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School Spying Scandal Gets Even More Bizarre
Several sources following the recent school webcam spying debacle are reporting that an even stranger twist has surfaced. The student in question that was disciplined for an "improper act" was apparently accused of either drug use or drug selling. Turns out he was eating Mike & Ike candy, not popping pills. While there is probably more to this story than has made it to the general public, the officials involved have done a particularly bad job of actually managing the events.
Yeah...because Mike & Ikes look just like illicit drugs. Completely ignoring the privacy aspect of this story, a school official mistaking freakin' Mike & Ikes for drugs is beyond comprehension.
http://www.illinoisnut.com/products/mainLarge_1028200752854pm.jpg
That looks quite unlike any drug I've ever heard of or seen.
Living With a Nerd
To be fair, the "Mike & Ike" claim was made by the kid. And he might be lying.
But the entire "what exactly was the kid doing" tangent is really just an attempt to justify the school's bad behavior.
The news just keeps on getting better and better. The more absurd this story gets, the more it will stand out as an example of why this sort of behaviour is unacceptable.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I still can't believe anybody but the IT department had access to this, and better yet no one in the IT department thought this might be a bad idea...
Really doesn't make much difference. The school shouldn't be punishing kids for taking drugs at home even if they really were doing that. If they came by the information legitimately then their choices are bringing the matter to the attention of the parents, the police, social services or some combination of those. If the information was acquired illegitimately then the choice gets a little harder but I can still see an argument for "we shouldn't know this but we really should let the parents know anyway and fire whoever got us into this mess". \deciding to discipline the student for a non-school related incident though is just completely the wrong move to make.
Apparently the school administration has lost all memory of being teenagers in the 60s and 70s.
Hint: Drugs do not come in big candy colored shapes. Think powders, small tiny pills, pieces of paper, crude plant material, or crudely rolled cigarettes. FYI, Sweet Tarts and M&Ms are still legal in most states.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
School officials are notorious for being completely clueless about the law; it's amazing what you find in some of the case law.
Wait, I thought the school made a statement saying they never ever used the laptop "security feature" for anything besides recovering lost and/or stolen equipment.
How is snapping a picture of a student, with _no_ stolen laptop, following in line with their stated security policy?
Ya, we didn't use it for its intended purpose. Ya, we did snoop around to satisfy our curiosity, but.. but.. BUT.. LOOK AT THE DRUGS!
*Facts presented so far in this case are less than facts until a court rules. I don't claim to know what happened, I'm just a sheep parroting the hearsay I come across.
And it was later discovered that none of the students broke any rules. The rule was that underwear could not be showing. The problem is people making up the rules as they go along, often in secret. Our government for example...
Ikes are good! Ikes are good! Ikes are good!
Mike and Ikes are good!
Do we know for a fact that it was factory-branded Mike & Ike's and not illegally copied or Chinese-bootlegged Mike & Ike-like candy? There's still ample opportunity to tie this story into several other perpetual Slashdot themes.
They were drugs, just prescribed by Dr. Mario!
So, how did that play out for the student trying to score?
Yo man, you want to score some real ass shit? I got Mike and Ikes. I got motherfucking Candy Corn straight out of Mexico. I'm talking about the premium cane sugar shit. What are you? You tweek? I got pixie-sticks. I got warheads. I got pure, uncut rock candy. I got what you need, bro! No, I got your ticket. You're a peep head. Look at these, man. Check out the pink frosting. primo. That'll be four Washingtons, bro. Cash, man!
Kids today...
“If you give me a 640x480 JPEG of the most honest of men, I will find something in it which will hang him”
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
The original clip that specified Mike and Ikes.:
http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/tech/WebcamGate_Family_s_Attorney___Who_Has_Access__Philadelphia.html
LOL! ... "I'm popping steroids"
Oh man... Back in high school, I routinely grabbed a box of mike & ike (pink and white flavor/version) from a vending machine and kept it in my backpack to snack on. One day in class, a kid that sat next to me in the row over saw that I kept putting my hand in my backpack and eating something. So he asked what I was eating.
Being a jackass, I replied secretly
Big white and pink pills... huge effin steroids!
He started yelling in class "Steroids! Steroids! He's popping steroids!!!!" Everyone looks over and I didn't expect that kind of reaction from something pretty comical. Luckily nothing came of it, I just replied really quickly that they're just Mike and Ikes... a few laughs later - everything was fine.
I would expect a high school student to do something like this. However, a principle of a high school should know better and this mess reeks of incompetence on his part.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
I go to Villanova University, which is 5 minutes by train from Lower Merion. One of my profs has a daughter that goes there (when I showed him the brief on Thursday, he was floored.)
The Mike & Ike thing is pretty damn bizarre, but it makes sense.
I expect the school already deleted the logs. Then again, given the tech competence of my own high school (all software and VLKs were on public shares, all documents were accessible [all users] if logged in via RDP, including passwords to the externally hosted attendance/transcript web app, etc.), it would not be terribly surprising if they just saved it all.
And I was disciplined for taking prescription medication for which the school had a proper release (i.e. I signed the right form and gave a doctor's note saying I needed to have the medication on my person). Nosy administrators "thinking of the children" and overreacting to non-issues (as well as egregious violations of privacy) would be nothing new in my book.
The School is in Pensylvania and Mike & Ike's are made in Illinois. This is obviously a case of corporate funding in public schools gone awry! Hershey's will not allow the children of Pennsylvania to be poisened by the corn syrup generated candies of Illinois!
They are just acting to protect our youth!
Think of the children.
Yeah, but if you actually remember the Sixties then you weren't there, man! Plus, you've got to figure that the double whammy of Alzheimer's and Senile Dementia is starting to creep up on Gen-X as well by now. All in all, I think it's quite understandable that they might have forgotten whether or not they even inhaled, let alone what the shit actually looked like, besides wasn't everything in trippy colours back then, I can't quite remember...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Hint: Drugs do not come in big candy colored shapes.
I'm guessing you didn't attend a lot of Grateful Dead shows....
