Does it really hurt the film if some more warping is added to the film?
I'd be inclined to say "yes". This isn't just a random selection of decayed images (rtfa). Bill Morrison went through hundred (thousands?) of hours of film to find stuff that had an evocative combination of image and decay. Adding random decay on top of that is only going to mask some of the beauty of the original collection.
It's rather like the difference between the mastery of Picasso (who did some very good realist painting in his early days) and the worst of the neo-impressionists who's work could honestly be one-upped by good quality fourth-graders.
You don't want your own copy of this film to end up like all the ones it's portraying, do you?
In that case, I'd get a film version. I have far more hope of my analog film archives outlasting me than I do of my CDs and DVDs of beeing readable in 20 years. I may not have an 8mm movie player, but I can at least view my dad's 1950's carnival movies frame by frame.
I developed some 10 and 15 year old film that I had the foresight of storing in my mother's secondary fridge (freezer section) before forgetting about it. It seems to have developed fine. Having it unfrozen will speed the degredation, but it should still be OK to develop.
That having, been said: the sooner, the better. The longer you wait, the more it will degrade.
As for the lifetime of film: I have some black and whites of my parents back in the fourties. and some nice stereo pictures of my dad with an unidentified girlfrend from before he met my mom (sometime in the 50's).
My 5.25" floppies form 1980, however are getting less and less likely to be readable. I don't think I have anything interesting on 8" floppies -- but if I do, I have no idea where to find a drive to read it.
p.s. letting your cat piss on your negatives is a bad idea (but even worse for floppy disks).
The purpose of this is not to GPL the standard. It's to make sure the standard allows for the GPL. The same sorts of problems that the clause causes for the GPL might also strike at proprietary developers. If it stays in, we could end up with problems like the GIF and MP3 fiascoes, where a feature is (say) required for clients, but only optional for servers. 5 years later, the owner of the (now popularly implemented) patent suddenly cracks down on use of the patent in servers.
In the other direction, we could end up with patented capabilities that are required (or just popular) on servers, but suddenly only allowed on clients or middleware
made by the mega-corp that owns the patent.
The horrid implications that the bug in this clause could cause for everybody (except for the patent owners) is only spotlighted by it's obvious conflict with the GPL. If this clause is made GPL-compatible, it will create freedom for all developers and users.
I've got nothing against the posting being rated +5. Although I disagree with it strongly, it is starting off an interesting thread. Let people know what the source of the thread is. People would be better off moderating responses up than moderating the 'GPL is the bug' item down.
Remember the admonition do moderators: focus on moderating up, not down. Moderation wars generally strike me as silly. I try to walk away from them.
Security exploits are 'benign' until someone exploits them in a vicious manner.
The security head at Boston's airport was probably going "Security here isn't perfect, but it's not like we have the problems that Israel does". If the US suffers from an electronic equivalent of Sept 11, it's going to be via the exploit of some of those 'benign' security holes.
Security is, and never will, be perfect but it does make it harder for
an intruder to pull something off.
Florida in the late '70s probably had the most stringent security of any airports
in the states (lots of cuban hijackers wanting to go home, etc.). Nontheless, I was able to walk all over their security systems before I made the mistake of
tellling someone what I'd just done (asking for help, I was).
It's not that most home users aren't affected by viruses, it's that most home users don't notic when they're infected. Most home users don't have the
money to pay for someone who can watch their network on an ongoing basis for
signs of intrusion. Even fewer are geekheads like me who can look at the
blinking lights on my hub, go 'where did that traffic come from' and
then load up ethereal and/or go through my firewall logs (firewall? what fireall) to figure out if what happened was really benign.
Even businesses -- One place that I do occasional work (the only Unix-head in a sea of Windows) didn't know that they were infected until I noticed way too much traffic for the time of day and started up ethereal. I told their admin, he plugged the holes, and a little while later I found more signs of exploitation on their net. The last time I told their Windows admin about a problem, he had given up trying to secure their boxes. Spammers are still using their proxy boxes to deliver email but most majour services (except Hotmail!) are refusing their connection, now.
If Al Quaida was using the thousands of 'benign' Windows exploits to setup a distributed meltdown of the internet, we wouldn't know it untill after the pieces fell down. They spent 4 years setting up September 11. How much damage could they do with 4 years worth of Windows exploits?
About 20 years ago, one of my professor used code metrics to catch people stealing code.
