Since its independence from colonial rule, the country made advances in nearly every index. Go ahead, prove me wrong by finding charts to the contrary.
> Indian parasites
Parasites? Indian diaspora are quite productive and successful. In US, they have the highest per-capita incomes.
Let's not lump everything under communism which has many extra connotations. At most, what you are talking about is socialism. In India, almost everyone agrees that the country needs more education and that no one should have to starve (US poor are a different kind of poor, nothing like Indian poor). The problem is getting the resources to the most needy without most of it leaking out on the way there. Contrast US medicare. Even with some fraud, it is extremely efficient (in terms of money reaching recipients). India does not have such systems yet.
Besides, you don't get to tell people of a democratic country, to have capitalism or socialism (which is what US did in its dictator driven satellite states, which were not yet ready for capitalism). They will choose. If the bulk of the population does not have entrepreneurial opportunity (lack of education to think systematically, assess risk, exploit capital channels etc), capitalism is meaningless and it will simply become code for feudalism.
The question in India is - HOW. The question in US often is - WHETHER. Both are good questions in their respective contexts.
US has less need for socialistic safeguards, while India still does (but less now, than 60 years ago). What India and China are at least theoretically doing is proper. First use socialism to get the basics right, get everyone operational and then peel it away slowly once the people can compete. Its the way we raise babies. We are not Spartans.
When criticizing India or China, remember that these have been away from foreign domination only relatively recently (60 yrs), compared to US and Europe (several centuries). They are progressing nicely.
a.) India always does it cheaper. b.) The capability will go towards providing commercial space services. Its a money maker, rather than a drain. India is already doing this. c.) The problem India has now is not so much as not having money. It does not have non-corrupt institutions to properly distribute the resources. They will improve as education improves in subsequent generations who will then elect better politicians, demand cleaner systems and more effectively fight for their rights. Projects like these inspire students.
Does this mean that they will take the data offline and archive it away from their query systems?... such that it is not just another excuse for keep using the data?
What exactly does "longer" mean in their petition? One year, two years? Forever?
> a cancer within the body of your society! Muahahaha!
Only if you breed uncontrollably and quickly make many unemployed electrical engineers who won't move out and live in your basement. Otherwise, a phagocyte is on its way to pick you up:-).
You forgot to cover the membrane bound nucleus (or nuclei since you presumably have two down there) hosting your genetic material - pretty important for the definition of a Eukaryote.
Being in school is not being in "academia". School is one of the most social experiences you will have in life... engineering included.
> usually taught by a prof that looked well qualified on paper but was horrible.
Unless you mean his teaching style, how did you know? An undergrad simply does not know enough about the subject to evaluate professors.
> b) study all night with other Engineering students in the class
Why is this even a bad thing? Having a rigorous curriculum is bad? And studying with others is a social experience.
> or at least 'dork' in the colloquial sense of looking neutral/unstylish at best, poor social skills, lacking manual skills, etc etc
Not the EEs I have seen. Engineering certainly seems to attract a greater preponderance of nerds/dorks than other fields who seem to have the focused obsession qualities that a study of engineering (among other subjects, like Math, Physics etc) can channel. It is however hardly a prerequisite. I know plenty of non-Dorky EEs.
> but that doesn't mean you use it as a way to 'weed out' students from the industry!
Who is using this as a way to "weed out" students again?
I think you are missing the point of the article. It was about people discouraged from engineering because they did not have the expected gender or ethnicity. It was not about discouraging people who may not have the temperament to succeed in engineering. You seem to have left because EE was really not for you, not because you were unfairly weeded out. I hope you had success elsewhere.
> Maybe you should branch out a bit before you use the word "only" so often.
It’s the word of distinction that I am making with other delivery systems *I* used. I used it with all deliberation.
> It's actually quite common for games to log play time. Heck this extends back to the Quake / Starcraft days.
I do not know if that is true. None of the many non-Steam games I currently have, give any hint of this being true.