Apparently you don't know what it was like being a kid in the 80s and 90s. Prescription pills are the drugs of choice by most these days, easier to get by with in plain sight, generally easy to come up with an excuse for having on you or taking, only illegal if you don't have a prescription ... which you don't typically carry around with you.
and ...
Even less noticeable when you carry them around in a candy box and act completely normal with them.
You clearly were not part of the crowd who 'did drugs in school', thats probably a good thing, just stop pretending to know what goes on with the kids who do. If you have kids, I suggest you ask them about the drugs in their school rather than telling them about drugs, they'll probably already know more.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
It turns out that one of the the network administrators at the school district has a fairly large online presence, and has posted quite a bit relating to this program on his blog over the years. Some folks have started looking over the blogs and the software being used, and it is pretty interesting.
holey crap, for a school that's only been around for 20 years, they've got a remarkable number of fucked up incidents
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What they left out is she was required to teach in a g-string.
"particularly bad job of actually managing the events" is how we do it.
IE, see last summer's racial incident at the hunnington valley swim club when black kids were invited, then banned from the pool.
What are the chances Mr. Schooladministrator will be asked, "Why did you watch Billy Beatnick supposedly taking drugs for 30 seconds and then watch Chelsea Cheerleader for the next 3 hours?"
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
I just facepalmed so hard that I think I broke something. The school will be hearing from my lawyers.
True. I wasn't a kid in the 80s or 90s. Prescriptions were considered too tame when I was a kid.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Still legal, for a short time.
However, the Obama we-hate-fat-kids panel will soon fix that loophole.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Some guy sold me a bag of Mike & Ike for $50 and when it didn't do anything we realized it was Good & Plenty.
My girlfriend gave me grief about it and I was like, "why don't you score it next time, it's not like any of you bitches have red-green color blindness!"
Hahahahha.. this is my first post ever on Slashdot.
Just had to say, some of you americans are totally insane, and this case really proves it. I just shock my head in disbelief.
Anon coward from Norway
What are the odds that they took one picture and it just happened to be of a kid doing drugs? Zero. The big question: how many pictures would you have to take in order to guarantee a picture of a kid doing drugs? Hundreds? Thousands? That's the crime here, all the pics they took where someone was NOT doing drugs.
stuff |
Yeah, but if you actually remember the Sixties then you weren't there, man! Plus, you've got to figure that the double whammy of Alzheimer's and Senile Dementia is starting to creep up on Gen-X as well by now. All in all, I think it's quite understandable that they might have forgotten whether or not they even inhaled, let alone what the shit actually looked like, besides wasn't everything in trippy colours back then, I can't quite remember...
In fact, America's Finest News Source is reporting on this very story.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yeah, much better to keep people ignorant so they're incapable of making informed choices!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Schools are overpopulated with kids from poor/undereducated families.
These kids cause trouble.
Schools find ways to kick out these students to bring their "Numbers" Up.
Kicked out students are deemed as failures grow up in a few years stuck in the same area.
Live in poverity have kids.
Kids go to school...
Schools need to find reasons to keep them in schools not find reasons to kick them out. It doesn't matter if they are not model students or model human being. They should have a chance to succeed inspite of themselfs.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Except in this case if Rx drug abuse was the claim, the school wouldn't have any idea if the pills were legit or not.
So they used web cams to spy in the school and students got accused of taking drugs when eating Mikes and Ike's? Don't people know you should turn off your web cam unless you using it, well it's not expected that someone would spy on you at the same time it's simply good practice to turn it off.
As someone pointed out on another site, there are two big problems with the school's position:
1.) Just because they told the kids that they might activate the web cam to find it doesn't give them the right to do so. If the activity is illegal, telling someone you are going to do it beforehand doesn't make it legal. IANAL, but this one sounds pretty shaky.
2.)Even if they had the legitimate authority to use the web cam, once they realized that the laptop was in the hands of the right person, they would have been legally obliged to stop spying. Any information they gleaned from that spying would have been inadmissible in court.
From the posting at that link it looks like the school is on a serious freakout powertrip. Requiring the students to have one of these computers, requiring them to use them to the exclusion of all others and then spying on them periodically even if there was no report of the laptop being stolen.
The school board and school administration of that town should be burned to the ground with metaphorical salt sown in their professional fields.
Why? because most school administrators love overstepping their authority, and being jerks. One the things they have been trying to do is prevent students from eating "junk-food", so given their nature, they would like to try to prevent this at home. At some local schools, they ripped out all the good food and replaced it with "organic" crud. No one ate it, and all just rotted - so they were forced to go back to the "junk-food". School administrators have no checks and balances on their authority, and behave as one would expect. It's a window into what would happen if there were no checks and balances on the president (no supreme court, senate, house, etc.). It should also be noted that some students are actually sick, or were actually sick (me), and needed to pop prescription drugs, including commonly abused ones. I don't want to know what that's like in normal school.
Glad I'm a homeschooler.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
Not true. A lot of them do. They just happen to be legal with a valid prescription.
Apparently you've never seen any Mike and Ikes, they look about as much like prescription medications as hotwheel cars look like real cars.
Also, apparently you don't know what it was like being a kid in the 2000's. If you think kids these days are not doing as hard or harder drugs than kids in the 60s and 70s then you are sorely mistaken. Half of the crap in public schools didn't even exist back then.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Not one of these students installed Linux on it lol
We had a teacher who once said something like that in school back in the 80's. So we figured he'd be able to handle some really heavy shit. One tab of blotter in his soda and we ended up not seeing him back at school for a week and a half.
From the link above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHu92imqJec
Basically, all laptops were set to switch to "stolen mode" as soon as they get online from anywhere outside the school['s network].
And then they start sending screenshots, camera shots and DNS and IP info on regular basis.
Apparently, their IT God thought nothing about setting up the laptops kids will be taking home so their home network is considered safe.
Also, their School's Resident High Inquisitor thought that since the "stolen mode" is on, that means that spying on kids is fair game.
Brilliant examples of stupidity. Simply brilliant.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Even if a person were crazy enough to think it was alright to secretly spy on people and then start some sort of punitive process I can't imagine someone taking screenshots really provides any real chain of custody/evidence to keep it admissible.
