NOBODY who is a government employee has any business reading private facebook or emails w/o first obtaining a warrant issued by a judge, and naming the reason for the search, backed by articulatable evidence why said person is a suspect.
Get over yourself. The courts have already held that not only are facebook posts are public, but also that even deleted posts can be turned over. Besides, you agree as part of your terms of use that facebook can reveal all sorts of crap. Don't like it - don't use facebook.
And having at least a dozen other students posting comments shows the posts in question were far from a "private communication" (who knows how many other students viewed the posts w/o commenting).
I was about to side with the kids on this until I read TFA. They called him a pedophile... screw these kids, expel 'em!
2 things you never throw around lightly: Pedophile & Rape.
If you read the other article, they not only called the teacher a pedophile, but also a rapist and bipolar.
The sort of damage that could do to a teacher's career is unbelievable. And the parents are saying "my children shouldn't be punished so harshly." And threatening to sue the school.
Maybe the parents need to do some parenting. Or get a dose of their own medicine (set up a fake facebook page accusing them of being a pedophile and rapist, and see their reaction).
And maybe a more appropriate punishment is NOT suspending kids, but making them stay LONGER in school. Wash some of the graffiti off the lockers, etc. I could never figure out how suspending a kid was a punishment.
Princpal: "You skipped school yesterday, so we're suspending you today"
Student: "So what you're saying is I have permission to skip school today too? Works for me!"
... and how is your post related to the previous dozen posts? Oh, wait, you're one of the "threads must not deviate from the parent topic" nazis:-)
Seriously though, the reason the buttons were removed was because they wanted to make it more "touch-friendly" - having the two buttons so close together was a problem, and the obvious answers (put more space between, or move one to the left) eluded them, and "why bother with desktop and laptop users, we want to INN-OWE-V8!"
The end result is a LOT of wasted screen real estate. I'm sticking with KDE, and from the comments, there are a lot of people who will be dropping GNOME. Sure, you can change the defaults, but defaults should make sense, and this one doesn't, any more than making the cancel button the first one does. No matter, whether it's gnome or unity they both suck.
Been years since I bought a blank CD or DVD. I have about 30 DVDs left. At current burn rate this will last me a couple of years.
Unless this is really atypical behaviour, they're not getting a lot of money from blank discs.
Which is why they want to get a constant stream of revenue from your internet connection. It's even better than selling you a CD, since they get a constant revenue stream, with no production cost to them.
It's much less than 10% of the world who are on facebook. Throw in all the people with multiple accounts, the accounts that haven't been used in months, the accounts created to be rented out as fans at five for a penny, and the people who generate oodles of accounts so they can get more points in their games, and it's doubtful that the number of unique facebook users is more than 1% or 2% of the world.
And we can divide THOSE into 3 groups - people bored out of their skulls looking to waste some time, people so insecure that facebook is their ego booster, and social marketing types who want you to believe that a facebook presence isn't fools gold.
Download geeklog - you'll get flat, nested, threaded, printable, notifications of responses to your comments, and the ability to edit the original comment to append new text (handy when you made a typo and don't want to start a flame war or look retarded:-)
The "edit comment" is configurable by the site admin - off, or up to x minutes after the original post. Users see the added text in a different font, along with a note saying the comment was edited. No confusion.
They won't fix the lack of threading because threading and/or nesting requires more server resources. Better database design. The ability to show nested threads in a screen more than x pixels wide. Facebooks' design is still stuck in the last century, both in terms of layout (fixed width) and implementation (flat comments).
i wonder why you don't have a facebook account?
everyone is on this.
Since i use facebook i found lost relatives, family, old friends.
Facebook helped me a lot.
So would winning the lottery.
Ever wonder why they were "lost" in the first place?
People change, people move on, people develop different interests. Limiting "contact" to 75 words or less posts is a good idea, because anything more, and you'd realize WHY you "lost" them in the first place, or vice versa. Sort of like the couple who got divorced after the kids moved out because now they actually had time to talk to each other...
However, it's actually a HUGE incentive for sites to start using it. They will get loads of free traffic as people post link to the story to their Facebook wall.
