So how do you invalidate your vote as a protest against both candidates (without being an apathetic non-voter)? There are people who consider it their civic duty to vote, even if they spoil their ballot to vote for neither, how does a 'vote for one or the other' system accommodate such people? how do you use such machines in a compulsory voting environment?
In fact in my state you do not even need your license on your person to drive Why is that unusual? Do you cease to be a qualified driver if you aren't carrying a piece of plastic?
Over here in the UK if you can't produce your license you get 7 days to take it to a police station or they come and take you away and no-one ever sees you again, or something.
Admittedly that does mean that police can pull people over solely for the purpose of checking their documents (which no-one ever carries) just to harass them and waste some of their time going to a police station.
It's an altogether bad situation having 'drivers licenses' which specifically entitle you to drive rather than a non-orwellian method of proving that you are person XYZ on the national list of people qualified to drive. (Why do you need a 'drivers license' if you can prove your identity and the DVLA can then confirm that such a person has a license?)
requirement of anonymity?
We have a secret ballot over here, but there's no law compelling you to keep secret who you voted for if you choose not to. Why is such a law useful?
'can not' or 'is not'?
'is not' is true, 'can not' doesn't make any sense. There is absolutely no logical reason to hold someone punishable for something that they didn't know they weren't allowed to do (It doesn't serve as a deterrent to them or anyone else [deterring people from doing something that they don't know is illegal], it doesn't rehabilitate them, it doesn't protect society). The reason for it is solely that law enforcement doesn't like the common man having a trump card. "You have offended against our laws and we're going to punish you for it, regardless of whether it's right, just or reasonable to do so. Because we can and we need to punish someone"
Oh, and the fact that no doubt people who DID know something was illegal would try to claim ignorance and it would be hard to prove otherwise. Unfortunately that does mean that in cases where someone truly doesn't know that something is illegal they get screwed anyway.
The European convention on human rights bans 'punishment without law' this includes laws that aren't knowable (so, yeah, it includes the exception for ignorance not being a defence, because no-one would have ratified it otherwise) but it's not a hard step to see how laws that aren't published are no different from laws that are published but you've never heard of when you look at the 'is this action against the law?' thought process before doing anything. Now, if that process outputs 'no', you haven't got a criminal intent anymore, with no criminal intent, where's the justification for punishing someone as a criminal?
bah! that does suck. I'm firmly of the belief that in an exam ANYTHING that takes the specified input and puts the right result out is a 'correct' answer and should be marked on how well you're implemented your solution, not how well you've implemented the intended solution.
Assignments and tests are different, you should take the time to do them in accordance with 'best practice', but in an exam situation anything that works should be a right answer.
yeah, well, you see, he was doing some stuff with the numbers, and due to his incompetence with statistics he tried dividing the number of computers by the probability and his computer magically stopped working.
Generally, in Europe free speech is as protected as in the US, it's just that national governments haven't got their heads around it yet, and it takes an extremely determined person to take it all the way to European human right court. Even then it takes an age to get a decision and governments, not liking being smacked-down, tend to drag their heels over doing anything about it.
Case in point, curfews. The British government (the police, to be precise) decided to issue a curfew banning all under 18's form being on the street unaccompanied after 9pm, wether or not they'd actually committed a crime. It was taken, by a young person who felt it was unfair, to the high court which ruled on the police's side only because the person who brought the case hadn't been affected by it. (he'd not actually been detained, he'd been trying to get it overturned so he could go out legally, rather than going out illegally.) The judge specifically said that he would have ruled against the police if the person in question had been detained & taken home. The ruling was because the curfew was incompatible with human rights legislation.
Fast forward 6 months to halloween. Kids are a pain, as they tend to be at halloween. Chief constable says 'we're considering using curfews next year'. They've been told it will be illegal for them to do it, but until they actually get properly defeated in court they aren't going to stop, why? because there's no loss to them to keep doing it until they're told that they must stop.
