If you recall, 2-3 weeks ago the jury ruled that Google had violated Oracle's copyrights on the Java API's. The caveat being that it is not established in US law whether or not API's are protected by copyright. The judge instructed the jury to deliberate as is API's are protected by copyright. Now, we are just waiting on the judge's ruling as to whether or not API's are protected by copyright. If he rules that they are not, which I personally expect will be the ruling, then the jury's ruling on the API copyright issue will be moot.
This was the copyright issue mentioned in the article, not the rangeCheck code, which is apparently a non-issue.
At the time, I think that Apple was not prepared to become a pure software company. If they had continued down that road, and the clone makers would have forced the issue, they would have been going head-to-head against Microsoft as a desktop OS vendor. I think Jobs was just not ready to do that, but I think Apple could have usurped widows as the standard consumer desktop. I think they want to remain the big fish in a small pond.
We have an X-serve at work. Trust me when I say that Apple has NEVER made enterprise class servers. There simply is no technical excuse for Apple to not license OSX server to run as a virtual machine on non-apple hardware. VMWare and Parallels are ready to do it. I saw a reply from Parallels customer service where they essentially said that they had the technology working to allow direct installs of OSX on non-Apple hardware. But, they won't release it because that would violate their agreements and upset Apple. Again, I don't think Apple wants to be in the big server market. This is really frustrating for me because I end up having to rig up solutions because Apple won't sell me the software or servers I need from them
If the carriers did not strong-arm people into buying data plans, they would not be running out of capacity. According to this survey (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404086,00.asp) 50.4% of Americans with cell phone service have smartphones. Nearly every one has a data plan because all of the major carriers, except for T-Mobile, require it for smartphone users, and T-Mobile does not make it well known that you can avoid the data plan charges.
Considering today's economy, given the choice, many people would gladly save the ~30 bucks a month that a data plan costs.
What the parent is talking about is an ATF registry that you can read about here: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/01/judge-upholds-atf-gun-rule-for-sw-border-states/
This is not an "assault rifle" registry. It is a registry that tracks all multiple sales (as in 2+) of semi-auto rifles bigger that.22 caliber and with a detachable magazine. The kind of rifles that hundreds of thousands of Americans own for hunting and target shooting purposes. Assault rifles, by definition, have the capability to fire in fully-automatic or burst mode. No one in the general public sells or buys assault rifles in blocks of 35 at a time in the US from a legitimate dealer. Buying an assault rifle involves a Federal Firearms License, and no US dealer is going to let that requirement slide.
Gun dealers have been working with the ATF to stop straw-man purchases for a long time before this. What happened with Operation Fast and Furious, an operation launched in 2009 under Obama's administration, the ATF instructed gun dealers to allow suspected straw-man purchasers to buy weapons. They allowed over 2000 guns to "walk" and almost entirely failed to track and recover those guns, and at the same time using that failure to argue FOR the rifle registry that are now operating. There were other gun-walking sting operations run under the Bush administration, which were much smaller in scope and had mixed success on recovering the weapons.
Tempered glass doesn't shatter? I was under the impression that glass was tempered so that it would shatter into many small pieces, rather than fracturing into a few large shards that are more dangerous. I agree about the lamination being there to keep the pieces together.
When my toddler reached for the power outlet I smacked her hand. If I could not reach her quickly I shouted and startled her. Either way she was traumatized and cried, but she does not try to play with power outlets anymore. Do you honestly think you can reason well enough with a 1year old to get them to stop touching something?
Who the fuck cares if it makes money - it's a STATE UNIVERSITY not a CORPORATION. It doesn't have to "make money".....
Sadly, that is not true. I wish it were. I work for a non-profit school. We HAVE to make money or else we can not make payroll, keep the lights on, operate buses, heat the buildings, etc. Non-profit does not mean no-profit and it does not mean that we are not a business, it just means that there is no owner who gets to take the surplus money home at the end of the day.
