When you say "it becomes a criminal action", you are disagreeing with the first judge, Nancy Fiora, Magistrate Judge of the US District Court in Arizona who found it legal. The fact that it's going to the Supreme Court means it's at least _unclear_ whether the school had the right for this search. And you obviously have some idea of student's rights that is not founded in history or law, because a student's locker and bag are most certainly within a school's right to search for drugs or weapons, without a warrant or a parent present, under previously established court precedents. And the very concept of not searching because it "might involve the psychological mindset of the child" is just plain silly. Doing homework involves "the psychological mindset of the child". So does teaching math, or science, or religious history, or having mixed genders and races and religions, and schools are _supposed_ to affect a child's "psychological mindset".
And no, this strip search was not "punishment", although it's certainly degrading. The school was doing investigation, not punishment: there is an _enormous_ difference.
Look, I don't like this strip search. It sounds ridiculous, and I'm glad the US Supreme Court is examining it, because I don't think it's reasonable. But the idea that the school was doing something automatically illegal is based on an idea of children's rights that is just not founded in older law or history, and is only recently remotely justified in custom and law.
And 512 Meg leave my RHEL and Debian systsems running _fine_. Leaving out most of the semi-graphical debris in the Windows toolbar is a big help, as is the superior Linux handling of virtual memory. (Windows NT and XP memory handling is basically from VMS, and while it's done fairly well for the kernel, for the programs, it's not well used.)
_Oh_. I understand your point, but I think there are problems with that distinction, too. A criminal conviction, even if the records are sealed with a child hits 18, certainly affects their education. And this behavior wasn't criminal: the search was for ibuprofen in prescription strength. That's certainly not a narcotic: I'd be very, very surprised if it were a felony in that state.
Schools are in a tough position for this sort of thing. A zero-tolerance policy is much, much easier to handle and enforce than requiring subtle judgment on a case by case basis.
Yes, I've actually grabbed cracked versions of games I bought in order to play them from DVD image instead of having to insert a CD or DVD. I always considered that kind of requirement unreasonable.
They should just use throw out all the personal pictures of fat people. By displaying only slim pictures, I'm sure they could save a great deal of bandwidth.
Worse: managing developers and getting them to play well together is tricky. When one team freewheels well, another has a micromanaging leader who is really _good_ at it, and another is using Agile programming, getting them all under the same corporate umbreall is awkward. It's compounded by merging in-house technologies: employment listings, accounting systems, webpages, Active Directory versus LDAP, CIFS versus NFS versus local storage and backup for file sharing, Perforce versus Bitkeeper versus CVS for source control, etc., all mount up surprisingly in lost productivity for doing a merge.
I've worked in a company that bought out a small company in a related field: it was an amiable purchase, the products were a good fit, and the developers became pretty thrilled with the fiscal benefit and their stock options. But the new location stank for them, they got split up to different groups, and small companies are far more flexible for new technologies.) So most of them drifted away over the next few years, and their former, exciting product leadership was lost entirely.
The argument is nonsense. It's like selling or shipping someone the components and assembly directions to violate a patent: they can choose to assemble them in a way that doesn't violate the patent, but by providing the instructions to assemble it in a specific order, Bittorrent provider is directly supporting the intellectual property vioalation.
I don't usually compare patent law to copyright law, but this one is obvious.
Quite right. _Superseding_ the parents' rights over a child's welfare is completely out of line, except in cases where the parents are clearly abusive and the state becomes an agent of the state to protect the child's rights. But a school can't punish a child themselves? That is often well within the school's legal and social domain. It used to include corporal punishment as a matter of course: that's rare, now, but certainly includes extra homework and detention.
If it's "probably patentable", it's probably already been patented. Companies that take their IP seriously and engage in electronic development are very good at writing broad patents to protect their market from minor advancements. Unless your idea is already in the patent process and you have a competent patent attorney who's already helped you write the application, your idea is unlikely to be patented, and you are very likely to be robbed. Look at the history of the Microsoft Mouse patent lawsuits for examples of big companies ripping off small developers for clever improvement ideas, and _NEVER_ rely on an NDA with a big company to prevent them from rebranding and profiting from work you discussed in a closed meeting with them, looking for investment funds.
