If Linus Torvalds was an utter incompetent, would anybody have bothered to "step in and fix" the Linux kernel?
If Richard Stallman was an utter incompetent, would anybody have bothered to "step in and fix" Emacs, or any of the other GNU tools he's had a hand in writing?
The point is this: When your system is designed by people who are *demonstrably* incapable of designing a system that meets the goals they've stated they will meet, how long do you expect any community to last around that? Diaspora has gotten so far only because of kind press. Looking at the impact graphs on Diaspora's github page, it looks as if there's roughly 10 people who are actively contributing to the project. How long until the community members get sick of fixing bad code, or realize that most of the code has been written by them because they had to rewrite the bulk of the original code to allow for things like security?
And how long after that until the project either loses contributors to forking, or it undergoes a leadership coup?
Because they said they'd built that car out of cheerios and succeeded.
Once again: WE KNOW that you can build a social network, and we also know that you can build an open-source social network. It's been done. The project was not "interesting" from that perspective - Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Appleseed, and a host of other 'social networks' have already done one or both of those things.
The key differentiator for Diaspora was the goal of creating a secure, decentralized model that put the user in charge of their own privacy. The differentiator emphatically WAS NOT that they were "open source" - again, that's already been proven to be possible by other projects.
Which brings us to the question of why we *should* give a shit about Diaspora. I'll let their Kickstarter writeup speak for itself, here's what they had to say:
We believe that privacy and connectedness do not have to be mutually exclusive. With Diaspora, we are reclaiming our data, securing our social connections, and making it easy to share on your own terms. We think we can replace today's centralized social web with a more secure and convenient decentralized network. Diaspora will be easy to use, and it will be centered on you instead of a faceless hub.
Please point out for me where they say "we aim to open source Facebook," because I'm not seeing it.
The GOAL of Diaspora was to create a more-secure social networking environment which gave control of user privacy back to the users.
The METHOD they intended to use was to open-source what they produced, and then build a community around it.
The RESULT was an unmitigated mess: the code they spent months writing did NOTHING to achieve their stated goals, in fact it was even LESS secure and private than Facebook, because it ignored standard and common security and privacy practices - things which should be part of your design from the ground up, including user authentication and access control for each and every operation the system performs.
They started out by saying "We're going to build an alternative which puts the user in control of their data." They created an alternative which puts ANY user in control of ANY data.
This is not trolling, this is an honest assessment of the progress & results of Diaspora. Their goals were more security & more privacy. They achieved neither of those goals with the code they wrote. Open source is not some magic sauce you marinate your code in in order to improve it, but suddenly the entire focus of Diaspora has gone from "it's more secure and more private," (their initial, stated goals) to "it's open source," as if that forgives the multitude of failings that the code has, simply because a bunch of people can read the source that implements those design flaws.
You've also got to admit that this happens proportionally far more often at American checkpoints than it ever did at British checkpoints in Iraq, or at checkpoints of other Nato members in Afghanistan- even those in the rather brutal regions such as the Canadians or British.
That's a pretty fucking HUGE assumption you're making there, and one which I'm not prepared to concede to you without substantial hard numbers and analysis demonstrating that American-manned checkpoints have a much higher rate of these incidents (as a proportion of checkpoints in operation) than other NATO forces.
If the Brits man 20 checkpoints and have 2 such incidents, and the Americans man 100 checkpoints and have 8 such incidents, Americans have "more incidents," but the likelihood of any given checkpoint having an incident is lower. You can't ignore the relative troop populations in your analysis.
And given the rest of your post, it's pretty clear that you have very little understanding of how the us military trains or operates.
Why exactly do we need to prove that its possible to build a social network? There are already a number of very successful ones in existence.
Car analogy: diaspora said they were going to make a car that works better than a Toyota. They produced something with no doors, no locks, which gets 2 miles to the gallon, and which has the tendency to explode if you get too close to other cars.
Why would you then insist on arguing that they were going to destroy toyota's market dominance any day now?
