Peter Norvig, now CTO of Google, agrees with you. Coding, like writing, is best improved by an alternating diet of writing and reading good works. He collected a few of the best he'd found in a book called Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, available from his web site or from Amazon: http://norvig.com/paip.html
It talks about AI because it was the 80s (92 by the time it hit shelves) and AI was cool---but the applications involved are now just what we call computing. It's not perfect: fifteen years have passed since it was written. In that time, C++'s STL and Boost have caught up with many features of Common Lisp. Java's come along and done well. Other interactive dynamic languages than Lisp exist: Python, for example. So you'll have to do some translating in your head---but for the same reason that Cicero is read by students of English rhetoric, Norvig should be read by C++ and Java programmers seeking mastery.
They actually do give you something, in the Blizzard EULAs: they give you the right to make copies and use them for Spawned games. That is consideration -- otherwise you'd have to spend $100 for five more licenses to play a local multiplayer game.
Also, the Battle.net TOS gives you access to battle.net mode in the games, which is also worth something.
This will probably be used as precedent to allow future EULAs, but the Blizzard versions actually do have consideration, and that's an important element in the judge's ruling.
Squeak SmallTalk, http://www.squeak.com/ , is a close sibling -- the descendant of SmallTalk, much as HyperCard was. The syntax is as simple as HyperTalk, though it is not compatible with HT. It does have some expressive power which HT lacked, though. And Squeak's "Morphic" UI has the same GUI-editing features as HyperCard.
I get two paragraphs in and notice he claims Scheme is interpreted. This is nonsense. Scheme code can be run by an interpreter, but interactive compilers have been standard practice for years.
open gets you into bundles (Program.app), as well as to documents tied to particular programs.
softwareupdate and defaults cover a bunch of ground. Now that there's a decently usable Carbonized Emacs, I don't even use an X server most of the time: Terminal, Emacs, and Camino cover 99% of my needs. Oh, and Preview for looking at compiled TeX.
But that said, you're unfairly biasing the comparison by not using X11 and free software. One of the big advantages of the Mac is that it provides *both* (MS Office, iChat, Finder and other GUI tools for business) and (Emacs, an X Server, a good free programming environment). Cutting half of that off isn't a Mac any more; it's more like a 1997 Mac. For example, I have a custom-built Postfix install with TLS support on my laptop, using client certificates to authenticate to my home MTA: perfect mail relaying no matter where I am. And it lets me tell Mail.app to just use the localhost as an SMTP server. Now I get good S/MIME and GnuPG support, in-line spelling checking, and a nice UI *and* the technical features I want. AND, since it's standard-based IMAP, I can hand that system off to friends and family, and use it at work, but use Gnus for my personal mail.
Thanks to Google's cache, this is Dr. Geer's bio from @stake. I had the opportunity to hear him speak once, and he sounded about as brilliant as the following description would make you think:
Daniel E. Geer, Jr., Sc.D.
Chief Technology Officer
Daniel E. Geer, Jr., Sc.D. oversees the strategy and direction of @stake's approach to digital security. Over the last thirty years, Dr. Geer has led the application of technology in medical computing, distributed systems management, electronic commerce, and digital security. After fifteen years in the Harvard medical establishment, he variously served in senior leadership roles for MIT's groundbreaking Project Athena, Digital Equipment Corporation's External Research Program, Open Market, OpenVision Technologies (now Veritas), CertCo, and now @stake. His security consulting firm, Geer Zolot, was the first of its kind.
An expert in modern security protocols and business metrics, Dr. Geer has been called upon to testify before Congress on multiple occasions. Dr. Geer speaks and publishes regularly on a range of issues in digital security; his November 1998 speech, "Risk Management is Where the Money Is," has been widely quoted, warranting both reprint as a special issue of the RISKS Digest and prompting editorial comment in Wired Magazine. His bibliography is deep and continuing, and with Avi Rubin and Marcus Ranum, he is co-author of The Web Security Sourcebook.
