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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I’m an old geezer, having graduated from college over 30 years ago now… This doesn’t have to do with piracy, but with professors. One advanced course I took covered topics that included AI and chaos theory. It was taught by a visiting professor from another country and she was terrible. It was clear she was just regurgitating what was in out textbooks without trying to really understand it.

    One day she was out and we had another professor with an actual background in AI fill in. We learned a lot that one day.

    Our college had anonymous evaluations that students would fill out on the last day of a course, and the college really pushed the claim that they were taken seriously. Before the day came to fill these out most of the students in the class got together and formed a plan. We all agreed on how we would fill out the questions. For example, one question asked what we liked best about the course. We all agreed to write something along the lines of “the day the professor was out and the other professor taught instead. We actually learned a lot that day”. We never saw that professor at our college after that year ended, and like to think our evaluations were a big part of the reason. The bottom line is that we provided a united front for our grievances through those anonymous evaluations.

    If your college offered similar sorts of course/professor evaluations I would have tried to do the same thing in this case. Get as many members of the class to band together and point out the issues of having to “obtain” MATLAB, and being unwilling to consider free alternatives. If your college doesn’t do these sorts of evaluations then getting multiple students to write complaints to the department head, etc. might be a viable alternative.



  • I’ve had my identity stolen multiple times over the years, and have had to deal with fraudulent IRS tax returns and at least 5 attempts to take credit cards out in my name. One of the data breaches that impacted me was the federal government (search for the office of personnel management or OPM data breach for details) and that got me over 10 years, and potentially lifetime protection from a really good credit & identity monitoring company.

    I will NEVER willingly hand out my banking or debit card info to third parties. If fraud occurs it’s much easier to deal with a credit car company, so I’d much rather pay that way than save a little time and/or money.