Is your goal to have a degree because it would be useful to list on a résumé, or do you want the degree because you think the content of the BS in CS would be useful? If it's the latter, then independent study or auditing college courses might be the answer for you. If it's the former, though, you more or less have to accept that the BS is not just a vocational degree--it is a degree from a university that attests to you not only knowing the content of the major but also the gen-ed requirements.

Can anyone comment on how the Google wave protocol deals with spam? Does it have a method for dealing with the problem, or is it vulnerable in all the same ways that SMTP is vulnerable?

It's impossible for guarantee 100% storage integrity, just like it's impossible to guarantee 100% uptime. What you want to ask is what risk of data loss you are willing to take.

This page compares some of the options in terms of Mean Time To Data Loss (MTTDL). For the amount of space you're looking at (~500gb), a three-way mirror is probably sufficient to last for your lifetime.

But there's always the risk of fat-fingering "rm -rf" or having the building catch fire, so maybe you want to have two synchronized sets of mirrors, stored in different physical locations. Only you can decide if that's too paranoid for you (or not paranoid enough).

So does this discovery change the odds for the universe ending in a heat death or a big crunch? AANA astrophysicist, but I would guess that, if galaxies are more likely to form around black holes, it means that there's a large gravitational pull right at the center of the more mass-dense areas of the universe and thus increases the chance of the universe ending in a big crunch vis-a-vis heat death.

Actually, hospital personnel are supposed to ask for your medical history multiple times. IANA(medical professional), but I read that asking multiple times is intended to make sure the information is as accurate as possible. If I remember correctly (and I can't find the link, sorry), at least one study found a noticeable difference in what patients disclosed of their medical history over the course of a stay in a hospital. Oftentimes, patients would either intentionally cover up some information at first (not mentioning an STD, for example, because of embarrassment) or simply forget to mention something (e.g., forgetting to mention a medication or accidentally giving the wrong dosage).

This is not to say that repeatedly asking a patient under a haze of drugs or pain is the best approach, but there can be valid concerns behind it.

1. There is a measure of the valuable of the labor's contribution to the production. They're called wages, buddy.

2. Economists include opportunity cost when drawing cost curves, which is most definitely non-monetary.

3. Marginal cost is not zero for software. That's the basis for Levine and Boldrin's theories about why intellectual monopoly isn't necessary. Check it at http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual /against.htm