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Have you even been to collage? What idiot makes the implication that tuition is the expensive part? Thats the smallest part!

Ad hominem much? I have not been to collage [sic].

However, I went to, and graduated from, UC. And over in the fact based part of reality, tuition is indeed the most expensive part of education. Let's review the evidence...

- Stanford tuition at ~43K/year is much more than the $6K you'd pay for housing, the next highest cost.

- At UC Berkeley, versus the $13,200 resident tuition, you might pay $9,500 off campus, or ~7K/year for room AND board with the co-op.

Of course you can spend much more on housing, if you so choose.

Subsidies inflate pricing. I agree.

Because companies change what they can, rather than a fair cost. The answer to that is simple - let the government run the universities too. That's a much better fix than denying most of the young people a higher education as Ron Paul's proposal does.

Let's do an actual comparison: UC versus Stanford.... Undergrad tuition UC $13,200 for residents, $36,078 out of state, vs $13,350 quarterly for Stanford = $42,270 yearly. So the out-of-state tuition for UC is fairly comparable to Stanford. I don't see how Stanford is profiting heavily... although they are charging 9% more, we'd have to compare whether they provide a better education for the money, etc. However this does not demonstrate that government subsidies for student loans/pell grants inflate Stanford's pricing, nor that government is more efficient at providing a university education. You might then argue that state subsidy of the resident tuition causes out-of-state tuition to inflate, but you'd be hard pressed to actually prove that.

The unfortunate actual issue is that UC tuition has risen quickly over recent years as the state has been unwilling to fully fund it.

It's funny, Raskin said that even Lisa wouldn't have been graphical if he hadn't specified it for the Macintosh beforehand!

"The Lisa was very Star-like; the Lisa stole things from Star right and left—it stole people, it stole ideas, even stole the font names, exactly."

http://library.stanford.edu/mac/primary/interviews/raskin/parc.html

You sir are a dupe. The Macintosh and Lisa projects were well underway before Jobs Ever heard of the PARC XEROX project. You should google Jeff Raskin who created the mac and learn he was planning it well before 1979. Here's a bit of history:
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html

the real issue here however is not that but rather, the fact the Schimtt was on apple's board of directors. This is why it is stealing not copying.

Its not a chatterbot. Its CALO. http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/projects/calo/

Steve Jobs' contribution isn't about white plastic, it's bringing the GUI to the masses when the guys who invented it were content to let it moulder in a lab.

Except that is the opposite of history - Jobs kept trying to kill the project at Apple that brought the GUI to the masses. Raskin and his team had already incorporated most of the Xerox PARC technology in the Macintosh project, and Steve wanted it killed, so Raskin went over his head. Steve still kept trying to kill the project so Raskin organized a field trip to Xerox PARC so that Jobs could get a clearer idea of why the ideas were important and would hopefully stop trying to kill the project. After this instead of trying to kill the Mac, Jobs forced Raskin out to take his project.

So we have the GUI in SPITE of Steve Jobs, not because of him.

http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html

Companies have programs that donate surplus working equipment to schools and needy families. So before you claim all those webcams for a project, why don't you see if you can actually donate them for a worthy cause. Just because you have a ton of webcams doesn't mean you should do something wacky like this: http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/

Build a camera array similar to what Stanford has done (see http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/ ) for fast imaging, or building a camera array to refocus images after the fact (see http://lightfield.stanford.edu/ ).

Otherwise, you could do your own "bullet-time" live spin-around imaging system by placing them around a circular room.

Build a camera array similar to what Stanford has done (see http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/ ) for fast imaging, or building a camera array to refocus images after the fact (see http://lightfield.stanford.edu/ ).

Otherwise, you could do your own "bullet-time" live spin-around imaging system by placing them around a circular room.

Concerning getting through school too easily and then giving up when hitting the wall, this following article is quite important....
https://www.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/cgi-bin/drupalm/system/files/Intelligence%20Praise%20Can%20Undermine%20Motivation%20and%20Performance.pdf

QUOTE:
        Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

        Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

Two more stages of testing provided this startling finding:

        Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

They were invited to Xerox and bought the tech off them. Afterwards, Apple hired some of the staff. Read history (or ask Woz) and don't be a douche.

