The electoral college system was instituted because the Founders didn't want a democracy. The idea is that government should be of the people, not by the people. There was also a much stronger idea of the individual states as entities in their own right. `The United States' was once a plural...
Originally Senators were selected by their states' legislatures, not by popular vote. The idea is that the Representatives would represent the people, but the Senators--an older and wiser group--would represent the states themselves. The reason for the electoral college is that it enabled the states, not the people, to select the president.
And electoral votes are allocated on the basis of population--they more-or-less reflect the distribution of the popular vote. Only once in more than 200 years have they disagreed. And those who think the the college keeps third parties down are more than stupid. What keeps third parties down is the fundamentally dual nature of almost every issue, and the fact that single-issue voting is incorrect. An official will decide many issues--one votes for the cadidate who most nearly matches one's own opinion. All parties try to maximise the number of people willing to vote for them--if there is a party A with 40% of the vote, then party B will be its polar opposite, in order to get that other 60%. When the majority of the people agree on an issue, then so too will the parties, for the most part.
This is why the two big parties--as well as Nader's Greens--are flip sides of the same authoritarian coin: the populace likes telling others what to do, and is willing ot be told what to do. It's who does the telling they care about. Most people are stupid, selfish sheep. They will vote to kill their neighbour if it enriches them (= voting socialist; rob the rich and give to the poor!), to pry in their neighbour's bedroom (= voting far-right; husbands and wives cannot do as they consent), to placing their security in the hands of an unworkable bureaucracy (= voting far-left). They care little for their own liberties and not a bit for anyone else's.
The situation is really quite hopeless. Rule of one fails because the one is selfish. Rule of the few fails because the few are selfish. Rule of many fails because many are selfish. Rule of all fails because all are selfish.
The Crusades were not so much about conversion or about slaughtering infidels, as they were about retaking land from said infidels--land which had been Christian since about 70. And, in reality, it was a way for a warlike people to expend their energies. Like all wars, religion di not cause it; religion was its excuse.
Yeah, but this is the same country that is a veritable police state, in which you can be held without trial or any public notice for up to something like three weeks, in which the death penalty, while rare, is also carried out in secret--often the first notice the family gets is when they are requested to pick up the cremated remains. Also a country which just in the last few months got around to criminalising child porn, of all things! Not exactly my idea of a great place.
Bleacch. No thanks; I'll take the US or even Europe any day.
I cannot believe this AC was modded up--hopefully his puerile comments have been modded back down and y'all need never see his mindless natterings.
He compared single-sex schooling to single-race schooling. This demonstrated a masterful ability to ignore what I wrote: that men and women enjoy the benefits of a single-sex education. Segregated schooling was all about public school funds going to rich white schools and not to black schools, and about seperating the races because they were somehow 'bad' for one another. Complete and utter bovine excrement, of course--race means nothing.
OTOH, same-sex schooling is not about discrimination at all. It's about having a hoice to go to a private institution, one which will better support one's educational goals. Men do better; women do better. Contrast this with segragation, in which whites were better off and blacks were mistreated. No-one is forced into a same-sex school; it is of one's volition. And no-one has a right to force a private institution to accept him or her.
Women's colleges fight just as hard as men's colleges to prevent integration of the sexes. Men and women are different, unlike blacks and whites, and men and women tend to distract one another from their studies. Students do perform better in single-sex schools--a large number of them, at the very least.
It's about freedom, folks. The freedom to choose one's circumstances. Why would a man want to go to a school which would hate him? Why would a woman want to go to a school which would hate her? There are more than enough alternatives; once again, it is unlike segregation, in which public institutions offered no widely-used alternative. Blacks were subjugated under that system; with same-sex eduation, both men and women are better off.
I went to co-ed institutions for my entire academic career, of course, like most people. My brothers, OTOH, went to a Jesuit high school--they enjoyed it. I know several men and women who went to some of the few same-sex colleges left--they all much preferred them to the alternatives.
That is why the GPL should only cover statically linked libraries. Anything else is IMHO fair game. And yes, I am aware of why it takes the approach it does--fear of proprietary wrappers. But that does not bother me too much. If there is a proprietary wrapper around a dynamically loadable GPLed library, then the user can a) use the GPLed library--which is fine or b) pay for and use the proprietary wrapper, which adds functionality. He's paying for added functionality.
