I've seen a ton of news articles on the "Anti-Blaster" worm. Virtually all of them quote users to the effect of "It's easier to let my computer be infected by the Anti-Blaster worm and let it deal with the patch then it is to figure out how to patch it myself."
Most people out there want to treat the computer like an appliance. It just works, they don't have to do anything to it. While I'd like to see less buggy code in the first place, I think an auto-update function is just fine for the vast majority of people. People don't complain (too much) when their DirectTV or Tivo auto updates it's software...for those who want the computer to be an appliance this is the same thing.
You need to look at what you are paying for, and what you need. With Redhat you're paying for a package (eg, physical box of stuff), some of their packaging expertise, a small amount of their own custom goo, and presumably support. You're also indirectly funding GNU and Linux development. If that's not worth $350k, there are a number of options out there.
I personally use FreeBSD. No, I'm not suggesting you switch, but since I use it I'll detail it as another point of view. I download the software, for free, and pay no licenses. I also don't get a pretty box, support, and I've done nothing to fund development. The pretty box is available, for a fee. Support is available from a number of companies, for a fee. You can fund development as much or as little as you like with donations.
Without telling us what you need, we're not going to be able to make a recomendation. Maybe you use some Red Hat "feature" a lot that's worth $350k/yar, maybe you don't. What I can tell you is there are more expensive (price Microsoft!), and less expensive (eg, FreeBSD) options. There are also many, many, many options in the middle.
It's different because the aircraft recorders are on planes that carry people for money. The road equivilant would be putting black boxes on busses, not cars.
Small private planes do not have flight recorders (in general). You can buy one and put one in, but most people don't. They are mandated on planes that haul people, and planes above a certian size that are rented.
Also remember that in many plane crashes you can tell little of the actual cause by looking at the wreckage. If an engine blows up mid-flight, for instance, by the time the plane hits the ground at many hundreds of miles per hour much of the evidence of how the engine exploded has been turned into dime size bits from the ultimate impact. That doesn't happen a lot with cars, they don't often get destroyed after an accident.
Re:This really doesn't make sense....
on
C&W Bails Out
·
· Score: 1
Part of the problem is that data center usage is shrinking. And no, it's not just the dot.bombs going away. A 1RU server today is much more powerful than a 4 RU server of just 2 years ago. Many companies have been able to reduce their footprint while increasing their processing power. Add to this the costs to air-condition and power this denser-than-planned expansion, and the data centers are having a tough time.
Your "home ISP", or more in particular, your "e-mail ISP" should provide you secure reception and sending of e-mail. That is, they should allow POP or IMAP over SSL to download mail, and use SMTP AUTH over SSL (either STARTTLS or smtps). That way you are always sending and receiving via your "e-mail isp".
The reason most people use "local" mail servers when they dial in is because lots of dial ins block outgoing to port 25 to stop spam. A band-aid on top of a band-aid. Use a secure, authenticated channel for your e-mail and you both add security to your own e-mail, and help stop spam.
If I had a nickle for every person who went to school to be a programmer and then ended up not being a programmer I'd be richer than bill gates.
There's nothing wrong with being a programmer, it's a good job. That said, there are a lot of people who are good at it, and get training in it, that quickly get bored/tired/burned out and move on to other aspects of the industry. Universities turn out CS majors by the truckload, many of which end up not programming (at least, not as a primary job function).
Programers, old or young, do it both because they are good at it and enjoy it. You need not be a particular age to meet those criteria.
It's almost that simple...but let's use a real world example.
You go to a business on a tuesday at 3PM. You try their door and find it locked. Turns out they are closed on tuesdays. Is it unauthorized access? I think not.
Now, you go to the same business on the same tuesday at 3PM. They are still closed, but forgot to lock their door. You walk right in, realize something is funny, and leave without taking anything. Is it unauthorized access? Maybe.
Finally, you go to the same business on Sunday night at 3AM, and poke at the door until it opens for you. Unauthorized access, yep.
