By the time I was in grade school, we were playing Oregon trail on the Mac Classic at school. My parents bought a copy for our Mac Classic home, too. Reading the manual revealed the default administrative password for the game: "boom" (a reference to the older versions of the game).
Of course, the copies of the game at school used the same default password. You couldn't do much; the most exciting thing you could do was increase the frequency of animals, and bump the hunting session time from 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
And so I learned the first lesson of security, at age 10: don't leave default passwords unchanged. And of course, the corollary: if you want to gain unauthorized access to something, try the default password first.
You give script your email address, it sends you an email and you follow a validation link within the email. Implementing this on my website where I had a captcha before got rid of 100% of the spam.
In many circumstances, email validation will cause users who would have otherwise filled out your captcha, to leave your site without contributing.
For example, I'll gladly solve a captcha to comment on a blog, but 90% of the time, if email validation is required, I'm just going to close the window and move on to someone else's site.
Filling in a captcha is a nuisance, but email validation is an even larger nuisance that also requires that I give you personal data.
- There *are* fewer applications for Apple computers, which is to be expected as they don't command the market-share of, say, Windows - They are *different* to use, and if you're used to Windows, that means you have a learning curve to climb, which implies work just to use the computer
It's the same story here. Three of our developers (including myself) have been lifelong windows users. The last mac I'd used, personally, was a early 1990s Performa.
All three of us bought macbooks for personal use, independently. I can't speak for the other two, but personally, the choice was largely driven by the fact that I'd had a *terrible* experience with HP laptops in the year leading up to that purchase -- the hardware was just poorly designed and assembled -- in the last year, I've seen two HP machines fall apart.
I'm not huge on MacOS. I really hate some of the things it does. I've never even opened up any of the iLife apps, other than iTunes. I didn't buy this thing for the Mac experience. I bought it 'cause it was the best hardware I could get for the price.
It's small. It's light. It's got great battery life (I get *at least* 3 hours, if not 5). It goes into, and comes out of sleep mode instantly. It has a decent integrated graphics chip, which means it plays 3D games far better than my old $1k HP laptop ever did -- and let me tell you, it is *hard* to find a $1100 laptop with decent integrated graphics and a gig of ram. And the magsafe power connector is guaranteed not to fail like the power connector on my HP did (the socket came loose from the motherboard).
I couldn't give two shits about the whole mac lifestyle thing. It was quality hardware at a competitive price.
The guys who write the Habitat Chronicles blog have been in the graphical multi-user online service game for a long time. If you're in to MMO design, and haven't already read it, The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat paper is a good starting point.
It's amazing how many things they point out in that paper (which is now 17 years old), that MMO designers *still* screw up to this day.
I am in the process of planning and buying some hardware to build a media center/media server
The advantages of RAID 0 versus RAID 1 versus RAID 5 have already been covered in detail, here, and in many books and websites.
However, allow me to address the issue of how they relate to a media center:
Firstly, when you say "media center/media server", do you mean "I just want to build myself a kickass Tivo?", or do you mean "I want to serve video for everyone in my frat house, simultaneously?"
If the former, consider that Tivos ship with 5500 RPM drives for several reasons: 1) They're cheaper than faster drives 2) They run cooler than faster drives 3) They run quieter than faster drives 4) They use less power than faster drives 5) They're more than fast enough for streaming a single video to your TV while recording another
Long story short, if you're just building a "free" Tivo with a kickass drive array, performance is *not* an issue. Keep in mind that if you're building a set-top box of sorts, the low heat and low noise features are *very* big benefits. You probably want RAID 5, and/or JBOD.
If, however, you're planning on serving video to more than a handful of stations simultaneously, you may need to consider performance. This is a vote for RAID 0 and/or RAID 10.
Now, the second axis: How important to you is this data? Really?
