Permutation city, Distress and Diaspora are all worth reading along with his short stories.
Yeah, I've read them all, and enjoyed all of them. Some really out there ideas in all of his books. If you like Greg Egan, read Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter. It's a series of short stories set in his Xeelee sequence universe, and has some great science ideas and concepts, including a story about a life form make from mathematical postulates!
Most SF authors really do not have a good grasp on science. Most however do have a firm grasp on authentic sounding technobabble, which is different from science alltogether!
If what we're talking about if hard SF then you're completely wrong. A lot of the authors are either working in the field themselves or have at least degree level educations in it, and they definitely know what they're talking about. And if you look at the credits in most hard SF books you'll see a list of scientists that have looked over the ideas in the book and given the author more feedback on their veracity.
Maybe you should read some of the SF that's come out in recent years before shooting your mouth off. There's plenty of excellent novels with great ideas being talked about in this article, go and read them.
This does sort of seem like a joke at first, but for anyone who's read a lot of hard science fiction it does have a point - a lot of it is written by people with physics and science degrees and a technical background, and they are carefully researched - often by asking scientists working in the relevant fields for their input.
Apart from the obvious example of satellites in geostationary orbit coming from Arthur C Clarke, the other main example I can think of is stable wormholes. They were considered to be impossible for a long time since there was no way to prevent the entrances from collapsing and sealing the wormhole off. But when Carl Sagan was writing Contact he got in touch with Kip Thorne to see if a theoretically plausible mechanism for FTL travel was possible, and after some calculation and research he showed that you could build stable wormholes given "exotic" matter. Now there is a significant body of research into this phenomenon, all of which stemmed from Carl Sagan's quest for realism in his book.
Since SF authors have to consider the whole of society in order to come up with a coherent setting for their stories their predictions, if based upon decent technological knowledge, are often more canny than most "futurologists". In the long term, a lot of the advances made will depend on how society adapts to them, and this is not always taken fully into account.
I'm currently in the middle of reading Distress by Greg Egan (an author worth reading), and it's got a lot of great ideas about how society might evolve in the next fifty years, and a lot of plausible technology. Other authors worth reading for great ideas are Stephen Baxter, Gregory Benford, Peter F Hamilton and Greg Bear, but I'm sure I've left many more off that I've read and enjoyed:)
And maybe putting the stories in the various sections on the front page as well? If you go to search.pl now they appear there, and there's loads of intersting bits with hardly any comments on them. But unless someone's stayed up late and posted a story between 8 and 9 here in the UK I have to wait until at least 1 for another story. Which sucks:)
No, the spammers can't use caps any more, they'll just move onto bold instead. And any alternative is bound to be worse, just because an effort was made to try and thwart them.
The whole Trollmastah thing was the result of a bet to see whether or not someone posting nothing but nonsense could end up with positive Karma after a period of moderation. And he won as well - his Karma was 33 at the end despite his -1 (and even -2 for a while) default! But he does have a "regular"/. account, although I won't say who it is:)
Since electromagnetism is some 10^40 times stronger than gravity you wouldnt need such an incredible charge (well, relatively speaking) to influence the rotation curve of a galaxy as much as a huge amount of matter would by gravity. Also, EM diminishes by the distance squared too, so the curve would look identical.
Well, the potential energy of the EM force would then be added to the gravitational PE, making the required rotational kinetic energy less so the galaxy wouldn't rotate so fast.
Or alternatively for the same rotational velocity and kinetic energy the gravitational contribution to the potential energy would be lowered by the EM contribution, hence less mass is required.
So sure in theory that could be an explanaition, but how on Earth would a star be negatively charged? That would imply it had an excess of electrons over protons, and since both come almost exclusively from the ionization of hydrogen where would this massive excess (and it would have to be pretty big to have a noticeable effect) come from?
