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It took some courage for AC to post his (I believe sincerely held) opinion that this news is not good. The only two other such opinions I saw were rated -1. Granted, s/he posted anonymously and his tone is bitter and condescending. But your caricature of him isn't any better, IMO.

I would feel better about the world if there were fewer space missions and no ``space privatization'' (whatever that means). I'm not sure I can explain my uneasiness in terms acceptable to Slashdot, but the feeling is strong.

If TBL has taken on a role as protector of the web from balkanisation, he is truly seeing the tool theory clearly: I wouldn't really call the web a tool, any more than sledgehammers, potatoes, love, or money are tools.

Let's say the internet is a "thing". We all see it in a slightly different way and give it a different set of values, and then use it accordingly. The fact that the internet is being used for monetary gain is a clear picture of what the values of some people are.

Tim Berners-Lee has seen a great vision of what it is, and that is his own mission and duty, not so much that of the money people (Whose mission might be to act as an obstacle to him?). Each of us can have our own vision of it, and therefore our mission to do with this as well.

But I believe I should support what he's saying, support the web consortium, make the web a good place. Money can be a beautiful "thing" too, but it's the bad aspects of the values we give it that are what I'd be more wary of.

Maybe at some point we'll understand, even if we're big greedy caricature businessmen, that you can't really use something if it's all fucked up. The earthquake in Taiwan comes to mind: How much computer hardware money would have been saved if those houses had had better protection, if there were better support for victims, more resources for this kind of disaster? If people didn't already have an understanding of some simple and narrow-minded kind that being ecological for example might be a good idea, then absolutely no-one would invest in ecological business practices (recycling, not polluting, etc). The reason people invest in that stuff is that it makes simple economic sense to do it!

In the same way, how much money can we save by adhering to the ww3's standards now? As well as all the other values we can gain from it...

In short, Tim, keep your head up there in the clouds, stay skint and visionary, keep inspiring and standardising the www!

Well, if he didn't pull a Jim Rome-esque move and intentionally piss off the subject of his interview after he's been warned ("Strangelove! Strangelove! Strangelove!"), he probably decided to scurry off to write his mediocre prose as filler for his subpar interview. I'm sorry, but, as far as I'm concerned, Teller's views are infinitely more important than phallic towers and the writer's hackneyed view of today as less black-and-white than ever before (which is every generation's delusion about itself) and the world being without evils (in an oh-so-US-centric viewpoint; then again, the name of the magazine is Scientific American ) to blow up or maim. Teller is interesting on so many levels so it's rather sad that the interviewer wobbled through the thing like Dr. Strangelove taking those first steps after a triumphant, "Mein Fuhrer!" I'm afraid I don't see the parallel with Strangelove and Teller, anyway, and I think Teller deserves much more credit (if not for fame, for infamy) than perpetual association with a Peter Sellers's caricature.

Still, I can't say I expected much more than what we got. Teller has so much to offer and is such a strong personality that a rather meek bookworm is bound to come away with little substance in a broad interview. I could see an entire series of interviews focusing on various aspects of Teller the ideas and Teller the man. There's certainly something worth probing in his rather extreme opposition to Communism and Fascism. I get the impression that he would quite honestly drop an atomic bomb on the "Reds" if he was given the chance to. Of course, then again, his fervent love for nuclear physics seems to have drawn him into the inane idealogy that its the catch-all, cure-all. Need a harbor in Alaska? Blow it up! To be fair to him, however, one must acknowledge that he didn't explicitly express agreement with the method he suggested for Project Chariot, and only backed the idea of a way to trade more easily with Alaska.

Teller, anyway you look at him, is special. Perhaps most so because he is the one man who can garner an equal amount of contempt from nearly every segment of the population. That's something that not even our friend Gates has accomplished, yet. However, if MS drops more bombs on us like Win98 and Win98 SE, I may find myself begging for the mercy of a good, ol' nuke.

P.S., Was it Chris or Jim Everret (?!) that threw the table at Jim Rome and grabbed him after Rome intentionally crossed the line? I think it was Jim Ev., since I'm pretty sure Rome dug his own grave by persisting in calling Jim, "Chris" (intentionally). O lithe sports reporter, do not tempt the wrath of a much bigger man with your childish taunts...

I have to agree about the ending, though. It was like eating those Snackwells cookies - it just left me feeling a little unsatisfied.

I'd like to know too, but doubt we ever will.

This article is likely to slashdot them with negative responses. I replied, caustically but politely. I hope they get a lot of well written negative comments. It's too bad the people in Washington aren't likely to see them.

