I tend to subconciously latch onto indicators of
cardinal direction (constellations, position of the sun,
orientation of city streets, etc.). One day I was in a
part of town that I visit frequently and nearly sh*tted
bricks when I realized that a satelite dish wasn't
pointing in the direction I thought was South. My
internal compass was off by an entire 90 degrees.
Tons of uses. For instance, I once had to give ~70 people access to a little database, so I randomly generated passwords and then ran a script to send everyone their individual username/password combination. It was a good little hack for a freshman computer scientist, and the VBA support behind Access and Outlook made it pretty easy.
Similarly, I've written little Perl scripts here and again to email out student grades.
Outlook's scriptability is not fundamentally flawed. It fails because of human interface issues, and I'm not just talking about cosmetic GUI elements: good security may ultimately require educating end users, especially those in an office environment. We'll have progress when my officemates stop emailing me dancing santa exe's.
Quote: "If we have some sort of activity that shows terrorists would have been thwarted by quantum cryptography, then we'll instantly have quantum cryptography all over the place."
By contrast, if they have some sort of activity that shows terrorists would have been
*aided* by quantum cryptography, then you'll instantly see it locked down and outlawed.
Why? Uh... because our society is deluged with marketing.
On one end you have the spammers, telemarketers,
Herbalife and Amway pawns, pamphleteers, and other
such scum. On the other end, you have corporations
pushing lifestyle images--promises of hipness and
popularity--instead of emphasizing the substantitive
aspects of their products and services (quality,
support, selection, etc.). Glossy brochures instead of white papers. Billboards dot the
horizon; ads spring out from the muzak in
grocery stores; instant millionaire sweepstakes
junk up the mailbox at home; local TV news is
5 minutes content, 5 minutes warm fuzzy story,
and 20 minutes ads (half of which advertise the
news station itself). Can you see the culture
we've created? It brims full of artifical promises,
broken appeals to our need for identity, one hype
after another yanking us around like dumb animals.
For people
with intense mental lives, these phenomena collectively represent
a violation... a sort of mind rape.
This is not the type
of culture I want to live in, and I believe that
you can justify just about any non-violent approach
to stopping the ads, including modifying existing
software to disable ads.
I understand this is not totally fair. If my
choice to use an advertising supported service
could be made in an environment where (1) ads from
other sources aren't pushed on me (i.e., no billboards, especially glittery ones while trying to change lanes on a 16-lane superhighway near an interchange)
and (2) cost-feasible non-ad
alternatives exist, then I might not be so hostile.
Ultimately, it's an "ends justifies the means"
argument, which is pretty weak morally, but
very solid pragmatically (and pragmatics always
wins when the situation is dire).
Fight for your mindspace. Ultimately, it
would be better for everyone if intrustive,
non-informational ads were driven to extinction.
Exactly! Thanks for saying it. Stallman is a
great visionary and all, but his naming schemes
(while brilliantly nerdy) just suck. I wouldn't
mind calling it GNU/Linux if "GNU" didn't
have such conflicted lexical/orthographic origins.
For the type of work involved in the low-level
CS courses, asking to compare solutions is akin
to third graders asking to compare solutions
to their multiplication assignments. While I
agree that two people can learn by comparison,
it's helpfulness in this case is eclisped by
the fact that it would result in a lot of group
work (~cheating) for these particular assignments.
Most higher-level CS courses encourage teamwork
and cooperation... in fact, most of them force
you to do your project work in teams. Learning
how to program, though, is something you have
to learn by yourself if you really want to understand
what you're doing.
Sigh... what bullshit. Straight from the class
syllabus we have:
"At no time is it acceptable for you to share your solutions to the
homework assignments with other students, whether these solutions are
complete or partial, nor is it acceptable to compare your solutions
with other students.... Students who fail to follow these rules will
be charged with academic misconduct."
Cheating your way through high school? Then don't expect to pass an
intro CS course at Georgia Tech without getting caught. You're an
adult now, and Georgia Tech treats you so. If you *do* get caught,
though, I'm sure you can find some columnist to whine too, especially
if you're from a liberal metropolitan area.
