Yes. Look up 'Web Engineering'.

"Proponents of web engineering supported the establishment of web engineering as a discipline at an early stage of web. [...] San Murugesan, Yogesh Deshpande, Steve Hansen and Athula Ginige, from University of Western Sydney, Australia formally promoted web engineering a new discipline in the first ICSE workshop on Web Engineering in 1999. Since then they published a serial of papers in a number of journals, conferences and magazines to promote their view and got wide support. [...]However, it has been controversial, especially for people in other traditional disciplines such as software engineering, to recognize web engineering as a new field. The issue is how different and independent web engineering is, compared with other disciplines.

Terrifying but true, and it's good to know - because that way, no matter how depressing one's career choice might happen to be, one can always think: at least I'm not working towards a PhD in Web Engineering.

As the Swedish example shows, it's not unknown for Europeans to study multiple subjects. In the UK, not all universities (or university course structures) allow a great deal of 'pick and mix' flexibility in learning, but see for example the Open University in the UK for an example of a system that lets you study just about anything you feel like in virtually any order you can cope with. Many people in the UK solve the problem by taking a conversion postgraduate degree, and gaining multiple undergraduate degrees is another solution that until fairly recently was widely considered to be a perfectly valid thing to aim for. Second undergrad degrees have recently become more difficult to achieve because of Labour's fairly recent decision to deny any level of government contribution for anybody wanting to complete a second (or further) qualification at any given level. Gordon Brown apparently figured that one of any given qualification was quite enough, so it's probably fair to assume that Labour subscribed to the theory you mention - that one should limit oneself to one topic of study.

I disagree, but do concede that there is no need for in-depth study of a very large number of specific topics in university (a wide range of topics would be good, though). What is important is that during a student's university studies, he or she gains all the necessary skills to be able to continue to study and learn after his or her formal studies end. The idea that one needs a named degree in order to prove knowledge or understanding of a given field is problematic, and as far as I can tell is pushed by universities for about the same reason as tech companies market the idea of tech certifications - it's a reasonably good earner for the various organisations involved, as well as simplifying life for Human Resources. But really, the point of a (worthwhile) degree is in large part that it teaches the student how to learn. There aren't that many jobs that directly use knowledge of classical languages, but there are a whole lot of happily employed classics graduates. And if the graduate classicist is working in economics or software development, does it really matter if their degree didn't mention software development by name?

As for the assertion that 'being well versed in multiple areas of knowledge is an almost uniquely american tradition', well, it's laughably wrong, but then you knew that. In any case, polymaths are no longer in fashion in corporate culture, in the UK, in many European countries, or in the USA. Academic funding agencies do not on the whole approve of polymaths, and interdisciplinary work can be difficult to fund unless there is a clearly defined expert from each discipline involved in the funding proposal. But this is, as far as I can tell, true across the western world. It is linked to a general love for statistics, evaluation, and ranking, whether it's six-sigma or citation metrics. If we can't classify people as grade something whatchamacallits, then they break our neat models, and that doesn't make us happy at all.

The point, as far as I can tell, is that there are many chances to bolt on external junk, whilst it's pretty difficult/unusual to be able to compromise the ATM itself. External devices are just opportunistic ways of reading the data off your card (ie. magnetic strip, maybe a camera to read out the PIN as the user inputs it). I suppose you could place an overlay on the screen, but it sounds like a lot of work compared to a little magnetic strip reader.

If you'd managed to compromise the ATM (so as to be able to change the image displayed on that particular screen) you wouldn't need to bolt anything onto the outside at all - the ATM knows everything you're likely to want to steal. But then, if you were able to successfully hack an ATM, why waste time skimming credit card numbers?

Well, it clearly wasn't that funny - Clouds did pretty badly in competition :)

Aristophanes was mocking everybody in sight as far as I can tell - Strepsiades' name means 'twisting' or 'scheming'. He is a weak man trying to pull the wool over his creditors' eyes dishonestly, and throughout the play he reaches for whatever seems to offer the best short-term advantage. The play tends to upset people because of its portrayal of Socrates, but it's pretty well offensive to everybody involved.

"There are no gods, and the lightning is not a sign of Zeus' displeasure, it's just [insert somewhat reasonable-sounding theory here]'

It might be harder to commit convincing heresy in a multitheistic belief system (because you always have the 'but my preferred god says that' argument), but it's certainly not difficult. It might be even easier because rather than one god you have to believe in, there's a whole pantheon.

For some examples, check out Aristophanes' Clouds. Aristophanes was obviously not accurately reporting Socrates' arguments - he was writing a comedy - but it gives you an idea. In this example, Strepsiades is the fall guy.

