Frankly, I find the name rather chilling -- kind of Third Reich or Soviet Russiaish. "Office of Homeland Security", increased domestic security, creation of new police offices without restrictions placed on former ones. The introduction of the PATRIOT Act (passed by panicky legislators who now ineffectually complain about what they did), and the subsequent introduction of PATRIOT II.
You know what I dislike? Governmental reduction of:
* Free expression of opinion. * Freedom of the press. * Right to privacy of postal and electronic communications. * Protection against unlawful search and seizure.
The establishment of an entirely new federal police institution aimed at "protecting the homeland" with extensive powers never before granted.
It's not *worth* it, nor is it particularly effective at stopping terrorism. It is not a reasonable reaction to a terrorist act, even one aimed at governmental infrastructure.
Except I'm not talking about the PATRIOT Act.
I'm talking about the Reichstagsbrandverordnung, or Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State, which happened 60 years ago, where Hitler first gained full control of the German government. The Nazis insisted that they needed more extensive police powers as an emergency to help stop terrorist acts, after their Reichstag was burned down.
Many people wonder how the Nazis could seize control of Germany. It was amazing -- people kept giving up rights, convinced that their leaders would stop and not continue on out of control. They let their equivalent of the executive branch run amok, unchecked by their legislators, exactly as is happening now. Once they got slightly comfortable with the state of affairs, more rights were taken away, and it became harder and harder to criticize the government in power. Fear of the unknown kept the leaders in control -- they kept claiming that there were enemies everywhere, even within the state, and that they were simply exercising German military strength to ensure that Germany was secure. Exactly as our current administration does. Ashcroft's speech could have been taken straight from an English translation of any of Hitler's attacks on his critics.
I firmly believe that the current largest flaw in existing security systems is that they are generally too difficult to use -- that they require significant additional effort on the part of the user. Security needs to be *especially* intuitive to help avoid misconfiguration (with security, misconfigurations are often hard to detect and can have catastrophic results), and easy and relatively low-effort to use to encourage people to use them.
From what I understand, SElinux divides the root privileges somewhat. Instead of root being able to do everything, things such as "bind to ports under 1024" "write to any file" are subdivided. By default, you get all (for backwards compatibility) but programs can drop privileges when they need to. In this case, I don't think it would help, the privs are too coarse grained.
I believe that you're thinking of POSIX capabilities, another set of security features in Linux 2.2 and above. This allows giving certain "root-like" capabilities to processes. SELinux is rather more fine-grained. (Also, this brief overview may be useful).
The folks putting SELinux together are the sort of folks that aren't going to overlook rewriting.:-)
NetBSD has the ability to restrict syscalls.
SELinux supports higher-level constructs than just syscall blocking, so you aren't limited to just blocking on a per-syscall level -- see the links I dropped in here.
The trick there is getting the perms permissive enough to allow the install, yet secure enough to stop some of the evil stuff. No curent OS really does this. Maybe some of the stillborn Java OS could, with their security properties, but computers in current use are designed to be very permissive.
Yup.
SELinux is complex enough (most end users don't know what a syscall is) that most people will probably just use a very high-level interface to it. Packagers can set up some policy (for example, having apache run without disk-writing access or something along those lines) and software developers other stuff. It's not quite just like setting up a chroot jail. It's more like mucking about with tc or something.
Windows, yes; I'm dubious that Internet Explorer is still in favor among Slashdot readers. I know of few people that have tried recent builds of Firefox and still prefer MSIE. Mozilla used to be well behind when it came to user experience, but things have seriously changed.
I'm using a Windows machine at the moment because I'm not near my own computer, and I can't exactly put Linux on someone else's computer.
Yes there is, when did Microsfot (or any other major software company) begin releasing beta software through P2P networks as a means for testing?
But the guy was pretty clearly looking for an illegal version of the software, which would be released through such channels as Gnutella. I don't think that there is a lot of question that he was lying about looking for a legal beta version. The question is whether it's reasonable to say that the only reason he fell prey to a trojan is because he's an idiot. I don't think it is. With spyware, especially, the blend between "reputable" and "malicious" software has become extremely blurred and difficult to identify (and with the case of custom trojans, current automatic scanning systems cannot pick up on them).
