AV companies can't afford to take the threat of a libel lawsuit lightly. They have to step carefully whenever someone with backing installs malicious software on your box. Why do you think it took them so long to get into the spyware removal business? Lawsuits.
You have 24 coins, one of which is measurably heavier than the others, but otherwise indistinguishable. You have a pair of scales. Find the heavy coin in the minimum number of weighing operations.
I like this one as an interview question for potential developers. The first attempt leads to a situation that, if extrapolated on, reaches the correct solution.
From Jetbrains. It's the best Java IDE on Earth, bar none. It's non-free, but well worth the purchase price. You *must* at least take them up on their eval period. It's that good.
If you really want to improve your ability to type without looking at the keys, learn Dvorak with a re-mapped QWERTY.
The layout is far superior to QWERTY, but that's not the point. The point is that when you instinctively look down at the keyboard to find the 'j' key, you will be greeted by such shocking cognitive dissonance that after a few days, you'll give up on looking at the keys, and actually learn where they live. I think it's even better than a blank keyboard, and it's certainly cheaper:)
Yeah, I have one too. They're great, and they replace your mouse (which is probably just as germ-infested) as well as your keyboard. The learning curve isn't all that bad. I picked up Dvorak at the same time with little trouble.
They are a bit spendy (they can be had for just under $300 new, if you look hard) compared to regular keyboards, but about middle of the road for special input devices.
This is very true. Computer Science is a branch of mathematics that has very little to do with either computers or science:)
As you've said, the world needs programmers. I would guess that 95% of the software industry's developers could be classed as "just programmers". Most of them wouldn't know a deterministic finite automaton from a turing machine. Most have never needed to.
The other 5% are not Computer Scientists, however. They are real Software Engineers. They have more in common with Mechanical Engineers than with mathematicians. They usually know enough real CS to get by, but that is not their focus. They get paid the big bucks.
Practicing Computer Scientists are rarely found outside of the ivory tower. There are very few industry jobs for those who want to do real CS.
So if you want a job in industry, I would suggest that you learn how to program in school, and get a degree. I don't think the school's name really matters that much.
If you want to go the extra mile, find some good books or upper-level classes on Software Engineering. Learn that.
Don't sweat the theory too much. It might help in interviews, but is otherwise only occasionally useful in the day to day life of a software developer. Personally, I think it's fun to know, but that's me.
"256 bit AES encryption" must indicate a 256 bit key size, since the block size is fixed at 128 bits. Why a 256 bit key? Because it's a large number and looks good in the marketing material. It is inconceivable that any brute force search effort could find a 128 bit key, at least before the sun dies.
So, we really only need 128 bits of entropy to make a "good enough" AES key. There are about 1.3 bits of entropy per character of English text, so around 20 words will give us a decent pass phrase. We need a standard size, so we take the SHA-1 of the pass phrase, and append a constant padding value to get us up to 256 bits. This is ok, because we really only have a 128 bit key, but marketing wants 256 bits, and AES has no known weak keys.
We have now derived an encryption key from a pass phrase. We use this key to encrypt the files on the device, and we never store it anywhere.
If, for support reasons, we need to be able to recover the encrypted data for a user, then we could set up a voluntary (opt-in) key escrow service using a secret splitting algorithm.
This problem is fixable. What remains to be seen is whether Lexar will stand behind their product and get serious about security, or whether they will take the easy out and back down on their claims.
Long ago, when I was a kid, my library had a dynix system accessed by serial dumb terminals. They were great. The almost never broke. There was nothing you could do to hijack them, because they were dumb terminals. Sure, they had monochrome green screens that displayed only text.
But really, you're looking for a card catalog replacement, not some sort of a data-processing badass.
If you can make a sound cost-benifit argument for graphical terminals, go with some sort of dedicated XServer. Most of the same advantages, and you get a mouse with pretty pictures.
I like it. I'm projecting on a white wall (no screen yet) from about 10 feet with a Dell 3300MP. It's ceiling-mounted. The image is 83 inches (4:3, diagonal, wide-angle limit). The color reproduction (even without a screen) is beautiful, and the image is very clean. You will need a progressive scan DVD player with a component video output. Images that large suffer greatly from the poor signal quality of composite video (I tried that first, it was bad enough that I couldn't even fully focus the player because the signal was blurry - still watchable though). I haven't tried S-video yet.
