The first thing I do when I buy a computer is wipe everything that came on it and install Linux. If I can't do that, it's not a computer --- it's an appliance, or a toy. Most computer users may not be Linux users, but I think a lot of people (subconsciously or otherwise) realize that if they can't do what they want with a computer device they're looking at buying, they don't want it either.
In that sense then, science would be on par with other belief systems' "methods" such as "by revelation" or "received knowledge." Each is going to have its supporters and detractors. My earlier position still holds, albeit in slightly modified form: These are all belief systems (or methodologies thereof), and if someone's belief system (or its methodology) is at odds with another (or its methodology), they or their children shouldn't be compelled to participate in the belief system (or its methodologies) with which they disagree.
The article also claimed the teacher called the student's religion "superstitious nonsense." If that's accurate, that's the part I'd call "ridiculing" the student's religion and a religious "slur."
As part of its ruling, the appeals court vacated a district judge's earlier decision that the teacher, Dr. James Corbett, violated the establishment clause in a comment he made in class that creationism was "superstitious nonsense."
The appeals court side-stepped the question of whether Dr. Corbett's comment on creationism and other derogatory remarks about religious faith were unconstitutional. Instead, the panel concluded that since Corbett was entitled to qualified immunity it was not necessary for the appeals court to determine whether his comments actually violated the Constitution.
The more disturbing aspect of this is that it's yet another demonstration of spinelessness in the court: Oh, we don't even need to answer this question; teachers are simply immune to such challenges.
Personally, I'm an atheist/agnostic* and a firm believer in evolution, but I've come to understand that science is as much of a "belief system" as any other religion or philosophy. Some people will say that because it's based on a methodical system of experimentation, observation, and reasoning, that this somehow makes it superior, but it's still based on certain unprovable axioms, "articles of faith" if you will: That one can trust one's own senses and ability to reason, and others' ability to use their senses and reason reliably. Some will say science has a better "track record" of aiding humanity, except most of these other "belief systems" seemed to do the job just fine for a lot longer than science has (e.g., 200 years for science vs. about 2000 for Christianity. Some will say children need to learn science in order to "get ahead" or "succeed" in the real world, but that's just tacit admission that science is the dominant belief system in the United States. It'd be like telling a Jew living in 1400s Germany that he has to convert to Christianity in order to "get ahead" or "succeed" in the overwhelmingly Christian society surrounding him. It may be a true statement of fact, but it doesn't make it right to force a person to do it.
So with all this in mind, despite my own belief in science as opposed to theistic philosophies, I support the rights of parents to teach their children whatever belief systems they choose --- and, if they wish, to shelter their children from belief systems that oppose those beliefs. It all comes down to respecting people's choices and not forcing them into other belief systems against their will.
The true problem here is the compulsory and universal nature of public school. Because it's the "one true" school system, everyone with a devout and universal belief system --- theist and atheist alike, Christian and scientist alike --- is going to fight over what it teaches. Create a "one sized fits all" solution and everyone fights to make it their preferred size. The solution is to eliminate the "one size fits all" institution.
* I consider myself an atheist, but in the sense that until and unless the existence of a god is demonstrated, I default to believing that there is none. Technically this is agnosticism, but perceptually agnosticism is more about admitting "we don't really know" than taking a stance one way or the other.
P.S.: On the topic of marriage, this is another perfect example of people fighting to make a "one size fits all"-like system represent their belief systems. The whole problem would be solved if the State got out of the marriage-licensing business altogether and left it up to people's preferred private institutions to conduct marriages: The homophobic Christians can conduct their marriages at churches that bar gays, and the more liberal-minded ones can conduct their marr
Considering how many people are using social media nowadays, pretty soon "Odd, this guy doesn't have any social media accounts" will be automatic suspicion he's an undercover cop.
