This is not a case of red tape. Preventing emergancy signals or signals from other users is illegal, get over it and recoup some of the money wasted on a jammer.

Exactly. Something like this is so blatantly and obviously illegal that it's frankly surprising that anyone even proposed this plan.

Also it's shocking that the article's headline seems to imply that the head is in the right here.

I agree. You try to stop my kid from being able to contact me or the emergency services and my kid won't be in your school.

I went through 10+ years of schooling where I could not immediately contact my parents and I and many others survived just fine. I think that school aged children having mobile devices probably does more harm than good when you factor in cyber bullying. Has there been an occasion where your child has had to contact you in an emergency?

For everyone who is misinterpreting this statement. I am not suggesting that jamming phone signals is acceptable. It isn't for the very reasons provided to the headteacher in the article. What I am suggesting is that children do not need access to their devices during lesson time, at which point the children are being supervised by a responsible adult (the teacher) who is able to contact emergency services or parents in the event of an emergency. Requiring students to hand in and retrieve their mobile phones from teachers at the start and end of a lesson is an entirely reasonable solution to the problem being faced by this (and probably many others) school.

I often had to call my parents to pick me up, both because of snow days and after school activities. Depending on pay phones for this was a giant hassle.

It's also ridiculous that someone who has a life threatening accident near this school might not be able to call emergency services from their cellphone.

Your appeal to cyber bullying is also baseless unless you can provide some evidence that blocking cell phones at school will accomplish this. This kind of hollow emotional appeal is how we end up with draconian laws that don't actually accomplish anything except massive inconvenience.

You are conflating two issues here. I am against the use of jammers, the UK govt has strict laws against this for the very reasons provided to this headteacher and which you refer to when you mention accident reporting to emergency services. We have no disagreement on that issue.

I had those issues to, but the school notified parents if the school was closing early due to adverse weather and I made arrangements in advance for after school activities, same way I made arrangements to meet friends before we had mobile phones.

re: cyber bullying I never supported the blocking of cell phone access. My point was that we can survive without having them available to us 24/7. In a school setting having children hand them in and collect them from the teacher at the start/end of every lesson is a reasonable solution. Should some catastrophe befall the the student the teacher is there to call emergency services or contact the parents, if the catastrophe occurs on the way home or the way to school or at break time then the student has their phone.

Your previous comment, made in this thread, makes it sound like you supported the jamming. I completely agree that students don't need their phones with the 24/7.

I don't agree with having the teacher collect them and give them back out because that sounds like a massive waste of time, but students could keep them in their locker, or in their backpacks (with the understanding that use during class would result in immediate confiscation for the day/until a parent collected it), or whatever. They don't need them in hand during class, clearly.

Apologies if my first comment was unclear. seems like we agree.

Me too! Now that you mention it, I've never even had to call 911 once in my life.

I guess we can just start putting cell phone jammers up everywhere and it'll be fine.

That's anecdotal evidence. What's to say your experience reflects the experience of all children in school today?

please see my edit.

There are other means for a child to make contact aside from personal mobile devices. Conventional phones, for example. At our local school, all mobile devices are put in lockers and are not allowed in class.

And in an emergency you can walk to the locker, retrieve the phone, and make a call. It makes no sense to require landline use in an emergency when mobile phones provide a valuable backup.

What makes no sense is y'all allowing your children to be spied on by Google/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/Snapchat/NSA/GCHQ 24/7 on an age when they don't know better.

I'm sure the NSA and GCHQ are super-interested in spying on the inane texts that kids send each other while sitting in high school math class.

Had an email to all parents today, saying that if your child is unwell.. they are still not allowed to call their parents to let them know. I'm contemplating a strongly worded response..

You know the school is responsible for them while their in the premises, right?

Yes.. but if my child is unwell and feels like they want to talk to a parent.. and they have the means to do so.. I do not feel the school has the right to stop them.. especially if it might comfort the child.

The right to stop them? Of course not. They have the obligation of providing a telephone for it to happen. You're only making up excuses.