They failed to produce a prototype that demonstrated any ability to create secure code. And yet people are still sitting here arguing that it's just a matter of time before this abortion takes over the web and saves us all from facebook, despite it having demonstrably worse security and privacy controls - the very reason for its existence! - than facebook.
Diaspora is a failed source forge project created by a couple enthusiastic kids whose biggest achievement was to figure out a way to convince people to give them 200,000 dollars.
These aren't "bugs," these are "gaping holes in security and privacy controls that don't appear to even have been considered."
There's a difference between "our security system will behave badly when somebody presents it with a specially crafted URL, leading to unauthorized escalation of privileges" (a bug) and "our security system assumes that anybody accessing URL automatically has access to update, modify, delete, etc. anything at that URL." (a gaping hole in security, and a glaring *design* flaw).
Unless you define "bug" to be such a broad category that it includes "incomplete, poorly thought-out rubbish," you cannot call some of these issues "bugs" in the software.
This has already been done: it's called Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut. We know that it's possible to build a working web site for social networking, we didn't need Diaspora to show us that. Diaspora came to the table with the premise of building upon Facebook's "something working": namely, that users would be secure & in charge of their data. That was their key differentiator, they didn't need to show "hey somebody can build a web site that will allow people to communicate with friends!" They needed to show that it could be done more securely and with more respect for user's privacy.
They *failed* to produce a working proof of concept to show that goal could be met. They *failed* to do that because they did not incorporate simple security principles into their initial proof of concept.
Considering their revenues were 52 million in 2006, and they launched in 2004, I'd say you're off a bit on your estimate.
It took them longer to turn a profit, but they were clearly generating a sizable income off their web site within 2 years of launch. Given that, I'd say it's pretty safe to say that they probably launched with a pretty coherent business plan in place. You don't grow from launch to 52 million in revenue accidentally.
Actually yes, I'm not sure why you consider that such an onerous restriction.
My company offers iPhone connections using personal devices - I volunteered mine for the pilot. If I lose my device, I'm more than happy to have them capable of wiping the device, my data included. If I don't lose the device, and they accidentally wipe it, oh well.. shit happens. They informed me when I signed up in no uncertain terms that this was a risk of using my personal device. I prefer accepting that minimal risk if it allows me to avoid having to carry around a bulky blackberry all the time in addition to my personal phone.
Considering iTunes keeps (optionally encrypted) backups of your iPhone automatically, what's the impact? Perhaps you're out a phone for a few hours until you can restore a backup if they do it accidentally. If you lose the device for real, not having to initiate 2 remote wipes (one for company data, one for personal data) might actually save you time and hassle. If that minimal risk is too high for you... don't use your personal device on the corporate network.
whereas another observer might simply conclude that the cat is not smart enough to understand what you want it to do
You could also conclude that cats don't spend much time communicating with one another 'verbally' - there's usually a strong physical - 'body language', if you will - element to it as well. Dogs seem more verbally expressive (I know that the average dog I've owned has been far noisier than the average cat), and thus may be more likely to understand that the noises you're making at it are communication, whereas the cat is hearing the noises, and looking at you (the source of the noises), but doesn't comprehend that the noises are tied to some sort of expected behavior.
I think you're right though - trying to assign "intelligence" in the human sense on an animal is a rather silly exercise.
So your case is that it is wrong to expect no innocent pregnant women or children to be shot at checkpoints
Specifically to your point about checkpoints - we can expect it all we want. At the end of the day, you have to admit that: a) It is primarily young, nervous men and women managing the checkpoint in a warzone; b) There is not always time to conduct a full "analysis" of the situation;
The proper expectation would be that it is *minimized,* not that it would 'never happen.' When you're manning a checkpoint, and you see a car speeding at you, not stopping or slowing as all of the signs and announcements tell it to... are you going to wait until it gets to you and blows up, or are you going to open fire and hope that you can stop the car before it reaches you?
I think these are *precisely* the sort of things that fit under the category of "mistakes made in the heat of battle" - you don't have time to stop the car, politely ask a few questions, share a cup of tea, and laugh about the misunderstanding with the car's driver, and become close Facebook friends. It is absolutely tragic that these sorts of things happen, but unless you mean to suggest that the women you're talking about were on foot, standing placidly in line, and a psychotic M50 gunner opened up on them, then you have to concede that these events, while tragic, are more than likely the result of "tragic mistakes and misunderstandings."
