I have the answer to this issue. It is elegant, egalitarian (well, mostly), easy to implement and enforce, and it fits squarely within Constitutional guidelines.
The solution is to ban all minors from purchasing any printed materials, music, motion pictures, or video games, or access to them, without an over-18 present. This solution could be further perfected by banning unescorted minors from entering places that sell such materials.
This solution is perfect. It is simple and easy to enforce. Just check everyone's ID at the door or at the register. There are no free speech implications because all materials containing speech are restricted (therefore it is non-discriminatory) and because minors do not yet enjoy the full benefits of citizenship, such as voting, anyway. Under this solution, there is no censor board deciding what is offensive, obscene, or violent and what is not.
And not only is this solution perfect in its effectiveness and efficiency, but it makes perfectly clear what the adult world thinks of the adolescents of this country.
It seems to me there is a double-standard going on in Yahoo! and Microsoft. When you sign up for their e-mail service you agree to their Terms of Service, which always says stuff like "I agree not to DoS the service or fraudulently use the service" and stuff like that. Clicking "I agree" is taken to be equivalent to signing a contract.
So now, they have changed our privacy settings without our knowledge or consent. Unless they can argue that their Terms of Service permit this (subject to change without notice?), they must either admit that they broke their contract or admit that they have no contract with us (my preference).
If somebody starts a class-action, I'll join it. Accountability is most needed for aggregates of persons (government, corps).
I don't think completely doing away with the FCC is a good answer either. The FCC does some good things for consumers; for example, the requirements that electronics accept interference and not interfere with other devices. If it wasn't for the FCC, then 100MHz motherboards would drown out the 99X radio station (99.7 MHz) here in Atlanta, or maybe the vacuum cleaner would cause every other piece of electronics in my apartment to stop working, or something.
Granted, the free market could solve most of the problems that destroying the FCC would create. But some important problems it could not solve, like if the corporate office down the street had microwave transmitters at dangerous levels.
One thing I think is a good idea is for Congress to mandate opening up the AM, FM, UHF, and VHF bands to unrestricted status. If you want a transmitter, and you can afford to power the sucker (a 10KW radio transmitter would cost about $2500/month to power in Atlanta), go for it. Radio Anarchy baby. Or at the very least, open up UHF. I mean, how many people actually broadcast on UHF any more? Everybody uses cable now.
But even then, keeping the FCC around would be a good thing. Emergency services (police, fire, medical) should have some protected spectra to use for their radios, and it should be criminal to interfere with those bands in my opinion.
It is already illegal to copy and redistribute a copyrighted work (in general). There are civil and criminal penalties in place to punish those who do. The government's obligation to copyright holders ends there. No further measures are necessary or proper.
It is very difficult to ensure that your financial habits are not linked to you. Right now the only way to truly ensure this is to use cash, and to not use any membership cards or even coupons. Any other method of payment ties your name to the purchase. VIP cards tie your name to the purchase. Coupons could even tie you to the purchase, depending on how you got them.
But even cash may not be safe after some time. Some Euro coins are already implanted with ID chips. This means that banks, retailers, etc. can track the flow of each individual coin.
That means if you get two coins from a bank, spend one with a VIP card at a grocer, and spend the other at a bookstore with no VIP card, the book purchase could possibly be tied to you. What happens if US currency is made with these? (Could they have this already? They have the stripe in all bills from $5 up...) Or what happens if people just start tracking the serial numbers en masse?
You can protect yourself from cash-tracking schemes by always exchanging cash with other people. Withdraw cash, and don't spend it until you trade it for cash from another person. Only spend the traded cash. For the ultra-paraniod, come up with a scheme where you trade with as many different people as possible. This scheme also works for individually tagged coupons and VIP cards; just trade with a friend after every use. Try not to use the same VIP card twice.
I tried opennic once. I liked the idea; backwards compatibility to ICANN (with one exception), democratic structure, and so on. But I never got any names resolved at all. I assume the reason was load, or maybe because all the root servers are people's 486s at home sitting on cable modems.
What opennic needs is university sponsorship. The real strategy for opennic is first to convince ISPs and corporate WANs to use it, then to convince web site admins to move their names to it once it is ubiquitous. That means it absolutely has to be reliable, and I think university sponsorship is the best path for them to take.
