It may have been my biggest mistake in my original post to not mention that we have no campus housing. My network practices only apply to student computer labs. They effect nothing else.
If your students have such restricted internet access in their campus housing than that's pretty much what you are doing.
You'll find I've never made mention of campus housing because we have none. In the event we do get campus housing I'd likely have a different policy for that segment of the network.
Some quick points:
di.fm is an easy block. It's pure streaming audio with nothing to save. It can't be captured to be used in PowerPoint (no, I'm not going to instruct our students on something like streamripper), and it can't be time-shifted to cite a specific piece of music. It can, however, be used by several people at any given time to put a quantifiable crunch on our overall bandwidth usage. This has included faculty abuse in the past as well. It may be worth mentioning that only the audio streams from the site are blocked, and you can still browse the di.fm website.
Myspace isn't blocked because of what it is, but because of how it's used here. I guess that may be ambigious, but oh well. And it didn't even start out as a student issue, but a staff one. I don't disagree with the purpose and potential of social networking sites, but when all they are used for is crass conversation and, in some cases, cheating on test and passing homework back and forth, I don't have a problem blocking it. I also believe if you're a heavy Myspace user, it started before you came to school here and you have access to it from somewhere else. Our classes are short and don't occupy our students entire lives. Just because they don't have access to Myspace from my labs doesn't mean they're cut off from the world. Also, in a previous reply, I mentioned I don't block Facebook becuase I think it's done right and it's used well.
Google Video and YouTube do have some good content, but I found that people were more interested in lonelygirl15 than any other educational content. I even believe that, in the right context, lonelygirl15 is educational content, but that's not the way it was being viewed or used. Also, both these sites, as well as other media outlets, are blocked by default, but available on request. Users are completely free to request access at any time and it's allways granted.
If it's at all possible, I try not to block sites, but whittle them down a little. Some poeple use straight blocking, some use throttling, I do it my way. You can get to ESPN and CBS, but you can't watch the video there. You can get to di.fm, but you can't listen to the audio streams. I actually recently reshaped things a bit so you can get to YouTube and Google Video to browse, but the streams won't actually play. Again, if users make a simple request they'll get what they want.
I know this is a hot-button topic, and people that disagree with blocking see those on the other side as Stalinistic overlords, but I'm not that kind of guy. It makes me horribly upset that Verizon blocks port 80 on my home connection, but it's a term of their services that I agreed to when I signed up. All our students are forced through a long orientation where they're explained everything about all facets of our school, including my network. I even have them open a browser and we all visit www.sex.com together. I specificaly bring up Myspace and explain it's the history of usage that led to it's blocking. I'm close with the students and they have yet to express I'm being overbearing. We reevaluate things once in a while, and they do change.
I bet you'll find that if you're in a situation where you can't access some given internet resource, and you approach your school administration or IT department with your case for why it's benificial, you'll be a little more well received then you probably expect.
How about academic lectures in MP3 format?...Certainly there are non-academic items available; I'll even grant you that most of the MP3 downloads, YouTube, and Google Video content is not particularly useful from an academic standpoint...
I don't disagree with you at all,but I was specific in my reference to unfettered access. I'm certainly not making the arguement that there's nothing good out there, just that it's severely overshadowed by the amount of non-good and peoples tendendcies to over-pay attention to the non-good material. All a member of the faculty has to do is request access, even to highly unusual material, and it will be made available without question. It might require a bit of forethought on their part and most of the time they can even find me during their class to make an immediate exception. Students are even welcome to drop by and ask something be removed (if even temporarily) from the block lists and I can't think of a single time I've refused. It's just that most of the time they'd rather get on a soapbox and bitch then even attempt to make constructive contact.
Have you ever even logged in to FaceBook?
It's funny you mention Facebook because it's the one main social site I don't block. It's the exact site I was thinking of in the original post when I said I block most social networking sites. There's value in Facebook that the other don't seem to have. I'm not saying the way I do things is the way everyone should do it, just that it's the way it's done at my place. I block Myspace because of the way a large segment of our students were using it, which was decidedly non-academic. Other users at other locations may be different.