He holds a Sc.D. in Biostatistics from Harvard University's School of Public Health as well as an S.B. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. His professional involvement includes a decade of leadership within USENIX, the advanced computing systems association, of which he is past president. He today serves as an advisor to the board of the Financial Services Information Sharing & Analysis Center (FS/ISAC) under the auspices of the US Dept. of the Treasury, as well as similar fiduciary and non-fiduciary roles for a select number of promising startups.
A huge problem with the law is that filters which don't tell you they're filtering are OK: if you're using a reasonably clever Google-filter, for example, you may never know that information has been filtered.
Additionally, many methods of filtering infringe the copyrights of the original authors, or may if the MPAA lawsuit against the DVD bowdlerizers succeeds. Funny that we may have to hope for the MPAA to make filtering harder.
Whoah! The sort of tying which should violate the GPL already does: if I said "You must pay me for a support contract to get the source to this binary I'm giving you," that would violate the GPL. But there's nothing wrong at all with what RedHat's doing: they give you the binary, and they give you the source. Then they offer a separate deal, in which they'll support the software they gave you in exchange for money. They choose not to offer yet another deal, in which they'll support any other software for gobs of money.
How is this different from what, say, Debian does? They do not warrant that they will provide support; nevertheless, they'll try to help if you ask on their mailing lists. But they really can't help much with your Gentoo/RedHat/OpenBSD problems.
I can't bring myself to agree with Felten's compulsory licensing arguments from two directions. First, as a producer of content: there's some content I want to give away for free. I don't want any recompense for documentation I write, or for some software. I just want it out there getting used. Other stuff I want much stricter protections on -- some of my security-related work, for example. Compulsory licensing schemes I've seen proposed prevent me from doing either of these. In addition, they typically compel a license for distribution, but not for modification. In the case of CDDA files, which must be modified (into MP3s) to be useful, this is useuless.
That ties into the second problem: advocating a compulsory licensing regime without closly tying that advocacy to an inverse DMCA is very dangerous. Imagine a compulsory licensing world where Palladium and TPM-backed digital restrictions management prevent you from copying or modifying the files you acquire. In order for compulsory licensing to be even worth considering, it has to be tied to a ban on opaque formats and on technical measures to prevent modification and distribution.
This sort of early, government-sponsored infrastructure reminds me of the interstate highway, universal telephone service, and regulated spectrum initiatives. Each has granted benefits which not only were not imagined at conception, but could not have been. Nobody could have envisioned Amazon/UPS when the interstates were first built. e911 was beyond comprehension when universal coverage was introduced, much less 555-TELL.
Of course, look out for effects like the network affiliates, one of the principal unintended effects of the TV spectrum allocations.
Having run into this last night, please be aware that Fink's system-xfree86 package doesn't support Apple X11 0.3 yet. I'm sure that support will come soon, but it was awfully disconcerting pulling a powerbook out of its box, grabbing X11, the SDK, and Fink, and watching it mysteriously fail.
The STIX fonts look like an interesting idea, but I don't see from the article while they're truly necessary. The Computer Modern fonts used by TeX, the standard for mathematical typesetting, work just fine.
In addition, the article claims incorrectly that PDFs cannot easily include hyperlinks. I believe the authors of the hyperref package would be fascinated to know this their package allows easy embedding of hyperlinks and anchors into PDF files, such that the links work perfectly in Acrobat, xpdf, and other viewers.
It doesn't infringe the copyright of the Linux Kernel to write code against the kernel-module specification and distribute it in binary-only form. However, it does infringe that copyright to distribute the Linux Kernel.
The GPL is a license to distribute the kernel under certain conditions. Those conditions are incompatible with including a binary-only module linked to the kernel. There are several companies distributing binary-only modules right now, but none of them provide it linked with the kernel.
