Copyright or Cheatingright?

After reading the articles and other blogs I must agree with just about everyone else, although I still hate to conform, that copyright laws are more confusing than the tax code. And a lot harder to enforce.
Even though I have knowingly broken the law by stealing hotel towels (some are sooo soft), eating grapes in the grocery store and even copying CDs and videos I have never done it for financial benefit. It seems to me that's what the copyright laws are all about, MONEY!!!! And in fact the laws make criminals out of ordinary people by crimes committed out of ignorance. I can think of several incidents since I have been at ULV where I have used pictures off the web in presentations and I suppose the argument can be made that doing something for a grade could be misidentified as financial gain, but that was never my intent. But at least I can say I never violated the law on the Internet while in high school. Probably because there was not Internet when I was in high school. Ha Ha.
Some of the sites like Creative Commons have great intentions but are handicapped by the confusing wordings of the law and in reality are not very helpful. Both the public and the lawyers need to be better educated on this subject. It is wrong to use someone else's work without credit but when you put something on the Internet for the whole world to see it is going to be used for better or worse by somebody.
I guess it all comes down to personal responsibility. If you don't want somebody to use your stuff, don't leave it where they can get it.

The future of education?

In nineteen seventy seven when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in junior high school one of my teachers predicted the future of education. He claimed that when our kids were in school the desks world recognize the particular student and automatically mark them present or absent, every student would have their own computer terminal at their desk tied into the master classroom computer and all the students information would be stored on punch cards. Punch cards looked a lot like a Scan-Tron forms but were thick with holes that the computer read. Of course this was back when only NASA and big companies had computers, they were huge and slow and one needed a engineering degree to operate one.
I image things will change quite a bit because of new technology, some bad changes but mostly good. Probably the biggest social change is that technology is making the world smaller and better known. Even if a person living in La Verne California has never met a person living in Baghdad Iraq, they can still read each others blogs and maybe by some miracle have a little less hostility toward each other. Hey, its a start.
Students having laptops is certainly a wonderful thing. Anybody remember encyclopedia books, or having to run to the library to do research? All that is now at our fingertips and with a Wi-Fi equipped laptop we can access it almost anywhere.
I like to imagine in a perfect world students from anywhere in the world would be able to attend a virtual classroom at any school, anywhere in the world at little or no cost. Students in third world countries with Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC program could attend a virtual classroom at Harvard, MIT or even ULV.