Teachers also cannot have a nonwork-related website that allows exclusive access with a current or former student.
The key word which most people miss is "exclusive". So this law would prohibit having a student as your ONLY Facebook friend, but as long as you have at least one other friend, you should be okay. Also, as others have noted, the next sentence in the law says that former students have to be under 18 years of age for the law to apply at all.
Tough? Hell, that law is currently a godsend for kids of teachers. "Sorry, mom, I can't have you in my facebook friends, it's the law".
I bet a lot of kids would kill for that opportunity!
Actually, I think the solution most kids use is to have two Facebook accounts with their name spelled slightly differently. One for friends, and one for family and family friends. Obviously, kids won't bother to mention the existence of the "friends" account to their parents.
Many teachers use Facebook as a means of communicating with clubs, teams, and even classes. Since ninety-five percent of the students (a guesstimate) are on FB, it's an easy form of communication.
And do you feel it is appropriate that that other 5% should be required to create Facebook accounts just so they can get assignments or turn in homework? Many people choose not to have Facebook accounts for privacy reasons. Should students be denied that choice?
Who cares if the teacher was criticising religion or not. Individual opinion of people who work for the government is not the same as government policy.
So why is it not okay for teachers to talk about creationism in class (except to denounce it)? Personally, I think both should be okay, but it seems to me there is a real double standard here.
Yes, the summary is biased. As the article points out, it is in fact the large cars that are dangerous-- they are, however, dangerous to the smaller cars.
Making cars smaller doesn't result in more deaths-- unless you have large cars on the road as well. It is the larger cars that are killing people. (and the bogus statistic comes from the "National Center for Policy Analysis"-- read: political action group paid to shill for oil companies.)
That may well be true, but which would you rather be driving in a collision, the large car or the small one?
I was not using my real name on BBSs and I've never used my real name on any ISP account I ever had (first one was in 1994). I was not the exception.
If you read the GP's post, he's talking about the Internet, so BBS's have nothing to do with it. As for your ISP account, by 1994, pseudonyms were quite common, as he also points out. Remember, the Internet goes back to the early 1980s.
Those old enough to remember the show ALF will recall that his home planet of Melmac was destroyed when everyone turned on their hairdryers at the same time one day.
you're suggesting that leaving the invalidly licensed software on the machines is a better course of action? LOL
Yes, don't USE the unlicensed software, but be aware that deleting it, once an investigation has started or been promised, could be a crime. Most important advice: talk to your lawyer, not Slashdot!
IANAL, but if its a civil suit, its not really evidence in the criminal sense. I would think you can be only be charged with destroying evidence in a criminal case- otherwise you could be charged every time you throw out your cheese since its evidence of -something-.
Destroying evidence in any legal proceeding, or any investigation that is part of such a proceeding, civil or criminal, is a CRIMINAL offense. Ask any lawyer.
Throwing out cheese would only be a problem if there were an investigation going on where it might be reasonably assumed that the cheese would be material evidence. If someone were murdered by cheese suffocation, and the police said they are going to be searching suspects home for similar cheese, then yes, throwing away the cheese would be a crime! Under most other circumstances, it would probably be okay to discard old cheese.
Since the BSA provided us with the list they claimed was illegal, we scrubbed it from the offending boxes so as to appear legal.
VERY BAD ADVICE!!!!! When the BSA goes after your company for software copyright violation, it is purely a CIVIL matter. The worst that can happen is your business can be sued out of existence. By destroying evidence, you are committing a CRIMINAL offense, and one that is prosecuted very vigorously, especially by the Feds. You can spend some serious time in jail for that sort of thing.
He says it's a former employee, so what are you suggesting when you're saying "deal with the whistleblower"? You obviously can't fire him. What else can you do? Kill him?
Well, if the statements aren't true, he can sue the former employee for everything he's worth.
This can be dodged by disabling javascript, like everyone already does, who cares about privacy.
I also appear to have dodged it by having their servers blocked in/etc/hosts. Not sure at which point I did that.
Blocking access to the KISSmetric site is only a temporary solution as it will do nothing to solve the underlying security problem which this site is exploiting. There's nothing to prevent other services from springing up which do much the same thing. This is a problem which must be solved in the browser.
