In December, a New Jersey schoolboy was arrested for drawing in class.

In the post-Sandy Hook rage to blame anything (guns, video games, internet-addicted youth) the easiest thing to blame is always the kid who fails at the blankly inoffensive ideals of childhood. This 16-year-old drew a glove shooting flames. The police searched his house. They found the sort of gutted machines that hint at a proclivity for engineering. He was arrested on December 18, and was still in juvenile hall when papers ran the story on the 28th.

This handily sums up what's wrong with the way administrations are handling kids. I feel lucky in that when I was in high school, administration really didn't know what to do with me other than sit watchfully and be thankful I would make it through my senior year's classes without even needing to look up from whatever non-class-related thing I was reading or working on at the time.

Some kids differ from other kids. Surprise, surprise--they're a lot like actual people in that respect. The only thing that comes from treating kids like there's something wrong with them when they do things that the adults around them aren't smart enough to do or comprehend is disenfranchisement. They very quickly stop giving even one single fuck about what the adults want and will not only actively ignore them but rebel against them just as hard as the adults try to reshape their activities into something 'more normal'. More importantly, it teaches them to distrust authority of all kinds, because "authority" perpetually distrusts them and never demonstrates any unwillingness to break it's own rules or any remorse at having done so "for the sake of the children".

Nevermind that there's a substantial body of "normal adults" running around loose in the job market with less mental maturity than they had when they graduated from high school.

Case example: One of the more level-headed kids I know sports a mohawk and is going to an "alternative" school because of a rather minor transgression that I'm suprised they did more than give him a stern look and perhaps a day of suspension over. The lesson he's learned is to not trust them, and that he's actually not nearly as fucked up as even he thought he might be. Thankfully he's going to be spending his senior year in a regular high school, where administration will hopefully not try to pigeon-hole him. He'll give them A's and B's easily if they just let him be.

Shooter Boys and At-Risk Girls | VICE

Traditional broadcast radio, you're next.

Rep. Jerry Nadler has proposed a bill that effectively turns the cost of royalties being paid by cable and satellite music services to eleven. The bill will probably eventually make it into law, thanks to how effective our system of lobbyists is at turning corporate interest into reality through bribery.

...and don't say we didn't tell you it would happen.

First, they came for the webcasters...

Good reading.

Education

So I finally came across somewhere with the collected videos of what was going on this weekend in New York.

For over a week, the Wall Street protests have taken place peacefully, and then over the weekend, it appears the police decided they needed to try and provoke things... with some brutal beatings and bogus arrests.

They're still currently claiming none of the officers did anything wrong.

...so if NYC erupts into chaos later this week, at least you'll know what caused it.

Oppression of the People.

New York Police Are Shit

OKay so perhaps my summary is slightly histrionic, but...

I have been saying for months and months now that I refuse to have a smartphone because the carriers force you to take a data plan... which means my phone would be on their network 24/7, subject to whatever things they've failed to keep in check, and compounded by that they don't want me to have the level of control necessary to firewall that shit out and are willing to enforce that by contract.

Well, it's nice to see that someone else agrees with me and that cell phone networks are about as nasty as the typical cablemodem netblock or college campus network of the 90's.

Cell Phone Networks Are A Hive Of Filth And Contagion

Not that I'm even a little suprised that Fox News has things terribly wrong, but if you needed yet another item of evidence to show people that Fox News has about the same grasp of reality as the average advanced Alzheimer's sufferer, look no further.

They actually believe a 15-year-old kid to be a "Leading member of Lulzsec".

Fox News Makes Things Up, Again

Absolutely. This is pure hilarity. :)

YouTube - ‪My Drunk Kitchen Ep. 4: Not Easy, Bake Oven‬‏

Basically, in case you haven't already heard, WIPO has gone so far off the deep end as to have decided that they want to s**t in the eyes of Public Domain.

No, no, no, a thousand times no, and yes this is the sort of thing that will make it no longer worth telling people they should abide by copyrights.

Adding extra rights to be granted to someone just because they had the money and the power to broadcast something, especially when this applies to works already in the public domain, is no better than fascism.

No, no, no, a thousand times no.

No, no, a thousand times, no 'Broadcast Treaty'

This right here is a perfect example of why you wear protective eyewear when shooting bottle rockets at each other.

Franklin Woman Takes Firework To The Eye

So, I'd dearly love to know why it is Mark Zuckerberg isn't being asked to stand before a judge and explain himself over hiring that PR firm to trash talk Google to the press. (Don't be a dolt--regardless of what FB claimed their motives were, that's exactly what they did.)

It's pretty clear now the way they intend to "take on" Google is by stirring up press hostility for Google to keep them doing as little as possible with the information they could glean from their users--and then themselves deploying services that are exactly as fishy as the things they're "not quite" accusing Google of doing.

Worthy of note is that Google actually walked away from an application to allow users to use facial recognition software to identify who is in a picture because they didn't like the privacy implications... but Facebook knows that your privacy is their money so they're going to sell it off any way they possibly can.

By default, all the photos you might have put into Facebook are fair game for their software to work out better ways of automatically recognizing your face... the idea being that users can upload a picture of someone, and Facebook will tell them who it is (and companies who might want a really good way to snoop on random passers-by to find out who they are can pay Facebook to use that, I'm sure). So, once again, Facebook does something that exposes formerly private user information to new forms of public scrutiny, and you have to opt-out to avoid it.

If Google has to have government snoops up in their business for two years over some packets that were the equivalent of wifi confetti, Mark Zuckerburg should have an entire committee devoted to watching him while he pees to make sure he's not up to something--just because the word "leak" might be used somewhere in a sentence.

Facebook strips more of your privacy away, by default