Slashdot Mirror

It looks like a book, but I don't believe it.

The only piece of information I got out of this is that "geek" has switched meanings with "nerd". Wow. Out of the 80's and into the 90's. Gee.

And what's this about biting the heads off of chickens?!?

I think I'll save my time, money, and patience, and just read The Hacker Crackdown again.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

First, was there ever a real JonKatz?

If so, when did you kill the real JonKatz and replace him with a JonKatz generator?

Can we expect a source release of the real JonKatz generator, or are you keeping it under wraps so people don't bug you about it, like they do with the SlashCode?

Really, we're curious. Do you really expect us to believe you'd use a title like "Dying Babies and The Myth of American Freedom" if you just wanted to talk about Censorship?

For those who don't know, the JonKatz generator takes buzz-words and input on a popular topic, and mangles it with the (patented?) unique verbose Katzian style. I can imitate it, but never perfect it, as the real JonKatz generator looks coherent, but at a second glance never is.

Simple example--this isn't as good as the real JonKatz Generator, since I'm using its output as input, and JWZ's dadadodo as the generator. But it isn't too far off. The incoherency is similar, but the grammar and structure need some work.

Free music sites, order vitamins and Slashdot. Free browsing, habits. But they can keep our information from copying a world where this information on citizens, the right to track their habits.

In the FDIC, all the distance between corporate and increasingly dependent on and portals and intellectual property can't really be more than AOL and intellectual property can't really be privacy. According to attempt this, the Web sites, order vitamins and writing cool software buy, books check out, of our privacy is a law enforcement agency or preventing Court in and civil libertarians would explode in and other businesses. If you enter, what data marketing and the Net and unintended, however, as we get our political systems already seems remote. All of privacy they can even trace our government has have acquired or invoke the Net and unintended, however, as the minute they fail to Site to Site to the data is increasingly dependent on the largest Financial Institution Web.

Really, I think the JonKatz generator is an excellent program. But the Slashdot community deserves to know the truth about it. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

It's about time someone sued those bastards. Go, mp3.com, defend your good name!

We need some legislation about the need for open file formats along with open standards, completely separate from legislation about copyrights over the content. I don't care if you want to protect your Britney Spears song, Mr. BigRecordCompany, that doesn't give you the right to persecute the people using mp3 files.

I don't believe people can get this upset over a *file format*, jeez. It's almost as stupid as "Burn all .gif's day". It's a bunch of bits, a standard representation, and attempting to own it and sue people just makes the world a dimmer place.

However, whenever people smell money, expect something stupid. Like LinuxOne, for example...

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Sad but true, my friend, sad but true.

(No, wait, I swear this was an on-topic reply! really...
um... say something about Be! Quick! Ah, nuts... :)

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Now we know that BeOS is a major player in the OS market--they have a product with a useless two-letter acronym in the title! While Microsoft has long had "NT", BeOS is competing with "IA", sure to sow confusion due to Intel's forthcoming "IA64" chipset. (As in, "When are they porting BeIA to the IA64?")

As usual, Linux and Unix still have to play catch-up to be a major player. The Linux Zealots claim that three-letter recursive acronyms like "GNU" are superior acronym technology. We here at FUD-Net think they said the same thing about three-button mice, and let's face it, that's just *way* too complicated for us.

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Sure, their mascot is a reptile, but how well does it scale? :)

Anyhow, I think if you're gonna name it Sue-something, Sue-sasaurous would be more appropriate. Why? 'cause that's a *big* chameleon!

I'd probably call it either Leon or Cammie, but maybe that's just me.

Yeah, I like "Cammie the SuSE Chameleon", that's cute.

But hey, at least I didn't say charazard... :P

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, I haven't messed with it, I went from a P133 to a K6/300, and my next purchase will be... well, whatever has the best price/performance ratio in x86-land by mid-summer, probably. But like I said, hardware hacking has gotten complicated enough for me to stay out of it, because I haven't been keeping up.

It used to be, you didn't miss much by not keeping up, like I said. IDE and SCSI, ATAPI cdrom drives, floppy controllers, ISA and PCI, Serial and Paralell Ports... and now they have to mess it all up with a bunch of proprietary, non-standard technologies.

