Who said he was interested in improving e-book security? He was interested in enabling Russian consumers to exercise their LEGAL RIGHTS. In Russia it is explicitly legal to copy a work from one medium to another for personal use. In fact, it's even legal in this country, according to Senator Orrin Hatch. In a hearing on the DMCA, he observed:
''Can I make a copy of a CD that I buy and put it into a car?'' asked Hatch. When Rosen hemmed and hawed, Hatch muttered, ''The answer is yes.''
(http://gareth.membrane.com/leflawnet/hatch.html )
The DMCA contravenes and abrogates classical legal rights of citizens in the USA and around the world. Ironically, Adobe's e-book format illegally impedes the rights of Russian consumers according to Russian law. I'd love to see the outrage if Russia kidnapped some American executives and programmers to hold them trial for violating Russian laws protecting freedom of information.
I'm dismayed by this situation too. Even bright CS-oriented people frequently have no understanding of algorithms, systems, applied mathematics and the like. Do they teach math classes in computer science programs today? I've noticed that qualified physicists and engineers are aggressively courted for many positions where these skills are needed.
Furthermore, the decreasing price of hardware and proliferation of squishy languages has enabled a depressing decline in the analysis of problems and elegance of solutions. For example, the java generation seems to use hash tables for everything, even when simple arrays would be ideal. These are not the same software engineers who launched Voyager into interstellar space.
"Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation -- hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter."
From "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL" by Ed Post
AFS looks very cool. I've looked around at the FAQ and done some searching but I haven't been able to determine whether it supports SSL for transporting the raw data. However, I have observed that it supports secure authentication. Does AFS provide the capability to encrypt all data traffic with SSL? If not, might we have some luck including that feature now that the package has been open-sourced?
You should read about approval voting. It's a lot less complicated and achieves the same end (I think) you're trying to achieve. Other posters have covered this in more detail so I won't repeat here. Preference voting has its adherents too, but I don't think it buys you that much more for the added complexity. Specifics aside, our current system is rotten unless you like the major party duopoly.
Assuming that you have a decent internet connection, you could encourage students to use one of the many online storage services. idrive.com has a university partnership program and is fairly easy to use for AOL-level users.
ZIP drives are certainly comparable to floppies, in that they are slow, unreasonably expensive, offer low capacity, and most importantly, they're totally unreliable. I wouldn't trust valuable data to a ZIP disk for fifteen minutes. This is not meant as a troll; I'm just trying to make a point that ZIP disks are a poor solution to any fathomable problem.
CD-RW drives are selling for under $100 these days, and CD-R / CD-RW discs are under 50 cents. That's a lot cheaper than my first floppy drive and floppy disks, respectively. Try installing cheap CD recorders in each computer, along with a UDF tool like DirectCD. I'd wager that recordable CDs will provide better data integrity, lifetime and (undoubtedly) value than floppies. (I rarely get three uses from a floppy before it goes bad.)
DARE is to drug education what Microsoft is to software. If anything, I'm being unfair to Microsoft. Though I am not a drug advocate*, I believe that a propaganda campaign based on half- truths, factual distortions and authoritarian intimidation is bound to produce unintended consequences. Every reputable study I have seen has borne out my intuition.
I believe that we have a responsibility to educate children about drugs, but that's not the real mission of DARE.
* However, I am adamantly opposed to the drug war, as it is completely illogical and immoral.
The next time you're planning the pyrotechnic show for a building demolition, think about LaserMAME and MAJOR HAVOC! How cool would that be? Play MAJOR HAVOC on the side of a building in 1:1 scale; when the reactor is triggered on level 13 and the little guy escapes in his space ship, the whole building blows up!
You have to admit, MAJOR HAVOC was about the coolest vector game ever, and there could be no more fitting and lifelike way to play it than on the side of a six story building (especially in conjunction with implosive demolition, but be sure to get permission from your parents and/or the building owner.)
