In my Algorithms class, the professor had us taking turns doing the grading. Our class had a lot of students with family ties (spouses,cousins,etc). It looked like perhaps HALF of the class cheated - way beyond simply studying together. I sorted the papers by similarity, where there were many cases of the same absurdly wrong answer duplicated by people with the same family name, etc. I took care to write the comments identically worded in these cases, and let the professor come to her own conclusions. I never understood the students that didn't just shrug off an 'F' on a single test with the same flippancy that they shrug off trying to pass legitimately. But I would say that the grading system is totally stupid and discourages reasonable risk taking with your GPA. It causes people to load up on chump classes to inflate their grades; and to cheat for the letter grade. It should be more like a ladder system; where 'C' *really* is the actual average grade (no - really - 'average' should always mean statistically average!) because you move on to *harder* subject matter when you are in fact above average. You should be judged on the difficulty of the workload you work on. Stuff that's not in your major should barely affect your overall grade as well. There is no reason why deciding to fail a required humanities class in order to get science/math classes right should jeopardize your science/math degree. The real world requires setting priorities as well.

Thanks for being brave and telling it like it is! Imagine either outsourcing to one of these internet black holes - or simply running a business from the black hole, where having internet access is like having the power being on. Somebody posts something that offends the gov, and your plan to host your marketing videos on youtube and customer relations via facebook no longer work. It's the road to continued subservience to the countries that won't act like this. It's a painful truth that all great change starts out as blaspheme in the eyes of somebody, and it's a victimless 'crime' when there's nothing useful it it anyway. People everywhere just need to grow up and deal with it; more specifically in these cases, let God himself deal with it. There have been a-holes for as long as there have been humans. And there are unresolvable conflicts between different religions and the truth itself; the truth, or your sincere beliefs will always offend someone.

Shit happens. You are not entitled to win the lottery every time something goes wrong. The old lady is dead, and this incident didn't exactly cut her life short. Her estate should be beaten to a pulp for even trying something like this. If this were a younger person "run over" by a 4 year old, there would have been no injuries whatsoever. If you can't survive a fall to the sidewalk, then you are taking a risk by going outside. You certainly can't be entitled to millions of dollars if when your time finally comes. When we were religious, if something bad happened to you then that's something that God did to you for something that you must have done. I know a lot of this stupidity is driven by insanely high medical bills that people incur when they hit the emergency room. Maybe I need to write it down somewhere: if I end up in that condition, then *please* declare me a total loss (like a car!) so that I don't have a $2Million dollar bill for a few hours at the hospital to pass on to my family. This is stupidity, and it has to stop.

If the probability of getting something bad like a keylogger given that you are running Windows is much higher than for any other OS, then any theories about why this is true will not protect you. Nothing else matters beyond this (numeric) fact. I have a friend that gets his Windows system re-hacked a couple times a year, and he has never had a problem on his Macbook. I don't care why anymore. It's an interesting argument when talking about attacks against a pre-determined individual perhaps, but a badly setup linux setup is apparently "safer" than a super-secure Windows setup when you go by the only thing that matters: NUMBERS.