I agree. I despised this when I was in school because I was the good kid. But working at a school now I realize that not only are consequences necessary when they question the authority, but that in general, using their peers against them is very effective. By depriving all of the students, instead of hailing to culprits as heroes, they will be angry and that anger will be shown to the guilty students. The group will probably hate the principal more, but they will respect his authority and be quicker to dismiss any idea of doing this themselves.
And since I know some here will start saying let's not blow this out of proportion... the culprits apparently are apparently stealing the principal's identity and defaming him. If someone did that to me I would want to find them in a dark alley. This is almost certainly a crime and was possibly committed using the school's own computer network. A lock down of the network or locking students out seems like a pretty standard procedure if administration believes it was used in a crime.
I believe a lot of it is just keeping a close eye on your kids. What worked for you might not work for another. Every kid is different. Also every parent is different and many kids come to this with a completely different environment than what we 'nerds' are used to.
I played nice games, D&D games, violent games, etc, and I would be on the computer for hours. All day really. But, like is a common thread here, I started out with a C-64 and those games weren't terribly violent. Then I moved up to a CGA 8088. Violence really wasn't much more than the commodore. Life like situations required a lot of imagination.
I watch my son closely because the games seem more immersive. There's a certain disconnect when you are represented by a yellow pie or a blockish barrel-jumping plumber. But I realize that part of that is that I have a 1980's perspective and my son is better equipped than I was, at his age, to point out what is fake and why.
I'll let him play games with killer robots, electrical blasters, shooting ice at people. I draw the line at shooting real people because it is not age appropriate for him (he's 5). I wouldn't let him watch something like Sin City so I'm not going to let him play it out on the computer. Even still I need to take away games when he gets too sucked in. He will start talking and playing about doing to real life people the things that are going on in his games. When the games start bleeding into R/L then it is time to take a break, whether it is Pole Position or GTA.
These opinions matter. They are not musicians talking about oil spills. They are independant, or less mainstream, musicians providing their insight onto how an area of law will limit citizen's ability to listen to music that would otherwise be available to them. This becomes a free speech issue and these artists are speaking out about what could be lost if the market is unfairly manipulated by these monopolies.
I'm not saying that isn't the case. But regardless of how excessive their use is, Comcast promises, Comcast needs to fulfill. If we are talking about users that are this far over the top, and as previously posted, only around 1,000 users, then why is this a problem? Comcast can't handle 1,000 non-typical users?
Comcast has had plenty of time and plenty of money to deal with the issue of bandwidth. Instead of cutting these users off they should be using them as test cases to figure out how they are going to cope with the bandwidth demands of the next decade when typical users and those that program for them will start demanding this excessive bandwidth.
In the all-you-can-eat analogy, there's a 100 picky kids for every fat guy who's going to eat until he pukes. Since Comcast isn't discounting the old ladies that check their webmail for new emails about the grandkids once a week I also wouldn't expect them to cut the service of the heavy downloaders.
If this is an issue for Comcast then they need to be professional and put forth clear guidelines on the subject. If it's a non-issue they should stop playing around with their customers' accounts.
Trademarks are tied to the industry aren't they? So that a company named Sucky Car Parts could co-exist with a company named Sucky Cable Company because the two wouldn't be confused as they are in two different fields. Companies in different areas in different industries are going to collide online, but there is nothing they can do about it. There are limited domains. I think anyone who complains should have to put 'industry' in front of their domain so UTube can start going by plumbinguTube.com and stop whining.
But what if you lost your place? What then, smarty pants? The end of the freaking world, that's what!
You should hear me cursing as I *attempt* to shut down an entire lab only to have all the computers hang waiting for me to confirm that they can close whatever program is too stupid to close at shutdown. There are a few of them that have hung me, Adobe is the most frustrating.
You are right on with this. If educators are asking of our youth to write 'about' something then they are creating a large part of the problem. With modern technology I can know 'about' anything in about 30 seconds. When kids are regurgitating the articles they see online they are honestly meeting our 'know about' expectations as they perceive them. The 'know about' type of assignments are worthless and the students treat them as such.
