Topic: No software is free? I say we charge her with theft...

[toasty0]

a second sad thing for that teacher is that Mac is making huge inroads to college/research.  Many of the offices in the building I work in (a local university medical research building) are getting Macs.  MS based machines are still the norm but Mac is widdling it down.

The machines for internet use in the hallways are all Linux based, so that is good too.  

Many of you are too young to remember, but at one time Mac owned all schools. Then they played the monoply card and everyone ran to PC.

Mac or Apple II? 

Apple and then Mac. I remember pounding fortran into one of those funny little boxes called Mac.

Apple Basic was evil.

[Nemesis]

Apple Basic was evil.

How could you expect it to be anything else?  They licensed it from Microsoft after all. 

 

[Nemesis]

Update on this story

Karen and I have talked on the phone now for a couple of hours, here and there. We've come to understand each other more and had she said some of the things in her email that she said during our phone conversations...this black ink on white digital paper probably wouldn't exist.

And neither would over 2000 comments that were less than kind on one end of it and absolutely brutal on the other.

The student did get his Linux disks back after the class. The lad was being disruptive, but that wasn't mentioned. Neither was the obvious fact that when she saw a gaggle of giggling 8th grade boys gathered around a laptop, the last thing she expected to see on that screen was a spinning cube.

She didn't know what was on those disks he was handing out. It could have been porn, viral .exe's...any number of things for all she knew. When she heard that an adult had given him some of the disks to hand out, her spidey-senses started tingling. Coupled with the fact that she truly was ignorant of honest-to-goodness Free Software, and you have some fairly impressive conclusion-jumping.

In a couple of ways, I am guilty of it too.

Karen seems to be a good teacher, and as she stated to me today, she has learned more about the tech world in a few days than she's learned in five years.