Last week, the fight between Apple and pugnacious hedge fund investor David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital went all flat when he withdrew a lawsuit after the company yanked a proxy proposal that would have allowed shareholders to vote on eliminating preferred stock from the company charter.

But the real issue at the core of the fight — the massive mountain of $137 billion in a cash hoard that Apple holds and that Einhorn wants it to distribute in some fashion to shareholders — still remains.

It’s not clear what Apple will do now, especially since a lot of it is overseas. But execs have indicated that they are evaluating what to do to best serve nervous investors, who have bidded the stock down 40 percent since the fall. While it’s not clear what that will be, it’s also pretty likely Apple will do something.

Until the company decides, though, I have some good ideas for CEO Tim Cook to consider:

* Apple could purchase 1,567,506 Tesla Model S Performance vehicles with 85 kWh battery and a carbon fiber spoiler at $87,400 each, which would effectively allow CEO Elon Musk to buy the New York Times (a bargain at $1.42 billion!) and use it as his own personal blog.

* It could buy 17.9 houses for each Yahoo employee located near its Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ, so they could be super-close to work, per CEO Marissa Mayer’s wishes. That breaks down to 206,015 overall homes for 11,500 workers, at a median sales price of $665,000 for the area.

* Apple could acquire a big chunk of the Internet all at once, including Groupon ($3.36 billion), Yahoo ($25.95 billion), Facebook ($61.7 billion), Twitter ($10 billion), LinkedIn ($18.32 billion), Yelp ($1.47 billion), AOL ($2.81 billion), Pandora ($2.09 billion), Zynga ($2.69 billion), OpenTable ($1.32 billion) and, finally, Pinterest ($2.5 billion). Phew.

* It could pay Andrew Mason’s $378.36 severance after getting jacked as CEO of Groupon 364,013,179 times over.

* Apple could pay for 97,857 parties for Yammer’s David Sacks’s 40th birthday (at $1.4 million each). Snoop Dogg included.

* It could foot the bill for the budget cuts to save the U.S. government $85 billion this year, so Americans could stop having to say “sequester.”

* Apple could buy $329 16 gigabyte Wi-Fi iPad minis for 416,413,374 people — everyone in the U.S. (315,429,318), plus France and Spain.

* Or it could just give the 7,069,909,686 people on the planet $19.38 each, and call it a day.

* Apple could use $1 bills to carpet an area of 560 square miles, which would more than cover Silicon Valley.

* Finally — and I think this would be a nice gesture to make up for calling his efforts a “silly sideshow” — Apple could give Einhorn 15.56 times the value of his $8.8 billion fund.

Or, of course, not.

Take one Silicon Valley exec. Who is rich. Who is a woman. Who seems, on the superficial surface at least, to have it all. Mix with high-profile book she has penned about gender issues in the workplace and a social networking effort to organize around. Sprinkle in some fear, some loathing and a generous dollop of startlingly ignorant assertions about how new media works. Bake in the spotlight for a millisecond.

Voila: Sheryl Sandberg Flambé.

Indeed, at this early point in the marketing game of the well-known Facebook COO’s new book, “Lean In,” the unusual level of vitriol aimed at her is, frankly, is eye-opening. While there is plenty that smart people can disagree with in her tome — after all, this is a very hot-button issue — the fact that it has ratcheted up this far before the March 11 publication date says a lot about a lot of things.

Not the least of which is that the relationship between old media and new media is, in the parlance of the huge Silicon Valley social networking company, complicated.

Consider Jodi Kantor’s New York Times article, titled “A Titan’s How-To on Breaking the Glass Ceiling,” which appeared at the end of last week.

As it was crafted, it immediately went right after Sandberg’s “carefully orchestrated media campaign” — leaving aside the pertinent fact that in this noisy day and age, every big media launch is carefully orchestrated — and then immediately took issue with her effort to start “Lean In Circles”

Oddly described by Kantor, the site is one on “which women can share experiences and follow a Sandberg-crafted curriculum for career success.” Actually, it was a little more complex than that, with major contributions from the highly regarded Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University to this effort.

Then, Kantor uses a sensationally arrogant-sounding Sandberg quote — “I always thought I would run a social movement” — from a recent video interview. As it turns out, though, it’s only a partial lift and almost totally out of context.