How do I bring up my contact list on this thing? Where's the screen? These are some funny little buttons. What's this slot for? Wait. You mean I'd have to carry quarters around? All the time, just in case I might want to make a phone call? Can't I use Rixty or Bitcoin or Paypal or something instead? What if I just need to send a text?

It would be a lot like asking the kids who attended school before mobile phone ubiquity to use morse code over telegraph lines instead of touch-tone dialing on the public phones or the phone in the office.

If you want to force kids to live in the past, do it in history class. Otherwise, adapt your policies and curriculum for the times in which we all live.

I think expecting kids to remember one emergency contact phone number in case they're not able to use their mobile for whatever reason is entirely reasonable, and not remotely comparable to expecting them to be able to use morse code.

No, it would be more like expecting me, when I was a child, to know how to send a morse coded telegram, when I had my parents' phone numbers memorized, and the touch-tone land-line telephone is right there.

Or it would be like expecting a kid able to send a morse code telegram to write a letter and have it delivered by the postal system, when the morse key and telegraph line is right there.

Or it would be like expecting a kid who knows how to write a letter and use the postal addressing system to inscribe and fire a cuneiform tablet then pay a random itinerant to carry it to the next town, when there's a post office right there.

It's unnecessarily forcing someone to use the previous generation of communications technology.

And if mobile phones were 100% guaranteed to be charged when you need them, that would be fine, but since they're not, asking a child to memorise a few digits so they're able to use someone else's phone in an emergency is perfectly reasonable redundancy.

Also, as far as I know, there wasn't ever a time when people knew how to send telegrams, but didn't know how to write letters. Indeed most people didn't know how to send telegrams with a telegraph key at all, they'd just write up their message and take it to an office to be keyed by an operator. A process which is largely identical to posting a letter.

You know you can recharge a cellphone, right? In fact you can make a call while it's still charging! Guaranteed one of your friends has a charger you can use.

Guaranteed? What makes you so sure? And then you need to find a power socket you can use (not difficult in a school, but could be elsewhere), and wait for the minimum charge level, and then wait for it to boot.

But if you know the number, you can use your friend's phone in a few seconds.

Same reason you're sure that one of your friends will have a cellphone. The numbers make it exceedingly likely.

You can't call an "emergency contact phone number" from a payphone without the right change unless that number is 911 (or the local equivalent). My kid[1] can't call me from a payphone in an emergency. Not only does my kid not carry change, but won't know my number. I don't even know my own mom's number.

And yes, the secretary/front desk/whatever can call me on behalf of my child, but that seems pretty ridiculous, too when everyone already owns a cell phone.

[1] My kid is two years old, so this is obviously academic for me at this point.

>You can't call an "emergency contact phone number" from a payphone

Of course, and you probably couldn't even find one in the first place.

But you could borrow a friend's phone, or ask a teacher to use a school phone, or even just ask someone in a random store if you're desperate. Just having access to that number without a charged mobile takes you from helpless to having many options, and it takes minimal effort. (Hell, write it down if you have to.)

Sure, but you could also just call on your cellphone like everyone else does all the time. What is the point of complicating it? It's totally reasonable to ask your kid to memorize your number in case of an emergency (or their cellphone actually breaks). That's entirely different from saying it's reasonable that kids can't use their cellphones and need to rely on pay phones.

Yes? That's exactly what I said.

This whole thread was about banning/blocking cellphones. Your initial reply made it sound like you agreed that this was fine because kids should memorize an emergency number anyway. I see now that wasn't your intent.

Man, you live in a padded bubble. When the real world slaps you and your children in the face with a shovel you're all dead.

I haven't used a payphone in at least a decade. I haven't carried a calling card in nearly two decades. I have change in my pocket that could be used for a payphone maybe twice a year.

It makes no sense to expect students to use a payphone in this day and age. How many schools even have working payphones now? I bet most had them removed or disconnected because no one uses payphones anymore.

It also nicely ignores that you're not blocking it at school. You're causing interference for an entire area.

The article is weird though; "think of the children", "red tape", etc. Too much intended to trigger a response.

Would be turning a room into big Faraday's cage with the sole purpose of preventing radio communication also illegal? Let's assume people are free to leave the room if they need.

