Slashdot Mirror

If you traceroute to www.msn.com, or www.hp.com, or a bunch of other high profile sites you will see they are actually being redirected to nsact.net first. NSA Cable Tap anyone? nsact.net is owned by savvis who have had many projects together with the NSA before.

most backbone providers have a 'secret' NSA tap room..
http://wired.com/news/technology/0,70910-0.html

And you all sit idly by..

As long as our fine congress has as strong a grasp of how the Internet works as Senator Ted Stevens how can they fail to make the right decision?

"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially."

Personally I think 5 days is pretty good to transfer an entire Internet to your personal office. I however have lower expectations than our esteemed Senator.

Since nobody seems to have answered the original question of "Why aren't we trying this with humans?" -- The answer is that "We are. And it doesn't work that well."

If you search for "NASA Hypergravity" on Google, you will find all kinds of data about the experiments, all kinds of crackpots talking about becoming super-strong or the like and this interesting Wired article written by one of the participants. If you don't want to dig too deep, check out the article. It's a pretty good summary from the inside out.

The internet is a series of tubes. Someone was probably downloading a whole book that got caught in one of these tubes.

Yes, exactly.

Open Source is totally unprofitable

It's also similar to the challenge that hopefully the diamond industry will face some day, when synthetic diamonds become acceptable to the idiots that pay for real ones. A bit of a waste of technology, but anything that causes less money to flow into these cesspools of human idiocy the better. But IMO, it won't happen with fragrances, really these companies don't even sell the barest shred of a product, just the image, so tech can't really bring them to their knees. Diamonds and music are different while still relying on sign value - you do get something in the end, and if it serves it's main purpose just as well (looking expensive/sounding cool) then the consumer will probably go to the cheaper source.

Fake diamonds are already here. De Beers are trying to counteract the "problem" by saying things like:

"If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone," ... "It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week."

"the email postal address is..." Must be going to Ted Stevens' office.

A Company named DigiScents tried this during the boom. Shockingly enough, the company folded. From Wired, Nov. 99/a.

Microsoft is certainly trying. Fortunatly, iTunes doesn't implement this yet.

Crate Coupler vs. Lucent

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,68894-0.htm l

You MUST work for the RIAA if you're comparing downloading music to stealing candy. Candy is tangible, it costs money to produce, store, and sell EACH one -- mp3's are just bits of information stored in 1's and 0's -- "stealing" an mp3 doesn't hurt anyone's profits IF YOU WEREN'T GOING TO BUY IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. I'm not saying that it's right or wrong to "steal" music by filesharing, but I am saying that the RIAA is ridiculous for prosecuting a 12 year old for doing so.
She's 12 -- no 12 year old I know has money & transportation to go to the store and buy a CD, so by her downloading it's not like it caused her to not buy the cd and therefore hurt any record company's profits (in fact, maybe her parents would hear the music she downloaded and go out and buy her similar artists, therefore helping increase record companys' profits [CD sales actually increased in recent years http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,35848,00 .html]).
You say it's like stealing candy -- WRONG. Every 12 year old I know has been informed by their parents that stealing is wrong -- they've also been taught that "stealing" involves tangible goods. I don't know any 12 year olds who have been taught (by parents OR by schools) that filesharing is wrong -- it doesn't say "the activity you are about to participate in is illegal" when you download unauthorized files in bittorrent or any another p2p program. A 12 year old KNOWS not to steal a candy bar because it is wrong, a 12 year old does NOT KNOW that they're doing anything wrong when they click on a button to download the song they heard on the radio.
What is the point of the RIAA suing this 12 year old? To gain back lost profits? Again -- I point you to the fact that she is a fucking 12 year old and not a trust-fund baby. No job, no money, nothing to be had from suing her (maybe they wanted her Barbie[tm]s). The amount of money they must have spent on legal fees (with their evil lawyers direct from LawyerMart [LawyerMart is a copyright of Hell Enterprises]) alone would have been more than enough to give a "File-sharing is wrong and hurts people and kills puppies" presentation for THE ENTIRE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL the 12 year-old attended.
If the point is to persuade people not to file-share, the lawsuit is moot -- just because a 12 year old downloaded 1 song and you sue her does not mean anyone is going to say "hey, maybe I shouldn't do this", the only result will be people saying "The RIAA is full of tools!"

