Adding up retail sales is a convenient way to calculate GDP (the retail price of an item is equal to the total value of the production that went into making it), but you have to be careful not to think of the retailers' sales figures as being entirely the retailers' contribution to GDP. It is true that retailers add production to the GDP figure, but they're also serving as a proxy to consumers for the production of the items' manufacturers, plus the those manufacturers' part suppliers, plus those suppliers' suppliers, all the way down to the companies that actually extracted the natural resources that make up the items sold.
Actually, 'production' means more than manufacturing. The amount of production accomplished during some step in the economic chain from raw material to consumer is the "value added" - the difference in prices between the materials and the finished product.
Example: I am a widget maker. I buy widget parts from suppliers, and I pay workers to assemble those parts into widgets, which I then sell to distributors. If I pay 60 cents for the parts, and then sell the widgets for a dollar, then I have added 40 cents of value per widget. (Rationale: the parts came in valued on the open market at sixty cents; they left my facility valued at a dollar. The difference can be accounted for by the value I've added as a result of my operations.) The GDP therefore increases by 40 cents times the number of widgets I sell.
Wal-Mart does not manufacture anything, but they do add value: they perform the services of distribution, stocking, shelving, storage, and so forth. The total value Wal-Mart adds to the economy is its gross margin - the amount of its sales minus the amount of money it spent purchasing the goods it resold. For 2002, this figure was $54,687,000,000. (source: Wal-Mart 2003 annual report) For comparison, the 2002 US GDP was $9,439,900,000,000 (source: Bureau of Economic Analysis).
This means that Wal-Mart was responsible for 0.56% of the production in the American economy in 2002. The original poster's mistake was to use their net sales figure of $244,524,000,000. That number is indeed 2.6% of the US GDP - very close to the quoted figure. However, $191,838,000,000 of that is the cost of goods sold by Wal-Mart (the money they paid to purchase those goods), and represents production by other entities besides Wal-Mart.
Apple's service enables CD burning. Real's, presumably, doesn't for recent hits - tracks that the record industry is particularly interested in keeping off the p2p services. I don't know what the actual factors are that influence Real's classification of a track as burnable or not are, but I think this makes for a viable theory.
Real has slightly crippled their service relative to Apple's, but they are, in return, able to offer a discount to those users who download 50 songs or more per month.
Of course, we have to ask - who is doing the returning here? I'd be interested in learning what sorts of costs are being placed on the supply-side upon these services. Is the record industry giving discounts to services depending on the level of crippledness they impose upon consumers? I'd be very curious to know what the terms of the contracts are that Apple and Real signed with the recording industry companies.
Here's an interesting exercise that one of my professors pointed out:
int n = 4; while (n is the sum of two primes) n = n + 2;
The question "is n the sum of some two primes?" is of course always computable in finite time; just try all the prime numbers less than n/2 until you find one that is different from n by another prime number.
If you can show whether this program halts or not, then congratulations, you've solved the Goldbach conjecture, one of the most famous open problems in mathematics.
That's not quite accurate. Here's a parallel statement:
"Here's a simple logical proof that a perfect tic-tac-toe playing computer can't be made: If such a thing existed, and it played itself, one side could only draw at best, because there cannot be two winners."
Tic-tac-toe *is* a solved game; its value is 0. Perfect play by both sides always results in a draw. A perfect program, then is not one that always wins; it's one that always attains the maximum value allowed by the opponent's moves.
The GPL is not a contract: "You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it."
It is simply a grant of rights conditional on a particular set of actions being taken.
But if you want to think of it in the consideration framework, the licensee receives the right to distribute GPL'd code in ways not normally permitted by copyright law, and the licensor receives the fulfillment of his or her desire that the software be redistributed according to the terms of the GPL.
The physical letter and its contents become your property, but not necessarily the same of the copyright, trademark, or patent rights embedded in the physical object.
If you receive a copy of the latest John Grisham novel in the mail unsolicited, you get to keep it - but you don't get to set up your own printing press to make copies. You own one copy, not the copyright.