In full, it is about how Sandberg thought she would be a do-gooder who would doubtlessly not make much money: “I always thought I would run a social movement, which meant basically work in a nonprofit. I never thought I would work in the corporate sector.”

Then comes my favorite part from the Times piece: “With less than three weeks until launch — which will include a spread in Time magazine and splashy events like a book party at Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s home — organizers cannot say how many more groups may sprout up.”

Hmm. Hmm. They can’t say. Wow. Perhaps that’s because Lean In Circles have not started yet? You know, the service has not opened and therefore no one is using it.

Could Instagram have said how that piles of would use it before it started, especially since its first iteration was a dud? Nope! Could YouTube have known “Oppa Gangnam Style” was going to be a ginormous hit? Nope! Could the New York Times have known that it might have wanted to get ahead of this Internet thing before it decimated their business? Nope!

Here’s the thing — you can’t really fail before you start, but perhaps that’s just a Silicon Valley thing.

Let’s be clear, the “Lean In Circles” might turn out to be a big zero and perhaps Sandberg cannot compel women to use them. It could be an online ghost town. Or it could be very popular.

Who knows? All I am certain of is that it will — as the success of most online products depend on — be about whether people find whatever Sandberg is offering useful.

Also wrong is an account of Lean In essays that Sandberg has requested from some prominent women, which Kantor underscored asks for happy endings. True, but not quite if you read the whole document, which also says in part:

“Leaning in means pushing through the challenges and going down a path with an uncertain outcome. The path often leads to a positive internal result (newfound confidence, strength or determination) and often an external
reward (promotion, raise or goal achieved.) Leaning back means choosing to stay in a known or comfortable situation. This often leads to an internal
realization (desire to grow, change, consider leaning in the next time) and possibly a negative external result (stagnation, missed opportunities, loss of income.)”

After that, like many pieces so far, the article is all about how rich ladies with big houses and nannies should not lecture to other ladies without them. Perhaps that is so in some contexts and there is no question that her own massive success might be Sandberg’s most potent Achilles heel in trying to get her message out.

But in my reading, book as a whole is less grand and tsk-tsk than I expected and more about the plethora of depressing stats about women in the workplace, as well as some advice that has vaunted her to the top.

Lots of high-profile male execs have done this without the same level of anger directed at them. Thus, even though Sandberg is not the bilious and appalling as Donald Trump, she does not get to pontificate in any way that seems like, you know, she’s had some traction in the workplace — the Treasury Department, Google, Facebook — and might have some good tips to share.

Interesting, though it was not the only media account like this, the Times then followed today with one of the more bizarre and hyperactive columns I have seen of late by Maureen Dowd, who never met a pun she did not abuse mercilessly (and I love a good pun!).

“She has a grandiose plan to become the PowerPoint Pied Piper in Prada ankle boots reigniting the women’s revolution — Betty Friedan for the digital age,” Dowd wrote, also using the out-of-context Sandberg quote again to make her obtuse point. “She seems to think she can remedy social paradigms with a new kind of club — a combo gabfest, Oprah session and corporate pep talk. (Where’s the yoga?).”

Unpacking all those disparate images is a task for someone else with more energy than I have, but it becomes less comical when she goes all digital media expert.

“People come to a social movement from the bottom up, not the top down,” wrote Dowd. “Just because digital technology makes connecting possible doesn’t mean you’re actually reaching people.”

Um, no, it does not — and I am not sure who said it did. Although I am certain Sandberg knows more than Dowd about reaching people online and the potential for getting them to act.

Still, it is just a start and Sandberg does not seem to be saying otherwise. And perhaps it is a good thing to debate whether book is pushing women meet goals they perhaps cannot.

Or — maybe, just maybe — it is a little more complicated. In fact, it is a lot more complicated — the issue of women at work is a thorny issue –which is why it will be interesting to see if Sandberg’s book and social network will have an impact or not.

To be clear, I have no idea if it will and neither does anyone else. No one thought Facebook would have a billion users (I definitely did not!).

That answer is to come, of course, after what will doubtlessly be a rollout where the turbulence is just beginning.

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” wrote Sandberg in her book.