It seems that in both the initial letter and counter-counter letter, there were a number of examples listed -- fish, dinosaurs (the guy seemed to really like Triceratops) and other creatures that show gradual change.
Obviously, you can take an extreme standpoint and say "well, yes, but God (or an evil demon, to steal from Decartes) could have forged everything to fool us, but I'm assuming that you aren't trying to go that far -- at that point, you simply deny the value of evidence -- you don't even know that you have hands or feet.
Source of the Bug: Who is to Blame? Windows NT:
Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk
Ron Redman, deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office The crash was caused by the inability of the OS to properly handle division by zero. "Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor," DiGiorgio Redman agrees with him, but he is more careful in casting blame
Why? Who is to Blame? The application program:
Lieutenant Commander Roderick Fraser, the chief engineer on Yorktown at the time of the system shut-down
Harvey McKelvey, former director of navy programs for CAE Electronics "The fault was with certain applications that were developed by CAE Electronics in Leesburg" Fraser "If you want to put a stick in anybody's eye, it should be in ours." McKelvey They didn't use the right version of the software - the latest version would have prevented this problem...
"Because of politics, some things are being forced on us that without political pressure we might not do, like Windows NT" Redman
While I have a hard time finding data on exactly what was done during the fix (I get the impression that the Navy was a bit closed-mouth about all of this), it seems that a reboot was part of the procedure.
OTOH, I doubt that they've made changes that fundamentally improve reliability.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Linux is necessarily a better choice.:-) Both OSes are awfully complex.
Actually, you know, Microsoft's bundling of software, despite the competitive advantages ("This isn't a web browser, your honor -- it's an operating system") has some PR disadvantages. When there is a security breech, the press reports that *Windows* has a security problem, and the entire system becomes tainted by association (granted, there's no way to remove Internet Explorer or friends, but it still sucks for the Microsoft developers that wrote completely unrelated code and still catch flak). In the Linux world, you wouldn't hear that "Linux has a security hole". You'd hear that "Samba has a security hole" or "sendmail has a security hole". Much easier to sell. Granted, that's partly a real-world benefit -- I don't have sendmail on any of my systems, and use postfix instead -- but some of it is sheer PR from name association.
I guess rather than welding it they'd be using epoxy to repair? At least that's what we do with R/C planes that use carbon fiber (well, usually you replace the carbon fiber completely when it breaks -- not an option for a ship made of it.)
Maybe they use individual plates that can be replaced one at a time.
I only know about the theoretical side of CSMA/CD, but as far I can see, its an ineherent flaw in communicating over shared broadcast channels.
Few communication channels follow the abstract "shared broadcast" model.
If all devices had and used directional receiver antennas (say, six antennas pointing in different directions with that pick up different signal strengths and determine the source location based on these strengths), we could avoid the problem.
Trying to pin the fact that radio communication can be jammed on Microsoft? I'd say that that'd be a wee bit ambitious.
The only thing that I can think of that could allow a fix would be, as the article alluded to, directional support in all 802.11 devices to help triangulate interference. Still a pretty awful hack.
The "OSS is an insecure virus" campaign business ended when Microsoft discovered that it didn't resonate well with their customers.
I'm just curious as to what will happen if Microsoft finds someone inserting code from their non-GPL-compatible release into a GPLed piece of software. Will they give people the same courtesy that the GNU Project does -- remove it or open source it -- or will they try to sue and shut down the GPL-using author?
Microsoft doesn't have a problem with open source per se. The GPL, however, is a threat, because it attacks two points (closed source and patents) that they use to prevent competention from popping up and going after their market. If they use GPL code, they lose a good chunk of what keeps them king of the market. They love the BSD license, because it gives them goodies for free (and they don't have to do anything in return).
Producing software that is open source but not GPL-compatible helps fragment the opne-source world and weaken the GPL (unlike the BSD license, which is different from the GPL but compatible with it).