You see, in the real world your/intent/ matters, often more than your actions. Don't intend to murder someone but you do, not such a big thing. Intend to murder someone but don't, a much bigger deal. Unfortunately intent is not understood very well when it comes to cyber crimes. The law can't tell the difference between someone just checking if the door is closed because they legitimately wanted to access something, and someone trying to find the back door into the place. These standards will, for better or for worse always vairy from person to person, location to location. Try a door in East Nowhere Iowa and you're probably a good guy, try a door in Harlem and you must be a crook.
This is like having your credit card stolen. If you notice, and notify the company promptly so they can start blocking charges then you are only out $50 (and sometimes they even waive that). However if you don't notice until your bill comes at the end of the month that it's been gone for a whole month, then you're out the whole amount.
Same thing for bandwidth. If the customer notices a problem and notifies the ISP so they can take steps to block / track the attack then they shouldn't have to pay. However, if they are too lazy to monitor their own gear, and/or call the ISP they deserve every dollar they get charged. The customer needs to be a partner with the ISP in fighting these sorts of things, otherwise the ISP never has a chance to catch the real criminals.
Of course, all this is for medium size and up ISP customers. Smaller businesses and/or individuals may just want a "turn it off if it goes above x" until I call model, which is completely reasonable.
Basically the flyback transformer and deflection coils all may vibrate in the range of human hearing. Both can have the current (and thus, frequence) change as the image changes. Some people can't hear this at all, some can only hear when the change is happening, and not when the image is static.
In a laptop with speakers I'd much more suspect the graphics card, most of which are really bad about generating RF, is generating sounds that are being picked up by the speakers via induction.
With governments losing all sorts of tax revenue due to basic economic factors, they are looking all types of problems. This one is not unusual:
* Governments tax electricity, if you generate your own or conserve they loose tax money.
* Governments tax gasoline. If you use fuel cell cars or more energy efficient cars they loose tax money.
* Governments tax cigarettes. If you smoke less of them they loose tax money.
Use taxes and sin taxes often seem like a good idea, but the government quickly get used to the income, and when one activity falls out of favor they must hit up some other activity with a new use or sin tax to pay for it.
I've got to assume there's some way to fry the imbedded RFID tags. No doubt if you send the right signal at them (eg, too strong), or x-ray them or something you can burn out the circuits. Who's going to be first to post schematics?
If you've achived 5 9's, then your budget is either just right, or too big. Either way, a small reduction is in order to see what happens.
If you haven't, then clearly your budget is too small. Tell your boss that if he wants 5 9's then he's going to have to spend more money, and the proof is that the current money only provides a level less than that.
While I think your comments are fairly accurate,
I think most people on here will think #1 and #2
is bogus.
#1 - Over a long distance second accuracy is
more than enough. With free software and/or GPS
receivers able to offer milisecond accuracy, I'm
sure it would be trival to get things really
syncronized and be able to compute times accurate
within a second or two. Over a 10+ mile run that
would not be enough variation to get out of a
ticket.
#2 - Once #1 is completed, making the hardware
compute the time on the fly, and photo all
"speeders" plates would be trivial. Still issues
with the drivers, but I can't believe a positive
id on the car would be difficult at all.
On the merits of this story. I believe this
is within rental car companies rights. I think
the only issue here is a contractual language
dispute. Without the contract in front of me, I
will conclude it's a valid dispute.
That said, citizen, protect thy self. Does
anyone know of a "jammer" for GPS signals? I
know from experience they are weak, and even a
good receiver can be blocked by placing it in
the wrong spot in a car or under an overpass,
etc. It wouldn't take much signal to jam it.
Would such a thing be legal? Is there a market
for renting them at airport counters near the rental car counters?
I've been looking for a cheap GPS time receiver
that interfaces with standard ntpd nicely. I can
see you're on to something with these referb units, and the serial converter you mention. I
could probably figure this out given enough time,
but a few more details of what you bought, and
how you hooked it up would be really nice. If
I can get this going for
WCOME has bonds, like all companies do. There
is a particularly interesting set, I believe
valued around 2.5 Billion that come due in January
or Feburary.