Besides that, the guy's just stupid (or so I would believe, seeing
that the article doesn't describe what he did in any detail). When I
took (and later TA'ed) the intro courses, we were given a clear idea
of the difference between "discussing high level conceptual design" and "copying
somebody else's code, even a snippet". In addition, we got a
couple of thou-shall-not-cheat lectures from both the professors and the
TA's.
Great way to drum up news with an old
story, Slashdot. Stop sensationalizing some bitch and moan piece
about a poor kiddy who got caught and get back to stuff that
matters.
I figure that if it's on public property and I'm a tax payer.
I have a right to remove them if I see fit.
The bad thing about this logic is that people
posting the signs can use it to justify their
activity... if you have a right to remove it, they
have a right to post it.
Ultimately, though,
these poles belong to the power company
(at least they do in my town of Birmingham, AL),
and
posting on them is considered trespassing.
Of course... the power company doesn't really cares
too much.
A few years back, some unknown people
went all over town slapping stickers that said
"Pole Trash! Do not support these businesses." in
such as a way to obscure the content of each ad.
Kinda funny for the "Make money at home!" ads, but
it seemed like an assholish thing to do to the
little local guys running their own legit businesses.
I expected Blade II to be a bunch of fight scenes
strung together by a loose plot and lots of reeky
junior-high testosterone. And that's pretty much
what I got, except it churned me more than I
anticipated. They could have created fight scenes
to display the art of a fighting human body, but
instead they opted for the neato flashing spheres
of UV light and the shock value of mandibleless
jaw-and-neck openings. They could have created
a somewhat engaging plot, but instead they freely
twist it back and forth--creating awkward and
contradictory characters--just to add one-liners
and artifical O-Henry surprises.
To be honest, I can see what's cool about
Blade's image, but it bothers me that some people
(including the friend I saw the movie with) don't
see the impovershment of that image. At least
Queen of the Damned found something other than
mindless violence to dwell on (namely, a sense
of danger sensousness and tragic passion... echoed
by Blade only during the closing sunrise scene).
Allow me to present some random thoughts in defense of GA Tech's cheatfinder:
First, the program is used to finger potiential cheats... all suspects are examined by humans who are aware that the cheatfinder may report false positives. It's not as if the cheatfinder automatically files charges with the Dean's office. In this sense, the cheatfinder serves to augment (not replace) human intelligence in a way that would otherwise be infeasible in a class with 600 students.
Second, the assignments are non-trivial, so design can vary substantially. Even when the things are simple, it can be awful damning when two people choose the same design approach to all problems on their homework (especially when the problems are conceptually independent of each other, or when two students' answers share the same monstrously silly mistake).
Third, an incredible number of people cheat; most of these people don't get caught, or if they are caught, they don't get punished, or if they do get punished, it's a light wrist-slap for the first offense (say... receiving an "F" in the class and a note on the transcript instead of expulsion). Because The College of Computing has a program, they catch the highest number of cheaters. I feel sorry for all of the honest students (especially those in the harder majors) who must compete against cheaters their entire academic career: their degree is devalued in the marketplace by the behavior of others.
Fourth, the cheatfinder program recognizes and adapts for common structures in student programs: if fifty percent of the class shares a common structure, there are at least three explanations: (1) fifty percent of the class coluded with each other, (2) the problem is "naturally constrained" so as to be most readily solvable in this one fashion, or (3) the professor goofed and gave the problem as an example in class. Cheatfinder is smart enough to realize that (1) is unlikely, and so considers the duplicated structures to be innocent. So if the entire class cheated and turned in the same exact assignment, the cheatfinder would not report it.
Fifth, counter to some suggestions by fellow slashdotters, it is best to run this thing at the lower levels of the program. The higher level classes aren't focused on "how to program" and generally don't afford as many opportunites for cheating (many, but not all, of GA Tech's 4000 level classes have every student-team work on a different project). At the higher levels, code reuse can be a good thing, provided that proper credit is given to the real author and that the essential learning challenge is not removed.
