The next step is to transition the slow learners to cooking, sewing and shop class.
Yeah, because you want the "dumb" kids fixing your car and building your house...
Seriously - if you never hit a patch of school where it just didn't make sense for a while, you weren't challenged enough. (My favorite teachers were the ones that actively *found* your weak spots to make sure you were paying attention). Hell, I didn't figure out linear algebra until the morning of the exam - literally woke up that morning thinking "oh, that's what the hell they're talking about".
The article didn't focus much on this point, but it was mentioned that teachers keep asking if there is a way to prevent the kids from getting so far ahead. I don't think your going to get much enthusiasm from teachers that want to restrain learning to what is "supposed" to be learned at each grade level.
Gotta see it from the teacher's POV - they have to keep 30+ kids engaged all year. If a couple of them have blasted through the curriculum and are "done", you can't just let them run around all class. So what do you do with them?
Knowing a few teachers, I would say the question isn't "I don't want them to learn this", it's "I can't teach three grades of math simultaneously to the smart kids *and* get everyone else through the curriculum"
I think you were lucky with your parent's choice of schools.
I was a honors student (graduated a few years ahead of you), but my school (only one in town) didn't offer any AP classes. No robotics, lasers, or optics. And the school didn't have enough spare gear to risk letting anyone actually mess with them.
In my favor, when the new high school opened I got to do a lot of video-editing and production, but even that required four of us cashing in five years of accumulated favors from faculty and staff.
Anyhow, it really does depend on what school you end up in - it's entirely possible to be a smart kid in a school that has no resources to deal with you.
had she simply said, "no thank you, i dont approve of your practices or the safety of your technology" and accepted the fact that without a security screening
no one gets on an aircraft, everything would have been OK. She could have taken a car, a bus, or a train likely to her destination
Actually, at that point she couldn't have turned around and left - TSA has made it clear that once you step into their lair, they will have their way with you, one way or the other.
Interestingly enough the woman attempted to take a video of the incident:
At one point, Abbott tried unsuccessfully to take a video with her cellphone.
I was wondering about that (and TFA is very vague on the subject) - did Abbott try to take a video with her cell and fail because of a failure of the phone (battery dead, it's not a cameraphone, she doesn't know how to drive it), or was she prevented from taking a video with her cell?
Okay so if i dressed my daughter in tights and a sleeveless leotard she still would have to be scanned and or searched??
Yep - there was a story about a month back where a lady voluntarily took off her shirt (leaving her in just a bra), and was still told she had to get Officially Felt Up.
Probably because this was the knee-jerk response to the issue. Doctors and nurses are allowed to touch children without parents complaining therefore, QED, using doctors and nurses in the airport will eliminate parental complaints. Never mind the completely different context...
I've yet to meet a doctor who will examine my daughter without *insisting* that someone else is in the room with them - generally a parent. Part of that is to help the kid feel safe (not only do they explain what's going to happen, they usually make a point of getting the parent's agreement so the child knows that this is OK), and part is to avoid lawsuits, and part is that it's just polite to ask people before you start touching them
Contrast with TSA, who (a) don't seem to see the need to be polite, and (b) have no qualms about making it clear that they will do what they please regardless of your wishes.
OK, that is the existing system. Some states are trying to change that so that they can get businesses outside of thier jurisdiction who ship it to people in their jurisdiction to collect sales tax for them.
No, right now you tax the buyer but expect the seller to collect the tax. I'm saying tax the seller directly. (Yes, the seller will pass the cost along, but that doesn't change the actual price, just who gets in trouble for not paying it).
Amazon doesn't want to collect the money because they bet that consumers won't report the taxes, and that the government can't/won't go after the missing money. That gives Amazon their competitive advantage.
The US has some of the lowest tax rates of any civilized nation.
No it doesn't. Federal income tax, perhaps, but when you add all the taxes together it's not much better than the nanny states of Europe.
Depends how you count it - every country supplies different things in exchange for it's taxes. But I don't think anyone can claim that the US is getting good value for it's tax money currently. (Well, unless you like buying things that explode.)
You mean the way that mail order houses do. No, wait, mail order firms do NOT collect sales taxes in states they are not located in.
Maybe the problem here is requiring private businesses to act as tax collectors.
So, you're saying you don't want local businesses to collect sales tax either? That a better system is for each citizen to itemize their total purchases over the entire year, and then pay a tax bill then? And then the attendant enforcement issues as people try to claim they only bought 17 boxes of Crunchy-Os and not 34?