The same attitude applies with restrictions on freedom of speech, it may be technically illegal to impose the restrictions, but a national government will go ahead anyway until someone raps them on the knuckles for it.
Routers aren't cheap, not good ones anyway. Of course, I don't know how much it costs them to provide the modems, but I suspect that a router with a built in modem costs more than the modem on it's own.
Also consider the fact that cable modems (as opposed to ADSL ones) aren't found built into routers (at least, I've never seen one), if the cable providers started providing them instead of the basic modems they'd have to start giving out a considerably more complex piece of kit and wouldn't be able to get off-the-shelf ones. That would seem to me to be an expensive solution compared to the driver CD having Zonealarm, Spyboy, AD-Aware and AVG free edition on it and it taking care of the installations itself (rather than: 'there's some good software on here, go install it yourself if you can be bothered/are technically competent enough to do it').
ah, but brainiac confirmed the 'man-wearing-a-nylon-tracksuit-in-a-plastic-bucket + fumes' myth.
BTW, most of us know that brainiac isn't a science show and isn't trying to be a science show, it's just a good excuse to blow caravans up.
yes. A search warrant is really just a piece of paper that makes something that you would otherwise baulk at, 'OK because the paper says so'. Having said that, search warrants are here to stay and incorporating them into the usage of scheme 3 would be a good idea. Scheme 2 is still out thought there are substantially more bad uses for such data two years or more down the line (using people's movements from two years ago as evidence, following people to wait for them to slip up, being out-to-get someone) not to mention that fact that such data is really quite worthless since the location of your car is not evidence of the location of you, but it will be spun as valuable concrete evidence. (see; speeding fines being sent to the owner of the vehicle and the onus being on them to prove that they weren't driving the vehicle [and in doing so turn someone else in])
Interestingly enough the police response to this (admittedly dreadful) incident is over the top relative to how much effort they put into other murders. An incident room with 30 officers or more may be turned onto a murder normally, a few hundred officers is noteworthy (in murder investigation terms) as far as I can gather half of Yorkshire police force (as well as people from other forces) have been working on this.
This, coupled with an ex-chief of one of the police forces calling for reinstatement of the death penalty for those who kill police officers is pointing to a 'nice' system that the police are setting up for themselves; it's more wrong to kill a police officer than anyone else. I suppose trying to make that point and protect themselves is human nature, the test is wether the politicians will be stupid enough to enforce such a dangerous point of view with legislation.
do they:
1) input a number plate that they want to track and it pings every time they pass a camera, discarding records of number plates which aren't the ones being tracked (i.e. recognise plate, check against list of plates being looked for, if it's not on the list, discard)
2) record every number plate and look through the logs to look when a particular one passed a particular camera, then keeping the logs until forever.
3) some sort of hybrid, like keeping the logs for 24 hours to see what happened earlier in the day, but killing them after that. (like some sort of caching system)
No1 I'd just about support (so long as there were adequate safeguards to make sure that it was only used to track suspects (not potential suspects) and I'd just about stretch to No3 so long as the logs really were being killed.
No2, however, is a BIG no-no. Automated camera systems to track the movements of every car in the country and then keep that on a permanent record are VERY bad (although I suspect that is what happens). When did spending a vast sum on public money on an automated system to track the car-using public go through parliament?
And another thing, where do the police get the idea that it's a given that they can 'deny the use of the roads to criminals'? take this very case, right now these people are SUSPECTS they haven't even been charged, as such they aren't 'criminals'. Someone explain why being a suspect means that you're no longer entitled to use the roads without being tracked? They'll be wanting tracking bugs in shoes next 'to deny criminals use of their feet'
ah, but in that case it was a pilot scheme and everyone was given a free digibox if they didn't have one already.
What I'm more concerned about is the learning curve, rather than the price though. Some members of the elderly community (for wont of a better word) have enough difficulty getting their heads around a normal analogue TV with 5 channels where you press 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 for video for the channel you want. Hand them a digibox plugged into their TV and tell them "it's 6 for video and 'AV' for regular TV, which you then have to choose with this remote. To change the volume you have to use the TV remote though, and channel four is on 009, News24 is on 080 and BBC2West is on 790-something, go to 790 and fish around until you find it", they'll never understand and will just get annoyed that they've had their TV effectively robbed away from them.
