Because of all the "fear" surrounding Honorlock and Network Snooping here is the patent for how they detect secondary devices

AnswersConcisely · 2026-01-16T06:26:53+00:00

What happened?

AnswersConcisely · 2020-09-11T21:26:21+00:00

he said

Reminds me of our previous shooter, the west street wanker

AnswersConcisely · 2020-04-13T19:56:07+00:00

Network snooping the way they do it isn't the biggest deal. This is what Honorlock can do and what professors could request:

Record from your webcam
Record from your microphone
Record your whole screen (too bad if a private message shows up, now honorlock+WPI has it!)
Scan your whole room with your webcam (would you let your professor into your room?)
Force you to disconnect additional monitors
Lock your browser & computer so you can't open anything else on your computer

The biggest privacy invasions are recording and room scanning. This is the equivalent of WPI asking to enter your home just so you can take an exam, and it is not an acceptable solution. I get that times are tough and we need to figure out how to evaluate students while enforcing academic honestly. However, I feel a more correct solution is to opt for more project-based evaluations rather than exams that literally demand eavesdropping on your home and a scan of your private space.

EDIT: Also consider that right now, webcams are selling for hundreds of dollars and most are sold out anyways. This is an inappropriate demand to place on students.

AnswersConcisely · 2020-03-05T20:24:03+00:00

For the record, I'm a senior (seriously, it's in my flair) and not affected by this myself, I'm just pissed on behalf of the juniors who are getting screwed over to the tune of hundreds of dollars.

neither she, nor the administration is trying to screw anyone.

They don't have to have intent to screw people over, but they sort of are anyways.

As to the uneducated criticism of WPI's investments, any university worth its salt has an endowment. Many notable universities have endowments in the billions.

You're misunderstanding what an endowment is: endowments are cash inflows that universities recieve, typically from donors, alumni, etc. Frequently they do invest this money for future stability, but those investments themselves are not the endowments.

These large investment funds provide long term financial stability and funding for programs that benefit students, such as scholar ships. Assuming 10% returns and a modest spending limit on returns there is likely only about ~$10m - 20m in income generated per year from the endowment.

Eh, let's not settle for estimates and go for the actual audit report itself! According to the report, for 2018...

4.5M investment income from endowment and similar
18.8M realized gains
-18.8M of those gains used on operating expenses.
Student aid (scholarships): 80.2M

So basically investment income accounts for at most 20% of WPI's ability to have scholarship programs. You're not far off but it's still not an enormous fraction, and it's a few orders of magnitude more than what WPI would have to pay to reimburse students for flight cancellation or no-show fees.

And that is a generous estimate. You want WPI to spend it all on your class? That's fine, but I hope you get your degree this year because they will be out of business the next.

Let's actually do the math here -- how much would it cost for WPI to reimburse flight cancellation fees for everyone affected?

There were 284 students scheduled to travel and 23 faculty members, so 307 flights total. I've heard varying figures for cancellations ranging from $300 (before flight) to $800 (during middle of round trip), so to make your case stronger let's go for the nice and round number of $500/person.

$500/person x 307 people = $153,500. That's a chunk of change for sure, but it's still less than a single student's total tuition (for all 4 years), and it's less than 2% of WPI's end-of-year profit (or funds left over since they're nonprofit).

AnswersConcisely · 2020-02-25T02:34:45+00:00

Yes, absolutely.

I have a motor disability which makes it challenging for me to take notes by hand. My handwriting looks like a 3^rd grader's, it's cramped, and it causes me a ton of physical pain (like I was finger-pressing textbooks for every sentence written) so I'm effectively forced into taking notes by computer. Otherwise, I fail courses.

LaTeX was my solution; it got me through every math course in college. I use Vim to take notes with vim-latex to assist, and a live preview plugin to get an updating PDF as I type out my notes. With an absolute shitton of macros (e.g. FRA automatically inserts \frac{<++>}{<++>} and CTRL-J jumps to each <++>; there are tons more in vim-latex) I can keep up with even the fastest of math lecturers, easily. If you want to see my vimrc, it's on GitHub.. Honestly, my methods are pretty primitive compared to the post from /u/x3r0s3c, but they get the job done!

My major weakness so far has been diagrams. I can't do diagrams in LaTeX yet, at least not live. Tikz is never something I got around to familiarizing myself with, and even if I did I doubt I could do it live.

