To quote Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
The funny thing with Free Speech, you ethier have it or you don't. The minute you start saying, "Well this speech is OK, but that speech over there, that has to go", you open Pandora's box.
Personally there's a lot of stuff on TV or radio that I would rather not see. It all comes down to, what is one man's offensive trash, is another man's free speech, and simply because I believe that a certian site shouldn't exist (for whatever moral, legal, religous, or phil grounds) I have to respect their right to say it. Full stop. This is one of those things you can't do half way, lest you get book bannings, and all other sorts of bad karma stuff.
*laughs* make sure you buy the extended warrenty plan at whatever random discount electronics store you buy the Palm at:) ----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Wow, that brings back memories of my thought experiments when I heard about electralizing H2O into H2/O2. I figured the way to make a car was to put water into the gas tank, explode it in the cumbustion chamber and end up with H2O again that you could pump back into the system and start all over again.
My poor gr 6 teacher got the unenviable job of explaining the laws of thermal dynamics to me:)
I buy your prediction. The three laws have proved to be remarkably resiliant thus far:).
I also manage my time. I have better things to do with my time then to search through a one-off slashdot comment for my typos. I also have better things to do with my time then to defend myself against an OT comment from an AC.
Actually, as you'll note I stated that I attended college, I just left early. As a matter of fact I got straight 4.0 in all my english courses, and full honours distinction in my high school english courses.
Maybe you should have taken a course in not putting your foot in your mouth, or considered before you did. I'm dyslexic, look it up in a medical dictionary if you've not encountered the word before. And think next time you decide you need to critize someone for the way they present their argument instead of critizing the argument itself.
*note to moderators: I realize this is OT, but it is in response to an OT flame. I am volentarily not using my +1 bonus.* ----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
I left university after 3 yrs because they were only interested in teaching me to become a programmer and after reading The Cockoo's Egg, I knew I wanted to be a sysadmin. So I packed my bags, moved to the high arctic, and wired a large chunk of Canada, and use that for my portfolio.
It can be done, I'm far enough along now after 5 yrs of experience that noone cares what my education looks like at this point, they're much mroe interested in what I've done in jobs up to here. My education is considered irrelivent by those who do ask about it anyways because it's all programming courses.
Having said that, there is something to be said about a good certification like CCNA/CCIE for cisco stuff. I have respect for it as an IT hiring manager. ----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Unfortunatly unless you're selling an object and then contracting to do maintance, or installation, it's very hard to contract into the states. ----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
The article in question misses something key in my experience, both as a TA/lab assistant and an IT worker/manager
You can't "make" an IT person. You can't take some random smart person and teach them programming. It does not work that way. The truly good (programers, sysadmins, etc) have soemthing. They have an intrinsic grasp of how things work that cannot be taught in my experience. If you've ever taught programming you'll know what I mean. I was a TA for 2 years for a first year programming class. I could tell within 5 minutes after sitting down with someone in the lab for the first day weather they would excell or not. And it didn't matter how much time myself, the prof or anyone else spent with the student, if they didn't "get it", they weren't going to. We might be able to get them to a passing grade, but they would never be someone who could go out into the work force and be an independant worker. Some of these people I've since bumped into in the field and they are doing web page design with Front Page.
So it's not simply a matter of saying "oh gee, well we need to bring more people into first year computer science" there is a deeper personality issue. We need to encourage this personality trait. And frankly the people who have it *have* to use it. They are the people who did volenteer projects before it became profitable to be an IT worker.
Um actually, I'm totally self taught. I learned what I know from the net. I taught myself unix by voleteering with a freenet.
And the jobs I'm applying on in the states all have full medical coverage, why would I need to lean on the Canadian system? ----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
OK, I'm a Canadian IT worker. I'm currently looking at job offers from the states. I've got 5 yrs of experience. The offers I'm getting start at about 80K, for companies with names like Electronic Arts, among others.
My observations:
1) The US is a great place to look for work *after* you have some cool experience to your name. You need to have done something if you want the good offers, because there's so many people that if you don't have the experience getting the interesting projects that intice other employers to give you the cash is hard.
2) They like to see someone who has been tinkering before they started getting paid for it. Geeks who were in it since they were 10 are more interesting then people who became geeks after reading about how much money there is in computers.