Since this is for an embedded device, I think you're stuck: do it in user-mode, distribute it separately from the kernel (two CDs in the same box doesn't count) or figure out how much you'll make from the Linux market and how much it'll really cost to GPL your driver.
This story has an interesting echo with Larry Niven's story "Fallen Angels," available from the
Baen Free Library. It's the story of what happens when the anti-scientist green-earthers get their way and ban greenhouse gasses. Ironic that WHOI seems to think greenhouse gasses may cause an ice age.
Most interestingly, manufacturing a circumvention device for use in your own home is still illegal under the DMCA. It allows their use for security research and backup purposes, but not their manufacture. Similarly, it's legal for a child to smoke a cigarette in most places -- but it's not legal to give him one or leave one where he could get it.
Yes. It starts out with preconceptions, but you don't know what they are. The "right way" to do it is to have uniform weights, so you *know* that it has no preconceptions... but that means using a quite different learning algorithm. It's the difference between random and representative. If you flip a coin ten times, HHHHHHHHHH is just as common as HTHTHTHTHT, but only one is representative.
And, in fact, this isn't trademark infringement. Adobe's nuked their own chances of enforcing the trademark on "Adobe Illustrator" years ago. One of the requirements for a Trademark is that it be a brand name. For example, SPAM is a trademark of Hormel Foods. Thus, any reference to SPAM(tm) brand spiced meat uses their trademark. If the mark is frequently used as a noun (e.g. references to SPAM), that dilutes the mark.
So my understanding of this is that by frequent references to "purchase Adobe Illustrator today!" Adobe already lost this fight.
I'm not a lawyer... yet.
Re:AOL is totally cool (some corrections)
on
AOL And The GPL
·
· Score: 2
I'm glad to hear that AOL has been friendly and easy to work with; that makes me much more inclined to believe that this is an accident and soon corrected. However, sending patches back to be incorporated into Midori and giving a pointer to the source is insufficient.
The GPL requires that they include a notice that the software is under the GPL and either the source or a written offer for the source.
The blocking of Macromedia wasn't even close to secret. Macromedia was blocked because Above.net put their name on a list, and other people saw it. It's not prohibitively difficult to get a copy of that list; anybody could have grabbed one and noticed it.
If all the folks flaming here think the RBL is such a bad idea, take it upon yourselves to examine the list for new additions, publicizing bad moves like this. Or start up a competing service.
For myself, I add a header to my incoming mail based on the RBL, and rate that as more likely to be spam... so while I think Above.net is foolish to be black-holing packets from the RBL members, I think it'd be more foolish to force them to stop.
Nah. It's not a matter of being against intellectual property. Most of the objections I've seen aren't saying that Tatu doesn't have the right to trademark the name of his company -- they're saying that SSH is the name of the protocol as well. Trademarking SSH would be as ridiculous as trademarking TCP or "Telephone."
All three are generic terms, and have been for years. Tatu wants the benefit of having his company share a name with the protocol, without having to take the downside of the protocol sharing a name with the company.
Schiller says we should "be nice," but I don't see a way to do so without inconveniencing or confusing hundreds of thousands of people.
I've always used ssh1, I don't know why, I guess because the first time I started using it, a friend said to me: "Use ssh1, ssh2 sucks". So I did. What are the main differences between ssh1 and ssh2 and why is ssh1 fundamentally broken and ssh2 not?
Put simply, Tatu considers ssh1 broken because he released it under a non-restrictive license and wishes he could take it back. While it is true that ssh2 encrypts more of the communications channel than ssh1, the attacks on ssh1 are of a difficulty roughly on par with stealing a TCP connection from a modern OS: the attack is
possible, but extremely impractical.
I do consider ssh2 to be broken crypto. The protocol specifies the base and modulus for its public-key-exchange algorithm. This means that anybody can sit down and "study" that base and modulus for weaknesses and attack spots. Heck, the NSA -- or Tatu -- could have pre-computed the information necessary to break the encryption on an ssh2 stream.
