It's not the speed that puts strain on the body, it's the _change_ in speed (i.e. acceleration). You are currently going ~67062 MPH around the sun and probably didn't notice. If you suddenly slowed down to 4000 MPH around the sun, you would definitely notice that. ;-). (http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=356)
This is a great point, but raises issues around the entire US public education system that often times crosses the line of babysitting vs. education (I know nothing about this school).
Managing a bunch of 15 - 19 YO's is pretty challenging and as schools continue to get their budget raised or cut, based on attendance, it will be more important to manage attendance vs. GPA / performance. Having kids safely in school, with butt in seat in class, will be continue to be a driving KPI.
Human beings aren't cattle, but an education system built around preparing kids for a 9 - 5, factory job, is essentially a cattle farm.
Why should all of the children who are in school voluntarily have their entire learning experience disrupted by the kid who keeps being forced back into school by a truant officer?
I think it 's mostly a question of meaningful consent. Just as a 14 year old cannot consent, legally, to having sex with a 30-year-old, a child cannot really be trusted with the choice to opt out of school.
Money in the public primary and secondary education system — and in the US that is around half a trillion dollars each year — flows according to body count, not learning. You get what you reward.
I'm not sure I see the difference between this program and a company that distributes a similar system for employees to track all the same information?
Minors are more easily indoctrinated into accepting that sort of thing. Employers who do this are being just as antisocial and psychopathic as this school district; the difference is that adults are mature enough to say, "This is not right," whereas children will grow up thinking, "This is how the world works, I better accept it."
"Employers who do this are being just as antisocial and psychopathic as this school district"
Because using rfid badges to unlock doors at an office building/control and log access to server rooms, etc is a psychopathic and antisocial thing to do
Most uses of RFID badges for access control have nothing to do with building control or server rooms (and why would you want something as poorly secured as RFID when a smartcard would be equally convenient and far more secure?). Most uses of RFID are based on the same reasoning that leads to the installation of keystroke logging software, MITM devices, etc. -- the idea that employees should be watched at all times, and that the more detail you have about your employees work habits, the better (and you should never have know how to judge the products of their work; after all, that is not the job of a top-level manager).
As an information security professional, I am so glad we use RFID badges. I want to know who is getting into my secure datacenter and when, and be able to revoke that right with the click of a button if things start going pear-shaped with their activities.
RFID is a broad spectrum, not necessarily one technology. Some are more secure than others. Even with the most basic, though, it's pretty easy to clone a key or a keycode as well. Keys can't be revoked if you don't know where they are, and keycode changes require everyone to learn the new keycode. It's a game of give and take.
Well, for one thing, the school is an arm of government, not a private party. We allow private parties to do all sorts of things we don't allow governments to do.
This doesn't change the legal issue in dispute -- whether someone can be compelled to give up a basic civil right in exchange for attending the school she wants to attend.
Is it a basic civil right? To not be monitored in school? Schools have cameras, they have security guards, they have teachers watching you constantly, they have screen monitoring software on the computers, they have locker searches, and all of these have been upheld as Constitutional because in a school, students have no right to privacy.
Whether this particular case (which admittedly is different from other privacy cases I've seen), the girl is choosing to be at this school. The school gave her the option to opt out of the program and just have a normal card, and she refused. The school then gave her another option, which is to return to the school she is legally required to attend rather than the one she is choosing to attend. That seems more than reasonable to me.
A very good question. The answer is that courts decide this sort of thing, and the notion of "civil rights" is a moving target over time.
But if her civil rights are violated, then the fact that she volunteers to be there instead of another school should not be allowed to interfere with the judgment.
How am I so sure? Well, as one example, African-Americans must be allowed to attend the school of their choice, and the argument that they have alternative schools is (in the eyes of the law) insufficient. The south famously argued that African-Americans had their own schools and shouldn't be arguing for admission to other schools. The Supreme Court disagreed.
> The school then gave her another option, which is to return to the school she is legally required to attend rather than the one she is choosing to attend. That seems more than reasonable to me.
