Seeing as they've sued at least one person who didn't even own a computer that's not necessarily going to help. In the long run it might (put them out of business), but short term no one is safe from their litigation campaign.
every one I've seen specifies in the event of an error in your favor, you have pre-approved them to just direct debit your account.. no notice required...
This varies from place to play, up until my last job every direct deposit form I'd seen didn't have this option in it. Then at the last job, once they decided to make direct deposit available, it had a particularly odious version basically giving them the right to withdraw money based on... well anything. Needless to say I refused to participate and continued to get paper checks. Most of my coworkers couldn't understand why I refused. I thought it was interesting that my boss also refused to sign it. I think he and I were the only two who actually read the terms.
Sorry, not biting. Given the number of bills and amendments that do not pass, I think this narrowly escapes being described as FUD.
Quite a number of bills and amendments end up not being introduced because of preemptive reporting and outrage. Universities are in a bit of a pickle here because they don't want to offend the senate majority leader (this could impact their funding negatively in the future), but they need to protest and fight these proposed changes. Pointing them out ahead of time and getting the public riled up and complaining is a very effective way to prevent the proposed amendment from being tried and avoids a direct confrontation between the universities and the senate. So no, it's not FUD, it's part of the normal process.
It's not like this should be surprising to anyone on/., we've seen reports on various nasty bills/amendments that were going to be introduced (several that were going to be snuck on as last-minute riders to something really important, like funding bills) and then seen reports a few days to weeks later that the congresscritters backed down after the public outrage. Hopefully that's what will happen here.
Oh but the artist should perform at concerts to make his money! Well that was simplistic and quite frankly unfair. Why should a musical artist be forced to make money by touring? Why can't his song be a commodity like any other work of fiction? When E-books are shared, do you expect the book author's main source of income being from performing public readings?
You seem to have forgotten that the author's books are available in the library to be checked out and read for free. This has been the case for a long time, and somehow authors still manage to make money. It should be noted that only the really popular authors can generally earn enough from writing to not have any other kind of job, but even those generally must keep writing to continue to earn enough to support themselves/their family/etc. There are exceptions, I doubt J. K. Rowlings will need to write another book for the rest of her life for example, but most authors have to continue to write to earn money. By your logic those authors shouldn't have to keep writing to earn a living, they wrote the book once they should be paid for it forever right? Musicians have to tour and continue writing more music for the same reasons that authors continue to write -- so they can continue to earn money. I don't think that's unfair at all, they get paid for what they do, but to make a living from it they have to work at it. You know, just like the rest of the world.
The problem being that your assumptions are based on the knock off being of inferior quality and not an exact digital reproduction. When talking about songs, each digital copy of a song in the wild lowers the value of the authentic song file. Why pay for something you can get for free?
And now I can answer this question better. I buy books, even though I can get those books at my public library for free. Some books I buy new, some I get used. So why would I buy a book when I can get it free? Because I want to own my own copy, I want to support the author, etc. The same applies to music, and the success of the iTunes store proves that people will pay for music even when it's available for free. Those who are downloading and not buying anything will likely never buy anything, they just don't think it's worth money. Some will buy music in the future, they can't afford it now (teens and college students fit into this category pretty well). Some people will also buy more music because they were able to test-listen to it for free first.
To be fair, I am mostly irritated by the idea of giving an artist (or ticketmaster) a valid reason for charging even more money for a concert. It would be nice if a concert ticket remained within the economic means of an average teenager/young adult.
I don't see why this would raise the price of tickets, most artists/bands already have to make all their money from concerts because of the horribly unfair contracts the record labels force them into. If they're managing to make money from current ticket prices there's no reason (beyond inflation) that prices should go up.
I was led to believe that an artist tours to promote their album...
You were lead wrong then, sorry. This was probably true up to around the 1960s, maybe 1970s, but nowadays artists/bands must tour to make a living. Often they have to do so to pay back the record companies too. Don't take my word for it though, Courtney Love gave a great speech about it (the link is a transcription of her speech). Steve Vai has a copy of his letter up that he sent to congress about the record companies' accounting practices. Finally, Steve Albini has an an article up also telling how the contracts work in the record compani
Move to a country home in the deep south and get DSL. I live 7 miles from a town with a population of about 1000 people, a mile off the highway on a dirt road and I have 3Mbit dsl service that's pretty darn reliable. How someone can live in the city and not have dsl or high speed wireless service available amazes me.
You are very, very very lucky where you're located. I'm in the south, in a much less rural area than you (subdivision outside a town much larger than the one you're close to), and the subdivision's been here since the 1970s. Bellsouth has yet to make DSL available for us. Drive up the road about 5 miles and it's available, here, not a chance in hell. It's been this way since 2002 when I first went to get broadband here, Bellsouth's site then told me it wasn't available and it was coming soon. I went to check Comcast and they already had our area covered. We got Comcast back in 2002 and have seen our speeds upgraded for free 3 times since. Bellsouth still hasn't bothered, and I don't expect they ever will even though there are enough subdivisions close together here to make it more than worth their while.
So be thankful you have DSL where you're at. To be quite honest I doubt you could even get a T1 installed at this location from Bellsouth, and who'd want to go in on one when Comcast's current download speeds are four times faster?
But the insinuation that these chemicals are damaging and cause problems for everyone, is false. In fact I would venture a guess that the people who have bad experiences with these substances are very much in the minority, otherwise these problems would be much more recognized and accepted.
I'll agree that these things likely don't cause problems for everyone, however there's a problem with many doctors not realizing that they can cause problems for some people. We know that various foods can be triggers for migraines, and migraine sufferers will be advised by their doctor(s) to avoid those foods, or at the least to track when they eat them so they can determine if they're a trigger or not. We really need the medical establishment to accept that things like aspartame can cause migraines and other serious problems in some people, so that they can advise people to do the same thing with that as they do trigger foods. There's no reason even a handful of people should continue to suffer horrid migraines unknowingly when they might get rid of them just by cutting out the diet soda.
For what it's worth I'm not surprised to hear about the link between aspartame and migraines. Once it hit the market I learned very quickly that drinking even a little of a diet drink using it gives me one nasty headache. I actively avoid it, and I guess I'm lucky that the headache onset occurs quickly enough for me to identify aspartame as the culprit.
1. Actually check to make sure the person handing you the card is who they claim to be.
Back when my card number was stolen the crooks had a card with my number on it but their name. It didn't scan (nowadays it'd probably scan even) but the stores that the crooks hit did check their IDs. Of course the name on their photo IDs matched. One store went so far as to keep an etched copy of the card (rubbing a pencil over paper with the card underneath) on file and were able to provide that to the police. In fact it's thanks to that store that I found out so many details about the fraud.
So tell me how any of those merchants were supposed to know that the guys were crooks? The card number went through, they checked ID, the ID matched the card info, the card number went through. Everything looked like a valid card that's stripe info had somehow gotten messed up. Perhaps if banks required stores to input the name + the number on manually entered cards then merchants could combat this type of fraud as well, but until then (and if they've started doing this since I applaud them) the issuer seems far more liable here, their policies are allowing the crooks to defraud merchants in ways that merchants cannot detect.
Perhaps that's how it works at your bank, but not all of them. As a few others have already noted, their experiences were different. When I had this happen my bank required me to file a fraudulent charge(s) report, which had to be accompanied by a police report before they'd remove the charges and extra fees (over the limit fees caused by some of the charges). I ended up not having to pay a cent of the bogus charges or the fees they caused, but I had to wait over a month for them to be removed. Even though they did cancel that card number and issue me a new card, I wasn't able to use it for weeks while I waited for them to process the fraud report. Getting the police report was a bit of a pain since the fraud took place in another town about 200 miles away and I had to get it filed by phone and fax, but it took less time to get than the bank took to process the fraud report and the police were much more helpful. (It took me 2 days to get the police report, it took a bit over 4 weeks for the bank to process the fraud report and remove the charges from my account. Then I had to call them to remind them to remove the over-the-limit fees, they had "forgotten" to remove them.)
Don't assume your experience is how it works everywhere and be glad your bank's not an ass about these things.
It's not her job to play Twenty Questions, or Detective, or engage in religious profiling. Apparently the girl is from a "mostly Jewish" neighborhood, and while Jewish law prohibits desecration of a dead body, that does not mean someone from a "mostly Jewish" town WOULDN'T be an organ donor. Maybe their parents were Jewish, and they're agnostic, for fuck's sake. Why should someone have to explain all that to get a beer?
