"The way these things are best challenged is usually after-the-fact in court. If you want to ignore that and challenge police while they're doing your duty, you'd better have a really good reason."
There is no way to challenge a police order to stop filming or to disperse *except* to refuse to obey, get arrested, and then argue the validity of the police officer's order in court. So a person can't follow your "best challenged" argument EXCEPT by "ignoring that" and challenging the police.
Also, you do NOT need a "really good reason" to ignore the order (e.g. a police officer's demand that you stop filming or taking photos). You just have to be right, that the order is an illegal infringement on your constitutional rights. These rights aren't conditional on your having a "really good reason" to expect your rights to not be infringed upon. You don't need to have some reason like "I'm with the New York Times and this is an Important Event that I've Been Assigned to Cover". You can have a reason such as "I'm a citizen of the US. I'm engaging in my constitutional right to take photos in a public space. " While a "really good reason" may also include "My presence here is not disrupting anything except YOUR ability (as a police officer) to wantonly commit acts upon my fellow citizens in a possibly illegal manner, without risk of being caught in the act by my photos." this is not a requirement for being allowed to engage in activities (such as photography in public) that are protected by the constitution.
He violated a restraining order. He could have simply had filed for a mirror order put in to restrain HER behavior as well as his (so they are both in the same situation), and then they BOTH follow the judge's orders.
Instead, he ignored the court's order. When someone does that, it's called contempt of court and you can indeed go to jail for it. We do not have "free speech" to speak out in public in violation of a court-issued restraining order. This has nothing to do with "free speech" and everything with following a judge's orders.
The link to TFA is broken, here's the correct link:
A friend who managed an IT team insisted that if one of his team members was required at a morning meeting, and the meeting "had to start before 10 am" that the meeting must be scheduled for 7 am. If they were going to make HIS team members come in early, they could darn well get themselves out of bed and into the office early as well. Otherwise, they could schedule the meetings for 10 am or later. Fair's fair.
TFA claims this is a precedent setting ruling, but that's not true. Getty Images collected on behalf of Ernst Haas in a very similar case of Copying (shooting a substantially similar photo) specifically to Avoid Paying a License Fee.
the second photo was intentionally made to avoid licensing fees from using the original.
This is the key factor. There was a copyright infringement case that centered on the same issue back in the 1970s, about a photo that was used on an album cover. The photo was of a woman on a beach at sunset, with the sun coming thru between her legs and creating a starbust (rays of light) spreading out from the sun. The band liked the photo but balked at paying the licensing fee, and hired another photographer to create a photo that was not identical, but which had the same key features (woman, sun, starburst, beach). They lost the lawsuit and had to pay a 6 figure copyright infringement fine.
I will post a follow-up if I can find the cite to the photos in question.
Tornadoes form where hot moist air and cold dry air meet, the two weather systems creating a strong downdraft on one side, strong updraft on the other. I think it might be possible for a well-placed explosion to create an updraft on the downdraft side, disrupting the initial horizontal rolling air column that, when it dips down at one end then becomes a tornado. You would want to do this long before it develops into a mile-wide vertical column of a massive tornado. Testing this would be difficult, and implementing it on all possible tornadoes before they form is impractical (and then there would be explosion fallout problems), but it is still theoretically possible.
Why not consult the Chicago Manual of Style? Because it's not the final authority - no style manual is. It was written for a specific purpose and it only applies to THAT purpose.
I'm a 2-spacer. My primary argument is that it eliminates all possible ambiguity about if the period is ending an abbreviation or ending a sentence. I frequently run into situations where text written with single-spaces produces ambiguity and I have to re-read the sentence(s) to figure out where they stop and start.
I also feel it makes for easier reading to have a bit more space between sentences. (The same reason I use 2 line feeds between paragraphs.) The primary argument against (e.g. creating "rivers" of white space in text) comes from crappy layout decisions such as using justified text in too-small columns.
FYI, I learned to type on a computer, not a typewriter.
The contract will expire, sooner or later. When that happens, if the school has been happily operating in a Windows-free environment the administration will clearly see that there is no need to renew the contract. The sooner they start using alternative, open source software, the better. Don't let the Windows contract stall or slow this process! Thinking; Oh, we won't save any money by not using Windows now, so we should go ahead and use it to "get our money's worth" is false economy. Even if Windows software were free, it's still not the best choice. It's bloated, it's buggy, by design it's insecure. If you have the IT staff that can support free Open Source OSs and applications, you will be better off than tying your organization to closed-source software, especially when it comes from Microsoft.
Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Applications and Websites
You will find the following:
What your friends can share about you through applications and websites When your friend visits a Facebook-enhanced application or website, they may want to share certain information to make the experience more social. For example, a greeting card application may use your birthday information to prompt your friend to send a card.
If your friend uses an application that you do not use, you can control what types of information the application can access. Please note that applications will always be able to access your publicly available information (Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages) and information that is visible to Everyone.
Personal info (activities, interests, etc.) Status updates Online presence Website Family and relationship Education and work My videos My links My notes My photos Photos and videos of me About me My birthday My hometown My religious and political views
So you CAN control what information your friends know about you that is "shared" with applications.
The anonymous reader who reported on TFA is not correct that you can no longer control the distribution of your most personal data on Facebook.
To test my theory, I searched Facebook for "mark smith" and found dozens of Mark Smiths whose privacy settings don't share any personal information (such as their city/hometown) with strangers. All I learn about these various Mark Smiths is that:
Mark only shares some of his information with everyone. If you know Mark, send him a message or add him as a friend.
Then I created a test account on Facebook, and locked it down. See if you can find any info on facebook about the account I just created in the name of: Catherine Fiver.
I'd like to see someone in this thread give a concrete example of a setting they can't actually lock down to an acceptable privacy level, because I've gone over all the privacy settings and it looks like you can lock your account down to a level of uselessness (such as the Catherine Fiver account) where no one else on Facebook will know anything about you unless you connect to them as a friend, and even then they will know almost nothing about you. You can lock down how visible your account is - choosing if you want to allow indexing by search engines - and if your account is found by facebook user searches by non-friends. If you lock your account down to the limit (as I did with my test account), non-friends won't ever find or see you on facebook.
The default choices for each data field are "everybody", "friends of friends", "only friends" and "customize". Within the customize menu you can choose "just me", or allow or block specific people.
I use the customized CSS from www.floppymoose.com to block ads in Firefox. Works like a charm! I've been using it for about 5 years, and there hasn't been a single security incident associated with this solution.
Guard that sheet like you would your credit cards. If your wallet is lost, immediately set all your passwords to something temporary then build a new password list all over again.
I don't think you thought this one thru very carefully. Once the wallet is lost, how would he login to all his accounts to reset the passwords?
Most websites have a function to email you your password, or to reset and email you your new password. But that doesn't work if you don't remember your email password and you lost that slip of paper...
Speaking of exercise and weight loss, does anyone know of an online calorie calculators that figure calories burned based on:
Weight Distance Effort (type of exercise)
All of the online calculators I've been able to find use time instead of distance, which makes no sense. If I move a given weight (my body) a given distance (e.g. 5 miles) using a standard type of effort (walking/running, or bicycling which takes less effort), then the calories burned are the same no matter the speed. This is basic physics. But all of the online calculators say that the faster you go the fewer calories you burn. If it takes 25 minutes to run 5 miles or 100 minutes to walk 5 miles, it still takes the same amount of "work" to move a mass that distance, and the calories burned should be approximately the same. If I ride my bike 20 miles and it takes 1 hour my effort per minute will be *about* twice the rate as if it takes 2 hours and both rides should require (burn) about the same amount of calories. But the calorie calculators say that the slower ride burns twice as many calories because I rode for a "longer" period.
That's interesting. Where I work, inserting a personally-owned pen drive to a computer on the network that gets caught in a scan results in a suspension. Inserting a personally-owned pen drive that pushes malware out onto the network gets you fired. Inadverdently attaching a spreadsheet with customer data to an email and sending it outside the organization gets you fired, everyone in your area subjected to additional training, and an executive or two dragged before a congressional subcommittee to fall on their swords. Deliberately accessing customer data to which you have no right gets you all of the above, plus you go to jail.
Other places don't take security as seriously?
I'm saving this as a great counter-example when someone claims that government agencies can't ever do things as efficiently or as well as private industry.