3) There are jobs out there for >30s, they're just different ones. I didn't get one of them and someone came to me afterwards and said "frankly we liked you, we thought you were great technically but we really want someone over 30". They're just different. More planning and leadership, less "what's the second byte in this TCP packet mean?".
4) It really helps to have a cool project under your belt. Something every second interviewee hasn't done.
I did this 2 yrs ago as well, best offer was 45k. What a difference a couple of years of experience makes.
Also it should be noted that it is much more of a pain in the butt for a US company to hire a forien (even Canadian) worker. I know I compete at a disadvantage vs US workers for this reason.
Just thoughts for what they're worth. ----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Well speaking as somone who just got turned down for a job because they wanted someone over 30 (landed another job in the same unit though, because they liked my techincal chops) I find this hard to buy.
Admitably the jobs you get over 30 are different, (more planning and social skills, less hitting head against computer keyboard, is this a *bad* thing?) but they are out there. If you're not getting them offered to you, maybe you should go take a course or two in planning/project mangment.
You don't get paper delivery jobs offred to you etiher you know:)
Actually the point of the theroy is that the odds are exactly the same. Its called the Gamblers Falicy. No matter how many times you roll a six on your die, the odds of you rolling the next six is exactly 1/6. The dice have no memory.
What I was doing was atempting to establish odds for an event that I have only limited information on, (Although I do believe I read something sthat said that the odds of a substantial asteriod hit in the next 100 years is approx 1-in-10,000, which after you de-sensationalize it, translates into one substantial hit per 10,000 centuries, or one substantial hit in 1,000,000 years. That gives you the odds of an asteriod hitting you tommorow of 1 in 365,000,000. I'd buy a lottery ticket long before losing much sleep. Oh and stop driving *now* as your risk of dieing from that is astronomicly more likely.:) ----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Agreed, I certinally wouldn't wanna underrate the job that the fine people at NEAT and the other tracking projects are doing, but all the same I do not think a few million mile away chunk of rock should be blown out of perportion.
Y2K could have been a disaster too, but with (relitively) calm and proactive response by the IT industry it turned out to be a bust. This was wildly hailed by the media as "IT professionals yell wolf" after the fact. I'd rather not see the people from NEAT and others get tared with the same brush if there turns out that there are no asteroids on a colision course with our blue marble.
Let's wait to find something that is going to hit us before we start panicing. Sure, go ahead, develop tracking and interception technologies, that's only prudent, but it's not front page news. ----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
There's room for a lot of 1km chunks of rocks in.0317 AUs (3% of the distance between the earth and sun).
I remember a segment on Space (Canada's Scifi network) where they put two balls on a field and started hitting tenis balls between them, with a baseball bat. Chunks of rocks, even HUGE chunks of rocks are very small in comparison to even the distance between the earth and moon.
If we haven't had a serious hit in the last 2k yrs what do you think the chances of us getting one in the few years since we've had the technology to see them? ----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Now, I'm far from being a Microsoftie, but professionally and personally I'm a "Right tool for the right job" sorta person. There are some niches where that right tool is Windoze, some where it's a Unix, some where it's a MacOS box and some where it's Be.
Sounds like MS is learning that there is a niche where Windows does not belong, in high uptime server applications. I applaud their climbing the learning curve, but wish they'd stop trying to convince my customers/employers/pets/lawn furnature that they are the correct solution for *my* servers!
Honestly tho, would you really wanna support the CEO's secretary (you know the type) on linux?
I was a Lab Assistant for our 'serious' comp sci lab in my college. (Vax/VMS) At the time our language of choice was (no language holy wars please, I'm a firm beliver that the basics of Comp Sci can be taught in any language at all so long as they are taught correctly) Pascal.
On our VAXCluster we had the system compiler and a fancy smancy text based IDE called DR Pascal.
The marking policy was that if you wrote reasonably standard pascal we didn't care what you churned it out in, but in case of a dispute, tie went to ethier of our 'offical' compilers. In general assignments were marked from source code, not object code, anyways. Basicly they didn't want to see inline assembler extentions from Turbo Pascal:).
(Like some gr 12 student I might mention who wrote his hangman program with self modifying inline assembler...:)... Got it back with an A+, a comment that it ran, the teacher wasn't sure how, but if I ever did it again I was getting an F- for giving the teacher a migrane:))
As is usual with the censorware debate, you are trying to use a screw driver to insert a nail.