In order to have good assignments that really improve a students understanding and assess their understanding we need to ask them to compare/contrast, explore similarities, find primary source materials, and experiment to find new knowledge.
If all we are doing is asking our kids 'about' something then the skills we are teaching them have been replaced by the computer about 20 years ago. It sounds like you have a good professor than understands learning as well as he understands engineering.
There's the problem and the problem with the analogy in the article of downloaded music. The problem in both cases is that Turnitin is
profiting
from the private, copyright valid, intellectual property of students. It's one thing for professors to have a document scanned for cheating. It's another thing for the company to profit off that work from students. While many of us are comfortable with downloading music, I doubt many of us would back someone who was building a business on selling that music they had downloaded.
Do we need to give up our rights to get an affordable education? I don't think 'castrating freedom' was listed on my last college invoice.
I work at a school, so my end users are 6-12 year olds, or worse... 26 year old teachers, or worse... 60 year old teachers. I spent a lot of time trouble shooting logins, changing passwords, over and over again with no success until I finally realized that there are a lot of people that just can't spell their names right. Now that's the first thing I ask them, "How do you spell your name?". It doesn't help that some parents name their kids names like Eyboni or Charls or Zim'boni with apostophrophes and silent Q's and what have you.
I work with young teenagers and they are always flailing about at their computer desks, kicking their feet around, leaning back, kicking their feet at the wall. They routinely knock the power out for a dozen or so users and look stunned and ask me what happened to the power. They always seem so surprised when I point out that they have managed to karate-kick the plug right out of the outlet and occassionally having bent the prongs into ruin.
But I think the issue was that Google may have honestly been supressing them. This was actually a good thing, because KinderStart was one of those search-engine-fraud-link-whoring sites where they pretend to be a search engine but pack in a pile of worthless links. Google eliminated a bunch of these no-content worthless sites because they were on their way to ruining Google and other search engines. Google has been more successful than some others at solving the problem.
One of the strengths of Google is that they do suppress sites and can do so subjectively. Google is in the position of providing relevant results to its searchers. It is not in the business of providing users to websites, unless you count those that advertise. This is all good for us, but bad for scummy-scammy no-content ad sites. This is why scummy-scammy ad sites feel it necessary to sue them.
That is exactly the wrong objective in suing MS. You don't have to get big monetary judgements to hurt MS. Look at Europe. The key isn't to go for the money. You want to go for where they *make* their money. MS chose to get fined 2.5 million a day (retroactively no less) rather than give up control over media API's.
Most non-geeks aren't going to care about the OS. They want their web browser, their flash games, their media player, and they want their hardware to 'just work'... oh, and software that runs on their system (games). MS losing control of which software works well on their OS would be expensive to them in many ways.
"If we choose to ignore the rule of law and subvert the Constitution in the name of "safety," we will raise the specter that, in the loss of American values and American freedoms, America will become merely a place name rather than an ideal to be emulated." - Judge John Murphy of Nebraska, in a decision upholding the 4th amendment
So to combat a minor amount of unauthorized installations, MS is going to give THIS MUCH fuel to the arguments that Windows is a horrible choice for government use? Admittedly, I'm sure MS wont require all government workstations to 'phone home'. But who wants software in which spying features are standard to be installed in government agencies. Even though most people don't really care about occasionaly privacy violations, it seems that this is severe enough that A LOT of people are going to start paying attention.
This would be awful if it put PayPal out of business. I don't see how that could possibly happen, but all the same, it would not be good for Google.
Look what has happened to PayPal without any real competition in the game, poor service, lots of fear over how accounts are handled. I think the same thing would happen to Google without competition forcing them to be the best.
I know a lot of people are starting to fear Google. Google used to be the underdog, and people love underdogs, especially Americans and especially geeks. Google seems to be motivated by jumping over the bar, no matter who is setting it, no matter how high. If Google becomes a dominating force I think many of us fear that they are exactly in the right position to become another MS.