If I were them, I would be e-mailing the IT departments of every major university in the world. The sooner the better, the way things are looking now.
wberry: If evolution is so obviously true this should not be a problem.
Hektor_Troy: Following that train of thought, why is it, that schools aren't teaching "anti holocaust" history?
That isn't really what I meant. I was saying that if evolution is so obviously true, gdyas shouldn't be worried that free-thinking, informed students will be "deceived" by the Creationists' ideas.
But I will respond to this comment of yours regardless:
What creationists are trying to do, is to teach others about their religion (christianity/judaism) - why can't they settle for that being taught in classes about religion? Why do you feel the need to push YOUR religious beliefs onto people of another religion? How would YOU feel, if your children were forced to learn about one of my suggested topics?
I personally would settle for that being taught in Religion classes, but most high schools have no such classes. Ideally I would prefer that Biology classes not teach the cosmology associated with evolution, but just the natural selection concepts, and include cosmology (including evolutionary, Creationist, and panspermic topics) into a Philosophy or Religion class in high school.
But the purpose of the Creationism in schools movement is not "to teach others about our religion", because school is not the place for that (except for removed, academic treatment). Christians teach others about their religion in daily living and relationships, always have, and always will.
and respond. However, your reply has some of the flaws that I hear Creationists so often criticized for: responses to phantom claims, hidden assumptions, begging the question, and abject insult. Mind you, some of what you say I agree with and always have, but I think a lot of your speech is exaggerated.
First the petty stuff:
Excuse us scientists for only being able to get pieces of a 5-6 billion year-old puzzle.
I note your assumption that I am not a scientist. It reveals your attitude. I suppose Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from a top-ranked US university qualifies me in some way as a scientist. I disclaimed already that it does not qualify me as a biologist or biochemist, but still.
First, I don't see how making an animal lose a pair of limbs helps for gene therapy.
Did you read the article? Perhaps your vaunted knowledge of biology will disagree, but the article claimed that this genetic mechanism could facilitate advances in medicine.
It's when creationists push for that delusion to be the basis of other's lives through law and forced creationist teaching in public schools that I get indignant.
Not only does this statement reply to something I did not say, it's a misrepresentation of the push for Creationism in education. As an aside, the real reason for the push is to guarantee that students are aware that some people disagree with evolution and why. All they want is a descriptive (not persuasive!) treatment of both schools of thought in the classroom. If evolution is so obviously true this should not be a problem.
Yes, there are some wackos who want evolution excluded from the classroom. But you and I agree that is contrary to free thought. Excluding either one, then, is contrary to free thought. (Or are "free thinkers" the people who agree with you?) Many textbooks already give brief treatment to both Creationism and panspermia, though usually with a persuasive tone rather than a descriptive tone.
Ah, yes. You forgot to say "I'm OK, you're OK".
What's that supposed to mean? This isn't "agree to disagree", which I hate, this is debate. I see no more reason to follow your world-view than you see to follow mine.
And now the not-petty stuff:
Glad to get down to brass tacks with you. The mechanism is natural selection, which we're constantly seeking to describe more thoroughly in our work. We're also seeking all the factual evidence we can to mount atop the mountains of it we already have. While it's difficult to reach through the millenia of the fossil record, we're working on it, based on facts, as we go along.
This isn't a response; it's a restatement of my challenge. I said we don't have all the evidence that would be required for complete proof, and your reply is that we're working on it. It's a valid statement, but it's not a rebuttal; it's an agreement!
Now I'd like to require the same factual rigor of you. Please provide factual proof of a God's existence and his influence in placing living things on this planet. I want a candidate mechanism and a detailed explanation of what changes occurred and how. Again, we'd like facts and not bible quotations please.
I don't have any incontrovertible proof either. We're working on it. I won't bother with Bible quotes, because only people that believe in God, and Jesus, and believe what Jesus stood for accept what it says. Apparently you don't, so there's no point in talking about it from that angle.
A common argument of theirs has been that entire organs & limbs can't simply appear or disappear through simple genetic changes.
That was no argument of mine, for what it's worth. But what I would argue is that when you drastically change certain essential traits in an organism, you affect its survivability in its environment. The Creationists want to see demonstrable evidence that this mechanism can operate without dooming the organisms to extinction.
Again, the extraordinary claim that we were placed here by a God requires the extraordinary proof of being provided evidence of God's existence and his influence in worldly affairs.