A better idea is just to tax the companies directly - you want to sell to my citizen, you pay X%. Same net effect, but none of this weaseling.
Someone please tell me how a corporation based in Washington State and legally incorporated in Delaware suddenly becomes a tax collector for states in which it does not have a physical presence?
Because it's easier trying to get the corporation to pay a sales tax then going after their own citizens for not paying the use tax.
Also, because it's easier to collect the tax at the moment you buy the item, rather than trying to have you itemize every box of cereal you purchased at tax time.
What I see as a problem is requiring every business that sells over the internet (or mail, or phone) to keep an updated database of every single tax jurisdiction in the country. I believe Texas has 300 or more at last check. And this has to be kept up, to the minute. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt.
But oddly, every other national chain does this with little problem. Why can't Amazon?
There are plenty of good reasons to simplify tax codes, but Amazon isn't the one to bring it up. (Or at least, I'd respect their opinion a lot more if they were collecting taxes like a good corporate citizen.
Why should it have to pay what brick-and-mortar stores have to pay for something it doesn't use?
Because they are still gaining the benefits.
What you're describing is the "suburb strategy" (or possibly the Walmart strategy), where you park yourself on the outskirts of town just past the city limits, knowing full well that every customer, supplier, and staff member has to use the city roads to get in and out, but not paying for any of those services (because "I'm not in town"). It's the same argument you get from people who move to bedroom communities for the lower taxes, but still drive in and out to work in the big city. It's trying to get something for nothing.
Some cities go the "toll booth" method of capturing that lost money, but I prefer how my city did it - people complained to the city because one of the roads was congested, old, and needed repair. City looked into it and found that nearly all the traffic and congestion was caused by bedroom community commuters. The official response back was "we deal with the roads that *our* taxpayers need fixed. You guys want this road fixed, you can pay for it". Fast-forward a few years of complaining, and the bedroom community ended up paying for the roadwork to be done.
Moral - if Amazon doesn't want to pay their fair share, I don't see why any particular town or state should go to any effort to make their lives easier either.
Exactly. Taxes on Interstate commerce is a Federal issue. It *is* unfair that local retailers have to collect sales tax while folks like Amazon don't. But that won't be solved by insisting that a company comply with or even know about the tax codes of every tiny municipality they affix an address label for. Fix it at the federal level with a law and free-to-business simplified and standardized database of tax collection requirements.
Let's be clear, folks - Amazon's "it's too HARD to keep track of tax codes" argument is total BS. Any national chain has to do this as a matter of course. Walmart keeps track of it. McDonald's has to keep track of it. Home Hardware has to keep track of it. Hell, most of those chains have to keep track of not only the various states, but then tax codes in different *countries* as well. There is zero reason why Amazon can't do it as well. They just don't want to.
And let's be clear as to why they don't want to - it's a massive competitive advantage. What's your state's tax rate? That's the discount Amazon can offer. Your local store could offer that price as well, if they didn't have to collect tax as well.
If Amazon wins on this, the logical conclusion is simple: if there's a significant competitive advantage to not selling locally, companies will stop doing it. You'll set up shop in whatever state you get the best deal in, and then sell to everyone in the world *except* that state.
Fire up the old NES, play a round of Tecmo Super Bowl.
My friend has an Apple II and Teipai on 5 1/4 floppy that she plays every year or so (the old versions had a bug she likes to exploit, so she won't play a newer version).
True, but if that was a feasible plan, then they wouldn't be going after court orders for the key, would they?
No. You have a crypted hard drive. First thing that'd be done would be to copy the entire crypted drive and then try to hack it in its new location. If it gets nuked, just recopy the crypted drive from the source.
Which still brings us back to the basic point: there are two possibilities. One, they can decrypt the drive in a reasonable amount of time, in which case they don't need the key. Two, they *can't* decrypt the drive in a reasonable amount of time, which means that they can't prove what your key may or may not have done. (Because to prove that they need to show a "properly decrypted" drive, which brings us back to Option One).
tl;dr: if they let you punch in the password, they have to take your word for it that they're getting the real decrypted drive. Plan accordingly.
Random possibility: if all files are bits, why hasn't someone build a music player that will read any file? Sure, the music will sound atonal, but that's what the kids are into these days. Let them prove that this file is actually encrypted and not a music file. (See, I'll play it for you. *squawkscreech*)
> "So, while you can be compelled to surrender a physical object (the key to the safe, in the previous analogy), the 5th Amendment is specifically is about something in your mind."