This site is really an affront. First the "big lie" premise that the trial is about Microsoft's "freedom to innovate", as if they ever had, or ever respected anyone else's freedom. The kicker though is the caricature of the American flag -- uh, yeah, thanks for not using the Microsoft logo in the little monitor at least! Supporting Microsoft is patriotic, I'm sure, remember how Microsoft said any delay in Win98 from the bundling trial might have serious effects on the economy?

Three things:

1) This guy's got a point, but... (see below).

2) Hey, guys - see how all the surrounding posts are still at their default scores, 12 hours after they got posted? The "too late to moderate" thing is one of /.'s worst problems. In case you haven't noticed, the relative dumbness of comments tends to decrease in proportion to how late in a discussion they're offered, so the degree to which they're moderated up is inversely proportional to their actual worth. Just pointing that out again (presumably to no one, since I'm constitutionally unsuited to reloading all day, and therefore not a valued /.er). The "continuing discussions / great debates box" someone brought up way up there near the middle was a damn good idea - or maybe instead just a "last comment posted at wx:yz EST" on the front-page teasers (which I think would uncomplicate the coding, since comment totals seem to refresh themselves so efficiently, and it's basically the same deal) - to get the attention of the mods, all of whom are apparently/obviously compulsive reloaders....though I guess not within the top 20%. Yikes.

1 cont'd) ...but, what I'd propose instead is a little more of an honor system, wherein everyone's user prefs included an "I Don't Know Shit About..." set of checkboxes, which precludes the user from moderating in the chosen categories until he's caught up on the basics. I'd suggest that the average /.er should check "Apple," "Crypto," "South Park," "BSD," "Photoshop" and "Slashdot" for starters, just to keep yourself honest. (And mine would be, say, "Star Trek," "Debian," "Beowulf Anything," "Build Your Own Computer, Yuppie!" and "Pop-psych Analysis of Geekdom.")

It also might be a worthwhile pain in the ass to default-disable "Funny"-scoring and -unscoring ability until the user can correctly connect the words "irony," "mockery," "satire," "sarcasm" "metonymy," "parody," "caricature," "flippancy" and "raspberry" with examples of each (you know, like you used to do on the McDonald's placemats with "Grimace" and "Mayor McCheese" and their respective product-shaped cars), because nothing at /. has pissed me off more than the (real) MAE LING MAK NAKED AND PETRIFIED guy (not his imitators) getting marked "offtopic" unjustly (look up "metonymy," then check out his post in the RHAT trademark story, for example).

3) [Insert tirade about ACs moderating themselves]!!!!!

Please read the relevant FAQs before spouting off again. Evolution does not contradict evidence, logic, religion, or the second law of thermodynamics. Evolution and abiogenesis are different issues, and Behe's book is about the latter, not the former. Punctuated Equilibrium, whatever caricatures you may have heard notwithstanding, is really Darwinian evolution. And please don't say, "It is just a theory" or "What evidence do they really have?" until you have actually looked at what evidence has been uncovered from the combined efforts of several scientific fields for 150 years.

Oh, and those who claim that there is a debate, there is not. The last serious scientific challenge to the theory of Evolution was in the first decade of this century. (Brownie points to anyone who knows the substance of the challenge and/or the resolution!) If you think that you can turn up quotes contradicting this, check the original reference for the quotes before repeating them. There are a lot of out-of-context quotes which are spouted that do not - in context - mean what Creationists claim that they do. And there are a lot of upset scientists who are good and tired of being misquoted.

So please, read those FAQs before posting.

Thank you,
Ben Tilly

Creating something for young people should not be an excuse to use simplistic caricatures that insult the intelligence of a mature audience, nor should it be an excuse to use a story that doesn't make people think. Consider things like Sesame Street and Dr. Seuss which, while aimed at children, are challenging and clever. That Lucas seems to have intended to make Star Wars intellectually empty should not make him immune to criticism.

I read Microserfs, and I thought it was the most pointless and boring story I ever read. I didn't care about the characters (or is that "caricatures"?) and I couldn't find anything remotely resembling a plot.

Tux and his friends can not be caged for long. They will rise from the dust of commercial software, spread their wings and soar (kernel 3.0 probably) over the corpses of those monopolists who would make them into a display.

As for the birds at the expo - I'd like to know who is responsible for using a living thing as a gimick. It's an insensitive thing to do. The people who would do this, would certainly not care much about their customers or the quality of their products.