So you were running 100 Mb every where, even on up links and server connections? It sounds like you had a bottleneck where every machine was sharing the same 100 Mb uplink to the server. That is not a latency issue, that is a bandwidth issue. For small packets the latency difference between 100 Mb and 1000 Mb is negligible until you start pushing against your bandwidth caps. Your redesigned network alleviated the bandwidth crunch by allowing the desktops to share the 1000 Mb uplink to the server, 10 times the previous bandwidth. It looks like pretty good solution for minimizing costs while increasing bandwidth.
I have seen cases where places had daisy-chained switches and hubs for network capacity. This can become a real latency issue as every switch take a little time to process each packet.
I don't get the GP's point either, but what I know is that cable is cheap and labor is expensive. Running additional cables to one location only adds a few bucks to the cost because there is little additional labor.
In one building project at work the HVAC plans changed so that we had to switch from standard cables to plenum rated. The plenum rated cable is 3 times more expensive, but it only raised the overall costs for the cabling by 10%. The labor by far outweighed the materials in cost
It's also a lot cheaper to run extra capacity during construction than to add it later. Once the dry wall and drop ceilings are in, it take a lot more time to run cables. If you can't afford the switches to connect all the spare ports, just detach the jacks from the faceplates and stash them up inside the boxes. Don't forget to put a blank in the faceplate.
UTP cabling is also amazingly flexible and efficient for all kinds of uses. You would be amazed what you can do with it. I have used it to carry video, POTS lines, VGA signals, USB connections, from room to room just by patching from one port to another and by plugging in the right adapters on each end. Once the cable is in place and available, a multitude of uses become possible.
There is a piece of software called "Really Random Numbers" that uses white noise from your computer's sound card to generate random numbers. "The result is random data that passes virtually all statistical tests of randomness," for whatever that is worth. I've played around with it. It is pretty neat, but I don't have much call to use software and don't know how to evaluate randomness in any case.
.... Whether Zimmerman committed a crime or not hinges on proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman actually attacked Martin.
No, I don't think it does.
If a person provokes another into a fight and then kills that person, they are guilty of non-justifiable homicide. Whether it is first or second degree homicide or voluntary or involuntary manslaughter is up to the courts to decide. But, it is NOT self defense, and Florida's stand your ground laws don't change that. The only thing that stand your ground laws change is the presumption of guilt. Without stand your ground laws, you must attempt to flee, or else you are presumed guilty, and the rest of the facts of a self-defense case are irrelevant.
In this case, Zimmerman provoked Martin by following him. He may have caught up to Martin and said more to provoke him. Martin may not have intended to start a fight, but by following and apparently attempting to confront Martin, Zimmerman knew that a fight was possible, and he knew he had a gun backing him up. If this had turned out differently and Zimmerman was dead, "stand your ground" would have been there to protect Martin. I mean, Martin clearly had reason to believe his life was in danger.
The parents were just stupid. If stupid were criminalized would all be in jail.
The media outlets who allow unqualified people, like Jenny McCarthy and her ilk, to spout off on medical issued with no medical professional to counter their claims are at fault for gross incompetence. Parents who have been victimized by this misinformation campaign (and insurance companies and hospitals have had increased costs due to kids getting sick who never should have) should sue the media companies and the clueless conspiracy mouthpieces. I have no idea if it the parents would win in court, but maybe it would get the mass media entities to run weekly apologies and retractions for every bogus anti-vaccine claim and pointing out that the only study ever linking autism to conventional vaccines was done by a fraud who was trying to sell his own vaccine technology.
I used to worry about magnets around my computer. Then I dissembled a few hard drives and saw the kind of rare-earth magnets used to move the heads.
CRT monitors and floppy disks are vulnerable to magnets, but you are not going to damage your computer with a refrigerator magnet. To damage it you would have to use something really special, like an MRI machine.
Even on desktops, I find the standard windows automatic updates schedules to be insufficient.
At work, most people shut down their computers overnight, missing update windows. Other people never log off, so you can not expect the computers to install updates at shutdown. People can not be relied on to notice the Automatic Updates icon and click to allow updates either. I am reluctant to force a computer to reboot when someone is logged on, in case they have unsaved work.
I have found to well is to have updates install overnight, but if the update window is missed, the computers will install patches 15 minutes after booting. If someone is logged when patches are installed, then the computers will prompt the user once per hour to reboot the computer after patching if a reboot is required. I configure this through Active Directory at work and through group policy on stand alone computers at home and for friends and relatives.
