I (unfortunately) have lived in GA for the past half dozen years. I remember when GA went up from 50th to 49th in education; all the teachers were so happy (which made me feel even worse. They were HAPPY to be up to 49th!) BTW, the GA General Assembly voted about totally repealing the state public education program back when segregation was stopped. The vote was close; greed barely won over that because they wanted all the federal $ that they got for their schools.
Don't panick though.Look at that link; Is that really the full text? Look at how short the thing is! Also look at how they determine if a video game is evil; the requirements will only fit Mortal Kombat. I also see a loophole or two.
My point is this; they aren't seriously pushing this law. They don't even want it to pass; someone just pulled out an old bill from back when Mortal Kombat was sturring things up and is using this for some political maneuver.
If you believe that the human mind is only the product of the physical brain, then the brain can be broken down into 1's and 0's. The brain is made of physical matter, which has physical laws. These laws can be simulated.
The trick then is to either develop the scaning technology to make a 3d scan of a human brain good enough to make such a simulation.
Or run the simulation based off a real person's DNA, simulating the physics of the DNA in a fertailzed egg cell, and continuning to simulate the cell's development on an atom by atom basis. An environment would also have to be simulated (for food, etc).This would have the advantage of producing a 'computer person' without knowing how the brain works beforehand. Then you could look at your simulation data and see how a 'real human brain' works on an atom, molecule or cellular basis over a period of time.
Either way takes a rediculous amount of computing power, but is certainly not impossible.
However, if you belive in souls, then reducing the human mind to 1's and 0's is rediculous.
An interesting thing about computers is you can dump a copy of it's internal state, and restore it later.
Imagine training a neural net computer/android thing like a human, but regularly saving the state of it's entire mind to some kind of bulk storage. The benefits of this would be rather impressive.
Once something is learned incorrectly, it is a pain to unlearn (this is a basic characteristic of brains for mammels; i dont know how accurate this is with non-mammels and artificial neural nets). If your android learns something incorrectly, you can restore it to it's state just before the lesson, give it a modified lesson and see if it gets the idea. keep changing the lesson depending on the conceptual errors it seems to get, and eventually you have a lesson that, given its 'current' way of thinking, will give it a nearly flawless understanding of the informating you are trying to give it.
Hopefully you wouldn't have to revise any particular lesson more than once. It may still be tedious (like teaching a person can be) but the results may be worth it.
When it comes to learning, humans dont have an 'undo' button. But computers...
The reason people thought all this would be done by now was that 'back in the day' people had no idea of how hard it would be. People can do things now with computers that were previously thought impossible; things that people thought we could do turned out to be nearly impossible.
I think that we are now better equiped to make estimates on the future progression of computer technology because we actually understand computers more now. Before, people didn't really understand what making HAL really involved.
Nasa already tried a long cable experiment. This one was probably made of metal though. They deployed a long cable from the space shuttle (i forget how long, but it was pretty darn long) and let it 'drag' behind. The idea was that as it dragged across the Earth's magnetic field, it would produce an electric current that the shuttle may be able to use.
Well, they goofed up the math somehow. They underestimated the stresses on the cable and the thing snapped shortly after deployment, flinging it away from the shuttle. They did not retrieve the cable; one more piece of space junk.
You have the right idea, but didn't take it far enough.
If this did go down in the water, and it released the power of a nuke (or two or three) it would not produce a tsunami big enough to bug people living on the coasts. The order of magnitude simply is not the same. Think about the vast amounts of mass in the form of water that we are talking about moving; the US and Russia have conducted many nuclear bomb tests without killing millions of people in floods.
You may want to think about it another way. A clip commonly used in nuke documentories shows a test of a nuke on several old naval ships. During the whole clip, there are no truely huge waves created.Even several times the power of that nuke won't produce waves of sufficient size to make it from in the middle of nowhere to a coast.
Mostly interfaces in movie computers trade functionality and/or efficiency for neat effects, along with some outright impossible stuff(like downloading a significant animation to a diskette).
But the various graphical interfaces for linux are supposedly very customizable. What would it take to do things like put high-tech movie looking windows on your desktop? I imagine that there is a way to apply skins to the windows (heck, even Win9X can do that with the right program, but it still has to have the same basic window layout).
So how hard would it be to make a linux box have really funky skinned windows with a tech-looking background? I vaguely remember reading about a program that made your windows transparent by using one of the newer gfx cards.
To take it a step further, it would be cool to have custom transitions. For example, instead of a window simply dissappearing when you close it, it vertically shrinks, then horizontally shrinks, then dissappears. When you open a new window the reverse happens. This effect is used alot in tv-land computers, and can look pretty cool.