Hmmm, let me bust out photoshop or the Gimp, next thing you know your screwing a goat on your desk.
Real video surveillance systems have to have measures to make sure the evidence has not been tampered with.
in order to bring about the glorious christian theocracy of north america:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html
of course, jesus' greatest message was tolerance. yet his most vocal advocates today only seem to advance the cause of "christianity" by extending the bounds of intolerance
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
After all, they have diplomatic immunity.
There has to be a way for Mike and Ikes to prybar this into an ad campaign.
Or raves in which a lot of time, candy is used as a delivery device. LSD lolipops, shroom pudding, "magic" brownies. nomnomnomnomnomnom
I just knew graduating from high school was a bad idea.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
At the beginning of the video he mentions that you can "give control to the certain amount of people who can turn the feature on and off".
So, it goes on automatically once it is outside of the network, BUT you can turn it on/off manually whenever you want while it is still connected to the home network.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The asshats that thought this was a good / acceptable use of the equipment in question should be publicly executed for treason.
No, I am not joking.
And everyone involved in the warrant-less wiretapping should be right beside them. EVERYONE.
It's about time we, as a public, institute a zero-tolerance policy of our own and start defending our rights as citizens of a "free" (har har!) country.
These people deserve nothing less than a slow, painful, public hanging.
dosing someone with LSD is one of the most fucked things you can do (despite the fact that it was one of the CIA's favorite pastimes for a while).
Congrats on being a big fucking asshole with your asshole friends.
Nice :)
Don't most laptops these days have a little light that indicates when the webcam is active? Did none of the students notice that?
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
If you remember the 60s or 70s you weren't really there.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I don't understand why we're even talking about what the kid did or did not do at his home.
School officials have no fucking business sniffing around in other peoples houses. This is just outrageously wrong and illegal. Even if he was taking drugs, the video should not be accepted by any court as prove. Not even the police is allowed to film you in your own home without previous reason.
I'm trippin' on carrots and celery right now, and my boss doesn't even realize it!
I'm growing more and more tired of this country's retarded drug laws. Since when should it be ANYONE's business what someone chooses to put into their own body? It's not as if it's doing other people any harm.
The only reason there's a culture of crime surrounding these substances is the same reason for the culture of crime surrounding alcohol during the prohibition, i.e. the inability for anyone to acquire the drug legally or reliably. The laws themselves are the cause of the very phenomena lawyers use to justify their existence.
And it's way more interesting that Tiger Woods LOL.
Anarchy or big brother? I choose the former. Anarchy is the REAL democracy, and the only solution for the U.S.A. (the second best solution is National Socialism, the ideal form of socialism) And for those who think I am a Xth-grade-level kid, I am a PhD student in Computer Science from University of Chicago, more educated that most /. dumbass.
And when shit happens in this country? I will be the first one to jump on the plane and go back to India.
Mormons ring a bell? How about the widespread prosetylizing of Africa by Christian Missionaries? Not knocking at the door yet?
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." What part of "I don't give a fuck if it was reported (I'm still not sure it was from what's been reported) stolen, you still don't have the right to spy on me in my home" did they miss? If you think it's stolen and you think you have evidence that it's in my posession, then you get to go to the police and if they agree they can talk to a judge about a search warrant. If the judge agrees, they get one.
Well, to play devils advocate, it could be that the kid isn't eating candy-looking drugs and he was being spied upon without due process because one of the teachers is a perv.
Did everyone miss the fact they sent the videos apaprently to a third party for a review of content? So if there is anything that could be considered pr0n do they SOBs go to jail for distribution of child pr0n or is this yet another government agency above the law?
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Apparently you don't know what it was like being a kid in the 80s and 90s. You clearly were not part of the crowd who 'did drugs in school', thats probably a good thing, just stop pretending to know what goes on with the kids who do.
Son, I did more drugs in high school than you've probably ever read about on Wikipedia, and I completely agree with the OP. Mike & Ike's look nothing like any drug I've ever seen in my life. When was the last time you came across a neon red Ritalin?
I think you'd be pretty damn surprised if I wasn't posting anon. "What? Him? No way!"
I hear kids that start on Mike and Ike usually graduate to more powerful drugs like Hot Tamales which legends says are imported via Mexican confectionery cartels.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
in order to bring about the glorious christian theocracy of north america:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html
of course, jesus' greatest message was tolerance. yet his most vocal advocates today only seem to advance the cause of "christianity" by extending the bounds of intolerance
I don't think you understand what tolerance is. If you think Jesus' message was about tolerance, then completely missed his point. Tolerance implies looking down on other people, put up with their flaws and feel sorry for them. Jesus' message called for Christians to not look down on the world but rather to love unconditionally. Loving does not mean that you have to accept the negative behavior of others while accepting the people themselves. This emulates how Jesus embraced a group of 12 flawed human beings and made them his disciples.
Christians are called to change the world and right wrongs rather than just sit there smugly "tolerating" others.
Tolerance is the lazy man's way because you are not helping others reach their true potential.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
The school has some laptops which are not to be removed from school property. When the reporter asked the kid's family if he was authorized to remove the laptop in question from school grounds, they refused to answer. Technically, the system worked. They were missing a laptop and activated the remote viewing mechanism to determine who might have the laptop. Turns out that the kid was eating Mike and Ikes at the time. Doesn't justify him removing property from the school without authorization.
This is the best post I seen in /. for ages!
It still is, for sugar.
Or so the simpsons told me.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
...about as well as abstinence-only sex education. Look up some statistics, and you might revise your definition of "most folks".
As for safety, that very much depends. Caffeine could be extremely dangerous, given a high enough concentration, yet it's legal for anyone. Alcohol is dangerous if you drink and drive, but it's legal above a certain age, certainly once they realize that trying to ban it was causing more harm than the substance itself. Contrast to marijuana...
Or better yet, try Coca. That's right, the main ingredient for Cocaine, illegal to possess in the US, but Coca leaves make very good tea, and at that concentration, it's a mild stimulant -- less stimulating and less addicting than coffee, but very good for dealing with high altitudes.