Actually the real history is that Raskin arranged the visit so that Steve Jobs would see why the technology that was in the Macintosh was important and hopefully convince Jobs to quit trying to kill the Mac.

http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html

Umm, no; that was Doug Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute.

Yes, yes it was.

I love the two-handed pointer, with dedicated modifier keys (which resemble piano keys in their size and pivoting movement) under the left hand, and the pointer itself under the right.

It might be said that this layout was copied, much later, as the common control mechanism for PC-based first-person games (ASFW keys under left hand, mouse in right).

xerox actually invented both the mouse

Umm, no; that was Doug Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute.

In this case, the groupthink is right on and Francis Gurry's counter-history, such as it is, is patently(!) absurd. People are responding to his specific point about the web, which Cory accurately summarised. Thanks for the reasoned deviation from the party line, though. (I see it's been modded flame bait, now, but I disagree) You deserve an equally good counter-argument and I'll try to give it.

The context is a question posed to the panel: "How can countries, how can organisations improve in the area of innovation." In response to that question, and to the idea of measuring innovation that the Global Innovation Index aims to realise, everyone else on the panel talked about the important of things other than (you could say: in addition to) patents and traditional intellectual property tools. Daniele Archibugi included in his discussion of business innovations, an emphasis on the importance of institutions like schools (17:49) and of the infrastructure for innovation -- including the commons of the internet. Naushad Forbes called patents a "limited indicator of new product innovations and an almost non-existent indicator of new service and new business model innovations" (25:53), meaning that they do not account for the range of different kinds of innovation. Leonid Gokhberg talked about "differentiated policy mixes for different industries" as well as for different types of companies (33:57) because "innovation should be taken in its broad sense, including its non-technological, social, and environmental [effects]" (12:14).

Rolf-Dieter Heuer talked about how the Index fails to measure true innovation because it measures patents and not basic science, which he argues is the essential driver of innovation, essentially an inaccurate indicator instead of the thing itself (13:32). He values "substantial change" over "incremental change" (13:40). As an example of this problem, he cites the invention of the world wide web, which because it was not patented would not have shown up in this index, and yet reflects an important innovation of current age (to understate the case).

Francis Gurry addresses his concluding "white card" comments in response to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, but they apply as much to Lynn Saint-Amour's remarks, indeed you can see him begin to compose his words at 44:10 after she says "if it [the web] was patented, the internet community would have found a way to route around it." She talked generally, not terribly on-topic, about how innovators can use openness to their advantage and the value of non-traditional channels of innovation (the last point at 17:48).

In the context of everything that came before, Mr Gurry's specific comments about the world web web reflect a dogmatic misunderstanding of how the web came to be and how it worked, especially in the 1990s. It's a bizarre and irrelevant counter-history, as I assume is being argued elsewhere in this thread as I compose this long and detailed reply. In brief, if the web had been patented and commercialised it would indeed have been routed around, as Lynn Saint-Amour said. Also, it would not have returned the patent profits to basic research, as Francis Gurry suggests, because then it would have become applied research and the funds would have funded incremental change in the commercial environment, to use Professor Heuer's words. Gurry does not seem to have been listening to the academics and policy advisers around him. They're all saying "tradition IP instruments can't do it all." His response is that "intellectual property is a very flexible instrument" (50:13), essentially "oh yes it can too do it all."

I fancy you can get a measure of the in

They have a website with lots of free course material:

http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=348ca38a-3a6d-4052-937d-cb017338d7b1

They tend to have very good professors giving the recorded lectures.

These, maybe not. Well, probably not the AI or computer learning one but the DB one might. However, Stanford has other lecture series that would be of benefit to someone learning to program, as that is what they are targeting. Stanford Engineering Everywhere has released three of their biginning CS courses. Start with 106a, which does not require anything beyond a willingness to learn.

I am the previous captain of the Stanford team and will be following the team across the outback again this year as a groupie. Racing itself is arguably the least important part of the overall race effort. While it allows you to choose winners and losers, on its own it doesn't contribute much to the overall solar car team experience. The race is only a few days long, but the effort to get there takes years.

