The US government is certainly not an organization that values freedom over money. Yet ICANN has not done any of the following things that the ITU has proposed:
Unique identifiers for Internet users or their computers
Separate "service classes" for servers and client computers
A system of fees, surcharges, etc.
Special licensing for providing particular kinds of Internet services
These are the sort of things that, despite intense pressure from various industries, we have not seen on the Internet as controlled by ICANN. Sure, we've seen some censorship, but at the end of the day I can still use PGP and I can still run my own mail server, and I can do so without needing to obtain anyone's permission. This morning I ssh'd to my mother's computer to help troubleshoot a problem she was having -- and nothing stopped me, despite the fact that her computer is connected to the Internet through a "consumer grade" cable package.
ITU has a long history of designing communications systems that cement the power of monopoly service providers and which prevent people from hacking or coming up with their own solutions to problems. ITU's approach to the telephone network reflects its mindset; likewise with ITU's approach to radio. Amateurs? Hackers? You're lucky to get a tiny bit of space to play in, but you better not do anything that could threaten the big boys who provide "real" service to consumers.
To put it another way, if ITU had designed the Internet, there would never have been Google, because there would have been too much paperwork to fill out, too many licensing fees, and too many bandwidth fees to make something experimental like that work. The Internet's most important design feature is not packet switching, it is the idea that all computers connected to the Internet can do the same things, limited only by technical things like CPU or connection speeds. ITU doesn't design that sort of network; ITU designs this sort of network:
Without the ability to reason about problems, your technical skills will get you nowhere. You know Ruby? You know.NET? What are you going to do when your framework or language is missing a feature? What you are going to do if you are presented with a problem that is not in your skillset?
That should be the point of college: to open your mind, to introduce you to new ways of thinking about problems, to train you to think and to develop solutions to problems that other people did not already solve. Things that are missing from your "toolbox."
People Skills
What do you think people who lack this talent should do?
I'm making more money than all of my 4-year degree friends because I decided long ago to educate myself in a field that's likely to GROW
Congratulations, but most people are not autodidacts.
He was definitely morally guilty as he's a chancer who thought he could make a bundle of cash by skirting the law
Not all laws are rooted in morality. Copyright, for example, is not a moral imperative; it was created to promote a particular industry's financial interests, and it has always been about promoting industry interests.
He made money with advertising by hosting links to pirated content, where he provided facilities for the people with the pirated content to provide and update the links, and took a more custodial role than a simple hands off search engine
So what you are saying is that he created a system where anyone who was hosting video files could advertise their videos? Maybe the MPAA should have made use of this system, since it sounds like it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper than their current advertising strategy.
He shouldn't be extradited, but he should be charged in the uk, and fined sufficiently that he hasn't made a profit out of this venture
So he had a good idea that might threaten the financial interests of the movie industry; your solution is to drive him out of business?
I'm fairly certain he was hosting the content himself.
You are fairly incorrect then; he hosted links.
If I spent all my money to make an expensive show and then someone ripped it off and started streaming it for free and stealing my viewers and making money off my work that they paid nothing for, I'd fucking kill them
Then you are a psychopath.
The fact that Hollywood companies are rich, greedy assholes is irrelevant
Except when they use their wealth to buy off politicians and create a situation where the US government tries to use an extradition treaty over a website with links to other websites that supposedly infringed on copyrights (whether or not a particular use of a copyrighted work is actually copyright infringement needs to be decided in court; only judges can decide if the fair use doctrine applies, even if the entire work was copied, and even if it seems "obvious" that it was no fair use).
Stealing content
Nothing was stolen. Hollywood had as much access to and benefit from their movies and TV shows before TVShack as they did afterwards.
making money on someone else's work is wrong
Oh, is it now? Let's get the assholes who are doing it then:
If someone ripped off Libre Office and started selling copies for cash
That person would be entirely within their rights, as the GPL allows the sale or commercial use of covered works. In fact, there is a multi-billion dollar software company that routinely sells LibreOffice:
Sure there is: the GPL allows people to sell copies covered works without having to ask permission, so nobody will face extradition over doing so. Hollywood thinks that every time you copy a movie, you are committing copyright infringement, regardless of whether or not that has been settled in court, and has been trying to hijack the government to keep their business in the black (while simultaneously claiming they are losing money). That is the difference. This is not about the legality of hosting links to possibly illegal videos, it is about the hijacking of a major world power's government.
