My protest and official reaction to the CS@UIUC DMCA Takedown Act of 2015

Does anyone actually remember 2005? (e.g., when uiuc.edu was not redirected to illinois.edu)

The apparent answer to this with respect to students at UIUC is apparently a decided NULL; response. I left the university with official coverage on my CV of "graduate engineering school degree" a couple of years before the horrid and off-putting invokation of Takedown (Act) termed (see this history) federal copyright law on CS students at my otherwise fine Alma Mater. Instead of dwell on the former poor administration decision making that by my readings online were supported at the time by Cinda Heeren and Craig Zilles, I will instead issue my response to the "takedown" blunder by reposting some code that I encountered in my freshmen CS courses the first time I was enrolled in them years ago. It appears (to me) that their support was not original and was actually plainly pre-dated by hidden messages of support for this policy CS department authorities many years back. So let's insist on being more positive and STEM-supportive in our post-undergrad educational initiatives!

I hope that the so-termed "code library" (which in its naming implies how fundamentally important to engineering enlightenment a proper and thorough introduction to data structures in C++ is) which I am currently taking word-for-word off my 2000-era backup media fills a void in the knowlegebase of CS-world education freely available online. When I first enrolled in CS225, this code was supplied for labs on a university-housed private file server for students on EWS. At least, I think its in good spirit to rectify the royal takdown act f-up by making available some of the forgotten about CS code literature which is actually one of the good things CS@Illinois has produced over the years.

Unfortunately, it appears that Cinda refused to re-use this code in her efforts to improve the MP (a.k.a. programming assignments) structures to CS225 in the years post-Jas0n and pre-UBC. The highlights of what she missed in her approximation to the previous course are covered (linked to as Cliff's Notes) here. To be clear, my endorsement of this code being made available online is no reflection on my past interactions (or viewpoints thereof) with the source-code-headered authors who may claim this prestige on their CV. Quite to the contrary. And, moreover, since the source is still so dated with only approximate Makefiles which reference the multi-thousands-per-licence Sun CC compiler instead of a reasonably modern invokation of the template capabilities of GNU's g++ (even by the standards in those days, this suggests laziness by the authors -- BTW), I think that "we" (as in the people) should bring this educational resource up-to-date. By doing this with a series of external pull requests, we can also make a thorough protest of the takedown act from years ago that hits on the derivative works clause violation to the DMCA. I also like the idea of correcting any logic errors found in the source just to inspire others to take up the spirit of offending the seemingly delicate, obsessive, and vocally temperamental sensibilities of the former (forgotten about these days) lecturer in CS whose name appears on the most (by plain old tally count) of the header files re-posted in this repository.

With all of this in mind, let's get started and enjoy the code! And, if there exist any questions there about this code, please either post a new issue thread or fork to generate a pull request to propose a redaction of offensive material. All issues and pull requests will be reviewed and thoughtfully considered within a short window of time after posting (give me at least one week). The editor does, however, reserve the right to deny and/or reject any questionably motivated modifications to the presentation in this repository after appropriate consideration.