This is close to the BSD ideal, except that under the BSD license the whole thing can be one monolithic binary--I can get A for free, and tinker with the source, or pay for either A' or A'' and not have any source, but have added functionality.
I do think that Stallman's original reaction was a tad incorrect, though. He could have argued, not that source should be free, but that source should come with every product. For example, were I to buy MS Word, I would get the source. I would be free to modify/correct that source. I would be free to give that modified source to other owners of said source. I would not be able to give it to those who had not paid for it. This would have enabled the good things he wanted, allowed sharing, but at the same time protected the legitimate intellectual property rights--and the ability to make money therefrom--of the code developers.
What's your point? Perh. Bush was socially inept, or perhaps he thought that a woman could be objective.
Ask anyone who has gone to a same-sec school--the bonding there is incredible. All-girls schools and all-boys schools are excellent for many students, from elementary school to college. When one sex or another (usually women, but sometimes men) forces its way in, the social climate changes for the worse. Why exactly do you think all-male and all-female schools resist integration so? It's not because they hate the other sex--it's because they enjoy the atmoosphere they have.
A guy can love his wife but want to go drinking with his buddies. A woman can love her husband but want to talk with her friends. Or the man talk with his friends while his wife goes drinking with her buddies--whatever. And people can be quite amicable to the opposite sex but prefer to study with their own.
Note: I am not the poster to whom the below was directed...
Do you still keep your slide-rule around, because these pesky calculators of today just don't cut it?
I took the SAT for years in high school, from before they allowed calculators to after. The first year they allowed calculators I brought a slide rule instead, just to make it interesting. I got a better score with it than I did with the calculator.
Slide rules were laid out for calculation, not for arithmetic: you performed one operation, then flipped the rule over and performed the next, then flipped it over again and performed the next. Math tends to follow certain patterns in calculations, and the slide rule's design took advantage of it. Thus one was able to get the answer faster and more easily. Not to mention that the rule familiarised one with logarithms. Or that it was a Really Cool Thing.
Abortion is quite controversial. If one considers it murder, than it is a crime against liberty. If one does not, then it is a crime against liberty to prevent abortion. Browne's position is that it is not a federal issue and therefore should not be addressed at the federal level.
I think that abortion is murder, but I recognise that many disagree.
Communism is Socialism, and Socialism is Communism. Look at the historical development of Socialist parties and that sort of thing. They are equivalent in policy and are equivalently wrong. The fact that the Socialists have spent a century claiming not to be Communists does not make it so; if it qucks like a duck, looks like a duck, walks like a duck &c.
Socialism is wrong and does nto work. It has damaged Europe and the US; Europe has done bette because i has a greater cultural tradition to draw on, but even it is falling. The US is in trouble because of it, and yet we continue to export that venomous philosophy. We are not a free market, and we are not capitalist. We are a social democracy.
Look at what a majority of people feel to be a major issue: prescription drugs. WTF? What will next year's issue be--shoes? Pr0n magazines? Free net connexions for the indigent? It's bread and circuses time, folks...
Bush is no good, Gore is awful and Nader would destroy this country. Browne's policies are excellent, but he will not be elected.
I don't vote though, not out of laziness but out of conviction. I disagree with self-government in general and I disagree with our government in particular. To vote would be to betray that which I believe, and I will not do it.
Actually, registration could serve a useful purpose to us gun owners, if it could be guaranteed that confiscation would not follow. But it cannot be guaranteed; even an amendment to our Constitution has not protected us.
If every gun were registered along with its ballistic characteristics in a big ol' database, it would then be possible to determine, to some degree, which guns were likely to have been used in a murder. This would simplify the job of detecting &c.
But as long as there are tyrants wishing to deprive us, this cannot be. And there will always be that sort of sub-rational twit in this world.
Well, not quite--although it can seem that way. Basically the weirdness boils down to this: I trade you three chickens for one cow. I am better off, my by own standards, because I have a cow; you are better off, by your standards, because you have three chickens. We're both better off an richer--we created value in our transaction. It's an odd thought, and one that took me quite some time to wrap my head around.
Pyramid schemes don't work because eventually value stops being pumped in at the lower levels. But in an economy it is constantly being pumped in. I work a certain amount each day because it is worth that much money to give up that much of my free time--I feel better off for it, and IBM feel better for utilising my labour. I then spend that money on various goods--I prefer the goods to the money, which I had preferred to my free time, yet the sellers prefer the money to their goods. They in turn use their money to purchase other goods. We all consume our goods (read books, eat food, hang art on the walls &c.) and, desiring more, repeat the cycle. We are all better off than before--no-one loses. It's not a zero-sum game.