You are confusing communism with fascism. In fascism, society as a whole takes precedence over individuals (except, of course, those who are in command of society and who therefore decide what society should be doing). In communism, workers own the means of production; communists often promote non-individualistic approaches to society (shared ownership of things besides the means of production), but this is not strictly necessary for a communist system and markets are possible in communism.
That's where everything tends to fall apart.
Communism tends to fall apart at the nation-state level because it is usually not voluntary. Voluntary communism -- collective ownership of factories, farms, and even entire towns -- has worked and continues to work. The problem with communist revolutions is basically identical to every other revolution: most people are not great enlightenment thinkers, so when the revolutionary army overthrows an abusive government, you usually wind up with some form of dictatorship (see e.g. Cuba, or for something more modern, Egypt). That is not the fault of communism; it happens among capitalists as well.
In capitalism, the government is (should be) a different entity altogether from the many, many businesses and banks that control the money.
In fact, money is not possible without government (let's see if Bitcoin can prove me wrong), because governments are the most important force in the demand for money (regardless of the supply of that money). Banks issue loans because they know that one of two things will happen: either they will get more money than they started with, or the government will let them take some property as collateral. Businesses demand money as payment for goods and services because they know that without money, they will be unable to make the payments they are legally required to make -- taxes, loan repayment, etc. Individuals use money when they deal with businesses, banks, and the government because they are dealing with organizations that either require money (like the government) or which will accept nothing else because of the legal framework surrounding money (like businesses and banks); thus individuals must have at least some money available to them (note, however, that individuals and small businesses frequently loan or barter things that are not money, or that they share such things; that does not scale very well, which is why governments started using money in the first place).
So really, capitalists need the government just as much as communists do, and for basically the same reason as anyone else: law. Laws are what make societies possible (though too many laws can become a crushing, tyrannical part of society); without laws, society crumbles and chaos ensues. Capitalists need laws to ensure that they can work in a system where they can own property and where they can engage in organized trade; without laws, capitalism fails because people can just walk up and take what they want, without trading for it (perhaps killing the person who says "no"). Communists need laws too: not only can money exist within communist systems, but communist system need laws the describe who may utilize or consume things (as property law does not cover such things in a communist system). A collectively owned factory is communist (just a very small scale), yet that factory will still have contracts, work assignments, and procedures for hiring or firing people (and the law will ensure that a person who is fired can be refused entry to the factory).
[Government] power lies in having control of the courts, the military/police, and as overseer of property rights. All of this is separated from that money and power that the money brings
No, courts, police, and property rights comprise nearly all of the demand for money in any free society, and more general
So on the one hand, you think loans are a bad thing because of the banking crises. On the other hand, you think that sometimes an investment is worth making. What exactly do you think an investment is? Investments are loans: you are giving your money to someone, and you expect them to give you back more.
See, there is a difference between "taking on debt you cannot repay" and "taking on debt that you have a plan to repay." If you have a good business plan, you can take out a loan to pay for the business to run. Sometimes, that loan is in the form of selling stock (common or preferred), sometimes bonds, sometimes it is with a bank, sometimes with individual investors, sometimes a combination of all the above. Surprisingly, this system enables businesses to be run by people who are not already wealthy, and has the effect of allowing people who were not born into the ruling class to join it (compare with other, older systems where only people who are already wealthy can start businesses).
How on Earth does SETI@Home benefit society? Even if by some bizarre coincidence, we actually detected evidence of intelligent life outside of the solar system, the likelihood that society would benefit by that is basically nil.
Here's the highest-level view possible: a bunch of anarchists thought that an interesting cryptographic trick would let them have money without government, and then a bunch of opportunists realized that they could scam people with Bitcoin much in the same way that bankers scam people with unusual investments.
Bitcoin will let us see if money is something that can truly exist without government, or if the anarchists were full of it. Bitcoin's success or failure will almost certainly tell us more about this than about deflationary spirals.
So what you are saying is, if I happen to have some Bitcoin units, I should hang on to them as long as possible, because eventually people will have divided Bitcoin units up to the point where the handful I saved up will be worth a fortune? Sounds like a great currency (except for the whole "this is going to fail" part)!
I have quite a few Israeli friends; most are concerned with civil and social issues, not with military issues, and I am told that is basically what politics in Israel are like. There were major protests in Israel last year; they were over the price of food, the rent, etc. Israel is not terribly different from other countries: the people are mostly concerned with things that immediately affect them like the cost of living.