Or you could just take the kneejerk reaction of "All drugs are bad!" or maybe "All illegal drugs are bad!" Which makes you sound about as intelligent and informed as "Fire bad!"
In fact, let's take this to an extreme. Suppose we actually legalized marijuana. Would you rather your kid be buying the stuff at the store, in regulated doses with the THC content explicitly labeled? Or would you rather them buy it from a drug dealer, laced with who knows what, in much higher concentrations?
I'd say, legalize it all, regulate it, and tax it. It's going to happen whether you allow it or not, and the societal costs of prohibition are much higher than the drugs themselves.
By the way: I don't drink, or do drugs, aside from caffeine. I never have, aside from coca tea, and I likely never will.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Particularly buxom co-eds so we can post their pictures on the Usenet.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
"My God, he's popping those pills like candy!"
What kind of kid pops the fun pills while at a public school library?
One item I have not seen raised is possible infringement of child pornography laws. Is it that uncommon for a laptop to be running while someone is undressing in their bedroom. Should the staff of the school download pictures taken during that time, would that not make them guilty of possessing child pornography? I wonder if it has already happened.
The whole thing reeks of multiple privacy infringements. It is especially bad because the school made ownership of these laptops mandatory.
Yet one more reason why my boys are going to be home-schooled.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
Even if the kid was shoving heroin suppositories up his ass, it wouldn't make a difference.
Aside from the serious issue of surruptitiously spying on a minor, it's not the school's job or mandate to watch what kids do in the privacy of their home, legal, illegal, or indifferent. They have no right, and if this were evidence in a trial it would be rejected.
I am well aware of what the school CLAIMS the software is there for, in fact, they likely are telling the truth - regardless of that though, the fact is that the information on how to control the cam was either abused or not properly secured. Anybody with a brain knows that people have voyeuristic tendencies, especially when teenagers are involved.
Not true.
Pills are most definitely illegal if you are carrying them around on you without a script and YOUR name isn't on the bottle. If you have pills that are not contained in a pill bottle WITH a prescription label on the bottle... then that is considered illegal. This becomes especially true when carrying pills that people are known to abuse. It's not like the "Oh, I forgot my license at home" trick... they will arrest you for having loose pills on you.
I've read the various articles and one thing that struck me is that no one questions the assumption that the assistant principal pulled up the student's webcam even though the school district claims he didn't and couldn't have. Couldn't one of the kid's friends have snapped a picture during a web chat or with their own illicit software and then given a copy to the assistant principal?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
There's something we're not being told here.
It seems unlikely that the school would have the ability to spy on people like this. It's ludicrous to think that they would. Teachers have better things to do with their time than watch hundreds of kids who might be doing something wrong, and they'd have to be complete idiots not to realise the potential for child porn allegations.
The complaints are all from the plaintiffs who may be making completely unwarranted assumptions. These are just complaints. Not findings of fact.
If the laptop was stolen, where is they police report?
I could understand it not being reported as stolen; if they were just going to write it off. But since they were taking the effort to track it down, they must have been a police report filed.
In addition why was the student not busted really hard for making a false claim of the laptop being stolen?
Its sounding like they trying to cover it up. And that should be good for even more jail time for the conspirators. Wahoo!
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I can't believe that they couldn't tell tell that he was eating candy!
http://stock-background-texture.com/
Tolerance is the lazy man's way because you are not helping others reach their true potential.
Why can't you love me the way I am, rather than trying to force me to reach what you consider to be my true potential?
One of the network technicians for Lower Marion School District, Mike Perbix, described a method to remotely Enable and Disable the built in iSight. He concludes this description of how to remotely use webcams with the single word, "ENJOY!".
What, exactly, was he "ENJOY!"ing about the ability to remotely operate webcams?
Oddly enough, most of the acid I've taken has been dripped on sweet tarts.
Even if the student was actually taking or selling drugs, the means still doesn't justify the end. I'd say nice try if the school officials weren't dipshits.
I am neither an American nor a lawyer, but my understanding is that under current U.S. law, if you are caught with sexually-themed images of e.g. teenagers, you basically get to spend the rest of your life as a "Registered Sex Offender" (even if you *are* the teenager in question). I can't imagine they just magically happened to turn on the camera just in time to capture this one image, it's got to be larger-scale than that. Bets on whether this surveillance program has caught at least one teenager "misbehaving"? If it has - who is liable? Is it the computer admin guy? The principal? The school board? Could all of the above wind up on the Registry? In jail for possession and distribution of child pornography? Any lawyers out there feel like commenting on this?
Mike & Ike candy sales skyrocket...
I think it's pretty clear that the teach was trolling the web cans looking for some hot boy action. I mean seriously, what do you think this young stud was doing with his lap top in his room? Come on, you know what's going on here.
You should maybe look up what that line is in context, as it's Jesus saying "turn and offer the other cheek when struck on one", not some "lie in wait until NOBODY expects our revenge!"
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, and drugs were exactly what a whole other posts have already said they were. Mainly, nothing like candy, and taken in dosages nothing like candy.
If the school was spying on kids in their bedrooms then they have child porn in their possession. Why aren't the police confiscating their equipment? Why isn't the FBI involved? They are probably remaining silent precisely because they know as soon as they admit to having any pics they're caught dead to rights and it'll be grounds for a search warrant.
But if you ask me, there's already grounds for a warrant here...so what the hell is going on?
This in from Computerworld:
The company selling the software used by a Pennsylvania school district to allegedly spy on its students blasted what it called laptop theft-recovery "vigilantism" today.
Absolute Software said it dissuades users of theft-recovery software from acting on their own. "We discourage any customer from taking theft recovery into their own hands," said Stephen Midgley, the company's head of marketing, in an interview Monday. "That's best left in the hands of professionals."
Midgley confirmed that Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pa. was running Absolute Manage, formerly known as LANRev, which Absolute Software acquired last December. The suburban Philadelphia school district purchased and deployed LANRev prior to Absolute's acquisition, he said, noting that most school districts buy the software for power management features that let IT staff remotely power down systems.