Google has spent the past several years (a) getting millions of people dependent on their services first anonymously, then (b) with pseudonymous accounts that tie people's activities all together. People and companies use Google for searching (Log in to "personalize" your results; having Google keep your "search history" is great convenience, right?), emailing, storing sensitive documents, uploading photos, planning their movements, marking maps with locations both public and private, and probably a bunch of other things I don't even know about. And now Google has (c) created a competitor to Facebook and signed up millions of people in the first few weeks, which, once you attempt to use, they expect you to divulge a "legal" name --- and if they suspect the name you put in isn't, they want to see a government ID in order to allow you to continue using their services.
This is Google slowly building up, and now closing, a trap --- in order to snare what probably amounts to exabytes of personal information on real human individuals. We know it's the CIA funding Facebook. I wonder which intelligence/surveillance agency is funding Facebook's new "competitor."
From a government employee when they're acting in an official capacity? Yes.
Again: Consider this situation where instead of attacking the student's religion, the government official attacked the student's race. Actionable or not? If so, why would that be any different than this situation?
Thinking about this further, the racial slur example is specifically a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment: "No State shall... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." So a religious slur is probably both a violation of that clause of the Fourteenth and a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First.
Yes, I read the article. It's about a government employee criticizing someone's religious beliefs (ridiculing them, specifically), while in their official capacity as a schoolteacher. And this is a compulsory setting, no less; not something where the recipient could just easily leave and dissociate themselves from said government employee.
What if instead of ridiculing the student's religion, the teacher had called them a racial slur? Would that be a violation of the student's rights?
True. And the average person probably doesn't understand that unit abbreviations are case-sensitive: "MB/s" and "Mb/s" are two very different things. Of course, plenty of pieces of software screw this up, especially with respect to using a lowecase k for "kilo-", and "MBPS" for "megabits per second," used in documents, advertising materials, &c., is rather common.
Sure. My point wasn't to necessarily say that Google gave them the information proactively, but just to point out one glaring omission in the chain of events that led to the police finding this guy: That Google and their records made the connection between GMail and IP address.
Being a Slashdot reader, you and most of the other people here would probably say this is obvious. But for the thousands (millions?) of ordinary people who read the BBC article, if it had been explicitly mentioned that Google provided the IP address from which the GMail account was accessed, a small percentage of readers would probably think, "Wait, Google can do that?" And a small percentage of those people might start learning a thing or two about how to protect their privacy online.
And while liberals everywhere celebrate this victory against creationism, they will entirely miss the implication of this case: The government just said an entire class of its employees can violate people's First Amendment rights with impunity.
This kind of acceleration in government can be seen everywhere.
Compare the sizes of the law books* put out by your state's legislature this year against ten or a hundred years ago.
I recently had to do some deed research at the County Registrar's office. Documents are organized by "book" and "page" number, for example, a deed will be referred to as "Book 123, Page 456." It took something like two hundred years for New Hampshire to hit book 1000, another 50 or so to hit Book 2000, and only a couple decades to make it to Book 3000. They're currently in 3800 or so. These books used to be used to record just deeds and mortgages, but now there's every manner of trivial document in there.
* Not the statutes themselves, but the book of bills that passed in a given legislative session.
So, if you're planning an extortion scheme, don't drive your car to the internet cafe, don't set up the account from an airport, wear anonymous clothes (like Jason Bourne does?) and do all your accesses through hacked shell accounts somewhere in Outer Mongolia.
And don't use Google, who fed the IP information to the police.* That seems to be the key here; without an ability to link the GMail account to an IP address in the first place, they never would have found a physical location at which to look for a specific person or a car.
* GMail headers, last I checked, do not contain this information. Some webmail providers add an X-Originating-IP header, e.g. Hotmail, but Google doesn't.
Please learn the difference between "13% of people lie" ("1 in 8 Take Fake Phone Calls") and "people are lying 13% of the time" before posting any more articles about statistics.
Indeed! A person who was skillfully using two phones at once and didn't cause an an accident is certainly the "poster-child for why cell phone use in cars should be banned." Not causing an accident is clearly evidence of how, um, accident-prone cell phone use while driving makes people!