[shrug] It's all a continuum. I can't see how the thing isn't a trojan. I've done dead-code disassembly of malware, and been able to detect nasty software -- I wouldn't call someone dumb who isn't able to do that. Some people know more or less about their computer and can pick up on potentially malicious behavior. I pretty much long ago gave up on thinking that it was reasonable to try and make people detect malware and avoid it unless they can be given short, clear, understandable rules ("Don't open attachments" is short and clear, "don't open attachments with potentially dangerous extensions" is unreasonable -- how the heck are people supposed to know what is "potentially dangerous" or spend time keeping up on a huge list?). Heck, there are probably buffer overflows in a ton of programs, so a trojan.zip or.mp3 is quite possible. Computers are just so complex that it's very difficult to keep the actively scheming malware author (with time to do research) from tricking a number of probably less technically adept end users into executing malware.
Finally, when AppleScript is running, it's a bit too late. Even if a person programs, knows what AppleScript does, knows that Word doesn't use AppleScript as part of its normal Macintosh runtime, they're too late to avoid plenty of potentially disasterous damage.
You're pointing out that the trojan could have been more insiduious. This may be quite true. I do not think, however, that the claim that "it is not a trojan" is defensible.
Schools need to go back to the basics, readin', writin', 'rithmetic. Literacy and critical thinking should be the goals of school, and if the kids never even touch a computer in school, they won't miss a thing.
While I agree with some of what you've written, a few things here set me off.
I agree with reading. Students need to read more. The problem is that I have universally hated everything that schools have made me read. I even have a couple of controls -- I read Catch-22 on my own before I was made to read it, and *loved* it. I hated it when I had to go through and keep a log, writing down metaphors and literary devices used. My father let me read his Steinbeck collection. I adored Steinbeck without exception...but when we read Grapes of Wrath, I hated it. I think that a better move would be to install in students an enjoyment of reading. Elementary school is, I think, an important time to encourage students to read. Put books that they'll enjoy on the shelves. Work with local government to ensure that all students get city public library cards granted them at school. Separate reading from literary analysis -- I am not a tremendous fan of literary analysis, but I do think that reading has tremendous benefits to a wide range of people. Let people read The Lord of the Rings or Crime and Punishment without being forced to analyze every line, and I think that more people will have a long-term love of reading instilled.
As for writing...I agree, but I think that writing requirements of today are significantly different from the writing of just a couple of decades ago. I think that quality of handwriting is much less of an issue, the ability to type is more important, and the ability to quickly write grammatically correct phrases is important (for real-time typing communication).
I think that the need to know arithmetic has gone down a bit. Learning one's times tables is a useful thing to have around, and is still critical. However, a lot of things that used to be done in the head are generally done on a computing device. Adding up long series of numbers quickly mentally isn't a very useful skill any more, since someone doing so is going to have a calculator. This is not without prescedent -- schools no longer teach how to, say, find a square root by hand, though that was at one point a pretty fundamental operation to know how to do by hand. Calculators have just become too common.
I agree absolutely with critical thinking. I had a speech class in high school that included analysis of propaganda that I think should be standard to teach folks that have to live in today's well-marketed world. having a required legal class might also be a good idea -- at the least, we are governed by law, and it doesn't hurt to have a good understanding of what it allows. It also provides a good critical thinking foundation.
Don't give teachers raises. Instead, upon entry into the work force each of their students would be tithed 1%-2% of their pretax salary, pooled together to then be divided equally among their old teachers. Theoretically, the better the teacher's job is done, the better their students will be paid, and thus the better teachers will be rewarded appropriately.
That's a very interesting idea, but there's definitely some things that would have to be resolved. I think a lot of art teachers would take issue with such an approach, and teachers of "require classes" and larger classes would reap significantly more money than the teacher that chooses to teach a probability class that isn't mandatory.
The amount of time spent changing font types, font sizes, paragraph alignment, etc. is added time they could have avoided. Typing speed is a severe limiter for a long report -- and "teacher says it has to be typed/printed".