No, but you'd need a better Faraday cage than a microwave.

As an STL maintainer, I can say that using "STL" to refer to "the C++ Standard Library" is a perfectly valid use of metonymy.

Do you not maintain threads, RegEx etc... ? At best STL can be reffered to as a subset of the Standard Library, which contains the algorithms and containers framework. I take Stroustrup's word over a maintainer with the intials STL, who has an interest to keep calling it by this name.

No, the STL doesn't exist any more, at least as a going concern. That's why it's metonymy. It sounds like you're thinking of synecdoche.

Because for those of us that started using C++ when C++ ARM was the only reference to it, the STL is a synonym of Standard Library.

"Standard Library" sounds better and I'll probably use it instead of "STL" in the future, but I'm not sure that "STL" is not used anymore or have been discarded.

I agree, I call it STD myself because of the namespace's name and the apt connotation.

Software Transmitted Disease

If you produce content, no one is willing to pay for it and your only source of income for it is adverts then I say your business model is flawed and good riddance to you.

I don't disagree with you, but just from a devil's advocate point of view, some would argue that by using ads to pay for the content, it allows the content to get to those people who couldn't have afforded to pay for it themselves.

Or, niche topics that can't draw enough support to stay afloat. Thus leading to an increasing sameness and banality.

Call it the tyranny of popularity.

> Or, niche topics that can't draw enough support to stay afloat

This isn't specific to adverts and applies to every industry/endeavour that depends on voluntary engagement for funding. Name one thing that does not require a minimum level of popularity to be self-sustaining

It's not flawed, it's just not simple. Or, it's a happy accident that people figured out how to be middlemen between advertisers and news consumers (the classic example).

In the paper newspaper days I didn't mind ads at all. And I probably wouldn't have paid the full cost of subscription if the advertisers weren't the real source of income.

Now, as someone in another said, advertisers are stalkers. I mind that.

In the newspaper, the ads stayed in their boxes, and you could easily ignore them - honestly, I don't ever actually seeing newspaper ads, they faded into the background so much. They weren't playing music, flashing gifs, launching fullscreen popup windows and click-through modals.

Exactly. The online ads are objectionable by design.

Have you seen a weekend local paper in the U.S. recently? There are whole ad sections that I drop straight in the trash. It's often at least 50% of the paper by weight.

There may be deals for supermarket meat etc. but in general it seems like a total waste.

That's been the case for decades. When I used to get the Sunday paper half of it would go straight to the trash before I poured my coffee.

I respectfully disagree with you.

Most larger websites produce two or three articles a month that I'm interested in. Smaller websites may only produce one or two articles a year that I'm interested in reading. There is no way I'm going to sign up for 100+ websites in order to read sporadic content. But this sporadic content is what does exist and needs to exist in order to get a well rounded web. So it's not realistic to say to a smaller niche blog to produce "better" and more frequent content that appeals to everyone. That's part of the beauty of thousands of niche web sites over, for example, dozens of niche magazines of the past.

So, there is a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed. There needs to be a way to aggregate all these sites into a single payment system. You pay for a year and get access to the sites you like. Then this payment processing company takes care of allocating the money based on various factors like how many people access each article.

Finally, in order to maximize revenue to content providers, this company should be setup not to take a fixed percent of each transaction but only take what it needs to sustain itself. In other words, at the end of each week/month/whatever the company totals up it's expenses and take their percentage only up sustainability (which includes growth factors). No more middle man leaches!

Such a “well rounded web” has no inherent right to exist. If it is at the cost of having ads, and that cost is too high, then we won’t get it. And that would be fine with me. I remember the Internet before the web. I can easily imagine an Internet without it.

"I respectfully disagree with you."

And yet you do not, instead you propose a system in which people pay for content.

The part I disagree with is the "no one is willing to pay for" part. Should have made that clearer.

I contend that lots of people are willing to pay, just not by the current means. (And proposed a possible solution that would suit me, and what I naively believe to be others too.)