The same logic applies here. In the US, for better or for worse, everything that is "fixed in a tangible medium of expression" is automatically copyrighted. That probably includes spam, despite the fact that this state of affairs doesn't advance the progress of "Science and the useful Arts." (Maybe spam is a useless art?)
The whole concept of mass-distribution copyright is a very strange one. When I post something to Usenet, am I giving implicit permission to Google to archive my post and serve it up years later? What about posting to a forum like Slashdot, which claims that I still own my comment, but nonetheless republishes it without any agreement from me?
With a development like this, we could shoot entire boy bands into space and make the world a better place.
To the author: are you channeling the Rice University Marching Owl Band today? We just performed a show in which we advocated the launching of boy bands into space. Is this a great-minds-think-alike thing, or did you spend some time at Reliant Stadium this weekend?:)
There are bound to be a few privately held (or public but still with heavy family ownership) companies out there that started small and grew rapidly. It's simple statistics; these folks are way off on the right side of the bell curve, and the amazing wealth is going to be spread around the family and the company.
Explosive companies produce noveau riche, because the money and prosperity doesn't have as much time to diffuse throughout the economy as it does with a slower-growing firm. The natural result is a temporary concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people. Once the company ceases its exponential growth, the money begins to diffuse. The first appearance of the name "Rockefeller" on the Forbes list, for instance, appears in the 73-spot, with $2.5 billion - still a lot, but a far cry from the man who still holds the inflation-adjusted record for the biggest fortune accumulated.
The fact that there's a concentration of money isn't a problem, because the money naturally goes away after a while as it's spent and donated and split among multiple heirs who eventually have to take real jobs.
We don't have an aristocracy here. We have money, and money moves from place to place. Sometimes a lot of it settles on one person. That's the economy for you.
The amount of cluelessness that airport security has is amazing.
You can't have a nail clipper, but they will hand you an aluminum can if you ask for one. Ever twisted up a Coke can to get a sharp edge? It's sharper than most kitchen knives.
You can use your shoelaces as a garotte. You can bring crutches on the plane and strike people with them. You can even train for a few months in martial arts and make the whole weapon thing irrelevant. Keeping marginal weapons out of the cabin is not the solution - anyone with a reasonable amount of craftiness can improvise something.
Taking a page from computer security: the primary thing we want to prevent is privlege escalation - stopping someone in the cabin from taking control of the aircraft. The solution to this is twofold:
Keep people in the cabin out of the cockpit. Reinforced doors do this. Policy telling the pilot to never, ever open that door in the case of a problem keeps the doors effective.
Keep people in the cabin from being a threat to others. If you can threaten lives, then you can control the plane via threat. The solution is to keep real weapons - guns, bombs, large knives - out of the cabin, and encourage passengers to resist would-be hijackers armed with lesser weaponry.
We can solve a lot of our airline security problems by rationally considering the problems and solutions. The path we're taking now, though, simply erodes privacy without a corresponding upswing in safety.
I'm not sure how it's architected at your school, but at mine, everyone with an on-campus network connection transparently gets benefit from Internet2. It's very simple: If your packets are going to an institution connected to Internet2, then they get routed over Internet2. The routing decision is made at the campus border. No problem, everyone gets to use it. All Internet2 is is a new, fast backbone that a select group of research institutions gets to use.
I've gotten faster transfers from machines at MIT than ones 400 yards away from my dorm room as a result of this hookup.
Isn't this how most institutions are using Internet2? Just put another card in the border router and let everyone at it. It doesn't seem to make sense to pay all that money for a high-speed network connection and not integrate it with your campus network.
(Incidentally, a traceroute to the webserver you linked in your post passes through Abilene.)