Even if that is the case, it is more of an intrusion if the delivery system logs/transmits play times than if individual games do. For example, it’s one thing for Slashdot to log my usage of Slashdot and another thing for my ISP/DoubleClick/NSA logging my use of Slashdot, along with everything else (not a perfect analogy, but adequate).
Your experience seems to be different than mine. I know I have launch problems. I have seen others complain similarly in forums.
There are all sorts of experiences from those who assert, like you, that they have no problems to those who have the very same problems that I do.
I have no experience with Origin, uplay, G4WL so far. I have avoided Sim City and Assassins Creed 3 so far, precisely for the reason of always-on DRM (along with Diablo III and a few others).
All the other digital distributions I bought from, work exactly like any other paid software on my Desktop – never need Internet after install. Steam is the only one that I use (no doubt that Origin, G4WL and uPlay also do – and hence I don’t buy from them), which keeps reminding me that I only have a service.
> I still assert that it's a shitload better than what the competitors are ramming down our throats.
To be fair, I do like that you buy the game once for all platforms. Other vendors often want you to buy it separately for each platform. I am interested in home streaming to my laptop from my Desktop that Steam is said to be working on. No other vendor is working on that now. Some redeeming features. But I still prefer other vendors.
None of them warrant a $599 SteamBox purchase to play them. Most of them are laptop (with integrated graphics) material. Now if someone brought out a SteamBox in Ouya price range (at least for starters), it would make sense.
> they are one of the few companies who have gotten the mix right.
Hardly. I tried several PC online merchants and Steam is the worst. The late Direct2Drive, GamersGate and Amazon are all superior to Steam. I avoided Steam for a long time but tried it after picking up a few Humble Bundles. I am not happy at all with the service.
I want my relation to the merchant to end after I made the purchase... or at least, after I install it. Steam is the only one that requires me to run a client to launch the game.
Steam is the only service that forces updates. I only play single player and don't want them foisted on me. I also have bandwidth caps. Very annoying. It seems to ignore the setting to not update.
Steam is the only one which logs my playtime. I consider that an invasion of privacy just the same way I consider Kindle tracking page turns an intrusion. There seems to be no way to turn it off.
Their "offline mode" is broken. When I find myself without an Internet Connection and enter the offline mode, many games won't launch. It seems that I need to validate games online every once in a while. All other services don't bother me this way. Steam is only slightly better than always-on DRM. If I can predict and plan my offline times and verify (check the list games that I can backup validate the ones I can't), it works... but unreliable otherwise.
Sometimes, it says the client needs to be updated... and if I don't have an Internet connection at that time, it just refuses to launch at all... not even in offline mode. As I type this, it just downloaded a client update even though I told it to not update except at night. Steam is very disrespectful of network settings and concerns.
I am playing Titan Quest now. It appears that there is a difference between my game save in online mode and offline mode and my offline save which reset the game to the beginning overwrote my progress in online mode. Losing progress is very annoying in an RPG.
Steam may get a pass by the masses. But it is a step backward for user rights. It treats it users as children or thieves. At least in my limited experience, it is worse than console DRM in many aspects.
> I understand that this is predominantly liberal media, and believe it or not, I am predominantly liberal. I voted for Obama. I believe the Republicans are working very hard to destroy our Democracy. I believe many of the Democrats are eager to help them.
Good to hear that you have a worldview of a political simpleton. It helps explain the rest of the post.
> However, I can say this with absolute certainty. Who gave him the right? Was he elected? Did someone make him king? Did God anoint him? Access is not permission to steal.
If we followed your logic, we won’t have whistle blowers. Who gave Daniel Ellsberg the right to leak Pentagon Pagers to NY Times? Was he elected? Did someone make him king? Did God anoint him? Access is not permission to steal.
Were you fine with him then? Ellsberg believes that Snowden, given current legal climate of the Obama administration, did not have a choice to do anything differently.
