Grossly misguided equation. The cost of the book is the price + the time to acquire. The benefit of the book is in the enjoyment of reading it -- which implies that readers don't see time spent reading as a "cost", unless you believe they're seeing reading as a benefit and a cost at the same time. Believe it or not, people actually enjoy the process of reading and seeing a work unfold, not just checking a completed book off the reading list.
I completely agree. The "foundational premise" of MOOCs isn't just about the cost of college, as the author claims... it's about access more broadly, of which cost is just one part. Sure, your average middle class American teenager has plenty of education opportunities -- people in full time jobs, distributed around the world, in rural areas, working full time and odd hours? Not so much. For these people, MOOCs truly are an "anything is better than nothing" proposition, and they don't have to replace college to be wildly successful. In fact, they can serve as a medium for elite universities to access talent they otherwise would never find -- as in this story: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/the-boy-genius-of...
I had a very similar problem when I drowned my iPhone and switched my SIM to an old Windows Phone 7 I had lying around. If you have your old phone, you can disable iMessage while the SIM is still in it, which apparently works -- but if you don't, you're basically up a creek. I ended up changing the email address on my iCloud account.
It baffles me that online iCloud doesn't have a dashboard for controlling this. Doesn't seem it should be that hard to unlink phone numbers from iMessage.
There is absolutely nothing in Eich's record which would indicate what you're saying is true. If he had actually had a "direct effect on the standard of living" of any employee, that should have been resolved through an internal review process of his actual behavior, not a public lynching of a man based on a political issue (that was, let's not forget, endorsed by a majority of California voters).
Opposing something right because it's politically convenient isn't any more ethically defensible than opposing something you truly disagree with. You, as liberals tend to do, are giving Obama a pass -- he can't not do the right thing, by your logic.
I suspect that many Republicans nominally against gay marriage are privately for it, but the political ramifications for saying so would be much graver for an older, whiter and more religious constituency. Do we give them a pass, too?
Even if this were true (which it isn't), the slippery slope argument most definitely applies here. Are you going to reject the veneration of our founding fathers because they held slaves? What if a company has middle managers who are against same sex marriage, or engineers? Do we boycott them as well? You are advocating for intellectual puritanism in the name of protection of diversity -- an utterly incoherent position.
Also, we're talking about political speech from many years ago, for a cause that the majority of Californians passed -- and, lest we forget, President Obama, liberal hero he is, did not support gay marriage until 2012. Many, many religious conservatives (hundreds of millions of them, in fact) would argue against your conflation of anti-gay marriage with anti-gay. And just because you seem unable to fathom dissenting views on this issue doesn't mean they don't exist.
Interesting example of journalistic framing choices having a huge impact. Obviously, the jury is still out on these, and there are lots of people yelling loudly from both sides. But this story presents the pessimistic view only. It's also amusing how two years is treated as such a long time -- "they should have caught on by now." How many paradigm shifts happened in less than two years?
Put another way -- how many upper-middle class professionals (doctors/lawyers/engineers) would you say have graduated from college? Many, many more than 1 in 5. You can't deduce data about specific occupations from a broad statistical measure like overall percentage of bachelor's degrees in a population.