It might make a pretty good lie detector.

That's still on the order of a million gallons of gas saved each day in the US.

My CRX is 127cm (I just looked it up), and I assure you that's quite low.

Not likely. You can improve the in-"class" experience, but it's the outside-class socializing and BSing with like-minded people that makes the on-campus experience so much richer. What gap do you predict will have closed in 10 years so that this is no longer true?

Crap, should've read the preview, and/or not used angle brackets. Above post should read:

By feedback, I don't mean an accurate assessment of the quality of the work (which is also [ideally] a function of grading). I mean specific feedback like I write on my upper-division students' papers, e.g. "you were doing well up to this point, but then you made which gave you . Here's an example of why is not valid." This is the kind of feedback my lower-division students, whose homework is submitted and graded online, do not receive, and which I assume 130,000 AI students will likewise not receive.

Automate the hell out of it so they can have 130,000 students paying tuition (eventually) for a class taught by one (or a few) faculty. Of course, automated grading does not give very meaningful feedback, but maybe if they had some really great AI doing it. Hmm...maybe that could be the class project? Quick, somebody call Ray Kurzweil!

There's not some cosmic clock that marks a simultaneous "now" for every point in the universe, such that the light from that supernova actually traveled for 21 million years to reach us. Simultaneity doesn't exist, independent of reference frame. In our reference frame, the supernova exploding and the light reaching us are simultaneous events. If you don't believe it, pick up a physics book--even a very watered-down pop physics book from Barnes & Noble will set you straight on this issue.

Well, as long as we're being pedantic...let's say we never figure out how to break or dodge the light speed limit, but we do learn how to travel at 0.9c. Now this one is 30 years away (or 60 or so if you want to count acceleration at launch and landing, which I'm sure you do). And your average Milky Way star that's say 50,000 lightyears away is now...gosh, it's actually a whole hell of a lot more unreachable.

This single reason is more than enough to dismiss the idea.

Yeah, about what I expected. You haven't thought about this very hard--or if you have, it hasn't amounted to much. I guess you think that everyone who e.g. lost a chunk of their retirement in the recession (or went through a divorce or death of a spouse, or had a serious illness, or, or, or...) and now has to work harder to keep the family afloat was just irresponsible for procreating in the first place. Typical Slashdot knee-jerk "born on third base and thinks he hit a triple" libertarianism.

Oh, and if you had bothered to read before your knee jerked into your keyboard, you'd realize that I asked you a practical question, not an ethical or policy question: how do you think the (significant fraction of all American) families who can't easily find another few hundred dollars every month are actually going to cope with something like this? Or was "tough shit" indeed your entire answer?

Not really. Are you (or have you considered the case of) a single parent or a partner in a dual-income family that requires both incomes to make ends meet? Would you care to offer your perspective on how such a family would deal with a four-day school week?

And I bet you're not a parent. Have you considered what it takes to make a two-income or single-parent household with children actually work? School is free daycare (inasmuch as anything funded by taxes is free). That's not all it is, of course, but that free daycare is absolutely critical for any family that needs both parents (or the single parent) working full-time.

So, yes, absolutely the biggest complaint will be from those parents. And they're goddam right for complaining about it.

I started programming on Apple ][ BASIC, and for a long time I believed that anything the computer could do, it could be programmed to do in BASIC. Eventually, I found out that you needed some machine language code to do a lot of things (even sound--the way you generated a tone on that computer was to "tick" the speaker in an explicit loop, and in BASIC you could practically hear the individual ticks!), but that didn't happen until I'd encountered and solved many problems on my own.

Even playing the best games of the time, I felt like given enough time and mastery of the language, I could produce something comparable in BASIC, and that drove me on, for a long time. Give a bright kid a BASIC interpreter now, and they'll ask you, "what's the point of this?"

Because it would be impossible for a malicious app to access anything else through its own "high-score" URL, right?. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what you have in mind with this?