I would have to say that I view Slashdot not just as a discussion group but also as a new service.
It just happens that I am generally interested in a large fraction of most of the news articles pointed at by the/. community, a much larger fraction than lets say the news on either Rootprompt or Salon. It is in a happy medium between the technical and the real world where I like to be.
For this reason I view the comments to be more of a source of supplementary information. People who are in the know, or at least think they are chime in with extra info and links, and of course, opposing viewpoints on even the slightly objectionable points. Moderation generally takes care of the rest. In general I could care less about someone's opinion or a rant; I just want more infor and perhaps another viewpoint on the topic to facilitate making my own decisions on the issue.
I hope I am not getting into this discussion too late for anyone with info to read this, but I think one of the main points of the Salon article is that the Spam doesn't do any good for the companies who post it. Since it is so hard to reply to their mailings anyway. Since a company has to buy a list of emails (and then maintain it), as well as time on a server sending out emails, it seems that even though it is much cheaper than traditional advertising methods, it is not free. However, since it seems to do so little, why bother doing it?
I would really like to see some real research done by those business school types. Actually, maybe we could do it as geeks...ie send out some test spam and see how many hits we get on our test site. I am guessing in significant figures, it will be 0.
I have done websearchers for real data on the efficacy of email advertising, targeted and otherwise, but I haven't been able to turn anything up.
One last thing is the difference between smail junk and spam, is that you can be reasonably sure that there is really a store somewhere offering you whatever is for sale; that is most often not the case, as is described in the Salon article. So even if you were interested in whatever pr0n or whatever was being shilled, you couldn't buy it anyway.
(Sorry for getting further off topic). Actually this has already been done. It has come up a few different times here at/. One mention involved external sensors without brain implants:
I guess this is still very experimental, but they have certainly been putting sensors with radio transmitters in the brains of paraplegics for a while now. I believe a lot of this is being done at Case Western. It allows the person to control his/her environment. With little motors in things like the doors and windows, and having all the lights wired into the system, it goes a long way toward increasing the self sufficiency of paralyzed people. All you need to do is be able to choose between two options, and then you can scroll through menus, etc.
I think it is definately safe to say that not all of what we group together as dinosaurs were warm blooded. Somewhere along the way some of them became so, because clearly some dinosaurs evolved into birds. I am not sure if we will ever be able to determine exactly where on the spectrum this occurred.
It was almost assuredly a very gradual process as well. An improved circulatory system as the one discovered, would only be part of the necessary physiological changes necessary. Other important changes include the ability to regulate blood flow to cold areas (why your cheeks turn red in the cold), and being able to control the rate of metabolism to burn up calories to generate heat. I may be going out on a limb also by saying that warm bloodedness was probably something that evolved in predators, for various reasons.
Anyway, this whole discussion merely indicates how crappy the whole idea of taxonomy really is. It may have been cool and innovative in ancient times, but it is still a hold over to more ancient times. The defintions of different groupings gets more shadowy every year as more evidence is gathered in biochemistry and genetics. Different types of organisms run along a spectrum; they do not fall into discrete groups except as individual organisms. Indeed, Lord Kelvin was most referring to the taxonomy in the biology of his day when he said "Physics is the only science, everything else is just stamp collecting." All these namings and classifications are only loose abstractions of how things really work, and we shouldn't get hung up on what is and what isn't a member of a certain group. Unfortunately the natural world doesn't create nice simple objects with clear rules of inheritance. It's a jungle out there!
I believe you are refering to The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert T. Bakker. He was one of the first people to put forth the idea that dinosaurs were warm blooded, I actually believe he was the first. He was/is something of a maverik and published his results in newspaper articles and "popular" books such as this one instead of peer reviewed journals, and his thus his ideas took a while to catch on in the mainstream paleontology world. However, it is now a commonly accepted idea the field. (I think the male paleontologist character in Jurassic Park was loosely based on Bakker, but Bakker looks like a hacker).
It is now believed that birds are the direct descendent of the dinosaurs, eg the Archaopteryx which was the first bird-like creature to have feathers. However, it had teeth, a reptile like tail, and feathers on each wing. It is only known to be essentially a bird because of the preserved feathers. Indeed, feathers are really modified scales, wrapped around on themselves. They are hollow, and have fluffy parts to provide insulation, something especially helpful at higher altitudes. Without the feathers, it would have been mistaken for a small dinosaur.
This sort of points in the direction of feathers being a development after warm bloodedness. Cold blooded creatures would be at a disadvantage when they were trying to warm themselves in the sun if they were all insulated. This points to birds being, essentially, just another type of dinosaur with just a warmer covering.
