It can run about $7,500 to put a quarter of the screen banner up on a section front page on the NYTimes.com for a month. A comparable ad in the paper would cost you over a hundred thousand dollars [for a day.]
I'm not surprised then that paper is dying - there are only so many rich idio^W advertisers who are willing to pay $100K for a daily ad. Electrons are cheaper, and impulse buyers can follow the ad immediately. Ever tried to click on an ad in a newspaper?
Well, obviously transportation of *additional items* is free if you take a car. If you take a train these additional items will not only inconvenience you while you are there, you may also need to pay for the luggage.
On top of that, with the train you have no option of stopping in some other town for dinner - you can only go from point A to point B, even if your plans have changed.
Most new laptops with a built-in webcam have a hardwired LED that lights up when the webcam is powered on, you should feel safe with one of those.
Yes, as long as you stare at that LED all the time. I'm sure there are people who are OK with that, but most of them are in psychiatric facilities. The rest of us may not even look at the laptop if we aren't using it.
Also, does the LED activate in the single frame mode, when a still picture is taken? That could happen pretty quickly. Another possibility is that the LED may be always on - that depends on the software that reads from the camera.
Why the heck would you want to pay $50 to park a car when you can get there faster by light rail - including the ski hill - for less than $5?
If your group consists of 5 people, and if you intend to go back.
Besides, if you have a car you can take some spare clothes, water and lunch, binoculars, cameras - and whatever else you might need, transportation is free, and your car is your personal staging area where you can always pick something up and drop something off. But a heavy bag that you are doomed to carry whole day can wreck the whole experience.
That doesn't mean the allegations aren't true, just that it would be VERY surprising if so.
If I was a partner in a law firm that files a class action lawsuit on behalf of 1800+ people I'd probably spend $100 on a private computer specialist who can look at the laptop and see if there is (or is not) a software that can do this remote webcam thing. It's not like the school would write such a program from scratch, they'd simply buy one.
When a "poor" family owns two cars, a TV, and all manner of electronics, it's ludicrous to claim that they can't feed their children.
A young family that pays a 30-yr mortgage on the house, two car loans and a c/c bill and has children is especially likely to be very poor, to the point that if the government offers subsidized lunches at school they gladly take that offer.
I'm guessing that the kid was looking at smut, and was caught self-abusing
I agree with the hypothesis, but object to the "self-abusing" part. What planet are you from?
Or maybe he was using the webcam to post a picture on his Facebook page of himself making a rude gesture
It is not inappropriate to make any gesture when you are alone. Social taboos are against communicating such a gesture to another. The school has no way (or authority) to see what he does with the picture (I'm not even touching the freedom of speech angle.)
and adding a profane tag to it
The webcam can't see the screen.
Perhaps he was searching Google for information about how to roll a joint
Unfortunately a public school student doesn't need Google to see how it's done. And even if that was captured by the camera, rolling cigarettes with tobacco is not illegal, and the webcam can't say what was in them.
Any scenario I can think of would stem from the kid doing something on the laptop that raised a red flag to a network admin
I don't think a network admin is a teacher or is qualified to be a teacher. Most likely the spying was done not by an IT guy but by a teacher who knows the kid personally and felt OK to call the parents to talk about it. That requires a God complex that only teachers have.
And that's, IMO, why the class action does not accuse the defendants of CP unless CP is found. First of all, it's not needed to start the wheels, and once the lawsuit is going every single computer that is involved with sending or receiving images will be turned upside down. Chances are, they will find incriminating images. A disproportionally large number of pedophiles are teachers; we read about their arrests every few weeks, as it seems (and because laptops today don't take much energy anyway, and because it takes forever to reboot a Windows box.)
Otherwise any recording that at some point includes a minor can be construed as child porn.
