This is in now way India-specific; but "I'd better shore up my battered sense of importance by getting my foot on the other guy's neck" seems to be the response that crops up to the sensation of vast, cosmic, insignificance as often as some nobler sense of kinship with your fellow gravity-well-dwellers.
I don't exactly like the fact; but when being better in some absolute sense isn't an option, we frequently turn to finding somebody to be worse, as though that's a substitute.
I have seen a few instances of this concept being actually true; but only in (computer assisted) old-and-busted-legacy-education.
I did some contracting on a couple of educational software implementation projects for a school system. One math, one music. In the math case, the software maintained an account for each student and (once told the general level and area to work with) would proceed to pose the student problems, keeping track of accuracy and speed, and adjusting the difficulty of future problems accordingly. It also crunched and pretty-printed the data for the teachers. Fundamentally, nothing that flash cards weren't doing slightly less efficiently since forever, and the software was capable of absolutely nothing useful if a given student was really having difficulty (except making the fact obvious to the teacher so they could do something about it and get a special education person involved if necessary). Within it's scope, though, it was better than flashcards at hitting the 'stuff you need work on; but aren't just beating your head against the wall on' bracket, and it made it easy to ID students with issues, sometimes even the conceptual areas they were particularly weak in, and get them the relevant assistance.
The music one was a bit more sophisticated. It came with a large library of pieces for which it was capable, once given the student's instrument type, of playing any neccessary accompaniment and of recording the student's playing. At it's most basic, this provided an easy mechanism for allocating and collecting 'practice X, Y, and Z for Tuesday' style assignments, since the recordings could be automatically collected, if desired, by the teacher the student's account was associated with. The more sophisticated capability was the ability to analyze the student's play and identify and score the degree of deviation from the correct output across an entire piece. Very neat to watch and also allowed convenient identification of students with weaker or stronger grasp of a piece (Not trivial if you want one music teacher to cover a zillion students. 1-to-1 listening is trivial for a competent music teacher; but finding time to do 90+ sessions of that, at least once a week, while also teaching them something new? Machines have their virtues...) and could show the student (graphically, note by note) their performance on the piece.
In both cases, the software would have been of dubious utility, especially for the hard cases, which it was pretty much only useful for identifying, not remediating; but computers can definitely do good-enough-and-far-more-comprehensive-than-you'd-hire-the-faculty-for high speed analysis of student performance.
I'm unconvinced by their ability to do much short of throwing additional drills at you (barring nontrivial further development of rather hairy problem areas) if you aren't getting it; so both programs would have been a total cock-up without the existing faculty in the loop, except for the strongest students who had the least use for them anyway (vs. almost-as-good flashcards and sitting down for piano practice customs); but very fast feedback was something that they could do, and did do. Probably still do, unless they've let them bitrot...
I got some bad news for ya, these new Consoles don't have any custom hardware like past times. It's all standard PC components now for the PS4 and Xbone.
Not terribly relevant: regardless of what consoles are made of, the broad outlines of what games are going to look like generally depends on what is within shooting distance for doing a console port for. There may or may not be some improvements in the PC version, if yours can handle it (Skyrim HQ textures pack, support for higher-than-TV resolutions, etc.); but if serious surgery to the game is required to get it working on a console, that is a major limiting factor.
Honestly, more than any change in graphical power, I'm looking forward to seeing what having consoles with non-ridiculous amounts of RAM does for us. Even on games where the prettiness levels adjusted nicely to additional power, it was always a bit ridiculous sitting on 16GB of RAM (plus basically as much HDD space as the game wants, for state details where mediocre access speed is OK) and playing games that scrimped to ensure that all game-critical assets and state would fit in the half gig and shared with the GPU arrangement on the last generation of consoles. That's the sort of thing that makes games, even good looking ones, eerily sparse.
I'm assuming that there are nonzero costs associated with operating the command and control infrastructure, whatever minimal legal exposure you might be taking, the value of the operator's time, and whatever alternate uses there are for the bots (especially since high CPU load is probably one of the most visible, and thus risky, things that you can do to a bot, increasing the risk that the computer will be wiped, scrapped, or remediated).
