Nowdays it is too easy to goof off on computers rather than use them for educational purposes. In fact, it seems that current 'educational software' is mostly a bunch of cartoon chrud with a little bit of math etc. here and there.
An elementary school math tutor for the kids who were behind asked me to make a math tutor computer program that wasn't cartoony etc. Getting exact details on what she wanted was like pulling teeth, but in the end we wound up with a piece of software that was kid-friendly (meaning easy for them to control, some kids have coordination issues when it comes to moving mice) and actually helped improve their math abilities.
One thing that I am quite proud to have worked with is the AR Program (Accelerated Reader). The concept is to have point values and difficulty values for most of the books in the library. Kids check out whatever books they want (they are strongly encouraged to use books of an appropriate difficulty level) and can take computerized quizzes on them. The kids can trade in points they earn for candy and small, cheap toys. It actually works! I would have imagined that the kids would have gotten tired of it quickly, but the teachers take it seriously and the majority of the books in the school library have AR quizes available.
I have volunteered in several elementary schools, but in the one where they emphasized this AR program I regularly saw kids leaving the library with books and actually eager to read them. That is a very big thing; getting kids modivated to learn/read is one of the biggest problems in educational. This computer software is not advanced; it could be made to work on an AppleIIGS, but the fact that it is actually getting kids to read (and to like it!) is profound.
Well, I dont think that either side truely 'won' their arguments. However, I say the government guy scored alot fewer points than our guy. The gov guy's arguments took much bigger hits; the justices saw some pretty big problems there.
That is possibly why the guy in australia got off. Their gov was doing an 'investigation' to decide whether sony was guilty of price fixing. Which they are; the whole idea is that people in different regions are willing/able to pay different amounts for a produce. They want their prices for each region to be as high as possible, without going over that region's consumer price limit.
"Yep, you're wrong here. You can still use Palladium capable machines to run arbitrary code. Palladium enables software to require restrictions management to be enabled, and specify the restrictions; It doesn't enforce anything that the running software doesn't ask it to. If you don't put Palladium support in the software you run then Palladium has no effect on your code."
If that were true then you can open the executable in a hex editor, change the security checks into noop and your former security restriciton requiring program no longer requires security restriction. That is the same trick used on alot of 0-day warez. Imagine hacked palladium programs being on the net before the OS is officially available.:P
A more interesting then MS could do is encript the executable itself. Then a non-DRM-activated cpu couldn't even read the instructions. That would make things harder, until the encryption is figured out. This wouldn't be like the CPS2 though; palladium systems will be more available to hackers than a CPS2 was, and there will be more incentive to break the encryption. People will mess with the hardware to break the encryption just like they ultimately did with the CPS2.
So now Atari becomes a major force in the software world by being the first to prior art that is key to the functioning of the Palladium OS.:P
You know, it would be odd if there was a company that actually did stuff like this. Go get patents to things people already made in the past. The company does the patent office paperwork for the one that origionally made the 'prior art' through an agreement that lets them instantly buy the patent upon its creation. The patent then can be used against whoever and charge royalties.
Or you could also do the esnipe thingn like the guy in the article did.
"This is of course providing that it's genuinely non-obvious (which this probably isn't) and that there is no prior art, which there may be in the land of console gaming."
It is in the latest issue. It says 'reverse engineering under siege,' It doesn't attempt to predict who will win the legal matters, but explains what the threat is and how it will cause extreme harm to the tech industry if reverse engineering is taken away. Most slashdotters probably know most of that, but it is an interesting read.
Midochondrial DNA has an extremely low mutation rate. I believe that as a result their geneic diversity is pretty small. The differences between your midochondria and mine would be slight.
Yeah, so you have better hardware on your PC than your console. Too bad you still don't have a game that fully takes advantage of 3d cards from a few years ago.
Doom 3 is proably the best game graphically you can get (or will be able to get). Want to know what hardware it is made for? It isn't your newest Geforce card... the engine was designed around the Geforce2. Or do you read the stuff Carmak puts out?
If you have a file that will only work if authorized from a server, couldn't a packet sniffer get the info the server is passing? Then you simulate the server interaction whenever you want to use the file.