SOCRATES: [The Clouds] are the only goddesses; all the rest are pure myth.
STREPSIADES: But by the Earth! is our father, Zeus, the Olympian, not a god?
SOCRATES: Zeus! what Zeus! Are you mad? There is no Zeus.
STREPSIADES: What are you saying now? Who causes the rain to fall? Answer me that!
SOCRATES: Why, the Clouds, and I will prove it. Have you ever seen it raining without clouds? Let Zeus then cause rain with a clear sky and without their presence!
STREPSIADES: By Apollo! that is powerfully argued! For my own part, I always thought it was Zeus pissing into a sieve. But tell me, who is it makes the thunder, which I so much dread?
SOCRATES: The Clouds, when they roll one over the other.
STREPSIADES: But how can that be? you most daring among men!
SOCRATES: Being full of water, and forced to move along[...] they bump each other heavily and burst with great noise.
STREPSIADES: But is it not Zeus who forces them to move?
SOCRATES: Not at all; it's the aerial Whirlwind.
STREPSIADES: The Whirlwind! ah! I did not know that. So Zeus, it seems, has no existence, and its the Whirlwind that reigns in his stead? But you have not yet told me what makes the roll of the thunder?
SOCRATES: Have you not understood me then? I tell you, that the Clouds, when full of rain, bump against one another, and that, being inordinately swollen out, they burst with a great noise. Take yourself as an example. When you have heartily gorged on stew at the Panathenaea, you get throes of stomach-ache and then suddenly your belly resounds with prolonged rumbling.
STREPSIADES: Yes, yes, by Apollo I suffer, I get colic, then the stew sets to rumbling like thunder and finally bursts forth with a terrific noise. At first, it's but a little gurgling pappax, pappax! then it increases, papapappax! and when I take my crap, why, it's thunder indeed, papapappax! pappax!! papapappax!!! just like the clouds.
SOCRATES: Well then, reflect what a noise is produced by your belly, which is but small. Shall not the air, which is boundless, produce these mighty claps of thunder?
STREPSIADES: And this is why the names are so much alike: crap and clap. But tell me this. Whence comes the lightning, the dazzling flame, which at times consumes the man it strikes, at others hardly singes him. Is it not plain, that Zeus is hurling it at the perjurers?
SOCRATES: If Zeus strikes at the perjurers, why has he not blasted Simon, Cleonymus and Theorus? Of a surety, greater perjurers cannot exist. No, he strikes his own temple, and Sunium, the promontory of Athens, and the towering oaks. Now, why should he do that? An oak is no perjurer.
STREPSIADES: I cannot tell, but it seems to me well argued. What is the lightning then?
SOCRATES: When a dry wind ascends to the Clouds and gets shut into them, it blows them out like a bladder; finally, being too confined, it bursts them, escapes with fierce violence and a roar to flash into flame by reason of its own impetuosity.
STREPSIADES: Ah, that's just what happened to me one day. It was at the feast of Zeus! I was cooking a sow's belly for my family and I had forgotten to slit it open. It swelled out and, suddenly bursting, discharged itself right into my eyes and burnt my face.

There was nothing unintentional about it. Socrates describes himself as a gadfly in Plato's 'Defence of Socrates'. It seems to have been his signature style...

Also, Socrates was 70 and, according to Xenophon, was committing the ancient Athenian version of 'suicide by cop'.

Xenophon describes Socrates as saying that '[i]f my years are prolonged, I know that the frailties of old age will inevitably be realised, - that my vision must be less perfect and my hearing less keen, that I shall be slower to learn and more forgetful of what I have learned. If I perceive my decay and take to complaining, how... could I any longer take pleasure in life?'

http://www.springerlink.com/content/x7286wq826173461/

I have to say: 'No duh.'

Your entire point appears to be 'Urban legends are present in large text corpora, and that's bad'. It's not bad, it's not good - it just is. A good part of the reason for studying at all, be it in sciences, humanities, arts, whatever, is to come to the understanding that just because a lot of people have said it doesn't necessarily mean that it's true. As an aggregation mechanism for what a lot of people say, Google will be no more or less correct than any other aggregation mechanism of what people say. This includes libraries, which contain a smaller subset of the same urban-legend-riddled culture.

If a student were to come out of their first four years at University still believing that 'everything I read in a book is true', then I would think that the University had failed. There's no difference between that and 'everything I read on the Internet is true', except that the Internet kindly does some of the checking indexes and wielding highlighter pens that you would need to do on the way to getting that dataset out of a set of books yourself.

Yeah, that would be a good plan, but for some reason most staff won't do it. I really have no idea why not, but it's probably the same thing that causes people to use the same password for absolutely everything in sight. That said, a second account still wouldn't solve the 'creepy work-related stalking' problem anyway.

We have a moderately large office, three to four permanent staff, and a bunch of students. We ended up getting each developer a large desk plus an extra table. That meant that people can work together with each other/visiting students when they want without having to get right into each others' personal space, but they still get some illusion of distance from everybody else the rest of the time. But yes - three is enough people in a room. We're lucky that the configuration of the room means that at least noone else is in visual range when you're at your desk, but you can still hear each others' conference calls.