If there were an open spec, I know I wouldn't have to wait this long for decent support under Linux. But no, we've got incompatible video cards, incompatible processor extensions, incompatible media, incompatible I/O... Obviously there's an advantage to standardizing the hardware platforms and the software interfaces. I'd be happy with maybe two, well-documented, competing standards in each separate domain. But no...

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

If I have a claim to fame, that's probably not it.

However, Mr.Dimmick isn't bad at Quake, and at the time, he was playing it non-stop. In fact, he was at the top of the list for that game...

...then Carmack came in, and proceeded to wipe the floor with him. That's why I'm sorry I missed it. :)

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

It's aimlessly sticking words together for the most generic name possible that sounds cool and isn't taken. (heck, even if it is taken...)

LinuxOne

Internet Explorer

LinuxMac

ActiveX

And, for that matter, Office, Word, Windows, Money, etc., etc., etc.

The only original things Microsoft ever did... they bought from other people.

Apparently LinuxOne can't do that, they're forced to resort to outright theft.

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hey, programming is his job and his life.

I know I wouldn't marry anyone who wanted to get rid of my hobby and my job. That's a little *too* personal, no matter what.


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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Whoa, dude. I don't know which post you *thought* you were replying to, but you've got it all wrong.

The guy you're flaming was complaining that the technology moves too fast for the user to keep up, or be able to safely upgrade. And I, for one, agree with him.

I tend to upgrade every two years or so, but if I upgraded componentwise, I'd want a motherboard that lasted.

And you made a lot of assumptions about that guy, alright? Think about it. If I had a few computers lying around (I do), and I bought a new one, I might want to build a better second one out of the remaining components. I tend to reuse old hard drives, because there are standards that allow this. What about chips?

Regular pentium-style ZIFF sockets were standard for a long time. Now we have all kinds of weird proprietary cards, buses, RAM, whatever. I know enough not to mix random RAM, but the complexity has definitely gotten out of hand for all but the up-to-date hardware hacker, and that isn't me.

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Good luck with married life, John. There's something to be said for a wife who kicks ass at Quake. :)

I don't know him, but he fragged a friend of mine once. Wish I could have seen it...

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Even if Slashgrits is just headlines and a poll, couldn't we have a Slashbox for it?

Pretty please? I *need* my daily updates on the latest grits-pouring, pancake-making, ninja news for trolls, stuff that petrifies! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I haven't messed with SuSE--the more than complete distribution. Apparently it's *so* big, we need *two* slashdot stories on it, wow! :)

But--big deal. A survey where people pick their favorite distribution. Wow, I've never seen that before. That's about as cool as a Slashdot Poll!

At least FreeBSD wasn't voted as the "best Linux distribution"--I think that'd get some attention! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I tend to have an "engineering" attitude towards coding when I just need to get something done, but even then I might work harder to introduce optimizations or syntactic elegance when it isn't necessary.

However, I've been programming for long enough that now I know when some constructs just look prettier, and when they're actually just really slow. That wasn't always the case!

Example--compare these:

use count%=8 or count&=8,
use (++count)%=7 or if (++count>7) count = 0;

Each example does the same thing, (making a couple of assumptions here) but some of them do division, and the others don't. Some of them might be harder to understand, too. But if you have to, comment it instead of using the slow way because it's prettier. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Right, once it's just you and someone else, you can drop the crap, and just treat each other as people. :)

It's only groups where you have those problems, and often it's only when groups confront people that they have those problems socially. There's a preacher at my school who loves to get people angry and riled up, and they'll end up saying things they wouldn't normally say in a one-on-one situation.

However, when just talking to one other person, anyone in that group can generally come to an understanding of some kind, even the preacher!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What, it prints out "Inf"? The "real compiler" I tried did the same thing. Of course, if you had a "real interpreter"... (contradiction in terms?)

(define main
(lambda (i x)
(if (= i 1000000000)
x
(main (add1 i) (* x x)))))
(main 0 3.14)

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, the environment is definitely a separate chunk that can be made to work with the compiler(s). That's one thing I like about RHIDE.

I don't know how much of a market there would be for an X RAD tool, but I understand there are such things for FLTK and GTK. (?)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, that's what happens when you turn a C compiler into a C++ compiler. However, that's actually not nearly as bad as some implementations I've seen, believe it or not.