To all of you criticizing the value of solar cars: The point of solar racing isn't to prove that solar cars are a viable mode of transportation. It's to be an extreme engineering exercise for students. Through it they learn project management, budget management, marketing, engineering optimization, teamwork, and real-world design skills. It takes an immense amount of thinking and excellent execution to build a car that weighs a few hundred pounds that can cruise down the freeway at 65 mph all day long on the power of a toaster and that doesn't break after bumping through the desert for thousands of miles.

For what it's worth, Tesla Motors was born out of the Stanford solar car team. Their first battery pack was made in our shop years ago as part of JB's retrofit of his old Porsche. Mission Motors owes quite a bit of its heritage to solar car racing as well, with its founders coming from the Stanford and Yale teams.

If any of you are in the SF bay area, I encourage you to come take a look at one of these cars in person. Our latest entry, Xenith, will be back on campus in January and we enjoy hosting visitors. Just send an email through the form on the Stanford Solar Car Project website.

An older version of the machine learning class videos actually given at Stanford is available here:
http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx

Despite the title saying "Machine Learning| Artificial Intelligence" it seems to be only the Machine Learning class.

That said, the AI class may be more useful for you unless you plan to do hardcore machine learning. The AI class seems to go over a broader set of machine learning topics than the ML class. I'm guessing the AI class will cover it's topics in less detail.

Having actually taken both of the classes in question at Stanford I'd disagree. They're useful but it's not god shoving knowledge into your head. If you can learn from a book (seriously learn, not half ass it) then just go with that.

Plus, you can already get the machine learning class videos (and a few other ones):
http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx

You lose all control over the material and some ugly things can happen.

Either give some example and reference for the above quote, or I call FUD.

Just to be clear, I'm not arguing against the value of the Public Domain and I would be perfectly happy with a 15 year copyright after which things naturally fall into the Public Domain. I was only referring to the OPs question about just declaring the thesis Public Domain and calling it good. CC is a way of "dedicating works to the public domain"

I was mostly referring to the same confusion over rights that the OP was trying to avoid and that was described in the Wikipedia link posted above. There's no clear legal definition of "Public Domain," and there are places where it's actually not possible to legally release all rights (Germany is cited in the Wiki article, but Portugal is also an example, I believe). Those are some of the problems CC was created to solve. On the other hand, CC licenses are very explicit about what they allow and make it easy for someone to reuse the work. Without those assurances someone might reuse a work only to find that they original rights owner (or more likely an heir or assignee) is suing them and there's no recourse because the release into the Public Domain wasn't legally valid. You might still win, but it's murky enough in some cases to cost money defending the case.

There are other things that could happen without much legal recourse if you do manage to give up all rights, for instance someone could change the author's name only and republish it, which, depending on the work and the effort involved my be disappointing. Remember that the OP wanted to make sure that his work was properly cited. Worse, someone might leave the name on it, change the content to meet some agenda of their own and republish it, so that it appears the original author said things they didn't. If I wanted to release something directly into the public domain, I would be inclined to do it anonymously to avoid that problem.

Another advantage to using a real license of any sort is that somewhere an attorney was involved. From your comments, you are not an attorney. Neither am I. For good or ill the law doesn't work the way an engineer would design it. Public Domain doesn't work just because you or I may say it should. It works when and if a court will find that works in most cases. For most of my own stuff, CC works great because I don't want to have to reinvent all of this every time I publish something.

You seem to have a strong opinion about this. Do you have a problem with CC licenses that releasing material directly into the Public Domain seems to fix?

Oh, and the second university I checked said something similar:

In submitting a thesis or dissertation to Stanford, the Author grants The Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University (Stanford) the non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable right to reproduce, distribute, display and transmit Author's thesis or dissertation, including any supplemental materials (the Work), . . . to sub-license others to do the same,and to preserve and protect the Work . . . .

Now, you are right in that public institutions frequently have rules along these lines:

The copyright to a thesis belongs to the student, according to the University's General Rules. As a condition of being awarded the degree, however, the student grants the University the non-exclusive right "to retain, use and distribute a limited number of copies of the thesis, together with the right to require its publication for archival use."

So the copyright is yours but you are required to share some of those rights with the institution.

