I'm an Australian university student in one of our top 10 universities, so I thought it would be interesting to compare your experiences to mine, especially since the cost of a 4 year degree (~$32k) is similar to the average cost in the US (according to wikipedia, anyway).

All our lecturers have consultation hours, which is basically a block of time they schedule each week for anyone who wants one-on-one help, and they start each unit by telling us when they are and to make use of them if we need it.
While I haven't used them myself, whenever I have emailed a lecturer or posted a query on the discussion forums, I've usually gotten a reply in a few days.

So I'd say we do get help, but only if we ask for it.

Timetabling is a fairly hard problem, computationally speaking. The more students who take a unit, the more slots there will be for its classes, but that's still subject to the availability of its lecturers. On top of that, you can't assume that everyone will take the same units at the same time - lots of courses require the same units, or require you to take them in a certain (distinct) order in order to take certain electives, and some people will need to alter their course structure if they fail a few. Having some dead time is unavoidable as a result of this.

A 30 minute class is pretty stupid though - the longer the class, the less dead time you'll have between classes. 60-90 min lectures work well in my experience.

How were you required to buy it? I'm genuinely curious, because I often hear this as a criticism (of US universities).
How it works here is the unit guide sets out a proscribed textbook, or recommended resources. Whether we buy them or not is entirely up to us, though some coursework may say "refer to ch X for background", and the library usually has copies that they don't allow to be loaned (so that they're always available).

I don't live on campus, but I haven't heard of any problems with the campus security.

FTFY.

I started using a Gentoo derivative (Sabayon*) about a year ago, and it's an absolute pleasure to work with. (Particularly how colourful the package manager is compared to Debian.) In addition to the above, I suggest the following:
-Keep package.use, etc. and make.conf under version control. (This is really helpful in case you accidentally break something.)
-Use git instead of rsync for the portage tree - it's much faster, especially when the total no. of changes is small. (This is doubly true if you have multiple Gentoo installs.)

* Sabayon has systemd as the default, but it's easy enough to change back to OpenRC and being able to use binary packages saves a lot of time.

The problem is that these decisions are going to be made long before we have anything resembling a complete understanding of what these genes do. The classic example is sickle cell anemia: given the choice it would be selected again, even though it results in resistance to malaria. This kind of control over genetics can only lead to a reduction in biodiversity (since the majority of people will make decisions using similar values), and then we're just one pandemic away from near-extinction.

For loops are an imperative construct - you wouldn't find one in a functional language. Depending on what you were trying to achieve, you might express a similar concept using a fold and an algebraic type (Either or Maybe) to indicate when to ignore the rest of the elements.
I do agree that error handling is more inconvenient than in languages with exceptions though - wrapping the result in a type that can contain the result or an error is only a minor improvement on C-style return codes.

Personally, I've settled for a compromise between the two - Rust and D are both imperative languages with excellent functional programming support.

I can honestly say this is the best geek humour I've seen on Slashdot all year.

My girlfriend is exactly as crazy as I am, and I can honestly say it works quite well.

This is precisely why I trust Google more than Facebook. Google will use my information to show me ads, but Facebook will sell that information to the highest bidder.

There are two big problems with Python (and no, the whitespace thing is not either of them).

The first is that the Python community has effectively been fragment by Python2 vs Python3. Many libraries support one but not the other, which can lead to dependency hell.

The other big problem is duck typing. No language which uses duck typing by default (with no way to strongly type variables) should be used for programs more than a few hundred lines long. Strongly typed variables significantly improve the static verification of programs, and throwing something like that away just seems foolish. The most common justification I've seen for it is that it's more concise and saves time, but there are plenty languages which are strongly typed and use type inference instead of requiring explicit declarations (e.g. Haskell).

Gentoo really doesn't enough love - it wasn't even mentioned in the article, despite being on par with Arch.
If anyone is interested in Gentoo but put off by the prospect of having to compile all your packages, I suggest they try Sabayon - it's a Gentoo derivative that uses a binary package manager in addition to portage, so you can install packages as easily as with apt-get/yum while still being able to use portage if you really want to mess around with USE flags.

It also results in glucose intolerance.
Regardless of how we think the body processes it, it's pretty hard to argue with the evidence on what effects it actually has.

I have mod points ... oh, wait....

For that specific case, it does require SSH access.
However, SSH access is often used for protocols like git, which makes this rather problematic.
Additionally, the vulnerability is just as effective using the CGI variables via apache.

AFAICT, uselessd strips out everything that isn't part of init from systemd, including journald. So exactly which daemons are left that are intertwined with each other?

Try reading the project site, because AFAICT it meets your requirements. They've removed pretty much everything except for init, including journald and udev.