[video] games 'function as crucial gatekeepers for interest in science, technology, engineering and math,' and that without these groups represented properly, 'it may place underrepresented groups behind the curve.'"
Bullshit on that one. I know a lot of boys think they are "good with computers" because they spend a lot of time gaming, but reality rarely lives up to their self perception. The more the white male middle class and upper class potential professionals and potential elites spend their childhoods addicted to games the better. They'll give up their places in the socioeconomic order and unconsciously undermine their own privilege. Let the spoiled pale brat boys squander their minds. Let the female, transgender, people of color, etc feel alienated by corporate developed video games. Maybe they'll pick up a book, join a discussion group, or code their own self-empowering games.
Zuckerberg may be the cute face to front Facebook, but we all know that the (only) two other board member's Peter Theil and Jim Breyer are humanists of the highest degree.
Yes! because Thiel's extreme vision of capitalism where corporations control the whole world is 'humanizing'. TheVanguard.Org and 'The Diversity Myth' are humanist projects, not neoconservative? Support for the rich using offshore tax havens...that's the ethical human thing to do!
Jim Breyer's time on the board of Walmart, why, I'm sure he's helping Walmart become more caring, personal, and humane.
Greylock Venture Capital's ties to the CIA are also of no concern, I'm sure.
Can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.
I think It's pretty insane that people present their personal details in public via social networking. This same type of connectivity could be implemented with end to end encryption, signatures to verify everyone, and secure deletion. Social networks could be a p2p, open source, empowering service. Instead, people just upload their entire lives to the web, and use services run by some of the most extreme right wing members of the ruling class. WAKE THE FUCK UP!
Court also ruled that the individual school officials could not be held personally liable
If the courts won't hold them liable, than the people must! If the administrators responsible don't quit, than the students need to go on strike. How can anyone consent to their peers being abused in this manner?!?!? It's time parents, teachers, and students stand up for each other and demand that the administration step down. These pigs are either power hungry megalomaniacs or contributor to sexual assault (or both).
OK, lets say you are out in public. You can't bring your desktop out in public, and you can't trust any public dekstop to be secure. So therefore if you care about security, you are using your laptop.
Unless you are some expert in optics, you probably aren't going to calculate what angle people (and any CCTV cameras) can see your screen but not your keyboard. I guess you could put a piece of cloth over your hands as you type, but that would be weird and cumbersome. The smart thing to do is to completely hide your laptop from view.
Again...it's hard to imagine a situation where your screen is visible but not your keyboard. Remote displays are the only situation that comes to mind.
If someone can shouldersurf, 99% of the time they have physical access and all security is null. If they can see your ***ed password on the screen, than they can see your fingers type they characters of your password on the keyboard (again with 1% exceptions like keyboard covers and remote displays). If a malicious person can see your screen, than they are probably close enough that that can tap your cables, install hardware keyloggers, sniff your EMF, cold boot your RAM and grep it, do audio analysis of your typing and decipher your keystrokes, and etc.
***ing your passwords protects against a very small hole....the situation where someone is allowed to see your screen but is searched to make sure they have no monitoring equipment, has the keyboard kept out of site, and isn't allowed to touch anything.
I've never heard Chomsky or Mother Jones on the AM radio. I also wouldn't consider your examples "fringe".
Moveon is solidly pro-Democratic party, that's probably to the right of the American people. Democrats support corporate bailouts, drug wars, terror wars, etc. The American people do not.
Chomsky and Mother Jones might be a little to the left of the American mainstream, but would fit right with moderate European social democrats. I'd hardly call that fringe.
Thank flying spaghetti monster. Flash is the only proprietary software I use. I can't wait for in browser ogg theora support to take off, and the online video market to embrace it. As soon as I see it working, I'll delete my google video account and self-host all my videos.
Taking the train instead of driving would allow me to save thousands of dollars in gas, car payments, tolls, parking frees, tickets, maintenance, and etc. Maybe not five figures, but still a lot of money. There are non-financial indirect benifits to taking the train too.