But yes, it is really very odd until one grasps it. Can't say that I entirely have, myself.
Predominantly in poor schools. Race is not an issue--it is, as it ever has been, a class issue. The dupes are the racists on both sides who want it to be a race issue.
Nobody cares much about violence among the lower classes because one can show that certain kinds of violence have always been common amongst them--just as certain kinds of violence have been common amongst the upper classes and no-one cares much about that either. It is when the middle classes--traditionally, the most contented and least violent and criminal--see an increase that there is an issue.
The upper and the lower classes have always been violent, immoral and criminal. It is when the middle class goes the same way that there is cause for concern.
Not that the middle class is much better; it lacks the style of the upper and the honesty of the lower...
The Jewish ghetto in Warsaw managed to hold back the Germans for quite some time, very successfully, with no more than handguns and perh. a few long guns. Didn't do them any good in the long run, but it worked for awhile.
Heck, I believe it was the Danish king's retainers who held off the Nazis for some time with naught but staves and swords--their guns having been confiscated--before finally being defeated. That story could be apocryphal, though.
MacAddict has the details including a shell script...
As an old Mac hand, I cannot say how wonderful it is to see a sentence like that. The thought of a Mac site with shell scripts on it is just about the best thing in recent memory.
As I was saying to some friends this weekend, the Mac vs. PC arguments often cam to stuff that was not inherently bad about the platform, but which WinDOS got wrong. So all those arguments about CLI vs. GUI didn't really hold as much water as we once thought.
I'm running Linux now, but I may have to give OS X a look...
A union is just as bad as a monopoly--it is a monopoly on labour. Screws with the economic system something fierce. They were desperately needed when the monopolists and oligopolists of the last century abused their positions. If we could dissolve the megacorps and return to a free market, we would not have any need for the unions.
Not to mention that unions are just as corrupt and self-serving as any corporation. Take a look at the performing industry for an example; to move a picture on a set takes three members of three unions! If one is to show a truck in a film, a teamster mus tbe hired to sit on his hands during filming--even if it is background and already on the street. Unions are no better than the corps. At least a corporation is honest--it wants to increase shareholder value. Unions claim to be for fairness, but really would love to get $100,000/yr. and a thirty-minute break every hour for every janitor and machinist.
Don't deceive yourself--no-one in this world is pure. Not you, not me, not Bush, not Gore, not Nader, not corporations and not unions.
Actually, yes. If one can afford a weapon it is my belief that one should be able to purchase it, if one can convince someone to sell it. So if I can form a consortium to buy a single ack-ack, then we deserve to have it. Won't do us a whole lot of good, but...
Well, insofar as CDE works at all, they're right; AFAIK the GNOME and KDE apps have different (better, more featureful...) ways of doings things. And of course one would need to install their libraries for them to work--they would not work with solely CDE installed.
But why oh why would one wish to run CDE? It's ugly. It is painful to use. It does not offer intelligent functionality. It has very little point that I can see. It was folly to begin with and has remained true to its roots. Bury it, and let it rot in peace.
I'm an American, and when I was in France I made sure I had some rudimentary French. I knew enough to order and pay for things. Had a great time--the French are wonderful people.
When I was in Mexico, in a tourist town where everyone spoke English, I made sure I had some rudimentary Spanish. Som of my traveling companions thought it a waste of time, but it is my opinion that everyone appreciates an effort to speak in his language.
When I was in England I did my best to speak quietly and not play the part of the loud American tourist-buffoon. I'll admit that I learned no Flemish when in Belgium--I did not have time to find any resources before my trip. Fortunately the Flemish are a decent bunch who happen to be polyglots, and everything worked very well.
It's amazing how quickly one can begin to pick up a language if one wishes to.
My Linux usability tools are fvwm2, vi, mutt and abook. KDE and Gnome sit on my machine, but only because I don't need the space yet.
Re:Two schools of thought
on
Think Unix
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· Score: 2
Unix wizards do not oppose simplification because it devalues their efforts; they oppose it because they have learned the value of complexity. One can simply do more given more options. I can customise my desktop to a much greater extent with fvwm2 than I can with Windows. I can fiddle with stuff to my heart's content. I cannot do that with a simplified tool because many of my favourite twiddly bits will have been removed.
