Or, you know, so that a rapist would get put in jail. Since, you know, he raped her.

I think you're missing the part where he raped her. You don't get to make "expressions of frustration" that won't get taken seriously about killing the girl that you already raped.

I'm sorry, but you lose all right to joke about killing a girl once you've raped her.

Given how he talked about the makeup examine, I'd say this was probably an online exam students were allowed to complete on their own time. Which means having the questions ahead of time allows them to have the sit with the answers to the questions and just put in the correct answers. The only way that kind of exam actually determines a student's level of knowledge/ability to find answers from literature is if the student doesn't have the questions. I agree, being given a mess of questions and answers ahead of time and the professor picks a third of those for the actual examine is a good way of doing things, but that doesn't work if students have the Q&A during the test, which they obviously can if they take the test on their own time.

First, this is actually a good learning experience for you and those other students on proper citation. If any idea came from someone else, you have to cite it, otherwise it's idea theft. If you're lifting actual portions, you better be quoting, not just citing.

Second, this is hardly similar. "Advanced copy of a test" and "plagiarized small portions of a paper" are in different realms of cheating. Getting an advanced copy of a test is is very, very obviously cheating and very easy to identify. Accidental plagiarism is typically unnoticed by students and unidentifiable by professors.

Apparently you need to take a few more statistics courses. Based on scores alone, he could pull apart the two distributions (distributions of people who did not cheat, and those who did, which combine to make the bimodal distribution). Then, he can examine the pattern of questions to identify cheaters. People with the advanced partial copies will have nearly identical patterns, all getting the same difficult questions correct and the same easy questions wrong (as mentioned by an AC above) because they either had access to the question ahead of time or they didn't. Add to that the fact that the prof has the advanced partial copy and finding cheaters becomes almost trivial: whoever got all (or nearly all) the questions from the advanced partial copy and did significantly worse on questions not in the advanced partial copy is a cheater.

And a final nail in the coffin for the cheaters: they have to take a new test. After they've taken the new test, he can compare their "level of knowledge" from the first to the second. If they aced the section on subject A in the first test, then bombed it on the second test, major red flag.

The issue isn't that cheaters can't be identified. Cheaters are incredibly easy to identify. The issue is that, sometimes, people who legitimately did well can look like cheaters, which is exactly what he said: all the cheaters would be on the list, but not all the people on the list would be cheaters. But even those people will be few. In a class of 600, if he can get a .1% false positive rate, then maybe one student will be falsely accused. Given how the cheating occurred, he's likely to get an even lower false positive rate and an almost nonexistent false negative rate.

I don't think you understand what a corporation is. If a corporation is dissolved, regardless of what the executives do, the corporation has ceased to exist, i.e., died. Corporations are legal entities, and the dissolving of that legal entity is how you execute a corporation. I can't stress this point enough: a corporation is not the people who work for it.

Further, confiscating the assets, instead of giving the assets back to the shareholders, would screw more people not directly involved with the corporation than people involved in the corporation. For instance, I can own stock in Microsoft. If Microsoft dissolved, the corporation would buy it back, and I would get some of my money back (probably not a lot). You're suggesting I get none of my money back. Why? Who knows! I certainly don't think you have a rational explanation.

Wonderful suggestions. There will be a complete versioning system (I don't know how many times I've edited something several times then thought, "You know... this was all much better five days ago...").

As for backups (and file formats), the files will be downloadable/uploadable in doc/odt/pdf/txt (at minimum) and more will be added as standard word processors advance (for instance, docx). Further, I'll have distributed-redundant servers to help prevent a server shutdown from ruining everyone's day.

The multiple layers of security is an excellent idea that I hadn't given much thought to. I will definitely implement different user types (author, editor, commenter, reader) and integrate that into the versioning system.

Thank you for your time and thoughts. I'll be sure to keep Slashdot in the loop as the project moves forward.

I'm currently in the planning stages. I'm of the opinion that software should be planned first, then written, which is why I'm asking for suggestions now.

I will keep everyone posted when the open beta comes around.

Yeah, except for such laws as, I don't know, wiretapping.

"Home in my room" is common sense private. Sure, they didn't break any federal laws (all wiretapping laws not related to police are, to my knowledge, state), but I'm pretty sure that state crimes committed by a employees of a public institution automatically escalates the case to the federal level.

Digging deep enough, they're saying, "only the plaintiff has the right to sell merchandise bearing the Festival Trademarks at and near the Festival." They're not going after people making recordings of the festival. They're going after people illegally selling bootlegged merchandise at the festival. This is likely to happen. It seems perfectly reasonable to me to file court proceedings and get police support when there is a high likelihood of specific, known crimes being committed.

It's like seeing a bunch of suspicious looking people standing outside a jewelry store with crowbars at midnight. Sure, a crime has not been committed yet, but you're a jackass if you don't report it to police.

Yeah, that was my first thought.

His illness should not be taken into account at this stage of the criminal justice process. The proper stages are approximately:

1. Investigation

2. Arrest

3. Negotiation (plea bargain)

4. Failing 3, determination of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt (trial)

5. Upon 4, sentencing

6. Punishment/justice/whatever you want to call it

This is from a US point of view, but I don't think there's much difference on the UK side of things. Stages 1 through 4 are for establishing that a crime was committed and who committed it. AT NO POINT is the moral ability of the suspect relevant (except how it relates to the investigators in determining who committed the crime). Since this case is international, step 3 has gotten rather large and unwieldy, and that's where we're currently stuck. Three. When we get to step 5, we can talk about if his illness is relevant or not.

Side note: the ones who can't tell right from wrong? They ALSO have conduct disorder. Having Asperger's alone does not make you amoral. For this to even be relevant at step 5, antisocial personality disorder (the adult version of conduct disorder) would have to be proven. Even if it was, it's estimated that the majority of offenders in US prisons have APD, so it's not like we're more lenient with them.

In that specific case, the question is very clearly answered: committing a crime (any crime) across state borders (hacking, murder, etc.) OR committing a series of the same crime across multiple states is under federal jurisdiction. Since there is not a world governing body (UN doesn't count), there's less clear-cut jurisdiction over, say, someone in Canada shooting across the border and killing someone in the US. That being said, I believe the location of the victim would determine the jurisdiction of the crime.

Of course, that's not exactly analogous to this case. McKinnon actually committed two crimes: computer misuse in the UK and hacking in the US. He should be tried for both in the respective locations.