A while back I signed up for a MOOC in a subject that I find very interesting. The structure of the "learning" environment, with no way to engage in any kind of discussion without first navigating the colossal trainwreck of a message board cluttered with hundreds (thousands?) of introductory messages that no human being could possibly sort through, was such a huge turn-off that I can't imagine why I'd ever want to look at one of them again. They actually recommended Twitter - the most superficial, badly-threaded "communication" method since shouting to strangers at riots - to use as a discussion tool. A podcast that didn't try to be interactive would've been better, because at least it wouldn't have had "first day at a new high school" front-loaded onto it. Or give me a book to read rather than making me listen to a stilted one-way lecture that I can't skim as needed. For someone who went to a small college, in part to avoid those god-awful 100-student lecture classes, it was the most pedagogically hostile environment I've ever seen passed off as "education".

If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation.

Then you have not learned anything, padawan. It may be commonly true of your peers, but it is not true of most humans in middle age or later, especially those of less tech-friendly varieties.

I actually did very well in school, despite being a social misfit of sorts: a fairly typical smart kid who'd rather make stuff in his room than play with the other kids. Great GPA, test scores in the 99th percentile, etc. But it hasn't correlated with my professional and financial success, which has been ... limited. Which may just mean that success in school isn't always dependent on the attributes that make one successful in later life. Or maybe I've just been screwed over more than statistically average.

For those hesitant to google it, but curious what this is: it involves refashioning the end of the forearm into pincers, using each of the bones as a "finger".

Yeah, this is a textbook example* of how relying on an outside "cloud" service – especially one that you have no contractual control over – to store your data is a really dumb idea.

*OK, maybe it's just in the teacher's edition.

"Do you really expect me to disconnect an employee computer, hull it up to my office, and reinstall there - just so I can have a standard local root password the other admins also know?"

That'd be a more appropriate place to do an OS install, but no: I expect you to lift your head and look around before typing, to see if anyone is staring at the screen. Because if there are other people in the room, and you're really that concerned that they'll be snooping at your root password, they can just as easily look at your hands on the keyboard.

The practice of masking passwords in all circumstances is a perfect example of unthinking That's How We've Always Done It Syndrome. It dates back to the days of printing terminals, where everything you typed was dot-matrixed onto a roll of paper as you went. It was a very good idea and very important that those passwords not be echoed back to the user, because they'd be preserved on greenbar paper for someone else in the terminal room or computer lab to find.

But most password entry isn't done in that context anymore. With password-saving features on web browsers and smartphones, it's often done once, then left alone; people can easily take a quick look around to make sure no one's looking when they tap their e-mail password into their smartphone during initial setup. A login screen that doesn't echo the password as you type it, but has "remember my password" checkbox... makes no sense whatsoever. But they're programmed that way, because That's How We've Always Done It. Not masking the password when you initially set the password is a good idea because it's really not that difficult to make the same typo twice in a row, and once you've done that with the root password on a new system, you're screwed.

I work in an IT office, and every day I get multiple calls from users who've locked themselves out of their accounts because they couldn't see what they were typing. Caps-Lock is a frequent culprit, and if I had a dollar for every time I've asked a user to check that and try again (and it worked), I'd be able to buy pizza for the whole department every Friday.

There are certainly circumstances where masking the password is a good idea. Kiosks where the user is likely to have strangers standing in line behind her, portable devices that are likely to be used on coffee shop tables, and high-security environments of various kinds. But not all password entry requires that level of looking-over-your-shoulder-but-not-really-because-you-can't-be-bothered-to paranoia to applied. If I'm logging in to Netflix.com to add a movie to my queue, I don't need the kind of password-masking secrecy needed to log in to the medical-records software used where I work. And it's high time someone had the critical thinking skills to start making this judgment call on a case-by-case basis.

Ideologues don't allow the possibility that there are ever valid exceptions to their dogma.

Please read the second half of my reply. That is what's wrong with "enforcing the laws we have".

"What is wrong with enforcing the laws we have?" Aside from the fact that some of the laws we have are wrong-headed and counterproductive (e.g. copyright terms that not only outlive the creators, but also their children, and even their grandchildren, thus stifling independent creative appropriation), there's the fact that the laws we have don't make any sense (as in "I have no idea what this means", not just merely misguided) in the context of modern technology.

Don't forget the low-cost dumb terminals – I'm sorry: "thin clients" – which are incapable of doing anything at all independently of the centrally-adminstered silicon. The computing environment I work in today is architecturally very similar to the one I started working in back in the mid-1980s.

Thanks for playing... but, no.

"Engineers are the only people capable of designing applications."

Patently and obviously false. Engineers are good at engineering. Designers are good at designing. While it's perfectly possible (and maybe even common) for someone to have both skill sets*, they are not the same skill sets, and there are oodles of engineers out there who are utterly crap at design, and designers who are just as bad at engineering... and the world would be a slightly better place if more of them were aware of that.

*With one college degree in Computer Science, and another in Illustration, I may or may not be one of those people (I think I am), but I at least know what the skill sets are.

"Limits on what you can do with it" do not equal "compromised". I can't install arbitrary code on my crock pot either, but that doesn't mean it constitutes a security or privacy risk. Redefining words like this is a Fox-News trick. And why would a guest – even one as paranoid as the poster – be concerned that Apple might record what web site they looked at and attribute it to someone else?

"We've thought about buying an iPad for guests to use, but decided it wasn't right to knowingly let others use a computing platform that may have been compromised."

Seriously? What have you been reading that gives you bizarre notions like that? The iPad has a number of general shortcomings, most of which are related to its single-user OS and its closed architecture. And I'd hesitate to lend a guest my iPad, but only because – once unlocked for use – it's wide open for the user to poke around (e.g. read my mail, browser history, etc). But in terms of the OS being compromised, an iOS device that hasn't been deliberately jailbroken (by you) is about as safe an internet-access device as you're likely to find, short of custom building a Linux- or BSD-based system yourself.