It might be as simple as that. If the syllabus said "do your own work" and they didn't, then it's cheating. If your calc teacher says "I expect you to do the arithmetic by hand" and you use a calculator, then you're cheating. A classroom is a tiny little environment with its own rules, and violating those rules (even if they seem silly or outdated by those who don't understand them) isn't generally tolerated well.

Speak for yourself. I don't copy stuff off the Internet because I'm making new things and don't have anyone to copy from. I'd change careers tomorrow if I had a job where copy-and-pasting was the order of the day.

That's assuming you weren't talking about downloading modules to do routine stuff. Sure, I'll use someone else's HTTP request library instead of rolling my own.

I've told this story before, but... why not. I used to do my homework with my buddy. We would not copy each other's stuff, but we'd bounce ideas around: "hmm, this problem sort of looks like this thing", and "I'm trying to decide between these two data structures". That kind of stuff. You know, actually learning by thinking things through out loud and considering alternatives.

We had one class with an archetypically CompSci homework assignment, like "simulate a telephone switchboard with M operators, N callers, and X extensions". We each started off with boilerplate like "int operators, callers, extensions", etc., and went from there. When we were finished, we had written the exact same program. I mean, same variables, same functions, same indentation, everything. Probably not surprising given that we'd been doing this for a couple of years by that point, but still.

Fortunately, we had an awesome professor who knew both of us well. He called us each in separately (without saying why) to ask us how our program worked, why we'd made the design choices, and so on - basically interrogating us to see whether we'd actually done the work ourselves. Then he brought us in together, showed us each other's assignments, and watched us stammer in confused terror before he broke down laughing.

That could have gone very, very badly. We didn't cheat in any sense of the word, but it definitely would have looked like it to anyone else.

Ooh, like a cross between Freenet and FidoNet? I'm in. I don't know that this is the right software, but PirateBox shows a lot of potential and runs on the same hardware.

To clarify: I want to buy my own $35 hardware and install the downloadable firmware on it, not pay a 300% markup for someone else to do it for me. The project itself looks neat, not the commercial product itself.

Why do I need one of these? Seriously, I want one, and I could buy the hardware off Amazon for $35 and download an installer for free to make my own. I just can't think of a single legitimate reason why I should have one beyond "it's really neat". Help me, geek brethren and sisthren: why do I need to buy and set one of these up?

If you can't stand anyone running, still vote, but don't actually vote for one of those people. Don't write in anyone, either. Just turn in a ballot without any selection in that portion. In very small numbers, this doesn't do much. But suppose that 20% of voters effectively said "none of the above; they all suck". Imagine an officeholder who won the popular majority but was only selected by maybe 30% of voters. It would be awfully hard for them to toss around ideas like "I have a mandate!" or "the voters clearly elected me to..." when not many people actually did.

That's not how it works. SpamAssassin scoring is "stupid" and stateless, which is a deliberate (and good!) design. You don't write rules like "give negative (less likely to be spam) scores to valid DKIM signatures, but positive scores to invalid signatures". Instead, you write two rules: "add 3 if there's a DKIM signature" and "subtract 3 if the DKIM signature validates". The net result is that unsigned email doesn't get a DKIM-related score adjustment. Email signed with an invalid signature gets 3 added to it. Email with a valid signature doesn't have a net gain or loss (+3 for DKIM signature present, -3 for DKIM signature valid = 0 net adjustment).

Those positive scores have zero to do with SpamAssassin's opinion on valid signatures. They reflect a judgement on invalid signatures. If you're faking signatures from joeuser@example.com, you're probably up to something.

Hell yes. It's bullshit that we can bail out Wall Street and not a human citizen.

You know why? Because 18 year olds are dumb enough to want to. I don't say that to slag on service members - I was one, too - but it's the reality. By the time someone's in their late 20s, they start to have thoughts like "wow, it'd suck to die before I've had a family" and "man, I hope I'm not the one coming home as a quadruple amputee", and for most people that marks the point when you can no longer give them stupid orders and expect them to be rigorously followed. But at 18, they're still thinking "hey, let's go kick some ass!" Biologically, their prefrontal cortex hasn't yet matured to adult levels of decision making and consequence consideration.

This is the exact same reason why you can ask a kid if she wants to borrow $150,000 for an unmarketable major. "It's important to do what you truly love! Aren't you into medieval poetry? It'll all work out!", and she signs the loan application. The same kid four years later would reply "oh hell no, I'll be paying on that for the rest of my life", but an 18 year old thinks, "oh, sure, that makes perfect sense! And I won't be one of those bankrupt morons. I'm really good at this, unlike them!"

Note: I have the utmost appreciation for "unmarketable" majors. I'm glad people are studying art history, poetry, and other stereotypically unemployable fields, because experts in those fields contribute things to society that make this a better place to live. I mean that seriously. I'd hate to live in a world designed solely by STEM types with a complete emphasis on pragmatics and mathematical optimization. But it's nothing short of predatory to invite a kid who hasn't fully mentally matured yet to start life with crippling levels of debt, because they simply aren't equipped to appreciate the consequences.

A major problem has been that tuitions have risen alongside the ability of students to get loans to pay for them. This would go a long way toward a college charging $150,000 for an art history major. It's perfectly OK to still take those majors, but it's predatory for a college and bank offer to sell a kid (and at 18, yeah, they're still kids) a hugely expensive degree with little expected return on investment.

I feel strongly that college should not be a trade school. Nonetheless, that's how they're treated by financial markets. Well, that works both ways: just as you shouldn't lend a minimally-employed person $600,000 to buy an inflated house in a bubble market, neither should you lend a kid six digits without him having a reasonable chance to repay it. At least, you shouldn't do either of those and have an expectation that you'll ever be able to collect.

I have a Jawbone UP, and it provides 1) sleep quality tracking, so that each morning I get a graph of my light and deep sleep patterns from the night before, and 2) the ability to track a treadmill. Maybe your phone provides that; my iPhone 5 (pre-pedometer) does not.

I can't speak to the MS band, but there are useful sensors in other products in that class.

I don't think it's that straightforward. A tech giant like Microsoft has every smaller player gunning for them, either to eat into their market or to disrupt and replace them altogether. Microsoft probably could have stuck with XP forever, if it weren't for OS X and Linux showing "normal" people that alternatives actually exist. Even if your cousin doesn't want a Mac or Linux box, at least he now knows that Windows isn't the only OS out there. For a long time starting in the early-mid 90s, that wasn't the case for most people. MS probably could have profited of WinCE 7 for years to come if it weren't for those pesky iPhone and Android units that redefined what being a smartphone means. Word stagnated without Pages and OpenOffice. IE was dead until Firefox came along and reminded developers about things like "standards" and "crossplatform".

So even if Microsoft was perfectly isolated from shareholders and had no external pressure for growth, it's not enough for them to sit still and wait for competitors to chop away at them. They have to move into new markets just to keep from falling behind.

And Windows doesn't require you to jump through hoops to get it to "a certain level of functionality, depending on your Windows experience"? It takes me ages to make a Windows machine act like a civilized Unix box. It seems it takes you as long to make Linux act like Windows. I don't think that's a fair criticism of either OS.

The current firmware update ships as a bootable ISO. Burn it to a CD/DVD (or a flash drive if you can work it out), hold down "option" at boot, and you'll be looking at a DOS prompt in no time. I verified this two days ago when I misread the firmware version on the website and downloaded an updater for the version I already had.