Last year, my blog had an entry on how the internet is making us smarter and now its time to write about how the internet saves us from using our brain.

There are many websites online like http://customresearchpapers.us/, http://thepaperexperts.com/ and http://termpaperrelief.com/ that sell term papers for about $15 a page. There are many students who choose this path and there have been reports that most students get caught for plagarism because the papers they buy off these websites have been submitted and published before.

From Yahoo:

Some 37 percent of undergraduates admit to copying portions of their research papers from the Web, up from 10 percent in 1999, according to a 2006 poll of 60,000 U.S. college students by Donald McCabe, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers University, in Newark, New Jersey. Three percent admitted to downloading and submitting entire papers and 77 percent of students did not consider copying material off the Internet to be a serious issue.

“It’s so prevalent, it’s so easy, it’s so anonymous,” said McCabe.

How would you fight this?

A consortium of major universities is developing software that would let the U.S. government monitor negative opinions of the United States inpublications overseas. The universities include Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah.

A $2.4 million grant from the Homeland Security Department will finance the research over three years. The researchers are using a database of articles published in 2001 and 2002 which will be used to train a computer to recognize, rank and interpret statements.

Claire T. Cardie, a professor of computer science at Cornell, said “The software would need to be able to distinguish between statements like this spaghetti is good – and this spaghetti is not very good – it’s excellent”.

Remember the time when you saw a movie, you liked it and you went out and bought the dvd? Well, nowadays there are so many versions coming out that you dont want to look silly buying a movie only to find out there is another newer (or older), better version that is out. For example, remember Sin City? Well, they released the movie on DVD in August and by September, they were advertising a Recut, Extended, Unrated version.

George Lucas (of Star Wars fame) released the original Star Wars Trilogy as a DVD set when he ………

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Google has bought the garage that co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin has rented eight years ago as they set out to take over the world and they spent all their time in this Garage

The house belonged to Susan Wojcicki who is now Google’s vice president of product management. She did not work for Google at the time but knew the Larry and Brin because one of her friends had dated Brin.

Susan Wojcicki had rented out the garage at $1,700 a month for five months to the boys.