And tell me, how many of those 80+ million gun owners have had their phones tapped, or been stopped and searched by a police officer in a bad mood? That's just a couple of widespread abuses we know happen today. Obviously there have been smaller scale but much more damaging instances where government has far exceeded its constitutional authority in the recent past. If we look back a bit further to how US citizens of Japanese descent were treated during WWII, we can see how much those constitutional safeguards are worth when they really matter.
Meanwhile, remind me of the last time your well-regulated militia rose up and toppled a government that was waging illegal wars, at a cost of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of others, and of course many billions of taxpayers' dollars? In fact, remind me of the last time your 80+ million gun owners rose up to defend anything at all?
Unless you contend that the above examples are wrong and the rights supposedly guaranteed by your constitution have never been violated by the Federal Government, that tells you what your 80+ million gun owners are really worth — other than a great sound-bite and winning a game of my dick's bigger than yours is, of course.
The Constitution (more properly, the Bill of Rights) is not a grant of rights; rather, it forbids the government from impinging on the specified rights. That is, these rights exist by default, not at the pleasure of the state.
Touché.
I retract my previous post, and submit the following alternative, the significance of which is exactly the same in the context of this discussion:
As opposed to the US, where your rights are protected against infringement by the Federal Government by the Constitution, yet can be ignored at the pleasure of the President? Not a very convincing way to win an argument, my friend.:-)
Oh, wait, you aren't citizens, but subjects. Your rights are privileges granted by the monarch, and so can be revoked at the pleasure of the government.
As opposed to the US, where your rights are granted by the Constitution, yet can be ignored at the pleasure of the President? Not a very convincing way to win an argument, my friend.:-)
I appreciate your taking the time to post a link, but in this case, I would refer you to my posting history. (You can find this fairly quickly via Google: search for my user name and site:slashdot.org if you can't see far enough back using Slashdot's own tools.) I have criticised both Word and OpenOffice Writer in the past, in far more detail than the article you cited. And FWIW, I disagree with the article's conclusions, because while Writer might claim the same features as Word on paper, it has some basic usability flaws and fundamental bugs that in practice render many of those features unusable for serious work.
MSWord may even be the best word processor on MSWindows, but who cares? One only has to look as far as VHS vs. BetaMAX to discover how relevant that is.
Perhaps an ironic choice of example: VHS was technically inferior to its rival, but became the dominant standard for VCRs due to greater early market penetration and better branding. Today, decades later, it still holds that position, while no-one has cared about Betamax compatibility for years.
If this is all you see a manager doing, then there is no need for them at all.
There is no need for a lot of managers.
However, please remember that those three items were only my criteria for managing people. Managers also tend to have the project management responsibilities I mentioned. Some, but not all, are also technical leads, and I gave further requirements for things I would expect of them as well.
FWIW, I disagree strongly with your assertion that a good manager would necessarily make a great tech person. Some of the best project managers I've worked with had little idea about the technical details of the project, but were good at supporting those who did, liaising between them and customers/senior management, planning budgets, schedules and the like, and leaving the tech guys to get on with tech.
I'd think that's what most companies want - a manager that can immediately shift back into a worker-level mode when required, get things back up to speed, then go back and handle a tiny bit of paperwork.
It might be what they think they want. It probably isn't what they actually need.
It may be reassuring that you have a manager who can go back to doing what his or her people do, but it's a false sense of security. The approach doesn't scale. Rather than hiring a manager who can step in as a last resort, I'd rather hire a manager who didn't make the whole string of mistakes implied by the need to do so.
I disagree. I don't need a non-technical manager to know that something is impossible. I just need them to trust the senior technical people when they say it is, and not to have committed the team to doing it for a customer before they bother to ask.
OK, I'll take a stab. For reference, so you know how much or how little my opinion is worth, I've steered my career towards being a senior technical person rather than management. I'm pretty much a sideways move from the level of manager you're looking to hire here.