Remember, this is not a network of teens/adults swapping thousands/millions of songs or burning pirated cds and selling them; it's a single 12 year old girl. If she was the only person in the world to commit the horrible act of downloading some bits of information that are considered protected by "intellectual property right" laws then by all means -- sue her little tutu off... but while there are huge fish to fry yet the RIAA targets a 12 year old, I say "bullshit!".

Sigh..Fine call me a troll for pointing out a $100 laptop may not be great... But for $50 more, this desktop seems a much better option. And it has video ports that will hook up to a standard television... http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71222-0.htm l?tw=rss.index

Wired has a great article on this, http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70040-0.htm l

While it is a widely held belief - even being propagated by some patent offices with misleading titles like "Looking after your ideas" http://www.patent.gov.uk/patent/info/ideas.pdf -, no, you cannot patent an idea (well, software patents are the closest thing to that), you can patent an expression of an idea though (invention usually).

Here's an article from EFF's Jon Perry on Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.id eas_pr.html ,
and a less dense and clear (but probably outdated) from the Enterpreneur Network: http://tenonline.org/art/9010.html

Glad to see The Washington Post remind us of what Wired Magazine first described in 2004...maybe the RIAA will get it eventually if enough media outlets broadcast it... http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

This sounds great to me, although not exactly a new thing. If you haven't read about the "Long Tail" phenomenon you might be interested in these two articles:

Chris Anderson's article in Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
A Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

It appears she didn't prove much of anything. In fact, it may have been decompression on her spinal cord that caused the short-term improvement, not stem cells at all.

At this time copyright registration is too easy, it is automatic. Legally everytime you quote my /. message in your /. message, you have infringed my automatic copyright. Of course, that would be rediculous in something that is clearly a forum, a conversation doesn't make sense if you can't tell what is being replied to.

Similarly, books and articles can be seen as messages in threads. This metaphor predates computers. The publishers of the Great Books of the Western World and others have used the metaphor of the The Great Conversation. That all of writing was a conversation where newer authors were responding to older authors. We certainly expect anyone writing a significant work to cite references and even quote when necessary without jumping through too many hoops.

Moving into other media, documentary films can't be made if they can't show what they are documenting. That is the issue beyond the "Eyes on the Prize" controversy where so much of Dr. King's life and words were captured on copyrighted news reels.

Registering and renewing a copyright would be no more difficult than registering and renewing your car. Defending it might require a lawyer, but then, sometimes we use lawyers to handle car related problems, too.

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,69161,00 .html?tw=wn_tophead_7

Microsoft is focused on "the big, bold challenges,"
such as folding useful technologies into products
instead of just rushing something out to market.

- attributed to Kevin Johnson

Micro$oft is still intent on squeezing useful technologies into products,
while Yahoo, Google, et. al. are busily deploying them as services.

Wired had an article last October which spoke to this.

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,69161,00 .html?tw=wn_tophead_7

As Microsoft hits 30, critics reel off a list of complaints that sounds like, well, a Microsoft commercial: stifling bureaucracy, frustrating miscommunication, different units working on overlapping technology without adequate cooperation. In short, the very ills Microsoft promises to cure with its software.

...

As it gears up to release a slew of new products, Microsoft is trying to untangle bureaucratic snags with a corporate shakeup meant to get the best ideas to market faster and increase the company's push toward over-the-Internet software and services.

...

Microsoft is facing the classic dilemma that befalls a company that grows from a small startup to a major corporation, said the analyst Garrity. There's really no way to manage thousands of employees without a strong corporate structure, but that structure will inevitably alienate some workers who remember the freewheeling early days.