This would probably require a seperate computer pretending to be the server on the internet, but shouldn't that work?
Read the bottom of page 18 and the top of 19. "[T]he question is not what a device could have been made to do, but what it was intended to do and what it did do." I wonder if this will help a big in the RIAA mess. It would be a little bit of a stretch, but lawyers are supposed to be good at such things.
And they just don't learn - or do they?
on
CD Copy Stopper
·
· Score: 2
There is nothing magical here that is truely different from any other scheme. I read how this thing is designed, it will work off any standard cd drive. Which means that you can still 'rip' an image of the darn thing. You can try to figure out what a 'legitimate' code is and then just copy the data, or you can let whatever program that they consider 'legitimate' to run properly, but with a custom debugger grabbing the info as the program gets it. Heck, you can make a microcontroller that logs all communication going through the ide pins! Since both standard cd drives and computer ram can be read and hacked, there is no way this will work any better than any other half baked scheme.
With one exception. Those countermeasures I mentioned above probably won't work on Microsoft's new oh-so-secure upcoming OS (which shields ram and devices from such attacks, supposedly).
Yeah, I could see us using a suicide bomer humming bird in the middle east. So a bunch of guys are standing around with their big guns, then this bird comes out of nowhere and explodes in their faces. Yeah, it probably wouldn't kill anyone, but it sure would freak them out!
A couple minutes later, a flock flies towards them...
Alrighty. I thought you mean that this bill would directly lead to that. Which I don't think it does.
However, I do think the CBDTPA would directly lead to that. I presented a speech at my local U. about that. I think the CBDTPA is more about their trying to create a closed multimedia machine and having the computer industry pay the tab, but that is a seperate rant.:>
What this bill brings to mind to me is distribution control. Basically the big 5 in the modern music industry exists only because they control distribution. The net can allow artists to do their own advertising and distribution, completely eliminating them. People could buy the mp3s online and burn a cd without even stepping in a store. Yeah, you will still have to buy a burner + blank cds, but the music publishers don't sell those.:P
I totally agree with you about how to interpret laws.
'Demand narrowly defined laws.' I know what you mean, but it isn't going to happen. Politicians take pride in our flexable (by virtue of being broad) Constitution. Also, much of American politics is based in tradition (which is why legal documents still use 'old style' wording, and how certain aspects of Congress are handled). To demand narrow laws in the US would be to tradition and the Constitution bad things. That probably won't fly too well.
What really bugs me is how they are trying to sneek things in. If things are truely getting well debated and are visible to the public, things like this wouldn't get through so easily. But maybe this is just a fad. A previous trick that they used to do alot was to pass a highly publicised bill that supposedly do something that the people wanted (but that they didn't really care for) and intentionally leave key words undefined. That would render the law useless, and unenforcable or to be struck by theh courts outright. Look at the history of food industry regulation as an example. Alot of their laws were bs and never enforced for the above reason.
Things do get scarier, but normal people aren't aware of it. If you go to law school you get to learn all about blatant mafa involvement, for example. It looks like The People never will truely control the legislative process.
I looked through the bill, and it doesn't say anything like that. You can watermark music by your own band. Someone made that up. It only is against people who are breaking copyrights.
That kind of bs hurts us. When we use messed up info to try to counter goofy DRM bills, we just make ourselves look like idiots. Just look at the environmentalists; they have been giving exagerated reports etc. so much that most people don't listen even though they have a good point. We would not like to share that fate.
Yes, doctors do have egos. They also study for the rest of their lives. You can't legally be a doctor in the US without taking classes etc. each year. While there are some doctors who try avoiding learning anything new, most want to keep up with the latest and greatest research... kind of like how computer nerds like to keep up with the latest and greatest in computer science.
The biggest problem with this database idea is that using it takes time. In the US, there are more patients than doctors can handle. Using this database on each patient takes up more of their time, which means that the can see fewer patients per day, which means you have to wait longer before being seen by a doctor when you need medical attention. Something like this should be used by nursing staff, not the actual doctors. Even then, the nurses are also pressed for time.
The second biggest problem is keeping the thing up to date. Such a database would be vast and rapidly changing. I am sure you grossly underestimate what this undertaking is.