The above is a quick sketch of the arguments for why ssh1 and ssh2 are broken, together with some highly cynical suggestions for why they might be built that way. Go do some real research before you pick crypto to trust with anything you care about.
I'm not at all convinced that school psychologists and counselors are the right people to be dealing with this. I'll admit to a degree of bias from my own unpleasant experiences with school counselor types, but perhaps that same experience will convince others they're not the right people to have this sort of control:
A fellow student at my high school felt intimidated by me and a handful of friends; we made no secret of the fact that we thought her GPA was padded with easy classes, and that hard classes were avoided so as to keep that sacred GPA high. We never sought her out, never said anything obscene or even really questionable, but she complained that she was being harassed. A school counselor called several of us, separately, into her office. We weren't told what we were being accused of, or by whom, but were expected to recount every guilty stain on our consciences until they found what they were looking for.
Even after the counselors had slipped her name, we were not allowed outside help (even a phone call to our parents). The right to counsel, limits on self-incrimination, the right to confront the accused, the right to competent defense, the right to an impartial judge (arbiter, whatever) -- all of these go away in a "counseling" setting.
What happened in that room almost did add a speed bump to my career; a guidance counselor unhappy with how things were going tried to have my college recommendations revoked. Fortunately, it failed.
The penalties of the legal system may be, at present, being used out of scale to childrens' offenses, but the protections and safeguards of the legal system are absolutely necessary; even more for children than for adults.
I think a more appropriate response -- rather than pulling the cases out of the legal system -- is to appropriately deal with the two problems of cases which are brought to harass, and punishments which are administered for being charged. Punishments, or repurcussions of any form, have to wait until a trial's done. Cases brought fraudulently or to harass need to be thrown out quickly, and severely punished. Between these two, we could build a real system which protects the accuser and the accused, which keeps the innocent safe and makes sure only the guilty are punished.
I hear the accuser in that case is now, as am I, happily graduated from college and building a life for herself. I doubt she ever intended anything like the scene which resulted.
Slashdot Mirror
Peter Norvig, now CTO of Google, agrees with you. Coding, like writing, is best improved by an alternating diet of writing and reading good works. He collected a few of the best he'd found in a book called Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, available from his web site or from Amazon: http://norvig.com/paip.html
It talks about AI because it was the 80s (92 by the time it hit shelves) and AI was cool---but the applications involved are now just what we call computing. It's not perfect: fifteen years have passed since it was written. In that time, C++'s STL and Boost have caught up with many features of Common Lisp. Java's come along and done well. Other interactive dynamic languages than Lisp exist: Python, for example. So you'll have to do some translating in your head---but for the same reason that Cicero is read by students of English rhetoric, Norvig should be read by C++ and Java programmers seeking mastery.
Scheme is used for real applications with real GUIs -- the PLT web server, for example.
Also, the crypto library is... a good start. Assuming you mean Cryptokit, it has issues.
They actually do give you something, in the Blizzard EULAs: they give you the right to make copies and use them for Spawned games. That is consideration -- otherwise you'd have to spend $100 for five more licenses to play a local multiplayer game.
Also, the Battle.net TOS gives you access to battle.net mode in the games, which is also worth something.
This will probably be used as precedent to allow future EULAs, but the Blizzard versions actually do have consideration, and that's an important element in the judge's ruling.
TeX works about that way -- your code must pass a test suite to be called "TeX", but otherwise it's in the public domain.
Squeak SmallTalk, http://www.squeak.com/ , is a close sibling -- the descendant of SmallTalk, much as HyperCard was. The syntax is as simple as HyperTalk, though it is not compatible with HT. It does have some expressive power which HT lacked, though. And Squeak's "Morphic" UI has the same GUI-editing features as HyperCard.