The article repeats the same Myths of password security that we have been repeating for the last thirty years. Let me review them for you:
- Password Length is important
- Password Complexity is key (e.g. A-Z with at least one special, one number)
- Password Expiration is important
Like all good myths these have elements of truth in them but fail to really hit the nail on what the problems actually are, or namely:
- Strong login auditing is important (failed attempts, unusual patterns, etc)
- Login speed should be throttled (e.g. No 60/guesses per minute)
- Failed logins should be capped (e.g. Login wrong five times? Consult technical support)
Now we are talking about password security. You can also throw on a five length minimum. Now even if your password was "password" they would still find it extremely difficult to compromise the system since it would be slow and would break after the first five. If you tried to spread out the attempts over several weeks (making it slower still) the audit logs should be alerting the administrator to 14/failed attempts per week from China.
This is an excellent summary of the problem. I love how you addressed the small elements of truth in the 3 big myths, then explained what is more important. I hope you don't mind if I copy your list the next time I try to explain to my bank why their password policy (composed entirely of the 3 myths and missing all of the 3 items that are more important) is needlessly interfereing with ease of use and actually contributes to a lack of safety (because people ARE going to write down their login passwords when they are forced to change them every 60 days).
Can you imagine that someone probably once claimed Google will never crack 50% market share because there's competition, because Yahoo and Altavista (does anyone remember Altavista) and all those other search sites were there first?
Firefox will crack IE just like Google cracked Yahoo - because Firefox is better, and a non-Microsoft business policy will save businesses money in the long run. As each business looks at the cost of upgrading their software, and someone proposes a lower cost alternative, and the bean counters see that it saves them money, this is a crack in Microsoft's dam. Even when Microsoft offers schools and governments M$ software for free, many realize it's still to costly to be locked into the M$ platform and they go with open source software instead.
Get it into your thick skull already; copyright cannot stop you from using what you bought the way you want it. It only stops you from copying what you bought and giving it to others.
You are mistaken, and the above is incorrect.
When you "buy" a song, a photo, or software, what you are really doing is purchasing a license to use a copy of the item. The license almost always has restrictions. You can NOT do "anything you want" with your copy. For instance:
1) When you buy a song, you can't then play that song at your restaurant. This is a commercial airing of the song, and you have to pay royalties for this use. This is outside of the license you were granted for your personal use of the song. It doesn't matter how you purchased your copy - bought a CD or downloaded it from iTunes. Ditto for buying a DVD of a movie then showing the movie at your business.
2) When someone takes a photo of you at an event (e.g. sporting event, graduation, office xmas party) and you buy a print or a jpeg, you can't give your copy (no "copying" taking place) to someone else to use for commercial purposes. The photographer still owns the copyright on the image, and your copy is for your personal enjoyment only and is not licensed for commercial use. (Such commercial use usually involves making additional copies and the "copying" becomes the issue, but even if no additional copies are made, the commercial use is outside the license granted with the personal purchase of the photo.)
3) When you buy software, you can use it on one computer, and a backup computer. You can't install it on every computer in your home or office *unless* the seller explicitly gives you this right.
You do have the "right of first purchase" to use your copy for personal use or to sell it to someone else (as is the case with a music CD or video DVD). But your rights are limited, even for your own personal use.
Now, it is fair to argue that copyright laws have been extended (many times) in the past 100 years in ways that amount to a "taking" from the public domain, and that they are overdue for changes. As someone who benefits from copyright laws (I'm a photographer), I'm not in favor of their extended reach today, and back proposals to rein-in copyright. But until the laws are changed, this is the state of copyright law in the US today.
There are horse shows that score from 60-80 because when they scored from 0-100 all the scores fell into the 60-80 range anyway so they finally codified the "scoring range" to the numbers that were actually used.
There's nothing wrong with changing the scoring so that 50 is the lowest score - as long as they don't lump in all the students who score from 1-50 in with the student who actually scored 50! If they are going to set the base at 50, then the student who scored 0% right gets a 50, the student who got 20% right gets a 60, the student who got 50% right gets a 75, etc. If this improves student self esteem and the result is that kids keep trying to learn, then the goal is achieved.
Just don't call a 0% score "50%". Take the % sign off and just call it a "50".:-) Besides, [barbie voice] this % stuff is hard[/barbie].
Slashdot Mirror
There are legitimate reasons to setup a mail server that accepts mail for *@example.com.
"The way these things are best challenged is usually after-the-fact in court. If you want to ignore that and challenge police while they're doing your duty, you'd better have a really good reason."
