This can be spun both ways, that I agree. Although I did say that books should be cheaper, I agree with you in the fact that producing a good textbook is expensive (in more ways than just money) and time-consuming, and they should be valued accordingly.

I do believe, however, that it is more valuable for us as a society to have this sort of knowledge-disseminating piracy, than to strongly enforce textbook copyrights. You can argue that without the monetary reward, no good books would be written in the first place, but I disagree, I don't believe that most people who write textbooks do it for the money.

The point that those students are spending much more money elsewhere is moot. Textbooks are obviously not a basic necessity. Should a student sacrifice two month of his social life for the sake of purchasing a new textbook? Which of them will benefit him the most throughout his life? What is worth more that a textbook, and what is worth less?

This is all relative, of course. You say that anyone can ask for funding to buy textbooks. Where? In America? Me, I'm studying in Portugal, so I'll speak of what I know. We have good universities here, but there are no funds for buying books, and the 3-5 copies in the library are hardly enough for the dozens of students who procure them every year.

That would be because many here would laugh profusely at the notion that 'pirating' $80+ university textbooks is wrong because it discourages university teachers to write their own books.

What is wrong is to price knowledge so high and not subsidize it for students who can't afford $500 in textbooks.

I'm not offended when someone can't get the whole Britney Spears discography because it's too expensive, but it hurts me when many of my university colleagues want to study advanced physics or microelectronics and can't get the subject's textbooks because they're too bloody expensive. And it comforts me to know that they can 'pirate' the book, study and learn from it, and have the same opportunity to become great engineers as I, luckily, have.

You google it?

FreeBSD is the only distribution, other than Solaris, to have ported and implemented the ZFS filesystem (and no, a FUSE port doesn't count).

I've been looking forward to build a file server for personal use, and I'm eager to try out ZFS, which really puts FreeBSD high on my small list of candidates for an operating system. I'm going for consumer-grade hardware, and I'll be experimenting with stuff like using CompactFlash cards to store the OS.

OpenSolaris was my initial choice due to its higher maturity on the ZFS implementation, but I feel it's too constraining. I tried searching around for information about installing the system on flash mediums, information about wear-levelling, filesystems for flash media, and their forums and mailing lists fall short on these topics. The OpenSolaris installer doesn't even allow one to customize the installation, forcing me to install X.org, Gnome, and a ton of other stuff. No thank you, I'd very much like my file server to be command-line only, and to be smaller that your 3.1 gigabyte minimum for an installation.

As soon as I feel that FreeBSD's implementation of ZFS is stable and feature-rich enough for my needs, I'll definitely be rolling a file server with it. And I don't care if Netcraft disagrees with my decision; I really do feel BSDs deserve more and more notoriety these days.

I would also recommend you have a look at Delft University of Technology (www.tudelft.nl) in the Netherlands. As you'd expect from the Dutch, nearly everyone speaks fluent English, and this is particularly true in the academic community.

Last year, I spent two semesters studying abroad in Eindhoven Technical University (better suited for Electrical Engineering, my MSc), where I had all subjects taught in English, and everyone mentioned how TU Delft was a great university for studying Computer Science. Plus, I find the Netherlands to be a great country in terms of freedom ('Live and let live' is their motto, iirc), and it's also a great central hub to fly all around Europe.

And I wholeheartedly agree with what many are saying here: go and study abroad, but focus on getting to know the World, not just more CS. The experiences you'll have abroad will be far more valuable to you, your life, your way of thinking.

I have it right here in my desk as I am implementing a TCP Reno simulator in MATLAB (for learning purposes). I agree, it reads like a classic: concise and thorough.

With this one in the shelf I can even pretend to be a true network researcher :)

You can compare it to iPhone v.1 and it still falls behind. Its opensource nature undoubtedly has great potential, for the things iPhone doesn't do. But have a look at the side-by-side comparisons of basic tasks like browsing (in one of them you can see severe choppiness while scrolling Engadget's website, iirc) and you'll see what I mean.

Or shall we have HTC be the scapegoat for providing a thick, underpowered, multitouch-unable device?