You seem to just not like these leaks because you are a hyper-partisan.
> Snowden, by any description, by any definition is the bad guy here.
Don’t confuse your opinion with universal facts. In my opinion, there are no real bad guys. Snowden is not a bad guy; neither is NSA. Things can go horribly wrong without bad guys and someone to hate.
> He is a traitor.
Look up the definition of a traitor. He does not fit at all. His goal was to help US citizenry and the rest of the world, not help US enemies. You can argue that he was naïve (which I don't think he was at all), but you cannot argue that he is a traitor. But hey, these days it is fashionable to call people you don't agree with - traitors (Assange was called a traitor to US, even when he was not a US citizen). There are plenty of articles written on this by now, including in yesterday’s Washington Post.
> It doesn't matter that his results are good. It doesn't matter that the NSA takes a couple of hits or did some bad things.
Explain.
> He threatens that the "Worst is yet to come."
Cite.
> Face it, this is a bad scary world. Russia and China are not our friends.
Neither is it cold war era. Don’t forget that China is the biggest trading partner for US, that Chinese culture is fairly popular in US, as is US culture and universities among Chinese elite. You need to shed this “us vs. them” mentality.
> They look out for their own best interests.
Duh? They would be fools if they did not. You might have forgotten Opium Wars, but the Chinese did not. China is a suspicious friend of US because it got bitten before.
> When you don't look out for your own best interest as a nation then you turn into Portugal.
And US best interest is to have rule of law (can’t have life destroying treatments for whistle blowers like William Binney and expect that there won’t be whistle blowers like Snowden next) and not turn into a surveillance state. After all, that is what was supposed to separate US form the communist bloc of the old.
> Snowden will never be given Clemency. At this stage in his life I would suspect the only thing keeping him alive is the fact that there is the threat that something he has which might be "Really Big" hasn't been released.
Snowden already made it clear in the Gellman interview that there is no Deadman’s switch.
1. “I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”
2. Deadman switch is a terrible idea in his case. He said it was more like a suicide switch (even if he hypothetically wanted to harm NSA) since now he would be painting a target on himself for other foreign intel services that might want to see the full cache.
“That sounds more like a suicide switch,” he wrote. “It wouldn’t make sense.”
This is how I approach MOOCs. They provide a lot of value for me, but I count as "failure" in all of them.
1.) Review: I have taken a similar course in the past. I just want to skim through the lectures to refresh some bits I have not used in a while. 2.) Partial: I know some of the course content well. But the course covers additional materials that I could benefit from. 3.) Busy: Course is offered at a time when I am busy. So I just download the materials for later use. 4.) Auditing: The course description looks enticing. I have no practical reason to take the course except for curiosity. I just want to watch lectures to get a feel for the domain, but otherwise am not so committed yet as to do homework.
Add to these factors that... a.) MOOCs cost nothing to cheap (I just took the free ones so far). It is less of a risk to jump on board. I would think much more hard if I were paying say: $1500, like I have for live courses. So, sometimes I sign up for more than I can consume. b.) MOOCs add to me as a person; just not as much to my resume. So I have no interest in their certifications and hence am not looking for course completions.
To me, MOOCs are a way of Universities fulfilling their institutional responsibility in bringing learning to the public. That goes beyond job skills. MOOCs for me are not a replacement for a university life. But they provide a lot of value around its edges (prelude, supplement, refreshers etc). This is not to say anything about those who do make it into more of a replacement. I have seen some organize meetups and other parts of a learning experience that MOOCs cannot offer themselves. MOOCs have redefined teaching to some extent. They should also redefine metrics. To some extent they have already.
I have one advise for them. Make the lecture videos available separately. Don't count those of us who just "enroll" to get these, the same way as those that want to do it more formally. We are not coming in for a full course experience to begin with. Just enroll those who want to take assignments on a schedule and get course completion certificates. Don't count anyone who has clicked enroll, but has not completed more than 1 assignment, as truly enrolled.
