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Internet Curfew for College Students?
140Mandak262Jamuna writes "IIT Bombay, one of the top Indian engineering schools, is restricting internet access to its students. The restriction is simply to cut off all internet access at night from the dorms. The school claims the 24/7/365 internet access is hampering academic performance, personality development and extra curricular activities. Though these are the 'official' reasons, it appears there are other reasons too. Mr Prakash Gopalan, the Dean of Student Affairs, says, 'one only had to look at the hard drive of any of the students' computers to see that bad content dominated over good.'"
Now in addition to tuition, sports, and *gasp* quality of education, students will select schools based on Internet availability.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Eh? What about those of us whose extracurricular activities depend on the Internet? And those of us who colleges offer courses online? Those of us who take classes in the evening, and catch up with our social lives afterward?
Glad I don't live in a dorm.
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So why is it bad when IIT-Bombay limits access?
>'one only had to look at the hard drive of any of the students' computers to see that bad content dominated over good.'
It's a sad commentary about the Simpsons' effect on our culture - that I can only hear Apu's voice when I read this.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
That's because bad content is correlated with very large file sizes. Seriously, how long will this last?
I had 24/7/365 Net xs when I wuz in coll3g3!!! I turn3d 0ut ju5t f1ne!!! LOL!!!!
My blog
So now they download their pr0n during the day instead of at night. Instead of engaging in wholesome activities like playing CS:Source, they will go out drinking and fornicating. College students are going to find ways to be lazy no matter what you do. Just because you can track Internet usage and can't track the other stuff doesn't mean the solution is to cut off the Internet. You are just punishing people who could be using it to further their education.
In any case, I feel sorry for them because clearly they have stupid people in charge. But, on the plus side, they get some real world experience dealing with stupid people making decisions they have no say in.
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Oh, so they're spying on the hard drives of their students now. Bad University! Bad! Have you been taking lessons from the RIAA?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
'one only had to look at the hard drive of any of the students' computers to see that bad content dominated over good.'
Any? Any apart from the smarties who boot from a live CD (or USB stick) and don't touch the hard drive for their "late night browsing".
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
What's going to be bad is when students store a research paper or essay on a remote server or online e-mail service and need to access that paper to finish it at 11PM - Midnight etc and can't access it due to their internet restrictions.
I use to do a lot online research late at night but I was never in a dorm either. I guess you can always go the the library to access something like that if they don't shut off that internet either.
Bite my shiny metal ass.
If you can't handle college without having the administration trying to force you to work, you aren't going to be able to handle a job. Your boss isn't going to hold your hand. Letting the people spend time on the internet instead of studying weeds out the lazy and promotes the hard working. If you aren't going to make it in your field, it is best you find out quickly, instead of after years of wasted money on college.
I have heard time and time again about Indian education (specifically Computer Science) failing to adequately prepare students for real life. This seems like another example of that.
College students are masters of getting what they want despite rules and regulations. Some enterprising group of CS students will go around caching web sites or host forums off of their computers (or the CS lab computers) and the word will get out about where folks can go to be "on the internet" between dusk and dawn.
Of course, there's always game systems, iPods, and off-campus wireless networks for people to use.
The best thing to do would be to raise the requirements for classes, thus forcing people to have to study more, and require participation in an extra-curricular activity as a requirement for graduation. Or you could just realize that socialization patterns are changing and deal with it.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
IIT Bombay thinks of the kittens.
r bate..._God_kills_a_kitten
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_time_you_mastu
I guess it's back to beatin' off to the "dead tree" edition of <enter title of favorite skin-mag here>. At least the monitor was easier to wipe off.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
The primary purpose of attending university is to get an education, not 24/7 Internet access. I can and do restrict online access of the children at home. My house, my rules. The fact that some spoiled brats are whining about it just affirms the reasonableness of the rule. If you're going to pull an all night session it should be studying not gaming or web surfing.
6F 9E A9 1E 96 9F 74 27 ED B8 81 6D 0C 4E 1E 78
My other Sig is a 229.
So instead of pursuing virtual sex at nights, the students can pursue the real thing. That should keep the student health center busy.
$ du -hLs /home/daeg/porn /home/daeg/porn
/home/daeg/school /home/daeg/school
18G
$ du -hLs
29M
Ack! Quick, everyone symlink your porn directory into your school directory!