In general what I have seen is that if you used any money from them (grants, research assistantship, use of labs/equipment), the universities want the copyrights. If you did it all by yourself, you keep it. So it seems that you can typically only keep the copyright for some social science projects or purely theoretical stuff like that as it is close to impossible to carry out an applied scientific or engineering project without any help from the institution.

Multimedia isn't simply video. But consider "just" video, and client-side scripting gives you: Better control in the form of chapters for example, interactivity with annotations (though their untasteful use can be annoying), subtitles, better buffering to save bandiwdth, filters - to attach CSS to events at least. There's really a whole range of things if you think about it.
Granted, you can always build a desktop client to do this, but we're talking web. Cramming the above-said features into the markup language itself is just unnatural. Eventually, it'll become so complex you'd wish you've just had your scripting language (or you'll end up with and XML-based scripting language *frowns*).
Having a real programming language pre-enables you to implement whatever new concept might appear in the future as well. For example, see this: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/june/classx-video-processing-062811.html

Their pay ranges from $77K for a humanities assistant prof to $366K for a med school full professor. A science/engineering fill prof earns $180K on average. Some double their salaries consulting up to 20% of their time. elite schools pay more. Institutions in S.F./Silicon Valley pay more.

Winston Churchill: Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

It's likewise also the worst place to work - except for the others.

I note that while government and corporations both suck, no government but yes corporations sucks worse than no corporations but yes government. The Soviet Union sucked, but Somalia sucks worse. What's worst is when the government is just a tool of the corporations: fascism. And that really sucks. Fascist cubicles are the worst cubicles.

Protein Folding : folding@home

http://folding.stanford.edu/

Great, the link disappeared. These were the facts I was referring to:

20 facts about inequality and poverty in the US.

and thus, the circle is complete...

So:
1. Rice University had (and has) WARP - a sophisticated research platform of software controlled radios, build from the ground up using open source software
2. Stanford has the idea of using self-interference and demoes single-channel full-duplex wireless in 2010 at mobicon
3. Microsoft Research UK had some other ideas (May 2011) on self-interference and meshing for medium access control (check the citations: Stanford is mentioned)
4. Rice University takes a step further and establishes a math model and (this is the actual novelty) a way of doing it using an unexpensive setup.

Can't stop but wonder: in all the above there's no patent? Is it the promotion of "the progress of science and useful arts" possible outside "securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right"? And this is not communism?

Seems like it was.

Back in 1991, Stanford University spun off the management of their endowment into the Stanford Management Company. At first they were into classic passive investments, like most university endowments. But they've gone beyond that. They invest in venture capital companies. They're located out on Sand Hill Road, where all the Silicon Valley venture capitalists have offices. Executives have moved between the Stanford Management Company and venture capital firms for years. The ties to that community are very close.

This has worked out very well. Stanford tends to take an equity stake in companies spun out of Stanford. Stanford owns part of Cisco, part of Yahoo, and part of Google. It's getting to the point that Stanford University is becoming a VC firm that runs an educational operation on the side as a tax break.

So a deal to run educational operations through a VC firm is perfectly normal for Stanford.

The correct order should be:

1. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by H.Abelson and G.Sussman with J.Sussman
2. Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (sic!) by G.Sussman and J.Wisdom with M.Mayer
3. Operating Systems Design and Implementation by A.Tanenbaum and A.Woodhull
4. Modern Operating Systems by A.Tanenbaum
5. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 1 by D.Knuth
6. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 2 by D.Knuth
7. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 3 by D.Knuth
8. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 4 by D.Knuth

I am sure that The Art of Computer Programming Volume 5 by D.Knuth will be next on the list. I have seriously been counting the years to the estimated 2020.

I only regret that Gerry Sussman hasn't written more books and hasn't recorded more talks. I will buy everything he writes and I will listen to everything he says. Please, Gerry! If you read this then please drop everything you do and just start talking to the camera. I have watched your every talk and lecture that I could possibly find on the Internet many times - from the 1986 lectures at MIT to your lecture on mechanical watches. I seriously believe that everything you say should be recorded for future generations. I don't know anyone else who can talk about anything at all and I listen breathlessly like I was hypnotized. I'm sure that many people here could say the same. Let this be an open letter to Gerald Jay Sussman: Please write more books and please record more lectures for the sake of the future of computer science. And thank you for your outstanding contribution that you have made so far. It is something that has shaped literally generations of passionate enthusiasts of programming. Thank you.