And again, since black holes form from stars where would their supposed positive charge come from? I personally can't think of any mechanism that would cause this sort of distinct charge difference between stellar objects. And while I'm not up on all the details, I'm pretty sure that you could tell whether a star was negatively charged through spectroscopy or some other technique.
The technique they're using for Cangaroo is in fact based on the Whipple experiment and uses the same technique for distinguishing between gamma rays from blazars (where on Earth did that name come from:) ) and cosmic rays, although I'm not all that certain of the exact details of the process.
Why dose this dark matter exist ? Because without it the Big Bang is called into question. Of course the BB can't be wrong. We have built whole curriculums around this. It MUST be true.
You forget a possibly more important reason for dark matter to exist - in order to explain why galaxies are stable. In order for a stable, rotating galaxy to exist it must satisfy the Virial Theorem which is 2V+T=0 (I think), where V is the gravitational potential energy and T the rotational kinetic energy.
Given what we know from observations of both our own and other galaxies we can make reasonable estimates of both of these figures, using average stellar masses, the no. of stars/galaxy, the radius of a galaxy and its rotational period. What we get from these numbers is that there is only 10% of the necessary mass in the galaxies we see for them to be stable.
If there was no dark matter then the stars within galaxies wouldn't be gravitationally bound and would be flung out by the galaxy's rotation. But since we can look out to the Universe and see stable galaxies of many different ages we have to conclude that there is extra mass present in galaxies that we simply can't see. Each galaxy is embedded in a huge disc of dark matter, and without it there would be no galaxy.
Well, for one, the cost of a ground based installation is much less than a satellite, but that's the obvious answer:)
What they're doing is looking for the Cerenkov radiation produced when a high energy gamma ray from the "blazar" produced by a black hole hits the upper atmosphere. Cerenkov radiation is the product of electron/positron pair creation and bremmstrahlung and consists of relativistic particles which travel at velocities faster than the local speed of light. This results in the production of Cerenkov radiation in the blue part of the visible spectrum, which is what the telescopes actually detect.
However there is a far greater amount of Cerenkov radiation from normal cosmic ray incidents than there is from gamma rays produced in blazars. Since the cosmic ray particles are charged (they are usually protons) whereas the gamma rays aren't, they can be distinguished by whether they curve in the galactic magnetic field.
Anyway, since this is a proven technique, there's really no need for a space-based detector as of yet.
It's actually true. And given that the interview and selection process for working in a corner shop is hardly exhaustive, you can't ever really tell what the person manning your till is actually like, so it's sort of a preventative measure just in case.
The reason things are priced at say 3.99 rather than 4.00 is that is meant that people working in shops actually had to ring the sale up and get the change out of the till. This way they couldn't just pocket the money.
Re:It's far too early for this
on
Quantum Project
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I have to say that the industry has a definite soft spot for sci-fi fans - in that they are dedicated enough to be squeezed for all that they're worth and more. They seem to think that they can put any old shit out and people will watch and/or buy it, and unfortunately they're often proved right. Does any other genre of movies produce quite so many spinoff opportunities for the marketing teams to get their teeth into?
Am I the only person that thinks this is way before it's time? Given the relatively low penetration of broadband services at the moment, how many people are going to be able to watch this movie? And the specifications for watching it are extremely narrow, so anyone without an MS "standard" setup is out of luck as far as this is concerned.
Given the $3million price tag and the asking price of $3.95, in order to cover the cost they're going to need three-quarters of a million people to pay it. Is this even vaugely feasible? It certainly doesn't seem so to me. As a publicity stunt I'm sure it's got some value, but this is never going to be worth what it cost.
The idea of online movies is a great one, and we'll see more of it, but until broadband becomes far more popular it's probably a little early for this sort of thing.
Well obviously a large company like SCO are going to go over their answers thoroughly before they post them somewhere like/. where people will pick at and take issue with the smallest detail. Given some of the attitudes seen here everyday there was no way they were ever going to come out and be totally upfront and honest. Besides, it's not how 99% of businesses work.