How about have been? For more than a decade? I'm not saying it was the factor in the school I chose, but the ethernet port per person in the dorm rooms sure made me a lot happier with my decision, and that was in 1996.
Hinduism does not have a single uniform belief system but is a conglomerate of diverse beliefs and traditions. There is no central authority guiding the masses nor is there any central book or scripture guiding the belief. Instead hindus are encouraged to find their own way/path to God, even if that is different from everyone else's.
Therefore you will find all kinds of divergent belief systems in Hinduism - from the Kamasutra (which incidentally was written by a priest) to your set of voodoo priests that condemn "bad content". Hinduism does not state one as right and the other as wrong. Instead find your own path.
This in no way means that Hinduism is not being hijacked by the moral police who are quick to condemn "bad content" as "western influences".
More on topic, IIT is supposed to be a secular institute run by the government which is supposed to have nothing to do with Hinduism or any other religion.
Haven't you heard? All religions except mean old Mr. Judaism and Christianity are quaint, exotic and peaceful due to not being part of Western civilization.
All the jokes aside, while it is reasonable for *you* to restrict the activities of *your* children in *your* home, it is NOT okay to limit the activities of college students. Sure, they are there to get an education but what is this teaching them? That censorship is ok or even good?
Morality, social behavior, and personal habits are not modified in good ways by censorship or other controlling means. It might work right now for your children, but these are not children, they are college students - young adults whose main occupation is passing tests right now. While it's a bad analogy, most people who do prison time don't come out better than they went in.
If you think about it, you can't force someone to learn. You can force them to attend classes but you can't force them to learn. If they are going to fail, let them fail in school rather than as a developer in your new outsourced project!
What exactly is 'bad content' in this situation? If IIT owns the hardware the students are using then they have a say in how it is used. If they don't own it the situation is reversed. It's an assumption here, but I believe that net access is paid for with tuition? If the restriction is part of the school rules, then paying tuition is more or less like accepting those rules, but if the situation is just one of censorship it will come to a bad end. I'm also going to assume that students were not told of the restriction when they paid tuition.
If this were applied to life, restrictions on network and phone network access would be considered a very bad thing. (my apologies to rural communities that still have trouble getting network access) I really don't think this is the kind of lesson that students need to be taught.
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The problem there is that you expect them to be sane and logical about it. If they actually wanted to block "bad content", there would have been lots of other possibilities, like just blocking the porn sites at the proxy. Most companies do that.
In reality it's a knee jerk "think of the children!" (well, ok, the students) solution, based on little more than some "back in my day we didn't have these newfangled computers and everything was soo much better" nostalgia.
Logical? It doesn't even actually solve even the problem of "bad content", as there's still nothing to prevent one from downloading that earlier. It's not even based on any kind of study showing that the decline in grades is actually any different between a group which had its internet connection removed, compared to a control study who didn't. Is it actually based on the Internet, or maybe it's just that as the "me wanna be a rich computer guy too" explosion hit India, and the explosion of universities offering quick IT training, now enrollment isn't exactly limited to the top smartest and/or most passionate people any more? They don't know, but they're implementing a solution based on wild assumptions anyway.
It's just the same kind of nostalgia-tinted goggles, and/or fear of the new, that you can actually see all over the world. "Aaauuugh! Kids these days are into X, that will be the fall of civilization as we know it! We didn't have X back in our days, and look how much better everything was back then!" Where X even in the USA included at various points: comics, rock-and-roll music, tabletop games, computer games, etc, etc, etc. At every single bloody step there was some new uber-threat that would destroy civilization as a whole... except that always failed to actually happen, or indeed make any noticeable difference. In India's case X is simply "using the Internet", but otherwise the scare is exactly the same.
The problem with such nostalgia-based reactions is that nostalgia always presents stuff through rose-coloured glasses. We don't remember what it really was like X decades ago, we remember some idealized, sanitized version where everything was happier, the grass was greener, the sky was clearer, all students were the very incarnation of virtue and non-stop study, and the neighbours were all one big happy family. It never was like that, we just filtered out the bad parts, or re-painted them in a bright rose colour.
Hence any reaction or measure based on that kind of inherently bullshit invented "data", ends up nothing more than a case of GIGO. (Garbage In, Garbage Out.)