They had been trying to work a plan already
this year to borrow 5 Billion, and turn around
and use that to pay the 2.5 Billion back, and
have 2.5 Billion in new cash. The banks weren't
buying it though, and no one was loaning them
money. At this particular moment, the chance of
them borrowing another 2.5 Billion (to pay back
the bonds) is about zero, and if they don't the
creditors will almost definately force them into
bankruptcy.
Now, they have some time to sort things out
and get new financing in place. The only other
wrinkle is that this fraud puts them in default
on pretty much all of the rest of their 30 Billion
in bonds. No one has demanded accelerated repayment yet, but that is within their rights.
So, for the next 6 months they have to convince
everyone they owe money to that they are going to
be able to pay it all back, or file (because if they don't the creditors would file for them).
If they manage to walk that tightrope early next
year they must then get (probably from the same people) a new loan for 2.5 Billion, or sell off
enough assets to raise 2.5 Billion to just pay
it outright.
This is but the tip of the iceberg of their
financial woes though. There are hundreds of
other problems. It is going to be extremely hard
for them to avoid Chatper 11. Perhaps a in a
a thousand shot right now.
Most importantly, a CEO will always say they
are not going to go bankrupt. If they said they
were before they filed all sorts of bad things
would happen (creditors taking stuff before
the filing, for one), so that's not an option.
That will be the trumpet they carry until the
chapter 11 press release.
Recent measures put them somewhere between
10% to 20%, depending on exactly what you're
measuring (traffic level? number of users?
number of routes?). Even with that level of
traffic, some of that has other choices. For
instance, a network may be multi-homed to
Sprint and UUNet, and choose to move more traffic
through UUNet. They wouldn't fall off the net
if UUnet went down.
EBone shut down yesterday. One of the "largest
and oldest" networks in Europe by their own measure. Frankly, if you weren't single homed
to e-bone it was a non-event. No big decrease in
traffic. No piles of user complaints. A big
nothing. Quite similar to Y2K in fact.
Call me a skeptic, but car mods come in two forms:
Mass market canned solutions. Someone else does the engineering for you, and you bolt it on. I'd bet 75% of the mods fall into this catagory. Even for "complex" things like suspension or engine tuning, most people bolt on something with some (limited) adjustment.
Fully custom solutions, built from the ground up. Believe it or not, some people still build their own engines / suspension / body, etc. In general these follow old positions, carburators insted of EFI and the like.
So, your average home buyer can plunk down $$$'s for a prebuilt solution, complete with knowing what performance increase they can get. Or they can custom engineer something, which probably requires more knowledge than something simple a off the shelf program can come up with.
In the end, I see little opportunity for what you suggest.
I find it interesting you refer to 30 lines as a substantial amount of code. The article suggests the program was a rather large one, and
that 30 lines was a small fraction of the overall
code. My own computer science experience in the
past suggests 30 lines probably was a teeny fraction of the code.
Of course, the pureist will say, copying is copying, and even if it was 2 lines that's cheating. The problem is I see no proof he copied from another student. You may
scoff, how else would the code be the same,
well, that's easy.
I remember more than a few times sitting in
the lab working next to 5-10 of my classmates.
A common activity was to repeat the problem to
each other to be sure we understood it. "The
assignment said the program should output the
data in sorted order case insensitive, one on a line, right?"
"Yes." That's not cheating. Then someone else
might pipe up "Didn't the GTA give us a handout with a sorting example on it?" "Yes," another
would pipe up, and a third would produce the
class handout for all to read. Again, no cheating
yet. Of course the GTA example was case sensitive, so it had to be changed to be case
insensitive. It also worked on plain strings,
and the data was stored in structures (which were
all remarkably similar due to a similar process)
so that change had to be made as well. Those
two changes were done independantly.
In this case I proport no cheating has happened. Students conversations were limited
to the problem statement, not the solution.
Materials "shared" by the students were class
handouts that all had, although perhaps not
at that moment. The probability code ended
up the same, high. Identical, moderate.
Several times after assignments were returned
to us (graded et all, even after the course) I would then compare with
a friend to see how to do the things I got marked
down on, and vice versa. Several times I found
whole functions that were only a few characters
off of being identical, even though we never
colaberated at all. Everyone uses x, p, i.