Or do we only presume innocence for civilians here?
or adults murdered during interrogation by our military?
This should be an expectation, but I suspect that your use of "murdered" implies a much broader definition of "murder" than I'd perhaps agree with. Say we capture an insurgent, and during the stress of interrogation - legal, humane interrogation, let's leave aside waterboarding and the like - he has a heart attack, or a stroke, and he dies. Would you consider that murder? We captured him, stressed him... is it our fault that he blew a gasket? I'd say no. I suspect, though I'd like you to answer, that you'd say "yes, that's murder."
Because you don't want to upgrade your entire infrastructure every 3 years - you do half now, the other half in 18 months, the first half in 36 months, and so on. Most servers are depreciated on a 3 year schedule, scheduling upgrades every ~18 months allows you to achieve some level of stability without tossing it all out the window at the end of your cycle.
As far as "having enough bandwidth", that's why you do analysis: compare costs of your current bandwidth needs & expected growth with the cost of buying, implementing, and supporting your own infrastructure. He does not say that they are constantly streaming this video library, just that they have a very large one. It's very possible that there is very little active, continuous streaming that would soak up huge amounts of bandwidth.
they actually LOSE money each time you buy a new phone
No, they do not. Because each time you buy a new phone, they lock you into a 2-year contract whose total sticker price far exceeds the cost of the phone, and you pay something probably closely approximating wholesale prices for the phone in the volumes the carriers can purchase them in.
They have *every* interest in seeing your phone be "just good enough" that you don't leave their service, and "just bad enough" that you want to buy an upgrade phone, and sign a new 2 year contract with them, as soon as you are able. If they spend time upgrading your software once they've already got your money, they're eating into the profits they've made.
The list was chosen quite specifically to highlight the fact that the carriers & the manufacturers (who happen to be both equipment maker & OS vendor) have no vested interest in providing you with upgrades for the life of the phone - how would it be in Samsung's interest to keep you using that Galaxy phone for 7 years? They'll expend all kinds of development effort, in return for what... a few dollars profit per unit? That's pretty thin margins stretched over many years.
In point of fact, positive cash flow *is* the goal of any for-profit company's product. A company that goes into business without paying attention to their expenses vs. their income will not remain in business.
Because the vendors care about the initial sale and, where applicable, the contract they lock you into.
If you want a vendor who cares about the phone for more than 6 months, the only vendor pursuing a strategy compatible with that right now is apple, because they want that initial sale, but they also want future sales, and app sales, and iad revenue. They have a vested interest in making sure your phone gets that upgrade, because it helps them make more money. Samsung, htc, AT&T, verizon? Mostly they want the initial sale, and then quick obsolescence to keep their revenues up; they're not interested in spending a bunch of money rolling out upgrades so you can spend money on someone else's apps in another store.
I don't see how it does. He hasn't had this problem in the past, or at least not on such a widespread scale, so I'd suggest that the thing to look at is what is unique about this set of students that makes them more inclined to cheat than previous classes.
Maybe the class was too hard because the students were dumb; Maybe the requirements were too high for the poor idiot students; maybe they felt it was the professor's job to entertain them, rather than instruct; Maybe the students felt that they were owed some sort of incentive for behaving in an ethical and decent manner. I think your questions should all be turned around on the students, to determine why *they* specifically felt the urge to cheat, as this professor has delivered this course to numerous other groups, apparently without widespread cheating.
Most universities also have a "Student Code of Conduct," which defines cheating as a violation, and often outlines punishment ranging from "throwing out the work" to "explusion from the university/college." Cheating on a test also breaks that agreement, leaving the professor with very little recourse other than issuing another major test. I'd be interested to see the outcome of a court case that tested a student's "right to cheat" against a university's right to demand ethical conduct from their students.