Worse yet, wasting time and energy on such bullshit measures just serves to divert time, energy and attention from the _real_ problems and causes. E.g., these guys instead of actually spending some time figuring out what the real problems are, just did a feel-good bullshit measure and can rest for the next few years until it becomes obvious that it didn't work. In the meantime, _if_ there is an actual problem at work there, it can continue to have the same effect or even worsen.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Several years ago I had a (relatively short) spat of addiction to Neverwinter Nights. During a random conversation with my online mates one night, I was rather shocked to discover that most of them were in college. I myself had graduated college several years ago and had solid high-salary job. My Neverwinter hobby/addiction was just a brief fascination --- something to do in between girlfriends.
There is so much studying and socializing to do while in college, I honestly can't imagine playing any online game during college. That is why I was shocked --- I was like, what the FUCK are you doing playing Neverwinter Nights? We had been playing around 4 hours a day. College is a key time to improve oneself, and they had been squandering that time. While I was squandering my own time as well, the difference was that the impact on my life was one hell of a lot less (negligible, in fact).
Life needs more saving throws.
In other news India universities discovered they have money to rehire those nighttime sysadmins again...
Because the internet is the only thing that can distract college students in their free time, amirite?
If is truely for the sole purpose of helping people get back to studying, it is a very dangerous "solution". It will just allow more lazy people who don't have their priorities straight into society pretending to be responsible professionals. Let them fail!
[alk]
All arguments of internet freedom aside, what about the costs for this?
I'm only assuming based on my limited experience of paying for college (currently a second semester freshman) but I would assume that students do pay some kind of internet access fee when living in the dorm.
Any idea whether that fee was halved? (also assuming the internet cut-off period lasts 12 hours...)
Maybe I'm just a penny-pincher at heart.
From my experience, most IIT Engineering students won't even know CS:Source if it landed on their lap. Sure they are bright people who can solve differential equations in split seconds, but they are not so much into GAMING. I know this first hand, as I have friends from different IITs around India
How hard would it be for some friends of those in the college to set up some hi gain directional antennae and beam an off campus signal in?
Some cantennas and a repeater and your back on for late nights
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
Where did it say in the article that everyone at the college was religious or Hindu as you say? Or what about caves and potions? I must have been reading a different article...
The one I read was about college kids overdoing it. Now whoever woulda thunk that college kids could overdo anything? And whoever heard of an overzealous reaction trying to correct a problem. Crazy I tell ya, crazy!
A. You can not stop students from "bad" content. The internet isn't the ONLY source of all this. You can't really stop people from going outside IITB, and you wouldn't want to ransack every visitor at the gate.
B. I am not sure if the argument is against copyrighted content, but otherwise, I definitely believe that students must be given the freedom to watch what they have and what they want. And doing this ransacking business makes the university look terribly cheap. The students should at least get together and sue, i'd say!
C. Having tight firewalls and proxies is a great way to limit access to the internet. But refer to point A.
D. A lot of institutions have lately come up with sandboxing students' interests in the excuse of increasing productivity (if by that you mean jail time or slave labor, sure). It has the risk of making students go mad in line with notorious university schedules. And a lot of students are definitely not into sports nor into geek entertainment, if you're making a point about friendlier alternatives. It just doesn't work.
E. For those who would want to get deep into religious beliefs, hinduism couldn't care less if your child did the "wrong" thing at the right time. It does go against foolish, ignorant and orthodox people who can't reason why they do what they do. And by suppressing your child more, you'll only force him/her into rebellion, causing more damage than otherwise. F. The only real way to stop it all is if students by themselves learn to regulate their lives. It is not going to work by suppressing them. It actually works the other way round.
-Karthik
Now, if they filtered slashdot, I would spend way more time learning...
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
My university also doAÉ$~ß;$ß[;ädsl1pkrp$%£":L$K"P{J^NO CARRIER
I don't think I would attend a school that tried to restrict my internet access or had a poor infrastructure. If I'm going to school, and paying a fortune to attend, I expect to have access to every tool I might need any time I might need it (barring physical limitations).
By the time you reach college you should be self sufficient enough to manage your own affairs. If your not, you deserve what you get (fail/get pregnant/have a kid/get arrested/etc). It's not the schools place to babysit the students at this level.
