Slashdot Mirror

I abosutely HATE to do this to you guys, but....

Lookie here, it's not dead.

I *was* going to claim that the little-known but much-played "Colony" on the Speccy was my all-time addiction, but then I read this thread and somebody up above there talking about buying a HD to boot Civ reminded me that I spent a month or two putting together a reset-proof RAMdisk for my AtariST that intercepted calls to the A drive, only so I could preload Civ.

Yes, I know the links on my homepage are all buggered cos they've gone into CAPS. I will fix it. One day. I promise. Maybe.
---------------------------

I abosutely HATE to do this to you guys, but....

Lookie here, it's not dead.

I *was* going to claim that the little-known but much-played "Colony" on the Speccy was my all-time addiction, but then I read this thread and somebody up above there talking about buying a HD to boot Civ reminded me that I spent a month or two putting together a reset-proof RAMdisk for my AtariST that intercepted calls to the A drive, only so I could preload Civ.

Yes, I know the links on my homepage are all buggered cos they've gone into CAPS. I will fix it. One day. I promise. Maybe.
---------------------------

They went out of fashion, like the hindenburg, after an "explosion". A steam car was being used to attempt to break the world land speed record, but the beach was slightly uneven, it had ribs in the sand that set up a vibration that cracked a steam pipe. The damage was minimal and not dangerous, but it let out a great cloud of steam, and was reported in the press as having exploded, and that was that for steam-powered cars. Petrol engines are more practical nowadays only because they've had most of a century of development, and steam has been largely ignored. There's a swiss company that's making steam engines for locomotives, they've got ultra-efficient gas burners, and are 99% insulated, so they stay hot overnight and don't need 2 hours of warm-up in the morning, it's more like 10 minutes. Here's some info I just found: http://www.steam.demon.co.uk/trains/modern10.htm

Actually factually according to the accepted theoretical behaviour of infinities first proposed by Georg Cantor, the inside would be moving at a slower infinity. Check out Hilberts Hotel paradox.

Windows 3.1 - Perhaps the last version of Windows to actually contain some innovative stuff (TrueType springs to mind).

And TrueType was developed by Apple.

Small question on the side, how about international waters? A ship with a bunch of servers on it and a satellite uplink maybe?

A ship in international waters is still subject to the government that it is flagged under and also to the governments of the ship's last and next port of call. You have to sail from somewhere and if it is some third world dump that you have flagged under, the RIAA can rest assured that you will have no recourse after they send mercenaries to take over your ship.

Just move your server to Sealand. Cheaper and easier.

Actually, it seems some properties of Quantum computers can't be simulated with Turing machines.

,-._- pinkNoise `-_,

As for ad blocking technology I recommend wwwoffle, it does much more than that (perfect for modem users, but I even have it on my T1 connection)

Check http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/wwwoffle /
This should ideally not be at browser level, but earlier (mozilla, netscape, konqueror don't see ads with this)

First of all, I'm not giving an "argument by Einstein" (chuckle). I'm not an Einstein-worshipper either, but I'm just wondering: what if the old fella was right where QM is concerned? Trevor Marshall and others certainly seem to think so. And if you dismiss these people's point straight away, merely because so many scientific geniuses of the 20th century developed QM, then you're the one who's pulling an "argument by Feynman" (or by Heisenberg, or by Pauli)...

Frankly, I never liked the Copenhagen Interpretation at all (it certainly justifies the name "quantum magic", and gives the entire scientific enterprise a bad name), and maybe all of QM is based upon a faulty foundation. Yes, it'd be a monumental error, but if there's ever been a community that could make it, it's today's physics community. (I've seen it from the inside; if you have too, you know what I'm talking about. The mutual reinforcing of dogma; the unwillingness to test, experiment, reformulate, or do anything that even smacks of real science; the lack of intellectual honesty; the cargo-cult science; the mental laziness; the rigid structure of academia which requires one to conform to the dogma to get respected, or even to be acknowledged at all; the general subscription to Bohr & co.'s distorted (not to mention depressing and counterproductive) idea of what science is... Feynman is certainly rolling on his grave - as is Einstein.)

