Since this is not yet documented, I figured I would mention this here now... we are experimenting with some very rudimentary keystroke navigation in the discussion2 system. We support both FPS style WASD keybindings, as well as the standard vi layout of HJKL. Down/Up will cycle you through next/previous comment chronologically... left/right will cycle you through next/previous in thread order. Holding SHIFT down while you press the navigation key will collapse the previous comment. And when you get to the end, pressing down or right will attempt to retrieve more comments if you want them.

What this means is that you can now use D2 to simulate most of the most popular viewing modes of the original discussion system. By dragging both the abbreviate & display sliders right next to each other you effectively remove abbreviated comments which simulates nested mode. By toggling comment retrieval order to 'Oldest First' and using up down, you can effectivel read the discussion from oldest to newest. And of course the default settings gives you the best comments first, providing a nice default view of discussions for most anonymous users (who rarely participate and we want to really show only the best comments).

You can also disable D2 in the comment prefs (the word 'prefs' in the floating dialog box) if you are logged in. Right now we're testing D2 for a large percentage of anonymous readers. As soon as we finish IE7 support we'll roll out D2 for the rest of the ACs.

The Ann Arbor party seemed to go great- lots of people packed Leopold Bros place, doing battle with barflies and football fans. It was somewhat bizarre watching obvious normal bar people try to figure out what this large crowd of 'different' people were all about. We handed out a ton of t-shirts, drank much alcohol, ate nachos etc. Our party had a great number of Slashdot and SourceForge staffers... all folks who have been with Slashdot for so many years it's hard to remember Slashdot without them. I'm not exactly sure how many people eventually showed up... a lot of our RSVPs didn't show, and a lot more didn't bother sign up at all, so I think the two balanced out.

For me personally these sorts of things are always difficult. I'm not very good at crowds. I can smile for a picture, but I'm perpetually nervous when surrounded by strangers who have certain expectations of me. There's a reason I live life behind a keyboard!

Further compounding matters lately is baby induced chronic sleep deprivation. Me want REM cycles. It's always nice to get out and have a beer. Kathleen & I get only so many hours "out" together now, gotta make each one count. The party attendees were all cool... and understanding that I was pretty tired.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who showed up... I've still got the california party later this week. Hopefully my throat heals up by then. The only real problem with this location was the acoustics... I had to shout to be heard, and stick my ear in front of people to hear them (baby crying has done some amount of hopefully temporary ear damage). My throat is raaaaw from yelling. Sucking on cough drops helps.

As for other parties, boxes have been shipped. Hopefully they have arrived to most places on time, although I think they were shipped on a slowish shipping option so I'm not sure. I know some folks got shirts on friday, but I'm sure the others will arrive monday or so. Also, keep in mind that we only had 700 shirts and 2300 attendees from 136 parties with more than 5 attendees. So obviously not every party is getting a box... when we sent out the bulk mail, we had over 100 replies, and I'm sure there was nowhere near enough to fill even that.

But shirts or not, I hope your parties go well. Remember to submit videos or pictures or whatever to anniversary at slashdot dot org for your chance at the $1k ThinkGeek gift certificate grand prize.

So if you only count anniversary parties with 5 or more attendees, we have 128 venues with a grand total of 2366 attendees. The largest parties include Pudge's in seattle with 129, mine in Ann Arbor with 194 and Hemos's in CA with 197.

I'm sure that there will be many RSVPs that no show, but still, that's still an awful lot of interest. We'll be shipping shirts to a good number of those parties, but we have triple the attendees to shirts available, so we'll see just how far we're able to spread the love. Emails will be going out to party planners in the next couple days to get postal addresses.

As we're nearing 100 signed up people for the A2 Slashdot anniversary party, we've changed the venue to Leopold Bros... it's just a block south from the other place and they can handle us. I've also got word that we'll be printing a few hundred extra shirts since there was already like 50 parties with 5+ people in attendance. We certainly won't have enough for everyone, but we'll make a good dent in it.

I will of course put this information into a story next reasonable chance I get for a story, but I figured at least I could get the word out there. The anniversary party entry on the official page has been updated with the new location & address.

The A2 party already has like 70 signed up. We're going to have to rethink venue or time I think if we really have that many people. Wait a few more days and see what we can work out. Keep reading in the party forum for info. We have 500 shirts to print and hand out... it'll be fun to see where they go.

more info as I get it. There will be notes on future stories as days get closer.