Calling LANRev a "legacy" product, Midgley also said that Absolute would ship an update in the next several weeks that will permanently disable Theft Track, the name of the feature that lets administrators switch on a laptop's camera to take photographs of a potential thief after the computer is reported stolen. "It really doesn't serve any purpose," said Midgley of Theft Track.
All its theft-recovery software relies on a different model than the former LANRev, said Midgley. "We give no theft recovery tools to our [LoJack and Computrace] customers," he said. "The only truly proven model is a managed service model."
To kick off the recovery of a stolen or lost laptop, customers first must file a police report -- not a requirement of LANRev -- and only then contact Absolute, which in turn tracks the location of the missing machine via its IP address when the system goes online. Absolute employs a team of former law enforcement professionals who reach out to local police, provide them with the location information and then get out of the way. Software maker blasts 'vigilantism' in Pa. school spying case
Absolute Manage [LANRev] Automated Client Management for Mac and Windows Computers and Software
LoJack For Laptops
I wonder how many pieces of tape have been applied to the lenses of the web cams on these laptops in light of the various news stories...
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
Which is what leads to the religious right trying to get their religion enshrined in law, which is what leads us to holy wars in the middle east. Tolerance is most certainly what is necessary when you have people of different religions which by definition are irrational and will not be changed by any amount of discussion or preaching.
The students were allowed to take the computers home but the system was configured to take pictures when they did so regardless of whether or not it was reported stolen.
If this were any other case of possible child pornography, all the computers, backups, etc... would have been seized. I can only hope they have, in this case, and are found to contain hundreds of violations.
This is sickening.
I more outraged and offended by the blatant violation of these student's privacy than I am by what may have been captured. Even if every single image is found to contain nothing more offensive than candy eating and television viewing, I hope the school if found guilty of child pornography.
Especially if the PCs were a mandatory part of curriculum and not allowed to be modified in any way that would disable the webcam. Covering the webcam could be considered disabling it. And let's face it, would have been considered disabling it.
Disgusting.
I hope the entire school district burns for this.
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
Apparently you don't know what it was like being a kid in the 00s.
As someone who was still in highschool (in Pennsylvania) only two years ago and who used several drugs and was friends with many people who used many drugs (including a few who have since been arrested, imprisoned, sent to mental hospitals, etc), pills aren't that popular. Sure, _some_ people do them - but even then I've never heard of anyone actually taking a pill. They crush it and snort it. It's cheaper that way. Most commonly though it's weed or cocaine or something along those lines. It's a cigarette or a powder. Or alcohol of course. Most people who used drugs while at school either snuck in alcohol or snorted the pills before getting there. And very rarely someone would either sneak out to there car to smoke or head to the bathroom to snort something.
We can. We don't expect you to reach a particular potential in order to be loved. But keep in mind that all Christians are trying to reach their potential as well and none of us have reached it yet either, so sometimes we say things that are unfortunate and none of us exhibit the kind of perfect love that Christ had for people.
The problem is that the guidebook we follow (the Bible) says that God won't tolerate some things. He's black and white when it comes to what people do, and nobody lives a completely white life on their own. That's true for you and for me. The things that I'm not living up to my potential at may be different than yours, but they are there nonetheless. We can never be good enough, on our own, to meet His standards.
He offers a bridge between our lives and Himself. That bridge is Jesus Christ. It's the only way to get from point A (our lives) to point B (the eternal destination of heaven). You can choose not to make that choice. But if you don't make that choice you pay the consequences. If you do, the standards that sinners will be judged against at the great white throne judgment don't go away. When you make that choice to accept Christ as Savior, He expects you to work hard to conform your life to Christ's. He doesn't expect you to fix everything at once, but He does expect you to fix those things He points out. Some of the actions that are specified higher up in the posting list are actions or life styles that He expressly forbids. Neither you nor I may understand why He has chosen to be against those things, but it isn't up to us. They're His standards.
When it comes down to Christians commenting on these things, we typically get flamed. Do you train up your child in a vacuum of the knowledge of what is right and wrong and hope for the best? Many parents take that approach today. They take the "there are no absolutes - everything is relative approach". That isn't working out so well for society as a whole today. There is nothing relative when it comes to sin. If you are guilty of one, it is just as bad as if you were guilty of all.
God does call on Christians to exhibit love to everyone, even when it is hard. Part of that love is trying to let people know when they are breaking God's law. Beating them over the head about any particular issue isn't the right approach, but remaining silent when the subject comes up is not the right approach either. Earthly actions have earthly consequences. Sometimes they also have eternal consequences. The point is not to beat down the actions of those who have not accepted Christ as their Savior. The point is to lead them to accept Christ. Many problems we struggle with cannot be changed without His work in our lives. Unfortunately, too many Christians address issues rather than hearts.
You may not agree with the Bible's position on many subjects. I will freely admit that there are a tiny number of restrictions that I don't understand as well. But ultimately it isn't going to be about what you or I think. It is solely about what He thinks and whether or not you have chosen to cross the bridge of Christ to Him. If you have, He has high expectations for your behavior. If you haven't crossed that bridge, then you have no hope. You can disregard the Bible as a source of God's word. I've seen too many things in my life that are outside the natural but which do line up with the Bible to do that. Perhaps you haven't yet. If you do accept the Bible as God's word, then you have to try to live up to its expectations for you and rely on God's grace and mercy through faith to cover our sins when you fail. That may require you to make some changes in your life that you don't look on favorably. But the eternal consequences are far more important than any change you might have to make to conform to His positions on right and wrong.
1. Our fixation to Mike & Ike's
2. Spying?
3. Or responding on Slashdot?
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Tolerance implies looking down on other people, put up with their flaws and feel sorry for them.
You need to revisit the dictionary; that is the definition of condescension, not tolerance. Tolerance is where you accept that other people have the right to be or believe who or what they are or choose. Asserting that your religion is the only true one, and that your god is the only god to people who are not interested is not tolerance, no matter what name you do it in.
Christians are called to change the world and right wrongs rather than just sit there smugly "tolerating" others.