I get two paragraphs in and notice he claims Scheme is interpreted. This is nonsense. Scheme code can be run by an interpreter, but interactive compilers have been standard practice for years.
open gets you into bundles (Program.app), as well as to documents tied to particular programs.
softwareupdate and defaults cover a bunch of ground. Now that there's a decently usable Carbonized Emacs, I don't even use an X server most of the time: Terminal, Emacs, and Camino cover 99% of my needs. Oh, and Preview for looking at compiled TeX.
But that said, you're unfairly biasing the comparison by not using X11 and free software. One of the big advantages of the Mac is that it provides *both* (MS Office, iChat, Finder and other GUI tools for business) and (Emacs, an X Server, a good free programming environment). Cutting half of that off isn't a Mac any more; it's more like a 1997 Mac. For example, I have a custom-built Postfix install with TLS support on my laptop, using client certificates to authenticate to my home MTA: perfect mail relaying no matter where I am. And it lets me tell Mail.app to just use the localhost as an SMTP server. Now I get good S/MIME and GnuPG support, in-line spelling checking, and a nice UI *and* the technical features I want. AND, since it's standard-based IMAP, I can hand that system off to friends and family, and use it at work, but use Gnus for my personal mail.
Thanks to Google's cache, this is Dr. Geer's bio from @stake. I had the opportunity to hear him speak once, and he sounded about as brilliant as the following description would make you think:
Daniel E. Geer, Jr., Sc.D.
Chief Technology Officer
Daniel E. Geer, Jr., Sc.D. oversees the strategy and direction of @stake's approach to digital security. Over the last thirty years, Dr. Geer has led the application of technology in medical computing, distributed systems management, electronic commerce, and digital security. After fifteen years in the Harvard medical establishment, he variously served in senior leadership roles for MIT's groundbreaking Project Athena, Digital Equipment Corporation's External Research Program, Open Market, OpenVision Technologies (now Veritas), CertCo, and now @stake. His security consulting firm, Geer Zolot, was the first of its kind.
An expert in modern security protocols and business metrics, Dr. Geer has been called upon to testify before Congress on multiple occasions. Dr. Geer speaks and publishes regularly on a range of issues in digital security; his November 1998 speech, "Risk Management is Where the Money Is," has been widely quoted, warranting both reprint as a special issue of the RISKS Digest and prompting editorial comment in Wired Magazine. His bibliography is deep and continuing, and with Avi Rubin and Marcus Ranum, he is co-author of The Web Security Sourcebook.
He holds a Sc.D. in Biostatistics from Harvard University's School of Public Health as well as an S.B. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. His professional involvement includes a decade of leadership within USENIX, the advanced computing systems association, of which he is past president. He today serves as an advisor to the board of the Financial Services Information Sharing & Analysis Center (FS/ISAC) under the auspices of the US Dept. of the Treasury, as well as similar fiduciary and non-fiduciary roles for a select number of promising startups.
A huge problem with the law is that filters which don't tell you they're filtering are OK: if you're using a reasonably clever Google-filter, for example, you may never know that information has been filtered.
Additionally, many methods of filtering infringe the copyrights of the original authors, or may if the MPAA lawsuit against the DVD bowdlerizers succeeds.
Funny that we may have to hope for the MPAA to make filtering harder.
Whoah! The sort of tying which should violate the GPL already does: if I said "You must pay me for a support contract to get the source to this binary I'm giving you," that would violate the GPL. But there's nothing wrong at all with what RedHat's doing: they give you the binary, and they give you the source. Then they offer a separate deal, in which they'll support the software they gave you in exchange for money. They choose not to offer yet another deal, in which they'll support any other software for gobs of money.
How is this different from what, say, Debian does? They do not warrant that they will provide support; nevertheless, they'll try to help if you ask on their mailing lists. But they really can't help much with your Gentoo/RedHat/OpenBSD problems.
I can't bring myself to agree with Felten's compulsory licensing arguments from two directions.