That quote is apocryphal. Gates denies ever having said the bit about 640K of memory.

But if he had said that, and had said it in 1981, look where the computer industry went from `76 to `86. From hobby to sixteen million units sold in a year. At $300 or more each. I don't think Gates's idea is so far-fetched. And, you know, I'll take a guess and say Gates has more experience, maybe knows trends a little better than you. I don't know if you made any predictions about the Xbox, but it's been very successful for the company (in terms of units sold, at least).

Just curious, are there any surgical procedures that make you go "Oh boy! I've got to try that!"

I am interested in this one.

If this system is looking for the reflectivity and shape of the sensors couldn't a simple piece of one-way mirrored glass be placed in front of the sensors and effectively hide the camera? I wonder... I bet this will be cracked as quickly as Sony's CD copy protection was back in 2002.

Nielsen's been working on total measurement for years. Arbitron and VNU (current holders of Nielsen Media research) got together to build Project Apollo. However, because of the trouble Arbitron is having getting its Portable People Meter accredited, Apollo's deploying Nielsen's A/P Meter instead, which I've commented on before.

I work at Nielsen Media at the GTIC facility in Oldsmar FL and I've been hearing about Apollo for many years, but it seems that the rest of the world has only heard about it recently. Project Apollo has been described (internally) as the "holy grail" of measurement, which follows a consumer across every media channel and measures the affect on purchasing habits.

What it looks like Google is doing is a subset of Project Apollo, and even if it could compete on the TV/video side they probably need to license the tech from Nielsen. I'd love to have Google as an ally, but as a competitor I think they'll find Nielsen pretty hard to dislodge.

Some of the hot women might not care to be checked out by people they can't check out in return. Would you?

Some people might not care to be checked out by people they can't check out in return. Would you?

I think you need to read The Transparent Society - an ANCIENT Wired article (back when Wired had all the mojo) that opened my eyes and forever changed my view on power, privacy, security, and freedom.

Apple did this years ago, but with real jet engines. Its called the PowerMac G4. I was so impressed by this advance, that I immortalised it in my sig.

http://blog.wired.com/fightclub/index.album?i=0

Comparing faith and religious belief to a neurosis or schizophrenic condition is a Freudian way to look at God (and therefore seems to be unquestionably sanctioned by the "scientific" community). But, it is only one way to look at it. The true objective of science is to study all things, whether we believe they are real or not and from multiple perspectives, to determine answers about them. So, if you actually want to understand where people of faith are coming from, you have to study what they believe and whether there is a true basis for believing it. Maybe not in the way a physics or genetic specialist would approach it, but maybe in the way a social scientist does.

Albert Einstein believed in God AND developed the theory of relativity with the belief firmly in his mind that God was the cause of it all. He was unapologetic about that and is on the record as stating so. Yet we do not discredit his work because of his beliefs. Newton, Galileo, Brahe, Copernicus, and others were of the same mind, yet it did not hinder their ability to do solid science. Their only beef about religion was the Vatican's ridiculous interpretation of the nature, composition, and physical workings of the universe. In the case of Copernicus, it's interesting to note that:

"If Copernicus had any genuine fear of publication, it was the reaction of _scientists_, not clerics, that worried him. Other churchmen before him -- Nicole Oresme (a French bishop) in the fourteenth century and Nicolaus Cusanus (a German cardinal) in the fifteenth -- had freely discussed the possible motion of the earth, and there was no reason to suppose that the reappearance of this idea in the sixteenth century would cause a religious stir." (http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1987/PSCF9-87Lindber g.html, emphasis added)

The scientists, even then, thought they had all the answers. Boy, were they wrong.