...activists have several ongoing legal battles concerning this nonsense. Here is the blog of one activist who has been fighting a similar charge in court for a while. His blog is also following a bill we have in the N.H. Legislature to fix the wiretapping law here. Slashdot reported on this case too, New Hampshire activists who were charged in Massachusetts and recently exonerated.
I don't know how bad it is in the U.K. yet, but I read almost daily about arrests for things "I would never have expected" over here in the land-of-the-free United States.
Is this the organization that collects the royalties, quietly "notifies" the artist of the collection in a manner that the artist is almost sure not to find, waits some statutory limit like 2 or 3 years, then keeps the money for themselves? I seem to remember reading about a scandal involving this practice a few years back.
That some people may think their connection is slower than it "should be" because they're doing the calculations based on the binary system rather than SI. Just like how you plug in a 1.5T disk and it shows up as "1.4T" or "1.3T" in some OSes, because the OS is measuring the HD capacity in 1024-based units whereas the manufacturer used 1000-based units.
When watching this fight ensue, just remember that this is the organization that has spent the past 15-20 years fighting "piracy" claiming to be standing up for the rights of their artists.
So this storiy is basically a tacit admission either that:---
Blackberry and Facebook are doing realtime or near-realtime surveillance of users and sending suspicious information to the British police; or
The British police are capable of, and are, listening in on Blackberry or Facebook* without the co-operation of these corporationsi i.e., they're surveilling network traffic or similar. Facebook is entirely conducted through HTTPS nowadays, so if this be the case, that the bobbies can listen in is an even more significant revelation.
* This conclusion wouldn't hold of course if the police are merely trolling through what people post in public on Facebook, which is entirely a possibility considering how ignorant many people are about discretion and privacy.
# In Telecommunications, use of the correct SI definition of the unit is standard.
# Standard industry practice in RAM and ROM manufacture has been to use the Mb abbreviation in reference to the binary interpretation of the megabit. For example, a single discrete DDR3 chip specified at 512 Mb invariably contains 229 bits = 536870912bits = 512 Mibit of storage,[3] or 671088648-bit bytes, variously referred to as either 64 mebibytes or 64 (binary) megabytes.
Just like megabytes, this is yet another prefix that gets used differently depending on context and can confuse people. The Wikipedia article even has references if you really feel like having an attention span past the first paragraph of an article today.
Slashdot Mirror
The first thing I do when I buy a computer is wipe everything that came on it and install Linux. If I can't do that, it's not a computer --- it's an appliance, or a toy. Most computer users may not be Linux users, but I think a lot of people (subconsciously or otherwise) realize that if they can't do what they want with a computer device they're looking at buying, they don't want it either.
In that sense then, science would be on par with other belief systems' "methods" such as "by revelation" or "received knowledge." Each is going to have its supporters and detractors. My earlier position still holds, albeit in slightly modified form: These are all belief systems (or methodologies thereof), and if someone's belief system (or its methodology) is at odds with another (or its methodology), they or their children shouldn't be compelled to participate in the belief system (or its methodologies) with which they disagree.
The article also claimed the teacher called the student's religion "superstitious nonsense." If that's accurate, that's the part I'd call "ridiculing" the student's religion and a religious "slur."
The more disturbing aspect of this is that it's yet another demonstration of spinelessness in the court: Oh, we don't even need to answer this question; teachers are simply immune to such challenges.
Personally, I'm an atheist/agnostic* and a firm believer in evolution, but I've come to understand that science is as much of a "belief system" as any other religion or philosophy. Some people will say that because it's based on a methodical system of experimentation, observation, and reasoning, that this somehow makes it superior, but it's still based on certain unprovable axioms, "articles of faith" if you will: That one can trust one's own senses and ability to reason, and others' ability to use their senses and reason reliably. Some will say science has a better "track record" of aiding humanity, except most of these other "belief systems" seemed to do the job just fine for a lot longer than science has (e.g., 200 years for science vs. about 2000 for Christianity. Some will say children need to learn science in order to "get ahead" or "succeed" in the real world, but that's just tacit admission that science is the dominant belief system in the United States. It'd be like telling a Jew living in 1400s Germany that he has to convert to Christianity in order to "get ahead" or "succeed" in the overwhelmingly Christian society surrounding him. It may be a true statement of fact, but it doesn't make it right to force a person to do it.