Also, considering that as a company they ignored Linux for such a long time, they are understandably going to be cautious about making firm statements and plans about something for which they are not sure of future viability. The statements made in this interview were very cautious, in fact probably a bit too cautious. This is where a lot of the vaugeness has crept in IMHO.
Is that the same Stephen Donaldson that wrote about Thomas Covenant? I just couldn't get into his Thomas Covenent series, I found his writing to derivative of LoTR, and it just didn't grab me. Has his writing improved?
Ugh, don't mention the truly appalling Thomas Covenant series. They totally sucked. But the Gap series is extremely good, very heavy sometimes but well worth the read. They're in a totally different class from his other books (thank God).
Hmm, I personally thought Dune sucked, but that's just MHO. Anyway some responses about other sci-fi books.
The Machavellian Politics. It's refreshing to see corrupt, machavellian political machinations, with various factions plotting against each other, hiding their true motives. Too much science fiction is full of well meaning, pure at heart politicoes, it's nice to see some evil, greedy folks for a change (cf. Larry Niven, is there anyone in his books who isn't motivated by good intentions?)
I don't know what books you've read but there are plenty of books out there with these things in them. Have you read Stephen Donaldson's Gap series? They have all the nastiness, political infighting and greed in them you could ever want:)
The flaws the main characters have. It's nie to see main characters with personality defects, it makes Dune fit right into the Greek Tragedy genre.
Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy? There are some of the most flawed characters ever in there, characters who suffer from their problems throughout the 300 year scope of the books. And the descriptions of Mars itself are absolutely amazing. I don't actually think I've ever read any other sci-fi book where I thought "this could actually be true" about from these books.
Find Aphex Twins, "Pac man power pill" and "tetris medley".
Heh, given the disturbing videos to his songs "Come to Daddy" and "Windowlicker" I'd hate to see the videos for those songs:) Miniture Tetris blocks and Pacmen with Richard D James faces. Aaaagh!
For a start, this gas that they have detected is nothing to do with the requirement for dark matter of some kind at all - it merely means that we can detect all of the regular, baryonic matter that we believe to be present based on our calculations. We still need dark matter to account for the stability of galaxies and so on.
Anyway, dark matter doesn't have to be WIMPs in particular. There are other options - massive neutrinoes, MACHOs and so on. Don't get tied up into thinking there's only one alternative.
Corporations still not in charge but they could be
on
The Corporate Republic
·
· Score: 2
The thing is that whilst corporations are still based in a country they are vulnerable to the effects of legislation from that country, no matter how big they are. Witness the whole Microsoft trial - the biggest company in the world was not immune to being put on trial for all its vast wealth. And even the most international of corporations is vulnerable through the various treaties that bind countries together, and through the domino effect a successful case against a company can have.
The only way I can see for a corporation to truly have independence from governmental control is for it to be the government. And there are plenty of small countries out there which could be effectively "bought" by a corporation willing to take on its national debt, assets, GNP etc. In this way, the corporation effectively becomes the government, with all the rights to do what governments do - set their own laws and regulations, raise armies, have a foreign policy, create embassies and diplomats and so on.
Think of what an advantage that could be to a company. No matter what other countries may think of them, they are practically immune to interference thanks to their status as a soverign government. They can move all of their assets to their own country and establish distribution channels originating there. In this scenario, the corporation truly does rule.
I'm not sure about the amount of money it would require to do something like this, but given the trend towards giant mergers and acquisitions, it can't be soon before some giant conglomerate has the ability to do something like this for real. The question is, would they?
My fear is that increasing amounts of resource will be poured into maintaining these academic papers for posterity, when many are nothing more than a rehash of earlier work, or turn out to be pure crap anyway.
