The fundamental premise behind cheating is fraud. It is a type of dishonesty that exploits the assumption typically made by a person who is judging or grading an activity that people will be conforming to certain standards when one does not actually do so. Failure to inform the judge or grader of deviations that one has made from those standards when one might otherwise have had the impression that they were conformed to is almost always cheating, unless there is no possible way that such deviations could misrepresent your ability in that area to be greater than it actually is, assuming that the judge or grader had not been aware of them.
To answer your question about whether or not you cheated, however, I would personally be inclined to think that if you actually learned something from your consultation with other people (such that the knowledge really does become part of you, and the work that you can do from it from them on really would be your own), then that would not cheating. If you misrepresent your consultation with other people as entirely your own work without actually grokking what you have written, then that would be cheating.
Although the only person who can really answer whether or not you cheated is your marker, or your prof.
Downloading a program to do K-maps and using it during an exam is *definitely* cheating.
Writing such a program yourself and using, however... I think that's a little greyer, since to have written the program, you have to have really understood what was going on in the first place.
I wrote a program to do K-maps for any number of inputs (up to memory limits, which in practice turned out to be between somewhere between 16 and 20 on the computers we had at the time) for extra credit in my digital logic class. It turned out to be much more challenging than I had thought... but writing it was actually a very educational process... and I think that was probably the underlying intent behind it.
That's because those kids had never had to deal with a professor who styled his exams in such a way that if you did not have an intuitive understanding of the course material and how to apply it to *ANY* problem where that knowledge could possibly applied, where you'd sometimes even be expected to draw from multiple (possibly disjoint) paradigms simultaneously, and not just the general textbook style of problems which only expect you to regurgitate the information that's just been pumped into you.
I think the ability for a student to get away with not understanding the material depends greatly on the professor.
For example, when I was taking Comp. Sci, one of my 1st year professors was notoriously strict and he had earned an unofficial reputation for thinning out the herd for higher level courses, because his standards were far stricter than anything most people had previously encountered, including myself, actually. All assignments had to be handed in... late or not. Late assignments were graded as zero, but still had to be handed in. Any missed assignments would result in an "incomplete" grade. Nobody was to come into class after he had closed the door, or they would be kicked out. He also didn't tolerate any unexcused absences, and made a point of noting that absent people were still responsible for handing in homework due on that day, but would still receive a zero grade on the assignment if it was late, whether or not the absence was excused.
But the people who managed to pass that insanely tough first year course... and I mean even just *BARELY* pass... knew that course material absolutely thoroughly... There was just no way you could have gotten through his classes at all without developing an intuitive understanding of the course material, and how to really apply it, which was how his exams were styled. People who were too lazy to actually learn the material wouldn't get to that point, and would end up being utterly annihilated by the midterm. He was easily the toughest prof I had in that entire program... and there were times that I really didn't like him very much, but he really knew how to push people to their absolute limit.... and having come through that trial by fire, I can look back and easily see he was one of the best professors I ever had.
The probes we've sent did originate here... and life here seems to have a way of being quite pervasive and resilient... surviving extremes that have, prior to the last century, thought to be wholly impossible for anything living to live in.
I would be quite surprised if the rovers and other apparatus that we've sent there are not home to many types of microbial life... and are now engaging in the long and slow process of adapting to a Martian environment.
He also made it clear that they would not fail because they were not up to the task, they would fail because the grade curve would be adjusted to make sure that 20% of the students failed.
That sort of remark is wholly superfluous, because in practice, there will invariably be well over 20% of the class that doesn't excel anyways. In reality, that comment shows an overwhelming lack of empathy for first year students, whose confidence in their own ability to succeed is only just starting to develop, and could easily be shattered by that kind of thoughtless remark.
Unfortunately, it can only be reasonably construed that such a comment made to a first year class is done for the sole purpose of thinning out the crowd immediately... and could even arguably be a money-maker for the school, since many schools do not even offer 100% refunds after the first day.
No... because no school can provide anyone with enough personal interest in a field to be willing to devote the amount of practice it takes to actually *GET* skilled.