With that disclaimer given, what would I want to see in such a manager? I think there are specific things involved with managing people, managing projects, and technical leadership. AFAICS, you haven't given a more detailed description of the balance of these for your specific post, so I'll outline my thoughts on each of these areas.
Managing people
It's been my experience that good managers of people tend to do three things well:
Set realistic expectations.
Provide adequate resources.
Get out of the way.
Someone jokes elsewhere in this discussion that you can't just judge managers by how hands-off their approach is and who gives the most perks to their staff, but frankly, I think just doing that would be more successful than the current policy at many organisations!
So in terms of interviewing a potential manager, I would be tempted to go for a practical example to judge their people management skills: describe an imagined next project for their team, and ask them how they'd go about finding out enough about the people they've already got to divide up the work, how they'd deal with any gaps (going into recruitment and team-building ideas if it's relevant), maybe how they'd deal with any apparent surpluses or team conflicts as potential difficulties, how they'd go about briefing the team and getting them started on the work, and how they'd monitor and support their team once it was up and running on the project.
Project management
To me, this aspect has a lot to do with dealing with the people above the manager:
How would your interviewee make sure they've understood what is required of their team?
How would they expect themselves and their team to interact with more senior management during the course of the project?
How would they deal with changing requirements?
How do they go about planning a schedule, assessing risks and building in slack time, giving reasonable estimates, and so forth?
Again, I'd be tempted to set this in the context of a concrete example or two during the interview, starting with their first thoughts on an initial brief from senior management, perhaps switching to the people management work above next, and coming back later in the interview when some requirements now need to change halfway through the project to see how they'd deal with that.
Technical leadership
If this is relevant for the post in question, I'd be looking for:
their ability to think about their software design in big picture terms
whether they see how different areas would interact and how they might map development of related areas onto their team of developers
how they would ensure adequate testing (Are all 10 staff under them developers, or are some of them testing people? Are there other testers available within your organisation, with whom this team will need to work? What sort of balance between coders and testers does your interviewee prefer to work with, and how would they go about getting it?)
how they would balance getting the immediate requirements satisfied against long-term flexibility (including getting early prototype work up and running to avoid holding up other team members, while not unduly delaying completing the detailed work for each developer or sub-team)
their ability to assess the overall merits of different tools, programming languages, etc. that might be used on a project, and how they would go about identifying sensible options and deciding between them at the start of a new project (which is not the same as having guru-level knowledge of multiple programming la
First of all, no, you certainly shouldn't sign a contract explicitly giving your rights to your employer if you're not happy with that — and why would you be, if they're not paying you compensation for them?
But just striking through the text and sending it back is naive. The default position on intellectual property in employer-employee relationships differs significantly with jurisdiction. In the absence of an explicit agreement, they can argue things about salary and not having fixed working hours, and you can argue that their claim is unreasonable, but these things are probably going to get decided in court. In some places, I understand that such a contractual clause is explicitly unenforceable now regardless of what the employment contract says.
Bottom line: it's always best to have a contract that clearly states who gets the rights to things. For example, mine says they get the IP only for things I do on company time, using company resources, or connected with my employment. I'm not happy about the latter term, because it is too vague: I don't expect them to let me rewrite the product I'm paid to work on for them on my own time and then sell it, but neither do I think they should have even a questionable claim to any unrelated application I develop just because it happens to be software written in the same programming language. But at least get something explicit in the contract that you can argue your way.
Oh, and Slashdot is a stupid place to get legal advice. Consult a real lawyer, or at least a reputable organisation that will know the law in your jurisdiction and offer you impartial advice. For all I know, the above is completely misleading where you are, and you'd be an idiot to listen to me.
The irony is that honest politics that, for example, dramatically simplified the tax system in my country, really would save a fortune. The infrastructure costs of implementing all those special cases, with their separate collection and enforcement mechanisms, are significant. Just doing away with all of that and going to a system with a few, transparent taxes collected via a very small number of mechanisms would save a fortune in both personal taxes and business overheads. Pretty much everyone would benefit from this, it's just that some people would benefit more than others depending on how the current mess of hundreds of different taxes and credits treats them.