Mr Prakash Gopalan, the Dean of Student Affairs, says, 'one only had to look at the hard drive of any of the students' computers to see that bad content dominated over good.'
Bad by what definition? And who sets that standard? The Dean of Student Affairs deciding what's good and bad on the internet is a little like my pharmacist letting their conscience decide which meds are good and bad.
Both of those are bad ideas. Far more dangerous than any content on a college kid's hard drive.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
anything with a MS copyright or a ".exe" suffix.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
It is my firm belief that the good content will ultimately prevail over the bad.
"I can and do restrict online access of the children at home"
1) A university is not home
2) Most university students are 18 and over.
3) It's up the student to make those decisions
4) You aren't their daddy. The university is providing an education, not acting as parent... not that you can anyway, since as I previously mentioned, the students are over 18.
I suspect you're one of those people who always feel the need to "do something" when something doesn't agree with you. Those kids are partying in Daytona. Need new laws. Those darn protesters, we should have a law against them.
Really, just get over yourself.
And, BTW, I'm over 50 with several kids. So I actually have experience in these matters.
Just because there's porn on my HDDs than anything else, doesn't mean I spend all my time watching porn. It just means I have a large selection to choose from and wont tire easily from my collection. In the amount of hours in a week, I spend the majority of them at work and second to that would be resting.
Technological measures don't solve social problems... This is more an act of over-bearing school (nanny) administrators.
Additionally, 802.11 transceivers are tiny, and dirt cheap these days. All it takes is one person to plug a USB adapter into a library or lab computer, change your default gateway, and everyone is online.
And that's assuming they physically sever the network link... If not, any type of masquerading could get access. Even if the lab and library computers are on a separate network segment (DMZ, behind a router) a few minor software tricks can tunnel any and all traffic through, quite easily... At a technical school, half the student body should have the know-how to do that.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
here's lucrative new business plan:
setup wifi across the street with enough power to cover the dorms. then charge students for access with a smaller business of selling them wifi cards and accessories.
The restrictions apply on the hostel intranet to restrict gaming. Internet just happens to be a side effect.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Facts are for pussies. Feel the truthiness.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
And the administration gets to decide what "bad" is, and what "good" is. One person's bad is another person's "very bad" and another person's "not so bad". Content police. "Family value" police. Not a good idea. Whatever happened to pulling all-nighters to get the next project done. Now internet access is cut-off. Better do all your online research before 11:00PM.
If I have to read one more comment (in)directly telling people how they should lead their lives and especially grow as human beings by indicating just how ever-so-important the college phase is for social development, I'm going to pull a Bill Hicks. Not everyone is "squandering" their lives away by 'wasting' their time playing on the computer a lot - not even factoring in that people who play past a given time are huge addicts. Some of us, *gasp* went through that social thing in high school or the first couple years of college. Then we realize that the majority of people who go to college will forever have the maturity level of your average high-schooler, or worse. We call them frat guys. But that's going off-point. Even still, many of the 'addicted' gamers - *gasp again* - do go out to bars/parties/social events - and some of those people even have GIRLFRIENDS! I know, crazy right?
While I have bared witness to the addicted wowaholic who shells him/herself into their room and frantically paws at anyone who tries to make RL social contact with them, in my experience that's the minority. Most avid gamers do it in their spare time in place of, say, watching television.
And going on topic, what kind of self-righteous prick would employ these kinds of rules? Like he is so perfectly amazing, he never does anything lazy or unproductive, that he can determine when others can and can't do something *potentially* unproductive. OH NO! Most of a student's hard drive is filled with baaaad things that aren't geared toward solving the world's next big problem! Their lives must be utter SHIT. Give me a fucking break. Some of us actually prefer to live our lives without working to the absolute breaking point and stuffing every possible second of productive work into our bodies. It's called laying back and enjoying life.
What right do they have to judge their students like that? As a Comp Sci I've found a large culture in my circles around being awake during the evening and sleeping more throughout the day. If I were a student there I'd either being transferring to a place that respected my right to access the internet OR I would work with my fellow students to build my own solution based around someone sharing their own private connection. Hell I'd figure with enough pissed off students maybe you'd be able to find a local wireless ISP that'd work out for ya. The only way this is cool is that it forces students to find their own solution. Unless the students at this school are too lame to deal with it. But yeah, otherwise that's sort of a real deal-breaker. Maybe they don't want people living in residence
It's precisely the kind of students who aren't satified with anything but "the best" education who are least likely to put up with this.