"Extraordinary" is in the eye of the beholder. I think that Darwin's theories are extraordinary. I can just as easily say there are a "preponderance" of facts that back up Creationism, and neither of us is going to do the months of investigation to post links to it all. So in my mind this is just rhetoric, not argument.
Bias Disclosure: I am a Christian and Biblical Creationist.
The article opener claims that this finding can explain how sea creatures could evolve into insects. That isn't what it explains at all.
... the scientists show how mutations in regulatory genes that guide the embryonic development of crustaceans and fruit flies allowed aquatic crustacean-like arthropods, with limbs on every segment of their bodies, to evolve 400 million years ago into a radically different body plan: the terrestrial six-legged insects.
So they change a key gene or two and the shrimp lose some legs. SO WHAT? As useful as this may prove to be for gene therapy and all, this does not explain away the Creationists' argument!
To my knowledge, no evolutionist claims that insects were the first land animals. An animal that can survive in a marine environment just cannot migrate to land, no matter how many legs it has.
To explain away the Creationists' argument, not only does a candidate mechanism such as this have to be found, but there must be a detailed explanation of which changes occurred, to which species, in what order, and how the resulting creatures could survive in either land or water.
The evolutionists still have a lot of work to do. If a shrimp loses legs and gills, and absorbs oxygen through the skin, can it still survive in water long enough to go ashore?
Whenever I get in a discussion with evolutionist types, they often respond with an attitude of over-skepticism. Stuff like, "I won't even consider this belief system without absolute proof!" Are those same people now criticizing Creationists for not bowing before this non-proof?
Now as for myself, I have very little knowledge of Biology (just high school level), but I'm no dummy. I know all about the black and white moths, and the drug-resistant bacteria, and the Galapagos finches, and all that. No one I know, Creationists included, doubts that variations occur over time. But I for one reserve the right to doubt an idea like evolution, that if true would completely invalidate my world-view, without more evidence than we currently have.
NOTE: I did not say that I have no doubts about Creationism. I have quite a few, not the least of which is the "Starlight & Time" problem. But that's another topic.
My point in summary: Lots of you Slashdot types love the stance of universal skepticism, but everybody believes something they can't prove. Evolution may be yours, or atheism, or astrology, but Creationism is mine.
I took Intro to Computing in the Spring of 1996. It was cake for me because I was a Computer Science major and I dig this stuff. But a lot of non-CS people dreaded that class above all others, especially Management, International Affairs, and Architecture majors, but also some engineering people, such as Aerospace and Industrial Engineering.
(And can you really blame them? How many civil engineers really need to know how to sort numbers in O(N log N) time? Or insert into a linked list for that matter? They write hacked-up FORTRAN if they write anything at all.)
Kurt Eiselt came to the first lecture and gave us a scare speech about Cheatfinder. Knowing that it looks for similarities between two students' works, I was worried constantly about my homework answers. A typical problem was to write an inorder binary search tree traversal routine in pseudocode. Honestly, how many different ways are there to do this? And there are 500 people in all sections of the class?
Fortunately, I was never flagged, but I have heard a few stories (which may not be true, you know how that goes) of people who were flagged, and were only vindicated after losing student jobs and failing classes.
I don't think an automated cheat detection system is applicable to small problem sets like binary search, stacks, and Mergesort. For the later classes, say Sophomore level, I have no problem with it though.
Besides, many Greek orders and clubs on campus have extensive "word" banks--archives of previous homeworks and tests, with solutions, from previous class offerings. Are they going to check against all previous students' work too?
The ACLU's Web site details its opposition to expanded surveillance authority in the Patriot Act. The new federal law lowers the standard for obtaining wiretap authority, the site says, requiring judges to rubber-stamp any request law-enforcement deems "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation."
And, it says, the law extends "this low threshold of proof to Internet communications that are far more revealing than the numbers dialed to or from a telephone, and to portions of e-mail communications that cannot readily be separated from content."
On its face, the law seems reasonable because a warrant is required. However, the judge is effectively forced by law to agree to the warrant. Therefore, it isn't a warrant at all. Even the word 'warrant' itself means that a search or seizure should be warranted, that is, justified. But even unjustified searches and seizures are allowed under the "Patriot Act" if prosecutors invoke the magic word 'terrorism'.