Lots of things certainly pay better if you can steal some of the inputs; but unless you can steal enough to cover all your costs, some crime is just too worthless to pay. I don't know if CPU time for bitcoins has quite approached that point; but the delta between even the fastest x86s and GPUs and ASICs is pretty dramatic, so it wouldn't surprise me if it is getting close (particularly if you factor in the opportunity costs of using the bots for bitcoins, with the higher detection risk, rather than for something less visible to nontechnical users.)
"Who the hell is this guy to think he knows best as to how the owner should handle their staff?"
And such good advice, as well. Does he think that restaurant staff get juicy severance packages (even if it were legal to pull a 'lost present and future income' figure out of your ass and just fine an employee you are terminating...) or something?
Surely the low-paid and replaceable service peons are directly responsible for all organizational policies, because they haven't resigned and gone to work elsewhere!
It's my right to harass them if I don't like the policies set by people over which they have no power!
Also, Google Glass pushes the wrong buttons, psychologically, because it's more or less identical to having somebody with their cellphone out and in 'about to start filming/shooting' pose 100% of the time.
It isn't news that most cellphones have cameras; but (because of that), there are signals, like putting it in your pocket, bag, down on the table, etc. that you aren't using it at the moment or are using it, but only to dick around on the internet.
Nothing that you can't change in a few (moderately visible) seconds of movement, or that would stop your covert mic/sneaky fisheye and post-processing techniques from working; but it works socially. 'Glass', even if it's actually turned as far off as the hardware allows, is indistinguishable from a cellphone in its most invasive stance at all times(and, thanks to the haha-not-foldable design, your options for taking it off are substantially worse than with normal glasses).
Maybe the restaurant just didn't want to offend all the other guests by letting in a one-man camera crew.
Jeez, man, next you'll be asserting that it's acceptable for restaurants to uphold certain standards of dress and decorum in order to best serve their customer niche! That's some kind of revolutionary crazy talk.
Why limit the purpose of the site to drugs? Can we stick in molecules found in foods?
Probably because (unless you are willing to accept high-school-chem levels of oversimplification, and probably even if you are) computational chemistry is not exactly a problem that has any difficulty consuming all the computational resources we could possibly throw at it (unless you count problems with scaling, which I suspect that it has in spades, just to make computing with cheap interconnect less practical).
Drugs have the virtue of being (relatively) simple compared to most naturally occurring materials and (ideally) are fairly narrowly targeted. Both are significant virtues if you want to keep the scope of your simulation within the scope of the remotely possible...
Microsoft blew its right foot off with Windows 8.
They went to the doctor to get it reattached with Windows 8.1 only to wake up to find out that a second left foot was attached in place.
Unfortunately, Win7's dual-left-foot support was actually pretty good; but was removed because you can't operate the imaginary ipad-killing tablet that Balmer dreams about with two left feet...
That's the weird thing about Win8: Vista, while a failure, at least had the decency to founder largely because everything kept from XP was antique and everything scrapped and rebuilt was immature. Win8 started out as a product that people (at least the Windows-using ones) mostly liked, and then was systematically mutilated until the release date. That takes talent.
We could also adopt the truly revolutionary step of taking the theory that contracts actually reflect an 'agreement' between two contracting partners and applying it to the assorted contracts of adhesion that dominate the entire consumer side of the economy, with software simply one example among many, and hardly the most dangerous...
So long as you can 'consent' to mandatory binding arbitration in the kangaroo court of the company's choice, without further recourse, by clicking through some clickwrap, fighting over the details of what exactly one can and can't sneak into software is fighting a tiny skirmish in the middle of a war you've already lost.
I'd imagine that the fact that even GPU mining is a fairly dubious proposition at this point (I can't remember if the increases in price lately allow it to still be viable if the hardware costs are already sunk but you need to pay the electric bill; but the FPGAs and ASICs aren't getting any slower or less numerous), even donated or stolen CPU time would be close to worthless, even if doing it in Javascript doesn't impose much overhead...
How fast can you explain to the guy about to cut off your hand that it's not going to work? Is he going to believe you?
Wrong strategy: Simply explain that you'd be happy to assist a fine fellow such as him with making the desired modifications to your laptop's security settings...
Seriously, if somebody is willing to chop your hand off to bypass the security system (even if they are on the wrong track technologically) probably has many ways of demonstrating the sort of attacks enabled by physical access. You'll need to have something good on that computer to make even trying to hold out worth it.
