On 5/17/06, Marcus Brinkmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Or, to put it the other way round: Being able to cheat _ensures_ that I can always play for entertainment, and not because I want to achieve something else, because it leaves me the option to skip parts of the activity that I find tedious. So, cheating in this case helps a lot to prevent or contain addiction.
Consider a slightly modified use case: Online exams and marks files. This usecase is similar to games and high score files, except that this doesn't involve that *addiction* part, and cheating should not be allowed. Assume there exists a college where midterm exams are conducted for every subject (say once every month). All the exams are conducted online, and exams need not be of same type, (ie, some are objective type, some are fill-in-the-blanks, some are programming assignments, some are of wired kind -- a program can evaluate is the point here). Every exam for every subject has a corresponding marks file where result of evaluation is stored. How is this use case handled? If we assume a trusted service service updates the marks file, then we need different services to evaluate different type of exams (one for objective type, one for fill-in-the-blanks, etc). BAD. Or worse, if professors dont trust each other, then M professors, each teaching N different subjects, trusted service design requires M*N services. HECK. I hope you understand my usecase. If ditching non-trivial confinement (encapsulation *and* confinement) is only for preventing DRM kind of software on HurdNG, then i am tempted to ask - Can trivial-confinement *guarantee* us that DRM kind of software is *impossible*? Even in the presence of TC chip driver and closed software? I dont know the answer :(. I believe only a strict licence, like "every software which uses HurdNG servers either directly or *indirectly* must be GPLed" can only make DRM software impossible for HurdNG (Im assuming that open source DRM software is impossible, isn't it?) Ofcourse, with such a licencing, there is no point in asking for transparent space-banks, we already have source, right? Just my 2 cents :-) -bvk _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