I think you need to go read the articles again, I never got the impression that she actually said all that to the girl, but that she was posting about her own mental thought processes as to why the girl's answer as to where she was from just set off yet more alarm bells about the ID being fake. In that context it's perfectly reasonable, she already had reason to suspect the ID was fake, and the other information the girl provided was at best suspect. Seeing as her job is on the line if she accepts a fake ID she's going to err on the side of caution (for herself) and find that the possible, but not very likely, situation of her being a non-Jewish person from the area is most likely not the case here.
Confiscating a license, or any other ID, is a great way to end up in a heap of trouble unless it is specifically allowed in your jurisdiction (which it is, in many cases. But stupid if it's not.) The right way: take the ID, walk to the office, call the cops. Wrong way: taunt her, make fun of her, and NOT call the cops.
And now you've failed today's reading comprehension test completely. In the article from the first link she says "I've been informed that I'm required to do this." about confiscating the licenses. She doesn't say who has informed her but in context it's pretty clear her boss(es) were the ones who told her. Others in the comments have pointed out that it is indeed the law in New York that fake licenses are to be confiscated. And she didn't taunt her at the bar, she questioned her briefly, found her answers to be unlikely to be true and confiscated the ID and told her "You can't drink here, darling, and I'm keeping your ID." (That's from the cached copy in the second link.)
Posting people's IDs, forged or not, is a great example of spitting into the wind. The state is probably not terribly pleased at seeing examples of counterfeit documents posted, and if it turns out it IS a legitimate ID, now you're doubly fucked, because you just confiscated a valid ID, provided proof, AND copied an official state document, AND posted private information. If the forged ID came from a ring, they're going to be pissed their ID made it onto the net. The girl, her parents, friends, etc are going to be pissed too.That's a great way to wake up one morning and find your tires slashed and a rock through your windshield. Lose, lose, lose situation. And for what? Some attention-whoring on the 'net....
She apparently does this regularly and hasn't had a rock through her windshield or tires slashed yet. She's had a bunch of people commit mild identity theft over this one post, just ONE out of who knows how many mind you. And why is that occurring? Because the girl who used the fake ID is stirring up attention. Now, tell me, who exactly is "attention-whoring on the 'net" here? The bartender, or the girl who tried to use a fake ID and got busted? Looks to me like it's the latter, and she's even upping her crime level from presenting a fake ID to admitting she MADE the ID to filing a false DMCA report, etc.
If you'd bothered to research any at all and find out that it is indeed the law for fake IDs to be confiscated in New York you'd know that there isn't any question that the ID was fake at this point. If it had been all it would have taken is a quick visit to the police and they would have come to the club and got the girl's license back that night. Before the bartender went home with it. Before it got posted online. But that did
Don't let me get in the way of everyone's dogmatic Gates-hate, but Linus Torvalds operates in a similar way.
"I'm always right. This time I'm just even more right than usual." Torvalds, Linus (2005-07-14). Message to linux-kernel mailing list. Retrieved on 2006-08-28.
"If you still don't like it, that's ok: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do." Torvalds, Linus (1996-07-22). Post to comp.os.linux.advocacy newsgroup. Retrieved on 2006-08-28.
This isn't comparable to what Gates is doing in the article. According to that Gates would tell everyone that their idea was "the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." and didn't really mean it. He was saying it simply to make the presenter defend their idea, not saying "you're wrong and we're not going to do it that way". In both of the above quotes Linus is seems to be saying that he's right and that they will be doing it his way.
Linus could certainly be more tactful with how he worded those things, but I do note a distinct lack of cussing and (at the least) less drastic hyperbole. And how about some context to those quotes? On the second one at least I found you left off a bit before that that makes the whole thing much less worse than it sounds: "In short, at least give the penguin a fair viewing. If you still don't like it, that's ok: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do." I don't think it's unreasonable for Linus to be taking that attitude about the mascot that will define the OS that he created. He was apparently listening to input on it anyway, more than you can say for most people in that situation.
It's hard to argue that Gates' persistent bullying was anything but good for shareholders for at least the first 13 years of public trading.
Hard to, but not impossible. I personally wonder how many good ideas were ignored because an employee didn't feel they could defend it to management yet. I know some people would argue that if they couldn't defend it then it wasn't a good idea, but sometimes you have to work on an idea for a while before you can just how good (or bad) it is. By ignoring things that you can't defend right away you lose out on many potentially good ideas. Also MS probably lost out on some very intelligent and creative employees that didn't want to deal with that type of work environment, again affecting the bottom line.
I guess it boils down to this: while the shareholders did quite nicely from MS's management style, we'll never know if that was just a small fraction of how nicely they could have done if they'd been less abusive.
There's a world of difference between telling everyone that their idea is "the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." and testing potential hires on how they'd fine-tune a bubble sort. One's belittling and demeaning along with being untrue (and known to be untrue by the person saying it) most of the time. (You simply can't say this and it be true every time, also it's not just saying it's a bad idea, but the worst idea he's ever heard, making it much more difficult for the statement to be true.) The other one is seeing how creative someone is technically. In Google's case they're using this to judge the quality of potential employees before deciding whether to hire them or not. They're not alone in testing potential hires in such a manner, although they do seem to go above and beyond what most companies do.
As far as adapting, Google seems to adapt better than Microsoft, at least so far. MS tends to ignore certain markets/new directions until it's completely obvious they were wrong and missed the boat. (The infamous move to go after the Internet is one good example of this.) MS also seems to be better at following others than leading, for example in Internet search and online advertising most recently. This is not to say that MS isn't ever innovative (I think their Live service for Xbox has been innovative at least in some areas), but that that they seem to follow other's innovations more than they innovate themselves. Google has a big advantage for adapting because of their letting employees spend 20% of their time on personal projects. When those projects become useful they can be launched as a company project/product and more people assigned to them. That allows them to try out tons of different directions continually. Also they keep improving their products and do so at a quicker rate than MS does, although MS is more hampered with their traditional release cycle for products like Office and Windows. Gmail is a good example there, new features still get added even though it's no longer considered beta, and the product today is far more useful than it was at launch.
As far as Google Apps goes the whole point is that it's an online app, I wouldn't expect to see an offline component anytime soon. I do expect to see them offer servers that you can run on your local LAN/WAN with versions of Google Apps on them that'll address some of the concerns about losing access to the apps if your Internet connection goes down. You can get a local search appliance now, so I think it's just a matter of time. I suspect they've not worked out all the details yet on how they'll maintain those Apps Appliances and keep them updated and that's why they aren't offering them already.
The most important thing to have for any project is a CHAMPION. So if you aren't ready to champion your own idea then you are wasting everybody's time.
There's a distinct difference between expecting someone to champion their project and being a bully and abusing them verbally. Telling every person that their project idea is "the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." is just being downright mean. Especially when you just glare at them coldly after they defend themselves (as the article points out).
And then you get people who'll imitate the behavior without the smarts to back it up, so it becomes nothing BUT abuse. (Middle management for example.) I think Bill's management technique explains a lot about Microsoft's behavior over the years and why they're so disliked in the technical community. In fact looking back at how MS acted during their two biggest trials (the US anti-trust and EU anti-trust) you can see this "bullying" all over the place. Acting like a bully when you're the defendant in court is not a good idea. It'll just piss the judge (and possibly the jury) off, and they're the ones passing judgment on you.
Besides, it's not like this technique has worked incredibly well for MS, especially in areas like security. MS has also put out some really lousy stuff over the years, like MS Bob, that were apparently "championed" all the way to release, then bombed. Maybe if Bill had developed a culture less focused on bullying they could have avoided some of those things, and saved money. When you force every one of your employees to defend their projects in such a manner then how many are going to be willing to listen when people point out problems with them? You can't have any second doubts if you have to defend your projects constantly, so people will stop listening to any criticism, leading to lower quality all around.
I am astonished that everyone on this forum seems to be siding with the school.
