I love MOOCs (I hate the word mooc when pronounced Mook though) I have little doubt that many courses go into way less depth than a traditional collage course. But my motivations for learning are entirely different than your typical collage student (not all just the typical). I am picking and choosing my courses based upon what I want to know so that I can put it to use tomorrow. Passing the tests in the MOOC are motivated by the fact that if I can't pass them then I haven't really been paying attention. Your typical collage student is learning many subjects where they follow a "flip-card" learning strategy so that they can pound the knowledge into their head long enough to regurgitate it onto a test. Some material will be built upon and potentially kept for life such as the core subjects for the person's degree. So an Engineer will potentially keep much of the math that they then proceed to use over the next few years but few will remember much from their mandatory arts course. The same even within specialties. Accountants who go on to become advanced bookkeepers will most likely forget their stats course material within months of learning it. I have taken and passed 3 courses from Coursera and loved all three. In every case I have proceeded to put what I learned into action. So my guess is that in 1 year I will have taken what they have given me and run much farther than your typical student taking the same university level courses unless that student chooses a path that will put that material in to regular use. But this is the advantage of my being able to cherry-pick the courses I want and need.

But comparing MOOCs to their University classroom counterparts are like comparing Radio to TV. They are different beasties. A MOOC takes a different form of discipline to take it. They have certain disadvantages in that I doubt anyone took any of the courses I took within a 100 miles of my location making physical grouping almost impossible at this point. University courses are taught by whatever professor is at hand, be they good or bad. Eventually some of the best professors are going to do MOOCs (I wish Feynman could have cooked up one as his lectures were pretty awesome) resulting in a faster more efficient learning experience. MOOCs are bringing world class courses to my desk from institutions I couldn't have gotten into. Also the prices for many MOOCs are perfect for people in parts of the world where they have no access to higher education.

But what it really boils down to for me is that a world with MOOCs is going to be a better world for so many people. I suspect that there will be a few casualties but that overall the number of winners will be incomprehensible. Also keep in mind that this is really the beginning for MOOCs so who knows how much better they will get?

I would love to deploy some BSD machines and see how they fair in a long term A/B test against Linux machines. I hate to use the term but a TCO.

But with servers there is rarely one killer feature that make an OS way better than the others. Usually it is a bad feature that kills the OS. If you need a certain package and it doesn't exist or isn't well supported with a certain OS then that OS is dead to you regardless of all its other virtues.

Now I use Mac OS X for my desktop and Linux for my servers. I am impressed with the Bastard BSD underlying Mac OS X in that it doesn't get in my way.

So my question is: I am using CentOS because it keeps me in my Linux as Unix comfort zone but that NetBSD would be way better and every day I don't switch is a day wasted? Or would NetBSD make me angry that I left the happy easy land of CentOS?

The key here is who seems to wear the earpieces. It just doesn't seem to be a class of "Winners".

If you have seen the movie Oblivion and remember Tom Cruise's earpiece, then I could live with one of those. But the USB memory stick in my ear, those just suck. They should come with propeller hats (something I would have killed for age 9).

When the flip phone was all the rage it often reminded me of an 1890's station master pulling out his pocket watch and flipping it open/closed and then sliding it back into his pocket. The wristwatch basically put the pocket watch out of action. I suspect that history is going to repeat itself as I am now pulling out my smartphone repeatedly to quickly check various things such as the time, the weather, certain stocks, who just called, GPS, who just messaged, ebay alerts, fiddle with the audio, etc. Rarely do I pull out my smartphone to use the larger screen for things such surfing, typing, or talking.

So for at least 90% of my smartphone interfacing it would be awesome to interface with a convenient wrist watch to reach the phone in my pocket or pack. The key is that the watch does not stray into any territory where the phone excels. An example would be mapping. Don't try to put a small map on my watch; that will just drive me nuts. But a navigation app that just distance, direction, and turning instructions would be perfect for a watch.

Where I am presently confused is how to interface with my audio. I guess I could either use a bluetooth earpiece (loser) or headphones with a microphone and that would be fine.

The smartphone interface watch will be far more successful than google glasses. I think that google glasses will be cool for the most part at fulfilling our terminator fantasies but not for meeting our boring needs such as: What time is it?

I love when police gather huge amounts of data resulting in tonnes of false positives. So now every farmer (fertilizer) with a pressure cooker (most) who like Scuba (some) will be getting a visit. If that same farmer donates to a tea-party then the police will think they now have probable cause for a warrant. I really hope that judges will say, "Other than having a computer tell you to raid his house what actual police work have you done?"

Reason 587 to enshrine privacy rights and limit data gathering right in the constitution.

On the surface job losses are the obvious problem but where this can all go really wrong is if we continue with 20th century thinking in a robotic world.

First robots have the potential to turning the world into one of plenty. They should be able to produce food, goods, housing, and infrastructure in quantities and at costs so that everybody thrives. But if we allow a small elite to buy up all the land, and cartels to artificially restrict the quantity of goods then you will have jobless people with nothing and that is a formula for trouble.