Centerline's old "C++ compiler" didn't support boolean variables, true or false. I had to ifdef / define the darn things if I wanted to use them.

I'm not convinced that strong typing is a benefit, unless you can override it when necessary. However, I guess it helps catch errors if you know what types you want, and want speed. Lately, I've been using languages with pretty flexible types, and implementing something that *looks* like that in C++ is a real pain.

(pardon me while I override the + operator so it supports every combination of anything addition-like for every type, ever. ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Ooh, wow. Got some karma to burn, eh?

Yes, I know that sometimes all those mergers make me want to get down on my knees too, but unfortunately, I'm straight, male, and have to get to class now.

Later. Good luck getting out of the karma hole with your new account, "Daren Brantley".
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Ooh, ouch. Don't like GCC, eh? :)

Well, you can always use RHIDE, (looks like a Borland product, in text mode, yay!)
FreePascal, (pretty complete, not quite there last I checked. But back then it was FPK Pascal or something)
and NASM. (looks kinda like TASM, for those of us who don't want to learn AT&T-style Assembler syntax, for one.)

Oh, and feel free to port the BGI interface. I ported some of it to SVGALib, so I could move my graphics hacks over. Of course, I used p2c, and hacked the output some, and compiled with egcs, but it's all good. And my stuff runs much better now. I just wish SVGALib had more primitives, like "floodfill"... *sigh*
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Somehow, this doesn't shock me. If the last artice didn't damage LinuxOne's (lack of) credibility enough, well... they obviously don't get it.

And the generic Microsoft-style product names are getting on my nerves. LinuxMac? Puh-leeze. If these guys keep it up, maybe I'll even start liking Caldera.

LinuxOne: The One Linux IPO to miss this year.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

There once was a hacker named Dan,
Who interpreted whenever he can.
He said about Perl,
Don't calculate Curl!
That's why we still use Fortran.

A hacker who coded in COBOL
was snubbed by his friend who did no BOL:
"But don't you see, HAL,
it's all OOP now!"
...and promptly got hit by a SNOBOL.

Thanks, this has potential!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Maybe we *will* get to see all that Borland stuff ported to Linux. I hope Corel follows through on their good intentions.

Have we seen some little companies grow up and buy some big companies, or what? Compaq and Digital, AOL and Time Warner, and now this. It boggles the mind...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Oh man... I guess I'll finish that up tomorrow. I might end up using a list of vectors instead of a list, even though I shouldn't know about vectors yet. I'm sure there's a better way to do it, but... Argh!

Oh well. Scheme is an *interesting* language. I'll reserve further judgement until after I get this project done. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, yeah, you can. I enabled sound, used real disk emulation, sped it up by a factor of 2, and made it fullscreen. It was pretty fun.

But... You bastard, you just wasted 4 hours of my time! But I've got a 30 ship armada, so I guess I can't complain too much. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Not a flame? On slashdot? Okay, fair enough. :)

I think the two are correlated, just not strongly correlated. It should tend to be a different perspective, but... well, not always. It depends. :)

As a statistics problem, if you'll bear with me for a moment, for any trait you'd care to measure men and women have a mean, and a distribution, often bell-shaped. All most people people ever quote is the mean, or even the relative difference, as in "Women do better in verbal skills". Of course, this isn't precisely true, what it means is, "On average, the population of women does better in verbal skills." So you can have women who can't spell, and women who do second-order differential equations in their heads. It might not be the norm, but they're all out there.

So, women get defined by the traits that the populationa as a whole possess more strongly than the population of men do. And also by perception of reality, which partially stems from this, and by socialization, which depends on the culture and environment... and after that it's a mess, but you've got to start somewhere. :)

So what does this have to do with hacking? Well, whatever traits are out there to encourage it, either not as many women have it or pursue it, or it ends up manifesting itself differently, leaving a bunch of men playing with their computers, wondering where the women are. And perhaps some of the women who would join in are put off by the men's club atmosphere you might get because of this. (Maybe Sally likes Pascal, but she could care less about Mortal Kombat, for instance.) Of course, some women will fit in anyhow, but there will be less of them, for the same reasons outlined before.