On the train, I feel safer knowing an accident probably won't happen and that if it does, it probably won't kill me. I also don't have the headache of police stops and tickets. Additionally, I get to spend the commuting time reading, coding, sleeping, etc. It's much less stressful and allows me to be more productive. I know that my carbon footprint is lower and I'm doing less to support despotic oil regimes. I get exercise walking between public transport stops. Unfortunately, I live too far out in the suburbs to make commuting by train to work in the city practical. It just takes too long (frankly driving takes too long as well). I can only take public transport on the weekends and for personal travel. I'm currently looking for work in the Chicago area, and will strongly considering moving to take advantage of the city's train system.
Why should young people be the property of their parents until they turn 18?
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. "
I see many posts basically saying that censorship is OK because schools are for learning, not about entertainment. What kind of learning do you want these kids to experience? Do you want high schoolers to have some Sesame Street notion of reality? Understanding sex and sexuality is essential for understanding what it means to be human. You can probably learn math or physics in a censored environment, but what about any subject that actually looks at human beings? Biology? Anthropology? Sociology? History? Humans have gender. Humans have sex. Ignoring this means ignoring reality. Understanding art, music, and drama beyond the technical aspects of paint, notes, and movement means learning about the often sexual passions that drove the greatest creators. Real learning means unrestricted access to knowledge. Research is meaningless if it's just assigning one book for the student to read and regurgitate.
The Internet is the greatest tool for free speech and learning in all of human history. It has the power to put everyone on equal footing in terms of knowledge-power. Some of us see the this extremely powerful technology for what it is, a liberator with the ability to challenge existing hierarchical structures. Organized religion, corporate advertising, government deception, and restrictive social norms all crumble when the people can learn the truth.
The established leaders and their conservative allies fear us. If we want to see the Internet revolution, we can't just let it become a tool for corporate advertising, state approved and restricted learning, and social networking within closed cliques. We must have unrestricted access for everyone, starting at a young age. This necessitates a battle for civil rights on par with the struggles of workers, women, racial minorities, etc. It can't be won by court cases alone. We need to create a new culture of info-freedom, new forms of subverting attempts to control, throttle, and censor us. We need to fight in the streets, on-line, and in our hearts.
I remember that the support groups for the Republic Windows sit down strike used a twitter feed to organize. I also remember that face to face meetings were more important. Tweets are good for flash mobs because they can notify many people very quickly. However, for any mass action to be sustained, you need serious planning and logistical support. Activism can never be coordinated solely over minuscule text messages.
Some forms of female genital mutilation, such as removal of the clitoral hood, are roughly equivalent to male circumcision, others such as full infibulation, are much more severe. I personally oppose parents/doctors doing any medically unnecessary modification to children before the young person is old enough to have a say in the decision. I used the FGM example to contrast the Wests condemnation of it with the West's support for other means of denying young people's sexuality.
At least half of all high schoolers are sexually active (along with a larger proportion of college students, some also teenagers). When I was in high school, I remember most of my sexually active peers had digital pictures of themselves or their partners. This was true of males and females, gay, hetero, and bisexual. The number has probably increased recently now that everyone (middle class and above) has a camera phone.
I think young people need to fight back for their right to love each other and express themselves. These should be basic human rights. In the west we decry female genital mutilation because we believe that it is a basic human right to experience pleasure and to have full control of our own bodies. We need to apply the same standard to all of our post-pubescent population. As someone in their mid twenties, I can tell you that plenty of my peers in high school were more responsible in their sexual activity than my peers now. Maturity has more to do with individual personality than age.
Sexual images are a form of expression like any other. There is no reason that free speech should not apply to it as much as anything else.