No, they won't be going out to buy a brand new digital TV, that's really just too much expense.
ok, speed limit it 70 MPH
Person infront of me is doing 65 MPH
I have 300 miles to travel today
The difference in travelling time is slightly under 1/2 and hour
What if I have 600 miles to do? that's nearly an hour on top.
Ok, how about 1200 miles? (I'm not suggesting you do this in one go, you should definately have two drivers for such a journey) that's two extra hours, just from going 5MPH slower.
Now, say that I pull out 100 yards behind someone and pull back in at 100 yards (and assume that they have a 0 car length). If I'm travelling at 70MPH to overtake them, that's 81 seconds.
You don't spend 81 seconds in the outer lane unless you want every other driver on the road to think that you're an idiot. Once you get into the outer lane you make your overtake and get out as quickly as possible. at 75MPH, 40 seconds and at 79 MPH (the enforcement threshold)~ 31 seconds. Now, you you could use 90MPH you get your overtake done in 16 seconds and be free to continue your journey at 70MPH.
Now, consider the fact that you probably pull out at ~ 50 yards and back in at ~ 25 yards, at 80MPH you'll have overtaken in ~ 10 seconds. The practical difference between 80MPH and the 70MPH speed limit on a motorway over a short distance is negligible.
Also, when the insurer Norwich Union was trialing a system which recorded you speed and location when you drove to see how often you drove over the speed limit and adjust your premiums as necessary, speed-limit breaking for up to 11 seconds at a time was ignored entirely to allow people to overtake.
So, in conclusion, being able to break the speed limit over the short term is necessary to a smooth-running motorway network.
ah, summary justice at it's finest. You can't say Britain it lagging behind on progress, we're handing out new powers to dispense summary justice to the police almost every day, which creating crazy new laws just for summary justice purposes.
I'm moving to sealand.
"the malicious, high-handed and arrogant conduct of the Defendant warrants an award of punitive or exemplary damages to ensure that the Defendant is appropriately punished for her conduct and deterred from such conduct in the future."
The adjectives used at the beginning of that seem to describe the entire complaint, actually.
Basically, they want her punished, and for that reason they should lose the case automatically; criminal law is for punishing, civil law is for settling disputes.
And since when is $2million 'appropriate' to hand down to any 'normal citizen'?
ac goes into data centres, systems run on dc. Either it gets distributed to each computer as ac and converted in a medium-sized box in the back of each system, or it gets converted in one big box and distributed to the systems as dc.
The question is of the efficiency saving of doing all the converting in a big box against the efficiency loss of piping it around the data centre as dc, and wether you get a large total net saving (which I suspect that you do, since even inside the data centre, it's not going far)
anyone with a bit of knowledge of cryptography knows that it would take until long after France becomes a world superpower to crack encryption with a decent key length using a properly secure algorithm.
And anyone with a bit of common sense knows that any self-respecting terrorist is going to do just that.
So why then tell us that 90 days is wanted to crack decryption? It plainly isn't, it's wanted for something else and if mr Bliar doesn't want to tell us what he really wants it for it's safe to assume that it's something that no sane person would want him to have.
There's a worrying trend of giving a totally phony reason to push something through, rather than a pathetic one.
Unfortunately, Mr Bliar knows that a large part of the populace watched '24' with their 'proprietary algorithm' which gets them through mathematically secure encryption in a matter of seconds and so will believe that nasty terrorists use bigger keys which mean that it could take DAYS to break the encryption - it makes you wonder if the "80% of the population support us" statistic that they were trotting out on the news yesterday might actually be right.
well, no, they're not. It's only a shy short of imprisonment (if for a very short time) meted out by someone who isn't the courts with no opportunity for the person being punished to defend themselves. If it wasn't the practise and someone suggested it now, I suspect that they'd be laughed at. A lot. I suppose in a similar way as people who haven't grown up with the death penalty seeing it as barbaric, if people weren't used to the idea of schools giving kids detention since forever they'd be pretty outraged at the idea.