What I fail to understand why traditional bandwidth management wouldn't be more appropriate than web filtering.
Quite frankly because this is what works with our available time, with our equipment, with our user types, with our... environment. And besides, we're having a discussion about what is more appropriate, so we're naturally going to disagree here.
Sounds like you are not a very experienced admin if you are wasting so much time with the filters and playing moral police with your students..
I don't, in fact, spend that much time with it at all. When initially building the proxy there was some time spent refining the filters to not sway to much one way or the other, but since then it's been pretty self maintaining. As part of my routine, I spend time every other Friday doing a proxy check that includes hardware inspection, checking for software updates, giving the logs a quick check and going over in-house bandwith usage reports for top users. All of which I consider part of being a good admin.
The whole bandwidth excuse is just a cop-out that's used to often hide a bigger issue.
I don't have bigger issues. In fact, I don't have any issues. And I do throttle bandwidth where appropriate.
What next, are you going to restrict your students from listening to music? Socializing with each other outside of class? Watching movies?
Why would I? Those are all extremely stupid ideas.
university students are unable to see content that the rest of the (free) world sees
That's what filters do. That means they're working. The important piece that molds the context of this comment is how "content" is defined.
and more importantly are often blocked from very legitimate information crucial to their area of study
In almost every case I've been involved in, it broke down to exactly how crucial the information was. In my realm, if I think there's any educational value there whatsoever, I'll unblock it. I'm more concerned about proper student education then sensless content blocking. You place may be different.
Papers like Village Voice are blocked. Anatomy sites are blocked. Electronic Art sites are blocked. Anything with ".mp3" is blocked.
Village Voice and anatomy sites may be being blocked because of overzealous regex filters. I can't imagine why electronic art (how ambigious is that?!) sites are blocked unless you're refering to Electronic Arts, in which case I might not see your case. As far as MP3s, I, too, block any MP3 downloads at my campuses, unless requested on an individual basis for a good reason. I have yet to find a good reason why unfettered MP3 downloading aides education. Do you have one?
It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn, and smacks of censorship in horrible ways.
Now it's obvious you're biased, trolling, or just whining. Not to mention you just labeled yourself and your fellow faculty incapable of teaching without unfiltered internet access.
Are we alone, or part of a disturbing trend?
I don't know. Do you enjoy beating your wife?
Look, at my campuses I use a web proxy (Squid) for several reasons, and one of them is to block certain types of content. Most of the campuses have two multilinked T1s, which means right around 3Mb/s. I don't have enough bandwidth to support the world. First, the obvious stuff, like porn, goes into the blocklists. Then I do a little advert filtering. Anonymous web proxies are a no-no, as well as sites dedicated to any sort of large, streaming content. YouTube, Google Video, di.fm, and video portions of ESPN, CNN, and other are blocked, to name a few.
Oh, and Myspace, Friendster, and most of the other social sites are blocked. I challenge you to show me what educational value they have and then show me them being used that way.
And, yes, through a combo of mime-types and regex I block mp3, avi, wmv, mov, and just about every other audio and video type out there. You know what happens when I don't? People spend their time on apple.com waitching movie trailers or something equally unproductive. We got tired of wondering why our VPN or online applications were slow, only to discover people abusing the network. It is not my students right to download the latest game trailer for Whatever's Coming Out Next Month XII (omg!).
I'm betting you haven't:
Thought, at length, about how the internet can both help and hurt your students, both during and away from class.
Recorded specific examples of sites or resources you can't reach and why they would make a justifiable, positive impact on your class.
Met with your local IT staff to discuss your specific examples and discover what can be done about providing access to them.
Google is not, and will not be, liable unless they choose to be.