I mean, I guess you *COULD* try to accomplish those ends by having every math or science student in high school doing roughly 20 hours of homework a week... which is about what I think it would reasonably take in terms of practicing for a sustained period, over and above time spent learning the raw material (which is what classtime is), to really get good at it, but take a guess what the result would be?
Especially, considering most high school students aren't mature enough to understand the really big picture and see that the real point to such large quantities of homework is about practice, and be prepared to accept that there just aren't any shortcuts to mastering any skill worth knowing? Instead of people flunking out of college, you'd just have tons of kids dropping out of high school.
The problem lies in the fact that doing well in those types of courses requires a certain type of analytic thinking that is simply not that intuitive for most people. It's not that there's anything elite or special about science-related disciplines... it's just that people don't typically have the opportunity to practice that type of thinking on a daily basis, and it's really about as likely that a person will have a natural gift for math, for instance, as it is that a person will be able to play a piano well without ever having learned any musical instruments previously. Skills require practice to get any good... and that practice is time consuming, and will almost always be difficult if it is not accompanied by a genuine personal motivation to actually learn and excel at the skill (in which case, a person is usually practicing the skill outside of academia often enough that it doesn't seem as difficult anyways).
Spelling issues aside, it's what you pay your rent with when your landlord won't accept payments in cash (presumably because if they did, lots of tenants might prefer to just pay in cash, and they would be setting themselves up to be a target for a possible robbery on the day that rent happens to be due). One could also use a money-order to accomplish the same effect, but those cost substantially more than cheques, and much more difficult to cancel.
It's also what your employer gives you every payday when you don't work for a company with enough employees to justify the expense of them moving to a direct deposit system.
In addition to the small costs of the electricity to run the devices during transfer and the cost of the bandwidth utilized to actually copy the data, there are also administrative costs that must be used to cover the salaries of the people who would necessarily have to maintain the system and ensure its continued operation.
In an ideal world, computers would be perfect and never need human administrators to perform effectively. The real world is nowhere near ideal.
Some people would still actually need them... but I do not think that the number of people who need them is anywhere near the number of people who own and drive one every day unnecessarily.
Since you mentioned it, I don't think that drugs should be patentable either. Personally, I believe that they should be protected only as a "trade secret", if anything. While it's always possible somebody may be able to reverse engineer a trade secret and legally duplicate it, ideally (and this is more likely when you are talking about chemical formulas or recipes anyways), the costs of doing so should be prohibitive enough that it doesn't tend to happen often enough to do serious damage to those that invested in initially manufacturing it.
The point of saving ram is that you can get away with actually having less of it available in the first place, thereby saving energy that would be needed to power the extra transistors that would have made up the unused portion of ram.
Of course, this is much more important for things like embedded devices than it is for PC's.
Turbo Pascal leveraged the OS primarily only for doing things like necessary I/O. Everything else, including the implementation of the basic user interface and all of the controls, was completely self-contained in that exe.
But, in general, unless people live in a rural area, they still do not really need a large vehicle most of the time, and when they do, such periods are usually no longer than a weekend, with the possible exception of a single period of maybe a couple of weeks sometime during an entire year The question should then become whether it is cheaper to always be fuelling an SUV as a regular mode of transport than it is to periodically rent one for the times when actually you need it?
Change the words 'costs billions' to 'can cost millions', and the word 'drugs' to 'software', and you have one of the exact same arguments that defenders of software patents use.
Bah. Your soul is weightless. It is not matter, nor energy. It exists, but is a name for something that is entirely metaphysical, rather than physical.
Your soul is your personhood... or your "youness". It is not your personality, nor any aspect of your consciousness in particular, although it is frequently thought of as intrinsically coupled with these. It exists from the time that you could be equally said to exist, and will exist eternally - it can no more be destroyed than the past itself could be changed from the perspective of anyone living in the future. Like mathematical axioms, it has no physically definable properties, but to assert that your soul does not exist is equivalent to asserting that that you don't even exist yourself, because your soul *IS* you. It can't die with your body because your death will not alter that you will have existed, and your "youness" will inherently exist into perpetuity.