This is why I wrote my checks to the ACLU and the EFF on September 20th. I was afraid that things like this would happen. Sometimes it is good to be wrong.
And another thing about these "pen-register" taps on Internet transmissions. If the police investigating you get a list of phone numbers, they know who you've been calling and that's it. If they have a warrant (a real one) that's a very reasonable search IMO. I think it would also be reasonable if, under terms of a search warrant, law enforcement could obtain a trace of all your DNS traffic. But if they get a full URL history they know everything there is to know (except HTTP POST data and cookies)!
Have you ever really examined your browser history? Not the stuff on the pulldown tab, the stuff in the unadvertised 2 meg file buried deep in the browser directories. You will remember everything you ever read and did on the Internet if you see it. That is incredibly unreasonable IMO, especially when it is seized under a "Patriot Act" un-warrant.
Back in 1991 or 1992, in the days of 2400 bps modems, MS-DOS 5.0, and BBS'es, a "radical new compression tool" called OWS made the rounds. It claimed to have been written by some guy in Japan and use breakthroughs in fractal compression, often achieving 99% compression! "Better than ARJ! Better than PKzip!" Of course all my friends and I downloaded it immediately. Now we can send gam^H^H^Hfiles to each other in 10 minutes instead of 10 hours!
Now I was in the ninth grade, and compression technology was a complete mystery to me then, so I suspected nothing at first. I installed it and read the docs. The commands and such were pretty much like PKzip. I promptly took one of my favorite ga^H^Hdirectories, *copied it to a different place*, compressed it, deleted it, and uncompressed it without problems. The compressed file was exactly 1024 bytes. Hmm, what a coincidence!
The output looked kind of funny though:
Compressing file abc.wad by 99%.
Compressing file cde.wad by 99%.
Compressing file start.bat by 99%.
etc. Wait, start.bat is only 10 characters, that's like one bit! And why is *every* file compressed by 99%? Oh well, must be a display bug.
So I called my friend and arranged to send him this g^Hfile via Zmodem, and it took only a few seconds. But he couldn't uncompress it on the other side. "Sector Not Found", he said. Oh well, try it again. Same result. Another bug.
So I decided that this wasn't working out and stopped using OWS. Their user interface needed some work anyway, plus I was a little suspicious of compression bugs. The evidence was right there for me to make the now-obvious conclusion, but it didn't hit me until a few *weeks* later when all the BBS sysops were posting bulletins warning that OWS was a hoax.
As it turns out, OWS was storing the FAT information in the compressed files, so that when people do reality checks it will appear to re-create the deleted files, as it did for me. But when they try to uncompress a file that actually isn't there or has had its FAT entries moved around, you get the "Sector Not Found" error and you're screwed. If I hadn't tried to send a compressed file to a friend I might have been duped into "compressing" and deleting half my software or more.
All in all, a pretty cruel but effective joke. If it happened today somebody would be in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. Maybe it happened then too...
(Yes, this is slightly off-topic, but where else am I going to post this?)
Slashdot Mirror
I have the answer to this issue. It is elegant, egalitarian (well, mostly), easy to implement and enforce, and it fits squarely within Constitutional guidelines.
The solution is to ban all minors from purchasing any printed materials, music, motion pictures, or video games, or access to them, without an over-18 present. This solution could be further perfected by banning unescorted minors from entering places that sell such materials.
This solution is perfect. It is simple and easy to enforce. Just check everyone's ID at the door or at the register. There are no free speech implications because all materials containing speech are restricted (therefore it is non-discriminatory) and because minors do not yet enjoy the full benefits of citizenship, such as voting, anyway. Under this solution, there is no censor board deciding what is offensive, obscene, or violent and what is not.
And not only is this solution perfect in its effectiveness and efficiency, but it makes perfectly clear what the adult world thinks of the adolescents of this country.
It seems to me there is a double-standard going on in Yahoo! and Microsoft. When you sign up for their e-mail service you agree to their Terms of Service, which always says stuff like "I agree not to DoS the service or fraudulently use the service" and stuff like that. Clicking "I agree" is taken to be equivalent to signing a contract.
So now, they have changed our privacy settings without our knowledge or consent. Unless they can argue that their Terms of Service permit this (subject to change without notice?), they must either admit that they broke their contract or admit that they have no contract with us (my preference).