Neither of us own a private library of primary research conducted by ourselves or our own teams of scientists, so we'll both have to rely on Google-driven quote mining. Here is a small cross section sample of articles found around the keywords "research prayer healing". I've deliberately left the titles off of the link list below so that anyone reading this will have less chance of being biased by the headline. Can't do much about the domain names, though, so I'll just have to trust that anyone really interested in knowing a faith-based perspective will actually click those links. I've also deliberately chosen articles from as many viewpoints as possible, including skepdic.com so that a) I won't be accused of cherry-picking and b) so that, as scientists, we can begin to appreciate that there are many ways of looking at things and at least two ways of "knowing" (faith and experimentation).

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/366162p-311 612c.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/03/23/AR2006032302177.html
http://realityshifters.com/pages/articles/research confirmsdh.html
http://www.csicop.org/sb/2001-12/reality-check.htm l
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/07/14/AR2005071401695.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/prayer.ht ml
http://www.stnews.org/News-1590.htm
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/religion/healing_pr

All we need now is a war on pr0n,

There already is a war on pr0n!

Source article

Yes -- brilliant! You've captured the essences of the Slashdot v Microsoft "drama".

And congratulations to Bill for having the sense to move on with his life. Microsoft may not be the most ethical of companies, but they are no Enron. Bill Gates is no Kenneth Lay. If you want some other perspective, compare Gates with Jobs. I don't know what Larry Ellison is doing these days, but in the past, his main "philanthropic" ambition was to donate to an anti-aging research foundation.

"I've said it before and I'll continue to say it, Google has BIG plans that everyone is not piecing together. Long story short, I expect to see Google linux sometime within two years (I'd wager this year). This distro will be intimately linked with the online side of Google for storage and software. This will mean that you can go from your PC at home to any webbrowser on the face of the planet and have all of your information as it would be on your own desktop. ALSO, there's a possiblity of seeing something like Sun has where you can have a desktop open with programs, web pages, and files and then go to another PC and have the same desktop open from either a webbrowser or a future version of Google desktop. What do you think all those mobile computing boxes and dark fiber are for? It's all to make Google local to everyone and very very fast. Wait and see. dont forget the Google PC rumors with Walmart, I'm willing to bet that this will happen or something close to it and what we will see is a computer that boots in less than 30sec (a very stripped down and fast linux distro, perhaps on CF or equivalent) and then jumps onto a highspeed net connection to get on the Google network for software and files." I will add that with stories like this and this it becomes apparent that Google may be close to a work-around to all that pesky net neutrality bullshit.

I'm not going to defend Apple, but how much more are you willing to pay for an iPod to see that workers are treated the way you think they should be? Whose product will you buy because they treat their workers better than Apple does? Or will you refuse to buy it at all, for the sake of the working conditions in China or wherever? And how much will that help?

Regina Lynn from Wired.com, http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70547-0.html, reported on the adult film industry's efforts to develop new DRM programs that users wouldn't find too objectionable almost three months ago.

The adult film industry has pretty much lead the way in American entertainment in regards to online distribution and DVD innovation.

Well I don't know if it's a load of crap. A quick search turns up a couple cases: Blizzard v. BNETD and Mattel sued the makers of cphack (over some kind of censorship software).

This how-to implies that reverse engineering "for purposes of interoperability" is legal in many places, but that's just one reason people reverse engineer stuff. With legal limits on what and when you can reverse engineer products, it's definitely possible to be sued for it. And successfully sued if you're violating the law (whether or not you agree with the law).

There are many reasons why you don't see "game gods" being loudly proclaimed anymore. The article does hit some of them, but they seem to have forgotten a few:

1. Burnout ruins many careers.

Will Wright wasn't always a high-flying game designer selling millions. He worked on a shooter-type game back in the day, and the development of that lead him to explore some concepts which lead to the development of the classic SimCity.

Now consider what would happen if Will were a programmer in today's environment. What if he had to sacrifice personal and family life to work 80 hours per week minimum at EA on a sequel of a sequel with no input in the game? Would he have burned out in that environment, left the industry, and turned his creativity full-time to robotics instead?