As far as I know, absolutely none; in particular, throwing out enough RF to get a usable signal back would probably do your battery life and relationship with the FCC no good at all; but the large, precise, and sensitive PCB antenna arrays in Wacom tablets would be my off-the-cuff candidate for 'component most likely to be able to do the sensing' (but not the illuminating, they only work with the passive pens because those pens are designed to behave usefully in response to the quite feeble field put out by the tablet PCB, and nature is unlikely to be nearly so helpful). Plus, they look cool.
Good thing that IR-band pigments aren't already commercially available (never mind the tedious-but-likely-cheaper process of just looking for random stuff at Staples that happens to have the right property despite being formulated for visible-band applications, you only need to get lucky once and you'll probably have something you can spit out at usefully high resolutions on some ghastly inkjet that costs less than the ink it takes). This might actually be easier than cloning fingerprints...
Seeing as how it would be pretty easy to install an RFID reader on a PC, I'm going to guess that someone already patented it, wants too much money for it, and it won't expire for another ten years or so.
I think that the problem is mostly apathy. 'Enterprise' laptops offered smartcard support for years(as did/does windows) and you could get fairly cheap PCMCIA slot card readers(the just-slightly-larger size of the PCMCIA slot makes the physical design pretty easy, and implementing a low-voltage, low-speed serial bus isn't rocket surgery). Once 'contactless/RFID' became a Thing, laptops in the same bracket started to offer RFID as an option. It's mostly mired in cryptic alphabet soup (nothing reminds you exactly how many, mostly shitting and overlapping, some incompatible RFID 'standards' there are like trying to use something not purchased all in a lump and at a markup from a single vendor); but it's there. This document applies to select Dells; but others should be largely similar.
Broadcom's "BCM2079x Family" shows up at the party, usually with some amount of confusing vendor rebranding, fairly frequently.
Aside from the obvious untenability on a continued financial basis, have you seen any sign that the desire for education-as-signalling has changed?
If anything, the intensity of the arms race underway (while obviously as sustainable as any arms race never is, especially since it's a race between employers who ask, but dont' pay, for additional credentials, and students who sacrifice both money and time to obtain them) suggests the strength of demand for signalling functions. Once a given flavor of degree becomes ubiquitous, out comes the pressure to either get the next highest one, or make sure that you get that one from the most exclusive institution.
It is easy to posit that this cannot be maintained; the numbers just don't work; but the fact that nobody has a chance of talking this particular bubble down from the ledge before it jumps hardly suggests a situation where skepticism in the utility of signalling, rather than an untenably expensive arms race in signalling, is undermining the process.
Pending the invention of strong AI (which will certainly revolutionize 'individualized instruction'; but also sort of make all non-recreational human effort irrelevant...), it's difficult to imagine what would provide the change in kind, cheap, remote, delivery of actually-not-lousy education, rather than incremental changes in the degree of difficulty and cost of just delivering information from Point A to Point B.
We've demonstrated, at length, that mere information delivery is well within the scope of technology, and we've steadily brought a few non-text media types into the fold and vastly reduced the cost and latency. At the same time, though, those improvements have done dishearteningly little to solve the problem that we actually care about...
Obligated? Not in general (in this case, the startup had agreed to a partnership that involved serving these students, so it does represent a failure-in-contracting, whether because they overestimated the quality of their product or because they failed to come to an understanding with the customer about what was expected and what would be delivered. Not uncommon problems; but not virtues.)
However, while nobody is obligated to provide a universal product, this particular failure suggests a very dramatic narrowing of the scope for Udacity's product: It proved to be unsuitable to most customers, and the customers it was most suitable to were the ones that are generally considered relatively easy cases. That certainly isn't good news for any allegedly-disruptive offering, which is what Udacity has been selling itself as.
That doesn't really solve the problem in a substantial portion of cases. Unless a skill is strikingly visible in short order, or you have a prior in of some kind, people like 'degrees' because they serve a convenient signalling function in situations where full verification imposes excessive costs.
If you just want to do some DIY, or polish some specific skill for a job you already have, you don't need signalling; if you want people to hire you (or even get as far as bothering to test you in person), signalling has its uses.
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This is in now way India-specific; but "I'd better shore up my battered sense of importance by getting my foot on the other guy's neck" seems to be the response that crops up to the sensation of vast, cosmic, insignificance as often as some nobler sense of kinship with your fellow gravity-well-dwellers.