So, what you're saying is that the DOJ can compel someone to hand-over the key to a safe, but if that same exact safe had a combination lock, then the DOJ would be powerless because they can't ask you for the numerical combination that would open it? Seems like a bizarre distinction.
That tracks for me - it's entirely possible that the police will find the key on their own. It's a physical object. If they're compelling you to surrender it, it's generally because you've secured it elsewhere (safe deposit box or something), and they're getting permission to get that object from that location.
If they found your password on a post-it note, that would be fair game as well. But making you divulge information from memory moves fairly firmly into self-incrimination (not to mention the ability for them to ask you for things you actually don't know and making it "obstruction").
And I would think any decent attorney can beat that charge - if the device decrypts and the drive is blank, how can they prove that *wasn't* the original state of the drive? (After all, if they could prove what was in the files, they wouldn't need you to decrypt them, right?)
Either way, obstruction is almost certainly a lesser charge than what they'll get the Average American for with unfettered access to their computer.
If you invoke the Fifth in a criminal case, discussion STOPS. On the spot and there is NO further questioning allowed. Regardless of whether it's a State or Federal Court, per the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifth.
As I understand it, the discussion doesn't have to stop. You can invoke the Fifth to refuse to answer. That doesn't prevent them from continuing to talk to *you*, hoping to provoke you into saying something (which is then considered you waiving your 5th amendment rights).
I'll see your "clever" and raise you a "completely terrifying". I'm ashamed that it never occurred to me that something in a USB flash drive form factor wouldn't be a flash drive. I just got done lecturing a coworker about SQL injection, but I would've been utterly vulnerable to a "USB injection" attack up until 5 minutes ago.
That is pretty damn scary - makes me think I'll happily sit through a popup box saying "you just plugged in a [mouse]/[storage device]/[keyboard] : do you want to enable it?". Won't be long until you see the next step - where it actually *is* a small flash drive in addition to it's malware...
Slashdot Mirror
The next step is to transition the slow learners to cooking, sewing and shop class.
Yeah, because you want the "dumb" kids fixing your car and building your house...
Seriously - if you never hit a patch of school where it just didn't make sense for a while, you weren't challenged enough. (My favorite teachers were the ones that actively *found* your weak spots to make sure you were paying attention). Hell, I didn't figure out linear algebra until the morning of the exam - literally woke up that morning thinking "oh, that's what the hell they're talking about".
The article didn't focus much on this point, but it was mentioned that teachers keep asking if there is a way to prevent the kids from getting so far ahead. I don't think your going to get much enthusiasm from teachers that want to restrain learning to what is "supposed" to be learned at each grade level.
Gotta see it from the teacher's POV - they have to keep 30+ kids engaged all year. If a couple of them have blasted through the curriculum and are "done", you can't just let them run around all class. So what do you do with them?
Knowing a few teachers, I would say the question isn't "I don't want them to learn this", it's "I can't teach three grades of math simultaneously to the smart kids *and* get everyone else through the curriculum"
I think you were lucky with your parent's choice of schools.
I was a honors student (graduated a few years ahead of you), but my school (only one in town) didn't offer any AP classes. No robotics, lasers, or optics. And the school didn't have enough spare gear to risk letting anyone actually mess with them.
In my favor, when the new high school opened I got to do a lot of video-editing and production, but even that required four of us cashing in five years of accumulated favors from faculty and staff.
Anyhow, it really does depend on what school you end up in - it's entirely possible to be a smart kid in a school that has no resources to deal with you.
Terrorists and other ne'er-do-wells begin active surveillance and recruitment of people who have previously gained "trusted traveler" status.
Translation: go find someone who's already got their "get out of grope" card, and arrange for *them* to carry the Happy Boom Blox.
had she simply said, "no thank you, i dont approve of your practices or the safety of your technology" and accepted the fact that without a security screening no one gets on an aircraft, everything would have been OK. She could have taken a car, a bus, or a train likely to her destination
Actually, at that point she couldn't have turned around and left - TSA has made it clear that once you step into their lair, they will have their way with you, one way or the other.
Interestingly enough the woman attempted to take a video of the incident:
I was wondering about that (and TFA is very vague on the subject) - did Abbott try to take a video with her cell and fail because of a failure of the phone (battery dead, it's not a cameraphone, she doesn't know how to drive it), or was she prevented from taking a video with her cell?
Okay so if i dressed my daughter in tights and a sleeveless leotard she still would have to be scanned and or searched??
Yep - there was a story about a month back where a lady voluntarily took off her shirt (leaving her in just a bra), and was still told she had to get Officially Felt Up.