Moving the topic to the side a bit. School administrators - what? When I was in school we had ~ 4 members of 'administrative' staff and they had no contact with the pupils - everything was dealt with by teachers of one sort or another. The school was 'ruled' by the teachers who had non-teaching type people to help them. Not a school run by administrators which also employed teachers to teach kids.
I'm from the UK, incase you're wondering what all the questioning is for.
Surely what we need is a complete generation of young people who care a great deal for their rights, and also know that authority does sometimes need to be ignored/done away with (i.e. when it's corrupt, abused, self-appointed, etc) instead of the present system where about 1% have brains and get shouted down as terrorists/unpatriotic/dissenting when they stand up for their rights.
If everyone stands up for their rights then it will be impossible (or very hard) to remove them.
To use your employer example, if an employer finds that all/almost all of their new workforce refuses to accept rules governing their own time then the employer will have to change the rules - you can't fire/hire most of your workforce every week. The national economy will iron the wrinkles out eventually and everyone will be happier, except the fascists.
can you explain something here for those of us not from, er, wherever you're from.
How does a school keep kids in for a detention on a Saturday? Saturday isn't a school day (is it?) so you'd actually have to turn up there voluntarily to be kept in. Doesn't anyone ever say "uuuh no. Your authority ends at 3:30 PM on Friday and doesn't start again until 9AM Monday, so yaa-boo sucks to you" ?
Compelling kids to come in on a Saturday for detention seems to be the ultimate in schools invading on what kids do on their own time, why is no-one hopping up and down about it?
Slashdot Mirror
My grandmother has a cracking encyclopedia entry on Mars, speculating that the green tint on the 'bottom' of the planet may be caused by vegetation
So how do you invalidate your vote as a protest against both candidates (without being an apathetic non-voter)? There are people who consider it their civic duty to vote, even if they spoil their ballot to vote for neither, how does a 'vote for one or the other' system accommodate such people? how do you use such machines in a compulsory voting environment?
In fact in my state you do not even need your license on your person to drive
Why is that unusual? Do you cease to be a qualified driver if you aren't carrying a piece of plastic?
Over here in the UK if you can't produce your license you get 7 days to take it to a police station or they come and take you away and no-one ever sees you again, or something.
Admittedly that does mean that police can pull people over solely for the purpose of checking their documents (which no-one ever carries) just to harass them and waste some of their time going to a police station.
It's an altogether bad situation having 'drivers licenses' which specifically entitle you to drive rather than a non-orwellian method of proving that you are person XYZ on the national list of people qualified to drive. (Why do you need a 'drivers license' if you can prove your identity and the DVLA can then confirm that such a person has a license?)
requirement of anonymity?
We have a secret ballot over here, but there's no law compelling you to keep secret who you voted for if you choose not to. Why is such a law useful?
'can not' or 'is not'?
'is not' is true, 'can not' doesn't make any sense. There is absolutely no logical reason to hold someone punishable for something that they didn't know they weren't allowed to do (It doesn't serve as a deterrent to them or anyone else [deterring people from doing something that they don't know is illegal], it doesn't rehabilitate them, it doesn't protect society). The reason for it is solely that law enforcement doesn't like the common man having a trump card. "You have offended against our laws and we're going to punish you for it, regardless of whether it's right, just or reasonable to do so. Because we can and we need to punish someone"
Oh, and the fact that no doubt people who DID know something was illegal would try to claim ignorance and it would be hard to prove otherwise. Unfortunately that does mean that in cases where someone truly doesn't know that something is illegal they get screwed anyway.
