It should certainly end the paperclip shortage.

"Miss-construe". Fixed that for you.

It has to be a branding thing, don't you think? It just can't be mere Linux-geek snobbery; that would be too incredibly stupid after all the years of criticism.

Sigh. I did like Gnome.

Well, no. The kids who will take that course will have access to scholars for a few short years and then, in most cases, never again. They should be reading Pride and Prejudice, not Pride and Prejudice with Zombies (as much fun as that is), while they have expert guides.

Except, of course, for the provably positive probability of error. (Start here if you don't already know about single-event upset.)

Facetious or not, this might be the most sensible comment here. No one else has said nearly enough about the social life that college offers. Do you really think that millions of kids in their late teens/early twenties are going to stay in their parents' basements studying if there is any alternative available? Which would you have chosen, even at a steep price differential? Most people here already know that MIT gives away online courses. In an interview about them, an MIT professor laughed at the suggestion that the university was giving away an MIT education. He was right: in your Mom's basement, there's nothing of the intensity of discussion or competition or collaboration that exists at a real school. "Distance education is to education," said Jackson Lears years ago, "as phone sex is to sex." One more comment. I have urged my own university (a mid-sized brick-and-mortar) for years not to bother developing distance learning except for the bits that are useful in brick-and-mortar classes. I've done this because it's silly to think we can compete with the big boys. If we offer an online math class and Harvard offers an online math class, which would students rather have on their transcripts? I don't mean right now, when online learning is still disorganized and still bound by rules that only make sense for old-style schools; I mean in the near future, when supervised tests are available to certify that students have really learned the material and the rules about having a large percentage of your classes from one school evaporate. In twenty years, the distance learning field will be dominated by a few large players, and the rest will have wasted their effort. I'll chance my own prediction: distance learning will increase in importance, but will never amount to more than 10% of degrees awarded to people aged 18-24.

Not insightful. Many of us have no choice but to use Java apps at work.

Wow, the Israelis must be profoundly incompetent genociders. There are about twenty times as many "Palestinians" now as in 1948.

You don't have to be sensible, but you should at least get your facts straight.

Well, it depends on how you word it, really. If you compare officially theist regimes to officially atheist regimes, the latter are way ahead in murders over the last couple of centuries.

They aren't given any choice. Hamas, like Hezbollah, deliberately places military equipment and personnel in densely populated civilian areas.