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Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

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Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#41

Post by jacquesm »

sketerpot wrote: post #18
cperciva wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translation: It saddens me that this is necessary. It wasn't long ago that Latin was part of the standard curriculum in grammar schools. The people For clarity: This is my answer, not the answer given by Plato (who argues that the guardians should guard themselves) or answer from Juvenal (who implicitly takes the position that this is an impossible problem).

Why should Latin be part of the standard curriculum?

Think of latin as the foundation of French, Italian, modern day Romanian, Spanish and a whole lot of other languages to a lesser extent.

Understanding even only the rudiments of Latin will give you tremendous insight in to the historical development of languages and will help you a lot in learning them as spoken today.

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#42

Post by jacquesm »

Qz wrote: post #22

Can someone make the title a little more grammatical? It's not really a sentence and it doesn't make sense unless you already know what it's referring to.

Titles have to be 80 characters or less. Plenty of times it takes more than that to make a title more 'grammatical', so bits are sacrificed to fit the limit.

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#43

Post by s-phi-nl »

cperciva wrote: post #17
s-phi-nl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translation: Who will guard the guards? The people.

Translation: It saddens me that this is necessary. It wasn't long ago that Latin was part of the standard curriculum in grammar schools. The people For clarity: This is my answer, not the answer given by Plato (who argues that the guardians should guard themselves) or answer from Juvenal (who implicitly takes the position that this is an impossible problem).

I wish more people knew Latin, too. My interest in languages is one of the reasons both that I am here and that I have a φ in my username. I posted the translation because I thought doing so would teach the most people a useful Latin phrase which I didn't know.

Perhaps I should have posted a link to the Wikipedia article instead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes

[edit: added first two sentences]

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#44

Post by CWuestefeld »

DanielStraight wrote: post #40
pyre wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edit: I may have misunderstood you. I first read this to say that a hypothetical nude photo wouldn't be a big deal, because the school didn't mean to do that. Maybe you're saying the opposite, that it doesn't matter if there is NO such photo, because it should be obvious that it could easily happen. I took it that GP is stating that we shouldn't only consider this to be a big deal if nude photos show up. We shouldn…

This is correct. Nevertheless, I am torn in how to response to CWuestefeld's point. I want to say that it would be just as bad to obsess over intent without worrying about act, but I'm not sure that's true. Even in the cases presented (accidentally posting a nude photo and arresting someone who had not committed a crime), the crime is still not just in the act itself. The crime is also in the negligence involved. A n…

I can agree with that.

I guess it boils down to people needing to act responsibly. We must each fulfill those responsibilities that are incumbent upon us. If I'm entrusted with those SS#s, I'd better take care of them. If I took reasonable measures to do so but they're lost, I'm less bad then if I was irresponsible and just lucked out.

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#45

Post by sketerpot »

jacquesm wrote: post #41
sketerpot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should Latin be part of the standard curriculum?

Think of latin as the foundation of French, Italian, modern day Romanian, Spanish and a whole lot of other languages to a lesser extent. Understanding even only the rudiments of Latin will give you tremendous insight in to the historical development of languages and will help you a lot in learning them as spoken today.

So, essentially, learning Latin will give you a bunch of cognates that may be very useful if you then go on to learn French, Italian, etc.? I can see how this would be useful if you wanted to follow the linguistic evolution of those languages, but if you want to learn to speak them, wouldn't it be more effective to learn those languages directly? Since they have common roots, I imagine that learning one of them would give some advantage when you go to learn the next one.

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#46

Post by sketerpot »

cperciva wrote: post #20
sketerpot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should Latin be part of the standard curriculum?

Because learning Latin trains the mind in logical thought. Because studying Latin helps people learn about the grammatical structures which they use in their native tongue without understanding. Because understanding Latin makes it much easier to learn any of the many Latin-influenced languages, or even to guess at what text means without knowing the language. Because knowing Latin is a prerequisite for learning much…

> Because learning Latin trains the mind in logical thought.

How? Is there something magical about Latin? Would other, less dead languages have the same effect?

> Because studying Latin helps people learn about the grammatical structures which they use in their native tongue without understanding.

That's hardly unique to Latin.

> Because understanding Latin makes it much easier to learn any of the many Latin-influenced languages, or even to guess at what text means without knowing the language.

Why not learn another Latin-derived modern language, instead? You get some of that same effect, and you learn a language that isn't dead.

> Because knowing Latin is a prerequisite for learning much of European history from primary sources.

How many people are going to want to do that, ever? Consider the opportunity cost of learning Latin for those who won't. And then, of the people who will want to read those primary sources, how many of them would benefit from being able to read them in Latin rather than in a translation?

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#47

Post by sketerpot »

marr wrote: post #23
sketerpot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should Latin be part of the standard curriculum?

Imho, for the same reason that schools shouldn't only teach OOP langs. Ideas are expressed differently in different languages and there are often important nuances, where the real message is to be found, which are lost. For instance, it might have more of the intended effect to translate it as: "Who is watching the watchers?". A little paranoia here or there... today, the idea of 'guards' is pretty benign. That Latin…

> Imho, for the same reason that schools shouldn't only teach OOP langs.

If you're going for linguistic diversity, why not go all-out and learn something completely unrelated to Latin? Maybe one of the Asian languages, for example. I know one guy who says he thinks differently when he speaks Mandarin than he does when he speaks English. Maybe that would be a little too hard, compared to Latin?

> Thirdly, there are many great ideas written in Latin. Those ideas have profound things to say and we risk cutting ourselves off, as a people, or maybe more importantly as individuals, from "lessons learned".

Surely we, as a people, can afford a few decent translators?

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#48

Post by pyre »

hga wrote: post #37
pyre wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I recall from my interpretation of what the school's sysadmin said (and perhaps others), when the system connects to the net and it's not the normal LAN, it automatically starts taking pictures and sending those, screen shots and the usual (IP address etc.) to the school's servers. But I may be wrong. Wouldn't it make more sense to query the school system to see if the laptop is flagged as stolen before using th…

Purely from the security/retrieval viewpoint, I think not. You'd pass up potentially critical information that way. Hmmm, I suppose from that viewpoint you'd also want to follow their policy of not telling anyone about the security system in the first place.

> Purely from the security/retrieval viewpoint

That's the failure in that logic. "Purely from a security viewpoint," it would make sense to strip all airline passengers naked and force them to stow all their luggage/clothes (i.e. no carry-ons), and have armed security agents staring them down the entire flight.

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#49

Post by froo »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #6

I'm glad that somebody is still tracking this story, and it hasn't just dropped on the ground. Too often, it seems, a news story outrages us, but the furor quickly dies down. In the end, nobody even notices the ritual scapegoat. A little while back, somebody proposed here ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183587 ) a web app that would allow us to follow a news story entire life. This reminds of that, and why it…

I'm currently tracking a news story on a different matter. I just use google alerts, it's much better imo.

Re: Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

#50

Post by ams6110 »

pyre wrote: post #30
blantonl wrote: post #3

where there is smoke, there is fire. Sounds to me like what initially was an ability to view students working in school quickly digressed into illegal abuse of the deployment. That district's insurance company must be terrified at this point, because lawyers are going to come out of the woodwork to jump on this one.

> where there is smoke, there is fire. I will always hate that phrase, because it's one of the phrases my dad used to 'prove' that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

He did. He used them.
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