There are numerous other indicators including the appearance of what appear to be channels for blood vessels in the skulls of dinosaurs. Warm blooded creatures need to control the blood flow to the head and to both keep it warm at times and also to cool it; reptiles don't need this feature. The long strides of the predator dinosaurs point toward fast metabolisms, unlike cold blooded reptiles today, etc.
This new evidence though points clearly toward the advanced circulatory system of dinosaurs. A reptile heart only has three chambers (indeed the medical condition of a septumless heart is refered to as a having a reptile heart, I believe). A four chambered heart is required for efficient circulation, and is a feature of birds and mammals. It really shows compelling evidence for dinosaurs being able to maintain homeostasis in body temperature.
This article seems to pre-suppose the user is executing the virus intentionally, much like MS macro viruses (I mean executing something with the virus in it). However, I consider internet worms to fall under the umbrella definition of virii, and things that need to be worried about.
The original internet worm was based in Berkeley Unix, and based on flaws in sendmail (I believe); Linux would have be open to an analagous attack.
Today, the existence of script kiddies shows that cracking can be an essentially automated task. Now that means an AI agent could be designed to basically do everything needed to sniff out systems and then try to crack them. This could be a powerful, self replicating worm.
I think it is just the winds that are changing, and it is the big record labels which are becoming outdated. They may have some of the artists in their stables running scared, thinking they are going to get ripped off, but in the end the talent will win out. People will pay for new entertainment. It is the infrastructure which is getting passed by, which is why the A&R men are running scared.
The use of a record label to a consumer is that it acts like a sort of filter, sorting out innumerous crappy bands, and promoting a select few. It uses add campaigns to promote bands it thinks you (the consumer) will, and tries to bring your attention to them. However, the internet allows masses of people to actually decide what is good./. is popular because of the moderation system, and things like this also exist on sites like mp3.com (although it is just be popularity of downloads in a given genre). If I have time and interest, I can go deep into the archives of the unpopular, or I can just see what is currently popular when looking for new music. This is the same as going into the CD store and looking at the rack in the front of "current hits" or whatever. This whole process leaves out a huge number of middle management. However, there is still room for add-execs (as always).
Now how is the starving artist to make money? Well, if mp3's are freely available on high speed, reliable servers, then everyone will use them, instead of slow "illegal" sites, even if they are covered with banner adds. Mp3 distribution companies can pay artists the rights to record their music and put is up on their sites (covered with adds for all kinds of merchandise like t-shirts, etc).
Touring, I know that for some artists it may be unprofitable, but that is just a matter of where ticket prices are set and how much venues charge. Since you really only need a field with a chainlink fence, some ticket collectors/bouncers and maybe a bigtop tent in case of rain, even at ticket prices of like $5 each, I think even a moderate crowd would make the show profitable. I think it might also be a matter of what artists think is profitable (oh gee, I only made $5000 for 4 hours work tonight). It may be that the product of recording artists is not quite so valuable as it used to be, but that is something that must be dealt with in all markets. The small time artists who make their money on touring can only benefit from widespread mp3 distribution of their work. The wealthy artists may have to work harder for less money, but I don't feel really bad about Mariah Carey having to only make a few thousand for each show she does.
Does anyone remember how TSR used to persecute people who had D&D information up on their websites, like 5 years ago. I think this generally led to a large dip in the quality of material produced.
By contrast, Steve Jackson has allowed all kinds of stuff to be distributed for free. They even distribute a "Lite" version of their key GURPS rules for free. It is actually possible to play a fine game of GURPS using just these "Lite" rules. There are all kinds of utilities, game worlds, NPCS, equipment lists, and rule mods distributed for the GURPS systems, and some are really high quality.
You can download everything you need to play GURPS from the internet, and yet Steve Jackson makes money (even when dodging Secret Service hassles). This is because they make solid gaming materials. I have never found such great material. Their historial sourcebooks tend to be amazing, and their book based on fiction series tend to be excellent as well.
They operate from a different premise; they make their money from their source books, not from the system. They give advice in their magazine on how to switch to other popular systems.
D&D uses a crappy, outdate system. I think Risk has a more realistic combat system. Avoid the hype, don't bother with it.
I find this very interesting when it comes so fast on the heels of the article about Project Gutenberg. That is something more clearly in line with most of the thinking here at/. In many ways that may be more of the future of text on the internet. If anyone has read Bruce Sterling's newest (I believe) book Distraction, one of the themes is that all the Intellectual Property of the Western world was basically put on free display by the Chinese, downloadable from their satellites.
When Jon Katz complains that traditional publishers are not looking for new writers who know write about today's interactive age, I suspect he might be influenced by his own problems with the industry, which is perhaps more reflective of the many problems that/. readers have with his writing as well.