There are always ways. It only depends on how much effort you want to put into it. You could use proxy servers to mask IP and change them frequently or even jump from one free wifi hotspot to another. You could repeatedly purge all your cache, cookies, history etc after every site you visit.
If you RTFA, you'll see that this service is using persistent storage on your computer that is NOT contained in your cache, cookies, or browser history. Even using a DIFFERENT BROWSER on the same computer (i.e. Firefox, then Chrome) this site can track you and link your sessions. I regard this a as a browser bug, and it needs to be fixed in the browser. We can't rely on legislation or promises of good behavior from website operators to fix this problem. It really needs to be fixed in the browser, or, if it is a Flash issue, it needs to be fixed in Flash. I hope a patch comes out for Firefox soon!
RTFA
"The Oxford University team said bigger brains did not make people smarter.
Larger vision processing areas fill the extra capacity, they write in the Royal Society's Biology Letters journal."
But just as computers with very fast GPUs can have those GPUs put to other uses, thereby increasing the computer's overall processing power, isn't it reasonable to assume the same is true with the visual processing areas of the brain?
Google+ follows Twitter's following philosophy and in that way is much more like to Twitter than Facebook is. OTOH, Twitter allows anonymity which Google+ sadly doesn't.
I'm not aware of an anonymous tweet button in Twitter. How exactly to Twitter and Google+ differ in that respect?
This has nothing to do specifically with scientists, this is more about the difference between code you write for your own use versus code you write for others to use. Scientists aren't the only people who write code for their own use!
Conversely, scientists often do write code that needs to be shared, sometimes among large groups. I used to work in the field of experimental high energy physics, which typically have collaborations of hundreds or even thousands of people. Some of the software I worked on was to be used by the wider collaboration, and there were many coding practices we were expected to adhere to, in order to ensure the code worked properly on all the different systems in use. (We supported about 6 different OS's: VMS and several flavors of Unix.) Other software was written for my own personal analysis, and it wasn't meant to be shared, although it was expected that I at least run some consistency checks to ensure the code was giving reasonable results.
On the other extreme are general purpose tools, written by scientists for use by scientists on many different collaborations, such as CERNLIB, Root, Minuit, GEANT, etc. And lets not forget, the World Wide Web was created at a high energy physics lab (CERN) to facilitate online collaboration! It seems to have proven robust enough for a somewhat wider use!
Alzheimers can be 20 years in your body before it causes problems. There is no effective treatment. Forcing people to take this test early would simply mean that otherwise healthy people have 20 years of their lives ruined waiting for Alzheimers before the disease itself starts to affect them.
Really its like you didn't read the article:p
But given the type of care that Alzheimers patients require, wouldn't it make sense to spend those 20 years making arrangements and saving money for that care? Alzheimers can put an extreme burden (financial as well as emotional) on family members, so it seems to me irresponsible and selfish to simply bury your head in the sand and insist on not being told that you have this incredibly burdensome disease.
With respect, your parent's friends are idiots. Naming a kid something like "Flash" is a beacon for trouble down the road. No sympathy, sorry.
Right. Shame on parents for not considering the requirements of popular social media sites which might exist in the future when naming their children. Such "parents" ought to have their children seized by child protective services and placed in foster homes!
Maybe it's because it is invite only. I mean if something is exclusive, lot of people want in.
Yep. It's the star-bellied sneetches and the plain-bellied sneetches all over again. We may disapprove of them, but nobody wants to be a plain-bellied sneetch!
How does this work? if he broke the law in the UK, he should be tried in the UK. Under what grounds would extradition to the US make sense? he'd have to have committed a crime in US territory, and if the site wasn't there, and he wasn't there, then the answer to this seems pretty clear...
If you want to try him for a crime allegedly committed in the UK, try him in the UK, not the US. And if the UK laws don't allow you to try him in the UK because what he did wasn't a crime there, then too bad for you!
The problem is, he wasn't directly infringing, but rather posting links that facilitated infringement by others. Since those links could be followed by people in the USA, he is facilitating a crime in the USA which is itself a crime in the USA. Had he been directly infringing on copyright, rather than facilitating, then I don't think the USA would have jurisdiction.
Slashdot Mirror
Teachers also cannot have a nonwork-related website that allows exclusive access with a current or former student.
The key word which most people miss is "exclusive". So this law would prohibit having a student as your ONLY Facebook friend, but as long as you have at least one other friend, you should be okay. Also, as others have noted, the next sentence in the law says that former students have to be under 18 years of age for the law to apply at all.