Did you even read the last sentence in my previous post?
The more time I spend on Slashdot, the more I think a lot of people who talk about anecdotal evidence have no idea when it is and isn't relevant, and just wheel out the cliches to avoid answering the real questions.
That's not really what I mean, though. In fact, with only two choices, it's hard to see how a system could even get close.
If you reduce political principles to a straight a-vs-b choice, then pretty much the only distinction you could usefully make would be between individualism and collectivism. That is certainly a very important principle, which underlies many social, economic and political issues. But in the US, both major parties are so far towards the individualist end of that spectrum that they offer little meaningful choice anyway, while Europe has the opposite problem, with most countries dominated by socialist parties.
I think my idea of good government would be closer to yours than to what we have today.
The big problem with an approach such as you describe is who provides the checks and balances? If it is to be illegal for the administration to act other than in accordance with the principles for which the people voted, then some degree of judicial oversight must be involved to decide when they have crossed the line.
Now, you basically have two options. You can have another round of elections to decide who gets to have that oversight, or you have unelected people with, effectively, a power of veto over the elected.
One need only look at the power of the (not directly elected) US Supreme Court to overrule the (directly elected) legislature on constitutional issues to see how important it is to get these checks and balances... erm, balanced. If you don't, you get an odd-looking situation also demonstrated by the current US government, where the laws produced by the legislature are not just approved by but actually strongly influenced by the policies of the executive branch.
If Vista is selling so well, then why don't I know a single person or organisation who's using it?
This seems like one of those situations where the "official" statistics are wildly at odds with the observations of the guy in the street (or the server room). Of course my experience might not be typical, but looking at the comments in on-line forums full of people with an interest in IT, I'm guessing it is.
The unfortunate reality is that with the typical electoral system in the west, each election is decided on the basis of a very small number of very high profile issues. Things like economics, "defence", healthcare, and crime are tried and tested. Trendy issues — currently it's anything environmental over here in the UK — can also register significantly. However, minor things that still affect many people every day are rarely even considered. This is how things like IP and road traffic laws can reach a point where a very significant proportion of the population are criminalised for doing something that a majority of the population does not believe to be ethically wrong.
This will probably continue as long as we have this bizarre idea that politicians can predict before the election what will happen throughout their entire term of office. That simply isn't possible, unless their policies are never going to change depending on context. Consider the unpredictability of a world stock market crash or a plane flying into an iconic building, and unsurprisingly the reality doesn't always match up. It is silly to expect that it ever will, and we would do far better if political manifestos set out the principles and values supported by the each candidate, and reserved concrete policies for examples: "Under the current circumstances, I would therefore support this measure to provide further financial support to that group." We also need to get over this idea that any politician who changes his or her position on an issue is "doing a U-turn" and doesn't know what they stand for. Maybe the circumstances just changed? Maybe they came across better information, and revised their opinion in light of it? These are good things for politicians to do, as long as their actions are consistent with the principles and values for which they stood at election time. The idea that all politicians should have evaluated all information on all issues comprehensively before every decision they are asked to make is simply unrealistic, and I would rather vote for someone who acknowledged this and made a genuine effort to dot the right thing than someone who pretended they were omniscient and used this to attack their more considerate opposition.
Of course, such a principled election system would also show up some other problems with "representative" democracy in places like the US and UK today. As far as I can see, the major political parties in these countries are so closely aligned on many issues that someone who is fairly central but tends towards individual responsibility and capitalism rather than socialism and a large government simply has no-one to vote for who will argue their case. Given the barriers to entry in starting a new political party, this means a significant proportion of the population's voice is never heard.
This exactly the reason I don't believe all these reports that Google's (Or other) online apps will take over from local software. Sure online word processing can be handy, but if the network breaks, or their servers do you've got no comeback.