I think it is important to look at what I consider the three types of writing, and how they are currently displayed on the internet. The first is editorial, which is basically everything that JK spouts, and makes up a big part of all the/. comments. The second type is factual data and information, the kind of thing found in FAQ's, databases, instruction manuals, and specs. The third kind is fiction, basically meant for entertainment. However, obviously these three areas intersect. For example, Kafka's Metamorphosis is fiction, but is also basically an editorial exposition at the same time. Lots of fiction includes factual information, and good editorials need reference to factual information. Bad ones are essentially works of fiction.
Now, I don't pay for editorial content. I can find it on places like/. The moderation system helps assure me, that I can look at the best stuff when I am in a hurry, and yet go down to the depths when I have time or interest. The publishing world does this by hiring intelligent writers who have written well in the past, so hopefully they will write well in the future. I don't think many people pay directly to hear opinions, because so many of them are available for free. It is hard to make a living doing this. Webpages that display this kind of content generally survive on advertiser money. This is the natural evolution of this type of writing, since it is really an outgrowth of people arguing their opinions in pubs or public squares or around campfires or whatever.
The second type of writing, factual information, is something that can be extremely valuable. However, it is also frequently subsidized and other times just given away for free. The new GNU Open Documentation License is supposed to cover this. I am always willing to shell out money for manuals, text books, and so forth. This is a main area of potential profit for the internet. Everyone knows this is information age. This is also where electronic publishers can certainly lap traditional priting presses as they can instantly update information. There are already pay sites for financial information, and so forth. I believe there are even sites where you can pay for satellite photos and so forth. This is also an excellent area for people to donate their time and donate information for free. You can't patent a fact about the world or how to do something. This is the area, that I think in the end will really evolved the most. However, if you can't get your machine to boot, then you can't read the online help, so a paper manual will, perhaps, always be needed.
The last type of literature, fiction, will never die out. People still read fiction today, even when they have Playstations, DVD's, etc. People still watch kabuki theater, puppet shows, and the ballet. Types of entertainment never die out, although their popularity many periodically dwindle and then rekindle. People predicted the death of print with the coming of the radio, the motion picture, the TV, and now the internet. People predicted the extinction of artists with the invention of photography.
It is not all about interactivity and the new 'e' age as so many pundits claim. It is true that people want shorter and shorter spurts of information, but I don't need to interact with my weather report. I just want information, quickly, and hopefully tailored to me. The point is I don't even want to have to interact on click on a series of higher resolution maps. I just want the weather report for my area, instantly.
Whew, that was a JK size rant...I had better stop.;o)
I think Project Gutenberg is excellent and very useful. I recently used a large number of its texts to collect data on the frequencies of letters and pairs of letters in English (for a cryptanalysis program I am working on). Anyway, I think it would be neat to hear of oddball uses for such a database, that would be very difficult without it (other than just being able to read cool stuff for free).
I am not sure it is really worth going into too much depth on this topic. This seems like the kind of thing someone brings up at a party just to start conversation. However, I will throw in my own 2 cents.
One major issue I think worth mentioning is the leap-frog effect. Under-developed countries are able to jump into to a new market with the best technology, passing by outmoded forms. The example I am most familiar with is Brazil (although large and rich as third world countries grow, it still has large numbers of very poor, starving, and barefoot people). It is far cheaper in Brazil to get a cellular phone than a regular phone, and I have never seen so many cell phones in my life as in Brazil. Taxi drivers and maids alike all had them. This is because it is cheaper to put up a cell-tower than it is to lay hundreds of miles of regular land line. Since, the telecommunications infrastructure is lacking in the boondocks, they have just adopted cellular technology. I saw a man driving a donkey cart talking on a cellphone. Talk about culture shock. Third World countries that do invest in internet technology, will at least have the fortune of avoiding many of our (in the US) mistakes.
As far as the social impact, I think that certainly depends on the government and the culture of the country involved. It will always turn out that that freedom of information will win in the long run, despite growing pains along the way. China should learn from this, and their focus on their manned spaceflight program shows how far behind the United States they are.
Taking another example from Brazil, a country known for its sociable people, I would mention the popularity of IRC. It is huge with Brazilian young people, and it is becoming increasingly so with people from 2nd and 3rd world countries around the globe.
People in other countries will end up doing the same things people in the US do. They will use the Internet to talk to each other. This is what the average user does. Maybe they will look at a little porn, maybe buy some stuff from eBay or whatever is the analog in the language of their choice, but in the end it will popular for the same reason AOL is popular, things like Chat Rooms. Just like the Internet is, in the end, popular because of things like/.
Right on the main page of Slashdot, you will find a link to freshmeat which list hundreds of open source projects of all types in various levels of completeness (sp?). They, of course, have a nice search feature, which is admitedly is not too great, but should do the job. Your professor should be able to find some project he likes there. It is also a great source of interesting code to analyze.