Well frankly I'm astonished you're siding with the students given that the summary provides no real information, does not provide anything to back up its accusations, pretty much implies only the worst things and is written with a level of bias so obvious that it's not even funny. Did you miss the part where the guy writing it broke the rules when he was a student in the same district, got punished for it then went right up breaking them till he graduated? Do you really think someone that is so upfront about their rule-breaking is telling you the unadorned truth? Did you miss things like the article saying "up to 3 months" which could be completely valid if only ONE student was suspended for 3 months and the rest got only 1 day? Did you miss the fact that the article only implies that the suspensions were due to the students bypassing the filters? (Yeah seriously, go read it again, one sentence says the students were called to the office to be talked to about doing so, the next starts "The problem is" and mentions the suspensions. The implication is that those are related but conveniently it doesn't flat out state they are.) Also most of the article is a rant about the IT department in the school district, it never makes any definite connection between the IT department's supposed lack of skill and the suspensions, just implies that as well. Do you have any clue how hard it is to block all the web-based proxies students find to bypass filters? Even the most competent IT staff on the fucking planet couldn't keep up, there's always more students looking for proxies than you have staff (and time) to find them to block.
It's not like by viewing forbidden things they were hurting anyone else.
As someone else pointed out, viewing porn could get the school system sued. Also they could end up getting the system's E-Rate funding pulled and then the entire system would have no Internet access. Do you think those things wouldn't hurt the students obeying the rules and really wanting an education?
Sure, they were breaking the rules - but if I had been suspended for 3 months every time I broke a rule I'd never have had any time in school.
But I'll bet you were still punished when you were caught breaking the rules. The thing to keep in mind here is that there's no actual evidence that all the suspensions were for 3 months. There's also absolutely NO information about the real reasons for the suspensions or their lengths. In all likelihood the students who got the worst punishments were either repeat offenders or were suspended for bypassing the proxies in addition to breaking other rules.
Most of us who have been systems or network admins anywhere realize that users doing this type of stuff is rather more serious than end-users generally think it is. Those of us who've done the same work for a K-12 system (as I have) know that it's even more serious than it would be at a business. The kids broke rules in ways that could have had major repercussions for the entire school district and impacted the quality of education for every kid in the district (entirely based on how often they were bypassing the filters and what sites they were accessing. It's a fairly good bet that any site filtered at K-12 level is one that allowing students to access could cause you to lose your E-Rate funding however.) Frankly I'm siding with the students -- the students that these kids could have royally fucked over. I also reserve the right to change my stance if any actual proof comes along about what the kids did and it turns out it wasn't very severe. Seeing as there's not a single news article that I can find online about this, even in the local newspaper for that district, I am highly inclined to believe the suspensions were given for valid reasons. Parents tend to complain and/or sue when punis
What's the difference between a 3 month suspension and an expulsion? Three months is 13-14 weeks. How many kids are going to pass an 18 week semester after missing 13-14 weeks of it while getting automatic 0s on every assignment?
Around here nearly all suspensions are in-school suspensions and students must do their homework (along with additional schoolwork to keep them busy the entire day) during their suspension. Ironically enough a 3 month in-school suspension very well might leave the student having learned more in that period than they would have in regular class.
Sure expulsion means they can't come back but they are pretty FSCKED either way.
That depends, if they go the route of in-school suspension I mentioned above the student will have a black mark on their record but will finish the school year on time. Also even if they don't do that they may allow the student to attend summer school to finish up the coursework missed, thus keeping them on schedule to graduate on time. At absolute worst this is basically a one semester suspension, putting their graduation off a half year. All of those are better for the student than expulsion.
The setup was sloppy and unrealistic. There is absolutely no question about that. They picked up a half-assed blacklist solution, and the kids immediately circumvented it using a method that is as old as the blacklist itself.
You do realize you're basing this "fact" on the word of the submitter who admits openly that they 1. Broke the rules while going to a school in the same district, 2. Got caught and punished for it, and 3. Continued to break said rules? Sure they claim they told them about BIOS passwords and the IT department refused to implement them, but you seem to be 100% certain this person who so willingly admits to breaking rules and continuing to do so after being punished for it is telling you the unfiltered truth. There is no information in the summary that justifies that level of certainty, if you have information that backs up your stance then you should share it, otherwise you're making yourself look really, really gullible. (Would you like to buy a bridge? Real cheap, I promise...)
A three month suspension is a joke. Either expel the kid, or provide a reasonable punishment. A three month suspension suggests to me that they couldn't prove a case for expulsion, which in turn suggests that the offense wasn't worthy of expulsion, which then suggests that it probably wasn't worthy of a 3 month suspension either.
As I have pointed out in a reply to another post of yours, the article only says "up to", which very well could mean that only one student received that maximum suspension. Also a 3 month suspension says to me that the school system is trying to give this kid a chance to finish their education, something an expulsion will make considerably more difficult. Oh, and in the real world school systems do have to have to have damn good reasons for any suspension or risk being sued.
And in terms of the internet, yes, you can expect people to circumvent your filters if you make it possible for them to do so. I don't care where you are, or what business you're in. To expect otherwise and act shocked when it happens is disingenuous.
I realize this is Slashdot but can I be shocked that you've gone from trusting a biased summary with no documentation to back it up to freaking making things up? Please tell me where even the summary claims that the school system was "shocked" that the students found a way to bypass the filters. Do note that the claims of "up to 3 months" suspensions does not support this in the least. The bit about the "knee-jerk" reaction also does not support this as that was added by the editor, Cliff, not by the original author. That's just Cliff's knee-jerk reaction to the summary.
It's getting to be a bit obvious after reading a few of your posts in this thread that you're letting your gut reaction to this summary override your brain. Drop the gut emotional reaction, go back and reread the summary a few times with a critical eye. Notice how little it tells you and how biased it's written and how biased the author of it is. Then decide if your stance is justified, I think you may be a bit surprised at what you've been saying once you do this.
Well, clearly they were smarter than whoever set the system up in the first place.
No, clearly they have far more free time to look for open proxies to bypass the block list than the admins have to find them to add to it. There's nothing clever about this, go Google it, that one specific search has 426,000 results and that's probably not the best way to find them all. It's certainly not the only one, and that's a huge amount of sites to add to the block list, even if you assume you find only one proxy on average per result.
And it's a stupid policy; completely arbitrary, and in no way worthy of a THREE MONTH suspension...that's so beyond the pale there aren't even words. What do they get for fighting at that school? Death penalty? Isn't the point to provide kids with more information? I've dealt with enough crappy filter software to know it catches as many good sites as bad ones.
Go reread the summary, it says "up to 3 months". The submitter has a very obvious bias against the school district and that phrase could mean one kid got hit with a 3 month suspension and the rest got 1 day. In fact the summary doesn't even directly state the suspensions were because of bypassing the filters, although it certainly implies it. We also don't know how severe their transgressions were, were they just trying to access a gaming site or MySpace or were they caught using those proxies to browse porn from a school computer? Were these repeat offenses? The suspensions very well may have been quite legitimate punishment for these students but we simply have not been given the information to determine that. Try to look beyond the submitter's bias to see what little we've really been told. Overall the summary is mostly a rant by the submitter against his former school system's IT department.
If you provide internet access, you have to accept that people are going to use it for evil as well as good. Either you need to accept that you're not going to be able to stop a percentage of people, or you need to not provide access.
Most school systems indeed know and accept this, but there's more to this than you realize. The federal funding for K-12 Internet access comes with strings attached that require filtering. Failure to make a good effort to filter out that which the feds require can lose a school system that funding, something none of them can afford. Also just because people are going to break the rules does not mean you ignore them when they get caught doing it. Students are punished for all kinds of rules that they break, getting punished for breaking the Internet Acceptable Usage Policy is no different. Are you seriously suggesting that K-12 school system's IT department and teachers should just ignore it when they catch a student breaking the rules to bypass the filtering? While I wouldn't support a stupid zero-tolerance policy on punishing students caught doing so I believe they should be punished. At the very least they should be monitored more closely by the teacher who catches them. Depending on what site/sites they were caught accessing, and if they had a history of doing this in the past, the punishment should be more severe. I suspect if we had all the facts in this particular matter we'd find out that the students suspended were the worst offenders and repeat ones at that. Most school systems don't suspend students, especially not for 3 months, for getting caught bypassing the Internet filters, even if they're caught doing so to view porn.
Finally note that if this case was as severe as the submitter makes it sound in the summary there would be news articles about it. Despite finding the newspaper for the city the school district is in (and it also serves the county) I could find no mention of this incid
Modern education however does require full Internet access, including to sites talking about homesexuality, breast cancer and birth control.