Also, from the little I've seen of female programmers, they do approach things differently. Of course, I haven't met enough of them to do justice to them, so this is all in my experience. They tend to be more interested in, say, Java or Perl than assembler or C, in designing things rather than mulling over cycle counts, and whatnot. This pretty much goes along with the article, too. Of course, my girlfriend is more interested in hardware than I am, but I'd consider hardware hackers a different problem, since I'm not one. :)

I don't know if I buy it, I thought it made a cute sound bite at the time, and maybe it was somewhat patronising. I'll survive, I don't have that much shame, and it's great to see some of the women who lurk on slashdot come out and post for once. :)

Oh, and I would have replied to the first person who said he didn't know what I meant by that, and I tried to, twice, but both Netscape and Slashdot were not being very cooperative. (I'm getting pretty sick of Netscape halting, but at least it gives me an excuse to use Mozilla more. And Mr. "Internal Server Error" is also getting me down...)

later,

Peter
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Sorry, I'll try to be more patronising next time.

Heck, I thought it was pretty funny.

You don't want to be tokenised? There goes my woman compiler front-end, too. Darn.

Don't forget to turn down any of those annoying "women in engineering" scholarships, they only give you money because they want more chicks in their field--they must be competing for humanities in demographics.

And it's interesting that you're flaming me instead of Skud, since I basically just summed up the last half of her article in that one offensive line, for you. (I figured we'd have some interesting discussion on that, and I've seen a good comment or two about it)

Remember, one person's offensive stereotype is another person's rule of thumb. People use heuristics and special cases because they're faster than creating separate categories for everything.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Excellent. I've been using VICE, under Linux. It's pretty complete and has a lot of options.

(I managed to run the C64 version of the Second Reality demo (from '97, not by Future Crew)--the sound is very impressive, considering. Now I just need to get some free time, and play Rags To Riches, or Legacy of the Ancients, or Ultima V, or...)

Ah well. I've been attempting to code something for my Scheme class. I think I found a decent way to do it, but it breaks a different implementation we were using (and also might use stuff we haven't been taught yet...). I guess this function will just be special, and do things a different way. Blah.

Yeah, it's a great feeling when you know what you're doing, and it all works. Unfortunately, getting there is not always half the fun. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, if it weren't for BASIC on the C64, I might not have gotten as obsessed as I am now!

I think there's a lot to be said for playing around with technology at a young age as a formative stage in the life of a geek, male or female.

Of course, it's good to train them at a young age, because everyone knows that geeks have cooties... :)

What did you think about the implication that women who program aren't as much an active part of the community, but rather tend to use their skills to get their work done?

I guess that's what interests me, since I haven't seen as many women who code just for the sake of coding, but I'm sure they're out there! (my girlfriend has been meaning to write a funny text adventure for a while, even if that isn't necessarily her field of choice...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Oh man... I guess you'd better find those darn hackers who made that 'tr' program. (I didn't write it, the hackers you want are much older than I am, I didn't even know that much about optimizing character replacement back then, I swear!)

They knew they'd get in trouble one day, for letting people see encrypted text on USENET, when they *knew* that the corporate interests were against it, since it is secretly used as the fast algorithm instead of the 128-bit encryption versions of most popular web browsers.

That 128-bit thing and the random gibberish they send in the occasional block is just to throw off the hackers. In reality, they just stream compressed E-GUVEGRRA encoded text.

Wait... did I just violate another trade secret? I'm going to shut up now, and consult with my lawyers.

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Excellent!

I'd be tempted to license your E-GUVEGRRA technology just because it has such a cool name.

And I'd love to cite prior art, since I've seen a program with similar output, which can be implemented as "tr A-MN-Za-mn-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m"

(don't use it! I bet that data string is copyrighted too, I saw it on a website once!)

But since I can't even figure out the name of your technology, I'm afraid I couldn't get that much information to sue you.

And your header format is completely original, I'm very impressed! Maybe we could rkpunatr fbzr qngn? (You can't profit from my data without my permission! This warning message constitutes a good-faith effort on my part to dissuade you from doing so! If you disregard this message, I will sue you under the DMCA!!!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Maybe the EFF should publicly accept donations to buy a congressman for this issue? :)

I don't think the system in the US is fundamentally corrupt; otherwise, I wouldn't be so outraged. If it were that corrupt, this sort of thing would be commonplace.

