"What do you mean this doesn't work with Lynx! Also, I specifically requested GOPHER support over 6 months ago. What the hell?"
Firstly, EdX is an open platform made collaboratively by MIT and Harvard. Coursera is a private company. They're vastly different.
Secondly, the technical and design hurdles that they are overcoming with these products are not trivial, and they are often made significantly less difficult with cutting edge features available to developers on newer browsers. It might not be the difference between something working, or not working... but it will probably be the difference between something working well, using browser-supported code, and some crappy, hackish workaround.
Thirdly, if your definition of "open" requires supporting curmudgeons that arbitrarily decided to stop updating their browser at some point, because it's what you did, and you decided that the world should adapt to you, rather than the other way around, then nobody else cares what your definition of "open" is.
Fourthly, developing for backwards compatibility can easily double your UI development costs if you have to go back to, say, IE6. Doing so makes sense if your target audience is some bureaucracy filled company that refuses to update, that is going to be paying you a boatload of money for your online training service... but if you're offering people free, high quality education... downloading a free browser REALLY isn't much to ask.
I'm sure they would LOVE to have every feature and design idea work with all previous browsers, but it costs a lot of money, effort, and quite possibly functionality that they could not get to work with older browsers, simply to satisfy people too inflexible to adapt, and the tiny portion of people that can't adapt.
Or, it might be deliberately spun that way to give people the impression that they are "putting the safety of the general public" at risk, which, I believe, is one of the unquestionable patriot-act definitions of terrorism?
I generally feel like doing the same thing to the largest internet tramsmission cable I can find, when I disregard all of the good sense and wisdom that I've gained from my prior negative experiences, and actually read the comments on YouTube videos.
Even if a private firm can do it more efficiently, having public resources under public control seems more important than efficiency. Throwing a profit motive into the mix seems like a big problem to me (as it is with prisons, military operations, etc.)
How about we pay these companies to consult on the design of a new public system. How about we pay some private firms to iron out the inefficiencies in our public processes instead of just privatizing everything?
I just don't see how privatization of so many things, in general, is better for society. Businesses are, quite rightly, primarily concerned with making money, not the public interest. Throughout history, there are innumerable instances of private and public businesses working against the public interest in favor of their own profit motive.
If our government is unable to provide for the public in the ways that it should, we should fix it, not just pay private companies to do it instead. I don't understand how we seem to lack the mechanisms to do this.
Word. Soon, if they play their cards right, they are going to have *all* the obsolete. I heard they were planning on teaming up with CompuServe to corner the Gopher market.
Reason Magazine is the libertarian Huffington Post. I know you like to think that your political view is smarter and more reasonable than others, and you love to have a trillion people pigheadedly arguing that they're right and everyone that disagrees with them is stupid, so you can go through the comments and cherry pick the 'zingers' that reinforce your world view, but it's a meaningless exercise.
"'hackademic camps.' 'Hacking,' in the group's parlance, can involve any manner of self-directed learning: travel, volunteer work, organizing collaborative learning groups with friends"
How about we start using real language to describe things rather than beating this poor word into whatever form we see fit. What they're referring to is learning, which, outside of a university, is still learning, it's just not university learning. There are *lots* of non university learning options, but to call them hacking because they simply aren't quite as commonly accepted as being the most common path doesn't follow the spirit of the word. You're still building skills to build a career and progress your life, you just aren't using a degree to do so... If your world view is so narrow that you somehow consider progressing your career while abstaining from college to be an act of circumventing or subverting an obstacle, in the way that the word 'hacking' would indicate, well I'm willing to bet that you wouldn't be very qualified to do any sort of real 'hacking' at all. Hope that career involves doing something with lots of rules written down by other people for you to follow.
This is good... we can know exactly how much they're screwing us. This will be yet another legal disclosure to be buried in fine print, surrounded by legalese, and whisked away from the collective consciousness. Do they expect enough people to cancel their internet access, on principle, to pressure the ISPs to offer more reasonably priced plans? Give me a break.