You can set the delay after booting to whatever you want. When this option is turned on, the default is 5 minutes, but that can create a new problem. It seems that the Automatic Update service checks to see if someone is logged in when it starts patching, not when it is finished. So if someone logs in after patching has started, the computer may reboot on them without warning. If the delay is longer, say an hour, computers that are only turned on for short periods may never get patched.
Last December I was shopping for a TV and cruised through Best Buy to check out their sales. They had a reasonable looking TV that had just gone on sale at a very good price, but like any tech geek I wanted to do some comparisons before buying. It was one of their house brands, but the price and reviews compared favorably to similar TVs from other manufacturers. So the next day, my wife stopped by to pick up the TV.
One problem, though. Best Buy pulled a bait-n-switch on her.
They had been advertising the sale price for the TV I had seen. But sometime in the ~24 hours since I had been in the store, they brought in a pallet of TVs that looked identical to the one I wanted, but these had weaker speakers and fewer inputs. They marked these TVs at the same price as the one I had seen the day before. My wife went in to buy the TV, asked for the TV on sale at the specified price, and they gave her the inferior model.
I looked at the model number before opening the box and saw the error, so I packed the TV and my toddler in the car (the wife wasn't home) to exchange the TV for the correct model right away. Before going to customer service I surveyed the electronics section. Sure enough, there was a pallet of TVs of the lesser model that had not been there the day before. Not far away was the shelf with a handful of the TV I saw the day before on sale for the exact same price. I went to CS, toddler in tow, to make the exchange. The CS person was, to her credit, was very accommodating. But the slacker she sent to bring up the right TV took 20 excruciating minutes (my daughter HATES her car seat) and a reminder from the CS associate to get the new set out to me.
As I recall, the difference is that the English courts will not appoint a public defender in libel cases and that you are presumed guilty unless you can produce evidence that your assertions are true.
There is a very amusing documentary called McLibel about a case where McDonalds sued two people in England for a flyer they distributed decrying McDonalds food's nutritional value and some of their business practices. The two defendants were not wealthy and had to defend themselves. They were cleared of all counts except some of the business practice claims because they could not afford to fly in witnesses from South America. Meanwhile, McDonalds spent millions of dollars on legal fees and trashed their reputation in England.
1) E-Rate. This is the federal program that funds A LOT of technology in schools. A school's reimbursement for tech is based on their percentage of students eligible for free or reduced meals. Reimbursement can reach 90% (maybe more) for schools in very poor communities. Americans pay for E-Rate through the Universal Access surcharge on our telephone bills. E-Rate is the reason many inner-city schools have state of the art technology but crumbling buildings.
2) Tech is sexy and highly visible. Parents like it. For private schools, donors like it. It makes non-technical people think the schools are on the cutting edge of education. It doesn't matter if the schools are actually using the stuff effectively, or even using it at all. It's there, so it scores points.
Up until recently, I would have agreed with you on every point. I also work for a school and the subject of iPads and one-to-one programs come up fairly often, so I know whereof you speak. However, I recently saw a spot on the PBS News Hour about a school that is doing very well at incorporating students with learning disabilities into regular classrooms, and iPads loaded with word matching and speech-to-text applications are part of their recipe to help students with learning disorders, especially dyslexia. It is clear that they are not just giving the kids iPads and letting the tech sort itself out.
What Hester said is that "he asked me three times if he could view my facebook", and the excerpted letter asked for "access to" her facebook page. Nothing from what I have seen shows that Hester was asked to give up a password, except for news outlets editorializing the administrator's intent.
We also don't know if the co-worker made complaints. You can be sure that the school administration will not reveal this unless it comes to trial. The photo's perspective shows that Hester was standing in front of her co-worker while she was sitting exposed on a toilet. This was not a quick snap-shot taken under a bathroom stall door. Personally, I would have been deeply embarrassed if one of my "friends" posted a shot of me in this position.
Assuming that there is more to this than just a complaint from a parent, and there was a sexual harassment claim, if an employee under investigation stonewalled me like this, I would have fired them too.