Cutsey gimicks are great. Stuffed and inflatible Tux caricatures are emblematic of Linux, and the Tux logo is our banner. But please, let's show some respect for living things, and let's - if nothing else - not make ourselves targets for unnecessary criticism by proxy.

I'm not one to chain myself to an oak tree, but really, using a live animal in a display/advert shows a particular marketting mentality which does not benefit Linux or the Open Source movement in the least. Those of you at the expo, please take a minute to reflect about the impact of hype, about whom it harms, and make your opinion known to the penguin handlers.

1. Cladistics
   
2. Predictions of animal behaviour (see E.O.Wilson and ant studies)
   
3. Observed evolution in current population
   
4. Observed speciation events
   
5. Current distribution of species in environments that would favor speciation (which is what tipped Darwin off)
   
6. The archeological record for the last few tens of thousands of years
   

Few people seem to have noticed that the going-ons in Kansas are
entirely consistent with the country's current understanding of the
separation between church and state. The understanding, it appears, is
that religion has no place being "established" or promoted by the
government. But that is exactly what happens when evolution is taught in
schools.

As Johnson pointed out in Darwinism on Trial, the evidence for evolution
is very shakey. It takes a tremendous amount of antecedant bias to
regard evolutionary theories with the confidence that we do today. The
popular platitudes have little substance. Survival of the fittest? On
examination, the phrase is really a tautology, a way of saying the same
thing twice. Something survives because it is fit. It is fit because it
survives. Duh. Natural selection? Many biological structures do not lend
themselves to gradual evolution in a way that enhances survival in
intermediate forms. The human eye is a complex structure that is vastly
different from more primitive eyes of other animals. An eye that almost
works, like code that almost works, is useless. The bird feather is an
intricate thing that offers no utility in intermediate forms (if any
ever existed). Fossil evidence? Even Darwin did not think fossils could
prove his theory. Tons of bones later, there is a poverty of evidence
towards gradual macroevolution. So now we get punctuated
equilibrium. First we are told that evolution happens so slow we cannot
see it. Now we are told that it happens so fast we cannot see it. The
constant: we cannot see it. It's deep magic.

Few theories have had so much effort thrown towards proving it true. Few
theories have been so closed to question, or so little rigor. Ridicule
and dogmatism suppress dissent. It is hard enough to make a strong
argument for evolutionary theories. It is even harder to do so to school
children. It should come to no surprise that teachers resort to teaching
evolution as dogma, ignoring all nuances or problems. The problem is
this: the situation reflects a bias towards secular humanism. When
science is held hostage to an ideology, then a case can be made that the
stuff taught at public schools is geared towards pushing a humanist
religion and/or the suppression of other religions. This, according to
the establishment clause, is unconstitutional.

I hope to see an improved debate arising out of this situation. Talking
about creationist "science" or bashing religion or the religious only
clouds the issue. Rather than to resort to dogmatism, ad hominen
attacks, ridicule or caricaturing arguments against theories of
evolution, perhaps we can see a debate based on the theories on their
own merits.

Go read Eldridge and Gould (FYI the people whose paper started the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium) and read what they had to say about it.

The only people who think that it is NOT a form of Darwinian evolution are liars out to make it look like there is a debate within science about whether evolution is true (there is not), and those who have been fooled by the liars but who never bothered to go so far as to read the people whose positions were being caricatured by the liars.

*sigh*
Ben Tilly

> Anyone who has used IRIX knows how horrible it
> is at multi-tasking (I recall compiling on an O2
> or an Octane and witnessing other proesses grind
> to a halt) and other functionality that we take
> for granted under other operating systems.

Wow, that really hasn't been my experience with IRIX, although I am unable to speak for versions earlier than 6.5. Were you running 6.3 or something? Compiles making my machine sluggish has always been my beef with Linux...

As for "functionality we take for granted in other operating systems," from a purely functional perspective, I can't think of a single advantage Linux has on IRIX. It's not easy to make a uniprocessor, virtual memory OS, but it's not terribly hard, either. People do it in undergrauate classes every year. So far, all of the problems that Linux has successfully addressed were addressed a decade ago by some commercial OS. Anything newer, Linux struggles with. Linux's filesystem, real-time, and SMP are crude caricatures of the state of the art, and these are areas which are hugely important to large segments of SGI's customer base.

I love SGI's products. Hell, I'm typing this wearing my "Silicon Graphics: World's Greatest Computer Company" T-shirt, and I think there was a time when it was. It saddens me to see IRIX go, not just because I worked on it, but also because I think it's bad for SGI. From SGI's point of view, Linux has all the problems NT has (it requires ISV's to port, it isn't as technically mature as SGI needs it to be, it doesn't currently run well on SGI hardware). As gratifying as Linux folks might find the pats on the head from SGI, this Linux hoo-haa is a panicky, desperate move. Not a good sign.

