Calling it a video capture system is woefully inaccurate. I do agree that some Kinect games are poorly designed, and not enough resources have been put into thoughtfully getting the most out of this technology for games or other applications (i.e. after a long day at work, who really wants to swipe their whole arm across the sky repetitively to cover flow scroll through your Netflix catalog, when a sub-millimeter click of your thumb on a remote would achieve the same thing??), but that has to do with the tech being in its "mainstream infancy". Depth cameras were orders of magnitude more expensive before the Kinect. Watch this year as more tech of this sort with the Leap Motion etc, come into play. And saying it is a gaming failure sounds like counter-marketing hype after E3-- every kid under 13 I've seen loves running and jumping and controlling the Kinect. Yes there haven't been so many adult oriented kick ass games for it, and Microsoft stumbled massively when taking soooo long to release their Kinect SDK to PC developers. But just check out YouTube, there many, many are amazing hacks out there by people using the primesense drivers before MS slowly came to the party. A couple of us made a full-body realtime 3D avatar system, fully articulatable with Unity and these open source drivers very quickly. And iPisoft has their dual Kinect based motion capture suite that is cheaper than an hour in a pro mocap suite! So don't discount what the Kinect has proffered. It's not the holy grail, but its depth tech, combined with voice recognition, other wearable sensors, and maybe brain based controllers like the Emotiv, make the future look really cool. We just have to apply them correctly to the right interactions. Also, Microsoft could get off their ass and give us a 2nd generation one at a hardware cycle as fast as Apple and then they might have a chance again....

An online course doesn't have to mean it's lousy education, and that you'd have to pay through the nose for it from an expensive university. Excellent quality learning can be found online or in video courses for nominal fees compared to the incredibly overpriced (for what you get) university offerings. Clearly these also don't have to replace those institutions (and in a lot of cases, simply cannot), but rather, I hope they spur traditional "higher learning" to increase quality and lower prices to *reasonable levels*. I've found absolutely fantastic training in a 7 DVD set that $40K/year at a top state school couldn't touch. You can't begin to tell me that the student loan debts many have are worth the degrees they got from those institutions. Obviously, certain fields and practical labs just have to be done on campus, but there's a timeliness to much of the online training which can't be beat; and good interactive training (although often a bitch to create) can truly enhance learning speeds. Besides, $100 is nothing. We're not talking about angry birds or buying shareware here, as long as the course pays for itself in income you will get as a result of it, then it's a great price whatever the investment. ~$200K for 4 years and not able to get a job in the market with not so practical skills doesn't sound so appealing after seeing what's out there online. Employers care about results and job experience. Other hires are from networking, and on today's socially connected web, that's not only at the frat house.