You are right on. But I think there is an even bigger missed fault in that argument.
Paying the money would be way better for MS, than if it just chose to walk away from EU free and clear, although it's clear that they can't.
Imagine that they abandoned THAT MUCH market. IT abhors a vacuum as much as nature (unless it is a vacuum that is controlled by robots to clean their room in their mom's basement). If MS abandoned EU, it wouldn't just be losing sales, it would create a giant void that would be filled with competition, something that Microsoft has tried to control as much as possible all these years. With that kind of marketplace, those alternatives would mature very quickly, quickly enough to make very real threats to MS dominance in the US. MS needs Windows on every one of those European machines more than the EU needs MS.
Of course, as mentioned, anyone in Europe would be able to pirate Windows as much as they like if MS burned their bridges there.
Maybe if the colleges focused more on the problem of the jocks being drunken jerks instead of the symptom, that they *provide evidence* that they are drunken jerks online, this would be an education issue and not a free speech issue.
The real issue is that they are providing these guys a free ride in college, not always just monetarily, and the behavior they foster is something they are ashamed of (or otherwise hurts the college). Instead of taking off from the team those students that are poor representatives of the college, they use their financial power to stifle freedom of speech.
These are college students who are supposed to be getting an education. And the officials are running an educational institution (supposedly). Controlling how students communicate and express themselves is a bigger issue than telling them to go pee in a cup.
That's why I got into technology. I remember back in the days of Q-Link, Compuserve, and BBS. I was 12, I knew no one who could tell me anything about computers. No one also could talk with me honestly. I could get online, find out anything I wanted to, be an adult as far as anyone else knew. It was the only escape for me. 20 years later he I still am, conversing with anonymous strangers in a forum/board format, exchanging knowledge over which maybe many of us would still be a little bit persecuted over in real life.
In doing so, I think perhaps I'm not the only guy, who as a kid, found that computers allowed us to socialize, learn new things, and do all of this in an open way that mainstream society might fear.
Someone please help. My teenage daughter sends naked pictures to men online and chats about sex with adults. I can't be expected to supervise my own child and I'm sure my daughter can't be a slut when she's offline because there is no evidence. Someone help me because if we can't blame technology, someone might notice that I'm an incompetent parent.
There are lots of places out there that have 'inventoried' lists. I don't know the preferred term for them. But, searchable sites where someone has gone through and collected relevant sites for different topics. The cost versus traditional search engines is that you get fewer results, and might very easily be missing the best and newest site. The benefit is that you are getting fewer results and not getting the worst and newest site.
WE HAD strong privacy legislation. It was called the United States Constitution when I was growing up. Now I believe the correct term is toilet paper. They use it after they take a dump on the graves of the veterans that fought and died for those rights for 250 years.
It is actually worse than that. The officer was trying to get the director to violate state law and potentially open up the library to a huge civil suit.
NJ privacy statues *forbade* her from giving out this information without a supoena.
Not only was she not obligated to provide this information... the library was forbidden by law from providing the information. The officer asked her to commit a crime. For refusing, she has been chastised by the board, the mayor, and even the library's lawyer.
Shouldn't it be the lawyer that has the reprimand? Way to hire an incompetent lawyer! It would be one thing not to know the statutes if she was some ambulance chasing hack. But when she is representing the library and doesn't know the law involved in the case? That is pathetic. It's not even like it was some ruling, some interpretation of the law, it was spelled out clearly in a statute.
If there was a law protecting my privacy and the library violated it, especially if that resulted in cops on my doorstep and sex crime allegations, you better believe I'd have a good lawyer the next day and a civil case worth a few million worth of a lawsuit filed against the library within the week.
Not only did she protect a (presumed) innocent citizen, she also protected the library, and therefor all of the citizens that are paying taxes to support that library.
Slashdot Mirror
What? No psych majors?
