Any content filtering should be on the network level, at the school. If the students are required to take the laptops home, then it should be up to the parents to provide whatever content filtering they like on their home network. It isn't the school's job to police what websites students visit while at home.
I'm also curious. Are students going to be required to take school laptops home with them, even if they have their own computer at home? I think this is a disastrous idea. First, laptops are heavy, and many students are already developing back trouble from lugging heavy textbooks home with them every day. Also there is a safety issue. Laptops are valuable, and there is a good chance they will be stolen while a student is on his way to or from school. Is the student or parent financially responsible for the loss? What if the student is injured or killed while being mugged for his/her laptop? This is already a big problem with iPods in some cities. Are you prepared for those inevitable lawsuits? Remember, not all students take a school bus. Many walk or ride a bike to school. If I were a parent at your school, I would simply not allow my son or daughter to take a laptop with them on their walk to school. Would this get them into trouble at your school?
Why the colleges that teach these teachers are choosing to NOT require classes in technology is beyond me.
I went to teacher's college a couple of years ago at the University of Windsor and we were required to take a technology course. I assume it's the same at many teacher's colleges, but it might not be universal.
Today, using the internet, anonymity is easier to obtain then ever before.
Correction: Today, using the internet, the illusion of anonymity is easier to obtain than ever before. And that is a huge part of the problem.
Yes, I am aware of services like Tor, but most people aren't, and that's the problem. (And besides, do you really know who is running all those Tor nodes? I sure as heck don't.)
even if you play international music that is in the public domain, or music by indie artists that aren't members of their organization (meaning don't pay them a membership fee and thus don't receive their royalties), you still have to pay them.
Can you cite a source for that? I am aware of the BMI and ASCAP licensing fees, but this is the first that I've heard that you have to pay the fee for playing only public domain recordings, or those of non-members. Is there a statute in federal or state law that backs this up?
She should have been sued for wrongful death. She would have spent the rest of her life paying whatever she makes to the family of that little girl and the rest of us wouldn't have had our rights trampled in the process.
Actually it doesn't work that way, at least in the U.S. Civil suits are generally dischargable in bankruptcy, so that under no circumstances would she be paying "whatever she makes for the rest of her life." In practice, it is often very difficult to collect judgments in civil suits, especially when the defendant is not wealthy.
The student has to enter their userid, password, pin, and RSA Token. Once this is done
... the student withdraws from the university and looks for a campus that is less draconian. Oops, the Uni is out of business.
Which is precisely why legislation would be needed, which is the point the poster was trying to make. A legislative mandate would level the playing field. (I'm not saying I support such a scheme. I'm just reiterating what I think the poster was suggesting.)
I thought that since Apple is a publicly traded company they are required to retain ALL corporate e-mails as a result of Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. What am I missing here? (IANAL, so I'm genuinely curious.)
That's not true, actually. But it's a very commonly held misconception.
Spin is not a relativistic phenomenon in itself, although it does arise naturally from the Dirac equation.
Quite right. In fact, the Dirac equation has spin built in, but it doesn't follow from relativity + QM alone. In fact, it is quite possible to describe spinless particles in relativistic quantum mechanics as well, using the Klein-Gordon equation. It was tried first, in fact, but failed to predict the correct spectrum for the hydrogen atom, so first the Schroedinger equation (non-relativistic) then later the Dirac equation (relativistic) were put forward as the correct theories to describe the dynamics of the electron.
When we fall back from DST to standard time, I notice a lot of people seem more visibly depressed, or "blah."
Well, not everyone has the same reaction. What bothers me a lot more is having to get up and drive to work in the dark. I work in a cubicle in a room with no windows, so I don't see daylight until I go for lunch. I used to only have to drive to work in the dark for a few weeks in December and January, but after daylight saving time was extended a few years ago, there seems to be many more such days.
There are also safety issues. Parents don't want their kids walking to school in the dark, and year-round DST would have that effect. I know the "think of the children" argument is not popular on Slashdot, but in this case, I think it is a valid point.
One of Penrose's conclusions was that any attempt at artificial intelligence is necessarily incomplete, so it won't be possible, while Hofstadter said that it is possible to successively approximate something intelligent, and we can learn a LOT about ourselves in the attempts, and that in itself is worth it.