I don't exactly like the fact; but when being better in some absolute sense isn't an option, we frequently turn to finding somebody to be worse, as though that's a substitute.
I have seen a few instances of this concept being actually true; but only in (computer assisted) old-and-busted-legacy-education.
I did some contracting on a couple of educational software implementation projects for a school system. One math, one music. In the math case, the software maintained an account for each student and (once told the general level and area to work with) would proceed to pose the student problems, keeping track of accuracy and speed, and adjusting the difficulty of future problems accordingly. It also crunched and pretty-printed the data for the teachers. Fundamentally, nothing that flash cards weren't doing slightly less efficiently since forever, and the software was capable of absolutely nothing useful if a given student was really having difficulty (except making the fact obvious to the teacher so they could do something about it and get a special education person involved if necessary). Within it's scope, though, it was better than flashcards at hitting the 'stuff you need work on; but aren't just beating your head against the wall on' bracket, and it made it easy to ID students with issues, sometimes even the conceptual areas they were particularly weak in, and get them the relevant assistance.
The music one was a bit more sophisticated. It came with a large library of pieces for which it was capable, once given the student's instrument type, of playing any neccessary accompaniment and of recording the student's playing. At it's most basic, this provided an easy mechanism for allocating and collecting 'practice X, Y, and Z for Tuesday' style assignments, since the recordings could be automatically collected, if desired, by the teacher the student's account was associated with. The more sophisticated capability was the ability to analyze the student's play and identify and score the degree of deviation from the correct output across an entire piece. Very neat to watch and also allowed convenient identification of students with weaker or stronger grasp of a piece (Not trivial if you want one music teacher to cover a zillion students. 1-to-1 listening is trivial for a competent music teacher; but finding time to do 90+ sessions of that, at least once a week, while also teaching them something new? Machines have their virtues...) and could show the student (graphically, note by note) their performance on the piece.
In both cases, the software would have been of dubious utility, especially for the hard cases, which it was pretty much only useful for identifying, not remediating; but computers can definitely do good-enough-and-far-more-comprehensive-than-you'd-hire-the-faculty-for high speed analysis of student performance.
I'm unconvinced by their ability to do much short of throwing additional drills at you (barring nontrivial further development of rather hairy problem areas) if you aren't getting it; so both programs would have been a total cock-up without the existing faculty in the loop, except for the strongest students who had the least use for them anyway (vs. almost-as-good flashcards and sitting down for piano practice customs); but very fast feedback was something that they could do, and did do. Probably still do, unless they've let them bitrot...
I got some bad news for ya, these new Consoles don't have any custom hardware like past times. It's all standard PC components now for the PS4 and Xbone.
Not terribly relevant: regardless of what consoles are made of, the broad outlines of what games are going to look like generally depends on what is within shooting distance for doing a console port for. There may or may not be some improvements in the PC version, if yours can handle it (Skyrim HQ textures pack, support for higher-than-TV resolutions, etc.); but if serious surgery to the game is required to get it working on a console, that is a major limiting factor.
Honestly, more than any change in graphical power, I'm looking forward to seeing what having consoles with non-ridiculous amounts of RAM does for us. Even on games where the prettiness levels adjusted nicely to additional power, it was always a bit ridiculous sitting on 16GB of RAM (plus basically as much HDD space as the game wants, for state details where mediocre access speed is OK) and playing games that scrimped to ensure that all game-critical assets and state would fit in the half gig and shared with the GPU arrangement on the last generation of consoles. That's the sort of thing that makes games, even good looking ones, eerily sparse.
I'm assuming that there are nonzero costs associated with operating the command and control infrastructure, whatever minimal legal exposure you might be taking, the value of the operator's time, and whatever alternate uses there are for the bots (especially since high CPU load is probably one of the most visible, and thus risky, things that you can do to a bot, increasing the risk that the computer will be wiped, scrapped, or remediated).
Lots of things certainly pay better if you can steal some of the inputs; but unless you can steal enough to cover all your costs, some crime is just too worthless to pay. I don't know if CPU time for bitcoins has quite approached that point; but the delta between even the fastest x86s and GPUs and ASICs is pretty dramatic, so it wouldn't surprise me if it is getting close (particularly if you factor in the opportunity costs of using the bots for bitcoins, with the higher detection risk, rather than for something less visible to nontechnical users.)
The list isn't actually exhaustive: we have the "Federa Analog Act" for that...