If any of you are using an iPhone and are willing to help test out some Slashdot handheld crap, shoot me off a note... my email is the same address as always, and if you can't guess it, you probably can't help anyway ;) I've built a stylesheet and Tim put together a few little options that we think will make a few bits of Slashdot look nice on an iPhone (or really most lower resolution displays) but unfortunately none of us actually HAVE one yet... so anyway, let us know. Or if you work at Apple, send us freebies dammit!

The discussion2 system had 2 notable changes in this weeks code refresh that I'd love to hear feedback on (use email if you can't post here). The first is Scott's very excellent new draggable slider control. Everyone mostly figured out the slider tool before, but it was very unresponsive... but no longer! It has some layout niggles under some browsers, but it functions properly in most of them.

Equally exciting is new dynamic updating... the old code actually transferred the full discussion and displayed/hid content as requested by your settings. Thew new code properly requests comments as needed, and when needed. This cuts page sizes dramatically for people reading with filters turned up very high. It also puts us a few stone throws away from a 'refresh' button which can just add newly posted comments in place. There's some work to be done yet, but it's made a lot of progress. I hope you like it.

We've tested everything under most of our most common browsers... if you're curious they are very roughly FF2 38%, FF1.5 19%, IE7 8%, Safari 7%, Opera 3%. Missing from our compatibility list is IE6 with 13% of our traffic. Fixing IE6 is non-trivial and we'd certainly take patches... but since the IE6 population lost a point or two last month anyway, and fixing the code is pretty substantial, we'll probably be focusing our development time on the larger and growing platforms (FF2 and IE7 obviously being the most important).

Anyway, merry-whatever-you-believe to everyone out there. I'm spending my holidays the same as always- driving from family gathering to family gathering. Roads suck but the person I like being with most is in the car too, so it doesn't matter.

As long as we are dreaming big dreams about colonies on the moon and Saturn's moon Titan, how about making a cloud city into reality? Not on Earth, of course, but floating high among the cloud tops of the outer gas giants such as Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, where there is no solid ground to stand on.

The idea is more feasible than you might think. One surprise is that gravity turns out to be a non-issue -- even though these planets have many times more mass than the Earth, the fact that they are gas giants makes them much less dense than our planet, reducing the force of gravity at the "surface". For instance, at the altitude where the air pressure is at one atmosphere, the gravitational force is a benign 0.9 G on Saturn and Uranus, and 1.1 G on Neptune. (This is unfortunately not true of Jupiter, where the gravitational force in the cloud tops is around 2.4 G.)

Right now, nobody is planning any balloon missions to the gas giants. But I wonder how hard it would be to construct a large "cloud base", suitable for permanent habitation. Obviously you would start with unmanned balloon probes, which would find each other and link up to create a platform. One of the early "pioneer" balloons would have to contain a massive power source, preferably a sizeable nuclear reactor -- with the distances involved, solar power is not an option.

At some point the balloon platform could only grow by producing its own materials, as "importing" them from outside is ridiculously expensive. The atmospheres of the outer planets are abundant in hydrocarbons, mostly in the form of methane, so synthetic materials could be produced in conjunction with the energy from the nuclear reactor. From this perspective, Saturn might be more attractive, as its atmosphere contains significant amounts of nitrogen (in ammonia), oxygen (in water vapor), and phosphate (in phosphine), allowing the creation of more complicated plastics. Robotic labs in the balloon platform would separate out the required elements from atmospheric gases, react them into plastics, form the plastics into structural elements, and construct the station -- all of which would have to be automated processes.

As the mass of the station grows, the automated construction process would have to produce new balloons. And before the first humans arrived, the automated construction process would have to produce pressurized living spaces, including life support systems. Humans could travel to the station in a special space vehicle that converted into a blimp after entering the atmosphere; the blimp could maneuver into the station and dock with it for personnel transfer, like the Goodyear Blimp. Getting away would be a little trickier. It is possible to extract rocket fuel from atmospheric gases, but the rocket would have to be enormous to achieve escape velocity, which is 2-3 times that of Earth (the lower density does not help you here). Sending humans away from Earth is a challenge even for the largest contemporary rockets, much less rockets made out of plastic by an automated robot.

