Yeah, I meant it as more of a witch than a troll, really. Perhaps "see if the school's routers will float in water" might have been a bit more obvious... I went for the more subtle approach, but apparently some moderators take everything at face value! ;)

Wi-Fi is the obvious culprit. The spectral evidence is clear and this apparently isn't the first time it's caused problems in children...

http://www.salemweb.com/memorial/chronology.shtml

I thought the dwarves got seven cards. And, the humans got nine... and the elves three. Or, am I mixing something up?

Alright -- to respond to myself --it does look like the researchers did some sort of manual license checking for each commonly-shared work, but the article is pretty silent on what, exactly, that entailed. I'm virtually certain it didn't involve checking for fair use possibilities.

I'm curious as to how the same logic would have described the simple use of a VCR prior to the Sony case: "100% of material recorded on VCRs is copyrighted and definitely illegal." All copyrighted, yes, but much of the recording activity was later found to be "time-shifting": a fair use, and therefore legal and not an infringement.

What I'd really like to see therefore is a study where the researchers sample of the downloaders/sharers involved to see whether they make fair-use-sounding arguments or not. (Couldn't buy it another way, replacing my lost or worn-out copy, sampling music I wouldn't have bought otherwise, etc.) Sure some of this might not pass muster as fair use if eventually tested, but it makes a difference, particularly since, as the article notes, P2P users actually buy more media per capital than non-P2P users.

Such a study wouldn't break down content by "type of content" but by "type of use". Not doing so is a dead giveaway that the study isn't designed to seriously address the fair use issues at all.

"Copyrighted" refers to the work. "Infringing" refers to the *use* of the work. The first does not imply the second.

The aricle says they checked "...whether the file was confirmed to be copyrighted..." And then apparently made the jump to assuming that anything copyrighted must be illegal, sliding immediately into called them "infringing files."

Of course by that metric all the Linux distros are illegal as well since they too are "copyrighted." As is any blog post, web page, or photo taken in the last, say, 70 years. As is anything that is shared properly according to the terms of any license. Now the study may have actually looked at the license terms in place for each work, but this definitely not what the article *said*.

Not to mention that regardless of any express license terms, sharing that qualifies as fair use is also NOT AN INFRINGMENT and is LEGAL and should not be described as illegal or as "infringing files."

Any indication whether these types of things (terms of the licenses according to each item, whether the sharing events qualified as fair use) were taken into account? If not, then I'd counter by noting that 100% of the material on Warner Bros' home page is copyrighted too. Should I say it's being shared "illegally"? Of course not, but my whole point is that if you play with semantics loosely enough, you'll find that probably the vast majority of the material on the Net as a whole is "illegal" and "copyrighted."

*grumble*

This post gets at what seems like the obvious solution to me: "batteries".

Is battery tech so far behind generator tech that each windmill can't, say, charge a local battery for a few hours at high RPM, and then have that energy bleed out into the grid over time? This is a serious question - I have no idea what state-of-the-art battery technology is but it seems pretty obvious that these things should go together, just like they do in a car (alternator/battery).

I get that a fleet of electric car batteries and substations could serve that purpose, but then (once again) the inability of the grid becomes an issue, unless the cars/substations are right there at the windmills.

So, are large capacity batteries attached to each windmill just not feasible?

Yes, Acquiring a taste for Zappa can be done, even for the uninitiated/unsuspecting.

When I was in college I had a cassette with "Thing Fish" on it, and my roommate accidentally took it home with him for summer break. He got a delivery job that summer. The company truck had a cassette deck in it but no CD player. Since my roommate had no cassettes, he decided to give "Thing Fish" a listen (or three). Once he started listening to it he really loved it. This is a guy who previously had pretty mainstream musical tastes.

So I'd say as long as you're open to the weirdness and not too easily offended, you should give it a shot.

You might like:

Khan Academy http://www.khanacademy.org/

(Get an account for the review software if you have forgotten college algebra skills as well.)

MIT's Open Courseware http://ocw.mit.edu/

Many of these courses now have full video libraries of lectures, homework and exam solutions, etc. You can buy a text and take the course.

I am interested to see other finds out there, though.

Kate Bush's song about this type of thing: "Experiment IV"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6hvNe11r9U

"They told us
All they wanted
Was a sound that could kill someone
From a distance.
So we go ahead,
And the meters are over in the red.
It's a mistake in the making."

Actually, I couldn't help noticing earlier this week that Richard Feynman sounded an awful lot like Bender does. Too bad he's dead or he could take over the role!

Y hrdware?

Cuz humenz iz hrdware, not software.

Kitteh jus purrz an humanz go getz cheezburger.

Good thing. Zack may already be on its way...

http://boingboing.net/2009/04/08/gentleman-in-new-orl.html

So what does this demonstrate other than that strong legal prohibitions and penalties can affect how people behave?

An extreme example: if a country passed a law making it a capital crime to buy cheese from anyone other than the King's brother, I imagine that 1) the level of activity in the open cheese markets would go down markedly the day after the law was passed; and 2) Regis Frater CheeseCo would be booming.

So again, how is this result surprising and/or newsworthy? Isn't this exactly what you'd expect unless Swedes are totally disrespectful of their country's legal system already? (Give 'em a few more laws like this and they might get there!)

"What else can you do?" Really? This sounded like a completely routine school disciplinary matter to me. Even taking your swipe at "our lawsuit-happy culture" at face value, which do you think is riskier from a lawsuit standpoint: 1) giving a student a suspension; or 2) having her arrested?

The parent post puts it harshly, but in my view is pretty spot-on in spirit. You should be analyzing literature of "high quality" (academically/pedagogically weighty) rather than mass-market stuff which may not have much substance.

There's plenty that's mathematically interesting in, for example, poetry... You can study the structure of different types of poems mathematically and play games with that. Have students figure out which meters "work" (sound good) and which don't. Try to have them come up with a theory of meter they can use. Relate it to actual poetry meters or the work of some poets.

It doesn't have to be poetry, either -- you can play the same games with simple grammar. What's the shortest grammatically correct sentence they can write? The longest they can write (that is grammatically correct) without punctuation marks? Can they write a computer program that generates mad/ad lib sentences? (Cover this after showing how to diagram sentences, for example).

It needn't all be creative, either. I'm sure if you're worth your salt as an English teacher you probably already know about some authors that have done things like this in their work. Lewis Carroll springs to mind, but I'm sure there are many, many others.

Plus, since math/science have been partly behind many burning social issues (driving all kinds of controversial changes in society) I'm sure authors have discussed these things. I bet you can pull passages from Mark Twain or Aldous Huxley or others that discuss numbers in some way to make points about political or other issues. Math and science don't come from "somewhere else," they're interwoven into society, so they will be reflected in society's literature.

In other words, look at the material you're already teaching from a different standpoint and you may find what you're looking for. You don't "bring math and science into English/literature"... it's already there! I think the parent poster is concerned because you seem not to notice this.