And you're ignoring the last part - But conduct by the student, in class or out of it, which for any reason--whether it stems from time, place, or type of behavior -- materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others is, of course, not immunized by the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech - which is much more unrestricted. There is specifically NO restriction on the place
You're still taking it out of context. That whole paragraph is referring to conduct which takes place on school grounds. Conduct not taking place on school grounds was not even being considered in Tinker v. Des Moines.
No, the Supreme Court backs up schools taking action independent of any police activity.
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), when the Supreme Court decided that "conduct by the student, in class or out of it, which for any reason - whether it stems from time, place, or type of behavior - materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others is, of course, not immunized by the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech."
You're taking that bit of dicta from Tinker v. Des Moines completely out of context. The phrase "in class" is a reference to the classroom as opposed to the larger school campus, not a reference to at the school rather than completely off the grounds of the school.
Here's the whole paragraph:
The principle of these cases is not confined to the supervised and ordained discussion which takes place in the classroom. The principal use to which the schools are dedicated is to accommodate students during prescribed hours for the purpose of certain types of activities. Among those activities is personal intercommunication among the students. [note 6] This is not only an inevitable part of the process of attending school; it is also an important part of the educational process. A student's rights, therefore, do not embrace merely the classroom hours. When he is in the cafeteria, or on the playing field, or on [513] the campus during the authorized hours, he may express his opinions, even on controversial subjects like the conflict in Vietnam, if he does so without "materially and substantially interfer[ing] with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school" and without colliding with the rights of others. Burnside v. Byars, supra, at 749. But conduct by the student, in class or out of it, which for any reason--whether it stems from time, place, or type of behavior--materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others is, of course, not immunized by the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech.
It really isn't a threat to anyone. Unless students were previously labouring under the misapprehension that they were free to tell people that their teacher was a paedophile because he had told them off this changes nothing.
We don't know why the students said the teacher was a pedophile, actually.
What I think you have to bear in mind is that this wasn't the start of the investigation - I don't believe for a moment that it was a random Facebook raid by the teacher in question. This will almost certainly have been the end of the teacher's investigation after the allegations had been communicated to parents or to other children and had then come to the teacher's attention in the form of either harassment from students or concern from parents.
My guess -- and it's a pure guess -- is the statement got back to the principal because one of the students' friends' parents found out about it. But it doesn't matter whether it was a random Facebook raid or a targeted one; the raid was still outside the school's authority. Unlike, say, a locker, a Facebook account is not part of the school.
The question then, for all the people who say that the school acted unreasonably by using its internal disciplinary process when the Facebook posting was made outside school, becomes whether you would prefer that they had sued the student and forced him to pay substantial damages and hefty legal costs.
The school could not have sued, because the school was not libeled. The teacher would have had to have sued. And I doubt damages would have been substantial; the fact that clearly no one took the students' statements seriously (note that the reaction was to punish the student, not to suspend the teacher) would mitigate them. The legal costs are happening anyway; as the school overreached, they prompted a lawsuit.
The first protects your right to free speech, however you are still liable for any consequences of exercising that right. It does not grant you any immunity from being punished for what you said.
It most certainly protects you from being punished by government agencies for what you said. Without that, it's meaningless; Congress could pass a law specifying you be executed as a consequence of speaking against the government. The school is a public school, hence an arm of the government.
One of these students called their teacher a pedophile, the other called a teacher bipolar. If tossing around a statement like that isn't criminal when it isn't warranted, then I'm not sure what libel and slander are.
Torts, in most states, including Georgia. Which means that the statement isn't criminal.
Or, perhaps the teacher actually is bipolar, but has it well under control through medication, and you've got a kid spreading private medical information online, in an attempt to damage that person. Either way, you're dealing with a kid that has decided it's within his rights to deliberately and publicly try to damage the reputation of a person who makes a living working with kids.
Sorry, you can't have this one. If the teacher is bipolar, calling him bipolar isn't libel as truth is an absolute defense for libel. If the student discovered this through observation of the teacher's behavior, or because the teacher left his lithium prescription in plain sight in the classroom, the student has no duty to keep the information confidential.
Calling an innocent teacher a "pedophile" and a "rapist" - which is what these kids did - is the educational world's equivalent of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater.
No, it really isn't. Not that the case in question was a paragon of wise Supreme Court decisions anyway. What's missing is the emergency nature of shouting "fire!" -- those hearing the cry must respond immediately, without time for critical thought or investigation, or risk serious harm from the fire. In the case of calling someone a pedophile or rapist, no such emergency is present; while often enough those hearing the cry do fail to engage in critical thought or investigation, it is not because there is any compelling reason they cannot.