So don't post wierdness when you don't even know what the issues are!
Medical science is evolving very quickly. One big problem is that by the time something is published, some of the information is already outdated. Medical textbooks are revised numerous times before they reach students' hands.
Alot of doctors would love to have a high quality database. Yet in the US, doctors are very strapped for time. They often are cramming as many patients into their schedule as possible. They have the conflict of wanting to help as many people as possible vs giving quality care (doctors are often compulsive, so wanting to work less to have a life isn't as big a deal for them as you might think). My point is that if they use this database on each patient, it will mean that they see fewer patients per day. That would definitely be a 'bad thing.'
The limit here was in politics, not technology. NASA is big enough that is has it's own politics (I am not going to propose/support X because if it fails I don't get position Y), plus having to deal with outside politics (if X fails your funding goes down to Y).
This is why I suspect that truely commercial/private ventures will be the ones that give us a significant presence in space. Such organization don't have to worry about outside politics for funding, and their internal politics reward taking a risk and achieving something.
I still have my hopes up for www.armadilloaerospace.com It is still relatively primative, but progressing despite the budget being relatively tiny and with a small staff. I am hoping that, at the very least they will demonstrate that it is reasonably possible for private/commercial entities to go to space without the aid of NASA.
I think that if you have a vote 'go to mars by 2030 or reduce NASA budget to $0' then people would vote for mars. Alot of people would like to see something 'kool' being done, but as it is now NASA isn't doing anything 'visable' enough for people to want to fund it.
Good point. I forgot that processed waste is solid. I feel stupid now; I actually toured SRS twice where they convert wastes into solid (their simplified explanation is that they are basically mixing jello into liquid waste; making it easier to clean up/contain but no less radioactive).
Also, as you say the chrud is all over the place. At the plant in GA that I visited they don't mind telling you that they routinely release chrud into the air, but they never tell the public exactly when it is released. One of the nastier things our gov has done is nuclear bomb testing on our own continent. Yeah, they don't do that anymore but they used to. My grandmother used to see a mushroom cloud in the distance from where she lived. She lived upwind and far enough away to be safe (or she wouldn't have survived to tell me about it) but there was another town about as far away as hers that was downwind. Needless to say, they wound up with ALOT of cancer problems.
This kind of article is why it is ignored. Odd extreme reports that have no or little factual basis have caused the public to pretty much ignore such warnings. You could say that environmentalists have efficiently subverted their chances of having large public support. Of course, (mis)information from the 'other side' isn't helping either. Controlled media also helps; there are some VERY nasty ongoing environmental disasers in the US that most people simply dont know about because nobody tells them (for example, Oregon oil refineries used to dump wastes straight into a nearby river openly. The state made them pay large fees for each day that they did that. However, those fees were still much smaller than handling the waste properly, so they continued to dump openly and just pay the fines.)
As long as there are reports like this that are obviously bogus, the general population will pretty much ignore these issues. This article really shouldn't exist.
Strange, you called some other guy a hypocrite before and are calling me one now. I never said anything hypocritical here; I pointed out that both of us would be hypocritical for saying such a thing. It seems that you just say "I dont have a holier than though attitude like you do, you hypocrite!" whenever someone says something you don't like.
Your lack of feeling guilty had nothing to do with what I previously said. However, if you didn't feel guilty why are you posting anonymously?
"All the nuclear waste produced since day one would fit into a single football stadium."
Now this was more along the lines of what I was hoping for in a response. It contains an actual answer to a question, rather than name calling. I haven't heard of that before, and I think that is an interesting point.
How is nuclear waste a non-issue? Politics decide our environment; at least to the people living in towns near the roads they are going to be transporting the stuff. One truck accident and their environment will be very unpleasant indeed.
Um, I guess you want to volunteer your backyard for a nuclear storage dump? No? I guess nuclear power is ok if someone else gets stuck with the waste. It is strange that you are calling someone an environmental hypocrite. By the same logic you used in your first line, everyone who can read/post here probably is approximately the same as far as pollution goes. I guess that might include you as well as me.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Nowdays it is too easy to goof off on computers rather than use them for educational purposes. In fact, it seems that current 'educational software' is mostly a bunch of cartoon chrud with a little bit of math etc. here and there.
