Issue 4 Page 2

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2news In Flight Concert band to attend festival • The spring concert band will perform at the Music Performance Assessment Festival in Brevard March 27-29. At the Feb. 10-11 auditions, nine students made the All-District Band, including freshman William Hinchliffe, sophomores Samuel Walker, J.P. Retamal, Marianne Hoppe and Natalie Ciaramitaro, junior Jacqueline Black and senior Kathryn Gorgas. • Foreign language students attended the Western Carolina University Foreign Language Competition on March 13. Senior Brandi Gannon placed third in Spanish extemporaneous speaking. The Spanish Native Speaker quiz bowl team placed second and the French class placed third in music and skit. • The Henderson County Robotics Team competed in the Palmetto Regional Competition on March 22-24. The team was awared the FRC Creativity Award for their robot. The team made it to the first round of the semi-finals. The team will also attend the Raleigh Regional Competition April 5-7. • The members of the Health Occupations of America chapter recently sponsored a fundraiser for Mittens for Life for dialysis patients. They have collected a total of $317. • PRIDE and Jr. Civitan Club sponsored on March 22. Sixty-eight pints of blood were collected, which surpassed the club’s goal of 65 pints. The drive have 29 first time donors. • The Mock Trial Team finished their competition at the Asheville Courthouse on Feb. 4. The team included juniors Erin Wiley (attorney for prosecution and attorney for defense), Hailey Johns (bailiff for prosecution and witness on defense), Madison Tweed (witness for defense), Austin Downing (witness for prosecution and attorney for defense), Diane Gromelski (attorney for prosecution and attorney for defense), and sophomores Hunter Denney (witness for prosecution) and Anna Yarbrough (witness for prosecution) and Lauren Stepp (bailiff for prosecution and witness for defense).

wingspan • march 30, 2012

Ingles (cont. from Page 1)

comfort and brand loyalty.” The North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) has required that several changes be made to U.S. Highway 280 in the Mills Rive area to accommodate increased traffic. A major sewer line will need to be extended to reach the Ingles. The projected cost will be approximately $550,000, according to Laughter. “The NCDOT required some turn-lane improvements and restrictions on where consumers can turn in and out of the parking lots to minimize the impacts on traffic,” Laughter said. “All of the money required to match the grant funds were donated by private property owners and no funds were spent out of Mills River’s budget.” Much of the construction is being funded by a $301,000 job creation grant from the N.C. Rural Economic Development Center. “The grant is funded by taxpayer dollars at the state level,” Laughter said. “The grant funds are issued for projects that will help create economic development in an area and new, not relocated, jobs must be generated by the project. The grant also required matching funds, which were donated by private property owners, that will also benefit from the sewer line improvements. State officials project that the store will create approximately 31 jobs, with many being jobs that high school students can fill like baggers, cashiers and video clerks. Employees of Ingles must be at least 16 years old. Felisha Bradley, manager of the Ingles in Fletcher, said she employs 25 teenagers, a majority of her staff. “Working at Ingles teaches students responsibility and helps to build character,” Bradley said. “It’s also a preview of life. They can have a small, manageable job to prepare for the more serious job that they will have in the future.”

‘Grease’ Is the Word

In the spring musical Grease performed by the fine arts department last week, director Kelly Cooper’s husband, Lane Cooper, (above) sings “Beauty School Dropout” to senior Kara Miller. Miller played Frenchy in the story about a fictional high school in the 1950s. As ensemble members dance, junior Candice Holden (above) sings a solo, “Sandra Dee Reprise.” Seniors Jack Hofland and Brad Baker perform alongside freshmen Evin Miller and Joel Fennimore (left) as the Greasers.

‘Piracy’ (cont. from Page 1) DID YOU KNOW? Internet Intrigue • Google, which is the largest index site in the world, has indexed only .004% of the total Internet • 294 billion emails are sent per day • Twitter has 105 million registered users • Internet users view more than 2 billion videos each day on YouTube • Facebook has 1.2 billion users worldwide (82% of Internet users over 15) • 600 tweets are posted on Twitter per second •

20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute = if Hollywood released 86,000 movies every week

(Information from www.onlineschools.org, www.socialnetworkingwatch.com, www.mashable.com and www.sendmail.com)

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-ing of copyrighted or pirated content, a federal offense that could lead to up to five years in prison. “This is presented as something to keep everyone safe, and for people to collect their royalties, not pirate software and things like that, but where is it going to end?” West science teacher Larry Ashcraft said. “Consider Wikipedia, a big information source, and what if they had a picture on there that was taken by a photographer who is wanting to claim rights to it and they borrowed it or used it accidentally. It would just open the door to all kinds of problems.” SOPA would give the federal government the power to shut down any website that has or is linked to copyrighted material. This means even websites unknowingly linked to copyrighted material could be shut down. While some argue that SOPA would result in Internet censorship, others believe that freedom of speech does not serve as protection for the unauthorized streaming of copyrighted material. “Freedom of speech is not the same as lawlessness on the Internet,” Paul Almeida, the president of the Department for Professional Employees said in a statement he wrote to the U.S. House of Representatives regarding SOPA. “There is no inconsistency between protecting an open Internet and safeguarding intellectual property. Protecting intellectual property is not the same as censorship; the First Amendment does not protect stealing goods off trucks.” PIPA was introduced in the U.S.

Senate by Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy on May 12, 2011. The bill is a rewrite of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) after it was killed in 2010. Leahy was also the senator that first proposed COICA. While both SOPA and PIPA have the same intention to limit Internet piracy, PIPA serves as more of a voice for entertainers, musicians and authors who feel that their work is being stolen from them through the convenience of the cyber world. Some argue that copyright laws that were written before the development of the Internet aren’t adequate to regulate the World Wide Web. “My heart goes out to somebody whose efforts, in a movie or a song, are being stolen from them, and then at the same time trying to legislate people to be ethical and do the right thing, that’s barely going to happen,” Ashcraft said. “The brute force tactics of technology are going to make it to where you can’t do the wrong thing.” PIPA would add more restrictive guidelines. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo could be affected if SOPA and PIPA became law. Wikipedia, which is a major resource for both students and teachers, could also risk being shut down. “If Wikipedia were to shut down, then that would change a lot of things,” Ashcraft said. “When I teach a class, I’m at Wikipedia all the time. There are diagrams for earth science. I can pull up five or six things very quickly there, and it would take me a whole lot longer to draw them on the board or use an overhead.”


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