To paraphrase Richard Dawkin's central argument in "The God Delusion": all religion is necessarily evil because it fosters a culture in which a faith-based life is an acceptable lifestyle, which in turn leaves a society with no means of resaonably extirpating the extremists, who are truly dangerous. In other words, if moderate faith is acceptable, it is implicit that extreme faith must also be acceptable.
Of course, by this same logic, holding any position in any issue is neccessarily evil, because it fosters a culture in which it is acceptable to hold that position, and someone - an extremist - might decide to use force to force to defend that position. As a specific example, this makes Dawkins own position evil, because claiming that religion is evil fosters a culture in which extremists can justify killing religous people by claiming that they were evil - such as happened in Soviet Union.
In other words, Dawkins might be a decent scientist, but he sure is a lousy philosopher, and his constant using of his reputation as a scientist to lend credence to his crusade against religion is deceptive at the very least. He's more and more starting to resemble an atheist version of Jack Chick.
But the simple fact is that sex within monogamous marriages does not spread AIDS.
Unless, of course:
You are being faithfull, but your spouse isn't.
Either of you has been raped.
Either of you has ever had sex before marriage. Even if this was a sin, the condom ban punishes the other spouse, not the alleged sinner.
Either of you has ever had their skin pierced by anything, since whatever it was just might be contaminated.
Either of you has ever been in an accident or surgery requiring blood transfusion.
Either of you has been born from a mother who had a HIV infection.
Not that any of this matters, since the condom ban is based on the view that sex is inherently evil and thus something which should not be enjoyed but rather tolerated for the sake of humanity. Since this view is irrational, anything derived from it can't help but be so as well. The end result is that we have potentially tens of millions of people dying just because some ancient philosophers had hangups about sex and managed to get religious backing for them. Aren't traditions wonderful ?
In my submission, I gave an example query, which you can run at DBPedia with their standard prefixes:
Maybe my own search skills are rusty, but I couldn't find actual documents anywhere in the site, just various gibberish examples. In other words, is there actual documentation - especially a list of properties - anywhere ?
Actually I would have thought that eventually the only logical thing that will happen is that nations will start forcing their lazy citizens to use only the electricity that they need and stop wasting it left, right and centre.
Unneccessary, since this is one of the problems the free market actually can solve and is solving, with the price of electricity rising constantly. At this rate, the guy pedaling the treadmill providing power for a computer will have a higher salary than the guy using that computer.
Of course, this is only necessary if you need to take a pit stop during a long journey, most people would probably just charge it at home over night.
If most people just charge their cars at home over night, then there won't be any charging stations, because it will economically unviable to keep one going due to the shortage of customers.
This also means that your effective operating range is limited by your car; you can't go farther than your car batteries can take you on a single charge, because you can't recharge them anywhere, and if want to be able to return home, you're limited to half of that. Of course you can take a bus/train, but that is inconvenient, expensive and only available in and between larger population centers.
Heh, I can just imagine a scenario where the leaders of some small town in the middle of nowhere ban all cars capable of reaching the nearest town, leaving everyone dependent on them for supplies...
And yet, somehow, Microsoft has a rather laid-back work environment...
Well, of course. People learn to stay down when chairs fly over their heads. Besides, anyone who becomes stressed is kicked out.
Anyway, this might actually end up benefiting the employees. It is possible to learn to control your heart rate, thereby effectively nullifying this kind of monitoring. I wonder if the colleges of the future will have a course in Biofeedback Control 101 ?
Because artists have no freakin' idea what a good UI is. The fact that all the major tools for modeling have completely horrid UIs is not a coincidence. 3d modeling apps are the proverbial kitchen sinks.
That's partly because they try to combine modelling - with two or three different paradigms: polygons, NURBS and subdivision surfaces - texturing, rigging, animating, physics, particles, hair, etc. into a single program. Of course the end result is a horrible mess where it's impossible to find what you want. Which, I suppose, is a long-winded way to say that they're kitchen sinks;).
Ultimately, the problem is that 2D modeling - drawing - has traditionally been the domain of artists, while 3D modeling has been the domain of engineers and architechts. Artists don't have to know or care about mathemathics, while engineers and architechts have to. Their tools reflect this: brushes vs. millimeter paper. This division has been carried to the computer realm. It is straightforward to paint with Gimp - point and click a place in the screen, and color is added there - but the very first thing any 3D program manual starts talking about is polygons, and then goes on to explain the mathemathical foundation of NURBS. The limits of 2D screens and pointing devices don't exactly help, either.