Spuriously accusing someone else of any crime is bad enough; falsely accusing someone of being a child molester is beyond the pale; leveling such an accusation at a teacher - who would tend to face immediate suspension during any investigation, followed by dismissal and blacklisting, not to mention torches and pitchforks - is appalling behavior. Many jurisdictions have zero-tolerance, zero-discretion policies for responding to these types of claims, and school board officials have no choice about whether or not to investigate and take immediate action.
But no such accusation was leveled. Rather, this was mere trash-talking among a group of students. There's a difference between making an actual accusation and throwing accusatory words around, even if both are wrong. For instance, I might refer to a co-worker as a "thief" because he keeps taking pens off my desk, but the fact is that I'm not actually accusing him of committing the crime of larceny when I do so.
By the same token, if your coworker falsely accused a manager of raping one or more of his subordinates
Was any such specific accusation made here? From what I've read, he was called a "rapist" but no more specifics were given.
This isn't a free speech issue and it isn't a threat to posters on Slashdot.
It is to any who are still in the hell we call the primary and secondary education system.
The ability to spread malicious falsehoods about people is not a protected category of free speech; it is in fact a type of speech that has been prohibited for centuries.
It is, but there's more to the question than that. For instance, in libel law, one is not eligible for more than token damages if nobody who read the statement took it seriously.
Furthermore, there's the question of how much control a school has or should have over a student's life outside of school -- including posting on Facebook. To assert that the school has the power to require a student to show the principal the contents of the student's facebook account, and further to require the student to delete any offending posts, is going way too far, IMO.
You're naive. The kids had already had years of indoctrination about the dangers of pedophiles and the serious badness of 'inappropriate touching', etc. Obviously you don't have kids. What is sad is that their characters are so twisted at such a young age. Scary.
Perhaps it's those years of indoctrination which results in them being twisted. More likely they're just cruel little brats reaching for the worst thing they can find -- which their indoctrination has taught them is "pedophile".
Anyway, for once we have a story where the students are actually being punished for something punishable (at least through a civil penalty) for adults as well. But, again, the schools went overboard and exceeded their authority: "At the same time though, she said her school principal, Jolene Morris, violated her privacy by ordering her to log into her Facebook account at a school library computer. Morris then reportedly read the offending post and ensuing responses from friends before ordering Sosa to delete the posts."
Facebook is not part of the school. The principal does not have absolute authority over the student, nor any over Facebook.
Ted Kaminsky (sp) wrote that when people are living a more and more pointless life and utterly domesticated life, they will sometimes turn to drugs in order to keep themselves placated, and continue to believe that things make sense. If a society does not start consuming drugs whole sale, a lot of strife is sure to ensue. He said that among many other things.
Of coarse his thoughts were considered heretical, so the establishment wrote them off as a rambling lunatic.
If you mean Ted Kaczynski, he WAS in fact a rambling lunatic. Rambling you can get from his writings, lunatic from the fact that he mailed bombs to people.
You want to have a license now to get the gear and get the experience / make the connections without being hassled by the FCC.
Not so much the FCC, but the greybeards who will turn you in as soon as looking at you, all the while muttering about how in their day you needed to understand code @500wpm to even look at a radio.
Summary: Alleman was leaving a rally held to support another man, George Hodgdon, who the police didn't like very much. The cop, Brian Montplaisir, followed him, then pulled him over. Alleman called Porcupine411. Montplaisir says he crossed onto the shoulder; Alleman denies it.
Other activists claim to have been similarly harassed and arrested (with _police_ recordings of those arrests mysteriously not working), including for the "crime" of using a cell phone to record conversations in a police station (keeping in mind that telephone equipment is specifically exempted in NH law).
Obviously this is a biased account, but if this side of the story is true, all the Weare police need to be taken out to the back of the police station and shot.
(Trial? Why give them justice when they dish out injustice under the color of authority. Besides, we don't have the death penalty for bad cops. Unfortunately.)
It's not abuse, it's almost certain to be the natural extension of the law. The laws on wiretapping don't generally specify the methods that are used to do the actual recording, so an audio recording of any sort is equal to any other. If you're in a 2 party consent state, then this sort of prosecution is to be expected, if the person did the recording, which it sounds like he did, then he'll end up being charged and likely convicted.