The correct order should be:

1. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by H.Abelson and G.Sussman with J.Sussman
2. Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (sic!) by G.Sussman and J.Wisdom with M.Mayer
3. Operating Systems Design and Implementation by A.Tanenbaum and A.Woodhull
4. Modern Operating Systems by A.Tanenbaum
5. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 1 by D.Knuth
6. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 2 by D.Knuth
7. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 3 by D.Knuth
8. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 4 by D.Knuth

I am sure that The Art of Computer Programming Volume 5 by D.Knuth will be next on the list. I have seriously been counting the years to the estimated 2020.

I only regret that Gerry Sussman hasn't written more books and hasn't recorded more talks. I will buy everything he writes and I will listen to everything he says. Please, Gerry! If you read this then please drop everything you do and just start talking to the camera. I have watched your every talk and lecture that I could possibly find on the Internet many times - from the 1986 lectures at MIT to your lecture on mechanical watches. I seriously believe that everything you say should be recorded for future generations. I don't know anyone else who can talk about anything at all and I listen breathlessly like I was hypnotized. I'm sure that many people here could say the same. Let this be an open letter to Gerald Jay Sussman: Please write more books and please record more lectures for the sake of the future of computer science. And thank you for your outstanding contribution that you have made so far. It is something that has shaped literally generations of passionate enthusiasts of programming. Thank you.

The correct order should be:

1. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by H.Abelson and G.Sussman with J.Sussman
2. Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (sic!) by G.Sussman and J.Wisdom with M.Mayer
3. Operating Systems Design and Implementation by A.Tanenbaum and A.Woodhull
4. Modern Operating Systems by A.Tanenbaum
5. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 1 by D.Knuth
6. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 2 by D.Knuth
7. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 3 by D.Knuth
8. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 4 by D.Knuth

I am sure that The Art of Computer Programming Volume 5 by D.Knuth will be next on the list. I have seriously been counting the years to the estimated 2020.

I only regret that Gerry Sussman hasn't written more books and hasn't recorded more talks. I will buy everything he writes and I will listen to everything he says. Please, Gerry! If you read this then please drop everything you do and just start talking to the camera. I have watched your every talk and lecture that I could possibly find on the Internet many times - from the 1986 lectures at MIT to your lecture on mechanical watches. I seriously believe that everything you say should be recorded for future generations. I don't know anyone else who can talk about anything at all and I listen breathlessly like I was hypnotized. I'm sure that many people here could say the same. Let this be an open letter to Gerald Jay Sussman: Please write more books and please record more lectures for the sake of the future of computer science. And thank you for your outstanding contribution that you have made so far. It is something that has shaped literally generations of passionate enthusiasts of programming. Thank you.

The correct order should be:

1. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by H.Abelson and G.Sussman with J.Sussman
2. Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (sic!) by G.Sussman and J.Wisdom with M.Mayer
3. Operating Systems Design and Implementation by A.Tanenbaum and A.Woodhull
4. Modern Operating Systems by A.Tanenbaum
5. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 1 by D.Knuth
6. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 2 by D.Knuth
7. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 3 by D.Knuth
8. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 4 by D.Knuth

I am sure that The Art of Computer Programming Volume 5 by D.Knuth will be next on the list. I have seriously been counting the years to the estimated 2020.

I only regret that Gerry Sussman hasn't written more books and hasn't recorded more talks. I will buy everything he writes and I will listen to everything he says. Please, Gerry! If you read this then please drop everything you do and just start talking to the camera. I have watched your every talk and lecture that I could possibly find on the Internet many times - from the 1986 lectures at MIT to your lecture on mechanical watches. I seriously believe that everything you say should be recorded for future generations. I don't know anyone else who can talk about anything at all and I listen breathlessly like I was hypnotized. I'm sure that many people here could say the same. Let this be an open letter to Gerald Jay Sussman: Please write more books and please record more lectures for the sake of the future of computer science. And thank you for your outstanding contribution that you have made so far. It is something that has shaped literally generations of passionate enthusiasts of programming. Thank you.