I have exactly zero sympathy for the students who did cheat - his offer to let them continue, and 'earn' a grade in the course is actually pretty generous. For the students who didn't cheat, and who have to take the test again - it sucks, but if they did well on the first test, it's very likely they have a pretty solid mastery of the material, and will do well on the re-test; the fact that it might disrupt their plans is awful, but it also creates an environment where cheating has an actual social cost, which obviously (if 1/3 of the class did, in fact, cheat) wasn't the case to begin with.
I don't disagree with that notion, but the problem is of our own making, the means of correcting it are within our control, and sitting around lamenting it without doing anything and exhorting your fellow citizens to take action is simply adding to the circus aspect.
Get involved. Run for office or support people who do. Work to put third party candidates in office. Tell everybody who will give you the time of day what the problems are today, and don't do it in an echo chamber - talk to and seek out people who DISAGREE with your positions, and listen to their positions and try to find common ground with them -- don't just shout slogans at each other.
Politics are broken in this country, you're right. But they're broken because of what we've made of them, and allowed other people to make of them. The only solution to that is to roll up our sleeves and start digging our way out of the mess we've made for ourselves.
What commercial flying is, however, is a contractual arrangement between the passenger and the airline, and the government has no business interfering with that contract. The entire regime of commercial airline security is a blatant overstepping of the power granted to the government by the U.S. constitution.
You can thank a tremendously liberal interpretation of the Commerce & "Necessary and Proper" clauses for that.
Unfortunately, the Constitution doesn't provide average citizens with any way to punish the people in power who perform these illegal acts or who mandate that these illegal acts be performed.
Yes, if only average citizens were allowed the right to choose the people who are put into power, and hold them accountable for their activities (or inactivities) while in office, and replace poor performers with people with more sensible and moderate policies through a regularly scheduled election cycle.
But alas! We're stuck with this accursed monarchy!
It's amazing how a story like this brings out the "I had this friend who..." brigade, eh?
I've never met a Mormon or Jehovah's Witness missionary who was anything less than polite, well-mannered, and respectful, and I've had a good 8 or 9 visits from them at various times that I can recall. A simple, "No thank you, I'm not interested, but have a nice day," is usually all it takes to send them on their way. I find it hard to swallow that these people are being badgered in so persistent a manner that they have to resort to public indecency, threats, and being downright offensive in order to get them to leave, it seems quite out of character for the missionaries I've met.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this because IRC is such a popular communications medium that everybody in the world uses it?
Open source is not magic sauce.
If Linus Torvalds was an utter incompetent, would anybody have bothered to "step in and fix" the Linux kernel?
If Richard Stallman was an utter incompetent, would anybody have bothered to "step in and fix" Emacs, or any of the other GNU tools he's had a hand in writing?
The point is this: When your system is designed by people who are *demonstrably* incapable of designing a system that meets the goals they've stated they will meet, how long do you expect any community to last around that? Diaspora has gotten so far only because of kind press. Looking at the impact graphs on Diaspora's github page, it looks as if there's roughly 10 people who are actively contributing to the project. How long until the community members get sick of fixing bad code, or realize that most of the code has been written by them because they had to rewrite the bulk of the original code to allow for things like security?
And how long after that until the project either loses contributors to forking, or it undergoes a leadership coup?
Once again: WE KNOW that you can build a social network, and we also know that you can build an open-source social network. It's been done. The project was not "interesting" from that perspective - Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Appleseed, and a host of other 'social networks' have already done one or both of those things.
The key differentiator for Diaspora was the goal of creating a secure, decentralized model that put the user in charge of their own privacy. The differentiator emphatically WAS NOT that they were "open source" - again, that's already been proven to be possible by other projects.
Which brings us to the question of why we *should* give a shit about Diaspora. I'll let their Kickstarter writeup speak for itself, here's what they had to say:
Please point out for me where they say "we aim to open source Facebook," because I'm not seeing it.
The GOAL of Diaspora was to create a more-secure social networking environment which gave control of user privacy back to the users.
The METHOD they intended to use was to open-source what they produced, and then build a community around it.