The way the law currently stands, Google can not be held liable as long as they take sufficient measures to prevent, and react to effeciently remove, illegal (in this case, unlicensed and copyrighted) material. YouTube, now through Google, offers a service to upload and display video on the web. Sure, there are more minor details, but that's really just it. And that's not illegal. Users may choose to upload unlicensed, copyrighted material, but it's only up to Gootube to properly police it.
Some points:
Remember the crazy business about taxing CD burners and blank discs because they might be used to duplicate copyrighted material? In those cases the penalty is placed on the consumer, not the manufacturer. Nobody went and tried to shutdown Plextor.
Assuming there are massive copyright issues with YouTube, this deal works out well for both parties, buying them time to figure out how to best deal with it. Google is a well respected company and there's no reason to suspect they won't handle it with good faith. Any judgement brought against them at this point would be stayed until they've had time to deal with it. Think about if you've even been pulled over for expired plates on your car. Even if you get a ticket they most often always clear it if you get your papers in order by the court date.
YouTube already struck a deal with Warner Brothers and there is talk about the same thing happening with other major labels. Some expect YouTube to become MTV reborn online with labels providing their back catalog of music videos. Have you watched MTV lately? It's certainly not a venue for music videos anymore. And if the lables think they can get more added value from already produced material...
'You cannot monetize other people's content without their approval.' - That may be true, but approval is a minor detail. Throw an extra paragraph in the EULA. I don't think Google with take it that way, but it's not a big hump they have to get over. And anyway, take the revenue sharing idea of Revver and combine it with something like Google's adsense.
Um, no, they won't. A new computer *without* corporate discounts is 25%-30% of that.
and then..
I don't know of any motherboard-based video chip sets that include 256MB of RAM.
Even if that was true, why does that affect corporate PCs, which are usually higher quality.
So you're getting a higher quality machine for 25-30% of $1500-$2000?
Actually, if we're talking corporate, upgrades are rarely done for a variety of reasons.
s/corporate/shit/ - Whatever. I'm not sure what "corporate" environments you've worked in, but the M.O. from all my experience is to purchace a machine predicted to be usable for anywhere from 3-5 years, with upgrades (usually RAM) planned along the way.
Qt vs C#:...Documentation and support for Qt is vastly better than...
Red Hat vs XP:...Also, how much support does that $140 XP license get you?...
RT Linux vs WinCE/VxWorks:...and since you said you got lousy support from the Linux vendor......Perhaps you just needed a different vendor?...
Cygwin vs Windows Services for Unix:...Note also that SFU comes with no support, unlike that commercial Cygwin...
I'm not arguing a specific side here, but isn't it notable that this is one of the *exact* old-school arguements for closed-source commercial vendors? They used to bitch and moan (and many still do) that, yes, their products might cost more, but you're getting the advantage of a paid set of developers dedicated to that service or software.
You know, the Sharepoint team has been blogging for quite some time, and they've got a product that quite usable. Hell, why not use their own blogs.msdn.com? And when it comes down to it, why not use one of the millions of free blogging services or apps already available?
I'm just saying it's interesting that they've got in-house products they're not using, there are free services they're not using, and there are free packages they could run that they're not using. Instead they go for a most-likely limited commercial something.
Boycott Vista. Keep your old Windows XP PC around. Don't buy a new one.
That's the key that I think a lot of the other comments are missing. As individuals, we're not nearly as important to the absorbtion rate of Vista as Dell, HP, Gateway and all the other PC manufactures are. People "in the know" about Vista don't seem to be terribly excited about it, at least not as much as previous versions of Windows. Those not in the know will be presented with the opportunity to pay a couple hundred dollars for an upgrade, at minimum, to get no more functionality then thay have, and likely find out that the experience will suck unless they also purchace new hardware. That doesn't seem exciting to me either.
But from the day Vista is released, every small to large scale PC manufacturer will be preinstalling it instead of XP. Just about every new machine purchased will be a Vista purchase. The number of copies of Windows bought off the shelf pales in comparison to pre-installed distribution. So what if we don't go out and buy a retail upgrade?