Many code metrics will generally suvive simplistic changes like variable renaming, indentation reformatting and comment rewriting. Submissions with statistics too close to a known assignment become targets of closer examination.
The fact that your code is in a public place and well known should make it easy on your school. The profs can point to your code, explain code metrics and how they will survive most reus. People who reuse your code dispite such warnings will get the drubbing that they deserve.
One thing that I would suggest that you do is put a disclaimer on your website about how the department knows that your code is publically available and using it in their own assignments is not only illegal (violation of your copyright), but plagiarism that might result in their expulsion.
Note that if it is your code, and you've GPLed it, you're free to place the further restriction on it -- such as that it can't be used to cheat on assignments. That being done, you could even give the university the right to
prosecute plagiarism violations within the school on your behalf.
Diamond chips can work at a temperature of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, while silicon chips stop working above 150 degrees Celsius,
Yep. I can just see it now. Camouflaging my 4 processer server as a hot-plate. Problem is, when I set my computer to 'simmer' quake goes down to 158 frames/second.
If someone goes up and down the ICQ UID's and messages each with an ad, are they hacking your computer too?
That's a good question. Given that no implicit permission has been given to access the computer, I'd say that the answer is, in all probablility, yes. When someone puts a message on your winshield, they are using their own resources to do so. If someone paints the message on the side of your car, then that is vandalism. Forcing pop-up messages onto unwanting screens is in a bit of a no-mans land between the two. You are using someone else's machine to do this. You know that this is, most probably, unwanted and uninvited.
The sentiment is strong enough against spammers, that I think it might be quite possible to convince a judge that this fits the definition of 'hacking'. All of the necessary elements are there. I don't know what elements are missing. Given that you've got the hots to be doing this, you tell me what elements of hacking a computer are missing in this scenario.
The internet is not a free-fire zone. You are only allowed to access those ports and machines that you've been given permission to access (either implicit or explicit). Implicit access would be things like accessing an advertized web site, or an MX for the domain of someone who wants you to send them email.
When you access a port that many people aren't fully aware is open to produce a message that 99.99% of people are going to be annoyed by that seems to me like unauthorized access.
Webservers implicitly request that you contact them for info by having the URL published (either by other web pages or in advertising). Connecting to
Connecting to a random IP address and having the machine do something that you know has a 99.9% chance of annoying the user that runs it is generally considered hacking. The hacker is doing something that annoys the owner of the computer, to the financial benefit of the hacker.
Leaving your car unlocked does not make my stealing your radio (or your car) illegal. Locking it is only meant to slow down / discourage the illegality. It also signifies to an erronious but law-abiding citizen that they have the wrong car (key doesn't fit).
If you are causing another person's computer to do something that they do not want it to do, and that you know that they probably do not to want it to do that, then you are hacking. End of story.
This thing needs a rollcage(bar) for the pilot's head. At 120KG (almost 300 lb), if that thing tilts over on landing, the pilot's going to get his neck snapped (paresuming that he doesn't lose his head completely)./
It wouldnt' add much to the weight, but it would make a lot of difference to safety of that unit.
AJ510s were the $3500 terminals that UACS bought back in the early '80s.. with their own Z80, at least 32K of ram and runtime loading of the system on boot up, they were KICK ASS units... --- and yes they were pretty solidly built. When you're paying $3500 for a terminal, an extra $20 worth of structural steel doesn't really hurt (and you can use it for heatsinks).
Oh, and having had the 'opportunity' to move some of those suckers around, they're not just strudy -- they're friggin heavy. The first time I had to move one, I thought that it was bolted to the table... It wasn't. It was just gravity holding it down.
This gives me flashbacks to Matt Helm where Dean Martin played a James Bond Parody. One of Matt Helm's secret weapons was a 'smart gun' that had a 10 second delay setting. All sorts of fun with things like:
click, click. stupid gun doesn't work. (looks down barrel) splat!
Light definitely has measurable force. Have you ever seen those little photon windmills in science class? Four tiny foil squares -- each with one side painted black and the other white mounted on a wire exle. One side absorbs the light and the other reflects it back where it came from. The difference in the force created by reflecting the light and absorbing it (elastic vs inelastic collision) is enough to get the things spinning with a reasonable light source.