I've got over 300 gigs of drive space on my Tivo. Most of it is the last two weeks of television reruns (Scrubs, 6 copies of last Thursday's Daily Show, etc.), movies I recorded but won't watch, etc. There are about 10 gigs (3%) of video on there that's been saved for a few months, and frankly, I couldn't tell you a single thing on there that I'd miss if my drives went belly up tomorrow. So: do you *really* need to save all those Seinfeld reruns on a highly-redundant storage array? How *much* of the stuff on the server do you really need to keep?
Assuming it's less than 50% (in the Tivo scenario, it probably is), consider using JBOD for most of your storage, and maintaining a single backup drive, or small backup drive array. Or just backing up the good stuff to DVD.
In summary: If you're just building a Tivo, you probably don't really need the performance, or redundancy that RAID offers.
... if your C code requires you to know the difference between i++ and ++i, it is too complicated.
In my earlier years, I might have said the same thing about the ternary operator. Its syntax is a touch obscure, by which I mean, they don't teach you about it in programming 101.
However, once you're familiar with it, it allows you to do in one line, what might have taken 4 before. Which actually makes your code *more* readable.
Long story short, you have to strike a balance. You can't do everything in one line, as your code becomes too dense and unreadable. But you can't do too little either -- a whole if-else where a ternary would do takes *longer* to read. Similarly, proper use of increments can save you extraneous code.
Back in the mid-nineties, Electric Communities wrote E, and a product in E ("Microcosm"), which was designed for exactly this: secure online distributed worlds. Microcosm was, in some respects, a distributed Second Life, written in the days before the Pentium 2 was released. Everyone ran their own little server on their desktop, and you could create and trade objects securely.
The company, and Microcosm failed due to a combination of just being too demanding for the hardware available at the time (the PC of the day was a Pentium 166 mhz with 64 meg of ram, using a 28k modem to connect to the net, 3d cards were just hitting the market), too early as a net phenomenon (most people weren't online at the time, and everquest hadn't even come out yet), bad business decisions, and the dot-com collapse.
The founders of the company have all found their way to Yahoo in the last couple of years. Doug Crockford is probably the one most of the Slashdot crowd will recognize, likely from his javascript evangelism:
He also says for people to buy and donate the books to promote literacy (or some crap like that). Well, why is he burning the books instead of donating them ?
I've been working in the used book retail industry for a couple years now. If his stock was anything like the stuff we usually get (remainders and stuff that libraries couldn't sell at their book sales), no one would take it as a donation. There's a lot of truely worthless books out there -- beat up, 40 year-old paperback reprints of classics (Shakespeare, Dickens, etc.), cookbooks, grocery store paperback fiction (Danielle steel, etc.), and so on.
A lot of the stuff that circulates in the industry is stuff that was donated to libraries, which the libraries didn't need, couldn't sell, and basically just threw out. We pay a about $2 for every 30 pounds of those books, sort through 'em, and sell the decent ones (as low as 5% of what comes in the door) online for a couple bucks.
Say we pick up 1000 books that the library can't find any other buyers for.
Of that thousand, we'll probably throw out about 500 of 'em, right off the bat (cookbooks, etc.) because they're either obviously worthless, or have been priced
The other 500 or so get listed and shelved. 50 to 100 of them sell within a month. Another 50 to 100 might sell within the year. Generally, they go for $2 - $5.
By the time a year's passed, we've basically got 800 - 900 books left over, which are hardly worth the paper they're printed on.
Especially the extremely popular titles he has listed on his website. Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code?
Been working for an online used book retailer for a couple years. If someone dropped a box of Harry Potter and Dan Brown on our doorstep, we'd love it. Compared to a lot of the used books circulating out there, those things are pretty much guaranteed to sell for a few bucks, within a month. Over 50% of the books we get end up sitting on the shelf for a year or so, and then we trash them. Hell, half the books that come in the door aren't even worth shelving, 'cause they're priced down to $0.01 on amazon.
We sent a shipping container (think: those 55' long metal boxes on the back of tractor-trailer rigs) of our unsellable books off to Pakistan. IIRC, the guy paid us about $800 for however many tons of books that was, and several grand in shipping costs.