Of course, most able-bodied Israelis serve in the army. Here, for example, is an Israeli soldier's view of what it was like in West Bank:
For what it's worth, I met many Israelis at an academic conference this past summer. I also met Egyptians, and my Iranian coworker was there with me. We all had dinner together, and there was no tension, no arguing about politics, none of that -- most of these people thought the situation was absurd and that the violence was unnecessary (the Iranian recently finished her immigration paperwork and will soon be a US citizen; the Egyptians were glad to have not been in Egypt during the revolution).
No one is watching them use the bathroom, you're being ridiculous
The question was about what expectation of privacy students should have in school, not what privacy right is violated by RFID tags.
Badges like these have huge benefits:
They have far greater costs. If children grow up thinking that they need to carry RFID tags everywhere, they will believe that RFID tags are a normal part of life. If children grow up thinking that their comings and goings will be monitored, that every door they open will be recorded in a database somewhere, and that cameras are everywhere, they will not question mass surveillance when they are adults. You may want to live in a world where you are always being watched, but I don't.
access to computer labs
As if students couldn't walk into a computer room in the past? What do you think the RFID tag does? Do you really think people should be trained from an early age to believe that computer access should be tightly controlled and carefully monitored?
instant login to computers
No, you mean instant username entry; passwords are almost universally required even when smartcards are used for authentication (and I doubt that these RFID tags are even that advanced).
evening and weekend access to school property
I doubt it. Nowhere in TFA did I see anything that indicated that the district had planned such a thing. Even if that had been planned, it is very unlikely that students would be unsupervised at school; security guards would be present, at least for liability reasons (the last thing the district needs is for a student to be lying on the floor in a puddle of blood with nobody there to call an ambulance). So why not just have security guards allow the students into the building? What advantage do the RFID cards have here?
reduce theft, vandalism and bullying
Citation needed. Seriously, do you think a thief would not figure out how to steal some other student's card to get into a locked room? What do RFID cards have to do with bullying?
My high school installed cameras to catch students smoking marijuana in the halls. The students started smoking marijuana in the stairwells. What magic formula does this school district have that will be so hard for middle school students to find the cracks in?
She's very fortunate to be going to a school that offers such nice stuff
I think she'd be more fortunate to go to a school that is not built like a prison.
That is because hackers don't just act greedy. After all, they are daring to question the system, rather than just falling in line and trying to exploit other people. That is more dangerous than anything else, even more dangerous than someone who plans and executes a murder.
30 minutes should be considered ridiculous for this. Stratfor as a company should be under investigation, with possible criminal charges. Of course, why would society want to thank intelligent people who do not use their skills to exploit other people and actually try to benefit society, when instead we could punish them and demand that they just get in line and be selfish like everyone else?
So people feel better about themselves when they say thanks? Perhaps this is part of the reason why so many religions have special prayers before / after meals.
None of your coworkers see you come in and know what time you arrived correct?
Nobody sits there writing down when I enter or exit, when I go to the bathroom, when I get my lunch, etc. If you do, I would not want to work with you, and I do not think you would want to work with such a person. Not only that, but my coworkers do not go up the management hierarchy telling each person in the "chain of command" when I came in (and if you do that, you are antisocial).
Neither your computer nor the authentication server your computer uses log what time you logged in correct?
Ignoring the fact that I manage my own workstation (and so the logs are accessible only to me), such logs do not tell people when I went out for a walk, when I went to the bathroom, etc.; there is far less detail there. Those logs also say nothing about the work I am doing, since my work (like many other lines of work) often involves things that have nothing to do with typing on my computer, like meeting with people, writing on a whiteboard, making phone calls, etc. The difference with card-swipe logs is that they are all-encompassing -- if I go to a meeting in a conference, I need to swipe in; if I step out to go the bathroom, I need to swipe in on my way back (thankfully, we were not asked to swipe into the bathrooms); if I step out for lunch, I must swipe in to reenter the building, and again to reenter my office. That kind of detail is entirely inappropriate.
You're argument seems to be centered around the idea that your boss has no right to know if you are actually fulfilling your obligations as an employee.
I let my work speak for itself, as should anyone else. I am not doing work that requires me to be in my office at any specific time; if I get it done, it is done, and nobody needs to know when I was at my desk (or even if I was at my desk -- if I work from home and my work gets done, why should I be expected to be at my desk?). This does not work for everyone, of course; my mother needs to be at her job at certain times, because she works on a railroad.