Now for the disclaimer: I am a Georgia Tech TA, but I have not had direct exposure to the cheatfinder. Most of my claims are based on heresay and private conversations with those who do work on the cheatfinder. Some claims are based on my own experience TA'ing and trying to prosecute people.
It is definitly NOT cool that a mainstream source pick up on anime. Anime is great, anime is fascinating, anime is cool, and it would be a tragedy for it to be picked up and homogenized into American culture. And so while it may be selfish, I hope that anime never succeeds in mainstream America... I hope that is limited to fringe comic shops and fserv-packed IRC channels.
Anime provides a unique view of Japanese culture and language. Once you sub it into English, warp the characters, and merchandise the hell out of it, anime ceases to be an encounter with a foreign culture and starts to become yet another tribute to ourselves.
At Georgia Tech, the official policy states that anything you turn in for class/create with university resources (except in the most cursory of ways) belongs to them. If you want to release your work, you technically have to ask permission from Georgia Tech's research division. In the College of Computing, however, only high-level administrators care about this. My professors have never cared for and even dissed the official process.
The way I view it, you have plenty of options:
Ignore The Rules - Unless you've done something dramatic to catch the attention of head haunchos, nobody is going to notice/care. If, however, you have something really valuable, you might think twice before starting your own corporation to market it... the official policies may not always be fair or moral, but the university has badder, meaner lawyers than you do.
Incorporate the GPL - In my senior project, I used connection-pooling software from the guys at bitmechanic.com. This stunt can theoretically tie the hands of a university that wishes to capitalize on a student's project. Could you still get in trouble? Maybe. But at least the university would have to rewrite parts of your code to make it legal for other licenses.
Rewrite - If you've done something commercially viable, rewrite it from scratch. You'll create a better product with a longer lifespan and a clear path for the introduction of new features.
Cooperate - If you're not the entreprenurial type, but you created some valuable code and you want to make money off of it, try working with the university. They can take care of those pesky funding/marketing/accounting/legal details. Your piece of the pie will be small (see section 5.14.7.6 of GT's policy), but you'll have time to do the stuff you love and loads of prestige/job offers too.
As an aside, these policies do have a positive aspect: they protect (1) your teammates' work-investment and (2) the university's resource-investment in the tools you use. However, they could be considered immoral since they provide no explicit control of the software/product to the primary contributors (you and your teammates).
--
If you see this tagline often, then we're both losers.:-)
A corrupt culture will attack itself to avoid taking responsibility for its own failures.
Columbine wasn't the fault of some game (although games are a part of the cultural fabric, and they do influence behavior). Columbine was the fault of you and me. We have sold our souls to the moment and sacrificed our families for the GNP. Divorce rate, illegitimacy, dual-career families, ruthless business practices, commercially shattered-conciousness: collectively these practices create critical gaps in our social fabric. School shootings will continue until men start being men, women start being women, and parents start being parents.
Evangelion has earned its hype. Simultaneously a peak specimen of the sci-fi/action genre and a sublime exploration of the human psyche, the Eva series not only entertained me, it reedemed me. As one IMDB commentator said, in reference to the movie, "[It is] Absolutely Amazing, My life is now complete".
The action is set in Tokyo-3, a fortress city where three 14-year old children must pilot giant robots to wrestle with and destroy the messengers of God who threaten the destruction of all humankind. Classic anime, right? But it grows more complex than that: the interwoven machinations of action and introspection, super-science and mythology create a rich, pessimitic world in which characters find human interaction fundamentally encumbered by personal angsts.
To best enjoy Evangelion, you should watch the entire TV series. Be warned: the controversial ending displayed in episodes 25 & 26 has the wishy-washy feel of Serial Experiments Lain. However, Eva--brewed directly from Director's Hideaki Anno personal struggles--has genuine substance to it. Nothing proves this more than the movie, End of Evangelion, which covers the events in eps. 25 & 26 from a different prospective.
Dubs of the movie and series are unacceptable. Watch only subbed versions. An amazing amount of information is carried by intonation and stress. The most admirable character in the entire series, for example, sounds like a complete jerk in some of the dubs I've seen.