This is yet another example of shifting the responsibility to individuals to work against gigantic corporations, which are designed specifically to insulate themselves from the actions of individuals. These companies are purposefully not giving the customers properly priced choices, because they know that there's nowhere customers can go to get properly priced choices. Until someone compels one or more of them to give properly priced choices, or gives consumers another option, the status quo will remain in effect.
It's not price fixing because we haven't actually seen them talk about it... right? There's the "free" market for you.
Right, and brilliant undergrads have potential through their intelligence, but they don't have anywhere close to the extraordinary amount of knowledge or wisdom that their attitudes would suggest they command. The thing about knowledge is that you don't know that you don't have it until you have it, and a large part of wisdom is estimating and compensating for the knowledge that you don't have.
<my opinion> The type of arrogance is quite different. The philosophy student might be more overconfident in the reasoning behind their opinions, but it comes across as aloofness, rather than the aggressive a need to put other people down that many socially feral nerds have. It's the very reason that I won't attend any of the local *n*x user groups, or anything of that sort. There are only so many "loudest nerd wins" type arguments over pedantic, trite issues I can sit through, when they should be having reasonable and friendly discussions and sharing knowledge... building a community rather than a weekly assembly of petty arguments.
This is especially apparent to female students, as they often bear the brunt of these tendencies.
I work in a large university, and through some basic empirical research, I can tell you that the general *perception* here is that both engineering and CS majors have the largest percentage of arrogant, dismissive, and socially clueless students. In my experience, the near opposite is true with professors. I find professors of the humanities to often be extremely aggressively arrogant, and technical professors to be pretty nice.
My theory is that many of these students, who are naturally interested in technology, would quite likely be active in either online forums/chat, or online gaming, which both tend to be socially aggressive environments that do not always favor reason and humility, and quite possibly would have gleaned a lot of bad social habits from those environments. This is probably also the case with the people that they tend to hang out with.
Now that we're generalizing, I found engineering and CS students that I can happily converse with far more frequently than business school students. </my opinion>
Oh, I assumed that this was some sort of HR-ese, but that doesn't make it correct. I make an effort to call out every kind of terrible business-ese, everywhere I see it.
How much more can businesses try to rework the phrase "fired them because we didn't want to pay them?" Maybe eventually we'll call them 'happies' because they have a good work record and they didn't stop working there because they were killed on the job.
What business administrators say can be terribly confusing if you use the rather inconvenient lens of the actual meaning of their words, rather than simply substituting them, when we hear them, with what we all know they're actually saying to us.
This is the full ToS from TextDrive from when this offer was available:
TextDrive Terms of Service
The following terms and conditions (these “Terms”) govern the provision by TEXTDRIVE, INC. (“Company”) of the services and/or products (referred collectively herein as “Services and Products”) described on the Server Order Form, the Service Level Agreement and Service Exhibit attached hereto (collectively the “Service Descriptions”) and defined in any of the Company’s product support listing, to the customer (“Customer”) identified on the Service Descriptions. The Service Descriptions, these Terms and the attachments and any addenda hereto, executed with respect to the Services and Products, are referred to herein, collectively, as this “Agreement.”