BTW, don't you love English? `Will have been removed' is such a nice long verb...
I'm just curious--did you get sick of the character assassination of Dan Quayle? I do not agree with much of what he says--he's too authoritarian in many ways for me--but he was enver the dim bulb that he was reported as. Gore has made a career out of having his gaffes under-reported. There was a great bit I recall seeing once--perh. in the National Review--which demonstrated that he may very well have had more moronicisms than Quayle.
Somewhat recently there was a great piece which showed how he has changed from someone supporting tobacco and guns and opposing abortion to just the opposite. The man's an opportunist and an authoritarian one at that. Remember his wife...
Me, I don't vote. It's a stupid way to select leaders. The majority don't know any more and are no more noble than a minority. Most people are twits. It's bread & circuses time folks.
And in such a world, politically dominated by the big money corporations and run exclusively for their benefit, we'd simply take up arms and overthrow them. First against the wall and all that sort of thing.
Oh, I forgot--we're not allowed to have weapons. Well, overthrowing the Corporate Hegemony with a fruitbat probably won't work too well. Guess I'll continue getting shafted. Might as well lay back and enjoy it...
A parent should not be over-ridden. If some moron of a parent wishes to shield his kids from the net then that is his right. Pity for them, though. Once you open up the `we know better than do you' gate you'll find it awfully difficult to close it.
And why should any course require use of the net? Read Silicon Snake Oil and Stoll's other book for explanations of why education needs to get rid of its tech fascination and get back to teaching.
They may say regardless of age, but try getting any of the signatories on that to give an eight year old boy access to the stack of Playboys behind the counter...
The fact is that children are subordniate to their parents. If a parent wishes the kid to have access then the kid should have it. If not, then not.
This does not justify filtering, though. As has been pointed out, there are several solutions. One is to require a parent to be present in the library. Another--IMHO the best--is simply to turn the monitors towards the librarians. Solves the problem quite cheaply.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, now; Gore hasn't been declared the winner yet...
Originally Senators were selected by their states' legislatures, not by popular vote. The idea is that the Representatives would represent the people, but the Senators--an older and wiser group--would represent the states themselves. The reason for the electoral college is that it enabled the states, not the people, to select the president.
And electoral votes are allocated on the basis of population--they more-or-less reflect the distribution of the popular vote. Only once in more than 200 years have they disagreed. And those who think the the college keeps third parties down are more than stupid. What keeps third parties down is the fundamentally dual nature of almost every issue, and the fact that single-issue voting is incorrect. An official will decide many issues--one votes for the cadidate who most nearly matches one's own opinion. All parties try to maximise the number of people willing to vote for them--if there is a party A with 40% of the vote, then party B will be its polar opposite, in order to get that other 60%. When the majority of the people agree on an issue, then so too will the parties, for the most part.
This is why the two big parties--as well as Nader's Greens--are flip sides of the same authoritarian coin: the populace likes telling others what to do, and is willing ot be told what to do. It's who does the telling they care about. Most people are stupid, selfish sheep. They will vote to kill their neighbour if it enriches them (= voting socialist; rob the rich and give to the poor!), to pry in their neighbour's bedroom (= voting far-right; husbands and wives cannot do as they consent), to placing their security in the hands of an unworkable bureaucracy (= voting far-left). They care little for their own liberties and not a bit for anyone else's.
The situation is really quite hopeless. Rule of one fails because the one is selfish. Rule of the few fails because the few are selfish. Rule of many fails because many are selfish. Rule of all fails because all are selfish.
The Crusades were not so much about conversion or about slaughtering infidels, as they were about retaking land from said infidels--land which had been Christian since about 70. And, in reality, it was a way for a warlike people to expend their energies. Like all wars, religion di not cause it; religion was its excuse.
Bleacch. No thanks; I'll take the US or even Europe any day.
He compared single-sex schooling to single-race schooling. This demonstrated a masterful ability to ignore what I wrote: that men and women enjoy the benefits of a single-sex education. Segregated schooling was all about public school funds going to rich white schools and not to black schools, and about seperating the races because they were somehow 'bad' for one another. Complete and utter bovine excrement, of course--race means nothing.
OTOH, same-sex schooling is not about discrimination at all. It's about having a hoice to go to a private institution, one which will better support one's educational goals. Men do better; women do better. Contrast this with segragation, in which whites were better off and blacks were mistreated. No-one is forced into a same-sex school; it is of one's volition. And no-one has a right to force a private institution to accept him or her.
