Seriously, our collective IQ as a species is going down hill by the minute!

First of all, look at who is teaching our children thes days! People who have ABSOLUTELY NO idea about computers are teaching computer science in middle schools and high schools, and people who don't even know what a network is become sysadmins at these institutions! Recently a 13 year old boy was suspended for using net send command to send the message "Hey!" to all computers in his middle school. Sounds ridiculus - read the article! The sheer lack of knowledge and general lever of compuer lireracy of these educators is scary!

First of all, how come the school does not have a computer usage policy, and a form requireing parental consent, and agreement to it's terms? Seriously - the parents in the district should really get off their butts, and push for such a thing. Because without any guideline on what is acceptable computer use, and what is a punishable offense it is very easy for a lousy teacher with bad temper to really screw a kid over for, oh I don't know - something as minor as opening the command prompt, or god forbid - writing a batch file to automate some mundane task! If typing

net send /users Hey!

is labeled as "hacking" offence punishable by 3 day suspension, then just about anything the so called educators have no idea can face simmilar treetment? Give them a book of rules to follow fog god's sake - if the rules will explicitly state that students are not to send private messages of any kind over the school network then the punishment would be fine (still, 3 day suspension is still ridiculus and only reflects the lack of proper education on behalf of the teachers). Otherwise this is a parody, and a joke!

Secondly, if your staff is paranoid about students "hacking" hire someone who has at least a little bit knowledge about this stuff, and make him reduce the privledges with which the students log in. Give them a set of minimum luser privlages and your problems are over. Then show the teachers how to login with the power luser accounts so they can install their bonzie buddy and all kinds of other crap on their office desktop...

And finally make that compentent person explain to them what exactly does the term hacker means, cause they seem to have no clue.

Oh, and talking about lunacy, check this out. SCO is going after Google now!!! These guys are getting worse than RIAA! How long can they be allowed to pull this ridiculus stunt? I wonder if Google will give, and make a deal, or will they put up a fight.

Seriously, next thing we know SCO will pull RIAA like stunt and start suing individual Linux users! lol Oh, wait - no, they wont. Unlike RIAA people who have no brain matter left whatsoever, SCO people are smarter than that. They are after money - and individual user lawsuits will only bring losses. They are after the big fish - first IBM, now Google... This kindoff reminds one those baseless lawyers only waiting to get oine of those "violence in the media" lawsuits on their hands, expecting easy money.

The whole RIAA and SCO things are very much like that obese guy who sues Burger King for making him fat. All you can do is shake your head, and say "sit down and shut up - you are an idiot, and I don't want to hear another word!"

We are going to the moon again! Woohoo!

It's about time! Fox News just ran this story on their website. Here's an excerp:

" Hoping to reinvigorate America's space program following the Columbia tragedy, President Bush will reportedly announce plans next week to build a permanent space station on the moon that could serve as a base for sending astronauts to Mars"

This is about freaking time! The space program was in low gear for years now, and I was starting to loose faith that I'm gonna see a mars landing within my lifetime. Geez, I was even loosing faith that I will see us stepping on the moon again before I die. If bush gets the space program going again, he will get some MAJOR points in my book!

Seriously this is what we need - we need to get out there, explore and discover new things, new fuels and new resources! We need to go into space! Really, this gives me a new hope of seeing a moon station in my lifetime!

Still, governmentally controled space exploration is not gonna cut it in the long run. Sending people to space is very expensive, and we will not see any profits for a long time. So there is just not enough money for both economy, and aggressive space program - something must suffer. The private sector needs to get involved - once we get corporations lounching their space mining and gathering stations, and pulling billions worth profit on exotic resources, fierce competition will start. And this will make the space exploration blossom.

Is TV really going "MAD" ???

Seriously, what is going on with the TV lately? Did all the execs and management people gone INSANE? No - this is not another rant about a newest idiocy dreamed up by of Scifi people. I could not care less about these dumbskulls anymore. I mean how can you treat them seriously after that UFO lawsuit stunt!

And no - I'm not talking about the ever worsening stream of raw reality TV crap *cough*parishilton*cough* which is designed for nothing else than de-braining our young generation. I'm not gonna talk about the sewage quality programming that overflows all the networks. I'm not even gonna say anything about the geniuses at FOX who cancelled EVERY single good show they ever had, and insisted on endlesly renewing all sorts of garbage.

This is about something else... See, all this time I thought that the last bastion of sanity in the TV world was Commedy Central. I mean, they deserve major credit just for airing South Park! And yes, they have some garbage programming there too - but their attempts at reality shows were at least halfway watchable, and even their reruns were of good quality. Seriously, I think this was the most watchable chanell on TV.

But as you probably noticed Commedy Centrall just sold all their SNL rerun rights to E! in exchange for rights to a pile of MadTV episodes. They just sold years worth of star studded legacy stuff in exchange for a low quality SNL ripoff sketch show specializing in toilet humor and overacting... They just sold their rights to show comedic begginings of stars such as Mike Mayers, Adam Sandler, Criss Farley, David Spade, and guest spots of countless stars in exchage for some mildly funny antics of a cast of actors that never went anywhere. They exchanged classic for crap... Where is the logic here? I just don't get this...

Sigh... Let's just hope they wont lent John Steward to another station, or swap Conan reruns for some garbage...

Windows 98 dies on the 16th

From MS website:

"Windows 98
Product Availability: June 30, 1998
Mainstream Support: June 30, 1998 - June 30, 2002
Extended Support: June 30, 2002 - January 16, 2004 (Extended hotfix support ends June 30, 2003. After January 16, 2004, this product will be obsolete and assisted support will no longer be available from Microsoft. Online self-help support will continue to be available until at least June 30, 2006.)"

How many users are still on 98? Quite a bit I would presume. And most likely those who haven't upgraded yet are not willing too upgrade at all. Which means that they will be vounerable... This might be at most a nuisance for home users, but small companies that just haven't migrated yet might need to suffer some major losses due to the costs of software and hardware upgrades...

But then again it seems that all the recent network crawling worms target the network oriented OS's like Win 2k/XP rather than 98. So perhaps the threat is not so big, considering that finding 98 platforms still in use might be more and more problematic...