Aside from being good business sense on the accounting side of things, this is also a PR move. The hip company pays the nerds who can help them out taking advantage of the CLOUD! I mean crowd. Did I say cloud?

I built a computer a few years ago for two reasons:

1) to show the class I was teaching how a computer was built
2) to have a computer to be hooked up to a TV for watching TV/movies/etc.

I put linux on it but to my annoyance, Netflix was impossible because of Silverlight/DRM. That pretty much ruined it for me and I put Windows on it. Little things like that, I think, explain a lot of why people won't switch.

What are all those aerospace researching bureaucrats doing all day if not sending people to the moon? The brilliance of this question is that it reveals a new way to determine whether or not we should cut government funded programs:

Is the program doing precisely what middle school students expect it to do? If not, the axe.

Consequently, this is a great way to connect with the average voter.

They note the importance of reading before the class in the article but don't follow up much on that. This is crucial.

This problem presents itself when teaching interactively: If students don't prepare ahead of time, the lesson totally stalls. Then they are trying to figure out problems with no basis for it. What happens? The professor often ends up lecturing. Then no time is left.

My intuition (based upon TAing Statistics as a PhD student and being a high school teacher of history, philosophy, and information technology) is that very few students read before lecture. I often didn't as an undergrad. Why? Because as long as the lectures re-tread text material, student can get away with using the text only as a reference, not as a primarily source of information. If students are required to be active participants, they HAVE to read ahead of time. Otherwise they have no way of actually figuring out how to use the knowledge from the reading.

I agree with the poster who mentioned the importance of assessing theoretically. A lot of students think that theoretical assessment is easy -- they don't have to remember a lot and can just use their brain to figure out the test. At least in the Stats class I helped teach, this simply wasn't true. Whenever we had problems sets or exam problems which were more or less plug and chug, the students did GREAT. However, when we started asking theoretical questions (which statistical test is appropriate here? Why? How do you test assumptions...? Critique this statistically informed research piece.), students really struggled -- which means they don't get it. That tells me they weren't really ready to use statistics.

I bet this could have been alleviated significantly if we had spent more time in class really working through problems which asked tough theoretical questions in groups as a class. But alas, we lectured, then I had 50 minutes weekly to try to answer their questions -- never enough -- and the quality of work struggled. Many students never really seemed ready to work independently with the concepts: I think a big reason for this is they were taught by being talked at... so when it was time to show they knew stats, the brightest did fine but the majority freaked out.

The 128kbps m4as, particularly with dance music, tend to have really flat bass. Doesn't sound too good.