My school uses off the shelf Vostro desktops with Xeon processors. They run CentOS no problem.

Just because you have a safe doesn't mean they can't rip it out of the wall and deal with opening it later. You can deter people and make it hard for them but if they're determined they'll take it. I once heard of a guy who left for vacation for a long weekend and had his gunsafe stolen. I'm not saying that all criminals will do this but the determined ones will have prepared. He had a heavy steel safe with long bolts on the inside driven into the concrete foundation. Just like someone can go into a big business and pretend to be "IT support" and steal a big server rack with tens of thousands of dollars worth of blades.

A better metric to measure is to try and order pizza to the new house and see if the pizza place has any restrictions or just straight up won't deliver to that neighbourhood.

It doesn't take a lot of skill to click buttons. But seriously, almost anyone can do basic programming (hello world, calculators, make some sort of output etc.) but it's when you start to get into things like Objects, Design Patterns, Constructors/Destructors, and Pointers where you have to start exercising your logical thinking and just be able to understand it if you want to get to the next level. The reality is that not everyone is cut out to be a manager, or a labourer, or a foreman, or an engineer, or a programmer. You can train hard and become decent or even good but I truly believe there is some inherent skill and brain function/thought process that you need to become great at whatever it is we're talking about. Except Liberal Arts, it doesn't take much skill to flip burgers/start a deep fryer or make coffee. Hell you could probably learn how to do latte art over a weekend and make cool fractal or mathematical latte art.

Why not rig up an alarm like this http://handsomedonkey.com/videos/the-orgasalarm-patent-pending/ With a bit of programming and some off the shelf components you should be able to make one in real life and if someone tries to steal the scooter everyone around will turn and look at the person.

So does this mean that we're one step closer to solving P = NP?

It's a major problem when you're going "low and slow". That is when flaps are down and you're just coasting onto the landing strip. Not to mention that during that time it's the most dangerous to be distracted or impaired since there isn't very much of an escape route. Seeing as how flaps are down and you can't power up the engines or risk shearing off or damaging the flaps and there isn't much time to react and do things when you're in the landing stage anyways.

Christchurch kind of falls into the category as a "polytechnic" since it wasn't really always a "university" per se, however from what I understand it has one of the strongest Teaching College/Faculty in the UK. Really the key is quality education and turning out quality students. It doesn't mean someone who will just regurgitate but actually think about what they're doing and the future implications of it.

Here's a tissue.

In Canada it's the same. I have to take about 24 credit hours (or about 8 classes at 3 credit hours each) worth of Gen Ed classes. These courses include English (Academic and Technical Writing which everyone has to take AFAIK), Psych/Sociology/Poli Sci, Art/Media/Film Studies etc. They're interesting courses and I enjoy them. Now if they were to take up 1/3 or even 1/4 of my degree (well they do take up close to 1/4 of my degree) I'd have a problem but for now life is good and it breaks up the monotony of just grinding code, math equations, proofs, DB schema, contingency tables, and such. PS: I am also taking a concentration in Geographical Information Systems so I don't consider the Geography, Field Techniques, Remote Sensing, Geodesy, etc. courses "outside of my degree" or "Gen Ed" since I'm specializing in them.

This is probably going to lead to higher sales if anything. Since they can't have it they'll just buy it from elsewhere. To be honest if it's banned I'm pretty sure more of us would want to get our hands on it. It's kind of like the Streisand effect, if it's banned we want to check it out for ourselves.

Yeah there is. The iPhones camera is actually pretty good if you can get the setting, and lighting setup right. You don't need fancy high end DSLR's or expensive $1000 glass. Case in point: http://fstoppers.com/iphone

How about using Emacs as a web browser? Specifically, XEmacs and this one random one I've heard in passing called "w3m" or something should be able to do it pretty much out of the box.

Excuse me? Geography not bringing in much research money? I may be a bit biased since I'm in a GIS program but Geography does it's fair share of research. Now granted Geography as a discipline is quite broad (and I guess Geology and Archaeology are usually separate departments but then you have things like "The Department of Math and Computer Science") but it does have relevant applications and research. English and history though I'll agree are cost sinks.

I say "can you pass me that 30 'cee-em' ruler" or "that mATX mobo is 25 by 25 'cee-em'" You can shorten pretty much anything as long as context is there. Someone was telling me that in Japanese you can have an entire conversation that's super vague and still understand what was said based on context or something.