There is nothing better than a Slashdot interview with someone who not only reads and understands Slashdot but can out-troll the trolls. Admittedly, the questions you asked Neal Stephenson were great in their own right, but his answers... Wow! let's just say that this guy shows how it's done.

James Edward Gray II writes " Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide (Second Edition), known as the Pickaxe II to its fans, is an extremely current view of the Ruby programming language. Revised primarily by Dave Thomas, a founding father of the English Ruby community, Programming Ruby is distilled expertise from a reliable source. In the past, quality English documentation of Ruby has been in short supply, but if any one volume could solve that problem, this is it." Read on for the rest of Gray's review.

Doc Ruby writes "Wired reports that the "Senate could pass a bill as early as Wednesday evening that would let government counter-terrorist investigators instantly query a massive system of interconnected commercial and government databases that hold billions of records on Americans".

Pan T. Hose writes "The long awaited release of Parrot 0.1.1 "Poicephalus" has been finally announced on perl.perl6.internals newsgroup and perl6-internals mailing list simultaneously by Leopold Toetsch followed by an announcement on use Perl by Will Coleda and now also on Slashdot." (Read on for a list of changes since the last release, as well as a number of useful links.)

SexyFingers writes "Sun released Java 1.5. The non-API stuff that they've added made it finally "catch-up" with C# - since both languages are built to support OOP from the ground-up, their constructs become almost identical as additional OOP "features" are supported. So if you're doing C# and your foundations in OOP are rock-solid, there really isn't any difference whether you're coding C# or Java."

Doc Ruby writes "Colorado researchers 'have constructed microfluidic gates that use the relative flow resistance of liquid to carry out the basic logic operations NOT, AND, OR, XOR, NOR and NAND. The researchers have also combined a pair of gates into a half adder, which carries out half the operation of addition.' All CPUs processing binary logic are made of these types of gates, but usually execute as flows of electrons in wires, not fluids in tubes. Will this advance revolutionize chemistry and computing the way electric gates revolutionized electronics and computing? Will 'fluid programmers' give new meaning to "flowchart"?"

Doc Ruby writes "AP is reporting that 'The government's cybersecurity chief has abruptly resigned after one year with the Department of Homeland Security, confiding to industry colleagues his frustration over what he considers a lack of attention paid to computer security issues within the agency. Amit Yoran, a former software executive from Symantec Corp., informed the White House about his plans to quit as director of the National Cyber Security Division and made his resignation effective at the end of Thursday, effectively giving a single's day notice of his intentions to leave.' Yoran is the third cybersecurity chief in a row, after Richard Clarke and Howard Schmidt, to quit the Bush administration citing organizational inability to do his job. Maybe the job can't be done." In a possibly related story, individuals take cybersecurity lightly: Ant writes "This story says that consumers have a casual approach toward cybersecurity and fail to grasp the pervasiveness of online threats, according to a study released Thursday. More than a third of the 493 PC users surveyed by the nonprofit National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) said they had a greater chance of winning the lottery or being struck by lightning than of being hit by malicious code."

anonymous writes "The Free Software community is on a quest for the next generation development environment. Is it .Net, is it Java? Many (including Havoc) are quick to dismiss some of the gems invented by the Free Software community itself. Yes, Ruby is an incredibly consistent and clean language designed specifically to incorporate many of the best features and ideas of predecessors. Absolutely everything in Ruby is an object and practically everything can be redefined or extended on the fly. The effects and resulting power of such flexibility can be quite astounding to those who have adapted to contemporary language limitations. Now, the Ruby environment has been seamlessly integrated into KDE through Korundum, meaning that well-integrated and first-class desktop citizens for Linux can be sketched and developed in an extremely short time. Caveat: No explicit compilation is required and programming seems so easy it feels like cheating."

Surye writes "Though a few days late on the release, Irrlicht has released version 0.7 of its engine. The site describes it as 'an open source high performance realtime 3D engine written in C++. It is completely cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderer, and has all of the state-of-the-art features which can be found in commercial 3d engines.' Bindings for java, perl, ruby, and python, and it is platform independent (only implemented currently on Windows and Linux, but when it moves to other platforms, the code will be completely portable). The feature list is simply amazing, and since it's still being quite actively developed, I can see this becoming a major player soon."

