My Guess is... A CVR ( Cockpit Voice Recorders) is on a 30 minute cycle. Write to the end of the (tape ( continuous loop ) / memory module ) reset your pointer back to the begging and start recording over the 30 minute data chuck.
Now these days you could put a terabyte of flash in the things an record hundreds of hours, put the pilots have managed to ensure that only ( last I knew ) 30 minutes is recorded. Additionally in the cockpit there is/ used to be a button labeled CVR Erase which after pulling up to the gate pilots would press because they didn't want chats about their g/f's getting out to their wives.
I am not sure what the cycle time on the ADR ( airplane data recorder ) is but I would imaging it auto erases after it is downloaded by the operator.
The ONLY Android is doing any business in the cell phone market is because Apple will not farm out iOS period. If Apple gave awat iOS to ever every handset maker on the plant Android would wither and die in very short order. Why? Because Android is being morfed and fucked with by every phone vendor there is and across vendors there is no consistency in user interface or standard application set, it is just a mashup of whatever fucktard marketing moron thinks they can make money with. As another poster mentioned the iPhone is currently outselling ever single vendors smart phone and its numbers are nothing more then that.
The iPad.. Toy? I think not. They are being field tested at hospitals all over the place and in other business sectors far and wide and soon you will go into to see your physician and he or she will have an iPad in their hands. Why, because it has a consistent, well designed, well thought out user interface and a standard set of applications AND it can be locked down to keep the rank and file from fucking them up by downloading every app on the planet. I have seen a couple of test units. Full medical charting, view the x-rays on the fly. No more running to a room with a desktop machine, just pull the "films" up, zoom in,zoom out and look at the detail complete with notations of the Radiologists. They do the heavy typing in their office with a BT keyboard.
Bond trader gets all the data they need on the iPad and can execute trades while sitting at lunch,
As much as every geek wants to be able to make it into their own vision of what a tablet / pad computer should be Apple has already done that for the masses. While you might have more fun, be able to run shell scripts and fucking vi on an Android based tablet none them will ever come close to the polished product that is the iPhone and the iPad.
I am not a fanboy and I only own an Apple phone, so just call it like I see it, and although you may not agree with my assessment, the proof will be in the pudding as they say.
More then likely written in pure Assembler or Machine Code. Hand Debugged, Hand Optimized back when software engineers were programmers in the very real sense of the word.
For those of us who grew up watching movies shot on 35mm film, the images are simply cartoon like.
Movies are supposed to transport us, suspend belief, take us out of our daily hum drum lives and allow us to immerse ourselves into the work. In other words they are a manufactured dream.
Our dreams are fuzzy and kind of out of focus for the most part, fragments of our subconscious being interjected into our sleeping reality. The starkness of such hi resolution images is startling and nothing dream like.
Do I really want to see all the pours on "name your favorite actor" face? Do I want to see all the imperfections in set / model design? Nope. I have gone into extreme hi end places where everything is perfect, all the adjustments have been done and I see the jaggies, I see the compression break when mpeg has done its level best to remove the background that never changes except for hi rate pans and fast movement and seen things get blocky for blip or three and since our eyes to detect random images fairly well, they really stand out and snap me back to reality. Not good when one is suspending disbelief.
Hey Fuck off! There is nothing wrong with Modern Pascal Implementations like Delphi. Its OOP Model is better then C++ or any of those other bastardized bits of cruft. If you want real OOP like it was envisioned then stick with LISP or SmallTalk, but if you want to get work done...
Well i guess we are all pilots then. I am a current one myself.
So here is one to twist your noodle. In balance flight you AOA is always 0 (zero ) no matter the angle of the nose to the horizon.
Which is only to say that your AOA is only greater then zero if the wings angle relative to the direction of flight is other then zero.
In a worse case scenario, all the throttle in the world won't help you if you are in a nose up attitude (unless you have so much thrust to ascend ballistic) - you'll just do a power on stall and learn the four fundamentals of flight the hard way - stall, spin, crash and burn.
Turn in your pilot certificate or go back an re-read your POH before you get behind the controls again for god sake.
Attitude indicator is run off vacuum which is why there are electrical, static and vacuum operated instruments, hence the term and ability to fly IFR with a partial panel!
Actually just half asleep. Although it would be nice if/. had the ability for the OP to edit something after they hit post, but alas Taco and Crew are to busy writing bad code to add a decent feature.