Actually, these laws having been around for a while, nuances like this HAVE been worked out. Both the question of whether communication during a traffic stop is a communication subject to the law, and whether or not an incidental interception like this is covered. Even if they've been worked out in a way which is not to the cops favor, however, the cops will keep arresting based on them, because there's no cost to them to do so. Thus, the cops make their own law regardless of what legislators or judges actually say. Until cops start getting serious penalties, meaning dismissal AND jail time, for doing this sort of thing, they'll keep doing it.
Without looking at the case law (which I don't have access to), there's a few problems with the cop's point of view. The second-biggest is this:
II. "Oral communication'' means any oral communication uttered by a person exhibiting an expectation that such communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying such expectation.
III. "Intercept'' means the aural or other acquisition of, or the recording of, the contents of any telecommunication or oral communication through the use of any electronic, mechanical, or other device.
If you're talking to someone who is openly using a cell phone, you cannot reasonably justify an expectation that what you say will not reach the other party in the conversation. Since it's an interception whether or not the other party is recording, it doesn't matter that he had voice mail on the other end.
The biggest, however, is this one:
IV. "Electronic, mechanical, or other device'' means any device or apparatus which can be used to intercept a telecommunication or oral communication other than:
(a) Any telephone or telegraph instrument, equipment, facility or any component thereof:
(1) Furnished to the subscriber or user by a communication carrier in the ordinary course of its business and being used by the subscriber or user in the ordinary course of its business or furnished by such subscriber or user for connection to the facilities of such service and used in the ordinary course of its business in accordance with applicable provisions of telephone and telegraph company rules and regulations, as approved by the public utilities commission;
That's right: telephone equipment is specifically excluded. Assuming his voicemail was provided by his carrier, that's excluded too. He's innocent by black-letter law, and the cops are committing a clear abuse by arresting him under the circumstances.
When a government does this sort of thing, it's called a tax. When an established church does it, it's a tithe. Sorry, SOCAN, but when anyone else does it, it's just plain old stealing, and I don't mean copyright infringement.
All the other routers I have used, while not being fundamentally different in UI design, simply had substantially less options to play around with and focused more on what the average consumer actually used.
You've probably never used a Zyxel, then.
Yes, stock consumer router firmware is usually simpler. But you pay for that by simply not being able to do things you might want to do, like multi-NAT. DD-WRT is mostly aimed towards those who want to do more than the stock firmware allows, so it's going to be more complicated.
Ah, so it's revenge. Someone once said something like, "If you take an eye for an eye, then everyone will be blind.".
And he was a better politician than logician.
Taking an eye for an eye is a reference to the ancient law (found in the Old Testament and Hammurabi's code) that the offense of putting out another person's eye is to be punished by having the offender's eye put out. It's an important point to notice that no retaliation is due for the punishment; it's explicitly not like a vendetta.
Thus, if no one puts out anyone's eye, no eyes are lost. For each person who puts out an eye, one additional eye is lost. Even assuming no deterrent effect (which is of course the whole point), only twice as many eyes will be lost under "an eye for an eye" than under some less harsh regime. Since we can see that very few eyes -- far less than half -- are put out under the current less-harsh regime, we can tell that instituting "an eye for an eye" will in fact NOT leave everyone blind.
The same goes for "a life for a life". There are something like 16,000 crimes classed as "murder and non-negligent homicide" each year in the US. Assuming these are all committed by different people, and no deterrent effect, only 16,000 more people would die if each murderer were to be killed.
The problem here is that it is far too easy to delude yourself into believing that the people are on your side. That you - and only you - have the right to speak for them.
Sure, but Muhamar Qadafi is the head of government, not a vigilante at all.
Because we don't authorize the 16 year old's working at movie theatre's to shoot people videotaping the movies.
It's the 16 year olds working at the movie theaters who are copying the damn things in the first place. At least when they don't get them directly from a studio employee.
Some areas of the US were served by a CLEC, not a Bell. I guess Bell wasn't a monopoly, either, cause I had GTE before they merged with Bell Atlantic and became Verizon...
Some areas of the US were served by a company other than Bell, but those companies were still ILECs, not CLECs. For there to be a CLEC, there have to be at least two Local Exchange Carriers serving an area. GTE just had a local monopoly in a few areas not served by Ma Bell.
Agreed. In the end, the appearance of vigilantes is a symptom of something else; I won't go so far as to say it's inevitable, but if it takes vigilantes before things come to light, your country got problems.