On the moon -- without the earth's atmosphere to block any of the sun, I would expect that sunlight would have a measurable effect -- perhaps even enough to produce a measurable bend in a flag. I don't think, however, that there would be enough variation in the sun's light strength or in the actual 'solar wind' (streams of particles (gasses) ejected from the sun) to cause ripples in a flag.
About the only time I remember seeing the lunar flags ripple is when the astronauts do something to shake them. I could definitely see this as being a big more pronounced than usual on the moon -- in a vacuum there would be no air to help dampen the movement. Perhaps this could be actually used to help prove that the videos are legit!
Given that the nay-sayers brought this effect to our attention, using it to prove that the pictures were taken on the moon (or at least in a vacuum) might put a nice bullet in their foot.
it's good to see that UACS is up to it's old tricks. Back in my day, we were (among other things) known for our parties, where the beer was only '$.50'/glass. This was supposedly an attempt to burn off the extra money that we got by reselling computer accounts (back in the late '70s early 80's) (we were non profit, so we had to do something creative with the profit). It never really worked that well, so we ended up paying $5000 for a couple of intelligent terminals for the club office.
That they're down to buying cheap paper shredders leaves me worrying that the society is now in dire financial straights -- and they're probably selling beer for $2.00/glass now.
In my view, blogging is publishing (so is posting on slashdot).
For reasons completely unrelated to blogging, I've long since learned to do my best to separate fact from opinion. Modifiers like "I (don't) believe", "In my opinion", and "It seems like", or even just a simple "IMHO", mark opinion clearly as such.
When I post stuff to my (or any) website, I'm fully aware that I have a potential audience of millions (even though I'm usually happy to get 5000 hits/month). I believe that postings on the net (including blogging) should have the same rights (and therefore responsibilities) as publishing a 'dead tree edition'.
I remember in one case, I was responding to someone's request to remove a neo-nazi site from a machine hosted by my employer/client. I actually gave her two responses. One was the official one. The other was a personal response given from my personal account. To make it even clearer, I prefaced my personal comments with a note that the reason why I was using a different account was to make it clear that my response was a personal opinion, not a corporate one.
I was explaining to her why I felt that the site should not be forced off the air for freedom of speech reasons, even though I (like her) found the contents repugnant.
Some years previous to that, I was working at UBC during the Clayoquot Sound protests in BC (1993). I did a good bit of posting to local usenet groups -- often using my
university account after hours. For those postings, I changed my 'organization' field to 'Just Another Radical' -- once again to provide the distinction between my employer and my opinions.
Such little touches allow me to express my own opinion more freely while/by being responsible for my employers' legal fears.
As for posting on the net about what goes on at an employer where I have a non-disclosute agreement, that's just a legal minefield from day one. Even when writing about personal feelings about what occured, I'd be careful to only explain my feelings, not what occured -- until, and unless, I got an OK from my boss for the types of stuff I wanted to write about.
There's a big difference between writing about events in a personal diary vs. in a blog. A personal diary has some expectation of privacy and non-publication (at least until I get around to publishing my memoirs 30 years down the road). 'Blogs, on the other hand, start public. They have absolutely no pretense of privacy. Putting stuff that might turn out to be sensitive in such a location seems simply silly.
If I wouldn't put it in a letter to the editor (presuming that they'd publish it), then I wouldn't put it in my web log. Period.
Where's putty's URL? Every time I have to find it again...
I just go to the openssh site, and follow the links for other OS implementations. quick and easy to remember.
2002-12-16 21:30:02 Multiple Flaws In SSH Implementations (articles,security) (rejected)
Multiple people submit.
Yours gets rejected, his gets accepted.
(Perhaps his was better written, or Cmdr Taco was just having a bad day when he read yours). Perhaps his was actually submitted first (I've had an article spend 4 days in the queue).
I think that he was talking about using static DHCP, instead of dynamic DHCP. For those parts of the system that don't need to hardcode the IP address in them, this does help a bit... You move the machine, and the IP changes. You'll still have
to figure out where you've got hardcoded IP addresses.
DHCP certainly isn't a magic bullet but it does get some parts of planning the move into
solid existence, and I don't see it causing any problems. If nothing else, the post is at least interesting because until I read it, I hadn't even considered using DHCP as part of a large scale move for machines with static addresses.
