Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Banco, Warez, Fiction
What about a Dvorak-layout program for the number keys? hex4def6 writes "Ticalc.org is back up for business after the unfortunate incident in which "inapropriate Content" was pressed onto the CD's that Texas Instruments included in their "Fun Kit" graphlink kit from the Ticalc archives. New things in the archives include a neat winamp plugin that allows you to control winamp from your Ti-89 webpage. Check it out here. All the archives are back up, but there is a backlisting of new files submited."
Many happy returns! Eileen Gunn writes "Last August, Slashdot ran a story about The Infinite Matrix, an online SF zine aimed at technogeeks, that posted its first and last issue in one fell swoop, after losing its funding (what's new?). The site was slashdotted, of course, and among those visiting it was a Slashdot reader who threw the zine a 6-month financial lifeline. The Infinite Matrix is now posting new material every day from both Bruce Sterling and Terry Bisson. Plus, there's a new story by SF giant Avram Davidson, more fiction by Richard Kadrey and Kathleen Goonan, columns by John Clute and David Langford. Thanks, Slashdot! You've made my life infinitely more complicated."
This is like reading Jules Verne when he was writing newspaper serials -- and no eBook reader is required.
The perils of translation and the world of international banking. Al Giordano of Narco News wrote from Cochabamba, Bolivia, with a correction of my (incorrect) correction on Yesterday's post about First Amendment protections granted online journalism. He provides a better explanation about nomenclature and the Mexican banking system:
"Banamex, or Banco Nacional de Mexico (the way the plaintiff's name appears on the now-dismissed complaint against us), is translated as National Bank of Mexico.The 'Mexican Fed' that you refer to is titled Banco de Mexico, or Bank of Mexico.
So you got it right the first time!
The confusion stems from this: All Mexican banks were nationalized before becoming privatized. It's a long and bloody story and in fact my own story about it is one of the exhibits used by Banamex in its now-fracased SLAPP suit.
When Banamex filed suit against Mario Menendez, Narco News and me, it was still a Mexican bank. The Citibank merger wasn't announced until May 2001 and wasn't finalized until July 20, 2001, ironically, the same day we had our court hearing in New York."
Unfortunately, there's no monopoly on sketchiness. S^(2) writes "Here is a better rundown of the warez crackdowns across the globe. I guess people are running scared a bit and this page is hopping from mirrored site to site, but for now at least check out; http://www.cyberworld.ru/scenebusted/ It breaks down what groups were suspected to have been FEDs, which groups/members will be needing legal defense funds, which groups have shutdown, and a bit on the howto of the crackdown, such as agents raiding a house and watching what connections happened without pulling the plug. That can't be legal, can it? Should I hide my pc behind a wall of something benign, like say VHS bootlegs?"
Or, on the other hand, not distributing warez is an option.
I disagree ENTIRELY. If a post is directed at challenging a slashdot editor's statements, as many are, then it is most definitely ON TOPIC. For example, I posted a comment about a month ago, directed against michael. The story was about a Microsoft security flaw; in his post, michael commented that the flaw was a WINDOWS security flaw, when in actuality, it was a flaw in the recent versions of IE. A valid argument, without question, that sat very nicely at +4 Interesting or Insightful for about 30 minutes. Then, suddenly, michael posted a reply to my comment. The rating on my post IMMEDIATELY dropped 3 full points to +1 Troll or something like it. Eventually, the REAL moderators sent some leverage my way and put me back up to +3 or +4. In this situation, the fact that michael's reply was so closely followed by a rash of negative moderation can hardly be called a simple coincidence. The guy doesn't like to be called out on ANYTHING that he says, and he showed it that day.
My question to you is this...knowing that my complaint was VERY RELEVANT to the posted story, where else would you suggest that i post it?
A few points -
1) bitchslap. Rob's name for a perl script to take care of flood-bots. He should have named it "anti-flood.pl" instead. Rob is the only one who has ever had access to use it; I don't think it's been used many times on the site at all; I'm almost certain it hasn't been used in many months. The dreaded formkeys now prevent flooding from scripts proactively instead of the previous reactive system, so it's doubtful it will ever be needed again.
2) IP availability. According to Slashdot, your IPID is "8e451..." Mr. Ska's IPID is "b18e8..." Whoop. Big invasion of privacy there. The IPID system is solely a reaction to people abusing anonymity to post hundreds of crap comments. Now people who do that get automatically IP-banned for 72 hours. I'm all for it.
an MD5 hash of an actual IP address can still be deduced to a real IP address...there is no question about that. And again, I really don't have a problem with a website logging my IP address or making it available only for purely "administrative" purposes. My problem (and i think everyone's for that matter) lies in the fact that this information is not made available to all slashdot readers. The FAQ NEVER states that IP addresses are available (in ANY form, MD5-hashed or otherwise) to editors. Take, for example, Malda's explanation of the AC system from the FAQ:
We think the ability to post anonymously is important. Sometimes people have important information they want to post, but are afraid to do it if they can be linked to it...
