blog.the-erm.com

It seems more and more school isn’t about teaching you “how to think”, but teaching you “what to think”.

I think Firefox is a much safer browser. It’s a lot more secure than IE, and on top of that they actually try and uphold web standards when rendering a web page.

It’s cross platform, so you get the same results on linux, mac, and windows.

What this really says to me is that the teacher would rather “teach” that they have authority over the student, and the student must obey. Even if what they are doing is a more sound choice.

There is a phone number, maybe someone should cal and educate them. Personally I don’t have any desire to harass some school board member. They’ve got their hands full with all the other parents.

Here’s a link to the original image.

I like to pretend I look at all the angles of a situation.

First, how are the machines set up? Do the students have admin privileges? How did firefox get installed?

If student did have admin privileges, then it’s your own dang fault this got installed. You made them an admin. If you made them the admin it’s pretty much saying … you are in charge of this machine, you are responsible for how it works, and do whatever you wish. It’s your machine. You’re the manager of it, execute/install any program you like.

If student didn’t have admin privileges, then the student is obviously in the wrong, and I hope they don’t go to jail for defacing government property. On the other hand installing Firefox is more like picking up a piece of litter in the hallway, but if you had to break down the door to pick of the trash that’s breaking and entering 🙂

In all honesty if the kid had to crack the machine to install firefox then they should just let it go, serve the time in detention, and hope to God someone doesn’t send them to jail.

If Firefox was already installed by the admin, then what they did wasn’t wrong, and it was perfectly ok for them to run firefox.

However if a fellow student installed it … gee I don’t know. It was an honest mistake. It’s kinda like someone committing a murder and planting the evidence in your car. You’re screwed. How were you supposed to know it was used in a murder?

This is one bad thing about windows, I don’t know if there’s a log that lists all the stuff that’s installed when, and by who. In linux it’s pretty easy to go back do a couple of greps on the log and find out when anything is installed.