It's not a total win, but it may be more of a win than it appears to be on the surface. The Jury Foreman said that, although they felt that ELmSoft was afoul of the law, they also found the law "confusing". This opens up the argument that the law is unconstitutional because it's confusing. If a reasonable reader can't tell, for sure, that what they're doing is illegal, then the law itself is unconstitutional.
The next time someone tries to initiate a prosecution based on this law, there may be a constitutional challenge based on the opaqueness of the law.
They did that at my universities and their NT-domain was the most well built I have ever encountered... far more robust than the one we have at work...
I'd say that that backs up the theory that it takes a god-level sysadmin with attention to detail to lock down an NT network. It's not impossible, but it's far from a normal state of being.
Either way, PE is a lot easier, as well as the numerous other packages avail., than re-OSing the campus, or installing hardware into every machine.
Windows was originally designed around the presumption that there was really only one user on the system, and that user could/should do whatver (s)he wanted. To that was added the eventual realization that Oops! That's not always the case.
This has resulted in the back-ending of all sorts of security hacks onto what is still, essentially, a single-user system. A side effect of this is all sorts of special cases and wierd holes in the design of Windows that results in the need for things like PE.
Unix, on the other hand was designed as a multi-user system almost from day one. In this context, a single user system is simply the special case of N==1. Locking down a Linux system requires little more than putting passwords on GRUB and the CMOS editor, and possibly pulling the setuid bit from some questionable binaries. Once that's done, there's little that a non-root user can do beyond trashing their own account, or various DOS type stupidities (which can often be responded to by a good sysadmin).
Beyond that, the ability to prevent first-year stupidity is only one of the reasons why Linux was chosen as the standard for first-year students. Not having to worry about being sued when the students post the source code that you gave them (under some sort of non-disclosure agreement) on the net when asking for an answer to a question is another. Multiple GUI desktops, extensibility and totally free access to the source code are some of the others.
Slashdot Mirror
iFgth Etnrop!y ! giFth tErno!py ! giFt htrEno!p y!
--- Well maybe not...
(my karma-whore hacker method of modding up a funny AC post)
I'd be inclined to say "yes". This isn't just a random selection of decayed images (rtfa). Bill Morrison went through hundred (thousands?) of hours of film to find stuff that had an evocative combination of image and decay. Adding random decay on top of that is only going to mask some of the beauty of the original collection.
It's rather like the difference between the mastery of Picasso (who did some very good realist painting in his early days) and the worst of the neo-impressionists who's work could honestly be one-upped by good quality fourth-graders.
In that case, I'd get a film version. I have far more hope of my analog film archives outlasting me than I do of my CDs and DVDs of beeing readable in 20 years. I may not have an 8mm movie player, but I can at least view my dad's 1950's carnival movies frame by frame.
That having, been said: the sooner, the better. The longer you wait, the more it will degrade.
As for the lifetime of film: I have some black and whites of my parents back in the fourties. and some nice stereo pictures of my dad with an unidentified girlfrend from before he met my mom (sometime in the 50's).
My 5.25" floppies form 1980, however are getting less and less likely to be readable. I don't think I have anything interesting on 8" floppies -- but if I do, I have no idea where to find a drive to read it.
p.s. letting your cat piss on your negatives is a bad idea (but even worse for floppy disks).
In the other direction, we could end up with patented capabilities that are required (or just popular) on servers, but suddenly only allowed on clients or middleware made by the mega-corp that owns the patent.
The horrid implications that the bug in this clause could cause for everybody (except for the patent owners) is only spotlighted by it's obvious conflict with the GPL. If this clause is made GPL-compatible, it will create freedom for all developers and users.
Remember the admonition do moderators: focus on moderating up, not down. Moderation wars generally strike me as silly. I try to walk away from them.
Security is, and never will, be perfect but it does make it harder for an intruder to pull something off. Florida in the late '70s probably had the most stringent security of any airports in the states (lots of cuban hijackers wanting to go home, etc.). Nontheless, I was able to walk all over their security systems before I made the mistake of tellling someone what I'd just done (asking for help, I was).
It's not that most home users aren't affected by viruses, it's that most home users don't notic when they're infected. Most home users don't have the money to pay for someone who can watch their network on an ongoing basis for signs of intrusion. Even fewer are geekheads like me who can look at the blinking lights on my hub, go 'where did that traffic come from' and then load up ethereal and/or go through my firewall logs (firewall? what fireall) to figure out if what happened was really benign.
