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Please people, read this and stop making unsubstantiated claims on what RF leakage aliens can hear.

Radio Leakage: Is anybody listening?

There's also the fact that if we took the largest, most powerful radio telescope we have, put it on a planet orbiting our nearest star, pointed it directly at earth with the most powerful broadcast it could generate... by the time the signal got to us, there is no equipment on earth that could detect it.

That's completely false. If you took Arecibo and stuck it in orbit around Alpha Centauri and beamed a signal back it would be fairly easy to detect with an Arecibo-class telescope provided we were looking. For a little more on the math read up. We could receive transmissions from dozens of light years away with existing telescopes and even further away with arrays and/or locations with better signal-to-noise ratios than available on planet (like the dark side of the Moon).

The problem is not that we can't detect the signal. We got all the hardware. The problem is that we might be well outside the radio signal range to be detected, as radio signal can only be carried so far by its power. But the best option for accurate detection would be to place a radio monitoring hardware just outside the orbit of Pluto for that purpose.

http://www.computing.edu.au/~bvk/astronomy/HET608/essay/

For my introductory C++ unit (no, I don't show up half the time), the development environment is tcsh, the project manager is GNU Make, the compiler g++, and the only supported (ie, the tutor will give you help with it) editor is vi, although a few people use emacs or Midnight Commander. I'd say come study here but we don't have enough lab machines as it is!

Pascal is one of those languages that is great for teaching the basics of programming. The computing science department at the university that I work at (www.computing.edu.au) has switched from Pascal as its first introduction to programming and design. they have decided that Java is a good start. As the school is very much a UNIX based school, this is the sort of project that they could really sink their teeth into.

Curtin Uni is literally across the road from Canning College (location of the Perth installfest), so I'm sure that for the lack of trouble it would put them through the student body would benefit.