And this is just lost data, which is easily fixed in any useful system via a sensible back-up policy.
Wait until the first time a big web-based app doesn't mass-erase data, it mass-leaks it. As businesses stupid enough to trust their confidential documents to external systems watch their competitors get all their trade secrets for free, and consumers stupid enough to trust on-line systems to hold their credit card details securely for extended periods (I'm looking at you, Amazon) watch all their cards get defrauded, then people will realise that most web apps run by third party services simply don't offer any real advantage for anyone except lazy administrators.
I'm not sure the GP poster was arguing about the legal status, but rather the ethical one.
On the one hand, someone too young to understand that something is wrong and the negative consequences of doing it clearly should not be punished for their actions. On the other hand, the older person responsible for them who does understand should not be giving them the freedom to do damaging things. If, as a result of the responsible adult's negligence, a child causes harm to someone else, then while the responsible adult isn't guilty of causing the damage, I think it is ethical to expect them to offer fair compensation.
I will now add two caveats to the above.
Firstly, I think the age of "innocence" is vastly exaggerated in many western societies. I have seen kids hanging around by the cars outside my home, deliberately damaging them, and when confronted by an adult, one of them shouting, "I'm under 10, I can't commit a crime!" It may or may not be appropriate to fine the kid £500 for a respray of the side panel of the car he damaged, but he knew damn well that he was doing something wrong and it's certainly reasonable to deny him privileges for a few days so he gets the point that his behaviour was unacceptable.
Secondly, yes, sometimes damage will be done and it's not really fair to blame anyone. Kids are kids, and if an adult responsible for them took reasonable steps to control them and a genuine accident happens, that's life. In a socialist society, the answer to this is state compensation; in a capitalist society, it is private insurance. Not all ambulances should be chased by a predatory lawyer.
Oh, I agree that the majority of use of P2P is probably illegal. Arguments to the contrary are clearly untenable. I have never made apologies for people who do this, and have no sympathy if they get their access revoked for breaking the law.
However, it is also true that an increasing amount of valuable software is distributed over BitTorrent and the like, even if for now it's the minority. Moreover, BitTorrent represents a useful general concept in terms of "distributed distribution", which has many other potential applications for efficient digital broadcasting and the like. It is disappointing that a university, of all places, should be restricting new technologies with obvious constructive uses, just because of fear of the abuses. Doesn't this strike you as ironic?
Doesn't that kinda depend on being able to use the bandwidth for something useful, though?
If the university is offering high-speed Internet access for free to students, then restricting it to ensure it's properly available for academic use is one thing. If they're actually charging for it at a market rate, then restricting it is completely out of line. If the students start doing illegal stuff with it, sure, kick 'em off if it's causing problems, but don't block stuff by default even for those who are using those technologies for constructive purposes when those people are paying for the privilege.
Slashdot Mirror
And tell me, how many of those 80+ million gun owners have had their phones tapped, or been stopped and searched by a police officer in a bad mood? That's just a couple of widespread abuses we know happen today. Obviously there have been smaller scale but much more damaging instances where government has far exceeded its constitutional authority in the recent past. If we look back a bit further to how US citizens of Japanese descent were treated during WWII, we can see how much those constitutional safeguards are worth when they really matter.
Meanwhile, remind me of the last time your well-regulated militia rose up and toppled a government that was waging illegal wars, at a cost of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of others, and of course many billions of taxpayers' dollars? In fact, remind me of the last time your 80+ million gun owners rose up to defend anything at all?
Unless you contend that the above examples are wrong and the rights supposedly guaranteed by your constitution have never been violated by the Federal Government, that tells you what your 80+ million gun owners are really worth — other than a great sound-bite and winning a game of my dick's bigger than yours is, of course.
Touché.