Our Hosting Services Maximum Hard Disk Space. Customer will be provided with the amount of disk space stated in either their dedicated quote or corresponding plan from http://textdrive.com/plans/. Disk space and usage are monitored by TextDrive, Inc., when possible quotas are soft and responsible overages should not impair Customer’s ability to access said disk space. Customers are responsible for purchasing additional disk space beyond that detailed in their “Plan” or to remove files in order to bring their usage with their Plans’s limit. Jurisdiction and Jurisdictional Disputes. TextDrive Inc is a California corporation. The parties recognize that TextDrive, Inc is under the legal jurisdiction of the State of California, and US federal law. The parties expressly recognize that, where TextDrive, Inc. is acting solely as Customer’s Host, TextDrive, Inc. is not engaged in, and is not actively soliciting, interstate or international commerce for said Customer. Where TextDrive, Inc. is a named party to any type of dispute or litigation involving any acts by Customer that affect out-of-state persons or entities, Customer agrees that it shall indemnify, hold TextDrive Inc. harmless, defend TextDrive, Inc. and challenge the jurisdiction of out of state authorities over TextDrive, Inc. Storage, Backups and Internet Link. TextDrive Inc. shall store Customer’s Web Sites and Email messages on TextDrive Inc’s servers. The parties expressly recognize that Internet servers and links are susceptible to crashes and down time. TextDrive, Inc. warrants that it shall maintain a consistent link with the Internet, but TextDrive, Inc. cannot and does not warrant that it shall maintain a continuous and uninterrupted link. However, TextDrive, Inc does pass through the following Service Level Agreement from it’s Managed Hosting Provider (NextLevel Internet, Inc. of San Diego, California) and that is 100% Power Uptime and 100% Network Uptime. TextDrive Inc. does monitor all services on our servers at minimum of 5-minute intervals. Bandwidth. TextDrive, Inc agrees that it shall maintain a 100Mbps connection to each server, however, TextDrive, Inc. does not warrant any response rate or download time beyond it’s control, as this is depending on Customer’s and End Users ISP connections. Maintenance. TextDrive Inc. may, at its own discretion, temporarily suspend all service for the purpose of repair, maintenance or improvement of any of its systems. However, TextDrive, Inc. shall provide prior notice where it is reasonably practicable under the circumstances, and shall restore service as soon as is reasonably practicable. Customer shall not be entitled to any setoff, discount, refund or other credit, in case of any service outage which is beyond TextDrive Inc’s control or which is reasonable in duration. Security. The parties expressly recognize that it is impossible to maintain flawless security, but TextDrive, Inc. shall take reasonable steps to prevent security breaches in server interactions with Customer and security breaches in TextDrive Inc’s server interaction with resource
Yes. I can't sell a thousand people lifetime personal chefing service at $5,000 a piece, turn around and 'sell' the company to my friend, and have them immediately sunset the service, claiming that it's a new company that no longer has to honor old service agreements.
If they're selling you something as a lifetime subscription, that's a very specific thing that you're paying for. They have to disclose if that claim has caveats (for example, they can cancel it), not the other way around.
I can't sell you lifetime (as long as I'm in business) personal chef service for $5,000 and then, the next day, say that I'm sunsetting the service because it had 'run its course'. Same thing here. A class action is the way to go. You should be able to get a firm to take it on.
Wrong. If a company does not provide the goods or services that they sold you, in this case, a lifetime account, that's illegal in the US. There aren't even any shady "subject to change" clauses in the original ToS.
If I, as a company, were to sell you a lifetime of free car repair for $5,000 today, and then tomorrow say I was not going to do it anymore, even though I wasn't shutting down, simply because I felt that the service had 'run its course', then that would be illegal. This is no different.
Maybe they're running linux. Adding the cost of windows on to that would make it significantly more expensive. Maybe they're being rational enough about it to not be scared into immediately whipping out their wallet to have someone else protect their children. Maybe there are FOSS alternatives that are actually better. Did you actually do any research on it? If so, it'd be nice to hear what your results were.
Do you understand what an analogy is? The idea is to create a similar situation that'd different, and then analyze it so we can get a better understand of it.
Furthermore, simply calling an argument stupid, without actually providing any alternative, when the person presenting the argument clearly asked for counterarguments, is stupid. I'm guessing you don't have a lot of friends.
Slashdot Mirror
"What do you mean this doesn't work with Lynx! Also, I specifically requested GOPHER support over 6 months ago. What the hell?"
Firstly, EdX is an open platform made collaboratively by MIT and Harvard. Coursera is a private company. They're vastly different.
Secondly, the technical and design hurdles that they are overcoming with these products are not trivial, and they are often made significantly less difficult with cutting edge features available to developers on newer browsers. It might not be the difference between something working, or not working... but it will probably be the difference between something working well, using browser-supported code, and some crappy, hackish workaround.
