Re: Not joining you. Sorry.

I'll be heading through Barco de Avila tomorrow, are you allowed red cross style food parcels?

Re: With regard to the 20:1 ratio between entrance and success

My experience with Coursera:

Certainly I've signed up to courses, and then dropped out. Why shouldn't I? I take a look at the first week's lectures, see if it's what I'm expecting, and if not... I'm not paying anything, so no loss. I also had to drop out of another course halfway through - my entire family turned up to stay for a week, and there was no way I could both study and be with them. If I'd been paying I probably wouldn't have invited them, but...

Another point is that the course workload is often considerably higher than advertised, which is something that needs to be worked on. Too often the students that first take the course are guinea pigs, with new materials that require extensive study beyond the course, etc. Where possible, take the second course offering - a lot of bugs will have been ironed out.

Re: You can figure out if the person presenting the course isn't an expert pretty quickly

Whatever the cause, and I fully agree that it may not be justified or logical, the people running the course should be able to explain the reason for studying the subject - and I think it's reasonable for paying students (ie everybody these days!) to expect a decent answer.

Re: You can figure out if the person presenting the course isn't an expert pretty quickly

If one student out of a hundred is making the complaint you can probably ignore it. If a sizeable group are making it - even if they then recant in the future - that to me seems to imply poor teaching, or at the very least poor communication of the aims of the course.

Re: Content should be free

Two questions, slightly rhetorically:

1) The ease with which content can be copied (and the massive availability of instructional texts) means that it has started to lose value. As you point out, that content costs time and money to produce, how then can you recover those costs?

2) How do I, as an employer, know that you, the candidate, have actually studied this stuff?

One possible solution is charging for certification - make the content free, but as the article points out merely signing up for the course means nothing, and the ease with which you can cheat means finishing isn't much better. Charge, too, for face time with the teachers - I don't want to pay to listen to an expert lecture at me, I can get that from a video. But an hour of one-to-one (or small group) instruction? That has real value.

Re: This is all about Chinese OEMs cutting Google out of the revenue pie

It's not all crap - Maps, GMail and the like are excellent - but why can't I uninstall Goggles, Facebook, Books, etc. etc. without rooting my phone?

Re: That'll teach the smug "I'm special" git

Except the actual announcement would be something like "For passengers who haven't paid for Speedy Wifi, please switch your phones and other electronic devices off, otherwise it's 5 days in the slammer for you when we land".

Re: Personal

Not really, it just means a court order would be required to open this mail.

Re: Personal folders

Same in Spain, despite being corporate email the company cannot just open it.

Re: don't like the law, but...

I certainly appreciate the difficulties in applying the law to foreign companies, unfortunately I can see this leading to most countries installing filters at country-level to make the threat real.

However, I'm not sure a company the size of Twitter would simply ignore a UK law, they'd probably do something similar to Blackberry and set up data centres locally to be able to comply.

Re: Ooops

Yeah, I clearly remember working for IBM in Sydney. The reason they pulled out was that the risk was huge (a failure at this level is obviously very public) while the gains were small.

Re: Huevos rancheros por favor

Can't you just buy the Marmite in the supermarket? Round my way Carrefour stocks it.

You can get haggis from the www.thefoodhall.es - not in a tin. No idea how good it is though!

At a guess, Earthquake New Zealand?

Check your HTML codes...

The ~ symbol is a tilde, at least in Spanish (and by extension the HTML codes...)

@Norfolk 'n' Goode

How is Microsoft forcing anyone to buy their phones? You can still buy an iPhone or an Android phone...

Unless you like sketching, in which case a pen interface is pretty handy...

"fell into the sea"

Not quite the same, it flew in a controlled glide into the sea - fell implies a complete lack of control over the trajectory.