I am just a beginning graduate student in physics (and I am actually going to switch to CS), but this seems rather bogus. A few of the reasons I will elaborate on. Anyone who knows more about this, please feel free to post a rebuttal and correct my ignorance.
Gregory Chaitin... made a suggestive analogy...Chaitin showed that a vast ocean of such truths surrounds the island of provable theorems. Any one of them might be stumbled on by accident--an equation might be accidentally discovered to have some property that cannot be derived from the axioms--but none of them can be proved. The chilling conclusion, wrote Chaitin in New Scientist, is that randomness is at the very heart of pure mathematics
I am a bit confused as to what is so chilling about the fact that mathematicians find theorems, essentially randomly. They use heurisitics and insights though. The search space for all provable theorems from a set of axioms can be very large. This all goes back to Newell and Simon's Logical Theorist at the dawn of AI. I also don't recall where Godel showed that the density of unprovable, but true theorems is greater than that of provably true theorems.
"This is where physics comes in," says Cahill. "The Universe is rich enough to be self-referencing--for instance, I'm aware of myself." This suggests that most of the everyday truths of physical reality, like most mathematical truths, have no explanation. According to Cahill and Klinger, that must be because reality is based on randomness. They believe randomness is more fundamental than physical objects.
Why the hell does that guy thinking he is self-aware imply randomness in the universe? Perhaps the article is missing the details, and I am too ignorant to fill in the details, but I think the logic here is a bit shaky.
This matrix equation is largely the child of educated guesswork, but there are good precedents for that. In 1932, for example, Paul Dirac guessed at a matrix equation for how electrons behave, and ended up predicting the existence of antimatter.
Now this is completely different. Dirac guessed at the form of an operator. However, this was very informed guess work, and he knew that at least one solution of the equation had to produce the electron. He knew the form of the equation, from principles of quantum mechanics, and was just guessing one term, but he a framework to check his result. It sounds like these guys are guessing not only the equation but also all the terms. Also, their equation seems to be nothing more than simple addition and inversion (actually this can be a problem for them because not all matrices are invertible)of matrices. However, since there is no link to any published work or any references to any, we have no idea.
The whole branching thing going up as r^2 looks like just the result of branching out in a plane, as you increase your distance from a center point in a plane isotropically (in all directions the same) of course your surface area goes up like r^2. The fact that some basic forces like gravity and electromagnetism follow a 1/r^2 (notice the inversion) actually happens to be related to the surface area of a sphere (which is 4pi*r^2 and the propagation of force carrying particles (or waves) move out on the surface of a sphere. It is important to note that the strong force and the weak force follow a different decay law, related to the short lifespan of the force carrying particles. Anyway, what I am trying to say is this seems to be a ridiculous analogy.
Television is mentioned in the first paragraph: "No one asked these questions with the advent of the automobile, which led to unplanned suburbanization, or with the rise of television, which led to the decline of our political parties," The author just goes on to stress some of the most basic things we take for granted as being good and important. I think trying to claiming that TV encourages people to sit at home and not interact is a valid concern! Much more so than internet use which is interactive. Really stressing TV would have weakend his argument.
This seems far from Star Trek's holodeck and much more like the Cyberworld of Snow Crash and even William Gibson's Matrix. One of the main features of the holodeck was that the users were able to physically interact with the generated environment, ie they could sit down on a generated chair without falling on their butts.
The image on the special goggles and so forth seems much more like the laser projection on the goggles featured in Snow Crash. I am sure it is only a decade before this is how games like Quake and Unreal are played. Also chat rooms and pornography will probably come right after that, if not before.
I don't think we should worry about the potential military uses so much as these uses. If the modern interactive world draws people into it, so that they ignore the real world, how much more will this full immersion affect people?
I think that it is clear that there is a strong connection between the counter-culture aspect of computers, drugs and even modern music.
Cyberpunk fiction is full of recreational drug use. Gibson, Sterling and Effinger all include it as essential parts of the new world morality of the settings of their novels.
The internet itself is a uncontrolled form of communication and their is a large amount of information that is useful to people involved in illegal drug use and crime in general.
It is not that computers are linked to drugs, but that computers are linked to the modern counterculture, and drugs are just a part of that counterculture.
A lot of the original hackers were ex-hippies, and a lot of young computer science students I know are involved in the whole techno subculture. The Matrix is a bad example of this, but it shows that such a link exists in the mind of mass media anyway. I think it is save to say that Neo's punk friends were into some stuff heavier than just a few Heinekens.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have to say that I view Slashdot not just as a discussion group but also as a new service.
It just happens that I am generally interested in a large fraction of most of the news articles pointed at by the /. community, a much larger fraction than lets say the news on either Rootprompt or Salon. It is in a happy medium between the technical and the real world where I like to be.