Thirdly, if your definition of "open" requires supporting curmudgeons that arbitrarily decided to stop updating their browser at some point, because it's what you did, and you decided that the world should adapt to you, rather than the other way around, then nobody else cares what your definition of "open" is.
Fourthly, developing for backwards compatibility can easily double your UI development costs if you have to go back to, say, IE6. Doing so makes sense if your target audience is some bureaucracy filled company that refuses to update, that is going to be paying you a boatload of money for your online training service... but if you're offering people free, high quality education... downloading a free browser REALLY isn't much to ask.
I'm sure they would LOVE to have every feature and design idea work with all previous browsers, but it costs a lot of money, effort, and quite possibly functionality that they could not get to work with older browsers, simply to satisfy people too inflexible to adapt, and the tiny portion of people that can't adapt.
Or, it might be deliberately spun that way to give people the impression that they are "putting the safety of the general public" at risk, which, I believe, is one of the unquestionable patriot-act definitions of terrorism?
Yeah... I remember the first time I slashdotted on weed.
I generally feel like doing the same thing to the largest internet tramsmission cable I can find, when I disregard all of the good sense and wisdom that I've gained from my prior negative experiences, and actually read the comments on YouTube videos.
Who, at some point, hasn't gotten *that* tired of seeing stupid reddit memes?
Even if a private firm can do it more efficiently, having public resources under public control seems more important than efficiency. Throwing a profit motive into the mix seems like a big problem to me (as it is with prisons, military operations, etc.)
How about we pay these companies to consult on the design of a new public system. How about we pay some private firms to iron out the inefficiencies in our public processes instead of just privatizing everything?
I just don't see how privatization of so many things, in general, is better for society. Businesses are, quite rightly, primarily concerned with making money, not the public interest. Throughout history, there are innumerable instances of private and public businesses working against the public interest in favor of their own profit motive.
If our government is unable to provide for the public in the ways that it should, we should fix it, not just pay private companies to do it instead. I don't understand how we seem to lack the mechanisms to do this.
Word. Soon, if they play their cards right, they are going to have *all* the obsolete. I heard they were planning on teaming up with CompuServe to corner the Gopher market.
Haha, they're chat bots, not "people employed in the sex industry.
Make sure that nobody on the team that goes down there to further investigate is wearing a red shirt!
Please link to the original version of the story, rather than a more politically biased magazine's reporting on the original version of the story.
http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/04/16843014-exclusive-justice-department-memo-reveals-legal-case-for-drone-strikes-on-americans?lite
Reason Magazine is the libertarian Huffington Post. I know you like to think that your political view is smarter and more reasonable than others, and you love to have a trillion people pigheadedly arguing that they're right and everyone that disagrees with them is stupid, so you can go through the comments and cherry pick the 'zingers' that reinforce your world view, but it's a meaningless exercise.
Yeah, compared to YouTube, I'm quite sure this is peanuts.
Would the person you're quoting happen to be made of straw?
"'hackademic camps.' 'Hacking,' in the group's parlance, can involve any manner of self-directed learning: travel, volunteer work, organizing collaborative learning groups with friends"
How about we start using real language to describe things rather than beating this poor word into whatever form we see fit. What they're referring to is learning, which, outside of a university, is still learning, it's just not university learning. There are *lots* of non university learning options, but to call them hacking because they simply aren't quite as commonly accepted as being the most common path doesn't follow the spirit of the word. You're still building skills to build a career and progress your life, you just aren't using a degree to do so... If your world view is so narrow that you somehow consider progressing your career while abstaining from college to be an act of circumventing or subverting an obstacle, in the way that the word 'hacking' would indicate, well I'm willing to bet that you wouldn't be very qualified to do any sort of real 'hacking' at all. Hope that career involves doing something with lots of rules written down by other people for you to follow.