To top it all off, the popular OBJ format used to exchange 3D models completely fails to retain any of the all-important rigging or animation loop information. As a result, these models are fine if you want to do an image of Lot's wife but not otherwise. We desperately need a higher-level file format which captures rigging, animation cycles (such as walk cycle) and automatic things like blinking and breathing, as well as unconscious gestures, body language and such. In short, a file format to describe a digital actor. The current stuff is the equivalent of assembly, and about as efficient for large projects: good for the CPU, horrible to anyone who has to do anything with it.
And, of course, all this is completely ignoring all the stupid little things like polygons caving into the model like the empty shells they are, NURBS models breaking at seams, the utter masslessness of any model unless the animator specifically goes over each frame and figures out how inertia and gravity affect things, inverse kinetics chains flip-flopping in certain situations, etc.
I wonder when we'll get even the abstraction level equivalent of ANSI C for 3D; compared to the current stuff, it seems pure sci-fi.
Seriously, any UI will be "super fast" after 2 years of learning.
No, it won't. For a given task in a given UI, there is a way to do so with the minimum number of keypresses / mouselicks / whatever. This minimum number varies from UI to UI; the UI with the smallest minimum will also be fastest, because no matter how well you learn a given UI, your speed is still limited by the physical limits of your body. You simply can't press the buttons infinitely fast no matter how much you practice, so the less of them you have to press to accomplish a task, the faster you can perform it.
That said, I have no idea if Blender's UI is fast, slow or average; I couldn't make sense of it when I last tried it, and have resigned to doing my modelling with Povray scripts. I guess that tells something about the user friendliness of Blender:(...
Try to encourage them to lead active lives (once they see how they look and feel at the end of boot camp)
They will feel like death warmed over. Any sudden increase in your physical activity will do that. It takes months, if not years for your body to catch up. So, unless you plan on keeping them on the camp for multiple years, you're wasting your time - or rather, their time - especially since the people being freed from the camp are going to celebrate their freedom by avoiding everything which reminds them of it.
I speak this as a citizen of Finland, which has a conscript army and thus mandatory boot camps. I've never before or after been in such sorry condition than a year after I left there.
train people to defend themselves against any kind of attacker, whether it's a mugger or an invading country.
Would this be the same mugger who has also attended these mandatory camps and learned the same lessons ? And which one do you expect to invade you - Mexico or Canada ?
This is of course all ignoring the facts that mandatory camps are of extremely questinable legality to begin with, restricting the liberty of the people forced to attend to them just because you think it's good for them, and that trying to herd the whole population there would propably cause a (quite justified, IMHO) rebellion.
I'm guilty of that; once I even bought a CD I didn't even like, just to see if I could crack the copy-protection
Hm... So, if a music exec has a few songs which are pure crap to the point where no one would ever buy them, he could burn them to a CD, wipe it with steel wool, turn off error correction in his CD driver, copy the CD, and send the copy to be mastered and copied. Then he'll brag publicly that his new copy protection scheme is invincible and welcomes any pirate to try. Since no one wants to listen to the songs, no one will realize that a regular CD player can't play it, and will assume that the the inability of a computer CD drive to read it is due to the copy protection. The word gets around and all the l33t h4x0rs want to try, so the crap songs sell like bread.
As far as 10 goes...potential reprocutions are huge...likely, murder would skyrocket at first. People would figure it out though.
They did. Why do you think we have a legal system with an exclusive right to punish criminals ?
Once your neighbor realizes you could legally kick his ass for stealing your car, he is much less likely to steal your car.
What, do you think he's going to just take it like a good little sheep ? No, he'll get his gang, friends and family to help defend himself. This, of course, prompts you to do likewise. Congratulations, you now have a small civil war on your hands.
One would imagine this to be quite obvious, especially with all the historical examples of blood feuds.
Really.. When I was younger I told my parents what all my email addresses were, and I would never have created a new hotmail, etc address without telling them......
In other words, this decision will have no effect on anything whatsoever, and is therefore better than most decisions and almost miraculously good for a think-of-children -decision. Keep up the good work, AGs !
BTW. Am I the only one who is getting a bit creeped out by how the US politicians are always thinking of children ? Perhaps they should be given pretty young - but of legal age - "personal assistants" before we get a repeat of the pedophile priest scandal ? Or maybe they should make more official visits to Japan.
I don't see how a government can legitimately claim a dominion about property I own. How can they hold property rights if it's my property?