I guess this varies, but I could type *far* more quickly than I could write longhand in high school. I find the computer to be a much better composition tool than a pad of paper with lines all over. Also, I think that a "typed" requirement is not unreasonable. Just as a function of society, a lot of things *do* need to be typed these days (I can't think of the last time someone gave me something in longhand) and the use of secretaries to do so has gone down. Furthermore, the QWERTY interface is likely to be around for a long time (unlike, say, the Excel interface), and so folks are acquiring worthwhile skills.
Spell-check and grammar checks give an impression that they don't need to check their own work. I end up reviewing and marking the errors to make them correct them.
I've seen people do this a lot. I am not the greatest paper checker in the world -- for short papers, I generally just read them through once, fixing errors, but I found spell checking invaluable at picking up things that I might have missed. Grammer checkers are, in my opinion, pretty much useless.
The educational software that they found so fun when they were younger fit into two categories - something they already knew and was easy OR something they hadn't learned yet and had to ask for help with. There was no actual instruction on HOW to do things - just little games using the skills.
Amen. I think that "edutainment" software is almost entirely a complete waste of money. It rarely provides educational benefits above traditional media and either it provides almost no instruction or it's not much fun. I think that the only time I've found the software format particularly useful was when learning Spanish, when I had a Spanish tutor program at home. There, I could easily ask the thing to play back a word and do searches for words. The software was badly produced (also a near-universal for edutainment), but the format was helpful.
I'm not a Luddite by any means - I use my computers for maximizing my productivity. I even try to teach my children how to avoid the pitfalls by making them hand-write their rough drafts, research from books, and have a preset format that is used for all documents.
Sigh. I'm not sure I can agree with you here (though people arguing with folks about how they should raise their kids always seems to get tempers up). I really, really hated handwriting drafts. I found it slow, harder to read, and a pain in the butt to revise. I also have long since lost everything I wrote in school on paper, but still have digital copies of everything I did on the computer.
I can understand the "research from books" bit -- it's easy to not realize how much good, authoritative data is only available on dead wood -- but I also know how incredibly frusterating it can be. Normally, when I'm researching something, I'd never dream of touching paper unless I know that I need something that's on paper. The default is always electronic, because the tools available are so powerful and cut out so much drudgery. I'd even venture to say that within ten years, enough data will have been transcribed or will be available electronically by default that for *most* fields, electronic research will be the default.
Someone has cited they had a difference of opinion with educating professionals in that computer skills are a primary need versus science and math. I feel similar to this slashdotter except that I feel stronger language skills are needed primarily in our education system.
I agree.:-> Language-correctness posts are always open to corrections themselves.
First of all, s/cited/stated/. Citing is the act of referencing content.
Second of all, since you are not writing a direct quote (we can tell, since otherwise it would be set off with quote marks), the text should read "has cited that they".
Third of all, since the existence of skills is not a need (they exist, though perhaps they should be strengthened), your sentence should read "computer skills are more needed than math and science skills".
"I feel similar to this slashdotter" ought to be "I feel similar to this Slashdotter". Slashdot is a proper noun.
The text "are needed primarily in our education system" means something along the lines of "the education system is where we mostly need this, as opposed to other areas". Based on context, I suspect that you should excise "primarily".
I'm not going to do the whole post, but those are just the first two sentences.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean "PATRIOT Act".
Frankly, I find the name rather chilling -- kind of Third Reich or Soviet Russiaish. "Office of Homeland Security", increased domestic security, creation of new police offices without restrictions placed on former ones. The introduction of the PATRIOT Act (passed by panicky legislators who now ineffectually complain about what they did), and the subsequent introduction of PATRIOT II.
You know what I dislike? Governmental reduction of:
* Free expression of opinion.
* Freedom of the press.
* Right to privacy of postal and electronic communications.
* Protection against unlawful search and seizure.
The establishment of an entirely new federal police institution aimed at "protecting the homeland" with extensive powers never before granted.
It's not *worth* it, nor is it particularly effective at stopping terrorism. It is not a reasonable reaction to a terrorist act, even one aimed at governmental infrastructure.