That's it. That is the ONLY mention of anonymous posting that is included in the FAQ, and it leads me to believe that my anonymous posts are just that - anonymous. But they're not. The last sentence even goes so far as to indicate that anonymous posters CANNOT BE LINKED TO THEIR COMMENTS, when in fact, they can.
While this might not seem like an issue, it is. As long as editors have the ability to moderate poster comments, they have the ability to discriminate against certain users, based on that user's IP address. That's where the entire problem lies. If editors can moderate, they have two VERY unfair advantages - infinite points, and the ability to truly push their own agenda on any topic they choose. If either one of these two abilities were removed (and the other made blatantly obvious to readers), there wouldn't be a problem. If posters were TRULY anonymous, then editors wouldn't be able to single them out even when they post anonymously. Conversely, if editors were subject to the same rules of moderation that regular users were, then even the ability to sort by IP address wouldn't help them, as they would no longer be able to mod a single user into oblivion.
I don't see why this is such a big problem for you to understand, michael. You seem like a fairly reasonable person (when you take away your very un-journalistic biases), but you have yet to acknowledge the fact that some people might have a problem with this system. Tell me, how do you rationalize the fact that these unadvertised "features" give editors a very unfair advantage over dissenting readers? Why can't the "features" be advertised? Why does the AC system even exist, if AC's aren't really anonymous?
What about slashdot's bad press from deleting the CoS document that was posted? Why are you willing to stand up to MS but not to the CoS which is ostensibly much more evil than MS can ever be? I never understood that decision? Why not also come clean about accounts that you have tampered with? that's the collective you, not the sigular you. If someone has been affected by admin intervention, shouldn't they know that? For instance, though I don't really troll much, have never used a script to post to this site, etc. this account still NEVER gets mod points. The account is old enough, and I do participate regularly enough that I should, at least once get points. This leads me to suspect that my account has been given the secret "don't let this guy moderate" flag in the system. Can you (and will you) please confirm or deny?
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
Damn, it's really shocking to read the crap those agents pulled on the warez groups. Even ignoring the obvious immorality/illegality of it, it seems to me like they put a lot of time into the raids.
/. and go get the papers ready for my companies upcoming audit.
What the hell are they wasting their time for (and our money) on little stuff like this? It's like the federal government has no capability to distinguish between minor crimes and major ones.
If we don't watch out, the next war (after terrorism) will be on software. Damn, imagine if the BSA ever got to use guns. *shudder*
That's not a good thought. Sigh, I'd better stop posting to
As a former high school student, I can tell you that it's not the Tetris that caused students to stop paying attention in your class.
I dunno if you remember what it was like to be a high school student anymore, but if it's not the Tetris it'd be something else, like staring blankly out the window or day dreaming.
The Tetris on the calculator wasn't so fun that I would think about it when I wasn't playing it, it was just something I would do when I was bored to tears and needed a distraction. Rather than blame some calculator game for why your students no longer listen, maybe you should look at other possible causes........and yeah yeah, I know, you don't have a whole lot to be working with there, given the subject you're teaching to high-schoolers, but I have definitely had good and bad math teachers. The good teachers were the ones who made me think, and came up with interesting ways to link the subject back to real life. And even in their classes, I would play calculator games when they were spending too long on a subject (maybe for other people in the class) that I already understood.
So if all your students have stopped paying attention in your class, maybe rather than blaming the easy to blame calculator games, you should look at yourself and how you're teaching them.......
As one of my teachers told me, in college, 'lets face it. In real life, if you don't know the answer, you're going to either look it up, or ask somebody. So, on the tests, bring in your text books, go nuts. But the tests WILL be such that if you don't know the underlying theory, you're screwed.' And he did it, too. He'd structure some of the questions such that they looked like english wordings of the equasions, but he'd alter something. He'd go ahead and square root something that the forumla is supposed to, so if you plug it in, you'll square root it again, and fuck up. It was great.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
It just struck me WHY this happened now, to DoD! The group released less than 1% of total releases last year, but they were the ones behind the DeCSS algorithm (though not the code). They couldn't get anything out of punishing a 16 year old foreign national, so this is their tactic. There is no other reason for the FBI to target DoD over other groups with _much_ higher volume.