No they won't. All the evidence indicates that almost nobody actually READS most facebook posts. Look at the woman with over 1100 "friends" who posted her intent to commit suicide, and nobody did anything. The few people who actually read it (lets face it, do YOU read everything that's posted?) did nothing, since facebook is considered "junk food for the brain". Actually, more like "junk food lite."
In addition, if you use multiple monitors, this feature rocks - you can drag a maximized window from one monitor to another and keep it maximized. This may sound trivial, however if you used multiple monitors in XP you would know how annoying it is to have to minimize or restore a window, then drag, then maximize.
KDE has had that as one of the settings (Configure Desktop > Look and feel > Window behavior > Moving > Allow moving and resizing of maximized Windows) for ages. Another example of Microsoft "usability innovation" that's been around for years.
That doesn't mean it makes sense to maximize everything when you've got a monitor with a resolution of 1920x1080 or higher.
There are plenty of reasons to use applications maximized. Here are 10 off the top of my head:
1. tail -f/var/log/apache2/error_log - saves using the scrollback buffer, especially when there are lots of errors, long query strings, etc.,
2 code editing using a real tab instead of 2 or 4 spaces, and an editor that supports multiple views into a file, and multiple windows inside the editor itself. I've sometimes stretched this across TWO 1920x1200 screens;
3 web sites that aren't designed by morons back in the previous century to have a fixed
4 spreadsheets
5 graphical work, esp. on images zoomed in at 800% or more
6 various IDEs (such as eclipse)
7 games
8 file browsers (esp. with previews)
9 PIMs (not everyone uses gmail or hotmail or another webmail program)
10 table dumps
The only truths I've found are that the more screen space you have, the more uses you'll find for it, and that you eventually always want one more screen,
I'm not sure why they are spending so much time on Linux, when it is used so little for actual desktop work. This site should really set its focus on OS X which certified Unix (unlike Linux which is just a non-standard proprietary clone).
By your same logic, they should also devote more time to SCO products...
Just have a policy of deleting all logs after 24 hours. That gives enough time to block spammers by IP without also giving much of a window for courts to breach anonymity.
We have a cable / satellite duopoly for broadcast TV (nobody uses free OTA here; reception is nonexistent for most)
Please speak for yourself. I use the same rabbit-ears that I had for my tube TV on my plasma, and the picture quality is excellent at 1920x1080 (better tna my neighbor who's on cable) because the signal isn't recompressed, etc.
I'm surprised that more people don 't do this. Let's face it, if rabbit-ears don't work you can get a pretty good antenna, tower, rotor, etc., for far less than 1 year's "digital subscription".. Sure, you won't have 500 channels, but those 500 channels are really 57 channels and nothing on, and 443 channels that are repeats.
I've replied to plenty of the so-called points you raised. You failed on every one of them. You don't know your own country's recent history, you purposefully left out the fact that the woman in question in Gatineau was dying of Alzheimers' and it was her relatives, not her, who were b*tching and moaning - she was beyond language. You have no clue as to what we gave up in NAFTA - for example, we can't put an export tax on oil and use the price differential to encourage industry to set up here. We had a sweetheart deal under the old Auto Pact, which NAFTA screwed up. With only a few exceptions, we can't ban substances that aren't banned in the US - we had to continue to allow n additive - MMT- that was harmful - Ethyl Corp. vs Canada, thanks to NAFTA, while we couldn't go after Imperial Tobacco in US courts for the billions they made in enabling illegal tobacco smuggling.
You didn't even know what the oil patch was - you thought it was the tar sands. A quick google of "canada oil patch" would have fixed that, but anyone commenting on Canada-US trade relations should already be familiar with the term, as well as Canada's position as the #1 supplier of petro products to the US (Mexico is #2).
My original point was that health-care services in both english and french are guaranteed in quebec. They have been for decades. Anyone can find a few times when policy hasn't been correctly applied (or do you really believe that Quebec should be held to a higher standard - absolute perfection - than anywhere else?).
So many of your arguments are so uninformed (and some of them have no factual basis), that it's not possible to debate the points with you - you simply don't know enough to form, never mind defend, a cogent argument (which is why you dragged Alzheimers patients into the whole discussion, I guess - it's not like they're going to express a contrary - or any - opinion).
