Found this article that worth a look too:

http://www.atelier-us.com/internet-usage/article/stanford-university-offers-free-computer-science-and-robtics-courses

I am a part-time graduate student in EE at Stanford, and I just took one of these now-free CS classes (Programming Abstractions, aka CS106B) over the Summer to improve my C++ skillz. 

It was lots of work, but pretty fun and useful. However, it cost me a whopping $6400 for the privilege. I am not kidding, that is HCP tuition for one 5-unit class for one quarter. If they had released this back in May I totally would not have paid for it. So I hope you all enjoy it for free. It's an excellent course, but keep up with the homework... and think of all the money you're saving!

It makes perfect sense that Stanford distributes these lectures via torrents and similar means. Kudos to Stanford for distributing the lectures under the Creative Commons license!

I work at a US national lab and many of our students would benefit from these lectures. Ironically it is the US government which is already blocking all these forms of communcation at the labs and they are pushing the universities to do the same. Why? Let's try to understand the bigger picture.

There are a lot of stupid things happening at the US national labs and universities. For example, we lost our NNTP (Usenet) servers many years ago. At some places the people in charge gave us lame excuses, well, actually they simply lied. I could go on with security and other lies. Now the US government is pushing ISPs in the US to drop Usenet access. One by one, and every time we see more lies. See RCN as latest example.

Soon we will all be subject to warantless searches. It begins at the borders. This is already happening, and the US government is pushing other countries to do the same. See ACTA. If you in possession of a DVD, notebook, MP3 player or something like that, then customs will be forced to search you and search for evidence of copyright infringement. That is going to be part of ACTA. Now, if you are hanging in your couch infront of your TV, watching Fox News, and think that this will not happen to you in the US, think again. It did already happen. A guy was recently stopped for speeding, the cop found blank DVDs in the car and called the MAFIAA's "experts". That's right, the MAFIAA, and they found two "unauthorized" "unidentified" disks (oxymoron). 

I think it is important to point out how much everybody world-wide is affected by what the MAFIAA is doing. Think about it before you buy the next movie or music record. There are alternatives.

New Song: Ummm gabba laba do, ummm lafara, gabba,gbaa, dooo. Once get technicals down it'll sound Much better.
STeWie Drashek

MS Silverlight required. For shame, Stanford.