School goes too far

The more prevalent technology gets, the less privacy we all have.

One Pennsylvania student with a school issued laptop has allegedly been spied upon at home via the computer's built-in webcam and a program called boing-boing.

The story should disgust parents and students alike. The schools should have the right to monitor what a child does on their computers. It's their property. They should even have the right to monitor what children do at all times while they are at school--it's their responsibility.

Taking pictures of a child, at home, without his or her parents' consent, that is an invasion of privacy and a violation of the Civil Rights Act.

Stories like this one are only going to get more common as social media networking programs such as Facebook and Twitter continue to blur the lines between a person's public and private lives.

The student may have been doing something he wasn't supposed to on the laptop. That's not the point, there are other ways to prove that such as web search logs and cookies. What we do need to take note of is that what we do can be monitored.

Posting photos on the Internet, making comments on a friend's Facebook profile, tweeting--all of these things can be viewed by far more people than we intend.

Parents you need to inform your children that there is no such thing as true privacy on-line. Bosses and teachers can use it against you. The high school may have been in the wrong, but the trend of monitoring Internet behaviour isn't going to go away.

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It's snowing. Again.

I have lived in Northwest Georgia most of my life, but lately I find myself checking the map to make sure I haven't somehow gotten lost.

Picture this, you are driving down the Shorter Avenue--a four lane road with gas stations, stores and neighbourhoods. All of the sudden, you see a snowflake, a single snowflake drift towards the earth and melt.

Boom! All 93,000 residents in the county crowd the local Wal-mart and buy up all the milk and bread. They act out of fear because of a blizzard that hit Georgia way back in 1993. Since then it has snowed only rarely in Georgia, and then usually less than an inch per year if any.

Because of that, I usually mocked the panicked masses while I threw my swimming trunks in the wash knowing I would probably get to use them soon. Not so this year. For the first time in my life, it has snowed--really snowed twice in Rome in a single year.

I feel like a penguin.

I  have heard several people using our unusual weather to discredit climate change or prove it over the last several days. But the fact of the matter is, El Niño is to blame.

El Niño is a warm-weather pattern in the Northern Pacific Ocean that pulls rain East. Warm Weather, in the Pacific Ocean. The last time El Nino hit North America was in 1999. It brought an unusually rainy year followed by a drought season known as La Nina.

Both phenomenon are game-changers that screw up our weather for several years. The usually warm, mild winters of Georgia are just a nice dream while they are active.

What I want to know is why do people who get by without milk or bread for three weeks at a time need it now?