What makes it your property ? What if I claim ownership to something you also claim overship to ? Who decides which one of us it belongs to ? Whoever that is, has de facto dominion over the piece of property in question; after all, it was that entity - which, for the sake of simplicity, we might call government - which validated and enforced your or mine claim on said property.
Deny the idea that government has dominion over your property and you are also denying the very concept of property itself. You'll still have possessions, of course, but no property; nothing can belong to you legally if there are no laws, and laws only have meaning if they can and will be enforced.
Differentiating between property and possessions might seem like pedantry, but there is in fact a fundamental difference. Property is yours by right; the society is backing your claim to it, in accordance to certain rules (laws), and anyone trying to take it from you in violation of these rules is punished by the society in accordance to these laws. On the other hand, possessions are yours by might; nothing backs your claim to them besides your own ability to enforce this claim by force. If anyone manages to take them, his claim to them is just as valid as yours was; in fact it is propably more valid, since by overcoming you he proved himself to be more capable of backing his claims by force.
Notice my usage of the word "society" instead of "government" in the preceding paragraph. The government is simply the governing body of the society; it is not something separate from it, nor can there ever be a society without a government, be that government the US Congress, the tribal chieftain, the council of elders, old farmer Smith who has authority because everyone respects him, or anything else.
However, at that point we will already have frittered away 99% of our helium reserves, and it may be that many worthwhile usages will no long be economically feasible, despite being more efficient usages than the original wasteful usages that reduced the supply.
Well, luckily we have fourratherlargesources of helium in our solar system, just waiting for space travel to get up to task. So maybe this impending crisis could be the financial incentive everyone has been waiting for, and thus end up actually benefiting us ?
No kidding. When even the editors are calling it a slow news day, it's pretty bad.
Maybe someone could dig up some dirt on Intelligent Design people and post it on Slashdot ? Then we could once again have a flamefest about whether or not God exist or atheism is a religion.
Maybe we could tie it up with Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition and Jack Chick for good measure ?
Or a flamewar to end all flamewars: heartless Rayndian let the poor starve on the streets -style Libertarianists vs. Socialists who steal every last penny which you have righfully earned with your very own hands to build a Gulag and lock you there for your own good with a robotic nanny named "State".
Or just type random queries to Google and post an equally random summary which links to the first hit. No matter what it's about, the discussion will naturally turn to the topics mentioned.
As an aside, not that the argument requires more counter-points, you're shifting the basis of the market to one in which the consumer (you) bare the risk. After all, if everyone gets together to pay into the "We'd Like a LotR Trilogy" fund, that's $430 million you're not going to get back if the films are crap. Don't you prefer the risk to be on the producers' side rather than the customers?
The films that fail to brake even are funded by the profits from the succesfull ones. The producers aren't taking any risks, the moviegoers are paying every last penny used to produce the movies and a hefty profit for the producer on top of that. As long as you pay to watch movies, you are funding the crap ones just as much as the awesome ones. That is true in every conceivable funding scheme.
What about forms of art and works that are simply not possible to perform live? Do they have no value?
Such as comics ? Girl Genius and Megatokyo both have dead-tree editions available, and apparently sell well enough for stores to give them shelf space, despite being freely available in the Net.
So, if an artist isn't selling, then perhaps, just perhaps, it is not because of the Internet, but because of the art.
Crud, if there's one thing I cannot stand it's managing PhDs who don't understand they gotta study hard and pay their dues before they can break that coveted $10/hr mark...
Not neccessarily. They could simply leave IT and work for a moving company instead. 10 dot something euros an hour where I live, no education required.
What about the rest of the students who weren't expelled and are being educated by these idiots?
What about them ? I'd say that they are learning a very important lesson about might and right. Specifically, they're learning that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Furthermore, they are learning that simply because you have rights doesn't mean that you should excersize them, because there will be consequences; as many slashdotters have pointed out, just because you have a constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech doesn't mean that you couldn't be punished for speaking freely - in other words, you have just as much freedom of speech as you'd had in Soviet Russia, unless, of course, you are wealthy enough to not need a job.
In short, they are learning that the Constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper. This lesson will serve them well when they become adults, when it helps them avoid getting fired from their jobs for expressing any opinions online or engaging in any public activity, such as attending parties or visiting bars. Imagine the damage their employer could suffer if his clients learned that his employees actually have a life outside work ! That catastrophical possibility clearly justifies and neccessifies any and all methods to prevent it from ever coming to pass.