Except I'm not talking about the PATRIOT Act.
I'm talking about the Reichstagsbrandverordnung, or Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State, which happened 60 years ago, where Hitler first gained full control of the German government. The Nazis insisted that they needed more extensive police powers as an emergency to help stop terrorist acts, after their Reichstag was burned down.
Many people wonder how the Nazis could seize control of Germany. It was amazing -- people kept giving up rights, convinced that their leaders would stop and not continue on out of control. They let their equivalent of the executive branch run amok, unchecked by their legislators, exactly as is happening now. Once they got slightly comfortable with the state of affairs, more rights were taken away, and it became harder and harder to criticize the government in power. Fear of the unknown kept the leaders in control -- they kept claiming that there were enemies everywhere, even within the state, and that they were simply exercising German military strength to ensure that Germany was secure. Exactly as our current administration does. Ashcroft's speech could have been taken straight from an English translation of any of Hitler's attacks on his critics.
Ah, you're right. He was the only senator up for re-election to vote against the Iraq war.
Security is somewhere at 10th or fiteenth
:-)
I firmly believe that the current largest flaw in existing security systems is that they are generally too difficult to use -- that they require significant additional effort on the part of the user. Security needs to be *especially* intuitive to help avoid misconfiguration (with security, misconfigurations are often hard to detect and can have catastrophic results), and easy and relatively low-effort to use to encourage people to use them.
From what I understand, SElinux divides the root privileges somewhat. Instead of root being able to do everything, things such as "bind to ports under 1024" "write to any file" are subdivided. By default, you get all (for backwards compatibility) but programs can drop privileges when they need to. In this case, I don't think it would help, the privs are too coarse grained.
I believe that you're thinking of POSIX capabilities, another set of security features in Linux 2.2 and above. This allows giving certain "root-like" capabilities to processes. SELinux is rather more fine-grained. (Also, this brief overview may be useful).
The folks putting SELinux together are the sort of folks that aren't going to overlook rewriting.
NetBSD has the ability to restrict syscalls.
SELinux supports higher-level constructs than just syscall blocking, so you aren't limited to just blocking on a per-syscall level -- see the links I dropped in here.
The trick there is getting the perms permissive enough to allow the install, yet secure enough to stop some of the evil stuff. No curent OS really does this. Maybe some of the stillborn Java OS could, with their security properties, but computers in current use are designed to be very permissive.
Yup.
SELinux is complex enough (most end users don't know what a syscall is) that most people will probably just use a very high-level interface to it. Packagers can set up some policy (for example, having apache run without disk-writing access or something along those lines) and software developers other stuff. It's not quite just like setting up a chroot jail. It's more like mucking about with tc or something.
Windows, yes; I'm dubious that Internet Explorer is still in favor among Slashdot readers. I know of few people that have tried recent builds of Firefox and still prefer MSIE. Mozilla used to be well behind when it came to user experience, but things have seriously changed.
I'm using a Windows machine at the moment because I'm not near my own computer, and I can't exactly put Linux on someone else's computer.
Yes there is, when did Microsfot (or any other major software company) begin releasing beta software through P2P networks as a means for testing?
But the guy was pretty clearly looking for an illegal version of the software, which would be released through such channels as Gnutella. I don't think that there is a lot of question that he was lying about looking for a legal beta version. The question is whether it's reasonable to say that the only reason he fell prey to a trojan is because he's an idiot. I don't think it is. With spyware, especially, the blend between "reputable" and "malicious" software has become extremely blurred and difficult to identify (and with the case of custom trojans, current automatic scanning systems cannot pick up on them).
It seems that in both the initial letter and counter-counter letter, there were a number of examples listed -- fish, dinosaurs (the guy seemed to really like Triceratops) and other creatures that show gradual change.
Obviously, you can take an extreme standpoint and say "well, yes, but God (or an evil demon, to steal from Decartes) could have forged everything to fool us, but I'm assuming that you aren't trying to go that far -- at that point, you simply deny the value of evidence -- you don't even know that you have hands or feet.