I paid $1750 to Dell for the projector. It's a DLP rated at 1200 lumens, and with a native resolution of 1024x768, which is enough to play widescreen DVDs at 576p (which is better than DVDs put out) without "compression".
Be careful with eBay projectors. The lamps cost a pretty penny (Like 1/4 to 1/2 the cost of the projector), and the used ones may not have much lamp life left.
Also: be sure that your lifestyle fits a projector. The room needs to be dark (with my setup at least). You can't watch a movie and do something with your hands, like my wife sometimes does, without a desk lamp, and that affects the projector's image quality.
I imagine that a screen will help a lot, but I'm not there yet. I'll probably buy something inexpensive from Draper in the next few months.
The single largest imbalance in the earth's ecology is humanity. We take up more space than other species, we consume more resources, and we don't produce many things useful to other species.
If human civilization (which is mostly based on costal settlements) were to collapse as a result of rising oceans, what would the ecological impact be? Very little, I suspect. Most species would still have their niches. The niches would just move up hill and toward the poles.
The only species that would be heavily impacted would be those costal species that could not relocate faster than the water rises. I can't think of any, except humanity: we are not ourselves without our cities, and our cities cannot be moved.
Thus, global warming/flooding is not an environmental problem, it is an enviromental solution.
I own a Neuros. It's total crap. The radio-related features are worthless, because the reciever and transmitter both suck. Linux support is practically non-existant (from DI, NDBM works fairly well, when the Neuros doesn't crash). The unit is bulky and feels like a cheap plastic toy. It's been like six months since they "released" Ogg support; it's still not out of beta and it's still unstable.
To me, an mp3/ogg player is a piece of consumer electronics; it should just work. I don't want to hack it. I don't want to wait half a year for the features I bought it for to stabilize.
Neuros is not that. Buying a Neuros is like paying hundreds of dollars for a piece of half-done open source software; it may be worth it in the future, but not today.
That said, the iRiver IHP-120 has everything the neuros has (except Song Identification - no linux support - and the radio transmitter, which hardly works anyway), except it's not perpetually beta, it's very thin (like the ipod) and it looks sexy. Plus, optical I/O.
The Rio Karma looks good too, if you don't need recording, FM radio, or a USB Storage interface (which is what kills it for me; I need to be able to transport files on my MP3 player), and want Ethernet.
CNet has in-depth reviews of various models of MP3 player. It's a good place to go for research.
For hard-core enterprise image management, I suggest Altiris. They make a client-server imaging solution that can also do scripted OS installs, and run arbitrary code on the managed system. This is great for a QA environment where you have a lot of the same hardware and can share images readily.
It's probably pretty expensive though. Go with dd if you're on a budget:)
You could say the same for bus drivers. They don't make $250/yr, but if your bus needs to evade a drunk/stupid driver, you want him to do so successfully.
Except that bus driver need to constantly monitor their job; they must be eternally vigilant for stupid drivers, etc.
Airline pilots really do one thing: land the plane. Anyone with the requisite license (and flight training is faster than, say, college) could get the plane off the ground. The pilot doesn't do much once the plane is in the air; the autopilot hold the course.
So the pilot lands the plane. This takes all of 15 minutes tops. They do this what? Four times a day? Six? So we pay them $250,000 for 500 hours of work?
Really, when was the last time you heard about a pilot saving the lives on a plane when mechanical failure was not the root cause of the problem? We should be paying mechanics more, pilots less, and possibly developing a fly-by-wire system, so that planes can be launched and landed by ground-based pilots via remote.
Especially in this airjack-paranoid era, we should not have controls in the plane. They should be in a secured area on the ground. You can't hijack a plane that doesn't have a stick. Modern comercial aircraft are largely fly-by-wire anyway.
The worst that a hijacker could do in such a situation is kill the passengers and destroy the plane, rather than crash it into strategicly important targets.
A land-based hijacking would be highly difficult. Ground security is a known art with centuries of history. Add an override system with a redundant backup, and you're set.