A) Yes, I was thinking obscenity. Which is really fucking nebulous, but pretty clearly does not apply here.
B) Being protected speech just means that they can't have Johnnie arrested for it. Schools can suspend little Johnnie for saying "fuck". There is precedent for this: Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser (1986).
C) When you are right, you are right.
According to TFA, the Aid posted a picture of a coworker's pants around their ankles to a semi-public forum. Yeah, she may have meant it in fun, but we don't know if her coworker appreciated it, and schools are notoriously nervous about sexual harassment cases. Asking for the aid's password was stupid on the part of the administrator. But if I were this person's boss and she had stonewalled me giving up the photo and related correspondence, I would have fired her as well.
A) I should have said "Obscenity" in which case, it depends on your local communities social norms. What this kid wrote didn't bother me one bit and it seems hard pressed for any community to deem it so, but the possibility is there. It is still a weak argument and you are right to contradict it.
B) Protected or not, schools can punish students for profanity or abusive language at their discretion. Schools do not need to prove speech is illegal to punish a student for blurting out profanity at school. If a student uses school property to transmit profanity, then it is the same as being at school and the school has the discretion to punish it.
B) Where do you get off throwing personal insults at me. You are probably one of those people who think they can generalize a person's positions based on a short sentence posted on an Internet forum. (Irony intended)
B) The student and his parents almost certainly signed an Acceptable Use Policy prohibiting profanity before being granted access to school systems. The School claims the post was made using school owned technology, which is entirely possible with VPN and/or remote desktop technologies.
C) The punishment was obviously ridiculously overblown for the crime. The kid deserved a stern talking to or a detention at worst. I'd like to know what the school board thinks about this.
Do you really think IT likes policing content? 99% of us are too busy fixing (or breaking) the network to give a shit about what people are posting on Twitter. This crap comes from administrators who actually care about the company's or organization's or school's image. As long as you aren't breaking or hacking something or making unreasonable demands, we don't care.
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If you recall, 2-3 weeks ago the jury ruled that Google had violated Oracle's copyrights on the Java API's. The caveat being that it is not established in US law whether or not API's are protected by copyright. The judge instructed the jury to deliberate as is API's are protected by copyright. Now, we are just waiting on the judge's ruling as to whether or not API's are protected by copyright. If he rules that they are not, which I personally expect will be the ruling, then the jury's ruling on the API copyright issue will be moot. This was the copyright issue mentioned in the article, not the rangeCheck code, which is apparently a non-issue.
At the time, I think that Apple was not prepared to become a pure software company. If they had continued down that road, and the clone makers would have forced the issue, they would have been going head-to-head against Microsoft as a desktop OS vendor. I think Jobs was just not ready to do that, but I think Apple could have usurped widows as the standard consumer desktop. I think they want to remain the big fish in a small pond.
We have an X-serve at work. Trust me when I say that Apple has NEVER made enterprise class servers. There simply is no technical excuse for Apple to not license OSX server to run as a virtual machine on non-apple hardware. VMWare and Parallels are ready to do it. I saw a reply from Parallels customer service where they essentially said that they had the technology working to allow direct installs of OSX on non-Apple hardware. But, they won't release it because that would violate their agreements and upset Apple. Again, I don't think Apple wants to be in the big server market. This is really frustrating for me because I end up having to rig up solutions because Apple won't sell me the software or servers I need from them
If the carriers did not strong-arm people into buying data plans, they would not be running out of capacity. According to this survey (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404086,00.asp) 50.4% of Americans with cell phone service have smartphones. Nearly every one has a data plan because all of the major carriers, except for T-Mobile, require it for smartphone users, and T-Mobile does not make it well known that you can avoid the data plan charges.
Considering today's economy, given the choice, many people would gladly save the ~30 bucks a month that a data plan costs.
What the parent is talking about is an ATF registry that you can read about here: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/01/judge-upholds-atf-gun-rule-for-sw-border-states/ This is not an "assault rifle" registry. It is a registry that tracks all multiple sales (as in 2+) of semi-auto rifles bigger that .22 caliber and with a detachable magazine. The kind of rifles that hundreds of thousands of Americans own for hunting and target shooting purposes. Assault rifles, by definition, have the capability to fire in fully-automatic or burst mode. No one in the general public sells or buys assault rifles in blocks of 35 at a time in the US from a legitimate dealer. Buying an assault rifle involves a Federal Firearms License, and no US dealer is going to let that requirement slide.