I retract my previous post, and submit the following alternative, the significance of which is exactly the same in the context of this discussion:
As opposed to the US, where your rights are granted by the Constitution, yet can be ignored at the pleasure of the President? Not a very convincing way to win an argument, my friend. :-)
I appreciate your taking the time to post a link, but in this case, I would refer you to my posting history. (You can find this fairly quickly via Google: search for my user name and site:slashdot.org if you can't see far enough back using Slashdot's own tools.) I have criticised both Word and OpenOffice Writer in the past, in far more detail than the article you cited. And FWIW, I disagree with the article's conclusions, because while Writer might claim the same features as Word on paper, it has some basic usability flaws and fundamental bugs that in practice render many of those features unusable for serious work.
Perhaps an ironic choice of example: VHS was technically inferior to its rival, but became the dominant standard for VCRs due to greater early market penetration and better branding. Today, decades later, it still holds that position, while no-one has cared about Betamax compatibility for years.
Erm... Since the big name OSS software (Firefox, OpenOffice, GCC, etc.) were all written mostly by people employed by those big players?
Sure there is, though as I write this, its utility is questionable...
There is no need for a lot of managers.
However, please remember that those three items were only my criteria for managing people. Managers also tend to have the project management responsibilities I mentioned. Some, but not all, are also technical leads, and I gave further requirements for things I would expect of them as well.
FWIW, I disagree strongly with your assertion that a good manager would necessarily make a great tech person. Some of the best project managers I've worked with had little idea about the technical details of the project, but were good at supporting those who did, liaising between them and customers/senior management, planning budgets, schedules and the like, and leaving the tech guys to get on with tech.
It might be what they think they want. It probably isn't what they actually need.
It may be reassuring that you have a manager who can go back to doing what his or her people do, but it's a false sense of security. The approach doesn't scale. Rather than hiring a manager who can step in as a last resort, I'd rather hire a manager who didn't make the whole string of mistakes implied by the need to do so.
I disagree. I don't need a non-technical manager to know that something is impossible. I just need them to trust the senior technical people when they say it is, and not to have committed the team to doing it for a customer before they bother to ask.
OK, I'll take a stab. For reference, so you know how much or how little my opinion is worth, I've steered my career towards being a senior technical person rather than management. I'm pretty much a sideways move from the level of manager you're looking to hire here.
With that disclaimer given, what would I want to see in such a manager? I think there are specific things involved with managing people, managing projects, and technical leadership. AFAICS, you haven't given a more detailed description of the balance of these for your specific post, so I'll outline my thoughts on each of these areas.
Managing people
It's been my experience that good managers of people tend to do three things well:
Someone jokes elsewhere in this discussion that you can't just judge managers by how hands-off their approach is and who gives the most perks to their staff, but frankly, I think just doing that would be more successful than the current policy at many organisations!
So in terms of interviewing a potential manager, I would be tempted to go for a practical example to judge their people management skills: describe an imagined next project for their team, and ask them how they'd go about finding out enough about the people they've already got to divide up the work, how they'd deal with any gaps (going into recruitment and team-building ideas if it's relevant), maybe how they'd deal with any apparent surpluses or team conflicts as potential difficulties, how they'd go about briefing the team and getting them started on the work, and how they'd monitor and support their team once it was up and running on the project.
Project management
To me, this aspect has a lot to do with dealing with the people above the manager:
Again, I'd be tempted to set this in the context of a concrete example or two during the interview, starting with their first thoughts on an initial brief from senior management, perhaps switching to the people management work above next, and coming back later in the interview when some requirements now need to change halfway through the project to see how they'd deal with that.
Technical leadership
If this is relevant for the post in question, I'd be looking for:
First of all, no, you certainly shouldn't sign a contract explicitly giving your rights to your employer if you're not happy with that — and why would you be, if they're not paying you compensation for them?
But just striking through the text and sending it back is naive. The default position on intellectual property in employer-employee relationships differs significantly with jurisdiction. In the absence of an explicit agreement, they can argue things about salary and not having fixed working hours, and you can argue that their claim is unreasonable, but these things are probably going to get decided in court. In some places, I understand that such a contractual clause is explicitly unenforceable now regardless of what the employment contract says.