This school is simply doing its duty to teach the students the values of the society they're supposed to live in: keep your head down, your eyes on the ground, and never cross your superiors. It's the Neo-American Way.
Had this been a private school, he would have had utterly no recourse: expulsion at will for any reason, even none at all, is one of the perks (if you're an administrator) of being at a private school.
I'm not so sure that that's true, actually. After all, the student is paying a tuition, and a high one at that; taking his money and then expelling him does seem like a breach of contract to me. Even if the contract specifically said that it can be terminated by the university at any time for any reason or no reason at all, it is not at all certain that the courts would find such obviously once-sided terms valid.
I am not a lawyer, but if this happened to me, I'd certainly be contacting one.
If they cannot explain why "while (X) Y;" is identical to the sequence "if (X) Y; while (X) Y;"
It isn't. Checking X may have the side effect of altering the state of the program so that X checks true the next time, even if it checked false the first time. In that case, and assuming that X evaluated to false the first time, the "while (X) Y;" won't execute Y, while "if (X) Y; while (X) Y;" will; the first check ("if") fails but causes X to alter so that the second check ("while") to succeed and execute Y.
It is, of course, possible for these sequences to be identical for some values of X, but not for all.
Sysadmin == Always the last to know (often after something's been in production for a month or two and is starting to fail), when he/she should have been the first.
That's why a good sysadmin runs his own intelligence network. Passively cooled gigaherts CPUs make surprisingly good replacements for red-hot irons, and if all else fails, you can always use earphones playing Macarena in an endless loop.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, by this same logic, holding any position in any issue is neccessarily evil, because it fosters a culture in which it is acceptable to hold that position, and someone - an extremist - might decide to use force to force to defend that position. As a specific example, this makes Dawkins own position evil, because claiming that religion is evil fosters a culture in which extremists can justify killing religous people by claiming that they were evil - such as happened in Soviet Union.
In other words, Dawkins might be a decent scientist, but he sure is a lousy philosopher, and his constant using of his reputation as a scientist to lend credence to his crusade against religion is deceptive at the very least. He's more and more starting to resemble an atheist version of Jack Chick.
Of course I would, and charge for admission too.
Unless, of course:
Not that any of this matters, since the condom ban is based on the view that sex is inherently evil and thus something which should not be enjoyed but rather tolerated for the sake of humanity. Since this view is irrational, anything derived from it can't help but be so as well. The end result is that we have potentially tens of millions of people dying just because some ancient philosophers had hangups about sex and managed to get religious backing for them. Aren't traditions wonderful ?
In my submission, I gave an example query, which you can run at DBPedia with their standard prefixes:
Maybe my own search skills are rusty, but I couldn't find actual documents anywhere in the site, just various gibberish examples. In other words, is there actual documentation - especially a list of properties - anywhere ?
Unneccessary, since this is one of the problems the free market actually can solve and is solving, with the price of electricity rising constantly. At this rate, the guy pedaling the treadmill providing power for a computer will have a higher salary than the guy using that computer.
If most people just charge their cars at home over night, then there won't be any charging stations, because it will economically unviable to keep one going due to the shortage of customers.
This also means that your effective operating range is limited by your car; you can't go farther than your car batteries can take you on a single charge, because you can't recharge them anywhere, and if want to be able to return home, you're limited to half of that. Of course you can take a bus/train, but that is inconvenient, expensive and only available in and between larger population centers.
Heh, I can just imagine a scenario where the leaders of some small town in the middle of nowhere ban all cars capable of reaching the nearest town, leaving everyone dependent on them for supplies...
Only those who used onion routers.
Well, of course. People learn to stay down when chairs fly over their heads. Besides, anyone who becomes stressed is kicked out.
Anyway, this might actually end up benefiting the employees. It is possible to learn to control your heart rate, thereby effectively nullifying this kind of monitoring. I wonder if the colleges of the future will have a course in Biofeedback Control 101 ?
That's partly because they try to combine modelling - with two or three different paradigms: polygons, NURBS and subdivision surfaces - texturing, rigging, animating, physics, particles, hair, etc. into a single program. Of course the end result is a horrible mess where it's impossible to find what you want. Which, I suppose, is a long-winded way to say that they're kitchen sinks ;).
