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This is no different than every other stupid moral panic we've endured. If it's not terrorists in every neighborhood, it's pedophiles behind every bush and tree. If it's not pedos swarming the backs of local park bushes, it's out-of-control high-impact sexual slavery in every motel room even if no pimp or underage person is ever involved and everyone consents to what's going on. Anger and fear are the only two emotional states that cause the logical side of the brain to completely shut down. These moral panics exist solely for the purpose of power grabbing. It was never about protecting lives, children, or women; it has always been about making you afraid enough that you'll support permanent removal of the rights of yourself and others to conduct your respective lives as you see fit, giving that control to the authoritarian politicians that crafted the panic in the first place, and thanking them profusely for protecting you from others by making you a little bit more of a slave to the government and its very real slippery slope of control.

See also http://reason.com/blog/2017/06... and https://www.psychologytoday.co... and an interesting thing I found along the way http://www.acadiau.ca/~thomson...

That discrepancy may also provide a way for people to beat the rap on prostitution charges: don't solicit someone for sex, tell them you're making a porno flick and you want them to be in it.

So a hooker sells erotic videos, not sex, to the john. Sort of like a triple-X version of SuperStar Studios booths at amusement parks. Genius.

Almost. There are a few problems with the business model of selling copies of 1 Night in $hooker on DVD-R to johns, which a pimp will have to work through before beginning to offer the service through his "actresses":

• State laws ban trade in erotic videos that lack artistic value, which is usually defined as some sort of excuse plot. Actresses will have to learn to act in more S&M scenarios to keep the videos legally interesting. And what happens when the john derails the plot?
• Hookers will have to verify state ID closely so that they don't make child porn.
• Repeat business might decrease, as the john can just beat it to the first video he made with the actress.

She is a member of the Rodina block, which was a political party created by the Kremlin and which was eventually merged into a larger party called "Just Russia". The leader of the Rodina block has advocated restricting the operation of human-rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Russa.

Narochnitskaya herself has opposed the Orange Revolution (a.k.a. the democratization movement) in the Ukraine.

Worst of all, the Rodina party has fueled racist xenophobic violence in Russia. According to a report in 2004 by the "The Globe and Mail", "According to official estimates, 20,000 people in Moscow alone now belong to skinhead organizations or other extremist groups, a 30-per-cent increase from five years ago. Among their favourite targets are Jews -- dozens of street signs last year were painted with swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti -- and those from the Caucasus region on Russia's southern flank, a historic hatred that has grown deeper through a decade of bloody war in the breakaway republic of Chechnya."

The report further states that when an African student sought help from the Russian police to protect him from violent skinheads, a Russian police officer said, "Why are you here, Mr. Nigger? We don't have any bananas here."

Acadia has done this since 1996. However, it wasn't universal in 1996.

My school http://acadiau.ca/ currently has a program called the "acadia advantage" where they lend out laptops to every student at the begining of each year, they use rather crappy dell latitude D600's which have a nasty habit of eating hard drives. on the social side of it, the lounges in residences are devoid of life. the student union building used to be devoid of life as well, but they made it so we could buy things at the snack mart with our meals. its nice to have a laptop for every student, it levels out the field as no one needs to buy a laptop, they are included in the price of tuition. unfortunately acadia has the highest tuition rate on the east coast of canada.

Acadia University in Nova Scotia did this a few years ago. In fact, they included the cost of the laptops in tuition. (http://www.acadiau.ca/) Faculty hated it, because students would sit in class with their laptops playing games instead of listening to the lecture.

Yeah, I'm graduating from Acadia [http://www.acadiau.ca/ this year and headed off to one of the better law schools in Canada.

Dell actually deals with the laptops now... (I think they underpriced IBM a couple of years ago.)

I don't know how you'd do what you're trying to do with different types of laptops... Acadia issues the same type of laptop to every user, which allows the tech department to solve problems a whole lot faster. Write to these guys/gals; they'll surely have some solid recommendations.

Novell Networks provides the backbone for networking (from what I understand).

All the best!

Check out here: here. Personally I use guitar pro 4: -supports wide range of instruments -import/export midi -pretty easy to use -mysongbook.com has a massive archive of pretty much any song I want -supports musical notation and guitar tab -gp5s software processing sounds AWESOME Sibelius is a music program that keeps getting highly recommended to me. I tried it once. I don't mind it, don't like it as much as gp4. I think this is because I'm just used to GP.

Holy cow. Check out this site.

The guys that developed this (Music Path Software) were my Electronic Music professor (Dr. Both) and my Advanced Algorithms professor (Dr. Diamond). The kid that it was invented for (Lucas Porter) goes to my church and is an incredible talent.
Read more here: http://www.exn.ca/dailyplanet/story.asp?id=2004030 253
and http://musicpath.acadiau.ca/main.htm

I agree completly. Being a Computer Science student at a Canadian school , We are taught the OOA/D and have courses that are just one 4 month development project. These are all done in groups of 4 and are great fun putting them together.