More to the point, regardless of how much pr0n, myspace, and mp3s/movies students download, the Internet is an absolutely essential research tool for anyone doing science or engineering. The place one gets reference information on components is online. A generation ago, my reference stuff was a shelf of databooks. A few years ago, it was a pile of CDs. Now, I just download chip spec sheets in PDF when I need it. Of course, if one is in comp sci, the most likely time one is going to want to tie up one's broadband connection to download a Linux distro is just before going to bed... it'll be ready to burn in the morning regardless of how big it is.
How many class assignments require Net access to complete? Most, perhaps?
They'll either change policy or lose students disproportionately towards the top end of their intellectual spectrum.
I won't ask if they're getting their advice on controlling Net access from Oral Roberts University or schools of similar eminence, or if the guy who signed off from this was separated at birth from George Bush, that would be impolite.
Tech Public Policy stuff
It would seem as though they've forgotten who writes their checks. The students are paying to attend that university, and for those that pay for the dorms that includes the internet. I'm not in college, but if I were and I was paying for a dorm, it would be up for me to decide when I want to get online. It's a college not a grade school. Imagine if your ISP cut your internet off at night and said that you would be more productive at work? I'd be pissed if Comcast did that to me! I'd also be pissed if I were one of those students.
science or technology related for a living?
I write Linux tutorials for a living. . . 100% of my research is online. No Net access means I'm out of business.
Online is where one gets current IT and science information, not from textbooks which might be several years old or magazines whose content is months old as of the cover date. Limiting access means limiting student access to essential research materials. A stupid thing for an engineering school to do.
If you have to ask why IIT is doing a bad thing in limiting Net access, what are you doing on slashdot?.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Consider the number of college students that go out and "booze it up, etc, etc", perhaps rather than doing this, they're spending some time online playing a game. It doesn't necessarily mean that they are neglecting their studies, but rather that they are taking some time here and there to wind down and enjoy a nice game.
I tended to do the full-burn thing early-on, finish my assignments, and then kick back for a game of Quake 2/3 or various others when I was in college. It was a great way to relieve stress after busting my brain on code for several days/hours, and slightly more healthy than drinking my face off like many did.
Content that's bad or good according to whose standards? The standards of the person 'investigating' the student's computers?
Just Friday and Saturday?
Real hardcore CS students sit in the comp.lab from 1600-0800 every day of the week, including Sunday.
- These characters were randomly selected.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
I managed to get through college playing online games hours a day and became quite a pot head junior and senior year while starting to go out and party a lot from sophomore year on. Held a job for 20 hours a week goofing off at Best Buy to help pay my rent, got a double major in Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering in 4.5 years by going to class MAYBE 1/3 of the time. To top it off, I have a very nice job for an large company. I had a lot of fun and got those bad habits out of me and now believe I'm a better person while I had a hell of a time. Do what you want to do, just know when you're backed up against the wall and really need to do something.
The point is, I don't think cutting internet is going to do jack except piss students off at the administration. If I were a student there, I'd find a little startup money with friends and build a small wireless ISP off campus that reaches onto campus and sell bandwidth for a small price.
This is nothing new. I go to a college-prep boarding high school. Every night at midnight, our internet shuts off. An hour later, the computers themselves shutdown and won't turn on until 6:00 in the morning. You just get used to the fact that there is a limit to how late you can work.
That late nighter who is cramming in as much as he can? Or that guy trying to finish that project that is due tomarow and has to stay up till 2 in the morning? Seems a bit unfair.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
I wonder how long it will take before we start seeing some very advanced offline-browsing and shared-caching technology coming out of the amateur software development community in India?
I mean, if your internet access gets cut off at 6pm, then what you need to do, obviously, is rig up a few old machines with some big hard drives, and have them first work as caching proxies during the day, saving all the content that's been recently browsed, and then they need to crawl all the pages that are subjectively related (maybe based on Google PageRank?) to the pages that have been browsed, and cache those, too.
Likewise, you'd want to really get that bittorrent client smoking during the day, so that you'd have lots of content to watch after hours. (That'll make for some interesting traffic patterns.)
Yeah, it's not as good as having the 'real' internet at night, but it would let you get your fill of porn.
