I was actually going to shoot for a Soviet America joke, but seeing as the editor stole our thunder I guess not. It's a sad state of affairs when the editors start making stupid jokes in the articles, that's the job of the commentors. Now how am I ever going to earn that +5 funny that in no way contributes to my karma.
Please slashdot, won't you think of the smart asses?
Around where I live there's a porn store that used to (although doesn't anymore) post the picture, name, and a list of merchandise of anyone who is caught shoplifting from the store, as well as some commentary on the particular items in question. As a shoplifting deterrent in a store that many people are ashamed to be shopping in to begin with, I imagine it was quite effective. Also, as another poster has already pointed out, it's not libel if it's truthful, and having a policy report to back you up strikes me as about as truthful as you can reasonably get for this sort of offense.
awww, cmon....hasn't anyone seen the southpark movie?? Oh sure, I downloaded that off a Canadian bittorrent server the other day. Only problem was the moose that kept walking past the camera every 30 minutes or so.
Actually, China wouldn't care at all. The fact is, the United States is incapable of matching China's production costs, so it would be completely impossible for us to flood their market with cheap counterfeit goods (which are the only kind of counterfeit good that sells unless for some reason it's a limited supply item). As such, we could counterfeit Chinese goods coming into our country, but the chinese ones would probably be cheaper unless the Chinese government put large export tariffs on them, or we could try and ship counterfeit goods to China, but once again our goods would end up costing more than the origionals. The only reason that the US cares at all about IP is that it's our current major export, and as such we would really rather prefer if everyone payed us for it.
Most of the quality rips you find on bitorrent and such are actually ripped from inside the projection room as opposed to down in the audience. This won't cut back on pre-release copies in the slightest, and honestly I'd bet most of the copies floating around now are from the US and not Canada. This is mostly a PR thing to try and pressure the Canadian government into bending over and lubing up for the MPAA, and has nothing at all to do with piracy.
Majority does not rule in this case.
You *and only you* do if you're the parent.
You're immediate automatic abdication of your responsibility as a parent at the first hint of conflict in a purely hypothetical situation shows that to be the case.
Don't *ever* have children. It would hurt society and fuck them.
This is a rather old thread at this point, so this probably won't ever be read, but I feel I should respond anyway and I really wish this had not been posted as AC. I'm not abdicating my responsibility in this situation, merely facing the reality that when children are on school grounds, and are being monitored by school officials, they must behave by the rules the school has set in place. Those rules because they must apply equally to all students must be formulated to most closely match the opinion of the majority concerning appropriate behavior. If they did not match the majority opinion, then most people by definition would be unhappy with them and would complain.
If I had kids, the rules they would follow at home, would be drasticly different than those they would be required to follow at school, although seeing as I think the public school system is horribly broken, and intend to home school any children I decide to have, that won't really be an issue.
Enforcing rules and punishing actions is teaching them to choose more wisely. How is a child going to learn what is acceptable and what is not if they aren't punished for doing unacceptable things? I think perhaps I choose my wording poorly previously. I agree with this statement, although I think going around and trying to pro-actively restrict every conceivable action is utter foolishness. Now, some thing of course do need to be restricted, and they're the things that carry irrevocable consequences, such as ensuring that medications and harmful chemicals are locked away. But for everything else, the proper way to deal with it, is to explain why the rule is there, and when the rule is broken to enforce it in a proper manner.
Children will do what they want anyway, there's no real way to prevent it. You can try and enforce various rules, but even then you're only punishing the actions the children chose to do in the first place. Ultimately your goal as a parent isn't to run around trying to censor everything for your children, it's to teach your children why they shouldn't want to do those things in the first place. You can't force people to do things they don't want to do, only educate them and trust that they have the common sense not to do those things. In order for them to be able to make informed decisions you need to provide them with all the pertinent information though, and that's something that's apparently anathema to our school system. Everyone seems to think children are morons that are incapable of forming rational thought, when in reality they're merely lacking in pertinent information.