There is no way to challenge a police order to stop filming or to disperse *except* to refuse to obey, get arrested, and then argue the validity of the police officer's order in court. So a person can't follow your "best challenged" argument EXCEPT by "ignoring that" and challenging the police.
Also, you do NOT need a "really good reason" to ignore the order (e.g. a police officer's demand that you stop filming or taking photos). You just have to be right, that the order is an illegal infringement on your constitutional rights. These rights aren't conditional on your having a "really good reason" to expect your rights to not be infringed upon. You don't need to have some reason like "I'm with the New York Times and this is an Important Event that I've Been Assigned to Cover". You can have a reason such as "I'm a citizen of the US. I'm engaging in my constitutional right to take photos in a public space. " While a "really good reason" may also include "My presence here is not disrupting anything except YOUR ability (as a police officer) to wantonly commit acts upon my fellow citizens in a possibly illegal manner, without risk of being caught in the act by my photos." this is not a requirement for being allowed to engage in activities (such as photography in public) that are protected by the constitution.
He violated a restraining order. He could have simply had filed for a mirror order put in to restrain HER behavior as well as his (so they are both in the same situation), and then they BOTH follow the judge's orders.
Instead, he ignored the court's order. When someone does that, it's called contempt of court and you can indeed go to jail for it. We do not have "free speech" to speak out in public in violation of a court-issued restraining order. This has nothing to do with "free speech" and everything with following a judge's orders.
The link to TFA is broken, here's the correct link:
http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20120222/NEWS010702/302210147/
A friend who managed an IT team insisted that if one of his team members was required at a morning meeting, and the meeting "had to start before 10 am" that the meeting must be scheduled for 7 am. If they were going to make HIS team members come in early, they could darn well get themselves out of bed and into the office early as well. Otherwise, they could schedule the meetings for 10 am or later. Fair's fair.
TFA claims this is a precedent setting ruling, but that's not true. Getty Images collected on behalf of Ernst Haas in a very similar case of Copying (shooting a substantially similar photo) specifically to Avoid Paying a License Fee.
Found it. It's the photo used on the cover of Fatboy Slim's album Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars, which was found to infringe on Ernst Haas photo Sunset Silhouette.
Details on the lawsuit here: http://business.highbeam.com/2025/article-1G1-93613520/getty-collects-fatboy-slim-infringement
the second photo was intentionally made to avoid licensing fees from using the original.
This is the key factor. There was a copyright infringement case that centered on the same issue back in the 1970s, about a photo that was used on an album cover. The photo was of a woman on a beach at sunset, with the sun coming thru between her legs and creating a starbust (rays of light) spreading out from the sun. The band liked the photo but balked at paying the licensing fee, and hired another photographer to create a photo that was not identical, but which had the same key features (woman, sun, starburst, beach). They lost the lawsuit and had to pay a 6 figure copyright infringement fine.
I will post a follow-up if I can find the cite to the photos in question.
Oooh, the love of slashdot! I have received several invites already. Thanks everyone!
I'd like an invite, if anyone has one to spare. You can email me at myslashdotusername at gmail or send me slashmail.
Tornadoes form where hot moist air and cold dry air meet, the two weather systems creating a strong downdraft on one side, strong updraft on the other. I think it might be possible for a well-placed explosion to create an updraft on the downdraft side, disrupting the initial horizontal rolling air column that, when it dips down at one end then becomes a tornado. You would want to do this long before it develops into a mile-wide vertical column of a massive tornado. Testing this would be difficult, and implementing it on all possible tornadoes before they form is impractical (and then there would be explosion fallout problems), but it is still theoretically possible.
Why not consult the Chicago Manual of Style? Because it's not the final authority - no style manual is. It was written for a specific purpose and it only applies to THAT purpose.
I'm a 2-spacer. My primary argument is that it eliminates all possible ambiguity about if the period is ending an abbreviation or ending a sentence. I frequently run into situations where text written with single-spaces produces ambiguity and I have to re-read the sentence(s) to figure out where they stop and start.
I also feel it makes for easier reading to have a bit more space between sentences. (The same reason I use 2 line feeds between paragraphs.) The primary argument against (e.g. creating "rivers" of white space in text) comes from crappy layout decisions such as using justified text in too-small columns.
FYI, I learned to type on a computer, not a typewriter.