The European convention on human rights bans 'punishment without law' this includes laws that aren't knowable (so, yeah, it includes the exception for ignorance not being a defence, because no-one would have ratified it otherwise) but it's not a hard step to see how laws that aren't published are no different from laws that are published but you've never heard of when you look at the 'is this action against the law?' thought process before doing anything. Now, if that process outputs 'no', you haven't got a criminal intent anymore, with no criminal intent, where's the justification for punishing someone as a criminal?
bah! that does suck. I'm firmly of the belief that in an exam ANYTHING that takes the specified input and puts the right result out is a 'correct' answer and should be marked on how well you're implemented your solution, not how well you've implemented the intended solution.
Assignments and tests are different, you should take the time to do them in accordance with 'best practice', but in an exam situation anything that works should be a right answer.
yeah, well, you see, he was doing some stuff with the numbers, and due to his incompetence with statistics he tried dividing the number of computers by the probability and his computer magically stopped working.
Generally, in Europe free speech is as protected as in the US, it's just that national governments haven't got their heads around it yet, and it takes an extremely determined person to take it all the way to European human right court. Even then it takes an age to get a decision and governments, not liking being smacked-down, tend to drag their heels over doing anything about it.
Case in point, curfews. The British government (the police, to be precise) decided to issue a curfew banning all under 18's form being on the street unaccompanied after 9pm, wether or not they'd actually committed a crime. It was taken, by a young person who felt it was unfair, to the high court which ruled on the police's side only because the person who brought the case hadn't been affected by it. (he'd not actually been detained, he'd been trying to get it overturned so he could go out legally, rather than going out illegally.) The judge specifically said that he would have ruled against the police if the person in question had been detained & taken home. The ruling was because the curfew was incompatible with human rights legislation.
Fast forward 6 months to halloween. Kids are a pain, as they tend to be at halloween. Chief constable says 'we're considering using curfews next year'. They've been told it will be illegal for them to do it, but until they actually get properly defeated in court they aren't going to stop, why? because there's no loss to them to keep doing it until they're told that they must stop.
The same attitude applies with restrictions on freedom of speech, it may be technically illegal to impose the restrictions, but a national government will go ahead anyway until someone raps them on the knuckles for it.
That would be General and Lt. Colonel O'Neill.
Oh, er, I just blew the lid off the long term story arc to keep them in scripts for the next 8 seasons, didn't I?
Routers aren't cheap, not good ones anyway. Of course, I don't know how much it costs them to provide the modems, but I suspect that a router with a built in modem costs more than the modem on it's own.
Also consider the fact that cable modems (as opposed to ADSL ones) aren't found built into routers (at least, I've never seen one), if the cable providers started providing them instead of the basic modems they'd have to start giving out a considerably more complex piece of kit and wouldn't be able to get off-the-shelf ones. That would seem to me to be an expensive solution compared to the driver CD having Zonealarm, Spyboy, AD-Aware and AVG free edition on it and it taking care of the installations itself (rather than: 'there's some good software on here, go install it yourself if you can be bothered/are technically competent enough to do it').
ah, but brainiac confirmed the 'man-wearing-a-nylon-tracksuit-in-a-plastic-bucket + fumes' myth.
BTW, most of us know that brainiac isn't a science show and isn't trying to be a science show, it's just a good excuse to blow caravans up.
hah! the CSI people won't be behind the times like that.
They'll get the results before they put the DNA sample in the machine!
yes. A search warrant is really just a piece of paper that makes something that you would otherwise baulk at, 'OK because the paper says so'. Having said that, search warrants are here to stay and incorporating them into the usage of scheme 3 would be a good idea. Scheme 2 is still out thought there are substantially more bad uses for such data two years or more down the line (using people's movements from two years ago as evidence, following people to wait for them to slip up, being out-to-get someone) not to mention that fact that such data is really quite worthless since the location of your car is not evidence of the location of you, but it will be spun as valuable concrete evidence. (see; speeding fines being sent to the owner of the vehicle and the onus being on them to prove that they weren't driving the vehicle [and in doing so turn someone else in])
Interestingly enough the police response to this (admittedly dreadful) incident is over the top relative to how much effort they put into other murders. An incident room with 30 officers or more may be turned onto a murder normally, a few hundred officers is noteworthy (in murder investigation terms) as far as I can gather half of Yorkshire police force (as well as people from other forces) have been working on this.