The correct order should be:

1. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by H.Abelson and G.Sussman with J.Sussman
2. Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (sic!) by G.Sussman and J.Wisdom with M.Mayer
3. Operating Systems Design and Implementation by A.Tanenbaum and A.Woodhull
4. Modern Operating Systems by A.Tanenbaum
5. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 1 by D.Knuth
6. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 2 by D.Knuth
7. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 3 by D.Knuth
8. The Art of Computer Programming Volume 4 by D.Knuth

I am sure that The Art of Computer Programming Volume 5 by D.Knuth will be next on the list. I have seriously been counting the years to the estimated 2020.

I only regret that Gerry Sussman hasn't written more books and hasn't recorded more talks. I will buy everything he writes and I will listen to everything he says. Please, Gerry! If you read this then please drop everything you do and just start talking to the camera. I have watched your every talk and lecture that I could possibly find on the Internet many times - from the 1986 lectures at MIT to your lecture on mechanical watches. I seriously believe that everything you say should be recorded for future generations. I don't know anyone else who can talk about anything at all and I listen breathlessly like I was hypnotized. I'm sure that many people here could say the same. Let this be an open letter to Gerald Jay Sussman: Please write more books and please record more lectures for the sake of the future of computer science. And thank you for your outstanding contribution that you have made so far. It is something that has shaped literally generations of passionate enthusiasts of programming. Thank you.

I hope he spreads some of the wealth to the people from whom he "borrowed" work:

http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/kingweb/additional_resources/articles/palimp.htm

I'm not against borrowing, or sampling, but it's not out of line to ask that the original creators get something too.

While Xerox PARC did the original GUI environment, and invented little things like the Mouse

Small correction...Douglas Englebart invented the mouse. And a whole lot of other stuff that PARC and later, Microsoft and Apple, made "ordinary."

Here's what 'supercookies' actually are (from the horse's mouth: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6715)
* you hit a page which includes a wlHelper.js script
* wlHelper.js is served with header that tell your browser - cache this forever
* wlHelper.js contains code something like this:
      var unique_id = 'RANDOM_LOOKING_STRING_JUST_FOR_YOU'
      if MUID cookie doesn't already exist
            set MUID cookie to unique_id

You delete your MUID cookie - but next time you hit a page that contains wlHelper.js the cached version is pulled form your browser. unique_id is there in the cached code, so the cookie gets set again.

... years ago:

http://lalists.stanford.edu/lad/2008/01/0446.html

For some reason I got accused of being silly about the issue of selling media containing GPLed software...

Stanford undergrad tuition is essentially free if your family makes less than $100k/yr. Need-based financial aid policies mean that the $55k number is an upper bound, typically paid in full only by families making $200k and above (with various exceptions, of course, but that's the general pattern). In any case, this is a grad course, so the price of undergrad tuition is not really relevant to the discussion.

Stanford CS PhD students generally have their tuition, as well as an additional stipend for living expenses, fully funded by research grant money, so they don't pay a cent. The only students taking this class who would actually be charged full tuition are likely those in the professional master's degree program, which is basically Stanford's way of siphoning money from Silicon Valley tech companies: the companies send their employees for training and pay Stanford to do it.

This is all to say that I don't think Stanford's trying to rip anyone off here (quite the contrary, since they're providing the course for free). But it's also a rare course which can be taught in this way. It's easy to write an autograder that runs programs submitted to it and checks to see if they produce the correct output; it's much harder to automatically provide feedback on an English paper or a mathematical proof. Similarly, it's easy to record your lectures and put them up on Youtube; it's much harder to replicate a classroom discussion facilitated by a true expert. So, a few large-lecture CS classes aside, the vast majority of classroom experiences (at Stanford or anywhere else) are going to be very difficult to replicate at a web scale, now and for the foreseeable future.

If the content of this class is exactly the same as the "real" version, and at the end you are evaluated on the grading curve right alongside "real" students... then you have to question why the cost of "really" being a Stanford student is $55,385 per year, while the cost of receiving the same product without the formal diploma is $0.