Probably because this was the knee-jerk response to the issue. Doctors and nurses are allowed to touch children without parents complaining therefore, QED, using doctors and nurses in the airport will eliminate parental complaints. Never mind the completely different context...
I've yet to meet a doctor who will examine my daughter without *insisting* that someone else is in the room with them - generally a parent. Part of that is to help the kid feel safe (not only do they explain what's going to happen, they usually make a point of getting the parent's agreement so the child knows that this is OK), and part is to avoid lawsuits, and part is that it's just polite to ask people before you start touching them
Contrast with TSA, who (a) don't seem to see the need to be polite, and (b) have no qualms about making it clear that they will do what they please regardless of your wishes.
OK, that is the existing system. Some states are trying to change that so that they can get businesses outside of thier jurisdiction who ship it to people in their jurisdiction to collect sales tax for them.
No, right now you tax the buyer but expect the seller to collect the tax. I'm saying tax the seller directly. (Yes, the seller will pass the cost along, but that doesn't change the actual price, just who gets in trouble for not paying it).
Amazon doesn't want to collect the money because they bet that consumers won't report the taxes, and that the government can't/won't go after the missing money. That gives Amazon their competitive advantage.
Name a single national chain that has a presence in every tax jurisdiction in the country. Go on, I dare ya.
In the US? I'd be amazed if McDonald's didn't have an outlet in every tax jurisdiction. Probably Starbucks as well.
Up here in Canada, Tim Horton's is a fairly safe bet.
That strikes me as simple - if you sell something inside my jurisdiction, you have to pay tax.
The US has some of the lowest tax rates of any civilized nation.
No it doesn't. Federal income tax, perhaps, but when you add all the taxes together it's not much better than the nanny states of Europe.
Depends how you count it - every country supplies different things in exchange for it's taxes. But I don't think anyone can claim that the US is getting good value for it's tax money currently. (Well, unless you like buying things that explode.)
You mean the way that mail order houses do. No, wait, mail order firms do NOT collect sales taxes in states they are not located in. Maybe the problem here is requiring private businesses to act as tax collectors.
So, you're saying you don't want local businesses to collect sales tax either? That a better system is for each citizen to itemize their total purchases over the entire year, and then pay a tax bill then? And then the attendant enforcement issues as people try to claim they only bought 17 boxes of Crunchy-Os and not 34?
A better idea is just to tax the companies directly - you want to sell to my citizen, you pay X%. Same net effect, but none of this weaseling.
Someone please tell me how a corporation based in Washington State and legally incorporated in Delaware suddenly becomes a tax collector for states in which it does not have a physical presence?
Because it's easier trying to get the corporation to pay a sales tax then going after their own citizens for not paying the use tax.
Also, because it's easier to collect the tax at the moment you buy the item, rather than trying to have you itemize every box of cereal you purchased at tax time.
What I see as a problem is requiring every business that sells over the internet (or mail, or phone) to keep an updated database of every single tax jurisdiction in the country. I believe Texas has 300 or more at last check. And this has to be kept up, to the minute. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt.
But oddly, every other national chain does this with little problem. Why can't Amazon?
There are plenty of good reasons to simplify tax codes, but Amazon isn't the one to bring it up. (Or at least, I'd respect their opinion a lot more if they were collecting taxes like a good corporate citizen.
Why should it have to pay what brick-and-mortar stores have to pay for something it doesn't use?
Because they are still gaining the benefits.
What you're describing is the "suburb strategy" (or possibly the Walmart strategy), where you park yourself on the outskirts of town just past the city limits, knowing full well that every customer, supplier, and staff member has to use the city roads to get in and out, but not paying for any of those services (because "I'm not in town"). It's the same argument you get from people who move to bedroom communities for the lower taxes, but still drive in and out to work in the big city. It's trying to get something for nothing.
Some cities go the "toll booth" method of capturing that lost money, but I prefer how my city did it - people complained to the city because one of the roads was congested, old, and needed repair. City looked into it and found that nearly all the traffic and congestion was caused by bedroom community commuters. The official response back was "we deal with the roads that *our* taxpayers need fixed. You guys want this road fixed, you can pay for it". Fast-forward a few years of complaining, and the bedroom community ended up paying for the roadwork to be done.
Moral - if Amazon doesn't want to pay their fair share, I don't see why any particular town or state should go to any effort to make their lives easier either.
