By way of help, let me describe my favorite CS class - CS 201 in high school, with Ms. Bunn. I didn't learn as many facts/algorithms in it as in college classes (obviously), but it was a hell of a lot more fun, and I did a lot more work for it than I ever did in college, which some would argue means that I learned more of what's important.
At the beginning of the year, everyone picked a project -- two misguided students teamed up to write an OS, I picked a chess-playing program, someone did a database, someone did a simple BBS, someone did a symbolic math package, and so on. There were few restrictions on what you could pick, although you were encouraged to pick a year-sized chunk of work that was reasonably useful from a real-world perspective. We worked on these out of class for the year; she tried devoting class to status reports, but that was mostly useless -- who wants to hear the status of someone else's project? So she started devoting class to random CS tidbits, in chunks of a week or two. The only tidbits that really stick in my mind are a couple weeks' worth of Lisp (with most of the class being us solving in-class Lisp problems, on paper or in the computer lab) and a basic introduction to hashing. The in-class stuff was basically killing time, though; almost all the grades were from the projects. I think there was the occasional class devoted entirely to question-and-answer, also, although the saintly Ms. Bunn handled most project problems outside of class.
As I said, this was the most amazingly cool CS education I've ever gotten. In the course of finishing a project, you were guaranteed to pick up a whole lot of useful crap, but you also had the sense that you were doing something important (as opposed to the "Todaay, wee willl bee learnning aabout graaph algoorithmms..." style of education), and it was cool as hell once the projects got to the point that they were actually functioning programs ("Holy shit, it's really playing chess!") Most of the projects were structured so that there was no real stopping-place, so there was no risk of running out of work -- when I announced that my chess engine was as good as I could make it, Ms. Bunn smiled and gave me a book that described alpha-beta search, which kept me busy for the next several days continuously until it worked, and then until the end of the year trying to make it better. For the BBS or the symbolic math package, you could just keep adding features. The OS, of course, was barely begun at the end of the year, but what had been written appeared pretty sound, so I think the kids escaped without too bad a grade. I think a couple of people actually managed to "finish;" Ms. Bunn just let them slack for the rest of the year, but I could see you handling this differently.
Anyway, my advice to you is to try to separate the kids who want to take a class on CS from the kids who want to learn about CS, and then do something akin to the above for the ones who want to learn -- some of them will stun you with how much they produce when you let them produce whatever they want. Keep the class pretty small so you can keep track of each student's progress pretty regularly, make sure the students aren't afraid to switch projects if the one they're on is too hard, easy, or unrewarding, and throw good, informative books & websites at them like Mardi Gras beads -- if a student hasn't done any work for a week, it's probably because he doesn't know a certain syscall or file format.
A few more project ideas, somewhat modernized from when I was in HS: An mp3 player ("You're done? Okay, now write the encoder."), a side-scrolling one-player game, a simple web server, a corewars simulator, a packet sniffer (they'll love that), a file compression utility. None of these are completely beyond the reach of a talented HS student with a school year to throw at the problem, but they're all "real" programs, such that when people do start getting them working, they'll feel like gods. They'll also have long since forgotten that they're learning.
You're creating another War on Drugs, except this is the War on Swapping. It'll be moderately successful and waste huge amounts of govt. resources. Do you want to see file swapping where drugs are today - where you can be fired if you've ever been known to swap a file? Please stop drawing so much attention to it, and maybe we can avoid a lengthly and costly War on Swapping. By flaunting your illegal activities, you create the next War on Drugs.
So your thinking here is that if the government says it's illegal, we shouldn't do it, to avoid pissing off the government. You're saying it's our fault for wanting to smoke pot and trade ROMs, not the government's for getting its panties in a knot over it.
Fuck that. I am the government. The US civil rights movement, dodging the draft during Vietnam, protecting the lives of Jews in Nazi Germany... all these things were illegal. I'll try to make swapping ROMs legal when I can, but in the meantime I'm going to be a criminal. I feel it's my duty as an American not to obey stupid laws.
So a physicist, an engineer, and a mathematician are each locked into separate closets with a can of beans and no opener. After a few days, the bastards who did this open all the doors. The physicist did something clever, the engineer beat the can against the floor until it opened, and the mathematician is softly chanting, "Given the can is open... given the can is open..."
SDMI will work fine, as long as you can prevent people from re-encoding the audio stream that comes out of their speakers... in other words, never. This guy is the mathematician. Even if they somehow monkey up an inaudible watermark that survives the re-encoding, there will always be players & file-sharing systems that don't look for a watermark, so SDMI will never work. QED.
The funny thing is that everyone knows this, especially the people designing it, but I'd still put better than even money that SDMI will go into production anyway. My guess is that it's just one of those doomed projects that everyone is still stoically plugging away at so they can collect their paychecks. I'm actually quite disappointed in Hemos for not acknowledging that this technology is bullshit right in the story.
We need lyingbastard.com, a site devoted to debunking tecnological arguments that can be debunked in one paragraph or less. Knowing the US, though, it would be shut down for "libel."
Re:Talking so much without saying anything...
on
Nvidia Apologizes
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· Score: 2
I heartily agree. When I emailed Diane Vanasse that any future purchases of nVidia hardware by me hinged on her convincing me that this stuff wasn't true, she replied in part, "nVidia does not have a policy of strong arming any member of the media," and pointed me to the original HardOCP story and here for "the other side of the story." Here are some excerpts from "the other side of the story," taken out of context so as to make nVidia look as bad as possible:
A few weeks before the GeForce2 GTS launch, nVidia was good enough to fly me out to their headquarters in Santa Clara and check out their GeForce2 GTS before anyone else had even seen the card.
The staff at nVidia has bent over backwards to ensure that I have been treated fairly and have ensured that I have had information at my disposal to write informative and accurate reviews of their products.
If I ever wrote something that was in error or made their product look bad you can bet that nVidia would do everything in their power to protect their intellectual property.
I read these, repectively, as meaning: nVidia treats me good, tells me what to write, and would have my ass if I wrote something "that made their product look bad."
I really can't fathom why Taco said anything about admitting wrongdoing... this non-apology is yet another reason I won't be purchasing anything from nVidia ever again. I highly encourage anyone who hasn't already to let info@nvidia.com know that you'll be doing the same. Ask them for their side of the story; you'll receive enough bullshit to snow ten strong men.
Look here, evolution isn't an opinion. This guy got moderated down because his facts are wrong, not because he's challenging the viewpoints of others.
If someone says that gravity is caused by shadows in the invisible ether wind (we're in the sun's shadow, so the wind pushing us away from the sun is weaker than the wind pushing us towards the sun), it's a highly improbable nonsense idea, but it can still be interesting. If someone says that gravity is caused by invisible angels, it's medeival anti-scientific voodoo claptrap.
That's anarchy. The democracy I learned about is giving up your natural rights to protect the rights of others. You have the natural right to bash someone's skull in with a rock, but that interferes with their natural right to live. So in a society, you give up your right to bash someone in the skull with a rock, so that you don't have to worry about someone else bashing you in the head with a rock
You seem to have misunderstood my point. I'm not saying that everyone should be able to do whatever they want to do; I'm saying that everyone should be able to do what people generally agree that they should be able to do.
I cannot conceive of a democracy in which the majority votes to make it legal to bash someone in the skull with a rock. I do believe, however, that a vote of everyone living in the US right now would show that the majority believes that people should be allowed to smoke weed and use Napster -- which, in my opinion, means that both of these things should be legal, end of story. In the unlikely event that Napster starts putting musicians out of business and the music scene in the US dries up completely, the people can vote themselves some good old-fashioned draconian copyright laws, and all will be well.
In short, I distrust a large, commercial interest which claims that laws that do not correspond with the will of the people are in the people's best interests.
The big problem I have whenever people start talking about 'corporations' or 'the government' is that they don't realize that corporations and the government are made up of a bunch of little people trying to get by. A bunch of little people who would like a raise or a Christmas bonus or a good health plan. It's so easy to blame some faceless corporation or government for your problems, but you're really just blaming a bunch of other faceless people.
Read "Nazi Germany" for "corporations and/or the government." How has your argument changed? An organization should be judged by what it does, and I don't like what the RIAA does. I would feel the same way if it was run by a massive computer, an evil genius, or a farm full of happy puppies.
This may hurt the RIAA's case, but it shouldn't. They know full well that people still buy CDs only because Napster's quality is pretty piss-poor, most people can't play MP3s in their cars, high-speed net connections are rare, and so on. A couple of years from now, when I can type "Beatles White Album," wait forty seconds, and then drag-and-drop the quality-assured folder I just downloaded to a removable MP3 player plugged into my serial port, the RIAA will be fucked, and they know it.
Of course, the fact the everyone wants to be able to do the above doesn't seem to make an impact anymore... the democracy I learned about was based on the idea that The People could do any damnfool thing they wanted as long as most of them wanted to do it. That includes putting all the musicians on the planet out of business, which according to the RIAA is what The People would do if they weren't kept under their careful but benevolent control...
An operating system in itself is useless without software capable of running upon it, and the more software that can run upon it, the more widely adopted a system is likely to be. At present, Linux is mostly used to run websites, but its advocates would like to see businesses base their whole computer systems on the technology, as they do with systems such as Microsoft's Windows.
Some small companies and individual computer programmers are working on software to run on the Linux system, and many of the world's largest technology companies, such as Oracle and Sun Microsystems, are adapting their existing software products to run on it.
In fact, rumor has it that by the end of the year, Linux will offer the user a web browser, email client, word processor, and integrated development environment (TM). You know, just like Microsoft. Developers have also begun to speak of the "holy grail" of Linux development, an emulator that would allow Windows programs to run on Linux machines, although a product like this is obviously far in the future.
In my view, a lot of the things Miguel is talking about stem from people abandoning Unix's traditional lots-of-little-pieces philosophy just because what they're building is a GUI application. We need to go back to the shell-scripts-and-files analogy, instead of copying Windows' APIs-and-shared-libraries model.
Think about it -- it's silly that GUI programs are calling something that looks "internal" to them to pop up a dialog box. They should be issuing a shell command, like 'dlgmsg "Your repartitioning is complete." -b OK'. Or 'dlgmsg "Do you want to purge your deleted messages?" -b Yes -b No'./dev/proc/ is massively useful; why don't we have/dev/gui/? It seems to me that the whole Window Manager Bloating Wars came about because we chose to ignore the features of Unix that would have made it easy. Why do we have window handles instead of files (i.e. named pipes created by kde)? Why is changing a window's menus any more complex than 'menubar/dev/gui/win46 -m 0 File -mi 0 0 Open...'? Why is listening for window events harder than parsing/dev/gui/win46?
I know it's a hell of a lot more complicated than that, of course, and I can see a lot of flaws and complications in the above... but hell, maybe the window manager should have to run as root anyway (sarcasm). Does anyone know of a project that tried to do something like this?
So I see that there's this sort of incoherent "Ask Slashdot" question that has some insight behind it, and as I'm thinking about the question, it hits me: The way we can do away with copyright's more draconian features without hurting the artists, inconveniencing the consumer, or even putting the record executives out of business. Everybody wins. I mull it over in my head, and it still seems to make sense. I post my idea, and go on with trying to figure out why gcc thinks "test" is a char *, but foo() ? "test" : "test" is a const char *. Just about as the sun is coming up, I check my users page, eagerly waiting for (a) huzzahs of praise and increased karma, (b) an enlightening explanation of why my idea is crap, or (c) "Yeah, there's a website like that at..." I find that my post is still (Score: 1). Forgotten. Ignored (with the exception of one AC kind enough to feed my ego). With heavy head and anguished heart, I remind myself that I don't care, because I am not a karma whore. I repeat it to myself about thirty times, start to believe it, check this article, post something that pops into my head, and take a shower. I come back and it's at +3! The slashdot crack speed-moderation team has been busy eating raw methamphetamine, ignoring my other post (the good one), and waiting for me to slip up and post some random brain-fart so they can use up all their points on it, and I fell right into their clever plan! You bastards! You'll never take me alive! You'll never take me alive!
Jesus. I need to sleep or get laid as soon as possible. This computer shit is bad for your head.
Moreover, if the force of gravity increases dramatically at short distances, it may be possible for the next generation of accelerators -- such as Europe's Large Hadron Collider scheduled to begin operation in 2005 -- to create black holes, regions smaller than the radius of the extra dimensions where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape.
And the probability is yet again increased that humanity's last words will be, "It's working!"
One system I think would be cool: You take a peer-to-peer sharing system like Napster and add the ability to charge someone for serving them content -- "I'll upload jennajameson.mpeg to you for 50 cents." The client is configured to find the lowest price around for any piece of data you request, and to always sell it at the lowest price anyone's offering just then. The result is that any popular piece of data becomes pretty much free, but someone can still make money by producing new content. Here's an extremely inaccurate description of how:
Assume static demand, perfect information, and atomic transactions; if 1024 people are willing to pay $1 for the new Britney Spears single, then the first 512 are willing to pay $2 (because on average, they'll each sell one copy and wind up paying $1 net), the first 256 are willing to pay $4 (because they'll sell a copy at $2 to one of the second 256, and another one at $1)... until the first guy to buy it ponies up $1024 to Britney. If Britney's smart, she sells at $768 and lets the surplus cash go to the first people to buy -- a fan's not going to pay $768 for a single no matter what the math says, but a record executive would if he knew there was a buck in it. In this case, there's room for everyone to make a 33% return on whatever their investment is (minus the $1), essentially instantly. My faith in human greed compels me to believe that VCs would be banging down the figurative doors to invest at the high levels, bridging the gap between the $768 Britney got and the $8 that a fan might be willing to pay, if he knew he'd get most of it back.
So if everyone does their homework, the artist gets the lion's share of the profits, the VCs do the VC thing (getting paid for risking money), the consumer gets data dirt-cheap, and we don't need any of this copyright bullshit.
Of course, some smirking anarchist can buy the single at $512 and instantly start offering it at $1, in which case the price plummets and the VCs take a bath. Wait, what was the problem again?
Obviously, it's not this simple... but in the thirty seconds I've been thinking about it, I haven't been able to think of a really bad way it's not that simple. You'd need some tricky work with MD5/signatures to prevent cheaters, maybe restrict selling prices to powers of 2 to keep people from selling at $1023.99... huh. Your negative feedback is appreciated as always.
By reading this post, you have already agreed that this idea is originated, owned, and controlled by me. You are expressly forbidden from implementing, writing down, talking about, saving to disk, reverse-engineering, or criticizing this idea. You may not think about this idea for more than five minutes at a time. By accepting this license, you agree to be bound by all its terms, whether legal or illegal. This license may change at any time, in which case you are bound by both the old and new licenses. Where terms of this license conflict with reality, reality shall be deemed at fault. Please bend over and prepare for the installation of the Customer Service Module.
Yah, I agree with you; what pissed me off was that an apparently sincere attempt to defend the troll from the people who took the bait got moderated to +5, when even people who didn't realize the post was a troll should have realized that it was full of shit. Now, if only the moderators would always agree with ME, the moderation system would be perfect...
slashdot.org, long thought to be a bastion of free expression, began to show its true colors today. An unsuspecting teenager posted what she thought were insightful comments about the usefulness of cell phones, and was moderated down. Not only that, but it seems that at least twenty or thirty of Slashdot's readers are sexist!
If you're a troll, also (Yes, of COURSE the original post was a troll. Read it again.), then you've hooked me. If you take the original PMS post at face value, then it is absolutely devoid of content. It was offtopic, uninformative, and unintelligent. The same would be true if it was posted by a man, or a dog, or a wookie. A few of our less enlightened denizens chose to flame it because it apparently came from a 16-year-old girl... hey, the world is full of assholes. Sorry. I get a couple of these winners posting incoherent insults after some of my posts, too. I try not to lose any sleep over it.
I'm somewhat insulted to hear that I should be ashamed of myself... I didn't do anything wrong, and neither did "the majority of Slashdot readers." So ten or twenty out of our 200,000 readers are sexist enough to flame PMS... that's a record low compared to the real world, especially considering that she was engineered to attract sexist flames. I am also unimpressed with your attempt to imply that people who disagreed with PMS are "cavemen," because they're sexist, because they disagree with PMS, and she's a girl.
Read the original post again (psst! It's a troll). If defending this girl's insights is feminism, I'd hate to see your take on civil rights.
This flame has ended now; intelligent discussion may now resume.
Did they get a billion people to use it, and one got accepted? Or did they use a computer/mathematical model? Do they mind if I take a look at the model?
Oh well, I'm sure a biometrics company would never imply it was secure if it wasn't.
It isn't gov't censorship as such, but a lot of people (including me) think it's odious for the same reasons. Well-meaning parents who wind up restricting their kids' access to liberal party web sites and gov't-mandated censorware in libraries getting in the way of legitimate research are two bad things censorware can do. It also offers a false sense of security (witness this story), meaning that parents legitimately seeking to restrict their kids' access to porno on the net won't realize that it's impossible and take appropriate measures (unplugging their computers, for one). On a more nebulous level, censorware companies often make decisions about what to censor based on factors other than content -- witness the study, which I can't find now, where some good people copied gay-bashing quotes off of mainstream right-wing & religious web sites, posted them on Geocities, & submitted them to be censored. The censorware people agreed that this stuff was bad news. When asked to ban the original mainstream sites the quotes came from, they refused. This kind of thing can't be good for anybody, any more than censorware that restricts sites talking bad about the censorware-producing company.
These are some of the more concrete reasons I don't like censorware; the false sense of security is the worst flaw IMHO. AOL and other censorware providers have an interest in keeping people misinformed about the theoretical impossibility of what they claim to do; this leads to nasty stuff like the cphack fiasco, which also isn't good for anybody.
Hope this answers your questions. Note that I'm not trying to bash AOL's controls on young children; as I understand it, these either use a whitelist or deny web access altogether and are, I agree, a useful tool for parents. Almost all other censorware, though, commits the cardinal sin for software: It doesn't work.
This sounds like a stupid idea. As I understand it, the system hopes to intercept the emails/ICQ logs/etc. of people who are stupid enough to crack systems, molest children, etc. and then brag about it over unencrypted channels. If everybody knows what selection criteria it uses, it'll be trivial for warez doods (in particular) to skirt around it by avoiding its key words (or whatever), and most of the good that might have come out of it will be neutralized. The FBI will point this out, the request will be denied, and the ACLU will be The Guys Who Want The Criminals To Go Free if they make a stink.
Besides, there are much more valid reasons why Carnivore stinks. What the hell happened to eminent domain? If someone who gains unauthorized access to a web site is "stealing" server resources from the site, isn't the FBI "stealing" property that belongs to the ISPs here? What happens when the NSA decides that the security of the nation depends on them using my computer to help crack "terrorists'" encrypted messages? Kind of quartering soldiers in private homes, aren't we?
Also, you have privacy. Now this is a thorny issue; IP packets aren't private in a technological sense. However, I think the courts would look unkindly on a company that sniffed packets from a backbone and sold the data (anything I tell my doctor/lawyer over ICQ, for example) for mining. The fourth amendment, probable cause... is it legal for a cop who doesn't have a warrant to stand on my doorstep and then bust me because he saw a bong in my living room when I opened the door? Probably. After all, I had no expectation of privacy. "Just use encryption." "Just use the window." Man, fuck this government.
I've probably set off a couple of NSA sniffers already, so I'll give it a rest. God bless America; here's hoping she survives this generation's crop of power-hungry yahoos.
I checked out IAM.com, and yes, it sucks bad. Browser bus errors. Scrolling implemented by broken Java applets that don't "require" a mouse click to start scrolling and lag 1-2 seconds behind on my 600Mhz machine. The differences between models and marines ("Marines think war is hell, models think war is hailing a cab" and worse). Also for models, cheap ways to stay in shape: (1) Walk. (2) Run around. ("the same as #1, but a little faster") Under the "how to..." button on the musicians page, a glossary of insider music terms such as "GRAMMY AWARDS" and "RADIO DJ". Javascript buttons that do nothing except change the content on not-currently-visible windows. Searching is only available with free registration, and the registration form is gratuitously rude.
I highly recommend visiting this site; I laughed out loud several times at its utter awfulness.
In a flower garden, a weed can't do you much good. In society, criminals are essential. It is inevitable that powerful men will pass bad laws. It's just an unchangeable fact of human nature. Therefore, it behooves any government which calls itself "for the people" to reasonably limit the authority with which government can enforce ANY law, because having someone get away with a real crime is better than having someone get caught for pissing off the Powers That Be.
Saying that there is a "potential" for abuse is like saying that Windows has the "potential" to crash your computer. You're right; not all human life is special. Would you like your government to release a list of its "special" citizens? Or have it decided on a case-by-case basis by the cops? Or would you like a gov't that pretended that everyone was special, and gave rights and protections even to people that didn't deserve them?
Classify the following as flowers or weeds: Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, John Scopes, Rosa Parks, Lenny Bruce. Each of these people was widely regarded as trying to damage society, and most of them were prosecuted for it.
Slashdot's moderation rules bring wheat to the top (mostly), because they're engineered with the assumption that everybody is a greedy, abusive asshole who's trying to subvert the moderation system for their own selfish ends. America's laws bring freedom (used to, at least) because they're engineered with the assumption that politicians and policemen are evil, power-hungry tyrants who are trying to subvert the will of the system for their own gain. The laws that protect us from these guys set a few criminals free, yes. I like it that way.
First they came for the warez kiddies, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a warez kiddie. They then came for the child pornographers, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a child pornographer... finally they came for the assholes, but by then there was no one left to speak up for us.
Is it just me or does Senator Hatch tend to get things moving in congress alot? I admire his ability to cut through the crap and get things accomplished. It would seem as if the obvious solution for the music industry would be to adapt to changing times more quickly by offerring digital downloads for a small fee, I don't know why they just don't go ahead and do it. Mp3.com is a prime example of how easily it could work, just imagine mp3.com with a shopping cart.
Remember that this may well be a case of monkeys at typewriters. Hatch was the one who talked about tracing Napster users via their "intellectual property addresses."
This must be from the Bad Internet Ideas secret laboratory. For those who don't know, BII is an organization in LA founded by a group of entrepreneurs who, after failing to find funding for cheap, effective security and privacy software for businesses and individuals, embarked on an experiment to determine what ideas VCs were most likely to fund. They came up with 160 wildly different ideas for making money off the net and proposed each of them to 10 separate VCs, noted the reactions (including the money they were offered, if any), and performed advanced statistical analysis to determine what types of ideas VCs were likely to cough up the big bucks for.
The results shocked them. VCs go for bad ideas. Real-world feasibility, profit potential, and technological innovation all showed ironclad negative correlations with VC interest. Impossibility, incorrect assumptions, marginal gain, and large capital outlay all drew VC capital in droves. In retrospect, it was obvious -- good ideas haven't been tried before ("It looks pretty risky..."), require technical savvy ("Tell me again about the packets."), and are often cheap and easy to implement ("What do you mean server software is free?"). Bad ideas are simple, and run entirely on their own internal logic ("People don't mind commercials on TV."). They're easy to understand. VCs always want to invest in The Internet, but they startle and confuse easily. Bad ideas help keep them calm and make them feel technological: I GET it! Selling ads on MP3's! Why has no one thought of this before? Why were all those other guys babbling about pier-to-pier and data covens?
With their newfound knowledge, these four geniuses used their remaining $2500 to start BII, which has been tirelessly working to plumb the depths of badness an internet idea can achieve. Although their standard fare is web-porno filters and pay-per-use software, they do come out with a real gem every now and then... I have to admit, this is one of the worst ideas I've ever seen. Rumor has it they're planning on starting a web site after they retire, showcasing for posterity their most stunningly awful ideas. I'm looking forward to it.
So now the technology exists to reliably drug test employees without their consent (put one of these guys in the ventilation above someone's cube, say)... cool. Know what's going to happen?
Flunky: Sir, the "portal" drug testing system reports that 60% of our staff show traces of marijuana!
Boss: Get rid of... did you say 60%?
Flunky: Yes, sir. And 5% show traces of LSD.
Boss: Get rid of 'em!
Flunky: Sir, those 5% are estimated to be administering 98% of our network.
Boss: Umm...
Flunky: May I remind you that you are required by federal law to suspend these employees until their test results are clear?
Boss: Give me those. You're fired.
I could see a similar scenario with DNA spying. "Sir, 60% of our employees show an increased risk of Parkinson's disease!"
Seriously, I doubt Gattaca will happen any time soon, because companies that judge their employees on DNA content will be serious losers compared to those that don't really care, as long as their people are competent. 99% of what impacts your appropriateness for almost any job happens after the womb, so this system will simply allow people who don't get that to lose more efficiently. Right now, all they can do is look at skin color, sex, and well-groomed-ness, and they have to fall back on competence once in a while.
I do see potential for abuse, though, in testing employees for HIV without their consent...
In the unlikely event that this takes off, someone will figure out that their signal "encryption" consists of rot13ing the lyrics, and we're going to see a whole new wave of injunctions and lawsuits blighting our fair landscape as these guys start crying about how they can't make money without laws protecting their IP.
What crap. I'm honestly stunned that anyone thinks this can make money. Not just one satellite, but THREE? Are they expecting an enormous demand for radio you have to pay for and buy new equipment ($280) to receive? Fuck it, this can't be real. Someone started this web site as a joke, and Wired took the bait. If someone ponied up the scratch to put three satellites in orbit for this idea, then God is dead.
Being a computer nerd I usually go by logic which would tell me that if I can't come up with any reasons not to do it, it should be done; however I and many people I know still have the nagging feeling that theres something wrong with it. And I'm favoring going with my gut instinct in this case. Just wondering what other people's opinions on the morality of things like this are?
One of the first things I learned as a computer nerd was to ignore those nagging feelings unless I could justify them. Every time I used an undocumented interrupt, I felt bad. I knew that the thing I was building into my software could possibly cause a crash (or worse, a subtle incompatibility bug)... but I did it anyway, and it caused me very little grief, now that I think about it. My programs were still supported because DOS still had to support my interrupt, or else some of the Big Guys' software would stop working.
Regardless of what's right to do, someone (or some random corporation) will do it, somewhere, if it's possible. If it fucks up, they won't tell anybody. It follows that the way to minimize the fuck-ups (which, in this case, will cause genuine pain to human beings) is for as many people as is possible to try to do it, thus ensuring that technology that can genuinely fuck something up will be well-known as such, and dealt with properly.
Not for credit: Which is better in a world in which nuclear weapons are possible: Public knowledge of the nuke capabilities of each country, and common information about the basis, effects, and ramifications of this technology, or secrecy? Will laws protecting the secrecy of nuke technology keep it secret forever, for a while, or not at all? What about information concerning the effects of nuke technology? Will such laws cause great, acceptable, or slight harm to people who are actively curious or concerned about nuke technology? How effective will these laws be in preventing misuse of the technology by (respectively) citizens, corporations, and countries? Discuss.
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At the beginning of the year, everyone picked a project -- two misguided students teamed up to write an OS, I picked a chess-playing program, someone did a database, someone did a simple BBS, someone did a symbolic math package, and so on. There were few restrictions on what you could pick, although you were encouraged to pick a year-sized chunk of work that was reasonably useful from a real-world perspective. We worked on these out of class for the year; she tried devoting class to status reports, but that was mostly useless -- who wants to hear the status of someone else's project? So she started devoting class to random CS tidbits, in chunks of a week or two. The only tidbits that really stick in my mind are a couple weeks' worth of Lisp (with most of the class being us solving in-class Lisp problems, on paper or in the computer lab) and a basic introduction to hashing. The in-class stuff was basically killing time, though; almost all the grades were from the projects. I think there was the occasional class devoted entirely to question-and-answer, also, although the saintly Ms. Bunn handled most project problems outside of class.
As I said, this was the most amazingly cool CS education I've ever gotten. In the course of finishing a project, you were guaranteed to pick up a whole lot of useful crap, but you also had the sense that you were doing something important (as opposed to the "Todaay, wee willl bee learnning aabout graaph algoorithmms..." style of education), and it was cool as hell once the projects got to the point that they were actually functioning programs ("Holy shit, it's really playing chess!") Most of the projects were structured so that there was no real stopping-place, so there was no risk of running out of work -- when I announced that my chess engine was as good as I could make it, Ms. Bunn smiled and gave me a book that described alpha-beta search, which kept me busy for the next several days continuously until it worked, and then until the end of the year trying to make it better. For the BBS or the symbolic math package, you could just keep adding features. The OS, of course, was barely begun at the end of the year, but what had been written appeared pretty sound, so I think the kids escaped without too bad a grade. I think a couple of people actually managed to "finish;" Ms. Bunn just let them slack for the rest of the year, but I could see you handling this differently.
Anyway, my advice to you is to try to separate the kids who want to take a class on CS from the kids who want to learn about CS, and then do something akin to the above for the ones who want to learn -- some of them will stun you with how much they produce when you let them produce whatever they want. Keep the class pretty small so you can keep track of each student's progress pretty regularly, make sure the students aren't afraid to switch projects if the one they're on is too hard, easy, or unrewarding, and throw good, informative books & websites at them like Mardi Gras beads -- if a student hasn't done any work for a week, it's probably because he doesn't know a certain syscall or file format.
A few more project ideas, somewhat modernized from when I was in HS: An mp3 player ("You're done? Okay, now write the encoder."), a side-scrolling one-player game, a simple web server, a corewars simulator, a packet sniffer (they'll love that), a file compression utility. None of these are completely beyond the reach of a talented HS student with a school year to throw at the problem, but they're all "real" programs, such that when people do start getting them working, they'll feel like gods. They'll also have long since forgotten that they're learning.
Fuck that. I am the government. The US civil rights movement, dodging the draft during Vietnam, protecting the lives of Jews in Nazi Germany... all these things were illegal. I'll try to make swapping ROMs legal when I can, but in the meantime I'm going to be a criminal. I feel it's my duty as an American not to obey stupid laws.
SDMI will work fine, as long as you can prevent people from re-encoding the audio stream that comes out of their speakers... in other words, never. This guy is the mathematician. Even if they somehow monkey up an inaudible watermark that survives the re-encoding, there will always be players & file-sharing systems that don't look for a watermark, so SDMI will never work. QED.
The funny thing is that everyone knows this, especially the people designing it, but I'd still put better than even money that SDMI will go into production anyway. My guess is that it's just one of those doomed projects that everyone is still stoically plugging away at so they can collect their paychecks. I'm actually quite disappointed in Hemos for not acknowledging that this technology is bullshit right in the story.
We need lyingbastard.com, a site devoted to debunking tecnological arguments that can be debunked in one paragraph or less. Knowing the US, though, it would be shut down for "libel."
I really can't fathom why Taco said anything about admitting wrongdoing... this non-apology is yet another reason I won't be purchasing anything from nVidia ever again. I highly encourage anyone who hasn't already to let info@nvidia.com know that you'll be doing the same. Ask them for their side of the story; you'll receive enough bullshit to snow ten strong men.
If someone says that gravity is caused by shadows in the invisible ether wind (we're in the sun's shadow, so the wind pushing us away from the sun is weaker than the wind pushing us towards the sun), it's a highly improbable nonsense idea, but it can still be interesting. If someone says that gravity is caused by invisible angels, it's medeival anti-scientific voodoo claptrap.
You seem to have misunderstood my point. I'm not saying that everyone should be able to do whatever they want to do; I'm saying that everyone should be able to do what people generally agree that they should be able to do.
I cannot conceive of a democracy in which the majority votes to make it legal to bash someone in the skull with a rock. I do believe, however, that a vote of everyone living in the US right now would show that the majority believes that people should be allowed to smoke weed and use Napster -- which, in my opinion, means that both of these things should be legal, end of story. In the unlikely event that Napster starts putting musicians out of business and the music scene in the US dries up completely, the people can vote themselves some good old-fashioned draconian copyright laws, and all will be well.
In short, I distrust a large, commercial interest which claims that laws that do not correspond with the will of the people are in the people's best interests.
Read "Nazi Germany" for "corporations and/or the government." How has your argument changed? An organization should be judged by what it does, and I don't like what the RIAA does. I would feel the same way if it was run by a massive computer, an evil genius, or a farm full of happy puppies.Of course, the fact the everyone wants to be able to do the above doesn't seem to make an impact anymore... the democracy I learned about was based on the idea that The People could do any damnfool thing they wanted as long as most of them wanted to do it. That includes putting all the musicians on the planet out of business, which according to the RIAA is what The People would do if they weren't kept under their careful but benevolent control...
Christ.
Think about it -- it's silly that GUI programs are calling something that looks "internal" to them to pop up a dialog box. They should be issuing a shell command, like 'dlgmsg "Your repartitioning is complete." -b OK'. Or 'dlgmsg "Do you want to purge your deleted messages?" -b Yes -b No'. /dev/proc/ is massively useful; why don't we have /dev/gui/? It seems to me that the whole Window Manager Bloating Wars came about because we chose to ignore the features of Unix that would have made it easy. Why do we have window handles instead of files (i.e. named pipes created by kde)? Why is changing a window's menus any more complex than 'menubar /dev/gui/win46 -m 0 File -mi 0 0 Open...'? Why is listening for window events harder than parsing /dev/gui/win46?
I know it's a hell of a lot more complicated than that, of course, and I can see a lot of flaws and complications in the above... but hell, maybe the window manager should have to run as root anyway (sarcasm). Does anyone know of a project that tried to do something like this?
Jesus. I need to sleep or get laid as soon as possible. This computer shit is bad for your head.
Assume static demand, perfect information, and atomic transactions; if 1024 people are willing to pay $1 for the new Britney Spears single, then the first 512 are willing to pay $2 (because on average, they'll each sell one copy and wind up paying $1 net), the first 256 are willing to pay $4 (because they'll sell a copy at $2 to one of the second 256, and another one at $1)... until the first guy to buy it ponies up $1024 to Britney. If Britney's smart, she sells at $768 and lets the surplus cash go to the first people to buy -- a fan's not going to pay $768 for a single no matter what the math says, but a record executive would if he knew there was a buck in it. In this case, there's room for everyone to make a 33% return on whatever their investment is (minus the $1), essentially instantly. My faith in human greed compels me to believe that VCs would be banging down the figurative doors to invest at the high levels, bridging the gap between the $768 Britney got and the $8 that a fan might be willing to pay, if he knew he'd get most of it back.
So if everyone does their homework, the artist gets the lion's share of the profits, the VCs do the VC thing (getting paid for risking money), the consumer gets data dirt-cheap, and we don't need any of this copyright bullshit.
Of course, some smirking anarchist can buy the single at $512 and instantly start offering it at $1, in which case the price plummets and the VCs take a bath. Wait, what was the problem again?
Obviously, it's not this simple... but in the thirty seconds I've been thinking about it, I haven't been able to think of a really bad way it's not that simple. You'd need some tricky work with MD5/signatures to prevent cheaters, maybe restrict selling prices to powers of 2 to keep people from selling at $1023.99... huh. Your negative feedback is appreciated as always.
By reading this post, you have already agreed that this idea is originated, owned, and controlled by me. You are expressly forbidden from implementing, writing down, talking about, saving to disk, reverse-engineering, or criticizing this idea. You may not think about this idea for more than five minutes at a time. By accepting this license, you agree to be bound by all its terms, whether legal or illegal. This license may change at any time, in which case you are bound by both the old and new licenses. Where terms of this license conflict with reality, reality shall be deemed at fault. Please bend over and prepare for the installation of the Customer Service Module.
Yah, I agree with you; what pissed me off was that an apparently sincere attempt to defend the troll from the people who took the bait got moderated to +5, when even people who didn't realize the post was a troll should have realized that it was full of shit. Now, if only the moderators would always agree with ME, the moderation system would be perfect...
Censorship rife at Slashdot
slashdot.org, long thought to be a bastion of free expression, began to show its true colors today. An unsuspecting teenager posted what she thought were insightful comments about the usefulness of cell phones, and was moderated down. Not only that, but it seems that at least twenty or thirty of Slashdot's readers are sexist!
If you're a troll, also (Yes, of COURSE the original post was a troll. Read it again.), then you've hooked me. If you take the original PMS post at face value, then it is absolutely devoid of content. It was offtopic, uninformative, and unintelligent. The same would be true if it was posted by a man, or a dog, or a wookie. A few of our less enlightened denizens chose to flame it because it apparently came from a 16-year-old girl... hey, the world is full of assholes. Sorry. I get a couple of these winners posting incoherent insults after some of my posts, too. I try not to lose any sleep over it.
I'm somewhat insulted to hear that I should be ashamed of myself... I didn't do anything wrong, and neither did "the majority of Slashdot readers." So ten or twenty out of our 200,000 readers are sexist enough to flame PMS... that's a record low compared to the real world, especially considering that she was engineered to attract sexist flames. I am also unimpressed with your attempt to imply that people who disagreed with PMS are "cavemen," because they're sexist, because they disagree with PMS, and she's a girl.
Read the original post again (psst! It's a troll). If defending this girl's insights is feminism, I'd hate to see your take on civil rights.
This flame has ended now; intelligent discussion may now resume.
Oh well, I'm sure a biometrics company would never imply it was secure if it wasn't.
These are some of the more concrete reasons I don't like censorware; the false sense of security is the worst flaw IMHO. AOL and other censorware providers have an interest in keeping people misinformed about the theoretical impossibility of what they claim to do; this leads to nasty stuff like the cphack fiasco, which also isn't good for anybody.
Hope this answers your questions. Note that I'm not trying to bash AOL's controls on young children; as I understand it, these either use a whitelist or deny web access altogether and are, I agree, a useful tool for parents. Almost all other censorware, though, commits the cardinal sin for software: It doesn't work.
Besides, there are much more valid reasons why Carnivore stinks. What the hell happened to eminent domain? If someone who gains unauthorized access to a web site is "stealing" server resources from the site, isn't the FBI "stealing" property that belongs to the ISPs here? What happens when the NSA decides that the security of the nation depends on them using my computer to help crack "terrorists'" encrypted messages? Kind of quartering soldiers in private homes, aren't we?
Also, you have privacy. Now this is a thorny issue; IP packets aren't private in a technological sense. However, I think the courts would look unkindly on a company that sniffed packets from a backbone and sold the data (anything I tell my doctor/lawyer over ICQ, for example) for mining. The fourth amendment, probable cause... is it legal for a cop who doesn't have a warrant to stand on my doorstep and then bust me because he saw a bong in my living room when I opened the door? Probably. After all, I had no expectation of privacy. "Just use encryption." "Just use the window." Man, fuck this government.
I've probably set off a couple of NSA sniffers already, so I'll give it a rest. God bless America; here's hoping she survives this generation's crop of power-hungry yahoos.
I highly recommend visiting this site; I laughed out loud several times at its utter awfulness.
In a flower garden, a weed can't do you much good. In society, criminals are essential. It is inevitable that powerful men will pass bad laws. It's just an unchangeable fact of human nature. Therefore, it behooves any government which calls itself "for the people" to reasonably limit the authority with which government can enforce ANY law, because having someone get away with a real crime is better than having someone get caught for pissing off the Powers That Be.
Saying that there is a "potential" for abuse is like saying that Windows has the "potential" to crash your computer. You're right; not all human life is special. Would you like your government to release a list of its "special" citizens? Or have it decided on a case-by-case basis by the cops? Or would you like a gov't that pretended that everyone was special, and gave rights and protections even to people that didn't deserve them?
Classify the following as flowers or weeds: Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, John Scopes, Rosa Parks, Lenny Bruce. Each of these people was widely regarded as trying to damage society, and most of them were prosecuted for it.
Slashdot's moderation rules bring wheat to the top (mostly), because they're engineered with the assumption that everybody is a greedy, abusive asshole who's trying to subvert the moderation system for their own selfish ends. America's laws bring freedom (used to, at least) because they're engineered with the assumption that politicians and policemen are evil, power-hungry tyrants who are trying to subvert the will of the system for their own gain. The laws that protect us from these guys set a few criminals free, yes. I like it that way.
First they came for the warez kiddies, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a warez kiddie. They then came for the child pornographers, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a child pornographer... finally they came for the assholes, but by then there was no one left to speak up for us.
The results shocked them. VCs go for bad ideas. Real-world feasibility, profit potential, and technological innovation all showed ironclad negative correlations with VC interest. Impossibility, incorrect assumptions, marginal gain, and large capital outlay all drew VC capital in droves. In retrospect, it was obvious -- good ideas haven't been tried before ("It looks pretty risky..."), require technical savvy ("Tell me again about the packets."), and are often cheap and easy to implement ("What do you mean server software is free?"). Bad ideas are simple, and run entirely on their own internal logic ("People don't mind commercials on TV."). They're easy to understand. VCs always want to invest in The Internet, but they startle and confuse easily. Bad ideas help keep them calm and make them feel technological: I GET it! Selling ads on MP3's! Why has no one thought of this before? Why were all those other guys babbling about pier-to-pier and data covens?
With their newfound knowledge, these four geniuses used their remaining $2500 to start BII, which has been tirelessly working to plumb the depths of badness an internet idea can achieve. Although their standard fare is web-porno filters and pay-per-use software, they do come out with a real gem every now and then... I have to admit, this is one of the worst ideas I've ever seen. Rumor has it they're planning on starting a web site after they retire, showcasing for posterity their most stunningly awful ideas. I'm looking forward to it.
Flunky: Sir, the "portal" drug testing system reports that 60% of our staff show traces of marijuana!
Boss: Get rid of... did you say 60%?
Flunky: Yes, sir. And 5% show traces of LSD.
Boss: Get rid of 'em!
Flunky: Sir, those 5% are estimated to be administering 98% of our network.
Boss: Umm...
Flunky: May I remind you that you are required by federal law to suspend these employees until their test results are clear?
Boss: Give me those. You're fired.
I could see a similar scenario with DNA spying. "Sir, 60% of our employees show an increased risk of Parkinson's disease!"
Seriously, I doubt Gattaca will happen any time soon, because companies that judge their employees on DNA content will be serious losers compared to those that don't really care, as long as their people are competent. 99% of what impacts your appropriateness for almost any job happens after the womb, so this system will simply allow people who don't get that to lose more efficiently. Right now, all they can do is look at skin color, sex, and well-groomed-ness, and they have to fall back on competence once in a while.
I do see potential for abuse, though, in testing employees for HIV without their consent...
What crap. I'm honestly stunned that anyone thinks this can make money. Not just one satellite, but THREE? Are they expecting an enormous demand for radio you have to pay for and buy new equipment ($280) to receive? Fuck it, this can't be real. Someone started this web site as a joke, and Wired took the bait. If someone ponied up the scratch to put three satellites in orbit for this idea, then God is dead.
Regardless of what's right to do, someone (or some random corporation) will do it, somewhere, if it's possible. If it fucks up, they won't tell anybody. It follows that the way to minimize the fuck-ups (which, in this case, will cause genuine pain to human beings) is for as many people as is possible to try to do it, thus ensuring that technology that can genuinely fuck something up will be well-known as such, and dealt with properly.
Not for credit: Which is better in a world in which nuclear weapons are possible: Public knowledge of the nuke capabilities of each country, and common information about the basis, effects, and ramifications of this technology, or secrecy? Will laws protecting the secrecy of nuke technology keep it secret forever, for a while, or not at all? What about information concerning the effects of nuke technology? Will such laws cause great, acceptable, or slight harm to people who are actively curious or concerned about nuke technology? How effective will these laws be in preventing misuse of the technology by (respectively) citizens, corporations, and countries? Discuss.