I do not recommend Death & Rebirth. It condenses the series into a 2 hour show that lacks the beauty and completeness of the original.
Software vendors shouldn't be held responsible for their bugs. Why? Because it's pragmatically impossible to create bug-free software when you're dealing with millions of lines of code. Even if it is possible, it is economically infeasible to bring the required level of engineering to every project.
Instead, software vendors should be made accountable for process. Software Engineering is a mature body of research on the processes required to produce solidly engineered code. If Brand X software crashes my computer, I'll just have to live with it unless I find out that Brand X rushed their development cycle, slashed their budget, hired script kiddies to implement last minute hacks, and spent a whopping 10 minutes testing the final product. If that happens, I should be able to sue Brand X into nonexistance.
We could even taken it one step further and imagine a codified set of symbols that software vendors could place on their packages to indicate the level of rigor used during production. Third-party certification agencies could back these claims, and people who sue would only win when the company failed to live up to their published level of rigor. Entrepreneurs take note! There may be a market for this.
I'm glad that all 3 licenses exist. If I ever get around to writing releasable software (grin), I'll be glad to have the GPL, LGPL, and BSDL at my disposal.
Different licenses go well with different motivations. Personally (and I haven't really cemented my opinons here yet), I think GPL is best for large projects worked on by several programmers because it protects the work of a community. BSDL is for those less ambitious projects where you just want to create some code and let anybody use it without legal headaches.
why the hell are they always in academic institutions?!?!?! I suppose the buildings are old and thus chock full of explanations for the presences
Georgia Tech's Library is the perfect setting for a ghost story. When one first walks into the place, they feel a sense of age without glory, as if the building is in the process of dying. It is heightened by the creaky wood staircases, the cramped little restrooms set in odd places, and the sealed-off stairwell with water-corroded paint that can only be seen by looking out the right windows in another stairwell.
The bare flourescent light tubes are covered by parallel, flat plates in the shape of a half-arc that stick down like small guillotines. The large atrium formed by floors 1 and 2 of the West wing is duplicated on floors 3 and 4 (like the old identical-room-switcharoo trick). The building incorporates at least 6 different architectural styles among its operative stairwells: one of them is straight, small, narrow, and creaky; another is constructed like a huge, tomato-green spiraled tube that secretly snakes down towards the basement.
The East wing is two or three floors taller than the West wing, and from here one may peer down on the oldest of campus buildings. The light behaves differently on these floors... the sunlight traces shadows through ancient, hazed-over glass. Even when I stand there, beholding it with my own eyes, the scene appears impossibly faded, like one of grandma's wedding pictures (or maybe some JPEG compression artifacts).
The building has many secret places. Most striking are the many locked rooms that appear randomly scattered throughout the floor plans... their practical purposes forgotten. In this one particular room, statues and busts can be seen through the darkened glass. If I remember correctly, the entire top floor of the East Wing is closed to the public, accessible only to invisible research librarians.
Finally, the building stands at the highest geographical point on campus. "The Hill" was of strategic significance during the civil war battle that this region of Atlanta saw.
Funny, though... Nobody here is creative enough to make up any stories about it. That's Tech for you...
Georgia Tech can give you one kick-ass education in CS. As an undergraduate CS major, I feel that we get the complete package: it starts with learning basic algorithmic concepts (in pseudocode, no less), progresses to a real language (currently Java), and then blows wide open with classes on theory (algorithms and automata), compiler implementation, programming practicum, operating systems, software engineering, 00, language concepts, networking, and caffeine consumption. And that's *before* moving into one of the areas of specialization, such as AI, graphics, databases, usability, and seriously deep theory. It truly rocks.
Don't get me wrong--there's a lot of bad stuff about Tech. You have to put up with all sorts of bureaucratic crud, evil policies, hidden costs, a terrible male-female ratio, and all the demons that plague Atlanta (traffic, crime, pollution, heat, etc.). But in the end, you earn three really cool things: (1) a degree from a reputable college, (2) the flexibility required to adapt quickly to new technologies, and (3) a grim understanding of how life works. GA Tech really does teach you a little something about life, but that's a different subject.