And that's where the magic of Microsoft kicks in. Even when delivering a half-baked, late-delivered operating system, they'll still be successful. There's little to no chance that someone like Dell will be convinced to not deal with Vista. Bigger operating systems need bigger hardware means more sales means more markups. An individual boycot is not only unlikely, it's completely ineffective.
Second, I think not selling the morning after pill is still just as bad because they're forcing their corporate stance on the general population, relieving them of an aspect of choice.
Besides all that, you and I have health plans and mailboxes. While those might be common enough, you have to look at each piece and think if they're required in order to enter into other services. If I had a health plan, but no mailbox, what would I do? What if I didn't have a health plan at all? Where can I find the list of required holdings before I'm allowed to participate in some other facet of life? The circumstances might be extreme, but there are more people then most realise that are in extreme situations.
They are currently selling it in any state with a law saying they have to and do not sue for relief from those laws. Illinios and Mass have such laws.
Well that's a relief. Walmart plays nice when it has to by law.
Walmart used to have this nasty tactic of moving into town, forcing all the local pharmacies to close shop, then refuse to sell birth control because it just wasn't something they do. Their excuse was that people could always go somewhere else (they weren't taking away their right to birth control), but in many cases that meant driving a couple hours out of town. I don't think they're quite like that anymore though.
I agree with the parent, that, while it's obviously rediculous to compare Walmart+birth control to NYT+flash, if you're the sole venue for a product or service, it's certainly in your benifit to support as many people as possible.
After all, if they sell a defective product, that can cause severe harm to its consumers... I guess it's Microsof(t's) responsability to fix the damage.
I'm right there with you, but I can't seem to personaly look at the situation from every angle and be happy.
Compare it to the auto industry for example: If I want to start a car company in my garage, I'm expected to provided a minimum level of safetly in my vehicles, regardless of whatever my feelings are on the subject. I can't produce deathtraps and then justify it by, say, giving them away for free. There's a public safetly issue that I'm expected to live up to. This removes money from the equation, since I'm still responsible exclusive of cost.
So is Microsoft responsible simple because they charge for their products? Perhaps not.
Then instead of a car company I decide to start a software company and produce an all-in-one server that does email, file-n-print, and all that other good stuff. I'm retired and it's a hobby, so I'm not intereted in making money, and it will be given away free as well. Many people install it and use it instead of the offering from the big commercial company next door. One day, something goes wrong, and a code flaw causes my software to trash a lot of data. While I might feel horrible guilt, I never charged anyone anything so I don't feel fairly resonsible.
But, as above, if charging money doesn't decide responsibility, what does? A EULA?
OK, so I covered my garage-software-company-ass by including a LICENSE file that states, in no uncertain terms, that my software is AS IS with no express or implied warrenty. But guess what? The big company next door did the same thing with their EULA. How convenient.
It's easy to want Microsoft to be responsible when they're sitting there with their fat bank account. But it's hard to request legal action to force them into it, when in the same stroke it could severely impose minimum "software fitness" levels on every producer, including garage developers.
I think you fell for his incorrect use of "API", but if you look at the spirit of what he intended he does have a point.
There currently isn't any universal way to install packages/software in a cross-distro manner with little hassle. A seperate reply to you mentions "... it's very possible and debian users have been doing it for years.", but that just serves to disprove itself: it's only working for Debian. Now I know you and I are geeks and we can think of all kinds of ways to make this fun, but think of the work involved and then consider that public schools don't offer the best tech pay. I saw a job order recently looking for a new K-12 computer tech that also needed to double as a teacher. Heck, the whole reason this story is a story is because OSS is saving them tons of money. If Windows was as cheap as OSS, this never would have been brought up.
What he should have requested is something like a more effective LSB.