From experience (I was the network admin for a K-12 system up till last year) the #1 site that students try to access that they are blocked from is MySpace.com. At the K-12 level I have yet to hear a single valid reason a student would need access to MySpace from school during school hours. Likewise a lot of sites (porn for example) are also of no valid education use at the K-12 level. (There can be a legit educational need for access to these things at the college level where research projects can delve into subjects that would have parents suing at the K-12 level.) Also Internet access for K-12 schools is funded by the federal government and comes with strings attached -- specific categories of sites that must be blocked. Failure to at least make a good effort to block those sites can quickly have your funding pulled, taking away ALL Internet access for the school system, an event that will have a much more negative impact on students than not being able to access MySpace. MySpace is a particularly nasty problem for K-12 schools since many students tend to post things about what they're going to be doing after school so their friends will know, but don't restrict their profiles (and lie about their age so MySpace doesn't do it automatically). If someone were to abduct a kid/teen after school based on something they posted to MySpace during school and the system hadn't tried to block it, then guess who'll get sued? Yeah, the school system will.
At least in the state I worked in, the blocklist, which is controlled by the state, makes a strong effort to not block legitimate sites that talk about homosexuality, breast cancer, AIDs, safe sex, etc. All teachers and staff can submit a request on the page that comes up when a site is blocked for that site to be re-reviewed so all a student needs to do is tell their teacher what the site contains and why they need access to it. The teacher can then request the site be re-reviewed if they deem it a legit need. (And it's amazing how few of those requests teachers get compared to all the complaints students make about sites being blocked. If you look at the block logs you'll quickly see that around 99% of them are for sites that have no educational uses.)
I should note that not all sites that have no educational value get blocked, but ones that are getting abused (high traffic during school hours, especially sites with games on them) will end up added. In those cases the students bring this on themselves by abusing the ability to access the site, in particular accessing it at times they are supposed to be learning (like in a lab class before the lesson is over with).
Students do not access proxies because of security holes, students access proxies because of information censorship which they disapprove of.
Which is a fancy way of saying "students break the rules because they don't agree with them". There's lots of teens that break laws that they don't agree with (this isn't anything new either), yet if they get caught breaking said laws they get punished. The only difference is one of degree, breaking a law versus the school's rules. Both are wrong, most of the time the students know full well that both are wrong, and willfully break them anyway. By not punishing them you're teaching them what exactly? That it's OK to break any rule (and laws are rules too, just with more severe repercussions for breaking them) that they dislike? This is going to help them be productive members of society how?
The proxies are external information portals, and are not under your control. They simply route information from one place to another, providing a different means of accessing information. Therefore an attempt to block access to proxies is NOT a security issue and is ONLY a censorship issue.
Sorry, but you're an idiot. Tell you what, get a job somewhere that has an Internet Acceptable Use Policy that forbids looking at porn from your work computer and also backs that up by using a blocklist/proxy. Find a proxy server out there that isn't blocked from work, then use it to surf porn on your office PC. When you get caught and they go to discipline you tell them your theory above and see if it helps. (Hint: It won't.)
Whenever a user is willfully finding ways around network restrictions they become a security problem. This is especially true since the vast majority of network intrusions come from inside. Perhaps using a proxy server to get around a blacklist seems minor to you, but it can be a very major thing. In my example above your viewing porn at work could open up the business to a sexual harassment lawsuit if a woman happens by and sees you viewing it. Why do you think certain sites are blocked in the first place? It's not that the network admins are maliciously denying users/students access to certain sites, there are very good legal reasons to block most things! In a K-12 school system this is particularly so, if the system doesn't make a serious effort to block sites they can lose their government funding for Internet access. Do you think it's OK to let a few kids break the rules and get to blocked sites when it may mean the entire school (or district) losing Internet access? Is that really censorship?
In relation to this article,
What article? The only link in the summary is to the school district's web site. There is no news article linked about this. The submitter is hardly unbiased either, they admit they broke the rules while going to a school in the same district and even though they were punished for it, they continued to break them the same way until they graduated. I'm sorry, what they say about these suspensions may very well be 100% accurate, but given their bias I'm inclined to think they either didn't have the full story to report or they left out inconvenient facts that'd have made the suspensions look quite sensible. Perhaps these students had been warned and punished in the past for using proxies against the AUP and continued to do so, so they were suspended the next time they were caught? Could be, we simply don't know for sure because the submitter's bias if far too strongly aligned with rulebreaking being considered OK to trust that we have the full story.
students should not be punished as if they committed a security violation, because they did not. They at worst violated a censorship policy by viewing information that violates school policy.
You know, you need to go read the summary again very carefully. Even with the bias ther
These teenagers, as well as most teenagers in general, do not understand and will not consider implications of their actions before doing something stupid. They especially don't understand that when you post something on the internet, it is a form of publication; the world is able to read what you wrote. Purposefully publishing lies in printed form with the willful intent to harm someone's reputation is called slander, and is punishable by law. These kids clearly did exactly that.
While I think you're over-generalizing a tad (I've met teens that were much smarter than college students so not all teens are idiots), I would dare say it's the principal's job to assist in the education of the teens in his school, including the one who put up the fake MySpace profile. Exactly what type of lesson has he taught them from all of this? That adults act like a bunch of kids fighting on the playground when insulted? That even the principal, the highest authority in their school will act like a total idiot and neglect his job duties to go on a personal vendetta when he discovers his students are insulting him? Sure what the kid did was libel (not slander, slander's spoken), but the principal has completely failed in his duties and provided a perfectly horrible example to ALL of his students, not just the one who put up the fake profile. There's no defending that part, suing over the libel? Sure, not a problem. Diverting school resources to a personal vendetta? Now that's a major problem, and much worse than the libel the kid did because it affected the education of every damn kid in the school.
One thing you failed to mention is that the kid created the libelous profile from home, not from one of the school's computers. The principal used pretty much all of the school's computing resources to go on a personal vendetta against the kids (the one who created the profile plus students posting comments on it). I'd say neither one was considering the implications of their actions ahead of time.
The principal's daughter was emotionally distraught when she discovered the pages, as well as the principal.
So sue, don't disrupt the entire damn school and fuck up the education of hundreds of kids just because you were "emotionally distraught". We pay teachers, and principals even more so, to deal with this type of stuff and to educate our kids. Also think about what's happened with this thanks to the principal's over reaction. How emotionally distraught do you think his daughter is about his looking like a total ass in front of the entire nation now? What's worse is he can't blame this on libel, people are going to look at his actions and come to their own conclusions, but many are going to think he's acting like a spoiled brat.
The student's work was malicious in nature. An apology isn't going to make up for the harm that was done.
You kinda contradict yourself here, how can "the student's work [be] malicious in nature" if he "do[es] not understand and [did] not consider [the] implications of their actions before doing something stupid"? You can't have it both ways, if they didn't understand then it wasn't malicious, if they did understand then it was. In the first case I think an apology would have worked just fine, IF the principal hadn't over reacted and escalated this into a much larger issue than it could have been. Now that he's managed to drag it into the national spotlight I suppose an apology won't cut it, but neither will winning a lawsuit against the student get his reputation back. He's earned a new reputation for himself, one not based on the profile's libelous claims at all, and this reputation isn't beneficial to him either.
I will agree that the principal overreacted in regards to obliterating access to a computer in the school, but I can understand where his anger is coming from.
What IS sad, however, is that people don't consider $15 a good deal for an hours worth of music. As a musician, that just makes me sad. Maybe the quality of the goods need to go up, but $10-$15 seems like a steal if you've just gotten a great album you're going to be listening to for the rest of your life.
The catch is that it's a good deal to pay only for an hours worth of good music. The music industry's decisions over the last decade or so have greatly reduced the availability of good new albums. How many albums of the last 5 years can you honestly say you'd want to listen to every track on? How many of those do you like maybe 2-3 songs max? Is it still a good deal to pay $15 for 2-3 good songs? (We're in the $5 a song range at this point.)
Older albums that still have a majority of good music on them are worth more (at least to me), but since they're older now I'm not willing to pay $15 or more for them. I'd pay $10 pretty happily, especially for a physical CD, but it's pretty damn annoying that those albums tend to come with the bare minimum CD booklet. Just because it's older and I'm paying only $10 instead of $15 or more doesn't mean I don't want (and deserve) to get the lyrics with my damn CD.