The contract will expire, sooner or later. When that happens, if the school has been happily operating in a Windows-free environment the administration will clearly see that there is no need to renew the contract. The sooner they start using alternative, open source software, the better. Don't let the Windows contract stall or slow this process! Thinking; Oh, we won't save any money by not using Windows now, so we should go ahead and use it to "get our money's worth" is false economy. Even if Windows software were free, it's still not the best choice. It's bloated, it's buggy, by design it's insecure. If you have the IT staff that can support free Open Source OSs and applications, you will be better off than tying your organization to closed-source software, especially when it comes from Microsoft.
And hope that someone trying to do deep research doesn't decide to look at a timeline result to find the earliest posts that reference you.
In Facebook, go to:
Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Applications and Websites
You will find the following:
So you CAN control what information your friends know about you that is "shared" with applications.
The anonymous reader who reported on TFA is not correct that you can no longer control the distribution of your most personal data on Facebook.
To test my theory, I searched Facebook for "mark smith" and found dozens of Mark Smiths whose privacy settings don't share any personal information (such as their city/hometown) with strangers. All I learn about these various Mark Smiths is that:
Then I created a test account on Facebook, and locked it down. See if you can find any info on facebook about the account I just created in the name of: Catherine Fiver.
I'd like to see someone in this thread give a concrete example of a setting they can't actually lock down to an acceptable privacy level, because I've gone over all the privacy settings and it looks like you can lock your account down to a level of uselessness (such as the Catherine Fiver account) where no one else on Facebook will know anything about you unless you connect to them as a friend, and even then they will know almost nothing about you. You can lock down how visible your account is - choosing if you want to allow indexing by search engines - and if your account is found by facebook user searches by non-friends. If you lock your account down to the limit (as I did with my test account), non-friends won't ever find or see you on facebook.
The default choices for each data field are "everybody", "friends of friends", "only friends" and "customize". Within the customize menu you can choose "just me", or allow or block specific people.
It's not Google that should sue them, it's the government. It's tantamount to price fixing which is illegal because it hurts consumers.
I use the customized CSS from www.floppymoose.com to block ads in Firefox. Works like a charm! I've been using it for about 5 years, and there hasn't been a single security incident associated with this solution.
Guard that sheet like you would your credit cards. If your wallet is lost, immediately set all your passwords to something temporary then build a new password list all over again.
I don't think you thought this one thru very carefully. Once the wallet is lost, how would he login to all his accounts to reset the passwords?
Most websites have a function to email you your password, or to reset and email you your new password. But that doesn't work if you don't remember your email password and you lost that slip of paper...
Speaking of exercise and weight loss, does anyone know of an online calorie calculators that figure calories burned based on:
Weight
Distance
Effort (type of exercise)
All of the online calculators I've been able to find use time instead of distance, which makes no sense. If I move a given weight (my body) a given distance (e.g. 5 miles) using a standard type of effort (walking/running, or bicycling which takes less effort), then the calories burned are the same no matter the speed. This is basic physics. But all of the online calculators say that the faster you go the fewer calories you burn. If it takes 25 minutes to run 5 miles or 100 minutes to walk 5 miles, it still takes the same amount of "work" to move a mass that distance, and the calories burned should be approximately the same. If I ride my bike 20 miles and it takes 1 hour my effort per minute will be *about* twice the rate as if it takes 2 hours and both rides should require (burn) about the same amount of calories. But the calorie calculators say that the slower ride burns twice as many calories because I rode for a "longer" period.
That's interesting. Where I work, inserting a personally-owned pen drive to a computer on the network that gets caught in a scan results in a suspension. Inserting a personally-owned pen drive that pushes malware out onto the network gets you fired. Inadverdently attaching a spreadsheet with customer data to an email and sending it outside the organization gets you fired, everyone in your area subjected to additional training, and an executive or two dragged before a congressional subcommittee to fall on their swords. Deliberately accessing customer data to which you have no right gets you all of the above, plus you go to jail.
Other places don't take security as seriously?
I'm saving this as a great counter-example when someone claims that government agencies can't ever do things as efficiently or as well as private industry.
I'm shocked too. "D'oh, Google indexes publicly linked files? Who would have thought of such a thing?"
This won't take a "lot of people" by surprise but it might take a "lot of stupid people" by surprise. Which is not surprising.