Read the history of the U.S. Civil Rights movement, from beginning to end. Then ask yourself whether what you've just said is fair and reasonable.
I agree that I would like the courts to decide on this. We're all armchair observers just making our commentary the way we see it.
I'm not certain that the Civil Rights Act comes into play here, though. The problem there is that the government were mandating that people had to go to different schools just based on their skin color. On the other hand, magnet schools are inherently and legally discriminatory; they discriminate on talent. You're legally required to attend school, but you can qualify for attendance in a magnet school. They're not telling the girl to go back to the girl's school, or back to the black person's school, they're telling her to go back to the same school everyone else goes to, the normal school, the regular school, the legally mandated school. High school is not an alternative school, magnet high schools are. It's not discrimination to make someone go to a school everyone else goes to. Not everyone gets into a magnet high school; she did, and now she's been disqualified. Magnet high schools are not a right.
> I'm not certain that the Civil Rights Act comes into play here, though.
But it does. This person wants to attend a particular school, but that school violates her civil rights as a precondition for attendance. It's a clear violation of the civil rights rulings that were handed down in the 1960s. It would be like requiring people to take a literacy test before voting, but only in particular places. Beyond the civil rights implications, it violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution.
> The problem there is that the government were mandating that people had to go to different schools just based on their skin color.
Yes, but that's coincidental to the legal issues. If the people in question had been women, or another minority, or of a particular religious persuasion, or any number of other traits, the same laws would apply. Race has always been coincidental to the legal arguments.
> On the other hand, magnet schools are inherently and legally discriminatory; they discriminate on talent.
Sometimes true, but a red herring in this case, because the girl is qualified to attend. Because she is qualified, her civil rights become the issue.
> Magnet high schools are not a right.
Actually if it's a public school, yes, it's a right. The reason? If a particular person is qualified to attend this publicly funded institution, then any other equally qualified person should be able to attend also, and if not, the school had better have an excellent reason why not.
If it were a private school, the rules would be different, but this is a publicly funded school, therefore constitutional protections are in force.
I would love to see this kind of back and forth in the opinions of the Supreme Court. You're making some interesting arguments I haven't thought of. Unfortunately with the religious freedom claim, I doubt we'd see this come up.
This is very cool, but would love to see an easier way to strum the string instruments. It is hard to get a good rhythm going while holding the button down and fighting cursor drift.
Except that you can't. 5k is above 'discretionary spending' for a drone, but not worth it to convene meetings with upper management, fly in sales people, do an extensive demo/feasibility study, etc. Spolsky wrote a post about it years ago, and I generally found it's true. There is a gap between 'cheap' and 'expensive' for which it's hard to justify the sales expenses. While doing 1M deal is excruciatingly painful, it's not 200 times more painful than doing 5k deals, so in the end I prefer the one 1M.
The exception is software which is so widely regarded as being good and necessary that it's trivial to expense it. For example: Visual Studio, SQL Server, Oracle, AutoCAD. Software that has acquired a strong reputation can short-circuit the typical management heavy buying decision process. Instead of consulting with the software maker the decision process becomes focused on the question of need, alternatives, and budget.
To date it hasn't been very common for software to live in that niche, but it certainly can.
The management-heavy buying process still applies, however - as support and service contracts become extremely important for large organisations, and are essential to their operations.
There are pros and cons to both. Someone paying you $1M may start to act like they own you. Worse yet, if you don't have much other business, it might be true. Also, the process of selling will likely be long, drawn out, and complicated, wasting a lot of time you could use for development.
Also, it might be a lot harder to grow your business from 1 to N $1M buyers, whereas it might be comparatively easier to grow from 100K people paying $10 to 10M paying $10 or, say, 10M paying $10, 10K paying $1k, etc.
Indeed, a sizable chunk of those 100K individual customers are likely going to find a way to nag, review-extort, and support-whittle your $1M down to almost nothing.
