Jennifer Garrett, a researcher with the Heritage Foundation, recently wrote an amusing look at the state of the school choice debate in California (originally written for Scripps Howard, the op-ed was republished at CapitalismMagazine.Com. It seems a state legislator decided to try to hold public school teachers to their anti-choice rhetoric and, predictably, the teachers had a fit.

Garrett writes about the exploits of Republican state senator Ray Haynes, who recently introduced a bill that would have required teachers in public schools to send their children to public schools. That proposal did not go over very well. In fact the anti-choice California Teachers Association said, through spokesman mike Myslinksi, that “People have the right to put their children in [private schools.]”

Of course many of them already do. According to Garrett, a study by the CTA itself recently showed that one-third of teachers in California’s public school system send their children to private schools.

This is the same union, however, that Garrett notes successfully led the fight against California’s Proposition 38 which would have given parents vouchers to send their children to public schools. When a public school teacher sends his or her children to a private school that’s a choice; when a poor parent in a failing inner city school district wants to do the same thing, that’s called undermining the public school system.

Source:

Look Who’s Supporting School Choice Now!. Jennifer Garrett, Capitalism Magazine, April 30, 2001.

When the Secure Digital Music Initiative conducted its much-publicized SDMI Challenge — which offered a cash reward for anyone who could crack its protection — a group of Princeton researchers claimed they had found away around SDMI copy protection but refused to enter their solutions in the challenge because they preferred to publish them academically instead.

Now the SDMI is suing, and for now the researchers are backing down, to prevent the researchers from presenting their findings. Of course it’s a bit late since the paper that SDMI doesn’t want presented was already published on numerous web sites.

The interesting thing about SDMI is that, based on what the Princeton researchers found, the SDMI system was even less sophisticated than even its biggest critics had thought. SDMI utilize a watermarking scheme and the researchers used relatively straightforward methods to remove the watermarks without seriously degrading the quality of the sound (as they put it, the sound does degrade, but no worse than the degradation caused by the presence of the watermark itself).

In fact the methods the Princeton researchers are so obvious that quite a few Slashdot posters on the topic seem to think that the SDMI intentionally included techniques that it doesn’t plan to use and knows would be broken (though it is difficult to fathom why they would do this given that music companies were already a bit nervous about whether or not SDMI would actually provide copy protection that was reasonably difficult to circumvent).

As the Princeton researchers sum it up, all such copy protection schemes are likely doomed,

Do we believe we can defeat any audio protection scheme? Certainly, the technical details of any scheme will become known publicly through reverse engineering. Using the techniques we have presented here, we believe no public watermark-based scheme intended to thwart copying will succeed. Other techniques may or may not be strong against attacks. For example, the encryption used to protect consumer DVDs was easily defeated. Ultimately, if it is possible for a consumer to hear or see protected content, then it will be technically possible for the consumer to copy that content.

Games Domain reports that the DVD version of the Dungeons and Dragons movie will ship with a demo of Baldurs Gate II. Big deal. The real challenge would be to release a version of the D&D movie that was actually watchable.

ZDNet has a story about a bizarre decision by Microsoft. Basically, if you want to use their upcoming Media Player 8, you’re going to have to upgrade to Windows XP. My question is who the heck in their right mind would want a copy of Media Player 8?

All the Media Player programs that I’ve used are excessive resource hogs (the version shipped with Windows Me literally makes working on my 400mhz laptop impossible if it accidentally gets invoked) combined with an interface that is so bad that my cat could probably put a better one together.

I don’t care if they bundle it, I just hope MS leaves a way to uninstall it.

Sometimes I get the feeling I’m not a true American because I have yet to sue anyone.

Now Michele Nations is a real American. In 1994 she was walking at a municipal park in Tucson, Arizona, when she tripped over a 5 inch deep, 10 inch diameter hole made by a gopher or squirrel. As a result Nations sprained her ankle.

The other day she was awarded $450,000 in her lawsuit against the city which claimed that park officials had not given adequate warning of possible dangers from gopher and squirrel holes.

As an attorney for the city told the Arizona Star, “You would think in a park — in a natural space — people should have to watch where they’re going.” Apparently not — we’re Americans, damn it, and asking us to take any sort of personal responsibility is simply going too far.

(Thanks to Overlawyered.Com for digging up these goofy lawsuits).