As it is, I know what information is, and I like to collect it. It's mine, that's what it is. If I buy it, I can do whatever I want with it, because I paid for it. If I buy a book, I can read it or save it. If I buy a DVD, I should be able to watch it or trust it not to expire.

The information in that book or movie is now not the property of the people who produced it, because they sold it to me. If they don't like what I do with it, tough, I will laugh at them.

I didn't buy a license to read a book or watch a movie. I bought the physical book, or the movie. If they sue me for redistributing and selling it, that's understandable. But what do they lose if I watch it, or look at all the pretty bits, or use it as a source of data for a musical composition? Did they lose anything because of it? Am I hurting anyone?

They're just so scared of piracy, and someone "causing us to lose $XXX Billion dollars worth of revenue" that they don't mind tromping all over their customers basic rights as consumers. I don't think showing such a lack of respect for the customer is a good way to prevent piracy, or even to stay in business.

Of course, from this broad interpretation, it sounds like I could now take my classified papers and whatnot, encrypt them, and put a note on this that says, "This file contains my credit card numbers, and other classified information. If you decrypt this, I'll sue you under the DMCA". Maybe this could help Mitnick? :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, I saw that... That made me wonder, I could only guess you were offended by the drug reference. (but if you didn't know that about the Dead, you didn't listen to Casey Jones enough... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Wow. It sounds like Inferno or something, but only for MUDs. Implementing bytecode C and Common LISP and compilers? I hope this guy is using this source for something else, too. I might use it for class if it's really that fast and efficient, and maybe I'll even try MUDding someday... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Linux: it isn't just for hackers anymore.
Just boot it.
The choice of a GNU generation.
Obey your penguin.
Think different. No, really!

Nine out of ten sysadmins *never* agree... but they all think linux is pretty cool anyhow.

And, my favorite:

You would have to eat seventeen bowls of Windows to get the same features found in one bowl of Linux!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, I didn't give you any evidence, but let me check again. Oh yeah. Read Part Four of The Hacker Crackdown again. A search would have turned that up, along with other possible links, too.

Here's a quote. If you don't like it, whine to Bruce Sterling.

Before we tackle the vexing question as to why a rock lyricist should be interviewed by the FBI in a computercrime case, it might be well to say a word or two about the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead are perhaps the most successful and long-lasting of the numerous cultural emanations from the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, in the glory days of Movement politics and lysergic transcendance. The Grateful Dead are a nexus, a veritable whirlwind, of applique decals, psychedelic vans, tie-dyed T-shirts, earth-color denim, frenzied dancing and open and unashamed drug use. The symbols, and the realities, of Californian freak power surround the Grateful Dead like knotted macrame.

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

If I had to have a deity responsible, it'd be Odin. There's just something to be said for being born from a giant cow in chaos, destroying the evil giant and making the world out of his remains... :)

Well, there are a lot of theories concerning the age of the Earth, the solar system, the Universe, etc. Basically, it would take a while for a planet to form and cool, and it also tends to leave a record of what happens. There's the fossil record, and it also contains information about the climate at different times throughout history, and there's a magnetic record on the ocean floor that gets created and destroyed by the volcanic activity below. Just from that, the Earth has obviously been around a very long time, or some cosmic deity spent way too long thinking about how to make something like the Earth, complete with a fake fossil record, etc., etc. Statistically, radiometric dating is great too, since radioactive substances decay at a known rate and whatnot, but it isn't the only shred of evidence out there.

Also, you can conjecture about what raw materials would have to come together to form a planet, if gravity would cause some particles to clump together, where you could get the extra raw materials we have on Earth, if you'd need a complicated scenario like that for life to evolve on a planet or not, etc., etc. In a discussion like this, probably it'll all end up coming together.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, I don't use drugs (okay, the occasional hard cider, yeah!) but I do know some very smart people who do, and work with computers. There are a lot of classic examples here, too.

There's BSD & LSD (maybe required, for Unix development :) and there's the link between the hacker culture and The Grateful Dead. Of course, hackers and hippies have a link too, which is not surprising, along with hackers and communists, revolutionaries, etc., so it's not surprising that something as "counterculture" as drugs would be in there too.