That's exactly what they're doing. As I understand from the reports, groups of people are smuggling in seperate pieces of a device that they then assemble once past security. Each "ingredient" on it's own is seemingly harmless, with the possible exception of a single ingredient that several people will hold just in case one of them is grabbed.
Slashdot Mirror
Why ask for one BILLION dollars, when you can ask for ONE MILLION DOLLARS?!?! MUHAHAHAHAhahahaha...ha..aha..*ahem*.
Everything old is new again.
It may have been my biggest mistake in my original post to not mention that we have no campus housing. My network practices only apply to student computer labs. They effect nothing else.
Some quick points:
If it's at all possible, I try not to block sites, but whittle them down a little. Some poeple use straight blocking, some use throttling, I do it my way. You can get to ESPN and CBS, but you can't watch the video there. You can get to di.fm, but you can't listen to the audio streams. I actually recently reshaped things a bit so you can get to YouTube and Google Video to browse, but the streams won't actually play. Again, if users make a simple request they'll get what they want.
I know this is a hot-button topic, and people that disagree with blocking see those on the other side as Stalinistic overlords, but I'm not that kind of guy. It makes me horribly upset that Verizon blocks port 80 on my home connection, but it's a term of their services that I agreed to when I signed up. All our students are forced through a long orientation where they're explained everything about all facets of our school, including my network. I even have them open a browser and we all visit www.sex.com together. I specificaly bring up Myspace and explain it's the history of usage that led to it's blocking. I'm close with the students and they have yet to express I'm being overbearing. We reevaluate things once in a while, and they do change.
I bet you'll find that if you're in a situation where you can't access some given internet resource, and you approach your school administration or IT department with your case for why it's benificial, you'll be a little more well received then you probably expect.
It's funny you mention Facebook because it's the one main social site I don't block. It's the exact site I was thinking of in the original post when I said I block most social networking sites. There's value in Facebook that the other don't seem to have. I'm not saying the way I do things is the way everyone should do it, just that it's the way it's done at my place. I block Myspace because of the way a large segment of our students were using it, which was decidedly non-academic. Other users at other locations may be different.
Quite frankly because this is what works with our available time, with our equipment, with our user types, with our... environment. And besides, we're having a discussion about what is more appropriate, so we're naturally going to disagree here.
I don't have bigger issues. In fact, I don't have any issues. And I do throttle bandwidth where appropriate.
Why would I? Those are all extremely stupid ideas.
In almost every case I've been involved in, it broke down to exactly how crucial the information was. In my realm, if I think there's any educational value there whatsoever, I'll unblock it. I'm more concerned about proper student education then sensless content blocking. You place may be different.
Village Voice and anatomy sites may be being blocked because of overzealous regex filters. I can't imagine why electronic art (how ambigious is that?!) sites are blocked unless you're refering to Electronic Arts, in which case I might not see your case. As far as MP3s, I, too, block any MP3 downloads at my campuses, unless requested on an individual basis for a good reason. I have yet to find a good reason why unfettered MP3 downloading aides education. Do you have one?
Now it's obvious you're biased, trolling, or just whining. Not to mention you just labeled yourself and your fellow faculty incapable of teaching without unfiltered internet access.
I don't know. Do you enjoy beating your wife?
Look, at my campuses I use a web proxy (Squid) for several reasons, and one of them is to block certain types of content. Most of the campuses have two multilinked T1s, which means right around 3Mb/s. I don't have enough bandwidth to support the world. First, the obvious stuff, like porn, goes into the blocklists. Then I do a little advert filtering. Anonymous web proxies are a no-no, as well as sites dedicated to any sort of large, streaming content. YouTube, Google Video, di.fm, and video portions of ESPN, CNN, and other are blocked, to name a few.
Oh, and Myspace, Friendster, and most of the other social sites are blocked. I challenge you to show me what educational value they have and then show me them being used that way .