If somebody starts a class-action, I'll join it. Accountability is most needed for aggregates of persons (government, corps).
I don't think completely doing away with the FCC is a good answer either. The FCC does some good things for consumers; for example, the requirements that electronics accept interference and not interfere with other devices. If it wasn't for the FCC, then 100MHz motherboards would drown out the 99X radio station (99.7 MHz) here in Atlanta, or maybe the vacuum cleaner would cause every other piece of electronics in my apartment to stop working, or something.
Granted, the free market could solve most of the problems that destroying the FCC would create. But some important problems it could not solve, like if the corporate office down the street had microwave transmitters at dangerous levels.
One thing I think is a good idea is for Congress to mandate opening up the AM, FM, UHF, and VHF bands to unrestricted status. If you want a transmitter, and you can afford to power the sucker (a 10KW radio transmitter would cost about $2500/month to power in Atlanta), go for it. Radio Anarchy baby. Or at the very least, open up UHF. I mean, how many people actually broadcast on UHF any more? Everybody uses cable now.
But even then, keeping the FCC around would be a good thing. Emergency services (police, fire, medical) should have some protected spectra to use for their radios, and it should be criminal to interfere with those bands in my opinion.
It is already illegal to copy and redistribute a copyrighted work (in general). There are civil and criminal penalties in place to punish those who do. The government's obligation to copyright holders ends there. No further measures are necessary or proper.
It is very difficult to ensure that your financial habits are not linked to you. Right now the only way to truly ensure this is to use cash, and to not use any membership cards or even coupons. Any other method of payment ties your name to the purchase. VIP cards tie your name to the purchase. Coupons could even tie you to the purchase, depending on how you got them.
But even cash may not be safe after some time. Some Euro coins are already implanted with ID chips. This means that banks, retailers, etc. can track the flow of each individual coin.
That means if you get two coins from a bank, spend one with a VIP card at a grocer, and spend the other at a bookstore with no VIP card, the book purchase could possibly be tied to you. What happens if US currency is made with these? (Could they have this already? They have the stripe in all bills from $5 up...) Or what happens if people just start tracking the serial numbers en masse?
You can protect yourself from cash-tracking schemes by always exchanging cash with other people. Withdraw cash, and don't spend it until you trade it for cash from another person. Only spend the traded cash. For the ultra-paraniod, come up with a scheme where you trade with as many different people as possible. This scheme also works for individually tagged coupons and VIP cards; just trade with a friend after every use. Try not to use the same VIP card twice.
I tried opennic once. I liked the idea; backwards compatibility to ICANN (with one exception), democratic structure, and so on. But I never got any names resolved at all. I assume the reason was load, or maybe because all the root servers are people's 486s at home sitting on cable modems.
What opennic needs is university sponsorship. The real strategy for opennic is first to convince ISPs and corporate WANs to use it, then to convince web site admins to move their names to it once it is ubiquitous. That means it absolutely has to be reliable, and I think university sponsorship is the best path for them to take.
If I were them, I would be e-mailing the IT departments of every major university in the world. The sooner the better, the way things are looking now.
That isn't really what I meant. I was saying that if evolution is so obviously true, gdyas shouldn't be worried that free-thinking, informed students will be "deceived" by the Creationists' ideas.
But I will respond to this comment of yours regardless:
I personally would settle for that being taught in Religion classes, but most high schools have no such classes. Ideally I would prefer that Biology classes not teach the cosmology associated with evolution, but just the natural selection concepts, and include cosmology (including evolutionary, Creationist, and panspermic topics) into a Philosophy or Religion class in high school.
But the purpose of the Creationism in schools movement is not "to teach others about our religion", because school is not the place for that (except for removed, academic treatment). Christians teach others about their religion in daily living and relationships, always have, and always will.
and respond. However, your reply has some of the flaws that I hear Creationists so often criticized for: responses to phantom claims, hidden assumptions, begging the question, and abject insult. Mind you, some of what you say I agree with and always have, but I think a lot of your speech is exaggerated.
First the petty stuff:
I note your assumption that I am not a scientist. It reveals your attitude. I suppose Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from a top-ranked US university qualifies me in some way as a scientist. I disclaimed already that it does not qualify me as a biologist or biochemist, but still.
