I may be the first to say it here, but...

This afternoon, our school recieved a copy of Little Brother which was donated by a reader from Ridgefield, CT through this program. The Barnes and Noble desription says:

"I saw your request on Cory's site; I loved the book, I'm glad I could share."

Bless you, benefactor. And Cory, bless you, too. I've been walking around glowing for over an hour, book in hand. When people ask, I tell them that socio-economic networking is the best thing ever. And then we get to talk about stuff that really matters. And we all get a little closer, and a little more knowledgable, and a LOT more excited.

Thanks for making my job work better, for making our school easier and more fun, for connecting us to you and vice versa, for making the world. Thanks to everyone else, too, for everything else. Whee!

Off to find just the right kid and slip the book into her hand -- from there, I'll ask the kids to pass it along virally until the end of the year, and then we'll see where the book, the ideas, and the way it arrived here can take us.

Obviously, as long as reviewing spaces are supported by industry, negative commenting must not only be tolerated, but celebrated -- it's part of what keeps the system honest, else only the highest bidders can afford the best ratings. But I wonder how many people out there would be willing to sell their integrity for $75? Bet it's more than we'd like to think.

But rectifying poor commercial behavior should be free. This isn't a bribe. It's something much, much worse: good service ONLY to those who are willing to pay extra.

I see sinister parallels with, among other things, the concept of net neutrality here. Can you say "service neutrality"?

I'm a music blogger who recently got a wonderful, plantable business card made of paper like this, except in the bright mauve shape of a flower, from folkpop singer-songwriter Mae Robertson, who is using it to promote her new album -- the aptly titled "Meet the Sun Halfway". To me, the album title and flower cover design, plus themes of growth in her lyrics and a warm, bright voice, made the plantable card a no-brainer stroke of genius. (Music's pretty good, too, though it's still on the "to be blogged" pile.)

Thinking along the lines of exceptions, a la ZBlack above:

Is this "designed to" as in "built for the purpose of", or "designed to" as in "does it on purpose, though not necessarily as its primary function"?

Jim, that's a hell of a lot of odd things to happen in the shower.

But thanks to you, every time I get in the shower, I'm going to have to check the drain for wild animals.

#8 et. al.: It's all well and good to say we should shop Costco instead. But now that WalMart has eradicated small groceries in many neighborhoods, some of us in rural areas which can only sustain one big megastore can only choose between small, high-end botique stores and WalMart. Going elsewhere isn't realistic. Fighting the power is the only way to stay solvent and local.

#18: I'm no WalMart supporter, and I'm certainly not a supporter of sex offenders, but I have to take severe exception to anyone using "saw a registered sex offender working there" as evidence for the evilness (evility?) of the empire.

Sex offenders have a right to work. Walmart is a big, public store where such a worker can at least be visible as they perform their duties. Reluctant kudos to Walmart for providing a relatively safe space for people who need to work, but are limited in their choices for doing so.

@20: Sounds like the three monkeys. See no evil... Luckily, they are easily fooled into a dull, giberish-laden complacency by the cashew of simian ululations.

@19: Is the suggestion that in order to fit pennies into a dime roll, one would have to lathe them down a bit. Shhhh! You trying to get this guy into Federal prison for defacing money?

Oh Em Gee! Finally, a Cory sighting-to-be in my neighborhood! If you need a genuine home w/wireless to stay in nearby and don't mind two small blonde children underfoot, just say the word.

The Pioneer Valley really is the bellybutton of the universe. But if it helps, it's a pierced one, as Northampton is just up the river a spell. Talk about a place safe for polyamory :-)

Though I disagree entirely with whomever said that duplicate comments should be left because that is anti-democratic -- discussion is NOT voting -- I nonetheless think this may be the exceptional post that proves the rule.

Hence: brava, moderatrix. Congrats on a policy that manages to be all the best things that BoingBoing is -- wry, critical, thorough, authoratative, intelligent, community-oriented, accessible and readable. Dn't lt th trks gt y dwn.

I teach in an american public school, in a town which was recognized this year as one of Money Magazine's 100 best places to live.

Our school labs are currently running nine year old machines with 633 processors from the late nineties. Their hard drives are stuffed with educational and administrative "bloatware", which makes them sluggish as a 433.

I have no more or less sympathy, honestly, for anyone who complains that using the XO is like using a computer from the late 90s. Because the well-kept secret in modern public education in America is that, due to budget limitations, silly rules about budgeting which do not allow you to spend a bit more now to "upgrade" to a system in whichc omputers are leased, not purchased, fear of line-iteming, and deferred maintenance, the standard for schools these days is to use computers from the late 90s.

I'm not saying the third world doesn't deserve better. I'm saying that the testers who are "complaining" are probably comparing these machines to their own, not to the norm for the schools in (probably) their own neighborhoods. Maybe, in context, this is going to have to be acceptable for now.

@12: Thanks, Jardine. Though my part of the country is relatively liberal, public school systems are generally not, univerally. When it comes to making teacher lives hell, all it takes is one parent complaint, and I've yet to meet a town where that one parent doesn't live.