Have you seen the courses (I am going by Coursera)? They are not vocational courses (aside from a programming course, here and there) for cheap workers. So far, the courses are most attractive to people with graduate degrees.
> Every real college I knew back in the day would politely tell students that they weren't gonna make it past year 2 while working full time.
That entirely depends on the college and the course. Colleges that target working professionals (I have been in those taken by Physicians while they work) allow adjusting the course load per quarter and simply run longer for them.
It likely that this is just a standard procedure which fits the general category. Since this is pretty eggregious, I doubt that he will ever get a research grant again. For one, he will need to be a part of a research institution to get a grant. Which research university will hire him now, given the competitiveness of these positions? He might be able able to teach in some low level place, but his research career has ended.
The spying story will continue to be interesting through at least half of next year. I doubt it will hold steam until 2016. But if it does, we will see Ron Wyden and Justin Amash feature prominently in the race. They earned it.
Slashdot Mirror
Correction: Miss America, not Miss USA
> spiraling shithole
Since its independence from colonial rule, the country made advances in nearly every index. Go ahead, prove me wrong by finding charts to the contrary.
> Indian parasites
Parasites? Indian diaspora are quite productive and successful. In US, they have the highest per-capita incomes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01...
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org...
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/29/...
Today, an Indian-American runs Microsoft, an Indian-American is Miss USA and Indian-Americans reign spelling bee.
Of course, facts don't matter to you - a vanilla racist bigot.
Let's not lump everything under communism which has many extra connotations. At most, what you are talking about is socialism. In India, almost everyone agrees that the country needs more education and that no one should have to starve (US poor are a different kind of poor, nothing like Indian poor). The problem is getting the resources to the most needy without most of it leaking out on the way there. Contrast US medicare. Even with some fraud, it is extremely efficient (in terms of money reaching recipients). India does not have such systems yet.
Besides, you don't get to tell people of a democratic country, to have capitalism or socialism (which is what US did in its dictator driven satellite states, which were not yet ready for capitalism). They will choose. If the bulk of the population does not have entrepreneurial opportunity (lack of education to think systematically, assess risk, exploit capital channels etc), capitalism is meaningless and it will simply become code for feudalism.
The question in India is - HOW. The question in US often is - WHETHER. Both are good questions in their respective contexts.
US has less need for socialistic safeguards, while India still does (but less now, than 60 years ago). What India and China are at least theoretically doing is proper. First use socialism to get the basics right, get everyone operational and then peel it away slowly once the people can compete. Its the way we raise babies. We are not Spartans.
When criticizing India or China, remember that these have been away from foreign domination only relatively recently (60 yrs), compared to US and Europe (several centuries). They are progressing nicely.
India does get foreign aid. But I would not call it "dependent".
Not really...
a.) India always does it cheaper.
b.) The capability will go towards providing commercial space services. Its a money maker, rather than a drain. India is already doing this.
c.) The problem India has now is not so much as not having money. It does not have non-corrupt institutions to properly distribute the resources. They will improve as education improves in subsequent generations who will then elect better politicians, demand cleaner systems and more effectively fight for their rights. Projects like these inspire students.
Which country are you from? Is the per capita rape rate in your country much better?
Emacs has a binding for that.
You can do the same in Python.
I think you just need to type this first
import wolfram
But it prints this rant from Guido on why this is not Pythonic at all, after it does the import.
Does this mean that they will take the data offline and archive it away from their query systems?... such that it is not just another excuse for keep using the data?
What exactly does "longer" mean in their petition? One year, two years? Forever?
I bet its way more than 50 cents.
Rajastan is the Arizona of India with its Thar desert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Plenty of sunshine. Not cloudy at all. Not enough power infrastructure. Cheap, non-arable land.
Solar is a no-brainer for Rajastan.
