Schools don't generally punish students for breaking laws, they punish students for breaking rules so if they were thinking detention, suspension, or expulsion then they can generally expect to get away with violating the rights of a student as long as they don't push it too far or descriminate too blatently. If they try to hand iffy evidence over to the police for use in a criminal complaint against a kid then the prosecutor might have some issues with being able to use it but there is very little chance of a school getting in trouble for that kind of thing.
As for the other point this seems to be final act in a string of monumentally stupid decisions on the part of everyone involved at the school.
- In theory giving them laptops might save money by requiring fewer expensive text books and it could help out with a couple of classes but in practice it's probably a pretty bad idea because of porn, warez, vandalism, and apparently the terrible judgment of the administrators etc.
- Getting them laptops with webcams is a terrible idea because kids are dumb enough to take pictures of themselves nude on a school computer without help of the administrators. It's a damn good idea to keep yourself out of the equasion when it comes to pictures and videos of nude children.
- Setting those laptops up with spying software is beyond stupid unless it was intended to help track down stolen laptops and even then they should have exceptionally tight controls on the use of something like that. I'd say that the bare minimum for using this kind of thing would be a police report filed by the student stating the laptop was stolen and having a police officer present when the software is used.
- Using the software to track down students skipping school, drinking, looking at porn, doing drugs, having sex, etc. is a horrible idea that is almost certainly criminal.
In much the same way the aliens in War of the Worlds were destroyed by simple micro-organisms they were ill equipt to deal with, the Superbowl has a simple yet fatal weakness when it comes to the common human nipple. If the NFL gives you any guff about your party just lift your shirt and flash your nipples in a manner similar to the Care Bear Stare until they flee in terror.
I think we're moving away from high cost fighters and into fleets of low cost drones. The google tells me that an F22 runs about $150+ million each and a predator drone runs about $4.5 million. The training/maintenance/and other support costs are much lower for drones and the costs should go down since you'll make many, many more drones than larger aircraft.
I know our drones now aren't air to air fighters yet but a squadron of drone fighters would probably run a lot cheaper and be nearly as effective as a couple of big expensive planes. I'd also expect that it might be a little easier to stealth up a drone than something that has to carry a person and a drone could perform manuvers that a plane couldn't do safely with a human pilot inside. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, and PC game makers have also been training a generation of drone pilots for free.
Sick people don't have money because they spend it all on hospitals and medicine but horny old fat people have tons of money. If Dr. Jack wants some serious grant money he'd better try to turn fat cells in boner cells. He can use some of that cash to help him make Michael J. Fox less shaky and hell, why not give him a giant wang while he's at it.
He'd be great in a commercial, "Hi, I'm Michael J. Fox. You may have noticed that I'm a lot less shaky these days and I also have a giant wang now. I owe it all to Dr. Jack." Boom! Instant Nobel Prize.
I say they use the Indian rope trick to setup a space elevator. Between the weaving needed for the cable and the hundreds of millions of people with those flute things to lift it, I think they have the technology to make this happen.
The next space race should be about who can take the largest, most unweildly animal to the moon, let it run around, and bring it back safely. I say we try to a gorilla or a buffalo or a bear in a space suit that fits them and let them run around the moon a little bit and then the animal returns a hero. If that works we start with marine life. Let's put an enclosed dolphin tank on the moon and do a little show and then bring it all back home.
If we're doing this for science we can send probes cheaper and safer. If we're doing this for glory then send a giraffe or hippo.
No-hire and non-compete agreements are pretty common in contracts especially when the development work is specialized. This sidelines a lot of talent and helps exacerbate the software developer labor shortage employers are always complaining about. It also lowers wages for developers since they'd have more trouble finding work if they left their job. I think we need to severly limit what kind of restrictions companies can place on their employees' future job prospects.
Right now farm runoff containing nutrients is creating vast dead zones in places like the gulf of Mexico. If we could channel farm runoff through algae growing operations we might be able to help with the dead zone thing which would help the fishing industry.