Yes, but the "pure crap" shouldn't get past the whole peer review process to start with, so you'll only be left with the material that is worthwhile. And any further moderation is censorship really - who decides what is and what isn't worthwhile? It'd have to be someone involved in the field in order to be able to properly judge it, but on what criterion are you going to judge whether one paper is worth more than another?
In short, it needs moderating. Books and papers going out of print, or the final copies getting lost, are natures way of moderating irrelevant crap. Because, if it wasn't irrelevant, someone would have invested in preserving it.
But what may seem to be completely irrelevant when it was first written may turn out to be essential to a later development a hundred years down the line. Especially in maths there are a lot of small developments which seem to be pointless at the time but which turn out to be a key part of a greater whole discovered later. You can't decide to throw things away on the basis of "relevance", since relevance is something which you can never tell at the time.
Thanks. So I was wrong, but hey, I'm not going to lose any sleep over the issue:) And at least the replies which were more than "MODERATE THIS SHIT DOWN!" have allowed me to learn something, so in a way it was worth me making the original point anyway...
The solution is not e-mail registration, that is for someone willing have this garbage traced back to them (a liabilty) despite getting absolutly no compensation to post this shit. Think about it: why should I have either an e-mail or an IP address associated with this drivel?
Agreed. I mean it's only a weblog isn't it? It doesn't really matter who you are or what you post at all in the real world. And I don't really see the point in starting ACs at zero - after all, anyone can get an account and post the same stuff at 1. And WTF does an E-mail account say about who you are anyway? Nothing really.
Yes, I read the article, but what I was responding to in part was the comment at the end of the article blurb:
Sounds like self-interrogating distributed file systems can be useful to people unlikely to get sued by rock bands, as if that wasn't obvious.
Given that this system has the potential to be implemented in such a way as to be openly accessible rather than limited to a set userbase, and that was what HeUnique seemed to be implying, that was why I wrote what I did. What it is now is not what it could be in the future, and this type of mechanism can be implemented in other distributed networks as well. And given that the content it stores does not necessarily have to be scientific journals, I think my point does apply.
Slashdot Mirror
Permutation city, Distress and Diaspora are all worth reading along with his short stories.
Yeah, I've read them all, and enjoyed all of them. Some really out there ideas in all of his books. If you like Greg Egan, read Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter. It's a series of short stories set in his Xeelee sequence universe, and has some great science ideas and concepts, including a story about a life form make from mathematical postulates!
Most SF authors really do not have a good grasp on science. Most however do have a firm grasp on authentic sounding technobabble, which is different from science alltogether!
If what we're talking about if hard SF then you're completely wrong. A lot of the authors are either working in the field themselves or have at least degree level educations in it, and they definitely know what they're talking about. And if you look at the credits in most hard SF books you'll see a list of scientists that have looked over the ideas in the book and given the author more feedback on their veracity.
Maybe you should read some of the SF that's come out in recent years before shooting your mouth off. There's plenty of excellent novels with great ideas being talked about in this article, go and read them.
This does sort of seem like a joke at first, but for anyone who's read a lot of hard science fiction it does have a point - a lot of it is written by people with physics and science degrees and a technical background, and they are carefully researched - often by asking scientists working in the relevant fields for their input.
Apart from the obvious example of satellites in geostationary orbit coming from Arthur C Clarke, the other main example I can think of is stable wormholes. They were considered to be impossible for a long time since there was no way to prevent the entrances from collapsing and sealing the wormhole off. But when Carl Sagan was writing Contact he got in touch with Kip Thorne to see if a theoretically plausible mechanism for FTL travel was possible, and after some calculation and research he showed that you could build stable wormholes given "exotic" matter. Now there is a significant body of research into this phenomenon, all of which stemmed from Carl Sagan's quest for realism in his book.
Since SF authors have to consider the whole of society in order to come up with a coherent setting for their stories their predictions, if based upon decent technological knowledge, are often more canny than most "futurologists". In the long term, a lot of the advances made will depend on how society adapts to them, and this is not always taken fully into account.