Or maybe we're just a bunch of posers, I don't know. ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Alright, here's my take on this. It sounds like there are some problems with neo-Darwinism, but everything is not as bad as you make it sound here. :)

First, we don't know how old the Earth is, and we don't know how old the Universe is, but we have some pretty good guesses. However, anything in the "thousands" of years is definitely waaay too short, unless you're going for the "everything spontaneously came into existence five minutes ago, complete with false memories" argument, which would mean that I didn't *really* get that A+ in "Philosophy of Science", I just remember it that way. :)

Second, radiometric dating is pretty accurate and well-verified, provided your timescale is in geological time (which is what matters, for the age of the Earth--we're not trying to compute *my* age here). So an error plus or minus a few thousand years doesn't really matter when your timescale is in the millions or billions of years.

I repeat, don't try to date anything recent, it just doesn't make sense. If you don't believe the earthi is actually that old, do some research on the magnetic properties of rocks and their correlation on the ocean floor (due to the periodic switch in the magnetism of the earth). This is how they found more evidence for continental drift, and there's enough there to make a convincing case for the age of the earth being much greater than thousands of years, and therefore makes a case for the use of radiometric dating as a useful tool (measuring for millions or even billions of years).

Third, a species isn't a hard-and-fast definiton, and it's purely practical. There are sub-species as well. But there are some good guidelines. You should be able to breed within a species, for instance. Some good evidence for differentiation and competition would be, say, Australia. Theoretically, it drifted away from the other continents before the marsupials got out-competed. Therefore, Australia still has marsupials, because they were dominant in a (relatively speaking) small area, and ended up succeeding. Some of the same environmental niches are present, and the marsupials evolved to fill them, just as other animals did on the other continents. Of course, this theory requires continental drift, and geological time, and evolution, etc., etc. :)

Random beneficial mutations *are* rare. However, selective breeding works pretty well. If a lot of people have a lot of latent genetic traits that aren't used under pressure, and then a disease wipes out a lot of people that didn't have those traits, the people left will breed, and tend to have more of those beneficial traits. Random mutation is all well and good, but diversity in the gene pool over a long period of time seems more helpful to me.

I'm sure there are good explanations for the gap in the fossil record. But in science, just as in religion, we have to go with what we know, and try our best to fill in the gaps. Maybe if we found more fossils, we'd have a more solid theory in that respect.

Or maybe God is just taunting us, eh, just like he taunts those Sunday school kids with "Who did Adam and Eve's children marry", or whatever. ;)

Maybe some neo-darwinists got the speciation tree wrong there, it's something to think about. But snakes, crocodiles, and chickens are all pretty far apart, with snakes being the weirdest. Think about it, they lost their legs a long time ago, whereas crocodiles and chickens walk around just fine. Also, the dinosaurs might have been related to those chickens just as much as they were to the crocodiles, that's also been a recent evolutionary theory. At least there's argument and change happening in this field, that shows that it's alive and well, not dead and buried.

I don't know much about Lamarkian change, probably because it's a pretty lame theory. It seems to me that acquired characteristics couldn't strictly be bred for, which is the flaw in Lamarkian theory. However, individuals who learn how to do these actions might survive better, and teach their young, which would be a valid Darwinian theory.

(say a woman on a desert island learned how to shake coconut trees and get the food out of them. She's smart, she survives, she teaches her children, they survive. More of them survive and breed, and the rest of the island eventually learns the secret and gets smarter. :)

Fitness shouldn't be defined simply as leaving the most offspring, but that's a good start. Obviously you had to survive to do so, which is the point. Over a long period of time this is a good definition, because the survivors inherit the earth, and everyone else dies out. In that environment, they are fit.

That link you provided cleared things up a bit, thanks. It looks like neo-Darwinism is a specific branch of Darwinism that these people have chosen to attack. Of course, a decent theory would have to be a bit more complex than they have portrayed.