An elementary school math tutor for the kids who were behind asked me to make a math tutor computer program that wasn't cartoony etc. Getting exact details on what she wanted was like pulling teeth, but in the end we wound up with a piece of software that was kid-friendly (meaning easy for them to control, some kids have coordination issues when it comes to moving mice) and actually helped improve their math abilities.
One thing that I am quite proud to have worked with is the AR Program (Accelerated Reader). The concept is to have point values and difficulty values for most of the books in the library. Kids check out whatever books they want (they are strongly encouraged to use books of an appropriate difficulty level) and can take computerized quizzes on them. The kids can trade in points they earn for candy and small, cheap toys. It actually works! I would have imagined that the kids would have gotten tired of it quickly, but the teachers take it seriously and the majority of the books in the school library have AR quizes available.
I have volunteered in several elementary schools, but in the one where they emphasized this AR program I regularly saw kids leaving the library with books and actually eager to read them. That is a very big thing; getting kids modivated to learn/read is one of the biggest problems in educational. This computer software is not advanced; it could be made to work on an AppleIIGS, but the fact that it is actually getting kids to read (and to like it!) is profound.
Domo arigato. :>
I did read the whole thing btw.
Well, I dont think that either side truely 'won' their arguments. However, I say the government guy scored alot fewer points than our guy. The gov guy's arguments took much bigger hits; the justices saw some pretty big problems there.
That is possibly why the guy in australia got off. Their gov was doing an 'investigation' to decide whether sony was guilty of price fixing. Which they are; the whole idea is that people in different regions are willing/able to pay different amounts for a produce. They want their prices for each region to be as high as possible, without going over that region's consumer price limit.
"Yep, you're wrong here. You can still use Palladium capable machines to run arbitrary code. Palladium enables software to require restrictions management to be enabled, and specify the restrictions; It doesn't enforce anything that the running software doesn't ask it to. If you don't put Palladium support in the software you run then Palladium has no effect on your code."
:P
If that were true then you can open the executable in a hex editor, change the security checks into noop and your former security restriciton requiring program no longer requires security restriction. That is the same trick used on alot of 0-day warez. Imagine hacked palladium programs being on the net before the OS is officially available.
A more interesting then MS could do is encript the executable itself. Then a non-DRM-activated cpu couldn't even read the instructions. That would make things harder, until the encryption is figured out. This wouldn't be like the CPS2 though; palladium systems will be more available to hackers than a CPS2 was, and there will be more incentive to break the encryption. People will mess with the hardware to break the encryption just like they ultimately did with the CPS2.
So now Atari becomes a major force in the software world by being the first to prior art that is key to the functioning of the Palladium OS. :P
You know, it would be odd if there was a company that actually did stuff like this. Go get patents to things people already made in the past. The company does the patent office paperwork for the one that origionally made the 'prior art' through an agreement that lets them instantly buy the patent upon its creation. The patent then can be used against whoever and charge royalties.
Or you could also do the esnipe thingn like the guy in the article did.
"This is of course providing that it's genuinely non-obvious (which this probably isn't) and that there is no prior art, which there may be in the land of console gaming."
It is in the latest issue. It says 'reverse engineering under siege,' It doesn't attempt to predict who will win the legal matters, but explains what the threat is and how it will cause extreme harm to the tech industry if reverse engineering is taken away. Most slashdotters probably know most of that, but it is an interesting read.
Midochondrial DNA has an extremely low mutation rate. I believe that as a result their geneic diversity is pretty small. The differences between your midochondria and mine would be slight.
Yeah, so you have better hardware on your PC than your console. Too bad you still don't have a game that fully takes advantage of 3d cards from a few years ago.
Doom 3 is proably the best game graphically you can get (or will be able to get). Want to know what hardware it is made for? It isn't your newest Geforce card... the engine was designed around the Geforce2. Or do you read the stuff Carmak puts out?
If you have a file that will only work if authorized from a server, couldn't a packet sniffer get the info the server is passing? Then you simulate the server interaction whenever you want to use the file.
This would probably require a seperate computer pretending to be the server on the internet, but shouldn't that work?