For this reason I view the comments to be more of a source of supplementary information. People who are in the know, or at least think they are chime in with extra info and links, and of course, opposing viewpoints on even the slightly objectionable points. Moderation generally takes care of the rest. In general I could care less about someone's opinion or a rant; I just want more infor and perhaps another viewpoint on the topic to facilitate making my own decisions on the issue.
Oh cr*p, I just made a huge rant about my opinion, and contributed no new information. Um... check out all these neat papers on security your Linux system. Whew, I think I saved myself from commiting a SIN.
I hope I am not getting into this discussion too late for anyone with info to read this, but I think one of the main points of the Salon article is that the Spam doesn't do any good for the companies who post it. Since it is so hard to reply to their mailings anyway. Since a company has to buy a list of emails (and then maintain it), as well as time on a server sending out emails, it seems that even though it is much cheaper than traditional advertising methods, it is not free. However, since it seems to do so little, why bother doing it?
I would really like to see some real research done by those business school types. Actually, maybe we could do it as geeks...ie send out some test spam and see how many hits we get on our test site. I am guessing in significant figures, it will be 0.
I have done websearchers for real data on the efficacy of email advertising, targeted and otherwise, but I haven't been able to turn anything up.
One last thing is the difference between smail junk and spam, is that you can be reasonably sure that there is really a store somewhere offering you whatever is for sale; that is most often not the case, as is described in the Salon article. So even if you were interested in whatever pr0n or whatever was being shilled, you couldn't buy it anyway.
(Sorry for getting further off topic). Actually this has already been done. It has come up a few different times here at /. One mention involved external sensors without brain implants:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/01/14/1538227.sh tml
I guess this is still very experimental, but they have certainly been putting sensors with radio transmitters in the brains of paraplegics for a while now. I believe a lot of this is being done at Case Western. It allows the person to control his/her environment. With little motors in things like the doors and windows, and having all the lights wired into the system, it goes a long way toward increasing the self sufficiency of paralyzed people. All you need to do is be able to choose between two options, and then you can scroll through menus, etc.
Does anyone have any links for this?
I think it is definately safe to say that not all of what we group together as dinosaurs were warm blooded. Somewhere along the way some of them became so, because clearly some dinosaurs evolved into birds. I am not sure if we will ever be able to determine exactly where on the spectrum this occurred.
It was almost assuredly a very gradual process as well. An improved circulatory system as the one discovered, would only be part of the necessary physiological changes necessary. Other important changes include the ability to regulate blood flow to cold areas (why your cheeks turn red in the cold), and being able to control the rate of metabolism to burn up calories to generate heat. I may be going out on a limb also by saying that warm bloodedness was probably something that evolved in predators, for various reasons.
Anyway, this whole discussion merely indicates how crappy the whole idea of taxonomy really is. It may have been cool and innovative in ancient times, but it is still a hold over to more ancient times. The defintions of different groupings gets more shadowy every year as more evidence is gathered in biochemistry and genetics. Different types of organisms run along a spectrum; they do not fall into discrete groups except as individual organisms. Indeed, Lord Kelvin was most referring to the taxonomy in the biology of his day when he said "Physics is the only science, everything else is just stamp collecting." All these namings and classifications are only loose abstractions of how things really work, and we shouldn't get hung up on what is and what isn't a member of a certain group. Unfortunately the natural world doesn't create nice simple objects with clear rules of inheritance. It's a jungle out there!
I believe you are refering to The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert T. Bakker. He was one of the first people to put forth the idea that dinosaurs were warm blooded, I actually believe he was the first. He was/is something of a maverik and published his results in newspaper articles and "popular" books such as this one instead of peer reviewed journals, and his thus his ideas took a while to catch on in the mainstream paleontology world. However, it is now a commonly accepted idea the field. (I think the male paleontologist character in Jurassic Park was loosely based on Bakker, but Bakker looks like a hacker).
It is now believed that birds are the direct descendent of the dinosaurs, eg the Archaopteryx which was the first bird-like creature to have feathers. However, it had teeth, a reptile like tail, and feathers on each wing. It is only known to be essentially a bird because of the preserved feathers. Indeed, feathers are really modified scales, wrapped around on themselves. They are hollow, and have fluffy parts to provide insulation, something especially helpful at higher altitudes. Without the feathers, it would have been mistaken for a small dinosaur.
This sort of points in the direction of feathers being a development after warm bloodedness. Cold blooded creatures would be at a disadvantage when they were trying to warm themselves in the sun if they were all insulated. This points to birds being, essentially, just another type of dinosaur with just a warmer covering.
