This is where it gets interesting. Condense quark soup, and you can get another stable construct, made of -TWO- quarks, rather than three. Such constructs would be meta-stable, but kept under the right conditions could give you an entirely different periodic table. (You could form elements that had radically different natures. There'd be no neutrons, for example, so no isotopes. A nucleus would be kept stable with a mix of positively and negatively-charged particles, with the net charge being something really bizare.)
How would you construct this type of matter. Certaintly at the conditions required to form the quagma (quark-gluon plasma) you could construct such a material, but at lower energies the strong force comes back into play and hence we are looking at quatum chromodynamical effects again. To acheive a colour neutral particle with two quarks we need a quark and an anti-quark, which is a meson. Is this what you mean, because we've been able to produce those for a while now.
I think maybe you had something else in mind, but I wouldn't mind some clarification. Cheers.
Doesn't GR basically say that the universe has a finite "radius" so-to-speak and that you'll end up back where you started if you could travel long enough. Looks like Hawking's carried that over into the time-dimension as well?
It depends on what model of the universe you're looking at. The simplest models of the universe with a Big Bang are the FRW (Friedmann-Roberts-Walker I think) models which are based on Friedmann's original proposal in the 1910s IIRC. They were denounced by Einstein until Hubble made his discovery. In those models there is certainly a finite radius, as there will also be in any model with a singularity in it, since if the universe began at some point then it would take an infinite time to expand to infinite size.
Of course, there are some more exotic models of the universe which can be formulated using general relativity. The NUT universe (named after the initials of its creators) involves a universe where if you travel 360 degrees around the universe once you end up in a totally different "slice" of the universe instead! I'm not sure of how wou'd work out distance and time in that universe:)
Of course mathematically speaking it's possible for particles with imaginary mass to travel faster than light...*shrug* So if we can write off "imaginary time" at face value, being something "real", we should also be able to write off "imaginary mass" as being something that "is"?
Show me the tachyons!!!
As for tachyons, there isn't a problem with them in relativity AFAIK. A tachyon with zero energy however (and remember that nature always tends towards the lowest energy) is travelling at infinite velocity, which means it occupies every point in space-time simultaneously (if that word has any real meaning in this context), probably making experimental verification somewhat tricky. Anyway they are probably ruled out in the context of superstring theory, which avoids the tachyons that other theories have demanded.
Is primordial soup actually another state of matter like Gas, solid, liquid, and plasma? or is it just a form of plasma or something?
Whereas the four states you mention are all different states of regular matter - the quark-gluon plasma is where the actual nucleons that form the nuclei of atoms have broken down. Normally each nucleon consists of three quarks (udd for a neutron and uud for a proton IIRC) bound together by combinations of the eight types of gluon, which are the force carriers of the strong nuclear force.
Normally the gluons bind the quarks together so that you can only see them in combinations of either three quarks (the baryons) or a quark and an anti-quark (the mesons). As you add more energy to this system the force between the quarks actually increases (unlike gravity or electromagnetism) until you reach a point where you have pumped enough energy into the system to create an entirely new set of quarks, also bound. This property is called quark entanglement and is why so far we have never seen a free quark.
However at high enough energies quark entanglement breaks down and the quarks and gluons become free from each other, much in the same way that at high energies electrons and nuclei become free and form a plasma. This is why it is called a quark-gluon plasma.
I thought I'd heard that the latest thinking of great minds (such as Stephen Hawking's) was that the big bang theory was flawed, and that it probably didn't happen. True, or has somebody been pulling my leg?
What Hawking said was that since in the equations of relativity (dt/ds)^2 has a negative sign whereas the three spacial differencials - (dx/ds)^2 etc. - have a positive sign time appears in space-time interval equations as -ict, where i is the square root of -1, an imaginary number. His postulate was that we should accept this at face value rather than writing it off as just an artifact of the equations.
This lead him to the idea of the universe being a 4-D hypersphere which is unbounded but finite, so that if you went far enough foward in time you would return to where you started. So there would be a cyclical evolution of the universe - a Big Bang type event followed by expansion, then contraction followed by a Big Crunch event, and so on and on. The idea isn't really that popular though.
Also, and on the other hand, I have heard that the Law of Conservation of Energy in Physics was proposed by a non-physicist and just accepted because it seemed to fit the evidence, not on the basis of any rigorous experiments designed specifically to test the theory.