The number of digits indicated expresses the precision of the measurement. If I say that it's 80 degrees outside, I'm probably using my own human perception of the temperature, and if it's really 77.2 or 82.4, then I still gave a correct - if somewhat imprecise - reading. I only had one significant figure, and if you round these values to have just one significant digit, they come out to the same thing. If I declare the temperature to be 80.0 degrees, and you don't think I used a thermometer, you're rightly going to tell me that I'm a moron, because I don't have the ability to sense temperature with that sort of precision. If I did have an accurate thermometer which read 80.0, then I narrow the range of reasonable possible temperatures greatly.
There are all sorts of rules that nobody learns anymore about how to propagate error by doing your math with significant figures - the result gives you an order-of-magnitude idea of how wrong your result might be. It's the old scientist's version of garbage-in, garbage-out. Likely, Intel's marketroids don't understand this distinction - the process is probably closer to.10 micron than.1; maybe even.100 is a better measurement (I know nothing about chip fabrication, of course.)
*ponders the irony of using Farenheit degrees to explain scientific measurement*
False. "Open Source" is not a trademark; it has been ruled too generic to use. I think you're talking about "OSI Certified", which is a trademark of the Open Source Initiative.
You can call anything you want Open Source without legal trouble, because Open Source as yet has no legal definition.
"Under the Ubiquitous 'Value' Network strategy, Sony aims to create a secure(emphasis added), user-friendly environment where people can enjoy a wide variety of online digital media contents via various networked CE devices and PCs."
If Sony's definition of "secure" is what I think it is, then that means that they expect that this platform will contain DRM features to "protect" their content.
DRM is fundamentally incompatible with open source. If, as I am given to understand, the only thing closed-source about this release is Real's codecs, then there are no barriers to arbitrary saving, copying, and redistribution of downloaded streams. There will no longer be such a thing as a 'stream-only' Real feed; the software can be altered to not respect the appropriate bits. There is no security for the likes of Sony when consumers have control over their own computers - it flies in the face of their DRM strategy.
So what's up? Has Sony et al changed their mind about what defines "secure?" Has this consortium decided to give the content industries the cold shoulder? Or, if this is to contain some form of concession to the ??AAs, what technical shape will it take?
Katz claims that Smart's disappearance is being more heavily covered because wealthy professionals with kids, a coveted group for advertising purposes, are likely to be interested.
I don't understand how, if Smart were found tomorrow, anything would change about the motivations of the media folk who covered her apparent kidnapping. It neither proves nor disproves anything about Katz's main point.
Reading the press release: a hundred grand is for a distribution of Linux for a modified X-Box, and another hundred grand for doing it to a stock console.
Why is the capping done on the modem level and not at the router level ?
Because remember: ultimately, cable is a shared medium, pretty much like ethernet - and just as with ethernet, we need a MAC that all parties can agree to.
Ethernet works because all NICs respect the rules and play nice. If you wanted to, you could create a hacked ethernet card that did things like immediately retransmit after a collision without waiting - thus stealing more than its fair share of the bandwidth.
Now, other users of the ethernet couldn't stop you from doing this in any reasonable way, but if they were looking for it, they could find it, track it down to you, and complain.
In the case of a cable company, you're paying for a certain amount of bandwidth, and then you're using *more* than you paid for. The fact that you can do this is analagous to the fact that you can modify your electric meter so that it silently forgets every fourth kWh: sure, maybe you can, but the net effect is to steal service from the provider. And if they find out, the cops are going to come take the meter and anything else germane to an investigation.
I'm glad these folks got raided. If someone down my block were doing this, I'd want a stop put to it, before everybody had to uncap their modem to get a fair share and the neighborhood suffered catastrophic collapse from all the collisions and retransmissions.
A good undergraduate computer science program should leave you flexible enough to go be a grunt coder somewhere, or (if your grades and motivation are good enough) proceed on to grad school, or really anything along the technical spectrum.
Prospective undergrads should look for programs with an emphasis on broad study - a few theory courses, a strong course of programming-oriented project classes to develop you as a programmer, and interesting forays into areas like math and electrical engineering. Especially look for programs that allow upperclassmen to begin choosing their own path - my own degree requires a four-course concentration group agreed on between me and my advisor.
