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info on how to program a gba, using a gba? i wouldnt imagine a gba would make a great programming platform, altho it makes a nice target to develop for.

I assume that the boy has access to the family winbox and can get an MBV2 cable with his saved allowance. From there, he can use the family cable modem to download devkit advance and an emulator to the winbox, look at a couple examples, play with them, and learn how to program. Just make sure somebody else teaches him how to write maintainable code.

My prediction is that, unless antitrust legislation in the U.S. gets some teeth between now and then, the PC will become a Gameboy within fifteen years. Enjoy computers while they last.

Game Boy is a bad example. The Game Boy Advance is an open system, fully documented to the point that anybody with GCC can write software and run it on the GBA without taking a vow of silence or paying the big N. The only things the GBA checks before running your code are 1. the very simple checksum on the header and 2. a bit pattern that produces the Nintendo logo but is legal to copy under the Sega v. Accolade precedent. So go get GCC for ARM and an MBV2 cable from lik-sang.com and get hacking.

$article =~ s/become a Gameboy/become an XBox/; and it becomes more accurate.

While Nintendo currently have the hand-held crown it stopped accepting developers for the GBA a long time ago claiming that 400 was enough. From the handful of decent titles I'd guess it isn't.

Just because you can't sign up for Wario World (Nintendo's official developer support program) doesn't mean you can't develop GBA games and get published with one of the Tier-B publishers. If you want to get into GBA development, get yourself VisualBoyAdvance and GCC targeted for ARM7TDMI and start hacking. Then you can try your games on hardware with an MBV2 cable or Flash Advance Linker from Lik-Sang

Like the GBA it would almost certainly use an ARM chip as that's the only supported processor for Windows 'CE' 2002.

ARM or MIPS or PowerPC or x86 makes little difference compared to the graphics chip. Nintendo's GBA supports up to 128 sprites on top of four layers of scrolling, two layers of scrolling and one layer of rotation, two layers of rotation, or a bitmap. IIRC, Windows CE devices have only a bitmap and no hardware sprites, not even one for a mouse pointer because most of them are pen-based.

It's a sad thing but China is going to be more Free than america within a decade. The chinese have decided that they're going to use linux because 'Microsoft is an extention on the US government.' Which is a Scary thought... FBI: "we've determined you're using linux, and we've come to arrest you.."

China does supress a number of civil liberties, but soon america will be suppressing those liberties, and requiring you to use 'approved' hardware and software.

I just hope I'm wrong about this. I guess I better study those nuclear physics or start playing around with genetic engineering in my bathtub if I wan't to stand a chance against the oppressive police state that america is moving towards.

"the USA act is a mere tiny step away from the two way, always on televisions of 1984." What about interactive TV complete with targeted ads etc?

Have you ever played an evolution simulation like Primordial Life (sorry, Windows only. Wine?)? You can play aroung with the mutation rate, and try to find somethig optimal. Too low, and your creatures will never get past simple things, too high and you will create ill-adapted dodos. Perhaps this radiation is raising the mutation rate in the world. Have fun....

The GBA is actually more powerful than a SNES

Twice the CPU, twice the RAM, twice the graphics, and no more sound I/O lag.

it has pretty much the same gfx capability

Exactly twice as powerful. On Super NES, you could get three layers of 16 colors per tile or one Mode 7 layer of 256 colors per tile, and each line could hold only 256 pixels of sprites. On GBA, you can get four layers of tiles, two layers of tiles + one layer of Mode 7, or two layers of Mode 7. Each GBA scanline can hold more sprite pixels, allowing developers to fake more background layers. GBA sprites can also be 256-color and/or scaled.

worse sound

True, in a way. Super NES sound was 16-bit, with instruments compressed 4 to 1. GBA sound is 8-bit with uncompressed instruments. However, how many times will you be connecting the GBA to a rack system as opposed to a pair of simple headphones? Also, the GBA's ARM7TDMI CPU can see all the sound registers; the "loading" you saw on most Super NES games wasn't a problem with cartridge media but rather with the brain-damaged bus between the main CPU and the sound CPU. This was especially evident on Lord of the Rings, where turning off background music made map changes twice as fast.

it's not just a SNES in a tiny form factor, one has to recode

The Super NES was an enhanced NES, which used a single memory-mapped port for data writes to video RAM. The GBA is a new architecture based on memory-mapped everything, somewhat similar to the old Game Boy.

Recoding shouldn't be a problem; the GBA's ARM7TDMI processor has a decent GCC build available, and this makes coding much easier than it was for the 65c816 and SPC700 processors inside the Super NES, which could only use assembly language because they each had only three semi-general-purpose registers.

However, you'll never see Square games on GBA. Nintendo hates Square and Square hates Nintendo after how each treated the other in the Super Mario RPG project and the early days of the Final Fantasy VII project. On the other hand, what I've played of Golden Sun doesn't suck at all, and you already have the old Dragon Warrior games on GBC.