True that. That’s because, as it turns out, leaning in turns out to mean a very bumpy ride for those who do.

The post was both effective — it showed up high on Google searches, which is the reason Huffpo created it — and symbolic of Huffpo’s traffic strategy — which was either craven or clear-minded, depending on your perspective.

Now that kind of Google-baiting is old hat. Even for august newspapers with 41 Pulitzers. Here’s what the same query for today’s Oscars looks like today:

Say this for the Los Angeles Times piece — it delivers the goods, for both humans and Google’s robots. Here’s the keyword-filled top:

The 85th Academy Award nominees and winners have been chosen, the red carpet has been rolled out and the gilded Oscar statues have been polished. But what time is the show again?

The 2013 Oscars ceremony honoring the films of 2012 is set to take place Sunday at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. The pre-show broadcast will begin on ABC with red carpet arrivals at 4 p.m. PST (7 p.m. EST) and will be hosted by Lara Spencer, Jess Cagle, Kristin Chenoweth and Kelly Rowland.

The awards show will start at 5:30 p.m. PST (8:30 p.m. EST) and is scheduled to last three hours. It will be hosted by “Family Guy” and “Ted” star Seth MacFarlane and televised live in more than 225 countries.

And Google is presumably extra pleased that the story’s author, reporter/Web producer Nardine Saad, is a diligent Google+ contributor who has posted more than 30 LAT links so far this month.*

What’s that? You still find this sort of thing disheartening, even if it gives readers what they want and delivers some clicks to a newspaper that can use them? Well, you’re not alone. Here’s a gut reaction from New York Times editor Patrick LaForge:

Sad. RT @harrisj: LA Times starts the SEO battle for tomorrow bit.ly/15Fnmh4

— Patrick LaForge, NYT (@palafo) February 24, 2013

But you’re probably going to be in an ever-shrinking minority, says Raju Narisetti, who heads up The Wall Street Journal digital network (the Dow Jones digital umbrella which includes this Web site).

A (good) lasting lesson @huffingtonpost taught big newsrooms MT @harrisj: @latimes starts SEO battle for tomorrow twitter.com/harrisj/status…”

— Raju Narisetti (@rajunarisetti) February 24, 2013

And yes, even people like yours truly try to engage Google (and Facebook, and Twitter, and anyone that will increase the number of eyeballs on my stuff). AllThingsD’s publishing system, for instance, allows us to create “SEO heds” — headlines created with Google’s automatons in mind.

And if you know how to find the one I’ve created for this post, you’ll be able to figure out what time to watch the Oscars tonight. Enjoy!

* Conventional wisdom among Google-watchers is that even if no one reads anything you post on Google+, the search engine will reward active users with Google juice in search results. So get posting!

1.) This Is the Site Likely Responsible for the Recent Major Tech Company Hacks

2.) Yahoo CEO Mayer Now Requiring Remote Employees to Not Be (Remote)

3.) Microsoft Could Make Billions From Office for iPad

4.) Confirmed: Pinterest Completes $200 Million Funding at $2.5 Billion Valuation

5.) NFC: What You Need to Know

6.) I Love You, Man: Gates Lashes Himself to Ballmer Over Microsoft’s Mobile “Mistake” (Video)

7.) For $19, an Unlimited Phone Plan, Some Flaws

8.) Tesla Owners Hit the Road to Prove Long-Distance Can Be Done

9.) Why Google Made Its Own High-End Laptop, the Chromebook Pixel

10.) When Mayer Called Yahoo’s Mobile Revenue “Nascent,” She Wasn’t Kidding (And Here’s the Actual Number She Left Out)

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Nope.

The to-and-fro didn’t come up a single time. Not a word during his nine-minute segment, which focused almost entirely on Musk’s SpaceX exploits. Tesla itself barely merited a mention, though Kimmel did note that the company had won a Motor Trend award.

The Times said it is selling the paper, along with the rest of its New England Media Group, because “a sale is in the best long-term interests of these properties and the employees who work for them as well as in the best interests of our shareholders.”

Bloomberg first reported the sales talks.

The Times bought the Boston paper for $1.1 billion in 1993, and hired Goldman Sachs to explore selling it in 2009.