Welcome to the Corporate Republic.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
Well I hate to say it but I'm somewhat in support of these groups, if only because I'm sick of buying the latest games only to discover that the best part of the game was the free demo. Truly great games are one in a thousand, and even then they don't last long enough.
That's where the warez scene can swoop in and deliver salvation: download a stripped-down rip of whatever game you want, try it out for a couple days, then go out and buy the full-blown masterpiece. Or delete it and forget it ever existed. It encourages the game houses that work hard, while cutting the revenue stream of the half-assed hype-machine con artists, most of which sell their crap at Mallwart and other idiot chains.
Think of it like music: they put a catchy song on the radio, you pop 20$ on the album, then find yourself duped because 8 of the 10 songs are just filler. You can't ask for a refund because you've already 'consumed' the product (because that's what it is: a product). They'll politely tell you you're a pirate and that it would be unlawful for them to return your money. Same thing applies to PC games.
To get back to the point, I say they deserve a fair trial (if such a thing exists), not on the basis that I support organized non-profit piracy, but rather because the law system was most likely manipulated by corporate interests and thus the accused were unjustly treated.
The problem lies within the game market itself: the insane price-gouging that's going on and getting worse every year. Why should I blow 80$ (50 of your U.S. dollars) on a product I haven't seen nor experienced, and that carries no useful warranty ? Just look at Hasbro and how they're destroying the game industry by raping classic titles, making flashy smelly shit with the original concepts and selling them anywhere there's a cash register.
Ironically, the shareware business is practically dead, even though it was probably the most honest form of software marketing in existence. You had a decent game/utility on its own, not just a crippled 5-minute unstable demo. If you enjoyed the experience and wanted to prolong it, you'd pay 15-20$ for 2-3 extra episodes, or a bunch of USEFUL extra features in the case of utilities/mini-applications. And what if you didn't need or want the extras ? Then you just kept on using the shareware version because it was actually a fully enjoyable piece of software on its own.
Warez may be illegal, but it definitely has its place in the world and on the net. And its working members certainly aren't rats. If you want a rat, go find your favorite pro-invasive-law lobbyist. They're the ones making our lives miserable and taking away from everyone. Warez takes away from those who are screwing us in the first place.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
It's interesting you said that. Back when I was in high school, I took the "Independent Study" Calculus course. It was the only one my school offered, and I was one of three who took it. I took the whole thing on a beat-up TI scientific that a friend of mine had found laying outside on the ground. It was so old, it had batteries only - no solar. Anyway, later that year, I took the Calc AP test. The rules said that a graphing calculator was recommended, but my math teacher said it would probably just get in my way. The morning of the test, my calculator died - big crack through the LCD. The guidance counselor lent me his calculator - a four-function. Ok, it had a square root button too, but that was it. I took the whole test with it, and had to leave a lot of the answers in symbolic form - I think I gave the height of a tree as ln(3.8) + 2 or something.
:)
Anyway, long story short, I got a 4 - first at my high school ever to pass.
So, in conclusion, symbolic answers can be a good thing.
woxy.com - Bam! The Future of Rock and Roll
It seems to me to be a decent way to learn a little programming. The fact that you can carry it around with you and whenever you are bored whip it out and code a few more lines is a plus factor, not like my computer where when I sit down on it there's a lot more to do that distracts me from ever learning how to program on it...
The whole point of hacking is to make things work above their abilities. I wrote a multiplayer Tic Tac Toe type game for the TI-83 that worked over the link cable, which was pretty cool. (Turns out though that the link cable connection isn't good enough to do anything requiring speed or anything close to two way communication, so any multiplayer action type games are out...)
For a lark I am now programming a 3D Wireframe Renderer for my TI-83. It reads XYZ points from a matrix variable and then reads which points to connect with lines from another matrix variable. It is pretty cool, not useful for anything, but still cool.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
I'm a former mathematics teacher. You should be. Let me pick your post apart line by line. I'll be quite harsh, so stop reading now if you don't want your day ruined...
I'm sorry, but I draw the "geekiness" line at pissing away your time writing silly crap like that for a calculator.
Do you think it's silly for football players to lift weights because there are no weights on the football field? Learning to program in a small space develops excellent mental muscles. Learning to program in Z80 assembler (or whatever language is used) is invaluable to ANYONE who wants to understand computers. YOU don't see the usefulness in it, therefore you conclude it's pointless; I must disagree. I'd point out also (something that you as a teacher MUST come to understand) that anything that motivates a student to learn something, ANYTHING, is invaluable.
A calculator is a tool of science and business, not a gaming machine.
Ever hear of a computer? Ever hear of the IBM PC? Speak of facts, not wishes.
