61–70 of 196 posts
"I've got it! Let's go after the studious ones by blocking their access to online education! Let's force them to overload their VPNs and proxy servers while chasing their aspirations to improve the social and political climate in their countries of origin! That'll show them."
Coursera could suggest (and eventually subsidize) non-US VPN services for those students.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. Surely an uneducated adversarial population is more dangerous in the long run than an educated and productive one? I cannot possibly fathom the intended outcome of this sanction. Keeping a few kids from doing programming courses is not going to help the US ever have friendly ties with them. And it's not like this is an issue about which the opposing govt will care enough about to change their policies.
Blocking classes like this is like 0.0001% of what the sanction is for. It's an unintended consequence of a blanket sanction. The sanctions exist for two reasons: to directly prevent "enemy" nations from gaining weapons (or economic infrastructure) to use for bad purposes, and to put pressure on the foreign government (directly on members of the government, and indirectly through the population) to provoke change. Sa…
As someone who lives in Iran, this is sad but not news. I have gotten used to see half the websites blocked by my government(Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, WordPress, etc) and the other half by your government(Java SE or anything else from Oracle, Google Code, Google Play Store, anything from Xilinx, etc). If one of my favorite websites was blocked, I may have considered not using it anymore. When virtually all websites…
Maybe if our government didn't threaten other nations with annihilation, this sort of shit wouldn't happen to us. Who knows.
Udacity can be a good alternative.
What's really chilling about this is: >Federal regulations prohibit U.S. businesses from offering services to countries subject to economic sanctions -- a list that includes Cuba, Iran, Syria and Sudan On this message board, I can imagine that "U.S. businesses" includes a substantial number of us. You're all blocking those IPs, right? The State Dept. set a dangerous precedent when it didn't immediately respond to edX…
A startup in Europe should create a free proxy to use Coursera for these guys living in those unfortunate countries. Berlin, London, Munich, etc. anything?
A startup in Europe should create a free proxy to use Coursera for these guys living in those unfortunate countries. Berlin, London, Munich, etc. anything?
So that startup can have their Paypal account frozen? No thank you. Probably the best way is to create a Coursera competitor.