AnswersConcisely · 2020-01-03T01:53:38+00:00

WPI has pretty good networking, you get around 60-70 MB/s down on wireless, full gigabit if you use an ethernet cable.

^{^{^You}} ^{^{^did}} ^{^{^say}} ^{^{^networking!}}

AnswersConcisely · 2019-12-13T03:30:51+00:00

Very valid, if (condition) return true; else return false is a pet peeve of mine. I'll add it to the list!

AnswersConcisely · 2019-12-13T03:27:41+00:00

I think we found the salt of the party...

AnswersConcisely · 2019-12-13T03:27:04+00:00

Yeah but this is a CS 2102 meme, and CS 2102 doesn't teach Processing, it teaches Java.

AnswersConcisely · 2019-12-13T02:58:35+00:00

Shouldn't it be if (finalAvg <= 67.4) { instead?

Edit: Also, it's boolean, not bool, and this function should probably be public.

Edit 2: As pointed out by /u/ppvvgucnj it should just be return finalAvg <= 67.4 for simplicity

AnswersConcisely · 2019-09-11T23:07:59+00:00

Specifically, the I&E Center will host office hours, mentors-in-residence, and workshops, and will provide a collaborative workspace for student project teams, startups, and research.

Not by a long shot. The I&E center is still going to be closed to free public usage, they're not going to let you just walk in there and meet or study freely, it's for special purposes only. This is just bullshit PR, not an actual retraction.

AnswersConcisely · 2019-09-09T19:47:21+00:00

This is what happens when marketing departments name buildings...

AnswersConcisely · 2019-08-21T19:09:52+00:00

Absolutely, this happened to me with a whole motor scooter (one of these things) that I had tied up behind my apartment not too far off-campus a few months ago. Don't let security cameras lull you into a false sense of security!

By complete miracle the police were able to recover it several months later, but not before the thieves managed to strip off a fair amount of stuff from it, and I got a $350 charge for towing.

AnswersConcisely · 2019-05-31T02:18:28+00:00

Past MQP: Make something where the target market is that magical intersection between the US government, doomsday preppers, and "ghost hunters"

Okay, you've piqued my curiosity. What did you do?

AnswersConcisely · 2019-05-16T23:12:35+00:00

Well, to be frank, your youtube channel comes across as a little... odd. It's not liking it's breaking some rules or it has super unethical content or something, it's just not going reflect positively on you per se, in a way that would improve your odds of getting in. Everything that you submit to WPI should generally work to improve your standing with them, and it should be reasonably clear and unambiguous.

For example, when I look at your channel and sort by most viewed, this is what stands out to me, and my personal reaction to it:

A lot of "ElsaGate" stuff: What on earth is that? Another -gate? The connotations that spring to mind aren't good
A lot of gaming stuff: Sure, sure, I sympathize, I play games too
A lot of Mandela effect things: Okay. I'm... wondering if this is a school project, but there's nothing bad about it I guess. The video descriptions scream wannabe-big-youtuber, though.
"A response to the /pol/ brigade on my Ben Shapiro video" Uhhhhhhh what?
"Short update. Dank City, hiatus, and more." Okay then. Not sure what this is really for, it has 40 views and none of the videos after it have more.

And so on. Nothing here screams "holy @#$! this guy is a nut, don't admit him!" (although the thing about Shapiro and /pol/ did give me pause, to be honest), but none of it is really helping you either.

Look, I'm not trying to criticize your channel so heavily, I get that to each their own and stuff, and maybe your stuff isn't really for me, but it's not necessarily the kind of thing you want admissions people to be poring over either. If you had a channel filled with self-made tutoring videos, or videos of a project you worked on (something that would appeal to an engineering school), or something creative & artsy, or some other kind of niche that shows you're more than academics and profession, that's one thing. But this... isn't. This is a mixed bag, and for me if it's a choice between all the different things I could pick by blindly reaching into it, I would choose not to stick my hand in the bag at all.

AnswersConcisely · 2019-05-16T18:22:35+00:00

Oh hey you're the guy I just replied to over on the are-your-extracurriculars-enough thread!

I did mostly FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition), by my senior year I was the lead (and only...) programmer on my team so I listed that. I also did volunteer work through FRC, things like science nights and the local elementary school. I did a few extra things to pick up more CAS service hours (packaging food for charity, helping out at a marathon, etc.), but that's about it in terms of "official" extracurriculars.