One of my colleagues described the industry's behavior as "eating their young" and I think that's very accurate. Many of the potential "gaming gods" likely burn out before they get a chance to shine, and many slink into relative obscurity making smaller games that are fun but a lot less headline-grabbing.

2. Expectations are much, much higher.

The article talks about this a bit, in that we have large teams creating these games instead of individuals or small teams. However, the article fails to consider why we have large teams: because expectations are higher.

Now, part of this is the fault of game developers and publishers who have been pushing technical advancement as "innovation" over the past few years. The "next generation" of games have to look pretty in order to prove that they're worth the wait and the cost. Some genres were/are defined almost entirely by technical advancements, such as FPSes, so small teams need not bother competing with the big boys with any hope for success. But, the point remains that the large developers and publishers have invested a lot in the concept that "pretty = quality" for gamers.

Of course, the market is still the one buying the pretty games in preference to the other games, even if it is at the bidding of the marketing of the larger companies. As I've ranted many times before, if the audience were more willing to buy indie games it would change the industry in a radical way and support true innovation. But, people are ignoring potentially great games by great designers because the graphics aren't cutting-edge. This means those great designers don't get the chance to be shown as "game gods" as referenced in the article.

3. Less risk means less notoriety.

With multiple millions of dollars on the line, publishers aren't willing to take risks. Look at what the article dubs the older "game gods", and you'll see they've made games that defined whole genres. Miyamoto's Mario games, Wright's Sim games, Molyneux's god games, etc. They may not have been the first person in the respective genre, but they made a game that shaped how many people think of that category of games.

You don't get that today. Even Will Wright, master game designer, had trouble convincing the EA managers to let him do The Sims and had to work on it covertly within the company. Even a grandmaster like Miyamoto has had his missteps in the past, making games that have went largely unnoticed by the North American market. Publishers are wary about trusting a large budget to the masters, let alone someone up-and-coming that hasn't been proven.

In the end, we get fairly modest games that will make an expected return on investment. We don't see the games that define (or re-define) a genre, because that's too risky. So, we don't really see any games that truly inspire us to label the new creators as "game gods".

4. Games are hit driven.

How many talented bands do you know of that had a smash first CD then followed up with something rather mediocre? Those bands often sink below notice and don

Since everything on the netzilla is calledzilla zillazilla these days, I'll fill in the details for the grandparent commenter.

But by 1989, Richard Crandall, now Distinguished Scientist at Apple (and once my roommate at Reed College), started networking NeXT computers to find, factor, and test gargantuan prime numbers.

"Community supercomputing occurred to me one day at NeXT engineering headquarters," Crandall recalls. "I thought we ought to make these machines do what they were designed to do, which is to work when we humans are not working. Machines have no business sleeping."

Crandall installed software that allowed idle NeXT machines to perform computations, combining their efforts across the network. He called this software Godzilla, but after a legal inquiry from the company that owned the rights to the movie character, he renamed it Zilla. Crandall put Zilla to work on huge prime numbers, which are crucial in cryptography. It was then used to test a new encryption scheme at NeXT - a scheme now employed at Apple, which acquired NeXT. In 1991, Zilla won the Computerworld Smithsonian award for science.

Later, Crandall and several colleagues used distributed processing to complete the deepest computation ever performed, asking the question: Is the 24th Fermat number (which has more than 5 million digits) prime? "It took 10**17 machine operations - 100 quadrillion," Crandall says proudly. "With that level of computational effort, you can create a full-length movie. In fact, that's about the same number of operations Pixar required to render A Bug's Life."

For that you need good old fashioned recreational drugs... SEE: LSD!!!

Just because it is a troll does not mean that it isn't true. When Apple hands you an iBook that looks like a makeup case ... many other tech writers would still write enough "quoteable nice things" to ensure more goodies in the future.

--
I'm not an AC for USA topics.
I'm not an AC for NSA topics.
Be very afraid on Mac topics.