First, as a producer of content: there's some content I want to give away for free. I don't want any recompense for documentation I write, or for some software. I just want it out there getting used. Other stuff I want much stricter protections on -- some of my security-related work, for example. Compulsory licensing schemes I've seen proposed prevent me from doing either of these. In addition, they typically compel a license for distribution, but not for modification. In the case of CDDA files, which must be modified (into MP3s) to be useful, this is useuless.
That ties into the second problem: advocating a compulsory licensing regime without closly tying that advocacy to an inverse DMCA is very dangerous. Imagine a compulsory licensing world where Palladium and TPM-backed digital restrictions management prevent you from copying or modifying the files you acquire. In order for compulsory licensing to be even worth considering, it has to be tied to a ban on opaque formats and on technical measures to prevent modification and distribution.
This sort of early, government-sponsored infrastructure reminds me of the interstate highway, universal telephone service, and regulated spectrum initiatives. Each has granted benefits which not only were not imagined at conception, but could not have been. Nobody could have envisioned Amazon/UPS when the interstates were first built. e911 was beyond comprehension when universal coverage was introduced, much less 555-TELL.
Of course, look out for effects like the network affiliates, one of the principal unintended effects of the TV spectrum allocations.
Having run into this last night, please be aware that Fink's system-xfree86 package doesn't support Apple X11 0.3 yet. I'm sure that support will come soon, but it was awfully disconcerting pulling a powerbook out of its box, grabbing X11, the SDK, and Fink, and watching it mysteriously fail.
The STIX fonts look like an interesting idea, but I don't see from the article while they're truly necessary. The Computer Modern fonts used by TeX, the standard for mathematical typesetting, work just fine.
In addition, the article claims incorrectly that PDFs cannot easily include hyperlinks. I believe the authors of the hyperref package would be fascinated to know this their package allows easy embedding of hyperlinks and anchors into PDF files, such that the links work perfectly in Acrobat, xpdf, and other viewers.
It doesn't infringe the copyright of the Linux Kernel to write code against the kernel-module specification and distribute it in binary-only form. However, it does infringe that copyright to distribute the Linux Kernel.
The GPL is a license to distribute the kernel under certain conditions. Those conditions are incompatible with including a binary-only module linked to the kernel. There are several companies distributing binary-only modules right now, but none of them provide it linked with the kernel.
Since this is for an embedded device, I think you're stuck: do it in user-mode, distribute it separately from the kernel (two CDs in the same box doesn't count) or figure out how much you'll make from the Linux market and how much it'll really cost to GPL your driver.
This story has an interesting echo with Larry Niven's story "Fallen Angels," available from the Baen Free Library. It's the story of what happens when the anti-scientist green-earthers get their way and ban greenhouse gasses. Ironic that WHOI seems to think greenhouse gasses may cause an ice age.
Most interestingly, manufacturing a circumvention device for use in your own home is still illegal under the DMCA. It allows their use for security research and backup purposes, but not their manufacture. Similarly, it's legal for a child to smoke a cigarette in most places -- but it's not legal to give him one or leave one where he could get it.
Your Mileage May Vary Wildly
Yes. It starts out with preconceptions, but you don't know what they are. The "right way" to do it is to have uniform weights, so you *know* that it has no preconceptions... but that means using a quite different learning algorithm. It's the difference between random and representative. If you flip a coin ten times, HHHHHHHHHH is just as common as HTHTHTHTHT, but only one is representative.
And, in fact, this isn't trademark infringement. Adobe's nuked their own chances of enforcing the trademark on "Adobe Illustrator" years ago. One of the requirements for a Trademark is that it be a brand name. For example, SPAM is a trademark of Hormel Foods. Thus, any reference to SPAM(tm) brand spiced meat uses their trademark. If the mark is frequently used as a noun (e.g. references to SPAM), that dilutes the mark.
So my understanding of this is that by frequent references to "purchase Adobe Illustrator today!" Adobe already lost this fight.