I'm currently in the middle of reading Distress by Greg Egan (an author worth reading), and it's got a lot of great ideas about how society might evolve in the next fifty years, and a lot of plausible technology. Other authors worth reading for great ideas are Stephen Baxter, Gregory Benford, Peter F Hamilton and Greg Bear, but I'm sure I've left many more off that I've read and enjoyed :)
And maybe putting the stories in the various sections on the front page as well? If you go to search.pl now they appear there, and there's loads of intersting bits with hardly any comments on them. But unless someone's stayed up late and posted a story between 8 and 9 here in the UK I have to wait until at least 1 for another story. Which sucks :)
No, the spammers can't use caps any more, they'll just move onto bold instead. And any alternative is bound to be worse, just because an effort was made to try and thwart them.
The whole Trollmastah thing was the result of a bet to see whether or not someone posting nothing but nonsense could end up with positive Karma after a period of moderation. And he won as well - his Karma was 33 at the end despite his -1 (and even -2 for a while) default! But he does have a "regular" /. account, although I won't say who it is :)
Errm, IIRC it's four quad Xeons and a couple of dedicated DB servers. I can't be sure of any more details though.
Since electromagnetism is some 10^40 times stronger than gravity you wouldnt need such an incredible charge (well, relatively speaking) to influence the rotation curve of a galaxy as much as a huge amount of matter would by gravity. Also, EM diminishes by the distance squared too, so the curve would look identical.
Well, the potential energy of the EM force would then be added to the gravitational PE, making the required rotational kinetic energy less so the galaxy wouldn't rotate so fast.
Or alternatively for the same rotational velocity and kinetic energy the gravitational contribution to the potential energy would be lowered by the EM contribution, hence less mass is required.
So sure in theory that could be an explanaition, but how on Earth would a star be negatively charged? That would imply it had an excess of electrons over protons, and since both come almost exclusively from the ionization of hydrogen where would this massive excess (and it would have to be pretty big to have a noticeable effect) come from?
And again, since black holes form from stars where would their supposed positive charge come from? I personally can't think of any mechanism that would cause this sort of distinct charge difference between stellar objects. And while I'm not up on all the details, I'm pretty sure that you could tell whether a star was negatively charged through spectroscopy or some other technique.
The technique they're using for Cangaroo is in fact based on the Whipple experiment and uses the same technique for distinguishing between gamma rays from blazars (where on Earth did that name come from :) ) and cosmic rays, although I'm not all that certain of the exact details of the process.
Why dose this dark matter exist ? Because without it the Big Bang is called into question. Of course the BB can't be wrong. We have built whole curriculums around this. It MUST be true.
You forget a possibly more important reason for dark matter to exist - in order to explain why galaxies are stable. In order for a stable, rotating galaxy to exist it must satisfy the Virial Theorem which is 2V+T=0 (I think), where V is the gravitational potential energy and T the rotational kinetic energy.
Given what we know from observations of both our own and other galaxies we can make reasonable estimates of both of these figures, using average stellar masses, the no. of stars/galaxy, the radius of a galaxy and its rotational period. What we get from these numbers is that there is only 10% of the necessary mass in the galaxies we see for them to be stable.
If there was no dark matter then the stars within galaxies wouldn't be gravitationally bound and would be flung out by the galaxy's rotation. But since we can look out to the Universe and see stable galaxies of many different ages we have to conclude that there is extra mass present in galaxies that we simply can't see. Each galaxy is embedded in a huge disc of dark matter, and without it there would be no galaxy.
Well, for one, the cost of a ground based installation is much less than a satellite, but that's the obvious answer :)
What they're doing is looking for the Cerenkov radiation produced when a high energy gamma ray from the "blazar" produced by a black hole hits the upper atmosphere. Cerenkov radiation is the product of electron/positron pair creation and bremmstrahlung and consists of relativistic particles which travel at velocities faster than the local speed of light. This results in the production of Cerenkov radiation in the blue part of the visible spectrum, which is what the telescopes actually detect.