Of course, we would need slightly smarter autopilots. They would need to know how to failover to a different airport if their primary destination became unavailable for whatever reason (existing load-balancing/fail-over technology). They would need to be able to route around extremely rough weather (whatever algorithm is used to move Starcraft units past obsticles, plus a sensor network to locate such weather). They would need to be smart enough not to crash when being landed badly (a rules-based, real-time expert system and sufficient sensors). They would need to be able to provide enough data to a ground operator to land them (extant instraments, good cameras, force feedback from landing gear.)
I think the above hardware/software improvements would generally cost less than the difference between two pilots per plane and two pilots per runway, while providing sufficient other benefits.
Ah, but what if you, as a player-character, had a futuristic (by civil war standards) pair of revolvers or something. You take on special-ops missions trying to take out strategic targets, and such.
Or you could do Napoleon-era stuff. Mostly hand weapons and archers, but there are some early musketts. I'd really like to see a good, hand-weapon based FPS. Something with the command flexability you see in fighing games like Tekken, but with a first-person view and movement style.
I'm not a vet, I'm not a troll. I honestly feel that it's disrespectful of the sacrifice those soldiers made to reduce WWII to a first-person shooter.
I like FPS games. I enjoy a good game of CTF or DM. It's not the violence that bothers me. The very act of making the real traumatic experience of an actual human being into a game (with all the unpleasent bits cut out, of course) demonstrates a profound lack of compassion.
Both of my grandfathers fought in WWII. My wife's grandfather fought in WWII. I would be ashamed to have one of them see me taking part in reducing the most horific experience of their life to an evening's entertainment.
There are plenty of other settings for an FPS. We don't *need* to set them in WWII. I don't think we should; not until everyone who knew that war personally is dead.
You can't call it realistic until you spend the majority of your time waiting in the cold, hoping not to die.
You can't call it realistic if you can play after you've died once.
You can't call it realistic until the credit for every action you take is given to your superior officer.
WWII was a terrible event. I have no problem with FPS, but to make a mockery of WWII while the survivors are still alive seems disrespectful to me. Play all you want in a Sci-fi setting. Make mods "simulating" the america civil war. But I think it would be nice to show some respect for the still-living vets of WWII.
HDTV tuners are expensive. A quick look at Buy.com finds them listing for $400-$800. This card is only $190, and since it's integrated with a PC, turning it into a PVR is just a matter of software. Perhaps HDTV tuners will be the killer app that puts PCs in the entertainment center.
I also went to CWRU (class of 2002, BS in CS). I found everything Texodore said to be true, and even took EECS 322 from a certified insane professor and his dog-boy assistant.
However, on the whole, I recommend giving Case a try, especially for the hard-core geek. Here are my reasons:
Good liberal arts. You are required to take a certain amount of humanities and social sciences to get any degree at Case; I found the English, History, Theater, Anthropology and Philosophy departments to be of generally high quality
Good hard sciences. The Physics and Chemistry departments are excellent. I didn't take any lower-level Bio classes, so I can't speak to that (though I know at least two good Bio profs at Case).
Geeks. There are few places in this world with better socialized geeks than CWRU. You can be a complete geek and still have a happy social life. There are even girls at Case.
I also found the abuse of drugs and alcohol to be relatively low. It exists, but it's not hard to avoid if you're not into that.
Out of classroom learning. There's a lot of it. There are a large number of very knowledgable people at Case. It's a good place to pick up on network security and administration, biologically inspired robotics, and other topics that don't always make it to the classroom.
Cost. If you did well in highschool and on your SATs, Case may very well pay half your tuition with merit scholarships, making Case a pretty decent financial prospect.
At any research university, you will find professors who can't lecture. Anywhere with tenure, you will find professors who don't care. Case has those (espcially among the profs who teach undergrad CS). But it also has some really great professors. The atmosphere of Case is a good one though, over all.
Don't let the vocal, embittered ones get you down. College is what you make of it, wherever you are.
If you're applying for a position that you are overqualified for (and this happens a lot in this economy), just don't list all of your qualifications. Lies of omition on your resume are ok. If they ask you flat out in the interview, "Do you have a PhD?" then don't lie, but they won't ask. Once you're hired, don't treat it like a big secret. If they ask why it wasn't on your resume, just say that you've had trouble in the past.