The RESULT was an unmitigated mess: the code they spent months writing did NOTHING to achieve their stated goals, in fact it was even LESS secure and private than Facebook, because it ignored standard and common security and privacy practices - things which should be part of your design from the ground up, including user authentication and access control for each and every operation the system performs.
They started out by saying "We're going to build an alternative which puts the user in control of their data." They created an alternative which puts ANY user in control of ANY data.
This is not trolling, this is an honest assessment of the progress & results of Diaspora. Their goals were more security & more privacy. They achieved neither of those goals with the code they wrote. Open source is not some magic sauce you marinate your code in in order to improve it, but suddenly the entire focus of Diaspora has gone from "it's more secure and more private," (their initial, stated goals) to "it's open source," as if that forgives the multitude of failings that the code has, simply because a bunch of people can read the source that implements those design flaws.
That's a pretty fucking HUGE assumption you're making there, and one which I'm not prepared to concede to you without substantial hard numbers and analysis demonstrating that American-manned checkpoints have a much higher rate of these incidents (as a proportion of checkpoints in operation) than other NATO forces.
If the Brits man 20 checkpoints and have 2 such incidents, and the Americans man 100 checkpoints and have 8 such incidents, Americans have "more incidents," but the likelihood of any given checkpoint having an incident is lower. You can't ignore the relative troop populations in your analysis.
And given the rest of your post, it's pretty clear that you have very little understanding of how the us military trains or operates.
Why exactly do we need to prove that its possible to build a social network? There are already a number of very successful ones in existence.
Car analogy: diaspora said they were going to make a car that works better than a Toyota. They produced something with no doors, no locks, which gets 2 miles to the gallon, and which has the tendency to explode if you get too close to other cars.
Why would you then insist on arguing that they were going to destroy toyota's market dominance any day now?
They failed to produce a prototype that demonstrated any ability to create secure code. And yet people are still sitting here arguing that it's just a matter of time before this abortion takes over the web and saves us all from facebook, despite it having demonstrably worse security and privacy controls - the very reason for its existence! - than facebook.
Diaspora is a failed source forge project created by a couple enthusiastic kids whose biggest achievement was to figure out a way to convince people to give them 200,000 dollars.
These aren't "bugs," these are "gaping holes in security and privacy controls that don't appear to even have been considered."
There's a difference between "our security system will behave badly when somebody presents it with a specially crafted URL, leading to unauthorized escalation of privileges" (a bug) and "our security system assumes that anybody accessing URL automatically has access to update, modify, delete, etc. anything at that URL." (a gaping hole in security, and a glaring *design* flaw).
Unless you define "bug" to be such a broad category that it includes "incomplete, poorly thought-out rubbish," you cannot call some of these issues "bugs" in the software.
This has already been done: it's called Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut. We know that it's possible to build a working web site for social networking, we didn't need Diaspora to show us that. Diaspora came to the table with the premise of building upon Facebook's "something working": namely, that users would be secure & in charge of their data. That was their key differentiator, they didn't need to show "hey somebody can build a web site that will allow people to communicate with friends!" They needed to show that it could be done more securely and with more respect for user's privacy.
They *failed* to produce a working proof of concept to show that goal could be met. They *failed* to do that because they did not incorporate simple security principles into their initial proof of concept.
Considering their revenues were 52 million in 2006, and they launched in 2004, I'd say you're off a bit on your estimate.
It took them longer to turn a profit, but they were clearly generating a sizable income off their web site within 2 years of launch. Given that, I'd say it's pretty safe to say that they probably launched with a pretty coherent business plan in place. You don't grow from launch to 52 million in revenue accidentally.
Actually yes, I'm not sure why you consider that such an onerous restriction.
My company offers iPhone connections using personal devices - I volunteered mine for the pilot. If I lose my device, I'm more than happy to have them capable of wiping the device, my data included. If I don't lose the device, and they accidentally wipe it, oh well.. shit happens. They informed me when I signed up in no uncertain terms that this was a risk of using my personal device. I prefer accepting that minimal risk if it allows me to avoid having to carry around a bulky blackberry all the time in addition to my personal phone.
