What bothers me about this is that there seems to be this idea that there are "school rules" that can conceivable cover ANY off-campus behavior, actions or activities.

There's an argument that certain off-campus behaviours should be covered by school rules; cheating (i.e. hiring someone to do a school project, etc), kids on a school team using performance enhancing drugs, possibly bullying. But there's not much, and certainly any kind of the speech, "decorum" or association school rules should never be enforceable outside of official school activity.

However, the idea that any private or public school administration has the authority to get the passwords for someones online service account and search the content is ludicrous, and for the organization to actually put that kind of thing into writing as standard procedure (if we think they're up to something, we'll coerce a student or parent into violating the terms of service of an online account) into writing is just begging for a lawsuit.

But the others, I feel bad for them

I don't. Those of us who've been around for a while remember when the current batch of editors came onboard, and compared to the original crew they're useless; about as effective at editing as patent examiners are at examining patents.

I used to have most of them filtered out, but unfortunately if I kept those filters Slashdot would be (more) content-free.

So, fuck 'em. And fuck beta, of course.

I wonder if beta comes with air freshener?

If you consider living next to a pig farm to be fresh country air, then I guess you could call it that.