Obviously, none of these features are actually useful (except maybe transparent windows) but it would certainly impress people.
Spammers nowdays use fake emails. They harvest a huge list of valid emails, right? Well, it seems that some of them use that list for some kind of email spoofing as well as for sending.For a while, I was getting bounced emails and replies saying to stop sending spam that I never sent. However, it only lasted about three days. My guess is they go through their email list rotating the fake sender email addresses to make it harder for them to get cought/filtered. Since my email starts with a 'b' I was relatively high on their alphabetical list, and thus apparently one of the first they did this to.
It sure was funny getting a reply email to something I never sent telling me that I was reported for spam, but also scarry in a way.
The point is that testing is non-existent or the results are hidden. They are expected to be self-regulating, but are failing to do so.
Genetic engineering isn't innately evil just like chemistry isn't. But it requires an extremely taxing testing process to insure that you are doing it correctly. If you read up on how genetic engineering is actually done, you will see that the process is mostly chance. There is no way to truely change or insert one section of dna.They basically have to turn the origional dna into swiss cheese repeatedly and look for a plant with both new traits correctly inserted and none of the other important traits damaged because you inserted new dna smack in the middle of the coding for a critical protein. The bottom line of this is that genetic engineering is not like on tv where they can instantly make exact changes and everyone who says otherwise is just a bigot.
Current genetic engineering methods produce several orders of magnitude more errors than desired changes. This company has proven that it won't deal with even basic saftey procedures with the chemical dumping. They can't even deal with well known and easily testable biochemistry(all you was pop a fish in the river and it died in 3.5 minutes!) . How can we trust someone who won't handle such a relatively simple production process to do something (GE) that almost defenitely has errors that need to be properly tested?
I dont know if it also applies to software (it probably does) but in smaller Asian countries like Korea it is impossible to get official copies of music cds and movies. You can't find them for sale at all. However, you can find some very high quality bootlegs for pretty cheap. I tend to call them 'official bootlegs' because they are as close to the real thing that you can actually get.
In discovery channel they showed how some scientists were doing research in greenland that would allow them to calculate(via layers in glacier ice) the average temperature for any given year for the past several hundred thousand years. There results were interesting. In all the temperature history they found, the ONLY time that average temperatures stayed stable for a significant amount of time is during the lifetime of man; the past few thousand years. Before that, there were constant, rapid changes up and down in average temp.
In other words, evidence that such changes can occur without the intervention of humans already exists.
I do volunteer work in several elementary schools in a middle-of-nowhere city. I have worked in about a half dozen schools now, and the best one at fighting illiteracy is the one with the most computers (that are actually used). The majority of the computers in this school are all rather old, many of them running on ancient macs or win3.1 machines. However, they are well used in the 'Accelerated Reader' program. I have seen this program make a sharp difference in the children's willingness to actually pick up a book with this program. Getting a child willing to read is a big part of fighting illiteracy. This isn't someone else's rhetoric I am regurgitating; I have seen this myself.
Then I have seen other schools where the 'Clinton computers' just get stuck in a corner and get occasional use from teachers and teachers' aids only. That sure helps...
Ironically, the other schools in this area get more funding than this one because they have a higher percentage of low-income students (90% is the average, the one I am praising has 'only' 30-60%). However, the extra money doesn't seem to be well spent. Just throwing money at the problem doesn't even make a dent. All of the problems you listed will not be affected at all by putting more money in the system; it all depends on how the local government apportions it and handles it. For example, it doesn't matter if $X of extra money gets apportioned to schools if it takes > 6 months to get anything approved. 'Need a new boiler? No problem! You just have to call a long list of people and then wait another 6 months and hope for no additional delays. Yes, you will get that new boiler; it is guaranteed by law... just not when you get it.' This is the real trouble I have been dealing with.
So what we really need are local responsive governments (including school boards), sane teachers (You wont believe some of the oddities I have seen; Well, maybe you might. Your childhood memories probably weren't exaggerated...) and good school equipment that actually gets incorporated into the curriculum. Meet these three needs, and our schools will actually be pretty good despite other problems. As long as these needs aren't met, throwing money or books at the problem won't cause much change at all.
"If it involved lives im sure morals would win in the majority of cases. "
Let's continue that scenario a little.
If it involved terrorists trying to get in DoJ computers, the choice is probably 'do it or die.' All they have to do is find one nerd who feels his own life is more important than the DoJ computer system and they are in. Doesn't sound too hard...