Why, now, do we need music that badly that we're willing to pay shit to listen to shit? I don't know about you, but I don't see this as victory for the music world in the slightest.
I'm not defending the RIAA in the slightest... on the contrary, I think they're the biggest culprit in spreading this diseased culture.
Because this is the market the RIAA created with their idiotic decisions over the last decade or two. They killed the singles market and at the same time started forcing full albums to have only 2-3 good songs and the rest filler crap. This was done out of greed, they wanted you to pay them $20 for the same songs you would have paid around $5 for on singles. People were sick and tired of getting raped buying CDs so they started trading them online. Even though technology overtook their business plan they fought it tooth and nail. They then moved on to suing their customers to try and force them to go back to the old method of paying $15-20 for only 2-3 tracks they wanted. Unsurprisingly to anyone but the RIAA, this didn't work either.
So now you have a market that's used to only 2-3 songs being worth listening to on any album and only interested in those songs and not the rest. It's not the general public that killed off the album as a format, it's the recording industry. As for the quality of the music, that's also the recording industry's fault. They decided to promote mainly the crap stuff and sell it by having pretty "singers" instead of quality. And now they're paying the price for their stupidity, the market rebelled and they may go under as a result. Society is paying the price with quality music being less available.
On the bright side once the shift is complete I think we'll see quality come back as the recording industry loses its stranglehold on promotion and distribution. I'm afraid the album as a format is mostly dead though, the public is too used to singles and random shuffle play. I have to admit that even though I enjoy some of the old good albums, I like my music on random shuffle better. It's nice to have the variety.
Oh really? I guess you've sworn off ATM's? Yeah... I didn't think so.
I've sworn off Diebold ones, it's not even very difficult to do. I've not seen any of the in-store debit card things made by Diebold around here and I can go into any store that has those and buy a small item and get cash back quite simply. I end up paying less fees this way as well (since my bank charges me fees for using even their own ATMs).
This is more about brand image than anything else- they're afraid people will start noticing the Diebold name on the ATM machines and stop using those banks, because Diebold has not been able to be trusted with voting.
That fear is justified, I won't use my bank's ATMs because they're made by Diebold. Given all the horrendous security gaffs Diebold has made over their voting machines (like having a picture of the key that opens them up on their website) I'm not comfortable using my debit card in anything they've designed. How do I know that the ATM was treated with any higher level of security on Diebold's end? Frankly I'm convinced there are just as many security issues with their ATMs, that they just haven't gotten as much bad publicity yet. I'm not likely to trust their equipment in the future either, and if I was ever in a position to be buying their products I'll certainly chose a competitor.
After all, what's more important, voting or money?
Voting, but I have to deal with money year-round whereas we only have elections once a year at most here. Thankfully we don't have Diebold voting machines, but I'll still be avoiding their ATMs. Any company with their security track record doesn't deserve my trust or business.
Using Firefox 1.5.0.10 here and the demo's only semi-working. I typed what it said exactly and all it showed was "C:\bo". While it's not good that it managed to pick up any of it, working intermittantly like that isn't going to be doing any attackers any good. I wonder if the script's screwing up if you type too fast or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Seeing as they've sued at least one person who didn't even own a computer that's not necessarily going to help. In the long run it might (put them out of business), but short term no one is safe from their litigation campaign.
This varies from place to play, up until my last job every direct deposit form I'd seen didn't have this option in it. Then at the last job, once they decided to make direct deposit available, it had a particularly odious version basically giving them the right to withdraw money based on... well anything. Needless to say I refused to participate and continued to get paper checks. Most of my coworkers couldn't understand why I refused. I thought it was interesting that my boss also refused to sign it. I think he and I were the only two who actually read the terms.
Quite a number of bills and amendments end up not being introduced because of preemptive reporting and outrage. Universities are in a bit of a pickle here because they don't want to offend the senate majority leader (this could impact their funding negatively in the future), but they need to protest and fight these proposed changes. Pointing them out ahead of time and getting the public riled up and complaining is a very effective way to prevent the proposed amendment from being tried and avoids a direct confrontation between the universities and the senate. So no, it's not FUD, it's part of the normal process.
It's not like this should be surprising to anyone on /., we've seen reports on various nasty bills/amendments that were going to be introduced (several that were going to be snuck on as last-minute riders to something really important, like funding bills) and then seen reports a few days to weeks later that the congresscritters backed down after the public outrage. Hopefully that's what will happen here.
Oh but the artist should perform at concerts to make his money! Well that was simplistic and quite frankly unfair. Why should a musical artist be forced to make money by touring? Why can't his song be a commodity like any other work of fiction? When E-books are shared, do you expect the book author's main source of income being from performing public readings?
You seem to have forgotten that the author's books are available in the library to be checked out and read for free. This has been the case for a long time, and somehow authors still manage to make money. It should be noted that only the really popular authors can generally earn enough from writing to not have any other kind of job, but even those generally must keep writing to continue to earn enough to support themselves/their family/etc. There are exceptions, I doubt J. K. Rowlings will need to write another book for the rest of her life for example, but most authors have to continue to write to earn money. By your logic those authors shouldn't have to keep writing to earn a living, they wrote the book once they should be paid for it forever right? Musicians have to tour and continue writing more music for the same reasons that authors continue to write -- so they can continue to earn money. I don't think that's unfair at all, they get paid for what they do, but to make a living from it they have to work at it. You know, just like the rest of the world.
The problem being that your assumptions are based on the knock off being of inferior quality and not an exact digital reproduction. When talking about songs, each digital copy of a song in the wild lowers the value of the authentic song file. Why pay for something you can get for free?
And now I can answer this question better. I buy books, even though I can get those books at my public library for free. Some books I buy new, some I get used. So why would I buy a book when I can get it free? Because I want to own my own copy, I want to support the author, etc. The same applies to music, and the success of the iTunes store proves that people will pay for music even when it's available for free. Those who are downloading and not buying anything will likely never buy anything, they just don't think it's worth money. Some will buy music in the future, they can't afford it now (teens and college students fit into this category pretty well). Some people will also buy more music because they were able to test-listen to it for free first.
To be fair, I am mostly irritated by the idea of giving an artist (or ticketmaster) a valid reason for charging even more money for a concert. It would be nice if a concert ticket remained within the economic means of an average teenager/young adult.
I don't see why this would raise the price of tickets, most artists/bands already have to make all their money from concerts because of the horribly unfair contracts the record labels force them into. If they're managing to make money from current ticket prices there's no reason (beyond inflation) that prices should go up.
I was led to believe that an artist tours to promote their album...
You were lead wrong then, sorry. This was probably true up to around the 1960s, maybe 1970s, but nowadays artists/bands must tour to make a living. Often they have to do so to pay back the record companies too. Don't take my word for it though, Courtney Love gave a great speech about it (the link is a transcription of her speech). Steve Vai has a copy of his letter up that he sent to congress about the record companies' accounting practices. Finally, Steve Albini has an an article up also telling how the contracts work in the record compani
You are very, very very lucky where you're located. I'm in the south, in a much less rural area than you (subdivision outside a town much larger than the one you're close to), and the subdivision's been here since the 1970s. Bellsouth has yet to make DSL available for us. Drive up the road about 5 miles and it's available, here, not a chance in hell. It's been this way since 2002 when I first went to get broadband here, Bellsouth's site then told me it wasn't available and it was coming soon. I went to check Comcast and they already had our area covered. We got Comcast back in 2002 and have seen our speeds upgraded for free 3 times since. Bellsouth still hasn't bothered, and I don't expect they ever will even though there are enough subdivisions close together here to make it more than worth their while.
So be thankful you have DSL where you're at. To be quite honest I doubt you could even get a T1 installed at this location from Bellsouth, and who'd want to go in on one when Comcast's current download speeds are four times faster?
I'll agree that these things likely don't cause problems for everyone, however there's a problem with many doctors not realizing that they can cause problems for some people. We know that various foods can be triggers for migraines, and migraine sufferers will be advised by their doctor(s) to avoid those foods, or at the least to track when they eat them so they can determine if they're a trigger or not. We really need the medical establishment to accept that things like aspartame can cause migraines and other serious problems in some people, so that they can advise people to do the same thing with that as they do trigger foods. There's no reason even a handful of people should continue to suffer horrid migraines unknowingly when they might get rid of them just by cutting out the diet soda.