There are numerous other indicators including the appearance of what appear to be channels for blood vessels in the skulls of dinosaurs. Warm blooded creatures need to control the blood flow to the head and to both keep it warm at times and also to cool it; reptiles don't need this feature. The long strides of the predator dinosaurs point toward fast metabolisms, unlike cold blooded reptiles today, etc.
This new evidence though points clearly toward the advanced circulatory system of dinosaurs. A reptile heart only has three chambers (indeed the medical condition of a septumless heart is refered to as a having a reptile heart, I believe). A four chambered heart is required for efficient circulation, and is a feature of birds and mammals. It really shows compelling evidence for dinosaurs being able to maintain homeostasis in body temperature.
(Not bad for a physicist, eh?
This article seems to pre-suppose the user is executing the virus intentionally, much like MS macro viruses (I mean executing something with the virus in it). However, I consider internet worms to fall under the umbrella definition of virii, and things that need to be worried about.
The original internet worm was based in Berkeley Unix, and based on flaws in sendmail (I believe); Linux would have be open to an analagous attack.
Today, the existence of script kiddies shows that cracking can be an essentially automated task. Now that means an AI agent could be designed to basically do everything needed to sniff out systems and then try to crack them. This could be a powerful, self replicating worm.
I think it is just the winds that are changing, and it is the big record labels which are becoming outdated. They may have some of the artists in their stables running scared, thinking they are going to get ripped off, but in the end the talent will win out. People will pay for new entertainment. It is the infrastructure which is getting passed by, which is why the A&R men are running scared.
The use of a record label to a consumer is that it acts like a sort of filter, sorting out innumerous crappy bands, and promoting a select few. It uses add campaigns to promote bands it thinks you (the consumer) will, and tries to bring your attention to them. However, the internet allows masses of people to actually decide what is good. /. is popular because of the moderation system, and things like this also exist on sites like mp3.com (although it is just be popularity of downloads in a given genre). If I have time and interest, I can go deep into the archives of the unpopular, or I can just see what is currently popular when looking for new music. This is the same as going into the CD store and looking at the rack in the front of "current hits" or whatever. This whole process leaves out a huge number of middle management. However, there is still room for add-execs (as always).
Now how is the starving artist to make money? Well, if mp3's are freely available on high speed, reliable servers, then everyone will use them, instead of slow "illegal" sites, even if they are covered with banner adds. Mp3 distribution companies can pay artists the rights to record their music and put is up on their sites (covered with adds for all kinds of merchandise like t-shirts, etc).
Touring, I know that for some artists it may be unprofitable, but that is just a matter of where ticket prices are set and how much venues charge. Since you really only need a field with a chainlink fence, some ticket collectors/bouncers and maybe a bigtop tent in case of rain, even at ticket prices of like $5 each, I think even a moderate crowd would make the show profitable. I think it might also be a matter of what artists think is profitable (oh gee, I only made $5000 for 4 hours work tonight). It may be that the product of recording artists is not quite so valuable as it used to be, but that is something that must be dealt with in all markets. The small time artists who make their money on touring can only benefit from widespread mp3 distribution of their work. The wealthy artists may have to work harder for less money, but I don't feel really bad about Mariah Carey having to only make a few thousand for each show she does.
Does anyone remember how TSR used to persecute people who had D&D information up on their websites, like 5 years ago. I think this generally led to a large dip in the quality of material produced.
By contrast, Steve Jackson has allowed all kinds of stuff to be distributed for free. They even distribute a "Lite" version of their key GURPS rules for free. It is actually possible to play a fine game of GURPS using just these "Lite" rules. There are all kinds of utilities, game worlds, NPCS, equipment lists, and rule mods distributed for the GURPS systems, and some are really high quality.
You can download everything you need to play GURPS from the internet, and yet Steve Jackson makes money (even when dodging Secret Service hassles). This is because they make solid gaming materials. I have never found such great material. Their historial sourcebooks tend to be amazing, and their book based on fiction series tend to be excellent as well.
They operate from a different premise; they make their money from their source books, not from the system. They give advice in their magazine on how to switch to other popular systems.
D&D uses a crappy, outdate system. I think Risk has a more realistic combat system. Avoid the hype, don't bother with it.
I find this very interesting when it comes so fast on the heels of the article about Project Gutenberg. That is something more clearly in line with most of the thinking here at /. In many ways that may be more of the future of text on the internet. If anyone has read Bruce Sterling's newest (I believe) book Distraction, one of the themes is that all the Intellectual Property of the Western world was basically put on free display by the Chinese, downloadable from their satellites.
When Jon Katz complains that traditional publishers are not looking for new writers who know write about today's interactive age, I suspect he might be influenced by his own problems with the industry, which is perhaps more reflective of the many problems that /. readers have with his writing as well.