At a school I volunteer at, they are still running win95 and win3.1 Nobody has talked about how they are going to maintain the new lan, nobody on site knows a whole lot about computers (myself excluded, but I am not an employee). Security patches are a non-issue; they aren't even being considered. There simply isn't anyone there to do it.
This area is powered by old hydroelectric generators; we get significant spikes daily. This school was barely able to scrape together the money for surge protectors. They plugged their computers straight into the wall before they got some. They will be lucky to get security patches every few years.
If they could barely handle the one-time expense of getting surge protectors, they certainly aren't getting any tech people any time soon.
On the other hand, there isn't much people would want. Other than elementary level skript kidz trying to mess up the school's computer for fun, they don't really have alot of security concerns. Terrorists aren't likely to attack these machines, and if someone does get in the worst they can do is make the network unusable for a while.
At the school I volunteer at I talked to a woman who will be setting up a new lan. She was discussing how complicated setting up secure networks is with the librarian. She seemed pretty happy with herself that she knew how to prevent people from getting onto the computers by just clicking the 'X' button on the login menu. Her face looked pretty impressive when I told her that another trick lets people get in a system by loging in as 'Default'
Heh, I used that trick once to get in a hospital computer system where my father worked (he forgot his new password). The X trick didnt work, but Default sure did.
Let's just face it, we are dealing with normal people here. Not nerds. Most of us here could set up a more secure network than you will find on average. And I include alot of us who have never actually set up a network in that statement. Alot of things that are common sense to us are magical or totally unknown to normal people.
The only way the gov and various businesses are going to get more secure is if they train their people in computers (unlikely) or hire more nerds (also unlikely, for the gov at least. They cant/dont compete with businesses very well).
In other words, alot of basic things in the beurocratic and commercial worlds are going to have to change if they are going to seriously make their systems secure.
I do volunteer work at a local elementary school. I have been helping them repair computers that got damaged due to renovations during the summer and weird things the teachers do.
Now, teachers are somewhat educated people. You can't just instantly become a teacher (as you could get some other bureaucratic positions) yet they are technophobic or just plain computer illiterate. Heck, I have to help them set up their vcrs! The extent of computer security that they can handle is putting a password on the Accelerated Reader program so that kids don't change their grades.
These people are not stupid or ignorant in general. They just know jack about computers. If these teachers, being more educated than your standard bureaucrat might be, can't deal with computer security then how could a standard bureaucrat be expected to?
Government systems administrators? School networks don't have system admins. They have librarians that know a little bit about computers. That is who will be maintaining the network at the school I volunteer at when I eventually leave. As far as I can tell, they never have had a dedicated computer person in the entire school district who maintains these systems. I know there is a woman in the district who is going to be working on installing more computer equipment, but fixing things doesn't seem to be a normal part of her job.
It would be pretty neat to have a shirt with a little screen and a few buttons that can play simple games like lunar lander, galaga, space invaders etc. Then we wouldnt have to carry around gameboy advance units with arcade classics gamepacks.
The neat thing is that the article said that they already have the technology to make thread-based buttons and screens. Sounds interesting to me. Maybe instead of buying tons of shirts we can upload a.jpg to our t-shirts.:>
When on a trip to Japan, I took a tour of AFLAC Japan and Panasonic Japan. In one of those office buildings (I forget which) I had to go to the restroom. The tiolet had a panel with tons of buttons on it. Some of the buttons were ones I had previously seen on the comode tiolet combo units currently popular in Japan. I have no idea what the rest of the buttons were for. The thing also had a remote control in a pouch in the front of the stall. I guess it was there so people dont have to turn around to flush the thing!
Dang, this really does sound wierd! The wierdest part is that I am not making up any of this.
Aside from the fact that this court did not say that DeCSS is so innately evil that it must be stopped immediately, it also made two interesting points. These points will have an impact on upcoming legal precedings, even though they stated that they didnt want to make any judgements themselves.
1. computer source code is speech
2. DeCSS is probably legal in any case if it was not wrongfully obtained
While point #1 may help other cases alot more than the fate of DeCSS, it certainly helps a great deal.
Point #2 is what is really going to help give us the result we want in the final court. Most of the argument in the pdf hinges on whether or not the info for DeCSS was wrongfully obtained. They further boil it down to the click through agreement(and then stop, as they claim to not want to make a decision here). If later courts follow this logic, their cases will hinge on the validity of click-through licenses. These licenses never have been upheld; companies like to pretend they are legal but no court would support that because it only serves to screw over the consumer. If later courts follow the logic precident made in this case, we are all set.
However, if $ talks then certain judges may choose to ignore this. I guess we have to hope for honesty.