I guess the proverbial, "There, fixed that for ya." is reserved for sarcasm.. Sigh...
This is the result of a computer controlled fly-by-wire airplane having a cascade failure.
Glass cockpits are pretty and they really take a load of the pilot for a lot of things, but there is such a thing as to much of a good thing
If it is every factually determined what little chunk of silicone or line of code brought airplane down it will be studied in depth and hopefully they designers will learn something. But one thing is clear, in their rush to make everything digital and get those damn pesky analog instruments the hell out of there, they have taken away many of the pilots most reliable tools to do the one thing they are there to do which is fly the fucking airplane!
There are two ways to fly an airplane, by reference to the ground or using instruments.
In the middle of the night, over the ocean, in a storm you do not have reference to the ground so you have to use your instruments, that is if they work.
To keep a plane in the air, without reference to the ground / horizon a pilot needs a very few things and the are:
Attitude Indicator aka an Artificial Horizon
Altimeter
Air Speed Indicator
Now even without an airspeed indicator, most or the presumptions were a frozen and clogged pilot tube, you can still get a good clue about airspeed with nothing more then throttle setting. The attitude indicator tells you climb and dive left or right bank and the altimeter is obvious. With everything else dark, a pilot should be able to keep a plane in the air.
My educated guess is that when the whole interconnected and interdependent system went down they lost the ability to control the engines and the ability to move the aircraft's control surfaces and after that it was just over.
This is why Boeing for years always ran a hybrid system. The basic control over the airplane was not interdependent on anything and were separate systems that would accept input from the flight computer and make things like autopilot and all that possible while still keeping everything independent from all the other systems. It made for a pain in the ass system but the flight computer taking a shit would not keep the pilot from controlling the engines or other critical systems.
Unfortunately pilots listened to anymore and neither are engineers. MBA's are running airlines now and all they care about is reducing the head count, cramming more people into the planes and increasing the buck made per mile so they can get 8 figure salaries. This is why Boeing's trusted and proven hybrid system is in it's last throws or is gone completely because AIRBUS sells the bling baby and no CEO wants to be caught short on bling baby!
I really doubt that anyone in the next thousand years will be able to build a machine equal in all respects to the human brain.
You can build a machine that will perform a single task or a variety of tasks but I have yet to see anything from anyone about building a machine that will recognize that a new task is required to solve a new problem and then formulate and perform that new task.
The problem with a machine is that is does not think, it does not ponder, it does nothing intuitively. It can resolve any number of inputs based on predefined instructions as to what to do with each input, but that is about it. Give it an input that it has no instruction for and it will either ignore it, or simply stop.
Was it not Newton's inspiration to describe the laws of gravity by watching an apple fall from a tree? How is a machine to duplicate that process? How can one imbue a machine with the basic curiosity and the ability to correlate a particular instance in time to some other bit of knowledge and come up with theories that would eventually become the foundation of such things as Motion, Gravitation, Orbits of Planets and the Principia Mathematica? I suggest that it will be many generations before anyone can even begin to describe those functions of the brain that we use and take for granted on a daily basis.
And of course we are working up to a aircraft navigation and control system that will be 100% reliant on GPS. No GPS = planes do not take off. Not just passenger planes but also all air cargo.
Yeah they can and will take off they will just have to navigate the old fashioned way with a compass and a watch and a weather briefing that includes winds aloft. EVERY pilot is still taught that basic navigation skill to this day, just the same as I was when I got my pilots certificate.
Ships at sea used to use LORAN but the US Coast Guard has been dismantling the LORAN system they maintained. I believe it is gone now, so there is no going back
Yes LORAN is gone but sun still rises and the stars are pretty much where they should be. All I need is a clock with a known error rate, sextant, chart and a copy of Bowditch.
Being deployed in huge numbers in just about every Industry - Check
Incrementally better and better just like the iPhone, iPod and iMac - Check
Consistent and superbly documented SDK - Check
But yes all of this is merely Hype. I own exactly one piece of Apple tech and that is an iPhone 3GS. I have been in this industry for 30 years and there is nothing past or present to match the iPad in terms of usability, quality and utility, just nothing. If you think their is then bring it on, but you can't because it simply does not exist at any price point. Apple has built a device with the perfect blend of form and function in this time at this place and I am sorry, but everything else is just crap.
The same time yelling FIRE in a crowded theater did.
Perhaps you have been living under a rock?