Did you read the article? Perhaps your vaunted knowledge of biology will disagree, but the article claimed that this genetic mechanism could facilitate advances in medicine.
Not only does this statement reply to something I did not say, it's a misrepresentation of the push for Creationism in education. As an aside, the real reason for the push is to guarantee that students are aware that some people disagree with evolution and why. All they want is a descriptive (not persuasive!) treatment of both schools of thought in the classroom. If evolution is so obviously true this should not be a problem.
Yes, there are some wackos who want evolution excluded from the classroom. But you and I agree that is contrary to free thought. Excluding either one, then, is contrary to free thought. (Or are "free thinkers" the people who agree with you?) Many textbooks already give brief treatment to both Creationism and panspermia, though usually with a persuasive tone rather than a descriptive tone.
What's that supposed to mean? This isn't "agree to disagree", which I hate, this is debate. I see no more reason to follow your world-view than you see to follow mine.
And now the not-petty stuff:
This isn't a response; it's a restatement of my challenge. I said we don't have all the evidence that would be required for complete proof, and your reply is that we're working on it. It's a valid statement, but it's not a rebuttal; it's an agreement!
I don't have any incontrovertible proof either. We're working on it. I won't bother with Bible quotes, because only people that believe in God, and Jesus, and believe what Jesus stood for accept what it says. Apparently you don't, so there's no point in talking about it from that angle.
That was no argument of mine, for what it's worth. But what I would argue is that when you drastically change certain essential traits in an organism, you affect its survivability in its environment. The Creationists want to see demonstrable evidence that this mechanism can operate without dooming the organisms to extinction.
"Extraordinary" is in the eye of the beholder. I think that Darwin's theories are extraordinary. I can just as easily say there are a "preponderance" of facts that back up Creationism, and neither of us is going to do the months of investigation to post links to it all. So in my mind this is just rhetoric, not argument.
Bias Disclosure: I am a Christian and Biblical Creationist.
The article opener claims that this finding can explain how sea creatures could evolve into insects. That isn't what it explains at all.
So they change a key gene or two and the shrimp lose some legs. SO WHAT? As useful as this may prove to be for gene therapy and all, this does not explain away the Creationists' argument!
To my knowledge, no evolutionist claims that insects were the first land animals. An animal that can survive in a marine environment just cannot migrate to land, no matter how many legs it has.
To explain away the Creationists' argument, not only does a candidate mechanism such as this have to be found, but there must be a detailed explanation of which changes occurred, to which species, in what order, and how the resulting creatures could survive in either land or water.
The evolutionists still have a lot of work to do. If a shrimp loses legs and gills, and absorbs oxygen through the skin, can it still survive in water long enough to go ashore?
Whenever I get in a discussion with evolutionist types, they often respond with an attitude of over-skepticism. Stuff like, "I won't even consider this belief system without absolute proof!" Are those same people now criticizing Creationists for not bowing before this non-proof?
Now as for myself, I have very little knowledge of Biology (just high school level), but I'm no dummy. I know all about the black and white moths, and the drug-resistant bacteria, and the Galapagos finches, and all that. No one I know, Creationists included, doubts that variations occur over time. But I for one reserve the right to doubt an idea like evolution, that if true would completely invalidate my world-view, without more evidence than we currently have.
NOTE: I did not say that I have no doubts about Creationism. I have quite a few, not the least of which is the "Starlight & Time" problem. But that's another topic.
My point in summary: Lots of you Slashdot types love the stance of universal skepticism, but everybody believes something they can't prove. Evolution may be yours, or atheism, or astrology, but Creationism is mine.
This was linked to in a story a while back. I'm pulling from it for my letter.
Nader
I took Intro to Computing in the Spring of 1996. It was cake for me because I was a Computer Science major and I dig this stuff. But a lot of non-CS people dreaded that class above all others, especially Management, International Affairs, and Architecture majors, but also some engineering people, such as Aerospace and Industrial Engineering.
(And can you really blame them? How many civil engineers really need to know how to sort numbers in O(N log N) time? Or insert into a linked list for that matter? They write hacked-up FORTRAN if they write anything at all.)
Kurt Eiselt came to the first lecture and gave us a scare speech about Cheatfinder. Knowing that it looks for similarities between two students' works, I was worried constantly about my homework answers. A typical problem was to write an inorder binary search tree traversal routine in pseudocode. Honestly, how many different ways are there to do this? And there are 500 people in all sections of the class?
