It's amazing to encounter so prescient, political and imaginative a worldview as was brought us some years ago in -- of all things -- a paper-and-paper game called "Mage The Ascension." Like "Shadowrunner" and other compelling works, "Mage" is one of the memorable folktales of this culture, the sort of tales which now mostly seem to have taken sophisticated electronic form.

Tower writes: "Compaq Computer (Digital) and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center have won a $36 million contract to build a 2,728-processor supercomputer using 1.1 GHz EV68 processors in a 682 node Beowulf setup. Check it out here." This is a different machine than this one: That one was supposed to be used to calculate nuclear explosions, this one will be used by the National Science Foundation to work on biophysics, global climate change, astrophysics and materials science, according to the article.

A few years ago, the pen-and-pencil game "Shadowrun" would have seemed an especially geeky fantasy. In the Corporate Republic, it looms much larger, both a warning and a prophesy. Many of us are Shadowrunners now, many more are going to be in the 21st century. Fifth in a series. (Read More).

On May 23 we requested questions for Greg Lindahl, chief designer of the new NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratories massive Alpha Linux Cluster. Here are his answers. Fascinating stuff for people interested in big-time parallel computing.

Irrational Exuberance -- a provocative, even scary new book by Yale economist Robert J. Shiller -- is sending shock waves through Wall Street. Shiller argues that the techno-fueled stock-market boom is based on emotion, rumor, pyschology and herd instincts (like excitement about the Net), rather than on any rational facts or data -- and that it can't last. In fact, he writes, technology may be driving the market mad. If he's right, the market has to fall, and technology companies will be among those most significantly affected. (Read More).

Net scholar Mark Stefik has written The Internet Edge, Social, Technical and Legal Challenges for a Networked World, an effort to put in perspective and historical context this amazing, unnerving moment in human and technological history. Happily or not, we are all now living on the Internet Edge. The real change is just beginning. First of a series discussing some of the ideas raised in the book. (Read More).

dewey writes "Tera, a new kid on the supercomputing block, has successfully completed its acquisition of the supercomputing pioneer, Cray (formerly owned by SGI). The new company will take Cray's name. Tera has a press release from a month ago that spells out some of the details of the deal. "

Stephen Cass dropped this into my submissions box last week, and he figured all of you might be interested in this editorial regarding research institutes, corporate interests and how this relationship may develop in the future. He writes, "Freely available software, developed by researchers, is good for science and keeps commercial companies on their toes. In an era of quasi-monopolies, research institutions should encourage it." Intrigued? Read the article below and think about ways in which we can answer this question: What can we do to we keep researchers in the Open Source community and not lose them (and their science) to the Corporate World where their breakthroughs will become another piece of "Intellectual Property"?

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.