This is not a technical problem, this is an administrative problem. You'll never solve it technically. I am reminded of a Dilbert cartoon:
Dilbert is developing a censorware application. Dogbert observes to the effect, "You're going to pit your technical skills against the hormonal drive of your average 16 yr old male?"
This is a problem that screams administrative action. Get your users to sign an AUP, if they violate it remove their access. Simple and much more accurate.
Compare your problem to a problem ISPs usually have. They want their users not to spam. So do they limit the number of ppl on the To/CC lines, usually. They put "thou shalt not spam" and "we reserve the right to revoke your access at any moment" in their AUP, and if someone complains about spam, pulls the acct.
Simple, straight forward and a lot more accurate then any hit list of keywords you'll come up with.
Having said that you might also want to enable Content Advisor in whatever browser you're using (let's face it, given the environment this is likely IE), since sights that volentarily mark themselves as objectionable probably are:) ----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
1) itrace packets are only sent approx 1/20000 packets through a router, greatly reducing any traffic analysis benifits from monitoring itrace packets
2) the packets go to the destination. So only your destination and points between can read the itrace packets, but they can read your packet anyways, so no biggie.
Ergo, the only time an itrace packet will tell anyone anything more then they would know by looking at the IP header of your TCP packets is in the limited case where the IP address on the packet is forged.
Now why, you might ask, would you want to forge a IP address? Good question. Remember if your IP address is wrong, no return traffic will reach you. The 2 cases I can think of are:
1) doing a TCP hijack attack, and due to the probable low volumes (telnet doesn't generate THAT many packets) in the hijack stream the chances of getting caught by an itrace packet is pretty slim.
2) performing a DOS attack, which is pretty much totally evil.
3) doing a portscan with a decoy. You might get your fingers slapped here. Lifes a beach.
So, as far as playing on gnutella, or posting as AC on slashdot is concerned, you don't loose anything to itrace in terms of atonmymity that you hadn't already lost by having your IP address on a packet.
I hope that clears things up somewhat and avoids a flame or two.
Has anyone investigated the idea of throat mikes for this sort of thing. You can be a lot more quiet with a throat mike since it's closer and you have no ambiant noise problem to deal with as a bonus.
With script kiddies, it becomes a foot race between the whitehats and the script kiddies. How quickly can you get to your box when your pager goes off with a bugtraq-alert message? Can you get back to your box before the script kiddies can?
Make no mistake, script kiddies may be novices, but they can do a heck of a lot of damage to an organization if they beat you on the foot race.
Again, we hit the falicy of statistical generalization.
I went through school, and the only thing (other then an overly concerned mother) that saved me from being religated to remedial classes, for my inability to write coherently was the computer.
I have a moderate-extreme case of dysgraphia. My handwriting is like chicken scratches, and worse requires all my effort and concentration just to form the letters that well. As you might imagine, this tended to leave very little cognetive processing power free to be creative. It was so bad that the school in grade 1 thought I couldn't read because I was unable to write down the answers to the questions to test my reading comprehention.
Fortunatly for me, in grade 2 my parents bought me a C-64, a dot matrix printer, and a copy of paperclip. My marks on my written work went up as soon as I learned to touch type.
Also, coincidentally it got my start on my career, since the first time I logged into a BBS at age 9, I knew what I wanted to do with my life, despite not knowing the job title 'systems administrator' at that point.
Now if 1% of all students have my problems (and that's way under from the statistics I've been reading) by forbiding children this tool till they reach high school, you would be writing off millions upon millions of children.
WHEN will we learn the simple truth that what is good for one child is not good for every child. We all learn differently.
Just my 2 cents. ---- Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, therein lies the rub.
:)
To quote Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
The funny thing with Free Speech, you ethier have it or you don't. The minute you start saying, "Well this speech is OK, but that speech over there, that has to go", you open Pandora's box.
Personally there's a lot of stuff on TV or radio that I would rather not see. It all comes down to, what is one man's offensive trash, is another man's free speech, and simply because I believe that a certian site shouldn't exist (for whatever moral, legal, religous, or phil grounds) I have to respect their right to say it. Full stop. This is one of those things you can't do half way, lest you get book bannings, and all other sorts of bad karma stuff.