For what it's worth I'm not surprised to hear about the link between aspartame and migraines. Once it hit the market I learned very quickly that drinking even a little of a diet drink using it gives me one nasty headache. I actively avoid it, and I guess I'm lucky that the headache onset occurs quickly enough for me to identify aspartame as the culprit.
Back when my card number was stolen the crooks had a card with my number on it but their name. It didn't scan (nowadays it'd probably scan even) but the stores that the crooks hit did check their IDs. Of course the name on their photo IDs matched. One store went so far as to keep an etched copy of the card (rubbing a pencil over paper with the card underneath) on file and were able to provide that to the police. In fact it's thanks to that store that I found out so many details about the fraud.
So tell me how any of those merchants were supposed to know that the guys were crooks? The card number went through, they checked ID, the ID matched the card info, the card number went through. Everything looked like a valid card that's stripe info had somehow gotten messed up. Perhaps if banks required stores to input the name + the number on manually entered cards then merchants could combat this type of fraud as well, but until then (and if they've started doing this since I applaud them) the issuer seems far more liable here, their policies are allowing the crooks to defraud merchants in ways that merchants cannot detect.
Perhaps that's how it works at your bank, but not all of them. As a few others have already noted, their experiences were different. When I had this happen my bank required me to file a fraudulent charge(s) report, which had to be accompanied by a police report before they'd remove the charges and extra fees (over the limit fees caused by some of the charges). I ended up not having to pay a cent of the bogus charges or the fees they caused, but I had to wait over a month for them to be removed. Even though they did cancel that card number and issue me a new card, I wasn't able to use it for weeks while I waited for them to process the fraud report. Getting the police report was a bit of a pain since the fraud took place in another town about 200 miles away and I had to get it filed by phone and fax, but it took less time to get than the bank took to process the fraud report and the police were much more helpful. (It took me 2 days to get the police report, it took a bit over 4 weeks for the bank to process the fraud report and remove the charges from my account. Then I had to call them to remind them to remove the over-the-limit fees, they had "forgotten" to remove them.)
Don't assume your experience is how it works everywhere and be glad your bank's not an ass about these things.
I think you need to go read the articles again, I never got the impression that she actually said all that to the girl, but that she was posting about her own mental thought processes as to why the girl's answer as to where she was from just set off yet more alarm bells about the ID being fake. In that context it's perfectly reasonable, she already had reason to suspect the ID was fake, and the other information the girl provided was at best suspect. Seeing as her job is on the line if she accepts a fake ID she's going to err on the side of caution (for herself) and find that the possible, but not very likely, situation of her being a non-Jewish person from the area is most likely not the case here.
And now you've failed today's reading comprehension test completely. In the article from the first link she says "I've been informed that I'm required to do this." about confiscating the licenses. She doesn't say who has informed her but in context it's pretty clear her boss(es) were the ones who told her. Others in the comments have pointed out that it is indeed the law in New York that fake licenses are to be confiscated. And she didn't taunt her at the bar, she questioned her briefly, found her answers to be unlikely to be true and confiscated the ID and told her "You can't drink here, darling, and I'm keeping your ID." (That's from the cached copy in the second link.)
She apparently does this regularly and hasn't had a rock through her windshield or tires slashed yet. She's had a bunch of people commit mild identity theft over this one post, just ONE out of who knows how many mind you. And why is that occurring? Because the girl who used the fake ID is stirring up attention. Now, tell me, who exactly is "attention-whoring on the 'net" here? The bartender, or the girl who tried to use a fake ID and got busted? Looks to me like it's the latter, and she's even upping her crime level from presenting a fake ID to admitting she MADE the ID to filing a false DMCA report, etc.
If you'd bothered to research any at all and find out that it is indeed the law for fake IDs to be confiscated in New York you'd know that there isn't any question that the ID was fake at this point. If it had been all it would have taken is a quick visit to the police and they would have come to the club and got the girl's license back that night. Before the bartender went home with it. Before it got posted online. But that did
This isn't comparable to what Gates is doing in the article. According to that Gates would tell everyone that their idea was "the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." and didn't really mean it. He was saying it simply to make the presenter defend their idea, not saying "you're wrong and we're not going to do it that way". In both of the above quotes Linus is seems to be saying that he's right and that they will be doing it his way.
Linus could certainly be more tactful with how he worded those things, but I do note a distinct lack of cussing and (at the least) less drastic hyperbole. And how about some context to those quotes? On the second one at least I found you left off a bit before that that makes the whole thing much less worse than it sounds: "In short, at least give the penguin a fair viewing. If you still don't like it, that's ok: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do." I don't think it's unreasonable for Linus to be taking that attitude about the mascot that will define the OS that he created. He was apparently listening to input on it anyway, more than you can say for most people in that situation.
Hard to, but not impossible. I personally wonder how many good ideas were ignored because an employee didn't feel they could defend it to management yet. I know some people would argue that if they couldn't defend it then it wasn't a good idea, but sometimes you have to work on an idea for a while before you can just how good (or bad) it is. By ignoring things that you can't defend right away you lose out on many potentially good ideas. Also MS probably lost out on some very intelligent and creative employees that didn't want to deal with that type of work environment, again affecting the bottom line.
I guess it boils down to this: while the shareholders did quite nicely from MS's management style, we'll never know if that was just a small fraction of how nicely they could have done if they'd been less abusive.
There's a world of difference between telling everyone that their idea is "the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." and testing potential hires on how they'd fine-tune a bubble sort. One's belittling and demeaning along with being untrue (and known to be untrue by the person saying it) most of the time. (You simply can't say this and it be true every time, also it's not just saying it's a bad idea, but the worst idea he's ever heard, making it much more difficult for the statement to be true.) The other one is seeing how creative someone is technically. In Google's case they're using this to judge the quality of potential employees before deciding whether to hire them or not. They're not alone in testing potential hires in such a manner, although they do seem to go above and beyond what most companies do.
As far as adapting, Google seems to adapt better than Microsoft, at least so far. MS tends to ignore certain markets/new directions until it's completely obvious they were wrong and missed the boat. (The infamous move to go after the Internet is one good example of this.) MS also seems to be better at following others than leading, for example in Internet search and online advertising most recently. This is not to say that MS isn't ever innovative (I think their Live service for Xbox has been innovative at least in some areas), but that that they seem to follow other's innovations more than they innovate themselves. Google has a big advantage for adapting because of their letting employees spend 20% of their time on personal projects. When those projects become useful they can be launched as a company project/product and more people assigned to them. That allows them to try out tons of different directions continually. Also they keep improving their products and do so at a quicker rate than MS does, although MS is more hampered with their traditional release cycle for products like Office and Windows. Gmail is a good example there, new features still get added even though it's no longer considered beta, and the product today is far more useful than it was at launch.
As far as Google Apps goes the whole point is that it's an online app, I wouldn't expect to see an offline component anytime soon. I do expect to see them offer servers that you can run on your local LAN/WAN with versions of Google Apps on them that'll address some of the concerns about losing access to the apps if your Internet connection goes down. You can get a local search appliance now, so I think it's just a matter of time. I suspect they've not worked out all the details yet on how they'll maintain those Apps Appliances and keep them updated and that's why they aren't offering them already.
There's a distinct difference between expecting someone to champion their project and being a bully and abusing them verbally. Telling every person that their project idea is "the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." is just being downright mean. Especially when you just glare at them coldly after they defend themselves (as the article points out).
And then you get people who'll imitate the behavior without the smarts to back it up, so it becomes nothing BUT abuse. (Middle management for example.) I think Bill's management technique explains a lot about Microsoft's behavior over the years and why they're so disliked in the technical community. In fact looking back at how MS acted during their two biggest trials (the US anti-trust and EU anti-trust) you can see this "bullying" all over the place. Acting like a bully when you're the defendant in court is not a good idea. It'll just piss the judge (and possibly the jury) off, and they're the ones passing judgment on you.
Besides, it's not like this technique has worked incredibly well for MS, especially in areas like security. MS has also put out some really lousy stuff over the years, like MS Bob, that were apparently "championed" all the way to release, then bombed. Maybe if Bill had developed a culture less focused on bullying they could have avoided some of those things, and saved money. When you force every one of your employees to defend their projects in such a manner then how many are going to be willing to listen when people point out problems with them? You can't have any second doubts if you have to defend your projects constantly, so people will stop listening to any criticism, leading to lower quality all around.