The appearance of a few vigiliantes, despised by most, means little. The appearance of a fairly large number of vigilantes, operating with at least the tacit support of the general population, means they're serving a need for justice (whether poorly or well) that the government has failed to fill. The government condemns them regardless, because the government claims the privilege to dispense justice to be solely its own, but when the government claims that privilege then fails to fulfill the implicit duty, what do you expect?
Known terrorists have literally been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama was awarded the prize for having done absolutely nothing to earn it. The combination literally means everyone on earth has earned a Nobel prize.
There might be just one guy who hasn't earned it. Just for completeness, then, I nominate Colonel Mohamar Kadaffi of Libya for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm carefully backing off of your lawn. Please don't shoot.
You're still taking it out of context. That whole paragraph is referring to conduct which takes place on school grounds. Conduct not taking place on school grounds was not even being considered in Tinker v. Des Moines.
You're taking that bit of dicta from Tinker v. Des Moines completely out of context. The phrase "in class" is a reference to the classroom as opposed to the larger school campus, not a reference to at the school rather than completely off the grounds of the school. Here's the whole paragraph:
We don't know why the students said the teacher was a pedophile, actually.
My guess -- and it's a pure guess -- is the statement got back to the principal because one of the students' friends' parents found out about it. But it doesn't matter whether it was a random Facebook raid or a targeted one; the raid was still outside the school's authority. Unlike, say, a locker, a Facebook account is not part of the school.
The school could not have sued, because the school was not libeled. The teacher would have had to have sued. And I doubt damages would have been substantial; the fact that clearly no one took the students' statements seriously (note that the reaction was to punish the student, not to suspend the teacher) would mitigate them. The legal costs are happening anyway; as the school overreached, they prompted a lawsuit.
It most certainly protects you from being punished by government agencies for what you said. Without that, it's meaningless; Congress could pass a law specifying you be executed as a consequence of speaking against the government. The school is a public school, hence an arm of the government.
Torts, in most states, including Georgia. Which means that the statement isn't criminal.
Sorry, you can't have this one. If the teacher is bipolar, calling him bipolar isn't libel as truth is an absolute defense for libel. If the student discovered this through observation of the teacher's behavior, or because the teacher left his lithium prescription in plain sight in the classroom, the student has no duty to keep the information confidential.
No, it really isn't. Not that the case in question was a paragon of wise Supreme Court decisions anyway. What's missing is the emergency nature of shouting "fire!" -- those hearing the cry must respond immediately, without time for critical thought or investigation, or risk serious harm from the fire. In the case of calling someone a pedophile or rapist, no such emergency is present; while often enough those hearing the cry do fail to engage in critical thought or investigation, it is not because there is any compelling reason they cannot.
But no such accusation was leveled. Rather, this was mere trash-talking among a group of students. There's a difference between making an actual accusation and throwing accusatory words around, even if both are wrong. For instance, I might refer to a co-worker as a "thief" because he keeps taking pens off my desk, but the fact is that I'm not actually accusing him of committing the crime of larceny when I do so.
Was any such specific accusation made here? From what I've read, he was called a "rapist" but no more specifics were given.
It is to any who are still in the hell we call the primary and secondary education system.
It is, but there's more to the question than that. For instance, in libel law, one is not eligible for more than token damages if nobody who read the statement took it seriously.
Furthermore, there's the question of how much control a school has or should have over a student's life outside of school -- including posting on Facebook. To assert that the school has the power to require a student to show the principal the contents of the student's facebook account, and further to require the student to delete any offending posts, is going way too far, IMO.
Perhaps it's those years of indoctrination which results in them being twisted. More likely they're just cruel little brats reaching for the worst thing they can find -- which their indoctrination has taught them is "pedophile".
Anyway, for once we have a story where the students are actually being punished for something punishable (at least through a civil penalty) for adults as well. But, again, the schools went overboard and exceeded their authority: "At the same time though, she said her school principal, Jolene Morris, violated her privacy by ordering her to log into her Facebook account at a school library computer. Morris then reportedly read the offending post and ensuing responses from friends before ordering Sosa to delete the posts."
Facebook is not part of the school. The principal does not have absolute authority over the student, nor any over Facebook.
If you mean Ted Kaczynski, he WAS in fact a rambling lunatic. Rambling you can get from his writings, lunatic from the fact that he mailed bombs to people.
Not so much the FCC, but the greybeards who will turn you in as soon as looking at you, all the while muttering about how in their day you needed to understand code @500wpm to even look at a radio.
Even if aerogels really did make good batteries and had great energy density, you could end up like this:
The Good News: New aerogel battery has highest energy density by mass than any other battery.