Oops, bad copy-paste! That's the link I intended; sorry to all others for the misunderstanding. While we're at it, there's also this one; while Thompson certainly doesn't seem to have "what it takes" (as Trevor Marshall does), her site is also quite interesting.

The link doesn't seem to reflect to the information, you were hoping for. This does.

Totally off-topic, but certainly interesting stuff ...

> The problem for the government is that British history is so imperialistic and militaristic.

Almost right! The *real* problem for the Government is that it is busily trying to act as a democratic body in a country that is still a monarchy. Amidst all the decrying of Blair's Cabinet over "Tory ruin slowed by hardworking Labour leaders", the ugly truth is that no Government since the Second World War has acted properly as laid out by British law.

It gets worse. Blair wants to assimilate Britain into Europe. Not only is this unpopular (countless independent surveys really can't be wrong) but also illegal. Check out the Magna Carta Society for more information on exactly *why* it's illegal.

The last resort, and one that is being seriously considered, is the complete devolution of those regions eligible for it -- Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, and Yorkshire. Yes, Yorkshire. As a subject kingdom, Yorkshire actually has *more* right to devolve than Wales, which was conquered.

RR
-- Geek-Ware - Proud to be Geek!

If Mach 1 = speed of sound at sea level, does it really follow that the MPH speed of Mach 1 changes with altitude? Sure, the speed of sound varies with altitude, but isn't Mach 1 just a reference number for velocity?

I guess not since in 'The right stuff' Yeager produced a sonic boom as he passed M1 in the desert and was obviously not at sea level. So, how does that work? He had a M indicator in his X-1 cockpit that I guess was an airspeed indicator that had to adjust for his altitude in determining where the plane was relative to M1?

But then again, this speed of sound calculator only asks for temperature and humidity, not altitude in determining the speed of sound.

The ion based tests open their own set of loopholes, while closing the common photon tests loopholes.

Unlike photons, ions can be detected with high efficiency (theoretically 100% since they're massive particles). But since the spin coupling energy (with Stern-Gerlach magnets, the analogue of polarizers in optical experiments) is much lower than their kinteic energy, the spin measurements (selection) are much less reliable than those of optical photon polarizers. This results in large background counts (due to depolarization) and this subtraction is a well known loophole for LHV models (also occuring with photon tests when the sensitivity of the detectors is increased).

Additional problem is in reliable production of the entangled pair state, again due to the low energy of spin-spin coupling (between the spins of the ion pair) relative to other energies involved in the process of pair production and collimation. The result is again a large number of "accidental coincidence" detections, i.e. another contribution to the background to be subtracted.

Hence the background subtractions make ionic tests very similar to the case of photon tests when the photo-detection is increased to near 100%. This can be achieved by using very high energy photons (e.g. gamma photons from the electron-positron annihilation), in which case one can have near perfect detection, but polarization measurement doesn't work too well (via Compton scattering), producing very large background which needs to be subtracted (exactly as with ions, and for essentially the same reason).

An alternative way to increase the photo-detection efficiency is to use very sensitive (low threshold) detector, but that produces large dark current, the background noise, which again has to be subtracted. The resulting unsubtracted data in such case are almost exactly what a classically entangled EM wave packet would produce (i.e. what Maxwell equations would predict). You can, for example, see the actual raw data from Asepect's PhD thesis, where he did his famous cascade experiments, on Caroline Thompson's web site. For more modern PDC based experiments, see the similar Stochastic Electrodynamics models (which are again the Maxwell equations based models, but with stochastic initial & boundary conditions) which reproduce the raw data for these experiments, on the Trevor Marshall's site.

It is true, as far as I know, that no single experiment has gotten sufficient sensitivity using spacelike separated measurements... yet. It seems somehow perverse though to hang a defense of local realism on this fact.

