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The forgotten war on beepers

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Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#61

Post by BobaFloutist »

autoexec wrote: post #40
BobaFloutist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children don't really have property rights, and even if they did, courts have consistently ruled that the bill of rights is reduced in school settings.

Children don't have property rights but their parents do and they own their children's things. If a parent went to the school and asked for the confiscated item that school would be insane to deny them.

They'd be insane to deny them because disgruntled parents can cause an incredible amount of trouble for schools, not because confiscating the phone when established by clearly communicated policy is actually meaningfully illegal.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#63

Post by arp242 »

afandian wrote: post #45

Forget the beeper. The idea of arresting a child at school for anything (short of maybe violent assault) seems to be madness.

I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime, but this sort of thing is shockingly common, even when dealing with children. Here's another case I encountered a few weeks ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Brown_case – there are so many things wrong with the entire thing, starting with charging an 11-year old as an adult(!!!) but what really takes the cake is:

"Presiding Judge Dominick Motto of the Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, Common Pleas Court initially denied decertification and transfer to juvenile court because Jordan would not admit his involvement in the crime."

"We're going to punish you harder because you claim to be innocent" What kind of backward clinically insane shitcunt logic is that?! Especially when we're talking about a 11-year old?!

It's no surprise that the "kids for cash" scandal could have continued for years, because the entire system is rotten. In any half-way decent system giving 3 months detention to a 14-year old for making a MySpace parody page of a teacher should have set off every possible alarm bell, and that it didn't is pretty damning for the entire system. Also: what kind of school brings this matter to a judge in the first place...? This along is pretty crazy.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#64

Post by jerf »

hiatus wrote: post #37
toast0 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously, there is a substantial difference between a one-way receive-only device and cellphones. Motorola released their two way pager, the Tango in 1995. In 1996, they had an app for the Tango to access the web [1]. You can't make a call with a pager, but nobody makes calls anymore; there's not a lot of difference in capability; although there's a large difference in distribution. [1] http://www.wirelesscommunic…

Service was ~$25/month (and only worked in your area) and you were limited to ~100 messages a month at that price (with each message <100 chars long). I can't imagine browsing the web with that service would be affordable for any real use.

Prior to cell phones being powerful enough to just shove megabytes of JS at them and expect them to work it out, the web had a lot of little subsets like this. I'm sure it wasn't really "the web", but a few pages that used HTTP to access them but if you strayed outside that set it completely disintegrated. I believe I saw some Palm Pilot optimized web sites, there used to be web sites optimized for mobile devices back when that meant something, there were some Dreamcast-optimized sites, etc. It is probably better to imagine it as access to their bespoke services over HTTP, and they were all pretty useless as they lacked any network effect.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#65

Post by rickydroll »

Sebb767 wrote: post #25
rickydroll wrote: post #23

To me, two things are interesting in this post. First, even though urban legends have been documented and debunked for years, people still get suckered by them. Second, using photographs of newspaper pages is an increasingly rare form of documenting past events. While you can forge a newspaper page, it is more complicated than tweaking some HTML.

> While you can forge a newspaper page, it is more complicated than tweaking some HTML. With how many people are skilled in Photoshop compared to web development, forging a scan of a page is probably easier for a lot of people.

Yes, you are right, but theoretically, it's easier to prove the forgery if you have copies of the newspaper stored in multiple places. I think we need multiple archives of newspaper articles stored in an archival medium. We can't trust crypto signatures to be future-proof.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#67

Post by wkat4242 »

Wow. Weird.

We never had this in the Netherlands. But we got them later.

In fact for a long time they were the only way to be reachable in hospitals because they banned mobile phones for fear of interference with medical equipment.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#68

Post by hn8305823 »

ok123456 wrote: post #13

The policy at my school was that any "electronic device," be it a cellphone or pager, would be confiscated and held until the end of the school year. I had this happen to a (not yet modified) Radio Shack tone dialer.

In the 80's I had a walki-talkie confiscated till the end of the year also. It "just happened" to be crystaled for the same freq the school narcs/maintenance used.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#69

Post by xhevahir »

zzzeek wrote: post #42

it's important to note that the fake panic over beepers is not related to the current concerns that kids shouldn't be on their phones all day long and at school. The former is a "fake moral panic" based on the premise that all kids were doing / selling drugs. the latter is a concern regarding mood/attention/bullying/self-esteem well established by statistics and experts (though not all experts, it's hotly debated. Fo…

I think "moral panic" (to paraphrase Terry Eagleton on ideology) is like halitosis in that it's what the other person has and not oneself. Arguments that invoke it seem always to break down into finger-pointing and one-upmanship.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#70

Post by hn8305823 »

drdaeman wrote: post #15
ok123456 wrote: post #13

The policy at my school was that any "electronic device," be it a cellphone or pager, would be confiscated and held until the end of the school year. I had this happen to a (not yet modified) Radio Shack tone dialer.

> confiscated and held until the end of the school year. How things like that were even remotely legal?

You could always bring your parents into this if you really wanted to. For some reason that rarely ever happened...
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