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I taught programming as an adjunct at SUNY Geneseo, mostly to science students to fulfill their computer science requirement (note that I didn't say programming).

The first class that I taught was a survey of Computer Science for non-majors. It was fun for me as a professor to prepare the lectures. It allowed me to come up with creative metaphors to describe networking, operating systems, and even complexity theory. But I don't honestly think that it did any of them any good in their own scientific disciplines.

The other class that I taught was Introduction to Programming in C. Most of the students were under the impression that you showed up to class, listened to lecture and passed the tests. They didn't wanted to take the time to get the programming assignments to work. Still, I really believe that the ones who worked at it got a great benefit out of it. When they move on to doing serious research, they'll be better off.

I'll go one better, though. I think that it would be even better if not just programming, but software engineering were required. I have a friend who is finishing up his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering who calls me up frequently because he has had to write a lot of code during his Ph.D. and can't manage it. It would be great if he had learned at least a little bitter about Object Oriented Design, Refactoring, Automated Regression Testing ... but if they won't go for a programming course, how will they go for software engineering.

Think about the massive amount of data that would be (or is being for the paranoid) collected if everyone, everywhere's internet activity is monitored. How would this be stored, and more to the point, searched through in a statistically useful way? Far more effective is the threat of constant surveilance. People keep themselves in line when there's a possibility they're being watched, but they don't know if they are or not. In general, obviously. This is known as Panopticism [geneseo.edu].

As a man who listens to Jandek and is apolitical, I can attest to this. I've always felt very loved.

Wait, I shouldn't have told you about Jandek...

Notice how the big news on the site is the fact that he actually played a live show!

It is not the inevitable result of time. Children born with progeria age about 7 times faster than normal, dying of heart failure at 13 years.... All the symptoms of aging are there. The tellomere caps are ravaged for some reason. Aging is a process, it is programmed, it is reversible, there is no time-related cause for it, biological systems can be very long lived.

http://www.cs.geneseo.edu/math-thinking/

You're absolutely right. There isn't much to debate here. All colleges and universities I know of have similar acceptable use policies and this is completely within their legal bounds. I am against the Patriot Act as much as the next guy but this simply isn't the "what the f@$#" article that everyone has been waiting for.

Relavent UCSD Policies

UC Business and Finance Bulletin G-29, Procedures for Investigating Misuse of University Resources Appendix C, Whistle Blower Policy

Acceptable Use Policies

When I attended SUNY Geneseo, the dean made me take down my personal web page. It consisted of a classified ad listing for students to buy/sell their textbooks. There was no money in it for me at all but the school used a broad interpretation of their rules to take it down anyway. The real reason was because the school has an agreement with a local book store saying that all book orders will be placed through that store and no where else. I think that is even more controversial than what we are talking about here but they still got a way with it. Small town politics.

I don't really get all the outrage. I mean, I hate the idea of licensing rather than owning as much as the next guy, but just because of the advent of e-books and these restrictive terms does not mean you can no longer buy the real book and have it forever. It all boils down to basic economics; if you don't like it, do as I do and don't buy it. The product will fail in comparison to the actual books and will fade away. I have to say that my leather bound books that I can read anytime I want look alot more impressive than any file on a HD that you can no longer access.

So what's supposed to be a programming competetition becomes a hacking competition. This clock-is-ticking sort of setup makes it easy to rank people based on simple criteria:

1. Is the solution correct?
2. Relative to other competitors, when did it get sumitted.

A more interesting approach (though the tendency to go for AI problems is high), is to work it out so that the programs themselves compete. See this link for a contest set up by a former professor of mine. The problem given to contestants is "write a program that plays chinese checkers". After several months of development, the programs face off.

That example is a little more of an AI competition than a programming one, but there are other grounds on which a programs can compete. More mainstream things might be creating very optimized code - measured in instructions, or memory usage, or a combination of the two. These sorts of contests give a better indication of how good a programmer is than hack-up-a-slightly-modified-depth-first-search-in- 7-minutes-or-less.

A professor of mine (Dr. Hans Koomen) had developed a contest more focused on planning, design, and doing it right.

In 1996 (the only year it was run - if at all it was) it was a Chinese Checkers competition. Build a chinese checkers player, and duke it out. There was a hack contest in the morning too... I wanted to see it happen while I was there, but it never came about. Too bad, seemed like it would be fun.