The problem is that it's difficult to propose a stable, acceptable-to-everyone system in which you have free speech and Limbaugh doesn't.
Given that this is a bit of a practical restriction, I'd say that the ACLU is reasonably justified in taking the stance of defending everyone.
That's true for most systems -- universalizability is generally considered to be a pretty important property for systems.
It will be on pay-per-view only.
Are you claiming that the Nazis were normal people except the part about rounding up Jewish people???
Yes. Milgram Experiment. Stanford Prison Experiment.
This was perhaps best summed up by Lord Acton: Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
"Invoking Godwin's Law" is what you did by mentioning it by applying it to the parent's post.
0x0d0a's corollary to Godwin's Law:
People who invoke Godwin's Law tend to lack a real counterargument.
Wellstone was the only one to vote against invading Iraq.
Feingold was the only one to vote against the PATRIOT Act.
I suspect both are quite principled men, and pleasantly unswayed by the emotion of the moment.
Funnily enough, both the commanding office and the officer in charge of that project went on the record to state that the problem was not with NT.
...
How about this?
Here's the relevant text from their outline:
Source of the Bug:
Who is to Blame?
Windows NT:
Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk
Ron Redman, deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office
The crash was caused by the inability of the OS to properly handle division by zero.
"Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor," DiGiorgio
Redman agrees with him, but he is more careful in casting blame
Why?
Who is to Blame?
The application program:
Lieutenant Commander Roderick Fraser, the chief engineer on Yorktown at the time of the system shut-down
Harvey McKelvey, former director of navy programs for CAE Electronics
"The fault was with certain applications that were developed by CAE Electronics in Leesburg" Fraser
"If you want to put a stick in anybody's eye, it should be in ours." McKelvey
They didn't use the right version of the software - the latest version would have prevented this problem
"Because of politics, some things are being forced on us that without political pressure we might not do, like Windows NT" Redman
While I have a hard time finding data on exactly what was done during the fix (I get the impression that the Navy was a bit closed-mouth about all of this), it seems that a reboot was part of the procedure.
OTOH, I doubt that they've made changes that fundamentally improve reliability.
:-) Both OSes are awfully complex.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Linux is necessarily a better choice.
Actually, you know, Microsoft's bundling of software, despite the competitive advantages ("This isn't a web browser, your honor -- it's an operating system") has some PR disadvantages. When there is a security breech, the press reports that *Windows* has a security problem, and the entire system becomes tainted by association (granted, there's no way to remove Internet Explorer or friends, but it still sucks for the Microsoft developers that wrote completely unrelated code and still catch flak). In the Linux world, you wouldn't hear that "Linux has a security hole". You'd hear that "Samba has a security hole" or "sendmail has a security hole". Much easier to sell. Granted, that's partly a real-world benefit -- I don't have sendmail on any of my systems, and use postfix instead -- but some of it is sheer PR from name association.
I guess rather than welding it they'd be using epoxy to repair? At least that's what we do with R/C planes that use carbon fiber (well, usually you replace the carbon fiber completely when it breaks -- not an option for a ship made of it.)
Maybe they use individual plates that can be replaced one at a time.
Emergency repairs would be a bitch, though.
[evolution is] Pure conjecture, with no evidence. Yes, a theory, about as sound as the theory of UFOs abducting people.
I can't agree.
I only know about the theoretical side of CSMA/CD, but as far I can see, its an ineherent flaw in communicating over shared broadcast channels.
Few communication channels follow the abstract "shared broadcast" model.
If all devices had and used directional receiver antennas (say, six antennas pointing in different directions with that pick up different signal strengths and determine the source location based on these strengths), we could avoid the problem.
Trying to pin the fact that radio communication can be jammed on Microsoft? I'd say that that'd be a wee bit ambitious.
The only thing that I can think of that could allow a fix would be, as the article alluded to, directional support in all 802.11 devices to help triangulate interference. Still a pretty awful hack.
The "OSS is an insecure virus" campaign business ended when Microsoft discovered that it didn't resonate well with their customers.
