Their motto is, "Do no evil," so they can't be doing anything sinister. Plus, they gave me free web services, so they must all be really nice guys. Surely they're not going to do anything to hurt us...

When all three have exactly the same typos preventing the assignment from compiling, then there's not much worry about false positives.

In my classes, that would be irrelevant. Non compiling code gets 0% anyway.

Paper Mario isn't art? Silent Hill isn't art? Pikmin isn't art? Dead Space isn't art? Fable isn't art? There's so many games that have an amazing art direction. So, just because that art is placed in an environment that sets goals, it isn't art anymore? Pikmin would be the exact same experience if we replaced it with Atari graphics? Silent Hill would be just as scary if Pyramid Head was nothing more than a capital T chasing your character that looks like a Y?

Can the artifacts please either die or off or evolve? Please? It's really hindering the progress of the new generation when the old generation is brainwashing the current generation into believing crap like that. Sheesh.

Disclaimer: Yes, I know that many of you are in the current generation. I'm not talking about people who get it; I'm talking about the average 'Murican that believes whatever Fox News spits out.

I'm unconvinced. I've met several law-abiding people who would likely be murderers if they had easy access to guns. Whether or not that -justifies- gun control legislation, I'm not going to argue. And whether or not legislation rather than laziness, rational thought most of the tmie, or financing prevented those individuals from having a gun, I also won't argue.

Even the U.S. criminal justice system does not "refuse to tolerate even the possibility of a false positive". Not even in theory.

Whether cheating on a given assignment could be caught in this way depends on the assignment. It's not all or nothing. Moreover, any method of detecting cheating is an exercise in collecting red flags and looking at patterns (remember, you don't have to evaluate whether a student is cheating based on one assignment in isolation) until suspicion reaches a threshold; and then investigating to see if even that pattern was just a coincidence. A tool for automated code analysis is just a source of "red flag" data.

You're framing your arguments as though this were some theoretical idea for how to catch cheating. It's been going on for at least 10-15 years. The bottom line is, the tools don't fail students; the professors do. If you don't trust them to exercise proper discretion in interpreting the output of these tools, you shouldn't be paying to take their course at all.

The "perfect technical solution or nothing" attitude serves only cheaters. I'll nonetheless refuse from making assumptions about your motives.

I too was amazed at the lack of basic programming ability exhibited by many of my classmates. And I have the sneaking suspicion that these sort of students are now graduating and actually starting to design stuff in the real world, such as Toyota automobiles. If I had to put money on it, I’d bet on it being a relatively basic programming mistake such as an overflow or a divide-by-zero. Or an impossible, “you should never get here” state in the code that they failed to realize was possible.

Fuck 'em, then...

... what? The BBC has simply added DRM to prevent people ripping iPlayer streams. No one has to "fork over more cash to watch programmes they already paid for." In fact, one can watch iPlayer without having paid any TV License fee at all.

Instead of whining about the License fee, why not complain about the substance of the matter: that of DRM in online media?