Very nice, props to you sir. However, it seems you left out a few of my favorites.

Andrew Jackson eats the first marshmallow and declares that if you want to keep the second from him, you can enforce it with your army.

Rutherford Hayes eats his marshmallow just as you re-enter the room, and is awarded his prize only after you confer with your panel of co-researchers.

Grover Cleveland eats the first marshmallow, but gets his second when he comes back two days later.

William Howard Taft eats the marshmallow, then eats you, then gets stuck in the doorframe on the way out.

Warren Harding is dead when you come back.

You promise Herbert Hoover a second, but really just take away the first if he hasn't eaten it.

Gerald Ford tries to eat his marshmallow, but only manages to bite his tongue, fall down the stairs, and get shot at on the way out.

That was kind of my first thought, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like this could be a tremendous poster child for Project Natal. If it's at all like advertised, they could throw in a cheap fake plastic controller or something, maybe even have you map your own equipment to controls and get all the control of a PC game on the console. Or maybe use the standard controller in conjunction with motion capture. Hell, I'd definitely spend sixty bucks to rain destruction from a Mech that mimicked my movements.

I used to love Chegg. It started out working as essentially an online classified geared towards books, and since it started at Iowa State, the school I go to, there were plenty of people using it, and it wound up being a very good deal, taking the cost of books per semester down to almost nothing (except of course when they switched editions every few years).

Now that they're pushing their rental service so hard, it's a lot harder to save as much money. I couldn't find any of my books used last semester, which may be due to my major classes getting more specialized and smaller, so I decided to give them a try. They usually rent at 40-60% the cost of a new book, which I suppose still saves money on both ends when you figure in the new edition cycle. However, it is more expensive if you end up keeping the book, and so I suppose I'll end up going to the bookstore again for anything I can't mooch of older friends next year.

Basically it differs from the typical cycle of buying and selling back in that you get a slightly better deal in exchange for letting them know ahead of time that you will be giving it back at the end of semester. Works well in a lot of cases, but it does imply that you expect no lasting value from the book and generally turn out to be correct.

Sounds like the perfect gift for the ninja who's got it all.

...sorry.

I'm sure there's a way to do it right, though. Guitar Hero's doing all right selling games that require special controllers - not that putting out a new or crazy controller is guaranteed to be a great sales plan, but as long as they put out a few good games to go along with it it ought to do all right on the current xbox.

My fraternity actually used to do this and we've all but stopped now since nobody uses it. The reason is that nearly all of our classes have started posting old exams, answer keys, course notes, and a few of the good teachers will even post past homework. Most classes also have homework weighted pretty lightly so that learning the material (as tested on the exams) is what really matters. With this setup, past homework of course can't be used for cheating, but sometimes seeing something worked out will help make a connection you might not have otherwise and past exams really help take away the horrible feeling of not knowing if you're prepared for a test or not. I will agree with previous posters that if students are able to use past resources to cheat, this is more the fault of a lazy professor than anything.

Also, back when we did keep study files, it was an "advertised" benefit of joining the house, not swept under the rug as you seem to describe. As far as I know, no one at the university ever had a problem with us or any other house/organization/random group of friends doing it. Now we mainly focus on the fact that we've got older members from a wide array of majors who are willing to help out younger members as needed.

How could it permanently disfigure Orion? Can't you just say its name three times and have it pop right back?

Well, time to duck now.

I realize you're probably joking, but our intro class actually teaches VBA, and even though it's a general overview for engineers of all shapes and sizes, they really do a poor job of teaching the fundamentals of programming, choosing instead to focus mainly on the syntax and the language itself. As far as I know, no subsequent class ever uses VBA, so we struggle with any future programming almost as much as we would have without an intro class. They may be looking to fix that, but for now it functions primarily as a weedout class and nothing else.

I didn't go into computer/software engineering, but I did TA the intro class for a semester and have worked with its graduates (my engineering peers) on group projects and the like. In my opinion, they really ought to teach the logic of programming (flowcharts and the like) much more heavily than focusing on any one language. That way, you don't have people sitting and memorizing the way a certain program is written but lacking the common sense to so much as use a loop rather than writing the same calculation over and over again.

