I believe most laws account for a small age gap...usually if the couple is within 2-3 years, it's not an issue. I agree that there is no hard-and-fast rule that can be applied to such cases, but we certainly should draw the line somewhere, and right now that line is at 18. (The age-difference exceptions only kick in below 18 far as I know, which isn't much on this topic to be truthful.)
As far as the law goes, I'm not necessarily sure I accept that the government should be involved in consensual relationships once a person is of an age that they can make informed decisions...personally I think this is most likely in the 15 to 16 range, and let's not forget that any non-liberated minor in that age range still answers to their parents, so I'd feel ok leaving it to them and taking it out of the state's hands. (You might argue some parents are bad parents. Agreed...but how does passing a law fix that?! Once you accept that bad stuff happens occasionally regardless of fancy laws, you stop pursuing the pointless.) The degree of punishment should definitely be proportional to the amount of psychological damage caused, and in the case of nearly all consensual relationships, I think we're getting into soft territory to consider someone traumatized for life because they liked someone significantly older than themselves in most cases.
Having said that, we can debate what the law ought to be all day. The fact remains that the current law already is, and this is a pretty serious one to run afoul of for any reason. My advice: don't do it. If you do, you're a big boy and you know the consequences...no fair acting like a pedobear and then crying about it when you get caught. (I almost wrote, "There's no crying in pedophilia," instead, but then I realized...)
Yep, gotta say...everyone knows, or ought to, that you don't mess with kids, even if it seems reasonable at the time. In that specific case, why not just nix the physical stuff until 18? The developmental difference between a 21 year old and a 17 year old is sufficient enough to make me want that relationship to weather a 1 year timeout before the physical comes into play anyway. (Think about it—when you were ready to graduate from college, were you interested in dating high school kids?)
Anyway, as far as the case in TFA is concerned, I think it's a miscarriage of justice. People are ultimately responsible for what they do, even sympathetic people, and in this case the girl that committed suicide did so. There's a possibility she wasn't in command of her own faculties at the time, in which case it's a travesty, but still not a prosecutable one.
I'm not going to be voting the tormentor a Miss Congeniality prize anytime soon, but can anyone say exactly what the prosecutable offense was here? Pretending to be someone else on the web is not illegal. Faking interest in someone else is not illegal, on the web or in real life. Saying stuff, on the web or in real life, is not illegal, unless it constitutes harassment which it cannot be in this case...on the web, you can easily block people from contacting you if you feel like you're being harassed—no fair continuing a conversation that you have that kind of control over and then claiming harassment.
What I do have a real problem with is the capricious misapplication of the law just to nail someone the DA and the public doesn't like.
The fact that your friends are teachers gives them no more authority to speak on this topic than the teacher that instigated this mess, particularly since they apparently agree with the way she handled it, and I think we all agree that she handled it poorly.
That's not exactly what he/she said: to quote the GP, "I don't think overreacting can really come into the picture until we actually know what the class is like." Their point was merely that some school classes are pretty awful in terms of behaviour, and for many teachers the only way to prevent things getting completely out of hand is to rule through uncompromising strictness. Sadly, rational argument is not often something that works very well with a class of rebellious children!
Yea, these kids with expensive laptops giggling at OpenGL demos and passing around Linux CDs sound like some real inner city thugs.
Going back to the original mail the teacher sent (quoted here), all she did was confiscate the linux live CD (fair enough, since it was apparently causing a disruption at the time), and then talk to the student about the issue after class. Whilst her preconceptions about free software were deplorable, and her email to the HeliOS maintainer obviously an overreaction, her actual handling of the matter in class seems perfectly calm and reasonable.
The fact that you know teachers doesn't give you any special authority on the topic. I myself claim no special authority either...so with a total absence of special authority to go around, why don't we all just agree to discuss it as equals and assess the points on their own merits and reasonableness. Appeal to authority [wikipedia.org] is always a fallacy, but it's particularly absurd when there is no actual authority present, wouldn't you agree?
From the wikipedia article you just referenced:
"The second form, citing a person who is actually an authority in the relevant field, carries more subjective, cognitive weight. A person who is recognized as an expert authority often has greater experience and knowledge of their field than the average person, so their opinion is more likely than average to be correct.
Except in this case, the sole example of a specific teacher we have so far doesn't seem to be more correct on average on this point I was making. That's because the point I was making was an subtopic of teaching that I don't believe teachers really ever get any training on whatsoever—the pscyhological development of children is something not many teachers know much about, particularly when it comes to practical knowledge. (And in any case, the operative word in that defn you quoted is subjective.)