Even if the Supreme Court rules that the search was illegal, school districts will continue to abuse children. First of all, any court ruling will only apply to public schools, not private preparatory nor parochial schools. Secondly, even in public schools, the local district really isn't accountable to federal law. They can get away with whatever they want. Few students and parents have the time and money necessary to sue the district and bring the case though the court system. Discipline in the school system, be it searches or expulsions, assume guilt until innocence is proven. You need to take the expensive proactive step of suing the government to get your rights back. For students to overcome the common physical, intellectual, and sexual abuse in the school system, we need to have a serious youth movement. In Greece, teenagers aren't afraid to take over schools, battle with cops, and burn whatever gets in their way. Americans are too timid to achieve the rights that we deserve.
The media has always blindly repeated false information on a massive scale. The blunder referenced in the article actually shows us that Wikipedia helps the situation. We can see who makes edits and when they are made, so we can trace down these kinds of problems. The same media mistakes that have always happened continue to happen, but at least now we can know about them.
The ability to run servers from our homes is an important one, and not just for people like those who read Slashdot who are capable of setting one up.
Home servers are probably the only way to maintain a free and democratic society in a high tech economy. If we let the Internet become oligopalized and censored the way that TV and radio are, we will face a new era of corporate domination. When everyday citizens have control of the hardware that makes the Internet work, we will finally see the true realization of free speech. Concentrating our information and technology into a few massive datacenters makes censorship and control trivial. Only a decentralized, open network can empower the users, writers, reporters, developers, and other workers of tomorrow.
Who in their right mind would run a mission critical server on the power supply one has at home?
I run my home network off of batteries charged with solar panels. A simple (large) UPS would probably give me 99.9% uptime. It's not hard to provide stable power in most of the USA. The hard part about home hosting is getting a stable connection. Most cable/DSL/Wireless ISPs might have only a few hours of downtime a year, but this can still be unacceptable for some hosting situations. It would be nice if there was a cheap, easy way to get lines from a couple of ISPS and run an autonomous system from home. Only when every Internet user has an ASN (or equivalent) and redundant connections, will the net really be democratic and uncensorable.
a guy intentionally making homemade explosives that killed people
The explosives set by the Weather Underground did not murder anyone. A single bomb went off accidentally and killed several Weather Underground members who were working on it. Ayers was (obviously) not among the victims. Ayers choice to blow up government property was probably not the most effective tactic to end the Viet Nam war, police brutality, and US sponsorship for terror and dictatorship. I appreciate the idea that revolutionary action could help end these despicable injustices, but Ayers vision of a destructive vanguard organization probably just alienated the left and hurt our cause in the long run. Ayers and other Marxist-Leninists make insightful criticisms of our system, but their vision of how to bring about a better world often ends up reproducing the same hierarchies and destructive tendencies of state-capitalism.
I've worked in the electronics industry too. You might get tin whiskers if you use an immersion tin finish on the board and a tin solder for the assembly, but you don't need to do that to get a RoHS compliant product. There are immersion gold, immersion silver, and other leadfree solder finishes available. Modern leadfree solder alloys don't have the same kind of problems with tin whiskers as earlier ones. Reflow heating should be preformed as well. Effective conformal coating can also reduce the risk of whisker growth. Another issue is that many vendors lie or don't properly track how their components are made. Don't trust the sales people! Test your parts yourself to make sure that they comply with the specs that you ordered.
I support the adoption of RoHS in the USA because I've seen how corporations ignore the safety of their employees and customers with regard to hazardous materials such as lead. Strong democratic unions could be used to keep companies honest, but currently American unions tend to be too corrupt and weak to be able to change the industry.
I'm disappointed that so many Slashdot readers are surprised by the actions of this teacher. Children are naturally curious and love to learn. If we allowed them to use libraries, Internet connections, and democratic structures, than the majority could achieve prodigy-like abilities; instead compulsory schools teach them censorship, arbitrary authority, and outright lies. The corporations need some way to forge an obedient workforce.
Slashdot Mirror
[video] games 'function as crucial gatekeepers for interest in science, technology, engineering and math,' and that without these groups represented properly, 'it may place underrepresented groups behind the curve.'"