Well frankly I'm astonished you're siding with the students given that the summary provides no real information, does not provide anything to back up its accusations, pretty much implies only the worst things and is written with a level of bias so obvious that it's not even funny. Did you miss the part where the guy writing it broke the rules when he was a student in the same district, got punished for it then went right up breaking them till he graduated? Do you really think someone that is so upfront about their rule-breaking is telling you the unadorned truth? Did you miss things like the article saying "up to 3 months" which could be completely valid if only ONE student was suspended for 3 months and the rest got only 1 day? Did you miss the fact that the article only implies that the suspensions were due to the students bypassing the filters? (Yeah seriously, go read it again, one sentence says the students were called to the office to be talked to about doing so, the next starts "The problem is" and mentions the suspensions. The implication is that those are related but conveniently it doesn't flat out state they are.) Also most of the article is a rant about the IT department in the school district, it never makes any definite connection between the IT department's supposed lack of skill and the suspensions, just implies that as well. Do you have any clue how hard it is to block all the web-based proxies students find to bypass filters? Even the most competent IT staff on the fucking planet couldn't keep up, there's always more students looking for proxies than you have staff (and time) to find them to block.
As someone else pointed out, viewing porn could get the school system sued. Also they could end up getting the system's E-Rate funding pulled and then the entire system would have no Internet access. Do you think those things wouldn't hurt the students obeying the rules and really wanting an education?
But I'll bet you were still punished when you were caught breaking the rules. The thing to keep in mind here is that there's no actual evidence that all the suspensions were for 3 months. There's also absolutely NO information about the real reasons for the suspensions or their lengths. In all likelihood the students who got the worst punishments were either repeat offenders or were suspended for bypassing the proxies in addition to breaking other rules.
Most of us who have been systems or network admins anywhere realize that users doing this type of stuff is rather more serious than end-users generally think it is. Those of us who've done the same work for a K-12 system (as I have) know that it's even more serious than it would be at a business. The kids broke rules in ways that could have had major repercussions for the entire school district and impacted the quality of education for every kid in the district (entirely based on how often they were bypassing the filters and what sites they were accessing. It's a fairly good bet that any site filtered at K-12 level is one that allowing students to access could cause you to lose your E-Rate funding however.) Frankly I'm siding with the students -- the students that these kids could have royally fucked over. I also reserve the right to change my stance if any actual proof comes along about what the kids did and it turns out it wasn't very severe. Seeing as there's not a single news article that I can find online about this, even in the local newspaper for that district, I am highly inclined to believe the suspensions were given for valid reasons. Parents tend to complain and/or sue when punis
I'd be really interested in hearing how you expect him to hire more IT staff (much less competent IT staff which cost more) while facing budget cuts.
Around here nearly all suspensions are in-school suspensions and students must do their homework (along with additional schoolwork to keep them busy the entire day) during their suspension. Ironically enough a 3 month in-school suspension very well might leave the student having learned more in that period than they would have in regular class.
That depends, if they go the route of in-school suspension I mentioned above the student will have a black mark on their record but will finish the school year on time. Also even if they don't do that they may allow the student to attend summer school to finish up the coursework missed, thus keeping them on schedule to graduate on time. At absolute worst this is basically a one semester suspension, putting their graduation off a half year. All of those are better for the student than expulsion.
You do realize you're basing this "fact" on the word of the submitter who admits openly that they 1. Broke the rules while going to a school in the same district, 2. Got caught and punished for it, and 3. Continued to break said rules? Sure they claim they told them about BIOS passwords and the IT department refused to implement them, but you seem to be 100% certain this person who so willingly admits to breaking rules and continuing to do so after being punished for it is telling you the unfiltered truth. There is no information in the summary that justifies that level of certainty, if you have information that backs up your stance then you should share it, otherwise you're making yourself look really, really gullible. (Would you like to buy a bridge? Real cheap, I promise...)
As I have pointed out in a reply to another post of yours, the article only says "up to", which very well could mean that only one student received that maximum suspension. Also a 3 month suspension says to me that the school system is trying to give this kid a chance to finish their education, something an expulsion will make considerably more difficult. Oh, and in the real world school systems do have to have to have damn good reasons for any suspension or risk being sued.
I realize this is Slashdot but can I be shocked that you've gone from trusting a biased summary with no documentation to back it up to freaking making things up? Please tell me where even the summary claims that the school system was "shocked" that the students found a way to bypass the filters. Do note that the claims of "up to 3 months" suspensions does not support this in the least. The bit about the "knee-jerk" reaction also does not support this as that was added by the editor, Cliff, not by the original author. That's just Cliff's knee-jerk reaction to the summary.
It's getting to be a bit obvious after reading a few of your posts in this thread that you're letting your gut reaction to this summary override your brain. Drop the gut emotional reaction, go back and reread the summary a few times with a critical eye. Notice how little it tells you and how biased it's written and how biased the author of it is. Then decide if your stance is justified, I think you may be a bit surprised at what you've been saying once you do this.
No, clearly they have far more free time to look for open proxies to bypass the block list than the admins have to find them to add to it. There's nothing clever about this, go Google it, that one specific search has 426,000 results and that's probably not the best way to find them all. It's certainly not the only one, and that's a huge amount of sites to add to the block list, even if you assume you find only one proxy on average per result.
Go reread the summary, it says "up to 3 months". The submitter has a very obvious bias against the school district and that phrase could mean one kid got hit with a 3 month suspension and the rest got 1 day. In fact the summary doesn't even directly state the suspensions were because of bypassing the filters, although it certainly implies it. We also don't know how severe their transgressions were, were they just trying to access a gaming site or MySpace or were they caught using those proxies to browse porn from a school computer? Were these repeat offenses? The suspensions very well may have been quite legitimate punishment for these students but we simply have not been given the information to determine that. Try to look beyond the submitter's bias to see what little we've really been told. Overall the summary is mostly a rant by the submitter against his former school system's IT department.
Most school systems indeed know and accept this, but there's more to this than you realize. The federal funding for K-12 Internet access comes with strings attached that require filtering. Failure to make a good effort to filter out that which the feds require can lose a school system that funding, something none of them can afford. Also just because people are going to break the rules does not mean you ignore them when they get caught doing it. Students are punished for all kinds of rules that they break, getting punished for breaking the Internet Acceptable Usage Policy is no different. Are you seriously suggesting that K-12 school system's IT department and teachers should just ignore it when they catch a student breaking the rules to bypass the filtering? While I wouldn't support a stupid zero-tolerance policy on punishing students caught doing so I believe they should be punished. At the very least they should be monitored more closely by the teacher who catches them. Depending on what site/sites they were caught accessing, and if they had a history of doing this in the past, the punishment should be more severe. I suspect if we had all the facts in this particular matter we'd find out that the students suspended were the worst offenders and repeat ones at that. Most school systems don't suspend students, especially not for 3 months, for getting caught bypassing the Internet filters, even if they're caught doing so to view porn.
Finally note that if this case was as severe as the submitter makes it sound in the summary there would be news articles about it. Despite finding the newspaper for the city the school district is in (and it also serves the county) I could find no mention of this incid
From experience (I was the network admin for a K-12 system up till last year) the #1 site that students try to access that they are blocked from is MySpace.com. At the K-12 level I have yet to hear a single valid reason a student would need access to MySpace from school during school hours. Likewise a lot of sites (porn for example) are also of no valid education use at the K-12 level. (There can be a legit educational need for access to these things at the college level where research projects can delve into subjects that would have parents suing at the K-12 level.) Also Internet access for K-12 schools is funded by the federal government and comes with strings attached -- specific categories of sites that must be blocked. Failure to at least make a good effort to block those sites can quickly have your funding pulled, taking away ALL Internet access for the school system, an event that will have a much more negative impact on students than not being able to access MySpace. MySpace is a particularly nasty problem for K-12 schools since many students tend to post things about what they're going to be doing after school so their friends will know, but don't restrict their profiles (and lie about their age so MySpace doesn't do it automatically). If someone were to abduct a kid/teen after school based on something they posted to MySpace during school and the system hadn't tried to block it, then guess who'll get sued? Yeah, the school system will.