> He wrote a fictitious story about a miracle ... he intended to show the absurdity and the lack of reliability of these sites.
So, its basically along the lines of Sokal Affair. ...except for the arrest and incarceration of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
> breed uncontrollably
Oh wait. You are an engineer. Never mind.
> a cancer within the body of your society! Muahahaha!
Only if you breed uncontrollably and quickly make many unemployed electrical engineers who won't move out and live in your basement. Otherwise, a phagocyte is on its way to pick you up :-).
You forgot to cover the membrane bound nucleus (or nuclei since you presumably have two down there) hosting your genetic material - pretty important for the definition of a Eukaryote.
> academia is typically a very alienating place
Being in school is not being in "academia". School is one of the most social experiences you will have in life... engineering included.
> usually taught by a prof that looked well qualified on paper but was horrible.
Unless you mean his teaching style, how did you know? An undergrad simply does not know enough about the subject to evaluate professors.
> b) study all night with other Engineering students in the class
Why is this even a bad thing? Having a rigorous curriculum is bad? And studying with others is a social experience.
> or at least 'dork' in the colloquial sense of looking neutral/unstylish at best, poor social skills, lacking manual skills, etc etc
Not the EEs I have seen. Engineering certainly seems to attract a greater preponderance of nerds/dorks than other fields who seem to have the focused obsession qualities that a study of engineering (among other subjects, like Math, Physics etc) can channel. It is however hardly a prerequisite. I know plenty of non-Dorky EEs.
> but that doesn't mean you use it as a way to 'weed out' students from the industry!
Who is using this as a way to "weed out" students again?
I think you are missing the point of the article. It was about people discouraged from engineering because they did not have the expected gender or ethnicity. It was not about discouraging people who may not have the temperament to succeed in engineering. You seem to have left because EE was really not for you, not because you were unfairly weeded out. I hope you had success elsewhere.
> Maybe you should branch out a bit before you use the word "only" so often.
It’s the word of distinction that I am making with other delivery systems *I* used. I used it with all deliberation.
> It's actually quite common for games to log play time. Heck this extends back to the Quake / Starcraft days.
I do not know if that is true. None of the many non-Steam games I currently have, give any hint of this being true.
Even if that is the case, it is more of an intrusion if the delivery system logs/transmits play times than if individual games do. For example, it’s one thing for Slashdot to log my usage of Slashdot and another thing for my ISP/DoubleClick/NSA logging my use of Slashdot, along with everything else (not a perfect analogy, but adequate).
Your experience seems to be different than mine. I know I have launch problems. I have seen others complain similarly in forums.
See these threads
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=675439
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2280788
There are all sorts of experiences from those who assert, like you, that they have no problems to those who have the very same problems that I do.
I have no experience with Origin, uplay, G4WL so far. I have avoided Sim City and Assassins Creed 3 so far, precisely for the reason of always-on DRM (along with Diablo III and a few others).
All the other digital distributions I bought from, work exactly like any other paid software on my Desktop – never need Internet after install. Steam is the only one that I use (no doubt that Origin, G4WL and uPlay also do – and hence I don’t buy from them), which keeps reminding me that I only have a service.
> I still assert that it's a shitload better than what the competitors are ramming down our throats.
To be fair, I do like that you buy the game once for all platforms. Other vendors often want you to buy it separately for each platform. I am interested in home streaming to my laptop from my Desktop that Steam is said to be working on. No other vendor is working on that now. Some redeeming features. But I still prefer other vendors.
None of them warrant a $599 SteamBox purchase to play them. Most of them are laptop (with integrated graphics) material. Now if someone brought out a SteamBox in Ouya price range (at least for starters), it would make sense.
> they are one of the few companies who have gotten the mix right.
Hardly. I tried several PC online merchants and Steam is the worst. The late Direct2Drive, GamersGate and Amazon are all superior to Steam. I avoided Steam for a long time but tried it after picking up a few Humble Bundles. I am not happy at all with the service.