Reducing corn subsidies for biofuel, which we should do anyway, could drop the value of feed algae because we wouldn't be be turning so much corn into ethanol (assuming you could replace algae-based feed with corn).
The cost of petroleum is not just the wholesale price + taxes + mark ups. The cost also comes in the form of dependence on foreign oil and the security problems that causes, maintaining a military that can help ensure our access that oil, and the environmental impact of burning fossil fuels.
If ultimately they can't make the economics of algae growing work then clearly they shouldn't do it but there are other factors than the wholesale price of these commodities.
While the direct campaign contributions seem more slimy and I'm not comfortable with the $$$ = speech theory with the cash-and-carry government it implies, I think the very bothersome grey area comes in form of message ads like the 527 organizations ran.
It allows big money donors to hide behind a front group and throw support behind their candidate while saying pretty outrageous things which are far enough away from their candidate to give them deniability (i.e. swift boating). In my opinion this falls more clearly under speech than campaign contributions so I'm inclined to say it should be better protected but the way it's done is pretty disgusting.
I guess that's how some people view porno but that doesn't seem to have as detrimental effect on our government.
In this scenario I'd say we're giving away liberties for an increased risk of harm over the long term. I believe that an authoritarian government or one that is constantly grabbing more power for itself is more dangerous to its people than an external threat from terrorists. Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Idi Amin's Ugandan, the Banana Republics of Central and South America, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Hilter, etc. were all far more dangerous than terrorist groups unless they have the power to overthrow the government.
I think it's safer to live with more of a risk from terrorism, which is very low when compared with other less dramatic but more easily preventable causes of death, than to further empower a much more potentially dangerous body.
How about a better lie? I say that the technical crowd starts telling people that towers that give off electromagnetic signals cause increased libido in laboratory mice. Then your biggest problem is people tresspassing to screw under the towers but you can also sell wireless routers in sexed-up packaging in adult novelty stores for a tidy profit.
Now that China has over 24 million more men than women because of the One Child Per Family program they should follow that example and name their country Horny. Chile should give that name up to Canada and spell it Chilly. North Korea should hencforth be known as Korazy.
I'd like to think that before I die the idea of shooting one's self in the ass and/or groin with plasma after using the restroom is not only common but encouraged in the interest of cleanliness and good manners.
There are aspects of beauty that tend to be nearly universal and have a strong genetic link. Clear skin and symmetric facial features are good examples of that. The subtle effect of hormones on a woman's appearance has a measurable impact on their perceived beauty and men have likely evolved to find those effects appealing. The prominence in proportion of specific secondary sexual characteristics may vary by culture but people also tend to pair off with people from their own cultures so while there is no one definition of what is beautiful it stands to reason that there is evolutionary pressure to conform to that of one's culture.
It's also important to consider that men often have different standards of feminine beauty than women and the fashion elite do. Porn is more consistent than fashion with regard to the primary elements of their respective aesthetics.
If the purpose of copyright is to give exclusive rights to a work of intellectual property for a given period to promote the creation of those works before they are added to the wealth of the public domain then what does that mean for copyrighted closed-source software? It seems like the public would be entitled to the source of any software when the copyright for that software expires because people don't tend to just copyright binaries.
This leads to some awkward problems with closed source projects that we don't tend to find with other copyrighted works because it raises the risks that a copyright owner would be protected without any guarantee that they'd be able to supply the public with their copyrighted work when their protection elapsed. But there is also the issue that they never really released the source either. It could be argued that they released a derivative work of their own source when they sold copies of the binaries so compelling them to release the source might not be wrong as well as impractical.
Given the long copyright terms we have now and the pace of technology I don't expect this to be that serious of an issue but we really don't seem prepared to handle this.
