It's heartwarming to know that people read and enjoyed my articles! Thanks for the mention.

It's nice to see all of these comments.

Here's my side of it, as a columnist since 1996: http://blog.lerner.co.il/sad-d...

...or Sean Penn with a red paper cup...

Sure. And _your country_ then becomes a target for the long range _and_ the short range ones. I'd take my chances with the aircraft carrier, personally...

Internships are extremely valuable _once you know what you want to do_. They're less so when you're still feeling around (eg, freshman and sophmore years). People who have their BS probably fall into the former category, or at least I hope they do.

Your biological clock might not be ticking, but life seldom goes as people plan it will.

First, not a teacher. We're provided use of the application for checking our own work.

Second: the term "black box" would be appropriate if the output was a simple percentage of plagiarism with no explanation. By revealing _how_ that number was come to, the internal process of the box to derive it has been revealed (which is to say, it's comparing your work to a lot of other work in the app's DB). "Black box" is a purely colloquial term with no single formal definition - calling me out on using it is ludicrous.

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

To provide a counter-argument, my wife has a BS in ME _and_ a MS in ME, which she got in rapid succession. Her work in graduate school is _extremely_ relevant to her current job, which she got shortly after finishing up school. Your generalization that intern/co-op experience isn't good enough is almost hilarious - you don't think employers care that you worked a few summers for a major aerospace or electronics firm? I rather think that they do, because those references can be _very_ helpful in determining the quality of an applicant.

Now, let me provide another bit of advice from personal experience: going back to a good school full-time once you've started working is extremely difficult at best for most people. I'm not saying it's not doable, but if you've got a spouse and possibly kids you need to help support, the option is difficult to exercise. _If you want a graduate degree, best to do it up front._ You may not have the chance later.

Personally, I didn't care to go for an MS in CS (or an MA in Economics), but I did wind up going part-time for an MBA. It is not a ton of fun to back to school at this stage of my life, useful and interesting as it may be.

The app I used not only told you what the plagiarized source was, but also gave you the passage that was plagiarized from. So your objection is irrelevant. In fact, I specifically addressed it in the post you're replying to.

These detectors are not black boxes at all.

Depends on the degree it's being done. Search the Internets for "plagiarism paraphrasing" - it should be enlightening.

I don't really get what you're saying. If the program is showing 35%+ of the paper as plagiarized, that's pretty much a preponderance of evidence right there. The program will tell you were the plagiarism is from, too, if it's anything like what I used.

Very true. My wife reviews proposals at her work from time to time, and she has gotten surprisingly good at detecting which ones are doing wholesale plagiarizing. I suspect she'd probably miss it if it was a sentence or two, but some of these idiots are doing whole pages of it.

The tools are fairly good, but, in my experience, they'll always report 3-7% or so of your paper as plagiarized, just because it's pretty difficult to write about _anything_ without unknowingly using previously written words. I would _hope_ that anyone who would pursue disciplinary action from such a tool's results would at least take a look to see if the sections being flagged are consequential.

I have no idea how good they are with catching paraphrasing, though... it strikes me that the semi-intelligent plagiarizers would be doing that more than a straight copy and paste. There's also the "acceptable vs unacceptable" distinction to be made.

Go there after dark. At the base I visit frequently, they've got rent-a-cops doing gate guard duty during the day (presumably backed by some sort of military rapid-reaction force), but they've got full-out military handling the duties at night.

Fuel air bombs have nowhere near the yield that nuclear weapons do. Not even close. Even Russia's supposed "father of all bombs" only had a yield of 44 tons of TNT. The smallest nuke ever created, the W54, had a one kiloton yield - more than 20x times that amount.

How is this contradicting what I just wrote? epsxe runs almost all PS1 games, not just lots of them. SNESGP2X can't run a lot of SNES games that SNES9X on the PC can. You've basically proven my own point for me. Congratulations.