I'm no child psychologist either, though...so I'm only saying that I wish my argument to be judged on the points I'm asserted, and not simply ignored because some guy said something he heard from some teachers he knows that are as ill-equipped in the classroom as the average teacher on average. I hate it when I make a point and someone else's response essentially boils down to: that's not what someone else I know says! So what? What about the point itself? What do you think?
Up through middle school, which is the age of kids we're talking about, children's brains have not yet fully formed a strong self-identity, meaning that they are still being socialized. If an authority figure exhibits certain behavior, children at this stage and younger will respond to it and tend to reflect it. Which means all of your teacher friends, by refusing to give an inch are teaching their children that uncompromising behavior is reasonable...in effect, telling them to take a light year when the opportunity presents itself. That's what you call one o' them there "self-fulfilling prophecy" type things.
The fact that your friends are teachers gives them no more authority to speak on this topic than the teacher that instigated this mess, particularly since they apparently agree with the way she handled it, and I think we all agree that she handled it poorly. The very point I was trying to make is that it's distressing to me, and ought to be to you, is that I couldn't see any evidence that this teacher who's in charge of kids all day didn't seem to have any inkling of exactly how she should've handled it (though it is also equally clear to me that even she would most likely agree she dropped the ball).
The fact that you know teachers doesn't give you any special authority on the topic. I myself claim no special authority either...so with a total absence of special authority to go around, why don't we all just agree to discuss it as equals and assess the points on their own merits and reasonableness. Appeal to authority is always a fallacy, but it's particularly absurd when there is no actual authority present, wouldn't you agree?
Two people, the school teacher and the blogger, spend their days as educators. One educating people on the benefits of certain technology, the other kids. For what it's worth, I found the teacher's email to certainly be more threatening than it needed to be given the amount of research she'd done into the matter. And the blogger's response had a bit of bite to it, but it was through much of it making real, valid, informational points. Maybe he shouldn't have indicted all teachers...but it's certainly true that this teacher's attitude isn't exactly unique in the industry either.
What's disturbing to me here is not that the teacher wasn't aware of free software or not up on technology...rather, it's her overreaction to the kids. Everything about the way she handled that situation was wrong, wrong, wrong. Did she put the class back on track and then ask the kid in a non-accusatory way to explain what was going on?
No, she flew off the handle, smacked down on the kid, fired off a threatening, uninformed email...pretty much an out-of-proportion, emotional reaction to a kid being a bit disruptive in the classroom—and being disruptive because he was actually excited about learning something at that.
What's even more troubling is that, even after the fact, she's crying and clearly sorry, but I didn't get a strong indication that she even knew exactly what it was she did wrong so she can fix it and respond more rationally next time. It's hard to say from the little bit of the blogger's follow-up post...but we really, really need our teachers to be adults in the room. The way she initially reacted was more like how kids treat each other.
I think the defn of rogue they're using is: no longer obedient, belonging, or accepted and hence not controllable or answerable; deviating, renegade. Not the best word choice, but if you accept this defn and strip any negative value judgments from it, it is technically not far off.
More to the point, though, who cares what other people say? Read his words, form your own judgments. If you do your part as the reader, then it doesn't make any difference what others want you to think...you've figured that out for yourself.
If you're talking about a file server that routinely serves many users simultaneously, fragmentation has actually been shown to speed up throughput. What's that? you say.
Assume you have many large files that take several seconds to read being accessed simultaneously by several users. If they are all defragmented, on average the standard deviation from the center of the disk is higher than if they are highly fragmented. This would be irrelevant, but for the fact that a preemptive multitasking OS will periodically swap the current task out and switch to service another user...who's in the middle of reading a different file. The effect is that the head jumps around anyway, despite all of the files being totally defragged.
So in this scenario, how to increase total throughput for all users? It turns out that the more you fragment a given file, and the more a given file is dispersed over the entire disk, the lower the average seek time between context switches as the machine jumps from one task to another. (Well, to a point—if a file is so heavily fragged that the head often has to jump even during a single context switch, that's not optimal either.)
Anyway, this information is literally decades old at this point...I wonder if it's still relevant to modern OSes / file systems? Multiprocessor systems and caching might have solved this during the years in between...can anyone comment?
Clearly, the problem with the post was that the poster forgot to place the lyrics in context to how other races have composed lyrics throughout the ages.
Totally reasonable response to an explosively racist post. Well done!
I love how this discussion has an explosively controversial issue built right into the discussion, but such that it really has nothing to do with the actual topic at hand. It's like it was written to guarantee the topic of anonymity would get almost no attention at all.
