As a network administrator for a small local ISP I have to say I would absolutely loathe this proposal. I can't even begin to imagine the infrastructure and management nightmare to do something like this at all of our locations.

So OK, you use encryption for your APs, which you then have to give the password out to your customers making the wireless in effect public anyway.

Or do you propose we only use WPA2-EAP? So what, we have to not only manage each account individually, but I assume we have to do personnel verification? We simply could have some sort of web based account creation, but would we be held liable if they forged/stole the information? Do we have to do some sort of credit card authorization to make sure the person is who they say they are or do we have to see their ID personally? This kind of defeats the purpose of wireless in some locales.

And I assume they will want us to log all of the traffic otherwise we'd have to route our public IPs. While in and of itself is not that difficult, most of the time this would be increasingly difficult. Have you priced peering lately? It's not cheap and we're running out of IPs, running NAT at these places is sometimes the only way to bring wireless there. If we can run NAT but have to log the traffic the kind of hardware necessary in order to retain logs for any length of time and keeping it low latency is pretty astronomical and economically infeasible.

So here's a list of services that they will have to run in order to comply with this: Account management/key storage(ldap), Authentication(RADIUS), Account Creation(web whatever), Packet Logging(ntop) OR Peering Connection/Routable IPs, some sort of database for log retention, and an AP capable of handling the processing power for WPA2-EAP/Authentication. Oh plus you'll need someone to implement and administrate it.

Does the government plan on paying for this? While the company I work for has the ability to do this and we do for some locations, doing it everywhere would be a nightmare. Not to mention how ripe for abuse this whole system would be. There's a reason why it's not already done. It's expensive, time consuming, hurts the service, and it's easy to get around.

This is a dumb idea and it won't work. It will put smaller ISPs out of business and even the big ones will have trouble with it. And what do we do about Mom and Pop that don't know how to secure their own wireless? Do they now become liable if someone uses their connection?

The hell happened to common carrier status?

Just get one of the commercial multi wan routers and jam a bunch of connections into them. It's not true link aggregation but it's as affordable as it can get. It won't become one giant pipe, instead the connections from machines behind the router will get load balanced out. In order to get true link aggregation, well, it's horribly expensive and I'm almost positive that it can't be done with multiple ISPs.

From the release notes, specifically: http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5.4/html/Release_Notes/Filesystems.html yes it does support XFS and FUSE, but they say it's a "technology preview." So who knows what exactly that means.

Aren't you a precious little snowflake? I assume your parents are big donors to the school.

Actually, I was a broke as shit college student paying my own tuition by working 60 hours a week on top of being a full time student so I wouldn't fall into unmanageable debt. I live by my principles and my convictions, when those are violated I act to correct them. Taking 10 minutes out of my day to right a wrong certainly isn't going to kill me, though it may inconvenience me.

The profs should given you two options - put up and shut up, or an F. I suspect most teachers have better uses for their time than googling random phrases, especially when the college is already paying for an automated method.

Professors get paid by my check every semester. They are there because students like me say they can be. I suspect that they felt it is worth letting one student opt out than it would be to fight it. Sure, they may already be paying for he automated response, but this article mentioned a lawsuit which is nearly ironclad in that students are in fact having their rights violated. Do you think that colleges have a standing order to willfully disregard student's wishes in regards to an already murky legal area? It wouldn't make sense; they'd accept my wishes to opt out, spend the extra time, and go on with their lives.

You do not have to, and should not have to, opt out of your creative works being infringed.

You are absolutely right. This should be an opt in service with waiver or contract, unfortunately that's not the case. Complaining about it isn't going to fix it unless you can provide pressure to the people higher up in the food chain or by legal means. I was, however, a poor college student so I could only fight my own battles.

If the department dictated that the professor should take your laptop, sell it on eBay, and give the money to some third party corporation, would you see the professor as having done no wrong? This corporation is building its cashflow on your creative work, without license. If they want to come to you and negotiate a deal to use your creative work in their business model, fine. Until then, it is yours.

The main problem with this is, like another poster put it, every school has bylaws/student contracts/whatever o specifically say that they can do whatever they want with your work. While I completely and totally disagree with this, unless it's overturned in court or changed, it will continue to be the "law of the land." If they had provisions in said contract that you signed to take your possessions, then there's nothing you can do about it except challenge it.
I am not a revolutionary. I cared about my own work and acted to protect it, if everyone else cared as much then this wouldn't be a problem. This corporation is making money on others work, not mine. It is not my fault that the system is flawed, it is my problem though. It is not my problem that others do not see it our way, though it maybe my fault for not speaking out. At the end of the day, I can only act to protect myself, the fact that others are so apathetic or obedient to the system there isn't much I can do given time and money constraints. Though if someone organized a protest or petition drive to overturn this, I would certainly support it.

Seriously, each professor that I had that used this service specifically mentioned it the first day and it was written in the syllabus. I brought up an objection with each professor and they had no issue with me opting out and them presumably just googling various sentences in my papers. It wasn't an issue, the professors agreed with me when I voiced my objections about the privacy, copyright ownership, data retention, presumption of innocence, etc. The only reason that they used it was because the department head dictated it.

Exercise your rights. It's your paper. Remember, professors are people just like you. While they may believe you to be paranoid, they won't hold it against you if you voice your concerns with logic, passion, and conviction.

I know exactly what you mean. I was going through a box of genealogy things left by my late Grand Mother and realized that I couldn't read her hand writing. She was an English teacher for nearly 60 years and her hand writing was impeccable.

I'm 26 so I can understand the article. I recall being taught how to write in cursive in Elementary school for 1 grade, but after that it was basically write however you want as long as it's legible, cursive wasn't enforced and kind of felt like them teaching "Here is one way that you can write". Like the article said, computers started to come of age then and I was already an excellent typist when I learned cursive it had basically became a useless skill that I thought I'd never need. I never realized the consequence was not being able to read and that made me feel really wrong.

Though I work in IT and handwriting isn't a necessary skill, it is something that I've been working on the past few months. Luckily it's like riding a bike, it comes back easily. I do no think that I'll never need the skill, but you never know. I was lucky though, I was exposed to it, the generations after mine probably weren't.