Gun dealers have been working with the ATF to stop straw-man purchases for a long time before this. What happened with Operation Fast and Furious, an operation launched in 2009 under Obama's administration, the ATF instructed gun dealers to allow suspected straw-man purchasers to buy weapons. They allowed over 2000 guns to "walk" and almost entirely failed to track and recover those guns, and at the same time using that failure to argue FOR the rifle registry that are now operating. There were other gun-walking sting operations run under the Bush administration, which were much smaller in scope and had mixed success on recovering the weapons.
Tempered glass doesn't shatter? I was under the impression that glass was tempered so that it would shatter into many small pieces, rather than fracturing into a few large shards that are more dangerous. I agree about the lamination being there to keep the pieces together.
When my toddler reached for the power outlet I smacked her hand. If I could not reach her quickly I shouted and startled her. Either way she was traumatized and cried, but she does not try to play with power outlets anymore. Do you honestly think you can reason well enough with a 1year old to get them to stop touching something?
Who the fuck cares if it makes money - it's a STATE UNIVERSITY not a CORPORATION. It doesn't have to "make money".....
Sadly, that is not true. I wish it were. I work for a non-profit school. We HAVE to make money or else we can not make payroll, keep the lights on, operate buses, heat the buildings, etc. Non-profit does not mean no-profit and it does not mean that we are not a business, it just means that there is no owner who gets to take the surplus money home at the end of the day.
So you were running 100 Mb every where, even on up links and server connections? It sounds like you had a bottleneck where every machine was sharing the same 100 Mb uplink to the server. That is not a latency issue, that is a bandwidth issue. For small packets the latency difference between 100 Mb and 1000 Mb is negligible until you start pushing against your bandwidth caps. Your redesigned network alleviated the bandwidth crunch by allowing the desktops to share the 1000 Mb uplink to the server, 10 times the previous bandwidth. It looks like pretty good solution for minimizing costs while increasing bandwidth.
I have seen cases where places had daisy-chained switches and hubs for network capacity. This can become a real latency issue as every switch take a little time to process each packet.
I don't get the GP's point either, but what I know is that cable is cheap and labor is expensive. Running additional cables to one location only adds a few bucks to the cost because there is little additional labor.
In one building project at work the HVAC plans changed so that we had to switch from standard cables to plenum rated. The plenum rated cable is 3 times more expensive, but it only raised the overall costs for the cabling by 10%. The labor by far outweighed the materials in cost
It's also a lot cheaper to run extra capacity during construction than to add it later. Once the dry wall and drop ceilings are in, it take a lot more time to run cables. If you can't afford the switches to connect all the spare ports, just detach the jacks from the faceplates and stash them up inside the boxes. Don't forget to put a blank in the faceplate.
UTP cabling is also amazingly flexible and efficient for all kinds of uses. You would be amazed what you can do with it. I have used it to carry video, POTS lines, VGA signals, USB connections, from room to room just by patching from one port to another and by plugging in the right adapters on each end. Once the cable is in place and available, a multitude of uses become possible.
That's easy. Just flip a coin. Heads=1 and Tails =1.
There is a piece of software called "Really Random Numbers" that uses white noise from your computer's sound card to generate random numbers. "The result is random data that passes virtually all statistical tests of randomness," for whatever that is worth. I've played around with it. It is pretty neat, but I don't have much call to use software and don't know how to evaluate randomness in any case.
.... Whether Zimmerman committed a crime or not hinges on proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman actually attacked Martin.
No, I don't think it does.
If a person provokes another into a fight and then kills that person, they are guilty of non-justifiable homicide. Whether it is first or second degree homicide or voluntary or involuntary manslaughter is up to the courts to decide. But, it is NOT self defense, and Florida's stand your ground laws don't change that. The only thing that stand your ground laws change is the presumption of guilt. Without stand your ground laws, you must attempt to flee, or else you are presumed guilty, and the rest of the facts of a self-defense case are irrelevant.