Let me get this straight. McMurdie is basically saying, We need a pervasive technology solution to compensate for the fact that I have the wrong and/or incompetent personnel.
Well, the natural end is coming...if this is the case, then cartoon depictions of rape or abuse have to be treated as real too. I guess Homer's going to jail for a long time for strangling Bart. And I wonder about the moviemaking industry—if cartoon depictions of these things are now headed for illegality, then certainly live action depictions will be treated as real.
I wonder if the judge will order the perpetrators (say Jodie Foster's attackers in The Accused) to stay in character while they serve their time. After all, it's the fictional character being sentenced...
I understood that echo was a useful term in this context, but I couldn't figure out why it was better than reflection. You, sir, have expressed what I could not quite put my finger on.
You're proof that the int3rpipes is more than just trolls, flamewars, and idgits...thanks!
That's a cop-out. See previous response to my comment for the correct interpretation of the semantics. (btw, osu-neko ftw!)
Why do I say it's a cop-out? Because it can be applied to any bad definition with equally valid results. For instance, I now assert that the poster to whom you refer "is colloquially assumed to be wrong" as support for my response. See? Meaningless.
This idea will work great, but we'll need rich people in exclusive developments to kick off the trend. Since rich people usually get rich by being business people (read: technophobe) or lucky idiots (read: I'm bitter b/c I'm not rich), this is unlikely to happen soon.
Everything cool, like cell phones that are not the size of shoeboxes, trickled down from rich people that used to use cell phones the size of shoeboxes.
Easy fix! When they take over your ship, just grab the remote detonator and dive overboard with you and your loved ones. Then detonate your incendiary explosives from the water, taking them and their ship lashed to yours. (You can use the debris to float home.)
As unbelievable as your jest may seem, if you spend a few minutes with Google I'm sure you can find plenty of examples with people doing just that, sans any kind of water treatment plant.
Slashdot Mirror
u cn save ink n papr 2 !
What?
Oh SCSI tree, oh SCSI tree, How shiny are your plaaaaat-ters!
Redundancy, redundancy, how you protect your d444-t3rz!
huhuhuhuhuh...your post is about butts.
Have a 1.5 terabyte Christmas, everyone!
I believe most laws account for a small age gap...usually if the couple is within 2-3 years, it's not an issue. I agree that there is no hard-and-fast rule that can be applied to such cases, but we certainly should draw the line somewhere, and right now that line is at 18. (The age-difference exceptions only kick in below 18 far as I know, which isn't much on this topic to be truthful.)
As far as the law goes, I'm not necessarily sure I accept that the government should be involved in consensual relationships once a person is of an age that they can make informed decisions...personally I think this is most likely in the 15 to 16 range, and let's not forget that any non-liberated minor in that age range still answers to their parents, so I'd feel ok leaving it to them and taking it out of the state's hands. (You might argue some parents are bad parents. Agreed...but how does passing a law fix that?! Once you accept that bad stuff happens occasionally regardless of fancy laws, you stop pursuing the pointless.) The degree of punishment should definitely be proportional to the amount of psychological damage caused, and in the case of nearly all consensual relationships, I think we're getting into soft territory to consider someone traumatized for life because they liked someone significantly older than themselves in most cases.
Having said that, we can debate what the law ought to be all day. The fact remains that the current law already is, and this is a pretty serious one to run afoul of for any reason. My advice: don't do it. If you do, you're a big boy and you know the consequences...no fair acting like a pedobear and then crying about it when you get caught. (I almost wrote, "There's no crying in pedophilia," instead, but then I realized...)
Yep, gotta say...everyone knows, or ought to, that you don't mess with kids, even if it seems reasonable at the time. In that specific case, why not just nix the physical stuff until 18? The developmental difference between a 21 year old and a 17 year old is sufficient enough to make me want that relationship to weather a 1 year timeout before the physical comes into play anyway. (Think about it—when you were ready to graduate from college, were you interested in dating high school kids?)
Anyway, as far as the case in TFA is concerned, I think it's a miscarriage of justice. People are ultimately responsible for what they do, even sympathetic people, and in this case the girl that committed suicide did so. There's a possibility she wasn't in command of her own faculties at the time, in which case it's a travesty, but still not a prosecutable one.
I'm not going to be voting the tormentor a Miss Congeniality prize anytime soon, but can anyone say exactly what the prosecutable offense was here? Pretending to be someone else on the web is not illegal. Faking interest in someone else is not illegal, on the web or in real life. Saying stuff, on the web or in real life, is not illegal, unless it constitutes harassment which it cannot be in this case...on the web, you can easily block people from contacting you if you feel like you're being harassed—no fair continuing a conversation that you have that kind of control over and then claiming harassment.