Even businesses -- One place that I do occasional work (the only Unix-head in a sea of Windows) didn't know that they were infected until I noticed way too much traffic for the time of day and started up ethereal. I told their admin, he plugged the holes, and a little while later I found more signs of exploitation on their net. The last time I told their Windows admin about a problem, he had given up trying to secure their boxes. Spammers are still using their proxy boxes to deliver email but most majour services (except Hotmail!) are refusing their connection, now.
If Al Quaida was using the thousands of 'benign' Windows exploits to setup a distributed meltdown of the internet, we wouldn't know it untill after the pieces fell down. They spent 4 years setting up September 11. How much damage could they do with 4 years worth of Windows exploits?
Many code metrics will generally suvive simplistic changes like variable renaming, indentation reformatting and comment rewriting. Submissions with statistics too close to a known assignment become targets of closer examination.
The fact that your code is in a public place and well known should make it easy on your school. The profs can point to your code, explain code metrics and how they will survive most reus. People who reuse your code dispite such warnings will get the drubbing that they deserve.
One thing that I would suggest that you do is put a disclaimer on your website about how the department knows that your code is publically available and using it in their own assignments is not only illegal (violation of your copyright), but plagiarism that might result in their expulsion.
Note that if it is your code, and you've GPLed it, you're free to place the further restriction on it -- such as that it can't be used to cheat on assignments. That being done, you could even give the university the right to prosecute plagiarism violations within the school on your behalf.
Yep. I can just see it now. Camouflaging my 4 processer server as a hot-plate. Problem is, when I set my computer to 'simmer' quake goes down to 158 frames/second.
That's a good question. Given that no implicit permission has been given to access the computer, I'd say that the answer is, in all probablility, yes. When someone puts a message on your winshield, they are using their own resources to do so. If someone paints the message on the side of your car, then that is vandalism. Forcing pop-up messages onto unwanting screens is in a bit of a no-mans land between the two. You are using someone else's machine to do this. You know that this is, most probably, unwanted and uninvited.
The sentiment is strong enough against spammers, that I think it might be quite possible to convince a judge that this fits the definition of 'hacking'. All of the necessary elements are there. I don't know what elements are missing. Given that you've got the hots to be doing this, you tell me what elements of hacking a computer are missing in this scenario.
The internet is not a free-fire zone. You are only allowed to access those ports and machines that you've been given permission to access (either implicit or explicit). Implicit access would be things like accessing an advertized web site, or an MX for the domain of someone who wants you to send them email.
When you access a port that many people aren't fully aware is open to produce a message that 99.99% of people are going to be annoyed by that seems to me like unauthorized access.
Connecting to a random IP address and having the machine do something that you know has a 99.9% chance of annoying the user that runs it is generally considered hacking. The hacker is doing something that annoys the owner of the computer, to the financial benefit of the hacker.
Leaving your car unlocked does not make my stealing your radio (or your car) illegal. Locking it is only meant to slow down / discourage the illegality. It also signifies to an erronious but law-abiding citizen that they have the wrong car (key doesn't fit).
If you are causing another person's computer to do something that they do not want it to do, and that you know that they probably do not to want it to do that, then you are hacking. End of story.
It wouldnt' add much to the weight, but it would make a lot of difference to safety of that unit.
Oh, and having had the 'opportunity' to move some of those suckers around, they're not just strudy -- they're friggin heavy. The first time I had to move one, I thought that it was bolted to the table... It wasn't. It was just gravity holding it down.
All sorts of fun with things like:
On the moon -- without the earth's atmosphere to block any of the sun, I would expect that sunlight would have a measurable effect -- perhaps even enough to produce a measurable bend in a flag. I don't think, however, that there would be enough variation in the sun's light strength or in the actual 'solar wind' (streams of particles (gasses) ejected from the sun) to cause ripples in a flag.
About the only time I remember seeing the lunar flags ripple is when the astronauts do something to shake them. I could definitely see this as being a big more pronounced than usual on the moon -- in a vacuum there would be no air to help dampen the movement. Perhaps this could be actually used to help prove that the videos are legit!
Given that the nay-sayers brought this effect to our attention, using it to prove that the pictures were taken on the moon (or at least in a vacuum) might put a nice bullet in their foot.
That they're down to buying cheap paper shredders leaves me worrying that the society is now in dire financial straights -- and they're probably selling beer for $2.00/glass now.
