I'm sold. Based on your experience, would this course be approachable for self-study by individuals without 3 years of CS education? The MIT page[1] suggests the intended audience for the class are seniors and graduate students (M.Eng and PhD).
Are SCIFs terrible work environments for software developers specifically or does that assessment apply to other roles in the same environment? What made it so terrible?
Using peer pressure to encourage others into working all night without pay can be called "pizza parties", "hackathons", or even plain old "exploitation". Tomato, tuhmahto.
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EDIT: Added clarification
Wasn't Microsoft Research working on a technology similar to the 'hyperphoto'? It collated numerous photographs of the same location and allowed the viewer to navigate through multiple dimensions of the space.
[1] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/general.html