How much attention somebody received immediately following their death is almost invariably based much more heavily on their fame in life than on the merits of how much people were positively impacted by the things that person actually did during their life. In general, the latter only tends to become more recognized by later generations, and not the one that actually was personally involved with the individual.
You are right though... it is silly to compare them.
I live in Canada. While I do know that there are penalties for misrepresenting oneself as having actual engineering training and education, I am unaware of any prohibitions on the term "software engineer".
I've called myself a software engineer for decades now.... Nobody has ever so much as looked at me sideways for it.... it's even been listed on official records of employment that the government itself has records of... if it were illegal, I'm pretty sure I would have heard about it by now.
Personally, I believe the line should be drawn at the point where it can be detected that a person has created an unauthorized copy that isn't otherwise exempted from infringement by fair use. That includes the person who initially distributed the torrent file, even before he actually uploads any of its content, since distributing that torrent clearly shows intent to distribute the copy they have, and unless they had permission to make the copy they had for distribution, they would have definitely infringed on copyright at that point. I would further contend that to the extent that it can be reasonably determined that a copy of a work is likely to be infringing, that anyone who knowingly downloads a copy of such an infringing work is just as guilty of infringement as the initial uploader. Thus, it would not be illegal to download noninfringing works from piratebay or whatnot... but wholly illegal to download infringing ones, since works that are linked to from such sites tend to be infringing and this is fairly widely known to all but the blindly naive. Ignorance of a law is not an excuse to break it, however, so even that is not a problem.
Exceptions to the above general guideline could probably be handled on case-by-case basis.
Gah... I hit submit too soon. I don't have a problem with process patents, per se, but when the "Y" is not something that is even remotely real, it is tantamount to patenting the placement of a vertical line with a dot underneath it following a statement to indicate that the statement is intended to be expressed with great emotion. Of course, for that example, there's prior art... but it's the same general idea. Perhaps a better comparison would be to patent a particular shorthand notation.
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The fundamental premise behind cheating is fraud. It is a type of dishonesty that exploits the assumption typically made by a person who is judging or grading an activity that people will be conforming to certain standards when one does not actually do so. Failure to inform the judge or grader of deviations that one has made from those standards when one might otherwise have had the impression that they were conformed to is almost always cheating, unless there is no possible way that such deviations could misrepresent your ability in that area to be greater than it actually is, assuming that the judge or grader had not been aware of them.
To answer your question about whether or not you cheated, however, I would personally be inclined to think that if you actually learned something from your consultation with other people (such that the knowledge really does become part of you, and the work that you can do from it from them on really would be your own), then that would not cheating. If you misrepresent your consultation with other people as entirely your own work without actually grokking what you have written, then that would be cheating.
Although the only person who can really answer whether or not you cheated is your marker, or your prof.
Downloading a program to do K-maps and using it during an exam is *definitely* cheating.
Writing such a program yourself and using, however... I think that's a little greyer, since to have written the program, you have to have really understood what was going on in the first place.
I wrote a program to do K-maps for any number of inputs (up to memory limits, which in practice turned out to be between somewhere between 16 and 20 on the computers we had at the time) for extra credit in my digital logic class. It turned out to be much more challenging than I had thought... but writing it was actually a very educational process... and I think that was probably the underlying intent behind it.
That's because those kids had never had to deal with a professor who styled his exams in such a way that if you did not have an intuitive understanding of the course material and how to apply it to *ANY* problem where that knowledge could possibly applied, where you'd sometimes even be expected to draw from multiple (possibly disjoint) paradigms simultaneously, and not just the general textbook style of problems which only expect you to regurgitate the information that's just been pumped into you.
I think the ability for a student to get away with not understanding the material depends greatly on the professor.
