You evidently don't have a clue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtiCHtHxc48
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GxLNNu74DE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNW51s_tQOE

yeah because it is almost everyday that a large software vendor aims to reduce someone's level of suffering by not collecting any $$ on their product.

You definitely should. One of the biggest benefits of building apps for mobile phones is that you don't need to market your app - the app stores are excellent distribution channels and your app isn't stuck out there waiting to be discovered by the masses for the next 20 years. Major indie mac developers have made the switch to the iPhone and now more actively focus on iOS devices than they do on the Mac. This is a general trend. Smartphones' potential is still being discovered. Try to profit from the gold rush while you can.

MSR conducts tons of R&D and they are free to pursue any research they want. They fund the AT&T Bell Labs of the modern era.

Please do. This looks very nice.

Very few undergraduates I know take an active interest in research. At a school like MIT, Harvard or Caltech (throw in the schools take take extremely motivated kids) you can trust the undergraduate to take things seriously. Everywhere else, you are wasting your time and money if you expect the students to take an active interest in learning - kids don't want to take advantage of office hours currently.. to place them in control of finding, accumulating and critiquing their own literature is just wrong and contradicts everything known about human behavior Also did the kids get a refund for the school's experiment? I would sue if a college wasted an entire year of a kid's undergraduate life just because of a hypothesis of a new / untested teaching style.

My trackball comes with a wheel.

Most of India's trains are the sleeper-kind too. They are widely popular there and in recent times the government has been able to break even on their railway operations.

Do you mean Akamai ? I didn't look at it from that perspective. Thanks for pointing that out.

Wouldn't the absence of net neutrality allow a situation where a media organization with a political agenda (like most media organizations in the US) can buy out an ISP and carry out Rwandan Hutu style propaganda indirectly by only allowing their chosen party to "campaign". Also the media is given too much credit for "keeping a check on the government". Most of the media personnel nowadays display the IQ of someone who failed to graduate community college and they somehow can't remember what "integrity" is. I view the FCC's loss to Comcast in court to be the result of inadequate legislation and current lawmakers' limited understanding of the internet. Why can't Google tie up with a couple of ISPs to slow delivery of Bing's content to users? And why would anyone want to engage the judiciary for resolving any anti-trust problems when the loophole can be closed right now? Of course I might be wrong about these topics but I really can't see the negatives of enforcing net neutrality. The internet greatly improved my quality of life as people were not limited by barriers to launching services. Certain forms of content distribution might be artificially restricted even if they are perfect for the situation at hand.

Despite all the bad press they get, MS and Intel have very good hiring practices. They believe in hiring anyone who displays talent - regardless of nationality. They really don't have anything to gain by trying to game the H1B system. The shady stuff happens at smaller companies working on mostly insignificant stuff.

If you sit collecting proof for the industry, you will go bankrupt. Very few people I know give a damn about rewarding someone for their work. Windows 7 was retailing for $30 for students and many students preferred to pirate that too. Claiming that people take stuff like "the amount of DRM" and "how it affects usability" seriously is just bullshit. No one other than the average jobless nerd engages in that kind of analysis for something that solely provides entertainment. DRM is here to stay. Warez are more appealing to users because unlike cheap Chinese knockoffs of shiny iToys that won't work, pirated software gets you the real finished product for no cost. Is it so hard for you to understand that people don't see any reason to pay if it can be had for $0?

Agreed. Powerpoint brings its own problems to the table but it has permeated instruction so much that it is something we have to embrace. Using the overhead projectors (the ones that use clear plastic sheets) are the best way to teach.

I've seen profs use tablet PCs and every other dumb tool and the unanimous opinion of teachers and students alike is that overhead projectors and powerpoint are good enough for most teaching. Anything else accomplishes nothing extra but costs more $$.

Thanks a lot for this comment. I am a rising junior in CS and I will be applying to grad school next year. About talking to professors at your school, did you send out emails to them or did you meet them, say at a department social ? Which of these is preferred?