This is the oldest handwaving argument for dismissing the loopholes in Bell tests, i.e. why would some future increased sensitivity (for detection or polarizer efficiency) suddenly switch from the good agreement with QM (modulo loopholes) and give preference to the local realism.

First one should note that the non-adjusted experimental data is already consistent with the local realism (and there are numerous local models for variety of the setups reproducingt he experimental non-adjusted data). So nothing here has to change for more sensitive experiments. Only the wishfully adjusted data (when the loopholes are dismissed via ad hoc unverifiable assumptions) exclude local realism.

Second, it is perfectly natural for any local realistic model to make the efficiency of the detector or polarizer dependent on the values of the local (hidden) variables. Such dependency is outright excluded by the fair sampling (be it sampling by the detectors or the polarizers; in the ion case the critical fair sampling problem is at the Stern Gerlach magnets, the "polarizer," not the detector, which is here near-perfectly efficient; while in photon case it is at the photo-detectors, and not at the near-perfect polarizers). The ion tests only shift the fair sampling (in the hidden variable space) problem closer to the source, at the Stern-Gerlach and the pair source production depolarizations (which results in the background counts, which is presumed to be a fair sample in the LHV space, thus it is flatly subtracted subtracted from the total counts).

To illustrate this point in a form more accessible to non-physicists here, consider a national poll using email. Such poll will fail to detect people who do not have computers with internet connection and email account. Suppose now the poll analysis expert wasn't informed about the method of communication used to obtain the poll data. This is analogous to the Bell test experimenter looking at the counts of particles detected, but not being able to measure or know anything about the so-called local hidden variables (analog to the email, which is here invisible variable/value to the poll analyst).

The analyst, not knowing anything about the underlying means of communication, proclaims now that he will assume that the chance of being detected by the pollster doesn't depend on the (invisible to him) method of communication, hence the sampling is proclaimed to be fair, by declaring it to be so. This is exactly how the experimenters in the Bell tests establish that their sampling is fair (at detectors or polarizers), independent of the hidden variables -- by proclaiming it to be so.

Now suppose in our poll, a question asked "what was your income?" Clearly, the sample is biased here, and the income discovered this way will be higher than the national average. In other words, the poll is more sensitive in "detecting" higher income than lower income people. In the extreme, if the question is "are you homeless," the sample will completely miss any homeless person, i.e. this "detector" is made completely insensitive to the "homelessness" by virtue of the particluar value of the hidden variable (the means of communication = email). OTOH, if the means of communication were walking through the parks at 10PM, and asking anyone encountered the same questions, the results would be biased the other way. Here the hidden variable "means of communication" = "asking people in the parks at 10PM" -- the variable has different value, and the detection profile is quite different.

In other words, the hidden variables will perfectly naturally bias the sample, almost by necessity, since they do affect (or are correlated with) what is detected and what is missed. Ruling out the sample bias by fiat (as is done in every Bell test), is effectively excluding the hidden variables upfront, by declaring it so.

Extremely challenging, like in "it can't work and it won't ever work, but I hope the government and the industry sponsors won't find that out, at least until I retire, preferably after I am dead."

The whole field of Quantum Computing is a mathematical abstraction (fine, as any pure math is, as long as you don't try to claim that's how the real world works). Its vital connection with the real world is based on a highly dubious (even outright absurd, according to some physicists, including Einstein) conjecture about entangled quantum states (roughly, a special kind of "mystical" non-local correlation among events) which was actually never confirmed experimentally. And without that quantum entanglement the whole field is an excercise in pure abstract math with no bearing on reality.

While there were number of claims of an "almost" confirmation of this kind of quantum correlations (the so-called Bell inequality tests), there is always a disclaimer (explicit or, in recent years, between the lines as the swindle got harder to sell), such as "provided the combined setup and detection efficiency in this situation can be made above 82%" (even though it is typically well below 1% overall in the actual experiment; the most famous of its kind, Aspect experiment from early 1980s had only 0.2% combined efficiency, while 82% is needed for actual, "loophole free" proof) or provided we assume that the undetected events follow such and such statistics, etc. The alternative explanations of those experiments (requiring no belief in mystical instant action-at-a-distance), which naturally violate those wishfull assumptions, are ignored, or ridiculed as unimportant loopholes when forced to debate the opposition, by the "mystical" faction. After all, without believing their conjecture all the magic of quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, along with funding, would vanish.