I just wish we'd thought of this book bonfire scam first.
The US economy would not collapse if the interstate highway system suddenly vanished. Hell, maybe the rotting US rail system would get a much needed kick in the ass as a result.:)
The economy hit a bit of a speedbump due to a couple of towers collapsing, and the grounding of all flights for a few days, and you think the highway system disappearing overnight wouldn't be noticed?
Trains don't go everywhere. There are only so many miles of serviceable rails left in the country, and only so many locamotives. The infrastructure for converting entirely to rail just isn't there. It'd take years for it to get there.
By 2008, the trucking industry will haul 9.3 billion tons, or over 64 percent, of total U.S. freight tonnage. By 2008, 87 cents out of every dollar of U.S. freight revenue will go to the trucking industry. 70 percent of U.S. communities depend solely on trucking for delivery of their goods and commodities.
The trucking industry employs more than 9 million nationwide. (That's 3% of the population, and about 5% of the workforce)
Most of the nation's half million trucking companies would collapse overnight, entire cities would become uninhabitable over the course of the following months, and the economy would take a nosedive. It'd take decades to fully recover.
I'd gladly accept that we could probably do without the allocation of federal funds to the highway system at this point, if the states could themselves could capture those tax dollars and mange them themselves, but to suggest that "the interstate highway system suddenly vanish[ing]" wouldn't cause significant economic turmoil is completely unrealistic.
Logo's greatest weakness, in my experience, is it relies on understanding geometry, and specifically angles. I was introduced to logo at age 9, in the classroom. I didn't have the damndest idea that the sum of the angles in a triangle was 180 degrees, therefor it was impossible for me to even construct a triangle, much less any more complex shapes.
They don't even teach geometry til age 15 in California.
As a result, I didn't learn a damn thing from logo. I ended up teaching myself hypercard a couple of years later, and wrote several hypercard stacks as solutions for projects in math class. Then I picked up "C for dummies" at 14.
The main goals of these sorts of projects is to introduce kids to:
Logic (and, or, not)
Flow control (loops, branches)
Algorithmic thinking -- Breaking up tasks into smaller steps (You can't just tell the computer "make the cat dance", you have to start by moving one foot, then the other...)
The joy of making the computer do what you tell it to
These are high level concepts that take a while for children to grasp. Once you understand them, however, a wide world is opened up to you. Even if you don't go on to programming, automating tasks via macro programs, batch, or shell scripts becomes all the easier.
Understanding programming makes using a computer easier, and allows you to do more with it. Even if you never write a single line of "real" code.
There are already ample penalties for copyright infringement and ways to shut them down. In fact, it makes no different for the guilty party if he is fined for $100M or $1B, since he will not be able to pay it off anyway.
Actually, some of the guys who sell pirated software online end up netting a profit, even after prosecution and fines. There is some need for a crackdown on those guys -- right now, the crime of selling pirated software pays. As evidenced by the boatloads of "PHOTOSHOP CS3 READY FOR DOWNLOAD" spam messages flooding inboxes this month.
From the wording in TFS(ummary), it sounds like these are likely the guys they have in mind. Not college kids downloading MP3s.
My aunt doesn't have to know about overhead cams to drive to work, and people shouldn't have to know about 64-bit Vista WiFi drivers to logon.
If your Aunt buys her PC with all the features she wants, and vista installed, she shouldn't have to install any drivers. It's only when she installs her own wifi card that she needs to get into drivers.
To return to your car analogy -- if you want to install your own stereo system, you're either gonna have to know something about stereo systems, or you're gonna have to take your car to a qualified professional. The same applies to computers -- either you need to know what you're doing, or take your system to a qualified professional.
At my highschool of approx. 1200 students, the admin also taught several classes -- CAD being one of them, IIRC. He also lead the school robotics team, and a class in which he had students help with IT tasks around the school.