I'm not too sure about who proposed it, but it's not really a law - more of a hypothesis AFAIK. And yes it certainly is violated at the quantum scale as described by the energy-time uncertainty relation - delta E * delta t > h-bar, where E is the amount of energy 'borrowed', t is the time it is 'borrowed' for a h-bar is Planck's constant over 2*pi. However this energy is always paid back and only manifests itself in virtual particles which have only a fleeting existance, although they cause some very profound effects on reality.
For free energy try tapping the zero-point energy of the vacuum. The vacuum state of the universe (that is empty space-time itself) is not actually zero, but some fairly large energy. If we could tap into this (and I have read of some schemes involving the Casimir effect IIRC) we would have access to essentially unlimited energy. Of course we'd probably all drown in the amount of heat we would produce, but you can't have everything can you?
Look at his User Info. He posted another similarly trollish comment in the last story, and another one some stories back. He's definitely getting a very good response though - some people can't resist it:)
That knowledge is worth nothing at meetings like these. Nobody cares how the software works. Nobody is interested in terms like keyword blocking, overbroad blocking or underblocking, nor even information on effectiveness or First Amendment legal issues. The issue will be decided purely on the basis of emotion. Gigabytes evaporate down to two bits of data: (1) there exists porn; (2) filters block porn. There seems to be nothing more that anyone wants to know.
I'm sorry, but if you expected any different then you live in a dream world entirely unrelated to reality. People, especially the sort of non-technical audience at your meeting, cannot be bothered to spend time researching all (or often any) of the issues involved in such a debate. Your opponent played the winning tactics in this kind of meeting - simple points that ringingly announce that they support "morality", "decency" or whatever is the current hot tabloid topic.
This sort of community battle is generally destined to be lost before it even starts if the issues being raised involve these sort of topics. People would far rather press for the first solution presented that sounds plausible than make a study of all alternatives and their various pros and cons. The best place to fight this is unfortunately in court, where there's at least an obligation to consider all the issues.
I think the fact that this has wiped more than $1bn off the value of M$'s shares (is that American or European billions I wonder...) means that the people who ultimately could make or break M$, the stock guys, care about this ruling.
American billions I sincerely hope - otherwise you'd be saying that MS were worth over $1,000,000,000,000 (a European billion or an American trillion) previously - that is one hell of a valuation. I think the entire GNP of the world is only something like $15,000,000,000,000:)
All you have to do is to change the algorithm that chooses moderators and make it give more points to people that did post on enterprise computing threads.
This will mean that the next round of moderators will "probably" give more points to people talking about enterprise computing (generally that is what they would be interested in and good at because otherwise they wouldn't post to the enterprise threads) who in turn will come back to talk more often because the good posts get moderated up!.
To an extent this already occurs on/., although not officially through a change to the site's source code. It's far easier to earn points through extolling the virtues of open source and/or Linux than it is to write a genuine piece on how MS isn't the root of all evil. This isn't a policy - it's just that these are the prevaling views on/. and so moderators look more favourably at the former than the latter. That's just human nature unfortunately.
Of course another complicating factor here are moderators who only moderate articles already at 2 or 3, also leaving less chance of a post getting a good score. But I don't really want to start a(nother) rant about the/. moderation system so I'll leave it there.
If some Big Nasty Corp. acquires/. and starts dinking with the content, how many hours do you suppose it would take before an alternative site took the ballistic ride to success?
What you've got to remember is how long it took/. to build up the user base it has today. Even if someone starts up another site covering the same issues (I liked the suggestion for the name - SlashNot - that I read somewhere) it'll take ages for people to move over to the new site. To start with there'll be only a few people posting in the threads and/. thrives on replies and rebuttals to other posts. The more things that are posted, the greater and better the discussion that results. With only a few posts per topic the discussion will lack the depth that/. can acheive and so people won't bother reading the stories - they'll stick with/. despite its faults.
But a corporation that shells out big bucks for another whose most marketable asset appears to be/. will be reluctant to tip the scale by meddling, unless either truely clueless or else hostile to what's going on here.
I agree. If VA Linux are even thought to be meddling with the content here then the screams of outrage will be deafening. There would be a deluge of bad press, most likely affecting the price of their stock - after all it has to come down at some point and I'd guess it wouldn't take too much of a reason. I doubt they'll try to rock the boat here, but unfortunately, companies have made stupid decisions before.