Obviously not. However they gave students the laptops with clear understanding that students will keep them on their desks in their bedrooms. Very few students have separate offices. And if the laptop is in bedroom, it is unavoidable that students will be [un]dressing there at least twice per day. And chances are good that the laptop will be powered up all the time, since kids need 24/7 communication, as it seems.
let's not take the stance of the child pornography fearmongers and assume that any depiction of a child is pornographic
It isn't - it's still legal to take pictures of children. However if children are naked then it's much more difficult to prove innocence. I'm not a lawyer, and from what I remember courts have all kinds of tests for CP, including the "I know pr0n when I see it". All in all, if you are not an MD who took a photo for a specific medical purpose, statistically you are done for.
You can't (or shouldn't) enact laws that make for impossible situations.
The law may be fair or unfair, that I don't know. However it doesn't result in an impossible situation. It only bans sex offenders from cities. Once you leave a city you can live anywhere; even your nearest neighbor can be a mile away. A school is probably 10 miles away, if not more.
Stinking up the whole house, when it's much safer to smoke outside, with his buddies?
Besides, I know a few smokers, and most of them see smoking as a separate thing to enjoy. If you are in an expensive restaurant, looking at the table full of delicacies, you probably aren't that likely to flip a computer open and start hacking on some obscure SNMP code.
How much you want to bet there was a fine print clause buried in the Equipment Issuance paperwork that allows the school to monitor their student issued equipment in any way they deem fit?
Not much, because the Plaintiff's attorneys went through that paperwork with a fine-toothed comb and certified in their filing that there is no such clause in the documents. I'm sure they did a better job searching for a specific item than a 3rd rate lawyer for the school district when he was writing the whole thing.
Probably there isn't one indeed because it would be stupid and dangerous to claim that. It's one thing to monitor the *computer* - this is usually legal. But it's a very different thing to monitor the room where the computer is. The school's IT has no reason to see the room. Intercepting webcam images is not a "computer maintenance" like a scheduled defrag would be, for a simple reason - the image has nothing to do with the computer.
Note that the complaint does not list any items that would be a legitimate maintenance target - like documents saved by the user. Those indeed might be a fair game for the school. The complaint is about images that users never recorded themselves, and had no reason to suspect that they were recorded by others.
I personally would cover up any webcam or microphone built into a laptop given to me by school or work and just use external solutions.
Personally, I out of principle do not have a webcam - this laptop has none built in, and I don't connect an external one either. There is simply no need for anyone, authorized or not, to see anything here.
However it would require an advanced degree of tinhattedness on part of students to even be aware of the danger. IMO, a common student would have no reason whatsoever to tape the camera, especially if it has a legitimate use, such as with Skype, whether those uses are private or related to education.
In addition to that, the complaint mentions that other people, who have no reason whatsoever to even be aware of presence of the laptop in the room (let alone the camera in it) may consider the setting private, while in fact it is not.
I don't get why autofollow was so bad - you only got autofollowed when you created your account, and at that point, you have no content on your feed. What's the big deal?
Indeed, when tens of millions of people suddenly find a new software in their familiar email client they instantly know all there is to know how it works and what to do and what not to do. Even though none of that was explained to them. One of my friends, who also has a Gmail account, posted a test Buzz, and lots of people saw it (and me, before I disabled the sorry thing.)
Google already had one in the form of your Google Talk chat contacts.
There is quite a difference between sending a chat message to one selected contact and between sending a message to all contacts.
Now, as a semantic issue, I consider terraforming to be any activity that makes a existing region more amenable to human habitation.
That reminds me of something:
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'
Here, though, is the more conventional definition of terraforming:
Terraforming (literally, "Earth-forming") of a planet, moon, or other body is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying its atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology to be similar to those of Earth to make it habitable by terran organisms.
Since I was commenting on whether humans can stop global warming, it makes no sense to involve irrigation and other puny scratches on the surface of the planet - those don't affect the climate in the slightest. But Wikipedia's definition fits the task perfectly.
For each and every hardware that catches up and gives you $n hours of battery life there will always be hardware that chooses to not catch up, and as result gives you 2*$n hours of battery life.
Personally, I disable animations on every computer I use just because they are wasting my time. 3D effects are nice for a few minutes, but become irrelevant after that. The important part of a window is not its decorations, it's the client area.
