Actually, the school offerred to give her one without a chip or battery. She still refused so I'm guessing she wouldn't be satisfied with the microwave trick.
With a caveat (emphasis mine):
In response to public outcry and pressure from rights groups, the school has offered to remove the battery and chip, but wouldn’t budge on mandating the ID. Their offer would also require the Hernandez family to end their criticism and agree to comply with and even tout the policy, something Andrea’s father Steve Hernandez finds unacceptable.
The family wasn't willing to sell out their position just to exempt their kid - an admirable position. Not to mention that the offer shows the school is more concerned about the criticism than the safety issues.
BTW - why hasn't some friendly hacker mailed these folks an RFID transmitter that spams out random codes all day long?
Staff is probably more concerned because it IS a "security risk" to have people running around that don't belong. My local high school had an issue with a 20-something lurking around and ended up in the girls' locker room.
But somehow, we didn't have this problem pre-RFID tags? Actually, scratch that - your high school had a problem recognizing a 20-something "lurking around"? No-one was concerned enough to notice that he never went to class?
Why is showing your intelligence considered flaunting but excelling on the athletic field considered the, thing to do and celebrated?
Because at most schools, athletics reflects directly on the school's prestige - therefore the school signals that Athletics Is Good. Meanwhile, they'll pay a lot of lip service to academics and the arts, but follow the money - the sports team just got five or six-figures of funding for a new scoreboard or uniforms or field; how much did drama get?
This is a pet peeve of mine; one year our school band blew the doors off the provincial competition - junior and senior. Silvers and Golds (and one Gold with Honors). School put a note in the newsletter. Meanwhile there's a two-hour mandatory "pep rally" for the various sports teams - most of which didn't manage to even quality for provincials that year.
Schools want to reward academics? Then start treating your smart kids the way you treat your sports kids.
It's not private versus public, it's the size of the school. Less bullying in a small school because of the cross-fertilization of clicks. No one is a stranger making harder to pick on someone. But don't be the new kid because you can't hide in a small school.
Public school, 25 in grad class, K-12 with 21 of them.
This.
I can't say I've had the pleasure of private school, but my family moved around a fair bit and I've seen my share of schools of all sizes. Big-city schools have the advantage (for new kids) of constant turn-over - you're almost never the only new kid, and at the smarter large schools they mix/match the classes each grade (to prevent cliques of kids who have been in the same class for six years).
But I'd say the size of the community is almost more important - my junior/senior high school had around 500 kids, but it was the only school in the town. It wasn't uncommon for kids to have shared teachers from grades 1 to 12, and being the "new kid" (and worse, we moved mid-year) made life... interesting.
But in any school, there is the us/them dynamic. And the bullies will find *something* to bully you for - at least I never was in a school that didn't have bullies.
Please help support closed environments. They are better for computing.
I was on board until this part.
To borrow your fashion designer example, you're right that they don't care about Mac or Linux, so long as the software works. But the message needs to be - how do we get Linux/FOSS to work simply enough that the Fashion Designer doesn't care that he's running Linux?
In instances like what you describe, the computer is merely an appliance. The average user will treat it like an appliance because that's all they know.
And more importantly, it's all they want to know - they have no desire or inclination to tweak the device, so any additional overhead related to openness or customization is literally a negative.
I have a microwave. It cooks things. It has no user-customizable parts. This is fine by me, because I don't *want* to tweak my microwave settings, or spend time installing the last revision of the TurnTableRotation module. I don't want to reboot my microwave. I want to cook my food and move on to things I'm interested in doing. Some people come up with really cool things to do with microwaves, and that's great - but features they could use are wasted (and anti-features) for the rest of us who just want popcorn.
Another example is a car (yes, the favored analogy for Slashdot). Some people love to tweak their cars, some people are happy as long as you turn the key and it works. I drive an Echo, and it *literally* has two warning lights - one for "um, might want to get a service" and one for "you are screwed, I'm turning off until you get fixed". If I was a car geek, it would infuriate me - there's no details, no user-serviceable parts! But I'm not a car geek, I don't remotely have the skills or equipment to repair my own car, so two lights is exactly the amount of useful information for me - oh dear and oh shite, as my wife calls them.
No different for computers. Some people want to tweak the registry, update their drivers, overclock the chip, and otherwise hot-rod the machine. And some people want a reliable device that does what it needs to do and doesn't require too much time for upkeep.