I agree. I despised this when I was in school because I was the good kid. But working at a school now I realize that not only are consequences necessary when they question the authority, but that in general, using their peers against them is very effective. By depriving all of the students, instead of hailing to culprits as heroes, they will be angry and that anger will be shown to the guilty students. The group will probably hate the principal more, but they will respect his authority and be quicker to dismiss any idea of doing this themselves.
And since I know some here will start saying let's not blow this out of proportion... the culprits apparently are apparently stealing the principal's identity and defaming him. If someone did that to me I would want to find them in a dark alley. This is almost certainly a crime and was possibly committed using the school's own computer network. A lock down of the network or locking students out seems like a pretty standard procedure if administration believes it was used in a crime.
/.rs with ID's in the 500000s are smarter than /.rs with ID's in the 600000s.
I believe a lot of it is just keeping a close eye on your kids. What worked for you might not work for another. Every kid is different. Also every parent is different and many kids come to this with a completely different environment than what we 'nerds' are used to.
I played nice games, D&D games, violent games, etc, and I would be on the computer for hours. All day really. But, like is a common thread here, I started out with a C-64 and those games weren't terribly violent. Then I moved up to a CGA 8088. Violence really wasn't much more than the commodore. Life like situations required a lot of imagination.
I watch my son closely because the games seem more immersive. There's a certain disconnect when you are represented by a yellow pie or a blockish barrel-jumping plumber. But I realize that part of that is that I have a 1980's perspective and my son is better equipped than I was, at his age, to point out what is fake and why.
I'll let him play games with killer robots, electrical blasters, shooting ice at people. I draw the line at shooting real people because it is not age appropriate for him (he's 5). I wouldn't let him watch something like Sin City so I'm not going to let him play it out on the computer. Even still I need to take away games when he gets too sucked in. He will start talking and playing about doing to real life people the things that are going on in his games. When the games start bleeding into R/L then it is time to take a break, whether it is Pole Position or GTA.
These opinions matter. They are not musicians talking about oil spills. They are independant, or less mainstream, musicians providing their insight onto how an area of law will limit citizen's ability to listen to music that would otherwise be available to them. This becomes a free speech issue and these artists are speaking out about what could be lost if the market is unfairly manipulated by these monopolies.
I'm not saying that isn't the case. But regardless of how excessive their use is, Comcast promises, Comcast needs to fulfill. If we are talking about users that are this far over the top, and as previously posted, only around 1,000 users, then why is this a problem? Comcast can't handle 1,000 non-typical users?
Comcast has had plenty of time and plenty of money to deal with the issue of bandwidth. Instead of cutting these users off they should be using them as test cases to figure out how they are going to cope with the bandwidth demands of the next decade when typical users and those that program for them will start demanding this excessive bandwidth.
In the all-you-can-eat analogy, there's a 100 picky kids for every fat guy who's going to eat until he pukes. Since Comcast isn't discounting the old ladies that check their webmail for new emails about the grandkids once a week I also wouldn't expect them to cut the service of the heavy downloaders.
If this is an issue for Comcast then they need to be professional and put forth clear guidelines on the subject. If it's a non-issue they should stop playing around with their customers' accounts.
Trademarks are tied to the industry aren't they? So that a company named Sucky Car Parts could co-exist with a company named Sucky Cable Company because the two wouldn't be confused as they are in two different fields. Companies in different areas in different industries are going to collide online, but there is nothing they can do about it. There are limited domains. I think anyone who complains should have to put 'industry' in front of their domain so UTube can start going by plumbinguTube.com and stop whining.
But what if you lost your place? What then, smarty pants? The end of the freaking world, that's what!
You should hear me cursing as I *attempt* to shut down an entire lab only to have all the computers hang waiting for me to confirm that they can close whatever program is too stupid to close at shutdown. There are a few of them that have hung me, Adobe is the most frustrating.