Communication - Ill defined or changing specifications and poor documentation make development and testing very difficult. Technical - Large systems tend to be very complicated and it's difficult and expensive to make them fault tolerant and build in the sort of redundancy, validation, and security that make critical systems reliable. Leadership - Decision makers on the client and supplier side often don't know enough details about various parts of the project to really know what they want much less what they need. Organizational - Setting deadlines before defining the scope of the project, belligerent coworkers and other HR issues, uncooperative clients, cutting testing time to meet deadlines, and other general issues within the organizations can lead to death march development and other undesirable situations.
From the article: The Bush Administration resisted calls for an identity card in the US after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
I guess it would be more accurate to say, "The Bush Administration resisted calls for an identity card in the US after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 until he signed the Real ID Act into law in 2005."
If he'd gotten a loan and the loan payments were near $3,000/yr (which is pretty unlikely) or his average electricity savings increased over the life of the loan (more likely) he could offset his loan with his electricity savings and have a cost of little to nothing. I don't think solar is the best energy saving home improvement most people could make for their dollar but it's starting to get competitive.
The city is charging a fee for access to the network so the bonds could be paid back in part or in whole with revenue from the project and that same network adds value to the real estate. In practice TDS will probably undercut the city on cost at a loss or something close to it to punish them and dissuade others from trying to build their own municipal network as thuggish telecoms tend to do. It would be nice if the city could sue them for noncopetitive practices and use the money to pay off their bonds but that won't happen.
If you don't like municipal projects you should consider protesting them by staying off the streets, sidewalks, stay out of parks and libraries, hauling off your own garbage, digging your own well, making sure your body's waste is processed in septic tanks, etc.
The argument that millions of people believe it isn't very compelling. Millions of ignorant adults in the US are convinced that vaccinations cause autism.
The audience for their claims are the majority of Iranians who mistrust and hate the west and get virtually all of their news from state-run or state-controlled news agencies. If the Iranian government was more unified in what appears to be a blatant election fraud conspiracy then I doubt the public would do more than a day or two of fairly small, half-hearted protests.
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Schools don't generally punish students for breaking laws, they punish students for breaking rules so if they were thinking detention, suspension, or expulsion then they can generally expect to get away with violating the rights of a student as long as they don't push it too far or descriminate too blatently. If they try to hand iffy evidence over to the police for use in a criminal complaint against a kid then the prosecutor might have some issues with being able to use it but there is very little chance of a school getting in trouble for that kind of thing.
As for the other point this seems to be final act in a string of monumentally stupid decisions on the part of everyone involved at the school.
- In theory giving them laptops might save money by requiring fewer expensive text books and it could help out with a couple of classes but in practice it's probably a pretty bad idea because of porn, warez, vandalism, and apparently the terrible judgment of the administrators etc.
- Getting them laptops with webcams is a terrible idea because kids are dumb enough to take pictures of themselves nude on a school computer without help of the administrators. It's a damn good idea to keep yourself out of the equasion when it comes to pictures and videos of nude children.
- Setting those laptops up with spying software is beyond stupid unless it was intended to help track down stolen laptops and even then they should have exceptionally tight controls on the use of something like that. I'd say that the bare minimum for using this kind of thing would be a police report filed by the student stating the laptop was stolen and having a police officer present when the software is used.
- Using the software to track down students skipping school, drinking, looking at porn, doing drugs, having sex, etc. is a horrible idea that is almost certainly criminal.
In much the same way the aliens in War of the Worlds were destroyed by simple micro-organisms they were ill equipt to deal with, the Superbowl has a simple yet fatal weakness when it comes to the common human nipple. If the NFL gives you any guff about your party just lift your shirt and flash your nipples in a manner similar to the Care Bear Stare until they flee in terror.
I think we're moving away from high cost fighters and into fleets of low cost drones. The google tells me that an F22 runs about $150+ million each and a predator drone runs about $4.5 million. The training/maintenance/and other support costs are much lower for drones and the costs should go down since you'll make many, many more drones than larger aircraft.
I know our drones now aren't air to air fighters yet but a squadron of drone fighters would probably run a lot cheaper and be nearly as effective as a couple of big expensive planes. I'd also expect that it might be a little easier to stealth up a drone than something that has to carry a person and a drone could perform manuvers that a plane couldn't do safely with a human pilot inside. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, and PC game makers have also been training a generation of drone pilots for free.