I find your second point to be somewhat ironic. You do of course realize that these internet filters are essentially the equivalent of trying to "bolt down" the internet. The point is, you have an obligation to keep the equipment the students are using in good working order. In the case of computers and networks, this means ensuring that they are as secure as reasonably possible with regards to malware, and student actions on them. The way to do this is not to try and block every possible website that might have bad content, as that's digital whack-a-mole with about 10 billion moles, utterly impossible. The students should be monitored yes, and held accountable for their actions, which in the case of websites means that when little johny pulls up extremebondagemidgetpr0n.com and your logger flags it, you pull johny aside and call his parents and explain what he's been up to, and give him detention. If he does it again you escalate the punishment, same as any other normal offense. This has the wonderful property of forcing the children and parents to deal with their actions, and making life very easy indeed for the campus staff. These sorts of things can even be done using smarter software to look for certain patterns. Seeing a lot of JPG files coming from a URL, take a peek and see what it is, if it's something like flickr, oh well, no harm there, if it's not, well deal with it.
No, I do not have kids, although I'm probably going to be getting engaged soon, and I've put some thought into children and even in the past how I want to raise them. I would like to think that I'll stick to my guns on these things, but who knows, I don't claim to be prescient.
I think that the schools have a requirement to monitor the students access and to punish those that access sites that fall outside certain guidelines (although I have a feeling my guidelines are probably much broader than the general publics, so in this case I guess majority rules). I do not think a firewall restricting sites is the proper answer as it will NEVER be an effective solution. I've had to deal with firewalls on numerous occasions, and 90% of the time they failed to block access to things that they should have (and I didn't even want to go to... stupid fscking popups), and yet they universally manage to restrict access to useful and relevant material. Firewalls are useful in restricting access to certain ports yes, and probably should be configured to block common P2P and file sharing applications, but web filters are a terribly proposition. They're like DRM in some ways, difficult and costly to maintain, and faulty and prone to error.
That doesn't really fix the problem entirely. In the past I've bypassed filters by running OpenSSH on port 443 configured to reroute ports, and then SSH into that system through the firewall. Best part is, because it's on the https port and encrypted, the connection looks more or less the same as any other https connection. Even though the fact that it persists for an extended period of time might flag it for someone looking, you could always claim the site you visited was running a COMET AJAX app, or something similar that plays games with prolonged http connections.
The first question I don't think is should the kids be punished, but rather if the punishment they are receiving is in line with the infraction. I could understand maybe getting tossed in detention, or maybe a more pro-active solution, being forced to help the network admins secure the network (imagine that, doing something useful instead of with obviously talented kids instead of throwing the book at them), but getting suspended for any length of time is probably way overboard.
Second, why do the schools feel the need to put stupid firewalls up in the first place? Honestly, there's nothing out there that the kids can't easily access elsewhere. I could understand maybe being worried about them downloading trojans and viruses on accident from less than upstanding websites, but a better solution in that case would be to tighten up the security on the computers to prevent that sort of thing rather than just blocking websites outright. Personally, unless there's a specific reason not to, I think most schools should be running something like SELinux anyway. Much easier to secure and keep running clean than just about anything else, and it already has a strong permission set so that students can use the systems for class work and such, without having to jump through hoops.
Just the other day I was using my 3D accelerated Beryl desktop, and playing Half-Life 2, and World of Warcraft in Linux, so remind me again what's decades behind? Incidently, Beryl is much better than Aero, I've seen and used both, and Beryl, if you're shopping for eye candy, is more functional, looks and behaves cooler, and is much lighter on the resource usage than Aero, but then again, it doesn't have to poll all your hardware and spy on your processes constantly to make sure you're not doing anything Microsoft isn't happy about.
Well, considering the level of detail you can usually manage on level editors, I doubt it would be sufficient to violate copyright. I'm thinking it would have to be pretty specific to qualify as a copyrighted work, and as such hallways, stairwells, and the like probably don't violate anything. Now, if you had say a particular statue or something, or maybe an unusual courtyard layout that might be something, but I have a feeling the school would have some trouble prosecuting for copyright infringement on that. Also, since you're creating a virtual level, as opposed to creating an actual structure, I wonder how that affects the law. Finally, you could of course always try and claim it was some sort of parody of the original and fall under the fair use rules (what little are left) that way.
I wonder what the reaction would be if someone (non-student) released a map pack for a popular game that contained maps based on many major schools and universities around the country. I think it's not technicly illegal, although I'm sure they would do there best to try and toss some sort of charge against you.
I'm pretty sure that's one of the signs of the apocalypse.