As for speaking french, you made it clear that you think that people should only try when they're not the majority.
Here's your actual words:
However, living in a predominately french speaking area? Sure, you should try!
Your posts are the same warmed-over drivel that we see on both sides of the language divide, perpetrating isolated incidents to excuse slovenly behaviour. The whole gatineau hospital thing is dead and gone - give it up! It's like your "Hydro Quebec" thing - anyone who has a problem will just hit "0" to get an operator, same as anywhere else. Or as Pierre Trudeau said when people in the rest of the country were upset with bilingual packaging - "If it bothers you that much, just turn the damn box of cornflakes around!"
Another inanity:
You do know what racism is, yes? Making assumptions about a person, based upon their physical/cultural characteristics, yes?
No, that's stereotyping. Racism is actively discriminating against, denigrating, or otherwise mistreating someone because of those stereotypes.
But back to the old woman in Gatineau... she was not denied health care because of her language. She did not receive any less quality of services because she didn't speak french. To the contrary, it was her relatives who complained because THEY weren't being dealt with in english. The woman in question died of Alzheimers - it's a safe bet she didn't know what was going on in *either* language. This is the same sort of stupidity as the case where a french-speaking Quebecer "wasn't allowed to die in french" because she received care in a hospital where some of the attendants didn't have a "good-enough" grasp of french as far as her relatives were concerned.
The real point, which you overlooked, and which I originally made, was that unlike the rest of Canada, Quebec is making sure that future generations will be able to function in both official languages. Being able to postpone the onset of dementia is one benefit.
The key may be something called cognitive reserve. Learning and speaking two languages requires the brain to work harder, which helps keep it nimble. It's the same use-it-or-lose-it reasoning that underlies advice to do crossword puzzles and to continue to learn new skills throughout life — the idea is to help the brain create and maintain more neural connections. Brains with more cognitive reserve — and therefore more flexibility and executive control — are thought to be better able to compensate for the loss of neurons associated with Alzheimer's.
Another recent study backed up the connection between bilingualism and executive control. The study, which involved babies who were exposed to two languages from birth, found that bilingual infants don't confuse their two languages because they learn very early to pay attention better
Anyone can learn a second (or third, 4th, etc) language at any age, unless they already have too much brain deterioration. Or they don't want to make the effort (and there's people like that on both sides - proud of "not knowing").
Now when you consider that what we call "English" is really a bastardized version of French dating back to the Norman Conquest, and that the two languages have been pretty much parallel for almost 1,000 years, what's the big deal about learning it anyway?
Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. The same crap went on a second time with the Americans under the opening up of the oil patch, and a third time under NAFTA where we guaranteed them a minimum of 59% of our production no matter what.
And yes, it's as valid to blame American business interests for maintaining a corrupt local government, same as it was for the Banana Wars, or more recently, the Shah of Iran and their "best buddy" Sadaam Hussein while it was profitable for them.
Do you know that due to recent fervor over language recently, statements like 'press 9 for english' has disappeared from many state run menu items? Like Hydro Quebec? Amusingly, you can still press '9' to get english, but the prompt stating so is gone! Do you know that many government departments now refuse to speak english, even if they can? Due to their managers ordering them not to speak engish?
Of course it's gone. You no longer use the keypad to select language. You follow the voice prompts. The computer will detect if you're speaking english. This isn't the 20th century any more:-)
And yes, it was one hospital worker. I have NEVER had a problem receiving services in english. Then again, I'm comfortable with both languages, so it's never been an issue. Most of the time, if the person is french, I'll switch to french anyway - and they'll keep on in english as per hospital policy.
Well, regardless, living in Quebec does not mean you should speak french. However, living in a predominately french speaking area? Sure, you should try! However, if you can't -- you shouldn't be treated rudely.
You should make the attempt because you would want the same consideration shown to you. Doesn't matter who the majority in an area is, you're still going to have some dealings with the other language, so it's only polite to learn both, no matter which side of the linguistic divide you hale from. Your prescription of "if it's a predominantly french area" makes no more sense than for the french to only speak english when in a predominantly english area. That's how this mess continues to simmer for some people - they simply don't want to make the effort - and a LARGE chunk of those are english quebecers who have lived their whole lives here and don't have a clue.