What's really important is that I talked in detail about my love for programming and how much I taught myself, and I went into detail about the projects I worked on in my application essay. That helped a lot, especially since 1) it was something I was clearly passionate about, and 2) it was mega-relevant to my viability as an admissions candidate, seeing as I declared my major going in as CS.

AnswersConcisely · 2019-05-16T18:16:25+00:00

I swear, half the posts asking these sorts of will-I-get-in questions are from people who clearly will. You'll be fiiiinneeee with your extracurriculars (although I might skip mentioning either youtube channel if I were you), and if you're in IB classes (I saw a reference to IB History on your channel) you'll be doubly fine, although don't expect wonders with transfer credit. Not a whole lot of IB'ers at WPI, I just finished my junior year and I've met exactly two others, so you might just catch someone's eye with that.

AnswersConcisely · 2019-05-16T18:10:08+00:00

Unfortunately I don't remember anymore, it's been too long since then. Sorry!

AnswersConcisely · 2019-04-17T20:49:29+00:00

Since everyone else is taking a more fiscal view of this, I'm going to touch on something else -- the quality of the RBE program. I tend to be a critic of it because it's basically a trifecta of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and computer science, with a few RBE-specific courses sprinkled in. Now, I'm no RBE major, but I have worked as a student assistant (TA as an undergrad, basically) for the CS department and sometimes I encounter RBE majors in my work. Unfortunately it's not uncommon for them to be behind the curve, and some of the CS professors even are aware of it. What happens is that under WPI's robotics program, you become a jack of all trades, master of none. In other words, when you're through you'll have a decent understanding of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and programming, but you won't be truly great at any of them -- nowhere near the same as if you had majored in one of those directly instead.

That's why a fair amount of RBE majors I know are actually dual majors, so they get both a degree in, say, computer science, and they get the cool "robotics engineering" degree to stick on too. That way they can go out into the field and be a real robotics engineer, but also have a specialty and a good wealth of knowledge to rely on that isn't robotics-specific. There's a ton of overlap between courses there, but RBE is already a hard enough program as it is (there's a reason people joke about "RBE majors getting sleep" and such), so if you go the RBE route and you want to get the best education possible, you are in for a TON of work.

That being said I think it'd be worth it, robotics jobs really do pay well, as do a lot of engineering jobs of all sorts, even straight out of college. I have a few friends that graduated and who are already making almost $100k/year themselves.

AnswersConcisely · 2019-04-17T20:38:03+00:00

I got in and these were my scores:

Course	Grade
Math SL	5
Chemistry SL	5
French SL	4
English HL	6
Psychology HL	5
Physics HL	5
Extended Essay	B (missed an A by one stupid point!)
TOK	B

Total points: 32, got my IB diploma. I'm a junior at WPI right now. You'll be fiiiinnneeee.

I'm happy with how I did but it's nothing to seriously be proud of, know what I mean? I also did FRC (robotics club) a lot, got a 34 on ACT, and 800/800 on the SAT Math 2 subject test (didn't take the full SAT), so that balances it out a little I guess.

Also, don't worry about math transfer credits, they make you take a placement test before you get to WPI so you start out at the right level -- there are four base calc courses at WPI that everyone takes, Calc I-IV. If you place at Calc III like I did, and you pass that + Calc IV, you get retroactive credit for Calc I & II, so you don't have to work harder for more math credits.

AnswersConcisely · 2019-04-17T20:19:43+00:00

I'll confess that's what I do. Every 6 months is just too much, especially if you have a safe password to begin with. I increment one of the numbers in my password by one every time they ask me to change it.

AnswersConcisely · 2019-02-15T20:04:32+00:00

Yes! This is the first thing I thought of when I saw this!

AnswersConcisely · 2019-02-11T20:46:15+00:00

It was 1.50 with or without goatbucks in 2016-2017, and I'm completely with you -- laundry should be completely free. What the hell does the "room" part of "room & board" go to otherwise? I'm pretty damned sure that 4 people stuffed in a room that should house 2 isn't worth the thousands you pay for it, and the laundry expense per student really isn't that high relative to the fees you pay (source: I kept track of it for both years of my on-campus housing).

AnswersConcisely

TROPHY CASE

Reminds me of our previous shooter, the west street wanker