IMHO, the group needs to work together so they don't work on something they shouldnt have, and so when the team lead gives them their assignemnts for the night or week (I was the lead. Gave them lots, gave me lots... big project... ugh) they know what they are doing and come back with most if not all of their objectives taken care of. Our project was more succesful than other groups (my spelling aside) mainly because we were all friends and knew how to push each other to do our best. There were the groups of people the Prof stuck together because they didn't say that they had a group or didn't have anyone they could work with. Those people managed to complete the project but after reviewing our peers code, their work was bad. It lacked proper style in some cases and when a simple algorithm would have done the trick, they went nuts and did something totally in-efficient like using threads in Java... not smart.

So yes... a team's ability to interact with each other and their own mindsets on the team and the project being in sync do make for a better project. Now... if only those team building exersizes they put us through before the course worked...

Take a good look at the format. Its a spec defining how to digitize musical scores. When was the last time you went looking online for the score of a particular website? Whe was the last time you went looking online for a score that you could legally download?

This is an important protocol - for all those projects out there digitizing old music scores. Think classical music like Beethoven/Mozart. Up until recently, everyone in this buisness made their own homegrown system. Just to give a taste of where this project comes from:

• Humdrum Toolkit - a toolkit used by Stanford, Ohio State, and some other universities
• Finale one of the first visual score editing programs. Proprietarty format hacked by researchers.
• Score the 800 lb gorilla ofthe market. Music publications use this exclusively.
• GUIDO - another notation system developed for and by researchers.

These are just the standards I know of. This site lits many more I've never heard of. Hopefully MusicXML obsoletes these countless competing standards so those who research in this field can finally exchange data with one another - without porting around and maintating a collection of converters.

However, this really is irrelevant for the vast majority of slashdot readers. Unless your trying to digitize musical transcriptions, this standard is a curiosity at best. I have to wonder why it made the slashdot front page.

I am a Computer Science student at Acadia University in Wolfville Nova Scotia Canada, and we were the first university in the world to have LAN and intenet access in each students dorm room, and to issue an IBM laptop to each student.

For most of my classes, I have the traditional text book, but even in the time that I started here, (Last year ;)), my costs have gone down because most professors will give you URLs for sites with the text or references on them. This cuts my bills in half, but because we have laptops and OC3 internet connections, we have the highest tuition of any university in canada, coming in at just under 15,000 CDN (about 26,000 CDN for international students).

I just like the laptop, because I personally can't stand reading an EBook on my PDA all day... my eyes cant take it... i'm used to the laptop screen.

I think that we are never going to get out of this paper addiciton that we got ourselves into. Even with the wide spread usage of computer, we are using more paper than ever.

Therefore it doesn't matter whether you own the machine or not, as long as you have access to it.

Enroll in a University that provides notebooks, such as Acadia University in Nova Scotia:

Acadia University

Linux dual boot notebooks available to CS students as well!

My University uses a homebrewed Courseware Management System and it has actually been performing extremely well.

It was originally a comp sci student project that the university decided to adopt and develop. It is so much better than blackboard or WebCT because if we decide we want to add something new to it, we go ahead. At a university where every student has a laptop, this alone has been pretty cool. We have integrated ICU into it so that professors can choose a list of students in the class who are logged into the system and, with their permission, show the student's screen from the profs own laptop. Great if you're giving presentations and don't want to bring your laptop to the front of the room. We also have it integrated with our Library system so you can go into a course and see what books are on reserve for that course. Plus, all the usual stuff like testing modules (that include the ability to do audio recording), LaTeX integration (upload a .tex file, it automatically converts it to a jpg and displays it), course information, discussion boards, and countless other things. And the only thing it's cost the University are the salaries of one full time employee and two or three part time students every year to develop and maintain it.

Homebrewed CMS are the way to go!

My University uses a homebrewed Courseware Management System and it has actually been performing extremely well.

It was originally a comp sci student project that the university decided to adopt and develop. It is so much better than blackboard or WebCT because if we decide we want to add something new to it, we go ahead. At a university where every student has a laptop, this alone has been pretty cool. We have integrated ICU into it so that professors can choose a list of students in the class who are logged into the system and, with their permission, show the student's screen from the profs own laptop. Great if you're giving presentations and don't want to bring your laptop to the front of the room. We also have it integrated with our Library system so you can go into a course and see what books are on reserve for that course. Plus, all the usual stuff like testing modules (that include the ability to do audio recording), LaTeX integration (upload a .tex file, it automatically converts it to a jpg and displays it), course information, discussion boards, and countless other things. And the only thing it's cost the University are the salaries of one full time employee and two or three part time students every year to develop and maintain it.