Now, if we can just get this whole copyright thing straightened out a little bit (like maybe reducing the lifetime of a copyright instead of increasing it for a change), and repeal all the legislation on software patents, we may just get somewhere.
I'd like to say I'm surprised at a school acting like this, but honestly it's about the expected behavior. Companies, schools, and institutions in general typically take the approach that if they deny it exists it will go away.
On a completely unrelated note, did anyone else notice that the read more page seemed to be down? I was getting 503 errors clicking on it.
You might also want to consider using more than one license for different parts of the application. You could for instance create some sort of support library and license it under LGPL, but use BSD or GPL for the actual application. This way others can use the library in other projects, even closed source ones, but your application is always guaranteed to be open source.
And this relates to the story how? The article was about false accusations, and that most of the so called child porn sites being used as evidences in these cases were just dummy sites without much of anything on them being used for credit card fraud. Kind of a novel approach to credit card fraud at that, a bit closer to pay per click fraud than traditional credit card fraud as it was the hosts committing the fraud and relying on the re-seller to take the hit for the charge-backs.
Yes, but the RIAA is just slippery enough to skirt the edge of legal without actually being able to be charged. In theory if they pull stunts like this a little too often then the lawyers might be brought before the state bar for disciplinary action, but being as it's run by fellow lawyers short of openly insulting the judge (repeatedly) or some sort of egregious legal offense it's rarely done. IANAL, but I've been known to peruse groklaw from time to time (as an indicator of what it takes, check the history of Jack Thompson, a complete raving nut-job who's been brought before the bar twice, but is somehow still licensed to practice law).
Well, assuming that the field used by the shield has a central generator, and that the field must be expanded into place rather than just suddenly being in place, the field would most likely erase any magnetic media it passed through while expanding. If the field projector was central to the craft that would be a issue. If on the other hand you had man small projectors on the outside of the craft, then only something within any given projectors field radius would be effected (and would have the added advantage that a failure in one projector would only compromise a small portion of the hull rather than all of it).
(4) Although it's possible to use tricks to get rid of some of the particles, or channel particles to a place where they're not as harmful, you still have to deal with the fact that you have particles with both signs of charge, which feel forces in opposite directions from the same field. What repels one attracts the other. Also, if the particles get channeled to a certain place, and impact on something solid, then you get extremely intense secondary radiation at that spot.
Maybe rather than try to stop the particles it would be possible to channel them around the craft? Also, is it feasible to maintain two oppositely charged fields layered one within the other, so that what isn't channeled by one, gets picked up by the other? I don't really have much physics knowledge beyond what I recall form HS and the odds and ends I've picked up over the years, but just trying to toss out some ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
You must be new here.
or, alternativly
Welcome to Soviet America.
I was actually going to shoot for a Soviet America joke, but seeing as the editor stole our thunder I guess not. It's a sad state of affairs when the editors start making stupid jokes in the articles, that's the job of the commentors. Now how am I ever going to earn that +5 funny that in no way contributes to my karma.
Please slashdot, won't you think of the smart asses?
Around where I live there's a porn store that used to (although doesn't anymore) post the picture, name, and a list of merchandise of anyone who is caught shoplifting from the store, as well as some commentary on the particular items in question. As a shoplifting deterrent in a store that many people are ashamed to be shopping in to begin with, I imagine it was quite effective. Also, as another poster has already pointed out, it's not libel if it's truthful, and having a policy report to back you up strikes me as about as truthful as you can reasonably get for this sort of offense.
Actually, China wouldn't care at all. The fact is, the United States is incapable of matching China's production costs, so it would be completely impossible for us to flood their market with cheap counterfeit goods (which are the only kind of counterfeit good that sells unless for some reason it's a limited supply item). As such, we could counterfeit Chinese goods coming into our country, but the chinese ones would probably be cheaper unless the Chinese government put large export tariffs on them, or we could try and ship counterfeit goods to China, but once again our goods would end up costing more than the origionals. The only reason that the US cares at all about IP is that it's our current major export, and as such we would really rather prefer if everyone payed us for it.
Most of the quality rips you find on bitorrent and such are actually ripped from inside the projection room as opposed to down in the audience. This won't cut back on pre-release copies in the slightest, and honestly I'd bet most of the copies floating around now are from the US and not Canada. This is mostly a PR thing to try and pressure the Canadian government into bending over and lubing up for the MPAA, and has nothing at all to do with piracy.