At least in the state I worked in, the blocklist, which is controlled by the state, makes a strong effort to not block legitimate sites that talk about homosexuality, breast cancer, AIDs, safe sex, etc. All teachers and staff can submit a request on the page that comes up when a site is blocked for that site to be re-reviewed so all a student needs to do is tell their teacher what the site contains and why they need access to it. The teacher can then request the site be re-reviewed if they deem it a legit need. (And it's amazing how few of those requests teachers get compared to all the complaints students make about sites being blocked. If you look at the block logs you'll quickly see that around 99% of them are for sites that have no educational uses.)
I should note that not all sites that have no educational value get blocked, but ones that are getting abused (high traffic during school hours, especially sites with games on them) will end up added. In those cases the students bring this on themselves by abusing the ability to access the site, in particular accessing it at times they are supposed to be learning (like in a lab class before the lesson is over with).
Which is a fancy way of saying "students break the rules because they don't agree with them". There's lots of teens that break laws that they don't agree with (this isn't anything new either), yet if they get caught breaking said laws they get punished. The only difference is one of degree, breaking a law versus the school's rules. Both are wrong, most of the time the students know full well that both are wrong, and willfully break them anyway. By not punishing them you're teaching them what exactly? That it's OK to break any rule (and laws are rules too, just with more severe repercussions for breaking them) that they dislike? This is going to help them be productive members of society how?
Sorry, but you're an idiot. Tell you what, get a job somewhere that has an Internet Acceptable Use Policy that forbids looking at porn from your work computer and also backs that up by using a blocklist/proxy. Find a proxy server out there that isn't blocked from work, then use it to surf porn on your office PC. When you get caught and they go to discipline you tell them your theory above and see if it helps. (Hint: It won't.)
Whenever a user is willfully finding ways around network restrictions they become a security problem. This is especially true since the vast majority of network intrusions come from inside. Perhaps using a proxy server to get around a blacklist seems minor to you, but it can be a very major thing. In my example above your viewing porn at work could open up the business to a sexual harassment lawsuit if a woman happens by and sees you viewing it. Why do you think certain sites are blocked in the first place? It's not that the network admins are maliciously denying users/students access to certain sites, there are very good legal reasons to block most things! In a K-12 school system this is particularly so, if the system doesn't make a serious effort to block sites they can lose their government funding for Internet access. Do you think it's OK to let a few kids break the rules and get to blocked sites when it may mean the entire school (or district) losing Internet access? Is that really censorship?
What article? The only link in the summary is to the school district's web site. There is no news article linked about this. The submitter is hardly unbiased either, they admit they broke the rules while going to a school in the same district and even though they were punished for it, they continued to break them the same way until they graduated. I'm sorry, what they say about these suspensions may very well be 100% accurate, but given their bias I'm inclined to think they either didn't have the full story to report or they left out inconvenient facts that'd have made the suspensions look quite sensible. Perhaps these students had been warned and punished in the past for using proxies against the AUP and continued to do so, so they were suspended the next time they were caught? Could be, we simply don't know for sure because the submitter's bias if far too strongly aligned with rulebreaking being considered OK to trust that we have the full story.
You know, you need to go read the summary again very carefully. Even with the bias ther
While I think you're over-generalizing a tad (I've met teens that were much smarter than college students so not all teens are idiots), I would dare say it's the principal's job to assist in the education of the teens in his school, including the one who put up the fake MySpace profile. Exactly what type of lesson has he taught them from all of this? That adults act like a bunch of kids fighting on the playground when insulted? That even the principal, the highest authority in their school will act like a total idiot and neglect his job duties to go on a personal vendetta when he discovers his students are insulting him? Sure what the kid did was libel (not slander, slander's spoken), but the principal has completely failed in his duties and provided a perfectly horrible example to ALL of his students, not just the one who put up the fake profile. There's no defending that part, suing over the libel? Sure, not a problem. Diverting school resources to a personal vendetta? Now that's a major problem, and much worse than the libel the kid did because it affected the education of every damn kid in the school.
One thing you failed to mention is that the kid created the libelous profile from home, not from one of the school's computers. The principal used pretty much all of the school's computing resources to go on a personal vendetta against the kids (the one who created the profile plus students posting comments on it). I'd say neither one was considering the implications of their actions ahead of time.
So sue, don't disrupt the entire damn school and fuck up the education of hundreds of kids just because you were "emotionally distraught". We pay teachers, and principals even more so, to deal with this type of stuff and to educate our kids. Also think about what's happened with this thanks to the principal's over reaction. How emotionally distraught do you think his daughter is about his looking like a total ass in front of the entire nation now? What's worse is he can't blame this on libel, people are going to look at his actions and come to their own conclusions, but many are going to think he's acting like a spoiled brat.
You kinda contradict yourself here, how can "the student's work [be] malicious in nature" if he "do[es] not understand and [did] not consider [the] implications of their actions before doing something stupid"? You can't have it both ways, if they didn't understand then it wasn't malicious, if they did understand then it was. In the first case I think an apology would have worked just fine, IF the principal hadn't over reacted and escalated this into a much larger issue than it could have been. Now that he's managed to drag it into the national spotlight I suppose an apology won't cut it, but neither will winning a lawsuit against the student get his reputation back. He's earned a new reputation for himself, one not based on the profile's libelous claims at all, and this reputation isn't beneficial to him either.
The catch is that it's a good deal to pay only for an hours worth of good music. The music industry's decisions over the last decade or so have greatly reduced the availability of good new albums. How many albums of the last 5 years can you honestly say you'd want to listen to every track on? How many of those do you like maybe 2-3 songs max? Is it still a good deal to pay $15 for 2-3 good songs? (We're in the $5 a song range at this point.)
Older albums that still have a majority of good music on them are worth more (at least to me), but since they're older now I'm not willing to pay $15 or more for them. I'd pay $10 pretty happily, especially for a physical CD, but it's pretty damn annoying that those albums tend to come with the bare minimum CD booklet. Just because it's older and I'm paying only $10 instead of $15 or more doesn't mean I don't want (and deserve) to get the lyrics with my damn CD.
Because this is the market the RIAA created with their idiotic decisions over the last decade or two. They killed the singles market and at the same time started forcing full albums to have only 2-3 good songs and the rest filler crap. This was done out of greed, they wanted you to pay them $20 for the same songs you would have paid around $5 for on singles. People were sick and tired of getting raped buying CDs so they started trading them online. Even though technology overtook their business plan they fought it tooth and nail. They then moved on to suing their customers to try and force them to go back to the old method of paying $15-20 for only 2-3 tracks they wanted. Unsurprisingly to anyone but the RIAA, this didn't work either.
So now you have a market that's used to only 2-3 songs being worth listening to on any album and only interested in those songs and not the rest. It's not the general public that killed off the album as a format, it's the recording industry. As for the quality of the music, that's also the recording industry's fault. They decided to promote mainly the crap stuff and sell it by having pretty "singers" instead of quality. And now they're paying the price for their stupidity, the market rebelled and they may go under as a result. Society is paying the price with quality music being less available.
On the bright side once the shift is complete I think we'll see quality come back as the recording industry loses its stranglehold on promotion and distribution. I'm afraid the album as a format is mostly dead though, the public is too used to singles and random shuffle play. I have to admit that even though I enjoy some of the old good albums, I like my music on random shuffle better. It's nice to have the variety.
I've sworn off Diebold ones, it's not even very difficult to do. I've not seen any of the in-store debit card things made by Diebold around here and I can go into any store that has those and buy a small item and get cash back quite simply. I end up paying less fees this way as well (since my bank charges me fees for using even their own ATMs).
That fear is justified, I won't use my bank's ATMs because they're made by Diebold. Given all the horrendous security gaffs Diebold has made over their voting machines (like having a picture of the key that opens them up on their website) I'm not comfortable using my debit card in anything they've designed. How do I know that the ATM was treated with any higher level of security on Diebold's end? Frankly I'm convinced there are just as many security issues with their ATMs, that they just haven't gotten as much bad publicity yet. I'm not likely to trust their equipment in the future either, and if I was ever in a position to be buying their products I'll certainly chose a competitor.
Voting, but I have to deal with money year-round whereas we only have elections once a year at most here. Thankfully we don't have Diebold voting machines, but I'll still be avoiding their ATMs. Any company with their security track record doesn't deserve my trust or business.
Using Firefox 1.5.0.10 here and the demo's only semi-working. I typed what it said exactly and all it showed was "C:\bo". While it's not good that it managed to pick up any of it, working intermittantly like that isn't going to be doing any attackers any good. I wonder if the script's screwing up if you type too fast or something.