Ultimately, the problem is that 2D modeling - drawing - has traditionally been the domain of artists, while 3D modeling has been the domain of engineers and architechts. Artists don't have to know or care about mathemathics, while engineers and architechts have to. Their tools reflect this: brushes vs. millimeter paper. This division has been carried to the computer realm. It is straightforward to paint with Gimp - point and click a place in the screen, and color is added there - but the very first thing any 3D program manual starts talking about is polygons, and then goes on to explain the mathemathical foundation of NURBS. The limits of 2D screens and pointing devices don't exactly help, either.
To top it all off, the popular OBJ format used to exchange 3D models completely fails to retain any of the all-important rigging or animation loop information. As a result, these models are fine if you want to do an image of Lot's wife but not otherwise. We desperately need a higher-level file format which captures rigging, animation cycles (such as walk cycle) and automatic things like blinking and breathing, as well as unconscious gestures, body language and such. In short, a file format to describe a digital actor. The current stuff is the equivalent of assembly, and about as efficient for large projects: good for the CPU, horrible to anyone who has to do anything with it.
And, of course, all this is completely ignoring all the stupid little things like polygons caving into the model like the empty shells they are, NURBS models breaking at seams, the utter masslessness of any model unless the animator specifically goes over each frame and figures out how inertia and gravity affect things, inverse kinetics chains flip-flopping in certain situations, etc.
I wonder when we'll get even the abstraction level equivalent of ANSI C for 3D; compared to the current stuff, it seems pure sci-fi.
No, it won't. For a given task in a given UI, there is a way to do so with the minimum number of keypresses / mouselicks / whatever. This minimum number varies from UI to UI; the UI with the smallest minimum will also be fastest, because no matter how well you learn a given UI, your speed is still limited by the physical limits of your body. You simply can't press the buttons infinitely fast no matter how much you practice, so the less of them you have to press to accomplish a task, the faster you can perform it.
That said, I have no idea if Blender's UI is fast, slow or average; I couldn't make sense of it when I last tried it, and have resigned to doing my modelling with Povray scripts. I guess that tells something about the user friendliness of Blender :(...
They will feel like death warmed over. Any sudden increase in your physical activity will do that. It takes months, if not years for your body to catch up. So, unless you plan on keeping them on the camp for multiple years, you're wasting your time - or rather, their time - especially since the people being freed from the camp are going to celebrate their freedom by avoiding everything which reminds them of it.
I speak this as a citizen of Finland, which has a conscript army and thus mandatory boot camps. I've never before or after been in such sorry condition than a year after I left there.
Would this be the same mugger who has also attended these mandatory camps and learned the same lessons ? And which one do you expect to invade you - Mexico or Canada ?
This is of course all ignoring the facts that mandatory camps are of extremely questinable legality to begin with, restricting the liberty of the people forced to attend to them just because you think it's good for them, and that trying to herd the whole population there would propably cause a (quite justified, IMHO) rebellion.
Hm... So, if a music exec has a few songs which are pure crap to the point where no one would ever buy them, he could burn them to a CD, wipe it with steel wool, turn off error correction in his CD driver, copy the CD, and send the copy to be mastered and copied. Then he'll brag publicly that his new copy protection scheme is invincible and welcomes any pirate to try. Since no one wants to listen to the songs, no one will realize that a regular CD player can't play it, and will assume that the the inability of a computer CD drive to read it is due to the copy protection. The word gets around and all the l33t h4x0rs want to try, so the crap songs sell like bread.
MUAHAHAHAA !!!
They did. Why do you think we have a legal system with an exclusive right to punish criminals ?
What, do you think he's going to just take it like a good little sheep ? No, he'll get his gang, friends and family to help defend himself. This, of course, prompts you to do likewise. Congratulations, you now have a small civil war on your hands.
One would imagine this to be quite obvious, especially with all the historical examples of blood feuds.
In other words, this decision will have no effect on anything whatsoever, and is therefore better than most decisions and almost miraculously good for a think-of-children -decision. Keep up the good work, AGs !
BTW. Am I the only one who is getting a bit creeped out by how the US politicians are always thinking of children ? Perhaps they should be given pretty young - but of legal age - "personal assistants" before we get a repeat of the pedophile priest scandal ? Or maybe they should make more official visits to Japan.
What makes it your property ? What if I claim ownership to something you also claim overship to ? Who decides which one of us it belongs to ? Whoever that is, has de facto dominion over the piece of property in question; after all, it was that entity - which, for the sake of simplicity, we might call government - which validated and enforced your or mine claim on said property.