Granted, I only make little dos games or little utilities. I like to whip out djgpp and rhide and make tools to process data that I then put into programs for other systems, like windows. Since I am personally more familiar with djgpp than MS Visual Chrud, it is what I go for when I want to write a little tool really fast.
Does Gates really want to get rid fo a command prompt? All sorts of tools need command prompts. Most of the free tools on the web use the commandn line, and it is a real pain to make a shortcut that sends in your parameters. It takes a little extra effort, which is a step in the wrong direction.
Dos prompts to scare the 'normal' people though. I can see why Gates would want to get rid of it- he is trying to make computers more like toys. You pop in a disk and the program loads itself. You have big pretty icons to run your frequently used apps. He is trying to make WinXP 'normal human' friendly. To that end, XP just might succeed in making life easier for people who just want to use computers to do a few tasks, and not really learn how the thing works. However, what that means to us is that it will be more of a pain to do some of the wierd things we like to do like play with command line freeware raytracing programs.
Think about it another way. Ultimately, we will find ways to make our toys run reguardless of what Gates does. However, normal people dont help themselves in computer land. If XP makes life easier for normal people, he just made some more sales, so that is a good thing to do. If in doing so it drops a feature we want, he isnt losing much because 1. we already think he bites and 2. we will put that feature back ourselves (ie the WinME command line hack). No sales change. That means that dumping the command prompt could (theorhetically, at least in a way a businessman would believe even if it isnt true) put MS in the green.
You have a good point. If I did have 'goback' back in the DOS days I wouldn't have learned as much as I did. I could press a button and fix most problems. It certainly helps with convenience and the 'fear factor,' but will also reduce learning experiences.
That fear is very important. It blocks growth quite effectively. When people ask me how I got to be so good at computers (I do volunteer work at local elementary schools fixing computers) I tell them that I learned by breaking them. My first 386 especially, but also my 166mhz. I would play with everything in them and 'break' the things horrably, messing up the autoexec and (more often) messing up programs called by autoexec, causing the computer to crash before I could input anything. I dealt with physically broken computers too, and I can amaze people with how fast I can isolate problems to hardware(a common problem being a loose ide cable).
While these things aren't rocket science, you dont learn how to deal with these problems unless you are willing to pull up your sleevs and jump in. I wasn't afraid to 'break' my system repeatedly because it was fun to mess with the thing and I learned alot from what broke various programs and what fixed those same problems. On the way I learned how to use features of the OS and apps that most people are afraid to mess with.
I look at my parrents fiddling with the computer and I watch my 6 year old mess with the computer. They both have the same proficiency, but with one big difference. My parrents are afraid. Because of this they aren't learning much. Heck, they have done word processing for years, but only know about as much as my 6 year old that I have only let use the computer for a few months(and she can't even read yet!)
I can sort of see why people are afraid. Computers are expensive things to be messing up.To learn them well is complicated, time consuming and difficult.
Well, hopefully things like the Gateway Goback will help lessen the fear. Being able to 'goback' to before a driver messed up or installation went bad is pretty darn nice; wish I had that back in the dos days:>
Heck, maybe WinXP with its over-simplified candy-coated interface will make computers seem less intimidating. That seems to have been its purpose. If it actually works that way then it may actually be worth the evil it will cause. I think that anything that brings more computer-savy females is ultimately a good thing.;>
While I mostly agree with what you said, sometimes really obvious ideas are important (and not quite so obvious). The cotton gin is a great example- a simple device with a very basic purpose that should be very obvious, yet it didnt pop in anyone's head as early as we think it could have in hindsight. This bad boy invention ultimately helped bring some pretty big changes in the US.
But the cotton gin made it's inventer jack. The guy who make the first tv also made jack from his invention. Kind of makes you wonder.
Both inventions were made after patents were made available in the US, but the inventers both made zip. That also kind of makes you wonder.
I am certainly getting tired our funky patent process in general. It takes too long. You can patent the wheel. You can sue people for using wheels. What next?
As a patent owner (well, I dont have direct rights to the patent but I get a hefty % of all profits) I feel all of these frustrations. These patent wars of patenting things seemingly with the sole purpose of using them to sue others is downright silly. However, that brings me to the point of this post.
As a patent owner, I have to think about this question. If you had a patent that someone was violating (be it a sane patent or otherwise) would you sit back and watch? Or would you jump at the chance of getting a few $million? One more suit wont make the problem that much worse, right? I think that may be a large part of the problem.
"One more won't hurt..."
"One more won't make a difference..."