I want my relation to the merchant to end after I made the purchase... or at least, after I install it. Steam is the only one that requires me to run a client to launch the game.
Steam is the only service that forces updates. I only play single player and don't want them foisted on me. I also have bandwidth caps. Very annoying. It seems to ignore the setting to not update.
Steam is the only one which logs my playtime. I consider that an invasion of privacy just the same way I consider Kindle tracking page turns an intrusion. There seems to be no way to turn it off.
Their "offline mode" is broken. When I find myself without an Internet Connection and enter the offline mode, many games won't launch. It seems that I need to validate games online every once in a while. All other services don't bother me this way. Steam is only slightly better than always-on DRM. If I can predict and plan my offline times and verify (check the list games that I can backup validate the ones I can't), it works... but unreliable otherwise.
Sometimes, it says the client needs to be updated... and if I don't have an Internet connection at that time, it just refuses to launch at all... not even in offline mode. As I type this, it just downloaded a client update even though I told it to not update except at night. Steam is very disrespectful of network settings and concerns.
I am playing Titan Quest now. It appears that there is a difference between my game save in online mode and offline mode and my offline save which reset the game to the beginning overwrote my progress in online mode. Losing progress is very annoying in an RPG.
Steam may get a pass by the masses. But it is a step backward for user rights. It treats it users as children or thieves. At least in my limited experience, it is worse than console DRM in many aspects.
> I understand that this is predominantly liberal media, and believe it or not, I am predominantly liberal. I voted for Obama. I believe the Republicans are working very hard to destroy our Democracy. I believe many of the Democrats are eager to help them.
Good to hear that you have a worldview of a political simpleton. It helps explain the rest of the post.
> However, I can say this with absolute certainty. Who gave him the right? Was he elected? Did someone make him king? Did God anoint him? Access is not permission to steal.
If we followed your logic, we won’t have whistle blowers. Who gave Daniel Ellsberg the right to leak Pentagon Pagers to NY Times? Was he elected? Did someone make him king? Did God anoint him? Access is not permission to steal.
Were you fine with him then? Ellsberg believes that Snowden, given current legal climate of the Obama administration, did not have a choice to do anything differently.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/daniel-ellsberg-nsa-leaker-snowden-made-the-right-call/2013/07/07/0b46d96c-e5b7-11e2-aef3-339619eab080_story.html
You seem to just not like these leaks because you are a hyper-partisan.
> Snowden, by any description, by any definition is the bad guy here.
Don’t confuse your opinion with universal facts. In my opinion, there are no real bad guys. Snowden is not a bad guy; neither is NSA. Things can go horribly wrong without bad guys and someone to hate.
> He is a traitor.
Look up the definition of a traitor. He does not fit at all. His goal was to help US citizenry and the rest of the world, not help US enemies. You can argue that he was naïve (which I don't think he was at all), but you cannot argue that he is a traitor. But hey, these days it is fashionable to call people you don't agree with - traitors (Assange was called a traitor to US, even when he was not a US citizen). There are plenty of articles written on this by now, including in yesterday’s Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-make-a-deal-with-snowden/2014/01/06/33fb8e2c-770a-11e3-af7f-13bf0e9965f6_story.html
> It doesn't matter that his results are good. It doesn't matter that the NSA takes a couple of hits or did some bad things.
Explain.
> He threatens that the "Worst is yet to come."
Cite.
> Face it, this is a bad scary world. Russia and China are not our friends.
Neither is it cold war era. Don’t forget that China is the biggest trading partner for US, that Chinese culture is fairly popular in US, as is US culture and universities among Chinese elite. You need to shed this “us vs. them” mentality.
> They look out for their own best interests.
Duh? They would be fools if they did not. You might have forgotten Opium Wars, but the Chinese did not. China is a suspicious friend of US because it got bitten before.
> When you don't look out for your own best interest as a nation then you turn into Portugal.