In this case, Zimmerman provoked Martin by following him. He may have caught up to Martin and said more to provoke him. Martin may not have intended to start a fight, but by following and apparently attempting to confront Martin, Zimmerman knew that a fight was possible, and he knew he had a gun backing him up. If this had turned out differently and Zimmerman was dead, "stand your ground" would have been there to protect Martin. I mean, Martin clearly had reason to believe his life was in danger.
The parents were just stupid. If stupid were criminalized would all be in jail.
The media outlets who allow unqualified people, like Jenny McCarthy and her ilk, to spout off on medical issued with no medical professional to counter their claims are at fault for gross incompetence. Parents who have been victimized by this misinformation campaign (and insurance companies and hospitals have had increased costs due to kids getting sick who never should have) should sue the media companies and the clueless conspiracy mouthpieces. I have no idea if it the parents would win in court, but maybe it would get the mass media entities to run weekly apologies and retractions for every bogus anti-vaccine claim and pointing out that the only study ever linking autism to conventional vaccines was done by a fraud who was trying to sell his own vaccine technology.
I used to worry about magnets around my computer. Then I dissembled a few hard drives and saw the kind of rare-earth magnets used to move the heads.
CRT monitors and floppy disks are vulnerable to magnets, but you are not going to damage your computer with a refrigerator magnet. To damage it you would have to use something really special, like an MRI machine.
Even on desktops, I find the standard windows automatic updates schedules to be insufficient.
At work, most people shut down their computers overnight, missing update windows. Other people never log off, so you can not expect the computers to install updates at shutdown. People can not be relied on to notice the Automatic Updates icon and click to allow updates either. I am reluctant to force a computer to reboot when someone is logged on, in case they have unsaved work.
I have found to well is to have updates install overnight, but if the update window is missed, the computers will install patches 15 minutes after booting. If someone is logged when patches are installed, then the computers will prompt the user once per hour to reboot the computer after patching if a reboot is required. I configure this through Active Directory at work and through group policy on stand alone computers at home and for friends and relatives.
You can set the delay after booting to whatever you want. When this option is turned on, the default is 5 minutes, but that can create a new problem. It seems that the Automatic Update service checks to see if someone is logged in when it starts patching, not when it is finished. So if someone logs in after patching has started, the computer may reboot on them without warning. If the delay is longer, say an hour, computers that are only turned on for short periods may never get patched.
Last December I was shopping for a TV and cruised through Best Buy to check out their sales. They had a reasonable looking TV that had just gone on sale at a very good price, but like any tech geek I wanted to do some comparisons before buying. It was one of their house brands, but the price and reviews compared favorably to similar TVs from other manufacturers. So the next day, my wife stopped by to pick up the TV.
One problem, though. Best Buy pulled a bait-n-switch on her.
They had been advertising the sale price for the TV I had seen. But sometime in the ~24 hours since I had been in the store, they brought in a pallet of TVs that looked identical to the one I wanted, but these had weaker speakers and fewer inputs. They marked these TVs at the same price as the one I had seen the day before. My wife went in to buy the TV, asked for the TV on sale at the specified price, and they gave her the inferior model.
I looked at the model number before opening the box and saw the error, so I packed the TV and my toddler in the car (the wife wasn't home) to exchange the TV for the correct model right away. Before going to customer service I surveyed the electronics section. Sure enough, there was a pallet of TVs of the lesser model that had not been there the day before. Not far away was the shelf with a handful of the TV I saw the day before on sale for the exact same price. I went to CS, toddler in tow, to make the exchange. The CS person was, to her credit, was very accommodating. But the slacker she sent to bring up the right TV took 20 excruciating minutes (my daughter HATES her car seat) and a reminder from the CS associate to get the new set out to me.
As I recall, the difference is that the English courts will not appoint a public defender in libel cases and that you are presumed guilty unless you can produce evidence that your assertions are true.