Bullshit on that one. I know a lot of boys think they are "good with computers" because they spend a lot of time gaming, but reality rarely lives up to their self perception. The more the white male middle class and upper class potential professionals and potential elites spend their childhoods addicted to games the better. They'll give up their places in the socioeconomic order and unconsciously undermine their own privilege. Let the spoiled pale brat boys squander their minds. Let the female, transgender, people of color, etc feel alienated by corporate developed video games. Maybe they'll pick up a book, join a discussion group, or code their own self-empowering games.
Zuckerberg may be the cute face to front Facebook, but we all know that the (only) two other board member's Peter Theil and Jim Breyer are humanists of the highest degree.
Yes! because Thiel's extreme vision of capitalism where corporations control the whole world is 'humanizing'. TheVanguard.Org and 'The Diversity Myth' are humanist projects, not neoconservative? Support for the rich using offshore tax havens...that's the ethical human thing to do!
Jim Breyer's time on the board of Walmart, why, I'm sure he's helping Walmart become more caring, personal, and humane.
Greylock Venture Capital's ties to the CIA are also of no concern, I'm sure.
Can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.
I think It's pretty insane that people present their personal details in public via social networking. This same type of connectivity could be implemented with end to end encryption, signatures to verify everyone, and secure deletion. Social networks could be a p2p, open source, empowering service. Instead, people just upload their entire lives to the web, and use services run by some of the most extreme right wing members of the ruling class. WAKE THE FUCK UP!
Court also ruled that the individual school officials could not be held personally liable
If the courts won't hold them liable, than the people must! If the administrators responsible don't quit, than the students need to go on strike. How can anyone consent to their peers being abused in this manner?!?!? It's time parents, teachers, and students stand up for each other and demand that the administration step down. These pigs are either power hungry megalomaniacs or contributor to sexual assault (or both).
OK, lets say you are out in public. You can't bring your desktop out in public, and you can't trust any public dekstop to be secure. So therefore if you care about security, you are using your laptop.
Unless you are some expert in optics, you probably aren't going to calculate what angle people (and any CCTV cameras) can see your screen but not your keyboard. I guess you could put a piece of cloth over your hands as you type, but that would be weird and cumbersome. The smart thing to do is to completely hide your laptop from view.
Again...it's hard to imagine a situation where your screen is visible but not your keyboard. Remote displays are the only situation that comes to mind.
If someone can shouldersurf, 99% of the time they have physical access and all security is null. If they can see your ***ed password on the screen, than they can see your fingers type they characters of your password on the keyboard (again with 1% exceptions like keyboard covers and remote displays). If a malicious person can see your screen, than they are probably close enough that that can tap your cables, install hardware keyloggers, sniff your EMF, cold boot your RAM and grep it, do audio analysis of your typing and decipher your keystrokes, and etc.
***ing your passwords protects against a very small hole....the situation where someone is allowed to see your screen but is searched to make sure they have no monitoring equipment, has the keyboard kept out of site, and isn't allowed to touch anything.
I've never heard Chomsky or Mother Jones on the AM radio. I also wouldn't consider your examples "fringe".
Moveon is solidly pro-Democratic party, that's probably to the right of the American people. Democrats support corporate bailouts, drug wars, terror wars, etc. The American people do not.
Chomsky and Mother Jones might be a little to the left of the American mainstream, but would fit right with moderate European social democrats. I'd hardly call that fringe.
If you want to give examples of the radical left, check out crimethinc, bash back, or infoshop.org.
Fuck apple!
Thank flying spaghetti monster. Flash is the only proprietary software I use. I can't wait for in browser ogg theora support to take off, and the online video market to embrace it. As soon as I see it working, I'll delete my google video account and self-host all my videos.
Taking the train instead of driving would allow me to save thousands of dollars in gas, car payments, tolls, parking frees, tickets, maintenance, and etc. Maybe not five figures, but still a lot of money. There are non-financial indirect benifits to taking the train too.