When was Final Fantasy not mainstream? Most of the video gamers I know that played video games when the Nintendo was big remember FFI fondly. If not that, I seem to recall FFIV and FFVI being quite popular. And of course, William Gibson and J.R.R. Tolkien are considered 'must reads' or 'good authors' by most people who bother to read books. Looks like you're more interested in being part of a particular subculture than avoiding the mass market.

Besides, if'ns ya bother to ask me, the person you happen to be is defined not by how you are different from the crowd, or how you are the same. Such caricatures of personality are shallow and only relative.

To be honest, I feel similar twinges when I see all the people posting to /. But then, these things happen; ideas and forums and objects rise and sink in popularity, and the good old days and the bad old days will never be repeated.

Sorry to get so off-topic.

Hee hee! For those of you lucky enough to have the Globe's dead-tree edition handy, check out the article. There is a HILARIOUS caricature of Stallman on the front page. I especially like the bird sitting on his head }:-D

You are a caricature of yourself. You'll never get a job above mining coal with that kind of idiocy. "parrodying" indeed. I hope you get to middle school soon.

>Socialism doesn't work!

If capitalism produces people like you then give me socialism anyday.

Anyone know the lyrics to the "Red Flag"?

For every person who tells me "socialism doesn't work" I find at least one Dutch or Canadian person (just for two examples) who has pretty damn good evidence that it does, in the right dosage. While I disagree with the AC's post to which bil's is a reply, I don't think bil's response has the right tone to make the point that needs to be made.

Notice that "socialism" isn't the view that every industry is under direct central control. Kids, centralized, socially-based planning built your roads, probably educated you, and even if it didn't do so directly, it made it possible for the people who did do so to pay for it out of their own pockets by providing a society and infrastructure that makes the amassing of wealth by an individual possible.

Notice that, even according to recent mythologies, a centralized, government-appointed (granted, not elected) board has been implicated in the continued financial success of the US (Big Al Greenspan and the Fed), and on some of those occasions the commitment of public funds was necessary.

So here's the deal: I'll lay off the comparisons to Scrooge for people who think that free markets and their attendant inequalities are, in the right context and dosage, a Good Thing if those who don't think unfettered socialism is the be-all and end-all lay off comparisons to totalitarian regimes for those who advocate a governmental role in some industry or other.

Hint: that's because neither caricature is true.

And hey, let's be careful out there.

- Is the look of the model copyright-able? Anyone with a sufficiently powerful computer will eventually be able to generate virtual models. Will anything stop them from cloning the look of each other's models?

- I think a picture of a person has a different legal status than other types of pictures or computer generated images. What are the implications of this?

- Computer porno - these girls will do ANYTHING for free.

- Clothing, in particular fabric texture and the way fabric moves on the body is devillishly hard to simulate. Sure, they will have some stock simulated fabric types but what the model is wearing will never look/behave exactly the same way the garment does in real life.

- Some other people have pointed this out already: These models are not constrained by the human genome. They will eventually mutate into a gross caricature of the human form. Each fashion mag that uses them will tweak the current look just a bit. Bigger boobs, smaller waist, etc... Presto chango, eventually we've got barbie all over again.

-josh

One objection I've never heard, and this surprises me, is that Star Wars is a wonderful missed opportunity.

The Star Wars universe is a huge and well developed context in which many different, interesting tales could be told. Unfortunately, because they're marketed to kids for toy sales, the movies, books and comics are juvenile. I enjoyed Phantom Menace once I remembered it's directed at ten year olds, and concentrated on the special effects.

The fallout from that marketing angle is througout all the movies. The force is no longer a mystical element of the universe; it's a microbe that people have in greater or lesser quantities (leading, however, to the tantalizing possibility of bottling and freebasing it). The wars aren't fought with blood and bone, but with plastic aliens that get knocked down and don't get up. The insulting caricatures of other cultures were used for comic effect, with little thought to how adults might interpret them.

Surely I'm not alone in feeling cheated of what could happen if those movies were directed at adults. Whatever mythic quality they have is diluted to uselessness by the action figures that follow.

Star Trek movies make the same mistake, to a lesser degree. In Insurrection, Federation shuttlecraft come with a karaoke machine as a standard option, and the Enterprise can be flown with a Sidewinder joystick. I nearly puked in the theatre when I saw that.