Not only that, but Penrose doesn't offer any actual proof that AI is impossible, merely speculative reasoning. Therefore it seems doubly important that we continue our attempts to advance AI. Firstly, that the journey itself is worth the effort, and secondly we really need to find out for ourselves if it is possible.
True, and he's also come out in favor of censorship of science. He has stated, for instance, that the human genome should not be made publicly available as it may be used by terrorists, etc., to manufacture biological weapons. I think he even suggested that perhaps laws be passed to enforce such a doctrine. Do we really want such a person to be in a position of power?
Actually, that isn't true. You could specify integer variables by suffixing them with a percent sign (eg. i%=1). But most people were lazy and omitted the percent sign, so their programs ended up doing a lot of floating point math unnecessarily.
In a civil statute, one party seeks compensation for 'damages' that have been incurred at the hands of the other party. The argument is that the law that the RIAA uses has such severe penalties that are so far beyond the 'damages' that the law itself is really a criminal statute seeking to punish the wrongdoer for failing to comply rather than awarding damages to the injured party.
Actually, civil judgements can include punitive damages as well as actual damages, and punitive damages, by their very definition are in excess of the amount of injury suffered by the plaintiff. The idea is to serve as a deterrent to others who might engage in similar conduct. I was asking if there is any precedent in case law for classifying civil cases as criminal cases based solely on the amount of damages assessed. In other words, is this idea just some new theory that this law professor cooked up, or is there case law to back it up?
I read the article, but it is rather light on details. Does anyone know if there is any case law or statute which holds that civil penalties can be considered criminal by virtue of the amount of the penalty? The argument seems to be that because the statutory damages are so huge that by that very fact the law becomes criminal rather than civil. What precisely is the basis for that conclusion?
Is there any precedent for that reasoning?
You try living at college for 4 years without using the internet for anything personal.
I don't think the GP is suggesting that. Only that students don't use the academic network for their personal stuff. I know at the U. where I worked for the IT services department, we provided Internet access to all the dorms, but if students wanted to shell out for Internet access from the local cable company, they could do so, just like the students who live off campus have to do.
Before Sunrise Semester and Captain Kangaroo TV stations aired test patterns, and there was this Indian chief at the top of the test pattern. Evidently he held an exalted position among the gods of TV, who was he? Why isn't he on color bars? What is the technical significance of all those numbers on the test pattern?
There is more about it
here, and also a higher res version of the card.
WTF are you talking about? Look up the RFCs for IPv4 and you'll see "DARPA" written all over them. You believe that's the name of a private individual??
I'm not saying that there was no government involvement in developing these protocols, just that there was no regulatory oversight. Sure, many (but not all) of the individuals who've written RFCs were government employees or government funded at the time, but that hasn't stopped non-governmental entities from submitting RFCs, and essentially the marketplace has decided which have caught on and which haven't. If a regulatory agency such as the FCC started mandating which RFCs to follow and which are not to be followed, that would represent a huge change in direction for the Internet.
The FCC should just mandate a switch to IPv6, if the US leads, the rest of the world tends to follow. Ridiculous foreign policy demands aside.
Yikes! The FCC has never regulated internet protocols before. Do you really want them to start? Internet RFCs, which essentially define Internet protocols are not government regulations, but have been submitted by private individuals, and those that were useful caught on; others didn't. One could make the case that the Internet and its protocols evolved as rapidly and usefully as it did precisely because it didn't have government oversight.
If the router is handling the conversion and talking ipv4 internally, why would the devices need to support ipv6 again?
Ok, so let's say you have your router converting packets from IPv6 and IPv4, and translating your internal IPv4 addresses to external IPv6 addresses. Now, let's say you're sitting at your IPv4 computer connected to this magic router. You launch Firefox and type type the Slashdot URL. (More likely, you'd have it bookmarked.) So, what does your computer do? It sends a DNS request to get Slashdot's IP address. Now, in an IPv6 world, this IP address would have 128 bits instead of 32. How is your IPv4 operating system going to make sense of this?
So you might suggest a fancier router that is DNS aware, and translates those addresses back and forth, effectively acting as a DNS proxy. But there is a problem. How do you translate all IPv6 addresses to IPv4 addresses? Considering that the address space for IPv6 has 4 times as many bits, I don't see how this is even possible: you can't assign a unique 32 bit number to each 128 bit number.
