I'd like to offer that in my doctoral program (engineering/applied physics), nearly all the exams from the upper level graduate courses were take home, in that you couldn't possibly ask a meaningful question on an exam that would consume less than an hour of work, assuming the answer had to be rigorous. I never cheated, but honestly, the exam was sufficiently difficult and original that it didn't matter how many references you combed through: if you didn't know your stuff, then there was no way to complete the exam.

The problems that this writer tackled (at least the ones he/she described) were largely analysis or superficial synthesis problems. That is, the material usually asked for heaps of creativity (same in my field), but without requiring a deep knowledge of the subject. Because when you get down to it, your professor is just about the same as other PhDs: at most a few doctoral degrees propping up lots of experience. The experience, however, is usually second hand, as the graduate students actually do the work and the professor just gets to read about it (if that). The architecture of Academia is setup allows for cheating, as the professor is rarely a deep expert in all of the subjects he/she must teach. Simply put, the systems of professors and peer review only have a shot at filtering crap from honest students.

I think the point the poster was trying to make was that "acronym" was supposed to be "synonym" or even just "euphemism." The OP was trying to equate "Secure" with "DRM" in some sense (unclear from the context, IMO).

One correction and one addition. The correction: the exponential model for population growth and resource consumption when applied to human beings has been a public failure (ref. every human population explosion prediction from 1960's forward), so please don't reduce a more complex model down to a little exponential equation.

The addition: macro-economics. Specifically, where does money (in the West) derive its value from? Why do we think that exponential economic growth is sustainable given limited resources and populations in decline (though most have not peaked)?

Personally, I believe that the marketing for math which says that you should study it because it is useful is absurd. Math is art, not engineering or some other applied thing. When math is applied to study a problem, it usually forms the foundation for that discipline. Apply math to describing physical things and you have the physical sciences. Apply math to describe societies and you have the social sciences. Therefore, if the student studies these separate disciplines, the student necessarily must pick up the math. It is hard to pick up the math alongside many other new concepts from a given discipline because math is reasoning according to some fixed set of rules (which can be arbitrary). Without the abstract reasoning provided by mathematics, the student must practice it on the fly. My point is that practicing abstract reasoning using math is not necessarily an application of something, but rather a fundamentally creative exercise, like art.

Perhaps her confusion comes from the idea that the disposition of each child is an independent, random variable. Indeed, each child comes with a certain "random" (i.e. we don't know how it works) combination of genes from the parents, which predispose the child to behave in certain ways (though not necessarily determine behavior in those certain ways). Therefore, it is clear that each child shall behave differently from his/her older siblings. However, while a child's typical behavior determines the part of the difficulty of raising the child, it does not control everything. Parental experience also affects the subjective evaluation of difficulty (speaking as a parent of multiple children). Therefore, the difficulty of raising the N+1 child is, at best, a dependent random variable. The strength of the correlation between the N+1 difficulty and the N difficulty may be weak, but I would argue that modeling the difficulty as a purely independent random variable is incorrect.

Nevertheless, I strongly agree that her statement that she is "due" an easier child this next time around is fundamentally flawed unless she (and her partner) have consciously examined how her own disposition and mindset could have been different so that her previous children would have been interpreted as easier. Of course, the entire idea that she is "due" an easier child is based on a metaphysical concept of fairness, which can only be disproved for simple definitions of "fairness."

I think the important point here is that the phenomena be observable ('scientific" is at best redundant). Good science makes no claims on the importance of the phenomena, since that would ascribe a value that is at least anthropocentric. Materialists claim that there are no entities beyond the observable. Everyone else either makes no such claim or actively claims that there are things beyond the physical (i.e. metaphysical). Like causality or God.

The philosophy of science, like any philosophy, impacts how a person understands the subject. You can go really wrong if you try to supplant the philosophy with another (e.g. Creationism), but it is important to understand why science has worked so well. It isn't that science necessarily rejects anything metaphysical (such as causality, at least up to quantum physics), but simply minimizes the metaphysical requirements of any theory, since science is supposed to be experimentally verifiable. This is a good way to work, since no reasonable arguments can arise without some way to resolve them ultimately. It is important, however, to distinguish between the evidence and the interpretation of that evidence (theory!). The evidence never, ever, ever explains itself, since that requires some metaphysical interpolation (e.g., invoking objective reality, objective truth, integrity of the senses, perhaps causality, etc.).

I agree with most of your comments, except that philosophy does not equal history and science is more than a black box model. Indeed, a great temptation in science, especially the venerable physics, is to consider it simply as mathematical modeling. I have found throughout my doctorate the most useful theories are the ones which attempt to give a non-mathematical description of how the universe works in some particular way. In my field, numerical simulations are entirely possible for some complex situations, but one cannot be considered an expert if one simply presses a button to execute a mathematical model. In my opinion (as an engineer), the real test of a scientific theory is whether it can be used for a realistic engineering application. The typical engineering application requires one to assume a vast amount about the problem at hand and therefore becomes a tedious, uninspired exercise if only mathematical models are used to engineer the device. Whether we are ultimately describing epicycles or true orbits can make a really big difference in the difficulty and expense of the engineered device (imagine designing a satellite to keep up with the motions of the planets if they really moved in epicycles!). The closer we are to completely explaining a physical event means that we have a closer mental model of reality, which is the real pursuit of science.

That said, I am unfamiliar with any necessary interpretations which quantum mechanics places on the student that forces a particular metaphysical result on the question of the existence of God. References?

Is it really so different that the offending items are electronic than if they were physical?

Consider this scenario:
(1) Disgruntled person A wants to get person B in trouble by planting child porn in B's work desk.
(2) A calls the cops on B.
(3) Cops find the porn in B's work desk.

Do the cops automatically jump to the conclusion that B owned the child porn? Or do they try to investigate further to establish how the material likely got there? If yes to the latter question, then perhaps the basic problem is that cops don't get the desktop metaphor: anyone who has access to the desk can put stuff on it. There isn't an invisible shield permeable by only the desk's owner. Computers are literary no different and thoughts of equivalent magic shields around the computer's hard drive only impede justice.