You are right on with this. If educators are asking of our youth to write 'about' something then they are creating a large part of the problem. With modern technology I can know 'about' anything in about 30 seconds. When kids are regurgitating the articles they see online they are honestly meeting our 'know about' expectations as they perceive them. The 'know about' type of assignments are worthless and the students treat them as such.
In order to have good assignments that really improve a students understanding and assess their understanding we need to ask them to compare/contrast, explore similarities, find primary source materials, and experiment to find new knowledge.
If all we are doing is asking our kids 'about' something then the skills we are teaching them have been replaced by the computer about 20 years ago. It sounds like you have a good professor than understands learning as well as he understands engineering.
- profiting
from the private, copyright valid, intellectual property of students. It's one thing for professors to have a document scanned for cheating. It's another thing for the company to profit off that work from students. While many of us are comfortable with downloading music, I doubt many of us would back someone who was building a business on selling that music they had downloaded.Do we need to give up our rights to get an affordable education? I don't think 'castrating freedom' was listed on my last college invoice.
I work at a school, so my end users are 6-12 year olds, or worse... 26 year old teachers, or worse... 60 year old teachers. I spent a lot of time trouble shooting logins, changing passwords, over and over again with no success until I finally realized that there are a lot of people that just can't spell their names right. Now that's the first thing I ask them, "How do you spell your name?". It doesn't help that some parents name their kids names like Eyboni or Charls or Zim'boni with apostophrophes and silent Q's and what have you.
Try school kids.
I work with young teenagers and they are always flailing about at their computer desks, kicking their feet around, leaning back, kicking their feet at the wall. They routinely knock the power out for a dozen or so users and look stunned and ask me what happened to the power. They always seem so surprised when I point out that they have managed to karate-kick the plug right out of the outlet and occassionally having bent the prongs into ruin.
A billiard? In America we call that pool. You crazy Europeans. Just wait until I tell you what we call football...
But I think the issue was that Google may have honestly been supressing them. This was actually a good thing, because KinderStart was one of those search-engine-fraud-link-whoring sites where they pretend to be a search engine but pack in a pile of worthless links. Google eliminated a bunch of these no-content worthless sites because they were on their way to ruining Google and other search engines. Google has been more successful than some others at solving the problem.
One of the strengths of Google is that they do suppress sites and can do so subjectively. Google is in the position of providing relevant results to its searchers. It is not in the business of providing users to websites, unless you count those that advertise. This is all good for us, but bad for scummy-scammy no-content ad sites. This is why scummy-scammy ad sites feel it necessary to sue them.
That is exactly the wrong objective in suing MS. You don't have to get big monetary judgements to hurt MS. Look at Europe. The key isn't to go for the money. You want to go for where they *make* their money. MS chose to get fined 2.5 million a day (retroactively no less) rather than give up control over media API's.
Most non-geeks aren't going to care about the OS. They want their web browser, their flash games, their media player, and they want their hardware to 'just work'... oh, and software that runs on their system (games). MS losing control of which software works well on their OS would be expensive to them in many ways.
"If we choose to ignore the rule of law and subvert the Constitution in the name of "safety," we will raise the specter that, in the loss of American values and American freedoms, America will become merely a place name rather than an ideal to be emulated." - Judge John Murphy of Nebraska, in a decision upholding the 4th amendment
So to combat a minor amount of unauthorized installations, MS is going to give THIS MUCH fuel to the arguments that Windows is a horrible choice for government use? Admittedly, I'm sure MS wont require all government workstations to 'phone home'. But who wants software in which spying features are standard to be installed in government agencies. Even though most people don't really care about occasionaly privacy violations, it seems that this is severe enough that A LOT of people are going to start paying attention.
This would be awful if it put PayPal out of business. I don't see how that could possibly happen, but all the same, it would not be good for Google.
Look what has happened to PayPal without any real competition in the game, poor service, lots of fear over how accounts are handled. I think the same thing would happen to Google without competition forcing them to be the best.