I admit that I don't really understand the psychology of Indian IT students, but I can only imagine what would happen if you tried to pull something like this at a major U.S. IT school -- it would be an open challenge to the students, to figure out a way to get what they want despite the restrictions.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Let's hear it for the world's largest democracy! Looks like they have morality police, too!
I think it's when the Dean of Academic Affairs' screen froze after 344 hits for Aishwarya Raj's "Bollywood Uncensored," that the school knew they needed to institute some changes.
Bravo!
... then they graduate with honors. Having completed their fixed task, they get to socialize, which INCLUDES Net access. If you have to work out a high-bandwidth fee, figure it out.
You pegged it perfectly. It's the GRADES that matter. If someone is bright and gets their work done,
As someone else pointed out, students were lazing about in drunken stupors in the days before net access. I don't care about how someone washes out. Self control is PART of the unstated education of college, where you don't need Bathroom Passes.
As a much larger issue, in the 21st century, Content Lockdown mentalities are OBSOLETE. Yes, this terrifies many Powers-That-Be. Deal. The Information Age is here forever, and it's only going to get MORE intense.
Universities are ridiculously expensive anyway. They can afford the loss-leader (excepting lawsuits) of a Net connection.
This is just another instance of PowerLust disguised as Think of the Children.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
College students are supposed to be responsible for their actions. The college shouldn't nanny them like high school kids (even the extent of nannying of high school kids is a dubious practice if you ask me.) If college students take time off studies to be online, that is their problem. They're the only ones that will be hurt, and that is their (and only their) problem.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
dude, it's the IIT. there are a gazillion males, with a micro-miniscule (like, 1% or less) girls around as students, and even less if you count out the married graduate students, and even worse a percentage if you count only the ones willing to mingle without having their assignments done for them and taken out for dinners and treats (plus given the Indian scenario, all that could still not go beyond a 0.5th base, allright)
So, rest assured,the only fornicating they do is with their left (or right) hand. Now, curtailing the net during key hours will make sure that students will read more, if you get my drift.
It's India, and sometimes you do get professors and deans with a sense ofmorality comparable to the extreme biblebelt in USA. I have heard stories that once a dean put up notices extolling students to refrain from the thing involving their let (or right) hand..
I think that if i were paying tuition at this college it would be wise for them to give me what im paying for.. ahemm internet access, or i would just pickup and goto a better school.
The real reason for this restriction is to give them a reason to leave the computer and go take a shower /end of stereotype jab
Um, so what? What you've said has nothing to do with this article or the discussion of it.
NEWSFLASH DUMBFUCK, this article is about internet access. The hours of the library will remain unchanged, so your objection is, well, fucking dumb.
You point is stupid and meaningless.
It's pretty clear this guy assfucked you royally, exposed your idiocy, and you fabricated a response to save face. Too bad it was a moronic, irrelevant, useless response.
Do yourself a favor and shut your idiot mouth before you post again and say something even more retarded than you did this time.
"I'm positing that you're not THINKING about it. "
No bitch, you're posting useless shit. Stop. For your own good, stop. You've embarrassed yourself and your family, do your mom a favor and STOP.
This is really nothing new. The university where I work does throttle (though not completely suspend) Internet bandwidth during night hours. While officials here didn't look at students' hard drives, they did examine the packets for a period of time and determined that most of what was being transmitted was gaming related.
It makes sense from a financial standpoint. From the students' perspective, University Internet access is free, but in reality, someone pays for it, and they pay more when there's more of it.
Since we're just throttling the bandwidth instead of taking it away entirely, the argument against using online resources to finish homework is a moot point. Text (and a few pictures) don't take up much bandwidth.
Schools have been charging students for typewriter rental and photocopies for ages.
Seriously, if you can meter the usage and give each student an "allocation" based on coursework requirements, and charge rates that are just enough to recover the additional costs, go for it. Do NOT use it as a profit center, but do not waste taxpayer money on student's non-academic use.