If you go to Georgia Tech, you will learn about many different programming tools. However, you will master none of them: you will skip from language to language, learning one thing when you need it and then forgetting about it when it comes time to learn something else. Programming is about mastering the only real tool you have: your mind.
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to subconciously latch onto indicators of cardinal direction (constellations, position of the sun, orientation of city streets, etc.). One day I was in a part of town that I visit frequently and nearly sh*tted bricks when I realized that a satelite dish wasn't pointing in the direction I thought was South. My internal compass was off by an entire 90 degrees.
people access to a little database, so I randomly
generated passwords and then ran a script to send
everyone their individual username/password
combination. It was a good little hack for a freshman
computer scientist, and the VBA support behind Access
and Outlook made it pretty easy.
Similarly, I've written little Perl scripts here and
again to email out student grades.
Outlook's scriptability is not fundamentally flawed.
It fails because of human interface issues, and I'm
not just talking about cosmetic GUI elements: good
security may ultimately require educating end users,
especially those in an office environment. We'll have
progress when my officemates stop emailing me
dancing santa exe's.
Quote: "If we have some sort of activity that shows terrorists would have been thwarted by quantum cryptography, then we'll instantly have quantum cryptography all over the place."
By contrast, if they have some sort of activity that shows terrorists would have been *aided* by quantum cryptography, then you'll instantly see it locked down and outlawed.
I feel justified in disabling advertisements.
Why? Uh... because our society is deluged with marketing. On one end you have the spammers, telemarketers, Herbalife and Amway pawns, pamphleteers, and other such scum. On the other end, you have corporations pushing lifestyle images--promises of hipness and popularity--instead of emphasizing the substantitive aspects of their products and services (quality, support, selection, etc.). Glossy brochures instead of white papers. Billboards dot the horizon; ads spring out from the muzak in grocery stores; instant millionaire sweepstakes junk up the mailbox at home; local TV news is 5 minutes content, 5 minutes warm fuzzy story, and 20 minutes ads (half of which advertise the news station itself). Can you see the culture we've created? It brims full of artifical promises, broken appeals to our need for identity, one hype after another yanking us around like dumb animals. For people with intense mental lives, these phenomena collectively represent a violation... a sort of mind rape.
This is not the type of culture I want to live in, and I believe that you can justify just about any non-violent approach to stopping the ads, including modifying existing software to disable ads.
I understand this is not totally fair. If my choice to use an advertising supported service could be made in an environment where (1) ads from other sources aren't pushed on me (i.e., no billboards, especially glittery ones while trying to change lanes on a 16-lane superhighway near an interchange) and (2) cost-feasible non-ad alternatives exist, then I might not be so hostile. Ultimately, it's an "ends justifies the means" argument, which is pretty weak morally, but very solid pragmatically (and pragmatics always wins when the situation is dire).
Fight for your mindspace. Ultimately, it would be better for everyone if intrustive, non-informational ads were driven to extinction.
Exactly! Thanks for saying it. Stallman is a great visionary and all, but his naming schemes (while brilliantly nerdy) just suck. I wouldn't mind calling it GNU/Linux if "GNU" didn't have such conflicted lexical/orthographic origins.
For the type of work involved in the low-level CS courses, asking to compare solutions is akin to third graders asking to compare solutions to their multiplication assignments. While I agree that two people can learn by comparison, it's helpfulness in this case is eclisped by the fact that it would result in a lot of group work (~cheating) for these particular assignments.
Most higher-level CS courses encourage teamwork and cooperation... in fact, most of them force you to do your project work in teams. Learning how to program, though, is something you have to learn by yourself if you really want to understand what you're doing.
Sigh... what bullshit. Straight from the class syllabus we have:
Cheating your way through high school? Then don't expect to pass an intro CS course at Georgia Tech without getting caught. You're an adult now, and Georgia Tech treats you so. If you *do* get caught, though, I'm sure you can find some columnist to whine too, especially if you're from a liberal metropolitan area.
