This may be true in other parts of the world, but where I live in the province of Quebec, Canada, you CANNOT give yourself/use the title of engineer unless you are part of the Order of Engineers of Quebec. Other place may have similar laws.

Ah yes, what's wrong with the world today: something that is obviously no good causing you grief? Well don't do anything that would cause discomfort! It's only cool to protest if it doesn't inconvenience anyone, if that's ok with you? No? Oh well, then we'll just go on with our lives as usual.

I disagree strongly for thinking that a "major inconvenience" is not warranted when trying to stand up for what you believe in . In a world where we as individuals feel unable to affect change, I applaud individuals with influence using what they can to stand up for what they believe in. I hope the world your actions would precipitate does not come to pass.

Or just shut the water off while you're on vacation.

Or we could just use a solution that was already thought out pretty well, doesn't require massive infrastructure change, actually addresses the problem (i.e. as end users we have to trust the entire certificate chain, and ultimately the CA).

http://www.convergence.io/

And go listen to Moxi's defcon talk about this.

Because, as a professor (who most likely does research himself), he should know what the components of "good research" are?

Ok, so what if the professor cannot guarantee whether or not a student cheated? For example, the methods he seems to be using are looking for the same mistakes, that types of errors, things that would pop up when you recognized the question and just regurgitated the answer rather than approaching the question from your own understanding. What if a student "somewhat" cheated? Their exam looks sort of correct but slightly fishy. And he knows that there is at least some cheating but can only nail down all the "certain" cheaters. So he has a couple of options:

1 - Risk false-positives (i.e. a student that did not cheat yet was unfortunate enough to answer close enough to be suspect) and have some innocent students expelled.
2 - Let some cheating go while punishing other cheating (enforcing the "if you can get away with it, it is alright to cheat"). This punishes students that did not cheat by seeing their peers succeed where they did not deserve it.
3 - Offer a way out for those that cheated to in some way redeem themselves (it is NOT easy to even go in private and admit to cheating; this type of thing while it shouldn't be glorified for these cheats, IS something that is worth learning and will serve later in life), and those that choose not to, get dealt with via the normal cheating rules of the school.

Why the extra chance? Because those that cheated and turn themselves in will STILL most likely fail and those did it without cheating will still get the mark they deserve. Additionally, it will teach any student that knew of the cheating, but that decided not to cheat that they should have had the balls to act BEFORE the test was taken (and it seems that at least one person MAY have known before the exam about the leaked test-bank).

Right, but cross contamination from where? The argument that Earth "cross contaminated" Mars can just as easily be reversed, and as such is not much of a compelling argument. Really, what says that there might be some other source of life which "contaminated" Earth and Mars at that point?

I am an Apple user; so what makes your statement "bad"? In fact, it is just bad for Apple, if they care about that sort of thing. In reality, no company "forces" you to buy their products unless that product is required by consumers and there is only one supplier, neither of which strictly apply in this case. This might be "bad" for hobbyists, but as you phrased it, they will just avoid Apple products like "the plague". And if this does not impact Apple in a detrimental way (read: put them out of business) then I'm OK with that. One might argue that it's not fair to hobbyists that they cannot buy a cheap Mac, but that argument could be made of any high-priced luxury item that people would like. Not having the money to purchase an item does NOT make it unfair. Tying two products together such that they must be bought together at a higher price than is typical of that product domain is NOT unfair as long as there are other options, which there are.

What would be UNFAIR would be Apple charging a high price for their computers, and then saying you MUST buy a copy of OS X and that OS X is the only OS that will be allowed to run on their system (which it is NOT. you may install any OS you wish on their hardware, although I am not aware if they will refund you the cost of OS X, but I believe they consider it part of the machine when they sell you the computer. So at worst they are guilt of doing the same thing that Microsoft does with respect to a "OS-tax").

Yes, with the caveat that it would take a little while before the dosage was known due to development of film. However, what would the psychological effects of being told that you need to wear a badge to detect if the machine just overdosed you? Wouldn't you sort of re-evaluate the need for an x-ray at that point? If it involved the "likelihood" of harm/death to the point that it needed to be independently verified?

Except that the researcher could open himself to a lawsuit by Diebold.