At least at my school, it was clearly (and frequently) explained what plagiarism is and exactly what happens if they find you pulling that kind of stuff. Now, maybe if you come in as a 3rd year or something like that you might be able to miss all the talks, but I think any school would be extremely remiss if they neglected to give that sort of orientation to incoming foreign students.

As a personal anecdote, semi-related, my girlfriend is from India. She has a cousin back home who is paying somebody to attend college for her, so she can get a teaching degree. It blew my mind that yes, it's considered acceptable to do this--her whole family knows, and at least the ones over there don't see any problem with it.

It should actually be easier than Android. MeeGo seems much more of a standard Linux system, and Inferno already supports Linux/arm systems. It's up to you to run Inferno as an app on top of the MeeGo graphical layers, or to strip things down to the kernel/utilities layer and build from there, like we did.

It would be far better to just make a NAND. You can build any logical function out of NAND gates.

I have helped write non-trivial programs in Go. It's quite pleasant. I think the big reason Google hasn't bothered to provide "adequate tooling" is the developers. That is, I think many of the creators and big users prefer to just work with a plain text editor rather than an IDE. There's a reasonably decent Emacs mode for Go, but it's readable enough without any syntax highlighting, and gofmt will fix your indentation and such for you. As for the debugger, well, there's http://blog.golang.org/2010/11/debugging-go-code-status-report.html (very old but even then they already had GDB support going), but as the first line says, "When it comes to debugging, nothing beats a few strategic print statements to inspect variables or a well-placed panic to obtain a stack trace", which is all I ever used to debug my Go code--and found it reasonably painless! Oh, and regarding generics--I'm not sure they'll ever go in. It is proposed CONSTANTLY on the mailing list, and Pike et al always indicate that they're not interested.

PDP-11/23 (with 4 MB of RAM and a 512x512 framebuffer card!) in my apartment. It still works but the hard drives I have for it are shot.

Being on the new Sci-Fi Channel (sorry, SyFy) seems to make things into giant crocodile movies and professional wrestling.

When your customized system takes 2-3 times as long to boot as Windows on the same hardware, you probably have made a mistake. Maybe next time don't write it all in python.

Of interest in the "players set the rules" topic is LambdaMOO, where players actually sent in petitions which became ballots which were voted on and implemented. Frequently, a ballot to permanently shut down the game was submitted; luckily, they never passed. Other ballots would include changes in quota policy, new user policy, etc.

Compare the FAH systems to BlueGene/P. BlueGene is made up of System-on-Chip PowerPC computers, stuck on DIMM-like cards and then put into arrays, which go into racks, etc. Hugely power efficient, in part because each system doesn't maintain a disk and other crap.

On the other hand, your home computer is inefficient in terms of both heat, power, and space, because it has to run all the other hardware stuff you don't have in a proper supercomputer.

Replying for truth--every (mostly CS or supercomputing) conference I can think of wants PDF, with some accepting LaTeX or troff.

Real computer science students (and the computer engineering students who end up taking the classes too) are smart enough to pick up Unix as they work through the CS courses. It's a good idea to have one or two class sessions to talk about Unix, but having actual Unix courses seems rather silly.

So yeah, if they're teaching a full course on just using Unix, it's probably IT.

I spent a longer-than-is-healthy period of time trying to figure out to build a mostly safe EMP device to fry cars at stoplights with stereos that do that.

HERF gun.