I've found it true that overqualification makes you less likely to get a job. Companies want people who will be there for a while because hiring and training people is expensive. If you're over qualified, you're a flight risk.
Fast food workers are cheap. They make minimum wage, as a rule.
Someone would have to design a robotic system that could be purchased, operated and maintained for less than the wages of the workers it replaced in order to have it take over existing fast food jobs.
Think about how much you pay for your car, as an hourly rate. Then add the fact that cars are relatively simple mass-market devices that have been around for the better part of a century, where automated McDonald's would be developed by and for McDonald's at McDonald's expense, would be solving a more complex problem in a grease-filled environment, and would have to be adopted new, not after decades of incremental improvement. And, it would only ship a few hundred units a year.
No, it is much more likely that we will have our wage-slaves for centuries to come.
They've just described Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Or, a close approximation. Buffy trades some of that action for plot, and adds character development, which is curiously lacking from the mix.
The real problem here is that if you do what the post describes, you end up being unclassifiable, and the critics don't like that, as evidenced by Buffy's lack of serious Emmys.
According to the article at Infoweek, NAI plans to call their product SpamKiller, not SpamAsassin. Looks like the OSS version may be ok name-wise after all.
In my admittedly limited experience with New Scientist, I have found that the only thing they publish is this crap. All of their articles are some combination of poorly informed, poorly written, inaccurate and over-hyped. Frankly, if I were filtering through article submissions, I would ignore anything coming from New Scientist. If it's actually important, someone else will write it up, and their article will be better written.
I think a better (and more realistic) alternative to some sort of oath would be to treat software professionals like the engineers they are. In every state (AFAIK), you cannot lawfully claim to be an engineer without a license.
However, the tests that exist in most states are completely inappropriate to software engineering. Dynamics and statics are all very nice, but they have nothing to do with most software systems. What is needed is a test and license for software engineering. Licensed professionals could (assuming an appropriate test) command higher salaries than mere code monkies, and employers would know that they can expect a certain degree of quality from professionals.
This scheme also has the potential to improve the general quality of software. Just like a civil engineer signs and stamps building plans, declaring them sound, a software engineer could be employed to audit a software system's design and implementation, certifying it as secure and robust (to a point). As any experienced developer will tell you, code and design reviews are extremely important, and often neglected.
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AV companies can't afford to take the threat of a libel lawsuit lightly. They have to step carefully whenever someone with backing installs malicious software on your box. Why do you think it took them so long to get into the spyware removal business? Lawsuits.
You have 24 coins, one of which is measurably heavier than the others, but otherwise indistinguishable. You have a pair of scales. Find the heavy coin in the minimum number of weighing operations.
I like this one as an interview question for potential developers. The first attempt leads to a situation that, if extrapolated on, reaches the correct solution.
From Jetbrains. It's the best Java IDE on Earth, bar none. It's non-free, but well worth the purchase price. You *must* at least take them up on their eval period. It's that good.
If you really want to improve your ability to type without looking at the keys, learn Dvorak with a re-mapped QWERTY.
:)
The layout is far superior to QWERTY, but that's not the point. The point is that when you instinctively look down at the keyboard to find the 'j' key, you will be greeted by such shocking cognitive dissonance that after a few days, you'll give up on looking at the keys, and actually learn where they live. I think it's even better than a blank keyboard, and it's certainly cheaper
Yeah, I have one too. They're great, and they replace your mouse (which is probably just as germ-infested) as well as your keyboard. The learning curve isn't all that bad. I picked up Dvorak at the same time with little trouble.
They are a bit spendy (they can be had for just under $300 new, if you look hard) compared to regular keyboards, but about middle of the road for special input devices.
This is very true. Computer Science is a branch of mathematics that has very little to do with either computers or science :)
As you've said, the world needs programmers. I would guess that 95% of the software industry's developers could be classed as "just programmers". Most of them wouldn't know a deterministic finite automaton from a turing machine. Most have never needed to.