Homebrewed CMS are the way to go!

Acadia University in Canada (http://www.acadiau.ca) has been doing something like this for a while. The difference is that everybody at Acadia gets an IBM thinkpad when they go there, they don't have to "work" for it. They upgrade the model they use every two years and you can buy it from them for cheap at the end of the school year. It's a nice system, but then again Acadia is one of the most expensive schools in Canada

Please read this.

Lack of computers?? just switch to Acadia University (or a number of others for that matter) where they give you a laptop computer.. the ones they give the students in the fall have a DVD/CDRW Combo .. :) cant wait

Sorry to nitpick, but I think you need to read this.

The univeristy I got my first degree from, Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, gives all its students AND all its faculty IBM Thinkpads. It's a very small (less than 4000 students) but well-respected university a few hours north of Maine. Every residence room is wired with 100mbit ethernet to a decent internet pipe, as is every classroom, parts ot the campus pub, most on-campus hangouts, and the first two floors of the library. Even the town, with a population of less than 4,000 (not including the students) has both cable and DSL available for $39CAD (~$25USD)/mo. It's a wired place.

The students really do all use the laptops, and for more than ICQing from one side of class to another (although that's fun too). My fourth year, I was a teaching assistant, and one of my assignments was to moderate online discussion groups for classes on ACME (Acadia's online discussion and coursework system) - one of the things my professors and I found was that the students making the most intelligent posts online were often NOT the students making intelligent points in class - opening up online discussion allowed a lot of shy, nervous, or whatever people to come out and say their piece to the class in a forum that they were comfortable in. Professors really do reply to their emails, and students and professors alike use powerpoints and websites on a regular basis.

Also, because students were posting on a forum (like Slashdot), URLs and other methods of backing points in their arguments up was quite common, and helped to add a level of intelligence and legitimacy to discussions.

Overall, the Acadia Advantage, as it is called, works quite well - while there are some who criticize it, enrollment at the school is up substantially, and students are well-trained in internet research methodology, online collaboration, web publishing, and lots more regardless of their major. It works, and it gets a lot of attention in Canada (its why I chose the school in the first place). Hopefully the same benefits will be seen in giving the computers to younger kids, as the man from Maine proposes.

The univeristy I got my first degree from, Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, gives all its students AND all its faculty IBM Thinkpads. It's a very small (less than 4000 students) but well-respected university a few hours north of Maine. Every residence room is wired with 100mbit ethernet to a decent internet pipe, as is every classroom, parts ot the campus pub, most on-campus hangouts, and the first two floors of the library. Even the town, with a population of less than 4,000 (not including the students) has both cable and DSL available for $39CAD (~$25USD)/mo. It's a wired place.

The students really do all use the laptops, and for more than ICQing from one side of class to another (although that's fun too). My fourth year, I was a teaching assistant, and one of my assignments was to moderate online discussion groups for classes on ACME (Acadia's online discussion and coursework system) - one of the things my professors and I found was that the students making the most intelligent posts online were often NOT the students making intelligent points in class - opening up online discussion allowed a lot of shy, nervous, or whatever people to come out and say their piece to the class in a forum that they were comfortable in. Professors really do reply to their emails, and students and professors alike use powerpoints and websites on a regular basis.

Also, because students were posting on a forum (like Slashdot), URLs and other methods of backing points in their arguments up was quite common, and helped to add a level of intelligence and legitimacy to discussions.

Overall, the Acadia Advantage, as it is called, works quite well - while there are some who criticize it, enrollment at the school is up substantially, and students are well-trained in internet research methodology, online collaboration, web publishing, and lots more regardless of their major. It works, and it gets a lot of attention in Canada (its why I chose the school in the first place). Hopefully the same benefits will be seen in giving the computers to younger kids, as the man from Maine proposes.

The point is halfway there.

As for police fabricating evidence: here's an interesting story. Here's another. Here's another. And just in case you think this only happens in Canada, here's another.

Let's not even get into the number of death row prisoners cleared every year by DNA...

Several public universities in Canada have been requiring laptops from as far back as 1996. Entire campuses have been fitted out with places for students to plug in, view class notes, homework assignments, and email in completed assignments.

A prime example would be Acadia University. The laptops have become an integral part of how the university operates.

All laptops are fully insured in case they get stolen, and the cost (a leasing fee, with option to buy out after graduation and NOT a full-cost upfront buy) is tax-deductible because its included with the tuition. In addition, there are many bursery programs for students who need financial aid.

All in all, the results for Acadia have been incredible. It went from being just a 'party school' to having some of the top undergraduate programs in the country within a few years of introducing the laptop requirements.