Slashdot Mirror
I (unfortunately) have lived in GA for the past half dozen years. I remember when GA went up from 50th to 49th in education; all the teachers were so happy (which made me feel even worse. They were HAPPY to be up to 49th!) BTW, the GA General Assembly voted about totally repealing the state public education program back when segregation was stopped. The vote was close; greed barely won over that because they wanted all the federal $ that they got for their schools.
Don't panick though.Look at that link; Is that really the full text? Look at how short the thing is! Also look at how they determine if a video game is evil; the requirements will only fit Mortal Kombat. I also see a loophole or two.
My point is this; they aren't seriously pushing this law. They don't even want it to pass; someone just pulled out an old bill from back when Mortal Kombat was sturring things up and is using this for some political maneuver.
We guys just would like to see female androids more. ;>
If you believe that the human mind is only the product of the physical brain, then the brain can be broken down into 1's and 0's. The brain is made of physical matter, which has physical laws. These laws can be simulated.
The trick then is to either develop the scaning technology to make a 3d scan of a human brain good enough to make such a simulation.
Or run the simulation based off a real person's DNA, simulating the physics of the DNA in a fertailzed egg cell, and continuning to simulate the cell's development on an atom by atom basis. An environment would also have to be simulated (for food, etc).This would have the advantage of producing a 'computer person' without knowing how the brain works beforehand. Then you could look at your simulation data and see how a 'real human brain' works on an atom, molecule or cellular basis over a period of time.
Either way takes a rediculous amount of computing power, but is certainly not impossible.
However, if you belive in souls, then reducing the human mind to 1's and 0's is rediculous.
An interesting thing about computers is you can dump a copy of it's internal state, and restore it later.
Imagine training a neural net computer/android thing like a human, but regularly saving the state of it's entire mind to some kind of bulk storage. The benefits of this would be rather impressive.
Once something is learned incorrectly, it is a pain to unlearn (this is a basic characteristic of brains for mammels; i dont know how accurate this is with non-mammels and artificial neural nets). If your android learns something incorrectly, you can restore it to it's state just before the lesson, give it a modified lesson and see if it gets the idea. keep changing the lesson depending on the conceptual errors it seems to get, and eventually you have a lesson that, given its 'current' way of thinking, will give it a nearly flawless understanding of the informating you are trying to give it.
Hopefully you wouldn't have to revise any particular lesson more than once. It may still be tedious (like teaching a person can be) but the results may be worth it.
When it comes to learning, humans dont have an 'undo' button. But computers...
The reason people thought all this would be done by now was that 'back in the day' people had no idea of how hard it would be. People can do things now with computers that were previously thought impossible; things that people thought we could do turned out to be nearly impossible.
I think that we are now better equiped to make estimates on the future progression of computer technology because we actually understand computers more now. Before, people didn't really understand what making HAL really involved.
Nasa already tried a long cable experiment. This one was probably made of metal though. They deployed a long cable from the space shuttle (i forget how long, but it was pretty darn long) and let it 'drag' behind. The idea was that as it dragged across the Earth's magnetic field, it would produce an electric current that the shuttle may be able to use.
Well, they goofed up the math somehow. They underestimated the stresses on the cable and the thing snapped shortly after deployment, flinging it away from the shuttle. They did not retrieve the cable; one more piece of space junk.
You have the right idea, but didn't take it far enough.
If this did go down in the water, and it released the power of a nuke (or two or three) it would not produce a tsunami big enough to bug people living on the coasts. The order of magnitude simply is not the same. Think about the vast amounts of mass in the form of water that we are talking about moving; the US and Russia have conducted many nuclear bomb tests without killing millions of people in floods.
You may want to think about it another way. A clip commonly used in nuke documentories shows a test of a nuke on several old naval ships. During the whole clip, there are no truely huge waves created.Even several times the power of that nuke won't produce waves of sufficient size to make it from in the middle of nowhere to a coast.
Mostly interfaces in movie computers trade functionality and/or efficiency for neat effects, along with some outright impossible stuff(like downloading a significant animation to a diskette).
But the various graphical interfaces for linux are supposedly very customizable. What would it take to do things like put high-tech movie looking windows on your desktop? I imagine that there is a way to apply skins to the windows (heck, even Win9X can do that with the right program, but it still has to have the same basic window layout).
So how hard would it be to make a linux box have really funky skinned windows with a tech-looking background? I vaguely remember reading about a program that made your windows transparent by using one of the newer gfx cards.
To take it a step further, it would be cool to have custom transitions. For example, instead of a window simply dissappearing when you close it, it vertically shrinks, then horizontally shrinks, then dissappears. When you open a new window the reverse happens. This effect is used alot in tv-land computers, and can look pretty cool.