We're not a silicon valley venture-capital funded behemoth startup. Fark is self-funded and run out of my living room. They have parties with limos and live bands out there, while here in Kentucky I get pretty excited when I find a new bourbon at the store around the corner. Fark isn't in a financial position to stand up and take on the DMCA/MPAA/WTFOMG in a head to head legal battle, they'll crush us into fine paste. I can however say with confidence that the DMCA is a load of crap, the MPAA and their attorneys are douchebags, and someone needs to take them down. More power to Digg, if we can help we will. We just can't take point on this one. Digg has millions of VC dollars in their bank account, they're in a much better position than us to take this one on. Go gettum guys.
(Btw this does mean we'll have to continue deleting posts and links containing the code until some BS politico in Washington changes that BS law. Please don't post it thanks)
The initial responses are understanding. Shows the value of communicating with your users -- which is arguably what digg failed to do, in this situation. By the time any statement was made at all, the "revolution" was already at proceeding at full force.
There's actually one other thing that's lead to digg's "revolt" getting so far out of hand -- lack of editorial control. They're only yanking stories *after* the userbase at large has seen them -- sometimes, hours after the fact. Fark, by contrast, can pull these stories *before* they hit the front page. Seeing story after story front paged, and then killed has only encouraged other users to follow suit.
"So, you're not suspended - and you're not expelled - but sorry, you won't be attending classes here."
I'm curious what they're calling this, if not suspension or expulsion.
Having been ejected from my highschool in '99, in a similar, post-columbine, situation, I can verify that it's not uncommon for students to be expelled without the action actually being called expulsion. I cannot, however, recall the term they used.
It's really all about passing the buck. "Well, you might just shoot up a school, so whichever school it is, just make sure it's not mine."
On the positive side, several months earlier (the Spring of the previous school year -- still post-columbine), I'd written a short essay about a student shooting his English teacher for making him write an essay. I had no intention whatsoever of doing so, of course. I was an unhappy kid with a morbid since of humor, and I'd found the self-referential nature of the essay amusing.
My English teacher turned it into a discussion on free speech, and shared an article similar to this one with the class -- another student, somewhere, had written a violent essay, and 'disturbed' a few school officials. I respected him greatly, both before and after that incident, but even more now, as I fully understand the context in which he did that.
I used a similar solution from some knock-off vendor (which I can't even *find* via google, at this point), and lemme tell ya, it was absolute crap. A system that was perfectly usable for a single user became unusable for just two users. The software that drove the second session would lock up the processor for extended periods of time... even when the second terminal wasn't being used at all.
So, buyer beware. When done poorly, these solutions are worse than useless -- which makes the fact that they're fairly expensive all the more painful. Read reviews.
Slashdot Mirror
By the time I was in grade school, we were playing Oregon trail on the Mac Classic at school. My parents bought a copy for our Mac Classic home, too. Reading the manual revealed the default administrative password for the game: "boom" (a reference to the older versions of the game).
Of course, the copies of the game at school used the same default password. You couldn't do much; the most exciting thing you could do was increase the frequency of animals, and bump the hunting session time from 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
And so I learned the first lesson of security, at age 10: don't leave default passwords unchanged. And of course, the corollary: if you want to gain unauthorized access to something, try the default password first.
In many circumstances, email validation will cause users who would have otherwise filled out your captcha, to leave your site without contributing.
For example, I'll gladly solve a captcha to comment on a blog, but 90% of the time, if email validation is required, I'm just going to close the window and move on to someone else's site.
Filling in a captcha is a nuisance, but email validation is an even larger nuisance that also requires that I give you personal data.
If that's a problem for you, install bootcamp.
The graphics chip in the macbook easily outperforms the standard Mobile ATI chips that you'll find in most $1100-and-under laptops.
It's the same story here. Three of our developers (including myself) have been lifelong windows users. The last mac I'd used, personally, was a early 1990s Performa.
All three of us bought macbooks for personal use, independently. I can't speak for the other two, but personally, the choice was largely driven by the fact that I'd had a *terrible* experience with HP laptops in the year leading up to that purchase -- the hardware was just poorly designed and assembled -- in the last year, I've seen two HP machines fall apart.