Calling anyone a pedophile is a serious charge but calling a teacher one in a public forum can have the most serious of consequences.
That teacher is lucky he was not arrested, finger printed and booked on suspicion of that offense. Once that happens that teacher will be forever in the system and I don't care what any judge says about factual innocence or any bullshit like that. Local LEO computer systems update state systems which then update federal systems and after that that teacher is just fucked for the rest of their lives.
From then on when that teacher applies for a position and they do a background check this shit will pop up and there is not a school district in this country that will hire him.
Those kids deserve to be expelled from that school and never be allowed back into that school.
I would agree with you on the Postini point, but not on gmail. I take care of lots of little law firms and they simply have to have better categorization then gmail provides and gmails "folderless" system, just plain sucks. You have to tag e-mails? With an actual MTA and an post office the a-mail stay on the server are all nicely organized in folders and can be seached just as nicely as gmail's can if not better.
You and you are more then likely a 13 year old that doesn't do much that ranks right up there on the "Does Stupid Shit" O' Meter.
I am 51 and have a boy that will be turning 10 here soon. Lemme tell ya if he starts doing things that rank right up there on them "Does Stupid Shit" O'Meter, he is going to get a locked down Linux box with a bios password, user privileges only, sign on windows that we define and it will be sitting in the kitchen where mom and dad can keep and eye on him.
Oh and if you are a 13 year old and you think you are "l33t" or whatever other gibberish and you DO stupid shit, guess who gets to pay for your "l33tness"? Not you innocent little minor if will be your parents, you know those nice people who pay your way in this world?
Wouldn't it be so "l33t" to watch your parents have to defend your "l33tness" in court to the tune of many thousands of dollars?
Kid, no one wants to stifle you, no one wants to hold you back, repress you or any of that other bullshit you might here. Parents, believe it or not, really want you to excel and whatever it is you decide to do in your life as long as it does not hurt you or others, or them. But here is the problem, in all your "l33tness" you like any other kid sometimes lose sight of what the consequences of your actions are when you are just having a blast and being all "l33t" and forget that if you do something, even by accident, then your parents, not you, are going to be dealing with those consequences.
You are either not a parent, or you just don't pay that much attention to the news, or you were a parent ( to young children ) a long time ago.
When I was a 13 year old it was 1971 and the path was a lot wider, with that I agree, but that path has gotten narrower and narrower as the nanny state continues its headlong plunge into our lives.
Piss your kid off and all they have to do is go to school and mention any of a dozen things you have "done" to them and the school wont call you, they will call, usually in this order, Child Protective Services and then the Police and you will find yourself in custody trying to prove your kid is being a little shithead because you wouldn't give them a, pick one ( cell phone, play station, iPod, iTouch ) or any other thing that some idiot parent has given their kids to take to school.
This has happened in my kids school. I know the parents and they are good people that are trying to do their best with a kid who has figured out that he could really put a hurt on the parents by crying wolf. It may or may not happen again, but if the kid says something the school principal is obliged by law to report it. And guess what, your name is now in the CPS computer regardless of the outcome. This is not some "bogeyman" this is reality.
When I was 13 if I had pulled some nonsense like that, the principal would have called my mom, then my dad, parked my little ass in his office, had a quick chat with my mom, who would have taken me home and given me the beating I would have so richly deserved. My dad would have then kicked my ass again when he got home.
Are their kids who just need a little more attention and nurturing, yes there are. Are there kids who should be trusted more, yes there are. Are there kids who's activities deserve intense scrutiny because they have demonstrated that their judgment is unsound, yes there are.
Every parent has to make that call because every kid is different and each reach a level of maturity and trust at different ages. Your blanket statements and those of the others on/. are really useless and pointless because you are not walking in their shoes.
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Hmmm my ancient ( in printer terms ) HP 5000 was auto detected by SuSe and functions perfectly.
That 275 watts is after 30 years of use. It started out at +/- 500 watts!
It is politics and pilots. Of course they could, see my post earlier about this.
My Guess is... A CVR ( Cockpit Voice Recorders) is on a 30 minute cycle. Write to the end of the (tape ( continuous loop ) / memory module ) reset your pointer back to the begging and start recording over the 30 minute data chuck.