So the problem is much more complicated than it first appears.
So the kid never discussed this website with her friends while at school?
I don't know. If so, then that might very well be grounds for discipline by school officials. Was there any evidence presented in this case that the student boasted about this website while on school grounds?
Suppose the kid wrote the message in her homework while at home and handed it in - would that count?
Certainly the school would have the right to discipline the student in that case. However, the grounds here would be the act of bringing the offensive material to school, not the fact that the student wrote it in the first place. If a student wrote insulting material about a teacher while at home, and then threw it away, there would be no grounds for discipline.
If I'd have stood just outside the school grounds and hurled verbal insults at teachers just after school was finished I'd have got into real trouble and with good cause. How is this different?
Clearly school officials have jurisdiction at school, and parents have jurisdiction at home. This leaves open the situation where the student is in transit between home and school. The rules here vary by district. For instance, it is usually the case that while a student is on a school bus, they are under the school's jurisdiction until the bus drops them off at home. If the student walks or rides a bike to school, the school's jurisdiction may extend for instance to those streets where school safety patrols are working, but as I said, this varies from one district to another. Standing a foot off school property and shouting insults at the teacher is almost certain to get you into trouble. That's a far cry from sitting in your living room in your parent's house at your computer.
I agree that the parents SHOULD be disciplining the child. Unfortunately they seem to be backing the appalling behaviour of their offspring and going up against the school which is an atrocious lesson to teach the child: "behave badly and if you don't like the punishment hire a lawyer and sue".
True, but if we agree that parents have jurisdiction here, that includes not only the right to discipline, but also the right to NOT discipline, if they so choose. Yes, some parents suck. That doesn't give you or I the right to substitute our judgement for that of the parents.
Given that the law shields them from the full consequences in exercising free speech (reasoning: they are only kids and cannot be expected to know fully the consequences of what they are doing) why should they enjoy the full, adult rights of free speech for exactly the same reason: they don't know how to use it responsibly?
It's not a question of whether or not kids should or shouldn't have more restrictive free speech rights than adults; it's a question of who should be allowed to do the restricting. When at school, it should be the school officials. If a student stands up in class and shouts insults at the teacher, the school should be allowed to discipline the student. I don't think anyone would disagree with that, and it is an example of how kids don't have the same free speech rights as adults. When at home (which is presumably where the student posted the MySpace page), it should be the parents, not the school, or the government, which has the authority to restrict their kids' free speech rights. This is as much about a parent's rights as it about a child's. When schools extend their jurisdiction into the home, they are treading on the parent turf, and I think that is really the problem with this case.
There is also a difference between doing something illegal and doing something illegal while posing for your friend to take a photo: one is arguably a bad idea, but the other is plain stupid.
There is also a difference between drinking and holding up a can of beer in front of a camera. I have pictures in my family album of me holding a bottle of beer when I was about ten. The bottle was empty and my parents took the picture just for fun. (We were at a family reunion barbeque and most people were holding a bottle of beer, so I asked if I could hold an empty one while the picture was taken. No one objected.) Many people pose for pictures in fake or ridiculous poses. I've seen theme parks where you can pose for a picture with your head inside the mouth of a real-looking (but not real) shark, for instance. The obviously posed pictures are the ones most likely to be fake. If college admission officers are using such things as admission criteria then they those colleges will get the boring students they deserve. I'd rather go to a school that looked at grades, community involvement, etc., but hey, to each his own.
In fact, given that about 10% of schools are doing this, I'd be tempted to put up fake pics of me drinking just to weed out those school. They don't sound like the kind of places I'd like to attend.
Well, it means not drinking at age 17 in a country where the drinking age is 21. I'm sure there's other better examples of stupid pictures recruiters would dislike on the internet, but that particular example is both common and indefensible. If you're already partying and binge drinking in high school, I can't imagine yourself making a dramatic voluntary change in college.
There is a difference between underage drinking and binge drinking. And what's wrong with partying?
Slashdot Mirror
Any content filtering should be on the network level, at the school. If the students are required to take the laptops home, then it should be up to the parents to provide whatever content filtering they like on their home network. It isn't the school's job to police what websites students visit while at home.