Obviously, none of these features are actually useful (except maybe transparent windows) but it would certainly impress people.
Spammers nowdays use fake emails. They harvest a huge list of valid emails, right? Well, it seems that some of them use that list for some kind of email spoofing as well as for sending.For a while, I was getting bounced emails and replies saying to stop sending spam that I never sent. However, it only lasted about three days. My guess is they go through their email list rotating the fake sender email addresses to make it harder for them to get cought/filtered. Since my email starts with a 'b' I was relatively high on their alphabetical list, and thus apparently one of the first they did this to.
It sure was funny getting a reply email to something I never sent telling me that I was reported for spam, but also scarry in a way.
The point is that testing is non-existent or the results are hidden. They are expected to be self-regulating, but are failing to do so.
Genetic engineering isn't innately evil just like chemistry isn't. But it requires an extremely taxing testing process to insure that you are doing it correctly. If you read up on how genetic engineering is actually done, you will see that the process is mostly chance. There is no way to truely change or insert one section of dna.They basically have to turn the origional dna into swiss cheese repeatedly and look for a plant with both new traits correctly inserted and none of the other important traits damaged because you inserted new dna smack in the middle of the coding for a critical protein. The bottom line of this is that genetic engineering is not like on tv where they can instantly make exact changes and everyone who says otherwise is just a bigot.
Current genetic engineering methods produce several orders of magnitude more errors than desired changes. This company has proven that it won't deal with even basic saftey procedures with the chemical dumping. They can't even deal with well known and easily testable biochemistry(all you was pop a fish in the river and it died in 3.5 minutes!) . How can we trust someone who won't handle such a relatively simple production process to do something (GE) that almost defenitely has errors that need to be properly tested?
I dont know if it also applies to software (it probably does) but in smaller Asian countries like Korea it is impossible to get official copies of music cds and movies. You can't find them for sale at all. However, you can find some very high quality bootlegs for pretty cheap. I tend to call them 'official bootlegs' because they are as close to the real thing that you can actually get.
In discovery channel they showed how some scientists were doing research in greenland that would allow them to calculate(via layers in glacier ice) the average temperature for any given year for the past several hundred thousand years. There results were interesting. In all the temperature history they found, the ONLY time that average temperatures stayed stable for a significant amount of time is during the lifetime of man; the past few thousand years. Before that, there were constant, rapid changes up and down in average temp.
In other words, evidence that such changes can occur without the intervention of humans already exists.
I do volunteer work in several elementary schools in a middle-of-nowhere city. I have worked in about a half dozen schools now, and the best one at fighting illiteracy is the one with the most computers (that are actually used). The majority of the computers in this school are all rather old, many of them running on ancient macs or win3.1 machines. However, they are well used in the 'Accelerated Reader' program. I have seen this program make a sharp difference in the children's willingness to actually pick up a book with this program. Getting a child willing to read is a big part of fighting illiteracy. This isn't someone else's rhetoric I am regurgitating; I have seen this myself.
Then I have seen other schools where the 'Clinton computers' just get stuck in a corner and get occasional use from teachers and teachers' aids only. That sure helps...
Ironically, the other schools in this area get more funding than this one because they have a higher percentage of low-income students (90% is the average, the one I am praising has 'only' 30-60%). However, the extra money doesn't seem to be well spent. Just throwing money at the problem doesn't even make a dent. All of the problems you listed will not be affected at all by putting more money in the system; it all depends on how the local government apportions it and handles it. For example, it doesn't matter if $X of extra money gets apportioned to schools if it takes > 6 months to get anything approved. 'Need a new boiler? No problem! You just have to call a long list of people and then wait another 6 months and hope for no additional delays. Yes, you will get that new boiler; it is guaranteed by law... just not when you get it.' This is the real trouble I have been dealing with.
So what we really need are local responsive governments (including school boards), sane teachers (You wont believe some of the oddities I have seen; Well, maybe you might. Your childhood memories probably weren't exaggerated...) and good school equipment that actually gets incorporated into the curriculum. Meet these three needs, and our schools will actually be pretty good despite other problems. As long as these needs aren't met, throwing money or books at the problem won't cause much change at all.
"If it involved lives im sure morals would win in the majority of cases. "
Let's continue that scenario a little.
If it involved terrorists trying to get in DoJ computers, the choice is probably 'do it or die.' All they have to do is find one nerd who feels his own life is more important than the DoJ computer system and they are in. Doesn't sound too hard...