See, the real problem with recording when employees enter their offices, conference rooms, and buildings is that it shifts the balance of power further in favor of the boss. Upper level management can see when I enter my office; I, of course, cannot see when they enter their offices. Who actually has access to these logs is kept secret from me and the people I work with; it is not secret from the people we are working for. The people we work for do not even have to swipe in -- they have physical keys. The people who set the policies on the card swipes, on who can access what rooms and when, and who can read the database, do not even work in this building, and are so far removed from the work we do that if you asked them, they would just come up with some generic answer about the field we work in.
The problem with these shallow, one-dimensional metrics is that they only serve the purpose of giving disconnected managers an easy way to exploit employees and to turn employees against each other. Why defend that sort of thing? Judge employees by their contribution to organizational goals, not by the number of hours they work; if the MBAs who dream up these metrics are incapable of doing so, they should be fired and replaced by people who are not so incompetent.
I'm guessing it is also a violation of your privacy for your boss to see you at your desk? Since it is the same thing has having to use a badge to get through the door and all.
No, when my boss sees me at my desk, he knows that I came in at some point. When I have to swipe in, the boss also knows all of the following:
When I came in
If went out at some point, and when, and how many times
What my work pattern is
...and he knows this without having to come in himself to actually speak with me or anyone else. Not only that, but it is not just my boss who knows -- my boss and anyone who has access to that database (which is a list that is rarely made clear in official policies on these things), and anyone in the future who might be given access (again, unspecified). I do not need some person at the top level of management telling me that I am not working hard enough because I do not swipe in until 830am, nor do I need my coworkers being told to work more hours because of my swipe in pattern. I also do not want to be questioned about my coming and going a year from now when some new group of MBAs comes in with one-dimensional metrics.
So yeah, there is a difference, and it matters, and schoolchildren should not be trained to accept this sort of thing.
24 hours for all the other drugs, including amphetamines
Considering the fact that amphetamine (e.g. Adderall) affects a person's system for about four hours, I fail to see how this is a good thing. I also fail to see how it can be a good thing given the large number of people who use amphetamines legally, as prescribed by a doctor. Therapeutic doses of amphetamines will improve a person's ability to drive, so I have to wonder why we would even be concerned about people driving under the influence of amphetamines.
24 hours for all the other drugs,... and THC
THC is the drug in marijuana, so you must be mistaken (or this is a scam).
The real answer is to improve public transit, so that fewer people drive. Sure, people are going to need to drive around in rural areas, but we have a problem with impaired drivers in densely populated areas -- a problem that would be address by expanding public transit. Ultimately, the solution to impaired driving is to simply not have people drive -- but for the time being, we can pay people to drive buses, and we can focus our impairment tests on those people.
Isn't that what school is? Conform to what we want you to know?
In theory, the purpose of a public school system is to benefit the public and to break aristocracies (whose power is often maintained by a continued and exclusive access to quality education). In practice, the purpose of school is to babysit children while their parents are out working, because in today's world it is too dangerous for children to run wild in the streets (according to some). Brainwashing and teaching conformity are just unintended consequences of poorly thought out policies by the sort of bureaucrats who think scantron forms are a way to measure student aptitude (don't kid yourself: the people who are paid to educate children are not clever enough to develop a grand strategy for brainwashing them, and neither are the major party politicians who control school budgets; metal detectors, surveillance cameras, bars over the windows, etc. are just easy and lawyer-friendly ways to address the symptoms of broader problems).
And someone please explain what expectation of privacy a child should have on public property
How about the right to go to the bathroom without being watched?
Does she complain about security cameras too?
I would have. Considering that at my high school, holding a blank postboard in front of a security camera resulted in the guards running to the camera to see what was happening, while an actual fistfight (a rarity at my high school) didn't result in guards coming at all, it is pretty clear that the cameras have nothing to do with student safety (and neither do the guards).
Unless she plans on flipping burgers she better get use to badges and logins.
Or, people could learn to stand up for themselves and fight back against these sorts of things. I am a graduate student, and when my department was moved into a new building where our student ID cards were used as keys to our offices, and our doors could not be propped open without horribly loud alarms going off, we fought back. Eventually we got a compromise -- we could prop open our doors 9-5 on weekdays, so only the first person to come to the office would have to swipe in.
There is a broader problem here, and your response is a symptom of it: people have no desire to stand up for themselves, and they just let themselves get trampled by this sort of thing. This is where we come full circle, of course, since school is where people learn to be trampled -- unless they are wealthy and go to a school that teaches them how to trample others. So really, our public education system is failing to meet the goals it was originally created for (but we are too busy complaining about the UFT and about test scores to even notice that).
That will just result in bureaucratic idiots thinking that she is in school and in attendance, and her friend giggling when questioned about her location. The problem here is the assumption that this is about a single student, when it is really about the school district.