And discriminating based on age and race and physical appearance and sexuality is also stupid, right? Goodness, you're optimistic. Even where it's not directly applicable, the biases exist for interviewers and hiring managers.
Hiring a kid who doesn't have all the skills, but is young and trainable, over a more experienced older worker who already has their preferred approach to doing tasks, for example, makes reasonable sense. So does hiring a foolish but gifted programmer who thinks they're the next Steve Jobs, so you can use them up and dump them when you sell the small company. (I watched that happen to some younger acquaintances of mine a few years ago: only 2 of the 5 in the start-up made anywhere near the value of all their work, since the other 3 hadn't had long enough to accumulate the options, although they also massively contributed to making the company saleable.) And so does hiring someone without a spouse or kids for a job that involves late nights (as crunch time in software projects sometimes does).
Conversely, hiring someone who can pick up and start over and do a decent job in a long and difficult task, like getting a new degree in their 30's to pursue a new field, makes _complete_ sense in a reasonably stable company's IT or support groups where the world reboots every 5 years or so. But convincing an HR manager or interviewer of that, when they just got hired straight out of their local business school, is potentially awkward.
I agree about such keyboards being better for your hands. Having to use a bit of force to activate a key provides better hand strength and better hand position, and the physical feedback does help avoid typos (at least for we who learned on manual typewriters).
One of the reasons the machines don't get turned off is the expensive 5 minutes wasted by boot times. It's an irritating waste of precious time as you return from lunch or start work in the morning, it discourages turning off boxes at night, and it discourages turning off boxes during the day when unused.
Unfortunately, this is partly the fault of Microsoft (who enourage stupid, resource gobbling behavior at boot time like frequent resource scanning by update software and unnecessary disk indexing), and BIOS's that use ancient, proprietary, and frankly broken tools to scan for hardware that hasn't been used in 10 years. The OLPC very successfully uses a LinuxBIOS and booting procedure that cuts this lengthy pause to seconds: it should be on every server and most desktops in the country, but motherboard makers are very reluctant to support it for various reasons. As near as I can tell, it's mostly due to fear of intellectual property issues involving ancient BIOS utilities, and unwillingness to publish their own hardware knowledge associated with their own particular component selection.
I'd love to see ASUS use LinuxBIOS by default. I've actually been asked to do that for deployments: it wasn't mature enough to use yet at that time, but it seems much more stable now and of higher quality than the average new motherboard BIOS.
Oh, my. What la-la land of children's rights have you been living in? Until they're 18 or emancipated, parents have pretty full control. This includes searching their room, searching their person, and forcing medical care. And unless you've had to help with a 16 year-old drug using relative who didn't want to be searched after you drove them home from where they shouldn't have been, and have their room and clothes searched, I suspect you have _no_ experience in the matter.
It may have been different in your state, but in the state where I was, when the kid tried complaining the next day, it took the cops a while to point out the facts of life to the kid. They did call us to check, but were glad we were taking responsibility and making their jobs easier. And the kid did have pot paraphernalia in their room, despite all their claims to the contrary, which we certainly did not mention to the cops, but they were familiar with the household we recovered the kid from.
Don't forgot user passwords stored in cleartext by Subversion and unencrypted SSH passwords. When I'm in an NFS environment, I like to run a check for user home directories with passwords and passkeys stored that way, to use it to explain to people they shouldn't use their Subversion passwords for anything else, and to explain in very, very harsh terms that they need to encrypt their SSH keys.
They're too easy to wipe when attached. But yes, they're fabulous live image repositories, and they're good staging media to do a fast snapshot or rsnapshot or database dump and make the tape from the live media. It's then vastly, vastly faster to export the live disk for people to recover files from than it is to mount tapes or run fancy recovery clients with.