Now these days you could put a terabyte of flash in the things an record hundreds of hours, put the pilots have managed to ensure that only ( last I knew ) 30 minutes is recorded. Additionally in the cockpit there is/ used to be a button labeled CVR Erase which after pulling up to the gate pilots would press because they didn't want chats about their g/f's getting out to their wives.
I am not sure what the cycle time on the ADR ( airplane data recorder ) is but I would imaging it auto erases after it is downloaded by the operator.
Sorry, that's a dumb question even for /.
The ONLY Android is doing any business in the cell phone market is because Apple will not farm out iOS period. If Apple gave awat iOS to ever every handset maker on the plant Android would wither and die in very short order. Why? Because Android is being morfed and fucked with by every phone vendor there is and across vendors there is no consistency in user interface or standard application set, it is just a mashup of whatever fucktard marketing moron thinks they can make money with. As another poster mentioned the iPhone is currently outselling ever single vendors smart phone and its numbers are nothing more then that.
The iPad.. Toy? I think not. They are being field tested at hospitals all over the place and in other business sectors far and wide and soon you will go into to see your physician and he or she will have an iPad in their hands. Why, because it has a consistent, well designed, well thought out user interface and a standard set of applications AND it can be locked down to keep the rank and file from fucking them up by downloading every app on the planet. I have seen a couple of test units. Full medical charting, view the x-rays on the fly. No more running to a room with a desktop machine, just pull the "films" up, zoom in,zoom out and look at the detail complete with notations of the Radiologists. They do the heavy typing in their office with a BT keyboard.
Bond trader gets all the data they need on the iPad and can execute trades while sitting at lunch,
As much as every geek wants to be able to make it into their own vision of what a tablet / pad computer should be Apple has already done that for the masses. While you might have more fun, be able to run shell scripts and fucking vi on an Android based tablet none them will ever come close to the polished product that is the iPhone and the iPad.
I am not a fanboy and I only own an Apple phone, so just call it like I see it, and although you may not agree with my assessment, the proof will be in the pudding as they say.
Best part is that if the tube cracks because of some thermal stress from years of heat cycles... Still in a vacuum! bonus
More then likely written in pure Assembler or Machine Code. Hand Debugged, Hand Optimized back when software engineers were programmers in the very real sense of the word.
Although unconfirmed AFAIK the whole thing is run on a RCA CDP1802, also known as the COSMAC (Complementary Symmetry Monolithic Array Computer) and at this moment the entire spacecraft runs on +/- 275 watts of power at 30 Volts DC which is pretty damn amazing.
Put that in your god damn JVM/Python/PHP/Erlang/Lang De Jur pipe and smoke it ya damn weenies!
For those of us who grew up watching movies shot on 35mm film, the images are simply cartoon like.
Movies are supposed to transport us, suspend belief, take us out of our daily hum drum lives and allow us to immerse ourselves into the work. In other words they are a manufactured dream.
Our dreams are fuzzy and kind of out of focus for the most part, fragments of our subconscious being interjected into our sleeping reality. The starkness of such hi resolution images is startling and nothing dream like.
Do I really want to see all the pours on "name your favorite actor" face? Do I want to see all the imperfections in set / model design? Nope. I have gone into extreme hi end places where everything is perfect, all the adjustments have been done and I see the jaggies, I see the compression break when mpeg has done its level best to remove the background that never changes except for hi rate pans and fast movement and seen things get blocky for blip or three and since our eyes to detect random images fairly well, they really stand out and snap me back to reality. Not good when one is suspending disbelief.
Yes and you get to live in a cardboard box under a freeway overpass.
Column based storage is crutch for idiot MBA's and finance weenies who only understand spreadsheets.
Just look at their spreadsheets with columns that have 01,02,0n after the names.
You
constantly have to tell them that spreadsheet != database.
There are many places where anything other than C++ simply doesn't make sense.
Example Please.
The entire Linux kernel is written in pure C. Just where and in what circumstance are you talking about?
Hey Fuck off! There is nothing wrong with Modern Pascal Implementations like Delphi. Its OOP Model is better then C++ or any of those other bastardized bits of cruft. If you want real OOP like it was envisioned then stick with LISP or SmallTalk, but if you want to get work done...
Well i guess we are all pilots then. I am a current one myself.
So here is one to twist your noodle. In balance flight you AOA is always 0 (zero ) no matter the angle of the nose to the horizon.
Which is only to say that your AOA is only greater then zero if the wings angle relative to the direction of flight is other then zero.