For those interested in the other side of these kinds of claims, why it doesn't work and why it will never work, check the site by a reputable British physicist Trevor Marshall, who has been fighting, along with a small group of allies, the "quantum magic" school for years:

Quantum Mechanics is not a Science"

Unfortunately, the vast bulk of the research funding in this area goes to the mystical faction. As long as there are fools with money, there will always be swindlers who will part the two.

For a more popular account, accessible to non-physicists, of the opposing view, you can check a site by a practical statistician (and general sceptic) Caroline Thompson:

Caroline Thompson's Physics

From personal experience I would put ColdFusion and PHP tied for the top slot. CF is cleaner and easier for building small apps but PHP has MUCH better support and is better for medium size apps. Not to mention the easiest to learn. ASP sucks. Really there is no such thing as ASP since its really a hodgepodge of VBScript, JScript and HTML. With Microsoft's .NET it gets even worse with 16+ languages available. PHP is simple, has decent string handling and excellent online support. PHP+Apache+MySQL is a killer combo. Want an easy install? Check out PHPTriad for Windows. Chances are than any question you could come up with has been asked and answered in one os the the support groups.

(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof...

I imagine, then, that this will be interpreted as covering even hyperlinks to DeCSS. It's always rather funny to see this kind of blanket phrase included in legislation - all it does is give anyone with money a licence to interpret the law as they like.

What a nightmare.

Lucky the DMCA doesn't cover British citizens (yet).

--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me

You are absolutely correct. However, from all indications in the press, this crack was open for three months-- which is plenty of time to quietly make changes that get into the backup sequence and into the master source tree (there can be many copies, but sooner or later source must be merged unless each MS developer is working on a completely forked piece of software). And if this crack exists, are there others? Also, this is a company well-known for easter eggs. Not that I didn't think the Excel flight simulator wasn't fun, but think about what the whole idea of easter egg means in terms of security policy. I'm not saying they can't clean their software up or that there is even a reason to believe it was corrupted (trojan code still has to compile and not cause bugs during testing in order to make it back out of the corporation). But how would we know? And do you really trust them to be as careful or as truthful about it as you'd like?

I think what keeps useage (and social isolation) down is the lack of community with a point...

Esperanto actually contains a great deal of ambiguity and obscurity. See Why Esperanto is not my favourite Artificial Language , Learn Not To Speak Esperanto! , a Wired article on the subject , Lango , and The Problem of an International Auxiliary Language and its Solution in Ido for more information.

Looking at Kemp's other work does nothing to persuade me that the "palm" mural is "great" art. However, his other art, specifically the stuff he did with his hand and other objects on scanner beds is quite interesting to look at. His other artworks remind me largely of chinese or japanese design, where the writing itself is considered an artform. I don't get as much from that as i do the scanner bed stuff. That's a good use of technology for atristic purposes. interestingly enough, the scanner bed stuff is something that we all (concieveably) could do. heck, i've played with moving objects on the scanner bed before, never considered it art, but it looks pretty cool.

Looking at Kemp's other work does nothing to persuade me that the "palm" mural is "great" art. However, his other art, specifically the stuff he did with his hand and other objects on scanner beds is quite interesting to look at. His other artworks remind me largely of chinese or japanese design, where the writing itself is considered an artform. I don't get as much from that as i do the scanner bed stuff. That's a good use of technology for atristic purposes. interestingly enough, the scanner bed stuff is something that we all (concieveably) could do. heck, i've played with moving objects on the scanner bed before, never considered it art, but it looks pretty cool.