I'm not huge on MacOS. I really hate some of the things it does. I've never even opened up any of the iLife apps, other than iTunes. I didn't buy this thing for the Mac experience. I bought it 'cause it was the best hardware I could get for the price.
It's small. It's light. It's got great battery life (I get *at least* 3 hours, if not 5). It goes into, and comes out of sleep mode instantly. It has a decent integrated graphics chip, which means it plays 3D games far better than my old $1k HP laptop ever did -- and let me tell you, it is *hard* to find a $1100 laptop with decent integrated graphics and a gig of ram. And the magsafe power connector is guaranteed not to fail like the power connector on my HP did (the socket came loose from the motherboard).
I couldn't give two shits about the whole mac lifestyle thing. It was quality hardware at a competitive price.
Here's the source for the parent's anecdote:
http://www.fudco.com/habitat/archives/000058.html
The guys who write the Habitat Chronicles blog have been in the graphical multi-user online service game for a long time. If you're in to MMO design, and haven't already read it, The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat paper is a good starting point.
It's amazing how many things they point out in that paper (which is now 17 years old), that MMO designers *still* screw up to this day.
You pass out for half an hour, a man in a white coat does all the hard work for you, someone else drives you home, and you eat icecream for 4 days?
The advantages of RAID 0 versus RAID 1 versus RAID 5 have already been covered in detail, here, and in many books and websites.
However, allow me to address the issue of how they relate to a media center:
Firstly, when you say "media center/media server", do you mean "I just want to build myself a kickass Tivo?", or do you mean "I want to serve video for everyone in my frat house, simultaneously?"
If the former, consider that Tivos ship with 5500 RPM drives for several reasons:
1) They're cheaper than faster drives
2) They run cooler than faster drives
3) They run quieter than faster drives
4) They use less power than faster drives
5) They're more than fast enough for streaming a single video to your TV while recording another
Long story short, if you're just building a "free" Tivo with a kickass drive array, performance is *not* an issue. Keep in mind that if you're building a set-top box of sorts, the low heat and low noise features are *very* big benefits. You probably want RAID 5, and/or JBOD.
If, however, you're planning on serving video to more than a handful of stations simultaneously, you may need to consider performance. This is a vote for RAID 0 and/or RAID 10.
Now, the second axis: How important to you is this data? Really?
I've got over 300 gigs of drive space on my Tivo. Most of it is the last two weeks of television reruns (Scrubs, 6 copies of last Thursday's Daily Show, etc.), movies I recorded but won't watch, etc. There are about 10 gigs (3%) of video on there that's been saved for a few months, and frankly, I couldn't tell you a single thing on there that I'd miss if my drives went belly up tomorrow. So: do you *really* need to save all those Seinfeld reruns on a highly-redundant storage array? How *much* of the stuff on the server do you really need to keep?
Assuming it's less than 50% (in the Tivo scenario, it probably is), consider using JBOD for most of your storage, and maintaining a single backup drive, or small backup drive array. Or just backing up the good stuff to DVD.
In summary: If you're just building a Tivo, you probably don't really need the performance, or redundancy that RAID offers.
In my earlier years, I might have said the same thing about the ternary operator. Its syntax is a touch obscure, by which I mean, they don't teach you about it in programming 101.
However, once you're familiar with it, it allows you to do in one line, what might have taken 4 before. Which actually makes your code *more* readable.
Long story short, you have to strike a balance. You can't do everything in one line, as your code becomes too dense and unreadable. But you can't do too little either -- a whole if-else where a ternary would do takes *longer* to read. Similarly, proper use of increments can save you extraneous code.
This is actually exactly what the E Programming Language was designed for:
g e
9 93ab06e56af731346f78.1710507
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_programming_langua
Back in the mid-nineties, Electric Communities wrote E, and a product in E ("Microcosm"), which was designed for exactly this: secure online distributed worlds. Microcosm was, in some respects, a distributed Second Life, written in the days before the Pentium 2 was released. Everyone ran their own little server on their desktop, and you could create and trade objects securely.