Besides that, the guy's just stupid (or so I would believe, seeing that the article doesn't describe what he did in any detail). When I took (and later TA'ed) the intro courses, we were given a clear idea of the difference between "discussing high level conceptual design" and "copying somebody else's code, even a snippet". In addition, we got a couple of thou-shall-not-cheat lectures from both the professors and the TA's.
Great way to drum up news with an old story, Slashdot. Stop sensationalizing some bitch and moan piece about a poor kiddy who got caught and get back to stuff that matters.
I figure that if it's on public property and I'm a tax payer. I have a right to remove them if I see fit.
The bad thing about this logic is that people posting the signs can use it to justify their activity... if you have a right to remove it, they have a right to post it.
Ultimately, though, these poles belong to the power company (at least they do in my town of Birmingham, AL), and posting on them is considered trespassing. Of course... the power company doesn't really cares too much.
A few years back, some unknown people went all over town slapping stickers that said "Pole Trash! Do not support these businesses." in such as a way to obscure the content of each ad. Kinda funny for the "Make money at home!" ads, but it seemed like an assholish thing to do to the little local guys running their own legit businesses.
I expected Blade II to be a bunch of fight scenes strung together by a loose plot and lots of reeky junior-high testosterone. And that's pretty much what I got, except it churned me more than I anticipated. They could have created fight scenes to display the art of a fighting human body, but instead they opted for the neato flashing spheres of UV light and the shock value of mandibleless jaw-and-neck openings. They could have created a somewhat engaging plot, but instead they freely twist it back and forth--creating awkward and contradictory characters--just to add one-liners and artifical O-Henry surprises.
To be honest, I can see what's cool about Blade's image, but it bothers me that some people (including the friend I saw the movie with) don't see the impovershment of that image. At least Queen of the Damned found something other than mindless violence to dwell on (namely, a sense of danger sensousness and tragic passion... echoed by Blade only during the closing sunrise scene).
Allow me to present some random thoughts in defense of GA Tech's cheatfinder:
First, the program is used to finger potiential cheats... all suspects are examined by humans who are aware that the cheatfinder may report false positives. It's not as if the cheatfinder automatically files charges with the Dean's office. In this sense, the cheatfinder serves to augment (not replace) human intelligence in a way that would otherwise be infeasible in a class with 600 students.
Second, the assignments are non-trivial, so design can vary substantially. Even when the things are simple, it can be awful damning when two people choose the same design approach to all problems on their homework (especially when the problems are conceptually independent of each other, or when two students' answers share the same monstrously silly mistake).
Third, an incredible number of people cheat; most of these people don't get caught, or if they are caught, they don't get punished, or if they do get punished, it's a light wrist-slap for the first offense (say... receiving an "F" in the class and a note on the transcript instead of expulsion). Because The College of Computing has a program, they catch the highest number of cheaters. I feel sorry for all of the honest students (especially those in the harder majors) who must compete against cheaters their entire academic career: their degree is devalued in the marketplace by the behavior of others.
Fourth, the cheatfinder program recognizes and adapts for common structures in student programs: if fifty percent of the class shares a common structure, there are at least three explanations: (1) fifty percent of the class coluded with each other, (2) the problem is "naturally constrained" so as to be most readily solvable in this one fashion, or (3) the professor goofed and gave the problem as an example in class. Cheatfinder is smart enough to realize that (1) is unlikely, and so considers the duplicated structures to be innocent. So if the entire class cheated and turned in the same exact assignment, the cheatfinder would not report it.
Fifth, counter to some suggestions by fellow slashdotters, it is best to run this thing at the lower levels of the program. The higher level classes aren't focused on "how to program" and generally don't afford as many opportunites for cheating (many, but not all, of GA Tech's 4000 level classes have every student-team work on a different project). At the higher levels, code reuse can be a good thing, provided that proper credit is given to the real author and that the essential learning challenge is not removed.
Now for the disclaimer: I am a Georgia Tech TA, but I have not had direct exposure to the cheatfinder. Most of my claims are based on heresay and private conversations with those who do work on the cheatfinder. Some claims are based on my own experience TA'ing and trying to prosecute people.