Really now, even the Queen of England speaks french!
Besides, if you don't speak the language, you miss the good stuff in "Bon Cop, Bad Cop" and "Les Bougon" - subtitles are NOT a substitute.
I didn't realize you could set a "real" domain name to 127.0.0.1
Very cute.
Try http://www.neutrality.org:8080/ - one of the "alternate ports" (along with 8000). Obviously not set up too well, since it requires the www prefix. Traceroute says it's a dsl line with ameritech (SBC).
Slashdot Mirror
The line is pretty obvious:
NOBODY who is a government employee has any business reading private facebook or emails w/o first obtaining a warrant issued by a judge, and naming the reason for the search, backed by articulatable evidence why said person is a suspect.
Get over yourself. The courts have already held that not only are facebook posts are public, but also that even deleted posts can be turned over. Besides, you agree as part of your terms of use that facebook can reveal all sorts of crap. Don't like it - don't use facebook.
And having at least a dozen other students posting comments shows the posts in question were far from a "private communication" (who knows how many other students viewed the posts w/o commenting).
I was about to side with the kids on this until I read TFA. They called him a pedophile... screw these kids, expel 'em! 2 things you never throw around lightly: Pedophile & Rape.
If you read the other article, they not only called the teacher a pedophile, but also a rapist and bipolar.
The sort of damage that could do to a teacher's career is unbelievable. And the parents are saying "my children shouldn't be punished so harshly." And threatening to sue the school.
Maybe the parents need to do some parenting. Or get a dose of their own medicine (set up a fake facebook page accusing them of being a pedophile and rapist, and see their reaction).
And maybe a more appropriate punishment is NOT suspending kids, but making them stay LONGER in school. Wash some of the graffiti off the lockers, etc. I could never figure out how suspending a kid was a punishment.
Princpal: "You skipped school yesterday, so we're suspending you today"
Student: "So what you're saying is I have permission to skip school today too? Works for me!"
And how is this releated to the story?
... and how is your post related to the previous dozen posts? Oh, wait, you're one of the "threads must not deviate from the parent topic" nazis :-)
Seriously though, the reason the buttons were removed was because they wanted to make it more "touch-friendly" - having the two buttons so close together was a problem, and the obvious answers (put more space between, or move one to the left) eluded them, and "why bother with desktop and laptop users, we want to INN-OWE-V8!"
The end result is a LOT of wasted screen real estate. I'm sticking with KDE, and from the comments, there are a lot of people who will be dropping GNOME. Sure, you can change the defaults, but defaults should make sense, and this one doesn't, any more than making the cancel button the first one does. No matter, whether it's gnome or unity they both suck.
My mistake - the levy is on ALL CDs, not just the "audio" format ones.
Been years since I bought a blank CD or DVD. I have about 30 DVDs left. At current burn rate this will last me a couple of years. Unless this is really atypical behaviour, they're not getting a lot of money from blank discs.
Which is why they want to get a constant stream of revenue from your internet connection. It's even better than selling you a CD, since they get a constant revenue stream, with no production cost to them.
And yes, you get html preview, and you can change the set of tags that are allowed to regular posters, and a more permissive set to the admin.
This is double-dipping.
Better idea - why not make it a levy on iPods and other music players. Why should I have to pay a royalty when I don't download music?
And we can divide THOSE into 3 groups - people bored out of their skulls looking to waste some time, people so insecure that facebook is their ego booster, and social marketing types who want you to believe that a facebook presence isn't fools gold.
The "edit comment" is configurable by the site admin - off, or up to x minutes after the original post. Users see the added text in a different font, along with a note saying the comment was edited. No confusion.
Usenet readers do a better job.
i wonder why you don't have a facebook account? everyone is on this. Since i use facebook i found lost relatives, family, old friends. Facebook helped me a lot.
So would winning the lottery.
Ever wonder why they were "lost" in the first place?
People change, people move on, people develop different interests. Limiting "contact" to 75 words or less posts is a good idea, because anything more, and you'd realize WHY you "lost" them in the first place, or vice versa. Sort of like the couple who got divorced after the kids moved out because now they actually had time to talk to each other ...