Like it or lump it, it's free speech
Minupla
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Exactly what I'd write if you hadn't written it. Too bad I don't have any moderation points atm.
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Oh my, has a mere codec become so dangerous as to threaten a conference?!
Codec's are software, software is the implementation of an idea, and ideas are _very_ dangerous things if you are the status quo.
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
*laughs* make sure you buy the extended warrenty plan at whatever random discount electronics store you buy the Palm at :)
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Wow, that brings back memories of my thought experiments when I heard about electralizing H2O into H2/O2. I figured the way to make a car was to put water into the gas tank, explode it in the cumbustion chamber and end up with H2O again that you could pump back into the system and start all over again.
:)
:).
My poor gr 6 teacher got the unenviable job of explaining the laws of thermal dynamics to me
I buy your prediction. The three laws have proved to be remarkably resiliant thus far
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Actually, yes I did. Honours english distinction.
I also manage my time. I have better things to do with my time then to search through a one-off slashdot comment for my typos. I also have better things to do with my time then to defend myself against an OT comment from an AC.
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Actually, as you'll note I stated that I attended college, I just left early. As a matter of fact I got straight 4.0 in all my english courses, and full honours distinction in my high school english courses.
Maybe you should have taken a course in not putting your foot in your mouth, or considered before you did. I'm dyslexic, look it up in a medical dictionary if you've not encountered the word before. And think next time you decide you need to critize someone for the way they present their argument instead of critizing the argument itself.
*note to moderators: I realize this is OT, but it is in response to an OT flame. I am volentarily not using my +1 bonus.*
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
I left university after 3 yrs because they were only interested in teaching me to become a programmer and after reading The Cockoo's Egg, I knew I wanted to be a sysadmin. So I packed my bags, moved to the high arctic, and wired a large chunk of Canada, and use that for my portfolio.
It can be done, I'm far enough along now after 5 yrs of experience that noone cares what my education looks like at this point, they're much mroe interested in what I've done in jobs up to here. My education is considered irrelivent by those who do ask about it anyways because it's all programming courses.
Having said that, there is something to be said about a good certification like CCNA/CCIE for cisco stuff. I have respect for it as an IT hiring manager.
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Unfortunatly unless you're selling an object and then contracting to do maintance, or installation, it's very hard to contract into the states.
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
The article in question misses something key in my experience, both as a TA/lab assistant and an IT worker/manager
You can't "make" an IT person. You can't take some random smart person and teach them programming. It does not work that way. The truly good (programers, sysadmins, etc) have soemthing. They have an intrinsic grasp of how things work that cannot be taught in my experience. If you've ever taught programming you'll know what I mean. I was a TA for 2 years for a first year programming class. I could tell within 5 minutes after sitting down with someone in the lab for the first day weather they would excell or not. And it didn't matter how much time myself, the prof or anyone else spent with the student, if they didn't "get it", they weren't going to. We might be able to get them to a passing grade, but they would never be someone who could go out into the work force and be an independant worker. Some of these people I've since bumped into in the field and they are doing web page design with Front Page.
So it's not simply a matter of saying "oh gee, well we need to bring more people into first year computer science" there is a deeper personality issue. We need to encourage this personality trait. And frankly the people who have it *have* to use it. They are the people who did volenteer projects before it became profitable to be an IT worker.
For what it's worth, those are my thoughts.
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Um actually, I'm totally self taught. I learned what I know from the net. I taught myself unix by voleteering with a freenet.
And the jobs I'm applying on in the states all have full medical coverage, why would I need to lean on the Canadian system?
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
OK, I'm a Canadian IT worker. I'm currently looking at job offers from the states. I've got 5 yrs of experience. The offers I'm getting start at about 80K, for companies with names like Electronic Arts, among others.
My observations:
1) The US is a great place to look for work *after* you have some cool experience to your name. You need to have done something if you want the good offers, because there's so many people that if you don't have the experience getting the interesting projects that intice other employers to give you the cash is hard.
2) They like to see someone who has been tinkering before they started getting paid for it. Geeks who were in it since they were 10 are more interesting then people who became geeks after reading about how much money there is in computers.