Jesus [allegedly] called upon his followers to do unto others as they would have done unto them. So if you welcome people trying to convert you to their faith, by all means, attempt to convert them to yours. But if you won't consider the potential validity of their religious views, it is hypocritical to both preach to them and to consider yourself a follower of the Christ.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Oh, yes, the incredible unlikelihood that a boy might be eating candy instead of illicit drugs. You should never trust what a child tells you.
You know, Jeff, I'm old and wrinkly and a Dad now, but I too was a boy once. Grown-ups like you made my life miserable. You're the villain of every Stephen King novel ever.
On behalf of the Peter Pan Nation, Bite me, OK?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Arrest That Girl! She's Writing On Her Desk!
"I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10 :)." Alexa Gonzalez penned these words on her desk with a lime-green magic marker, and then added a smiley face. She was bored, waiting for her Spanish teacher to hand back homework at the beginning of class. Shortly after her doodling, the 12-year-old was arrested.
Alexa, a seventh grader at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills, New York, suspected that there would be some repercussions for her actions, but she was not ready for the handcuffs and the walk across the street to the police precinct. Worse yet, she was hauled out of her classroom, hands cuffed behind her back, in full view of her teachers and of course her classmates.
I don't know exactly how this could have happened, but I can only assume that Alexa's Spanish teacher called the principal, who decided that doodling on a desk is a criminal offense, and that an arrest needed to be made. Alexa was detained for several hours at the police precinct, and eventually allowed to leave. (I wonder what questions they asked her during the lengthy interrogation?). Although she had a stellar attendance record, she has not returned to school since. "She's been throwing up," said her mom. "The whole situation has been a nightmare."
"We're looking at the facts," says City Education Department spokesman David Cantor. "Based on what we've seen so far, this shouldn't have happened." Police spokesman Paul Browne added, "Even when we're asked to make an arrest, common sense should prevail, and discretion used in deciding whether an arrest or handcuffs are really necessary." So, the authorities made a mistake. That's understandable, once in a while.
But this is not an isolated case. Alexa is only the latest in a series of New York students to be arrested for a minor infraction. Possibly the most famous is 13-year-old Chelsea Fraser, arrested in 2007 for writing "Okay" on her desk at Intermediate School 201. Others include 5-year-old Dennis Rivera, who in 2008 was placed in handcuffs and sent to a psych ward after misbehaving in kindergarten, and a 12-year-old who was arrested in March 2009 for doodling on her desk at the Hunts Point School.
Across the country, there are plenty more examples of teens and preteens being arrested for seemingly minor offences. In November 2009, a food fight at a middle school in Chicago led to the arrests of 25 students, some as young as 11, according to the Chicago Police Department. And at least 12,000 tickets were issued to tardy or truant students by Los Angeles Police Department and school security officers in 2008. The Strategy Center, a California-based civil rights group that tracks zero tolerance policies, opposes this system. "The theory is that if we fine them, then they won't be late again," says
spokesman Manuel Criollo. "But they just end up not going to school at all."
This is not just about zero tolerance policies gone awry. It's about wilful cruelty to young people, at the hands of the very people who are supposed to be protecting them. When did zero tolerance become zero intelligence?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_tolerance_(schools)
These cases include students being suspended or expelled for transgressions such as possession of ibuprofen (a legal, non-prescription drug commonly used to treat menstrual cramps and headaches) with permission of the students' parents, keeping pocketknives (small utility knife) in cars, and carrying sharp tools outside of a woodshop classroom (where they are often required materials)......
* After bringing a Cub Scouts dinner knife to school to eat his lunch, a six-year-old boy was ordered by Christina School District to attend an alternative school for students with behavioral problems for nine weeks.....
* A third-grade girl, also in the Christina School District, was expelled for a year because her grandmother sent a birthday cake, and a knife fo
... said in a CNN interview today that he was 'addicted' to Mike & Ike candy, making it just another CNN "addicted to" story.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Tell that to Rush Limbaugh. The dirtbag got caught coming back from the Dominican Republic (home of a huge child prostitute industry) with a bottle of someone else's Viagra. While on probation. Without telling his probation officer he was going out of town. Since he's a right-wing-nut nothing happened of course, but you and I would have been in jail for a long time.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
"Why don't you love me while I'm stealing things from you?"
"Why don't you love me while I OD and die?"
"Why don't you love me while I abuse my little daughter?"
The answer is we do love you, but we aren't willing that any would get hurt or die. Just because I love my kids doesn't mean I'm going to let them make harmful and painful decisions (while young, eventually you have to turn them loose - just like you will eventually be turned "loose").
Religion and science are both 90% crap..but that doesn't negate the other 10%.
Tolerance implies looking down on other people, put up with their flaws and feel sorry for them
Fuck you. Tolerance is letting me be, period. Your own fucked up superiority complex is what makes you feel sorry for people when their philosophies don't match up with your own. What you described is closer to intolerance than actual tolerance.
Christians are called to change the world and right wrongs rather than just sit there smugly "tolerating" others.
What if the wrong you right is already right to me? Perhaps I was just eating candies and not doing drugs but your fanaticism leads you to jump to the "help out your fellow man" conclusion and bust me at school the next day.
Stop using "tiny URLs" on slashdot! They are pointless here, a little disrespectful of the readers because they hide the link, and a security risk. STOP! Read how to link using HTML tags, please.
The merest hint of child porn usually puts anyone involved in a world of shit. Why doesn't spying on kids this way bring out the think-of-the-children brigade? There's plenty of opportunity to turn it into a peep show for perverted school officials.
It makes sense to produce a web-cam with a lid. A piece of paper and scotch tape could be used on older web-cams.
For all I know a spyware soft could be installed on my PC relatively easy and someone may watch my room.
Web-cams are getting smaller and smaller. The same about drones. Soon an artificial creature of the size of a fly will be able to fly into a room and transmit the vdeo and audio in a perfect quality, including night-vision infrared video.