My @Home service was a headache from the day I ordered it until the day it was disconnected. Following the physical installation, it took six weeks and tens of long, frustrating phone calls to get the cable modem enabled. It suffered frequent, lengthy service outages. They silently instituted the hated 128k upload filter after a few months of barely adequate service. Finally, they shut off my modem a day earlier than I requested and discarded the unread contents of my mailbox. I had been planning to transfer my @home mailbox to another @home account (@home service supposedly comes with up to five mailboxes) but they wouldn't cooperate to permit this. Definitely the worst ISP I've ever used, despite the fact that I was a Netcom customer at one time.
I'm always impressed with any computer of the future utilizing holographic memory. "You see, it's 3-dimensional, which means you can store ONE TERABYTE of information. That's 1000 times as big as... that old hard drive you bought in 1993!"
Holographic digital storage is right around the corner, along with antigravity, fusion power and warp drive.
Don't hold your breath for holographic digital storage. I spent 4 1/2 years doing holographic digital storage R&D for a large defense contractor and it was basically a waste of time. Imagine a $250,000 system offering a few hundred KB of write-once storage that degrades with each access, physical access times on the order of a second, and best-case data throughput on the order of 1 MB/sec. Or spend one thousandth of that amount for a reliable hard drive with R/W capability, 10 msec latency, and throughputs on the order of 40 MB/sec today. I'll stick with hard drives until the next best thing comes along, and it won't be based on holography.
Perhaps they've fixed this in the last few months, but I doubt it. They never responded and I don't use Eudora any more so I can't say. However, the last time I checked, HTML-mail from Outlook was sent without any terminating CR following the trailing/HTML tag. However, Eudora was too stupid to add its own CR, so the "From " separator at the beginning of the next message was APPENDED TO THE PRECEDING LINE! I had a suspicion that mail was leaking out my mailbox until I opened it in a text editor and discovered the problem. Their tech support never acknowledged the problem and presumably never fixed it. Don't use Eudora if you care about archiving your mail.
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Who said he was interested in improving e-book security? He was interested in enabling Russian consumers to exercise their LEGAL RIGHTS. In Russia it is explicitly legal to copy a work from one medium to another for personal use. In fact, it's even legal in this country, according to Senator Orrin Hatch. In a hearing on the DMCA, he observed:
l )
''Can I make a copy of a CD that I buy and put it into a car?'' asked Hatch. When Rosen hemmed and hawed, Hatch muttered, ''The answer is yes.''
(http://gareth.membrane.com/leflawnet/hatch.htm
The DMCA contravenes and abrogates classical legal rights of citizens in the USA and around the world. Ironically, Adobe's e-book format illegally impedes the rights of Russian consumers according to Russian law. I'd love to see the outrage if Russia kidnapped some American executives and programmers to hold them trial for violating Russian laws protecting freedom of information.
Awesome! So now that California's electrical infrastructure is collapsing, are they going to start offering backup power via dial-up? (j/k)
I'm dismayed by this situation too. Even bright CS-oriented people frequently have no understanding of algorithms, systems, applied mathematics and the like. Do they teach math classes in computer science programs today? I've noticed that qualified physicists and engineers are aggressively courted for many positions where these skills are needed.
Furthermore, the decreasing price of hardware and proliferation of squishy languages has enabled a depressing decline in the analysis of problems and elegance of solutions. For example, the java generation seems to use hash tables for everything, even when simple arrays would be ideal. These are not the same software engineers who launched Voyager into interstellar space.
"Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation -- hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter."
From "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL" by Ed Post
AFS looks very cool. I've looked around at the FAQ and done some searching but I haven't been able to determine whether it supports SSL for transporting the raw data. However, I have observed that it supports secure authentication. Does AFS provide the capability to encrypt all data traffic with SSL? If not, might we have some luck including that feature now that the package has been open-sourced?
You should read about approval voting. It's a lot less complicated and achieves the same end (I think) you're trying to achieve. Other posters have covered this in more detail so I won't repeat here. Preference voting has its adherents too, but I don't think it buys you that much more for the added complexity. Specifics aside, our current system is rotten unless you like the major party duopoly.