Bottom line: it's always best to have a contract that clearly states who gets the rights to things. For example, mine says they get the IP only for things I do on company time, using company resources, or connected with my employment. I'm not happy about the latter term, because it is too vague: I don't expect them to let me rewrite the product I'm paid to work on for them on my own time and then sell it, but neither do I think they should have even a questionable claim to any unrelated application I develop just because it happens to be software written in the same programming language. But at least get something explicit in the contract that you can argue your way.
Oh, and Slashdot is a stupid place to get legal advice. Consult a real lawyer, or at least a reputable organisation that will know the law in your jurisdiction and offer you impartial advice. For all I know, the above is completely misleading where you are, and you'd be an idiot to listen to me.
The irony is that honest politics that, for example, dramatically simplified the tax system in my country, really would save a fortune. The infrastructure costs of implementing all those special cases, with their separate collection and enforcement mechanisms, are significant. Just doing away with all of that and going to a system with a few, transparent taxes collected via a very small number of mechanisms would save a fortune in both personal taxes and business overheads. Pretty much everyone would benefit from this, it's just that some people would benefit more than others depending on how the current mess of hundreds of different taxes and credits treats them.
Did you even read the last sentence in my previous post?
The more time I spend on Slashdot, the more I think a lot of people who talk about anecdotal evidence have no idea when it is and isn't relevant, and just wheel out the cliches to avoid answering the real questions.
That's not really what I mean, though. In fact, with only two choices, it's hard to see how a system could even get close.
If you reduce political principles to a straight a-vs-b choice, then pretty much the only distinction you could usefully make would be between individualism and collectivism. That is certainly a very important principle, which underlies many social, economic and political issues. But in the US, both major parties are so far towards the individualist end of that spectrum that they offer little meaningful choice anyway, while Europe has the opposite problem, with most countries dominated by socialist parties.
I think my idea of good government would be closer to yours than to what we have today.
The big problem with an approach such as you describe is who provides the checks and balances? If it is to be illegal for the administration to act other than in accordance with the principles for which the people voted, then some degree of judicial oversight must be involved to decide when they have crossed the line.
Now, you basically have two options. You can have another round of elections to decide who gets to have that oversight, or you have unelected people with, effectively, a power of veto over the elected.
One need only look at the power of the (not directly elected) US Supreme Court to overrule the (directly elected) legislature on constitutional issues to see how important it is to get these checks and balances... erm, balanced. If you don't, you get an odd-looking situation also demonstrated by the current US government, where the laws produced by the legislature are not just approved by but actually strongly influenced by the policies of the executive branch.
If Vista is selling so well, then why don't I know a single person or organisation who's using it?
This seems like one of those situations where the "official" statistics are wildly at odds with the observations of the guy in the street (or the server room). Of course my experience might not be typical, but looking at the comments in on-line forums full of people with an interest in IT, I'm guessing it is.
The unfortunate reality is that with the typical electoral system in the west, each election is decided on the basis of a very small number of very high profile issues. Things like economics, "defence", healthcare, and crime are tried and tested. Trendy issues — currently it's anything environmental over here in the UK — can also register significantly. However, minor things that still affect many people every day are rarely even considered. This is how things like IP and road traffic laws can reach a point where a very significant proportion of the population are criminalised for doing something that a majority of the population does not believe to be ethically wrong.
This will probably continue as long as we have this bizarre idea that politicians can predict before the election what will happen throughout their entire term of office. That simply isn't possible, unless their policies are never going to change depending on context. Consider the unpredictability of a world stock market crash or a plane flying into an iconic building, and unsurprisingly the reality doesn't always match up. It is silly to expect that it ever will, and we would do far better if political manifestos set out the principles and values supported by the each candidate, and reserved concrete policies for examples: "Under the current circumstances, I would therefore support this measure to provide further financial support to that group." We also need to get over this idea that any politician who changes his or her position on an issue is "doing a U-turn" and doesn't know what they stand for. Maybe the circumstances just changed? Maybe they came across better information, and revised their opinion in light of it? These are good things for politicians to do, as long as their actions are consistent with the principles and values for which they stood at election time. The idea that all politicians should have evaluated all information on all issues comprehensively before every decision they are asked to make is simply unrealistic, and I would rather vote for someone who acknowledged this and made a genuine effort to dot the right thing than someone who pretended they were omniscient and used this to attack their more considerate opposition.
