Bizarrely I wrote a novel last year about this kind of thing happening in the future. If anyone wants to read it I'd love some feedback ;)

In fairness, I work in the U.K. and most of my friends that I went to uni with, now in Law or Finance (including PAs) make more than I do.

We've been having good success running desktops as docker containers, scheduled on Mesos using cheaper GCE machines. We use TurboVNC as it has a built in Javascript VNC client too.

I thought this was going to be one of those websites that just had NO in big letters on it. Sadly it's not.

I was thinking this was going to be one of those websites that just says NO in big letters. Sadly it's not.

Google maps including live satellite feeds of the Earth... death of privacy, or really awesome thing?

Depends 'how live' it is I guess.

I doubt it'd be a good thing to be able to track vehicles in real time with number one eyeball. Though I can probably think of a number of applications of live streaming satellite info that would appeal to law enforcement.

I can't quite articulate why fully, but to me this article sums up everything that's wrong with programmers and the community in general (of which I consider myself a part). :(

From Jurassic Park:

Dr. Ian Malcolm: If I may... Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now

[bangs on the table]

Dr. Ian Malcolm: you're selling it, you wanna sell it. Well...

John Hammond: I don't think you're giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody's ever done before...

Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.

I don't see it as a wrong. Just a lot of programmers have a personality type that sees us planning and optimizing everything, making it into systems and disregarding rules of social interaction to some or greater extent. You need people like this to push the boundaries.

Because it is superficial and cheekily disrespectful of traditional social interactions, and typical "pre-bro" programmers take these interactions very seriously, since producing reliability is our duty above all? That's how I feel sometimes.

Care to elaborate? I don't see anything wrong with this and can't imagine how it "sums up everything that's wrong with programmers and the community in general".

It's a very clever and interesting piece of automation.

This is brilliant, thank you! Is there any audio/video of the lectures available anywhere? I've been enjoying some other Stanford courses on iTunes U and Coursera :)

Thanks! We ended up not recording the lectures this time around. I was playing with the idea of prerecording some videos MOOC style, but then ended up completely swamped even without them. Among the notes, slides, lectures, office hours, midterm design, coding assignments, project design, message boards, meetings, and various misc, running this class has turned out to be a stressful 100+ hours/week endeavor, and that's even with an all-star TA team by my side.

There have been some whispers of offering this class next year as a proper MOOC, in which case we'd definitely have videos. I'm just not sure if I'm up for it yet - I enjoy dissemination but I'm also starting to miss research quite a bit, and a MOOC would likely be the same thing or worse all over again.

Are you planning to offer it in non MOOC form (i.e. just teach it the same way, but presumably with less stress since you've already made the notes and assignments) at Stanford next year?