This is a rather old thread at this point, so this probably won't ever be read, but I feel I should respond anyway and I really wish this had not been posted as AC. I'm not abdicating my responsibility in this situation, merely facing the reality that when children are on school grounds, and are being monitored by school officials, they must behave by the rules the school has set in place. Those rules because they must apply equally to all students must be formulated to most closely match the opinion of the majority concerning appropriate behavior. If they did not match the majority opinion, then most people by definition would be unhappy with them and would complain.
If I had kids, the rules they would follow at home, would be drasticly different than those they would be required to follow at school, although seeing as I think the public school system is horribly broken, and intend to home school any children I decide to have, that won't really be an issue.
Children will do what they want anyway, there's no real way to prevent it. You can try and enforce various rules, but even then you're only punishing the actions the children chose to do in the first place. Ultimately your goal as a parent isn't to run around trying to censor everything for your children, it's to teach your children why they shouldn't want to do those things in the first place. You can't force people to do things they don't want to do, only educate them and trust that they have the common sense not to do those things. In order for them to be able to make informed decisions you need to provide them with all the pertinent information though, and that's something that's apparently anathema to our school system. Everyone seems to think children are morons that are incapable of forming rational thought, when in reality they're merely lacking in pertinent information.
I find your second point to be somewhat ironic. You do of course realize that these internet filters are essentially the equivalent of trying to "bolt down" the internet. The point is, you have an obligation to keep the equipment the students are using in good working order. In the case of computers and networks, this means ensuring that they are as secure as reasonably possible with regards to malware, and student actions on them. The way to do this is not to try and block every possible website that might have bad content, as that's digital whack-a-mole with about 10 billion moles, utterly impossible. The students should be monitored yes, and held accountable for their actions, which in the case of websites means that when little johny pulls up extremebondagemidgetpr0n.com and your logger flags it, you pull johny aside and call his parents and explain what he's been up to, and give him detention. If he does it again you escalate the punishment, same as any other normal offense. This has the wonderful property of forcing the children and parents to deal with their actions, and making life very easy indeed for the campus staff. These sorts of things can even be done using smarter software to look for certain patterns. Seeing a lot of JPG files coming from a URL, take a peek and see what it is, if it's something like flickr, oh well, no harm there, if it's not, well deal with it.
Ok, I'm going to tackle these in reverse order.
No, I do not have kids, although I'm probably going to be getting engaged soon, and I've put some thought into children and even in the past how I want to raise them. I would like to think that I'll stick to my guns on these things, but who knows, I don't claim to be prescient.
I think that the schools have a requirement to monitor the students access and to punish those that access sites that fall outside certain guidelines (although I have a feeling my guidelines are probably much broader than the general publics, so in this case I guess majority rules). I do not think a firewall restricting sites is the proper answer as it will NEVER be an effective solution. I've had to deal with firewalls on numerous occasions, and 90% of the time they failed to block access to things that they should have (and I didn't even want to go to... stupid fscking popups), and yet they universally manage to restrict access to useful and relevant material. Firewalls are useful in restricting access to certain ports yes, and probably should be configured to block common P2P and file sharing applications, but web filters are a terribly proposition. They're like DRM in some ways, difficult and costly to maintain, and faulty and prone to error.
That doesn't really fix the problem entirely. In the past I've bypassed filters by running OpenSSH on port 443 configured to reroute ports, and then SSH into that system through the firewall. Best part is, because it's on the https port and encrypted, the connection looks more or less the same as any other https connection. Even though the fact that it persists for an extended period of time might flag it for someone looking, you could always claim the site you visited was running a COMET AJAX app, or something similar that plays games with prolonged http connections.
The first question I don't think is should the kids be punished, but rather if the punishment they are receiving is in line with the infraction. I could understand maybe getting tossed in detention, or maybe a more pro-active solution, being forced to help the network admins secure the network (imagine that, doing something useful instead of with obviously talented kids instead of throwing the book at them), but getting suspended for any length of time is probably way overboard.