"print_sorted_output" is a common function name
choice. Add to the copied GTA (course) suppied
code and you get a lot of similar programs.
We don't have enough facts to determine if
this student is guilty or innocent. The fact
that 30 lines are roughly the same, or even
identical does not, in my mind, prove he cheated.
There must be other evidence to help lead us
to that conclusion.
As for Georgia Tech, there is a root problem
here. They have a separate computer science college,so it's hard to tell where they fit. Most
schools put computer education in the College of
Arts and Science, or in the College of Engineering. This is important. If you look at
other Arts and Sciences, students are encouraged
to work together. If you are majoring in dance,
and another student views your "final project"
(a dance, of course) and suggests "hold your chin
up higher while you spin" that's not considered
cheating on your homework. If you write a book,
and let another student read it before turning it
in, and they say "you should be more emphatic in
chapter 2" that's not cheating. On the other hand
engineering has right and wrong answers. If you
show someone your calculations on the load capacity of a beam for homework that's cheating.
So what is CS? Is it a creative discipline, like dance, or painting, or writing? If so the
root of improvement is working together, public
performance, peer review. On the other hand, is
it a hard science. There is a "right" program,
and everyone should get the "same" answer, so
any sharing would help a student leap to a conclusion without doing the work?
Re:Make it Seamless, Silly.
on
Can GnuPG Deliver?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No, it's not. Grandma installs a mailer. She sends an e-mail to her grandchild. If it works, she's happy, if not, she will do something else. She's not going to install a plug in.
Plug ins are fine to make things upgradable, and flexable. But let's face it, web browers ship with plug ins because they know 99% of the people want them. If everyone was moving PGP e-mail, that would be true of mailers too.
I don't care if it's an RPM, a FreeBSD Port, or a package to download. It must auto-install the plug in. It can come with the mailer, or be installed as a dependancy, but until it's automatic on all platforms it won't be used by the masses.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen a ton of news articles on the "Anti-Blaster" worm. Virtually all of them quote users to the effect of "It's easier to let my computer be infected by the Anti-Blaster worm and let it deal with the patch then it is to figure out how to patch it myself."
Most people out there want to treat the computer like an appliance. It just works, they don't have to do anything to it. While I'd like to see less buggy code in the first place, I think an auto-update function is just fine for the vast majority of people. People don't complain (too much) when their DirectTV or Tivo auto updates it's software...for those who want the computer to be an appliance this is the same thing.
You need to look at what you are paying for, and what you need. With Redhat you're paying for a package (eg, physical box of stuff), some of their packaging expertise, a small amount of their own custom goo, and presumably support. You're also indirectly funding GNU and Linux development. If that's not worth $350k, there are a number of options out there.
I personally use FreeBSD. No, I'm not suggesting you switch, but since I use it I'll detail it as another point of view. I download the software, for free, and pay no licenses. I also don't get a pretty box, support, and I've done nothing to fund development. The pretty box is available, for a fee. Support is available from a number of companies, for a fee. You can fund development as much or as little as you like with donations.
Without telling us what you need, we're not going to be able to make a recomendation. Maybe you use some Red Hat "feature" a lot that's worth $350k/yar, maybe you don't. What I can tell you is there are more expensive (price Microsoft!), and less expensive (eg, FreeBSD) options. There are also many, many, many options in the middle.
It's different because the aircraft recorders are on planes that carry people for money. The road equivilant would be putting black boxes on busses, not cars.
Small private planes do not have flight recorders (in general). You can buy one and put one in, but most people don't. They are mandated on planes that haul people, and planes above a certian size that are rented.
Also remember that in many plane crashes you can tell little of the actual cause by looking at the wreckage. If an engine blows up mid-flight, for instance, by the time the plane hits the ground at many hundreds of miles per hour much of the evidence of how the engine exploded has been turned into dime size bits from the ultimate impact. That doesn't happen a lot with cars, they don't often get destroyed after an accident.
Part of the problem is that data center usage is shrinking. And no, it's not just the dot.bombs going away. A 1RU server today is much more powerful
than a 4 RU server of just 2 years ago. Many companies have been able to reduce their footprint while increasing their processing power. Add to this the costs to air-condition and power this denser-than-planned expansion, and the data centers are having a tough time.