What I want to know is why a glasshole had to wait until he'd finished storming out before writing an angry blog post...
Isn't the augmented reality future supposed to allow you to blog angrily and make a scene at the same time, thus making you more efficient?
"Who the hell is this guy to think he knows best as to how the owner should handle their staff?"
And such good advice, as well. Does he think that restaurant staff get juicy severance packages (even if it were legal to pull a 'lost present and future income' figure out of your ass and just fine an employee you are terminating...) or something?
Surely the low-paid and replaceable service peons are directly responsible for all organizational policies, because they haven't resigned and gone to work elsewhere!
It's my right to harass them if I don't like the policies set by people over which they have no power!
Also, Google Glass pushes the wrong buttons, psychologically, because it's more or less identical to having somebody with their cellphone out and in 'about to start filming/shooting' pose 100% of the time.
It isn't news that most cellphones have cameras; but (because of that), there are signals, like putting it in your pocket, bag, down on the table, etc. that you aren't using it at the moment or are using it, but only to dick around on the internet.
Nothing that you can't change in a few (moderately visible) seconds of movement, or that would stop your covert mic/sneaky fisheye and post-processing techniques from working; but it works socially. 'Glass', even if it's actually turned as far off as the hardware allows, is indistinguishable from a cellphone in its most invasive stance at all times(and, thanks to the haha-not-foldable design, your options for taking it off are substantially worse than with normal glasses).
Maybe the restaurant just didn't want to offend all the other guests by letting in a one-man camera crew.
Jeez, man, next you'll be asserting that it's acceptable for restaurants to uphold certain standards of dress and decorum in order to best serve their customer niche! That's some kind of revolutionary crazy talk.
What kind of freedom-hater are you?
Not quite any reason; but glassholes aren't a protected class.
Why limit the purpose of the site to drugs? Can we stick in molecules found in foods?
Probably because (unless you are willing to accept high-school-chem levels of oversimplification, and probably even if you are) computational chemistry is not exactly a problem that has any difficulty consuming all the computational resources we could possibly throw at it (unless you count problems with scaling, which I suspect that it has in spades, just to make computing with cheap interconnect less practical).
Drugs have the virtue of being (relatively) simple compared to most naturally occurring materials and (ideally) are fairly narrowly targeted. Both are significant virtues if you want to keep the scope of your simulation within the scope of the remotely possible...
Microsoft blew its right foot off with Windows 8. They went to the doctor to get it reattached with Windows 8.1 only to wake up to find out that a second left foot was attached in place.
Unfortunately, Win7's dual-left-foot support was actually pretty good; but was removed because you can't operate the imaginary ipad-killing tablet that Balmer dreams about with two left feet...
That's the weird thing about Win8: Vista, while a failure, at least had the decency to founder largely because everything kept from XP was antique and everything scrapped and rebuilt was immature. Win8 started out as a product that people (at least the Windows-using ones) mostly liked, and then was systematically mutilated until the release date. That takes talent.
We could also adopt the truly revolutionary step of taking the theory that contracts actually reflect an 'agreement' between two contracting partners and applying it to the assorted contracts of adhesion that dominate the entire consumer side of the economy, with software simply one example among many, and hardly the most dangerous...
So long as you can 'consent' to mandatory binding arbitration in the kangaroo court of the company's choice, without further recourse, by clicking through some clickwrap, fighting over the details of what exactly one can and can't sneak into software is fighting a tiny skirmish in the middle of a war you've already lost.
That's "Legitimate" as in "Legitimate Businessmen".
I'd imagine that the fact that even GPU mining is a fairly dubious proposition at this point (I can't remember if the increases in price lately allow it to still be viable if the hardware costs are already sunk but you need to pay the electric bill; but the FPGAs and ASICs aren't getting any slower or less numerous), even donated or stolen CPU time would be close to worthless, even if doing it in Javascript doesn't impose much overhead...
How fast can you explain to the guy about to cut off your hand that it's not going to work? Is he going to believe you?
Wrong strategy: Simply explain that you'd be happy to assist a fine fellow such as him with making the desired modifications to your laptop's security settings...
Seriously, if somebody is willing to chop your hand off to bypass the security system (even if they are on the wrong track technologically) probably has many ways of demonstrating the sort of attacks enabled by physical access. You'll need to have something good on that computer to make even trying to hold out worth it.