Of course, such a principled election system would also show up some other problems with "representative" democracy in places like the US and UK today. As far as I can see, the major political parties in these countries are so closely aligned on many issues that someone who is fairly central but tends towards individual responsibility and capitalism rather than socialism and a large government simply has no-one to vote for who will argue their case. Given the barriers to entry in starting a new political party, this means a significant proportion of the population's voice is never heard.
They are? It's always seemed to me that the economics of a hosted (i.e., service) model benefit primarily the host service.
Fortunately, I have an identical basket of eggs that never go rotten, stored in my fireproof safe.
It's OK. You could always ask the government to send you a copy of their copy...
And this is just lost data, which is easily fixed in any useful system via a sensible back-up policy.
Wait until the first time a big web-based app doesn't mass-erase data, it mass-leaks it. As businesses stupid enough to trust their confidential documents to external systems watch their competitors get all their trade secrets for free, and consumers stupid enough to trust on-line systems to hold their credit card details securely for extended periods (I'm looking at you, Amazon) watch all their cards get defrauded, then people will realise that most web apps run by third party services simply don't offer any real advantage for anyone except lazy administrators.
I don't. But on the bright side, at least I can shoot him to shut him up!
I'm not sure the GP poster was arguing about the legal status, but rather the ethical one.
On the one hand, someone too young to understand that something is wrong and the negative consequences of doing it clearly should not be punished for their actions. On the other hand, the older person responsible for them who does understand should not be giving them the freedom to do damaging things. If, as a result of the responsible adult's negligence, a child causes harm to someone else, then while the responsible adult isn't guilty of causing the damage, I think it is ethical to expect them to offer fair compensation.
I will now add two caveats to the above.
Firstly, I think the age of "innocence" is vastly exaggerated in many western societies. I have seen kids hanging around by the cars outside my home, deliberately damaging them, and when confronted by an adult, one of them shouting, "I'm under 10, I can't commit a crime!" It may or may not be appropriate to fine the kid £500 for a respray of the side panel of the car he damaged, but he knew damn well that he was doing something wrong and it's certainly reasonable to deny him privileges for a few days so he gets the point that his behaviour was unacceptable.
Secondly, yes, sometimes damage will be done and it's not really fair to blame anyone. Kids are kids, and if an adult responsible for them took reasonable steps to control them and a genuine accident happens, that's life. In a socialist society, the answer to this is state compensation; in a capitalist society, it is private insurance. Not all ambulances should be chased by a predatory lawyer.
Oh, I agree that the majority of use of P2P is probably illegal. Arguments to the contrary are clearly untenable. I have never made apologies for people who do this, and have no sympathy if they get their access revoked for breaking the law.
However, it is also true that an increasing amount of valuable software is distributed over BitTorrent and the like, even if for now it's the minority. Moreover, BitTorrent represents a useful general concept in terms of "distributed distribution", which has many other potential applications for efficient digital broadcasting and the like. It is disappointing that a university, of all places, should be restricting new technologies with obvious constructive uses, just because of fear of the abuses. Doesn't this strike you as ironic?
Doesn't that kinda depend on being able to use the bandwidth for something useful, though?
If the university is offering high-speed Internet access for free to students, then restricting it to ensure it's properly available for academic use is one thing. If they're actually charging for it at a market rate, then restricting it is completely out of line. If the students start doing illegal stuff with it, sure, kick 'em off if it's causing problems, but don't block stuff by default even for those who are using those technologies for constructive purposes when those people are paying for the privilege.