If that's the sample, it's something kids should find on their own. (I'm intrigued, though: in what part of the world does spicy food scare people?)

Looks like I'll have to resort to my old standby for putting subversive books in their hands: buy a copy and donate it to the library anonymously. Good thing I share a desk/workstation/brain with the librarian. :-)

Turned 25 a decade ago...but I now teach in a middle school, where a few overachievers and avid readers could probably handle this book well...and we all could benefit from the ideas.

Is the book appropriate for the 13-14 year old set? Would hate to recommend it and then get fired for promoting inappropriate content.

They sell POT plants? This guy has plenty of other things to worry about than the mafia.

Take the cannoli and run, man.

The filtering software my school district uses blocks improv everywhere as "Adult/Mature Content". Did I miss the video about Improv Everywhere's Mall of America strip-in?

I love how disemvowelling affects links posted BY those who have been disemvowelled. Makes it impossible to figure out or trace what they were even talking about, and removes "I've posted my comments elsewhere" as an alternate for those who might be so badly in need of trollbaiting they'd folow the trolls to their lairs!

Srsly wsm.

Re: #6

I have a job. It's middle school information literacy teacher, and this kind of thing is IMMENSELY useful in helping kids understand the new hyper/web rhetorical forms which their society makes possible.

Thanks, all, for this and for the others. I've been mapping CYA books by hand on the whiteboard for years; nice to know I can hand these out instead!

Of course not, Mark. And I agree, THIS entry would be no reason to filter the site.

And yet...there are ways of talking about and reporting about pr0n which are less graphic, and more fit for smaller eyes. I'm currently accessing this from a middle school, for example. Thankfully, I convinced the district admin to unblock boingboing a few years ago, since I get good ideas and content for my computers/media/culture classes from here. And though this entry isn't something I can use, it's still relevant to someone tracking cyberculture, as I have to for my work.

I have no problems with this entry, in other words, though I know I'm taking a risk here in an empty classroom in a planning period. And though the NYT can theoretically address the same issue, I'd not feel as uncomfortable trying to defend reading it in the classroom. Degrees matter, here.

On the other hand, the screenshot of today's BoingBoingTV episode is much less appropriate than this one, and it's harder, I think, to justify that as news. At first, I thought I was in the comments section for the wrong entry.

I'm with Jeff -- going watchless is the way to go. Especially for innate clockwatchers, like us.

I work in a school, so there's clocks everywhere; I'm the technology teacher, so there's time in the lower right hand corner of most of my students' field of vision at all times. When I'm in an environment that's time-sensitive, in other words, I find that time is there already.

When I'm on my summer music festival rounds, I can use performances to roughly track time...when I'm in the woods, I can genuinely be there, and let sequence and being trump my old need for time. If I have somewhere to be, I set my cellphone.

I've been watchless now for over 8 years. The watch tan disappeared a long time ago. I never miss it.

I'll happily be the first to note that my grande vanilla latte tasted better than it used to. Richer mix, indeed.

It was, to be honest, a surprise -- how many companies make a sweeping change like that to a brand all at once...and actually get it right the first time?

It's good to know thetre are still some industries that don't have to bother with endless beta testing.

We bought our new house, the front acre (a square acre of woods) had a ruin very similar to the one in the photo -- clearly something which used to be a scaffold for a much larger and higher-up piece that has since fallen. I haven't the heart to remove it yet; I figure one day my girls (now 5 and 2) will be able to scavenge it for parts. Go Go Girl Treehouse Power!

But how do you know if you've put them on right?

I agree with Jonathan (#27). It was great to know about the historic value of the house, but knowing that you've pre-thought the alternate route, and that your alternate route carries LESS (or similar) cost to both state and to the locality AND cuts through NO homes, is the truly convincing argument here. Thanks for making me feel better about signing the petition.

To the commenters who said "anyone can make a public nuisance; this is how democracy works" -- those laws were created assuming local support could be won with an argument, NOT that a boing boing reader could use his familiarity with a global medium to garner support which might overwhelm the support means of those who might not happen to have learned how to connect with such global support. That isn't the case here -- but it could have been, and that ethical dilemma is real, worth serious consideration, and will come back to haunt us. Especially in a world where not every town or neighborhood has equitable access to education and a high-speed internet connection. NOT everyone can garner support like this. THAT is "the" point.

Re above: Sorry -- meant Aaron, not Greg -- that's what I get for doing this while teaching class, I guess. My concern still stands.

First, let me say I'm planning on signing the petition. But I do so with qualms, and here's why:

In the general case, I wonder if this KIND of approach (using Boing Boing to garner public outcry) raises questions about digital equity and technoclass status abuse. If the folks who live in Greg's alternate route, or the taxpayers who might have to pay more for a road that ends up longer, are less technosavvy, and thus can't get as organized, then they lose -- even if their case is as good as Greg's grandfather's case is.

In a nutshell, what I think I'm asking is: If I CAN reach BoingBoing, does that mean it's ethical TO use BoingBoing to hit my geographical locality?

Fundamentally, this may be a flaw in the local stakeholders using a "public outcry, but any public will do" standard. We may not be at fault, in other words. But I think the issue worth raising, at least.

