The ruling was a defeat for several constituencies -- including universities, libraries and computer programmers -- that had argued that the law should preserve traditional rights to archive and lend out copyrighted material or to use so-called reverse-engineering to understand how a piece of technology works.
With support from top universities and industry, computer science teaching has become an exciting option for graduates.
The novel's low-culture excursions are balanced out by higher dealings: the other main plot concerns Roger's ongoing debate with Dale Kohler, a university researcher and computer expert who wants to use the power of computers to prove the existence of a supreme being.
The CPK transformed itself into the People's Democratic Party during the Soviet Union's collapse and declined in influence after Kyrgyzstan, in contested elections in 1989, had gained its first democratically elected president, Askar Akayev, a former university professor and computer scientist.
The university library and computer science students maintain and enhance the system while students of architecture at the TUM enter and maintain data.
"This is what happens when crazy ideas catch fire and people say, 'Wait, there is nothing to stop this,' " said Mr. Miller, who is a lecturer at the university and a computer scientist at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
His dissertation in the university's electrical and computer engineering department involved the development of a keyless keyboard, one that did not require the same degree of finger pressure.
In the interim Mottershead is encouraging greater links between the university's journalism and computer science students, in a bid to get the two sides to communicate more effectively.
And the Department of Defense's basic research account, a major source of university math, engineering, and computer science funding, would grow by 2%, to $1.3 billion.
Between 1983 and 1996, the percentage of women earning bachelor's degrees at universities and colleges in computer science dropped from a high of 37.1percenttoto a low of 27.5percentt, a 25.9percentt decrease.