However there is a far greater amount of Cerenkov radiation from normal cosmic ray incidents than there is from gamma rays produced in blazars. Since the cosmic ray particles are charged (they are usually protons) whereas the gamma rays aren't, they can be distinguished by whether they curve in the galactic magnetic field.
Anyway, since this is a proven technique, there's really no need for a space-based detector as of yet.
It's actually true. And given that the interview and selection process for working in a corner shop is hardly exhaustive, you can't ever really tell what the person manning your till is actually like, so it's sort of a preventative measure just in case.
The reason things are priced at say 3.99 rather than 4.00 is that is meant that people working in shops actually had to ring the sale up and get the change out of the till. This way they couldn't just pocket the money.
Yeah, I have to say that the industry has a definite soft spot for sci-fi fans - in that they are dedicated enough to be squeezed for all that they're worth and more. They seem to think that they can put any old shit out and people will watch and/or buy it, and unfortunately they're often proved right. Does any other genre of movies produce quite so many spinoff opportunities for the marketing teams to get their teeth into?
Am I the only person that thinks this is way before it's time? Given the relatively low penetration of broadband services at the moment, how many people are going to be able to watch this movie? And the specifications for watching it are extremely narrow, so anyone without an MS "standard" setup is out of luck as far as this is concerned.
Given the $3million price tag and the asking price of $3.95, in order to cover the cost they're going to need three-quarters of a million people to pay it. Is this even vaugely feasible? It certainly doesn't seem so to me. As a publicity stunt I'm sure it's got some value, but this is never going to be worth what it cost.
The idea of online movies is a great one, and we'll see more of it, but until broadband becomes far more popular it's probably a little early for this sort of thing.
Well obviously a large company like SCO are going to go over their answers thoroughly before they post them somewhere like /. where people will pick at and take issue with the smallest detail. Given some of the attitudes seen here everyday there was no way they were ever going to come out and be totally upfront and honest. Besides, it's not how 99% of businesses work.
Also, considering that as a company they ignored Linux for such a long time, they are understandably going to be cautious about making firm statements and plans about something for which they are not sure of future viability. The statements made in this interview were very cautious, in fact probably a bit too cautious. This is where a lot of the vaugeness has crept in IMHO.
Is that the same Stephen Donaldson that wrote about Thomas Covenant? I just couldn't get into his Thomas Covenent series, I found his writing to derivative of LoTR, and it just didn't grab me. Has his writing improved?
Ugh, don't mention the truly appalling Thomas Covenant series. They totally sucked. But the Gap series is extremely good, very heavy sometimes but well worth the read. They're in a totally different class from his other books (thank God).
Hmm, I personally thought Dune sucked, but that's just MHO. Anyway some responses about other sci-fi books.
The Machavellian Politics. It's refreshing to see corrupt, machavellian political machinations, with various factions plotting against each other, hiding their true motives. Too much science fiction is full of well meaning, pure at heart politicoes, it's nice to see some evil, greedy folks for a change (cf. Larry Niven, is there anyone in his books who isn't motivated by good intentions?)
I don't know what books you've read but there are plenty of books out there with these things in them. Have you read Stephen Donaldson's Gap series? They have all the nastiness, political infighting and greed in them you could ever want :)
The flaws the main characters have. It's nie to see main characters with personality defects, it makes Dune fit right into the Greek Tragedy genre.
Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy? There are some of the most flawed characters ever in there, characters who suffer from their problems throughout the 300 year scope of the books. And the descriptions of Mars itself are absolutely amazing. I don't actually think I've ever read any other sci-fi book where I thought "this could actually be true" about from these books.
Find Aphex Twins, "Pac man power pill" and "tetris medley".