Sick people don't have money because they spend it all on hospitals and medicine but horny old fat people have tons of money. If Dr. Jack wants some serious grant money he'd better try to turn fat cells in boner cells. He can use some of that cash to help him make Michael J. Fox less shaky and hell, why not give him a giant wang while he's at it.
He'd be great in a commercial, "Hi, I'm Michael J. Fox. You may have noticed that I'm a lot less shaky these days and I also have a giant wang now. I owe it all to Dr. Jack." Boom! Instant Nobel Prize.
If the little iPod is the nano (1 billionth) then this new big one should be: iPod Giga.
I say they use the Indian rope trick to setup a space elevator. Between the weaving needed for the cable and the hundreds of millions of people with those flute things to lift it, I think they have the technology to make this happen.
The next space race should be about who can take the largest, most unweildly animal to the moon, let it run around, and bring it back safely. I say we try to a gorilla or a buffalo or a bear in a space suit that fits them and let them run around the moon a little bit and then the animal returns a hero. If that works we start with marine life. Let's put an enclosed dolphin tank on the moon and do a little show and then bring it all back home.
If we're doing this for science we can send probes cheaper and safer. If we're doing this for glory then send a giraffe or hippo.
No-hire and non-compete agreements are pretty common in contracts especially when the development work is specialized. This sidelines a lot of talent and helps exacerbate the software developer labor shortage employers are always complaining about. It also lowers wages for developers since they'd have more trouble finding work if they left their job. I think we need to severly limit what kind of restrictions companies can place on their employees' future job prospects.
Finally, there's a reason to play Super Mario Sunshine.
Right now farm runoff containing nutrients is creating vast dead zones in places like the gulf of Mexico. If we could channel farm runoff through algae growing operations we might be able to help with the dead zone thing which would help the fishing industry.
Reducing corn subsidies for biofuel, which we should do anyway, could drop the value of feed algae because we wouldn't be be turning so much corn into ethanol (assuming you could replace algae-based feed with corn).
The cost of petroleum is not just the wholesale price + taxes + mark ups. The cost also comes in the form of dependence on foreign oil and the security problems that causes, maintaining a military that can help ensure our access that oil, and the environmental impact of burning fossil fuels.
If ultimately they can't make the economics of algae growing work then clearly they shouldn't do it but there are other factors than the wholesale price of these commodities.
While the direct campaign contributions seem more slimy and I'm not comfortable with the $$$ = speech theory with the cash-and-carry government it implies, I think the very bothersome grey area comes in form of message ads like the 527 organizations ran.
It allows big money donors to hide behind a front group and throw support behind their candidate while saying pretty outrageous things which are far enough away from their candidate to give them deniability (i.e. swift boating). In my opinion this falls more clearly under speech than campaign contributions so I'm inclined to say it should be better protected but the way it's done is pretty disgusting.
I guess that's how some people view porno but that doesn't seem to have as detrimental effect on our government.
In this scenario I'd say we're giving away liberties for an increased risk of harm over the long term. I believe that an authoritarian government or one that is constantly grabbing more power for itself is more dangerous to its people than an external threat from terrorists. Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Idi Amin's Ugandan, the Banana Republics of Central and South America, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Hilter, etc. were all far more dangerous than terrorist groups unless they have the power to overthrow the government.
I think it's safer to live with more of a risk from terrorism, which is very low when compared with other less dramatic but more easily preventable causes of death, than to further empower a much more potentially dangerous body.
How about a better lie? I say that the technical crowd starts telling people that towers that give off electromagnetic signals cause increased libido in laboratory mice. Then your biggest problem is people tresspassing to screw under the towers but you can also sell wireless routers in sexed-up packaging in adult novelty stores for a tidy profit.
Wow, that place was aptly named.