Considering iTunes keeps (optionally encrypted) backups of your iPhone automatically, what's the impact? Perhaps you're out a phone for a few hours until you can restore a backup if they do it accidentally. If you lose the device for real, not having to initiate 2 remote wipes (one for company data, one for personal data) might actually save you time and hassle. If that minimal risk is too high for you... don't use your personal device on the corporate network.
Yeah, except without all that "financially successful" and "sound business plan" nonsense.
You could also conclude that cats don't spend much time communicating with one another 'verbally' - there's usually a strong physical - 'body language', if you will - element to it as well. Dogs seem more verbally expressive (I know that the average dog I've owned has been far noisier than the average cat), and thus may be more likely to understand that the noises you're making at it are communication, whereas the cat is hearing the noises, and looking at you (the source of the noises), but doesn't comprehend that the noises are tied to some sort of expected behavior.
I think you're right though - trying to assign "intelligence" in the human sense on an animal is a rather silly exercise.
The real question is this: did he ever figure out the cup holder?
Carp are quite edible. Think of it as the cat contributing to its own keep by getting a part-time job.
Too bad for your neighbor, but think of the money you'll save.
Specifically to your point about checkpoints - we can expect it all we want. At the end of the day, you have to admit that:
a) It is primarily young, nervous men and women managing the checkpoint in a warzone;
b) There is not always time to conduct a full "analysis" of the situation;
The proper expectation would be that it is *minimized,* not that it would 'never happen.' When you're manning a checkpoint, and you see a car speeding at you, not stopping or slowing as all of the signs and announcements tell it to... are you going to wait until it gets to you and blows up, or are you going to open fire and hope that you can stop the car before it reaches you?
I think these are *precisely* the sort of things that fit under the category of "mistakes made in the heat of battle" - you don't have time to stop the car, politely ask a few questions, share a cup of tea, and laugh about the misunderstanding with the car's driver, and become close Facebook friends. It is absolutely tragic that these sorts of things happen, but unless you mean to suggest that the women you're talking about were on foot, standing placidly in line, and a psychotic M50 gunner opened up on them, then you have to concede that these events, while tragic, are more than likely the result of "tragic mistakes and misunderstandings."
Or do we only presume innocence for civilians here?
This should be an expectation, but I suspect that your use of "murdered" implies a much broader definition of "murder" than I'd perhaps agree with. Say we capture an insurgent, and during the stress of interrogation - legal, humane interrogation, let's leave aside waterboarding and the like - he has a heart attack, or a stroke, and he dies. Would you consider that murder? We captured him, stressed him... is it our fault that he blew a gasket? I'd say no. I suspect, though I'd like you to answer, that you'd say "yes, that's murder."
Because you don't want to upgrade your entire infrastructure every 3 years - you do half now, the other half in 18 months, the first half in 36 months, and so on. Most servers are depreciated on a 3 year schedule, scheduling upgrades every ~18 months allows you to achieve some level of stability without tossing it all out the window at the end of your cycle.
As far as "having enough bandwidth", that's why you do analysis: compare costs of your current bandwidth needs & expected growth with the cost of buying, implementing, and supporting your own infrastructure. He does not say that they are constantly streaming this video library, just that they have a very large one. It's very possible that there is very little active, continuous streaming that would soak up huge amounts of bandwidth.
No, they do not. Because each time you buy a new phone, they lock you into a 2-year contract whose total sticker price far exceeds the cost of the phone, and you pay something probably closely approximating wholesale prices for the phone in the volumes the carriers can purchase them in.
They have *every* interest in seeing your phone be "just good enough" that you don't leave their service, and "just bad enough" that you want to buy an upgrade phone, and sign a new 2 year contract with them, as soon as you are able. If they spend time upgrading your software once they've already got your money, they're eating into the profits they've made.
The list was chosen quite specifically to highlight the fact that the carriers & the manufacturers (who happen to be both equipment maker & OS vendor) have no vested interest in providing you with upgrades for the life of the phone - how would it be in Samsung's interest to keep you using that Galaxy phone for 7 years? They'll expend all kinds of development effort, in return for what... a few dollars profit per unit? That's pretty thin margins stretched over many years.
