If you're a boomer engineer, you know the next step was a computer. No need to develop the calculator beyond the 41

"He said the role of a modern university is to prepare the students for their professional careers..." How sad. A university professor believes the university is a trade school, not a place to learn critical thinking and become educated enough to understand something of the ways of the world and one's place in it. So go ahead and simply teach the sheep AI so they can earn money and become good consumers.

Some of us humans like beer waste too

... isn't it?

Isn't the type of gun to which young people have access more important than the absolute number of guns? Maybe kids 50 years ago had greater access to guns, but I doubt they had ready access to weapons that could fire so much ammunition so quickly. It's the number of rounds of ammunition, not the number of guns, that enables mass shootings.

Why is the mic picking up ultrasonics? In any case, to defeat this they could just put an analog low pass before the ADC. There should be one there already (the anti-aliasing filter for the ADC). Band-limiting the input to around 4kHz like POTS should do the trick. Not that I want this jammer to be defeated...

*Remuneration*. It doesn't matter if Google was numbered again.

"4-tier construction on the circuit section used to convert analog video signals to digital signals" ... Really, posting marketing non-information on Slashdot? Perhaps it's a parallel/pipelined A/D, judging form the application, performance and use of "tier". In any case, A/D converters have common specs, and if this one is special those specs would be of interest. Nerds don't have to be protected from "fancy camera talk".

The only reason this works as well as it does (poorly - 10% to 28% according to the post) is that humans are hard-wired to find faces among images. We'll accept anything with two small ovals on the same line with another shape roughly in the middle, below. Nose optional. Try the equivalent with random images or music, and I'll bet the success rate would drop to nil.

At a research universities, the overhead charged by the university on engineering research grants goes into a general fund that supports the other disciplines, directly or indirectly. The flow of cash is from engineering to the other programs, not vice versa. The university engineering school often also must pay the university liberal arts college based on enrollment of engineering undergrads in required courses taught in the liberal arts college (such as some basic math and science courses). The suggested tuition differential, if justified on the basis of costs to the various departments, would have to take into account these facts of university finance. It's not nearly as simple as suggested.

... for a product that usually sells for many hundreds of dollars, they deserve what they get.

Thanks Vario ! I tried LTSpice on all three platforms (using stock WINE on Ubuntu and Crossover on Mac) and it works beautifully. In fact, it is easier to get up and running than OrCad in some ways, it has no net limits, and even does things OrCad can't (like print a schematic directly). The plotting tool accepts mathematical functions of time, node voltages, etc, so ideal and real results can be plotted simultaneously, just like OrCad. I will hand this over to a student for further testing, but from what I have seen, your suggestion has solved my problem.