As far as I know, absolutely none; in particular, throwing out enough RF to get a usable signal back would probably do your battery life and relationship with the FCC no good at all; but the large, precise, and sensitive PCB antenna arrays in Wacom tablets would be my off-the-cuff candidate for 'component most likely to be able to do the sensing' (but not the illuminating, they only work with the passive pens because those pens are designed to behave usefully in response to the quite feeble field put out by the tablet PCB, and nature is unlikely to be nearly so helpful). Plus, they look cool.
Good thing that IR-band pigments aren't already commercially available (never mind the tedious-but-likely-cheaper process of just looking for random stuff at Staples that happens to have the right property despite being formulated for visible-band applications, you only need to get lucky once and you'll probably have something you can spit out at usefully high resolutions on some ghastly inkjet that costs less than the ink it takes). This might actually be easier than cloning fingerprints...
Seeing as how it would be pretty easy to install an RFID reader on a PC, I'm going to guess that someone already patented it, wants too much money for it, and it won't expire for another ten years or so.
I think that the problem is mostly apathy. 'Enterprise' laptops offered smartcard support for years(as did/does windows) and you could get fairly cheap PCMCIA slot card readers(the just-slightly-larger size of the PCMCIA slot makes the physical design pretty easy, and implementing a low-voltage, low-speed serial bus isn't rocket surgery). Once 'contactless/RFID' became a Thing, laptops in the same bracket started to offer RFID as an option. It's mostly mired in cryptic alphabet soup (nothing reminds you exactly how many, mostly shitting and overlapping, some incompatible RFID 'standards' there are like trying to use something not purchased all in a lump and at a markup from a single vendor); but it's there. This document applies to select Dells; but others should be largely similar.
Broadcom's "BCM2079x Family" shows up at the party, usually with some amount of confusing vendor rebranding, fairly frequently.
Aside from the obvious untenability on a continued financial basis, have you seen any sign that the desire for education-as-signalling has changed?
If anything, the intensity of the arms race underway (while obviously as sustainable as any arms race never is, especially since it's a race between employers who ask, but dont' pay, for additional credentials, and students who sacrifice both money and time to obtain them) suggests the strength of demand for signalling functions. Once a given flavor of degree becomes ubiquitous, out comes the pressure to either get the next highest one, or make sure that you get that one from the most exclusive institution.
It is easy to posit that this cannot be maintained; the numbers just don't work; but the fact that nobody has a chance of talking this particular bubble down from the ledge before it jumps hardly suggests a situation where skepticism in the utility of signalling, rather than an untenably expensive arms race in signalling, is undermining the process.
A sufficiently vigorous exclusion theoretically fulfills the requirements of 'radically upending', if perhaps not the spirit of the request...
And boy are problems easier when you just reject the ones you don't know how to solve, then give yourself a gold star...
Pending the invention of strong AI (which will certainly revolutionize 'individualized instruction'; but also sort of make all non-recreational human effort irrelevant...), it's difficult to imagine what would provide the change in kind, cheap, remote, delivery of actually-not-lousy education, rather than incremental changes in the degree of difficulty and cost of just delivering information from Point A to Point B.
We've demonstrated, at length, that mere information delivery is well within the scope of technology, and we've steadily brought a few non-text media types into the fold and vastly reduced the cost and latency. At the same time, though, those improvements have done dishearteningly little to solve the problem that we actually care about...
Obligated? Not in general (in this case, the startup had agreed to a partnership that involved serving these students, so it does represent a failure-in-contracting, whether because they overestimated the quality of their product or because they failed to come to an understanding with the customer about what was expected and what would be delivered. Not uncommon problems; but not virtues.)
However, while nobody is obligated to provide a universal product, this particular failure suggests a very dramatic narrowing of the scope for Udacity's product: It proved to be unsuitable to most customers, and the customers it was most suitable to were the ones that are generally considered relatively easy cases. That certainly isn't good news for any allegedly-disruptive offering, which is what Udacity has been selling itself as.
That doesn't really solve the problem in a substantial portion of cases. Unless a skill is strikingly visible in short order, or you have a prior in of some kind, people like 'degrees' because they serve a convenient signalling function in situations where full verification imposes excessive costs.
If you just want to do some DIY, or polish some specific skill for a job you already have, you don't need signalling; if you want people to hire you (or even get as far as bothering to test you in person), signalling has its uses.