Your "home ISP", or more in particular, your "e-mail ISP" should provide you secure reception and sending of e-mail. That is, they should allow POP or IMAP over SSL to download mail, and use SMTP AUTH over SSL (either STARTTLS or smtps). That way you are always sending and receiving via your "e-mail isp".
The reason most people use "local" mail servers when they dial in is because lots of dial ins block outgoing to port 25 to stop spam. A band-aid on top of a band-aid. Use a secure, authenticated channel for your e-mail and you both add security to your own e-mail, and help stop spam.
If I had a nickle for every person who went to school to be a programmer and then ended up not being a programmer I'd be richer than bill gates.
There's nothing wrong with being a programmer, it's a good job. That said, there are a lot of people who are good at it, and get training in it, that quickly get bored/tired/burned out and move on to other aspects of the industry. Universities turn out CS majors by the truckload, many of which end up not programming (at least, not as a primary job function).
Programers, old or young, do it both because they are good at it and enjoy it. You need not be a particular age to meet those criteria.
It's almost that simple...but let's use a real world example.
/intent/ matters, often more than your actions. Don't intend to murder someone but you do, not such a big thing. Intend to murder someone but don't, a much bigger deal. Unfortunately intent is not understood very well when it comes to cyber crimes. The law can't tell the difference between someone just checking if the door is closed because they legitimately wanted to access something, and someone trying to find the back door into the place. These standards will, for better or for worse always vairy from person to person, location to location. Try a door in East Nowhere Iowa and you're probably a good guy, try a door in Harlem and you must be a crook.
You go to a business on a tuesday at 3PM. You try their door and find it locked. Turns out they are closed on tuesdays. Is it unauthorized access? I think not.
Now, you go to the same business on the same tuesday at 3PM. They are still closed, but forgot to lock their door. You walk right in, realize something is funny, and leave without taking anything. Is it unauthorized access? Maybe.
Finally, you go to the same business on Sunday night at 3AM, and poke at the door until it opens for you. Unauthorized access, yep.
You see, in the real world your
Dare County (outer banks, NC) has done desal since 1989, some links:
t p://www.membranes-amta.org/media/pdf/reliable.p df
http://darenc.com/Water/papers/desalcmg.htm
ht
This is like having your credit card stolen. If you notice, and notify the company promptly so they can start blocking charges then you are only out $50 (and sometimes they even waive that). However if you don't notice until your bill comes at the end of the month that it's been gone for a whole month, then you're out the whole amount.
Same thing for bandwidth. If the customer notices a problem and notifies the ISP so they can take steps to block / track the attack then they shouldn't have to pay. However, if they are too lazy to monitor their own gear, and/or call the ISP they deserve every dollar they get charged. The customer needs to be a partner with the ISP in fighting these sorts of things, otherwise the ISP never has a chance to catch the real criminals.
Of course, all this is for medium size and up ISP customers. Smaller businesses and/or individuals may just want a "turn it off if it goes above x" until I call model, which is completely reasonable.
I'm not sure about LCD's, but this problem is well known with CRT's. Most monitor manufactures know about the issues, here's a sample:
q _t roubleshooting.html
http://www.maginnovision.com/Service_Support/fa
Basically the flyback transformer and deflection coils all may vibrate in the range of human hearing. Both can have the current (and thus, frequence) change as the image changes. Some people can't hear this at all, some can only hear when the change is happening, and not when the image is static.
In a laptop with speakers I'd much more suspect the graphics card, most of which are really bad about generating RF, is generating sounds that are being picked up by the speakers via induction.
With governments losing all sorts of tax revenue due to basic economic factors, they are looking all types of problems. This one is not unusual:
* Governments tax electricity, if you generate your own or conserve they loose tax money.
* Governments tax gasoline. If you use fuel cell cars or more energy efficient cars they loose tax money.
* Governments tax cigarettes. If you smoke less of them they loose tax money.
Use taxes and sin taxes often seem like a good idea, but the government quickly get used to the income, and when one activity falls out of favor they must hit up some other activity with a new use or sin tax to pay for it.
