https://www.coursera.org/about/terms

> Notice for Minnesota Users

> Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.

You have stated that this "has had NO effect on Coursera's operation in Minnesota" and "I am a Minnesota resident, I am enrolled in multiple Coursera courses". Your continued enrollment is clearly in violation of the new TOS unless you are taking the classes from outside your state of residence.

First of all, just because someone spends 18 hours a day on a computer does not mean they're a "native netizen." That's not a real thing.

Secondly, you're still in [State/Country of residence] when you're online. Just because someone is checking Twitter in a bathroom in Minnesota does not mean they're no longer subject to laws and regulations in Minnesota.

But it could someday soon seem very quaint and wrongheaded.

The Catholic Church used to claim universal jurisdiction, and some religions still see their laws as perpetually applying to all born to their faith. To the contrary of such claims, richer communities have moved to primarily territorial, largely secular, slightly voluntary (through the ability to choose your residence) sovereign jurisdictional authorities.

This evolution could continue to reach primarily membership/networked, mostly-voluntary, often-overlapping and situationally-contingent sovereign jurisdictional authorities. These might fall back to territorial governance only when the issues involved (property lines, effluents, etc) are themselves territorial.

Educating yourself via the network could be seen as something in a totally non-territorial realm, and thus of no proper interest to territorial authorities. That would leave networked-sovereignty citizens as free to ignore the dictates of overreaching territorial authorities as many today feel free to ignore the Pope or Sharia Law.

"Native netizen" is a real thing because I said it is. An existence proof only requires the existence of a single instance.

Secondly, it's not about the amount of time spent using a computer (18 hours a day?!), but a state of mind. The corner of my mind responsible for identifying locations perceives "online" as a distinct physical location. If you asked me where I'm from, I could say City A, but if you asked me where I grew up, I would say "the Internet." Answering anything else would feel like lying.

The location of one's body is independent of the perceived location of one's mind. When it comes to the Internet, the second is more important.

State law prohibits degree-granting institutions from offering instruction in Minnesota without obtaining permission from the office and paying a registration fee. (The fee can range from a few hundred dollars to several thousand, plus a $1,200 annual renewal.)

So this amounts to a relatively small money grab for all practical purposes.

Quite possibly the importance of this law should not be overstated, and I agree with you and your children carrying on with your Coursera courses. But apparently you will be doing so in violation of the law.

Should not unjust laws be protested, if perhaps also disobeyed? I would not exactly be afraid to continue using Coursera in Minnesota, but experience has taught me that law enforcement should never be trusted 100% to be reasonable.

That said, you mentioned that you will be speaking with your state legislators -- you are doing as much to fight this as anyone reasonably could, and for that you have my gratitude. If 10,000 other Minnesotans took the same action as you, this would die as it deserves to.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/10/mar...

Clearly not. According to the article, the law deals specifically with institutions provide education, not individuals soliciting the courses.

This is much like poker laws that made it illegal for banks to process financial transactions, but never made it illegal for players to participate.

The creation of property rights is an imposition of the dictatorship of the majority. It tells the strong that they cannot use their natural gifts to further their own interests under the penalty of collective force. If the will of the majority dissolves, property rights are meaningless.

I, and millions of people around the world, have been disobeying the draconian drug laws for years and it's getting us nowhere. What advice do you have?

For example, I am about to vote to legalize marijuana in Colorado. I don't know whether it will pass, but you can bet that measure would never have been on the ballot were it not for the decades of data--on the medical and social effects of the drug and its criminalization--provided by people breaking the law.

I think that the changing attitudes are simply due to the old guard dying from old age and disease. When there are sufficiently few people who grew up in the era of hardcore anti-drug propaganda then there will be a policy change.

Aside from that: I wonder what would happen if all the people in the country who are using marijuana at least semi-regularly were to go to some very public place at the same time and light up a joint.

Instead of a posting a glib response, a reasonable thing to do would be to read the wikipedia article on civil disobedience and realize that a single person randomly disobeying a law in public is not how it works.

We are on the internet. Most of these conversations will go nowhere beyond where the people reading them will take them, which is nowhere. I am not interested in writing essay after essay debating things with people who have no power to change them in the first place. This is a waste of time. The internet primarily exists as a form of entertainment. This may be against the spirit of HN but I would argue that HN is against the spirit of the internet. My proof of this is that the vast majority (99%+) of the internet is nothing like HN.

Anyway, to address your point - numerous people take drugs publically at events like music festivals. The result of this action is a lack of arrests and a lack of policy change.

What you would want to do are:

1) Bring the issue to the public. Make sure that it ends up on the evening news more often than not.

2) Dispel most of the myths associated with drugs (e.g. all drug users are out-of-control crazed lunatics on a homicidal rampage to kill you and your kids!).

3) Get more people on-board. If more and more and more people are getting arrested very publicly for using drugs, then at some point, the government will have to do something, because they can't afford to have a significant portion of the population in jail.

These are the end-goals. Mostly to change public perception and to get the majority of the population on your side. Then you want to bring the issue to a head.

It's worth noting the perp is the Office of Higher Education, not the Department of Education: they are separate, cabinet-level bureaucracies. One is not a sub-department of the other.

https://mn.gov/governor/dayton/governors-cabinet.jsp

If you're an employee of the OHE, and you somehow think it's a good idea to go on record defending this silly statute, then you need to be fired. Period. No one at that organization should possibly think applying a decades old statute to a non-degree granting institution is the right thing to do.

Edit: I have contacted the source at the OHE and am waiting for a response. I'm hopeful this was all a misunderstanding, but one can never hope too much for the right outcome when dealing with bureaucracy.