And US best interest is to have rule of law (can’t have life destroying treatments for whistle blowers like William Binney and expect that there won’t be whistle blowers like Snowden next) and not turn into a surveillance state. After all, that is what was supposed to separate US form the communist bloc of the old.
> Snowden will never be given Clemency. At this stage in his life I would suspect the only thing keeping him alive is the fact that there is the threat that something he has which might be "Really Big" hasn't been released.
Snowden already made it clear in the Gellman interview that there is no Deadman’s switch.
S
Snowden said two things on this matter in the Gellman interview:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/edward-snowden-after-months-of-nsa-revelations-says-his-missions-accomplished/2013/12/23/49fc36de-6c1c-11e3-a523-fe73f0ff6b8d_story.html
1. “I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”
2. Deadman switch is a terrible idea in his case. He said it was more like a suicide switch (even if he hypothetically wanted to harm NSA) since now he would be painting a target on himself for other foreign intel services that might want to see the full cache.
“That sounds more like a suicide switch,” he wrote. “It wouldn’t make sense.”
Amy Davidson of The New Yorker completely deconstructs the entirety of Fred Kaplan's argument.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2014/01/did-edward-snowden-break-his-oath.html
This is how I approach MOOCs. They provide a lot of value for me, but I count as "failure" in all of them.
1.) Review: I have taken a similar course in the past. I just want to skim through the lectures to refresh some bits I have not used in a while.
2.) Partial: I know some of the course content well. But the course covers additional materials that I could benefit from.
3.) Busy: Course is offered at a time when I am busy. So I just download the materials for later use.
4.) Auditing: The course description looks enticing. I have no practical reason to take the course except for curiosity. I just want to watch lectures to get a feel for the domain, but otherwise am not so committed yet as to do homework.
Add to these factors that...
a.) MOOCs cost nothing to cheap (I just took the free ones so far). It is less of a risk to jump on board. I would think much more hard if I were paying say: $1500, like I have for live courses. So, sometimes I sign up for more than I can consume.
b.) MOOCs add to me as a person; just not as much to my resume. So I have no interest in their certifications and hence am not looking for course completions.
To me, MOOCs are a way of Universities fulfilling their institutional responsibility in bringing learning to the public. That goes beyond job skills.
MOOCs for me are not a replacement for a university life. But they provide a lot of value around its edges (prelude, supplement, refreshers etc). This is not to say anything about those who do make it into more of a replacement. I have seen some organize meetups and other parts of a learning experience that MOOCs cannot offer themselves.
MOOCs have redefined teaching to some extent. They should also redefine metrics. To some extent they have already.
I have one advise for them. Make the lecture videos available separately. Don't count those of us who just "enroll" to get these, the same way as those that want to do it more formally. We are not coming in for a full course experience to begin with. Just enroll those who want to take assignments on a schedule and get course completion certificates. Don't count anyone who has clicked enroll, but has not completed more than 1 assignment, as truly enrolled.
> MOOCs exist to train cheap workers
Have you seen the courses (I am going by Coursera)? They are not vocational courses (aside from a programming course, here and there) for cheap workers. So far, the courses are most attractive to people with graduate degrees.
> Every real college I knew back in the day would politely tell students that they weren't gonna make it past year 2 while working full time.
That entirely depends on the college and the course. Colleges that target working professionals (I have been in those taken by Physicians while they work) allow adjusting the course load per quarter and simply run longer for them.
It likely that this is just a standard procedure which fits the general category. Since this is pretty eggregious, I doubt that he will ever get a research grant again. For one, he will need to be a part of a research institution to get a grant. Which research university will hire him now, given the competitiveness of these positions? He might be able able to teach in some low level place, but his research career has ended.
The spying story will continue to be interesting through at least half of next year. I doubt it will hold steam until 2016. But if it does, we will see Ron Wyden and Justin Amash feature prominently in the race. They earned it.