Using protective nets on windows will not help as robots similar to cockroaches may be deployed. It will be the word without secrets.
what? you don't like the simple obvious meaning of "tolerance" because you've perceived that secular humanists have "coopted" it?
face it: you've just declared moral and philosophical bankruptcy with that delusional wordplay
sorry cretin, but redefining tolerance as intolerance does not win your argument. but thanks for playing
why don't you look deeply into the meaning of what it means to be a tolerant christian, and see that secular humanists embody the true spirit of jesus christ way more than small minded provincial assholes who are scared of gays, evolutionary theory, social progress, family planning, and anything else that threatens their simpleminded shallow pat understanding of the world and human nature. so they cling to the words of the holy scriptures, but completely miss the meaning
but that's a good one, i haven't seen that tactic before, its good entertainment value: redefine tolerance as intolerance
LOL! hilarious. stubborn ignorant denial at its best
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Just for legal fun:
One reason you don't see big carrier mediums (candy, etc) is that the weight of the candy counts when measuring how much drug there is for the purpose of determining minimum mandatory sentence
Under 21 U.S.C. 841(b)(1)(A)(v), where there is a violation involving:
(1)(A)(v) 10 grams or more of a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD);
Such person shall be sentenced to a term of imprisonment which may not be less than 10 years
The language of the statute leaves open to interpretation what exactly determines the weight of the mixture. Is it the LSD alone, or the entire mixture including the carrier medium? The U.S. Supreme Court answered this question, stating “the statute requires the weight of the carrier medium to be included when determining the appropriate sentence for trafficking in LSD.” - US v. Chapman
-AC
First, I don't think there are any OTC medicines available today that you can get high on unless they are adulterated. Most prescription medications also don't allow you to get high with the exception of certain classes of pain killers and psychoactive drugs. For those classes of drugs that present a REAL abuse risk, I am on board with requiring the nurse to hold and administer until the kids are out of high school. Too many adults abuse these kinds of drugs, and the risk is too great for selling/trading/abusing.
For the drugs that are not abuse risks, I find it totally unacceptable that school nurses must administer them after kids get out of elementary school. I think it is more liability than abuse risk that schools do this, though I still find it equally unacceptable. Kids are mature enough at that age to handle their medication requirements on their own to the extent their parents are comfortable with it. And by the time you are in high school, if you can't handle your own medication requirements, you should probably be in the school for special children who will never graduate.
I could go through lots of reasons for this, but I will stick to 2. There are risks of medicine mistakes when a 3rd party is maintaining care, custody, control, and distribution for you. It even happens to pharmacists and doctors. I especially don't trust a school nurse to do it 100% accurately. The other reason is we infantize children in the US, and there is no good reason we do it. Children need to learn how to grow up and take care of themselves gradually. Treating them like incompetent possessions until they are 17, then throwing them out of the house to go to college or find their way isn't a reasonable way to parent. Unfortunately parents, schools, and authority figures all encourage and participate in doing exactly this.
Many laptops with webcams also have microphones. so you can do low-quality videoconferencing. I don't know what make/model of laptops were used by the school. But I thought I'd ask... do they also have microphones? This would greatly increase the potential for eavesdropping.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Dear Lower Merion School District,
We at the US/Chinese/UK (delete as appropriate) government are impressed at the efficiency with which you are "caring" for your students. We have plans to "care" for our entire population, and would like to employ you as a consultant to aid in our efforts.
For our glorious nation,
Des Pott.
Do as you would be done to.
Now, consider that you're talking about high-school students -- almost all of whom are going to be under the age of 18. All of a sudden, you're out of the realm of a simple class action lawsuit, and looking at a charges of 'Creation, Possession, and possibly even distribution, of Kiddie Porn'. . . .
Now, that may not do much more than garner some more interesting headlines, but if you throw in counseling charges against the high-level managers who concieved of, OKed or mandated this stupid idea, I expect that anyplace where a similar plan is in place, the programs will be suddenly stopped. -- and to be honest, I'm more interested in getting this stupidity shut down now than I am in starting a witch-hunt against stupid school administrators.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Even USA Today "Experts say school could track missing laptops less intrusively" Really?!? You don't say!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I think what this (different) school is doing is fantastic, and I applaud their efforts and achievements. However ... checkout what happens at 4:37 in the video.
How Google Saved A School
Yes, different school, and the students are in school at the time, but .... I'm not sure I like the idea of teaching kids to accept this level of surveillance as 'normal'.
and the school becomes the court
killings......inside.....
Jesus also [allegedly] said: Do not judge others, lest you be judged by the same measure. If anything should promote tolerance it's that. However, most people seem to forget he said it.
"The school claims the system was only used to locate stolen laptops."
Is that even legal?
Tolerance does not mean you cannot say someone is wrong. It appears the greatest crime of intolerance these days is to accept that someone else has the right to have different beliefs (ie tolerate them), but say that they are wrong. Of course the new definition of intolerance is itself intolerant.
meh
The problem is that the guidebook we follow (the Bible) says that God won't tolerate some things.
That's a falsehood or at best a misunderstanding. Christianity is an orthodox religion, which is to say that the only thing it tells you that you have to do to win the game is believe in something, i.e. that Jesus died for your sins, and that it makes it okay for you to be a sinner as long as you are sorry about it. It doesn't say that you have to do or not do anything in particular to be "saved".
There is nothing relative when it comes to sin. If you are guilty of one, it is just as bad as if you were guilty of all.
But it won't keep you out of heaven as long as you believe in Jesus. You might be a heretic and be excommunicated from one church or another for some heresy; for example, you are a heretic if you don't believe in the holy trinity. But heretics still get to be saved, even on their deathbed, if they truly accept Jesus into their hearts or whatever.
You may not agree with the Bible's position on many subjects.
Which bible? The earliest manuscripts known, destroyed by fires at the libraries of Alexandria? Or the current editions, repeatedly and deliberately (as well as accidentally) edited by fallible men over the course of centuries?
If you do accept the Bible as God's word,
Then you must be a member of a fringe sect. Because it's clear that the bible was written by men, not by God. Very little of the bible is actually presented as the direct word of god. Unless, again, you have one of these wacky "translations" that's been edited over and over again to advance various personal and political goals.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Tolerance does not mean you cannot say someone is wrong.
No, it means accepting that they have a right to hold an opinion you believe is wrong. And religious tolerance is what permits you to hold your own religious views. If we go killing all the heretics, all that's required to get you dead is to get something you believe in declared a heresy.
