It wasn't a "difficult case." I was merely responding to the parent article, which claimed that a sufficiently harsh punishment solves the problem. I was presenting a counterexample. You're saying that a different approach solves this particular case. That's true, but not what I was writing about.

If your students were so lazy that they didn't read the assignment & notes carefully, shouldn't they get an A?

It's not quite that easy (speaking as a long time CS teacher). For example, once I found that two of my students had turned in the identical assignment. They did not know each other, so one clearly swiped the other's work. Neither would admit wrongdoing, they both understood the code, and there were no timestamps to check. With an expulsion policy, what do you do? Either expel them both (not fair, you're punishing an innocent person) or break your own policy (looking inconsistent, which weakens the policy). The hard part about dealing with cheating is the borderline cases.

Squeezeboxes are AMAZING. I have 7 of them in my home, and with a few button-presses, they can all be synchronized for whole-house audio. Also the server is open-source (Perl) and you can create your own plug-ins. I'm using plug-ins for faster search, logging of all tracks played, and creation of sync groups (so with one press, you can, say, set all your upstairs squeezeboxes to play one tune and all the downstairs ones another tune). Some squeezeboxes have built-in speakers (the Boom) and others require a stereo system. I have never regretted buying them. For the ultimate in space-efficiency, you can connect a speakerless squeezebox (e.g., the Classic) to a tiny in-wall amplifier (www.wireless-experts.com) that fits into a lightswitch box, connected to wall-mounted speakers. All people see is the squeezebox, the speakers, and a volume knob on the wall. Nice.

Two techniques I particularly remember for increasing my Linux effectiveness were:

1. find piped into xargs (or "find -print0" piped into "xargs -0" for safety) to process a directory tree in a single command

2. Printing commands on stdout and piping them into bash. For example, if you want to rename a bunch of files, and you put the old names into file "oldnames" and the new names into "newnames", one per line, you can do the mass renaming with:

$ paste oldnames newnames | sed 's/^/mv /' | bash

generates a sequence of "mv" commands and executes them.

First time I saw each of these, it was so eye-opening.