Read the bottom of page 18 and the top of 19. "[T]he question is not what a device could have been made to do, but what it was intended to do and what it did do." I wonder if this will help a big in the RIAA mess. It would be a little bit of a stretch, but lawyers are supposed to be good at such things.
There is nothing magical here that is truely different from any other scheme. I read how this thing is designed, it will work off any standard cd drive. Which means that you can still 'rip' an image of the darn thing. You can try to figure out what a 'legitimate' code is and then just copy the data, or you can let whatever program that they consider 'legitimate' to run properly, but with a custom debugger grabbing the info as the program gets it. Heck, you can make a microcontroller that logs all communication going through the ide pins! Since both standard cd drives and computer ram can be read and hacked, there is no way this will work any better than any other half baked scheme.
With one exception. Those countermeasures I mentioned above probably won't work on Microsoft's new oh-so-secure upcoming OS (which shields ram and devices from such attacks, supposedly).
The point is it is toy-like. People may think a laptop can hack their systems, but a dreamcast? "That is a little game thing my son plays with."
:>
I laughed out loud when I read this.
Yeah, I could see us using a suicide bomer humming bird in the middle east. So a bunch of guys are standing around with their big guns, then this bird comes out of nowhere and explodes in their faces. Yeah, it probably wouldn't kill anyone, but it sure would freak them out!
:P
A couple minutes later, a flock flies towards them...
Run away!
Alrighty. I thought you mean that this bill would directly lead to that. Which I don't think it does.
:>
:P
:P
However, I do think the CBDTPA would directly lead to that. I presented a speech at my local U. about that. I think the CBDTPA is more about their trying to create a closed multimedia machine and having the computer industry pay the tab, but that is a seperate rant.
What this bill brings to mind to me is distribution control. Basically the big 5 in the modern music industry exists only because they control distribution. The net can allow artists to do their own advertising and distribution, completely eliminating them. People could buy the mp3s online and burn a cd without even stepping in a store. Yeah, you will still have to buy a burner + blank cds, but the music publishers don't sell those.
I totally agree with you about how to interpret laws.
'Demand narrowly defined laws.' I know what you mean, but it isn't going to happen. Politicians take pride in our flexable (by virtue of being broad) Constitution. Also, much of American politics is based in tradition (which is why legal documents still use 'old style' wording, and how certain aspects of Congress are handled). To demand narrow laws in the US would be to tradition and the Constitution bad things. That probably won't fly too well.
What really bugs me is how they are trying to sneek things in. If things are truely getting well debated and are visible to the public, things like this wouldn't get through so easily. But maybe this is just a fad. A previous trick that they used to do alot was to pass a highly publicised bill that supposedly do something that the people wanted (but that they didn't really care for) and intentionally leave key words undefined. That would render the law useless, and unenforcable or to be struck by theh courts outright. Look at the history of food industry regulation as an example. Alot of their laws were bs and never enforced for the above reason.
Things do get scarier, but normal people aren't aware of it. If you go to law school you get to learn all about blatant mafa involvement, for example. It looks like The People never will truely control the legislative process.
We are all doomed!!!
I looked through the bill, and it doesn't say anything like that. You can watermark music by your own band. Someone made that up. It only is against people who are breaking copyrights.
That kind of bs hurts us. When we use messed up info to try to counter goofy DRM bills, we just make ourselves look like idiots. Just look at the environmentalists; they have been giving exagerated reports etc. so much that most people don't listen even though they have a good point. We would not like to share that fate.
Yes, doctors do have egos. They also study for the rest of their lives. You can't legally be a doctor in the US without taking classes etc. each year. While there are some doctors who try avoiding learning anything new, most want to keep up with the latest and greatest research... kind of like how computer nerds like to keep up with the latest and greatest in computer science.
The biggest problem with this database idea is that using it takes time. In the US, there are more patients than doctors can handle. Using this database on each patient takes up more of their time, which means that the can see fewer patients per day, which means you have to wait longer before being seen by a doctor when you need medical attention. Something like this should be used by nursing staff, not the actual doctors. Even then, the nurses are also pressed for time.