Ultimately, nobody wants to have your religious views forced upon them. You can't help people that way. This is why the best approach is to prove the validity of your views by walking your talk and making the world a better place as a result. If you can't do that, why should anyone care what you think?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The FBI does not want to prosecute the administrators, they want access so they can catch the kids downloading movies and send them to Federal prison. --
Why do "Al Qaeda" bulletins allegedly authored by Osama Bin Laden sound as if they were authored by Oliver North?
Whoever has the controlling interest determines the applicability of law and rate of execution to whomever trusts the inferiour use of that property.
Notice how the Principal is in a privileged role of the State (parent in fact), and considers the restless duty of parenting to extend from the rolls. There are no more traditional parents, because the State claims all children to be in it's command as parent alone.
Revolt already.
Lots of kids being told by "cool" teachers on drugs, they'll be impressed to re-invent ways to conceal the candies to resemble drugs just to get a few false-prosecutions on the courts.
Reminds me of when I bought my first pack of Cigarettes from the mailtruck Ice-Cream Man back in the 90's...they were bubble-gum Cigarettes that actually put a puff of powder in the air when you blew into them.
Now the drugs will resemble candies. I'ld like to thank the wonder LOLciphers in D.A.R.E. for that wonderful exhibit of Cocaine and Marijuana glasswork brought into my class to interrupt my Christian School Teacher's math class: fine intrusions as that remind me of why this is such a great country, when Drug peddlers also dress as COPS and steal competing drug-dealers glassware just to make a point that they can do it and cary mumified drugs and periphernalie into a drug-free zone while armed and wearing body-armor.
Society is for psychopaths hiding behind a badge.
"And you're girlfriend, she's hot. I think I'll rape her..."
Have sex with Indian girl = guaranteed AIDS
New Economic Perspectives
I'd suggest putting the glasses on "Dad" and re-read what I wrote.
I said it doesn't matter what the kid was doing. Mike & Ikes or main-lining heroin with a dead hooker lying on his bed.
It doesn't matter, the school was wrong and this entire line of questioning is just designed to deflect the spotlight from where it should be, on the school.
There were drugs in that Mike N Ike box, I know that because nobody actually eats Mike N Ike's.
Cowboy Neal?
Most people's metabolisms change with age. I seldom drink enough to get drunk anyway, but when I was young I could do it without hangovers; these days I have to be more careful or the next morning will be painful. And caffeine can be really nasty if you start using too much of it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
-
Because then according to the sleazy shit heads in the schools administration, he would have been performing an indecent act - which really would have been "proper grounds" for suspension; or would that just another cover story for making their own child porn and getting sprung for it.
-
Arseholes.
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
apple needs to have imac / latops with out webcam and if apple does not make that move then apple will have a even harder time getting in schools and corporate offices.
Okay, lesson for all you laptop thieves out there: Put a thick tape over the webcam before you turn it on. And if it's a Windows machine, you can format it, the product key is on the sticker.
I'm stunned that no-one has mentioned the extraordinary scenes of unethical behaviour on the PBS documentary where a remote spycam feature is being used at another school in the Bronx. My jaw dropped open as I saw (at ~4m50s) the Assistant Principal spy on two schoolgirls and describe how he routinely does this with all 6th and 7th graders ("they don't even realise we're watching" -- he then takes control of the second girl's machine and takes a picture, and we see her duck out of his line of sight. His commentary as he did this had me climbing the walls, it was so unpleasant and -- hopefully -- self-incriminating: "I always like to mess with them and take a picture". What's even worse is seeing the disconcerted look on the girl's face before she ducks and listening to the interviewer laugh -- the interviewer's reaction is a perfect example of how you can get caught up in a moment and fail to maintain independence of mind. You can't be certain from the video where she is -- there's a possibility she's at home. In a beautifully ironic twist, PBS carefully blurred out some of the writing on a whiteboard at ~3m40s, presumably to protect someone's privacy! Of course, they didn't bother to blur out the name of the second schoolgirl who got spied on.
It seems to me that catching and accusing this student has to be the result of a deliberate witchhunt - there are hundreds of students and they chose to look at this one, and 'see' drug abuse in his candy eating... They must have been out to get him and just him, just waiting for something - anything - to accuse him of.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
That light was supposed to be disabled.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I think that's a fair way to explain it.
And in the end, I'd say I much prefer tolerance to whatever the Christians are calling "helping others reach their true potential". That's a cute euphemism for all sorts of impolite behavior.
So anyone who wants to help me reach my true potential can either tolerate me, because I am already the person I want to be, or they can please piss off.
Since he's a right-wing-nut nothing happened of course, but you and I would have been in jail for a long time.
What are you talking about? Conservatives are always consistent in their morals and values. That's why they overwhelmingly voted for McCain over Bush in 2000, since they made it clear in 1992 how much they valued military service and despised draft dodgers. And why Mark Sanford was promptly impeached by the Republican legislature of South Carolina, as Sanford voted for Clinton's impeachment in 1998.
Black tape if you want to be professional about it, chewing gum if you want to be appropriate for a misbehaving schoolkid...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The one case I can see where they might hypothetically have a case for accusing him of inappropriate behaviour is that if the laptop were being used for cracking the school's computer system, posting inappropriate material in the school's discussion sites, etc. then they might have had an excuse to turn on the camera to verify who was using it, and then they might have been able to accuse him of inappropriate behaviour. None of their business if he's smoking dope naked or eating high-fructose-corn-syrup candies that are banned from the school's vending machines, but the candy picture could be legitimate evidence if they're busting him for cracking.
On the other hand, if their policy is really that the system is only used to locate stolen laptops, then they've either got a record that somebody said the laptop was stolen, or they don't, and if there's a record that that laptop was stolen, and if the laptop was registered to that kid, and the camera shows that kid using it, legitimate case closed, delete the picture, and anything else they do with the picture is invasion of privacy.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Also accepted is Admiral Ackbar: "Your tongue cannot repel flavour of that magnitude". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU-qSR0KZm4