This is good... we can know exactly how much they're screwing us. This will be yet another legal disclosure to be buried in fine print, surrounded by legalese, and whisked away from the collective consciousness. Do they expect enough people to cancel their internet access, on principle, to pressure the ISPs to offer more reasonably priced plans? Give me a break.
This is yet another example of shifting the responsibility to individuals to work against gigantic corporations, which are designed specifically to insulate themselves from the actions of individuals. These companies are purposefully not giving the customers properly priced choices, because they know that there's nowhere customers can go to get properly priced choices. Until someone compels one or more of them to give properly priced choices, or gives consumers another option, the status quo will remain in effect.
It's not price fixing because we haven't actually seen them talk about it... right? There's the "free" market for you.
Right, and brilliant undergrads have potential through their intelligence, but they don't have anywhere close to the extraordinary amount of knowledge or wisdom that their attitudes would suggest they command. The thing about knowledge is that you don't know that you don't have it until you have it, and a large part of wisdom is estimating and compensating for the knowledge that you don't have.
<my opinion>
The type of arrogance is quite different. The philosophy student might be more overconfident in the reasoning behind their opinions, but it comes across as aloofness, rather than the aggressive a need to put other people down that many socially feral nerds have. It's the very reason that I won't attend any of the local *n*x user groups, or anything of that sort. There are only so many "loudest nerd wins" type arguments over pedantic, trite issues I can sit through, when they should be having reasonable and friendly discussions and sharing knowledge... building a community rather than a weekly assembly of petty arguments.
This is especially apparent to female students, as they often bear the brunt of these tendencies.
I work in a large university, and through some basic empirical research, I can tell you that the general *perception* here is that both engineering and CS majors have the largest percentage of arrogant, dismissive, and socially clueless students. In my experience, the near opposite is true with professors. I find professors of the humanities to often be extremely aggressively arrogant, and technical professors to be pretty nice.
My theory is that many of these students, who are naturally interested in technology, would quite likely be active in either online forums/chat, or online gaming, which both tend to be socially aggressive environments that do not always favor reason and humility, and quite possibly would have gleaned a lot of bad social habits from those environments. This is probably also the case with the people that they tend to hang out with.
Now that we're generalizing, I found engineering and CS students that I can happily converse with far more frequently than business school students.
</my opinion>
Oh, I assumed that this was some sort of HR-ese, but that doesn't make it correct. I make an effort to call out every kind of terrible business-ese, everywhere I see it.
How much more can businesses try to rework the phrase "fired them because we didn't want to pay them?" Maybe eventually we'll call them 'happies' because they have a good work record and they didn't stop working there because they were killed on the job.
What business administrators say can be terribly confusing if you use the rather inconvenient lens of the actual meaning of their words, rather than simply substituting them, when we hear them, with what we all know they're actually saying to us.
"Some redundancies will be necessary"
You mean, those redundancies will be deemed unnecessary, and therefore eliminated. Hate to be a wording nazi, but that's bad.
This is the full ToS from TextDrive from when this offer was available:
TextDrive Terms of Service
The following terms and conditions (these “Terms”) govern the provision by TEXTDRIVE, INC. (“Company”) of the services and/or products (referred collectively herein as “Services and Products”) described on the Server Order Form, the Service Level Agreement and Service Exhibit attached hereto (collectively the “Service Descriptions”) and defined in any of the Company’s product support listing, to the customer (“Customer”) identified on the Service Descriptions. The Service Descriptions, these Terms and the attachments and any addenda hereto, executed with respect to the Services and Products, are referred to herein, collectively, as this “Agreement.”
Our Hosting Services
Maximum Hard Disk Space. Customer will be provided with the amount of disk space stated in either their dedicated quote or corresponding plan from http://textdrive.com/plans/. Disk space and usage are monitored by TextDrive, Inc., when possible quotas are soft and responsible overages should not impair Customer’s ability to access said disk space. Customers are responsible for purchasing additional disk space beyond that detailed in their “Plan” or to remove files in order to bring their usage with their Plans’s limit.