Doc Ruby writes "Black Box Voting has exposed a security hole in Diebold machines that tabulate votes collected from electronic voting machines. A code entered into the tabulator's user interface duplicates the "secure" counts into an insecure count which can be changed, and counted instead. The "double books" vulnerability and exploit were reported to the manufacturer over a year ago, and confirmed, while major customers (California and Washington states) were notified shortly thereafter. In spite of some revisions, the latest version of the software remains insecure. Diebold voting machines running GEMS version 1.18.x are vulnerable, running in about three dozen states. Although the software is widely deployed, and scheduled for use in shortly upcoming elections, risk mitigations are available, mostly protocols restricting physical or network access to the machines. Other auditing/accountability measures for ensuring only trusted access to the system are recommended."

Doc Ruby writes "The Congressional chatter about 'canning spam', in the CAN-SPAM law since January, has turned out to really mean 'they can still spam'. TechWeb News reports that 'In July, compliance fell for the first time under one percent to a measly 0.54 percent', from its 3% max. The researchers claim the ball has been dropped by 'law enforcement'. Those police are probably too busy deleting the 80% spam from their email, like everyone else."

Doc Ruby writes "LinuxJournal has an intro to uCLinux by David McCullough, one of the project developers. Specific techniques are discussed for Linux programming on this version, that runs on devices without the MMU that the Linux VM usually requires. Developers can make Linux apps run on uCLinux devices, including PDAs like a Palm IIIx, routers, DVD players, and even a FPGA."

Doc Ruby writes "At Verified Voting, TechWatch is recruiting technology professionals interested in election integrity 'By applying technical expertise to mind the polls, TechWatch volunteers can chronicle election problems at this upcoming election and future elections, as well as for follow-on litigation and policymaking, in a way that most poll watchers cannot'. Here's your chance to weigh in on an HCI that really matters."

Slashback this evening brings you a dose of updates and clarifications to previous stories about Yahoo!'s block on third-party messaging products, the Ruby-based Linux distro called Rubyx, and a few notes of caution on "unlimited" wireless internet service.

Doc Ruby writes "The TreoCentral community has announced a bounty for the first BlueTooth SDIO driver delivered for the Treo 600 (PalmOS 5). The thread shows the development of both the requirements of the quarry, and the contributions to the bounty. If this process works, is 'open funding' of development the next wave of the emerging online community? How will the 'traditional' vision/scope> requirements> features> >recode> retest> demo> cycle expand to include the user community in the financing?" Update: 06/16 19:43 GMT by T : Updated the bounty link to a server better able to handle it.

prostoalex writes "Folks at the Scriptometer conducted a practical survey of which scripting language is the best. While question like that is bound to generate flamewars between the usual Perl vs PHP, Python vs Perl, VBScript vs everything crowds, the Scriptometer survey is practical: if I have to write a script, I have to write it fast, it has to be small (less typing), it should allow me to either debug itself via a debugger or just verbose output mode. sh, Perl and Ruby won the competition, and with the difference of 1-2 points they were essentially tied for first place. Smalltalk, tcc, C# and Java are the last ones, with Java being completely unusable in scripting environment (part of that could be the fact that neither Java nor C# are scripting languages). See the 'Hello world' examples and the smallest code examples. Interesting that ICFP contests lately pronounced OCaml as the winner for rapid development."

Doc Ruby writes "Investigating a crack of eVoting company VoteHere, the FBI is said to be issuing a subpoena for the traffic logs of journalist Beverly Harris' BlackBoxVoting website. The FBI is pursuing Harris on the theory that her site is the connection between incriminating memos leaked from (VoteHere competitor) Diebold and the intrusion into VoteHere's servers. Are you on the list?"

jjohnson asks: "As a coder I've been exposed to a lot of programming languages, big and small, and they're all in (pseudo) English, reflecting their invention and development in English speaking countries (or to gain traction in English speaking countries, such as Ruby). Of course, there's no reason a programming language couldn't be developed in Russian, using a cyrillic character set; or Chinese, using kanji; or Japanese, using hiragana. All three of those nations have big/advanced enough developer communities to justify the development of native-tongue programming languages, which have the obvious benefit of not requiring their developers to learn/code in a foreign language. What non-English programming languages exist, and how do they compare?"

herrvinny writes "As a followup to a previous Slashdot Games article, the upcoming Pokemon Colosseum GameCube game will download an update to a Ruby/Sapphire Pokemon game to fix the internal clock." Pokemon players in the US who want their games patched without buying a new GameCube game can take their carts to EB World or GameStop stores to receive the update. There's also a "special gift" distributed with the patch that requires an open party slot.

Andrew Walrond writes "Rubyx the OS is created from source by rubyx the ruby script. Got it? The same small ruby script handles all subsequent package management, customised parallel and distributed user-mode package builds, and can create a live CD. For good measure, Rubyx (the os) sports an all new init and rationalised service management system written in ....can you guess?..."