So, can my child with AIDS borrow your child's inhaler? Or can your child with diabetes borrow another student's insulin and syringes? Or should a female student with stomach cramps borrow some ibuprofen from a classmate, only to discover later that she's pregnant and the fetus is damaged? (Ibuprofen is teratogenic.)
Children _should not_ be providing each other prescription medication, even if it's only a modest painkiller. The student ratting out another student is poor cause for a strip search, but schools should react firmly to this kind of situation.
I'm afraid that a teacher or principal has a _great deal_ of authority over schoolkids. It's only fairly recently that many school districtus and states have barred teachers from using physical punishment, and it's certainly not unconstitutional. (There are many, many years of precedent permitting it.) And schools are _supposed_ to act in the position of parents to protect children's safety.
It's unclear why you think they wouldn't have authority: there are certainly precedents for property searches, for detaining children against their will, and for providing medical treatment agains children's wishes. They're _children_, in the care of the schools: the children's rights are automatically limited by that relationship. Whether the schools' authority extends to strip searches is a fascinating issue: I'm looking forward to seeing the results of this one.
If I may quote: "A Knife Always Works". That was Larry Niven, writing about a fight between a sorcerer and an amazingly powerful demon. I suspect similar principles will still apply concerning lower tech weapons for a long, long time.
Unfortunately, unless you get a conviction of your employer or the guilty employees, it's a very serious potential nightmare to establish that they were doing an illegal act that would allow you to violate your NDA. And it's to a large, criminal company's advantage to stomp you _flat_ if you expose criminal wrongdoing, to keep you hushed up and the court records sealed, to discourage other potential whistleblowers, and to allow them to portray you as an unreliable witness with a personal grudge in any further proceedings. I've personally seen one case (involving sexual abuse, not IP) where exactly this occurred to the whistleblower, who had one heck of a time finding work after that and tried, desperately, to file civil lawsuits for being blackballed by her former superviros.
I've sadly seen several others where employees who complained too much about unlicensed software or illegal acts were let go more quietly, as "not team players" and "hampering productivity". This was partly due to frustration on the employee's parts, but I've certainly engaged in my own gentle forms of warfare against such software. (90% employee software discounts? For 200 copies purchased by the spouse of the vice president, purchased in lots of 5? Oh, please! I got us off of that software ASAP!)
You forgot '-3 fired', especially if it would cause a non-disclosure lawsuit for which he could be sued to bankruptcy, even if the company or the previous IT manager are prosecuted. It's also death on job recommendations or resume.
The OP needs to talk to the previous software purchasers or employees about how they got things, and ideally get _in writing_ who claims that software licenses exist. I've had to crack DRM on software to extract data for migration to open source, and explain to people that their laptops with their own "downloaded" copies of software could not sit inside the corporate network to protect the company and _me_ from lawsuit. It doesn't always work: but a company that steals this way is often stealing from their own employees in other ways, and is usually a good place to leave ASAP.
An SSH access to the server wouldn't be blocked, true. The existing IRC control channel would, and IRC has turned into a swamp of abuse, not justifying the bandwidth it takes up in any commercial and most social environments. And monitorinig IRC is _painful_, because of the tendency for raw traffic from spewing idiots to fill the logs. It's just not worth leaving unfiltered.
This is not just flamebait, but a serious policy: IRC has been a popular protocol for years, but with the advent of more secure and less abused protocols, there is no modern excuse for permitting IRC through any network or system firewalls. That helps cut the painful-to-monitor control channel.
In fact, most corporate and institutional firewalls should only allow a few registered and useful protocols through their breaches, such as HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, and SSH, and even those can often be funneled to a small set of securable servers. Yes, it interferes with the random-service-of-the-moment that some folks demand as their right. If they want such rights, they can pay the cost of running a host isolated by more secure firewalls and software management, outside the more trusted internal environment: folks should not expect both easy sharing of resources, and external access.