And the proper link is http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~uacs/events/shredder. html (note the lack of a leading 'www').
The proper link is http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~uacs/events/shredder. html (Note the lack of a leading 'www'). I presume that ugweb stands for undergraduate web pages.
For reasons completely unrelated to blogging, I've long since learned to do my best to separate fact from opinion. Modifiers like "I (don't) believe", "In my opinion", and "It seems like", or even just a simple "IMHO", mark opinion clearly as such.
When I post stuff to my (or any) website, I'm fully aware that I have a potential audience of millions (even though I'm usually happy to get 5000 hits/month). I believe that postings on the net (including blogging) should have the same rights (and therefore responsibilities) as publishing a 'dead tree edition'.
I remember in one case, I was responding to someone's request to remove a neo-nazi site from a machine hosted by my employer/client. I actually gave her two responses. One was the official one. The other was a personal response given from my personal account. To make it even clearer, I prefaced my personal comments with a note that the reason why I was using a different account was to make it clear that my response was a personal opinion, not a corporate one.
I was explaining to her why I felt that the site should not be forced off the air for freedom of speech reasons, even though I (like her) found the contents repugnant.
Some years previous to that, I was working at UBC during the Clayoquot Sound protests in BC (1993). I did a good bit of posting to local usenet groups -- often using my university account after hours. For those postings, I changed my 'organization' field to 'Just Another Radical' -- once again to provide the distinction between my employer and my opinions.
Such little touches allow me to express my own opinion more freely while/by being responsible for my employers' legal fears.
As for posting on the net about what goes on at an employer where I have a non-disclosute agreement, that's just a legal minefield from day one. Even when writing about personal feelings about what occured, I'd be careful to only explain my feelings, not what occured -- until, and unless, I got an OK from my boss for the types of stuff I wanted to write about.
There's a big difference between writing about events in a personal diary vs. in a blog. A personal diary has some expectation of privacy and non-publication (at least until I get around to publishing my memoirs 30 years down the road). 'Blogs, on the other hand, start public. They have absolutely no pretense of privacy. Putting stuff that might turn out to be sensitive in such a location seems simply silly.
If I wouldn't put it in a letter to the editor (presuming that they'd publish it), then I wouldn't put it in my web log. Period.
Where's putty's URL? Every time I have to find it again... I just go to the openssh site, and follow the links for other OS implementations. quick and easy to remember.
2002-12-16 21:30:02 Multiple Flaws In SSH Implementations (articles,security) (rejected) Multiple people submit. Yours gets rejected, his gets accepted. (Perhaps his was better written, or Cmdr Taco was just having a bad day when he read yours). Perhaps his was actually submitted first (I've had an article spend 4 days in the queue).
DHCP certainly isn't a magic bullet but it does get some parts of planning the move into solid existence, and I don't see it causing any problems. If nothing else, the post is at least interesting because until I read it, I hadn't even considered using DHCP as part of a large scale move for machines with static addresses.
You mean like they have, already, for most software????
The next time someone tries to initiate a prosecution based on this law, there may be a constitutional challenge based on the opaqueness of the law.
I'd say that that backs up the theory that it takes a god-level sysadmin with attention to detail to lock down an NT network. It's not impossible, but it's far from a normal state of being.
Windows was originally designed around the presumption that there was really only one user on the system, and that user could/should do whatver (s)he wanted. To that was added the eventual realization that Oops! That's not always the case.
This has resulted in the back-ending of all sorts of security hacks onto what is still, essentially, a single-user system. A side effect of this is all sorts of special cases and wierd holes in the design of Windows that results in the need for things like PE.
Unix, on the other hand was designed as a multi-user system almost from day one. In this context, a single user system is simply the special case of N==1. Locking down a Linux system requires little more than putting passwords on GRUB and the CMOS editor, and possibly pulling the setuid bit from some questionable binaries. Once that's done, there's little that a non-root user can do beyond trashing their own account, or various DOS type stupidities (which can often be responded to by a good sysadmin).
Beyond that, the ability to prevent first-year stupidity is only one of the reasons why Linux was chosen as the standard for first-year students. Not having to worry about being sued when the students post the source code that you gave them (under some sort of non-disclosure agreement) on the net when asking for an answer to a question is another. Multiple GUI desktops, extensibility and totally free access to the source code are some of the others.