So teach FORTRAN, teach VB6, teach them LOLCODE or whatever the hell you want but please make sure you're teaching them why the code is written the way it is and that computers don't necessarily think the way you do.

I've heard it's a sure sign of lupus.

You also can't use stones to play Tetris with the cars on a 12-lane highway. Can't wait for that video to hit Youtube.

Plenty of people alive today will not die of natural causes. Listen for loud, sudden noises and you should be able to find a few.

The download manager for eMusic works fine - they've released a version for linux. I have had a few problems with it (probably because I'm a bit of a n00b when it comes to Linux) but most can be straightened out by closing and restarting the manager. There's also a side project called eMusic J that works in linux and, of course, you can change your settings to download tracks individually in mp3 format if nothing else works for you.

I think it may be important to note that not everything needs "freshening up". Some teachers can pull off teaching the same thing every year, and teaching it very well.

For example, our department's statistics teacher uses the same powerpoint every year, same tests, and maybe even the same assignments and still manages to turn a field with very little joy to be found for most people into an interesting and enjoyable class. He also does most of the presentations for our department (materials engineering) which are enjoyed by everyone from grade-school age to adults. It's only once you see one of his presentations several times that you realize he's pretty much going through the same script verbatim.

It works very well for him, and as long as nothing's broke, I don't see any reason to fix it. On the other hand, I do agree with you that if a teacher thinks a large number of people would risk copying notes to avoid going to class and learning the material, she should probably look into alternate solutions rather than the one described.

I'm sure you're right in saying that she does not legally have the power to go into your backpack but it seems most people so far are forgetting the real power teachers have over students these days - grades.

I remember a chem class where we were "allowed" to turn in our lab notebooks for points as the labs/prelabs were going to be the same the next semester, and they wanted to prevent straight up copying if they could. I would guess the students here are in a similar, albeit worse-sounding, situation.

The students are well within their rights to refuse to turn over notes, or pull any of the copy-related stunts mentioned in this discussion. Problem is, the teacher is likely to have the power to go right home and dock them a letter grade or two, or, for example, require students to hand in notes to get the final exam. There just aren't a lot of options available to students if a professor's doing something wrong and they care about the class at all.

This may have been true in the past, but it is not anymore, at least not universally. I grew up on a farm in the middle of Iowa, not in poverty but certainly not well-off, and when I went to college, I was recruited by an old family friend to a fraternity. I was very uncertain at first, but the rush chairman was a nice guy (he ended up my "big brother" and I followed in his footsteps as a materials engineering major). I came down and stayed in the house for orientation, and after a good look at the dorms I'd be living in, I joined the house.

Honestly, living in house is cheaper than dorms, we've got several people who came in very socially inept (myself included), and I'm not a great judge of male physical appearance, but I know there's no looks category we factor in when deciding whether to rush or activate someone. In fact, the only problems we've had activating people dealt with more of the "scumbags and assholes" mentioned in an uncle post. There are several houses on our campus, chapters of our fraternity on other campus, and even our house years ago that seem to exemplify these qualities; we use these as examples what not do when we plan out what we want the fraternity to be like.

The Greek system as a whole is undergoing a lot of changes now that a lot more options for incoming students are opening up. Our chapter is one of very few on our campus that is actually growing right now, and I'd like to think it's because we don't treat people like shit.

And before I forget, as to the grandparent's point, I do think it was very beneficial in my case to live in the fraternity. I'm the type that doesn't make friends as easily, but once I do, I make good friends, and the fraternity was very conducive to this. It's also provided activities that help me branch out more. I can easily picture myself cooped up in a dorm room for four years, but thankfully that didn't happen.

The bottom line is that if people in fraternities you know do act like complete dicks, they probably are and you should steer clear of them. But if they do seem like nice guys, it could be because they are. Even little stereotypes like the ones people hold against Greeks can be damaging, so try to get to know them a little and then make a judgment. And if you have done this and happened to only run into asshats, I am sorry.