The other 5% are not Computer Scientists, however. They are real Software Engineers. They have more in common with Mechanical Engineers than with mathematicians. They usually know enough real CS to get by, but that is not their focus. They get paid the big bucks.
Practicing Computer Scientists are rarely found outside of the ivory tower. There are very few industry jobs for those who want to do real CS.
So if you want a job in industry, I would suggest that you learn how to program in school, and get a degree. I don't think the school's name really matters that much.
If you want to go the extra mile, find some good books or upper-level classes on Software Engineering. Learn that.
Don't sweat the theory too much. It might help in interviews, but is otherwise only occasionally useful in the day to day life of a software developer. Personally, I think it's fun to know, but that's me.
"256 bit AES encryption" must indicate a 256 bit key size, since the block size is fixed at 128 bits. Why a 256 bit key? Because it's a large number and looks good in the marketing material. It is inconceivable that any brute force search effort could find a 128 bit key, at least before the sun dies.
So, we really only need 128 bits of entropy to make a "good enough" AES key. There are about 1.3 bits of entropy per character of English text, so around 20 words will give us a decent pass phrase. We need a standard size, so we take the SHA-1 of the pass phrase, and append a constant padding value to get us up to 256 bits. This is ok, because we really only have a 128 bit key, but marketing wants 256 bits, and AES has no known weak keys.
We have now derived an encryption key from a pass phrase. We use this key to encrypt the files on the device, and we never store it anywhere.
If, for support reasons, we need to be able to recover the encrypted data for a user, then we could set up a voluntary (opt-in) key escrow service using a secret splitting algorithm.
This problem is fixable. What remains to be seen is whether Lexar will stand behind their product and get serious about security, or whether they will take the easy out and back down on their claims.
Long ago, when I was a kid, my library had a dynix system accessed by serial dumb terminals. They were great. The almost never broke. There was nothing you could do to hijack them, because they were dumb terminals. Sure, they had monochrome green screens that displayed only text.
But really, you're looking for a card catalog replacement, not some sort of a data-processing badass.
If you can make a sound cost-benifit argument for graphical terminals, go with some sort of dedicated XServer. Most of the same advantages, and you get a mouse with pretty pictures.
I like it. I'm projecting on a white wall (no screen yet) from about 10 feet with a Dell 3300MP. It's ceiling-mounted. The image is 83 inches (4:3, diagonal, wide-angle limit). The color reproduction (even without a screen) is beautiful, and the image is very clean. You will need a progressive scan DVD player with a component video output. Images that large suffer greatly from the poor signal quality of composite video (I tried that first, it was bad enough that I couldn't even fully focus the player because the signal was blurry - still watchable though). I haven't tried S-video yet.
I paid $1750 to Dell for the projector. It's a DLP rated at 1200 lumens, and with a native resolution of 1024x768, which is enough to play widescreen DVDs at 576p (which is better than DVDs put out) without "compression".
Be careful with eBay projectors. The lamps cost a pretty penny (Like 1/4 to 1/2 the cost of the projector), and the used ones may not have much lamp life left.
Also: be sure that your lifestyle fits a projector. The room needs to be dark (with my setup at least). You can't watch a movie and do something with your hands, like my wife sometimes does, without a desk lamp, and that affects the projector's image quality.
I imagine that a screen will help a lot, but I'm not there yet. I'll probably buy something inexpensive from Draper in the next few months.
The single largest imbalance in the earth's ecology is humanity. We take up more space than other species, we consume more resources, and we don't produce many things useful to other species.
If human civilization (which is mostly based on costal settlements) were to collapse as a result of rising oceans, what would the ecological impact be? Very little, I suspect. Most species would still have their niches. The niches would just move up hill and toward the poles.
The only species that would be heavily impacted would be those costal species that could not relocate faster than the water rises. I can't think of any, except humanity: we are not ourselves without our cities, and our cities cannot be moved.
Thus, global warming/flooding is not an environmental problem, it is an enviromental solution.
Global flooding is an economic problem though...
I own a Neuros. It's total crap. The radio-related features are worthless, because the reciever and transmitter both suck. Linux support is practically non-existant (from DI, NDBM works fairly well, when the Neuros doesn't crash). The unit is bulky and feels like a cheap plastic toy. It's been like six months since they "released" Ogg support; it's still not out of beta and it's still unstable.