3) There are jobs out there for >30s, they're just different ones. I didn't get one of them and someone came to me afterwards and said "frankly we liked you, we thought you were great technically but we really want someone over 30". They're just different. More planning and leadership, less "what's the second byte in this TCP packet mean?".
4) It really helps to have a cool project under your belt. Something every second interviewee hasn't done.
I did this 2 yrs ago as well, best offer was 45k. What a difference a couple of years of experience makes.
Also it should be noted that it is much more of a pain in the butt for a US company to hire a forien (even Canadian) worker. I know I compete at a disadvantage vs US workers for this reason.
Just thoughts for what they're worth.
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Well speaking as somone who just got turned down for a job because they wanted someone over 30 (landed another job in the same unit though, because they liked my techincal chops) I find this hard to buy.
:)
Admitably the jobs you get over 30 are different, (more planning and social skills, less hitting head against computer keyboard, is this a *bad* thing?) but they are out there. If you're not getting them offered to you, maybe you should go take a course or two in planning/project mangment.
You don't get paper delivery jobs offred to you etiher you know
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Wow, more releases per hour then M$ IE gets security advisories!
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Remove the rocks from my head to send email
After checking my source material, I've confirmed those odds were per-planet, not per person :).
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Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Actually the point of the theroy is that the odds are exactly the same. Its called the Gamblers Falicy. No matter how many times you roll a six on your die, the odds of you rolling the next six is exactly 1/6. The dice have no memory.
:)
What I was doing was atempting to establish odds for an event that I have only limited information on, (Although I do believe I read something sthat said that the odds of a substantial asteriod hit in the next 100 years is approx 1-in-10,000, which after you de-sensationalize it, translates into one substantial hit per 10,000 centuries, or one substantial hit in 1,000,000 years. That gives you the odds of an asteriod hitting you tommorow of 1 in 365,000,000. I'd buy a lottery ticket long before losing much sleep. Oh and stop driving *now* as your risk of dieing from that is astronomicly more likely.
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Agreed, I certinally wouldn't wanna underrate the job that the fine people at NEAT and the other tracking projects are doing, but all the same I do not think a few million mile away chunk of rock should be blown out of perportion.
Y2K could have been a disaster too, but with (relitively) calm and proactive response by the IT industry it turned out to be a bust. This was wildly hailed by the media as "IT professionals yell wolf" after the fact. I'd rather not see the people from NEAT and others get tared with the same brush if there turns out that there are no asteroids on a colision course with our blue marble.
Let's wait to find something that is going to hit us before we start panicing. Sure, go ahead, develop tracking and interception technologies, that's only prudent, but it's not front page news.
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Not to rain on the chicken littles, but...
.0317 AUs (3% of the distance between the earth and sun).
There's room for a lot of 1km chunks of rocks in
I remember a segment on Space (Canada's Scifi network) where they put two balls on a field and started hitting tenis balls between them, with a baseball bat. Chunks of rocks, even HUGE chunks of rocks are very small in comparison to even the distance between the earth and moon.
If we haven't had a serious hit in the last 2k yrs what do you think the chances of us getting one in the few years since we've had the technology to see them?
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Now, I'm far from being a Microsoftie, but professionally and personally I'm a "Right tool for the right job" sorta person. There are some niches where that right tool is Windoze, some where it's a Unix, some where it's a MacOS box and some where it's Be.
Sounds like MS is learning that there is a niche where Windows does not belong, in high uptime server applications. I applaud their climbing the learning curve, but wish they'd stop trying to convince my customers/employers/pets/lawn furnature that they are the correct solution for *my* servers!
Honestly tho, would you really wanna support the CEO's secretary (you know the type) on linux?
Minupla
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
I was a Lab Assistant for our 'serious' comp sci lab in my college. (Vax/VMS) At the time our language of choice was (no language holy wars please, I'm a firm beliver that the basics of Comp Sci can be taught in any language at all so long as they are taught correctly) Pascal.
:).
:)... Got it back with an A+, a comment that it ran, the teacher wasn't sure how, but if I ever did it again I was getting an F- for giving the teacher a migrane :))
On our VAXCluster we had the system compiler and a fancy smancy text based IDE called DR Pascal.