I've got to assume there's some way to fry the imbedded RFID tags. No doubt if you send the right signal at them (eg, too strong), or x-ray them or something you can burn out the circuits. Who's going to be first to post schematics?
If you've achived 5 9's, then your budget is either just right, or too big. Either way, a small reduction is in order to see what happens.
If you haven't, then clearly your budget is too small. Tell your boss that if he wants 5 9's then he's going to have to spend more money, and the proof is that the current money only provides a level less than that.
Guns are a constitutional right.
Unfortunately, sex is not.
So no Palladium until MS has a secure XBox.
Sounds like no Palladium to me
It's called Mr Fusion. Makes you wonder why they need all those batteries. Does kind of make you wonder why other cars don't come with one though.
While I think your comments are fairly accurate, I think most people on here will think #1 and #2 is bogus.
#1 - Over a long distance second accuracy is more than enough. With free software and/or GPS receivers able to offer milisecond accuracy, I'm sure it would be trival to get things really syncronized and be able to compute times accurate within a second or two. Over a 10+ mile run that would not be enough variation to get out of a ticket.
#2 - Once #1 is completed, making the hardware compute the time on the fly, and photo all "speeders" plates would be trivial. Still issues with the drivers, but I can't believe a positive id on the car would be difficult at all.
I'm sure #3 is the biggest issue, by far.
On the merits of this story. I believe this is within rental car companies rights. I think the only issue here is a contractual language dispute. Without the contract in front of me, I will conclude it's a valid dispute.
That said, citizen, protect thy self. Does anyone know of a "jammer" for GPS signals? I know from experience they are weak, and even a good receiver can be blocked by placing it in the wrong spot in a car or under an overpass, etc. It wouldn't take much signal to jam it. Would such a thing be legal? Is there a market for renting them at airport counters near the rental car counters?
I see I'm not the only one, so details!
I've been looking for a cheap GPS time receiver that interfaces with standard ntpd nicely. I can see you're on to something with these referb units, and the serial converter you mention. I could probably figure this out given enough time, but a few more details of what you bought, and how you hooked it up would be really nice. If I can get this going for
WCOME has bonds, like all companies do. There is a particularly interesting set, I believe valued around 2.5 Billion that come due in January or Feburary.
They had been trying to work a plan already this year to borrow 5 Billion, and turn around and use that to pay the 2.5 Billion back, and have 2.5 Billion in new cash. The banks weren't buying it though, and no one was loaning them money. At this particular moment, the chance of them borrowing another 2.5 Billion (to pay back the bonds) is about zero, and if they don't the creditors will almost definately force them into bankruptcy.
Now, they have some time to sort things out and get new financing in place. The only other wrinkle is that this fraud puts them in default on pretty much all of the rest of their 30 Billion in bonds. No one has demanded accelerated repayment yet, but that is within their rights.
So, for the next 6 months they have to convince everyone they owe money to that they are going to be able to pay it all back, or file (because if they don't the creditors would file for them). If they manage to walk that tightrope early next year they must then get (probably from the same people) a new loan for 2.5 Billion, or sell off enough assets to raise 2.5 Billion to just pay it outright.
This is but the tip of the iceberg of their financial woes though. There are hundreds of other problems. It is going to be extremely hard for them to avoid Chatper 11. Perhaps a in a a thousand shot right now.
Most importantly, a CEO will always say they are not going to go bankrupt. If they said they were before they filed all sorts of bad things would happen (creditors taking stuff before the filing, for one), so that's not an option. That will be the trumpet they carry until the chapter 11 press release.
Worldcom is not 50% of the internet.
Recent measures put them somewhere between 10% to 20%, depending on exactly what you're measuring (traffic level? number of users? number of routes?). Even with that level of traffic, some of that has other choices. For instance, a network may be multi-homed to Sprint and UUNet, and choose to move more traffic through UUNet. They wouldn't fall off the net if UUnet went down.
EBone shut down yesterday. One of the "largest and oldest" networks in Europe by their own measure. Frankly, if you weren't single homed to e-bone it was a non-event. No big decrease in traffic. No piles of user complaints. A big nothing. Quite similar to Y2K in fact.