It is definitly NOT cool that a mainstream source pick up on anime. Anime is great, anime is fascinating, anime is cool, and it would be a tragedy for it to be picked up and homogenized into American culture. And so while it may be selfish, I hope that anime never succeeds in mainstream America... I hope that is limited to fringe comic shops and fserv-packed IRC channels.
Anime provides a unique view of Japanese culture and language. Once you sub it into English, warp the characters, and merchandise the hell out of it, anime ceases to be an encounter with a foreign culture and starts to become yet another tribute to ourselves.
The way I view it, you have plenty of options:
- Ignore The Rules - Unless you've done something dramatic to catch the attention of head haunchos, nobody is going to notice/care. If, however, you have something really valuable, you might think twice before starting your own corporation to market it... the official policies may not always be fair or moral, but the university has badder, meaner lawyers than you do.
- Incorporate the GPL - In my senior project, I used connection-pooling software from the guys at bitmechanic.com. This stunt can theoretically tie the hands of a university that wishes to capitalize on a student's project. Could you still get in trouble? Maybe. But at least the university would have to rewrite parts of your code to make it legal for other licenses.
- Rewrite - If you've done something commercially viable, rewrite it from scratch. You'll create a better product with a longer lifespan and a clear path for the introduction of new features.
- Cooperate - If you're not the entreprenurial type, but you created some valuable code and you want to make money off of it, try working with the university. They can take care of those pesky funding/marketing/accounting/legal details. Your piece of the pie will be small (see section 5.14.7.6 of GT's policy), but you'll have time to do the stuff you love and loads of prestige/job offers too.
As an aside, these policies do have a positive aspect: they protect (1) your teammates' work-investment and (2) the university's resource-investment in the tools you use. However, they could be considered immoral since they provide no explicit control of the software/product to the primary contributors (you and your teammates).--
If you see this tagline often, then we're both losers.
A corrupt culture will attack itself to avoid taking responsibility for its own failures.
Columbine wasn't the fault of some game (although games are a part of the cultural fabric, and they do influence behavior). Columbine was the fault of you and me. We have sold our souls to the moment and sacrificed our families for the GNP. Divorce rate, illegitimacy, dual-career families, ruthless business practices, commercially shattered-conciousness: collectively these practices create critical gaps in our social fabric. School shootings will continue until men start being men, women start being women, and parents start being parents.
Evangelion has earned its hype. Simultaneously a peak specimen of the sci-fi/action genre and a sublime exploration of the human psyche, the Eva series not only entertained me, it reedemed me. As one IMDB commentator said, in reference to the movie, "[It is] Absolutely Amazing, My life is now complete".
The action is set in Tokyo-3, a fortress city where three 14-year old children must pilot giant robots to wrestle with and destroy the messengers of God who threaten the destruction of all humankind. Classic anime, right? But it grows more complex than that: the interwoven machinations of action and introspection, super-science and mythology create a rich, pessimitic world in which characters find human interaction fundamentally encumbered by personal angsts.
To best enjoy Evangelion, you should watch the entire TV series. Be warned: the controversial ending displayed in episodes 25 & 26 has the wishy-washy feel of Serial Experiments Lain. However, Eva--brewed directly from Director's Hideaki Anno personal struggles--has genuine substance to it. Nothing proves this more than the movie, End of Evangelion, which covers the events in eps. 25 & 26 from a different prospective.
Dubs of the movie and series are unacceptable. Watch only subbed versions. An amazing amount of information is carried by intonation and stress. The most admirable character in the entire series, for example, sounds like a complete jerk in some of the dubs I've seen.
I do not recommend Death & Rebirth. It condenses the series into a 2 hour show that lacks the beauty and completeness of the original.
Poke around on NASA's website. I learned a lot about Apollo 13 just by reading the mission logs.
Software vendors shouldn't be held responsible for their bugs. Why? Because it's pragmatically impossible to create bug-free software when you're dealing with millions of lines of code. Even if it is possible, it is economically infeasible to bring the required level of engineering to every project.