Still -- as fanciful as all this sounds -- it has previously been made as a serious proposal, in a paper entitled "Helium-3 Mining Aerostats in the Atmosphere of Uranus", by Jeffrey van Cleve. Outer gas giants have enormous stores of Helium-3, which is a potential fuel for fusion energy. In the distant future, Helium-3 might be a highly valuable substance, making a permanent mining colony on a gas giant feasible.

Interesting fact for today.

As all good Canadian schoolchildren know, the Province of Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949. What most good Canadian schoolchildren do not know is that, from 1907 to 1934, Newfoundland had the status of an independent Dominion in the British empire, effectively an independent nation, and legally equivalent to Canada at the time.

Newfoundland exchanged British rule for Dominion status on September 26, 1907, simultaneously with New Zealand. Due to the financial hardships and political crises imposed by the Great Depression, the Newfoundland government agreed to suspend its Dominionship on February 16, 1934, and revert to British rule, becoming the only British dominion to surrender its status.

During that time, Newfoundland had ten Prime Ministers, starting with Edward Patrick Morris and ending with Frederick C. Alderice.

The precise legal definition of "Dominion" leaves some question as to Newfoundland's true independence. Dominions were self-governing entities that were entitled to organize their own militaries and pursue their own trade relations, but that were not entitled to pursue an independent foreign policy from Great Britain. Over time, the definition evolved to the point of the Balfour declaration of 1926, which stated that the dominions "are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth". Although the Balfour declaration left little doubt about the independence of the Dominions, formal de jure independence was finally realized by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, but Newfoundland never ratified it before reverting to British rule.

Thus, de facto if not de jure, Newfoundland was an independent nation prior to confederation with Canada, making it the only Canadian provice that was at one time a nation. How do you like them apples, Quebec?

And finally, a trivia question. Which US states were independent before achieving statehood? I can think of three; there might be more. (My answer is in the comments.)

I'm an assistant professor of computer engineering at a large public university. I'm also the department newbie, having been hired over the summer, so my first class as a real, live, full-time, tenure-track, daddypants-wearing prof wrapped up on Friday. I was teaching a digital logic design course, which was assigned to me randomly, and outside my area of specialty. Still, I was very pleased when I found out I would be teaching it - I liked it as an undergrad, and was a lab assistant for a similar course as a graduate student.

(As an aside, I should mention something for those who have never been on the salaried side of the desk at an institution of higher learning. At my school, the sum total of the direction I received was to be told what course I would be teaching, and to be given the calendar description of that course. Nobody ever asked to see my course notes, my handouts, my exams, or my assignments; nobody in the administration ever sat in on a lecture. I could have been teaching Faust or talking about my dog and nobody would have been the wiser. That's not to say that support was unavailable: the department bends over backwards to give help to faculty who want it, but they stay completely out of the way unless you ask. It's an exhilarating amount of freedom for someone fresh off of the PhD-postdoc treadmill.)

I thought I would do something a little different from those professors who had taught the class before, and borrow an idea from the prof who taught it when I was a lab assistant. I decided it would be a great experience for the students to take the last three weeks of lab periods and do a design project, where they would build something interesting such as a digital clock, a game, or something else similar. Using the in-house FPGA board (we use the Altera UP2, which is standard for a lot of computer engineering programs), it should have been easy for the students to come up with some interesting, non-trivial design problem, giving them design experience and reinforcing the lessons from the class. And everyone would be in awe of my pedagogical greatness.

Should have been. I forgot the most important rule of engineering design, which is that designs never fail in theory, they fail in practice.

The students had no end of problems, most of which were the university's fault for having poor equipment (and mine for not anticipating their needs). For example, the UP2 board has two chips: an EPM7128 for small projects (perfectly suitable for simple lab-bench stuff), and a Flex10K for larger projects (which most of the students ended up having to use). I guess nobody had ever used the Flex10Ks before, because nobody had soldered the appropriate headers onto the boards. After some scurrying around to get that problem fixed, there were no ribbon cable connectors to attach to the headers, meaning that an ad-hoc and very inefficient solution had to be found.

Then the Flex10K was found not to provide enough current to power external seven-segment displays. There were voltage problems with externally-attached chips - some students wasted their money buying external components that did not end up working, which surprised me in a lot of cases. There was a shortage of boards: three boards were left for the students to sign out after hours; because of the lack of ribbon-cable connectors, it was basically impossible for them to share, because they couldn't just unplug their circuit and hand the board to their friend.

