In a coversation with friends during the recent doping inquiry with Clemens, I proposed a split of MLB into enhanced and un-enhanced branches.

In the un-enhanced branch, every player rises to the top of their natural ability; if they catch you doping illegally, you would be banned from *both* branches, and never allowed to play professionally again.

In the enhanced branch, you could bat while wearing a test tube actively pumping neon-green ooze into your veins, and no rules would be broken, but that would be your choice.

What I'm against is people having to actively try to satisfy two competing ideals in the same sport (continual excitement, improvement and results / un-natural enhancing and active hiding of illicit enhancers).

There's also a "curator effect" that some teachers take to heart, if you can call it that, in the sense that if it wasn't taught by them, you shouldn't know about it, or that knowledge is suspect in some way.

Going back to ancient times, my class on Applied Programming used Lotus 1-2-3 macros to develop an automated spreadsheet. Our professor insisted that we use /X commands, which were cryptic and made debugging difficult. My cousin loaned me a book which explained that the /X commands could be replaced with commands in braces, so /XBG would appear as {GOTO}, for example. My code became much more legible and easier for anyone who came afterwards to follow.

The professor, however, refused to accept any assignments that used the brace variant of these commands, even though they were legitimate and functionally identical, simply because he hadn't taught them. After all, I could have "cheated" by obtaining knowledge that wasn't available to others in the class. That was one professor that lost a lot of respect in my eyes. As someone who's been on both sides of the teaching relationship, I would regularly take pride in those that exceeded the scope of my classes, and that went above and beyond what we could cover in the classroom.

I can empathize with the shock of finding out you're wanted for something this severe that you have absolutely no involvement in. While we lived outside of the US, my brother had his car stolen, so we reported it to the police that very night.

A couple of weeks later, a magazine notorious for reporting on gory crimes with graphic photos (at the time, everyone joked that "blood leaked out of the magazine if you squeezed it hard enough") had both my brother and myself accused as murderers in a crime that involved the stolen vehicle. It turns out that a receipt they found in the vehicle had my brother's name and my family's phone number. It took a while to determine that the victim was related to the author of the article, and after talking with the police, we were able to clear our names and get a retraction printed.

I have two anecdotes from my years of teaching low-level courses in CS:

1) An introductory Java course had about 5 TAs that took care of programming labs, helped grade assignments and tests. One TA received an assignment for a student, but comments in the code mentioned that the author of the code was another student who was under a different TA. Both TAs spoke to these student separately, and it was pretty simple to determine which one had the student that was copying code from the other. When *that* student was confronted with the damning evidence, he retorted "What do you want me to do, change the variable names?"

2) I received assignments from my students, both electronically and in printed form. When going through the code, it was obvious that three students had colluded and made token changes to the code; functions were in the same order on each of these printouts, to the point that laying them out on a table side by side and flipping the pages one by one for all three printouts had the exact same spacing from the left margin, the same spacing between functions, indentation, etc. Since the program worked as intended, they got a score of 100. . . split into three grades of 33 each.

Though the above may work in a phishing website, it's absolutely worthless in a true MITM scheme. Recall that the MITM is forwarding *your* input to the *true* website, and will give you the same results as if you had entered them yourself.

*cough* Resolver One *cough*