Does SmartMoving really add anything worthwhile to an SMP series? It introduces a lot of setup difficulties and prevents people from immediately updating Minecraft without returning a whole lot additional benefit (aside from being really cool).

I'd be happy to play/build if you need someone else. I tend to be pretty good at pure survival, although I can't record anything.

As for the server, any SMP server with local-only chat would probably work.

If you read the newspaper you know that at this time, many schools have issued iPads loaded with textbooks to whole classes, and the trend is going to continue because the schools save a ton of money by not buying printed text books as a result.  So the question is, will these schools also spend money on calculators when a five dollar iPad calculator app can be used?  We are talking about a lot of money and it doesn't matter what the teachers want.  They will be told what they will use and if they don't like it they can find a new job.  No doubt the testing authorities will be required to adapt or find a new job also.  Switching to digital books on iPads is a huge revolution in education.  It is occurring at this very moment.  It is occurring more quickly than anyone ever imagined and no one doubts that for economic reasons it is going to obsolete the use of calculators in math classes.

It won't be cheaper to use iPads for long. Give it few years and the publishers will figure out this little thing called "DRM" to make sure those schools are forced to keep buying new copies of the books each year.

As for the claim that iPads are cheaper than calculators, um, what? A calculator costs around $130 to buy individually. If bought in bulk, that price goes down significantly. A bottom of the barrel iPad costs around $500. You say that the schools will save money on the textbooks? No, not a chance. As someone who is forced to buy my own textbooks, I can honestly tell you that publishers have no problem charging the same price for an electronic copy as a physical copy. And the disadvantage of electronics is the aforementioned DRM. Currently, most schools will buy a lot of books at once, use those books for a few years (sometimes a few decades...), then go buy more. With electronic books, suddenly the publishers can force schools to buy books every year or two if they want. You're crazy if you think they won't do that as much as they can. Basically, iPads are *not* cheaper than calculators in any sense I can imagine.

Similarly, I find your argument that "...it doesn't matter what the teachers want" to be ridiculous. Yes, it matters. Teachers aren't nearly as replaceable as you appear to think. They're difficult to hire and even more difficult to fire. Any school that annoys enough teachers may face some less than desirable warnings from one of the teacher's unions.

There are some other false claims in your quote, but I think this gets my point across.

DJ, I've tried refreshing the test image bunch of times. I'm pretty sure it's not in my cache.

Tommorow morning, i am taking the sat test. I need cas for my nspire, or else I will not be able to solve all of the problems in the time frame set!

When I took the SAT, all I had was a TI-84+ SE. I used it on precisely 3 problems: One, because I was too lazy to divide two decimals by hand, another because it was faster to add two integers with a calc, and the third because I needed to calculate the numerical sine of an angle. TL;DR: You don't need a CAS for the SAT. That's just TI's marketing.

C

Specifying a protocol by implementation in any computer language is generally a bad idea. There are reasons every major specification is in a human language, the primary ones being that it makes differing implementations of the spec possible.


EDIT:

@Qwerty.55

Of course, I am not proposing that we go and invert the ciphers and systems needed, but rather to combine existing ones.

On the topic of secure networking, I too am also interested, perhaps we may discuss about this topic in the future?

Ah, that's much more reasonable. It's still massive project though. I'd be happy to discuss with you

I do agree with this what you say, but I'm just giving some advice. HTTPS is a recommended way to do things, and it has a large community supporting it, but if our community wishes to create another protocol, I'm all for it.

On your first point, we could make it better by not showing where the traffic is going and where it is from. See "The Onion Router" (TOR) for a similar system. It works but it is very slow. Improvements can always be made

On your point about individuals, yes the FBI will not go looking for one person, but what if this person was the creator and distributor of the software to make things secure?

On the third point: Uh, that is what I said...

Addressing your fourth point, HTTPS is a very expensive (CPU-wise) way of encrypting. That is one of the major reasons that not many people use it. Also it is expensive in the financial sense as you do need to buy a certificate. I don't think that all the webmasters can pay for it every year. Yes, you can make your own but users get a suspicious "This certificate is not valid and can be a malicious phishing site" warning, which will deter many users.

Again, I'm not trying to oppose you or the community, just trying to give a few points (also I like to debate too)

Heh, I like debates too. I just want to help you think through this idea as much as possible. It is an "absolutely f***ing massive" undertaking that you're proposing, to put it mildly. The protocols that form the internet are designed to scale to monumental systems and solve some of the most difficult problems in networking. However, even ignoring all of those, you still have a problem of getting the security right, which is far from easy. History is littered with the corpses of cryptosystems that the inventors though were secure and actually weren't. Even Bruce Schneier gets it wrong sometimes and quite frankly, most people aren't going to trust a system made by a community relatively inexperienced in the field without a very strong proof of security. Security is *very* easy to mess up.

As for the claim that HTTPS is expensive CPU-wise, well, that's perfectly accurate. Here's the problem: Any encryption system worth its salt is. The fact that HTTP itself is expensive doesn't help much though.

On your point about individuals, yes the FBI will not go looking for one person, but what if this person was the creator and distributor of the software to make things secure?

You mean like the creators of the hundreds of other cryptosystems the NSA can't crack who are out there? There are a lot of ways to hide your data from just about anyone on the planet that you care to.



TL;DR There are an absolutely massive number of problems with this to be sorted out before anyone does any coding. The current system is probably best described as "ugly" or "painful," but it works. That's an amazing accomplishment in and of itself. I'd be happy to contribute help to this, but the problem really needs to be a lot more specific. All of this is of course to say nothing about user adoption, which is its own thorny problem.

PS: I've spent some time thinking/learning about secure networking lately for a project, if that isn't clear

You would use either floating point numbers (recommended) and regular gaussian elimination algorithms or you could use the division-free variants if you had arbitrary precision integer operations available. I'd recommend obtaining a copy of "Algorithms for Computer Algebra" by Geddes et al. if you want an in depth explanation.