This, coupled with an ex-chief of one of the police forces calling for reinstatement of the death penalty for those who kill police officers is pointing to a 'nice' system that the police are setting up for themselves; it's more wrong to kill a police officer than anyone else. I suppose trying to make that point and protect themselves is human nature, the test is wether the politicians will be stupid enough to enforce such a dangerous point of view with legislation.
do they:
1) input a number plate that they want to track and it pings every time they pass a camera, discarding records of number plates which aren't the ones being tracked (i.e. recognise plate, check against list of plates being looked for, if it's not on the list, discard)
2) record every number plate and look through the logs to look when a particular one passed a particular camera, then keeping the logs until forever.
3) some sort of hybrid, like keeping the logs for 24 hours to see what happened earlier in the day, but killing them after that. (like some sort of caching system)
No1 I'd just about support (so long as there were adequate safeguards to make sure that it was only used to track suspects (not potential suspects) and I'd just about stretch to No3 so long as the logs really were being killed.
No2, however, is a BIG no-no. Automated camera systems to track the movements of every car in the country and then keep that on a permanent record are VERY bad (although I suspect that is what happens). When did spending a vast sum on public money on an automated system to track the car-using public go through parliament?
And another thing, where do the police get the idea that it's a given that they can 'deny the use of the roads to criminals'? take this very case, right now these people are SUSPECTS they haven't even been charged, as such they aren't 'criminals'. Someone explain why being a suspect means that you're no longer entitled to use the roads without being tracked? They'll be wanting tracking bugs in shoes next 'to deny criminals use of their feet'
ah, but in that case it was a pilot scheme and everyone was given a free digibox if they didn't have one already.
What I'm more concerned about is the learning curve, rather than the price though. Some members of the elderly community (for wont of a better word) have enough difficulty getting their heads around a normal analogue TV with 5 channels where you press 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 for video for the channel you want. Hand them a digibox plugged into their TV and tell them "it's 6 for video and 'AV' for regular TV, which you then have to choose with this remote. To change the volume you have to use the TV remote though, and channel four is on 009, News24 is on 080 and BBC2West is on 790-something, go to 790 and fish around until you find it", they'll never understand and will just get annoyed that they've had their TV effectively robbed away from them.
No, they won't be going out to buy a brand new digital TV, that's really just too much expense.
ok, speed limit it 70 MPH
Person infront of me is doing 65 MPH
I have 300 miles to travel today
The difference in travelling time is slightly under 1/2 and hour
What if I have 600 miles to do? that's nearly an hour on top.
Ok, how about 1200 miles? (I'm not suggesting you do this in one go, you should definately have two drivers for such a journey) that's two extra hours, just from going 5MPH slower.
Now, say that I pull out 100 yards behind someone and pull back in at 100 yards (and assume that they have a 0 car length). If I'm travelling at 70MPH to overtake them, that's 81 seconds.
You don't spend 81 seconds in the outer lane unless you want every other driver on the road to think that you're an idiot. Once you get into the outer lane you make your overtake and get out as quickly as possible. at 75MPH, 40 seconds and at 79 MPH (the enforcement threshold)~ 31 seconds. Now, you you could use 90MPH you get your overtake done in 16 seconds and be free to continue your journey at 70MPH.
Now, consider the fact that you probably pull out at ~ 50 yards and back in at ~ 25 yards, at 80MPH you'll have overtaken in ~ 10 seconds. The practical difference between 80MPH and the 70MPH speed limit on a motorway over a short distance is negligible.
Also, when the insurer Norwich Union was trialing a system which recorded you speed and location when you drove to see how often you drove over the speed limit and adjust your premiums as necessary, speed-limit breaking for up to 11 seconds at a time was ignored entirely to allow people to overtake.