I think most people here, including me, will take a wait and see attitude to this. Hopefully there won't be anything to see.
How much of the opinion you state in your articles is really you, and how much of it is just a possible opinion that you think will give rise to a discussion of the current topic? It almost seems like you are just trying to provoke arguments sometimes, and that you write what you know will lead to angry flame wars between hordes of enraged/.ers. Also, how long do you spend on your articles - I've noticed that some of them are a little short on examples or factual detail to back them up, suggesting you're somewhat rushed for time (or don't care about these things - I'll give you the benefit of the doubt:) ).
These are not the words of a closed mind. These are the words of someone who is secure in his beleifs. You have confused to the two.
Sigh... You know it's a sig, it's not meant to be a profound statement about anything. All it represents is a gentle mockery of some of the more rabid Open Source fans out there, you know, the ones who post 3000 word essays in response to every troll that posts "Linux sucks! MS rules!" I'm fully aware of the benefits of having source code and support the whole idea, I just can't believe some of the people who post on here. Oh, and if you're so secure in your beliefs, why the hell are you posting this whole diatribe? Doesn't sound too secure to me.
Theoretical anonymity, de-centralized distribution, countless points of access, the sudden irrelevance of geography, sophisticated tools of encryption - these and other features of the Internet protocols made it virtually impossible to control speech on the Internet.
Ha ha, that's funny. These things all make it inconvenient to control speech, which is a far different thing from impossible. Given the will to impose ridiculous, draconian laws then the Net can be as controlled as you wish - look at the current situation in China as a shining example of the way foward (note the sarcasm there). Yes, countries in the west are unlikely ever to go quite that far but you'd be suprised at what can be done given the right spin by the government. Go and look at the Prevention of Terrorism Act that was passed over here in the UK some years back for an example of a law which was passed based on the public fear of terrorists. The same thing happened in America back in the halycon days of the Cold War. Never underestimate the ability of the government and the media to whip people up into a frenzy against 'evil group X'.
... argues that new advances in technology, especially software, threaten both free speech and privacy. Marketers, medical institutions and insurers, and individual companies are gathering staggering amounts of data about individuals, students and employees.
Sorry to repeat an old cliche, but information is power, and this will again become increasingly apparant in the future. If you don't want any of your information to exist outside of your home then live like a hermit, because unfortunately it's getting to the point where anything you do that can be attributed to you is being monitored and logged in the name of 'targetted advertising' or whatever. Anonymity is probably easier on the Net than off of it - at least at the moment - but there are still times when your actions are being logged - the time I spend here on/. is logged somewhere and I'm sure they could build up a profile of my interests from what stories I read here. You just have to accept that it's going to happen sometimes and try and avoid it the rest of the time.
The issue really lies in the hands of the people who frequent sites like this one. Technology is volatile, fluid and inherently unpredictable. It often moves beyond technics and has broader social implications - Linux for example.
Ah yes. The obligatory Jon Katz pat on the back for the/. and Linux community. What does this paragraph mean? What implications does it raise? It's just filler.
There's probably a way to do this in Python, but I don't know what it is.
for i in range(10):
myname = "FD%d" % i
tmp = "'This is variable %d'" % i exec "%s = %s" % (myname, tmp)
print FD6
Well, that's the first way I thought of to do this, and probably the simplest, although it's not quite as simple as Perl's ability to name variables using other variables:) From what I know the latest version of Python (v1.5.2) has all the same regular expressions as found in Perl v5, but they certainly aren't as easy to use as in Python. Still, your code got the thinking, and I might go back and practice my Perl a bit more:)
I assumed this was because of some sort of deep-seated fear of the future
I think it's more that people are a) afraid of change and b) people are sentimental. I don't think people are so much afraid of the future as they are afraid of how things will change and what this will mean for them - will they have to dig themselves out of their happy little rut:) How many times have you seen a program from 20-30 years ago talking about the "house of the future" or whatever, and instead nothing's changed.
Also, never underestimate the human ability to view the past through rose-tinted glasses. As we get older the things in our past which we didn't like get submerged beneath memories of the good times. Think of the popularity of old music and films - I can't remember how many 60s and 70s nights they had whilst I was at university:)
Well, the list would go on and on, and I'm sure dozens of others will post some of the other things I think are important, so I'll go for automated telephone exchanges. Without these people would have to ring the operator every time they wanted to make a call and the vast explosion in the communication infrastructure we've seen would never have occured, and thus, no Internet.