The second biggest problem is keeping the thing up to date. Such a database would be vast and rapidly changing. I am sure you grossly underestimate what this undertaking is.
So don't post wierdness when you don't even know what the issues are!
Medical science is evolving very quickly. One big problem is that by the time something is published, some of the information is already outdated. Medical textbooks are revised numerous times before they reach students' hands.
Alot of doctors would love to have a high quality database. Yet in the US, doctors are very strapped for time. They often are cramming as many patients into their schedule as possible. They have the conflict of wanting to help as many people as possible vs giving quality care (doctors are often compulsive, so wanting to work less to have a life isn't as big a deal for them as you might think). My point is that if they use this database on each patient, it will mean that they see fewer patients per day. That would definitely be a 'bad thing.'
The limit here was in politics, not technology. NASA is big enough that is has it's own politics (I am not going to propose/support X because if it fails I don't get position Y), plus having to deal with outside politics (if X fails your funding goes down to Y).
This is why I suspect that truely commercial/private ventures will be the ones that give us a significant presence in space. Such organization don't have to worry about outside politics for funding, and their internal politics reward taking a risk and achieving something.
I still have my hopes up for www.armadilloaerospace.com It is still relatively primative, but progressing despite the budget being relatively tiny and with a small staff. I am hoping that, at the very least they will demonstrate that it is reasonably possible for private/commercial entities to go to space without the aid of NASA.
I think that if you have a vote 'go to mars by 2030 or reduce NASA budget to $0' then people would vote for mars. Alot of people would like to see something 'kool' being done, but as it is now NASA isn't doing anything 'visable' enough for people to want to fund it.
Good point. I forgot that processed waste is solid. I feel stupid now; I actually toured SRS twice where they convert wastes into solid (their simplified explanation is that they are basically mixing jello into liquid waste; making it easier to clean up/contain but no less radioactive).
Also, as you say the chrud is all over the place. At the plant in GA that I visited they don't mind telling you that they routinely release chrud into the air, but they never tell the public exactly when it is released. One of the nastier things our gov has done is nuclear bomb testing on our own continent. Yeah, they don't do that anymore but they used to. My grandmother used to see a mushroom cloud in the distance from where she lived. She lived upwind and far enough away to be safe (or she wouldn't have survived to tell me about it) but there was another town about as far away as hers that was downwind. Needless to say, they wound up with ALOT of cancer problems.
This kind of article is why it is ignored. Odd extreme reports that have no or little factual basis have caused the public to pretty much ignore such warnings. You could say that environmentalists have efficiently subverted their chances of having large public support. Of course, (mis)information from the 'other side' isn't helping either. Controlled media also helps; there are some VERY nasty ongoing environmental disasers in the US that most people simply dont know about because nobody tells them (for example, Oregon oil refineries used to dump wastes straight into a nearby river openly. The state made them pay large fees for each day that they did that. However, those fees were still much smaller than handling the waste properly, so they continued to dump openly and just pay the fines.)
As long as there are reports like this that are obviously bogus, the general population will pretty much ignore these issues. This article really shouldn't exist.
Strange, you called some other guy a hypocrite before and are calling me one now. I never said anything hypocritical here; I pointed out that both of us would be hypocritical for saying such a thing. It seems that you just say "I dont have a holier than though attitude like you do, you hypocrite!" whenever someone says something you don't like.
:>
Your lack of feeling guilty had nothing to do with what I previously said. However, if you didn't feel guilty why are you posting anonymously?
"All the nuclear waste produced since day one would fit into a single football stadium."
Now this was more along the lines of what I was hoping for in a response. It contains an actual answer to a question, rather than name calling. I haven't heard of that before, and I think that is an interesting point.
Be happy.
How is nuclear waste a non-issue? Politics decide our environment; at least to the people living in towns near the roads they are going to be transporting the stuff. One truck accident and their environment will be very unpleasant indeed.
Um, I guess you want to volunteer your backyard for a nuclear storage dump? No? I guess nuclear power is ok if someone else gets stuck with the waste. It is strange that you are calling someone an environmental hypocrite. By the same logic you used in your first line, everyone who can read/post here probably is approximately the same as far as pollution goes. I guess that might include you as well as me. :P