Women's colleges fight just as hard as men's colleges to prevent integration of the sexes. Men and women are different, unlike blacks and whites, and men and women tend to distract one another from their studies. Students do perform better in single-sex schools--a large number of them, at the very least.
It's about freedom, folks. The freedom to choose one's circumstances. Why would a man want to go to a school which would hate him? Why would a woman want to go to a school which would hate her? There are more than enough alternatives; once again, it is unlike segregation, in which public institutions offered no widely-used alternative. Blacks were subjugated under that system; with same-sex eduation, both men and women are better off.
I went to co-ed institutions for my entire academic career, of course, like most people. My brothers, OTOH, went to a Jesuit high school--they enjoyed it. I know several men and women who went to some of the few same-sex colleges left--they all much preferred them to the alternatives.
This is close to the BSD ideal, except that under the BSD license the whole thing can be one monolithic binary--I can get A for free, and tinker with the source, or pay for either A' or A'' and not have any source, but have added functionality.
I do think that Stallman's original reaction was a tad incorrect, though. He could have argued, not that source should be free, but that source should come with every product. For example, were I to buy MS Word, I would get the source. I would be free to modify/correct that source. I would be free to give that modified source to other owners of said source. I would not be able to give it to those who had not paid for it. This would have enabled the good things he wanted, allowed sharing, but at the same time protected the legitimate intellectual property rights--and the ability to make money therefrom--of the code developers.
But that's not how things turned out.
Ask anyone who has gone to a same-sec school--the bonding there is incredible. All-girls schools and all-boys schools are excellent for many students, from elementary school to college. When one sex or another (usually women, but sometimes men) forces its way in, the social climate changes for the worse. Why exactly do you think all-male and all-female schools resist integration so? It's not because they hate the other sex--it's because they enjoy the atmoosphere they have.
A guy can love his wife but want to go drinking with his buddies. A woman can love her husband but want to talk with her friends. Or the man talk with his friends while his wife goes drinking with her buddies--whatever. And people can be quite amicable to the opposite sex but prefer to study with their own.
Do you still keep your slide-rule around, because these pesky calculators of today just don't cut it?
I took the SAT for years in high school, from before they allowed calculators to after. The first year they allowed calculators I brought a slide rule instead, just to make it interesting. I got a better score with it than I did with the calculator.
Slide rules were laid out for calculation, not for arithmetic: you performed one operation, then flipped the rule over and performed the next, then flipped it over again and performed the next. Math tends to follow certain patterns in calculations, and the slide rule's design took advantage of it. Thus one was able to get the answer faster and more easily. Not to mention that the rule familiarised one with logarithms. Or that it was a Really Cool Thing.
Still have it somewhere in its leather scabbard.
I think that abortion is murder, but I recognise that many disagree.
Socialism is wrong and does nto work. It has damaged Europe and the US; Europe has done bette because i has a greater cultural tradition to draw on, but even it is falling. The US is in trouble because of it, and yet we continue to export that venomous philosophy. We are not a free market, and we are not capitalist. We are a social democracy.
Look at what a majority of people feel to be a major issue: prescription drugs. WTF? What will next year's issue be--shoes? Pr0n magazines? Free net connexions for the indigent? It's bread and circuses time, folks...
Bush is no good, Gore is awful and Nader would destroy this country. Browne's policies are excellent, but he will not be elected.
I don't vote though, not out of laziness but out of conviction. I disagree with self-government in general and I disagree with our government in particular. To vote would be to betray that which I believe, and I will not do it.
If every gun were registered along with its ballistic characteristics in a big ol' database, it would then be possible to determine, to some degree, which guns were likely to have been used in a murder. This would simplify the job of detecting &c.
But as long as there are tyrants wishing to deprive us, this cannot be. And there will always be that sort of sub-rational twit in this world.
Well, not quite--although it can seem that way. Basically the weirdness boils down to this: I trade you three chickens for one cow. I am better off, my by own standards, because I have a cow; you are better off, by your standards, because you have three chickens. We're both better off an richer--we created value in our transaction. It's an odd thought, and one that took me quite some time to wrap my head around.