I cannot begin to describe the problems that it has caused me as a high-school math teacher.
Yes, you can. You go on to do so in the next sentence. It would have been better to say "I can only begin to describe..."
Not only has the rampant Tetris-playing caused my students to stop paying attention in class, but the ability to store "notes" in the calculator is a major source of cheating on tests.
You have a classroom management problem. The game-playing and cheating are symptomatic. It could be note-passing, it could be talking, it could be throwing pencils at the ceiling. The problem is not the paper, the mouths, or the pencils, it is the students' lack of respect and motivation. Like it or not, responsibility (if not causation) lies with you. Students play games because they have nothing better to do. As for the cheating, you make it sound as if you didn't understand the potential of these "tools", and I have no patience with this. You have no business teaching with them if you don't understand them. I worked with some of the early pioneers of the graphing calculator in secondary mathematics education, and rapidly learned that a teacher who didn't understand the technology would do more harm than good. Students would not only fail to progress in their mathematical skills; they would regress as they lost competence in skills they'd previously developed.
It has gotten so far that we have had to require that only scientific calculators be used on the upcoming midterm exams.
More evidence that you have NO business teaching with graphing calculators. You apparently hand students a tool, teach them to use it, and test them on their ability to accomplish tasks without the tool. You may as well teach them to do long division with paper and pencil and require oral examiniations in which they do all the work in their head. The analogy is almost exact. Here's what we did to solve your problem. On test days...
1. Students place all books under the desk as class starts; only the calculator and some writing implements are on the desk.
2. Students remove batteries from the calculators.
3. The teacher walks to each desk and verifies that the batteries are out.
4. The students replace batteries and place calculators under their desk.
5. The teacher passes out Part 1 of the test; it measures rote memorization of formulas, proofs, etc. This portion of the test is timed.
6. When Part 1 is completed, the teacher passes out Part 2; students could use their calculators.
This worked quite well for us.
On an unrelated note, why don't you write about HP calculators some time?
I believe they have...
They are far superior from a technological and software standpoint, and RPN works a lot better than standard algebraic notation.
Right, and Esperanto is far superior from a linguistic standpoint and works better than standard English phonics. But no one speaks Esperanto at my supermarket because everyone speaks English. RPN is a poor choice in a pedagogical environment because you must teach not one, but two mathematical languages. If you want to teach RPN, by all means do so..but teach only RPN and use textbooks whose notation makes RPN obvious.
Alas, I suppose now that HP's discontinuing them, they don't matter to the Slashdot crowd anymore...
Not a homogenous group...but you're probably mostly correct.
Some of this has been pointed out in other posts, but I wanted to be thorough. BTW, I'm a former mathematics teacher because I was a bad mathematics teacher. I loved mathematics, I loved my students, and I loved being in the classroom. I just really, really sucked at it. Anyway, I can see the symptoms from a thousand miles. You really need to either leave the field (as I did) or seek some drastic change to your teaching. A few years reflection on my failure has lead me t believe that classroom management (aka discipline) skills are the core competencies of good teachers.
the ability to store "notes" in the calculator is a major source of cheating on tests
dont let the students use calculators on exams. my best courses were the ones where we were not alowed to use calculators on exams. the problems used easy enough numbers that you didnt get caught up with number crunching on the calc. but you had to demonstrate a clear understanding of the material in order to get a correct answer. if you ask me most people use calculators far far to much for simple problems and they are so reliant on the calculator that they never really stop to think about the problem. or they are so trusting of the calculator that they make stupid typos and never catch them. for example take 100/10=? someone types 100/100 in to the calculator on accident they get 1 as the answer and just write it down. they never think about the problem.
"Shut up brain or ill stab you with a Q-tip" Homer Simpson
Obviously this is pertinent to the case of these busted warez organizations. From my humble participation in the scene in '94 and thereabouts, I never saw anyone from the larger groups (Razor, DoD, PwA, RTS) selling CDs, selling FTP access, or otherwise trying to make a buck from warez. Everybody just wanted to get the biggest and best 0-day releases, the coolest demos, and the hardest cracks, then spend all night in IRC bragging about it and trying to take over channels (yay EFnet).
Have there been any laws since the LaMacchia case that make priacy without profit a federal crime?
If you haven't got the faintest idea what I'm talking about, Google for David LaMacchia and Harvey Silverglate (civil libertarian and author of The Shadow University)
1)Write programs to do my repetitive homework assignments for me while the few morons in my class struggled with something basic.
2)Actually see the full calculation I was attempting to perform, in standard notation, before hitting Enter.
