Mary Greenberg of Lake Bluff, who has a son at Libertyville High School, argued the district is overstepping its bounds.

"I don't think they need to police what students are doing online," she said. "That's my job."

Associate Superintendent Prentiss Lea rebuffed that criticism.

"The concept that searching a blog site is an invasion of privacy is almost an oxymoron," he said. "It is called the World Wide Web."

This is either a poorly done article or Lea is a doofus. The two comments are unconnected. The parent didn't say it was an invasion of privacy. She said it was outside the schools purview. Those are two different things entirely.

I happen to agree with the parent. Illegal is one thing, but even then, the school should stay out of it. If someone's seriously writing about blowing up the school or something on a blog, it should be reported to the POLICE, not the superintendent. Though, I think that's bad enough, since some people will take everything seriously even when it's not intended to be.

Furthermore, it disturbs me that Lea doesn't get the problem here. Why do school administrators forget what it's like to be a teenager? It's not hard enough, so now, on top of all the other shit, you have to worry about every single thing you say on your blog? That's ridiculous and offensive. Who decides what's "inappropriate"? We know the answer of course, and it's total bullshit.

Not that any high school kids read this, but I have a message : Don't put up with that shit. Rise up in the cafeteria and stab them with your plastic forks.* Your parents can certainly exercise the right to define what you do in your free time, but the school should fuck right off in that regard.

* The line, of course, is from Pump Up The Volume which, in 1990, treated this issue pretty well, I think, thematically anyway. Talk Hard.

School District to Monitor Student Blogs - Yahoo! News

adam wrote:

So we're toast, right?

I mean, that's pretty much the pervasive global assumption these days: The 19th century belonged to England, the 20th century belonged to America, and the 21st century will belong to China. Tell your kids to study Mandarin.

I'm second to none in worrying about U.S. education and industry meeting the challenge of a rising China and India. But after a year traveling all over America talking to educators and innovators, I am not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China. No, not yet.

You see, my grandma back in Minnesota had a saying that went like this: "Never cede a century to a country that censors Google."

I'd sure enjoy reading this, but I'm not a times select member. Oh well.

RE: A Million Manhattan Projects - New York Times

Texas Rep Lamar Smith has introduced a bill to clear the way for the re-use of "orphan works" whose authors are unknown or unlocatable. This wasn't a big problem until 1976, when the US changed its rules and did away with copyright registration, so that everyone who created anything got an automatic lifetime-plus-decades copyright on it, from the lowliest napkin doodle to the most trivial Usenet post. This created the present situation where, according to the Supreme Court in Eldred v Ashcroft, 98 percent of the works in copyright are orphan works, and liable to disappear long before their copyrights expire.

The bill looks like a pretty good compromise, but the devil is in the details -- it requires petitioners to undertake "best practice" searches for missing copyright holders, but leaves those best practices up to the Copyright Office. Depending on the procedure established, this could either be the savior of American cultural history, or its downfall.

Boing boing : Orphan works bill introduced: could give old creativity a new life

"Ten Things I Hate About Commandments" is a mash-up trailer for a John Hughes style teen comedy, using footage from the Charlton Heston version of The Ten Commandments. It's masterfully done, and milk-out-the-nose funny.

It really is. I love that this kind of stuff is possible.

Boing Boing: If The Ten Commandments was a Teen Comedy

Toynbee tiles (also called Toynbee plaques) are messages of mysterious origin found embedded in asphalt in several major cities in the United States, and in three South American capitals as well. As of 2006, there are approximately 130 tiles, which are generally about the size of an American license plate but are sometimes considerably larger. They all contain some variation on the following inscription:

TOyNBEE IDEA
IN KUbricK's 2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPiTER.

[ I've run accross this phenomenon once before... thought it was cool then, still do. -k]

Toynbee tiles

And he will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: "Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it's just not going to work."

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

[ Wow. Just wow.

That's brilliant. So forget the whole concept of America, and emulate the Nazis? Yeah. Yeah, lets do that. Because the Nazis had a domestic policy *everyone* can get behind.

This level of stupidity will never cease to amaze me. -k]

WorldNetDaily: Against a fence

Apologist for the GOP

Mary Cheney writes that she was "furious" when John Kerry mentioned her sexuality during a 2004 presidential debate. If Kerry had any advantage to gain, it was in pointing out the chilling example of parents — in this case, Vice President Cheney and his wife — who look the other way while their gay children are used as symbolic whipping posts by the Republican Party. If this was Kerry's intent, it was justified and timely.

Ms. Cheney also writes that she "never imagined that there were people who would try to use me and my sexual orientation for their own political benefit." If anyone has used sexual orientation in a bid to gain votes, it is the Republicans, with their scaremonger electoral tactics. To suggest otherwise is patently absurd.

How sad that Mary Cheney continues to be an apologist for the Republican Party. I understand that she loves her father, but her loyalty to his career comes at a tremendous cost to millions of gay Americans who don't hold a fraction of the rights of other Americans.

The fact that she "almost" quit her job with the 2004 Bush/Cheney ticket should not be congratulated or applauded. Almost doesn't count. In the old days, we had a name for people like her: We called them Uncle Tom.

Greg Durham,

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Responses to Mary Cheney

As you can see, Pajiba is a mess. We were as surprised as anyone when the site went down yesterday, but based on the limited information we have, it looks like the Department of Homeland Security has seized the disk drive on which our site was hosted, and apparently they’ve also taken the backup files. So for the time being, Pajiba has no data, and we don’t think the DHS has any intention of returning the hard drive to our hosting company anytime soon. I suppose we shared server space with some punk who threatened the President or something, and now anyone on that server has to suffer the consequences. Frankly, the entire debacle is pretty heart-wrenching for us and, thus far, completely out of our control. We have no idea when, or if, the disk drives will be returned.

I wouldn't bet on it. What bullshit. I'd like to believe there was a good reason, such as a credible threat or lead, but these days, I really just don't have that much faith in our government or legal system.

Maybe that's the idea. Get everyone to hate government. Good job... it's working.

The Department of Homeland Security Has Shut Us Down

Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen said: "It's appalling that a British man is apparently attempting to sell gallows to President Mugabe's government [in Zimbabwe].

Agreed.

Now, I have a question. HOW THE FUCK STUPID ARE THESE DICTATORS THAT THEY HAVE TO *BUY* A GALLOWS!?!?

It's rope and a fucking simple gantry. For Fucks sake.

They can "run" a country but can't find some dudes to bolt together some wood and tie a noose? Evil *and* incompetent. And evil. Really really evil.

Boing Boing: British farmer supplies gallows to totalitarian governments

This is the coolest thing I've seen in a while. You can have a skeleton tattooed on your skin that only shows up in blacklight. Rock.

That's damn cool.

UV Ink Tattoos?