Dumping the Globe is consistent with the Times’ larger strategy of selling off everything but its flagship paper. Last year, for instance, it sold About.com for $300 million to Barry Diller’s IAC.

Last year the New England Media Group, which also includes the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, generated revenue of about $400 million. That was down approximately 2.5 percent from the previous year, and accounted for nearly 20 percent of the Times’ total revenue.

One of the Tesla S Road Trip cars, at a charging station in Milford, Conn.

The group, which started out with nine cars, drove the 353 miles from Rockville, Md. to Groton, Conn., live-tweeting telemetry updates and color commentary throughout the trip.

But not all of the starting nine completed the entire drive, for varying reasons.

I happened to cross paths with them today at a highway rest stop in Milford, Conn., where I saw the Teslas charging and found the owners sitting inside at a Dunkin’ Donuts. They were on their way back home.

At the rest stop, Tesla owner Aaron Schildkraut told me they had followed the same route the Times’ John Broder did, making pit stops in Newark, Del., and again in Milford, to super-charge their electric vehicles.

In case you haven’t been following the saga and are curious as to why these people would want to spend President’s Day weekend hanging out at rest stops: On Feb. 8, the New York Times ran a column titled “Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway”, that recounted a less-than-positive experience with the Tesla Model S, an award-winning electric vehicle that claims a 256-mile-per-charge estimated range. Broder’s car battery died during the test drive.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to call the Times piece a “fake,”  and followed up with a blog post that his supporters said backed up his assertion. Then Broder responded with a blog post of his own. Short version: If you’re a big Tesla fan, you don’t believe the Times. Lots of other people do.

The “Tesla Road Trip” folks aren’t the first to jump at the opportunity to mimic Broder’s drive. Last week, a reporter from CNN made the drive from Washington, D.C., to Boston without needing the help of a flatbed truck, although, as the reporter wrote, the trip was not anxiety-free.

The Tesla Road Trip drivers, hanging out inside the rest stop while they wait for their cars to finish charging.

None of the Tesla Road Trip cars have run out of juice, the group said. But the trip was not without incident: One driver’s Tesla S stopped working at the Delaware charging station, due to what they believe was faulty circuitry. The owner called Tesla support, the group said, and a software update was pushed to his car remotely, allowing him to drive it to Milford.

Tesla has not yet responded to a request for comment about that vehicle’s troubles.

In total, only four of the original nine Tesla S drivers stuck it out for the whole trip, from Rockville to Groton and back south. Some opted out early on, in Delaware. Another driver, during the first leg of the trip, chose to stay in New York City and see a Broadway play.

“We were going 65 [miles per hour] pretty much the whole trip,” Schildkraut said, noting that they slowed down when they drove through New York City and when they encountered snowy weather.

“I think Broder’s biggest problem was that he didn’t charge his car fully,” one of the drivers, Dante Richardson, opined. “You wouldn’t fill up your car with gas for 50 miles if you were taking a 100-mile road trip.”

The group said their trip was not commissioned or sponsored by Tesla, although they said Tesla vice president of sales George Blankenship contacted them after hearing about the mission.

“We FaceTimed with him during the drive,” said driver Lanny Hartmann, who spearheaded most of the group’s social media efforts.

Tonight, the company responded by holding firm on its efforts to limit content to registered users by default. However, it opened up three different loopholes that allow non-registered users in, similar to the way pay-walled news sites like the New York Times offer access to non-paying users.

Quora exec Marc Bodnick argued in a blog post that people should join Quora because participation is a key part of the site. When users register, they contribute answers and votes and follows, and they are drawn back into the site. That engagement and retention results in “increasingly large audiences” for writers, Bodnick said.

But for those who want to share their own writings and their favorite answers and posts more broadly — which is, after all, another way to find an audience! — Quora is providing the following openings:

1. Share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Starting today, when you use the Share button to share on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, people won’t be asked to join Quora to read what you’ve shared.
2. Sharing URLs. Another option is to share pages using short links (e.g., when you want to share via email). You can get a short link by clicking the Share button and then copying the short URL listed at the top of the Share box. Other people can open that link without being asked to join Quora to read the content.
3. Open any Quora URL. If you come across a Quora link anywhere and you want to read it without being asked to join Quora, you can add the text “?share=1″ to the end of the URL. Example: http://www.quora.com/Hostage-Situations/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-a-hostage-negotiator?share=1

As for mobile access, Quora still would rather users download its apps, Bodnick said in a follow-up statement.