For example, when I was taking Comp. Sci, one of my 1st year professors was notoriously strict and he had earned an unofficial reputation for thinning out the herd for higher level courses, because his standards were far stricter than anything most people had previously encountered, including myself, actually. All assignments had to be handed in... late or not. Late assignments were graded as zero, but still had to be handed in. Any missed assignments would result in an "incomplete" grade. Nobody was to come into class after he had closed the door, or they would be kicked out. He also didn't tolerate any unexcused absences, and made a point of noting that absent people were still responsible for handing in homework due on that day, but would still receive a zero grade on the assignment if it was late, whether or not the absence was excused.
But the people who managed to pass that insanely tough first year course... and I mean even just *BARELY* pass... knew that course material absolutely thoroughly... There was just no way you could have gotten through his classes at all without developing an intuitive understanding of the course material, and how to really apply it, which was how his exams were styled. People who were too lazy to actually learn the material wouldn't get to that point, and would end up being utterly annihilated by the midterm. He was easily the toughest prof I had in that entire program... and there were times that I really didn't like him very much, but he really knew how to push people to their absolute limit.... and having come through that trial by fire, I can look back and easily see he was one of the best professors I ever had.
The probes we've sent did originate here... and life here seems to have a way of being quite pervasive and resilient... surviving extremes that have, prior to the last century, thought to be wholly impossible for anything living to live in.
I would be quite surprised if the rovers and other apparatus that we've sent there are not home to many types of microbial life... and are now engaging in the long and slow process of adapting to a Martian environment.
That sort of remark is wholly superfluous, because in practice, there will invariably be well over 20% of the class that doesn't excel anyways. In reality, that comment shows an overwhelming lack of empathy for first year students, whose confidence in their own ability to succeed is only just starting to develop, and could easily be shattered by that kind of thoughtless remark.
Unfortunately, it can only be reasonably construed that such a comment made to a first year class is done for the sole purpose of thinning out the crowd immediately... and could even arguably be a money-maker for the school, since many schools do not even offer 100% refunds after the first day.
No... because no school can provide anyone with enough personal interest in a field to be willing to devote the amount of practice it takes to actually *GET* skilled.
I mean, I guess you *COULD* try to accomplish those ends by having every math or science student in high school doing roughly 20 hours of homework a week... which is about what I think it would reasonably take in terms of practicing for a sustained period, over and above time spent learning the raw material (which is what classtime is), to really get good at it, but take a guess what the result would be?
Especially, considering most high school students aren't mature enough to understand the really big picture and see that the real point to such large quantities of homework is about practice, and be prepared to accept that there just aren't any shortcuts to mastering any skill worth knowing? Instead of people flunking out of college, you'd just have tons of kids dropping out of high school.
I don't think it's high school's fault.
The problem lies in the fact that doing well in those types of courses requires a certain type of analytic thinking that is simply not that intuitive for most people. It's not that there's anything elite or special about science-related disciplines... it's just that people don't typically have the opportunity to practice that type of thinking on a daily basis, and it's really about as likely that a person will have a natural gift for math, for instance, as it is that a person will be able to play a piano well without ever having learned any musical instruments previously. Skills require practice to get any good... and that practice is time consuming, and will almost always be difficult if it is not accompanied by a genuine personal motivation to actually learn and excel at the skill (in which case, a person is usually practicing the skill outside of academia often enough that it doesn't seem as difficult anyways).
Which is why such rent is always *advance* payment... and not actual debt.
It's also what your employer gives you every payday when you don't work for a company with enough employees to justify the expense of them moving to a direct deposit system.
Not zero cost at all, actually.
In addition to the small costs of the electricity to run the devices during transfer and the cost of the bandwidth utilized to actually copy the data, there are also administrative costs that must be used to cover the salaries of the people who would necessarily have to maintain the system and ensure its continued operation.
In an ideal world, computers would be perfect and never need human administrators to perform effectively. The real world is nowhere near ideal.
When it can read my mind I'll be impressed... voice interface is too... "star trek".
Some people would still actually need them... but I do not think that the number of people who need them is anywhere near the number of people who own and drive one every day unnecessarily.
