Comment by ejk314 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ejk314 | Hacker News Reader

Ah, the good old days. I remember in middle school when I'd set up my first webpage. I got my first and only in-school-suspension for going to that site during class. Just going to the website. I just wanted to see if it was up, since I had never accessed it from anywhere but home. My teacher's explanation was "It could have been anything! You can't go to websites I don't approve of!"

Now, this would normally have been something trivial I would have just shrugged off. But my computer partner also got in trouble for "not stopping me". What was he going to do, knock me out of my chair before I pressed enter? This kid was the stereotypical teacher's pet who always did his homework and was quiet in class, so I felt particularly bad for getting him in trouble. I even offered to serve two days of ISS instead of him getting in trouble - of course that request was denied.

To this day, I still cannot understand that woman's reasoning. How is "you could have done something bad," grounds for punishment? What kind of person feels the need to punish a child who's showing enthusiasm for a subject they're teaching?

Looks like the unreasoned fear of the technically inept. And I do mean visceral fear, like a sense of imminent danger.

I remember once in "technology" class where we were asked to compose a small document with Corel WordPerfect, with a clip art. Well, I mistook "graph" for clip art, and got a weird square where I should have had a pretty icon. And I didn't know how to remove the square (couldn't select it with the mouse, and I didn't think of trying backspace or undo at that time). So I asked for help.

The instant the teacher saw my document, she said "Ahh, he crashed my computer!", then promptly closed the document without saving it. (15 minutes of work, dammit!)

Simply put, she didn't have the slightest idea about what went wrong, and assumed the worst. I flipped the bozo bit at that point, and never trusted her again.

A good story, I think a lot of us have at least one story like that of interactions with the technologically-inept.

But I wanted to ask you about your use of the term "flipping the bozo bit". I've seen others use that as a derisive way towards people they think less of, but curiously the source of this expression is prescribing precisely NOT doing this behaviour:

> McCarthy's Rule #4 is "Don't Flip The Bozo Bit". McCarthy's advice was that everyone has something to contribute — it's easy and tempting, when someone ticks you off or is mistaken (or both), to simply disregard all their input in the future by setting the "bozo flag" to TRUE for that person. But by taking that lazy way out, you poison team interactions and cannot avail yourself of help from the "bozo" ever again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit

Well, retrospectively, I'm not sure I should have flipped that bozo bit. I just remember that I did, at least as far as computers were concerned. (My bozo bits tend to have 2 entries: a person and a subject matter.)

More generally, though, it was one of those unmistakable proofs that authority isn't always legitimate. This happened often enough that I now decide for myself who has authority over me.

The kind of person who got that job simply to be able to enforce arbitrary rules on victims who can't fight back, to feel more powerful.

How is "you could have done something bad," grounds for punishment?

Well, most of society seems perfectly fine with owning and using restricted "jailed" devices, whose existence is justified by the same reasoning...

>How is "you could have done something bad," grounds for punishment?

Unfortunately, this kind of thing pops up in the real world a lot as well too. "You're riding a bicycle after drinking a few beers? You could have crashed into someone! DUI felony charge for you!"

Driving under the influence is categorically different. You are a real danger to others and can maim or kill them. How is that even remotely comparable to navigating to a personal website in class?

No matter how drunk you are, it's hard to maim someone else with a bicycle. You might knock someone over, but you're really only a danger to yourself.

Or any other vehicle that swerves out of the way to avoid you and anything they hit

As a pedestrian I disagree. I've actually seen cyclists knock someone down (it was a pure accident, no drinking involved as far as I know) and they were pretty badly injured (ambulance, etc). Last thing we need is cyclists drunk, they're dangerous enough when sober.

I only have anecdotal evidence, but offer the heuristic that most "drunk enough to be dangerous" bicyclists can't ride fast enough to maim anyone -- and if they're riding down a hill, they're much more likely to be maimed.

There's an inherent barrier to entry that makes drunk biking difficult enough to limit those who can actually do it. Like how often do you see someone drunk on a road bike with clips? How many drunk people bike on busy roads where they're more likely to get killed than the guy in an air conditioned hunk of metal on wheels?

A reasonable person's analysis might conclude that it's better to say, "hey, let's bike to the bar" that's 4 miles away rather than "let's drive," because statistically you're as/more likely to fall down and injure yourself as if you'd walked, and will harm society much less than if you'd decided to pilot a machine that requires a fraction of the bodily coordination to get from A to B.

Hell, they're even a danger to other cyclists when sober!

My girlfriend was injured a couple years ago when she was cut off recklessly by another student, also on a bicycle, and swerved to avoid him. End result was she wound up hitting loose gravel in a construction area, lost control, and ended up face-first into the pavement.

At university, I had a few near misses myself (as a pedestrian). I'd often park in one of the more distant lots and walk to class (one for the exercise, and two because it was nearly a two hour drive--I needed a stretch!), and the central thoroughfare was a wide, cement walkway that was mostly downhill. Most of the cyclists were cautious and traveled slowly, but there were always those (thankfully) few clowns who would race as fast as they could. I'm not sure if they were making a game of us as moving obstacles; regardless, I always kept an ear out behind me and kept far, far, far to the side near the grass!

shit man, although you're correct you sound boring as hell. riding a bike around when your drunk is super fun.

It's too late to edit my post but let me clarify the point I was trying to make to the parent poster, who responded to "having a few beers and getting on a bike" with "driving under the influence can maim or kill people."

I'm not advocating RUI but I do not think it should be classified, legally or ethically, as a DUI. Neither is good but there's a huge difference in actual danger between the two. It's along the same lines as "public urination," which is distasteful but usually harmless in context, landing someone on the sex offender registry next to people who did much, much worse things.

We are literally talking about the thing that makes them similar. You are being punished because you could have done something wrong, not because you did something wrong.

No, they're still not the same.

> You are being punished because you could have done something wrong, not because you did something wrong.

No, with drunk driving, getting behind the wheel IS wrong, regardless of the outcome. If someone plays Russian roulette, and they live, do you just go, "oh, no big deal, I'm not going to be upset about something that could have happened"? No, you judge every decision based not in hindsight, but based on what is known at the time. Driving while impaired is wrong, full stop. If you repeat the drunk driving experiment 100s of times, you'll see accidents more often than sober driving, but you shouldn't just punish those who get into the accidents, since they've made the exact same decision as those who are lucky and happened not to.

In the "loading the web page" case, it's like getting made at someone for pulling the trigger of a known empty gun because it "could have" instead been a gun that had bullets in it. If the kid loads the webpage 100s of times it will always be the same web page, with no issue. It's not like sometimes it will be a page with a virus on it. So in that case getting in trouble for "what you could have done" doesn't make any sense.

IOW, you shouldn't punish people based on "what they could have done", but you should punish people based on "what could have happened".

Fair argument. I'm convinced.

if you sit in a parked car with the engine on.. to lets say keep warm, its "intent to drive" even if you have no intent to do so.

http://illinoiscaselaw.com/dui-sleeping-in-car-illinois/ but you can find more. Whats unfortunate is people are TRYING to be responsible and still get in trouble.

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