As others have pointed out, this work by itself doesn't seem particularly groundbreaking. However, when considered as part of a series of works by the artist, it does have more meaning.

What Kemp has been doing over a longer period is exploring the medium of writing... How writing feels, how it looks, what it means.

Almost be definition, Palm has established a new writing paradigm: handheld, portable, editable electronic writing. Yes, Apple's Newton and other devices have done this before, but the Palm popularized the medium.

Kemp has taken this new paradigm and expressed it in meatspace, and quite well. If part of the meaning of art is to cause a discussion of issues, then not only has Kemp succeeded in creating a piece of surprising aesthetics, but also in fomenting a discussion of its merits.

As others have pointed out, this work by itself doesn't seem particularly groundbreaking. However, when considered as part of a series of works by the artist, it does have more meaning.

What Kemp has been doing over a longer period is exploring the medium of writing... How writing feels, how it looks, what it means.

Almost be definition, Palm has established a new writing paradigm: handheld, portable, editable electronic writing. Yes, Apple's Newton and other devices have done this before, but the Palm popularized the medium.

Kemp has taken this new paradigm and expressed it in meatspace, and quite well. If part of the meaning of art is to cause a discussion of issues, then not only has Kemp succeeded in creating a piece of surprising aesthetics, but also in fomenting a discussion of its merits.

And here's a shoddy list of PHP editors. Shoddy, as half of them aren't PHP related.

Oh, and First Post d00dz!

IMHO the amaturish nature of Slashdot is part of its appeal. Rather than having "stuffy" feel of the big news sites, the atmosphere is very relaxed here.

Although I do agree a little more care needs to be taken at times to stop mistakes being made to the live site. For example, minutes ago, a story was on the front page entitled "Voices From The Hellmouth Revisited: Part 4 of 10" (screenshot here) which obviously wasn't ready for primetime as it was in need of "Rob's part" The article has now been removed.

IMHO the amaturish nature of Slashdot is part of its appeal. Rather than having "stuffy" feel of the big news sites, the atmosphere is very relaxed here.

Although I do agree a little more care needs to be taken at times to stop mistakes being made to the live site. For example, minutes ago, a story was on the front page entitled "Voices From The Hellmouth Revisited: Part 4 of 10" (screenshot here) which obviously wasn't ready for primetime as it was in need of "Rob's part" The article has now been removed.

Yes - they used the Z machine.

The fact is that much of our back-slapping and pride in having built the internet is - well, not delusional exactly, but let's face facts, we are NOT the ones making big money from the Web. In my company the PR and marketing people, and the strategic-level suits, are the ones making real money. Oh, of course, we're well paid by the standards of the 'normal' economy; but let's not kid ourselves that this is anything but the suits tossing us whatever relatively minor rewards it takes to keep us at the twelve-hour days.

The young are also a bit more idealistic and impressionable. From what I've seen, they're more willing to accept a utopian ideology, despite its impracticalities or impossibilities, and even waste their time propagandizing about it, or trying to set it in motion. Particularly when there is so much disinformation being propagated by those with political agendas, be they left or right.

Ever watch a 14-yr-old trying to defend Marxist theory online? It'd be hilarious if it weren't sad due to the lack of situational awareness that demonstrates. Lack of experience can hamper judgement, apparently.

Take a few clueless chaps who have the ego and audacity to think that *they* have the one true path, give 'em readily-available information about, say, primitive explosives design, and they can do a fair bit of damage to themselves and those around them. Grandiousity and an exaggerated sense of self-importance can lead to silly, bloody plans -- regardless of source, be it ideology or simply a desire for fame.

Recall the Columbine chaps? Their plans were so ridiculous as to include hijacking a jumbo jet and crashing it into NYC -- from a couple of chaps who apparently couldn't properly detonate a propane-based explosive when other's lives (or taking of them) depended on it. Very Hollywood, that; a plan for fatally stupid imbeciles.

