I would recommend buying yourself a Macbook Pro, getting VMWare Fusion or if you're low on funds after buying the MB, then VirtualBox, and running a Linux VM. You get the solid quality of the MBPro hardware and the standardised hardware environment that a VM offers and the resulting good linux driver behaviour.

I use VirtualBox on my 2010 MBPro and it works like a charm.

Send a text to my mom when I get to the police station.

Oh, I would rather chew off my own foot than grade first year history papers, but that's what they are: endless digging up and quoting of primary sources with a massive bibliography.

For my institution in Canada, a big concern was that we might be jeopardizing our students' future options if they wrote something that was politically sensitive in the U.S. and it was snatched up under PATRIOT Act legislation and used against them for blacklisting or other discrimination in the future.

I was a technical advisor to a committee creating policy for Turnitin style service use on the university campus I work on. Turnitin isn't a plagiarism detection service: they're being disingenuous when they say that. It is a text matching service. The difference is significant: a first-year history paper might be 75% matched, but not plagiarized because the student correctly attributed all their quoted passages.

The committee recommended against using it for detecting plagiarism, and for encouraging its use as a teaching tool to make students aware of proper citation techniques and the importance of avoiding plagiarism.

Some service like this also happen to be quite good at the most common kind of plagiarism: someone on campus submitting someone elses paper from the previous year to a different prof... but that's a special clear-cut case of cheating, not what people commonly think of as plagiarism.

Just to clarify, multiple certs to the same party is not a problem: as certmaster for a university, hundreds of certs for different CNs have been issued to me.

And yes, I agree it is a broken system: it's a protection racket variant as it currently stands.

Did ANYONE who had commented in this thread actually read the linked article? Nowhere does it say that drone strikes are not hostile, it says that they don't meet the legal definition of "hostilities", which is a very different statement.

If the POTUS calls American Slashdot readers who don't RTFA morons every day for 91 days, he's being hostile, but it doesn't require congressional approval to continue because it's not hostilities as defined by the your War Powers Resolution.

Is there a passive defense against this? I'm very curious: this would seem to be a fairly serious threat for a military plane in combat, how do they deal with it? Is there a film that could be retrofitted to canopy windows on commercial craft?

The institution where I work has been considering the Turnitin products lately. It has been an interesting process analyzing what it can and cannot do, and how to avoid a confrontational situation like that described in the article. First of all, Turnitin can't detect plagiarism. It is a text matching software suite, and can detect commonality between works. Plagiarism is a social phenomenon, and can't be dealt with by an automated tool.

Where the product really shines in my opinion is when it is used as a teaching tool. Students are permitted to submit their assignments to Turnitin before they submit to their instructor, and they get back their originality report from Turnitin. Then they have the ability to *learn* proper attribution and citation with the help of this tool. When a paragraph gets a low originality rating, they can look and verify whether they have correctly cited their source material, and if they have, then they're good to go. When used like this, Turnitin becomes a valuable teaching tool that is appreciated by the students rather than something they try to fight against. And what is the goal in the end? It's not to throw students out of college, it's to make sure they understand how to attribute things correctly, and make them better writers.

To answer the question about what happens if there is a match to a paper from another institution: In that case, an instructor account can request a copy from the other paper's instructor via Turnitin. If the request is granted, the appropriate sections are forwarded to the requesting instructor.