The company, and Microcosm failed due to a combination of just being too demanding for the hardware available at the time (the PC of the day was a Pentium 166 mhz with 64 meg of ram, using a 28k modem to connect to the net, 3d cards were just hitting the market), too early as a net phenomenon (most people weren't online at the time, and everquest hadn't even come out yet), bad business decisions, and the dot-com collapse.
The founders of the company have all found their way to Yahoo in the last couple of years. Doug Crockford is probably the one most of the Slashdot crowd will recognize, likely from his javascript evangelism:
http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=cccd4aa02a3
I've been working in the used book retail industry for a couple years now. If his stock was anything like the stuff we usually get (remainders and stuff that libraries couldn't sell at their book sales), no one would take it as a donation. There's a lot of truely worthless books out there -- beat up, 40 year-old paperback reprints of classics (Shakespeare, Dickens, etc.), cookbooks, grocery store paperback fiction (Danielle steel, etc.), and so on.
A lot of the stuff that circulates in the industry is stuff that was donated to libraries, which the libraries didn't need, couldn't sell, and basically just threw out. We pay a about $2 for every 30 pounds of those books, sort through 'em, and sell the decent ones (as low as 5% of what comes in the door) online for a couple bucks.
Say we pick up 1000 books that the library can't find any other buyers for.
Of that thousand, we'll probably throw out about 500 of 'em, right off the bat (cookbooks, etc.) because they're either obviously worthless, or have been priced
The other 500 or so get listed and shelved. 50 to 100 of them sell within a month. Another 50 to 100 might sell within the year. Generally, they go for $2 - $5.
By the time a year's passed, we've basically got 800 - 900 books left over, which are hardly worth the paper they're printed on.
Been working for an online used book retailer for a couple years. If someone dropped a box of Harry Potter and Dan Brown on our doorstep, we'd love it. Compared to a lot of the used books circulating out there, those things are pretty much guaranteed to sell for a few bucks, within a month. Over 50% of the books we get end up sitting on the shelf for a year or so, and then we trash them. Hell, half the books that come in the door aren't even worth shelving, 'cause they're priced down to $0.01 on amazon.
We sent a shipping container (think: those 55' long metal boxes on the back of tractor-trailer rigs) of our unsellable books off to Pakistan. IIRC, the guy paid us about $800 for however many tons of books that was, and several grand in shipping costs.
I just wish we'd thought of this book bonfire scam first.
The economy hit a bit of a speedbump due to a couple of towers collapsing, and the grounding of all flights for a few days, and you think the highway system disappearing overnight wouldn't be noticed?
Trains don't go everywhere. There are only so many miles of serviceable rails left in the country, and only so many locamotives. The infrastructure for converting entirely to rail just isn't there. It'd take years for it to get there.
By 2008, the trucking industry will haul 9.3 billion tons, or over 64 percent, of total U.S. freight tonnage. By 2008, 87 cents out of every dollar of U.S. freight revenue will go to the trucking industry. 70 percent of U.S. communities depend solely on trucking for delivery of their goods and commodities.
The trucking industry employs more than 9 million nationwide. (That's 3% of the population, and about 5% of the workforce)
Most of the nation's half million trucking companies would collapse overnight, entire cities would become uninhabitable over the course of the following months, and the economy would take a nosedive. It'd take decades to fully recover.
I'd gladly accept that we could probably do without the allocation of federal funds to the highway system at this point, if the states could themselves could capture those tax dollars and mange them themselves, but to suggest that "the interstate highway system suddenly vanish[ing]" wouldn't cause significant economic turmoil is completely unrealistic.
Logo's greatest weakness, in my experience, is it relies on understanding geometry, and specifically angles. I was introduced to logo at age 9, in the classroom. I didn't have the damndest idea that the sum of the angles in a triangle was 180 degrees, therefor it was impossible for me to even construct a triangle, much less any more complex shapes.