It's called an iPhone. Your kid will carry it willingly, no stress, no questions asked.
I'm torn about this - on the one hand, I love the idea of both my kid having the ability to call me if she's in trouble, no hassle. (My parents used to make sure I had a quarter in my pocket at all times). And I'll admit to liking the idea of being able to quietly log in and check where she is (in a peace of mind way).
On the other hand, a lot of my childhood was defined by what I used to do when my parents weren't around - particularly my teenage years. I wandered, I got lost and found my way out again, I found new and interesting things to do. And my parents knew about some of it, knew about some of it and didn't tell me they knew, and never found out about the rest. I want my kid to have those experiences, and to learn that self-sufficiency that comes from knowing that help is a bit far away and you have to fend for yourself a little bit.
Yeah, except all the "good parenting" books I've read assume that your child is a small adult, who will rationally consider your arguments and agree with you, possibly after some reasoned debate and negotiation.
Hell, I work with grown adults who can't be reasoned with. We're expecting five year olds to perform better?
That's an oddity I've noticed at the (admittedly few) times I've had to get a patdown for a concert or nightclub. The guys get the full treatment, but they'll give half a glance into the woman's purse and then wave them through. (My wife's purse was messy enough that there was *no way* they saw the entire contents.)
I always wonder how many fights start by the lady pulling a weapon out from under the eyeliner...
Yea, I don't see to many 3 year old's using Microsoft Office applications, or SQL databases. The kid is just playing Metro Games, of course that's easy.
Not to mention that he has zero ingrained habits about how to use a computer. I don't hate the Office Ribbon because I can't figure it out - I hate it because instead of doing productive work, I'm wasting time figuring out where they hid the command this time.
Agreed - and in today's world of bundling, you better believe that the competition will cheerfully take over servicing my account if my current provider started reducing service without cause (and "some third party doesn't like what I'm using my connection for" is *not* cause).
I'm trying to think of any particular reason why I would ever pay the $35 - just keep an eye out for the when try and slip this into terms and conditions and call them up, refuse to accept.
That's assuming that you can't find a nice small-claims judge who will side with you when they throttle your connection (thus failing to meet their end of the service contract).
Well, to be fair it was destroyed during Generations (y'know, when they destroyed the ship). At the time they probably didn't expect to ever need it again.
On that note, I do wonder what happened to the replica from the old Las Vegas exhibit - that's another option for a "purist" Trek bridge.
Also: my school cut funding for all those other options, so I want to pull the science funding and put that back into drama and music and the other options we cut because I didn't want to increase my taxes.
If the dumbshits only put them at entrances/exits then your solution would work rather well. At least until the student was forced to account for his whereabouts when the manual attendance discrepancy started showing up on reports.
What discrepancy? There's only going to be one attendance system, and teachers generally have better things to do.
Back in my day, when they switched to the scantron attendance sheets (fill in block A if they're absent, block B if they're late.) Distract the teacher at the beginning of the class, they forget to fill in the blanks, ta-da! We're all here! School never bothered following up on that (because what incentive do they have?)
At which point, I'd find the kid with the best attendance record and bribe him/her to carry around a cloned RFID for me.
Heck with that - I'm going to find the kid with the same schedule as me, zap his card with my ID when he's not looking, and let him do the work (and get in trouble for not being there).
What will make this plan truly hilarious is if they use the same RFID system for access to secured areas. (Hilarity is left as an exercise for the reader)
The flaw is that you can't be sitting, coding merrily along, and suddenly your source has been (thunder crash) infected by GPL!. You choose if you want to use GPL code, and you pay for it in the same manner you pay to license any other code. The only difference is in the manner of payment.
Although I do like the "unintentional infection" defense - gee Judge, I was just putting together this video, and these copyrighted songs infected it! It's not my fault!
Forcing the driver out into user space is the "punishment" that's exacted because they don't GPL their driver, which as other people have correctly noted, they really can't because of cross-licensing agreements, patent violations which are hidden in code and protected by EULA from reverse engineering to discover the violations, and licensing for things like H.264 and the rest of the Sorensen CODECs.
I'll spot you the cross-licensing agreements (although I'd say those are fixable problems in the long term, and nVidia has had a long term to do so), but don't expect to garner a lot of sympathy saying "they can't do it because it'll show how much they've been stealing from everyone else!"
Short version: nVidia doesn't want to pay the asking price for access to the API. The fact that the payment is code instead of money doesn't change anything.