In point of fact, positive cash flow *is* the goal of any for-profit company's product. A company that goes into business without paying attention to their expenses vs. their income will not remain in business.
Because the vendors care about the initial sale and, where applicable, the contract they lock you into.
If you want a vendor who cares about the phone for more than 6 months, the only vendor pursuing a strategy compatible with that right now is apple, because they want that initial sale, but they also want future sales, and app sales, and iad revenue. They have a vested interest in making sure your phone gets that upgrade, because it helps them make more money. Samsung, htc, AT&T, verizon? Mostly they want the initial sale, and then quick obsolescence to keep their revenues up; they're not interested in spending a bunch of money rolling out upgrades so you can spend money on someone else's apps in another store.
And only the really great students bother to learn the concepts, rather than cram a bunch of facts into their head and later forget them all.
Does that invalidate the point of education, or point to an issue with entitlement-mentality students being taught by regulation-bound professors?
"I paid my money, I attended class, now give me my degree."
"I showed up and lectured about exactly what I was required to for students to pass the test, now give me my tenure."
I don't see how it does. He hasn't had this problem in the past, or at least not on such a widespread scale, so I'd suggest that the thing to look at is what is unique about this set of students that makes them more inclined to cheat than previous classes.
Maybe the class was too hard because the students were dumb; Maybe the requirements were too high for the poor idiot students; maybe they felt it was the professor's job to entertain them, rather than instruct; Maybe the students felt that they were owed some sort of incentive for behaving in an ethical and decent manner. I think your questions should all be turned around on the students, to determine why *they* specifically felt the urge to cheat, as this professor has delivered this course to numerous other groups, apparently without widespread cheating.
Most universities also have a "Student Code of Conduct," which defines cheating as a violation, and often outlines punishment ranging from "throwing out the work" to "explusion from the university/college." Cheating on a test also breaks that agreement, leaving the professor with very little recourse other than issuing another major test. I'd be interested to see the outcome of a court case that tested a student's "right to cheat" against a university's right to demand ethical conduct from their students.
I have exactly zero sympathy for the students who did cheat - his offer to let them continue, and 'earn' a grade in the course is actually pretty generous. For the students who didn't cheat, and who have to take the test again - it sucks, but if they did well on the first test, it's very likely they have a pretty solid mastery of the material, and will do well on the re-test; the fact that it might disrupt their plans is awful, but it also creates an environment where cheating has an actual social cost, which obviously (if 1/3 of the class did, in fact, cheat) wasn't the case to begin with.
I don't disagree with that notion, but the problem is of our own making, the means of correcting it are within our control, and sitting around lamenting it without doing anything and exhorting your fellow citizens to take action is simply adding to the circus aspect.
Get involved. Run for office or support people who do. Work to put third party candidates in office. Tell everybody who will give you the time of day what the problems are today, and don't do it in an echo chamber - talk to and seek out people who DISAGREE with your positions, and listen to their positions and try to find common ground with them -- don't just shout slogans at each other.
Politics are broken in this country, you're right. But they're broken because of what we've made of them, and allowed other people to make of them. The only solution to that is to roll up our sleeves and start digging our way out of the mess we've made for ourselves.
You can thank a tremendously liberal interpretation of the Commerce & "Necessary and Proper" clauses for that.
Yes, if only average citizens were allowed the right to choose the people who are put into power, and hold them accountable for their activities (or inactivities) while in office, and replace poor performers with people with more sensible and moderate policies through a regularly scheduled election cycle.
But alas! We're stuck with this accursed monarchy!
It's amazing how a story like this brings out the "I had this friend who..." brigade, eh?
I've never met a Mormon or Jehovah's Witness missionary who was anything less than polite, well-mannered, and respectful, and I've had a good 8 or 9 visits from them at various times that I can recall. A simple, "No thank you, I'm not interested, but have a nice day," is usually all it takes to send them on their way. I find it hard to swallow that these people are being badgered in so persistent a manner that they have to resort to public indecency, threats, and being downright offensive in order to get them to leave, it seems quite out of character for the missionaries I've met.