Some years ago I had the same problem with Sprint - they were sending me SMS spam about services, and sometimes some foreign people (hired by Sprint) called my cell phone about their service.
My response was simple - I canceled the service and moved to AT&T. As a condition of AT&T contract I demanded that SMS and Web access should be permanently disabled on my phone. I'm happy now, both because of the low cost of the service ($32/mo) and because of the peace of mind.
Alpha Centauri (or is it Proxima?) would take a four year journey one way, and that's the second closest star to the earth.
I guess we'll all have to go. Then there will be no exernal observer left, and our own time will dilate to some ridiculous 7 minutes. So I'm claiming copyright on the name "Spaceship Earth."
It shouldn't be a question of whether or not man caused global warming, but if man can stop global warming.
No, man is not yet ready for terraforming, I think it's pretty obvious. Even if we were ready, such an attempt *must* be very carefully simulated. Mankind does not have sufficient computing resources, or data, or models for much of that. Right now we don't know what's going on, if anything. Attempting terraforming without simulation is beyond criminal.
They absolutely refused to make the changes because they "couldn't" identify me.
IMO they were absolutely correct. All you had was online data - something that a hacker can intercept, shoulder-surf, phish your password and login as you, or simply use your computer while you are at lunch.
You were willing to trade a whole lot of security for a moment of convenience.
They wanted something that *wasn't* online. They'd have it in your account details, but that wouldn't be shown anywhere near your Web account. A foreign attacker would be certainly foiled; only someone local to you has a chance of getting your SSN (bribing your HR at work, breaking into your home, etc.)
Is it that big a pain to set up with decent security?
It is not easy. A professional can do it without much pain, because he already knows what goes where. But if you have no such experience you may make mistakes that will cost you.
Generally mail servers aren't that bad to configure (unless you want sendmail.) Some are easier than other; I like Postfix. You probably want an IMAP server too. But one problem you need to solve is spam control. Google, however evil it may have become, has a good spam filter. You, OTOH, will eventually be drowning in spam. I don't know what is the best solution for that today.
And security-wise, you'd want to make sure your firewalls are properly configured. You will need to test them, and you will need to keep the software on Internet servers up to date.
And what do you do about server downtime?
Email is not very sensitive to downtime; however if you have other services, like Web, then they will certainly stop working. You will need to come to wherever the server is, and fix it.
So all in all, it's not impossible to have your own server. You can run other services there if you want. But if you aren't interested in doing all that, then perhaps you need to get a non-free email account from a provider. For example, Hover offers their largest package with 6 mailboxes for $60/yr. You probably will burn more money than that on electric power to run your server.
As I confessed before, I'm not familiar with modern ways of teaching - you are, so I just accept what you say about space, access and other things.
However I still don't understand why students can't do their homework in their notebooks? You tell them what to do (refer to a book, or give an assignment) and then they do it on their paper. You check it out later, and once done they take their notebooks back. When I was in school we had no copiers there, and felt no need for any. I don't mean to debate the modern educational paradigm, of course:-) it just sounds weird to me. Next, maybe, you will tell me that modern students can't write in cursive with a semi-decent pen?:-)
We did have some custom brochures printed by the university, when I got there, but those were in labs, and we used them when doing a lab assignment. Once done, those brochures go back to the storage, and most of them got there safely. Of course, university students are a little bit more organized than your high school crowd.
What does any of this have to do with the story we are commenting on?
Believe it or not, it started with me suggesting a random thing - prohibiting wood fire in order to reduce the carbon footprint. I have no idea what controls will be instituted if the AGW is accepted, it was just something that I picked that sounded possible. You are welcome to suggest your own carbon-reducing measures.
All in all, I agree, this drifted away from the topic. The topic, back then, was "how and why green technologies / carbon reducing technologies hurt the civilization."
While we were educating each other this way someone else posted a comment which answered the question simply and effectively. Please have a read.
As humans become more advanced and sophisticated, their own self-restrictions actually increase. For example: a professor's sense of ethics is much more restricting than a homeless drug addict's.