One thing to look for is a program with no slavish devotion to any one language. By the time you've gotten out of a good undergrad program, you should have been thoroughly exposed to functional programming (Lisp/Scheme/ML/Haskell), OOP (Java's pretty much it in academia - nothing wrong with that), and imperative/systems programming (C/C++/assembly). The idea is that learning the languages should be a side project that comes along with learning the actual material. You should learn all the major paradigms in place today, and know when to use them, and know when to apply lessons from one when programming in another.
The most important thing, by far, though, isn't what you'll find in the classroom - it's what you'll find outside it. Does the university have student organizations or programs for the type of stuff that meets your interest? Is the undergraduate culture an engaging and interesting one, with opportunities for developing your social life?
How's the dorm life? How's the food? (This is actually really important, or seems that way at times.) Go down the hall of a dorm after classes are over, or during an evening: a good sign is lots of propped-open doors - it indicates an open, friendly floor culture.
How does the administration treat the students, faculty, and staff? Ask around: if there have been any major controversies within the past couple years, people will talk about them. Remember that a school administration doesn't directly impact your learning, but they do have a tremendous amount of influence over your life while you're at school.
Is the curriculum broad beyond just computer science? (Remember, theoretically, the reason you're going to a university is to improve your mind and learn about the world and discover yourself - not just to code all the time.) Ask people there. Did they like it? If they think it's a hellhole after three years, chances are you will too. A tech-factory isn't where you want to be if you're really out for a real education.
One thing *not* to worry about as much as many people do: Don't overconcern yourself with money. Higher-tier schools know that they need to attract students who can hack it, and so many give generous need- and merit-based scholarships. Take the supplied tuition figures with a grain of salt, apply anyway, and wait for the financial aid offers to come in before ruling out a more expensive university. You might be surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
Adding up retail sales is a convenient way to calculate GDP (the retail price of an item is equal to the total value of the production that went into making it), but you have to be careful not to think of the retailers' sales figures as being entirely the retailers' contribution to GDP. It is true that retailers add production to the GDP figure, but they're also serving as a proxy to consumers for the production of the items' manufacturers, plus the those manufacturers' part suppliers, plus those suppliers' suppliers, all the way down to the companies that actually extracted the natural resources that make up the items sold.
I said gross "margin". I meant gross "profit." Gross margin is a percentage. My bad.
Actually, 'production' means more than manufacturing. The amount of production accomplished during some step in the economic chain from raw material to consumer is the "value added" - the difference in prices between the materials and the finished product.
Example: I am a widget maker. I buy widget parts from suppliers, and I pay workers to assemble those parts into widgets, which I then sell to distributors. If I pay 60 cents for the parts, and then sell the widgets for a dollar, then I have added 40 cents of value per widget. (Rationale: the parts came in valued on the open market at sixty cents; they left my facility valued at a dollar. The difference can be accounted for by the value I've added as a result of my operations.) The GDP therefore increases by 40 cents times the number of widgets I sell.
Wal-Mart does not manufacture anything, but they do add value: they perform the services of distribution, stocking, shelving, storage, and so forth. The total value Wal-Mart adds to the economy is its gross margin - the amount of its sales minus the amount of money it spent purchasing the goods it resold. For 2002, this figure was $54,687,000,000. (source: Wal-Mart 2003 annual report) For comparison, the 2002 US GDP was $9,439,900,000,000 (source: Bureau of Economic Analysis).
This means that Wal-Mart was responsible for 0.56% of the production in the American economy in 2002. The original poster's mistake was to use their net sales figure of $244,524,000,000. That number is indeed 2.6% of the US GDP - very close to the quoted figure. However, $191,838,000,000 of that is the cost of goods sold by Wal-Mart (the money they paid to purchase those goods), and represents production by other entities besides Wal-Mart.
Apple's service enables CD burning. Real's, presumably, doesn't for recent hits - tracks that the record industry is particularly interested in keeping off the p2p services. I don't know what the actual factors are that influence Real's classification of a track as burnable or not are, but I think this makes for a viable theory.