I'd rather see FreeBSD on it, I wonder if that
would be worth any money.
Call me a skeptic, but car mods come in two forms:
Mass market canned solutions. Someone else does
the engineering for you, and you bolt it on. I'd
bet 75% of the mods fall into this catagory. Even
for "complex" things like suspension or engine
tuning, most people bolt on something with some
(limited) adjustment.
Fully custom solutions, built from the ground up.
Believe it or not, some people still build their
own engines / suspension / body, etc. In general
these follow old positions, carburators insted of
EFI and the like.
So, your average home buyer can plunk down $$$'s
for a prebuilt solution, complete with knowing
what performance increase they can get. Or they
can custom engineer something, which probably
requires more knowledge than something simple
a off the shelf program can come up with.
In the end, I see little opportunity for what you
suggest.
I find it interesting you refer to 30 lines as a substantial amount of code. The article suggests the program was a rather large one, and that 30 lines was a small fraction of the overall code. My own computer science experience in the past suggests 30 lines probably was a teeny fraction of the code.
Of course, the pureist will say, copying is copying, and even if it was 2 lines that's cheating. The problem is I see no proof he copied from another student. You may scoff, how else would the code be the same, well, that's easy.
I remember more than a few times sitting in the lab working next to 5-10 of my classmates. A common activity was to repeat the problem to each other to be sure we understood it. "The assignment said the program should output the data in sorted order case insensitive, one on a line, right?" "Yes." That's not cheating. Then someone else might pipe up "Didn't the GTA give us a handout with a sorting example on it?" "Yes," another would pipe up, and a third would produce the class handout for all to read. Again, no cheating yet. Of course the GTA example was case sensitive, so it had to be changed to be case insensitive. It also worked on plain strings, and the data was stored in structures (which were all remarkably similar due to a similar process) so that change had to be made as well. Those two changes were done independantly.
In this case I proport no cheating has happened. Students conversations were limited to the problem statement, not the solution. Materials "shared" by the students were class handouts that all had, although perhaps not at that moment. The probability code ended up the same, high. Identical, moderate.
Several times after assignments were returned to us (graded et all, even after the course) I would then compare with a friend to see how to do the things I got marked down on, and vice versa. Several times I found whole functions that were only a few characters off of being identical, even though we never colaberated at all. Everyone uses x, p, i. "print_sorted_output" is a common function name choice. Add to the copied GTA (course) suppied code and you get a lot of similar programs.
We don't have enough facts to determine if this student is guilty or innocent. The fact that 30 lines are roughly the same, or even identical does not, in my mind, prove he cheated. There must be other evidence to help lead us to that conclusion.
As for Georgia Tech, there is a root problem here. They have a separate computer science college,so it's hard to tell where they fit. Most schools put computer education in the College of Arts and Science, or in the College of Engineering. This is important. If you look at other Arts and Sciences, students are encouraged to work together. If you are majoring in dance, and another student views your "final project" (a dance, of course) and suggests "hold your chin up higher while you spin" that's not considered cheating on your homework. If you write a book, and let another student read it before turning it in, and they say "you should be more emphatic in chapter 2" that's not cheating. On the other hand engineering has right and wrong answers. If you show someone your calculations on the load capacity of a beam for homework that's cheating.
So what is CS? Is it a creative discipline, like dance, or painting, or writing? If so the root of improvement is working together, public performance, peer review. On the other hand, is it a hard science. There is a "right" program, and everyone should get the "same" answer, so any sharing would help a student leap to a conclusion without doing the work?
No, it's not. Grandma installs a mailer. She
sends an e-mail to her grandchild. If it works,
she's happy, if not, she will do something else.
She's not going to install a plug in.
Plug ins are fine to make things upgradable,
and flexable. But let's face it, web browers
ship with plug ins because they know 99%
of the people want them. If everyone was moving
PGP e-mail, that would be true of mailers too.
I don't care if it's an RPM, a FreeBSD Port,
or a package to download. It must auto-install
the plug in. It can come with the mailer, or
be installed as a dependancy, but until it's
automatic on all platforms it won't be
used by the masses.