Exactly. Taxes on Interstate commerce is a Federal issue. It *is* unfair that local retailers have to collect sales tax while folks like Amazon don't. But that won't be solved by insisting that a company comply with or even know about the tax codes of every tiny municipality they affix an address label for. Fix it at the federal level with a law and free-to-business simplified and standardized database of tax collection requirements.
Let's be clear, folks - Amazon's "it's too HARD to keep track of tax codes" argument is total BS. Any national chain has to do this as a matter of course. Walmart keeps track of it. McDonald's has to keep track of it. Home Hardware has to keep track of it. Hell, most of those chains have to keep track of not only the various states, but then tax codes in different *countries* as well. There is zero reason why Amazon can't do it as well. They just don't want to.
And let's be clear as to why they don't want to - it's a massive competitive advantage. What's your state's tax rate? That's the discount Amazon can offer. Your local store could offer that price as well, if they didn't have to collect tax as well.
If Amazon wins on this, the logical conclusion is simple: if there's a significant competitive advantage to not selling locally, companies will stop doing it. You'll set up shop in whatever state you get the best deal in, and then sell to everyone in the world *except* that state.
Fire up the old NES, play a round of Tecmo Super Bowl.
My friend has an Apple II and Teipai on 5 1/4 floppy that she plays every year or so (the old versions had a bug she likes to exploit, so she won't play a newer version).
True, but if that was a feasible plan, then they wouldn't be going after court orders for the key, would they?
No. You have a crypted hard drive. First thing that'd be done would be to copy the entire crypted drive and then try to hack it in its new location. If it gets nuked, just recopy the crypted drive from the source.
Which still brings us back to the basic point: there are two possibilities. One, they can decrypt the drive in a reasonable amount of time, in which case they don't need the key. Two, they *can't* decrypt the drive in a reasonable amount of time, which means that they can't prove what your key may or may not have done. (Because to prove that they need to show a "properly decrypted" drive, which brings us back to Option One).
tl;dr: if they let you punch in the password, they have to take your word for it that they're getting the real decrypted drive. Plan accordingly.
Random possibility: if all files are bits, why hasn't someone build a music player that will read any file? Sure, the music will sound atonal, but that's what the kids are into these days. Let them prove that this file is actually encrypted and not a music file. (See, I'll play it for you. *squawkscreech*)
> "So, while you can be compelled to surrender a physical object (the key to the safe, in the previous analogy), the 5th Amendment is specifically is about something in your mind." So, what you're saying is that the DOJ can compel someone to hand-over the key to a safe, but if that same exact safe had a combination lock, then the DOJ would be powerless because they can't ask you for the numerical combination that would open it? Seems like a bizarre distinction.
That tracks for me - it's entirely possible that the police will find the key on their own. It's a physical object. If they're compelling you to surrender it, it's generally because you've secured it elsewhere (safe deposit box or something), and they're getting permission to get that object from that location.
If they found your password on a post-it note, that would be fair game as well. But making you divulge information from memory moves fairly firmly into self-incrimination (not to mention the ability for them to ask you for things you actually don't know and making it "obstruction").
Not if your adversary just copies the data and decrypts it elsewhere.
True, but if that was a feasible plan, then they wouldn't be going after court orders for the key, would they?
That does bring up a good point, though - when will we see DRM-style encryptions? (Sorry, this hard drive isn't authorized to decrypt this file.)
obstruction of justice.
probably that's what they'd say.
And I would think any decent attorney can beat that charge - if the device decrypts and the drive is blank, how can they prove that *wasn't* the original state of the drive? (After all, if they could prove what was in the files, they wouldn't need you to decrypt them, right?)
Either way, obstruction is almost certainly a lesser charge than what they'll get the Average American for with unfettered access to their computer.
If you invoke the Fifth in a criminal case, discussion STOPS. On the spot and there is NO further questioning allowed. Regardless of whether it's a State or Federal Court, per the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifth.
As I understand it, the discussion doesn't have to stop. You can invoke the Fifth to refuse to answer. That doesn't prevent them from continuing to talk to *you*, hoping to provoke you into saying something (which is then considered you waiving your 5th amendment rights).
I'll see your "clever" and raise you a "completely terrifying". I'm ashamed that it never occurred to me that something in a USB flash drive form factor wouldn't be a flash drive. I just got done lecturing a coworker about SQL injection, but I would've been utterly vulnerable to a "USB injection" attack up until 5 minutes ago.
That is pretty damn scary - makes me think I'll happily sit through a popup box saying "you just plugged in a [mouse]/[storage device]/[keyboard] : do you want to enable it?". Won't be long until you see the next step - where it actually *is* a small flash drive in addition to it's malware...