At a school I volunteer at, they are still running win95 and win3.1 Nobody has talked about how they are going to maintain the new lan, nobody on site knows a whole lot about computers (myself excluded, but I am not an employee). Security patches are a non-issue; they aren't even being considered. There simply isn't anyone there to do it.
This area is powered by old hydroelectric generators; we get significant spikes daily. This school was barely able to scrape together the money for surge protectors. They plugged their computers straight into the wall before they got some. They will be lucky to get security patches every few years.
If they could barely handle the one-time expense of getting surge protectors, they certainly aren't getting any tech people any time soon.
On the other hand, there isn't much people would want. Other than elementary level skript kidz trying to mess up the school's computer for fun, they don't really have alot of security concerns. Terrorists aren't likely to attack these machines, and if someone does get in the worst they can do is make the network unusable for a while.
At least, that is what everyone hopes.
At the school I volunteer at I talked to a woman who will be setting up a new lan. She was discussing how complicated setting up secure networks is with the librarian. She seemed pretty happy with herself that she knew how to prevent people from getting onto the computers by just clicking the 'X' button on the login menu. Her face looked pretty impressive when I told her that another trick lets people get in a system by loging in as 'Default'
Heh, I used that trick once to get in a hospital computer system where my father worked (he forgot his new password). The X trick didnt work, but Default sure did.
Let's just face it, we are dealing with normal people here. Not nerds. Most of us here could set up a more secure network than you will find on average. And I include alot of us who have never actually set up a network in that statement. Alot of things that are common sense to us are magical or totally unknown to normal people.
The only way the gov and various businesses are going to get more secure is if they train their people in computers (unlikely) or hire more nerds (also unlikely, for the gov at least. They cant/dont compete with businesses very well).
In other words, alot of basic things in the beurocratic and commercial worlds are going to have to change if they are going to seriously make their systems secure.
I do volunteer work at a local elementary school. I have been helping them repair computers that got damaged due to renovations during the summer and weird things the teachers do.
Now, teachers are somewhat educated people. You can't just instantly become a teacher (as you could get some other bureaucratic positions) yet they are technophobic or just plain computer illiterate. Heck, I have to help them set up their vcrs! The extent of computer security that they can handle is putting a password on the Accelerated Reader program so that kids don't change their grades.
These people are not stupid or ignorant in general. They just know jack about computers. If these teachers, being more educated than your standard bureaucrat might be, can't deal with computer security then how could a standard bureaucrat be expected to?
Government systems administrators? School networks don't have system admins. They have librarians that know a little bit about computers. That is who will be maintaining the network at the school I volunteer at when I eventually leave. As far as I can tell, they never have had a dedicated computer person in the entire school district who maintains these systems. I know there is a woman in the district who is going to be working on installing more computer equipment, but fixing things doesn't seem to be a normal part of her job.
Just putting things in perspective.
It would be pretty neat to have a shirt with a little screen and a few buttons that can play simple games like lunar lander, galaga, space invaders etc. Then we wouldnt have to carry around gameboy advance units with arcade classics gamepacks.
.jpg to our t-shirts. :>
The neat thing is that the article said that they already have the technology to make thread-based buttons and screens. Sounds interesting to me. Maybe instead of buying tons of shirts we can upload a
When on a trip to Japan, I took a tour of AFLAC Japan and Panasonic Japan. In one of those office buildings (I forget which) I had to go to the restroom. The tiolet had a panel with tons of buttons on it. Some of the buttons were ones I had previously seen on the comode tiolet combo units currently popular in Japan. I have no idea what the rest of the buttons were for. The thing also had a remote control in a pouch in the front of the stall. I guess it was there so people dont have to turn around to flush the thing!
Dang, this really does sound wierd! The wierdest part is that I am not making up any of this.
Aside from the fact that this court did not say that DeCSS is so innately evil that it must be stopped immediately, it also made two interesting points. These points will have an impact on upcoming legal precedings, even though they stated that they didnt want to make any judgements themselves.
1. computer source code is speech
2. DeCSS is probably legal in any case if it was not wrongfully obtained
While point #1 may help other cases alot more than the fate of DeCSS, it certainly helps a great deal.
Point #2 is what is really going to help give us the result we want in the final court. Most of the argument in the pdf hinges on whether or not the info for DeCSS was wrongfully obtained. They further boil it down to the click through agreement(and then stop, as they claim to not want to make a decision here). If later courts follow this logic, their cases will hinge on the validity of click-through licenses. These licenses never have been upheld; companies like to pretend they are legal but no court would support that because it only serves to screw over the consumer. If later courts follow the logic precident made in this case, we are all set.
However, if $ talks then certain judges may choose to ignore this. I guess we have to hope for honesty.