Critics of the 'net have a valid point in that there is much information dangerous in the hands of violent fools -- and that, therefore, parents should be careful to mind their children. Right now, many families have -- and, many would say, need -- two working parents. That more than slightly reduces the time available to spend with them, which makes it more difficult to know if an unruly teen has been contributing to Stormfront or its ilk lately. To absolve the medium completely, with fun documents like a short guide to explosives easily found (that doc revealed via Google), is a bit disingenuous.

Interactive fiction, baby! Enough of these gazillions of polygons and anti-aliasing and dithering and graphics never seen this side of Whogivesadamnistan .. I've yet to find a visual game to compete with my imagination from playing some of the recent (read: within the last five years) IF games.

Maybe I'm an elitist, maybe I'm a computer-game luddite, but I say that a good game created with Graham Nelson's Inform compiler beats pretty much any recent game hands-down. Not that it's stopped me from playing Diablo, The Sims, Ultima IX, and pretty much every FPS that's come to market, but I derived far far far more enjoyment from actually _using_ my own imagination to envision a situation rather than having to depend on someone else.

Jeez, now I sound like my parents, telling me to read a book and quit watching TV...

I was at an electronics store the other day, and I saw a magazine (Elektor, Oct 2000) with an article about a new use for a gameboy. Basically, you plug in this cartridge, and connect cables to it, and you gameboy becomes a hand-held oscilloscope! I found a website about it, which also has a ROM image available for download if you want to try it out on an emulator! Pretty cool if you ask me...
-MSD.dyndns.org
"Sucks to your ass-mar"

I know it's lame, you know it's lame, but they just don't care.

Shameless plug: lame dotcoms only heard of through advertising on TV/posters in London, UK.

A short description of how the machine worked.

An Enigma simulation and some good links.

Some cool stuff!

----
Josh

It's a recipe including, among other things, 2 1/2 oz. baking soda, and a cup of fresh lemon juice. Swedish Lemon Angels
Also see some pictures.

Recall that the ringworld was in a state of civilizational collapse when it was discovered. The cause? The Puppeteer race was so terrified of the race that created the Ringworld that they launched a nasty space-fungus that devoured the materials of the high-tech devices there. Voila; the downfall of a possibly threatening civilization.

Hmmm...

How pleased I am to see IFComp finally mentioned on Slashdot! I know people in the IF community have been trying to have this happen for at least the past couple of comps. I hope that this will help to not only generate more IF players, but also authors.

One that note: I see folks have mentioned 'em, but nobody has done the service to the truly lazy and linked to 'em, so allow me then then to list off some favorite sophisticated interactive fiction authorship engines:

Inform, based on the parser Infocom used in its games (as of the late 80s), is a fully object-oriented language with a C-like syntax. It's my personal language of choice for the little bit of IF dabbling I've done; you can see the source for a small and silly game called 'Calliope' I wrote for last year's competition (I came in 23rd, heh (but I got to win an Honest Bob CD anyway, hurrah)) linked from my own IF info page(which also has the compiled game, and links to lots of other modern IF games (much better than mine!) and authors I like). Inform is also open-source, and binaries exist for any platform you might reasonably care to name.

There's also TADS and Hugo, about which I know little, but are both popular enough with other authors to be worth checking out for the interested newcomer.

Have fun!
J
MacOS Open Source

Why are people posting fake adventure scripts that read like ADVENT, or tearfully reminiscing about playing Infocom games or reading adventure books?

The IF contest isn't about paying homage to old classics, it's about writing new ones. Play Photopia. Play Spider and Web. These are new styles, new ideas, new puzzles. Don't judge these games on 1980s commercial game merits; they're not month-long adventures with arcane puzzles to keep you going; They're short stories packed with innovation. Well, at least the good ones are. And it's your job to find those good ones and vote for them.