In a worse case scenario, all the throttle in the world won't help you if you are in a nose up attitude (unless you have so much thrust to ascend ballistic) - you'll just do a power on stall and learn the four fundamentals of flight the hard way - stall, spin, crash and burn.
ROFLMAO
And the 2nd engine is for???
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow
Damn good thing you are not a pilot.
Your parroting a landing idiom, "Pitch for speed, throttle for altitude" not a good thing to do when trying to fly level, descend or climb.
Turn in your pilot certificate or go back an re-read your POH before you get behind the controls again for god sake.
Attitude indicator is run off vacuum which is why there are electrical, static and vacuum operated instruments, hence the term and ability to fly IFR with a partial panel!
Actually just half asleep. Although it would be nice if /. had the ability for the OP to edit something after they hit post, but alas Taco and Crew are to busy writing bad code to add a decent feature.
I guess the proverbial, "There, fixed that for ya." is reserved for sarcasm.. Sigh...
This is the result of a computer controlled fly-by-wire airplane having a cascade failure.
Glass cockpits are pretty and they really take a load of the pilot for a lot of things, but there is such a thing as to much of a good thing
If it is every factually determined what little chunk of silicone or line of code brought airplane down it will be studied in depth and hopefully they designers will learn something. But one thing is clear, in their rush to make everything digital and get those damn pesky analog instruments the hell out of there, they have taken away many of the pilots most reliable tools to do the one thing they are there to do which is fly the fucking airplane!
There are two ways to fly an airplane, by reference to the ground or using instruments.
In the middle of the night, over the ocean, in a storm you do not have reference to the ground so you have to use your instruments, that is if they work.
To keep a plane in the air, without reference to the ground / horizon a pilot needs a very few things and the are:
Now even without an airspeed indicator, most or the presumptions were a frozen and clogged pilot tube, you can still get a good clue about airspeed with nothing more then throttle setting. The attitude indicator tells you climb and dive left or right bank and the altimeter is obvious. With everything else dark, a pilot should be able to keep a plane in the air.
My educated guess is that when the whole interconnected and interdependent system went down they lost the ability to control the engines and the ability to move the aircraft's control surfaces and after that it was just over.
This is why Boeing for years always ran a hybrid system. The basic control over the airplane was not interdependent on anything and were separate systems that would accept input from the flight computer and make things like autopilot and all that possible while still keeping everything independent from all the other systems. It made for a pain in the ass system but the flight computer taking a shit would not keep the pilot from controlling the engines or other critical systems.
Unfortunately pilots listened to anymore and neither are engineers. MBA's are running airlines now and all they care about is reducing the head count, cramming more people into the planes and increasing the buck made per mile so they can get 8 figure salaries. This is why Boeing's trusted and proven hybrid system is in it's last throws or is gone completely because AIRBUS sells the bling baby and no CEO wants to be caught short on bling baby!
I really doubt that anyone in the next thousand years will be able to build a machine equal in all respects to the human brain.
You can build a machine that will perform a single task or a variety of tasks but I have yet to see anything from anyone about building a machine that will recognize that a new task is required to solve a new problem and then formulate and perform that new task.
The problem with a machine is that is does not think, it does not ponder, it does nothing intuitively. It can resolve any number of inputs based on predefined instructions as to what to do with each input, but that is about it. Give it an input that it has no instruction for and it will either ignore it, or simply stop.
Was it not Newton's inspiration to describe the laws of gravity by watching an apple fall from a tree? How is a machine to duplicate that process? How can one imbue a machine with the basic curiosity and the ability to correlate a particular instance in time to some other bit of knowledge and come up with theories that would eventually become the foundation of such things as Motion, Gravitation, Orbits of Planets and the Principia Mathematica? I suggest that it will be many generations before anyone can even begin to describe those functions of the brain that we use and take for granted on a daily basis.
And of course we are working up to a aircraft navigation and control system that will be 100% reliant on GPS. No GPS = planes do not take off. Not just passenger planes but also all air cargo.
Yeah they can and will take off they will just have to navigate the old fashioned way with a compass and a watch and a weather briefing that includes winds aloft. EVERY pilot is still taught that basic navigation skill to this day, just the same as I was when I got my pilots certificate.