To me, an mp3/ogg player is a piece of consumer electronics; it should just work. I don't want to hack it. I don't want to wait half a year for the features I bought it for to stabilize.
Neuros is not that. Buying a Neuros is like paying hundreds of dollars for a piece of half-done open source software; it may be worth it in the future, but not today.
That said, the iRiver IHP-120 has everything the neuros has (except Song Identification - no linux support - and the radio transmitter, which hardly works anyway), except it's not perpetually beta, it's very thin (like the ipod) and it looks sexy. Plus, optical I/O.
The Rio Karma looks good too, if you don't need recording, FM radio, or a USB Storage interface (which is what kills it for me; I need to be able to transport files on my MP3 player), and want Ethernet.
CNet has in-depth reviews of various models of MP3 player. It's a good place to go for research.
For hard-core enterprise image management, I suggest Altiris. They make a client-server imaging solution that can also do scripted OS installs, and run arbitrary code on the managed system. This is great for a QA environment where you have a lot of the same hardware and can share images readily.
:)
It's probably pretty expensive though. Go with dd if you're on a budget
You could say the same for bus drivers. They don't make $250/yr, but if your bus needs to evade a drunk/stupid driver, you want him to do so successfully.
Except that bus driver need to constantly monitor their job; they must be eternally vigilant for stupid drivers, etc.
Airline pilots really do one thing: land the plane. Anyone with the requisite license (and flight training is faster than, say, college) could get the plane off the ground. The pilot doesn't do much once the plane is in the air; the autopilot hold the course.
So the pilot lands the plane. This takes all of 15 minutes tops. They do this what? Four times a day? Six? So we pay them $250,000 for 500 hours of work?
Really, when was the last time you heard about a pilot saving the lives on a plane when mechanical failure was not the root cause of the problem? We should be paying mechanics more, pilots less, and possibly developing a fly-by-wire system, so that planes can be launched and landed by ground-based pilots via remote.
Especially in this airjack-paranoid era, we should not have controls in the plane. They should be in a secured area on the ground. You can't hijack a plane that doesn't have a stick. Modern comercial aircraft are largely fly-by-wire anyway.
The worst that a hijacker could do in such a situation is kill the passengers and destroy the plane, rather than crash it into strategicly important targets.
A land-based hijacking would be highly difficult. Ground security is a known art with centuries of history. Add an override system with a redundant backup, and you're set.
Of course, we would need slightly smarter autopilots. They would need to know how to failover to a different airport if their primary destination became unavailable for whatever reason (existing load-balancing/fail-over technology). They would need to be able to route around extremely rough weather (whatever algorithm is used to move Starcraft units past obsticles, plus a sensor network to locate such weather). They would need to be smart enough not to crash when being landed badly (a rules-based, real-time expert system and sufficient sensors). They would need to be able to provide enough data to a ground operator to land them (extant instraments, good cameras, force feedback from landing gear.)
I think the above hardware/software improvements would generally cost less than the difference between two pilots per plane and two pilots per runway, while providing sufficient other benefits.
But the pilots union would never go for it.
Ah, but what if you, as a player-character, had a futuristic (by civil war standards) pair of revolvers or something. You take on special-ops missions trying to take out strategic targets, and such.
Or you could do Napoleon-era stuff. Mostly hand weapons and archers, but there are some early musketts. I'd really like to see a good, hand-weapon based FPS. Something with the command flexability you see in fighing games like Tekken, but with a first-person view and movement style.
I'm not a vet, I'm not a troll. I honestly feel that it's disrespectful of the sacrifice those soldiers made to reduce WWII to a first-person shooter.
I like FPS games. I enjoy a good game of CTF or DM. It's not the violence that bothers me. The very act of making the real traumatic experience of an actual human being into a game (with all the unpleasent bits cut out, of course) demonstrates a profound lack of compassion.
Both of my grandfathers fought in WWII. My wife's grandfather fought in WWII. I would be ashamed to have one of them see me taking part in reducing the most horific experience of their life to an evening's entertainment.
