You can make a fun spike mic to listen to people in another room with old parts.

Take an old phono cartridge and carefully attach a metal nail to the tiny stylus end (where the diamond is).
Then plug it into an old phono amp as usual, and listen with headphones.
If you drill a hole on your side of the wall, big enough so the nail doesn't touch the edges, but lightly presses against the wall of the next room, you might be able to hear what's going on.
(Don't use this illegally!)

More likely, they would have you burned as a witch.

Correct. It would not be criminal unless the student actually filed a formal police report.

They used to arrest people in the Los Angeles subways for the same thing - but the Mayor finally stopped the ridiculous practice:

http://www.scpr.org/news/2014/...

It's not that easy. If they were migrating the OS and OTC software, it wouldn't be so problematic.
But they run millions of lines of custom code, purpose written for specific devices.
Changing OS would also require rewriting (and testing) all those specially apps.

That's sort of what they are doing with the free upgrade to Win10

I've personally defended Nakatomi Plaza from terrorists on several occasions.

...and apparently, strippers don't explode in a shower of cash when you shoot them.

CPU: Intel i7-920 2.66 GHz 45nm
GFX: Evga GeForce GTX 260
Mobo: Evga x58 3x SLI - LGA 1366 i7
RAM: Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600 6Gb
Case: Cooler Master HAF 932
System HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black 7200rpm WD 1000 LSRTL 1 Tb
Data HDD: 3x 1Tb
Ext HDD: Simpletech 1Tb Pro-drive
PS: Corsair TX850W
Optical: LG BH08 Super Multi Blue
OS: Win 7 Ultimate - 64 bit
Mouse: Logitech MX-1100
Monitor: 2x HP Pavilion 2311x

Because a 'workshop' or 'shop' is something you would find at a trade or tech school for future blue-collar workers.

A 'makerspace', although functionally identical (except for the Starbucks cups laying around), sounds like place you can go to make cool stuff while you are waiting for your 19th Century French poetry class to start.

Video editing, image processing, or VFX.

Avid and Premier, Photoshop, and After Effects can use the CUDA processing power of this card.

Unless the hack on that USB stick forces the target machine to start radiating data on RF via its monitor or other peripherals.

Those radiations could then be read from an external pickup.
"Van Eck phreaking is a form of eavesdropping in which special equipment is used to pick up side-band electronic-magnetic emissions from electronics devices that correlate to hidden signals or data for the purpose of recreating these signals or data in order to spy on the electronic device. Side-band electromagnetic radiation emissions are present in, and with the proper equipment, can be captured from keyboards, computer displays, printers, and other electronic devices."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...