Real has slightly crippled their service relative to Apple's, but they are, in return, able to offer a discount to those users who download 50 songs or more per month.
Of course, we have to ask - who is doing the returning here? I'd be interested in learning what sorts of costs are being placed on the supply-side upon these services. Is the record industry giving discounts to services depending on the level of crippledness they impose upon consumers? I'd be very curious to know what the terms of the contracts are that Apple and Real signed with the recording industry companies.
No big words.
Here's an interesting exercise that one of my professors pointed out:
int n = 4;
while (n is the sum of two primes) n = n + 2;
The question "is n the sum of some two primes?" is of course always computable in finite time; just try all the prime numbers less than n/2 until you find one that is different from n by another prime number.
If you can show whether this program halts or not, then congratulations, you've solved the Goldbach conjecture, one of the most famous open problems in mathematics.
That's not quite accurate. Here's a parallel statement:
"Here's a simple logical proof that a perfect tic-tac-toe playing computer can't be made: If such a thing existed, and it played itself, one side could only draw at best, because there cannot be two winners."
Tic-tac-toe *is* a solved game; its value is 0. Perfect play by both sides always results in a draw. A perfect program, then is not one that always wins; it's one that always attains the maximum value allowed by the opponent's moves.
The GPL is not a contract: "You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it."
It is simply a grant of rights conditional on a particular set of actions being taken.
But if you want to think of it in the consideration framework, the licensee receives the right to distribute GPL'd code in ways not normally permitted by copyright law, and the licensor receives the fulfillment of his or her desire that the software be redistributed according to the terms of the GPL.
The physical letter and its contents become your property, but not necessarily the same of the copyright, trademark, or patent rights embedded in the physical object.
If you receive a copy of the latest John Grisham novel in the mail unsolicited, you get to keep it - but you don't get to set up your own printing press to make copies. You own one copy, not the copyright.
The same logic applies here. In the US, for better or for worse, everything that is "fixed in a tangible medium of expression" is automatically copyrighted. That probably includes spam, despite the fact that this state of affairs doesn't advance the progress of "Science and the useful Arts." (Maybe spam is a useless art?)
The whole concept of mass-distribution copyright is a very strange one. When I post something to Usenet, am I giving implicit permission to Google to archive my post and serve it up years later? What about posting to a forum like Slashdot, which claims that I still own my comment, but nonetheless republishes it without any agreement from me?
With a development like this, we could shoot entire boy bands into space and make the world a better place.
:)
To the author: are you channeling the Rice University Marching Owl Band today? We just performed a show in which we advocated the launching of boy bands into space. Is this a great-minds-think-alike thing, or did you spend some time at Reliant Stadium this weekend?
...after breaking an astonishing 100,000 concurrent users earlier tonight!
I sure hope they fixed them all afterward.
There are bound to be a few privately held (or public but still with heavy family ownership) companies out there that started small and grew rapidly. It's simple statistics; these folks are way off on the right side of the bell curve, and the amazing wealth is going to be spread around the family and the company.
Explosive companies produce noveau riche, because the money and prosperity doesn't have as much time to diffuse throughout the economy as it does with a slower-growing firm. The natural result is a temporary concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people. Once the company ceases its exponential growth, the money begins to diffuse. The first appearance of the name "Rockefeller" on the Forbes list, for instance, appears in the 73-spot, with $2.5 billion - still a lot, but a far cry from the man who still holds the inflation-adjusted record for the biggest fortune accumulated.
The fact that there's a concentration of money isn't a problem, because the money naturally goes away after a while as it's spent and donated and split among multiple heirs who eventually have to take real jobs.
We don't have an aristocracy here. We have money, and money moves from place to place. Sometimes a lot of it settles on one person. That's the economy for you.
"I study shapes. Kind of like you do in kindergarden, but the shapes I think about are a lot more complicated."
You can't have a nail clipper, but they will hand you an aluminum can if you ask for one. Ever twisted up a Coke can to get a sharp edge? It's sharper than most kitchen knives.