On the train, I feel safer knowing an accident probably won't happen and that if it does, it probably won't kill me. I also don't have the headache of police stops and tickets. Additionally, I get to spend the commuting time reading, coding, sleeping, etc. It's much less stressful and allows me to be more productive. I know that my carbon footprint is lower and I'm doing less to support despotic oil regimes. I get exercise walking between public transport stops. Unfortunately, I live too far out in the suburbs to make commuting by train to work in the city practical. It just takes too long (frankly driving takes too long as well). I can only take public transport on the weekends and for personal travel. I'm currently looking for work in the Chicago area, and will strongly considering moving to take advantage of the city's train system.
Why should young people be the property of their parents until they turn 18?
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. "
I see many posts basically saying that censorship is OK because schools are for learning, not about entertainment. What kind of learning do you want these kids to experience? Do you want high schoolers to have some Sesame Street notion of reality? Understanding sex and sexuality is essential for understanding what it means to be human. You can probably learn math or physics in a censored environment, but what about any subject that actually looks at human beings? Biology? Anthropology? Sociology? History? Humans have gender. Humans have sex. Ignoring this means ignoring reality. Understanding art, music, and drama beyond the technical aspects of paint, notes, and movement means learning about the often sexual passions that drove the greatest creators. Real learning means unrestricted access to knowledge. Research is meaningless if it's just assigning one book for the student to read and regurgitate.
The Internet is the greatest tool for free speech and learning in all of human history. It has the power to put everyone on equal footing in terms of knowledge-power. Some of us see the this extremely powerful technology for what it is, a liberator with the ability to challenge existing hierarchical structures. Organized religion, corporate advertising, government deception, and restrictive social norms all crumble when the people can learn the truth.
The established leaders and their conservative allies fear us. If we want to see the Internet revolution, we can't just let it become a tool for corporate advertising, state approved and restricted learning, and social networking within closed cliques. We must have unrestricted access for everyone, starting at a young age. This necessitates a battle for civil rights on par with the struggles of workers, women, racial minorities, etc. It can't be won by court cases alone. We need to create a new culture of info-freedom, new forms of subverting attempts to control, throttle, and censor us. We need to fight in the streets, on-line, and in our hearts.
I remember that the support groups for the Republic Windows sit down strike used a twitter feed to organize. I also remember that face to face meetings were more important. Tweets are good for flash mobs because they can notify many people very quickly. However, for any mass action to be sustained, you need serious planning and logistical support. Activism can never be coordinated solely over minuscule text messages.
Some forms of female genital mutilation, such as removal of the clitoral hood, are roughly equivalent to male circumcision, others such as full infibulation, are much more severe. I personally oppose parents/doctors doing any medically unnecessary modification to children before the young person is old enough to have a say in the decision. I used the FGM example to contrast the Wests condemnation of it with the West's support for other means of denying young people's sexuality.
At least half of all high schoolers are sexually active (along with a larger proportion of college students, some also teenagers). When I was in high school, I remember most of my sexually active peers had digital pictures of themselves or their partners. This was true of males and females, gay, hetero, and bisexual. The number has probably increased recently now that everyone (middle class and above) has a camera phone.
I think young people need to fight back for their right to love each other and express themselves. These should be basic human rights. In the west we decry female genital mutilation because we believe that it is a basic human right to experience pleasure and to have full control of our own bodies. We need to apply the same standard to all of our post-pubescent population. As someone in their mid twenties, I can tell you that plenty of my peers in high school were more responsible in their sexual activity than my peers now. Maturity has more to do with individual personality than age.
Sexual images are a form of expression like any other. There is no reason that free speech should not apply to it as much as anything else.