Second, why do the schools feel the need to put stupid firewalls up in the first place? Honestly, there's nothing out there that the kids can't easily access elsewhere. I could understand maybe being worried about them downloading trojans and viruses on accident from less than upstanding websites, but a better solution in that case would be to tighten up the security on the computers to prevent that sort of thing rather than just blocking websites outright. Personally, unless there's a specific reason not to, I think most schools should be running something like SELinux anyway. Much easier to secure and keep running clean than just about anything else, and it already has a strong permission set so that students can use the systems for class work and such, without having to jump through hoops.
Just the other day I was using my 3D accelerated Beryl desktop, and playing Half-Life 2, and World of Warcraft in Linux, so remind me again what's decades behind? Incidently, Beryl is much better than Aero, I've seen and used both, and Beryl, if you're shopping for eye candy, is more functional, looks and behaves cooler, and is much lighter on the resource usage than Aero, but then again, it doesn't have to poll all your hardware and spy on your processes constantly to make sure you're not doing anything Microsoft isn't happy about.
Well, considering the level of detail you can usually manage on level editors, I doubt it would be sufficient to violate copyright. I'm thinking it would have to be pretty specific to qualify as a copyrighted work, and as such hallways, stairwells, and the like probably don't violate anything. Now, if you had say a particular statue or something, or maybe an unusual courtyard layout that might be something, but I have a feeling the school would have some trouble prosecuting for copyright infringement on that. Also, since you're creating a virtual level, as opposed to creating an actual structure, I wonder how that affects the law. Finally, you could of course always try and claim it was some sort of parody of the original and fall under the fair use rules (what little are left) that way.
I wonder what the reaction would be if someone (non-student) released a map pack for a popular game that contained maps based on many major schools and universities around the country. I think it's not technicly illegal, although I'm sure they would do there best to try and toss some sort of charge against you.
I'm pretty sure that's one of the signs of the apocalypse.
Now, if we can just get this whole copyright thing straightened out a little bit (like maybe reducing the lifetime of a copyright instead of increasing it for a change), and repeal all the legislation on software patents, we may just get somewhere.
I'd like to say I'm surprised at a school acting like this, but honestly it's about the expected behavior. Companies, schools, and institutions in general typically take the approach that if they deny it exists it will go away.
On a completely unrelated note, did anyone else notice that the read more page seemed to be down? I was getting 503 errors clicking on it.
You might also want to consider using more than one license for different parts of the application. You could for instance create some sort of support library and license it under LGPL, but use BSD or GPL for the actual application. This way others can use the library in other projects, even closed source ones, but your application is always guaranteed to be open source.
This guy has some good points and it's worth a read. Title of the article is "Pick a License, Any License"
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000833.That's what you think, but they're actually on the way to John Cardholders house at 833 N. Scammed drive 31337 Redmond Washington
And this relates to the story how? The article was about false accusations, and that most of the so called child porn sites being used as evidences in these cases were just dummy sites without much of anything on them being used for credit card fraud. Kind of a novel approach to credit card fraud at that, a bit closer to pay per click fraud than traditional credit card fraud as it was the hosts committing the fraud and relying on the re-seller to take the hit for the charge-backs.
Yes, but the RIAA is just slippery enough to skirt the edge of legal without actually being able to be charged. In theory if they pull stunts like this a little too often then the lawyers might be brought before the state bar for disciplinary action, but being as it's run by fellow lawyers short of openly insulting the judge (repeatedly) or some sort of egregious legal offense it's rarely done. IANAL, but I've been known to peruse groklaw from time to time (as an indicator of what it takes, check the history of Jack Thompson, a complete raving nut-job who's been brought before the bar twice, but is somehow still licensed to practice law).
Well, assuming that the field used by the shield has a central generator, and that the field must be expanded into place rather than just suddenly being in place, the field would most likely erase any magnetic media it passed through while expanding. If the field projector was central to the craft that would be a issue. If on the other hand you had man small projectors on the outside of the craft, then only something within any given projectors field radius would be effected (and would have the added advantage that a failure in one projector would only compromise a small portion of the hull rather than all of it).
Maybe rather than try to stop the particles it would be possible to channel them around the craft? Also, is it feasible to maintain two oppositely charged fields layered one within the other, so that what isn't channeled by one, gets picked up by the other? I don't really have much physics knowledge beyond what I recall form HS and the odds and ends I've picked up over the years, but just trying to toss out some ideas.