The marking policy was that if you wrote reasonably standard pascal we didn't care what you churned it out in, but in case of a dispute, tie went to ethier of our 'offical' compilers. In general assignments were marked from source code, not object code, anyways. Basicly they didn't want to see inline assembler extentions from Turbo Pascal
(Like some gr 12 student I might mention who wrote his hangman program with self modifying inline assembler...
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
As is usual with the censorware debate, you are trying to use a screw driver to insert a nail.
:)
This is not a technical problem, this is an administrative problem. You'll never solve it technically. I am reminded of a Dilbert cartoon:
Dilbert is developing a censorware application. Dogbert observes to the effect, "You're going to pit your technical skills against the hormonal drive of your average 16 yr old male?"
This is a problem that screams administrative action. Get your users to sign an AUP, if they violate it remove their access. Simple and much more accurate.
Compare your problem to a problem ISPs usually have. They want their users not to spam. So do they limit the number of ppl on the To/CC lines, usually. They put "thou shalt not spam" and "we reserve the right to revoke your access at any moment" in their AUP, and if someone complains about spam, pulls the acct.
Simple, straight forward and a lot more accurate then any hit list of keywords you'll come up with.
Having said that you might also want to enable Content Advisor in whatever browser you're using (let's face it, given the environment this is likely IE), since sights that volentarily mark themselves as objectionable probably are
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Remove the rocks from my head to send email
OK, before everyone gets up on their horses....
Firstly I support internet privacy totally.
Secondly this inititive does not erode that.
Read the article, and you find a few things...
1) itrace packets are only sent approx 1/20000 packets through a router, greatly reducing any traffic analysis benifits from monitoring itrace packets
2) the packets go to the destination. So only your destination and points between can read the itrace packets, but they can read your packet anyways, so no biggie.
Ergo, the only time an itrace packet will tell anyone anything more then they would know by looking at the IP header of your TCP packets is in the limited case where the IP address on the packet is forged.
Now why, you might ask, would you want to forge a IP address? Good question. Remember if your IP address is wrong, no return traffic will reach you. The 2 cases I can think of are:
1) doing a TCP hijack attack, and due to the probable low volumes (telnet doesn't generate THAT many packets) in the hijack stream the chances of getting caught by an itrace packet is pretty slim.
2) performing a DOS attack, which is pretty much totally evil.
3) doing a portscan with a decoy. You might get your fingers slapped here. Lifes a beach.
So, as far as playing on gnutella, or posting as AC on slashdot is concerned, you don't loose anything to itrace in terms of atonmymity that you hadn't already lost by having your IP address on a packet.
I hope that clears things up somewhat and avoids a flame or two.
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Remove the rocks from my head to send email
As a thought...
Has anyone investigated the idea of throat mikes for this sort of thing. You can be a lot more quiet with a throat mike since it's closer and you have no ambiant noise problem to deal with as a bonus.
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
With script kiddies, it becomes a foot race between the whitehats and the script kiddies. How quickly can you get to your box when your pager goes off with a bugtraq-alert message? Can you get back to your box before the script kiddies can?
Make no mistake, script kiddies may be novices, but they can do a heck of a lot of damage to an organization if they beat you on the foot race.
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email
Again, we hit the falicy of statistical generalization.
I went through school, and the only thing (other then an overly concerned mother) that saved me from being religated to remedial classes, for my inability to write coherently was the computer.
I have a moderate-extreme case of dysgraphia. My handwriting is like chicken scratches, and worse requires all my effort and concentration just to form the letters that well. As you might imagine, this tended to leave very little cognetive processing power free to be creative. It was so bad that the school in grade 1 thought I couldn't read because I was unable to write down the answers to the questions to test my reading comprehention.
Fortunatly for me, in grade 2 my parents bought me a C-64, a dot matrix printer, and a copy of paperclip. My marks on my written work went up as soon as I learned to touch type.
Also, coincidentally it got my start on my career, since the first time I logged into a BBS at age 9, I knew what I wanted to do with my life, despite not knowing the job title 'systems administrator' at that point.
Now if 1% of all students have my problems (and that's way under from the statistics I've been reading) by forbiding children this tool till they reach high school, you would be writing off millions upon millions of children.
WHEN will we learn the simple truth that what is good for one child is not good for every child. We all learn differently.
Just my 2 cents.
----
Remove the rocks from my head to send email