And then - because I underestimated the difficulty of the project - I only assigned it to be worth 10% of the students' grade, in spite of the fact that everyone was putting in long hours in the lab for a solid week or more before the due date.

In the end I was very impressed with what the students produced: a couple of clocks, a "slot machine", an LCD text display, a tic-tac-toe game, and so on. A lot of the projects achieved their main objectives, in spite of the problems, and I marked leniently to acknowledge the long hours that everyone put in.

In the wrap-up class on Friday, I asked for feedback on the project, and got a host of these complaints. I am dreading my course evaluation results (but hey: get a low mark in the beginning and then move up; it's all about the improvement).

I'm having the students write up a list of hardware problems they encountered, and with the benefit of this experience, I think I will do the project again next time. But we professors learn things every day, too.

Being a supporter of intellectual property (IP) protections*, and because I seem to enjoy banging my rhetorical head against a wall, I am frequently led into debates about the relative merit of IP laws. My impression, reinforced by this recent exchange, is that the arguments commonly heard against IP are weak, and almost laughably so. So here's a short list of poor arguments against IP protection that should be avoided:

• If we abandoned IP protections, there would be much more innovation than there is today, because we could learn from other people's contributions. There's nothing preventing you from reading, e.g., a patent and discovering how something works. This is the whole point of patents. Also, if this is true, then why aren't jurisdictions where IP enforcement is lax (e.g., China, southeast Asia, the former Eastern bloc) beating the pants off the United States as far as innovation is concerned? Indeed, more effort in these places seems to be directed towards infringement than innovation, which completely belies the argument. I have yet to hear a convincing counter to this point, which is the biggest elephant in the room for the anti-IP crowd.
• In the absence of IP, people will still innovate, and people will still get paid to innovate. A watered-down statement of the above, and true. But they would not innovate as much, because corporate and private research would be difficult to fund. It would be much riskier to develop, and harder to fund, a start-up tech company, because a much larger company could use its full resources to reverse-engineer the start-up's product, and use its reach to shut the start-up out. These risks scare away investors. To a much larger degree than today, professional innovators would only be funded by the government or by wealthy benefactors (e.g., at universities). I don't see as utopian a world where innovation takes place at the whim of the government or for the pleasure of the rich.
• In technology, being first to market is more important than having IP protection. Often true, but without protection, investing in innovation is riskier (because a competitor could copy your product at any time), and the comparative payoffs for investing in innovation are smaller (because your pricing power is gone once your innovative advantage is gone). Again, investors react to higher risk and lower payoff by getting out of the market.
• Once your product is stale, your market is gone, so you have to innovate. There doesn't seem to be any lack of buyers for, say, toasters. Their technology hasn't changed in decades, and in a lot of cases, neither has their style. There are enormous markets for well-made, static products.
• The Renaissance was one of the most innovative periods in human history, and they had no IP protection. True. But this is my favorite weak argument. The Renaissance did not have science as we know it today. There was no steam engine, no mass production, no replaceable parts. The economy of most nations was based primarily on agriculture. The printing press only made its appearance towards the end of the period. So basically, this argument boils down to the following: "In a world that is nothing like the one in which we live, they innovated without IP."

I support IP laws because innovation drives our economy, they support the little inventors by giving their ideas real value, and mostly because they have been demonstrated to work in practice. There are many things about them that suck, granted, but there is no evidence whatever that the alternative represents an improvement.

*I support reform of IP laws, but not abolition.

If you have enabled the Discussion2 beta, you will notice a number of confusingly titled links appearing in comments. These control expansion/contraction of threads in several different ways. They are confusingly titled because we want you to try each of them and let us know which ones you like best without concerning yourself explicitly with how they work.

You can email your feedback to me (try d2 at cmdrtaco dot net) or some of you can actually post here.

I think next week will have a patch with a number of D2 changes (including some results from this experiment hopefully) so your help is really appreciated.

As web applications grow more and more featureful, I slowly find myself replacing desktop apps with web apps. This really makes a lot of navigation on the desktop a real pain in the ass. Example: Gmail. It's probably open in a tab right now. Not sure which one... occasionally we accidentallly close tabs. But if I use quicksilver to open 'gmail' it will open a NEW tab every time. Same if I use the gmail notifier.