For more information, check out the Acadia Advantage site.

If the universities in the States follow the example set by Acadia, the laptops will be a serious edge for their students. And god knows that in today's economy, we can use any edge we can get.

Several public universities in Canada have been requiring laptops from as far back as 1996. Entire campuses have been fitted out with places for students to plug in, view class notes, homework assignments, and email in completed assignments.

A prime example would be Acadia University. The laptops have become an integral part of how the university operates.

All laptops are fully insured in case they get stolen, and the cost (a leasing fee, with option to buy out after graduation and NOT a full-cost upfront buy) is tax-deductible because its included with the tuition. In addition, there are many bursery programs for students who need financial aid.

All in all, the results for Acadia have been incredible. It went from being just a 'party school' to having some of the top undergraduate programs in the country within a few years of introducing the laptop requirements.

For more information, check out the Acadia Advantage site.

If the universities in the States follow the example set by Acadia, the laptops will be a serious edge for their students. And god knows that in today's economy, we can use any edge we can get.

This is nothing new nor a new idea. Mass. Universities may be the first in the USA, but this has been going on for at least 3 years at a University here in canada. Acadia University is a school semi close to where I live where all of the students get laptops. Unlike in Mass, they each get one of these laptops as part of their student fess. Therefore eliminating the stolen gear problem.

This allows the students to have a unique learning environment. Instead of computer labs on campus there are ethernet jacks in hallways and in various other places. Also, professors assume that you have access to a computer and this is always a correct assumption. It is much easier to assign assignments by email and know for sure that the computer labs won't be too busy for students to get them.

I don't go to acadia U, because their CS program isn't as good (they are really an artsy school for those who may be interested). But the idea I think is great. As for Mass. U. They may be first in the US, BUT they are not first at all.

Unfortunately the staff here at Acadia University have elected to base our network off Novell Netware and moreover they refuse to upgrade our network's infrastrucure/pipe to the outside world to deal with the load of having many thousands of laptops connected to the internet at once.

Anyway, you silly Americans think you're so revolutionary doing this - But Acadia's been doing it for the last 4 years... EH indeed.

And we pronounce it About, not aboot. It's not our fault that you think it should be abawt. :P

The Acadia Advantage

Ahh, but this isn't always the case. There is a university here in Nova Scotia called Acadia. As part of your tuition you get a laptop, and all of the dorm rooms are outfitted for highspeed access.

You are allowed to send in assignments and even attend some classes via your laptop. As for getting to do some exams on, or with your laptop, I haven't heard anything about them allowing this, but I know they are making extensive use of the laptops they provide students.

They were ahead of their time a few years ago when they started doing this, and yes the tuition went up a bit, but I think it is a valuable addition to the Students.

Acadia University, in Nova Scotia, Canada, uses laptops to some degree or another for all of its courses. If you do not have a laptop one will be provided. Every room includeing residence is wired with multiple ethernet jacks. Acadia is an very good small university with an excellent CS program. While the fees are a little high by Canadian standards the cerriculum is cutting edge.

Acadia's computer science degree requires (or at least it did when I was there and probably still does) a "Computers and Society" course. Ostensibly it's about social issues of IT but it was actually more like How To Use Cruddy software To Write a Class-Collaborative Book on Pointless Stuff (eg Groupware, or ISO9000, or Dykstra on proving algorithms (something I thought Turing and Gödel had pretty much settled)... There was next to zero discussion of issues like privacy, and when it was there was a frightening tendency to resolve them as "I'll do whatever I get paid to do, as long as it's legal, since that's what professionals do." Yikes.

I quit the course. It was a travesty.

That's probably the best thing that could happen.

I went through university hooked on the 'net nearly a decade ago, when it was a mere shadow of what it is now and there was no Ethernet to be had outside the lab. (Even the labs were mostly 9600 b/s dumb terminals.) It was a waste of my life... there's a lot I'd give up to get that time back. These toys are more insidiously addictive than any chemical. I'm queasy about what all this is doing to fragile minds, and I'm dead-set against mandatory programs like Acadia's. I'd never allow kids of mine to go to such a place... or at least they'd get no money from me.

Funny, Henry Ford's line is almost exactly what came to my mind... I was wandering the Dell site, though (they offer colours two), and it had a bit more frightening twist. Any colour you want so long as it runs Winduhs, aka any choice you want as long as it's not an important one.

I found the "We're thinking university logos" line kind of ironic - possibly even Freudian. I can guess the alleged university of Acadia will be one of the first to jump on that. "Any colour you want, so long as it's blue and red and Mess$oft all over." Blech... Something wrong with the Tremclad Technique?

How is it all this "today's technology" (ya right) has to rely on the tactics from the previous fin-de-siecle?