The article repeats the same Myths of password security that we have been repeating for the last thirty years. Let me review them for you:
- Password Length is important
- Password Complexity is key (e.g. A-Z with at least one special, one number)
- Password Expiration is important
Like all good myths these have elements of truth in them but fail to really hit the nail on what the problems actually are, or namely:
- Strong login auditing is important (failed attempts, unusual patterns, etc)
- Login speed should be throttled (e.g. No 60/guesses per minute)
- Failed logins should be capped (e.g. Login wrong five times? Consult technical support)
Now we are talking about password security. You can also throw on a five length minimum. Now even if your password was "password" they would still find it extremely difficult to compromise the system since it would be slow and would break after the first five. If you tried to spread out the attempts over several weeks (making it slower still) the audit logs should be alerting the administrator to 14/failed attempts per week from China.
This is an excellent summary of the problem. I love how you addressed the small elements of truth in the 3 big myths, then explained what is more important. I hope you don't mind if I copy your list the next time I try to explain to my bank why their password policy (composed entirely of the 3 myths and missing all of the 3 items that are more important) is needlessly interfereing with ease of use and actually contributes to a lack of safety (because people ARE going to write down their login passwords when they are forced to change them every 60 days).
Can you imagine that someone probably once claimed Google will never crack 50% market share because there's competition, because Yahoo and Altavista (does anyone remember Altavista) and all those other search sites were there first?
Firefox will crack IE just like Google cracked Yahoo - because Firefox is better, and a non-Microsoft business policy will save businesses money in the long run. As each business looks at the cost of upgrading their software, and someone proposes a lower cost alternative, and the bean counters see that it saves them money, this is a crack in Microsoft's dam. Even when Microsoft offers schools and governments M$ software for free, many realize it's still to costly to be locked into the M$ platform and they go with open source software instead.
Get it into your thick skull already; copyright cannot stop you from using what you bought the way you want it. It only stops you from copying what you bought and giving it to others.
You are mistaken, and the above is incorrect.
When you "buy" a song, a photo, or software, what you are really doing is purchasing a license to use a copy of the item. The license almost always has restrictions. You can NOT do "anything you want" with your copy. For instance:
1) When you buy a song, you can't then play that song at your restaurant. This is a commercial airing of the song, and you have to pay royalties for this use. This is outside of the license you were granted for your personal use of the song. It doesn't matter how you purchased your copy - bought a CD or downloaded it from iTunes. Ditto for buying a DVD of a movie then showing the movie at your business.
2) When someone takes a photo of you at an event (e.g. sporting event, graduation, office xmas party) and you buy a print or a jpeg, you can't give your copy (no "copying" taking place) to someone else to use for commercial purposes. The photographer still owns the copyright on the image, and your copy is for your personal enjoyment only and is not licensed for commercial use. (Such commercial use usually involves making additional copies and the "copying" becomes the issue, but even if no additional copies are made, the commercial use is outside the license granted with the personal purchase of the photo.)
3) When you buy software, you can use it on one computer, and a backup computer. You can't install it on every computer in your home or office *unless* the seller explicitly gives you this right.
You do have the "right of first purchase" to use your copy for personal use or to sell it to someone else (as is the case with a music CD or video DVD). But your rights are limited, even for your own personal use.
Now, it is fair to argue that copyright laws have been extended (many times) in the past 100 years in ways that amount to a "taking" from the public domain, and that they are overdue for changes. As someone who benefits from copyright laws (I'm a photographer), I'm not in favor of their extended reach today, and back proposals to rein-in copyright. But until the laws are changed, this is the state of copyright law in the US today.
You may also find these cites helpful:
Copyright Myths
Brief Intro to Copyright
There are horse shows that score from 60-80 because when they scored from 0-100 all the scores fell into the 60-80 range anyway so they finally codified the "scoring range" to the numbers that were actually used.
There's nothing wrong with changing the scoring so that 50 is the lowest score - as long as they don't lump in all the students who score from 1-50 in with the student who actually scored 50! If they are going to set the base at 50, then the student who scored 0% right gets a 50, the student who got 20% right gets a 60, the student who got 50% right gets a 75, etc. If this improves student self esteem and the result is that kids keep trying to learn, then the goal is achieved.
Just don't call a 0% score "50%". Take the % sign off and just call it a "50". :-) Besides, [barbie voice] this % stuff is hard[/barbie].