So with all this in mind, despite my own belief in science as opposed to theistic philosophies, I support the rights of parents to teach their children whatever belief systems they choose --- and, if they wish, to shelter their children from belief systems that oppose those beliefs. It all comes down to respecting people's choices and not forcing them into other belief systems against their will.
The true problem here is the compulsory and universal nature of public school. Because it's the "one true" school system, everyone with a devout and universal belief system --- theist and atheist alike, Christian and scientist alike --- is going to fight over what it teaches. Create a "one sized fits all" solution and everyone fights to make it their preferred size. The solution is to eliminate the "one size fits all" institution.
* I consider myself an atheist, but in the sense that until and unless the existence of a god is demonstrated, I default to believing that there is none. Technically this is agnosticism, but perceptually agnosticism is more about admitting "we don't really know" than taking a stance one way or the other.
P.S.: On the topic of marriage, this is another perfect example of people fighting to make a "one size fits all"-like system represent their belief systems. The whole problem would be solved if the State got out of the marriage-licensing business altogether and left it up to people's preferred private institutions to conduct marriages: The homophobic Christians can conduct their marriages at churches that bar gays, and the more liberal-minded ones can conduct their marr
An earlier comment put it perfectly: "If they're not doing anything wrong, what have they got to hide?"
It already has. Just look around Slashdot for all the stories of cops using wiretapping laws against people videotaping them.
And in reply to the rest of your comment: This article from CopBlock is highly relevant.
Considering how many people are using social media nowadays, pretty soon "Odd, this guy doesn't have any social media accounts" will be automatic suspicion he's an undercover cop.
...a whole orchestra of the world's smallest violins.
Google has spent the past several years (a) getting millions of people dependent on their services first anonymously, then (b) with pseudonymous accounts that tie people's activities all together. People and companies use Google for searching (Log in to "personalize" your results; having Google keep your "search history" is great convenience, right?), emailing, storing sensitive documents, uploading photos, planning their movements, marking maps with locations both public and private, and probably a bunch of other things I don't even know about. And now Google has (c) created a competitor to Facebook and signed up millions of people in the first few weeks, which, once you attempt to use, they expect you to divulge a "legal" name --- and if they suspect the name you put in isn't, they want to see a government ID in order to allow you to continue using their services.
This is Google slowly building up, and now closing, a trap --- in order to snare what probably amounts to exabytes of personal information on real human individuals. We know it's the CIA funding Facebook. I wonder which intelligence/surveillance agency is funding Facebook's new "competitor."
From a government employee when they're acting in an official capacity? Yes.
Again: Consider this situation where instead of attacking the student's religion, the government official attacked the student's race. Actionable or not? If so, why would that be any different than this situation?
Thinking about this further, the racial slur example is specifically a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment: "No State shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." So a religious slur is probably both a violation of that clause of the Fourteenth and a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First.
Yes, I read the article. It's about a government employee criticizing someone's religious beliefs (ridiculing them, specifically), while in their official capacity as a schoolteacher. And this is a compulsory setting, no less; not something where the recipient could just easily leave and dissociate themselves from said government employee.
What if instead of ridiculing the student's religion, the teacher had called them a racial slur? Would that be a violation of the student's rights?
True. And the average person probably doesn't understand that unit abbreviations are case-sensitive: "MB/s" and "Mb/s" are two very different things. Of course, plenty of pieces of software screw this up, especially with respect to using a lowecase k for "kilo-", and "MBPS" for "megabits per second," used in documents, advertising materials, &c., is rather common.
