Heck of a promise there, Mitt ol' boy

"What I can promise you is this -- when you get out of college, if I'm president you'll have a job. If President Obama is reelected, you will not be able to get a job."
— Mitt Romney to a New Hampshire college student

The problem is fairly simple. The best way to grow an economy and add jobs is increased manufacturing, and we don't do that very much any more. We have a jobless recovery: employers found that they could do as much or more with fewer staff, and now they have little incentive to add positions if there's no direct promise of increased sales/profit.

MIT and Stanford expand their online course offerings

Broader availability to education is a good thing. I was reading that in some third world countries that a smartphone is a lot of people's only computer, I hadn't thought about that in terms of a tech revolution.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/12/20/198231/mit-to-expand-online-learning-and-offer-certificates

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/11/23/2159216/stanfords-free-computer-science-courses

Google is working on an equivalent of Siri: Majel

Heh. Yes, named after Majel Barret Roddenberry, the voice of Star Trek's computers. It'll be interesting to see how it shapes up, Google has such a huge data mine to work with it should be quite viable. I use Siri occasionally, mainly as a lark. Last night I was playing with it as a joke and I said "play one song", and got Pink Floyd's One Slip, and that was it. I have used it while driving to play a podcast, and it's definitely useful that way. One thing didn't work as expected: Apple advertised that you could say 'remind me to buy milk when I leave work', I tried it to remind me to pick up some paper for my laser printer when I left Applebee's and I didn't get a reminder, but since I remembered that I needed to hit Staples it was no big deal.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/12/20/177218/google-working-on-siri-competitor-majel