Sep 30 2005

The real war

There is all this talk of a war going on in the Middle East, President Bush, and all that other jargon. However, what we commonly overlook is the civil war going on right here in the United States. There is a HUGE battle going on between the US citizens and the RIAA / MPAA / ANTI-piracy groups. Right now, as I write this, there is a large DoS (Denial of Service) attack on the cache servers of the WinMX network. However, that is not stopping traders; there is already a fixed .dll to block the DoS attacks, AND use new cache servers.

Who will win this battle? That much is relatively clear; the traders will always prevail. Reason being that if it can be made, it can be broken. Ah, the Challenge of Reverse Engineering (C.O.R.E.).

Though I don’t download music, I support those that would like to. I don’t like to download music because the quality is not nearly as good as buying the CD. When a sharer says it is 320kbps, they usually have just taken a 64kbps or 128kbps and re-encoded it to 320kbps. All this does is make the file size larger and doesn’t improve quality. That aside, I congratulate all the sharers that continue to share in spite of the ANTI-piracy groups.

I just thought it was interesting to see the battle ACTUALLY happening. Who knows what casualties and victories will happen overnight.

–Zach

Sep 26 2005

Open Letter

Alrighty, I’m finally done with my rough draft of my open letter. The letter addresses my concerns of the Balanced Literacy program being used in gradeschool. While I think it may be an effective methodology for high school, and even middle school, I don’t think it is efficient at the elementary level. This letter was intended to be in the style of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in that it used different types of appeals ranging from logical ones, to ethics, and emotional hypothetical stories.

Here ya’ go:
If it Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

–Zach

Sep 25 2005

GREAT article on literacy

If you are going into education, or are currently an educator, I urge you to read this article that I found about literacy. It offers some incredibly powerful tactics to improving literacy in younger children. While some of them seem to be common knowledge, they only are effective IF they are used properly. Check out this article on “The Six Ts of Effective Elementary Literacy Instruction.”

The 6 Ts

–Zach