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When you say "it becomes a criminal action", you are disagreeing with the first judge, Nancy Fiora, Magistrate Judge of the US District Court in Arizona who found it legal. The fact that it's going to the Supreme Court means it's at least _unclear_ whether the school had the right for this search. And you obviously have some idea of student's rights that is not founded in history or law, because a student's locker and bag are most certainly within a school's right to search for drugs or weapons, without a warrant or a parent present, under previously established court precedents. And the very concept of not searching because it "might involve the psychological mindset of the child" is just plain silly. Doing homework involves "the psychological mindset of the child". So does teaching math, or science, or religious history, or having mixed genders and races and religions, and schools are _supposed_ to affect a child's "psychological mindset".
And no, this strip search was not "punishment", although it's certainly degrading. The school was doing investigation, not punishment: there is an _enormous_ difference.
Look, I don't like this strip search. It sounds ridiculous, and I'm glad the US Supreme Court is examining it, because I don't think it's reasonable. But the idea that the school was doing something automatically illegal is based on an idea of children's rights that is just not founded in older law or history, and is only recently remotely justified in custom and law.
And 512 Meg leave my RHEL and Debian systsems running _fine_. Leaving out most of the semi-graphical debris in the Windows toolbar is a big help, as is the superior Linux handling of virtual memory. (Windows NT and XP memory handling is basically from VMS, and while it's done fairly well for the kernel, for the programs, it's not well used.)
_Oh_. I understand your point, but I think there are problems with that distinction, too. A criminal conviction, even if the records are sealed with a child hits 18, certainly affects their education. And this behavior wasn't criminal: the search was for ibuprofen in prescription strength. That's certainly not a narcotic: I'd be very, very surprised if it were a felony in that state. Schools are in a tough position for this sort of thing. A zero-tolerance policy is much, much easier to handle and enforce than requiring subtle judgment on a case by case basis.
And would choosing which kind of fool they are affects their business plan..... how?
Yes, I've actually grabbed cracked versions of games I bought in order to play them from DVD image instead of having to insert a CD or DVD. I always considered that kind of requirement unreasonable.
They should just use throw out all the personal pictures of fat people. By displaying only slim pictures, I'm sure they could save a great deal of bandwidth.
Worse: managing developers and getting them to play well together is tricky. When one team freewheels well, another has a micromanaging leader who is really _good_ at it, and another is using Agile programming, getting them all under the same corporate umbreall is awkward. It's compounded by merging in-house technologies: employment listings, accounting systems, webpages, Active Directory versus LDAP, CIFS versus NFS versus local storage and backup for file sharing, Perforce versus Bitkeeper versus CVS for source control, etc., all mount up surprisingly in lost productivity for doing a merge.
I've worked in a company that bought out a small company in a related field: it was an amiable purchase, the products were a good fit, and the developers became pretty thrilled with the fiscal benefit and their stock options. But the new location stank for them, they got split up to different groups, and small companies are far more flexible for new technologies.) So most of them drifted away over the next few years, and their former, exciting product leadership was lost entirely.
The argument is nonsense. It's like selling or shipping someone the components and assembly directions to violate a patent: they can choose to assemble them in a way that doesn't violate the patent, but by providing the instructions to assemble it in a specific order, Bittorrent provider is directly supporting the intellectual property vioalation.
I don't usually compare patent law to copyright law, but this one is obvious.
Quite right. _Superseding_ the parents' rights over a child's welfare is completely out of line, except in cases where the parents are clearly abusive and the state becomes an agent of the state to protect the child's rights. But a school can't punish a child themselves? That is often well within the school's legal and social domain. It used to include corporal punishment as a matter of course: that's rare, now, but certainly includes extra homework and detention.
If it's "probably patentable", it's probably already been patented. Companies that take their IP seriously and engage in electronic development are very good at writing broad patents to protect their market from minor advancements. Unless your idea is already in the patent process and you have a competent patent attorney who's already helped you write the application, your idea is unlikely to be patented, and you are very likely to be robbed. Look at the history of the Microsoft Mouse patent lawsuits for examples of big companies ripping off small developers for clever improvement ideas, and _NEVER_ rely on an NDA with a big company to prevent them from rebranding and profiting from work you discussed in a closed meeting with them, looking for investment funds.