Sorry, but you picked a bad day for such an example.
But to the matter of your observation: indeed more "enlightened" societies become more restricting. That's what kills them. It's not just the environmental regs, but the whole truckload of every imaginable tax, fee and regulation that makes it insane to open a business in the USA generally and CA specifically. Businesses around here close whole buildings and lay people off by thousands, and that's not just recession and outsourcing but primarily the bad business atmosphere. The state is $20B in the hole, and you don't need to be a Google founder to figure out who is going to pay for all that. I'm fixing up a small part of the house now, and the bureaucracy at the county drags this for about a year already, and the work isn't yet even scheduled to start. But they didn't fail to tell me that the reflectivity index of the paint must be not more than 41%. See how careful, thoughtful they are?
You claimed that burning wood was "banned in California" but it turns out that burning wood is restricted (not banned) in a certain part of California, for a few days per year.
Specifically note the "an end to the familiar, open-front hearth in new homes and remodels." If that is not a 100% ban then what is it? These are local regulations, but they are spreading fast.
Also note that the Central Valley is an agricultural region with farms miles away from each other, and only few cities.
I hope that clears the confusion as much as it is humanly possible. The executive summary is simple: for many locales it is illegal to install a wood-burning fireplace, and if you already have one it is illegal to use it on some days (in winter - just when you need it.)
Again, this is just an example of how deep the government control can go. We don't need to worry about their justifications. Today they may be valid - to keep the air clean. Tomorrow they may be bogus - to reduce the carbon footprint. Or maybe later they will tax you for your car mileage, separately from the gas tax that you already pay. Once governments take the power to regulate your life they seldom let it go.
Slashdot Mirror
It can run about $7,500 to put a quarter of the screen banner up on a section front page on the NYTimes.com for a month. A comparable ad in the paper would cost you over a hundred thousand dollars [for a day.]
I'm not surprised then that paper is dying - there are only so many rich idio^W advertisers who are willing to pay $100K for a daily ad. Electrons are cheaper, and impulse buyers can follow the ad immediately. Ever tried to click on an ad in a newspaper?
not all of us own an electric car
Well, obviously transportation of *additional items* is free if you take a car. If you take a train these additional items will not only inconvenience you while you are there, you may also need to pay for the luggage.
On top of that, with the train you have no option of stopping in some other town for dinner - you can only go from point A to point B, even if your plans have changed.
Most new laptops with a built-in webcam have a hardwired LED that lights up when the webcam is powered on, you should feel safe with one of those.
Yes, as long as you stare at that LED all the time. I'm sure there are people who are OK with that, but most of them are in psychiatric facilities. The rest of us may not even look at the laptop if we aren't using it.
Also, does the LED activate in the single frame mode, when a still picture is taken? That could happen pretty quickly. Another possibility is that the LED may be always on - that depends on the software that reads from the camera.
Why the heck would you want to pay $50 to park a car when you can get there faster by light rail - including the ski hill - for less than $5?
If your group consists of 5 people, and if you intend to go back.
Besides, if you have a car you can take some spare clothes, water and lunch, binoculars, cameras - and whatever else you might need, transportation is free, and your car is your personal staging area where you can always pick something up and drop something off. But a heavy bag that you are doomed to carry whole day can wreck the whole experience.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that the student in question reported the laptop lost or stolen.
If so, the kid would never allow his parents to go ahead with a major lawsuit.
If the School district is pressing charges
Apparently they don't. And they'd do that in an instant if a theft is reported.
kid tries to smear School before he goes to jail himself
In that scenario the kid only needs to say "Sorry, the laptop fell behind the seat in the car and I only found it a moment ago."
That doesn't mean the allegations aren't true, just that it would be VERY surprising if so.
If I was a partner in a law firm that files a class action lawsuit on behalf of 1800+ people I'd probably spend $100 on a private computer specialist who can look at the laptop and see if there is (or is not) a software that can do this remote webcam thing. It's not like the school would write such a program from scratch, they'd simply buy one.