Tough? Hell, that law is currently a godsend for kids of teachers. "Sorry, mom, I can't have you in my facebook friends, it's the law".
I bet a lot of kids would kill for that opportunity!
Actually, I think the solution most kids use is to have two Facebook accounts with their name spelled slightly differently. One for friends, and one for family and family friends. Obviously, kids won't bother to mention the existence of the "friends" account to their parents.
Many teachers use Facebook as a means of communicating with clubs, teams, and even classes. Since ninety-five percent of the students (a guesstimate) are on FB, it's an easy form of communication.
And do you feel it is appropriate that that other 5% should be required to create Facebook accounts just so they can get assignments or turn in homework? Many people choose not to have Facebook accounts for privacy reasons. Should students be denied that choice?
Who cares if the teacher was criticising religion or not. Individual opinion of people who work for the government is not the same as government policy.
So why is it not okay for teachers to talk about creationism in class (except to denounce it)? Personally, I think both should be okay, but it seems to me there is a real double standard here.
Yes, the summary is biased. As the article points out, it is in fact the large cars that are dangerous-- they are, however, dangerous to the smaller cars. Making cars smaller doesn't result in more deaths-- unless you have large cars on the road as well. It is the larger cars that are killing people. (and the bogus statistic comes from the "National Center for Policy Analysis"-- read: political action group paid to shill for oil companies.)
That may well be true, but which would you rather be driving in a collision, the large car or the small one?
I was not using my real name on BBSs and I've never used my real name on any ISP account I ever had (first one was in 1994). I was not the exception.
If you read the GP's post, he's talking about the Internet, so BBS's have nothing to do with it. As for your ISP account, by 1994, pseudonyms were quite common, as he also points out. Remember, the Internet goes back to the early 1980s.
Those old enough to remember the show ALF will recall that his home planet of Melmac was destroyed when everyone turned on their hairdryers at the same time one day.
you're suggesting that leaving the invalidly licensed software on the machines is a better course of action? LOL
Yes, don't USE the unlicensed software, but be aware that deleting it, once an investigation has started or been promised, could be a crime. Most important advice: talk to your lawyer, not Slashdot!
IANAL, but if its a civil suit, its not really evidence in the criminal sense. I would think you can be only be charged with destroying evidence in a criminal case- otherwise you could be charged every time you throw out your cheese since its evidence of -something-.
Destroying evidence in any legal proceeding, or any investigation that is part of such a proceeding, civil or criminal, is a CRIMINAL offense. Ask any lawyer.
Throwing out cheese would only be a problem if there were an investigation going on where it might be reasonably assumed that the cheese would be material evidence. If someone were murdered by cheese suffocation, and the police said they are going to be searching suspects home for similar cheese, then yes, throwing away the cheese would be a crime! Under most other circumstances, it would probably be okay to discard old cheese.
Since the BSA provided us with the list they claimed was illegal, we scrubbed it from the offending boxes so as to appear legal.
VERY BAD ADVICE!!!!! When the BSA goes after your company for software copyright violation, it is purely a CIVIL matter. The worst that can happen is your business can be sued out of existence. By destroying evidence, you are committing a CRIMINAL offense, and one that is prosecuted very vigorously, especially by the Feds. You can spend some serious time in jail for that sort of thing.
He says it's a former employee, so what are you suggesting when you're saying "deal with the whistleblower"? You obviously can't fire him. What else can you do? Kill him?
Well, if the statements aren't true, he can sue the former employee for everything he's worth.
This can be dodged by disabling javascript, like everyone already does, who cares about privacy.
I also appear to have dodged it by having their servers blocked in /etc/hosts. Not sure at which point I did that.
Blocking access to the KISSmetric site is only a temporary solution as it will do nothing to solve the underlying security problem which this site is exploiting. There's nothing to prevent other services from springing up which do much the same thing. This is a problem which must be solved in the browser.
There are always ways. It only depends on how much effort you want to put into it. You could use proxy servers to mask IP and change them frequently or even jump from one free wifi hotspot to another. You could repeatedly purge all your cache, cookies, history etc after every site you visit.
