When children are about old enough to stop vomiting on themselves, we teach them that instant gratification is bad—one of the simpler vices. But if Uber has its way and explodes into the big fat company of its own pipe dreams, it will make it OK for us to demand anything we want, whenever we want it.

A comprehensive study released today by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education looked at a million users of MOOCs—"venture capital's massive, terrible idea" to democratize education—and found that roughly half the students who registered for one of those online courses ever saw a lecture. What's more, only about 4 percent completed the course.

Behold a perfect Silicon Valley denizen, an archetype: he's been written up in TechCrunch for his hackathon-organizing company. He's been fluffed in Business Insider. And now, inevitably, he's publicly savaged the homeless and generally less fortunate of San Francisco.

The newest spam-blasting social app shares a name with Dave Eggers' fictional villain-company, and all of its charm. Why do startups—and their big-time backers—think they can get away with molesting your contact list?

Foursquare's brilliant new update, which offers passive real-time notifications as you're walking around, might help the company get an acquisition "by Google or Facebook," but it won't "explode their numbers," Ben Lerer tells Wired.

Sean Parker has a rocky relationship with the press unless (1) there is no word count or (2) it's about a subject he wants to discuss. A new article by Steven Bertoni, who covers the billionaire beat for Forbes, falls into the second category—judging by a sponsored post on Facebook where Parker paid to surface a link to Forbes.

Turning an entire region into a playpen for rich technologists sounds good on paper, sure, and everyone with a view of the water loves a good boat race—but at what cost? Five and a half million dollars to Californian taxpayers. That's the cost!

Since startup titles have lost their meaning, why not task a foxy troublemaker to represent your company? Days after Lindsay Lohan was accused of ordering an attack on Paris Hilton's brother, we got an invite to party for Just Sing It, an app that lets you "Instagram your voice," hosted by the femme fatale herself.

It only took half a year for the un-beating heart of America's tech sector to show any unified opposition to NSA dragnet techniques: ReformGovernmentSurveillance.com is a lazy piece of PR dreck—and about as transparently self-serving as it gets.

AllThingsD editors Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg made a deal with NBCUniversal "for a news and conference business that will bring their current staff" to a new, still unnamed website. The holding company is called Revere Digital, after the Revolutionary War hero.

When PayPal co-founder Max Levchin saw one of San Francisco's innumerable homeless over the weekend, he did what any of us would do: tweeted a picture with a remark about the person's use of portable electronics.

Late Friday afternoon Twitter released its "secret correspondence" with the Securities and Exchange Commission leading up to the IPO. The previously private documents show that the SEC had a lot of pressing questions about "slowing user growth and whether people were losing interest in viewing ads." But the company didn't always provide satisfactory answers.

Well, if you're going to be awful, at least be awfully honest. Or something. Or, maybe think twice before hopping off the Google Bus as it's surrounded by protestors and saying "Why don't you go to a city where you can afford it? This is a city for the right people." Update: This was probably staged.

[Demonstrators blocked a Google shuttle bus at 24th and Mission this morning with signs that said "Two-Tier System" and "Illegal Use of Public Infrastructure." Activists want tech companies to pay San Francisco $1 billion for "illegal" use of MUNI bus stops to fund affordable housing and help block evictions. One Google bus rider, upset about the delay in her commute, described the shuttle as hijacked and #undersiege. Image via Twitter]

Fortune's Dan Primack reports that Clinkle, the stealth mobile startup company that raised $25 million in venture capital without really explaining what it does, has "issued pink slips to 16 of its 60-person staff, or just over 25%." The layoffs have not been in engineering, but rather the business side of operations.

The volume of pure resentment spewing out of Snapchat is approaching early-Winklevoss levels: TechCrunch reports the co-creators, embroiled in legal grappling, are now asking for a restraining order against their former friend after alleged leaks to the press.

Business Insider reports that Yahoo began "serious talks to buy" Imgur, the meme-laden photo-sharing site that grew of its symbiosis with Reddit, this fall. We heard a similar rumor from a source in late October that we weren't able to substantiate. At the time, the source said the deal "might be up to $200 million."

What shining bastion of moral authority would bravely step up to defend a helpless $500 billion corporation being bullied by evil anti-trust investigators? The kind of editorial board that comes with its own warning.

From Venmo's live-updating homepage, just now. Everyone is finding new ways to integrate this useful service into their lives. [Thanks, Eileen!]

This recent profile in Vanity Fair is very, very strange, in that it obsesses over Marissa Mayer being very, very strange. It hits all the usual notes about the Yahoo! CEO (She's a geek! She loves fashion! Math, too! Google!) But it also, not-so-subtly, makes repeated innuendos about Mayer possibly being autistic.