How much of the expense of modern university education today is actually tied to the core product, and how much is simple sociology? That is, only a certain percentage of society can be in the "elite" ranks by definition... and so elite institutions must price themselves accordingly to maintain the appropriate exclusion.

The technology is rather related to point cloud rendering which is about 10 years old now. This is the most clever implementation of point cloud rendering that I am aware of and it is pretty cool: http://graphics.stanford.edu/software/qsplat/ It renders amazingly fast.

It has its shares of problems including requiring a lot of precomputation and as far as I know noone was able to do proper anitaliasing on point clouds. Texture interpolation in the traditional sense has also not been solved to my knowledge because with these point clouds all you can do is give individual points colors, so you will always have hard edges between points. Those two combined result in a lot of visual noise that destroys the illusion in the demo videos that I have seen so far.

Actually, it was being done realistically in near real-time over 10 years ago, using splatting based techniques (see surfels and QSplat http://graphics.stanford.edu/software/qsplat/). These systems weren't really suitable or fast enough for games at the time, but 10 years is a long time for hardware and software to progress.

This is probably not actually what is generally called "voxels", but a hierarchical point cloud system consisting of points on the surface of objects, rendered via some kind of weighted splatting mechanism. There was a lot of research into such systems for visualising some of the very high resolution point clouds coming out of digital laser scanning systems (for example QSplat, which came out of the Digital Michelangelo project http://graphics.stanford.edu/software/qsplat/).

Imagine this statement: "Sunlight is not ionizing radiation therefore it is unthinkable that it can cause cancer."

You're massively confused. Sunlight *is* ionizing radiation, at least the UV portion. That's why sunlight causes cancer.

http://cancer.stanford.edu/skincancer/skin/causes/uvrad.html

Women didn't leave the field voluntarily. Once it became apparent that programming was becoming a lucrative field women were systematically driven out by a system that favored men:

Eager to indentify talented individuals to train as computer programmers, employers relied on aptitude tests to make hiring decisions. ... [T]he tests were widely compromised and their answers were available for study through all-male networks such as college fraternities and Elks lodges. ... [A] second type of test, the personality profile, was even more slanted to male applicants. Based on a series of preference questions, these tests sought to identify job applicants who were the ideal programming “type.” According to test developers, successful programmers had most of the same personality traits as other white-collar professionals. The important distinction, however, was that programmers displayed “disinterest in people” and that they disliked “activities involving close personal interaction.” It is these personality profiles, says Ensmenger, that originated our modern stereotype of the anti-social computer geek. ... Although the stereotype of the anti-social programmer was created in the 1960s, it is now self-perpetuating. Employers seek to hire new recruits who fit the existing mold. Young people self-select into careers where they believe they will fit in—for example, women currently comprise 18% of computer science undergraduate majors, down from 37% in 1985.

The gender disparity in programming is not the result of slight differences between men and women or subtle unconscious biases. It is the result of overt discrimination going back decades to the origin of the profession. And it will take overt action to correct the disparity.

Flawless astroturf is indistinguishable from hard work. It's certainly possible, but is it actually cheaper than not making a crap product in the first place? The makers of flawless astroturf are unlikely to be employed by Motel 69. I've heard it presently costs somewhere north of $500m to get a new drug approved by the FDA. The dreadnoughts of Amazonia are overstated.

I've argued several times recently for the virtues of pseudonymous pluripotency and against the consolidated identity of Google+. But then, I don't besmirch my pseudonymous splendour with motel reviews. (I fear my gig could be busted on a measure of bifurcated alliteration; but for the moment, writing such a filter is--you guessed it--indistinguishable from hard work.)

When you think about it, this is the Turing test in miniature. In the samples given, the straight man on the left is the easier text type to mimic flawlessly than the gusher on the right; the difference is that the gushy cake mix is more likely (I presume) to influence consumers with poor impulse control, so the fakers helped themselves to a giant box of Woody Allen instant pudding.

I picked both samples as fake. The sample on the left doesn't pass for anything more clever than a really long paper tape with heart-felt opinions on infinite spools; the sample on the right doesn't pass any test.

The last book I purchased with recourse to the Amazon rabble was The Elements of Statistical Learning.