I'm also curious. Are students going to be required to take school laptops home with them, even if they have their own computer at home? I think this is a disastrous idea. First, laptops are heavy, and many students are already developing back trouble from lugging heavy textbooks home with them every day. Also there is a safety issue. Laptops are valuable, and there is a good chance they will be stolen while a student is on his way to or from school. Is the student or parent financially responsible for the loss? What if the student is injured or killed while being mugged for his/her laptop? This is already a big problem with iPods in some cities. Are you prepared for those inevitable lawsuits? Remember, not all students take a school bus. Many walk or ride a bike to school. If I were a parent at your school, I would simply not allow my son or daughter to take a laptop with them on their walk to school. Would this get them into trouble at your school?
Why the colleges that teach these teachers are choosing to NOT require classes in technology is beyond me.
I went to teacher's college a couple of years ago at the University of Windsor and we were required to take a technology course. I assume it's the same at many teacher's colleges, but it might not be universal.
Today, using the internet, anonymity is easier to obtain then ever before.
Correction: Today, using the internet, the illusion of anonymity is easier to obtain than ever before. And that is a huge part of the problem.
Yes, I am aware of services like Tor, but most people aren't, and that's the problem. (And besides, do you really know who is running all those Tor nodes? I sure as heck don't.)
even if you play international music that is in the public domain, or music by indie artists that aren't members of their organization (meaning don't pay them a membership fee and thus don't receive their royalties), you still have to pay them.
Can you cite a source for that? I am aware of the BMI and ASCAP licensing fees, but this is the first that I've heard that you have to pay the fee for playing only public domain recordings, or those of non-members. Is there a statute in federal or state law that backs this up?
She should have been sued for wrongful death. She would have spent the rest of her life paying whatever she makes to the family of that little girl and the rest of us wouldn't have had our rights trampled in the process.
Actually it doesn't work that way, at least in the U.S. Civil suits are generally dischargable in bankruptcy, so that under no circumstances would she be paying "whatever she makes for the rest of her life." In practice, it is often very difficult to collect judgments in civil suits, especially when the defendant is not wealthy.
The student has to enter their userid, password, pin, and RSA Token. Once this is done
... the student withdraws from the university and looks for a campus that is less draconian. Oops, the Uni is out of business.
Which is precisely why legislation would be needed, which is the point the poster was trying to make. A legislative mandate would level the playing field. (I'm not saying I support such a scheme. I'm just reiterating what I think the poster was suggesting.)
I thought that since Apple is a publicly traded company they are required to retain ALL corporate e-mails as a result of Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. What am I missing here? (IANAL, so I'm genuinely curious.)
That's not true, actually. But it's a very commonly held misconception.
Spin is not a relativistic phenomenon in itself, although it does arise naturally from the Dirac equation.
Quite right. In fact, the Dirac equation has spin built in, but it doesn't follow from relativity + QM alone. In fact, it is quite possible to describe spinless particles in relativistic quantum mechanics as well, using the Klein-Gordon equation. It was tried first, in fact, but failed to predict the correct spectrum for the hydrogen atom, so first the Schroedinger equation (non-relativistic) then later the Dirac equation (relativistic) were put forward as the correct theories to describe the dynamics of the electron.
How easy is it to detect and/or delete keylogger software? Does anyone know if the popular anti-virus software out there will detect it?
When we fall back from DST to standard time, I notice a lot of people seem more visibly depressed, or "blah."
Well, not everyone has the same reaction. What bothers me a lot more is having to get up and drive to work in the dark. I work in a cubicle in a room with no windows, so I don't see daylight until I go for lunch. I used to only have to drive to work in the dark for a few weeks in December and January, but after daylight saving time was extended a few years ago, there seems to be many more such days.
There are also safety issues. Parents don't want their kids walking to school in the dark, and year-round DST would have that effect. I know the "think of the children" argument is not popular on Slashdot, but in this case, I think it is a valid point.
One of Penrose's conclusions was that any attempt at artificial intelligence is necessarily incomplete, so it won't be possible, while Hofstadter said that it is possible to successively approximate something intelligent, and we can learn a LOT about ourselves in the attempts, and that in itself is worth it.