Slashdot Mirror
The US government is certainly not an organization that values freedom over money. Yet ICANN has not done any of the following things that the ITU has proposed:
These are the sort of things that, despite intense pressure from various industries, we have not seen on the Internet as controlled by ICANN. Sure, we've seen some censorship, but at the end of the day I can still use PGP and I can still run my own mail server, and I can do so without needing to obtain anyone's permission. This morning I ssh'd to my mother's computer to help troubleshoot a problem she was having -- and nothing stopped me, despite the fact that her computer is connected to the Internet through a "consumer grade" cable package.
ITU has a long history of designing communications systems that cement the power of monopoly service providers and which prevent people from hacking or coming up with their own solutions to problems. ITU's approach to the telephone network reflects its mindset; likewise with ITU's approach to radio. Amateurs? Hackers? You're lucky to get a tiny bit of space to play in, but you better not do anything that could threaten the big boys who provide "real" service to consumers.
To put it another way, if ITU had designed the Internet, there would never have been Google, because there would have been too much paperwork to fill out, too many licensing fees, and too many bandwidth fees to make something experimental like that work. The Internet's most important design feature is not packet switching, it is the idea that all computers connected to the Internet can do the same things, limited only by technical things like CPU or connection speeds. ITU doesn't design that sort of network; ITU designs this sort of network:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.25
Here, by the way, is ITU's next generation Internet plan:
http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/gsi/ngn/Pages/default.aspx
Technical Skills
Without the ability to reason about problems, your technical skills will get you nowhere. You know Ruby? You know .NET? What are you going to do when your framework or language is missing a feature? What you are going to do if you are presented with a problem that is not in your skillset?
That should be the point of college: to open your mind, to introduce you to new ways of thinking about problems, to train you to think and to develop solutions to problems that other people did not already solve. Things that are missing from your "toolbox."
People Skills
What do you think people who lack this talent should do?
I'm making more money than all of my 4-year degree friends because I decided long ago to educate myself in a field that's likely to GROW
Congratulations, but most people are not autodidacts.
No, in the UK at least it was created to provide artists like Dickens with a way of earning money from their creations.
No it wasn't. In the UK, you started with the Licensing Act, which was designed to promote the interests of the book publishing industry.
He was definitely morally guilty as he's a chancer who thought he could make a bundle of cash by skirting the law
Not all laws are rooted in morality. Copyright, for example, is not a moral imperative; it was created to promote a particular industry's financial interests, and it has always been about promoting industry interests.
He made money with advertising by hosting links to pirated content, where he provided facilities for the people with the pirated content to provide and update the links, and took a more custodial role than a simple hands off search engine
So what you are saying is that he created a system where anyone who was hosting video files could advertise their videos? Maybe the MPAA should have made use of this system, since it sounds like it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper than their current advertising strategy.
He shouldn't be extradited, but he should be charged in the uk, and fined sufficiently that he hasn't made a profit out of this venture
So he had a good idea that might threaten the financial interests of the movie industry; your solution is to drive him out of business?
I'm fairly certain he was hosting the content himself.
You are fairly incorrect then; he hosted links.
If I spent all my money to make an expensive show and then someone ripped it off and started streaming it for free and stealing my viewers and making money off my work that they paid nothing for, I'd fucking kill them
Then you are a psychopath.
The fact that Hollywood companies are rich, greedy assholes is irrelevant
Except when they use their wealth to buy off politicians and create a situation where the US government tries to use an extradition treaty over a website with links to other websites that supposedly infringed on copyrights (whether or not a particular use of a copyrighted work is actually copyright infringement needs to be decided in court; only judges can decide if the fair use doctrine applies, even if the entire work was copied, and even if it seems "obvious" that it was no fair use).
Stealing content
Nothing was stolen. Hollywood had as much access to and benefit from their movies and TV shows before TVShack as they did afterwards.
making money on someone else's work is wrong
Oh, is it now? Let's get the assholes who are doing it then:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
If someone ripped off Libre Office and started selling copies for cash
That person would be entirely within their rights, as the GPL allows the sale or commercial use of covered works. In fact, there is a multi-billion dollar software company that routinely sells LibreOffice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat,_Inc.
There is no difference.
Sure there is: the GPL allows people to sell copies covered works without having to ask permission, so nobody will face extradition over doing so. Hollywood thinks that every time you copy a movie, you are committing copyright infringement, regardless of whether or not that has been settled in court, and has been trying to hijack the government to keep their business in the black (while simultaneously claiming they are losing money). That is the difference. This is not about the legality of hosting links to possibly illegal videos, it is about the hijacking of a major world power's government.