I'm just curious as to what will happen if Microsoft finds someone inserting code from their non-GPL-compatible release into a GPLed piece of software. Will they give people the same courtesy that the GNU Project does -- remove it or open source it -- or will they try to sue and shut down the GPL-using author?
Microsoft doesn't have a problem with open source per se. The GPL, however, is a threat, because it attacks two points (closed source and patents) that they use to prevent competention from popping up and going after their market. If they use GPL code, they lose a good chunk of what keeps them king of the market. They love the BSD license, because it gives them goodies for free (and they don't have to do anything in return).
Producing software that is open source but not GPL-compatible helps fragment the opne-source world and weaken the GPL (unlike the BSD license, which is different from the GPL but compatible with it).
[shrug] It's all a continuum. I can't see how the thing isn't a trojan. I've done dead-code disassembly of malware, and been able to detect nasty software -- I wouldn't call someone dumb who isn't able to do that. Some people know more or less about their computer and can pick up on potentially malicious behavior. I pretty much long ago gave up on thinking that it was reasonable to try and make people detect malware and avoid it unless they can be given short, clear, understandable rules ("Don't open attachments" is short and clear, "don't open attachments with potentially dangerous extensions" is unreasonable -- how the heck are people supposed to know what is "potentially dangerous" or spend time keeping up on a huge list?). Heck, there are probably buffer overflows in a ton of programs, so a trojan .zip or .mp3 is quite possible. Computers are just so complex that it's very difficult to keep the actively scheming malware author (with time to do research) from tricking a number of probably less technically adept end users into executing malware.
Finally, when AppleScript is running, it's a bit too late. Even if a person programs, knows what AppleScript does, knows that Word doesn't use AppleScript as part of its normal Macintosh runtime, they're too late to avoid plenty of potentially disasterous damage.
You're pointing out that the trojan could have been more insiduious. This may be quite true. I do not think, however, that the claim that "it is not a trojan" is defensible.
Schools need to go back to the basics, readin', writin', 'rithmetic. Literacy and critical thinking should be the goals of school, and if the kids never even touch a computer in school, they won't miss a thing.
While I agree with some of what you've written, a few things here set me off.
I agree with reading. Students need to read more. The problem is that I have universally hated everything that schools have made me read. I even have a couple of controls -- I read Catch-22 on my own before I was made to read it, and *loved* it. I hated it when I had to go through and keep a log, writing down metaphors and literary devices used. My father let me read his Steinbeck collection. I adored Steinbeck without exception...but when we read Grapes of Wrath, I hated it. I think that a better move would be to install in students an enjoyment of reading. Elementary school is, I think, an important time to encourage students to read. Put books that they'll enjoy on the shelves. Work with local government to ensure that all students get city public library cards granted them at school. Separate reading from literary analysis -- I am not a tremendous fan of literary analysis, but I do think that reading has tremendous benefits to a wide range of people. Let people read The Lord of the Rings or Crime and Punishment without being forced to analyze every line, and I think that more people will have a long-term love of reading instilled.
As for writing...I agree, but I think that writing requirements of today are significantly different from the writing of just a couple of decades ago. I think that quality of handwriting is much less of an issue, the ability to type is more important, and the ability to quickly write grammatically correct phrases is important (for real-time typing communication).
I think that the need to know arithmetic has gone down a bit. Learning one's times tables is a useful thing to have around, and is still critical. However, a lot of things that used to be done in the head are generally done on a computing device. Adding up long series of numbers quickly mentally isn't a very useful skill any more, since someone doing so is going to have a calculator. This is not without prescedent -- schools no longer teach how to, say, find a square root by hand, though that was at one point a pretty fundamental operation to know how to do by hand. Calculators have just become too common.
I agree absolutely with critical thinking. I had a speech class in high school that included analysis of propaganda that I think should be standard to teach folks that have to live in today's well-marketed world. having a required legal class might also be a good idea -- at the least, we are governed by law, and it doesn't hurt to have a good understanding of what it allows. It also provides a good critical thinking foundation.