I have to say that writing Perl is a lesson in frustration and mental torture, or at least I found it to be so before I gave up on it altogether:) Personally I far prefer Python which is a hell of a lot more readable, supports all the same things AFAIK (it's been a while since I touched Perl) - regular expressions, SQL, HTML etc. And there's far less $ and $$ around:)
Well there's no conspiracy at work here, I assure you.
No, there's no conspiracy here, it's just the sheer greed of a man who's already got sh*tloads of money and wants more, more, more:) We'll have to wait for each episode to come out on VHS first, then the box set, maybe even a director's cut boxed set if we're lucky before we even get a hint of the DVDs and the amazing features that they'll contain (hopefully a shoot Jar-Jar game:)).
Currently, people don't know how to build software. Or, to be more accurate, there are good techniques out there to build software, but most people ignore them for one or more reasons, none of which hold up under close scrutiny.
Yes unfortunately most people who program have learnt to program well before they come into any contact with actually being part of a team writing a large application. When it's just you sitting in your room at home coding something just for the sheer hell of it your style of coding and the method you use to design and implement the code are relatively unimportant. I'm sure the most popular method is the 1) Think of something you want to code, and 2) Sit there and start coding it as soon as possible:) Unfortunately this doesn't, in my experiance, work at all well for larger projects.
The software house I currently work for has a lot of problems with how the project is managed. The man in charge of the overall development for our application is far more interesting in trying to code things which have caught his fancy at the time than in making the product consistant, efficient or even bug-free. Designs have generally been of the "here's what we want - go do it" kind, and once someone has done a particular client, they're the only person who knows exactly how it works. When people leave someone else needs to spend a good two weeks just trying to figure out the code. We've recently started to move into a more structured approach to coding, but it remains to be seen whether this will have any impact.
Now that software development is moving out of its "gold rush" period, where the firstest gets the mostest, we can begin to develop software engineering as a profession. This means training people in engineering instead of science, and defining what it means to be a software engineer. Unfortunately, we have a lot of work to do both on the level of education, and in the mindset of today's software developers.
Very true - we've got a lot of good programmers, it's just that they don't know how to write a large piece of software. This is something I see a lot of, and it seems that it takes not just good programmers, but also a good structure for them to work in, to produce something that is consistant, efficient and can be easily maintained. For people out there involved in the same sort of work ask yourselves - if everyone involved in your project left at once, how long would it take for a new team to pick up where you left off?
So much wonderfully intelligent discussion results from posting in response to his rubbish.
Agreed. Who cares if what he writes is complete nonsense, it serves to get decent debate going on the subject. I think he deliberately overdoes his articles anyway, just to provoke so much opinion:)
Unfortunately this leaves little mom n' pop web sites out of business.
True, but at the moment there isn't a need for such a thing. A lot of the mom n' pop web sites (good term BTW:)) probably won't carry any offensive material - I doubt the majority of web sites do. However again we come to the laws of supply and demand - if there are a lot of people wanting to host a web site and they cannot in their home country then someone will find a way to provide that service. The technology is there, but it's just not necessary at the moment. I'm sure a battalion of web site-less geeks could sort it all out if they were frustrated enough:)
Today, I am responsible for the content of my web site, and the buck stops here. If my ISP becomes co-responsible, what is going to happen to the personal website? What about controversial websites, that some find offensive? What about Free (speech) Software websites that some deep-pocketed lawyer-laden business finds offensive.
Even if the US sets this kind of precedent it still won't affect the web as a whole - many sites would move to servers and ISPs abroad, in countries where this kind of thing is allowed. This sort of thing would require every country in the world to agree, and then any country opting out could make a fortune hosting these sites. I believe that a lot of the online casino sites are hosted in the Cayman Islands where laws are a lot less strict than in the US.
What goes up must come down. The Romans sure did, and nobody ever thought they would.
And just how long did the Roman Empire last? Several centuries IIRC. While things tend to move faster today than they did then, once we are in the situation of having a group of meta-national corporations (read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series for a great take on the future development of Earth's corporations) controlling almost all services and goods the situation can be stable for a long, long time. Just look at the MS monopoly. Once a company has got itself into that position it can stay there practically indefinitely given some reasonably intellegent and ruthless people running it. And the larger the corporation, the longer it can stay in that position, through sheer inertia if for no other reason.