And, yes, through a combo of mime-types and regex I block mp3, avi, wmv, mov, and just about every other audio and video type out there. You know what happens when I don't? People spend their time on apple.com waitching movie trailers or something equally unproductive. We got tired of wondering why our VPN or online applications were slow, only to discover people abusing the network. It is not my students right to download the latest game trailer for Whatever's Coming Out Next Month XII (omg!).
I'm betting you haven't:
The way the law currently stands, Google can not be held liable as long as they take sufficient measures to prevent, and react to effeciently remove, illegal (in this case, unlicensed and copyrighted) material. YouTube, now through Google, offers a service to upload and display video on the web. Sure, there are more minor details, but that's really just it. And that's not illegal. Users may choose to upload unlicensed, copyrighted material, but it's only up to Gootube to properly police it.
Some points:
and then..
So you're getting a higher quality machine for 25-30% of $1500-$2000?
s/corporate/shit/ - Whatever. I'm not sure what "corporate" environments you've worked in, but the M.O. from all my experience is to purchace a machine predicted to be usable for anywhere from 3-5 years, with upgrades (usually RAM) planned along the way.
This is interesting...
...Documentation and support for Qt is vastly better than...
...Also, how much support does that $140 XP license get you?...
...and since you said you got lousy support from the Linux vendor... ...Perhaps you just needed a different vendor?...
...Note also that SFU comes with no support, unlike that commercial Cygwin...
Qt vs C#:
Red Hat vs XP:
RT Linux vs WinCE/VxWorks:
Cygwin vs Windows Services for Unix:
I'm not arguing a specific side here, but isn't it notable that this is one of the *exact* old-school arguements for closed-source commercial vendors? They used to bitch and moan (and many still do) that, yes, their products might cost more, but you're getting the advantage of a paid set of developers dedicated to that service or software.
I'm just saying...
The US dollar is a fictional currency anyway
This is different from other world currencies.... how? From your Wikipedia link: Although fractional-reserve banking is near universal,...
Besides that, how exactly is it justification for currency theft? Are you usually this incorrect in your arguements?
You know, the Sharepoint team has been blogging for quite some time, and they've got a product that quite usable. Hell, why not use their own blogs.msdn.com? And when it comes down to it, why not use one of the millions of free blogging services or apps already available?
Instead they're running off Community Server. Just look at their prices.
I'm just saying it's interesting that they've got in-house products they're not using, there are free services they're not using, and there are free packages they could run that they're not using. Instead they go for a most-likely limited commercial something.
I was thinking of a glass desk and maybe one camera below and one above, and maybe a foot pedal to trigger the cameras
Boy, you're right! Who'd want to fuss with a scanner!?
You guys are totally missing the point...
How fucking awesome is it that my hacked Diebold voting machine key can now open the hotel minibar!
Boycott Vista. Keep your old Windows XP PC around. Don't buy a new one.
That's the key that I think a lot of the other comments are missing. As individuals, we're not nearly as important to the absorbtion rate of Vista as Dell, HP, Gateway and all the other PC manufactures are. People "in the know" about Vista don't seem to be terribly excited about it, at least not as much as previous versions of Windows. Those not in the know will be presented with the opportunity to pay a couple hundred dollars for an upgrade, at minimum, to get no more functionality then thay have, and likely find out that the experience will suck unless they also purchace new hardware. That doesn't seem exciting to me either.
But from the day Vista is released, every small to large scale PC manufacturer will be preinstalling it instead of XP. Just about every new machine purchased will be a Vista purchase. The number of copies of Windows bought off the shelf pales in comparison to pre-installed distribution. So what if we don't go out and buy a retail upgrade?
And that's where the magic of Microsoft kicks in. Even when delivering a half-baked, late-delivered operating system, they'll still be successful. There's little to no chance that someone like Dell will be convinced to not deal with Vista. Bigger operating systems need bigger hardware means more sales means more markups. An individual boycot is not only unlikely, it's completely ineffective.
By the way, the referenced story was written yesterday, but the actuall event happened three years ago .
Fucking editors.
The issue with The Well has already been taken care of.
