Oh, that's not what you meant?

Er ... this is for DARPA.

There's a quote from an administrator saying the previous attendance system wasn't working well. No details. No way to figure out what problem this is supposed to solve, and how.

It's easy enough to take attendance in homeroom. Teacher signs in to his computer and the homeroom list is there. Kids are present by default so Teach doesn't spend more than a moment checking off the kids who aren't there, and then submits the form. Done.

Office staff run a report five minutes after the start of homeroom. If any teacher hasn't taken attendance then she gets a reminder. Office staff have been getting calls from parents for half an hour before homeroom started, so as soon as they have the report they're ready to see which kids were marked absent by the teachers (must call parents to verify) vs marked absent by office staff (parent has already contacted the school).

No fingerprints. Human-based facial recognition technology is probably quite a bit more accurate, doesn't spread germs in most cases and rarely raises questions of citizen rights.

Apart from the total lack of detail in the news story, the reporter managed to spell "buses" right and then blew on "isles".

John Shirley wrote in the 90s about just such systems, and how terrorists/freedom fighters* can and will game them.

Eclipse: http://www.amazon.com/Eclipse-Song-Called-Youth-Book/dp/1930235003

* Depends on your point of view, innit? (Well, if you're willing to disregard little niceties like the distinction between "combatant" and "civilian".)

pieces of software that have gone down or are generally misbehaving

I mean, when was the last time something on Facebook actually worked?

But dinosaurs run on Unix! Didn't you watch Jurassic Park?

... scientists using MRI scans determined that fire is hot, people generally prefer the company of people who smile a lot, and the check isn't really in the mail.

Let me offer this from a school IT admin's perspective. I'd love to be able to offer this to kids, on two conditions:

- What we give the kids are just plain documents, with no restrictions on their use, which make no modifications to their systems.

- The kids have e-readers which will last all day on a charge, so they're not unplugging school equipment to plug in their readers.

This. All he's measured is that, among those stackoverflow users who reveal their age, older users contribute more answers than do younger users. Then he wrote the headline to attract attention, and slashdot toed that line.

... on other platforms. *crash!*

Particularly nice website you got there. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it. (Nudges 24" monitor off desk with elbow.) Aw, lookit that. See? Accidents happen alla time.

So, the obvious questions. So, the obvious questions, if you're going to claim this program brings in the girls and teaches programming skills: - Control group where as much time, money and effort was put into teaching programming with other attractive goals (e.g., video making vs games)? The control mentioned in the study is apples/oranges - They're figuring out if they are teaching programming by having the teachers examine the students' work to see if computational patterns are there. And how is this superior to handing the kids a problem involving the computational pattern they're looking for and seeing if they can suss it out?

... and it goes into an infinite launching loop if the school's filter is set to block games.

They have consistently shown they're in the money biz, and don't give a fig about art or freedom of speech.

hypocrisy, e.g., a politician who claims to stand for morality but goes out with a hooker.

No, that's "redundancy".