Slashdot Mirror
... the UCITA bill being pushed through in s state near you!
Store in a cold (10K), dark, highly compressed place.
Surely shouldn't that be store in a ridiculously hot (10^9K), bright space?
This is where it gets interesting. Condense quark soup, and you can get another stable construct, made of -TWO- quarks, rather than three. Such constructs would be meta-stable, but kept under the right conditions could give you an entirely different periodic table. (You could form elements that had radically different natures. There'd be no neutrons, for example, so no isotopes. A nucleus would be kept stable with a mix of positively and negatively-charged particles, with the net charge being something really bizare.)
How would you construct this type of matter. Certaintly at the conditions required to form the quagma (quark-gluon plasma) you could construct such a material, but at lower energies the strong force comes back into play and hence we are looking at quatum chromodynamical effects again. To acheive a colour neutral particle with two quarks we need a quark and an anti-quark, which is a meson. Is this what you mean, because we've been able to produce those for a while now.
I think maybe you had something else in mind, but I wouldn't mind some clarification. Cheers.
Doesn't GR basically say that the universe has a finite "radius" so-to-speak and that you'll end up back where you started if you could travel long enough. Looks like Hawking's carried that over into the time-dimension as well?
It depends on what model of the universe you're looking at. The simplest models of the universe with a Big Bang are the FRW (Friedmann-Roberts-Walker I think) models which are based on Friedmann's original proposal in the 1910s IIRC. They were denounced by Einstein until Hubble made his discovery. In those models there is certainly a finite radius, as there will also be in any model with a singularity in it, since if the universe began at some point then it would take an infinite time to expand to infinite size.
Of course, there are some more exotic models of the universe which can be formulated using general relativity. The NUT universe (named after the initials of its creators) involves a universe where if you travel 360 degrees around the universe once you end up in a totally different "slice" of the universe instead! I'm not sure of how wou'd work out distance and time in that universe :)
Of course mathematically speaking it's possible for particles with imaginary mass to travel faster than light...*shrug* So if we can write off "imaginary time" at face value, being something "real", we should also be able to write off "imaginary mass" as being something that "is"?
Show me the tachyons!!!
As for tachyons, there isn't a problem with them in relativity AFAIK. A tachyon with zero energy however (and remember that nature always tends towards the lowest energy) is travelling at infinite velocity, which means it occupies every point in space-time simultaneously (if that word has any real meaning in this context), probably making experimental verification somewhat tricky. Anyway they are probably ruled out in the context of superstring theory, which avoids the tachyons that other theories have demanded.
Is primordial soup actually another state of matter like Gas, solid, liquid, and plasma? or is it just a form of plasma or something?
Whereas the four states you mention are all different states of regular matter - the quark-gluon plasma is where the actual nucleons that form the nuclei of atoms have broken down. Normally each nucleon consists of three quarks (udd for a neutron and uud for a proton IIRC) bound together by combinations of the eight types of gluon, which are the force carriers of the strong nuclear force.
Normally the gluons bind the quarks together so that you can only see them in combinations of either three quarks (the baryons) or a quark and an anti-quark (the mesons). As you add more energy to this system the force between the quarks actually increases (unlike gravity or electromagnetism) until you reach a point where you have pumped enough energy into the system to create an entirely new set of quarks, also bound. This property is called quark entanglement and is why so far we have never seen a free quark.
However at high enough energies quark entanglement breaks down and the quarks and gluons become free from each other, much in the same way that at high energies electrons and nuclei become free and form a plasma. This is why it is called a quark-gluon plasma.
I thought I'd heard that the latest thinking of great minds (such as Stephen Hawking's) was that the big bang theory was flawed, and that it probably didn't happen. True, or has somebody been pulling my leg?
What Hawking said was that since in the equations of relativity (dt/ds)^2 has a negative sign whereas the three spacial differencials - (dx/ds)^2 etc. - have a positive sign time appears in space-time interval equations as -ict, where i is the square root of -1, an imaginary number. His postulate was that we should accept this at face value rather than writing it off as just an artifact of the equations.
This lead him to the idea of the universe being a 4-D hypersphere which is unbounded but finite, so that if you went far enough foward in time you would return to where you started. So there would be a cyclical evolution of the universe - a Big Bang type event followed by expansion, then contraction followed by a Big Crunch event, and so on and on. The idea isn't really that popular though.