First off.. they have been saying one thing or another would "overload the internet" for ages and it has yet to happen.

Seriously. The guy who invented Ethernet predicted it would happen a decade ago. I'd be shocked if internet traffic weren't 30-100 times what it were then, and somehow, the bits keep flowing. For me at least, the Internet seems more reliable, not less.

"government should be about fostering a dynamic and risk-taking economy, not preserving the certainty of anyone's business models."

That's the money quote all right. Allowing the various telco monopolies and wannabe-monopolists to shake people down--for no added value--will reduce the ability of people to be dynamic and take risks. Deep pocket companies like Google can afford to pay, but startups will be hurt by this. I'm in the SF Bay Area, and as far as I know everybody on the penninsula is for net neutrality. If a major hotbed of internet innovation is for net neutrality, then anybody who talks like this should be for it.

I'll give you a great example. Most people I know have 2 choices for broadband: cable and DSL. I have only 1, even though I live in a very affluent, densely populated area. What's the issue? Cavalier Telephone. Cavalier is a small telephone service provider that competes with Verizon and offers discount, full-service POTS. They take advantage of the sharing rules that require Verizon to rent them their copper infrastructure at the rate Verizon charges itself. So Verizon stops upgrading. Most exchanges in the area are on newer switches, but the older switches (circa 1960's) - like the one my lines are on - can't support the line sharing. So Verizon eats the extra expense of maintaining those old switches, can't offer DSL themselves on those switches... but they don't have to share. They know that having a monopoly on POTS service in an area is worth more than the ability to offer additional services like DSL.

According to Wired,

The Barton bill gives the Federal Communications Commission authority to enforce net neutrality principles and set fines of up to $500,000 for violations.

What a joke. Even if the monopoly-friendly FCC ever decided to impose these fines, it would become nothing but a minor line-item on the telcos' multi-billion dollar balance sheets, and they filter, block, and shut down anything they want.

According to the article, the last (and only) thing to dethrone beer since the survey started was the Internet in 1997.
Free as in beer.
Free as in the Internet.
Free as in iPods.

HDR textures can take up something around 4x the space

Only when uncompressed, and even then they need take no more than 2x. There are numerous fast and efficent representation method for stored HDR images that take up little more than non-HDR. This is something I have a lot of experience in. Oh, and less texture compression usually means slower loading, as there is more data to fetch from disc. Better to encode it tighter, get it off the disc quicker, then decompress it in the background with a spare CPU core.

And 640k is enough for anyone, right?

A common misconception. A better quote from our mate Bill: "Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything's going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk."

Developers may or may not be happy with DVD9, but even if MS changes their minds, few developers would ever consider releasing a 360 game on HD-DVD. Especially if the HD-DVD add-on penetration rate is only 10% as you suggest.

Sure, he deserved getting caught. But it's just disappointing that a guy that has enough brains to earn $1M that way didn't have enough to just vanish and live quietly in another country before the police came looking.

It's quite amazing what people manage to pull off sometimes, like this: http://www.wired.com/news/business/1,52114-0.html

It's like the plot from a bank robbery movie! Thieves get in, steal traffic control equipment, then happily *eat and smoke* in the place, and drive away without hurry as the traffic lights lose sync. They even stole the alarm as well. There's something to be said about a job well done ;-)

As a shareholder, I think that it only makes good business sense for them to be evil.

----
"You decided I was an adversary on the basis of one sentence taken out of context"
----

    I read the your post. You spent some time writing and seemed pretty passionate so I thought I'd be decent enough to respond. I'm not sure if I'm hearing hostility back or just a rebuttle but you do seem upset. We often have a different pereption of written words and tone of voice.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70179-0.htm l?tw=rss.index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstructionism

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don't make myself a target by misunderstanding my opponent's comments and launching into needless diatribe
----

    You just seemed to-- although I believe one man's diatribe is often just another's wisdom.