What I do have a real problem with is the capricious misapplication of the law just to nail someone the DA and the public doesn't like.
The fact that your friends are teachers gives them no more authority to speak on this topic than the teacher that instigated this mess, particularly since they apparently agree with the way she handled it, and I think we all agree that she handled it poorly.
That's not exactly what he/she said: to quote the GP, "I don't think overreacting can really come into the picture until we actually know what the class is like." Their point was merely that some school classes are pretty awful in terms of behaviour, and for many teachers the only way to prevent things getting completely out of hand is to rule through uncompromising strictness. Sadly, rational argument is not often something that works very well with a class of rebellious children!
Yea, these kids with expensive laptops giggling at OpenGL demos and passing around Linux CDs sound like some real inner city thugs.
Going back to the original mail the teacher sent (quoted here), all she did was confiscate the linux live CD (fair enough, since it was apparently causing a disruption at the time), and then talk to the student about the issue after class. Whilst her preconceptions about free software were deplorable, and her email to the HeliOS maintainer obviously an overreaction, her actual handling of the matter in class seems perfectly calm and reasonable.
The fact that you know teachers doesn't give you any special authority on the topic. I myself claim no special authority either...so with a total absence of special authority to go around, why don't we all just agree to discuss it as equals and assess the points on their own merits and reasonableness. Appeal to authority [wikipedia.org] is always a fallacy, but it's particularly absurd when there is no actual authority present, wouldn't you agree?
From the wikipedia article you just referenced:
"The second form, citing a person who is actually an authority in the relevant field, carries more subjective, cognitive weight. A person who is recognized as an expert authority often has greater experience and knowledge of their field than the average person, so their opinion is more likely than average to be correct.
Except in this case, the sole example of a specific teacher we have so far doesn't seem to be more correct on average on this point I was making. That's because the point I was making was an subtopic of teaching that I don't believe teachers really ever get any training on whatsoever—the pscyhological development of children is something not many teachers know much about, particularly when it comes to practical knowledge. (And in any case, the operative word in that defn you quoted is subjective.)
I'm no child psychologist either, though...so I'm only saying that I wish my argument to be judged on the points I'm asserted, and not simply ignored because some guy said something he heard from some teachers he knows that are as ill-equipped in the classroom as the average teacher on average. I hate it when I make a point and someone else's response essentially boils down to: that's not what someone else I know says! So what? What about the point itself? What do you think?
No, I'm saying that an entire department occasionally has to do forensics. And they should hire people that can do that. You know, like CSI.
No.
Up through middle school, which is the age of kids we're talking about, children's brains have not yet fully formed a strong self-identity, meaning that they are still being socialized. If an authority figure exhibits certain behavior, children at this stage and younger will respond to it and tend to reflect it. Which means all of your teacher friends, by refusing to give an inch are teaching their children that uncompromising behavior is reasonable...in effect, telling them to take a light year when the opportunity presents itself. That's what you call one o' them there "self-fulfilling prophecy" type things.
The fact that your friends are teachers gives them no more authority to speak on this topic than the teacher that instigated this mess, particularly since they apparently agree with the way she handled it, and I think we all agree that she handled it poorly. The very point I was trying to make is that it's distressing to me, and ought to be to you, is that I couldn't see any evidence that this teacher who's in charge of kids all day didn't seem to have any inkling of exactly how she should've handled it (though it is also equally clear to me that even she would most likely agree she dropped the ball).
The fact that you know teachers doesn't give you any special authority on the topic. I myself claim no special authority either...so with a total absence of special authority to go around, why don't we all just agree to discuss it as equals and assess the points on their own merits and reasonableness. Appeal to authority is always a fallacy, but it's particularly absurd when there is no actual authority present, wouldn't you agree?
Two people, the school teacher and the blogger, spend their days as educators. One educating people on the benefits of certain technology, the other kids. For what it's worth, I found the teacher's email to certainly be more threatening than it needed to be given the amount of research she'd done into the matter. And the blogger's response had a bit of bite to it, but it was through much of it making real, valid, informational points. Maybe he shouldn't have indicted all teachers...but it's certainly true that this teacher's attitude isn't exactly unique in the industry either.
What's disturbing to me here is not that the teacher wasn't aware of free software or not up on technology...rather, it's her overreaction to the kids. Everything about the way she handled that situation was wrong, wrong, wrong. Did she put the class back on track and then ask the kid in a non-accusatory way to explain what was going on?