When a "poor" family owns two cars, a TV, and all manner of electronics, it's ludicrous to claim that they can't feed their children.
A young family that pays a 30-yr mortgage on the house, two car loans and a c/c bill and has children is especially likely to be very poor, to the point that if the government offers subsidized lunches at school they gladly take that offer.
I'm guessing that the kid was looking at smut, and was caught self-abusing
I agree with the hypothesis, but object to the "self-abusing" part. What planet are you from?
Or maybe he was using the webcam to post a picture on his Facebook page of himself making a rude gesture
It is not inappropriate to make any gesture when you are alone. Social taboos are against communicating such a gesture to another. The school has no way (or authority) to see what he does with the picture (I'm not even touching the freedom of speech angle.)
and adding a profane tag to it
The webcam can't see the screen.
Perhaps he was searching Google for information about how to roll a joint
Unfortunately a public school student doesn't need Google to see how it's done. And even if that was captured by the camera, rolling cigarettes with tobacco is not illegal, and the webcam can't say what was in them.
Any scenario I can think of would stem from the kid doing something on the laptop that raised a red flag to a network admin
I don't think a network admin is a teacher or is qualified to be a teacher. Most likely the spying was done not by an IT guy but by a teacher who knows the kid personally and felt OK to call the parents to talk about it. That requires a God complex that only teachers have.
Which shouldn't constitute child pornography.
And that's, IMO, why the class action does not accuse the defendants of CP unless CP is found. First of all, it's not needed to start the wheels, and once the lawsuit is going every single computer that is involved with sending or receiving images will be turned upside down. Chances are, they will find incriminating images. A disproportionally large number of pedophiles are teachers; we read about their arrests every few weeks, as it seems (and because laptops today don't take much energy anyway, and because it takes forever to reboot a Windows box.)
Otherwise any recording that at some point includes a minor can be construed as child porn.
Obviously not. However they gave students the laptops with clear understanding that students will keep them on their desks in their bedrooms. Very few students have separate offices. And if the laptop is in bedroom, it is unavoidable that students will be [un]dressing there at least twice per day. And chances are good that the laptop will be powered up all the time, since kids need 24/7 communication, as it seems.
let's not take the stance of the child pornography fearmongers and assume that any depiction of a child is pornographic
It isn't - it's still legal to take pictures of children. However if children are naked then it's much more difficult to prove innocence. I'm not a lawyer, and from what I remember courts have all kinds of tests for CP, including the "I know pr0n when I see it". All in all, if you are not an MD who took a photo for a specific medical purpose, statistically you are done for.
You can't (or shouldn't) enact laws that make for impossible situations.
The law may be fair or unfair, that I don't know. However it doesn't result in an impossible situation. It only bans sex offenders from cities. Once you leave a city you can live anywhere; even your nearest neighbor can be a mile away. A school is probably 10 miles away, if not more.
Smoking a joint while updating his MySpace page?
Stinking up the whole house, when it's much safer to smoke outside, with his buddies?
Besides, I know a few smokers, and most of them see smoking as a separate thing to enjoy. If you are in an expensive restaurant, looking at the table full of delicacies, you probably aren't that likely to flip a computer open and start hacking on some obscure SNMP code.
How much you want to bet there was a fine print clause buried in the Equipment Issuance paperwork that allows the school to monitor their student issued equipment in any way they deem fit?
Not much, because the Plaintiff's attorneys went through that paperwork with a fine-toothed comb and certified in their filing that there is no such clause in the documents. I'm sure they did a better job searching for a specific item than a 3rd rate lawyer for the school district when he was writing the whole thing.
Probably there isn't one indeed because it would be stupid and dangerous to claim that. It's one thing to monitor the *computer* - this is usually legal. But it's a very different thing to monitor the room where the computer is. The school's IT has no reason to see the room. Intercepting webcam images is not a "computer maintenance" like a scheduled defrag would be, for a simple reason - the image has nothing to do with the computer.
Note that the complaint does not list any items that would be a legitimate maintenance target - like documents saved by the user. Those indeed might be a fair game for the school. The complaint is about images that users never recorded themselves, and had no reason to suspect that they were recorded by others.