Really good headphones are an important part of making it work for us, and even then it doesn't always work too well. One creepy guy joins the team and everybody suddenly comes up with perfect reasons to work from home. So, fortunate hiring (and good hiring skills) probably would help a lot too, but short of that management needs to keep an eye on the working atmosphere and fiddle with the variables if it's not going well.

Regarding instant messaging, you're quite right. We've established a few habits of when to try to be online, but in practice, most people have so many problems with random unwanted messages from random stalkers that they set themselves to invisible if the client allows it. Instant messaging benefits a lot from a fine-grained access model - 'I'd like my family to be able to see that I'm online except for the hours between 9 and 5; I'd like my co-workers to see me as online between 9 and 12 and 3 and 5; I'd like that creepy woman who nonetheless happens to be an important customer of ours to be unable to detect that I am online at all, unless I specifically have to be online for a meeting with her.'

Looks like it. Even Stephen Timms, noted dumbass and so-called Minister for Digital Britain, doesn't know what it is.

According to him, IP address stands for Intellectual Property address.

What a post. I'm reminded of O'Reilly, in conversation with The Daily Show's Jon Stewart: "You got stoned slackers watching your dopey show every night. 87% are intoxicated when they watch..."

Tell me, do you find that outright manufacture of statistics is generally an effective mechanism in successfully debating complex issues? If you do, do you find that this mechanism is:

a) a good thing, because you get to win arguments based on totally uncited shit you pulled out of your ass, or
b) seriously concerning, because entire areas of governmental policy are set via arguments based on totally uncited shit that lobbyists pull out of their asses?

Your post is an example of extremely lazy ad hominem argumentation, and possibly also extremely lazy thinking as well. Here are some statistics for you. Given that this is a story about filesharing activities in the UK, here's a stat from the UK:

Harris Interactive conducted research among the UK general public aged 16-54 from February to March 2009, which gave a 23% incidence of music file-sharing using peer-to-peer networks in the UK population aged 16-54, or 8.3 million file-sharers based on ONS population data. This number omits people under 16 completely.

Additionally, Jupiter Research conducted consumer research on behalf of the BPI in August 2007, which predicted 6.7 million peer-to-peer file-sharers during 2008, and 7.3 million for 2009.

Source: http://www.theunsignedguide.com/news/795/facts-about-file-sharing/

It is not impossible that 23% of individuals in the UK all share the same characteristics (poor earning, social misfits, highly vocal complainers) - although if that is the case it is surprising to me that only 20684 emails (rather than the expected 7-8 million) have been sent to MPs regarding the Digital Economy Bill. But can you really characterise 23% of the population as 'a minute fraction'?

Dunno about college placement tests, but to start thinking about maths in general there's nothing like just buying a couple of books and going at it (but make sure you have the answer booklet/solutions are in the back of the book). If you're feeling a little panicky you might even want to start with something really un-threatening ('Statistics for dummies' exists for that). You might want to see what the standard textbooks would be for the courses that are prerequisites for the ones you're looking to study, and perhaps ask which areas you would be expected to be comfortable with.

Also, the MIT opencourseware site is probably your friend: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/

As regards an online tutor, depending on whether you currently live near a college/university/miscellaneous site of higher learning, you might want to see if there are any postgrads in applicable subjects who are willing to tutor. In my experience online tutors are seldom worth half as much as talking to a real live actual human being, and they are usually more expensive. YMMV - especially if you are extremely busy an online tutor may actually suit you better than scheduling another real live person into your week.

Finally - good luck :)

Agreed.

The OP might want to listen to this recording...

Your case study seems to reinforce Torvalds' theory of data preservation:

Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;) -- Linus Torvalds

And:

* Crap battery life (10 hours instead of weeks, or about four days if you leave on the wireless).

* Added weight (0.73kg instead of 0.53kg for the Kindle DX, against 0.36kg for a Sony Daily Edition). Several reviewers have reported that they found the Kindle DX too heavy compared to the competition, which given that it's an ebook reader seems like a reasonable comment. The DX is already pretty heavy.

* Several hundred dollars of difference in price, assuming you want 3G; the base model has very little in common with the Kindle DX.

I'm not saying this because I'm a fan of the DX; personally, I loathe the design, the inability to add extra storage and the essentially proprietary nature. But if you're going to compare, compare like for like. This does not fit the existing niche for ebook readers very well, being rather heavy, rather expensive, and prone to run out of battery half way through a long haul flight - frequent travel and student life seem to be the sort of use case that suit existing ebook reader designs the best.

It's also not ideal as an office tablet, given the lack of input devices - you can dock a keyboard on all sorts of devices. Lots of people buy bluetooth keyboards for use with portable devices. I don't think I've ever seen a person using one in an airport, except for me, and I'm a vi masochist.

Perhaps there is a large niche for not very good but very expensive ebook readers that also offer not-very-practical but very expensive office-suite functionality and moderately acceptable but very expensive media playback. Perhaps people will just buy it so they can be people who own an iPad. Either way, it has very little in common with Kindle DX.