There are plenty of other settings for an FPS. We don't *need* to set them in WWII. I don't think we should; not until everyone who knew that war personally is dead.
You can't call it realistic until you spend the majority of your time waiting in the cold, hoping not to die.
You can't call it realistic if you can play after you've died once.
You can't call it realistic until the credit for every action you take is given to your superior officer.
WWII was a terrible event. I have no problem with FPS, but to make a mockery of WWII while the survivors are still alive seems disrespectful to me. Play all you want in a Sci-fi setting. Make mods "simulating" the america civil war. But I think it would be nice to show some respect for the still-living vets of WWII.
HDTV tuners are expensive. A quick look at Buy.com finds them listing for $400-$800. This card is only $190, and since it's integrated with a PC, turning it into a PVR is just a matter of software. Perhaps HDTV tuners will be the killer app that puts PCs in the entertainment center.
I also went to CWRU (class of 2002, BS in CS). I found everything Texodore said to be true, and even took EECS 322 from a certified insane professor and his dog-boy assistant.
However, on the whole, I recommend giving Case a try, especially for the hard-core geek. Here are my reasons:
At any research university, you will find professors who can't lecture. Anywhere with tenure, you will find professors who don't care. Case has those (espcially among the profs who teach undergrad CS). But it also has some really great professors. The atmosphere of Case is a good one though, over all.
Don't let the vocal, embittered ones get you down. College is what you make of it, wherever you are.
There are millions of lines of offending code! There are thousands of Open Source infidels screaming for mercy! Buy our stock!
If you're applying for a position that you are overqualified for (and this happens a lot in this economy), just don't list all of your qualifications. Lies of omition on your resume are ok. If they ask you flat out in the interview, "Do you have a PhD?" then don't lie, but they won't ask. Once you're hired, don't treat it like a big secret. If they ask why it wasn't on your resume, just say that you've had trouble in the past.
I've found it true that overqualification makes you less likely to get a job. Companies want people who will be there for a while because hiring and training people is expensive. If you're over qualified, you're a flight risk.
Fast food workers are cheap. They make minimum wage, as a rule.
Someone would have to design a robotic system that could be purchased, operated and maintained for less than the wages of the workers it replaced in order to have it take over existing fast food jobs.
Think about how much you pay for your car, as an hourly rate. Then add the fact that cars are relatively simple mass-market devices that have been around for the better part of a century, where automated McDonald's would be developed by and for McDonald's at McDonald's expense, would be solving a more complex problem in a grease-filled environment, and would have to be adopted new, not after decades of incremental improvement. And, it would only ship a few hundred units a year.
No, it is much more likely that we will have our wage-slaves for centuries to come.
They've just described Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Or, a close approximation. Buffy trades some of that action for plot, and adds character development, which is curiously lacking from the mix.
The real problem here is that if you do what the post describes, you end up being unclassifiable, and the critics don't like that, as evidenced by Buffy's lack of serious Emmys.
According to the article at Infoweek, NAI plans to call their product SpamKiller, not SpamAsassin. Looks like the OSS version may be ok name-wise after all.
In my admittedly limited experience with New Scientist, I have found that the only thing they publish is this crap. All of their articles are some combination of poorly informed, poorly written, inaccurate and over-hyped. Frankly, if I were filtering through article submissions, I would ignore anything coming from New Scientist. If it's actually important, someone else will write it up, and their article will be better written.
I think a better (and more realistic) alternative to some sort of oath would be to treat software professionals like the engineers they are. In every state (AFAIK), you cannot lawfully claim to be an engineer without a license.
However, the tests that exist in most states are completely inappropriate to software engineering. Dynamics and statics are all very nice, but they have nothing to do with most software systems. What is needed is a test and license for software engineering. Licensed professionals could (assuming an appropriate test) command higher salaries than mere code monkies, and employers would know that they can expect a certain degree of quality from professionals.
This scheme also has the potential to improve the general quality of software. Just like a civil engineer signs and stamps building plans, declaring them sound, a software engineer could be employed to audit a software system's design and implementation, certifying it as secure and robust (to a point). As any experienced developer will tell you, code and design reviews are extremely important, and often neglected.