The author informs that the stack is "difficult bit to wrap your head around first", then makes a bizarre statement "Once again – pushed values are indexed with negative, function arguments with positive numbers." This is not correct, you can use positive or negative indexes in either case. Positive indexes are absolute and negative are relative to the top of the stack.

Yes you're right, I just hoped that this may be a useful mnemonic (admittedly maybe a confusing one, but worked for me) for people starting with Lua. A simplification. How the index with negative offset is computed is explained in detail in the linked PIL/"The Stack" then. From my experience, the most common errors for beginners are 1-based indexing and stack manipulation.

Have a look at freelists www.freelists.org/

I love their Terms of Service:

> I have read and agree to the above terms , and agree that if I ask FreeLists for email addresses or send SPAM using their resources, they have permission to inflict severe pain on me with large, blunt objects.

[emphasis mine]

Oh that brings to mind the old User Friendly comic attitude. We really need more of that these days.

FreeLists is a great, "no bullshit" service. It's ran by a geek friend/ex-co-worker of mine. The only "caveat" is that everything must be public (i.e. no private/closed lists).

I know. I was really surprised to see that there has only been ~1000 donations.

This is news to me and I have a problem with the term as it does not include citizens of Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is part of The UK(Great Britain and NI), yet not part of Great Britain(England, Scotland and Wales) or Britain(England and Wales). The Irish, amongst others, do not refer to the islands as the British Isles due to the association with Britain.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Isles#cite_note-postwar...

Yeah, there are a lot of subtleties and disagreements. To cite another example, do you include the Isle of Man? They've long been though of as a seperate people.

In addition, 'Irish' could mean a number of things (Northern or Southern/Eire, or in some parts of the world just of Irish descent).

The tumultuous political, military, and colonial history of the British Isles, Ireland, and the surrounding smaller islands has contributed to some very confusing nomenclature when talking about the places and people belonging to them.

There have been a number of bit modules developed by 3rd party developers, including LuaJIT's Mike Pall, in addition to 5.2 which had bit functions. However, the bit functions were slow and a dog to use.

"Stop changing the story title", Donald Knuth

Yet I do not see Groupon apologising for their behaviour, which was evil.

I don't think you can characterize it as being evil. There's also no clear ulterior motive for pushing through with the name, and "capitalizing on the name recognition of the Gnome project" is not a valid hypothesis since that name doesn't mean anything for 99% of Groupon's customers.

It looks more like they were just being a typical stubborn corporation. Some product manager got really attached to the name and they tried to hang on to it as a matter of course, because they're massive and feel they don't have to budge to anything. In the end, they caved to negative publicity, as any company in their position would.

You don't say anything that's not exactly right, but you're still missing the point.

They had the opportunity to own up to their mistake and seek the goodwill of the community. They missed that chance. Perhaps not "evil", but certainly worth some continued indignation.

Evil was the point, I don't think I missed that. It seems to me your point is I failed to recognize how much indignation this caused, but that wasn't really within the scope of the comment I was replying to. And I'm not trying to debate whether continued indignation is warranted or not.

My suspicion is it'll blow over pretty quickly, though, if for no other reason than there are more pressing issues keeping most open source developers awake as opposed to an already resolved trademark dispute which never even went to court. This was a good day, wasn't it?

Whilst GNOME has not fully disclosed the information, which has been disgust for months at Board Meetings, I would stand by the evil comment. Groupon, the massive for profit organisation, made a conscious decision ("Not only did Groupon refuse ...")to basically say FU to GNOME. They then used their position as a major organisation to try and coerce them into an unacceptable situation("alternative branding options") which included filling more trademark applications.

I would, and do, call them bullies and bullies are evil.

I see your point, though I would still reserve the word for stuff that is at least an order of magnitude more troubling. Including this comment, I said so three times in different variations, and the fact that we're arguing over this word still means we probably can't arrive at a common definition of what constitutes "1.0 units of evil" which we all agree on.

Barring this common definition, I'd rather talk about the facts of what happened, or even useful speculation and opinions about it, than to discuss labels that have different meanings for every single person reading this.

It's getting a bit unproductive. I'm sorry to have entered this discussion now because it makes me sound like I'm defending behavior that I don't actually support.