Fortunately, I was never flagged, but I have heard a few stories (which may not be true, you know how that goes) of people who were flagged, and were only vindicated after losing student jobs and failing classes.
I don't think an automated cheat detection system is applicable to small problem sets like binary search, stacks, and Mergesort. For the later classes, say Sophomore level, I have no problem with it though.
Besides, many Greek orders and clubs on campus have extensive "word" banks--archives of previous homeworks and tests, with solutions, from previous class offerings. Are they going to check against all previous students' work too?
The ACLU's Web site details its opposition to expanded surveillance authority in the Patriot Act. The new federal law lowers the standard for obtaining wiretap authority, the site says, requiring judges to rubber-stamp any request law-enforcement deems "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation."
And, it says, the law extends "this low threshold of proof to Internet communications that are far more revealing than the numbers dialed to or from a telephone, and to portions of e-mail communications that cannot readily be separated from content."
On its face, the law seems reasonable because a warrant is required. However, the judge is effectively forced by law to agree to the warrant. Therefore, it isn't a warrant at all. Even the word 'warrant' itself means that a search or seizure should be warranted, that is, justified. But even unjustified searches and seizures are allowed under the "Patriot Act" if prosecutors invoke the magic word 'terrorism'.
This is why I wrote my checks to the ACLU and the EFF on September 20th. I was afraid that things like this would happen. Sometimes it is good to be wrong.
And another thing about these "pen-register" taps on Internet transmissions. If the police investigating you get a list of phone numbers, they know who you've been calling and that's it. If they have a warrant (a real one) that's a very reasonable search IMO. I think it would also be reasonable if, under terms of a search warrant, law enforcement could obtain a trace of all your DNS traffic. But if they get a full URL history they know everything there is to know (except HTTP POST data and cookies)!
Have you ever really examined your browser history? Not the stuff on the pulldown tab, the stuff in the unadvertised 2 meg file buried deep in the browser directories. You will remember everything you ever read and did on the Internet if you see it. That is incredibly unreasonable IMO, especially when it is seized under a "Patriot Act" un-warrant.
Back in 1991 or 1992, in the days of 2400 bps modems, MS-DOS 5.0, and BBS'es, a "radical new compression tool" called OWS made the rounds. It claimed to have been written by some guy in Japan and use breakthroughs in fractal compression, often achieving 99% compression! "Better than ARJ! Better than PKzip!" Of course all my friends and I downloaded it immediately. Now we can send gam^H^H^Hfiles to each other in 10 minutes instead of 10 hours!
Now I was in the ninth grade, and compression technology was a complete mystery to me then, so I suspected nothing at first. I installed it and read the docs. The commands and such were pretty much like PKzip. I promptly took one of my favorite ga^H^Hdirectories, *copied it to a different place*, compressed it, deleted it, and uncompressed it without problems. The compressed file was exactly 1024 bytes. Hmm, what a coincidence!
The output looked kind of funny though:
Compressing file abc.wad by 99%.
Compressing file cde.wad by 99%.
Compressing file start.bat by 99%.
etc. Wait, start.bat is only 10 characters, that's like one bit! And why is *every* file compressed by 99%? Oh well, must be a display bug.
So I called my friend and arranged to send him this g^Hfile via Zmodem, and it took only a few seconds. But he couldn't uncompress it on the other side. "Sector Not Found", he said. Oh well, try it again. Same result. Another bug.
So I decided that this wasn't working out and stopped using OWS. Their user interface needed some work anyway, plus I was a little suspicious of compression bugs. The evidence was right there for me to make the now-obvious conclusion, but it didn't hit me until a few *weeks* later when all the BBS sysops were posting bulletins warning that OWS was a hoax.
As it turns out, OWS was storing the FAT information in the compressed files, so that when people do reality checks it will appear to re-create the deleted files, as it did for me. But when they try to uncompress a file that actually isn't there or has had its FAT entries moved around, you get the "Sector Not Found" error and you're screwed. If I hadn't tried to send a compressed file to a friend I might have been duped into "compressing" and deleting half my software or more.
All in all, a pretty cruel but effective joke. If it happened today somebody would be in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. Maybe it happened then too...
(Yes, this is slightly off-topic, but where else am I going to post this?)