Having attended Texas high school back in the late '90s and early '00s, it's my recollection that there are privacy laws on the books protecting students on school grounds or engaged in school activities from having their likeness used without parental permission (I think there were a handful of exceptions, such as yearbook photos, however). The school passed out waivers at the start of the school year in an attempt to get that permission from parents, and most parents signed them since otherwise their student wouldn't appear in the yearbook aside from for their standard photo, as I recall.

Again, this was all around 15 years ago at this point, so my recollection is fuzzy, but it's entirely possible that even though this kid may own the rights to those pictures, he may be barred from using them on account of privacy laws regarding Texas students. If so, that wouldn't be a copyright issue, but it would be a situation where the principal may need to get involved.

The line would be at posting their private contact details, home address, or other personal information. But their professional e-mail address that's posted on a public-facing site for the sole purpose of providing the public-at-large with a way to contact them? Absolutely fair game.

My parents tried grounding me once. After I thoroughly enjoyed having so much free time to make progress through my stack of novels, they started adding the stipulation, "...and no reading!" whenever they'd send me off to my room. Getting grounded stopped being so much fun after that.

No worries. My post was a long, rambling, me-standing-on-a-soapbox post. Soapbox posts are rarely understood as intended, both because they're hard to read and because they're rarely communicated well. I'd wager a little of both was at play here. ;)

There's probably not security per-se, but I strongly suspect that a firmware update would have some kind of error detection that may panic somewhere along the line if say one of the layer 2 FCS didn't match after being transmitted across one of the lines, causing a TCP segment to get dropped. For that one pump it would work, but it would screw over the rest of them.

Are accurate.

'Nuff said.

It went to Grand Jury and was no-billed.

A lawyer that can't work out a resolution for the issue at hand in TFA without going to jury trial is a fucking moron.

It got him an off-hour story on Slashdot.

$100,000? That's just a tiny bit inflated. My legal fees for two felonies were slightly more than $5,000. It's not going to cost six digits to get judicial relief in a circumstance like this. It probably doesn't even get the lawsuit stage, a demand letter sent to the school district and reviewed by their attorney would probably suffice. "Yeah, we're going to lose this one. Wipe the student's record clean, tell him you're sorry, and move on."

There's plenty of stupidity in the American legal system to make fun of without making stuff up.

I must not have communicated very clearly then, since what I actually believe and was trying to communicate was something more like this...

What a jumbled mush of disgruntled ramblings. I can understand why you are so disgruntled because you are probably upset that none of your coworkers or likely even friends and family listen to your incoherent arguments.

Making business more reliable and reducing risks is not communism. It isn't even capitalism, it is just good business.

Part of managing a company is ensuring you do not take unnecessary risks. One very unnecessary risk is relying too much on individual employees. Any employee can be hit by a bus tomorrow, and a well run company can weather the loss of any one employee no matter how skilled. One part of proper knowledge management is codifying and disseminating the intrinsic knowledge of key employees so the company is not too reliant on them.

Argumentum ad dictionarum is at the very least an informal fallacy. Attempting to argue about what really is a specialized definition of the word "tool" with a general definition you find on Google is tantamount to a fallacious appeal to authority.

Can't we just agree that everyone in this thread is whining, with only the OP making decent arguments in that whining?

There is an actual definition of the word tool. We are under no obligation whatsoever to use your private definition.

And you're not an expert, so your criticisms are largely meaningless.