No, she flew off the handle, smacked down on the kid, fired off a threatening, uninformed email...pretty much an out-of-proportion, emotional reaction to a kid being a bit disruptive in the classroom—and being disruptive because he was actually excited about learning something at that.
What's even more troubling is that, even after the fact, she's crying and clearly sorry, but I didn't get a strong indication that she even knew exactly what it was she did wrong so she can fix it and respond more rationally next time. It's hard to say from the little bit of the blogger's follow-up post...but we really, really need our teachers to be adults in the room. The way she initially reacted was more like how kids treat each other.
I think the defn of rogue they're using is: no longer obedient, belonging, or accepted and hence not controllable or answerable; deviating, renegade. Not the best word choice, but if you accept this defn and strip any negative value judgments from it, it is technically not far off.
More to the point, though, who cares what other people say? Read his words, form your own judgments. If you do your part as the reader, then it doesn't make any difference what others want you to think...you've figured that out for yourself.
If you're talking about a file server that routinely serves many users simultaneously, fragmentation has actually been shown to speed up throughput. What's that? you say.
Assume you have many large files that take several seconds to read being accessed simultaneously by several users. If they are all defragmented, on average the standard deviation from the center of the disk is higher than if they are highly fragmented. This would be irrelevant, but for the fact that a preemptive multitasking OS will periodically swap the current task out and switch to service another user...who's in the middle of reading a different file. The effect is that the head jumps around anyway, despite all of the files being totally defragged.
So in this scenario, how to increase total throughput for all users? It turns out that the more you fragment a given file, and the more a given file is dispersed over the entire disk, the lower the average seek time between context switches as the machine jumps from one task to another. (Well, to a point—if a file is so heavily fragged that the head often has to jump even during a single context switch, that's not optimal either.)
Anyway, this information is literally decades old at this point...I wonder if it's still relevant to modern OSes / file systems? Multiprocessor systems and caching might have solved this during the years in between...can anyone comment?
Clearly, the problem with the post was that the poster forgot to place the lyrics in context to how other races have composed lyrics throughout the ages.
Totally reasonable response to an explosively racist post. Well done!
I love how this discussion has an explosively controversial issue built right into the discussion, but such that it really has nothing to do with the actual topic at hand. It's like it was written to guarantee the topic of anonymity would get almost no attention at all.
I find it both entertaining & amusing. :-)
Let me get this straight. McMurdie is basically saying, We need a pervasive technology solution to compensate for the fact that I have the wrong and/or incompetent personnel.
Yea....
Well, the natural end is coming...if this is the case, then cartoon depictions of rape or abuse have to be treated as real too. I guess Homer's going to jail for a long time for strangling Bart. And I wonder about the moviemaking industry—if cartoon depictions of these things are now headed for illegality, then certainly live action depictions will be treated as real.
I wonder if the judge will order the perpetrators (say Jodie Foster's attackers in The Accused) to stay in character while they serve their time. After all, it's the fictional character being sentenced...
Dude, that's sick. I'm ok with gay marriage, but I draw the line at dogs and logical units.
I understood that echo was a useful term in this context, but I couldn't figure out why it was better than reflection. You, sir, have expressed what I could not quite put my finger on.
You're proof that the int3rpipes is more than just trolls, flamewars, and idgits...thanks!
That's a cop-out. See previous response to my comment for the correct interpretation of the semantics. (btw, osu-neko ftw!)
Why do I say it's a cop-out? Because it can be applied to any bad definition with equally valid results. For instance, I now assert that the poster to whom you refer "is colloquially assumed to be wrong" as support for my response. See? Meaningless.
Reflections are not instantaneous. (Yes, I'm annoying...but correct.)
This idea will work great, but we'll need rich people in exclusive developments to kick off the trend. Since rich people usually get rich by being business people (read: technophobe) or lucky idiots (read: I'm bitter b/c I'm not rich), this is unlikely to happen soon.
Everything cool, like cell phones that are not the size of shoeboxes, trickled down from rich people that used to use cell phones the size of shoeboxes.
Then why tout it as "evolution"? Don't we have enough trouble keeping the creationism-ist-tites at bay?
Easy fix! When they take over your ship, just grab the remote detonator and dive overboard with you and your loved ones. Then detonate your incendiary explosives from the water, taking them and their ship lashed to yours. (You can use the debris to float home.)
As unbelievable as your jest may seem, if you spend a few minutes with Google I'm sure you can find plenty of examples with people doing just that, sans any kind of water treatment plant.
Dude, it's not like he stuck his used paper to the wall like your friends did your place in college after a night of hearty drinking...