Pyramid schemes don't work because eventually value stops being pumped in at the lower levels. But in an economy it is constantly being pumped in. I work a certain amount each day because it is worth that much money to give up that much of my free time--I feel better off for it, and IBM feel better for utilising my labour. I then spend that money on various goods--I prefer the goods to the money, which I had preferred to my free time, yet the sellers prefer the money to their goods. They in turn use their money to purchase other goods. We all consume our goods (read books, eat food, hang art on the walls &c.) and, desiring more, repeat the cycle. We are all better off than before--no-one loses. It's not a zero-sum game.
But yes, it is really very odd until one grasps it. Can't say that I entirely have, myself.
Nobody cares much about violence among the lower classes because one can show that certain kinds of violence have always been common amongst them--just as certain kinds of violence have been common amongst the upper classes and no-one cares much about that either. It is when the middle classes--traditionally, the most contented and least violent and criminal--see an increase that there is an issue.
The upper and the lower classes have always been violent, immoral and criminal. It is when the middle class goes the same way that there is cause for concern.
Not that the middle class is much better; it lacks the style of the upper and the honesty of the lower...
Heck, I believe it was the Danish king's retainers who held off the Nazis for some time with naught but staves and swords--their guns having been confiscated--before finally being defeated. That story could be apocryphal, though.
MacAddict has the details including a shell script...
As an old Mac hand, I cannot say how wonderful it is to see a sentence like that. The thought of a Mac site with shell scripts on it is just about the best thing in recent memory.
As I was saying to some friends this weekend, the Mac vs. PC arguments often cam to stuff that was not inherently bad about the platform, but which WinDOS got wrong. So all those arguments about CLI vs. GUI didn't really hold as much water as we once thought.
I'm running Linux now, but I may have to give OS X a look...
Not to mention that unions are just as corrupt and self-serving as any corporation. Take a look at the performing industry for an example; to move a picture on a set takes three members of three unions! If one is to show a truck in a film, a teamster mus tbe hired to sit on his hands during filming--even if it is background and already on the street. Unions are no better than the corps. At least a corporation is honest--it wants to increase shareholder value. Unions claim to be for fairness, but really would love to get $100,000/yr. and a thirty-minute break every hour for every janitor and machinist.
Don't deceive yourself--no-one in this world is pure. Not you, not me, not Bush, not Gore, not Nader, not corporations and not unions.
Actually, yes. If one can afford a weapon it is my belief that one should be able to purchase it, if one can convince someone to sell it. So if I can form a consortium to buy a single ack-ack, then we deserve to have it. Won't do us a whole lot of good, but...
But why oh why would one wish to run CDE? It's ugly. It is painful to use. It does not offer intelligent functionality. It has very little point that I can see. It was folly to begin with and has remained true to its roots. Bury it, and let it rot in peace.
When I was in Mexico, in a tourist town where everyone spoke English, I made sure I had some rudimentary Spanish. Som of my traveling companions thought it a waste of time, but it is my opinion that everyone appreciates an effort to speak in his language.
When I was in England I did my best to speak quietly and not play the part of the loud American tourist-buffoon. I'll admit that I learned no Flemish when in Belgium--I did not have time to find any resources before my trip. Fortunately the Flemish are a decent bunch who happen to be polyglots, and everything worked very well.
It's amazing how quickly one can begin to pick up a language if one wishes to.
Not all of us are boors, you know.
My Linux usability tools are fvwm2, vi, mutt and abook. KDE and Gnome sit on my machine, but only because I don't need the space yet.
BTW, don't you love English? `Will have been removed' is such a nice long verb...
Somewhat recently there was a great piece which showed how he has changed from someone supporting tobacco and guns and opposing abortion to just the opposite. The man's an opportunist and an authoritarian one at that. Remember his wife...
Me, I don't vote. It's a stupid way to select leaders. The majority don't know any more and are no more noble than a minority. Most people are twits. It's bread & circuses time folks.
Oh, I forgot--we're not allowed to have weapons. Well, overthrowing the Corporate Hegemony with a fruitbat probably won't work too well. Guess I'll continue getting shafted. Might as well lay back and enjoy it...
And why should any course require use of the net? Read Silicon Snake Oil and Stoll's other book for explanations of why education needs to get rid of its tech fascination and get back to teaching.
The fact is that children are subordniate to their parents. If a parent wishes the kid to have access then the kid should have it. If not, then not.
This does not justify filtering, though. As has been pointed out, there are several solutions. One is to require a parent to be present in the library. Another--IMHO the best--is simply to turn the monitors towards the librarians. Solves the problem quite cheaply.