Even if the Supreme Court rules that the search was illegal, school districts will continue to abuse children. First of all, any court ruling will only apply to public schools, not private preparatory nor parochial schools. Secondly, even in public schools, the local district really isn't accountable to federal law. They can get away with whatever they want. Few students and parents have the time and money necessary to sue the district and bring the case though the court system. Discipline in the school system, be it searches or expulsions, assume guilt until innocence is proven. You need to take the expensive proactive step of suing the government to get your rights back. For students to overcome the common physical, intellectual, and sexual abuse in the school system, we need to have a serious youth movement. In Greece, teenagers aren't afraid to take over schools, battle with cops, and burn whatever gets in their way. Americans are too timid to achieve the rights that we deserve.
The answer to our traffic woes is probably not flying cars, but rather something like self-driving cars on defined tracks.
This has been deployed all over the world, for over 50 years.
Cars are obsolete.
The media has always blindly repeated false information on a massive scale. The blunder referenced in the article actually shows us that Wikipedia helps the situation. We can see who makes edits and when they are made, so we can trace down these kinds of problems. The same media mistakes that have always happened continue to happen, but at least now we can know about them.
Business unions are sellouts. We need democratic industrial unions.
The ability to run servers from our homes is an important one, and not just for people like those who read Slashdot who are capable of setting one up.
Home servers are probably the only way to maintain a free and democratic society in a high tech economy. If we let the Internet become oligopalized and censored the way that TV and radio are, we will face a new era of corporate domination. When everyday citizens have control of the hardware that makes the Internet work, we will finally see the true realization of free speech. Concentrating our information and technology into a few massive datacenters makes censorship and control trivial. Only a decentralized, open network can empower the users, writers, reporters, developers, and other workers of tomorrow.
Who in their right mind would run a mission critical server on the power supply one has at home?
I run my home network off of batteries charged with solar panels. A simple (large) UPS would probably give me 99.9% uptime. It's not hard to provide stable power in most of the USA. The hard part about home hosting is getting a stable connection. Most cable/DSL/Wireless ISPs might have only a few hours of downtime a year, but this can still be unacceptable for some hosting situations. It would be nice if there was a cheap, easy way to get lines from a couple of ISPS and run an autonomous system from home. Only when every Internet user has an ASN (or equivalent) and redundant connections, will the net really be democratic and uncensorable.
a guy intentionally making homemade explosives that killed people
The explosives set by the Weather Underground did not murder anyone. A single bomb went off accidentally and killed several Weather Underground members who were working on it. Ayers was (obviously) not among the victims. Ayers choice to blow up government property was probably not the most effective tactic to end the Viet Nam war, police brutality, and US sponsorship for terror and dictatorship. I appreciate the idea that revolutionary action could help end these despicable injustices, but Ayers vision of a destructive vanguard organization probably just alienated the left and hurt our cause in the long run. Ayers and other Marxist-Leninists make insightful criticisms of our system, but their vision of how to bring about a better world often ends up reproducing the same hierarchies and destructive tendencies of state-capitalism.
I've worked in the electronics industry too. You might get tin whiskers if you use an immersion tin finish on the board and a tin solder for the assembly, but you don't need to do that to get a RoHS compliant product. There are immersion gold, immersion silver, and other leadfree solder finishes available. Modern leadfree solder alloys don't have the same kind of problems with tin whiskers as earlier ones. Reflow heating should be preformed as well. Effective conformal coating can also reduce the risk of whisker growth. Another issue is that many vendors lie or don't properly track how their components are made. Don't trust the sales people! Test your parts yourself to make sure that they comply with the specs that you ordered.
I support the adoption of RoHS in the USA because I've seen how corporations ignore the safety of their employees and customers with regard to hazardous materials such as lead. Strong democratic unions could be used to keep companies honest, but currently American unions tend to be too corrupt and weak to be able to change the industry.
http://www.rageagainsttheright.com/supreme-court.jpg
I'm disappointed that so many Slashdot readers are surprised by the actions of this teacher. Children are naturally curious and love to learn. If we allowed them to use libraries, Internet connections, and democratic structures, than the majority could achieve prodigy-like abilities; instead compulsory schools teach them censorship, arbitrary authority, and outright lies. The corporations need some way to forge an obedient workforce.