But to be charged of child pornography, that one image would have to be child pornography.
Indeed it's just speculation. However consider these facts:
What is the most likely activity that took place?
I personally would cover up any webcam or microphone built into a laptop given to me by school or work and just use external solutions.
Personally, I out of principle do not have a webcam - this laptop has none built in, and I don't connect an external one either. There is simply no need for anyone, authorized or not, to see anything here.
However it would require an advanced degree of tinhattedness on part of students to even be aware of the danger. IMO, a common student would have no reason whatsoever to tape the camera, especially if it has a legitimate use, such as with Skype, whether those uses are private or related to education.
In addition to that, the complaint mentions that other people, who have no reason whatsoever to even be aware of presence of the laptop in the room (let alone the camera in it) may consider the setting private, while in fact it is not.
I don't get why autofollow was so bad - you only got autofollowed when you created your account, and at that point, you have no content on your feed. What's the big deal?
Indeed, when tens of millions of people suddenly find a new software in their familiar email client they instantly know all there is to know how it works and what to do and what not to do. Even though none of that was explained to them. One of my friends, who also has a Gmail account, posted a test Buzz, and lots of people saw it (and me, before I disabled the sorry thing.)
Google already had one in the form of your Google Talk chat contacts.
There is quite a difference between sending a chat message to one selected contact and between sending a message to all contacts.
Now, as a semantic issue, I consider terraforming to be any activity that makes a existing region more amenable to human habitation.
That reminds me of something:
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'
Here, though, is the more conventional definition of terraforming:
Terraforming (literally, "Earth-forming") of a planet, moon, or other body is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying its atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology to be similar to those of Earth to make it habitable by terran organisms.
Since I was commenting on whether humans can stop global warming, it makes no sense to involve irrigation and other puny scratches on the surface of the planet - those don't affect the climate in the slightest. But Wikipedia's definition fits the task perfectly.
Hardware will catch up in due course.
For each and every hardware that catches up and gives you $n hours of battery life there will always be hardware that chooses to not catch up, and as result gives you 2*$n hours of battery life.
Personally, I disable animations on every computer I use just because they are wasting my time. 3D effects are nice for a few minutes, but become irrelevant after that. The important part of a window is not its decorations, it's the client area.
I was getting spam texts from T-Mobile
Some years ago I had the same problem with Sprint - they were sending me SMS spam about services, and sometimes some foreign people (hired by Sprint) called my cell phone about their service.
My response was simple - I canceled the service and moved to AT&T. As a condition of AT&T contract I demanded that SMS and Web access should be permanently disabled on my phone. I'm happy now, both because of the low cost of the service ($32/mo) and because of the peace of mind.
Alpha Centauri (or is it Proxima?) would take a four year journey one way, and that's the second closest star to the earth.
I guess we'll all have to go. Then there will be no exernal observer left, and our own time will dilate to some ridiculous 7 minutes. So I'm claiming copyright on the name "Spaceship Earth."
It shouldn't be a question of whether or not man caused global warming, but if man can stop global warming.
No, man is not yet ready for terraforming, I think it's pretty obvious. Even if we were ready, such an attempt *must* be very carefully simulated. Mankind does not have sufficient computing resources, or data, or models for much of that. Right now we don't know what's going on, if anything. Attempting terraforming without simulation is beyond criminal.
They absolutely refused to make the changes because they "couldn't" identify me.
IMO they were absolutely correct. All you had was online data - something that a hacker can intercept, shoulder-surf, phish your password and login as you, or simply use your computer while you are at lunch. You were willing to trade a whole lot of security for a moment of convenience.
They wanted something that *wasn't* online. They'd have it in your account details, but that wouldn't be shown anywhere near your Web account. A foreign attacker would be certainly foiled; only someone local to you has a chance of getting your SSN (bribing your HR at work, breaking into your home, etc.)
Is it that big a pain to set up with decent security?
It is not easy. A professional can do it without much pain, because he already knows what goes where. But if you have no such experience you may make mistakes that will cost you.