As a teacher of technology, I use dry-erase marker all day -- on the white board, on the computer screens, even on the windows of my classroom. People are always startled (hey, you can't DO that) when I write on stuff.

But it seems to me that a dry-erase cheese board would be a totally useless idea. I mean, in real life the cheese never stays in exactly the same place. By the time the second or third person has a chance to use the board, odds are they'll be befuddled, and spend time trying to figure out what kind of creature nsle ale is, and should one eat such a thing -- to the detriment of attending to their host, as Martha would surely wish us to do.

Missed some :)

1. An "endless" activity would be better, of course -- as would ANY activity allowed to run until it had truly hit an organic end. I hate to say it, though, but anyone who suggests that is clearly not ready to confront the cold hard realities of teaching in public environments. Balancing the large number of standards we are required to cover in the 40 hours I have with any given student with the obvious ideal of letting every activity run the way it "should" is the lot of all public school teachers. I used to think it was better to avoid this by teaching in environments where the amount vs. depth of content I covered was up to me. As I age, however, I find public school students need me, and people who, like me, agree that there must be SOME way to create a better balance between good learning and competency-standards. And I, for one, am not ready to abandon the next generation of kids who need to be exposed to better teaching and learning modes just because it's easier to teach the "right" way in environments where only the rich and privledged can benefit. That said, if anyone has any ideas about how to do both better in the usual 40 hour course, let me know -- I'll send the competency and coverage list along, so you can see that even the activity I described is a high, high risk that costs us time we cannot and may not spare lest we lose our jobs. Don't like it? Curse NCLB...

2. Oh, and ironically, three units later, there we are asking students to consider what the internet know about you. Kiwihopeful: Glad to see your "concerns" are based, instead, on the same assumptuions of what SHOULD work than that which drives my teaching!

Kingsara: I think the answers to your questions are "yes" and "nobody...until they demonstrate that they are not reponsible enough to participate -- that is, until they demonstrate that they are not willing to accept responsibility for shared consensus-building." Yes, that second answer leads to questions about how one manages the recognition and subsequent priviledge-loss, if there is to be one, but I'd not presume to be the one who should answer that question -- that itself should, IMHO, be part of the consensus-building process.

Kiwihopeful: by saying that my activity suffers from a mistake is to miss the fact that this activity was designed to spark subsequent conversation and subsequent activities. If this was the "whole" unit, I'd agree it was a pretty silly unit for exactly the reasons you present; that it is not, however, makes moot (I hope) your concern that the activity merely exposes OR reinforces OR teaches a "ha ha web 2.0 won't work" mentality. It must do that in the short term, I guess, in order to show students why it is important to learn better ways, but such is the classroom: you can't teach everything at once, because students are STUDENTS, and so subsequent activities can't take advantage of "we all understand" assumptions unless we do previous activities that help us all understand, expose, develop and explore those assumptions. Students don't "own" the ways something can NOT work, in order to think about how to make it work, unless they are confronted with the potential for disaster. Only those who would leave it at that -- who would assume that every activity must cover everything that CAN theoretially come from that activity -- are the ones taking the cheap shots, IMHO.

Stephan's concern echoes my own, which raised the red flag in MY mind up to both the Onion article referenced above and a lesson I used to teach my high school students (in private school) when we first start talking about Web 2.0.

The lesson went like this: all students were given a piece of chalk...and told that whatever rules remained on the board at the end of the week will be the classroom rules for the following Monday.

Inevitably, students end up fighting over chalk, destroying each others' chalk, holding each other back from the board while their friends write rules...one year a kid even carved a rule into the board with a nail (It got taped over, though).

Come Monday, the board was a mess. At best, we ended up with rules like "Thomas has to sit under his chair all day" and "Mr F can't use the letter W". At worst, what remained weren't rules at all, but slurs and gibberish (how do you enforce "Becky rules"?).

The moral, which kicks off our discussion of web 2.0 culture: in an open access world where content is driven by users, it only takes a few miscreants to disrupt the best intentions of the majority.

Given that even wikipedia has some structure in place to mitigate this sort of thing, but that the kiwiwiki may not, I'd be interested in seeing if this works...especially because I suspect there's a few folks out there who will be trying to push the Kiwi police-wiki towards the libertarian end, which seems to me anathema to most models of policing.

Personally, though, given my own experience, I'd bet on the Onion. 'pediawikis work, I think, because most people most of the time agree on what is and is not fact (note the "mosts" there, though). But IMHO, lawmaking and wikis don't mix -- because not everyone agrees on what should be.

Oh, and for the curious: I now teach middle school, so I've had to turn what used to be a violent but fun and educational activity is now a thought experiment. In the US public school model, at any rate, the activity is a bit too risky to run.

Was going to enjoy showing this to my 7th grade class -- currently on the cusp of a two week project on the history of computing, and later to go on to explore how our assumptions about culture (gender roles, anyone?) affect technological evolution.

Unfortunately, link currently goes to "account suspended" page -- perhaps boingboingers slammed it too hard?

Anyone got an alternate host up? My 7th graders will begin their unit on Friday. Thanks, folks!