Since you mentioned it, I don't think that drugs should be patentable either. Personally, I believe that they should be protected only as a "trade secret", if anything. While it's always possible somebody may be able to reverse engineer a trade secret and legally duplicate it, ideally (and this is more likely when you are talking about chemical formulas or recipes anyways), the costs of doing so should be prohibitive enough that it doesn't tend to happen often enough to do serious damage to those that invested in initially manufacturing it.
The point of saving ram is that you can get away with actually having less of it available in the first place, thereby saving energy that would be needed to power the extra transistors that would have made up the unused portion of ram.
Of course, this is much more important for things like embedded devices than it is for PC's.
Turbo Pascal leveraged the OS primarily only for doing things like necessary I/O. Everything else, including the implementation of the basic user interface and all of the controls, was completely self-contained in that exe.
But, in general, unless people live in a rural area, they still do not really need a large vehicle most of the time, and when they do, such periods are usually no longer than a weekend, with the possible exception of a single period of maybe a couple of weeks sometime during an entire year The question should then become whether it is cheaper to always be fuelling an SUV as a regular mode of transport than it is to periodically rent one for the times when actually you need it?
Change the words 'costs billions' to 'can cost millions', and the word 'drugs' to 'software', and you have one of the exact same arguments that defenders of software patents use.
Bah. Your soul is weightless. It is not matter, nor energy. It exists, but is a name for something that is entirely metaphysical, rather than physical.
Your soul is your personhood... or your "youness". It is not your personality, nor any aspect of your consciousness in particular, although it is frequently thought of as intrinsically coupled with these. It exists from the time that you could be equally said to exist, and will exist eternally - it can no more be destroyed than the past itself could be changed from the perspective of anyone living in the future. Like mathematical axioms, it has no physically definable properties, but to assert that your soul does not exist is equivalent to asserting that that you don't even exist yourself, because your soul *IS* you. It can't die with your body because your death will not alter that you will have existed, and your "youness" will inherently exist into perpetuity.
How much attention somebody received immediately following their death is almost invariably based much more heavily on their fame in life than on the merits of how much people were positively impacted by the things that person actually did during their life. In general, the latter only tends to become more recognized by later generations, and not the one that actually was personally involved with the individual.
You are right though... it is silly to compare them.
In all fairness, TLaP day has been going on for several years now, and has had time to gather more momentum than this newly proposed day.
Citation required. Seriously.
I live in Canada. While I do know that there are penalties for misrepresenting oneself as having actual engineering training and education, I am unaware of any prohibitions on the term "software engineer".
I've called myself a software engineer for decades now.... Nobody has ever so much as looked at me sideways for it.... it's even been listed on official records of employment that the government itself has records of... if it were illegal, I'm pretty sure I would have heard about it by now.
I have some specific tech skills from the early 80's as well... and some are not remotely worthless.
For instance, I learned C in 1982.
Or isn't knowing a specific programming language considered a specific tech skill?
Personally, I believe the line should be drawn at the point where it can be detected that a person has created an unauthorized copy that isn't otherwise exempted from infringement by fair use. That includes the person who initially distributed the torrent file, even before he actually uploads any of its content, since distributing that torrent clearly shows intent to distribute the copy they have, and unless they had permission to make the copy they had for distribution, they would have definitely infringed on copyright at that point. I would further contend that to the extent that it can be reasonably determined that a copy of a work is likely to be infringing, that anyone who knowingly downloads a copy of such an infringing work is just as guilty of infringement as the initial uploader. Thus, it would not be illegal to download noninfringing works from piratebay or whatnot... but wholly illegal to download infringing ones, since works that are linked to from such sites tend to be infringing and this is fairly widely known to all but the blindly naive. Ignorance of a law is not an excuse to break it, however, so even that is not a problem.
Exceptions to the above general guideline could probably be handled on case-by-case basis.
Gah... I hit submit too soon. I don't have a problem with process patents, per se, but when the "Y" is not something that is even remotely real, it is tantamount to patenting the placement of a vertical line with a dot underneath it following a statement to indicate that the statement is intended to be expressed with great emotion. Of course, for that example, there's prior art... but it's the same general idea. Perhaps a better comparison would be to patent a particular shorthand notation.