Accounting for about 25% of overall traffic, mobile platforms are important and growing on Quora — for both reading and contributing. We’ve worked hard to create the best mobile experience with our Android and iOS apps, and we encourage users to download them for the optimal mobile experience. We are always listening to the feedback of our community, and will continue to iterate the way that we help people discover the best Quora experience on any device.

(Image courtesy of imageshunter/Shutterstock)

The latest victim of digital miscreants is the U.S. Department of Energy, in an attack, the New York Times says, that resulted in the compromising of personal data on “several hundred employees.” It is, of course, hard to know whether this incident is connected to the high-profile attacks upon that newspaper’s computers along with those of The Wall Street Journal (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.), the Washington Post and Bloomberg News.

The apparent targets were journalists who cover China. One can easily imagine a scenario where attackers acting in the pay of Chinese political leaders were tasked with learning as much as possible about “sources and methods,” which — in the intelligence business as well as in journalism — are the twin crown jewels of the trade: Who provides information that shows up in stories, and how that information is shared.

The source of another attack, this one on Twitter, is as yet unknown, and may not be connected to the China-sourced attacks on the media organizations. When one rash of attacks comes to public light, it sort of behooves other companies to disclose attacks that may be wholly unconnected in order to soften the blow to a corporate reputation. When computer security disclosures take place in groups, it’s easy to conflate them and make them all seem like one big story, even if each disclosed incident may be unconnected.

And these are only the companies that have admitted to being targeted in the latest round of incidents. It’s easy to imagine that there are probably more that decided it was not in their best interest to go public with the information, or that haven’t done so yet. In prior incidents, companies like Intel and Google have conceded that they, too, have been attacked by parties working in China.

Disclosure may soon become the rule rather than the exception. According to new rules expected to be proposed Thursday before the European Union parliament, search engines, banks and utilities will be required to disclose attacks against them.

The timing of the disclosures comes as the Obama administration is said to be working on a classified set of guidelines on the conduct and use of cyber weapons. While Twitter or news media organizations aren’t exactly considered critical infrastructure that if attacked would trigger a retaliation, the sheer volume and effectiveness of attacks suggest a time is coming when attacks against systems crucial to the flow of daily life, like power utilities and the banking system, will become more routine.

Last month, government sources disclosed that Iran was thought to be behind a series of denial-of-service attacks against several U.S. banks. Those attacks might have been retaliation against the U.S. for its role, never officially acknowledged, in the Stuxnet attacks against the Iranian nuclear research program.

Effective as the Stuxnet attacks may have been — they are said to have caused some Iranian nuclear centrifuges to explode — they showed the world what is possible, and in time that learning will stick. The ease of Stuxnet-like attacks against industrial systems in particular has already been demonstrated by security researchers, and has long been on a list of things Western policymakers have to worry about when it comes to cyber security.

Consider this just a hunch, but there’s going to be a lot more news like this throughout the year.

Nate Silver, the famous poll expert for the New York Times who correctly called the U.S. presidential election for Barack Obama, has really gone out on a limb today, prognosticating that the San Francisco 49ers will likely win the Super Bowl.

“The reasons that exceptional defenses fare so much better in the Super Bowl are still somewhat murky, but this factor bodes well for this year’s 49ers, whose defense belongs in the elite group, according to S.R.S. (it ranks 17th among Super Bowl teams),” wrote Silver, in part.

The football team is the favorite already, so it’s not that much of a limb to crawl out on — and it’s also unlikely to attract as much controversy as Silver’s election calls that sent Republicans into a tizzy.

Except to those pulling for the Baltimore Ravens, of course.

If you haven’t read it yet, I’ll spare you the effort. Last fall, the Times was getting ready to publish a lengthy report about how relatives of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao had amassed a sizable fortune. Knowing China’s reputation for carrying out hacking attacks against companies and other entities that annoy it, Times executives had the foresight to have the company’s Internet service provider watch for any unusual activity.