I think it is important to look at what I consider the three types of writing, and how they are currently displayed on the internet. The first is editorial, which is basically everything that JK spouts, and makes up a big part of all the /. comments. The second type is factual data and information, the kind of thing found in FAQ's, databases, instruction manuals, and specs. The third kind is fiction, basically meant for entertainment. However, obviously these three areas intersect. For example, Kafka's Metamorphosis is fiction, but is also basically an editorial exposition at the same time. Lots of fiction includes factual information, and good editorials need reference to factual information. Bad ones are essentially works of fiction.
Now, I don't pay for editorial content. I can find it on places like /. The moderation system helps assure me, that I can look at the best stuff when I am in a hurry, and yet go down to the depths when I have time or interest. The publishing world does this by hiring intelligent writers who have written well in the past, so hopefully they will write well in the future. I don't think many people pay directly to hear opinions, because so many of them are available for free. It is hard to make a living doing this. Webpages that display this kind of content generally survive on advertiser money. This is the natural evolution of this type of writing, since it is really an outgrowth of people arguing their opinions in pubs or public squares or around campfires or whatever.
The second type of writing, factual information, is something that can be extremely valuable. However, it is also frequently subsidized and other times just given away for free. The new GNU Open Documentation License is supposed to cover this. I am always willing to shell out money for manuals, text books, and so forth. This is a main area of potential profit for the internet. Everyone knows this is information age. This is also where electronic publishers can certainly lap traditional priting presses as they can instantly update information. There are already pay sites for financial information, and so forth. I believe there are even sites where you can pay for satellite photos and so forth. This is also an excellent area for people to donate their time and donate information for free. You can't patent a fact about the world or how to do something. This is the area, that I think in the end will really evolved the most. However, if you can't get your machine to boot, then you can't read the online help, so a paper manual will, perhaps, always be needed.
The last type of literature, fiction, will never die out. People still read fiction today, even when they have Playstations, DVD's, etc. People still watch kabuki theater, puppet shows, and the ballet. Types of entertainment never die out, although their popularity many periodically dwindle and then rekindle. People predicted the death of print with the coming of the radio, the motion picture, the TV, and now the internet. People predicted the extinction of artists with the invention of photography.
It is not all about interactivity and the new 'e' age as so many pundits claim. It is true that people want shorter and shorter spurts of information, but I don't need to interact with my weather report. I just want information, quickly, and hopefully tailored to me. The point is I don't even want to have to interact on click on a series of higher resolution maps. I just want the weather report for my area, instantly.
Whew, that was a JK size rant...I had better stop. ;o)
I think Project Gutenberg is excellent and very useful. I recently used a large number of its texts to collect data on the frequencies of letters and pairs of letters in English (for a cryptanalysis program I am working on). Anyway, I think it would be neat to hear of oddball uses for such a database, that would be very difficult without it (other than just being able to read cool stuff for free).
There is the following page:
Dune Mini-Series
It will air sometime towards the end of 1999 on the Sci-Fi Channel.
I am not sure it is really worth going into too much depth on this topic. This seems like the kind of thing someone brings up at a party just to start conversation. However, I will throw in my own 2 cents.
One major issue I think worth mentioning is the leap-frog effect. Under-developed countries are able to jump into to a new market with the best technology, passing by outmoded forms. The example I am most familiar with is Brazil (although large and rich as third world countries grow, it still has large numbers of very poor, starving, and barefoot people). It is far cheaper in Brazil to get a cellular phone than a regular phone, and I have never seen so many cell phones in my life as in Brazil. Taxi drivers and maids alike all had them. This is because it is cheaper to put up a cell-tower than it is to lay hundreds of miles of regular land line. Since, the telecommunications infrastructure is lacking in the boondocks, they have just adopted cellular technology. I saw a man driving a donkey cart talking on a cellphone. Talk about culture shock. Third World countries that do invest in internet technology, will at least have the fortune of avoiding many of our (in the US) mistakes.
As far as the social impact, I think that certainly depends on the government and the culture of the country involved. It will always turn out that that freedom of information will win in the long run, despite growing pains along the way. China should learn from this, and their focus on their manned spaceflight program shows how far behind the United States they are.
Taking another example from Brazil, a country known for its sociable people, I would mention the popularity of IRC. It is huge with Brazilian young people, and it is becoming increasingly so with people from 2nd and 3rd world countries around the globe.
People in other countries will end up doing the same things people in the US do. They will use the Internet to talk to each other. This is what the average user does. Maybe they will look at a little porn, maybe buy some stuff from eBay or whatever is the analog in the language of their choice, but in the end it will popular for the same reason AOL is popular, things like Chat Rooms. Just like the Internet is, in the end, popular because of things like /.
How can it be a real Linux conference without anybody representing the Dust Puppy!