Ships at sea used to use LORAN but the US Coast Guard has been dismantling the LORAN system they maintained. I believe it is gone now, so there is no going back
Yes LORAN is gone but sun still rises and the stars are pretty much where they should be. All I need is a clock with a known error rate, sextant, chart and a copy of Bowditch.
the greatest feature of the iPad2 is hype
Really? Lets see...:
But yes all of this is merely Hype. I own exactly one piece of Apple tech and that is an iPhone 3GS. I have been in this industry for 30 years and there is nothing past or present to match the iPad in terms of usability, quality and utility, just nothing. If you think their is then bring it on, but you can't because it simply does not exist at any price point. Apple has built a device with the perfect blend of form and function in this time at this place and I am sorry, but everything else is just crap.
The same time yelling FIRE in a crowded theater did.
Perhaps you have been living under a rock?
Calling anyone a pedophile is a serious charge but calling a teacher one in a public forum can have the most serious of consequences.
That teacher is lucky he was not arrested, finger printed and booked on suspicion of that offense. Once that happens that teacher will be forever in the system and I don't care what any judge says about factual innocence or any bullshit like that. Local LEO computer systems update state systems which then update federal systems and after that that teacher is just fucked for the rest of their lives.
From then on when that teacher applies for a position and they do a background check this shit will pop up and there is not a school district in this country that will hire him.
Those kids deserve to be expelled from that school and never be allowed back into that school.
I would agree with you on the Postini point, but not on gmail. I take care of lots of little law firms and they simply have to have better categorization then gmail provides and gmails "folderless" system, just plain sucks. You have to tag e-mails? With an actual MTA and an post office the a-mail stay on the server are all nicely organized in folders and can be seached just as nicely as gmail's can if not better.
You and you are more then likely a 13 year old that doesn't do much that ranks right up there on the "Does Stupid Shit" O' Meter.
I am 51 and have a boy that will be turning 10 here soon. Lemme tell ya if he starts doing things that rank right up there on them "Does Stupid Shit" O'Meter, he is going to get a locked down Linux box with a bios password, user privileges only, sign on windows that we define and it will be sitting in the kitchen where mom and dad can keep and eye on him.
Oh and if you are a 13 year old and you think you are "l33t" or whatever other gibberish and you DO stupid shit, guess who gets to pay for your "l33tness"? Not you innocent little minor if will be your parents, you know those nice people who pay your way in this world?
Wouldn't it be so "l33t" to watch your parents have to defend your "l33tness" in court to the tune of many thousands of dollars?
Kid, no one wants to stifle you, no one wants to hold you back, repress you or any of that other bullshit you might here. Parents, believe it or not, really want you to excel and whatever it is you decide to do in your life as long as it does not hurt you or others, or them. But here is the problem, in all your "l33tness" you like any other kid sometimes lose sight of what the consequences of your actions are when you are just having a blast and being all "l33t" and forget that if you do something, even by accident, then your parents, not you, are going to be dealing with those consequences.
You are either not a parent, or you just don't pay that much attention to the news, or you were a parent ( to young children ) a long time ago.
When I was a 13 year old it was 1971 and the path was a lot wider, with that I agree, but that path has gotten narrower and narrower as the nanny state continues its headlong plunge into our lives.
Piss your kid off and all they have to do is go to school and mention any of a dozen things you have "done" to them and the school wont call you, they will call, usually in this order, Child Protective Services and then the Police and you will find yourself in custody trying to prove your kid is being a little shithead because you wouldn't give them a, pick one ( cell phone, play station, iPod, iTouch ) or any other thing that some idiot parent has given their kids to take to school.
This has happened in my kids school. I know the parents and they are good people that are trying to do their best with a kid who has figured out that he could really put a hurt on the parents by crying wolf. It may or may not happen again, but if the kid says something the school principal is obliged by law to report it. And guess what, your name is now in the CPS computer regardless of the outcome. This is not some "bogeyman" this is reality.
When I was 13 if I had pulled some nonsense like that, the principal would have called my mom, then my dad, parked my little ass in his office, had a quick chat with my mom, who would have taken me home and given me the beating I would have so richly deserved. My dad would have then kicked my ass again when he got home.
Are their kids who just need a little more attention and nurturing, yes there are. Are there kids who should be trusted more, yes there are. Are there kids who's activities deserve intense scrutiny because they have demonstrated that their judgment is unsound, yes there are.
Every parent has to make that call because every kid is different and each reach a level of maturity and trust at different ages. Your blanket statements and those of the others on /. are really useless and pointless because you are not walking in their shoes.