or the virtual year of the Linux desktop?

The first possibility you suggested might have been possible but unlikely: we were all wearing staff lanyards. Your seccond suggestion is impossible, none of these kids knew me or my peer.

I understand that some recent news have revealed false accusations leading to disciplinary consequences for the falsely-accused. However, I am yet to hear of a case of successful false accusations occuring at prestigious universities, or of false accusations rising in an alcohol-free, non-private situations. Saying that talking to someone during office hours exposes you to being falsely accused of sexual harassment is an exaggeration. Not even the ultra-conservatives in this university are arguing this.

I TAed a class at an Ivy League CS department last semester. It was sad to see that students would rather wait in line to talk to me (a male TA) during office hours than approach the available female TA sitting next to me. This behavior does not help anyone. This is probably the kind of problem that Brown's student advocates will be addressing, not recommending to fire/expell faculty/students or influencing faculty hire decisions.

I think you nailed this. I currently go to Yale and unfortunately many other international students are *terrified* of finding a means to stay in the US. This is idiotic! Most of us want to stay at least for a while, and I think a majority plan to make it permanent. It really is a no brainer: jobs in our home countries pay an order of magnitude less than the US and there is also no interesting work outside the US in many areas (like computer science). However, how can you separate Harvard from Podunk? SAT scores? Salary after graduation?

Elite colleges in the US are plagued with international students, particularly computer science majors. A very significant amount of the greatest engineering talent comes from these colleges: MIT, Stanford, the Ivy league, etc. Additionally these kids generally come to the US to stay, at least for a good while: consider that they can expect to be paid 10x less in their home countries. The admission process of top american universities recognized these kids as being more talented than american candidates. Are companies to blame for wanting to get these kids an H1-B? Or is the american education system and its lack of results the real root of the problem?

I have never assembled a computer, you insensitive clod!

This is my audio player of choice. Lyrics on the player Window. No problems setting up any hotkeys. Reasonably configurable interface. Doesn't look like it was made in 1998. Reasonable song information management. All those online music platforms which I do not use. By far the most well rounded player in Linux.

This article misses the fact that elite colleges are also typically the most generous when it comes to financial aid. I am studying CS at Yale. Yale's tuition + room and board cost is nowhere near affordable by my family. Nevertheless, I got a Yale scholarship that covers everything I cannot pay, and I will not be indebted when I graduate. My tuition is probably lower than a state college's (although they might provide some aid for cases like mine, but not me since I'm an international). And I am by no means a special case, 50% of the student body is on financial aid. The perception that elite colleges are out to strip you of your money and put you on a life-long debt is false. They are willing to throw money at you if you get admitted. Also, it is rare that anybody graduates from the CS department without any job offers. I admit that what I learn is probably not drastically different than what people learn at a state college. Still, it is much harder to make it above the curve here than it will be at a state college, and much more effort/focus will be needed to stay afloat. There is certainly a discrepancy in difficulty, and employers will probably appreciate that.

https://xkcd.com/284/

Isn't this taking the open source thing too literally?

It is finally here! Now we just need it to be an open platform.

You are right, I missed that point and your analogy is better. Nevertheless, I also think that it is unlikely that the educational content of the internet will devolve into a bandwidth hungry activity (anyone have insights on this?), which is the cited example. After all, the elite of the United States is still educated in classrooms, and the most data that can come out of that is a video stream. See, for example, oyc.yale.edu, which provides video of lectures (and even transcripts), problem sets, tests and other materials. I think that a bandwidth divide just promotes a luxury divide (something acceptable in capitalism) and does not make the divide larger by affecting other divides, such as education.

So, a faster speed is bad because some won't have access to it? How is not implementing a faster speed option going to help them? This is the exact same problem with, for example, real estate: Since some people can pay for better houses, should we prohibit such houses because it gives them an unfair advantage? It seems that the author does not realize that the problem is of much greater dimensions than: "Google is discriminating people by income." Capitalism is discriminating people by income, and if that is his complaint, then his article sucks at conveying it.

My university refuses to cancel classes. They are sore because they had to cancel classes due to snow for the first time in twenty years last year. Sent from my astrophysics class.