Also, and on the other hand, I have heard that the Law of Conservation of Energy in Physics was proposed by a non-physicist and just accepted because it seemed to fit the evidence, not on the basis of any rigorous experiments designed specifically to test the theory.
I'm not too sure about who proposed it, but it's not really a law - more of a hypothesis AFAIK. And yes it certainly is violated at the quantum scale as described by the energy-time uncertainty relation - delta E * delta t > h-bar, where E is the amount of energy 'borrowed', t is the time it is 'borrowed' for a h-bar is Planck's constant over 2*pi. However this energy is always paid back and only manifests itself in virtual particles which have only a fleeting existance, although they cause some very profound effects on reality.
For free energy try tapping the zero-point energy of the vacuum. The vacuum state of the universe (that is empty space-time itself) is not actually zero, but some fairly large energy. If we could tap into this (and I have read of some schemes involving the Casimir effect IIRC) we would have access to essentially unlimited energy. Of course we'd probably all drown in the amount of heat we would produce, but you can't have everything can you?
Look at his User Info. He posted another similarly trollish comment in the last story, and another one some stories back. He's definitely getting a very good response though - some people can't resist it :)
That knowledge is worth nothing at meetings like these. Nobody cares how the software works. Nobody is interested in terms like keyword blocking, overbroad blocking or underblocking, nor even information on effectiveness or First Amendment legal issues. The issue will be decided purely on the basis of emotion. Gigabytes evaporate down to two bits of data: (1) there exists porn; (2) filters block porn. There seems to be nothing more that anyone wants to know.
I'm sorry, but if you expected any different then you live in a dream world entirely unrelated to reality. People, especially the sort of non-technical audience at your meeting, cannot be bothered to spend time researching all (or often any) of the issues involved in such a debate. Your opponent played the winning tactics in this kind of meeting - simple points that ringingly announce that they support "morality", "decency" or whatever is the current hot tabloid topic.
This sort of community battle is generally destined to be lost before it even starts if the issues being raised involve these sort of topics. People would far rather press for the first solution presented that sounds plausible than make a study of all alternatives and their various pros and cons. The best place to fight this is unfortunately in court, where there's at least an obligation to consider all the issues.
Some things never change.
Did you really expect them to?
I think the fact that this has wiped more than $1bn off the value of M$'s shares (is that American or European billions I wonder...) means that the people who ultimately could make or break M$, the stock guys, care about this ruling.
American billions I sincerely hope - otherwise you'd be saying that MS were worth over $1,000,000,000,000 (a European billion or an American trillion) previously - that is one hell of a valuation. I think the entire GNP of the world is only something like $15,000,000,000,000 :)
All you have to do is to change the algorithm that chooses moderators and make it give more points to people that did post on enterprise computing threads.
This will mean that the next round of moderators will "probably" give more points to people talking about enterprise computing (generally that is what they would be interested in and good at because otherwise they wouldn't post to the enterprise threads) who in turn will come back to talk more often because the good posts get moderated up!.
To an extent this already occurs on /., although not officially through a change to the site's source code. It's far easier to earn points through extolling the virtues of open source and/or Linux than it is to write a genuine piece on how MS isn't the root of all evil. This isn't a policy - it's just that these are the prevaling views on /. and so moderators look more favourably at the former than the latter. That's just human nature unfortunately.
Of course another complicating factor here are moderators who only moderate articles already at 2 or 3, also leaving less chance of a post getting a good score. But I don't really want to start a(nother) rant about the /. moderation system so I'll leave it there.
If some Big Nasty Corp. acquires /. and starts dinking with the content, how many hours do you suppose it would take before an alternative site took the ballistic ride to success?
What you've got to remember is how long it took /. to build up the user base it has today. Even if someone starts up another site covering the same issues (I liked the suggestion for the name - SlashNot - that I read somewhere) it'll take ages for people to move over to the new site. To start with there'll be only a few people posting in the threads and /. thrives on replies and rebuttals to other posts. The more things that are posted, the greater and better the discussion that results. With only a few posts per topic the discussion will lack the depth that /. can acheive and so people won't bother reading the stories - they'll stick with /. despite its faults.
But a corporation that shells out big bucks for another whose most marketable asset appears to be /. will be reluctant to tip the scale by meddling, unless either truely clueless or else hostile to what's going on here.
