[TAG] Teacher Throws Fit Over Student's Linux CD

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> The (alleged) e-mail with the goofy litigation threat, that were claimed
> to have been from the (consistently unnamed) teacher were of course
> pathetic no-nothingism, but it's positively amazing how Starks has
> seemed to find and grapple onto exactly such people in incident after
> incident, over the years, always as if they were his tailor-made
> opponents for each particular moment.

Reviewing some more of the follow-ons from the original squabble, 
there _is_ some hope that Starks is indeed growing up a bit:  He posted
a belated clarification[1] that:

o The teacher did not, as he'd claimed, confiscate the student's Linux disks,
  just hold them until the end of the class because he had been 
  (as I figured) disputive of the class with them.[2]
o The teacher did not, as some had claimed, put the student on "detention".
o She had not threatened Starks or anyone else with litigation, but 
  merely expressed a suspicion that he might be advocating illegal 
  activity.

About the only thing Starks did that was right was not splashing the
teacher's name and e-mail address all over Slashdot.  Assuming there
ever was such a teacher.

And there lies one big problem:  We're asked to make the charitable
assumption that the entire little morality play wasn't invented out of
whole cloth, for publicity / melodrama purposes, by a notorious
self-promoter, which is also more than possible.  Frankly, the style of
writing in the alleged teacher's e-mail seems fake, and the entire
incident seems much too pat.  


[1] http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/character-assasinations-aint-us.html

[2] Quoting Starks's clarification:  "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."