1) Students in a high school do not have the same rights to privacy as students in college/the general population. What might normally be unlawful search and seizure may actually be allowed (see eg random locker searches).
2) Preventing cheating is a legitimate and compelling interest. I picked those words carefully. Why? Because when the court needs a test to evaluate a practice, those are two of the levels that they look for. Now, is this the least restrictive means? Probably not. But the school could argue that it is, as it does not force anyone to do any extra work.
3) It would be very nice if teachers could rewrite every class every year. But that's not the most efficient. Think of it this way: do you write code from scratch every time? Or do you copy and paste on occasion? Teachers are also taking questions more and more from the standardized tests that students will have to answer. Sometimes there aren't enough for multiple tests to be made. Everyone is quick to criticize teachers when they see something go bad. No one ever thanks them for everything that they do that benefits society. That's why so many of them leave the profession.
IANAL, but I am a law student and a former teacher.
There is no way this ends up good, if MS makes the sale. But here's a question. At what point does MS own too much of the computing world? With MS buying Borland and Rational, does this signify the end developments for other OS's? If not this, then how much more does MS need to buy before they do own practically everything.
Something to think about: Post Enron, and all the campaign finance issues that it has brought up, might there be a way to defeat this through bringing to light the contributions recieved by the sponsors? Or is that even relevant? Should we be looking at the motives of politicians who sponsor bills? IMO, we should when the bills are being passed for the benefit of donors to the pol's campaign. It seems to me that Senators and Congressmen forget who they work for (the people who elect them) and just care about fundraising. Okay, rant mode off.
11th Circuit Court of Appeals, Docket # No. 00-16346
Voyeur Dorm v City of Tampa
It's interesting to note that they ruled in favor of Voyeur Dorm because the company does not specifically service Tampa. The test cases involved companies that operated for the city and this one operates globally.
The University of Maryland has the same deal with Pepsi. There is one fridge unit of Coke on the entire campus afaik. In fact, the McDonald's in the Student Union is one of only 2 that sells Pepsi (the other being in the Staples Center in LA). When Coke was on the campus they were pretty good about competition and both companies' products were available. With Pepsi, it's only their and Frito-Lay products allowed.
What about their comment that the Linux Community seemed more interested in other things, such as embedded and wireless. Maybe they have a point. It's time for the Linux community to take a giant step back and say "What do we want Linux to be?"
If the goal is a mainstream OS then there needs to be more productivity towards that goal. Go back to the desktop and write software for that.
OTOH, if the goal is to be an all-purpose OS "for us, by us" then who cares if Dell sells it or not?
M$ asks, but we need to answer...where DO we want to go today?
Okay, but are they misquoting because they add links? If they link Bank to Wells Fargo, with the underlining, and assuming the user doesn't know the software is there and doing this then doesn't that imply that MY page is endorsing Wells Fargo somehow?
Patents are not made public until they are approved, at least in the United States. I believe I overheard a gripe from a patent attorney I did some work for that in Europe the proposals were made public. The reasoning for this is sound, at least in protecting the potential patent-holder. If my patent for a better mousetrap were released before I had the exclusive right to it, then someone else could develop and put it on the market before I got a chance to. However, if you can prove that you were developing something, you can challenge patents. So they must have a list of cases before the USPTO somewhere which would list just the type of idea up for patent (ie: a software program that writes "foo" in 800 colors). Having someone monitor that would be useful, but how many software patents are issued a year? And could the FSF really say anything that would make much difference? The hearings are mainly to decide whether or not the idea is unique enough to be patentable. Just my $0.02
Slashdot Mirror
So a couple of things.
1) Students in a high school do not have the same rights to privacy as students in college/the general population. What might normally be unlawful search and seizure may actually be allowed (see eg random locker searches).
2) Preventing cheating is a legitimate and compelling interest. I picked those words carefully. Why? Because when the court needs a test to evaluate a practice, those are two of the levels that they look for. Now, is this the least restrictive means? Probably not. But the school could argue that it is, as it does not force anyone to do any extra work.
3) It would be very nice if teachers could rewrite every class every year. But that's not the most efficient. Think of it this way: do you write code from scratch every time? Or do you copy and paste on occasion? Teachers are also taking questions more and more from the standardized tests that students will have to answer. Sometimes there aren't enough for multiple tests to be made.
Everyone is quick to criticize teachers when they see something go bad. No one ever thanks them for everything that they do that benefits society. That's why so many of them leave the profession.
IANAL, but I am a law student and a former teacher.
You worry me
KARMA-BURN!!!!
There is no way this ends up good, if MS makes the sale. But here's a question. At what point does MS own too much of the computing world? With MS buying Borland and Rational, does this signify the end developments for other OS's? If not this, then how much more does MS need to buy before they do own practically everything.
Something to think about:
Post Enron, and all the campaign finance issues that it has brought up, might there be a way to defeat this through bringing to light the contributions recieved by the sponsors?
Or is that even relevant? Should we be looking at the motives of politicians who sponsor bills? IMO, we should when the bills are being passed for the benefit of donors to the pol's campaign. It seems to me that Senators and Congressmen forget who they work for (the people who elect them) and just care about fundraising.
Okay, rant mode off.
This story was posted in August.4 3&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/03/02322
Wish we could mod the article down.
11th Circuit Court of Appeals, Docket # No. 00-16346
Voyeur Dorm v City of Tampa
It's interesting to note that they ruled in favor of Voyeur Dorm because the company does not specifically service Tampa. The test cases involved companies that operated for the city and this one operates globally.
The University of Maryland has the same deal with Pepsi. There is one fridge unit of Coke on the entire campus afaik. In fact, the McDonald's in the Student Union is one of only 2 that sells Pepsi (the other being in the Staples Center in LA). When Coke was on the campus they were pretty good about competition and both companies' products were available. With Pepsi, it's only their and Frito-Lay products allowed.
What about their comment that the Linux Community seemed more interested in other things, such as embedded and wireless. Maybe they have a point. It's time for the Linux community to take a giant step back and say "What do we want Linux to be?" If the goal is a mainstream OS then there needs to be more productivity towards that goal. Go back to the desktop and write software for that. OTOH, if the goal is to be an all-purpose OS "for us, by us" then who cares if Dell sells it or not? M$ asks, but we need to answer...where DO we want to go today?
Okay, but are they misquoting because they add links? If they link Bank to Wells Fargo, with the underlining, and assuming the user doesn't know the software is there and doing this then doesn't that imply that MY page is endorsing Wells Fargo somehow?
Patents are not made public until they are approved, at least in the United States. I believe I overheard a gripe from a patent attorney I did some work for that in Europe the proposals were made public. The reasoning for this is sound, at least in protecting the potential patent-holder. If my patent for a better mousetrap were released before I had the exclusive right to it, then someone else could develop and put it on the market before I got a chance to. However, if you can prove that you were developing something, you can challenge patents. So they must have a list of cases before the USPTO somewhere which would list just the type of idea up for patent (ie: a software program that writes "foo" in 800 colors). Having someone monitor that would be useful, but how many software patents are issued a year? And could the FSF really say anything that would make much difference? The hearings are mainly to decide whether or not the idea is unique enough to be patentable. Just my $0.02