I consider the BSD license less free because it allows others to infringe on people's freedom.
BSD is no more or less free than GPL - they're both simply statements on what you want people to do with your code. (So is "no license" for that matter).
BSD says "here, go do whatever the hell you want with this - if you make a million bucks, I don't care". GPL says "here's something cool I'm handing out for free, as long as you're making something for free with it as well". And "no license" is "You want to use this, you talk to me and we'll figure something out."
How can something be stolen if it is being given away? The whole point of BSD is that you are "free" to use what is being offered for "free" and you are "free" to contribute back into the community code base to make the product better for everyone else. Through that collaboration you can end up with a better product but everyone is always "free" to take that product of the collaboration and run with it to create something unique.
The problem is someone is also "free" to take your product, wrap it around something proprietary with a brand name and sell it, taking all the profit and not returning anything back to the group.
If you don't care about who profits from your code (and in particular, you don't mind that someone else profits from your work), BSD is just fine.
Also another reason SuperPACs are the bane of our society - they keep all the connections neatly hidden so proper attribution/consequences for atrocious attack ads or or paid puff-pieces can never be worked out and corporate owners can basically buy elections for their favored rubber-stamper.
I think there's a simple solution to this - the public should hold candidates to any and all advertising done on their behalf, authorized or not. You don't like it? Then get out there and publicly disavow it.
Ran Slackware in university (was lucky enough that I could download it direct instead of 15-floppy hell), and that system lasted me nearly a decade. When the machine died we were on Windows (the wife wanted it, and it was her machine). Ran Ubuntu for a while a few years back, but could never get it 100% stable - video issues mostly - and by then I had a job and kids and other hobbies besides hotrodding OSs.
Every so often I think of trying it again, but it always comes down to the basic time issues.
"After further investigation, the medical examiner has announced that while doctors had the ability to repair the damage to Mr Zotov's heart, he would not give permission for the operation due to the hospital's inability to reverse-engineer the equipment to his satisfaction."
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Actually, the school offerred to give her one without a chip or battery. She still refused so I'm guessing she wouldn't be satisfied with the microwave trick.
With a caveat (emphasis mine):
The family wasn't willing to sell out their position just to exempt their kid - an admirable position. Not to mention that the offer shows the school is more concerned about the criticism than the safety issues.
BTW - why hasn't some friendly hacker mailed these folks an RFID transmitter that spams out random codes all day long?
Staff is probably more concerned because it IS a "security risk" to have people running around that don't belong. My local high school had an issue with a 20-something lurking around and ended up in the girls' locker room.
But somehow, we didn't have this problem pre-RFID tags? Actually, scratch that - your high school had a problem recognizing a 20-something "lurking around"? No-one was concerned enough to notice that he never went to class?
Why is showing your intelligence considered flaunting but excelling on the athletic field considered the, thing to do and celebrated?
Because at most schools, athletics reflects directly on the school's prestige - therefore the school signals that Athletics Is Good. Meanwhile, they'll pay a lot of lip service to academics and the arts, but follow the money - the sports team just got five or six-figures of funding for a new scoreboard or uniforms or field; how much did drama get?
This is a pet peeve of mine; one year our school band blew the doors off the provincial competition - junior and senior. Silvers and Golds (and one Gold with Honors). School put a note in the newsletter. Meanwhile there's a two-hour mandatory "pep rally" for the various sports teams - most of which didn't manage to even quality for provincials that year.
Schools want to reward academics? Then start treating your smart kids the way you treat your sports kids.
It's not private versus public, it's the size of the school. Less bullying in a small school because of the cross-fertilization of clicks. No one is a stranger making harder to pick on someone. But don't be the new kid because you can't hide in a small school.
Public school, 25 in grad class, K-12 with 21 of them.
This.
I can't say I've had the pleasure of private school, but my family moved around a fair bit and I've seen my share of schools of all sizes. Big-city schools have the advantage (for new kids) of constant turn-over - you're almost never the only new kid, and at the smarter large schools they mix/match the classes each grade (to prevent cliques of kids who have been in the same class for six years).
But I'd say the size of the community is almost more important - my junior/senior high school had around 500 kids, but it was the only school in the town. It wasn't uncommon for kids to have shared teachers from grades 1 to 12, and being the "new kid" (and worse, we moved mid-year) made life... interesting.