Yes, animals with different DNA can look more similar than animals with the same DNA might appear. (bats and blue whales are both mammals--DNA analysis tells you how long ago a species might have diverged, not what they look like now)

Yes, beneficial changes can happen very quickly. I don't know how that works exactly, but I'd gather it would be a survival trait that can be bred for. In fact, I wonder how many of these survival traits we don't know about. I doubt Luck is one, but that idea figures strongly into the Ringworld books, and even if its wrong, it looks like a good example of thinking outside the box, like the box that web page placed neo-Darwinism into, and definitely not all Darwinistic insights.

To keep coming up with more good theories, there have to be more insights. Followers, by definition, do not have more insights. The only way to get them is to think up something else, and see if it works. Evolution is more complex than Darwin let on, but he didn't finish the job here, he only started it.

If anyone really knowledgable has some insights on either of these topics, please respond. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Tad Williams writes great stuff. I need to read the third book of Otherland, (it's not out in paperback yet, is it?) and I liked the second one, but I think I liked the first one better. I just love that futuristic computer stuff; D&D-style virtual gaming worlds, yeah!

Regardless, the "trapped in a realistic virtual world" plot still hasn't run out of steam yet. I was just reading Amber again, which (of course) has to do with some pretty realistic "virtual worlds" (shadows), and everybody loves The Matrix, even if it isn't Neuromancer. :)

I think that for the futuristic perspective novels, I like Tad Williams almost as much as I like David Brin (for Earth, which was awesome, and still pretty possible--amazing in that genre!).

But really I like Tad's vivid depictions of reality. His books are very long, but they seem more real than many other books I've read just because of his attention to detail. Reading one of his books as opposed to a 300-page book is like reading the 300-page book instead of seeing the movie. The Memory, Sorrow, Thorn series is a great example of this.

And yeah, it's really funny to read the notice at the front of the last book in paperback, that says basically "due to publishing constraints, we had to split this into two books for paperback". They're still both greater than 800 pages long. (!) Again, this is like Amber, since they just published all of those books into one volume recently. At least it isn't that long, but almos every book ends like a cliffhanger, because it's part of a larger storyline. Tad Williams has to do this too, which is somewhat frightening.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, Peter Baylies should be public domain, as there have been many of them, including (but not limited to) my uncle.

However... I always wanted to sue and win against the Ugly American Legal System, Inc. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The Data in Peter Baylies' Slashdot Posts are provided by Peter
Baylies for information purposes, and to assist persons in obtaining
information about or related to a slashdot story or related anecdote.
Peter Baylies does not guarantee its accuracy. By reading this
post, you agree that you will use this Data only for lawful
purposes and that, under no circumstances will you use this Data to:
(1) allow, enable, or otherwise support the transmission of mass
unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations via e-mail
(spam); or (2) enable high volume, automated, electronic processes
that apply to Peter Baylies (or his systems). Peter Baylies
reserves the right to modify these terms at any time. By reading
this post, you agree to abide by this policy.

A trademark is pending for the terms "Slashdot Posts" and "Slashdot".
Purely as a formality, I assure you.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Maybe next year he'll have a laptop with a Crusoe processor. :)

Besides the new article posters, I haven't seen that much of a change in the way Slashdot has been run so far. Lets hope it stays that way...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Apparently Microsoft likes themselves just the way they are.

The survey is interesting, but the questions don't apply. I mean, "Microsoft's freedom to innovate"? They have that freedom, I'm just waiting for them to *use* it.

Also, half of America isn't really following the MS Trial. I'd be more interested in the opinions of the half that is... (Slashdot?)

Of course, the Republicans are favoring the big business, and the Democrats tend not to, with the Independents in the middle. But what else is new, eh?

Also, the implication that the DOJ would end up *increasing* the prices of Microsoft software is ludicrous. Microsoft does a fine job all by themselves, they aren't going to get any help in that department.

The argument for strong competitors was biased, considering they didn't state the argument *against* strong competitors: Microsoft currently owns the x86 operating system business. Those are the facts, look up the percentages. This might be starting to change, but it hasn't changed enough yet. Basically, Microsoft doesn't have enough competition where it counts, and it's not because their products are technically superior, either.

...and I guarantee you, 63% of Americans also don't know how to use those darn PDF thingies...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Why do we like Gibson?

Perhaps because "The sky above the port was the color of television,
tuned to a dead channel".