Now that China has over 24 million more men than women because of the One Child Per Family program they should follow that example and name their country Horny. Chile should give that name up to Canada and spell it Chilly. North Korea should hencforth be known as Korazy.
I'd like to think that before I die the idea of shooting one's self in the ass and/or groin with plasma after using the restroom is not only common but encouraged in the interest of cleanliness and good manners.
a little periodical called High Times.
There are aspects of beauty that tend to be nearly universal and have a strong genetic link. Clear skin and symmetric facial features are good examples of that. The subtle effect of hormones on a woman's appearance has a measurable impact on their perceived beauty and men have likely evolved to find those effects appealing. The prominence in proportion of specific secondary sexual characteristics may vary by culture but people also tend to pair off with people from their own cultures so while there is no one definition of what is beautiful it stands to reason that there is evolutionary pressure to conform to that of one's culture.
It's also important to consider that men often have different standards of feminine beauty than women and the fashion elite do. Porn is more consistent than fashion with regard to the primary elements of their respective aesthetics.
If the purpose of copyright is to give exclusive rights to a work of intellectual property for a given period to promote the creation of those works before they are added to the wealth of the public domain then what does that mean for copyrighted closed-source software? It seems like the public would be entitled to the source of any software when the copyright for that software expires because people don't tend to just copyright binaries.
This leads to some awkward problems with closed source projects that we don't tend to find with other copyrighted works because it raises the risks that a copyright owner would be protected without any guarantee that they'd be able to supply the public with their copyrighted work when their protection elapsed. But there is also the issue that they never really released the source either. It could be argued that they released a derivative work of their own source when they sold copies of the binaries so compelling them to release the source might not be wrong as well as impractical.
Given the long copyright terms we have now and the pace of technology I don't expect this to be that serious of an issue but we really don't seem prepared to handle this.
Communication - Ill defined or changing specifications and poor documentation make development and testing very difficult.
Technical - Large systems tend to be very complicated and it's difficult and expensive to make them fault tolerant and build in the sort of redundancy, validation, and security that make critical systems reliable.
Leadership - Decision makers on the client and supplier side often don't know enough details about various parts of the project to really know what they want much less what they need.
Organizational - Setting deadlines before defining the scope of the project, belligerent coworkers and other HR issues, uncooperative clients, cutting testing time to meet deadlines, and other general issues within the organizations can lead to death march development and other undesirable situations.
From the article: The Bush Administration resisted calls for an identity card in the US after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
I guess it would be more accurate to say, "The Bush Administration resisted calls for an identity card in the US after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 until he signed the Real ID Act into law in 2005."
The message was: "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."
If he'd gotten a loan and the loan payments were near $3,000/yr (which is pretty unlikely) or his average electricity savings increased over the life of the loan (more likely) he could offset his loan with his electricity savings and have a cost of little to nothing. I don't think solar is the best energy saving home improvement most people could make for their dollar but it's starting to get competitive.
The city is charging a fee for access to the network so the bonds could be paid back in part or in whole with revenue from the project and that same network adds value to the real estate. In practice TDS will probably undercut the city on cost at a loss or something close to it to punish them and dissuade others from trying to build their own municipal network as thuggish telecoms tend to do. It would be nice if the city could sue them for noncopetitive practices and use the money to pay off their bonds but that won't happen.
If you don't like municipal projects you should consider protesting them by staying off the streets, sidewalks, stay out of parks and libraries, hauling off your own garbage, digging your own well, making sure your body's waste is processed in septic tanks, etc.
If we can get it down to the size of a hamster we'll be rid of drug mules too (along with the vast majority of the traveling public).
The argument that millions of people believe it isn't very compelling. Millions of ignorant adults in the US are convinced that vaccinations cause autism.
The audience for their claims are the majority of Iranians who mistrust and hate the west and get virtually all of their news from state-run or state-controlled news agencies. If the Iranian government was more unified in what appears to be a blatant election fraud conspiracy then I doubt the public would do more than a day or two of fairly small, half-hearted protests.