But in any school, there is the us/them dynamic. And the bullies will find *something* to bully you for - at least I never was in a school that didn't have bullies.
You could measure your power usage to 17653.8 kWh, your provider measures 19877.2 on its end. What's the number they should use for billing?
Isn't that why the meter is at the house, and not the substation? The reading on the meter at my house is the official number.
Keep records from your router, and wait for them to throttle your connection or charge you extra.
Then take 'em to small claims court. Far cheaper than a full lawsuit, just you vs. their rep and a lawyer, and most legal shenanigans disallowed.
Let their rep explain their position, and wait for the judge to laugh 'em out of the room.
Please help support closed environments. They are better for computing.
I was on board until this part.
To borrow your fashion designer example, you're right that they don't care about Mac or Linux, so long as the software works. But the message needs to be - how do we get Linux/FOSS to work simply enough that the Fashion Designer doesn't care that he's running Linux?
In instances like what you describe, the computer is merely an appliance. The average user will treat it like an appliance because that's all they know.
And more importantly, it's all they want to know - they have no desire or inclination to tweak the device, so any additional overhead related to openness or customization is literally a negative.
I have a microwave. It cooks things. It has no user-customizable parts. This is fine by me, because I don't *want* to tweak my microwave settings, or spend time installing the last revision of the TurnTableRotation module. I don't want to reboot my microwave. I want to cook my food and move on to things I'm interested in doing. Some people come up with really cool things to do with microwaves, and that's great - but features they could use are wasted (and anti-features) for the rest of us who just want popcorn.
Another example is a car (yes, the favored analogy for Slashdot). Some people love to tweak their cars, some people are happy as long as you turn the key and it works. I drive an Echo, and it *literally* has two warning lights - one for "um, might want to get a service" and one for "you are screwed, I'm turning off until you get fixed". If I was a car geek, it would infuriate me - there's no details, no user-serviceable parts! But I'm not a car geek, I don't remotely have the skills or equipment to repair my own car, so two lights is exactly the amount of useful information for me - oh dear and oh shite, as my wife calls them.
No different for computers. Some people want to tweak the registry, update their drivers, overclock the chip, and otherwise hot-rod the machine. And some people want a reliable device that does what it needs to do and doesn't require too much time for upkeep.
For the three-and-under set, I'd recommend saving some money and buying squeeky shoes. (The ones with little squeeky toys built into the soles)
It's called an iPhone. Your kid will carry it willingly, no stress, no questions asked.
I'm torn about this - on the one hand, I love the idea of both my kid having the ability to call me if she's in trouble, no hassle. (My parents used to make sure I had a quarter in my pocket at all times). And I'll admit to liking the idea of being able to quietly log in and check where she is (in a peace of mind way).
On the other hand, a lot of my childhood was defined by what I used to do when my parents weren't around - particularly my teenage years. I wandered, I got lost and found my way out again, I found new and interesting things to do. And my parents knew about some of it, knew about some of it and didn't tell me they knew, and never found out about the rest. I want my kid to have those experiences, and to learn that self-sufficiency that comes from knowing that help is a bit far away and you have to fend for yourself a little bit.
Yeah, except all the "good parenting" books I've read assume that your child is a small adult, who will rationally consider your arguments and agree with you, possibly after some reasoned debate and negotiation.
Hell, I work with grown adults who can't be reasoned with. We're expecting five year olds to perform better?
That's an oddity I've noticed at the (admittedly few) times I've had to get a patdown for a concert or nightclub. The guys get the full treatment, but they'll give half a glance into the woman's purse and then wave them through. (My wife's purse was messy enough that there was *no way* they saw the entire contents.)
I always wonder how many fights start by the lady pulling a weapon out from under the eyeliner...
Yea, I don't see to many 3 year old's using Microsoft Office applications, or SQL databases. The kid is just playing Metro Games, of course that's easy.
Not to mention that he has zero ingrained habits about how to use a computer. I don't hate the Office Ribbon because I can't figure it out - I hate it because instead of doing productive work, I'm wasting time figuring out where they hid the command this time.
Agreed - and in today's world of bundling, you better believe that the competition will cheerfully take over servicing my account if my current provider started reducing service without cause (and "some third party doesn't like what I'm using my connection for" is *not* cause).
I'm trying to think of any particular reason why I would ever pay the $35 - just keep an eye out for the when try and slip this into terms and conditions and call them up, refuse to accept.