You can use your shoelaces as a garotte. You can bring crutches on the plane and strike people with them. You can even train for a few months in martial arts and make the whole weapon thing irrelevant. Keeping marginal weapons out of the cabin is not the solution - anyone with a reasonable amount of craftiness can improvise something.
Taking a page from computer security: the primary thing we want to prevent is privlege escalation - stopping someone in the cabin from taking control of the aircraft. The solution to this is twofold:
- Keep people in the cabin out of the cockpit. Reinforced doors do this. Policy telling the pilot to never, ever open that door in the case of a problem keeps the doors effective.
- Keep people in the cabin from being a threat to others. If you can threaten lives, then you can control the plane via threat. The solution is to keep real weapons - guns, bombs, large knives - out of the cabin, and encourage passengers to resist would-be hijackers armed with lesser weaponry.
We can solve a lot of our airline security problems by rationally considering the problems and solutions. The path we're taking now, though, simply erodes privacy without a corresponding upswing in safety.I'm not sure how it's architected at your school, but at mine, everyone with an on-campus network connection transparently gets benefit from Internet2. It's very simple: If your packets are going to an institution connected to Internet2, then they get routed over Internet2. The routing decision is made at the campus border. No problem, everyone gets to use it. All Internet2 is is a new, fast backbone that a select group of research institutions gets to use.
I've gotten faster transfers from machines at MIT than ones 400 yards away from my dorm room as a result of this hookup.
Isn't this how most institutions are using Internet2? Just put another card in the border router and let everyone at it. It doesn't seem to make sense to pay all that money for a high-speed network connection and not integrate it with your campus network.
(Incidentally, a traceroute to the webserver you linked in your post passes through Abilene.)
The number of digits indicated expresses the precision of the measurement. If I say that it's 80 degrees outside, I'm probably using my own human perception of the temperature, and if it's really 77.2 or 82.4, then I still gave a correct - if somewhat imprecise - reading. I only had one significant figure, and if you round these values to have just one significant digit, they come out to the same thing. If I declare the temperature to be 80.0 degrees, and you don't think I used a thermometer, you're rightly going to tell me that I'm a moron, because I don't have the ability to sense temperature with that sort of precision. If I did have an accurate thermometer which read 80.0, then I narrow the range of reasonable possible temperatures greatly.
.10 micron than .1; maybe even .100 is a better measurement (I know nothing about chip fabrication, of course.)
There are all sorts of rules that nobody learns anymore about how to propagate error by doing your math with significant figures - the result gives you an order-of-magnitude idea of how wrong your result might be. It's the old scientist's version of garbage-in, garbage-out. Likely, Intel's marketroids don't understand this distinction - the process is probably closer to
*ponders the irony of using Farenheit degrees to explain scientific measurement*
The DMCA includes a specific exemption for law enforcement, so no, this wouldn't work.
False. "Open Source" is not a trademark; it has been ruled too generic to use. I think you're talking about "OSI Certified", which is a trademark of the Open Source Initiative.
You can call anything you want Open Source without legal trouble, because Open Source as yet has no legal definition.
"Under the Ubiquitous 'Value' Network strategy, Sony aims to create a secure (emphasis added), user-friendly environment where people can enjoy a wide variety of online digital media contents via various networked CE devices and PCs."
If Sony's definition of "secure" is what I think it is, then that means that they expect that this platform will contain DRM features to "protect" their content.
DRM is fundamentally incompatible with open source. If, as I am given to understand, the only thing closed-source about this release is Real's codecs, then there are no barriers to arbitrary saving, copying, and redistribution of downloaded streams. There will no longer be such a thing as a 'stream-only' Real feed; the software can be altered to not respect the appropriate bits. There is no security for the likes of Sony when consumers have control over their own computers - it flies in the face of their DRM strategy.
So what's up? Has Sony et al changed their mind about what defines "secure?" Has this consortium decided to give the content industries the cold shoulder? Or, if this is to contain some form of concession to the ??AAs, what technical shape will it take?