First, I said used to.
Second, I think not selling the morning after pill is still just as bad because they're forcing their corporate stance on the general population, relieving them of an aspect of choice.
Besides all that, you and I have health plans and mailboxes. While those might be common enough, you have to look at each piece and think if they're required in order to enter into other services. If I had a health plan, but no mailbox, what would I do? What if I didn't have a health plan at all? Where can I find the list of required holdings before I'm allowed to participate in some other facet of life? The circumstances might be extreme, but there are more people then most realise that are in extreme situations.
They are currently selling it in any state with a law saying they have to and do not sue for relief from those laws. Illinios and Mass have such laws.
Well that's a relief. Walmart plays nice when it has to by law.
Walmart used to have this nasty tactic of moving into town, forcing all the local pharmacies to close shop, then refuse to sell birth control because it just wasn't something they do. Their excuse was that people could always go somewhere else (they weren't taking away their right to birth control), but in many cases that meant driving a couple hours out of town. I don't think they're quite like that anymore though.
I agree with the parent, that, while it's obviously rediculous to compare Walmart+birth control to NYT+flash, if you're the sole venue for a product or service, it's certainly in your benifit to support as many people as possible.
Either way, Windows are still vulnerable.
Look. There's no reason to bring Microsoft into this.
Here's a picture of it with headphones plugged in. Gives a pretty good idea of scale.
Won't someone think of the children?!
After all, if they sell a defective product, that can cause severe harm to its consumers... I guess it's Microsof(t's) responsability to fix the damage.
I'm right there with you, but I can't seem to personaly look at the situation from every angle and be happy.
Compare it to the auto industry for example: If I want to start a car company in my garage, I'm expected to provided a minimum level of safetly in my vehicles, regardless of whatever my feelings are on the subject. I can't produce deathtraps and then justify it by, say, giving them away for free. There's a public safetly issue that I'm expected to live up to. This removes money from the equation, since I'm still responsible exclusive of cost.
So is Microsoft responsible simple because they charge for their products? Perhaps not.
Then instead of a car company I decide to start a software company and produce an all-in-one server that does email, file-n-print, and all that other good stuff. I'm retired and it's a hobby, so I'm not intereted in making money, and it will be given away free as well. Many people install it and use it instead of the offering from the big commercial company next door. One day, something goes wrong, and a code flaw causes my software to trash a lot of data. While I might feel horrible guilt, I never charged anyone anything so I don't feel fairly resonsible.
But, as above, if charging money doesn't decide responsibility, what does? A EULA?
OK, so I covered my garage-software-company-ass by including a LICENSE file that states, in no uncertain terms, that my software is AS IS with no express or implied warrenty. But guess what? The big company next door did the same thing with their EULA. How convenient.
It's easy to want Microsoft to be responsible when they're sitting there with their fat bank account. But it's hard to request legal action to force them into it, when in the same stroke it could severely impose minimum "software fitness" levels on every producer, including garage developers.
I think you fell for his incorrect use of "API", but if you look at the spirit of what he intended he does have a point.
There currently isn't any universal way to install packages/software in a cross-distro manner with little hassle. A seperate reply to you mentions "... it's very possible and debian users have been doing it for years.", but that just serves to disprove itself: it's only working for Debian. Now I know you and I are geeks and we can think of all kinds of ways to make this fun, but think of the work involved and then consider that public schools don't offer the best tech pay. I saw a job order recently looking for a new K-12 computer tech that also needed to double as a teacher. Heck, the whole reason this story is a story is because OSS is saving them tons of money. If Windows was as cheap as OSS, this never would have been brought up.
What he should have requested is something like a more effective LSB.
The trick is to be a bit smarter...
That's exactly what they're doing. As I understand from the reports, groups of people are smuggling in seperate pieces of a device that they then assemble once past security. Each "ingredient" on it's own is seemingly harmless, with the possible exception of a single ingredient that several people will hold just in case one of them is grabbed.