Jurisdiction and Jurisdictional Disputes. TextDrive Inc is a California corporation. The parties recognize that TextDrive, Inc is under the legal jurisdiction of the State of California, and US federal law. The parties expressly recognize that, where TextDrive, Inc. is acting solely as Customer’s Host, TextDrive, Inc. is not engaged in, and is not actively soliciting, interstate or international commerce for said Customer. Where TextDrive, Inc. is a named party to any type of dispute or litigation involving any acts by Customer that affect out-of-state persons or entities, Customer agrees that it shall indemnify, hold TextDrive Inc. harmless, defend TextDrive, Inc. and challenge the jurisdiction of out of state authorities over TextDrive, Inc.
Storage, Backups and Internet Link. TextDrive Inc. shall store Customer’s Web Sites and Email messages on TextDrive Inc’s servers. The parties expressly recognize that Internet servers and links are susceptible to crashes and down time. TextDrive, Inc. warrants that it shall maintain a consistent link with the Internet, but TextDrive, Inc. cannot and does not warrant that it shall maintain a continuous and uninterrupted link. However, TextDrive, Inc does pass through the following Service Level Agreement from it’s Managed Hosting Provider (NextLevel Internet, Inc. of San Diego, California) and that is 100% Power Uptime and 100% Network Uptime. TextDrive Inc. does monitor all services on our servers at minimum of 5-minute intervals.
Bandwidth. TextDrive, Inc agrees that it shall maintain a 100Mbps connection to each server, however, TextDrive, Inc. does not warrant any response rate or download time beyond it’s control, as this is depending on Customer’s and End Users ISP connections.
Maintenance. TextDrive Inc. may, at its own discretion, temporarily suspend all service for the purpose of repair, maintenance or improvement of any of its systems. However, TextDrive, Inc. shall provide prior notice where it is reasonably practicable under the circumstances, and shall restore service as soon as is reasonably practicable. Customer shall not be entitled to any setoff, discount, refund or other credit, in case of any service outage which is beyond TextDrive Inc’s control or which is reasonable in duration.
Security. The parties expressly recognize that it is impossible to maintain flawless security, but TextDrive, Inc. shall take reasonable steps to prevent security breaches in server interactions with Customer and security breaches in TextDrive Inc’s server interaction with resource
Yes. I can't sell a thousand people lifetime personal chefing service at $5,000 a piece, turn around and 'sell' the company to my friend, and have them immediately sunset the service, claiming that it's a new company that no longer has to honor old service agreements.
If they're selling you something as a lifetime subscription, that's a very specific thing that you're paying for. They have to disclose if that claim has caveats (for example, they can cancel it), not the other way around.
I can't sell you lifetime (as long as I'm in business) personal chef service for $5,000 and then, the next day, say that I'm sunsetting the service because it had 'run its course'. Same thing here. A class action is the way to go. You should be able to get a firm to take it on.
Wrong. If a company does not provide the goods or services that they sold you, in this case, a lifetime account, that's illegal in the US. There aren't even any shady "subject to change" clauses in the original ToS.
If I, as a company, were to sell you a lifetime of free car repair for $5,000 today, and then tomorrow say I was not going to do it anymore, even though I wasn't shutting down, simply because I felt that the service had 'run its course', then that would be illegal. This is no different.
It doesn't say anything of the sort under their Terms of Service at the time, available through the wayback link.
Maybe they're running linux. Adding the cost of windows on to that would make it significantly more expensive. Maybe they're being rational enough about it to not be scared into immediately whipping out their wallet to have someone else protect their children. Maybe there are FOSS alternatives that are actually better. Did you actually do any research on it? If so, it'd be nice to hear what your results were.
Do you understand what an analogy is? The idea is to create a similar situation that'd different, and then analyze it so we can get a better understand of it.
Furthermore, simply calling an argument stupid, without actually providing any alternative, when the person presenting the argument clearly asked for counterarguments, is stupid. I'm guessing you don't have a lot of friends.