC 2.0" phase where it sold premium laptops (ThinkPads) to corporate buyers before selling that business too.

>> The answers are no, no, and yes, respectively.

If I'm reading this right, you just said:
But what, exactly, does this mean? no
Does it mean that we're seeing the "edge" of the Universe? no
Does it mean that there's nothing to see, farther back beyond it? yes
Does it mean that, as time goes on, we're going to be able to see farther back in time and space? (no response)

>> Just channel surf some night when you have insomnia. The infomercials...

Wow - thanks for the flashback. I almost forgot how crappy cable was...

>> does having a single- or limited-purpose device make really make sense for consumables that aren't coffee?

If you can find enough suckers to buy them and yield big profits, then yes. (See the original Keurig, for example.)

1) Forget the Universal Format approach - your users will kill you for messing up their formatting, and you'll never get complete feature parity
2) Store the docs in their original format
3) Get Apache Solr to search your content
4) You'll be spending a lot of time on #3, so leave time to tinker