I know a lot of people are starting to fear Google. Google used to be the underdog, and people love underdogs, especially Americans and especially geeks. Google seems to be motivated by jumping over the bar, no matter who is setting it, no matter how high. If Google becomes a dominating force I think many of us fear that they are exactly in the right position to become another MS.
You are right on. But I think there is an even bigger missed fault in that argument.
Paying the money would be way better for MS, than if it just chose to walk away from EU free and clear, although it's clear that they can't.
Imagine that they abandoned THAT MUCH market. IT abhors a vacuum as much as nature (unless it is a vacuum that is controlled by robots to clean their room in their mom's basement). If MS abandoned EU, it wouldn't just be losing sales, it would create a giant void that would be filled with competition, something that Microsoft has tried to control as much as possible all these years. With that kind of marketplace, those alternatives would mature very quickly, quickly enough to make very real threats to MS dominance in the US. MS needs Windows on every one of those European machines more than the EU needs MS.
Of course, as mentioned, anyone in Europe would be able to pirate Windows as much as they like if MS burned their bridges there.
Maybe if the colleges focused more on the problem of the jocks being drunken jerks instead of the symptom, that they *provide evidence* that they are drunken jerks online, this would be an education issue and not a free speech issue.
The real issue is that they are providing these guys a free ride in college, not always just monetarily, and the behavior they foster is something they are ashamed of (or otherwise hurts the college). Instead of taking off from the team those students that are poor representatives of the college, they use their financial power to stifle freedom of speech.
These are college students who are supposed to be getting an education. And the officials are running an educational institution (supposedly). Controlling how students communicate and express themselves is a bigger issue than telling them to go pee in a cup.
That's why I got into technology. I remember back in the days of Q-Link, Compuserve, and BBS. I was 12, I knew no one who could tell me anything about computers. No one also could talk with me honestly. I could get online, find out anything I wanted to, be an adult as far as anyone else knew. It was the only escape for me. 20 years later he I still am, conversing with anonymous strangers in a forum/board format, exchanging knowledge over which maybe many of us would still be a little bit persecuted over in real life.
In doing so, I think perhaps I'm not the only guy, who as a kid, found that computers allowed us to socialize, learn new things, and do all of this in an open way that mainstream society might fear.
Someone please help. My teenage daughter sends naked pictures to men online and chats about sex with adults. I can't be expected to supervise my own child and I'm sure my daughter can't be a slut when she's offline because there is no evidence. Someone help me because if we can't blame technology, someone might notice that I'm an incompetent parent.
There are lots of places out there that have 'inventoried' lists. I don't know the preferred term for them. But, searchable sites where someone has gone through and collected relevant sites for different topics. The cost versus traditional search engines is that you get fewer results, and might very easily be missing the best and newest site. The benefit is that you are getting fewer results and not getting the worst and newest site.
WE HAD strong privacy legislation. It was called the United States Constitution when I was growing up. Now I believe the correct term is toilet paper. They use it after they take a dump on the graves of the veterans that fought and died for those rights for 250 years.
It is actually worse than that. The officer was trying to get the director to violate state law and potentially open up the library to a huge civil suit.
NJ privacy statues *forbade* her from giving out this information without a supoena.
Not only was she not obligated to provide this information... the library was forbidden by law from providing the information. The officer asked her to commit a crime. For refusing, she has been chastised by the board, the mayor, and even the library's lawyer.
Shouldn't it be the lawyer that has the reprimand? Way to hire an incompetent lawyer! It would be one thing not to know the statutes if she was some ambulance chasing hack. But when she is representing the library and doesn't know the law involved in the case? That is pathetic. It's not even like it was some ruling, some interpretation of the law, it was spelled out clearly in a statute.
If there was a law protecting my privacy and the library violated it, especially if that resulted in cops on my doorstep and sex crime allegations, you better believe I'd have a good lawyer the next day and a civil case worth a few million worth of a lawsuit filed against the library within the week.
Not only did she protect a (presumed) innocent citizen, she also protected the library, and therefor all of the citizens that are paying taxes to support that library.