----
"I find it mind-boggling that anyone could possibly take a link to a "Howling Mad" Murdock site seriously."
----

    I find it amazing that some adults haven't learned that other people don't always get their motivations or use of language from a quick remark. This is why it's called DEBATE and this why Slashdot is called a FORUM.

      As for my lack of humor, I still manage to laugh at Chappelle jokes so apparently he's doing something you aren't. (Don't feel bad or get so defensive--I'm not claiming to be a talented comedian either:)

    Just continuing on the theme.... laughter to me is basically like food or taking a sh~t. I don't force feed food to myself because I view it as unhealthy to my body. If I'm hungry I eat. Similarly I view gorging on "laugher" as an unhealthy practice for our minds. It fills some emotional need I have at the moment and that's it. Humans are many emotions and we should cherish all of them--not try and force the issue.

    There is this popular myth that if we aren't laughing like jackels we are therefore unhappy. I can assure you that's media bullshit that's probably largely to blame for millions of Americans addictions to SSRIs and illicit drugs. From my perspective it seems obvious that too many people use laugher as a both a weapon and a crutch. (Not saying this is you... just a general comment) There is way too much philosophy in the concept of giggling-- which is essentially a physical health issue approximating the aforementioned crap.

----
"including speculative views attributed to me that you then proceeded to argue against."
----

True that. This why it's up to you to clarify those things with a rebuttle instead of going postal on me. My comments were not intended as putdowns (other than I didn't get your joke part). Obviously I know nothing about you.

Mind you I now know you have lots of pride. :)

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we need civilized leaders rather than jungle dwellers
-----

And who defines them? You? Them? Are the rest supposed to just shut up and play the inferior role? (not saying this is your opinion...just asking)

...staying close to commercial airliner flight paths. Yeah, that's what these guys thought too.

"Many of these assholes should be kicked out come the elections in November."

The problem is that there are assholes on both sides of the aisle. Fritz Hollings (D-Disney^H^H^H^H^H^HSouth Carolina) sponsored the SSSCA, which tried to introduce some pretty extreme copyright enforcement provisions itself. Both the parties are so close together on so many issues like this, I'm not sure it matters who is in office.

It would be typical with a forum full of engineers to simply pass up web 2.0 as some marketing buzzword for a new implementation of something old. In many ways the attributes associated with what is being collectively called 'web 2.0' are simply old ideas implemented in a medium where they can succeed in a big way.

It's important to understand that the difference in the web is not in the implementation but in the experience of the end user and how content is created, managed, and distributed. Adaptive path has a writeup about this at http://adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archiv es/000547.php

The difference is important because it changes how developers and designers percieve the web when they are creating new things. There are many features of newer web software that contribute to the ways in which people use and experience the web.

My favorite is the preference in designing software for the long tail. Which is mentioned in Wired http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html This is the practice of serving many niche markets with targeted software instead of building software to service all of the market and doing it badly. This causes less confusion, less clutter, better software and faster turnaround.

Some of the other features of the newer web software you might have already noticed are decentralization, remixability, co-creation, and their side-effect of emergent systems. Web services, niche software and the network effect all make these things much more feasible than they have been in the past since there are well defined frameworks for distributing services that are easy to work with and adding more niche services increases the value of all web software by a large amount.

Notice I didn't say AJAX or Ruby on Rails or Django or [insert your new framework or technology here]. These are merely details of implementation. If a framework makes your company faster then that's good. If a technology lets your user's client fetch web service data for them, that can also be good. These things are only technologies used to reach an end product. Web 2.0 could have been done in many languages and frameworks and on many platforms. That's not to say that certain languages, frameworks, etc. didn't have an effect on the design of the software, as any language or framework has a certain effect on the overall style of the developers using it.

This was about a need for developers and designers to move beyond what was status quo for interaction between websites and their users. They are taking full advantage of the tools they have created and the network that was built up over the past few decades. To belittle their efforts into something meaningless is to surely miss the entire point.