If you follow the logical trail you will have people with capital deploying robots to do things that reduce their labor force while either maintaining or increasing productivity. Simply putting massive amounts of people on welfare while leaving a lucky few to continue to leverage up their capital just won't work.

Outright communism won't work as that is an equally failed experiment so a simple method would be something like scaling taxes. As you control more and more of any market your taxes will eventually approach 100%. This will continuously create competitive opportunities for smaller businesspeople. Other tax laws will also have to be implemented where your ratio of profit to employees can't exceed a certain limit. While this might artificially push companies to hire people this will still be vastly superior to just having masses of people on welfare. At least companies will figure out ways to find productive ways to engage humans.

The key change in economic thinking from 20th century to robotic 21st century actually goes back to Adam Smith. Economics is based on consumption not production. Up to the present economic policy has focused on production. But the boom bust cycle has generally been the result of producing more than consumers could or would consume. With robotic production producing way too much will be dead easy so the focus needs to be heavily weighted on making sure that all consumers are ready and waiting. A few extremely wealthy plus the masses scraping by on welfare make, on average, terrible consumers. Gainfully employed people in an equitable society on average make far better and regular consumers. I am not advocating wasteful consumption just the whole "American Dream" of comfortable and safe living for the greatest number of people.

I suspect that a few countries are going to get this balance right (Nordic countries spring to mind) and that many western countries and most third world countries are going to get this horribly wrong. The cringingly funny part will be when the countries that get it wrong will try to favorably compare themselves to the functional countries by pointing out the number of billionaires and other production numbers such as luxury yaghts and the superior number of police and the size of their army. As opposed to the growing number of people slipping into illiteracy.

What it will boil down to is that some populations will stressfully compete with robots while other country's populations will relax and enjoy the fruits of the labor of their new hard working companions.

Half woosh; I should have specified the OS. MRT on the Apple Mac OS X. I hear good things about MSs product.

Then try to delete the MS crap off your msPad.

I hate how these companies seem to think that they can take over my machine; HP seems to think that all I do is print. Office seems to think that I type all day. AV software usually seems to think that all I do is want to hunt viruses. iTunes seems to think that I just screw with my iPad/iPhone all day. BlackBerry violates your machine. Java seems to think that it should check for an upgrade 100% of the time.

The last few updates from Apple have this hidden MRT process that goes made for hours after the upgrade. But the MRT gives no hint that it is installing, and no hint that it is running. Your machine grinds to a halt so you slowly bring up the list of active services and find that it is using all your CPU and that of your neighbor plus so much memory that it is worse than the viruses that it is hunting.

I wish that people would have an OS that has a simple sandbox keeping software installation tools from installing whatever they want. Then when I run Office or iTunes or even my AV it will then run. When I shut it down it will stop. The same for drivers. When I go to print it should run the driver and then go away.

But another critical tool that could be created right now would be to have an activity monitor that differentiates vital services from crap from Acer or HP. With this tool you would bring up a list of services running and not only kill them now but disable them for all time. No more kill the service only to have some daemon pop it back up seconds later. I don't want to go digging through any config/startup/hidden file nonsense.

Many laws today if taken to their logical extreme are pretty stupid. But the two things that tend to ameliorate their implementation is that there are limits to how many police can do so many things along with that the police themselves(usually) use common sense. So if you are zipping down the road going 68 in a 65 zone most police won't bother with you along with the fact that there are a limited number of police.

But with more and more policing becoming automated it is possible that you will drive, as you usually do, from home to work and arrive to discover that you have $10,000 in fines. Every time you bumped up over the speed limit, even for a few seconds, gets you another $500. Every time you didn't come to a complete stop (as in not moving at all) at a stop sign $150. Not to mention the zillion stupid laws that most people, including policemen, don't even know; so every time you didn't signal 150 feet before turning another $150. Did you jaywalk to cross the quiet street to go into work? $300!

Right now the robotic systems are fairly stupid and can only monitor basic concepts like the physics of automobiles. But both their information gathering ability (have every traffic light make a record of all license plates.) along with their analytical ability (you are acting suspicious) is only going to get better and is going to give the police more and more probable or actual cause to arrest, fine, and detain us.

Applying information theory can allow people to see all kinds of interesting things but will also throw up many false positives. Your driving habits might overlap with a series of murders/robberies.

Then you get into who will have access to this information. If you join a political group fighting against the robotization of policing the police might suddenly take great interest in your movements and without much effort make life hell by say the above $10,000 worth of fines every time you drive.

I don't see this as a bizarre conspiracy so much as the mathematics of how our laws are created and then implemented are going to become incompatible with robotic policing. Right now the lawmakers are inclined to grease the squeaky special interest groups. They pass laws that they know will rarely, if ever, be implemented but quiet down the self righteous special interest groups. Just look at most drug laws in the western world. These are most definitely not the laws of the majority but those of a small group of stick-up-the-ass whiners. Now picture a world where all their existing stupid laws are enforced rigidly and nearly as often as the supposed offenses.