Anyone remember the Adventure Game Toolkit? All the coding was done with numerical indices (ie, you told the compiler that ROOM 4 exited NORTH to ROOM 7) and a lot of the parser and things were hardcoded, but it was loads of fun. I actually had a significant portion of a game written, but then I switched to the incredibly superior Inform and my procrastinating habits finally caught up with me. I do intend to complete a game at some point though...

www.zpok.demon.co.uk/cuecat/

I'm not a U.S. citizen, but I couldn't find handcock or hancock, or whatever the name was she was looking for on a list of U.S. presidents...
http://www.fujisan.demon.co.uk/USPresidents/presli st.htm

I wonder whether idealab will sue Bainlab for the same reason? (hmmm, think I missed them off the lameness list... "a mistake I don't mean to dooplicate" - check Bainlab in mozilla... heh, they really 'get' this "web thing", ay!

Developers mailing list archive - http://www.mail-archive.com/openssl-dev@openssl.or g/
SSLeay doco - http://www.columbia.edu/~ariel/ssleay/
SSLeay FAQ - http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~ftp/Crypto/
Dr Stephen Henson's home page - http://www.drh-consultancy.demon.co.uk/ Agreed, some of it's pretty sparse. Join the developer mailing list and ask a few questions - www.openssl.org

Hey, me too.

F*****g hard it was too.

Amen to that.

Not bitter because we was too stupid to get in are we?

Possibly, or maybe he/she was trolling. Or believed the media hype about Laura Spence. There's a nice take on that incident here.

One of the American physicists at Churchill who did her MPhil here said that the US system was broader but less in depth, FWIW (this was largely in reference to the level of mathematics in the Cambridge course).

except for 1:

Violence: the game of egregious and repulsive bloodshed

//rdj

It's amazing to encounter so prescient, political and imaginative a worldview... as shown in Hogshead's Violence: the roleplaying game of egregious and repulsive bloodshed Written by Greg Costikyan under the name 'Designer X'. This'll let him spout pro-RPG sentiments while rehashing Hellmouth.

[Lyrics] Momus
from Ping Pong
The Age Of Information

This is a public service announcement

Ladies and gentlemen, we are now entering
The age of information
It's perfectly safe
If we all take a few basic precautions
May I make some observations?

Axiom 1 for the world we've begun:

Your reputation used to depend on
What you concealed
Now it depends on what you reveal

The age of secretive mandarins who creep on heels of tact
Is dead: we are all players now in the great game of fact instead
So since you can't keep your cards to your chest
I'd suggest you think a few moves ahead
As one does when playing a game of chess

Axiom 2 to make the world new:

Paranoia's simply a word for seeing things as they are
Act as you wish to be seen to act
Or leave for some other star

Somebody is prying through your files, probably
Somebody's hand is in your tin of Netscape magic cookies
But relax:
If you're an interesting person
Morally good in your acts
You have nothing to fear from facts

Axiom 3 for transparency:

In the age of information the only way to hide facts
Is with interpretations
There is no way to stop the free exchange
Of idle speculations

In the days before communication
Privacy meant staying at home
Sitting in the dark with the curtains shut
Unsure whether to answer the phone
But these are different times, now the bottom line
Is that everyone should prepare to be known
Most of your friends will still like you fine

X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an E mail and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming world war three

Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go

Axiom 4 for this world I adore:

Our loyalties should shift in view according to what we know
And who we are speaking to

Once I was loyal to you, and prepared to be against information
Now I am loyal to information, maybe I'm disloyal to you
My loyalty becomes more complex and cubist
With every new fact I learn
It depends who I'm speaking to
And who they speak to in turn

Axiom 5 for information workers who wish to stay alive:

Supply, never withhold, the information requested
With total disregard for interests personal and vested

Chinese whispers was an analogue game
Where the signal degraded from brain to brain
Digital whispers is the same in reverse
The word we spread gets better, not worse
Better, not Worse

___
"Peasants! Not only are they dying, they're boring!"

Dave Langford, writer, critic and journalist has been commenting on his Hugo wins online for years... Maybe not on the web, but certainly in Usenet and on conferencing services.

And this year Ansible got another, making 18...

Take a look at Ansible, the best little SF newszine around.

S.