However, it's actually a HUGE incentive for sites to start using it. They will get loads of free traffic as people post link to the story to their Facebook wall.
No they won't. All the evidence indicates that almost nobody actually READS most facebook posts. Look at the woman with over 1100 "friends" who posted her intent to commit suicide, and nobody did anything. The few people who actually read it (lets face it, do YOU read everything that's posted?) did nothing, since facebook is considered "junk food for the brain". Actually, more like "junk food lite."
In addition, if you use multiple monitors, this feature rocks - you can drag a maximized window from one monitor to another and keep it maximized. This may sound trivial, however if you used multiple monitors in XP you would know how annoying it is to have to minimize or restore a window, then drag, then maximize.
KDE has had that as one of the settings (Configure Desktop > Look and feel > Window behavior > Moving > Allow moving and resizing of maximized Windows) for ages. Another example of Microsoft "usability innovation" that's been around for years.
That doesn't mean it makes sense to maximize everything when you've got a monitor with a resolution of 1920x1080 or higher.
There are plenty of reasons to use applications maximized. Here are 10 off the top of my head:
1. tail -f /var/log/apache2/error_log - saves using the scrollback buffer, especially when there are lots of errors, long query strings, etc.,
2 code editing using a real tab instead of 2 or 4 spaces, and an editor that supports multiple views into a file, and multiple windows inside the editor itself. I've sometimes stretched this across TWO 1920x1200 screens;
3 web sites that aren't designed by morons back in the previous century to have a fixed
4 spreadsheets
5 graphical work, esp. on images zoomed in at 800% or more
6 various IDEs (such as eclipse)
7 games
8 file browsers (esp. with previews)
9 PIMs (not everyone uses gmail or hotmail or another webmail program)
10 table dumps
The only truths I've found are that the more screen space you have, the more uses you'll find for it, and that you eventually always want one more screen,
Fortunately, there are so many other window managers that there's no need to use gnome.
Because the editors choose the shittiest submissions. (I sent a few too.)
You sent in a few of the shittiest submissions?
No wonder you're posting A.C.
I'm not sure why they are spending so much time on Linux, when it is used so little for actual desktop work. This site should really set its focus on OS X which certified Unix (unlike Linux which is just a non-standard proprietary clone).
By your same logic, they should also devote more time to SCO products ...
Just have a policy of deleting all logs after 24 hours. That gives enough time to block spammers by IP without also giving much of a window for courts to breach anonymity.
But what good is a tool that requires six fingers to use?
Considering that most people have 10 fingers, what's wrong with a tool that requires six?
Most people have 8. Those other two things are called "thumbs".
We have a cable / satellite duopoly for broadcast TV (nobody uses free OTA here; reception is nonexistent for most)
Please speak for yourself. I use the same rabbit-ears that I had for my tube TV on my plasma, and the picture quality is excellent at 1920x1080 (better tna my neighbor who's on cable) because the signal isn't recompressed, etc.
I'm surprised that more people don 't do this. Let's face it, if rabbit-ears don't work you can get a pretty good antenna, tower, rotor, etc., for far less than 1 year's "digital subscription".. Sure, you won't have 500 channels, but those 500 channels are really 57 channels and nothing on, and 443 channels that are repeats.
Stop breathing just to be on the safe side.
Are you sure this is a good id... i... *thud*
Well, if you succeed, you'll never make another bad decision ... ever!
I've replied to plenty of the so-called points you raised. You failed on every one of them. You don't know your own country's recent history, you purposefully left out the fact that the woman in question in Gatineau was dying of Alzheimers' and it was her relatives, not her, who were b*tching and moaning - she was beyond language. You have no clue as to what we gave up in NAFTA - for example, we can't put an export tax on oil and use the price differential to encourage industry to set up here. We had a sweetheart deal under the old Auto Pact, which NAFTA screwed up. With only a few exceptions, we can't ban substances that aren't banned in the US - we had to continue to allow n additive - MMT- that was harmful - Ethyl Corp. vs Canada, thanks to NAFTA, while we couldn't go after Imperial Tobacco in US courts for the billions they made in enabling illegal tobacco smuggling.