Katz claims that Smart's disappearance is being more heavily covered because wealthy professionals with kids, a coveted group for advertising purposes, are likely to be interested.
I don't understand how, if Smart were found tomorrow, anything would change about the motivations of the media folk who covered her apparent kidnapping. It neither proves nor disproves anything about Katz's main point.
Elizabeth Smart's case is being heavily covered in national media. Alexis Patterson's is not.
Reading the press release: a hundred grand is for a distribution of Linux for a modified X-Box, and another hundred grand for doing it to a stock console.
Why is the capping done on the modem level and not at the router level ?
Because remember: ultimately, cable is a shared medium, pretty much like ethernet - and just as with ethernet, we need a MAC that all parties can agree to.
Ethernet works because all NICs respect the rules and play nice. If you wanted to, you could create a hacked ethernet card that did things like immediately retransmit after a collision without waiting - thus stealing more than its fair share of the bandwidth.
Now, other users of the ethernet couldn't stop you from doing this in any reasonable way, but if they were looking for it, they could find it, track it down to you, and complain.
In the case of a cable company, you're paying for a certain amount of bandwidth, and then you're using *more* than you paid for. The fact that you can do this is analagous to the fact that you can modify your electric meter so that it silently forgets every fourth kWh: sure, maybe you can, but the net effect is to steal service from the provider. And if they find out, the cops are going to come take the meter and anything else germane to an investigation.
I'm glad these folks got raided. If someone down my block were doing this, I'd want a stop put to it, before everybody had to uncap their modem to get a fair share and the neighborhood suffered catastrophic collapse from all the collisions and retransmissions.
A good undergraduate computer science program should leave you flexible enough to go be a grunt coder somewhere, or (if your grades and motivation are good enough) proceed on to grad school, or really anything along the technical spectrum.
Prospective undergrads should look for programs with an emphasis on broad study - a few theory courses, a strong course of programming-oriented project classes to develop you as a programmer, and interesting forays into areas like math and electrical engineering. Especially look for programs that allow upperclassmen to begin choosing their own path - my own degree requires a four-course concentration group agreed on between me and my advisor.
One thing to look for is a program with no slavish devotion to any one language. By the time you've gotten out of a good undergrad program, you should have been thoroughly exposed to functional programming (Lisp/Scheme/ML/Haskell), OOP (Java's pretty much it in academia - nothing wrong with that), and imperative/systems programming (C/C++/assembly). The idea is that learning the languages should be a side project that comes along with learning the actual material. You should learn all the major paradigms in place today, and know when to use them, and know when to apply lessons from one when programming in another.
The most important thing, by far, though, isn't what you'll find in the classroom - it's what you'll find outside it. Does the university have student organizations or programs for the type of stuff that meets your interest? Is the undergraduate culture an engaging and interesting one, with opportunities for developing your social life?
How's the dorm life? How's the food? (This is actually really important, or seems that way at times.) Go down the hall of a dorm after classes are over, or during an evening: a good sign is lots of propped-open doors - it indicates an open, friendly floor culture.
How does the administration treat the students, faculty, and staff? Ask around: if there have been any major controversies within the past couple years, people will talk about them. Remember that a school administration doesn't directly impact your learning, but they do have a tremendous amount of influence over your life while you're at school.
Is the curriculum broad beyond just computer science? (Remember, theoretically, the reason you're going to a university is to improve your mind and learn about the world and discover yourself - not just to code all the time.) Ask people there. Did they like it? If they think it's a hellhole after three years, chances are you will too. A tech-factory isn't where you want to be if you're really out for a real education.
One thing *not* to worry about as much as many people do: Don't overconcern yourself with money. Higher-tier schools know that they need to attract students who can hack it, and so many give generous need- and merit-based scholarships. Take the supplied tuition figures with a grain of salt, apply anyway, and wait for the financial aid offers to come in before ruling out a more expensive university. You might be surprised.
A friend of mine and I did spot that. We laughed. Nobody around us got it.