Not only that, but Penrose doesn't offer any actual proof that AI is impossible, merely speculative reasoning. Therefore it seems doubly important that we continue our attempts to advance AI. Firstly, that the journey itself is worth the effort, and secondly we really need to find out for ourselves if it is possible.
True, and he's also come out in favor of censorship of science. He has stated, for instance, that the human genome should not be made publicly available as it may be used by terrorists, etc., to manufacture biological weapons. I think he even suggested that perhaps laws be passed to enforce such a doctrine. Do we really want such a person to be in a position of power?
No support for integer-only arithmetic.
Actually, that isn't true. You could specify integer variables by suffixing them with a percent sign (eg. i%=1). But most people were lazy and omitted the percent sign, so their programs ended up doing a lot of floating point math unnecessarily.
In a civil statute, one party seeks compensation for 'damages' that have been incurred at the hands of the other party. The argument is that the law that the RIAA uses has such severe penalties that are so far beyond the 'damages' that the law itself is really a criminal statute seeking to punish the wrongdoer for failing to comply rather than awarding damages to the injured party.
Actually, civil judgements can include punitive damages as well as actual damages, and punitive damages, by their very definition are in excess of the amount of injury suffered by the plaintiff. The idea is to serve as a deterrent to others who might engage in similar conduct. I was asking if there is any precedent in case law for classifying civil cases as criminal cases based solely on the amount of damages assessed. In other words, is this idea just some new theory that this law professor cooked up, or is there case law to back it up?
I read the article, but it is rather light on details. Does anyone know if there is any case law or statute which holds that civil penalties can be considered criminal by virtue of the amount of the penalty? The argument seems to be that because the statutory damages are so huge that by that very fact the law becomes criminal rather than civil. What precisely is the basis for that conclusion? Is there any precedent for that reasoning?
You try living at college for 4 years without using the internet for anything personal.
I don't think the GP is suggesting that. Only that students don't use the academic network for their personal stuff. I know at the U. where I worked for the IT services department, we provided Internet access to all the dorms, but if students wanted to shell out for Internet access from the local cable company, they could do so, just like the students who live off campus have to do.
Before Sunrise Semester and Captain Kangaroo TV stations aired test patterns, and there was this Indian chief at the top of the test pattern. Evidently he held an exalted position among the gods of TV, who was he? Why isn't he on color bars? What is the technical significance of all those numbers on the test pattern?
There is more about it here, and also a higher res version of the card.
In other words, I'm a tax professional with a certification that goes back well over 100 years.
Impressive! Just how old are you?
WTF are you talking about? Look up the RFCs for IPv4 and you'll see "DARPA" written all over them. You believe that's the name of a private individual??
I'm not saying that there was no government involvement in developing these protocols, just that there was no regulatory oversight. Sure, many (but not all) of the individuals who've written RFCs were government employees or government funded at the time, but that hasn't stopped non-governmental entities from submitting RFCs, and essentially the marketplace has decided which have caught on and which haven't. If a regulatory agency such as the FCC started mandating which RFCs to follow and which are not to be followed, that would represent a huge change in direction for the Internet.
The FCC should just mandate a switch to IPv6, if the US leads, the rest of the world tends to follow. Ridiculous foreign policy demands aside.
Yikes! The FCC has never regulated internet protocols before. Do you really want them to start? Internet RFCs, which essentially define Internet protocols are not government regulations, but have been submitted by private individuals, and those that were useful caught on; others didn't. One could make the case that the Internet and its protocols evolved as rapidly and usefully as it did precisely because it didn't have government oversight.
If the router is handling the conversion and talking ipv4 internally, why would the devices need to support ipv6 again?
Ok, so let's say you have your router converting packets from IPv6 and IPv4, and translating your internal IPv4 addresses to external IPv6 addresses. Now, let's say you're sitting at your IPv4 computer connected to this magic router. You launch Firefox and type type the Slashdot URL. (More likely, you'd have it bookmarked.) So, what does your computer do? It sends a DNS request to get Slashdot's IP address. Now, in an IPv6 world, this IP address would have 128 bits instead of 32. How is your IPv4 operating system going to make sense of this?