There is a very amusing documentary called McLibel about a case where McDonalds sued two people in England for a flyer they distributed decrying McDonalds food's nutritional value and some of their business practices. The two defendants were not wealthy and had to defend themselves. They were cleared of all counts except some of the business practice claims because they could not afford to fly in witnesses from South America. Meanwhile, McDonalds spent millions of dollars on legal fees and trashed their reputation in England.
Two things are at play here.
1) E-Rate. This is the federal program that funds A LOT of technology in schools. A school's reimbursement for tech is based on their percentage of students eligible for free or reduced meals. Reimbursement can reach 90% (maybe more) for schools in very poor communities. Americans pay for E-Rate through the Universal Access surcharge on our telephone bills. E-Rate is the reason many inner-city schools have state of the art technology but crumbling buildings.
2) Tech is sexy and highly visible. Parents like it. For private schools, donors like it. It makes non-technical people think the schools are on the cutting edge of education. It doesn't matter if the schools are actually using the stuff effectively, or even using it at all. It's there, so it scores points.
Up until recently, I would have agreed with you on every point. I also work for a school and the subject of iPads and one-to-one programs come up fairly often, so I know whereof you speak. However, I recently saw a spot on the PBS News Hour about a school that is doing very well at incorporating students with learning disabilities into regular classrooms, and iPads loaded with word matching and speech-to-text applications are part of their recipe to help students with learning disorders, especially dyslexia. It is clear that they are not just giving the kids iPads and letting the tech sort itself out.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/american-graduate/jan-june12/amgradengaging_03-21.html
They start talking about the technology at 2:30 into the video.
But did they even ask for her password?
What Hester said is that "he asked me three times if he could view my facebook", and the excerpted letter asked for "access to" her facebook page. Nothing from what I have seen shows that Hester was asked to give up a password, except for news outlets editorializing the administrator's intent.
We also don't know if the co-worker made complaints. You can be sure that the school administration will not reveal this unless it comes to trial. The photo's perspective shows that Hester was standing in front of her co-worker while she was sitting exposed on a toilet. This was not a quick snap-shot taken under a bathroom stall door. Personally, I would have been deeply embarrassed if one of my "friends" posted a shot of me in this position.
Assuming that there is more to this than just a complaint from a parent, and there was a sexual harassment claim, if an employee under investigation stonewalled me like this, I would have fired them too.
A) Yes, I was thinking obscenity. Which is really fucking nebulous, but pretty clearly does not apply here. B) Being protected speech just means that they can't have Johnnie arrested for it. Schools can suspend little Johnnie for saying "fuck". There is precedent for this: Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser (1986). C) When you are right, you are right.
According to TFA, the Aid posted a picture of a coworker's pants around their ankles to a semi-public forum. Yeah, she may have meant it in fun, but we don't know if her coworker appreciated it, and schools are notoriously nervous about sexual harassment cases. Asking for the aid's password was stupid on the part of the administrator. But if I were this person's boss and she had stonewalled me giving up the photo and related correspondence, I would have fired her as well.
A) I should have said "Obscenity" in which case, it depends on your local communities social norms. What this kid wrote didn't bother me one bit and it seems hard pressed for any community to deem it so, but the possibility is there. It is still a weak argument and you are right to contradict it.
B) Protected or not, schools can punish students for profanity or abusive language at their discretion. Schools do not need to prove speech is illegal to punish a student for blurting out profanity at school. If a student uses school property to transmit profanity, then it is the same as being at school and the school has the discretion to punish it.
B) Where do you get off throwing personal insults at me. You are probably one of those people who think they can generalize a person's positions based on a short sentence posted on an Internet forum. (Irony intended)
Three thoughts.
A) Profanity is not protected speech.
B) The student and his parents almost certainly signed an Acceptable Use Policy prohibiting profanity before being granted access to school systems. The School claims the post was made using school owned technology, which is entirely possible with VPN and/or remote desktop technologies.
C) The punishment was obviously ridiculously overblown for the crime. The kid deserved a stern talking to or a detention at worst. I'd like to know what the school board thinks about this.
Do you really think IT likes policing content? 99% of us are too busy fixing (or breaking) the network to give a shit about what people are posting on Twitter. This crap comes from administrators who actually care about the company's or organization's or school's image. As long as you aren't breaking or hacking something or making unreasonable demands, we don't care.