Right on the main page of Slashdot, you will find a link to freshmeat which list hundreds of open source projects of all types in various levels of completeness (sp?). They, of course, have a nice search feature, which is admitedly is not too great, but should do the job. Your professor should be able to find some project he likes there. It is also a great source of interesting code to analyze.
I am just a beginning graduate student in physics (and I am actually going to switch to CS), but this seems rather bogus. A few of the reasons I will elaborate on. Anyone who knows more about this, please feel free to post a rebuttal and correct my ignorance.
Gregory Chaitin ... made a suggestive analogy...Chaitin showed that a vast ocean of such truths surrounds the island of provable theorems. Any one of them might be stumbled on by accident--an equation might be accidentally discovered to have some property that cannot be derived from the axioms--but none of them can be proved. The chilling conclusion, wrote Chaitin in New Scientist, is that randomness is at the very heart of pure mathematics
I am a bit confused as to what is so chilling about the fact that mathematicians find theorems, essentially randomly. They use heurisitics and insights though. The search space for all provable theorems from a set of axioms can be very large. This all goes back to Newell and Simon's Logical Theorist at the dawn of AI. I also don't recall where Godel showed that the density of unprovable, but true theorems is greater than that of provably true theorems.
"This is where physics comes in," says Cahill. "The Universe is rich enough to be self-referencing--for instance, I'm aware of myself." This suggests that most of the everyday truths of physical reality, like most mathematical truths, have no explanation. According to Cahill and Klinger, that must be because reality is based on randomness. They believe randomness is more fundamental than physical objects.
Why the hell does that guy thinking he is self-aware imply randomness in the universe? Perhaps the article is missing the details, and I am too ignorant to fill in the details, but I think the logic here is a bit shaky.
This matrix equation is largely the child of educated guesswork, but there are good precedents for that. In 1932, for example, Paul Dirac guessed at a matrix equation for how electrons behave, and ended up predicting the existence of antimatter.
Now this is completely different. Dirac guessed at the form of an operator. However, this was very informed guess work, and he knew that at least one solution of the equation had to produce the electron. He knew the form of the equation, from principles of quantum mechanics, and was just guessing one term, but he a framework to check his result. It sounds like these guys are guessing not only the equation but also all the terms. Also, their equation seems to be nothing more than simple addition and inversion (actually this can be a problem for them because not all matrices are invertible)of matrices. However, since there is no link to any published work or any references to any, we have no idea.
The whole branching thing going up as r^2 looks like just the result of branching out in a plane, as you increase your distance from a center point in a plane isotropically (in all directions the same) of course your surface area goes up like r^2. The fact that some basic forces like gravity and electromagnetism follow a 1/r^2 (notice the inversion) actually happens to be related to the surface area of a sphere (which is 4pi*r^2 and the propagation of force carrying particles (or waves) move out on the surface of a sphere. It is important to note that the strong force and the weak force follow a different decay law, related to the short lifespan of the force carrying particles. Anyway, what I am trying to say is this seems to be a ridiculous analogy.
Television is mentioned in the first paragraph: "No one asked these questions with the advent of the automobile, which led to unplanned suburbanization, or with the rise of television, which led to the decline of our political parties," The author just goes on to stress some of the most basic things we take for granted as being good and important. I think trying to claiming that TV encourages people to sit at home and not interact is a valid concern! Much more so than internet use which is interactive. Really stressing TV would have weakend his argument.
This seems far from Star Trek's holodeck and much more like the Cyberworld of Snow Crash and even William Gibson's Matrix. One of the main features of the holodeck was that the users were able to physically interact with the generated environment, ie they could sit down on a generated chair without falling on their butts.
The image on the special goggles and so forth seems much more like the laser projection on the goggles featured in Snow Crash. I am sure it is only a decade before this is how games like Quake and Unreal are played. Also chat rooms and pornography will probably come right after that, if not before.
I don't think we should worry about the potential military uses so much as these uses. If the modern interactive world draws people into it, so that they ignore the real world, how much more will this full immersion affect people?
I think that it is clear that there is a strong connection between the counter-culture aspect of computers, drugs and even modern music.
Cyberpunk fiction is full of recreational drug use. Gibson, Sterling and Effinger all include it as essential parts of the new world morality of the settings of their novels.
The internet itself is a uncontrolled form of communication and their is a large amount of information that is useful to people involved in illegal drug use and crime in general.
It is not that computers are linked to drugs, but that computers are linked to the modern counterculture, and drugs are just a part of that counterculture.
A lot of the original hackers were ex-hippies, and a lot of young computer science students I know are involved in the whole techno subculture. The Matrix is a bad example of this, but it shows that such a link exists in the mind of mass media anyway. I think it is save to say that Neo's punk friends were into some stuff heavier than just a few Heinekens.