Applications each open individually, and they know that they get focused when activated/launched whatever. But effectively firefox may (or may NOT!) actually encapsulate 2-3 different applications... spreadsheets, email, or say, the bookmarks that I use to maintain Slashdot's submissions bin.

I'm not exactly sure how to deal with this. I imagine this problem will only grow if good web applications continue to replace desktop applications.

one of the many emails I get on an almost daily basis is email requests to be included on the slashdot supporters list. I read these emails, and every few weeks filter out the junk links (SEO spam etc) and add a few to the list. I try to include only links that look like they are actual people. I'm not crazy picky, but I don't include really obvious stuff. Some folks get annoyed if I don't choose there link, but here's a recent one that really kind of blew my mind. I won't tell you the domain name for obvious reasons, but this guy emailed me 3-4 times over the course of a few days. Finally today I got this one:

Subj:Please don't fuck people around, thanks

Now he rambles a bit, but regardless, I don't need rudeness in my inbox, so I finally reply to this guy. He'd send me like 4 messages, so I figured I'd tell him to stop it. I simply wrote

I am not going to link you back. that is very rude.

This was like 4 hours ago. And keep in mind that the preceding message was the only one I wrote. These all came from him in rapid succession:

Yes thanks,
how about not naswering on my prevoius e-mails ?

How about FUCK DMOZ.ROG ?
Sorry
But i don't know any more who is more Crude, or Rude
any way thanks for your answer ...

followed by...

Thanks, your button has been removed.
At least i don't need to play a prostitute in order to get a link on your
site.

And minutes later he links me one of the entries on the supporters page that his site is better than. But then the truth comes out:

If i did not wrote that subject would you answer me than ?
I apologize, i stop smoking now in 5 weeks :-)

Ok, so that explains it. He quit smoking. That sucks. Must be rough. But then he needs to further clarify:

PLEASE IS THERE A WAY I CAN APOLOGIZE FOR THIS ?
I'm on the web since 1997 ...
I'm sorry ...
I'm 43 years old (married + 4 children)
I have stopped smoking last 5 weeks, this might have reduced my patience ...
Thank You.
This is my last e-mail and i will be not bothering you.

Now I actually kind of feel bad about all of this. I mean, not like baby punching bad, but at least an aww thats unfortunate. Until I get...

OK i understand, you hate muslims ...

WTF?! Muslims? When did that come into it? It's pretty clear that this guy's english is not his first language, but who am I to judge? My english is my first language and I'm barely literate. But somehow this guy has determined that I hate his religion, even tho I didn't even know what it was. But wait, that's not all:

OK i think you are a Spam filter not a human right ?
If I use "Fu*ck" word you react directly ...
OR are you Serbian and hate Albanians ?

and most recently:

Probaly you don't know what APOLOGIZE is.

Poor spam filter.

Mind you all of these messages were sent minutes apart- when I was out picking my car up from the shop! But it doesnt' end. While writing this journal entry I got

OK i see you hate Jews,
I'm half jewish ...
but i can't hep

Now wait a minute, I thought he was muslim. And I was serbian? I'm very confused as to who I hate atm. But I'll end this with his last message

Hmm in no way i can trigger any other answer ?!

I guess this is the closest thing to triggering any answer I can think of.

Over the last few months, the office has become home to a variety of creatures. It started when samzenpus brought in a turtle. He found this poor creature stuck in road tar. He saved the thing from certain death, cleaned the tar off him and dropped him in an aquarium. Soon after Hemos brought in an old tank to put in some salt water fish. Not to be outdone I finally fulfilled a childhood fantasy by getting a pet Ball Python that i have named Col. Tubesnake.

He's doing well. He's been eating his mice like a good little snake. This morning he didn't seem interested in the mouse tho, which i understand. I've been giving him frozen feeder mice from the pet shop which don't seem to do much for his hunter instincts. This time I warmed the thing on my coffee cup heater thingee and got it a lot warmer then before and tossed it in the tank. He struck almost before the mouse hit the ground. Snakes kick ass. The question is who will be the first to get a scorpion or tarantula.

Random popular culture notes: Aaron Sorkin's new Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip premiered earlier this week and has a lot of potential. Good cast, and of course since Sorkin is basically my jesus, I really hope the show comes together. Tonight is the premiere of The Office. Not much else on network TV worth watching this season, which I guess leaves me time to farm for herbs and raid in warcraft and wish the expansion would come out.