The review that finally sold me was the guy who said, "whenever I get into real trouble, this is the first book I crack open". He was saying that there was plenty of depth between the lines, for the reader willing to struggle. Any large book I'm going to lug around in the physical world had better come equipped with more lifelines than the 2nd Titanic.

I also bought an introduction to VHDL programming at the same time (Amazon now has me narrowed down to a few dozen meatspace puppets) that was precisely the opposite: a quick bootstrap with nothing whatsoever to recommend a third reading. For the price, I was disappointed. Perhaps it paid for itself on the first reading; even if it did, it was a soulless experience.

It's not that everyone wants convenience. It's more the case that most large companies want consumers who want convenience. Convenience is a sound people make while opening their wallets knowing that they skipped out on proper evaluation.

Competence is indistinguishable from hard work. When I do read reviews, I tend to scan *every* review, not just the five (most helpful to Amazon) that they offer up for one click less. While my eyes are skimming madly for dialtone in the morass of pseudo-babble, my brain is consolidating in background the few useful sentences, pro against con. The brain is good at PCA if you give it a chance.

It doesn't mean you're entitled for someone to do a bunch of work to put it in a convenient format, and then spoon feed it to you.

Actually yes it does mean exactly that.

If you do not own the copyright on a work then you have no legal basis for claiming copyright on any conversion of that work to a new medium. Specifically there is no new material upon which a derivative work can be claimed. There is no creative process in a mechanical scanning process and so no new work is created: the OCR copy is simply a copy of a work in the public domain. In order to claim copyright JSTOR would need to either modify the content of the papers, add sufficient extra material to warrant a derivative, or claim copyright on the particular collection.

There is a good overview of the issues available here.

The parent hit it right on the head. Stanford CS still believes in teaching the people -- who are likely to professionally program -- using Java and C++. Seriously, the only reason this is being discussed like this is because of Stanford's unusual course numbering system. This is not the usual meaning of a "101" course. This is not a required intro course and most technical people will not bother taking it. (Knowing Stanford students, "techies" would probably consider it beneath them.)
The first programming class most people [who can hack it] take is the 106 series. The 106 series are the classes you expect all of the engineers, and most of the hard scientists (bio, chem, etc.), some of the economics majors, etc. This also includes the CS majors that don't skip to 107. Stanford has had an introductory non-majors class in Javascript for a while, CS 105. I only knew a couple of people who took 105 (both econ majors), and more than I am going to bother to count who took 106. (I hung out with techies.)
Just to give some perspective, lets check the numbers. Enrollment for 106A in 2009-2010 was 1087 over the year . The number I am pulling up for CS105 was approximately 300 a year in 2007. Final FYI, next year CS101 is only offered 1 quarter and CS105 is offered for all 3.
tl;dr non-event becomes headline due to misleading name

Linked lists. Recursion. Calling by reference. Strong typing. Explicit declaration (or at least the need of it). There are some ways around those, but these hacks are even going to warp their minds worse than not learning those things would.

Umm just so you know (since you seem to be having such a good time bitching about it), the normal Stanford undergraduate computer science curriculum does not include CS 101. The first programming class CS majors will take is one of the versions of CS 106, and they'll go on from there - and just guess what's covered in CS 106B/X? (warning: pdf, it's on page 3)

CS 101 is for people who are not computer science majors and who might not ever program again in their lives. Thus, by teaching them Javascript, they're taught something that may potentially become useful - after all, most non-technical people have access to a web browser, but very few of them have access to a C compiler or a Python interpreter.

Linked lists. Recursion. Calling by reference. Strong typing. Explicit declaration (or at least the need of it). There are some ways around those, but these hacks are even going to warp their minds worse than not learning those things would.

Umm just so you know (since you seem to be having such a good time bitching about it), the normal Stanford undergraduate computer science curriculum does not include CS 101. The first programming class CS majors will take is one of the versions of CS 106, and they'll go on from there - and just guess what's covered in CS 106B/X? (warning: pdf, it's on page 3)

CS 101 is for people who are not computer science majors and who might not ever program again in their lives. Thus, by teaching them Javascript, they're taught something that may potentially become useful - after all, most non-technical people have access to a web browser, but very few of them have access to a C compiler or a Python interpreter.