Deny the idea that government has dominion over your property and you are also denying the very concept of property itself. You'll still have possessions, of course, but no property; nothing can belong to you legally if there are no laws, and laws only have meaning if they can and will be enforced.
Differentiating between property and possessions might seem like pedantry, but there is in fact a fundamental difference. Property is yours by right; the society is backing your claim to it, in accordance to certain rules (laws), and anyone trying to take it from you in violation of these rules is punished by the society in accordance to these laws. On the other hand, possessions are yours by might; nothing backs your claim to them besides your own ability to enforce this claim by force. If anyone manages to take them, his claim to them is just as valid as yours was; in fact it is propably more valid, since by overcoming you he proved himself to be more capable of backing his claims by force.
Notice my usage of the word "society" instead of "government" in the preceding paragraph. The government is simply the governing body of the society; it is not something separate from it, nor can there ever be a society without a government, be that government the US Congress, the tribal chieftain, the council of elders, old farmer Smith who has authority because everyone respects him, or anything else.
Well, luckily we have four rather large sources of helium in our solar system, just waiting for space travel to get up to task. So maybe this impending crisis could be the financial incentive everyone has been waiting for, and thus end up actually benefiting us ?
If having such contracts isn't rare, what's the problem ?-)
Maybe someone could dig up some dirt on Intelligent Design people and post it on Slashdot ? Then we could once again have a flamefest about whether or not God exist or atheism is a religion.
Maybe we could tie it up with Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition and Jack Chick for good measure ?
Or a flamewar to end all flamewars: heartless Rayndian let the poor starve on the streets -style Libertarianists vs. Socialists who steal every last penny which you have righfully earned with your very own hands to build a Gulag and lock you there for your own good with a robotic nanny named "State".
Or just type random queries to Google and post an equally random summary which links to the first hit. No matter what it's about, the discussion will naturally turn to the topics mentioned.
The films that fail to brake even are funded by the profits from the succesfull ones. The producers aren't taking any risks, the moviegoers are paying every last penny used to produce the movies and a hefty profit for the producer on top of that. As long as you pay to watch movies, you are funding the crap ones just as much as the awesome ones. That is true in every conceivable funding scheme.
Such as comics ? Girl Genius and Megatokyo both have dead-tree editions available, and apparently sell well enough for stores to give them shelf space, despite being freely available in the Net.
So, if an artist isn't selling, then perhaps, just perhaps, it is not because of the Internet, but because of the art.
Not neccessarily. They could simply leave IT and work for a moving company instead. 10 dot something euros an hour where I live, no education required.
What about them ? I'd say that they are learning a very important lesson about might and right. Specifically, they're learning that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Furthermore, they are learning that simply because you have rights doesn't mean that you should excersize them, because there will be consequences; as many slashdotters have pointed out, just because you have a constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech doesn't mean that you couldn't be punished for speaking freely - in other words, you have just as much freedom of speech as you'd had in Soviet Russia, unless, of course, you are wealthy enough to not need a job.
In short, they are learning that the Constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper. This lesson will serve them well when they become adults, when it helps them avoid getting fired from their jobs for expressing any opinions online or engaging in any public activity, such as attending parties or visiting bars. Imagine the damage their employer could suffer if his clients learned that his employees actually have a life outside work ! That catastrophical possibility clearly justifies and neccessifies any and all methods to prevent it from ever coming to pass.
This school is simply doing its duty to teach the students the values of the society they're supposed to live in: keep your head down, your eyes on the ground, and never cross your superiors. It's the Neo-American Way.
I'm not so sure that that's true, actually. After all, the student is paying a tuition, and a high one at that; taking his money and then expelling him does seem like a breach of contract to me. Even if the contract specifically said that it can be terminated by the university at any time for any reason or no reason at all, it is not at all certain that the courts would find such obviously once-sided terms valid.
I am not a lawyer, but if this happened to me, I'd certainly be contacting one.
It isn't. Checking X may have the side effect of altering the state of the program so that X checks true the next time, even if it checked false the first time. In that case, and assuming that X evaluated to false the first time, the "while (X) Y;" won't execute Y, while "if (X) Y; while (X) Y;" will; the first check ("if") fails but causes X to alter so that the second check ("while") to succeed and execute Y.
It is, of course, possible for these sequences to be identical for some values of X, but not for all.
That's why a good sysadmin runs his own intelligence network. Passively cooled gigaherts CPUs make surprisingly good replacements for red-hot irons, and if all else fails, you can always use earphones playing Macarena in an endless loop.