I agree. If VA Linux are even thought to be meddling with the content here then the screams of outrage will be deafening. There would be a deluge of bad press, most likely affecting the price of their stock - after all it has to come down at some point and I'd guess it wouldn't take too much of a reason. I doubt they'll try to rock the boat here, but unfortunately, companies have made stupid decisions before.
I think most people here, including me, will take a wait and see attitude to this. Hopefully there won't be anything to see.
To Mr Katz...
How much of the opinion you state in your articles is really you, and how much of it is just a possible opinion that you think will give rise to a discussion of the current topic? It almost seems like you are just trying to provoke arguments sometimes, and that you write what you know will lead to angry flame wars between hordes of enraged /.ers. Also, how long do you spend on your articles - I've noticed that some of them are a little short on examples or factual detail to back them up, suggesting you're somewhat rushed for time (or don't care about these things - I'll give you the benefit of the doubt :) ).
These are not the words of a closed mind. These are the words of someone who is secure in his beleifs. You have confused to the two.
Sigh... You know it's a sig, it's not meant to be a profound statement about anything. All it represents is a gentle mockery of some of the more rabid Open Source fans out there, you know, the ones who post 3000 word essays in response to every troll that posts "Linux sucks! MS rules!" I'm fully aware of the benefits of having source code and support the whole idea, I just can't believe some of the people who post on here. Oh, and if you're so secure in your beliefs, why the hell are you posting this whole diatribe? Doesn't sound too secure to me.
Theoretical anonymity, de-centralized distribution, countless points of access, the sudden irrelevance of geography, sophisticated tools of encryption - these and other features of the Internet protocols made it virtually impossible to control speech on the Internet.
Ha ha, that's funny. These things all make it inconvenient to control speech, which is a far different thing from impossible. Given the will to impose ridiculous, draconian laws then the Net can be as controlled as you wish - look at the current situation in China as a shining example of the way foward (note the sarcasm there). Yes, countries in the west are unlikely ever to go quite that far but you'd be suprised at what can be done given the right spin by the government. Go and look at the Prevention of Terrorism Act that was passed over here in the UK some years back for an example of a law which was passed based on the public fear of terrorists. The same thing happened in America back in the halycon days of the Cold War. Never underestimate the ability of the government and the media to whip people up into a frenzy against 'evil group X'.
Sorry to repeat an old cliche, but information is power, and this will again become increasingly apparant in the future. If you don't want any of your information to exist outside of your home then live like a hermit, because unfortunately it's getting to the point where anything you do that can be attributed to you is being monitored and logged in the name of 'targetted advertising' or whatever. Anonymity is probably easier on the Net than off of it - at least at the moment - but there are still times when your actions are being logged - the time I spend here on /. is logged somewhere and I'm sure they could build up a profile of my interests from what stories I read here. You just have to accept that it's going to happen sometimes and try and avoid it the rest of the time.
The issue really lies in the hands of the people who frequent sites like this one. Technology is volatile, fluid and inherently unpredictable. It often moves beyond technics and has broader social implications - Linux for example.
Ah yes. The obligatory Jon Katz pat on the back for the /. and Linux community. What does this paragraph mean? What implications does it raise? It's just filler.
There's probably a way to do this in Python, but I don't know what it is.
Well, that's the first way I thought of to do this, and probably the simplest, although it's not quite as simple as Perl's ability to name variables using other variables :) From what I know the latest version of Python (v1.5.2) has all the same regular expressions as found in Perl v5, but they certainly aren't as easy to use as in Python. Still, your code got the thinking, and I might go back and practice my Perl a bit more :)
I assumed this was because of some sort of deep-seated fear of the future
I think it's more that people are a) afraid of change and b) people are sentimental. I don't think people are so much afraid of the future as they are afraid of how things will change and what this will mean for them - will they have to dig themselves out of their happy little rut :) How many times have you seen a program from 20-30 years ago talking about the "house of the future" or whatever, and instead nothing's changed.
Also, never underestimate the human ability to view the past through rose-tinted glasses. As we get older the things in our past which we didn't like get submerged beneath memories of the good times. Think of the popularity of old music and films - I can't remember how many 60s and 70s nights they had whilst I was at university :)
Well, the list would go on and on, and I'm sure dozens of others will post some of the other things I think are important, so I'll go for automated telephone exchanges. Without these people would have to ring the operator every time they wanted to make a call and the vast explosion in the communication infrastructure we've seen would never have occured, and thus, no Internet.