Instead, software vendors should be made accountable for process . Software Engineering is a mature body of research on the processes required to produce solidly engineered code. If Brand X software crashes my computer, I'll just have to live with it unless I find out that Brand X rushed their development cycle, slashed their budget, hired script kiddies to implement last minute hacks, and spent a whopping 10 minutes testing the final product. If that happens, I should be able to sue Brand X into nonexistance.
We could even taken it one step further and imagine a codified set of symbols that software vendors could place on their packages to indicate the level of rigor used during production. Third-party certification agencies could back these claims, and people who sue would only win when the company failed to live up to their published level of rigor. Entrepreneurs take note! There may be a market for this.
I'm glad that all 3 licenses exist. If I ever get around to writing releasable software (grin), I'll be glad to have the GPL, LGPL, and BSDL at my disposal.
Different licenses go well with different motivations. Personally (and I haven't really cemented my opinons here yet), I think GPL is best for large projects worked on by several programmers because it protects the work of a community. BSDL is for those less ambitious projects where you just want to create some code and let anybody use it without legal headaches.
why the hell are they always in academic institutions?!?!?! I suppose the buildings are old and thus chock full of explanations for the presences
Georgia Tech's Library is the perfect setting for a ghost story. When one first walks into the place, they feel a sense of age without glory, as if the building is in the process of dying. It is heightened by the creaky wood staircases, the cramped little restrooms set in odd places, and the sealed-off stairwell with water-corroded paint that can only be seen by looking out the right windows in another stairwell.
The bare flourescent light tubes are covered by parallel, flat plates in the shape of a half-arc that stick down like small guillotines. The large atrium formed by floors 1 and 2 of the West wing is duplicated on floors 3 and 4 (like the old identical-room-switcharoo trick). The building incorporates at least 6 different architectural styles among its operative stairwells: one of them is straight, small, narrow, and creaky; another is constructed like a huge, tomato-green spiraled tube that secretly snakes down towards the basement.
The East wing is two or three floors taller than the West wing, and from here one may peer down on the oldest of campus buildings. The light behaves differently on these floors... the sunlight traces shadows through ancient, hazed-over glass. Even when I stand there, beholding it with my own eyes, the scene appears impossibly faded, like one of grandma's wedding pictures (or maybe some JPEG compression artifacts).
The building has many secret places. Most striking are the many locked rooms that appear randomly scattered throughout the floor plans... their practical purposes forgotten. In this one particular room, statues and busts can be seen through the darkened glass. If I remember correctly, the entire top floor of the East Wing is closed to the public, accessible only to invisible research librarians.
Finally, the building stands at the highest geographical point on campus. "The Hill" was of strategic significance during the civil war battle that this region of Atlanta saw.
Funny, though... Nobody here is creative enough to make up any stories about it. That's Tech for you...
Stephen Bennett
Georgia Tech can give you one kick-ass education in CS. As an undergraduate CS major, I feel that we get the complete package: it starts with learning basic algorithmic concepts (in pseudocode, no less), progresses to a real language (currently Java), and then blows wide open with classes on theory (algorithms and automata), compiler implementation, programming practicum, operating systems, software engineering, 00, language concepts, networking, and caffeine consumption. And that's *before* moving into one of the areas of specialization, such as AI, graphics, databases, usability, and seriously deep theory. It truly rocks.
Don't get me wrong--there's a lot of bad stuff about Tech. You have to put up with all sorts of bureaucratic crud, evil policies, hidden costs, a terrible male-female ratio, and all the demons that plague Atlanta (traffic, crime, pollution, heat, etc.). But in the end, you earn three really cool things: (1) a degree from a reputable college, (2) the flexibility required to adapt quickly to new technologies, and (3) a grim understanding of how life works. GA Tech really does teach you a little something about life, but that's a different subject.
If you go to Georgia Tech, you will learn about many different programming tools. However, you will master none of them: you will skip from language to language, learning one thing when you need it and then forgetting about it when it comes time to learn something else. Programming is about mastering the only real tool you have: your mind.
Georgia Tech Links
Undergraduate CS Program Info
General College of Computing Education Info
GT Main Page
Groan... Time to go write a C-preprocessor for lab.