This brings up a question I've been pondering... What's wrong with lazy, complacent and dull-minded people to just be let to their own devices a bit? In a MOOC framework, they'd have easy, painless access to all require course material, including exercises and a discussion forum when they need help. If they can't be bothered to do it, then sucks to be them.

I'm being serious here: we're wasting valuable resources trying to keep mediocre people from entirely failing, only for them to get mediocre grades that barely give them their diploma so that they can go on to be mediocre employees with brains so numbed and dull that they're basically automata. If we let them fail (yes, letting people fail, the horror!) early on, it could act as a wake up call. I've rarely seen people without any interest in life; usually if they find school boring it's in large part because they're not at the right place. Instead of putting them on life support, letting them fail could make them realize they need to change career paths, and it'd still be early enough for them to do so without significant damage.

The trend right now is that students, especially young ones, shouldn't be allowed to fail. That sets a dangerous precedent, for once you're out of the school system (I consider graduate degrees to be "outside the school system") you're very much allowed to fail and discarded without second thought if you do. It's setting out an entire generation to unrealistic and frankly absurd standards that you can do jack shit and still make it. That sometimes happens, but it's not the norm.

To be perfectly honest, I call bullshit. There are many courses at university where I haven't been at any class and just read the book and passed easily. I think those courses (and they made up a significant proportion of all my undergrad courses) would've benefited from being structured like MOOCs instead of traditional courses. Textbooks are boring, rarely give insights and generally are only there to fall back on when the teacher wasn't clear on something. To rely on them entirely can work, but it's a lot tougher than it needs to be.

I think it's very possible to not only equal an undergrad course but even to surpass it. The easy way to test it would be to take exams from previous years and see if the students can complete them. If they can, then they've objectively learned a sufficient amount of material for MOOCs to be surrogate courses. The point is that nothing inherent to MOOCs makes them less adapted to learning than traditional classroom courses.

It's all about access, but in more than one way. On top of the ability to access courses at all, MOOC greatly facilitate having access to excellent professors. This matters tremendously.

An unfortunate problem with many high-level courses right now is that there are few people competent enough to give them, and even fewer to give them in an engaging, interesting and understandable manner. With MOOCs, you only need one great person doing the course online for everybody to benefit. That's a huge difference compared to traditional classrooms. Flip side is obviously that competition among MOOC professors and providers is a lot fiercer. You can be a top tier researcher in a particular domain and fail to another person that might not have released as many papers but knows how to communicate things to students better. You can be a great teacher but get sidelined by someone who's put a lot more effort into the course and created more quality material.

Basically, MOOCs remove one of the big problems of traditional school systems, in that if a teacher sucks, there's a good chance there's another one somewhere doing the same course better.

And yet, it was arguably an excellent media player.

Is there a point to reading Slashdot every day, or posting comments about asking for a point to things?

Can you tell me what's wrong with pretty colors and snappy writing? Those are the kinds of claims that infuriate me. Would I want to have more science-fiction in Abrams Trek? Yes, of course. Why would it need to come at the expense of good visuals and snappy writing, though? All it does is reinforce the idea that modern "cool" movies or TV shows can't possibly have depth, or that deep movies and TV shows need to look shitty and have wooden, sluggish dialogue.

Private funding tends to heavily bias parties that support corporations (at the detriment of consumers), since they have the larger pockets. It should come as no surprise that the US is becoming a corporatist's heaven. Public funding can be balanced to minimize bias, at least, whereas private funding is much harder to balance.

The way I see it, the facebook brand is in a similiar position to the Windows brand. They're popular in the sense that they're ubiquitous, but not in the sense that they elicit passion. Unlike, for instance, Apple, you won't see "facebook fanboys" who'll defend the site to the death. It's used because just about everyone knows someone on it (as you said, the networking effects), but not because it has any particular strength or marketing genius.

The question you need to ask yourself is that if all of a sudden facebook was replaced by another website fulfilling similar/identical needs, would people care? I think not. If you asked the same for Apple, though, I think a lot of people would cry out at their iDevices being taken away. That, right there, is brand power.

For the same reason that we're not expected to support Pentium IIs and Windows 98. Things move on. The Desire S was a single core 1GHz machine with 768MB of RAM. Modern machines are quad core 1.5GHz with 2GB of RAM. You can't expect the same software to scale to this large a discrepancy.

It's not quite that simple. If the beam is narrow enough, it won't pass through much rain. If the beam is of the proper wavelength, fog may not deviate it much. Furthermore, there's the little element that the beam will instantly evaporate whatever water it comes close to, so it could very well "buffer" an area around it just by being there. This isn't to say it wouldn't be affected at all, but chances are it could still be effective if calibrated properly.

It is a good idea. It takes very little effort, it's compatible with every possible backend, and it's an additional warning for when things go awry. Remember, you never plan for things to go wrong.

Many, many sites are still on low-cost shared hosting, where MySQL is often all there is. I'm not even sure you'll see a transition from MySQL to SkySQL or MariaDB anytime soon in that environment. It took them years to get to PHP5. MySQL is better than no SQL.

Now get your sodding rose tinted glasses off and look properly. Old games were simplistic, they had almost no depth of gameplay and while they had refined that gameplay very, very well, they're in no way objectively better (or worse) than newer games. If all you do is whine that the next Call of Duty isn't your cup of tea and games were "so much better back in my day", then it's your problem entirely.

For each Call of Duty, there's a gem of a game to be found. FTL. Minecraft. VVVVVV. Terraria. Don't Starve. Stardrive. AI War. Torchlight. World of Goo. Mark of the Ninja. Magicka. SpaceChem. Frozen Synapse. Heck, even AAA games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Far Cry 3 or Company of Heroes. Figure out what you like and play it, instead of just complaining about it on the internet.

And honestly, I'd say that's a good thing. You're running out of waste. It's convenient to use waste to produce electricity, but it's not efficient nor really environmentally friendly (sure, it's not in the ground anymore, but it's in the air instead). You're much better off reusing/recycling whatever you can and scaling up more efficient energy sources instead.

Perhaps more traditional transmissions, yes. Things like CVT (continuous variable transmission), however, were designed specifically to always give the best possible ratio and so invariably consume less fuel than manuals. It's like having an infinite amount of gears and being able to dynamically choose the best gear at any point in time.