Heh, given the disturbing videos to his songs "Come to Daddy" and "Windowlicker" I'd hate to see the videos for those songs :) Miniture Tetris blocks and Pacmen with Richard D James faces. Aaaagh!
For a start, this gas that they have detected is nothing to do with the requirement for dark matter of some kind at all - it merely means that we can detect all of the regular, baryonic matter that we believe to be present based on our calculations. We still need dark matter to account for the stability of galaxies and so on.
Anyway, dark matter doesn't have to be WIMPs in particular. There are other options - massive neutrinoes, MACHOs and so on. Don't get tied up into thinking there's only one alternative.
The thing is that whilst corporations are still based in a country they are vulnerable to the effects of legislation from that country, no matter how big they are. Witness the whole Microsoft trial - the biggest company in the world was not immune to being put on trial for all its vast wealth. And even the most international of corporations is vulnerable through the various treaties that bind countries together, and through the domino effect a successful case against a company can have.
The only way I can see for a corporation to truly have independence from governmental control is for it to be the government. And there are plenty of small countries out there which could be effectively "bought" by a corporation willing to take on its national debt, assets, GNP etc. In this way, the corporation effectively becomes the government, with all the rights to do what governments do - set their own laws and regulations, raise armies, have a foreign policy, create embassies and diplomats and so on.
Think of what an advantage that could be to a company. No matter what other countries may think of them, they are practically immune to interference thanks to their status as a soverign government. They can move all of their assets to their own country and establish distribution channels originating there. In this scenario, the corporation truly does rule.
I'm not sure about the amount of money it would require to do something like this, but given the trend towards giant mergers and acquisitions, it can't be soon before some giant conglomerate has the ability to do something like this for real. The question is, would they?
My fear is that increasing amounts of resource will be poured into maintaining these academic papers for posterity, when many are nothing more than a rehash of earlier work, or turn out to be pure crap anyway.
Yes, but the "pure crap" shouldn't get past the whole peer review process to start with, so you'll only be left with the material that is worthwhile. And any further moderation is censorship really - who decides what is and what isn't worthwhile? It'd have to be someone involved in the field in order to be able to properly judge it, but on what criterion are you going to judge whether one paper is worth more than another?
In short, it needs moderating. Books and papers going out of print, or the final copies getting lost, are natures way of moderating irrelevant crap. Because, if it wasn't irrelevant, someone would have invested in preserving it.
But what may seem to be completely irrelevant when it was first written may turn out to be essential to a later development a hundred years down the line. Especially in maths there are a lot of small developments which seem to be pointless at the time but which turn out to be a key part of a greater whole discovered later. You can't decide to throw things away on the basis of "relevance", since relevance is something which you can never tell at the time.
Thanks. So I was wrong, but hey, I'm not going to lose any sleep over the issue :) And at least the replies which were more than "MODERATE THIS SHIT DOWN!" have allowed me to learn something, so in a way it was worth me making the original point anyway...
The solution is not e-mail registration, that is for someone willing have this garbage traced back to them (a liabilty) despite getting absolutly no compensation to post this shit. Think about it: why should I have either an e-mail or an IP address associated with this drivel?
Agreed. I mean it's only a weblog isn't it? It doesn't really matter who you are or what you post at all in the real world. And I don't really see the point in starting ACs at zero - after all, anyone can get an account and post the same stuff at 1. And WTF does an E-mail account say about who you are anyway? Nothing really.
Yes, I read the article, but what I was responding to in part was the comment at the end of the article blurb:
Sounds like self-interrogating distributed file systems can be useful to people unlikely to get sued by rock bands, as if that wasn't obvious.
Given that this system has the potential to be implemented in such a way as to be openly accessible rather than limited to a set userbase, and that was what HeUnique seemed to be implying, that was why I wrote what I did. What it is now is not what it could be in the future, and this type of mechanism can be implemented in other distributed networks as well. And given that the content it stores does not necessarily have to be scientific journals, I think my point does apply.