Don't give teachers raises. Instead, upon entry into the work force each of their students would be tithed 1%-2% of their pretax salary, pooled together to then be divided equally among their old teachers. Theoretically, the better the teacher's job is done, the better their students will be paid, and thus the better teachers will be rewarded appropriately.
That's a very interesting idea, but there's definitely some things that would have to be resolved. I think a lot of art teachers would take issue with such an approach, and teachers of "require classes" and larger classes would reap significantly more money than the teacher that chooses to teach a probability class that isn't mandatory.
The amount of time spent changing font types, font sizes, paragraph alignment, etc. is added time they could have avoided. Typing speed is a severe limiter for a long report -- and "teacher says it has to be typed/printed".
I guess this varies, but I could type *far* more quickly than I could write longhand in high school. I find the computer to be a much better composition tool than a pad of paper with lines all over. Also, I think that a "typed" requirement is not unreasonable. Just as a function of society, a lot of things *do* need to be typed these days (I can't think of the last time someone gave me something in longhand) and the use of secretaries to do so has gone down. Furthermore, the QWERTY interface is likely to be around for a long time (unlike, say, the Excel interface), and so folks are acquiring worthwhile skills.
Spell-check and grammar checks give an impression that they don't need to check their own work. I end up reviewing and marking the errors to make them correct them.
I've seen people do this a lot. I am not the greatest paper checker in the world -- for short papers, I generally just read them through once, fixing errors, but I found spell checking invaluable at picking up things that I might have missed. Grammer checkers are, in my opinion, pretty much useless.
The educational software that they found so fun when they were younger fit into two categories - something they already knew and was easy OR something they hadn't learned yet and had to ask for help with. There was no actual instruction on HOW to do things - just little games using the skills.
Amen. I think that "edutainment" software is almost entirely a complete waste of money. It rarely provides educational benefits above traditional media and either it provides almost no instruction or it's not much fun. I think that the only time I've found the software format particularly useful was when learning Spanish, when I had a Spanish tutor program at home. There, I could easily ask the thing to play back a word and do searches for words. The software was badly produced (also a near-universal for edutainment), but the format was helpful.
I'm not a Luddite by any means - I use my computers for maximizing my productivity. I even try to teach my children how to avoid the pitfalls by making them hand-write their rough drafts, research from books, and have a preset format that is used for all documents.
Sigh. I'm not sure I can agree with you here (though people arguing with folks about how they should raise their kids always seems to get tempers up). I really, really hated handwriting drafts. I found it slow, harder to read, and a pain in the butt to revise. I also have long since lost everything I wrote in school on paper, but still have digital copies of everything I did on the computer.
I can understand the "research from books" bit -- it's easy to not realize how much good, authoritative data is only available on dead wood -- but I also know how incredibly frusterating it can be. Normally, when I'm researching something, I'd never dream of touching paper unless I know that I need something that's on paper. The default is always electronic, because the tools available are so powerful and cut out so much drudgery. I'd even venture to say that within ten years, enough data will have been transcribed or will be available electronically by default that for *most* fields, electronic research will be the default.
Someone has cited they had a difference of opinion with educating professionals in that computer skills are a primary need versus science and math. I feel similar to this slashdotter except that I feel stronger language skills are needed primarily in our education system.
:-> Language-correctness posts are always open to corrections themselves.
I agree.
First of all, s/cited/stated/. Citing is the act of referencing content.
Second of all, since you are not writing a direct quote (we can tell, since otherwise it would be set off with quote marks), the text should read "has cited that they".
Third of all, since the existence of skills is not a need (they exist, though perhaps they should be strengthened), your sentence should read "computer skills are more needed than math and science skills".
"I feel similar to this slashdotter" ought to be "I feel similar to this Slashdotter". Slashdot is a proper noun.
The text "are needed primarily in our education system" means something along the lines of "the education system is where we mostly need this, as opposed to other areas". Based on context, I suspect that you should excise "primarily".
I'm not going to do the whole post, but those are just the first two sentences.