So you might suggest a fancier router that is DNS aware, and translates those addresses back and forth, effectively acting as a DNS proxy. But there is a problem. How do you translate all IPv6 addresses to IPv4 addresses? Considering that the address space for IPv6 has 4 times as many bits, I don't see how this is even possible: you can't assign a unique 32 bit number to each 128 bit number.
So the problem is much more complicated than it first appears.
So the kid never discussed this website with her friends while at school?
I don't know. If so, then that might very well be grounds for discipline by school officials. Was there any evidence presented in this case that the student boasted about this website while on school grounds?
Suppose the kid wrote the message in her homework while at home and handed it in - would that count?
Certainly the school would have the right to discipline the student in that case. However, the grounds here would be the act of bringing the offensive material to school, not the fact that the student wrote it in the first place. If a student wrote insulting material about a teacher while at home, and then threw it away, there would be no grounds for discipline.
If I'd have stood just outside the school grounds and hurled verbal insults at teachers just after school was finished I'd have got into real trouble and with good cause. How is this different?
Clearly school officials have jurisdiction at school, and parents have jurisdiction at home. This leaves open the situation where the student is in transit between home and school. The rules here vary by district. For instance, it is usually the case that while a student is on a school bus, they are under the school's jurisdiction until the bus drops them off at home. If the student walks or rides a bike to school, the school's jurisdiction may extend for instance to those streets where school safety patrols are working, but as I said, this varies from one district to another. Standing a foot off school property and shouting insults at the teacher is almost certain to get you into trouble. That's a far cry from sitting in your living room in your parent's house at your computer.
I agree that the parents SHOULD be disciplining the child. Unfortunately they seem to be backing the appalling behaviour of their offspring and going up against the school which is an atrocious lesson to teach the child: "behave badly and if you don't like the punishment hire a lawyer and sue".
True, but if we agree that parents have jurisdiction here, that includes not only the right to discipline, but also the right to NOT discipline, if they so choose. Yes, some parents suck. That doesn't give you or I the right to substitute our judgement for that of the parents.
Given that the law shields them from the full consequences in exercising free speech (reasoning: they are only kids and cannot be expected to know fully the consequences of what they are doing) why should they enjoy the full, adult rights of free speech for exactly the same reason: they don't know how to use it responsibly?
It's not a question of whether or not kids should or shouldn't have more restrictive free speech rights than adults; it's a question of who should be allowed to do the restricting. When at school, it should be the school officials. If a student stands up in class and shouts insults at the teacher, the school should be allowed to discipline the student. I don't think anyone would disagree with that, and it is an example of how kids don't have the same free speech rights as adults. When at home (which is presumably where the student posted the MySpace page), it should be the parents, not the school, or the government, which has the authority to restrict their kids' free speech rights. This is as much about a parent's rights as it about a child's. When schools extend their jurisdiction into the home, they are treading on the parent turf, and I think that is really the problem with this case.
There is also a difference between doing something illegal and doing something illegal while posing for your friend to take a photo: one is arguably a bad idea, but the other is plain stupid.
There is also a difference between drinking and holding up a can of beer in front of a camera. I have pictures in my family album of me holding a bottle of beer when I was about ten. The bottle was empty and my parents took the picture just for fun. (We were at a family reunion barbeque and most people were holding a bottle of beer, so I asked if I could hold an empty one while the picture was taken. No one objected.) Many people pose for pictures in fake or ridiculous poses. I've seen theme parks where you can pose for a picture with your head inside the mouth of a real-looking (but not real) shark, for instance. The obviously posed pictures are the ones most likely to be fake. If college admission officers are using such things as admission criteria then they those colleges will get the boring students they deserve. I'd rather go to a school that looked at grades, community involvement, etc., but hey, to each his own.
In fact, given that about 10% of schools are doing this, I'd be tempted to put up fake pics of me drinking just to weed out those school. They don't sound like the kind of places I'd like to attend.
Well, it means not drinking at age 17 in a country where the drinking age is 21. I'm sure there's other better examples of stupid pictures recruiters would dislike on the internet, but that particular example is both common and indefensible. If you're already partying and binge drinking in high school, I can't imagine yourself making a dramatic voluntary change in college.
There is a difference between underage drinking and binge drinking. And what's wrong with partying?