This is a mistake, and I will fix it when the site is up again.

Thanks. I fixed that, so at least one thing is online.

Hi, I was not aware of this. I will announce an alternate prize for people outside the US, if we can figure out what web site is friendly with gift certificates in other countries (Amazon?)

It is indeed a terribly redundant use of cat, but not useless: it makes it easier to read, by placing the command line invocation by itself at the end of the line.

Billy doesn't have the choice between (a) saving up or (b) financing the whole dang thing with loans.

Most of us will (c) take out loans to pay for part of college, and cover the rest by working before and throughout college, including summer internships; by choosing an affordable school, rather than one that costs over 20K/year; by making choices like not living in a dorm for all four years; and by not paying for graduate school out of your own pocket (it is rarely economical to do so.) I did these things, and ultimately got as far as a Ph.D. with a total loan burden on the order of 20K.

As I said, it seems like a cultural problem: people don't seem to understand that they can and must do these things if they are broke. Instead they think their only choice is a massive loan sufficient to finance an entire four-year degree.

Maybe it's because you're borrowing over 80,000 dollars for a college education.

5 minutes with a spreadsheet would tell you how much and for how long you have just screwed yourself, and by borrowing that kind of money you prove that you can't or won't spend even that much effort to think before borrowing.

I think part of the problem is cultural: I was broke back when I went to college, and I needed loans; but I also knew that you should never borrow anywhere near enough to pay your whole tuition bill. That's far too much money to borrow even if you aren't dead broke. Poverty forces you into indebtedness, but it also makes you paranoid about accumulated debt, and you understand that something that costs tens of thousands of dollars will require you to eat Ramen, work multiple jobs, and make affordable choices even if someone will extend you credit.

But now I hear horror stories about students who borrow enough money to buy a house in much of the USA, and use that to pay for an entire four-year degree plus graduate school. It's like the kids don't understand that they're poor; they get a credit line and stop acting like people who have to work for a living.

True, but let's not conflate "what conservatives don't like" with "what was prevented." Conservatives don't like the destruction of embryos, period.

The federally funded variety was just the one type that the Bush administration had the political will to stop.

On top of that, conservatives tend to be wary of other acts that don't involve the destruction of an embryo, but are conceptually close. For example, conservatives often oppose emergency contraception, some even regular contraception. I would not be surprised if many conservatives were opposed to research on existing embryonic stem cell lines.

On top of this, access levels have little to do with it. Suppose you have an OS that runs at user level, requires a password to install software, but still keeps the install script at user privs, isolating downloaded applications as much as possible. Would that stop this attack?

You are downloading, installing and running a program. It secretly does malicious things that only require user-level privileges (emailing someone spam, for example, or participating in a DDoS attack.) You will not prevent that with restrictions on account privileges alone.

To blame the privilege model when someone installs contaminated software is like blaming your burglar alarm when a dinner guest turns out to be a kleptomaniac.

You might have missed the last 25 years where Macs claim to be more user friendly and cater to a less technologically inclined user-base, lending significant support to his suggestion.

They replaced the operating system between then and now.

The old MacOS was engineered with the goal of being user-friendly to ordinary people. The new OS is actually a repackaging of NextStep, which was originally engineered with the goal of being user-friendly to programmers.

I found the original MacOS extremely confining but idiot-proof; the new OSX has all the power tools but is less user-friendly than Windows. For example, if you plug in a thumb drive, Windows gives you a pop-up with options and suggestions; OSX just mounts it. The OS tends to behave in the hands-off way a programmer expects, and sometimes leaves the novice user in the dark.

I am the organizer of the UCC, and I apologize for the delay. We are normally pretty relaxed with our schedule, being academics; but this year I think more so, because the student who assists me with UCC is currently in deep hack mode on his own research project. I assure you, however, that we will have the results up within a month, or else we will lap the next contest!

We've had "auto-tune" on some musical instruments for hundreds of years. A piano, for example, is bang-on in tune regardless of how inexpertly you hit a key. It was engineered that way. Is piano music inauthentic, because some technology made it easy to play perfectly in tune every time without any skill?