You asked for it; you got it. We asked Jon Katz your questions, ranging from the community to religion, and he's offered up his responses. If you can't get enough of our resident gasbag, check out his interview at Playboy, too.

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas once wrote that the right to be left alone is the beginning of all freedom. That's bad news, because privacy as we've come to understand the idea is over, and tracking software -- now widely deployed on the Web and in businesses from banking to supermarkets -- helped to kill it.

The Human Genome Project, often referred to on this site, may be the most inspiring and disturbing technological project in contemporary history. It embodies the often tragic drama of contemporary technology: well-meaning people trying in the noblest way to improve the world; setting in motion forces few ordinary people understand, agree upon or are prepared for.

coaxial writes: "At SuperComputing '99, the fastest network in the world, 2.4 gigabits, was built between the University of Washington and Microsoft's Redmond campus thanks to the DARPA-sponsored National Transparent Optical Network (NTON), the university's Pacific/Northwest Gigapop, and Nortel. You can read all about it from the NCSA now apart of The Alliance . " Cool, MP3's and DECSS'd DVD movies at the speed of the light.

DaveM writes "The Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory is working with IBM and VA Linux Systems to build "Chiba City" -- the largest supercomputing cluster dedicated to highly scalable open source software development. The 512-CPU Linux cluster will be opened to the U.S. research community, including universities, laboratories and industry. "

One of America's most enduring and self-deluded myths about itself is that it's a free, thus morally superior country. It's not, as last weeks' feature on Princeton Bioethicist Peter Singer made clear. This society is riddled with unapproachable taboos. But technology is changing that, making some of our self-inflated notions of ourselves actually come true.

First Prediction: January l, 2000. People will be ticked off to suddenly realize the Millenium is a year away. Join Sir Arthur Clarke, me, a Princeton plasma physicist and hopefully hordes of geeks and nerds in the first 21st century Slashdot Predict-A-Thon. Your history of the 21st century is as good -- and as welcome -- as anybody else's.

Part Two: How to stave off the Coming Cyberclysm, to find some rational choice besides the backwards-looking Luddites and the Gee-Whiz Techno-Heads who dominate discussions about technology? Only the Gods can help, and I might have found one who will (one of the Fates, as it happens), with the help of AI computing advances and intuitive software.

Greg Lindahl writes "The Forecast Systems Laboratory, a divison of NOAA, selected HPTi, a Linux cluster integrator, to provide a $15 million supercomputing system during the next 5 years. The computational core of this system is a cluster of Compaq Alphas running Linux, using Myrinet interconnect. Check outwww.hpti.com for information on the company. "

Pundits in media and politics are already going into overdrive hyping 2000 as the year in which the Net will crash into the American political system like a tidal wave.

It's not going to happen. Washington is the last holdout against the wall-busting power of the Net. They'll go kicking and screaming, but not next year.

Thanks to Scott Elyard, who has returned and has written a "second chapter" to his original piece about SGI. Once again he's debunking mysteries, and discussing changes within SGI. Click below to read more.

IBM's announcement that it was funding a Deep Computing Institute made news on the Web when it was announced on May 24, but little offline. That's a shame. Deep Computing is a hugely significant convergence of technology, deep corporate pockets, the open source software model, artificial intelligence, powerful new 3-D visualization programs, a new generation of supercomputers and some of the best researchers in the world. This won't solve all the world's problems, but it will sure tackle them in a radical new way. Especially the ones whose solutions have been beyond reach.

John A. Turner writes "Haven't seen anything on /. about how much Linux-related stuff there was at Supercomputing '98 so thought I'd mention it. One of the best things was a panel discussion titled "Clusters, Extreme Linux, and NT". There's a nice summary of the Linux-related events at SC '98 at the Extreme Linux site " Note that reactions to Red Hat's support options announcements included One area in which Linux is far ahead of the pack is clustering . Has any participant written up a summary we could post? Update Rahul Dave has written a report for us.

The NSCA has done some not-very-novel research: build a cluster of computers and solve a parallelisable problem on it. The novelty? Well it runs on NT, so now Microsoft is crowing that NT is wonderfully scalable. As contributor Mark Harrison points out: "I figure if this NT cluster is using NT Server, which it must if it it is using more than 10 TCP/IP connections per node (I know nothing about these parallel systems, but with 124 two-processor nodes, each node must communicate with more than ten other nodes). NT server costs a bunch (about $1,000 per licence, I believe), so the cost is $124,000 for the OS. So much for their tagline, "High-Performance Supercomputing at Mail-Order Prices." How about "Save $123,975 on your supercomputer -- Use Extreme Linux." " Well... it might be time to help Ben Elliston who presented his encapsulation of IP in SCSI in August's Linux Journal which has a higher throughput than ethernet.

Frey Sigurjonsson sent us this Techweb story about the Avalon Beowulf cluster. By now we all know that this is the machine that scored in the top 500 super computers list. This is just a nice mainstream article about the about the 68 computer cluster that achieved 19.2 GFlops for a mere $150,000.

sasha e. writes "Wired.com has a nice story on Avalon, making interesting points about Beowulf as the future of supercomputing. Nice bit of pro-Linux in there as well.. "

starheight writes "Bill McColl has written an article contrasting traditional massively parallel supercomputing with a whole new generation of compute-intensive apps that require massively scalable architectures and can deliver both incredible throughput and real-time responsiveness when processing millions or billions of tasks."