They don't even teach geometry til age 15 in California.
As a result, I didn't learn a damn thing from logo. I ended up teaching myself hypercard a couple of years later, and wrote several hypercard stacks as solutions for projects in math class. Then I picked up "C for dummies" at 14.
These are high level concepts that take a while for children to grasp. Once you understand them, however, a wide world is opened up to you. Even if you don't go on to programming, automating tasks via macro programs, batch, or shell scripts becomes all the easier.
Understanding programming makes using a computer easier, and allows you to do more with it. Even if you never write a single line of "real" code.
Actually, some of the guys who sell pirated software online end up netting a profit, even after prosecution and fines. There is some need for a crackdown on those guys -- right now, the crime of selling pirated software pays. As evidenced by the boatloads of "PHOTOSHOP CS3 READY FOR DOWNLOAD" spam messages flooding inboxes this month.
From the wording in TFS(ummary), it sounds like these are likely the guys they have in mind. Not college kids downloading MP3s.
Wait, you mean there are stories/authors who don't get lambasted on slashdot?
I thought we pretty much did our best to rip every story to shreds?
If your Aunt buys her PC with all the features she wants, and vista installed, she shouldn't have to install any drivers. It's only when she installs her own wifi card that she needs to get into drivers.
To return to your car analogy -- if you want to install your own stereo system, you're either gonna have to know something about stereo systems, or you're gonna have to take your car to a qualified professional. The same applies to computers -- either you need to know what you're doing, or take your system to a qualified professional.
Modern technological tools are complicated.
Ah, but you see, the police are a step ahead of you.
Which ethnic group is, per capita, most likely to commit the crimes of both rape and pillaging?
Pirates!
Most motion sensors wouldn't detect, say, someone sitting at a computer, reading slashdot.
Having the music cut out unless you wave your arms around every 5 minutes might be a touch obnoxious.
At my highschool of approx. 1200 students, the admin also taught several classes -- CAD being one of them, IIRC. He also lead the school robotics team, and a class in which he had students help with IT tasks around the school.
The initial responses are understanding. Shows the value of communicating with your users -- which is arguably what digg failed to do, in this situation. By the time any statement was made at all, the "revolution" was already at proceeding at full force.
There's actually one other thing that's lead to digg's "revolt" getting so far out of hand -- lack of editorial control. They're only yanking stories *after* the userbase at large has seen them -- sometimes, hours after the fact. Fark, by contrast, can pull these stories *before* they hit the front page. Seeing story after story front paged, and then killed has only encouraged other users to follow suit.
You're thinking of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment
r iment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Prison_Expe
Having been ejected from my highschool in '99, in a similar, post-columbine, situation, I can verify that it's not uncommon for students to be expelled without the action actually being called expulsion. I cannot, however, recall the term they used.
It's really all about passing the buck. "Well, you might just shoot up a school, so whichever school it is, just make sure it's not mine."
On the positive side, several months earlier (the Spring of the previous school year -- still post-columbine), I'd written a short essay about a student shooting his English teacher for making him write an essay. I had no intention whatsoever of doing so, of course. I was an unhappy kid with a morbid since of humor, and I'd found the self-referential nature of the essay amusing.
My English teacher turned it into a discussion on free speech, and shared an article similar to this one with the class -- another student, somewhere, had written a violent essay, and 'disturbed' a few school officials. I respected him greatly, both before and after that incident, but even more now, as I fully understand the context in which he did that.
I used a similar solution from some knock-off vendor (which I can't even *find* via google, at this point), and lemme tell ya, it was absolute crap. A system that was perfectly usable for a single user became unusable for just two users. The software that drove the second session would lock up the processor for extended periods of time... even when the second terminal wasn't being used at all.
So, buyer beware. When done poorly, these solutions are worse than useless -- which makes the fact that they're fairly expensive all the more painful. Read reviews.