This is how we know that our copyright system is completely out of control. Extradition over links?
In communism, there is one entity: society.
You are confusing communism with fascism. In fascism, society as a whole takes precedence over individuals (except, of course, those who are in command of society and who therefore decide what society should be doing). In communism, workers own the means of production; communists often promote non-individualistic approaches to society (shared ownership of things besides the means of production), but this is not strictly necessary for a communist system and markets are possible in communism.
That's where everything tends to fall apart.
Communism tends to fall apart at the nation-state level because it is usually not voluntary. Voluntary communism -- collective ownership of factories, farms, and even entire towns -- has worked and continues to work. The problem with communist revolutions is basically identical to every other revolution: most people are not great enlightenment thinkers, so when the revolutionary army overthrows an abusive government, you usually wind up with some form of dictatorship (see e.g. Cuba, or for something more modern, Egypt). That is not the fault of communism; it happens among capitalists as well.
In capitalism, the government is (should be) a different entity altogether from the many, many businesses and banks that control the money.
In fact, money is not possible without government (let's see if Bitcoin can prove me wrong), because governments are the most important force in the demand for money (regardless of the supply of that money). Banks issue loans because they know that one of two things will happen: either they will get more money than they started with, or the government will let them take some property as collateral. Businesses demand money as payment for goods and services because they know that without money, they will be unable to make the payments they are legally required to make -- taxes, loan repayment, etc. Individuals use money when they deal with businesses, banks, and the government because they are dealing with organizations that either require money (like the government) or which will accept nothing else because of the legal framework surrounding money (like businesses and banks); thus individuals must have at least some money available to them (note, however, that individuals and small businesses frequently loan or barter things that are not money, or that they share such things; that does not scale very well, which is why governments started using money in the first place).
So really, capitalists need the government just as much as communists do, and for basically the same reason as anyone else: law. Laws are what make societies possible (though too many laws can become a crushing, tyrannical part of society); without laws, society crumbles and chaos ensues. Capitalists need laws to ensure that they can work in a system where they can own property and where they can engage in organized trade; without laws, capitalism fails because people can just walk up and take what they want, without trading for it (perhaps killing the person who says "no"). Communists need laws too: not only can money exist within communist systems, but communist system need laws the describe who may utilize or consume things (as property law does not cover such things in a communist system). A collectively owned factory is communist (just a very small scale), yet that factory will still have contracts, work assignments, and procedures for hiring or firing people (and the law will ensure that a person who is fired can be refused entry to the factory).
[Government] power lies in having control of the courts, the military/police, and as overseer of property rights. All of this is separated from that money and power that the money brings
No, courts, police, and property rights comprise nearly all of the demand for money in any free society, and more general
So on the one hand, you think loans are a bad thing because of the banking crises. On the other hand, you think that sometimes an investment is worth making. What exactly do you think an investment is? Investments are loans: you are giving your money to someone, and you expect them to give you back more.
See, there is a difference between "taking on debt you cannot repay" and "taking on debt that you have a plan to repay." If you have a good business plan, you can take out a loan to pay for the business to run. Sometimes, that loan is in the form of selling stock (common or preferred), sometimes bonds, sometimes it is with a bank, sometimes with individual investors, sometimes a combination of all the above. Surprisingly, this system enables businesses to be run by people who are not already wealthy, and has the effect of allowing people who were not born into the ruling class to join it (compare with other, older systems where only people who are already wealthy can start businesses).
How on Earth does SETI@Home benefit society? Even if by some bizarre coincidence, we actually detected evidence of intelligent life outside of the solar system, the likelihood that society would benefit by that is basically nil.
Here's the highest-level view possible: a bunch of anarchists thought that an interesting cryptographic trick would let them have money without government, and then a bunch of opportunists realized that they could scam people with Bitcoin much in the same way that bankers scam people with unusual investments.
Bitcoin will let us see if money is something that can truly exist without government, or if the anarchists were full of it. Bitcoin's success or failure will almost certainly tell us more about this than about deflationary spirals.
So what you are saying is, if I happen to have some Bitcoin units, I should hang on to them as long as possible, because eventually people will have divided Bitcoin units up to the point where the handful I saved up will be worth a fortune? Sounds like a great currency (except for the whole "this is going to fail" part)!