3)Being able to quickly recall the last few things I did... and edit them efficiently to correct mistakes or perform repetitive tasks.
4)Cheat. Polyatomic ions (which I eventually learned just from using them so much). As I recall, that was the extent of my cheating.
5)Check my calculus answers. It was impossible to cheat in my high school calculus class because we always had to show our work. Checking (not cheating) on the calculator saved my butt more than once.
6) Spiffy self-written Pythagorean program clued me in as to whether or not I would get an answer at the end of my work, and if so, what it would be. As I had a mere TI-82, it was actually necessary for me to write this program. (Half-cheating - The pythagorean theorem is so damn easy. I only wrote the program after seeing how much time I was wasting doing it by hand.)
7)Programs to reset the variables to various sets of constants, depending on what class I was in, or after another program had just destroyed my variables... it was so much easier in Chem class to just hit "N" than do the SciNotation for Avogadro's number.
My biggest gripe about graphing calculators in high school are the schools that standardize on one type of calculator and waste valuable time to teach the kids how to use them. There would also be less program (and thus game!) sharing if a few kids had Casios, maybe some HPs for variety, and a few more had various flavors of TI, among which there are minimal compatibilities. (For example, 83 is mostly backwords compatible to 82, but not at all w/ 85. Same with the 86 w.r.t. the 85.).
As I recall, there was only one test on which my high school calculus teacher didn't allow graphing calculators. All the other times it didn't matter, but the multi-line display sure was a much bigger help than anything else in the calculator.
Imagine if the FBI had spent millions of dollars setting up dragnets on known jaywalkers around the world. These people KNOW they're breaking the law, and they've been caught red-handed. You don't have the RIGHT to jaywalk. Jail time is the only possible answer, right? And to top it all off, undercover agents secretly were telling suspects how to jaywalk, and where to jaywalk.
Puts things a little more in perspective, right?
(Note: I'm assuming that jaywalking is illegal in most jurisidictions.. if not, insert your own silly law here)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
This is what I don't get, isonews.com openly sells MOD chip for PS2, (so ppl can play copied/ pirated games) and encourages piracy, why is the site op not arrested?
However, I think that the reason you believe that shareware is almost dead is because the mainstream producers/publishers we got accustomed to (Apogee, Epic Megagames, iD) have either replaced the word 'shareware' with 'demo' or went the commercial boxed route because they were successful enough. Well, that and the exodus of BBS users to the Internet. Anyway, there is still decent shareware gaming to be found. It is admittedly a couple of steps behind the Hollywood-style production process you see in most commercial games today, but in many cases that is made up for by the gameplay itself, the cheaper pricing, and the appreciation from the developer. I've been following the comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic and comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.space-sim newsgroups lately, and aside from a 6+ year flamewar there were a couple of suggestions for decent games from small developers. The first, Dominions (http://www.illwinter.com/dominions.html), is a turn-based strategy game that is somewhat similar in style to Master of Magic. The other, Starships Unlimited (http://www.apezone.com/), is a turn-based strategy game that is not unlike Master of Orion. I like turn-based strategy games. Also, I bought a game a couple of months ago called Pontifex (http://www.chroniclogic.com/pfx.html) in which you engineer bridges on a budget that are supposed to hold up under the stress of a train with a variable weight passing over it a variable number of times.
All of these are pretty neat games and meet your definition of shareware. I heard about all of them by wandering off of the normal game-finding path. (http://www.swreg.org) is one avenue many shareware developers (including all of the above) are turning to to sell their games; they should have a storefront on there somewhere where you can browse titles to download or buy, but I think the site might be broken right now. If you don't mind wading through it, Usenet is a good place to spot game reviews or announcements. (http://www.isonews.com) also has a pretty good game review forum on it, though given the general direction of the site these tend to be about standard commercial games and not shareware.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention that shareware is still alive and still worthy of trying out if you know where to look.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
2. Students remove batteries from the calculators.
3. The teacher walks to each desk and verifies that the batteries are out.
4. The students replace batteries and place calculators under their desk.
Tee hee, I remember my HP48GX had a mega-capacitor inside of it that would keep the memory for up to 10 minutes with no batteries. The idea was to make it easier to change the batteries without losing data, but it made it great for those who didn't understand the technology :)
Not to mention it had symbolic maniuplation and automatic built-in unit conversion YEARS before TI caught up.
Personally, I like the attitude of my calculus teacher. You had to show the steps on the test, so I wrote some programs that used the symbolic maniuplation to come up with the right results. A few of the other students thought this was an unfair advantage, but her opinion was, "If you understand the subject well enough to write a program to do it for you, more power to ya."