I have to say that writing Perl is a lesson in frustration and mental torture, or at least I found it to be so before I gave up on it altogether :) Personally I far prefer Python which is a hell of a lot more readable, supports all the same things AFAIK (it's been a while since I touched Perl) - regular expressions, SQL, HTML etc. And there's far less $ and $$ around :)
Well there's no conspiracy at work here, I assure you.
No, there's no conspiracy here, it's just the sheer greed of a man who's already got sh*tloads of money and wants more, more, more :) We'll have to wait for each episode to come out on VHS first, then the box set, maybe even a director's cut boxed set if we're lucky before we even get a hint of the DVDs and the amazing features that they'll contain (hopefully a shoot Jar-Jar game :)).
Currently, people don't know how to build software. Or, to be more accurate, there are good techniques out there to build software, but most people ignore them for one or more reasons, none of which hold up under close scrutiny.
Yes unfortunately most people who program have learnt to program well before they come into any contact with actually being part of a team writing a large application. When it's just you sitting in your room at home coding something just for the sheer hell of it your style of coding and the method you use to design and implement the code are relatively unimportant. I'm sure the most popular method is the 1) Think of something you want to code, and 2) Sit there and start coding it as soon as possible :) Unfortunately this doesn't, in my experiance, work at all well for larger projects.
The software house I currently work for has a lot of problems with how the project is managed. The man in charge of the overall development for our application is far more interesting in trying to code things which have caught his fancy at the time than in making the product consistant, efficient or even bug-free. Designs have generally been of the "here's what we want - go do it" kind, and once someone has done a particular client, they're the only person who knows exactly how it works. When people leave someone else needs to spend a good two weeks just trying to figure out the code. We've recently started to move into a more structured approach to coding, but it remains to be seen whether this will have any impact.
Now that software development is moving out of its "gold rush" period, where the firstest gets the mostest, we can begin to develop software engineering as a profession. This means training people in engineering instead of science, and defining what it means to be a software engineer. Unfortunately, we have a lot of work to do both on the level of education, and in the mindset of today's software developers.
Very true - we've got a lot of good programmers, it's just that they don't know how to write a large piece of software. This is something I see a lot of, and it seems that it takes not just good programmers, but also a good structure for them to work in, to produce something that is consistant, efficient and can be easily maintained. For people out there involved in the same sort of work ask yourselves - if everyone involved in your project left at once, how long would it take for a new team to pick up where you left off?
So much wonderfully intelligent discussion results from posting in response to his rubbish.
Agreed. Who cares if what he writes is complete nonsense, it serves to get decent debate going on the subject. I think he deliberately overdoes his articles anyway, just to provoke so much opinion :)
Unfortunately this leaves little mom n' pop web sites out of business.
True, but at the moment there isn't a need for such a thing. A lot of the mom n' pop web sites (good term BTW :)) probably won't carry any offensive material - I doubt the majority of web sites do. However again we come to the laws of supply and demand - if there are a lot of people wanting to host a web site and they cannot in their home country then someone will find a way to provide that service. The technology is there, but it's just not necessary at the moment. I'm sure a battalion of web site-less geeks could sort it all out if they were frustrated enough :)
Today, I am responsible for the content of my web site, and the buck stops here. If my ISP becomes co-responsible, what is going to happen to the personal website? What about controversial websites, that some find offensive? What about Free (speech) Software websites that some deep-pocketed lawyer-laden business finds offensive.
Even if the US sets this kind of precedent it still won't affect the web as a whole - many sites would move to servers and ISPs abroad, in countries where this kind of thing is allowed. This sort of thing would require every country in the world to agree, and then any country opting out could make a fortune hosting these sites. I believe that a lot of the online casino sites are hosted in the Cayman Islands where laws are a lot less strict than in the US.
What goes up must come down. The Romans sure did, and nobody ever thought they would.
And just how long did the Roman Empire last? Several centuries IIRC. While things tend to move faster today than they did then, once we are in the situation of having a group of meta-national corporations (read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series for a great take on the future development of Earth's corporations) controlling almost all services and goods the situation can be stable for a long, long time. Just look at the MS monopoly. Once a company has got itself into that position it can stay there practically indefinitely given some reasonably intellegent and ruthless people running it. And the larger the corporation, the longer it can stay in that position, through sheer inertia if for no other reason.