I have quite a few Israeli friends; most are concerned with civil and social issues, not with military issues, and I am told that is basically what politics in Israel are like. There were major protests in Israel last year; they were over the price of food, the rent, etc. Israel is not terribly different from other countries: the people are mostly concerned with things that immediately affect them like the cost of living.
Of course, most able-bodied Israelis serve in the army. Here, for example, is an Israeli soldier's view of what it was like in West Bank:
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/oded_naaman_israeli_defense_forces_palestinians_occupation.php
For what it's worth, I met many Israelis at an academic conference this past summer. I also met Egyptians, and my Iranian coworker was there with me. We all had dinner together, and there was no tension, no arguing about politics, none of that -- most of these people thought the situation was absurd and that the violence was unnecessary (the Iranian recently finished her immigration paperwork and will soon be a US citizen; the Egyptians were glad to have not been in Egypt during the revolution).
No one is watching them use the bathroom, you're being ridiculous
The question was about what expectation of privacy students should have in school, not what privacy right is violated by RFID tags.
Badges like these have huge benefits:
They have far greater costs. If children grow up thinking that they need to carry RFID tags everywhere, they will believe that RFID tags are a normal part of life. If children grow up thinking that their comings and goings will be monitored, that every door they open will be recorded in a database somewhere, and that cameras are everywhere, they will not question mass surveillance when they are adults. You may want to live in a world where you are always being watched, but I don't.
access to computer labs
As if students couldn't walk into a computer room in the past? What do you think the RFID tag does? Do you really think people should be trained from an early age to believe that computer access should be tightly controlled and carefully monitored?
instant login to computers
No, you mean instant username entry; passwords are almost universally required even when smartcards are used for authentication (and I doubt that these RFID tags are even that advanced).
evening and weekend access to school property
I doubt it. Nowhere in TFA did I see anything that indicated that the district had planned such a thing. Even if that had been planned, it is very unlikely that students would be unsupervised at school; security guards would be present, at least for liability reasons (the last thing the district needs is for a student to be lying on the floor in a puddle of blood with nobody there to call an ambulance). So why not just have security guards allow the students into the building? What advantage do the RFID cards have here?
reduce theft, vandalism and bullying
Citation needed. Seriously, do you think a thief would not figure out how to steal some other student's card to get into a locked room? What do RFID cards have to do with bullying?
My high school installed cameras to catch students smoking marijuana in the halls. The students started smoking marijuana in the stairwells. What magic formula does this school district have that will be so hard for middle school students to find the cracks in?
She's very fortunate to be going to a school that offers such nice stuff
I think she'd be more fortunate to go to a school that is not built like a prison.
That is because hackers don't just act greedy. After all, they are daring to question the system, rather than just falling in line and trying to exploit other people. That is more dangerous than anything else, even more dangerous than someone who plans and executes a murder.
30 minutes should be considered ridiculous for this. Stratfor as a company should be under investigation, with possible criminal charges. Of course, why would society want to thank intelligent people who do not use their skills to exploit other people and actually try to benefit society, when instead we could punish them and demand that they just get in line and be selfish like everyone else?
So people feel better about themselves when they say thanks? Perhaps this is part of the reason why so many religions have special prayers before / after meals.
None of your coworkers see you come in and know what time you arrived correct?
Nobody sits there writing down when I enter or exit, when I go to the bathroom, when I get my lunch, etc. If you do, I would not want to work with you, and I do not think you would want to work with such a person. Not only that, but my coworkers do not go up the management hierarchy telling each person in the "chain of command" when I came in (and if you do that, you are antisocial).
Neither your computer nor the authentication server your computer uses log what time you logged in correct?
Ignoring the fact that I manage my own workstation (and so the logs are accessible only to me), such logs do not tell people when I went out for a walk, when I went to the bathroom, etc.; there is far less detail there. Those logs also say nothing about the work I am doing, since my work (like many other lines of work) often involves things that have nothing to do with typing on my computer, like meeting with people, writing on a whiteboard, making phone calls, etc. The difference with card-swipe logs is that they are all-encompassing -- if I go to a meeting in a conference, I need to swipe in; if I step out to go the bathroom, I need to swipe in on my way back (thankfully, we were not asked to swipe into the bathrooms); if I step out for lunch, I must swipe in to reenter the building, and again to reenter my office. That kind of detail is entirely inappropriate.
You're argument seems to be centered around the idea that your boss has no right to know if you are actually fulfilling your obligations as an employee.
I let my work speak for itself, as should anyone else. I am not doing work that requires me to be in my office at any specific time; if I get it done, it is done, and nobody needs to know when I was at my desk (or even if I was at my desk -- if I work from home and my work gets done, why should I be expected to be at my desk?). This does not work for everyone, of course; my mother needs to be at her job at certain times, because she works on a railroad.