I'm not a lawyer... yet.
I'm glad to hear that AOL has been friendly and easy to work with; that makes me much more inclined to believe that this is an accident and soon corrected. However, sending patches back to be incorporated into Midori and giving a pointer to the source is insufficient.
The GPL requires that they include a notice that the software is under the GPL and either the source or a written offer for the source.
The blocking of Macromedia wasn't even close to secret. Macromedia was blocked because Above.net put their name on a list, and other people saw it. It's not prohibitively difficult to get a copy of that list; anybody could have grabbed one and noticed it.
If all the folks flaming here think the RBL is such a bad idea, take it upon yourselves to examine the list for new additions, publicizing bad moves like this. Or start up a competing service.
For myself, I add a header to my incoming mail based on the RBL, and rate that as more likely to be spam... so while I think Above.net is foolish to be black-holing packets from the RBL members, I think it'd be more foolish to force them to stop.
Nah. It's not a matter of being against intellectual property. Most of the objections I've seen aren't saying that Tatu doesn't have the right to trademark the name of his company -- they're saying that SSH is the name of the protocol as well. Trademarking SSH would be as ridiculous as trademarking TCP or "Telephone."
All three are generic terms, and have been for years. Tatu wants the benefit of having his company share a name with the protocol, without having to take the downside of the protocol sharing a name with the company.
Schiller says we should "be nice," but I don't see a way to do so without inconveniencing or confusing hundreds of thousands of people.
--Brian
Put simply, Tatu considers ssh1 broken because he released it under a non-restrictive license and wishes he could take it back. While it is true that ssh2 encrypts more of the communications channel than ssh1, the attacks on ssh1 are of a difficulty roughly on par with stealing a TCP connection from a modern OS: the attack is possible, but extremely impractical.
I do consider ssh2 to be broken crypto. The protocol specifies the base and modulus for its public-key-exchange algorithm. This means that anybody can sit down and "study" that base and modulus for weaknesses and attack spots. Heck, the NSA -- or Tatu -- could have pre-computed the information necessary to break the encryption on an ssh2 stream.
The above is a quick sketch of the arguments for why ssh1 and ssh2 are broken, together with some highly cynical suggestions for why they might be built that way. Go do some real research before you pick crypto to trust with anything you care about.
A fellow student at my high school felt intimidated by me and a handful of friends; we made no secret of the fact that we thought her GPA was padded with easy classes, and that hard classes were avoided so as to keep that sacred GPA high. We never sought her out, never said anything obscene or even really questionable, but she complained that she was being harassed. A school counselor called several of us, separately, into her office. We weren't told what we were being accused of, or by whom, but were expected to recount every guilty stain on our consciences until they found what they were looking for.
Even after the counselors had slipped her name, we were not allowed outside help (even a phone call to our parents). The right to counsel, limits on self-incrimination, the right to confront the accused, the right to competent defense, the right to an impartial judge (arbiter, whatever) -- all of these go away in a "counseling" setting.
What happened in that room almost did add a speed bump to my career; a guidance counselor unhappy with how things were going tried to have my college recommendations revoked. Fortunately, it failed.
The penalties of the legal system may be, at present, being used out of scale to childrens' offenses, but the protections and safeguards of the legal system are absolutely necessary; even more for children than for adults.
I think a more appropriate response -- rather than pulling the cases out of the legal system -- is to appropriately deal with the two problems of cases which are brought to harass, and punishments which are administered for being charged. Punishments, or repurcussions of any form, have to wait until a trial's done. Cases brought fraudulently or to harass need to be thrown out quickly, and severely punished. Between these two, we could build a real system which protects the accuser and the accused, which keeps the innocent safe and makes sure only the guilty are punished.
I hear the accuser in that case is now, as am I, happily graduated from college and building a life for herself. I doubt she ever intended anything like the scene which resulted.
All of this was years pre-Columbine.