Sure. My point wasn't to necessarily say that Google gave them the information proactively, but just to point out one glaring omission in the chain of events that led to the police finding this guy: That Google and their records made the connection between GMail and IP address.
Being a Slashdot reader, you and most of the other people here would probably say this is obvious. But for the thousands (millions?) of ordinary people who read the BBC article, if it had been explicitly mentioned that Google provided the IP address from which the GMail account was accessed, a small percentage of readers would probably think, "Wait, Google can do that?" And a small percentage of those people might start learning a thing or two about how to protect their privacy online.
And while liberals everywhere celebrate this victory against creationism, they will entirely miss the implication of this case: The government just said an entire class of its employees can violate people's First Amendment rights with impunity.
This kind of acceleration in government can be seen everywhere.
Compare the sizes of the law books* put out by your state's legislature this year against ten or a hundred years ago.
I recently had to do some deed research at the County Registrar's office. Documents are organized by "book" and "page" number, for example, a deed will be referred to as "Book 123, Page 456." It took something like two hundred years for New Hampshire to hit book 1000, another 50 or so to hit Book 2000, and only a couple decades to make it to Book 3000. They're currently in 3800 or so. These books used to be used to record just deeds and mortgages, but now there's every manner of trivial document in there.
* Not the statutes themselves, but the book of bills that passed in a given legislative session.
And don't use Google, who fed the IP information to the police.* That seems to be the key here; without an ability to link the GMail account to an IP address in the first place, they never would have found a physical location at which to look for a specific person or a car.
* GMail headers, last I checked, do not contain this information. Some webmail providers add an X-Originating-IP header, e.g. Hotmail, but Google doesn't.
Please learn the difference between "13% of people lie" ("1 in 8 Take Fake Phone Calls") and "people are lying 13% of the time" before posting any more articles about statistics.
Indeed! A person who was skillfully using two phones at once and didn't cause an an accident is certainly the "poster-child for why cell phone use in cars should be banned." Not causing an accident is clearly evidence of how, um, accident-prone cell phone use while driving makes people!
...activists have several ongoing legal battles concerning this nonsense. Here is the blog of one activist who has been fighting a similar charge in court for a while. His blog is also following a bill we have in the N.H. Legislature to fix the wiretapping law here. Slashdot reported on this case too, New Hampshire activists who were charged in Massachusetts and recently exonerated.
I don't know how bad it is in the U.K. yet, but I read almost daily about arrests for things "I would never have expected" over here in the land-of-the-free United States.
Is this the organization that collects the royalties, quietly "notifies" the artist of the collection in a manner that the artist is almost sure not to find, waits some statutory limit like 2 or 3 years, then keeps the money for themselves? I seem to remember reading about a scandal involving this practice a few years back.
That some people may think their connection is slower than it "should be" because they're doing the calculations based on the binary system rather than SI. Just like how you plug in a 1.5T disk and it shows up as "1.4T" or "1.3T" in some OSes, because the OS is measuring the HD capacity in 1024-based units whereas the manufacturer used 1000-based units.
When watching this fight ensue, just remember that this is the organization that has spent the past 15-20 years fighting "piracy" claiming to be standing up for the rights of their artists.
So this storiy is basically a tacit admission either that:---
Blackberry and Facebook are doing realtime or near-realtime surveillance of users and sending suspicious information to the British police; or
The British police are capable of, and are, listening in on Blackberry or Facebook* without the co-operation of these corporationsi i.e., they're surveilling network traffic or similar. Facebook is entirely conducted through HTTPS nowadays, so if this be the case, that the bobbies can listen in is an even more significant revelation.
* This conclusion wouldn't hold of course if the police are merely trolling through what people post in public on Facebook, which is entirely a possibility considering how ignorant many people are about discretion and privacy.
Try actually reading the article you linked to.
Just like megabytes, this is yet another prefix that gets used differently depending on context and can confuse people. The Wikipedia article even has references if you really feel like having an attention span past the first paragraph of an article today.