Alternatively, don't give students any free access outside of computer labs and the library. In the dorms, make them rent a connection and charge them by the size of the pipe and the amount of monthly traffic, and price it on a cost-recovery basis. A basic 10MB/sec connection with a couple hours of saturating the connection each week plus a couple hours watching videos and 10-20 hours of listening to music or online gaming each week should be quite affordable. The student who spends 168 hours/week saturating the link will need to pay more - maybe 10-20x as much - as the "basic" user. If it's for real academic purposes his professor's department can pay for it and the student can be charged the same amount a "course fee" so his financial aide will cover it. Either that, or the professor can get his students some lab space.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Given the state's cushy kickbacks with telcos owned by the lawmaker's wife's cousin's step-brother, it may very well cost the state $1.00 a bit. :)
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
nt
Even some state schools do this.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Their recruiting department needs to know these things.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
J Stor Dot Org - I'm a college student, and my University has stopped stocking most academic journals in hard copy, instead requiring me to go onto JStor.org to find them... which is fine with me, since it makes finding the articles and doing the actual research 100 time easier. But without 24/7 internet, most research papers I've written wouldn't have gotten finished.
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
But while our downloading of software / porn / etc is limited in speed, at least we get it 24/7...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
'one only had to look at the hard drive of any of the students' computers to see that bad content dominated over good.'"
Sounds like the college is a failure, not the students. Why havent they successfully taught students the right thing to do? Nancy Reagan could do a better job.
If that had happened at my college, I would move off campus. The way most colleges are these days, shut off their Internet and they will just go to the bars and clubs. Yeah, that will enrich an educational experience.
Internet is now not 24/7 there. Drugs are available 24/7, dealers don't care it is night (many prefer it) and your stash won't disappear after a certain time of day.
Let's see how much drug usage climbs after this has been in place for a while.
My guess, at least 20%.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
I managed to land a job at the computer lab. Most of my time is spent surfing Slashdot and working on Rosetta Code. Er, I mean, sitting around and waiting for students to ask me questions.
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One of my EE TAs is an IIT Bombay grad. Based on his experience as an engineer, I have no doubt that IIT Bombay provides a first-class education.
However - despite the fact that my TA has a 4-year EE degree, he as never used a graphing calculator, nor has he ever used a computer algebra system (Maple, Mathematica).
This surprised me (and my fellow lab students) a great deal - while it is expected that we should be able to do computations without a calculator (indeed, calculators are banned on all Applied Mathematics exams and some EE exams), it's also expected that you will understand how to use the resources that you have. MATLAB is a wonderful tool (which my TA is quite proficient in), but it is NOT a CAS, nor is it indended to be one.
The attitude at IIT is, "you should work it by hand". Want to solve a system of 4-variable s-domain mesh-current equations? You're going to be using Cramer's Rule and a LOT of recursion to find the determinants. Want to do inverse Laplace transforms on a 2nd-order system function? You had better get good at partial fraction expansion.
You can have this kind of academic rigor at an institute that's as elite as IIT. It's the same kind of thing that goes on at our military academies. When you are among the best of the best, more can be demanded of you.
A couple of things: 1 - Many kids that enter college in India are not yet 18. So theoretically most freshers and (some sophs as well) aint really 'adults'. Does that matter one bit is a completely different issue. 2 - The students at some of the IITs enjoy ridiculously fast connections compared to people in the rest of the country. 128kbps is considered 'high-speed' in many places in India. The 24/7/365 access is provided by the university. The university can bloody well cut *their* connection off any time they like. Tough luck! If that hurts your pr0n surfing or wow-ing, try and get a connection from elsewhere.
I think UT Austin handles the bandwith problem quite well. After a few years of trying different methods, they settled on the current format:
Students are allotted 4/8/12GB of weekly bandwith depending on their plan. If you go over your bandwith limit, you are automatically moved into a 2nd class network that has bandwith throttled (slightly better than dial-up) or buy 1GB for $5.
I don't know a lot about Indian culture, but apparently they like their Porn. Are you perhaps transposing your own cultural norms onto their society? How old are Indian university students? 25? 18? 16? In their culture are they expected and trained to be self sufficient at that age? Are universities expected to guide the social development of Indian students? Not that I agree with turning off the net for forced social time, (God knows I did some late-night homework) but they may *legitimately* feel that they need to slap these "kids" into socializing, dating, marrying, etc. (In the eyes of parents)
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I know plenty of 30 or 40-somethings that cannot be relied upon to make adult decisions.
18 is an arbitrary age where we decide that society is going to hold you responsible for your actions. No aptitude test is given--it's all "social promotion".
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock