...'cause the X-Box is so fast it actually travels forward in time!
Um, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but to my knowledge the next-gen nVidia hardware that's going to be in the X-Box hasn't even seen first silicon yet. The final product is (at least) a year off.
So how in fsck are they producing demos from a hardware platform that doesn't exist yet?
Many fast processors on the market = incentive for processor designers to push the envelope to be competitive.
Everyone, not just Mac and PPC users, should be happy at this announcement. Even if it makes Macs so crazy-fast they go back in time, can you imagine how good the eventual competitor from the x86 community is going to be?
Apparently, cell phone designers think I'm not in enough danger from people zipping around at 75mph with phones glued to their heads.
Now, the same guy who's driving into ditches whenever his phone rings is going to have the additional distraction of peering at a tiny LCD to see what track he's listening to.
What's next? MP3 handguns?
Counterpoint: Computers as Work
on
Universal Access
·
· Score: 2
"Giving away computers to teach people about computer literacy is like giving teenagers pornography to teach them about sex." -- Andrei Codrescu
Intel giving its employees computers I can understand, but Ford? What exactly is Joe Autoworker going to do with a shiny new PC if he doesn't have one already?
While I love the idea of computer-as-perk, this is clearly a ploy by management to further encroach upon employees' private time. They're already expected to work extra shifts when called, attend company events, etc., and now they're going to be accessible to the Boss 24-7.
The suits must be laughing their heads off. They've extended the corporate workplace into employees very homes, and the media is lauding them for their generosity!
Did you stay home sick today? Don't worry; you can still work on the nice shiny PC your employer thoughtfully provided you.
Are you sometimes away from home when the boss calls? Check your e-mail when you get back, or you're fired.
Don't have access to an on-site application from home? You soon will, and your boss will be logging your hours. Don't forget; promotions go to "team players"!
Amidst the many technical issues already raised, I'd like to ask a simple logistical question:
How do you keep fingerprint readers clean?
Thought Experiment #1: How many of you have ever spent a significant amount of time in a public computer lab? (counts hands) OK, everybody. Now, recall the last time you looked at a screen that had been used by the general public for more than a couple of hours. Caked with fingerprints, wannit?--and that's a part of the computer people aren't supposed to touch. I don't even want to get into what public keyboards look like.
Thought experiment #2: How many of you have ever looked at the walls above the urinals in a public men's restroom? (counts hands) OK, all of the men, and a surprising number of the women. They've often got snot, hair and...other things on them, usually at eye level.
Now, imagine what your bank's cash machine is going to look like after a day's worth of customers have plastered their nose wiping, Big Mac eating, butt scratching hands all over a single teensy-weensy little square of glass.
Maybe you carry moist towelettes everywhere you go, but I don't. The very idea of putting my hands on something that's been touched by hundreds, perhaps thousands of people since its last cleaning is enough to make me pause.
Isn't there a technical issue here too, in that dirty readers aren't going to function correctly?
At first blush it would seem that some smallish country with a stable (not necessarily legitimate) government could make a killing at this.
A longer view might suggest that any such country isn't likely to have the communications infrastructure necessary to make a Web haven work.
For all Neal Stephenson's merits, the idea in _Cryptonomicon_ of a data haven is a huge stretch. Let's see, all we need is an independent country, geographically close enough to the U.S. to make business trips feasible, and ruled by an autocrat with lots of money and a technology fetish. That'll work.
Maybe it is, but it doesn't have to be. I haven't signed any agreements to look at specific content on the Web.
if you remove the capability for content providers to make money you remove once chunk of the web, you will just be left with hobby sites, pay sites, charity sites and online stores.
Yep. Note what these sites have in common: a revenue stream not dependent on advertising. Whether the funding is coming from the owner's pocket (hobby sites), an organizational budget (charity sites) or from profits generated from the site's content or product (pay and retail sites), there's no need for advertising.
The Web is not television, nor is it print. The advertising methods that work in those media cannot work on the Web, at least not indefinitely. As others on this thread have observed, there are already products that block images; we're just waiting for the one "killer app" implementation that will catch on with the average surfer.
When that happens, sites that rely on banner ads will have to change their revenue model or die.
There is something called an inalienable right. Microsoft has an inalienable right to the IP it has produced.
No.
Inalienable rights are for people. Microsoft is not a person.
Micrsoft is a corporate entity which exists only through the auspices of government. There is no natural right to form a stockholder-owned, limited-liability entity.
Microsoft exists because the people, through their government, have found it beneficial to allow certain legal rights to corporate entities. These rights are not preexisting, not inalienable, and subject to revocation if the conditions upon which they were granted are violated.
What Katz is missing here is that Metallica *is* trying to resolve the dispute through legitimate channels. Specifically, it's using Napster's own published grievance policy.
There's no way on Earth the band, its attorneys, its management or its record company is going to take over 300,000 defendants to court over minor copyright violations. Napster knows this, Metallica knows this, and I think Katz knows this.
What Metallica's lawyers are doing is choking Napster with its own policies. Napster's membership agreement allows Napster to pull any account for IP violations, among other things. Napster has also publicly stated its policy of banning the accounts of users demonstrated to be sharing copyrighted material illegally.
So, Metallica has called Napster's bluff. Napster never expected to be handed such a huge pile of complaints, and has neither a mechanism nor the resources to process them.
Napster shouldn't have promised what it couldn't deliver. Now, other artists and their labels will follow Metallica's lead, dropping ton after ton of complaints on Napster and watching the company strangle on the red tape of its own policy.
Ironically, if Napster had played the "common carrier" game--disavowing all responsibility for content transmitted over its service--it might be on better legal footing. By promising diligently to ban the accounts of violators, it's attracted the very legal actions it sought to avoid.
Mitnick's latest misadventure is just the opening shot on a new front in the Feds' war on your civil and human rights.
Prosecutors and judges have long employed parole as a means of disposing of inconvenient or troublesome individuals. The public generally sees parole as a "slap on the wrist," when in fact it allows the government to impose pretty much any arbitrary infringment on a convicted person's civil rights. Parole boards often don't have to answer to the courts, and are given broad discretion in determining which behaviors violate the terms of a given person's parole.
So, the Feds don't like Mitnick making money as a speaker? Suddenly the parole board determines that talking about his crime is a violation of his parole, and PRESTO! his First Amendment rights vanish. He'll have to spend thousands of dollars--which the terms of his parole conveniently insure he won't have--just to get a hearing, and final resolution of the matter might take the remainder of his parole term.
From now on, all the Feds have to do to silence you is trump up a few charges, threaten you with prison if you're convicted and huge legal bills regardless, and "allow" you to sign a plea agreement that gives them de facto authority to disregard your civil rights at will.
Expect to see parole terms greatly lengthened in the future, with 20 years or even lifetime parole instead of (or in addition to!) jail sentences.
Re:Why recover the laptop?
on
Laptop Lojack?
·
· Score: 1
A $2000-3000 laptop isn't such a big issue for a country which pays other bills in billions...
Remember, this is the same federal government that used to spend $600 for toilet seats.
Sure, those laptops cost $3000, but they're 25Mhz 386s with monochrome screens and 4mb of RAM.
I've had a TiVO for about a year now, and I barely can stand to watch TV without the ability to pause and rewind. A car radio with this functionality would be perfect, especially with voice control.... "Computer, back up 30 seconds."
The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again! The hardcore marketers are going to do whatever is necessary to get the information they want, COPPA or no COPPA. I expect corporations that market to kids to create some kind of "kid-safe" umbrella database for all their sites. Parents will only have to provide permission once for, say, all of Microsoft's or Proctor and Gamble's kid sites. The corps in turn will have a far easier time disseminating their user data among different divisions and subsidiaries, as there will be no duplicate or ambigious entries to resolve across multiple databases. It will be the legitimate sites that parents might actually want their kids to visit that will simply ban anyone under the COPPA limit. Why make trouble for yourself by accepting kids when you don't have to? Thus, kids get screwed, and marketers get what they want throught different channels. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.... Now, the really funny part will come when some soccer mom sues a company for age discrimination on behalf of little Snotleigh, who can't download free unicorn pictures from the Web anymore. What's the sponsor or owner of the site supposed to do then?
Re:I've Been There...Here's Why it's a Bad Idea
on
Laptops In Education
·
· Score: 1
Now that that's out of the way, here's why this whole laptop idea is Bad: it's not a solution to the problem of the quality of education in America. It is at best a Band-Aid, something for politicians and teacher unions to point to to say "we're educating your children". It is a panacea. To quote Gertrude Stein, "There's no there there."
Remove "and teachers unions" from the paragraph above, and I'll say "Mod this up!"
Teacher's "unions" are often professional organizations with no power to bargain on behalf of their members; i.e., they're not unions at all. Circumstances at your location may vary.
As a general rule, teachers hate the theorybabble that comes out of college education programs, and they resist top-down mandates for trendy methodology. New faculty at most schools spend their first several years having everything they learned as Education majors beaten out of them by the other teachers, the students and the administration.
Ask experienced teachers what they think of "chicken in every pot" proposals, and you'll get an earful. They've seen it all before in the promise of educational TV, comprehensive national programs, revised textbooks, etc., and they're no less skeptical when the panacea comes in the form of a shiny new laptop. Prepackaged courseware is not a product of the computer age.
It's funny that everyone seems to agree on how to improve the public schools: raise teacher pay, recruit and retain teachers with strong fundamentals, reduce administrative costs and return to basics. Teachers want all these things. Parents want all these things. Hell, the kids want all these things. Why can't we implement them?
And it's a strong argument against off-the-shelf solutions... these machines need to be configurable for learning-specific needs, both in large batches by the instructors, and individually by the students.
The attraction of off-the-shelf closed solutions is enforced standarization. As a teacher who's had the (relatively) minor frustration of running a literature class in which not all students had the same edition of the textbook, I shudder at the thought of facing thirty bright-eyed adolescents with fully-functional laptops.
"Teacher, I dumped MS Word and installed Word Perfect, so I can't follow your example."
"Teacher, I installed Linux on mine last night. Is there an open-source clone of the program we're supposed to be using?"
Whenever I hear someone waxing rhapsodic about classroom use of computers, I know that person's not a teacher, and likely has never been.
I am, and every day I see my university's mania for "computer-assisted learning" further marginalizing and alienating the weaker students.
Oh, sure, some students thrive in a computer-intensive environment, but they're the students who would succeed in a traditional classroom as well. I read their essays, respond to their homework, and see no differences between the work they do with computers and the work they do with pencil and paper.
The weaker students, however, find computers to be just one more hurdle to jump in an educational system that already puts too many barriers in their path.
We hear the education gurus talking oh-so-seriously about "breaking the credit for contact model of education," yet anyone who's ever taught real students knows that the bottom third of any class needs contact with a living, breathing human being who can explain material to them, sometimes repeatedly. The educationists claim that students are becoming "more connected" with their teachers through the use of e-mail, web boards, chat, and other online tools, yet students complain perennially about their frustrated desires for more face-to-face contact with their instructors. Sure, the best students often want to be left alone while they work, contacting teachers and advisors only occasionally, but guess what? The best students aren't the only ones.
I've seen this in action numerous times. I've been participating in a pilot project at my university to introduce the use of computers into first-year writing courses. The best students take off and fly in the new environment, and of course these are the students chosen to pose for publicitiy photos with beaming administrators and "instructional designers." Careful comparisons of their work to that of comparable students from previous semesters, however, reveals no qualitative difference--they're doing the same work they'd be doing without the expensive hardware and networked classrooms.
The weaker students are a different story. In their exit surveys they pine woefully for simpler tools, less time spent on technology instruction, more emphasis on traditional methods and less on what's trendy. Ironically, these are the students who, according to the gurus, are supposed to benefit from the new environment. The oppressive "sage on the stage" model of education, we're told, is the primary cause of poor student performance, and new "modes" are required to reach "at risk" students. Oddly, every time we try something new in the classroom, overall student performance declines until we return to traditional models.
The elitism of the computerized classroom aside, logistical problems create nightmares for teachers and students alike. Any class predicated on interaction between students can be disrupted by a single student who didn't prepare, didn't read the assignment, didn't bring materials to class. How much worse does this get when students not only have to manage themselves, but complicated computer equipment as well?
Who here has worked tech support? You were dealing primarily with adults, right? How do you think you'd respond if asked to administer a couple of hundred laptops with customized software, each in the hands of a teenager or pre-teen who may or may not know anything at all about computers? Now, throw in a few dozen faculty, all of whom also may know nothing about computers but who can't afford to lose face in front of the students. Add a handful of young hackers who are going to try to compromise computer and network security just for the sheer thrill of it. Post your reaction as replies to this message, if you will; I'd really like to show a few of them to my bosses.
Please, those of you who are still enthusiastic about proposals to equip students with laptops, go visit a middle school and sit through a couple of classes. Teachers are frustrated enough when class is disrupted for ill-prepared pupils, endless assemblies and announcements, pointless "activities," and the like. Now, they have to put up with "Teacher, my laptop crashed!" as well?
For an interesting if somewhat reactionary take on the subject, read David F. Noble's Digital Diploma Mills. Noble's main target is trendy educational theory at universities, but his basic message applies equally well to primary education.
(1) Plain-vanilla: rapidly dump (and continue dumping) a lot of random-noise content into Freenet from multiple launch points (DDOS).
Sure, this works, but only to the extent that people are willing to continue doing it indefinitely. Who's going to maintain the access points to keep flooding Freenet day-in and day-out? Who's going to go to all the trouble to find all the Freenet nodes and keep dinging them with bogus requests?
Freenet needs some sort of mechanism for blocking requests from hosts (and perhaps even entire domains) that keep pulling the same keys over and over. I believe they're working on that.
(2) Targeted: let's say there is a Freenet file, e.g. '/us/politics/ClintonBlowsGoats' that you want to suppress. Just make your own file with the same net
Aren't the keys hashed from the actual data in the file? It was my understanding that keys are unique, and so simple name substitution won't be an effective attack.
The Freenet site expresses some doubts about whether it's desirable (or even technically feasible) for Freenet to be easily searchable by document title or keyword. That's just not how it works.
The keys will be distributed through non-Freenet channels, in much the same way as people distribute PGP keys now: as e-mail and news.sigs, on WWW sites, etc. No one will request the bogus "ClintonBlowsGoats" file, because they'll be looking for it based on a key passed to them by a trusted source.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. People thought Steve Jobs had finally achieved his dream of a "slotless, fanless" computer with the iMac, and now this.
Um, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but to my knowledge the next-gen nVidia hardware that's going to be in the X-Box hasn't even seen first silicon yet. The final product is (at least) a year off.
So how in fsck are they producing demos from a hardware platform that doesn't exist yet?
Many fast processors on the market = incentive for processor designers to push the envelope to be competitive.
Everyone, not just Mac and PPC users, should be happy at this announcement. Even if it makes Macs so crazy-fast they go back in time, can you imagine how good the eventual competitor from the x86 community is going to be?
Speed good. Choice good.
Apparently, cell phone designers think I'm not in enough danger from people zipping around at 75mph with phones glued to their heads.
Now, the same guy who's driving into ditches whenever his phone rings is going to have the additional distraction of peering at a tiny LCD to see what track he's listening to.
What's next? MP3 handguns?
"Giving away computers to teach people about computer literacy is like giving teenagers pornography to teach them about sex."
-- Andrei Codrescu
Intel giving its employees computers I can understand, but Ford? What exactly is Joe Autoworker going to do with a shiny new PC if he doesn't have one already?
While I love the idea of computer-as-perk, this is clearly a ploy by management to further encroach upon employees' private time. They're already expected to work extra shifts when called, attend company events, etc., and now they're going to be accessible to the Boss 24-7.
The suits must be laughing their heads off. They've extended the corporate workplace into employees very homes, and the media is lauding them for their generosity!
Did you stay home sick today? Don't worry; you can still work on the nice shiny PC your employer thoughtfully provided you.
Are you sometimes away from home when the boss calls? Check your e-mail when you get back, or you're fired.
Don't have access to an on-site application from home? You soon will, and your boss will be logging your hours. Don't forget; promotions go to "team players"!
How do you keep fingerprint readers clean?
Thought Experiment #1: How many of you have ever spent a significant amount of time in a public computer lab? (counts hands) OK, everybody. Now, recall the last time you looked at a screen that had been used by the general public for more than a couple of hours. Caked with fingerprints, wannit?--and that's a part of the computer people aren't supposed to touch. I don't even want to get into what public keyboards look like.
Thought experiment #2: How many of you have ever looked at the walls above the urinals in a public men's restroom? (counts hands) OK, all of the men, and a surprising number of the women. They've often got snot, hair and...other things on them, usually at eye level.
Now, imagine what your bank's cash machine is going to look like after a day's worth of customers have plastered their nose wiping, Big Mac eating, butt scratching hands all over a single teensy-weensy little square of glass.
Maybe you carry moist towelettes everywhere you go, but I don't. The very idea of putting my hands on something that's been touched by hundreds, perhaps thousands of people since its last cleaning is enough to make me pause.
Isn't there a technical issue here too, in that dirty readers aren't going to function correctly?
"You are cordially invited to the marriage of frilly, fru-fru industrial design and the suave sophistication of an impenetrable user interface.
"You'll be the first on your block to have a computer no one wants to look at *or* use."
Every BSD iMac will come with a pocket protector and a black beret.
At first blush it would seem that some smallish country with a stable (not necessarily legitimate) government could make a killing at this.
A longer view might suggest that any such country isn't likely to have the communications infrastructure necessary to make a Web haven work.
For all Neal Stephenson's merits, the idea in _Cryptonomicon_ of a data haven is a huge stretch. Let's see, all we need is an independent country, geographically close enough to the U.S. to make business trips feasible, and ruled by an autocrat with lots of money and a technology fetish. That'll work.
...to notice how hilarious it is for a color palette screwup to have been noticed by Jason CLUTs?
Maybe it is, but it doesn't have to be. I haven't signed any agreements to look at specific content on the Web.
Yep. Note what these sites have in common: a revenue stream not dependent on advertising. Whether the funding is coming from the owner's pocket (hobby sites), an organizational budget (charity sites) or from profits generated from the site's content or product (pay and retail sites), there's no need for advertising.
The Web is not television, nor is it print. The advertising methods that work in those media cannot work on the Web, at least not indefinitely. As others on this thread have observed, there are already products that block images; we're just waiting for the one "killer app" implementation that will catch on with the average surfer.
When that happens, sites that rely on banner ads will have to change their revenue model or die.
No.
Inalienable rights are for people. Microsoft is not a person.
Micrsoft is a corporate entity which exists only through the auspices of government. There is no natural right to form a stockholder-owned, limited-liability entity.
Microsoft exists because the people, through their government, have found it beneficial to allow certain legal rights to corporate entities. These rights are not preexisting, not inalienable, and subject to revocation if the conditions upon which they were granted are violated.
There's no way on Earth the band, its attorneys, its management or its record company is going to take over 300,000 defendants to court over minor copyright violations. Napster knows this, Metallica knows this, and I think Katz knows this.
What Metallica's lawyers are doing is choking Napster with its own policies. Napster's membership agreement allows Napster to pull any account for IP violations, among other things. Napster has also publicly stated its policy of banning the accounts of users demonstrated to be sharing copyrighted material illegally.
So, Metallica has called Napster's bluff. Napster never expected to be handed such a huge pile of complaints, and has neither a mechanism nor the resources to process them.
Napster shouldn't have promised what it couldn't deliver. Now, other artists and their labels will follow Metallica's lead, dropping ton after ton of complaints on Napster and watching the company strangle on the red tape of its own policy.
Ironically, if Napster had played the "common carrier" game--disavowing all responsibility for content transmitted over its service--it might be on better legal footing. By promising diligently to ban the accounts of violators, it's attracted the very legal actions it sought to avoid.
Mitnick's latest misadventure is just the opening shot on a new front in the Feds' war on your civil and human rights.
Prosecutors and judges have long employed parole as a means of disposing of inconvenient or troublesome individuals. The public generally sees parole as a "slap on the wrist," when in fact it allows the government to impose pretty much any arbitrary infringment on a convicted person's civil rights. Parole boards often don't have to answer to the courts, and are given broad discretion in determining which behaviors violate the terms of a given person's parole.
So, the Feds don't like Mitnick making money as a speaker? Suddenly the parole board determines that talking about his crime is a violation of his parole, and PRESTO! his First Amendment rights vanish. He'll have to spend thousands of dollars--which the terms of his parole conveniently insure he won't have--just to get a hearing, and final resolution of the matter might take the remainder of his parole term.
From now on, all the Feds have to do to silence you is trump up a few charges, threaten you with prison if you're convicted and huge legal bills regardless, and "allow" you to sign a plea agreement that gives them de facto authority to disregard your civil rights at will.
Expect to see parole terms greatly lengthened in the future, with 20 years or even lifetime parole instead of (or in addition to!) jail sentences.
Remember, this is the same federal government that used to spend $600 for toilet seats.
Sure, those laptops cost $3000, but they're 25Mhz 386s with monochrome screens and 4mb of RAM.
Do this! Do this!
I've had a TiVO for about a year now, and I barely can stand to watch TV without the ability to pause and rewind. A car radio with this functionality would be perfect, especially with voice control.... "Computer, back up 30 seconds."
Heck, yes, I'll buy something like this as soon as it hits the market, provided it works as described.
USD$600? A little steep, for sure, but not unreasonable given the feature set.
Now, remove the voice activation, or decrease the capacity, and I'm out.
The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again! The hardcore marketers are going to do whatever is necessary to get the information they want, COPPA or no COPPA. I expect corporations that market to kids to create some kind of "kid-safe" umbrella database for all their sites. Parents will only have to provide permission once for, say, all of Microsoft's or Proctor and Gamble's kid sites. The corps in turn will have a far easier time disseminating their user data among different divisions and subsidiaries, as there will be no duplicate or ambigious entries to resolve across multiple databases. It will be the legitimate sites that parents might actually want their kids to visit that will simply ban anyone under the COPPA limit. Why make trouble for yourself by accepting kids when you don't have to? Thus, kids get screwed, and marketers get what they want throught different channels. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.... Now, the really funny part will come when some soccer mom sues a company for age discrimination on behalf of little Snotleigh, who can't download free unicorn pictures from the Web anymore. What's the sponsor or owner of the site supposed to do then?
Remove "and teachers unions" from the paragraph above, and I'll say "Mod this up!"
Teacher's "unions" are often professional organizations with no power to bargain on behalf of their members; i.e., they're not unions at all. Circumstances at your location may vary.
As a general rule, teachers hate the theorybabble that comes out of college education programs, and they resist top-down mandates for trendy methodology. New faculty at most schools spend their first several years having everything they learned as Education majors beaten out of them by the other teachers, the students and the administration.
Ask experienced teachers what they think of "chicken in every pot" proposals, and you'll get an earful. They've seen it all before in the promise of educational TV, comprehensive national programs, revised textbooks, etc., and they're no less skeptical when the panacea comes in the form of a shiny new laptop. Prepackaged courseware is not a product of the computer age.
It's funny that everyone seems to agree on how to improve the public schools: raise teacher pay, recruit and retain teachers with strong fundamentals, reduce administrative costs and return to basics. Teachers want all these things. Parents want all these things. Hell, the kids want all these things. Why can't we implement them?
The attraction of off-the-shelf closed solutions is enforced standarization. As a teacher who's had the (relatively) minor frustration of running a literature class in which not all students had the same edition of the textbook, I shudder at the thought of facing thirty bright-eyed adolescents with fully-functional laptops.
"Teacher, I dumped MS Word and installed Word Perfect, so I can't follow your example."
"Teacher, I installed Linux on mine last night. Is there an open-source clone of the program we're supposed to be using?"
"Teacher, I wiped out my hard drive...."
shudder
I am, and every day I see my university's mania for "computer-assisted learning" further marginalizing and alienating the weaker students.
Oh, sure, some students thrive in a computer-intensive environment, but they're the students who would succeed in a traditional classroom as well. I read their essays, respond to their homework, and see no differences between the work they do with computers and the work they do with pencil and paper.
The weaker students, however, find computers to be just one more hurdle to jump in an educational system that already puts too many barriers in their path.
We hear the education gurus talking oh-so-seriously about "breaking the credit for contact model of education," yet anyone who's ever taught real students knows that the bottom third of any class needs contact with a living, breathing human being who can explain material to them, sometimes repeatedly. The educationists claim that students are becoming "more connected" with their teachers through the use of e-mail, web boards, chat, and other online tools, yet students complain perennially about their frustrated desires for more face-to-face contact with their instructors. Sure, the best students often want to be left alone while they work, contacting teachers and advisors only occasionally, but guess what? The best students aren't the only ones.
I've seen this in action numerous times. I've been participating in a pilot project at my university to introduce the use of computers into first-year writing courses. The best students take off and fly in the new environment, and of course these are the students chosen to pose for publicitiy photos with beaming administrators and "instructional designers." Careful comparisons of their work to that of comparable students from previous semesters, however, reveals no qualitative difference--they're doing the same work they'd be doing without the expensive hardware and networked classrooms.
The weaker students are a different story. In their exit surveys they pine woefully for simpler tools, less time spent on technology instruction, more emphasis on traditional methods and less on what's trendy. Ironically, these are the students who, according to the gurus, are supposed to benefit from the new environment. The oppressive "sage on the stage" model of education, we're told, is the primary cause of poor student performance, and new "modes" are required to reach "at risk" students. Oddly, every time we try something new in the classroom, overall student performance declines until we return to traditional models.
The elitism of the computerized classroom aside, logistical problems create nightmares for teachers and students alike. Any class predicated on interaction between students can be disrupted by a single student who didn't prepare, didn't read the assignment, didn't bring materials to class. How much worse does this get when students not only have to manage themselves, but complicated computer equipment as well?
Who here has worked tech support? You were dealing primarily with adults, right? How do you think you'd respond if asked to administer a couple of hundred laptops with customized software, each in the hands of a teenager or pre-teen who may or may not know anything at all about computers? Now, throw in a few dozen faculty, all of whom also may know nothing about computers but who can't afford to lose face in front of the students. Add a handful of young hackers who are going to try to compromise computer and network security just for the sheer thrill of it. Post your reaction as replies to this message, if you will; I'd really like to show a few of them to my bosses.
Please, those of you who are still enthusiastic about proposals to equip students with laptops, go visit a middle school and sit through a couple of classes. Teachers are frustrated enough when class is disrupted for ill-prepared pupils, endless assemblies and announcements, pointless "activities," and the like. Now, they have to put up with "Teacher, my laptop crashed!" as well?
For an interesting if somewhat reactionary take on the subject, read David F. Noble's Digital Diploma Mills. Noble's main target is trendy educational theory at universities, but his basic message applies equally well to primary education.
Sure, this works, but only to the extent that people are willing to continue doing it indefinitely. Who's going to maintain the access points to keep flooding Freenet day-in and day-out? Who's going to go to all the trouble to find all the Freenet nodes and keep dinging them with bogus requests?
Freenet needs some sort of mechanism for blocking requests from hosts (and perhaps even entire domains) that keep pulling the same keys over and over. I believe they're working on that.
(2) Targeted: let's say there is a Freenet file, e.g. '/us/politics/ClintonBlowsGoats' that you want to suppress. Just make your own file with the same net
Aren't the keys hashed from the actual data in the file? It was my understanding that keys are unique, and so simple name substitution won't be an effective attack.
The Freenet site expresses some doubts about whether it's desirable (or even technically feasible) for Freenet to be easily searchable by document title or keyword. That's just not how it works.
The keys will be distributed through non-Freenet channels, in much the same way as people distribute PGP keys now: as e-mail and news .sigs, on WWW sites, etc. No one will request the bogus "ClintonBlowsGoats" file, because they'll be looking for it based on a key passed to them by a trusted source.