See, the real problem with recording when employees enter their offices, conference rooms, and buildings is that it shifts the balance of power further in favor of the boss. Upper level management can see when I enter my office; I, of course, cannot see when they enter their offices. Who actually has access to these logs is kept secret from me and the people I work with; it is not secret from the people we are working for. The people we work for do not even have to swipe in -- they have physical keys. The people who set the policies on the card swipes, on who can access what rooms and when, and who can read the database, do not even work in this building, and are so far removed from the work we do that if you asked them, they would just come up with some generic answer about the field we work in.
The problem with these shallow, one-dimensional metrics is that they only serve the purpose of giving disconnected managers an easy way to exploit employees and to turn employees against each other. Why defend that sort of thing? Judge employees by their contribution to organizational goals, not by the number of hours they work; if the MBAs who dream up these metrics are incapable of doing so, they should be fired and replaced by people who are not so incompetent.
I'm guessing it is also a violation of your privacy for your boss to see you at your desk? Since it is the same thing has having to use a badge to get through the door and all.
No, when my boss sees me at my desk, he knows that I came in at some point. When I have to swipe in, the boss also knows all of the following:
So yeah, there is a difference, and it matters, and schoolchildren should not be trained to accept this sort of thing.
24 hours for all the other drugs, including amphetamines
Considering the fact that amphetamine (e.g. Adderall) affects a person's system for about four hours, I fail to see how this is a good thing. I also fail to see how it can be a good thing given the large number of people who use amphetamines legally, as prescribed by a doctor. Therapeutic doses of amphetamines will improve a person's ability to drive, so I have to wonder why we would even be concerned about people driving under the influence of amphetamines.
24 hours for all the other drugs, ... and THC
THC is the drug in marijuana, so you must be mistaken (or this is a scam).
The real answer is to improve public transit, so that fewer people drive. Sure, people are going to need to drive around in rural areas, but we have a problem with impaired drivers in densely populated areas -- a problem that would be address by expanding public transit. Ultimately, the solution to impaired driving is to simply not have people drive -- but for the time being, we can pay people to drive buses, and we can focus our impairment tests on those people.
Isn't that what school is? Conform to what we want you to know?
In theory, the purpose of a public school system is to benefit the public and to break aristocracies (whose power is often maintained by a continued and exclusive access to quality education). In practice, the purpose of school is to babysit children while their parents are out working, because in today's world it is too dangerous for children to run wild in the streets (according to some). Brainwashing and teaching conformity are just unintended consequences of poorly thought out policies by the sort of bureaucrats who think scantron forms are a way to measure student aptitude (don't kid yourself: the people who are paid to educate children are not clever enough to develop a grand strategy for brainwashing them, and neither are the major party politicians who control school budgets; metal detectors, surveillance cameras, bars over the windows, etc. are just easy and lawyer-friendly ways to address the symptoms of broader problems).
And someone please explain what expectation of privacy a child should have on public property
How about the right to go to the bathroom without being watched?
Does she complain about security cameras too?
I would have. Considering that at my high school, holding a blank postboard in front of a security camera resulted in the guards running to the camera to see what was happening, while an actual fistfight (a rarity at my high school) didn't result in guards coming at all, it is pretty clear that the cameras have nothing to do with student safety (and neither do the guards).
Unless she plans on flipping burgers she better get use to badges and logins.
Or, people could learn to stand up for themselves and fight back against these sorts of things. I am a graduate student, and when my department was moved into a new building where our student ID cards were used as keys to our offices, and our doors could not be propped open without horribly loud alarms going off, we fought back. Eventually we got a compromise -- we could prop open our doors 9-5 on weekdays, so only the first person to come to the office would have to swipe in.
There is a broader problem here, and your response is a symptom of it: people have no desire to stand up for themselves, and they just let themselves get trampled by this sort of thing. This is where we come full circle, of course, since school is where people learn to be trampled -- unless they are wealthy and go to a school that teaches them how to trample others. So really, our public education system is failing to meet the goals it was originally created for (but we are too busy complaining about the UFT and about test scores to even notice that).
That will just result in bureaucratic idiots thinking that she is in school and in attendance, and her friend giggling when questioned about her location. The problem here is the assumption that this is about a single student, when it is really about the school district.
"Looks like a black guy is driving. Let's test him for THC and arrest him if he tests above 0."
Indeed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Socrates