Assuming that you have a decent internet connection, you could encourage students to use one of the many online storage services. idrive.com has a university partnership program and is fairly easy to use for AOL-level users.
ZIP drives are certainly comparable to floppies, in that they are slow, unreasonably expensive, offer low capacity, and most importantly, they're totally unreliable. I wouldn't trust valuable data to a ZIP disk for fifteen minutes. This is not meant as a troll; I'm just trying to make a point that ZIP disks are a poor solution to any fathomable problem.
CD-RW drives are selling for under $100 these days, and CD-R / CD-RW discs are under 50 cents. That's a lot cheaper than my first floppy drive and floppy disks, respectively. Try installing cheap CD recorders in each computer, along with a UDF tool like DirectCD. I'd wager that recordable CDs will provide better data integrity, lifetime and (undoubtedly) value than floppies. (I rarely get three uses from a floppy before it goes bad.)
DARE is to drug education what Microsoft is to software. If anything, I'm being unfair to Microsoft. Though I am not a drug advocate*, I believe that a propaganda campaign based on half- truths, factual distortions and authoritarian intimidation is bound to produce unintended consequences. Every reputable study I have seen has borne out my intuition.
I believe that we have a responsibility to educate children about drugs, but that's not the real mission of DARE.
* However, I am adamantly opposed to the drug war, as it is completely illogical and immoral.
The next time you're planning the pyrotechnic show for a building demolition, think about LaserMAME and MAJOR HAVOC! How cool would that be? Play MAJOR HAVOC on the side of a building in 1:1 scale; when the reactor is triggered on level 13 and the little guy escapes in his space ship, the whole building blows up! You have to admit, MAJOR HAVOC was about the coolest vector game ever, and there could be no more fitting and lifelike way to play it than on the side of a six story building (especially in conjunction with implosive demolition, but be sure to get permission from your parents and/or the building owner.)
My @Home service was a headache from the day I ordered it until the day it was disconnected. Following the physical installation, it took six weeks and tens of long, frustrating phone calls to get the cable modem enabled. It suffered frequent, lengthy service outages. They silently instituted the hated 128k upload filter after a few months of barely adequate service. Finally, they shut off my modem a day earlier than I requested and discarded the unread contents of my mailbox. I had been planning to transfer my @home mailbox to another @home account (@home service supposedly comes with up to five mailboxes) but they wouldn't cooperate to permit this. Definitely the worst ISP I've ever used, despite the fact that I was a Netcom customer at one time.
I'm always impressed with any computer of the future utilizing holographic memory. "You see, it's 3-dimensional, which means you can store ONE TERABYTE of information. That's 1000 times as big as ... that old hard drive you bought in 1993!"
Holographic digital storage is right around the corner, along with antigravity, fusion power and warp drive.
Don't hold your breath for holographic digital storage. I spent 4 1/2 years doing holographic digital storage R&D for a large defense contractor and it was basically a waste of time. Imagine a $250,000 system offering a few hundred KB of write-once storage that degrades with each access, physical access times on the order of a second, and best-case data throughput on the order of 1 MB/sec. Or spend one thousandth of that amount for a reliable hard drive with R/W capability, 10 msec latency, and throughputs on the order of 40 MB/sec today. I'll stick with hard drives until the next best thing comes along, and it won't be based on holography.
I wish I had some moderation points. That was pretty funny.
Perhaps they've fixed this in the last few months, but I doubt it. They never responded and I don't use Eudora any more so I can't say. However, the last time I checked, HTML-mail from Outlook was sent without any terminating CR following the trailing /HTML tag. However, Eudora was too stupid to add its own CR, so the "From " separator at the beginning of the next message was APPENDED TO THE PRECEDING LINE! I had a suspicion that mail was leaking out my mailbox until I opened it in a text editor and discovered the problem. Their tech support never acknowledged the problem and presumably never fixed it. Don't use Eudora if you care about archiving your mail.