The Bad News: Unfortunately, energy density by volume is so poor you'd need to fill your car with aerogel to make it a mile.
A better article is here.
Summary: Alleman was leaving a rally held to support another man, George Hodgdon, who the police didn't like very much. The cop, Brian Montplaisir, followed him, then pulled him over. Alleman called Porcupine411. Montplaisir says he crossed onto the shoulder; Alleman denies it.
Other activists claim to have been similarly harassed and arrested (with _police_ recordings of those arrests mysteriously not working), including for the "crime" of using a cell phone to record conversations in a police station (keeping in mind that telephone equipment is specifically exempted in NH law).
Obviously this is a biased account, but if this side of the story is true, all the Weare police need to be taken out to the back of the police station and shot.
(Trial? Why give them justice when they dish out injustice under the color of authority. Besides, we don't have the death penalty for bad cops. Unfortunately.)
License plate motto of the District of Columbia... what's that have to do with anything?
Actually, these laws having been around for a while, nuances like this HAVE been worked out. Both the question of whether communication during a traffic stop is a communication subject to the law, and whether or not an incidental interception like this is covered. Even if they've been worked out in a way which is not to the cops favor, however, the cops will keep arresting based on them, because there's no cost to them to do so. Thus, the cops make their own law regardless of what legislators or judges actually say. Until cops start getting serious penalties, meaning dismissal AND jail time, for doing this sort of thing, they'll keep doing it. Without looking at the case law (which I don't have access to), there's a few problems with the cop's point of view. The second-biggest is this:
If you're talking to someone who is openly using a cell phone, you cannot reasonably justify an expectation that what you say will not reach the other party in the conversation. Since it's an interception whether or not the other party is recording, it doesn't matter that he had voice mail on the other end. The biggest, however, is this one:
That's right: telephone equipment is specifically excluded. Assuming his voicemail was provided by his carrier, that's excluded too. He's innocent by black-letter law, and the cops are committing a clear abuse by arresting him under the circumstances.
Wear a tool belt (keep the wire cutters there), work clothes, and a hard hat... nobody will look twice.
When a government does this sort of thing, it's called a tax. When an established church does it, it's a tithe. Sorry, SOCAN, but when anyone else does it, it's just plain old stealing, and I don't mean copyright infringement.
You've probably never used a Zyxel, then.
Yes, stock consumer router firmware is usually simpler. But you pay for that by simply not being able to do things you might want to do, like multi-NAT. DD-WRT is mostly aimed towards those who want to do more than the stock firmware allows, so it's going to be more complicated.
And he was a better politician than logician.
Taking an eye for an eye is a reference to the ancient law (found in the Old Testament and Hammurabi's code) that the offense of putting out another person's eye is to be punished by having the offender's eye put out. It's an important point to notice that no retaliation is due for the punishment; it's explicitly not like a vendetta.
Thus, if no one puts out anyone's eye, no eyes are lost. For each person who puts out an eye, one additional eye is lost. Even assuming no deterrent effect (which is of course the whole point), only twice as many eyes will be lost under "an eye for an eye" than under some less harsh regime. Since we can see that very few eyes -- far less than half -- are put out under the current less-harsh regime, we can tell that instituting "an eye for an eye" will in fact NOT leave everyone blind.
The same goes for "a life for a life". There are something like 16,000 crimes classed as "murder and non-negligent homicide" each year in the US. Assuming these are all committed by different people, and no deterrent effect, only 16,000 more people would die if each murderer were to be killed.
Sure, but Muhamar Qadafi is the head of government, not a vigilante at all.
It's the 16 year olds working at the movie theaters who are copying the damn things in the first place. At least when they don't get them directly from a studio employee.
Some areas of the US were served by a company other than Bell, but those companies were still ILECs, not CLECs. For there to be a CLEC, there have to be at least two Local Exchange Carriers serving an area. GTE just had a local monopoly in a few areas not served by Ma Bell.
The appearance of a few vigiliantes, despised by most, means little. The appearance of a fairly large number of vigilantes, operating with at least the tacit support of the general population, means they're serving a need for justice (whether poorly or well) that the government has failed to fill. The government condemns them regardless, because the government claims the privilege to dispense justice to be solely its own, but when the government claims that privilege then fails to fulfill the implicit duty, what do you expect?
There might be just one guy who hasn't earned it. Just for completeness, then, I nominate Colonel Mohamar Kadaffi of Libya for the Nobel Peace Prize.