That's assuming that you can't find a nice small-claims judge who will side with you when they throttle your connection (thus failing to meet their end of the service contract).
Well, to be fair it was destroyed during Generations (y'know, when they destroyed the ship). At the time they probably didn't expect to ever need it again.
On that note, I do wonder what happened to the replica from the old Las Vegas exhibit - that's another option for a "purist" Trek bridge.
Also: my school cut funding for all those other options, so I want to pull the science funding and put that back into drama and music and the other options we cut because I didn't want to increase my taxes.
If the dumbshits only put them at entrances/exits then your solution would work rather well. At least until the student was forced to account for his whereabouts when the manual attendance discrepancy started showing up on reports.
What discrepancy? There's only going to be one attendance system, and teachers generally have better things to do.
Back in my day, when they switched to the scantron attendance sheets (fill in block A if they're absent, block B if they're late.) Distract the teacher at the beginning of the class, they forget to fill in the blanks, ta-da! We're all here! School never bothered following up on that (because what incentive do they have?)
At which point, I'd find the kid with the best attendance record and bribe him/her to carry around a cloned RFID for me.
Heck with that - I'm going to find the kid with the same schedule as me, zap his card with my ID when he's not looking, and let him do the work (and get in trouble for not being there).
What will make this plan truly hilarious is if they use the same RFID system for access to secured areas. (Hilarity is left as an exercise for the reader)
The flaw is that you can't be sitting, coding merrily along, and suddenly your source has been (thunder crash) infected by GPL!. You choose if you want to use GPL code, and you pay for it in the same manner you pay to license any other code. The only difference is in the manner of payment.
Although I do like the "unintentional infection" defense - gee Judge, I was just putting together this video, and these copyrighted songs infected it! It's not my fault!
Forcing the driver out into user space is the "punishment" that's exacted because they don't GPL their driver, which as other people have correctly noted, they really can't because of cross-licensing agreements, patent violations which are hidden in code and protected by EULA from reverse engineering to discover the violations, and licensing for things like H.264 and the rest of the Sorensen CODECs.
I'll spot you the cross-licensing agreements (although I'd say those are fixable problems in the long term, and nVidia has had a long term to do so), but don't expect to garner a lot of sympathy saying "they can't do it because it'll show how much they've been stealing from everyone else!"
Short version: nVidia doesn't want to pay the asking price for access to the API. The fact that the payment is code instead of money doesn't change anything.
I consider the BSD license less free because it allows others to infringe on people's freedom.
BSD is no more or less free than GPL - they're both simply statements on what you want people to do with your code. (So is "no license" for that matter).
BSD says "here, go do whatever the hell you want with this - if you make a million bucks, I don't care". GPL says "here's something cool I'm handing out for free, as long as you're making something for free with it as well". And "no license" is "You want to use this, you talk to me and we'll figure something out."
How can something be stolen if it is being given away? The whole point of BSD is that you are "free" to use what is being offered for "free" and you are "free" to contribute back into the community code base to make the product better for everyone else. Through that collaboration you can end up with a better product but everyone is always "free" to take that product of the collaboration and run with it to create something unique.
The problem is someone is also "free" to take your product, wrap it around something proprietary with a brand name and sell it, taking all the profit and not returning anything back to the group.
If you don't care about who profits from your code (and in particular, you don't mind that someone else profits from your work), BSD is just fine.
Also another reason SuperPACs are the bane of our society - they keep all the connections neatly hidden so proper attribution/consequences for atrocious attack ads or or paid puff-pieces can never be worked out and corporate owners can basically buy elections for their favored rubber-stamper.
I think there's a simple solution to this - the public should hold candidates to any and all advertising done on their behalf, authorized or not. You don't like it? Then get out there and publicly disavow it.
Ran Slackware in university (was lucky enough that I could download it direct instead of 15-floppy hell), and that system lasted me nearly a decade. When the machine died we were on Windows (the wife wanted it, and it was her machine). Ran Ubuntu for a while a few years back, but could never get it 100% stable - video issues mostly - and by then I had a job and kids and other hobbies besides hotrodding OSs.
Every so often I think of trying it again, but it always comes down to the basic time issues.
"After further investigation, the medical examiner has announced that while doctors had the ability to repair the damage to Mr Zotov's heart, he would not give permission for the operation due to the hospital's inability to reverse-engineer the equipment to his satisfaction."