I'd love to see this happen. Just yesterday, I watched the driver in front of me smash his car through a fence into someone's backyard. He'd been on the phone. If someone had been in the way at the time, they'd be dead.

Unfortunately, the same corporate CEO's who make calls in their cars also buy congresspeople, so I think the odds are slim this kind of legislation would pass.

The basics:

• Finances organized in Quicken
• Digital photos and music organized in simple folders/directories: photos by date, music by artist & album
• Computer files (25 years' worth) organized into directories on Linux PC by topic. Nightly cron job does "find ~ -print > ~/ALLFILES" so I can find any filename with a quick grep. Backups to two 2 TB portable drives, swapped monthly into a safety deposit box.
• Job stuff organized in Outlook Calendar at work... and kept at work. Don't bring the job home at night if you can help it.
• Social calendar kept by spouse. :-)
• Truly important stuff kept in safety deposit box.

That's basically it. No "smart phone", no iWhatever gadgets, no portable electronics. I prefer my machines to sit in one place so I can walk away from them.

This isn't addiction, any more than watching too much TV is addiction. I've been using the Internet daily for decades but can (and do) walk away from it, completely, for vacations etc., without any difficulty. It's actually nice to get away. Calling something an "addiction" takes away personal responsibility. That's appropriate for truly addictive substances (when you're chemically dependent) but not for sitting on your ass in front of a computer.

>"...after all linear algebra is no help when building database driven websites...."

Unless the web site is totally trivial, you definitely want math skills. Any programmer who can't estimate the runtime of an algorithm (say, several interacting, nested loops) doesn't get a place on my project. And combinatorics & graph theory are a very good idea for any interesting web software. And how the heck can you build a data structure of any complexity without understanding how fast you can insert, delete, and find members?

I'm sure there are thousands of mediocre developers who don't think about these issues and just build stuff that seems to work.

No matter which provider you choose, never depend on them for backups. Keep your originals locally and copy them to the webserver. Rsync is a great, effortless tool for this kind of synchronization. If you're maintaining SQL databases on the webserver, back them up at least daily with cron and download the backups. A few simple scripts will work wonders for your protection and your sanity.

This was clear copying, all the way down to the comments. Literally 100% identical code. There are various ways to proceed in this case, but the parent article's claim (a sufficiently harsh punishment is all you need) isn't one of them.

It wasn't a "difficult case." I was merely responding to the parent article, which claimed that a sufficiently harsh punishment solves the problem. I was presenting a counterexample. You're saying that a different approach solves this particular case. That's true, but not what I was writing about.

If your students were so lazy that they didn't read the assignment & notes carefully, shouldn't they get an A?

It's not quite that easy (speaking as a long time CS teacher). For example, once I found that two of my students had turned in the identical assignment. They did not know each other, so one clearly swiped the other's work. Neither would admit wrongdoing, they both understood the code, and there were no timestamps to check. With an expulsion policy, what do you do? Either expel them both (not fair, you're punishing an innocent person) or break your own policy (looking inconsistent, which weakens the policy). The hard part about dealing with cheating is the borderline cases.

Squeezeboxes are AMAZING. I have 7 of them in my home, and with a few button-presses, they can all be synchronized for whole-house audio. Also the server is open-source (Perl) and you can create your own plug-ins. I'm using plug-ins for faster search, logging of all tracks played, and creation of sync groups (so with one press, you can, say, set all your upstairs squeezeboxes to play one tune and all the downstairs ones another tune). Some squeezeboxes have built-in speakers (the Boom) and others require a stereo system. I have never regretted buying them. For the ultimate in space-efficiency, you can connect a speakerless squeezebox (e.g., the Classic) to a tiny in-wall amplifier (www.wireless-experts.com) that fits into a lightswitch box, connected to wall-mounted speakers. All people see is the squeezebox, the speakers, and a volume knob on the wall. Nice.

Two techniques I particularly remember for increasing my Linux effectiveness were:

1. find piped into xargs (or "find -print0" piped into "xargs -0" for safety) to process a directory tree in a single command

2. Printing commands on stdout and piping them into bash. For example, if you want to rename a bunch of files, and you put the old names into file "oldnames" and the new names into "newnames", one per line, you can do the mass renaming with:

$ paste oldnames newnames | sed 's/^/mv /' | bash

generates a sequence of "mv" commands and executes them.

First time I saw each of these, it was so eye-opening.