Generally mail servers aren't that bad to configure (unless you want sendmail.) Some are easier than other; I like Postfix. You probably want an IMAP server too. But one problem you need to solve is spam control. Google, however evil it may have become, has a good spam filter. You, OTOH, will eventually be drowning in spam. I don't know what is the best solution for that today.
And security-wise, you'd want to make sure your firewalls are properly configured. You will need to test them, and you will need to keep the software on Internet servers up to date.
And what do you do about server downtime?
Email is not very sensitive to downtime; however if you have other services, like Web, then they will certainly stop working. You will need to come to wherever the server is, and fix it.
So all in all, it's not impossible to have your own server. You can run other services there if you want. But if you aren't interested in doing all that, then perhaps you need to get a non-free email account from a provider. For example, Hover offers their largest package with 6 mailboxes for $60/yr. You probably will burn more money than that on electric power to run your server.
As I confessed before, I'm not familiar with modern ways of teaching - you are, so I just accept what you say about space, access and other things.
However I still don't understand why students can't do their homework in their notebooks? You tell them what to do (refer to a book, or give an assignment) and then they do it on their paper. You check it out later, and once done they take their notebooks back. When I was in school we had no copiers there, and felt no need for any. I don't mean to debate the modern educational paradigm, of course :-) it just sounds weird to me. Next, maybe, you will tell me that modern students can't write in cursive with a semi-decent pen? :-)
We did have some custom brochures printed by the university, when I got there, but those were in labs, and we used them when doing a lab assignment. Once done, those brochures go back to the storage, and most of them got there safely. Of course, university students are a little bit more organized than your high school crowd.
What does any of this have to do with the story we are commenting on?
Believe it or not, it started with me suggesting a random thing - prohibiting wood fire in order to reduce the carbon footprint. I have no idea what controls will be instituted if the AGW is accepted, it was just something that I picked that sounded possible. You are welcome to suggest your own carbon-reducing measures.
All in all, I agree, this drifted away from the topic. The topic, back then, was "how and why green technologies / carbon reducing technologies hurt the civilization."
While we were educating each other this way someone else posted a comment which answered the question simply and effectively. Please have a read.
As humans become more advanced and sophisticated, their own self-restrictions actually increase. For example: a professor's sense of ethics is much more restricting than a homeless drug addict's.
Sorry, but you picked a bad day for such an example.
But to the matter of your observation: indeed more "enlightened" societies become more restricting. That's what kills them. It's not just the environmental regs, but the whole truckload of every imaginable tax, fee and regulation that makes it insane to open a business in the USA generally and CA specifically. Businesses around here close whole buildings and lay people off by thousands, and that's not just recession and outsourcing but primarily the bad business atmosphere. The state is $20B in the hole, and you don't need to be a Google founder to figure out who is going to pay for all that. I'm fixing up a small part of the house now, and the bureaucracy at the county drags this for about a year already, and the work isn't yet even scheduled to start. But they didn't fail to tell me that the reflectivity index of the paint must be not more than 41%. See how careful, thoughtful they are?
You claimed that burning wood was "banned in California" but it turns out that burning wood is restricted (not banned) in a certain part of California, for a few days per year.
Here are some more links then:
link, link and link.
Specifically note the "an end to the familiar, open-front hearth in new homes and remodels." If that is not a 100% ban then what is it? These are local regulations, but they are spreading fast.
Also note that the Central Valley is an agricultural region with farms miles away from each other, and only few cities.
I hope that clears the confusion as much as it is humanly possible. The executive summary is simple: for many locales it is illegal to install a wood-burning fireplace, and if you already have one it is illegal to use it on some days (in winter - just when you need it.)
Again, this is just an example of how deep the government control can go. We don't need to worry about their justifications. Today they may be valid - to keep the air clean. Tomorrow they may be bogus - to reduce the carbon footprint. Or maybe later they will tax you for your car mileage, separately from the gas tax that you already pay. Once governments take the power to regulate your life they seldom let it go.