If you RTFA, you'll see that this service is using persistent storage on your computer that is NOT contained in your cache, cookies, or browser history. Even using a DIFFERENT BROWSER on the same computer (i.e. Firefox, then Chrome) this site can track you and link your sessions. I regard this a as a browser bug, and it needs to be fixed in the browser. We can't rely on legislation or promises of good behavior from website operators to fix this problem. It really needs to be fixed in the browser, or, if it is a Flash issue, it needs to be fixed in Flash. I hope a patch comes out for Firefox soon!
Or someone bricks your car on the highway while you're driving it because you cut them off.
Is that necessarily a bad thing?
RTFA "The Oxford University team said bigger brains did not make people smarter. Larger vision processing areas fill the extra capacity, they write in the Royal Society's Biology Letters journal."
But just as computers with very fast GPUs can have those GPUs put to other uses, thereby increasing the computer's overall processing power, isn't it reasonable to assume the same is true with the visual processing areas of the brain?
With a warrant, any cop can do this.
They can't with me, cause I don't drive around with my cell phone turned on.
Google+ follows Twitter's following philosophy and in that way is much more like to Twitter than Facebook is. OTOH, Twitter allows anonymity which Google+ sadly doesn't.
I'm not aware of an anonymous tweet button in Twitter. How exactly to Twitter and Google+ differ in that respect?
I'm surprised iTunes wasn't in the list. Isn't it one of the more popular encoders?
This has nothing to do specifically with scientists, this is more about the difference between code you write for your own use versus code you write for others to use. Scientists aren't the only people who write code for their own use!
Conversely, scientists often do write code that needs to be shared, sometimes among large groups. I used to work in the field of experimental high energy physics, which typically have collaborations of hundreds or even thousands of people. Some of the software I worked on was to be used by the wider collaboration, and there were many coding practices we were expected to adhere to, in order to ensure the code worked properly on all the different systems in use. (We supported about 6 different OS's: VMS and several flavors of Unix.) Other software was written for my own personal analysis, and it wasn't meant to be shared, although it was expected that I at least run some consistency checks to ensure the code was giving reasonable results.
On the other extreme are general purpose tools, written by scientists for use by scientists on many different collaborations, such as CERNLIB, Root, Minuit, GEANT, etc. And lets not forget, the World Wide Web was created at a high energy physics lab (CERN) to facilitate online collaboration! It seems to have proven robust enough for a somewhat wider use!
Alzheimers can be 20 years in your body before it causes problems. There is no effective treatment. Forcing people to take this test early would simply mean that otherwise healthy people have 20 years of their lives ruined waiting for Alzheimers before the disease itself starts to affect them.
Really its like you didn't read the article :p
But given the type of care that Alzheimers patients require, wouldn't it make sense to spend those 20 years making arrangements and saving money for that care? Alzheimers can put an extreme burden (financial as well as emotional) on family members, so it seems to me irresponsible and selfish to simply bury your head in the sand and insist on not being told that you have this incredibly burdensome disease.
With respect, your parent's friends are idiots. Naming a kid something like "Flash" is a beacon for trouble down the road. No sympathy, sorry.
Right. Shame on parents for not considering the requirements of popular social media sites which might exist in the future when naming their children. Such "parents" ought to have their children seized by child protective services and placed in foster homes!
Maybe it's because it is invite only. I mean if something is exclusive, lot of people want in.
Yep. It's the star-bellied sneetches and the plain-bellied sneetches all over again. We may disapprove of them, but nobody wants to be a plain-bellied sneetch!
How does this work? if he broke the law in the UK, he should be tried in the UK. Under what grounds would extradition to the US make sense? he'd have to have committed a crime in US territory, and if the site wasn't there, and he wasn't there, then the answer to this seems pretty clear... If you want to try him for a crime allegedly committed in the UK, try him in the UK, not the US. And if the UK laws don't allow you to try him in the UK because what he did wasn't a crime there, then too bad for you!
The problem is, he wasn't directly infringing, but rather posting links that facilitated infringement by others. Since those links could be followed by people in the USA, he is facilitating a crime in the USA which is itself a crime in the USA. Had he been directly infringing on copyright, rather than facilitating, then I don't think the USA would have jurisdiction.
The same holds true for teachers and professors. They have both been fired for things they said publicly outside of the school/university.
I thought the whole point of tenure was to protect the freedom of speech of professors.
You forgot Perl 6 will be released!