And discriminating based on age and race and physical appearance and sexuality is also stupid, right? Goodness, you're optimistic. Even where it's not directly applicable, the biases exist for interviewers and hiring managers.
Hiring a kid who doesn't have all the skills, but is young and trainable, over a more experienced older worker who already has their preferred approach to doing tasks, for example, makes reasonable sense. So does hiring a foolish but gifted programmer who thinks they're the next Steve Jobs, so you can use them up and dump them when you sell the small company. (I watched that happen to some younger acquaintances of mine a few years ago: only 2 of the 5 in the start-up made anywhere near the value of all their work, since the other 3 hadn't had long enough to accumulate the options, although they also massively contributed to making the company saleable.) And so does hiring someone without a spouse or kids for a job that involves late nights (as crunch time in software projects sometimes does).
Conversely, hiring someone who can pick up and start over and do a decent job in a long and difficult task, like getting a new degree in their 30's to pursue a new field, makes _complete_ sense in a reasonably stable company's IT or support groups where the world reboots every 5 years or so. But convincing an HR manager or interviewer of that, when they just got hired straight out of their local business school, is potentially awkward.
I agree about such keyboards being better for your hands. Having to use a bit of force to activate a key provides better hand strength and better hand position, and the physical feedback does help avoid typos (at least for we who learned on manual typewriters).
One of the reasons the machines don't get turned off is the expensive 5 minutes wasted by boot times. It's an irritating waste of precious time as you return from lunch or start work in the morning, it discourages turning off boxes at night, and it discourages turning off boxes during the day when unused.
Unfortunately, this is partly the fault of Microsoft (who enourage stupid, resource gobbling behavior at boot time like frequent resource scanning by update software and unnecessary disk indexing), and BIOS's that use ancient, proprietary, and frankly broken tools to scan for hardware that hasn't been used in 10 years. The OLPC very successfully uses a LinuxBIOS and booting procedure that cuts this lengthy pause to seconds: it should be on every server and most desktops in the country, but motherboard makers are very reluctant to support it for various reasons. As near as I can tell, it's mostly due to fear of intellectual property issues involving ancient BIOS utilities, and unwillingness to publish their own hardware knowledge associated with their own particular component selection.
I'd love to see ASUS use LinuxBIOS by default. I've actually been asked to do that for deployments: it wasn't mature enough to use yet at that time, but it seems much more stable now and of higher quality than the average new motherboard BIOS.
Oh, my. What la-la land of children's rights have you been living in? Until they're 18 or emancipated, parents have pretty full control. This includes searching their room, searching their person, and forcing medical care. And unless you've had to help with a 16 year-old drug using relative who didn't want to be searched after you drove them home from where they shouldn't have been, and have their room and clothes searched, I suspect you have _no_ experience in the matter. It may have been different in your state, but in the state where I was, when the kid tried complaining the next day, it took the cops a while to point out the facts of life to the kid. They did call us to check, but were glad we were taking responsibility and making their jobs easier. And the kid did have pot paraphernalia in their room, despite all their claims to the contrary, which we certainly did not mention to the cops, but they were familiar with the household we recovered the kid from.
Don't forgot user passwords stored in cleartext by Subversion and unencrypted SSH passwords. When I'm in an NFS environment, I like to run a check for user home directories with passwords and passkeys stored that way, to use it to explain to people they shouldn't use their Subversion passwords for anything else, and to explain in very, very harsh terms that they need to encrypt their SSH keys.
They're too easy to wipe when attached. But yes, they're fabulous live image repositories, and they're good staging media to do a fast snapshot or rsnapshot or database dump and make the tape from the live media. It's then vastly, vastly faster to export the live disk for people to recover files from than it is to mount tapes or run fancy recovery clients with.