There was once a website that was called isgay.com basically what you did was put in a sub-domain such as Billy-Bob.isgay.com and it would then take you to a newspaper style article that went on and on about how gay billy-bob was. Needless to say it was autogenerated from the sub-domain that you entered. The best part of the website was a section listing their hate-mail. Basically it consisted of "I HAVE CONTACTED THE INTERNET POLICE....blah blah." I think some of their haters were crying when writing it thinking that they had been outed.

All this guy has basically done is to engage the classic Streisand effect (I wonder if she is angry at her name becoming a meme for stupid on the internet) and now the 99% of Germans who didn't associate his name to Scientology now will.

It sounds like MS has become like most IT departments in the world; the department of NO.

Generally IT people are operating under a a system where they are brutally punished if things go wrong, are vaguely rewarded if they do what someone wants, and not rewarded for doing things that people don't understand (like simplifying the usage of VPNs). So these IT departments see any change requests as increasing the possibility of disaster and thus bad. This results in a combination of refusing to adapt to the company's needs as both dictated through employe requests and through changing technology. This is evidenced through many larger older organizations still running a bunch of SUN servers or a Novell network.

But it is often far more vicious where you have IT people actively reaching out into the company and telling them what technology they may use and how they might use it. One advantage of the iPhone over the Blackberry was that generally iPhones were impossible to ruin through "Corporate Policy" and BlackBerries could be completely neutered through an easy to use interface. But out of control IT people need not fear for long as horrible companies came along to give them the tools to mangle even the iPhones.

IT people might blah blah about corporate security and various data management laws but the simple fact is that if companies don't exist for the sake of their IT departments. IT is a tool that most companies use to achieve their core goal. Yet you have IT departments treating say the head of marketing of a $20 billion dollar company like an infant "for his own good". Where I find it interesting is when IT meets the President or the CEO. Often the president will say something like "I don't want to change my password every 30 days" The IT people don't dare pull the "corporate policy" card but resort to whining about the rational with the CEO concluding, "I'm going to change my password at the exact same frequency that I change the head of IT. So set things up accordingly."

Again this is not all because IT is filled with evil trolls but because their rewards are structured incorrectly. The best run companies that I have ever seen structured IT really well so that when some guy comes in with his Vic-20 and wanted to use it for presentations they either showed him how bad an idea it was or made it happen but then billed his department for the effort. Saying NO just wasn't something they were insented to do. The result was the more stupid the requests from various departments the more budget that went to IT. This way you don't cut ITs budget you told the various department heads to be less stupid with their money.

Back to Microsoft. It sound like MS has created a similar case of fiefdoms that have perverse incentives that are not aligned with the basic goals of the company. I know in the old days of MS they would hand out stock options like candy. This resulted in many people becoming insanely rich. Maybe they need to go back to that same structure. If a small department does something extraordinary they get some big bucks. This would have to be carefully managed as I can see a few superstar programmers doing the heroic only to watch their manager pull up in a new Porsche on Monday and for them to quit on Tuesday.

Most is the operative word. No video acceleration, Wi-fi not so good, and it crashes when you close the lid.

Close but no cigar.

I long ago abandoned MS due to a complete lack of compelling product features (sad seeing that things like Visual Studio were pretty ground breaking at one point). But this is a feature that shows a fundamental understanding of what customers want and an ability to deliver this feature. Not that this will change the world but maybe, just maybe, this will be a wake-up call at MS that delivering what people want not just what MS wants them to want is the basis of a business model superior to their present model of just riding on their laurels.

People really need to see past any autonomous abilities of a machine. If I am driving down the street and my car's steering goes mad and I run someone over the criminal courts will probably forgive me. There should be no difference if I have sent my robot car off on an errand and it runs someone over. Every scenario applies in both cases. If in both cases I was negligent about maintenance then I might be in criminal trouble. If it were deliberate, I am definitely in trouble.

I personally find all this nit-picking. Very little in law will need to be changed. A few cases of law that insist on humans being in control, say of cars, will need to be amended or replaced such as if a robot is an approved driver that you don't need to be sober. Other laws will come when various people have cases of the stupids such as loading a 6 month old baby into a robot car and sending it alone to Grandma's.

But most existing laws will at best be fine or need the tiniest bit of tweaking. Such as sending a robot off to mug someone or rob a bank. How does that exactly work if you are in another jurisdiction. Or something really cool such as initiating the robot's program to commit a crime after a statute of limitations has passed; when did the crime take place? 7 years ago or yesterday? What if it hides out with the loot for the statute of limitations? But these will be edge cases. Most will be little different than normal people misusing normal machines or slightly autonomous machines.

If anything I see cases of where laws will need to be eliminated to get out of the way of robots: If robots are crazy safe drivers with negotiation going on as they pass through intersections then stopsigns, traffic lights, even one way laws will be useless. The same with most speeding. If the car mathematically knows it is safe then let the car go as fast as its safety limits allow. The few laws that remain such as traffic calming neighborhoods insisting on slower speeds the laws could go into a database so that the law violated would not be going too fast but having a car programmed to ignore the database.

Next will be work safety laws, why have any mine work safety regulations if no human ever goes below ground.

I suspect it is actually going to take ridicule to eliminate many of the laws that are just stupid when applied to robots. And that many of the laws against robots will be born from hysteria and will also be deserving of ridicule.