You didn't even know what the oil patch was - you thought it was the tar sands. A quick google of "canada oil patch" would have fixed that, but anyone commenting on Canada-US trade relations should already be familiar with the term, as well as Canada's position as the #1 supplier of petro products to the US (Mexico is #2).
My original point was that health-care services in both english and french are guaranteed in quebec. They have been for decades. Anyone can find a few times when policy hasn't been correctly applied (or do you really believe that Quebec should be held to a higher standard - absolute perfection - than anywhere else?).
So many of your arguments are so uninformed (and some of them have no factual basis), that it's not possible to debate the points with you - you simply don't know enough to form, never mind defend, a cogent argument (which is why you dragged Alzheimers patients into the whole discussion, I guess - it's not like they're going to express a contrary - or any - opinion).
As for speaking french, you made it clear that you think that people should only try when they're not the majority.
Here's your actual words:
However, living in a predominately french speaking area? Sure, you should try!
Your posts are the same warmed-over drivel that we see on both sides of the language divide, perpetrating isolated incidents to excuse slovenly behaviour. The whole gatineau hospital thing is dead and gone - give it up! It's like your "Hydro Quebec" thing - anyone who has a problem will just hit "0" to get an operator, same as anywhere else. Or as Pierre Trudeau said when people in the rest of the country were upset with bilingual packaging - "If it bothers you that much, just turn the damn box of cornflakes around!"
Another inanity:
You do know what racism is, yes? Making assumptions about a person, based upon their physical/cultural characteristics, yes?
No, that's stereotyping. Racism is actively discriminating against, denigrating, or otherwise mistreating someone because of those stereotypes.
But back to the old woman in Gatineau ... she was not denied health care because of her language. She did not receive any less quality of services because she didn't speak french. To the contrary, it was her relatives who complained because THEY weren't being dealt with in english. The woman in question died of Alzheimers - it's a safe bet she didn't know what was going on in *either* language. This is the same sort of stupidity as the case where a french-speaking Quebecer "wasn't allowed to die in french" because she received care in a hospital where some of the attendants didn't have a "good-enough" grasp of french as far as her relatives were concerned.
The real point, which you overlooked, and which I originally made, was that unlike the rest of Canada, Quebec is making sure that future generations will be able to function in both official languages. Being able to postpone the onset of dementia is one benefit.
Anyone can learn a second (or third, 4th, etc) language at any age, unless they already have too much brain deterioration. Or they don't want to make the effort (and there's people like that on both sides - proud of "not knowing").
Now when you consider that what we call "English" is really a bastardized version of French dating back to the Norman Conquest, and that the two languages have been pretty much parallel for almost 1,000 years, what's the big deal about learning it anyway?
And yes, it's as valid to blame American business interests for maintaining a corrupt local government, same as it was for the Banana Wars, or more recently, the Shah of Iran and their "best buddy" Sadaam Hussein while it was profitable for them.
Of course it's gone. You no longer use the keypad to select language. You follow the voice prompts. The computer will detect if you're speaking english. This isn't the 20th century any more :-)
And yes, it was one hospital worker. I have NEVER had a problem receiving services in english. Then again, I'm comfortable with both languages, so it's never been an issue. Most of the time, if the person is french, I'll switch to french anyway - and they'll keep on in english as per hospital policy.
You should make the attempt because you would want the same consideration shown to you. Doesn't matter who the majority in an area is, you're still going to have some dealings with the other language, so it's only polite to learn both, no matter which side of the linguistic divide you hale from. Your prescription of "if it's a predominantly french area" makes no more sense than for the french to only speak english when in a predominantly english area. That's how this mess continues to simmer for some people - they simply don't want to make the effort - and a LARGE chunk of those are english quebecers who have lived their whole lives here and don't have a clue.
Really now, even the Queen of England speaks french!
Besides, if you don't speak the language, you miss the good stuff in "Bon Cop, Bad Cop" and "Les Bougon" - subtitles are NOT a substitute.
I didn't realize you could set a "real" domain name to 127.0.0.1
Very cute.
Try http://www.neutrality.org:8080/ - one of the "alternate ports" (along with 8000). Obviously not set up too well, since it requires the www prefix. Traceroute says it's a dsl line with ameritech (SBC).