So, can my child with AIDS borrow your child's inhaler? Or can your child with diabetes borrow another student's insulin and syringes? Or should a female student with stomach cramps borrow some ibuprofen from a classmate, only to discover later that she's pregnant and the fetus is damaged? (Ibuprofen is teratogenic.)
Children _should not_ be providing each other prescription medication, even if it's only a modest painkiller. The student ratting out another student is poor cause for a strip search, but schools should react firmly to this kind of situation.
I'm afraid that a teacher or principal has a _great deal_ of authority over schoolkids. It's only fairly recently that many school districtus and states have barred teachers from using physical punishment, and it's certainly not unconstitutional. (There are many, many years of precedent permitting it.) And schools are _supposed_ to act in the position of parents to protect children's safety.
It's unclear why you think they wouldn't have authority: there are certainly precedents for property searches, for detaining children against their will, and for providing medical treatment agains children's wishes. They're _children_, in the care of the schools: the children's rights are automatically limited by that relationship. Whether the schools' authority extends to strip searches is a fascinating issue: I'm looking forward to seeing the results of this one.
If I may quote: "A Knife Always Works". That was Larry Niven, writing about a fight between a sorcerer and an amazingly powerful demon. I suspect similar principles will still apply concerning lower tech weapons for a long, long time.
Unfortunately, unless you get a conviction of your employer or the guilty employees, it's a very serious potential nightmare to establish that they were doing an illegal act that would allow you to violate your NDA. And it's to a large, criminal company's advantage to stomp you _flat_ if you expose criminal wrongdoing, to keep you hushed up and the court records sealed, to discourage other potential whistleblowers, and to allow them to portray you as an unreliable witness with a personal grudge in any further proceedings. I've personally seen one case (involving sexual abuse, not IP) where exactly this occurred to the whistleblower, who had one heck of a time finding work after that and tried, desperately, to file civil lawsuits for being blackballed by her former superviros.
I've sadly seen several others where employees who complained too much about unlicensed software or illegal acts were let go more quietly, as "not team players" and "hampering productivity". This was partly due to frustration on the employee's parts, but I've certainly engaged in my own gentle forms of warfare against such software. (90% employee software discounts? For 200 copies purchased by the spouse of the vice president, purchased in lots of 5? Oh, please! I got us off of that software ASAP!)
And avoid the spamming from the vendor for the next 8 years.
You forgot '-3 fired', especially if it would cause a non-disclosure lawsuit for which he could be sued to bankruptcy, even if the company or the previous IT manager are prosecuted. It's also death on job recommendations or resume.
The OP needs to talk to the previous software purchasers or employees about how they got things, and ideally get _in writing_ who claims that software licenses exist. I've had to crack DRM on software to extract data for migration to open source, and explain to people that their laptops with their own "downloaded" copies of software could not sit inside the corporate network to protect the company and _me_ from lawsuit. It doesn't always work: but a company that steals this way is often stealing from their own employees in other ways, and is usually a good place to leave ASAP.
An SSH access to the server wouldn't be blocked, true. The existing IRC control channel would, and IRC has turned into a swamp of abuse, not justifying the bandwidth it takes up in any commercial and most social environments. And monitorinig IRC is _painful_, because of the tendency for raw traffic from spewing idiots to fill the logs. It's just not worth leaving unfiltered.
Because you're an idiot, and you think that because it's Linux it's "safe".
This is not just flamebait, but a serious policy: IRC has been a popular protocol for years, but with the advent of more secure and less abused protocols, there is no modern excuse for permitting IRC through any network or system firewalls. That helps cut the painful-to-monitor control channel.
In fact, most corporate and institutional firewalls should only allow a few registered and useful protocols through their breaches, such as HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, and SSH, and even those can often be funneled to a small set of securable servers. Yes, it interferes with the random-service-of-the-moment that some folks demand as their right. If they want such rights, they can pay the cost of running a host isolated by more secure firewalls and software management, outside the more trusted internal environment: folks should not expect both easy sharing of resources, and external access.