Predictably, it showed up. It was a classic spear-phishing attack that contained a remote access tool, packaged in an email attachment innocently opened by an employee. The incident provided the Times and the security firm it hired, Mandiant, the opportunity to watch the intruders’ activity for an extended period of time as they roamed the network. Once Mandiant had a pretty good idea of all the different paths for getting in and out, they shut down and isolated all the affected machines, plugged all the holes and that was that.

Interesting. But it’s not the first time the Times has been hacked in a high-profile manner. The story reports that the first attack occurred on Sept. 13. That’s a notable date because it is, coincidentally, the 15-year anniversary of the day in 1998 that the New York Times Web site was attacked by a hacking group calling itself Hacking for Girliez.

I wrote about that attack for Wired. The attack was a basic Web defacement. The Times front page was replaced with another page (you can see the results, not completely safe for work, here) that contained within its HTML code a rambling message about the then-jailed hacker Kevin Mitnick, and a weird poem.

No one was ever arrested for the attack and it’s a pretty sure bet no one ever will be, mainly because the statute of limitations would have long expired. But someone did get the perpetrators to sit for an interview. Adam Penenberg, then a writer for Forbes and now an editor for PandoDaily, got “Slut Puppy” and “Master Pimp” to answer some questions. Their motivation at the time? They were bored and couldn’t agree on a video to watch.

The 1998 attack was the first incident for the Times, and for a little while its entire Web site was taken down in order to prevent the display of the hacked page. The timing of this attack probably has nothing to do with this latest attack. But then again, hackers of all stripes are known for long memories and a unique sense of humor.

The same way lots of other online publications are handling the balancing act: A freemium/pay wall model.

Hughes’ publication, which relaunched yesterday with a redesigned website, iPad app and print magazine, will also use a new pay wall, which will allow nonsubscribers to read up to eight online articles per month, per device. That is: You could read eight articles on your MacBook, and another eight on your Kindle, etc.

Hughes doesn’t reference the pay wall in his letter introducing his redesign, and there doesn’t seem to be any direct reference to it anywhere else on the site. But a registration page does note that paying subscribers will get “unlimited online access;” a rep for Hughes confirmed the pay wall this morning.

“Free up to a point” is an increasingly common strategy for online publications: The New York Times, for instance, launched its pay wall in the spring of 2011, but allowed nonsubscribers to read up to 20 stories a month; a year later, it made the wall harder to jump by lowering the limit to 10 stories a month.

And our News Corp. colleagues at The Wall Street Journal have had a much stricter pay wall in place for years, and only allow nonsubscribers to read a handful of stories. (But AllThingsD is 110 percent free, free, free! No plans to change that, as far as I know.)

Hughes, who got his start and made his fortune when he helped Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg build Facebook, looks like he wants to position the New Republic as a not-super-exclusive club. In addition to the print and iPad magazine, subscribers will also get access to other goodies, like live events.

Will that pitch, plus a dollop of advertising, be enough to ensure that the 98-year-old publication turns a profit? We’ll ask Hughes himself at our own live event next month: You can see him at our D: Dive Into Media conference Feb. 11-12 in Laguna Niguel, Calif.

That one isn’t free, but it is going to be an excellent show, says this very conflicted reporter. Head here if you want to join us.

Now it’s going to do something quite different. In partnership with the state of California, Udacity will teach remedial and introductory courses on algebra and other topics to public university and community college students, for a vastly reduced fee.

Udacity co-founder Sebastian Thrun (the former Stanford professor and ongoing Google X autonomous car leader) and California Governor Jerry Brown are to announce the program at a press conference at San Jose State on Tuesday morning. A pilot program to adapt MOOCs — massive open online courses — for this purpose will open this month.

The New York Times describes the partnership as a way for the state to help address the fact that many of its students lack academic preparation for college. San Jose State has already been experimenting with MOOCs — it offered an electrical engineering class with edX this past fall. However, professors remain wary of being replaced by online education’s combinator of videos and “mentors.”

But the deal also benefits Udacity, which has massive dropout rates — the estimate for all MOOCs is that 90 percent of students who register drop out.

So, rather than its normal syllabus of aspirational personal enrichment classes, Udacity will be inserting itself into a more core part of education.

Thrun told the Times that he saw the program as an opportunity to figure out how to retain motivated students.