So, in conclusion, being able to break the speed limit over the short term is necessary to a smooth-running motorway network.
ah, summary justice at it's finest. You can't say Britain it lagging behind on progress, we're handing out new powers to dispense summary justice to the police almost every day, which creating crazy new laws just for summary justice purposes.
I'm moving to sealand.
Team slashdot much redouble it's efforts!
The last thing we want is seti@home team 'USGovt' overtaking us!
"the malicious, high-handed and arrogant conduct of the Defendant warrants an award of punitive or exemplary damages to ensure that the Defendant is appropriately punished for her conduct and deterred from such conduct in the future."
The adjectives used at the beginning of that seem to describe the entire complaint, actually.
Basically, they want her punished, and for that reason they should lose the case automatically; criminal law is for punishing, civil law is for settling disputes.
And since when is $2million 'appropriate' to hand down to any 'normal citizen'?
ac goes into data centres, systems run on dc. Either it gets distributed to each computer as ac and converted in a medium-sized box in the back of each system, or it gets converted in one big box and distributed to the systems as dc.
The question is of the efficiency saving of doing all the converting in a big box against the efficiency loss of piping it around the data centre as dc, and wether you get a large total net saving (which I suspect that you do, since even inside the data centre, it's not going far)
anyone with a bit of knowledge of cryptography knows that it would take until long after France becomes a world superpower to crack encryption with a decent key length using a properly secure algorithm.
And anyone with a bit of common sense knows that any self-respecting terrorist is going to do just that.
So why then tell us that 90 days is wanted to crack decryption? It plainly isn't, it's wanted for something else and if mr Bliar doesn't want to tell us what he really wants it for it's safe to assume that it's something that no sane person would want him to have.
There's a worrying trend of giving a totally phony reason to push something through, rather than a pathetic one.
Unfortunately, Mr Bliar knows that a large part of the populace watched '24' with their 'proprietary algorithm' which gets them through mathematically secure encryption in a matter of seconds and so will believe that nasty terrorists use bigger keys which mean that it could take DAYS to break the encryption - it makes you wonder if the "80% of the population support us" statistic that they were trotting out on the news yesterday might actually be right.
well, no, they're not. It's only a shy short of imprisonment (if for a very short time) meted out by someone who isn't the courts with no opportunity for the person being punished to defend themselves. If it wasn't the practise and someone suggested it now, I suspect that they'd be laughed at. A lot. I suppose in a similar way as people who haven't grown up with the death penalty seeing it as barbaric, if people weren't used to the idea of schools giving kids detention since forever they'd be pretty outraged at the idea.
Moving the topic to the side a bit. School administrators - what? When I was in school we had ~ 4 members of 'administrative' staff and they had no contact with the pupils - everything was dealt with by teachers of one sort or another. The school was 'ruled' by the teachers who had non-teaching type people to help them. Not a school run by administrators which also employed teachers to teach kids.
I'm from the UK, incase you're wondering what all the questioning is for.
Surely what we need is a complete generation of young people who care a great deal for their rights, and also know that authority does sometimes need to be ignored/done away with (i.e. when it's corrupt, abused, self-appointed, etc) instead of the present system where about 1% have brains and get shouted down as terrorists/unpatriotic/dissenting when they stand up for their rights.
If everyone stands up for their rights then it will be impossible (or very hard) to remove them.
To use your employer example, if an employer finds that all/almost all of their new workforce refuses to accept rules governing their own time then the employer will have to change the rules - you can't fire/hire most of your workforce every week. The national economy will iron the wrinkles out eventually and everyone will be happier, except the fascists.
can you explain something here for those of us not from, er, wherever you're from.
How does a school keep kids in for a detention on a Saturday? Saturday isn't a school day (is it?) so you'd actually have to turn up there voluntarily to be kept in. Doesn't anyone ever say "uuuh no. Your authority ends at 3:30 PM on Friday and doesn't start again until 9AM Monday, so yaa-boo sucks to you" ?
Compelling kids to come in on a Saturday for detention seems to be the ultimate in schools invading on what kids do on their own time, why is no-one hopping up and down about it?