Granted, I only make little dos games or little utilities. I like to whip out djgpp and rhide and make tools to process data that I then put into programs for other systems, like windows. Since I am personally more familiar with djgpp than MS Visual Chrud, it is what I go for when I want to write a little tool really fast.
Does Gates really want to get rid fo a command prompt? All sorts of tools need command prompts. Most of the free tools on the web use the commandn line, and it is a real pain to make a shortcut that sends in your parameters. It takes a little extra effort, which is a step in the wrong direction.
Dos prompts to scare the 'normal' people though. I can see why Gates would want to get rid of it- he is trying to make computers more like toys. You pop in a disk and the program loads itself. You have big pretty icons to run your frequently used apps. He is trying to make WinXP 'normal human' friendly. To that end, XP just might succeed in making life easier for people who just want to use computers to do a few tasks, and not really learn how the thing works. However, what that means to us is that it will be more of a pain to do some of the wierd things we like to do like play with command line freeware raytracing programs.
Think about it another way. Ultimately, we will find ways to make our toys run reguardless of what Gates does. However, normal people dont help themselves in computer land. If XP makes life easier for normal people, he just made some more sales, so that is a good thing to do. If in doing so it drops a feature we want, he isnt losing much because 1. we already think he bites and 2. we will put that feature back ourselves (ie the WinME command line hack). No sales change. That means that dumping the command prompt could (theorhetically, at least in a way a businessman would believe even if it isnt true) put MS in the green.
You have a good point. If I did have 'goback' back in the DOS days I wouldn't have learned as much as I did. I could press a button and fix most problems. It certainly helps with convenience and the 'fear factor,' but will also reduce learning experiences.
That fear is very important. It blocks growth quite effectively. When people ask me how I got to be so good at computers (I do volunteer work at local elementary schools fixing computers) I tell them that I learned by breaking them. My first 386 especially, but also my 166mhz. I would play with everything in them and 'break' the things horrably, messing up the autoexec and (more often) messing up programs called by autoexec, causing the computer to crash before I could input anything. I dealt with physically broken computers too, and I can amaze people with how fast I can isolate problems to hardware(a common problem being a loose ide cable).
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While these things aren't rocket science, you dont learn how to deal with these problems unless you are willing to pull up your sleevs and jump in. I wasn't afraid to 'break' my system repeatedly because it was fun to mess with the thing and I learned alot from what broke various programs and what fixed those same problems. On the way I learned how to use features of the OS and apps that most people are afraid to mess with.
I look at my parrents fiddling with the computer and I watch my 6 year old mess with the computer. They both have the same proficiency, but with one big difference. My parrents are afraid. Because of this they aren't learning much. Heck, they have done word processing for years, but only know about as much as my 6 year old that I have only let use the computer for a few months(and she can't even read yet!)
I can sort of see why people are afraid. Computers are expensive things to be messing up.To learn them well is complicated, time consuming and difficult.
Well, hopefully things like the Gateway Goback will help lessen the fear. Being able to 'goback' to before a driver messed up or installation went bad is pretty darn nice; wish I had that back in the dos days
Heck, maybe WinXP with its over-simplified candy-coated interface will make computers seem less intimidating. That seems to have been its purpose. If it actually works that way then it may actually be worth the evil it will cause. I think that anything that brings more computer-savy females is ultimately a good thing.
My luck I spelled 'cotton gin' wrong. ;>
While I mostly agree with what you said, sometimes really obvious ideas are important (and not quite so obvious). The cotton gin is a great example- a simple device with a very basic purpose that should be very obvious, yet it didnt pop in anyone's head as early as we think it could have in hindsight. This bad boy invention ultimately helped bring some pretty big changes in the US.
But the cotton gin made it's inventer jack. The guy who make the first tv also made jack from his invention. Kind of makes you wonder.
Both inventions were made after patents were made available in the US, but the inventers both made zip. That also kind of makes you wonder.
I am certainly getting tired our funky patent process in general. It takes too long. You can patent the wheel. You can sue people for using wheels. What next?
As a patent owner (well, I dont have direct rights to the patent but I get a hefty % of all profits) I feel all of these frustrations. These patent wars of patenting things seemingly with the sole purpose of using them to sue others is downright silly. However, that brings me to the point of this post.
As a patent owner, I have to think about this question. If you had a patent that someone was violating (be it a sane patent or otherwise) would you sit back and watch? Or would you jump at the chance of getting a few $million? One more suit wont make the problem that much worse, right? I think that may be a large part of the problem.
"One more won't hurt..."
"One more won't make a difference..."