The metaphors, language, and constructions are both fresh and elegant.

All the characters seem somewhat unrelated until they all come together in
one crystal-clear moment. And then you probably need to read the book
again. :)

The immersion in the virtual world is impressive, rich, and visceral--the
difference between Literature and Gibson is like the difference between
VRML and Quake 3.

Actually, let me extend that analogy. VRML is precise, painstaking, slow
and boring. Gibson is beautiful, realistic, fast-paced, and exciting
while still being completely unbelievable.

Maybe it was cooler in the 80's. Maybe it appeals to the little cyberpunk
in me, chatting on the BBS, checking out PGP for DOS, watching ANSI
movies, and wondering what the future would be like... But I think it's
still awesome.

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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Oh man. William "FREAKING" Gibson.

I would *love* to see Molly in a movie. (for those who don't know... if Trinity were really a badass, she'd have permanent, Woverine-esque claws to go with the leather pants and bad attitude...)

Heck, that was worth it, just to hear Gibson make fun of Johnny Mnemonic. Maybe 'The Matrix' was how Keanu chose to make up for his sins there.

Or, even better, the gov't would never have funded The Internet as it is today... maybe. But it sure has helped the economy.

Man, Gibson entertains me. You know, when he got his Apple ][, he expected some kind of pulsating crystal inside. Man, was he disappointed. He's a visionary alright. We even get to read Neuromancer for my Science Fiction class. Yes!

Thank you slashdot, you've made my day.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Dude, if wearing an armband to protest the Vietnamm war is considered free speech, then writing an encryption program to protest laws against strong encryption should be considered free speech.

Shooting people tends to infringe on their freedoms as well, and is therefore treated somewhat differently. If I got together a bunch of people who wanted to protest laws against assisted suicides, and shot them during an art presentation, I'd probably be arrested for murder, but at least the trial would be interesting. (Can you kill someone with their consent? Probably not, legally, but if you can prove it, it isn't murder, IMO)

However, any other "shooting people" example doesn't necessarily apply. All you're saying is that cracking wouldn't be protected speech, not coding.

You're right, source == speech isn't a tried and true defense, and I wouldn't want to use it as one. However...

Speech is speech. Transcribed speech is speech is text. Text on paper is text on a disk is speech. Speech is information. Code is information, can be spoken, and can be text on a disk... Math is not patentable, and code can be expressed as math...

The lesson, boys and girls, is to protect your code, you need to first have a recorded tape or transcription of everything you want to code in math, BNF notation, English, or some combination, until the laws and lawyers catch up with the reality of the situation, and what is obvious to the programmers. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hi, I'm pb, and this is an Offtopic post. But it's important, so don't moderate it, or keep it around 2, okay, guys?

Maybe you've noticed all the images popping up on slashdot lately. Well, it's an easy bug to exploit, I've tested it on a hidden thread (and on my user page, it's nice to have a picture).

Well, the long and the short of it is, security through obscurity is no excuse. I encourage you to do something about this, either by moderating UP that anonymous coward who first showed it to us with his funny Bill Gates post, or by posting a harmless image, or by contacting the staff running Slashdot, or by downloading the recently released Slash code, and checking if it's similar enough to be patched for this. Because if slashdot is vulnerable, the hole will have to be patched both on here, *and* on every site that uses their code.

Thank you.


Also, on the topic at hand: cool. It's always good to have Linux on a new processor, especially early. Of course, we knew this was going to happen, they've been working under NDA for a while, and I trust Linus. Also, people will probably still be waiting for the Monterey, and analyzing how Intel will do with its competition from both AMD and Transmeta now. Anyhow, the next few years should be very interesting.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Slashdot scientists discovered the origin of ball lightning while attempting to overclock their new Athlons to 1Ghz without proper cooling mechanisms.

"...and then I gave it the juice, man, and it was like, this huge cloud of fire and stuff passing through my case, and I said 'Whoa, Stovetop, did you do that?', and Stovetop said 'No, man, maybe it was the silicon', and I said 'Thats stupid', but then Stovetop said 'I think thats the same as ball lightning', and I said 'that would hurt, man', and Stovetop got pissed at me and left and wrote up a paper and got famous and stuff, and all I have is this charred motherboard and stuff."
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.