I would pay big bucks for a port of Zero Wing to GBA.

The Yahoo article doesn't mention this, but this month's print issue of Empire Magazine did. The Fellowship actors' tattoos all depict the Tengwar symbol for 9. (Tengwar being Tolkien's Elvish alphabet; you can see what it looks like here.)

the idea of FPGA computing has been around for a little while at least (look here for examples). i think Scientific American even wrote about "configurable computers" in 1997 or so. why aren't they more popular, then?

modern processors are well-adapted to general computing tasks.

FPGAs (read: custom iron) might be good for a few specialized tasks (breaking 3DES, for instance), but most of us will be a lot happier on our UltraSparcs and Athlons and G4s.

As for Hastings Research : maybe you would like to see a sample of some of their other quality research. When have you ever heard a white paper draw a metaphor between market conditions and a glass being half full? But seriously they do have a six foot magnetic whiteboard to "prototype" their research. (they don't put rookies in center field either.) If you need to know they also provide a list of profitable web sites. (Look to the bottom of the page for their judicious use of "keywords" to help prop up their standing in search engine results.)

This is the worst article ever on slashdot.

As for Hastings Research : maybe you would like to see a sample of some of their other quality research. When have you ever heard a white paper draw a metaphor between market conditions and a glass being half full? But seriously they do have a six foot magnetic whiteboard to "prototype" their research. (they don't put rookies in center field either.) If you need to know they also provide a list of profitable web sites. (Look to the bottom of the page for their judicious use of "keywords" to help prop up their standing in search engine results.)

This is the worst article ever on slashdot.

A few weeks ago here I saw someone use the phrase "by enlarge" where they obviously meant "by and large". Before I went and anally nitpicked this post, I had to go and look it up to make sure I was actually right.

Turns out this phrase has a nautical origin. I didn't know that. I picked this up, just like everyone else, by hearing it in a context meaning "for the most case" and just started saying "by and large" without knowing what it meant. Fortunately, there are abundant resources on the web to satisfy my anal-retentive nit-picking research needs:

Nautical Expressions in the Vernacular

"Captain Harris was already explaining by and large. With a piece of fresh Gibraltar bread and arrows drawn with wine he showed the ship lying as close as possible to the breeze: '. . . and this is sailing by the wind, or as sailors say in their jargon, on a bowline; whereas large is when it blows not indeed quite from behind but say over the quarter, like this.'

The origin is nautical, and had a very precise meaning. It was an order to the man at the helm of a sailing ship, meaning to sail the ship slightly off the wind. A similar command was "full and by" which meant to "sail as close to the wind as it can go."

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

From The Young British Soldier, Rudyard Kipling

Another appropriate quote:

Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

George Santayana

There is bitter fruit in Afghanistan. I hope the decision-makers in Washington are not being reckless.

I saw the last stanza quoted in an op-ed piece: from Rudyard Kipling's The Young British Soldier

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Personally, I'd like to sit back and watch Michael Caine's and Sean Connery's fine performances in The Man Who Would Be King again, but I'd like to throw a little historical perspective into the current crisis. I think the Afghans have been pissed off at the West ever since it was conquered by some Greek dude named Alexander. Of course the British didn't help the West with it's more recent activities either. Afghanistan really has a fascinating history, just as much as Iraq does. It's too bad they are both ruled over by despotic regimes. I am particularly taken with the first paragraph from this essay on Kipling's Imperialism:

In Kipling's work, as in his life, the British Empire assumed a complex mythical or legendary function, which he passed on to his readers. It was a positive force in the sense that it ordered and unified his creativity, and a negative one to the extent that it limited his perspective. In life he seems to have thought of it very much as one might have thought of the earlier Roman Empire: its purpose was to maintain stability, order, and peace amongst the heathen, to relieve famine, provide medical assistance, to abolish slavery, to construct the physical and the psychological groundwork for "civilization," and to protect the mother country. It was an island of security in a chaotic world. (And in fact, when the Empire did eventually dissolve, many of the worst nightmares of the Imperialists came to pass--in the slaughter which marked the partition of India, for example).

And while you're at it take a gander at Kipling's Imperialist apologist masterpiece The White Man's Burden

This war on terrorism is going to require of us a true understanding of our enemies and not to make the same mistakes others have before us in dealing with them. I will close my comments with the last stanza of that poem as well (believe me, the irony is not lost on me).

Take up the White Man's burden!
Have done with childish days--
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.

A prayer for Osama bin Laden
It's an interesting piece by Steffan O'Sullivan.

(Apologies for being OT.)

But I tried to contact the people at Steve Jackson Games but hey still haven't gotten their shit back from Big Bro' who's analyzing it over 5 year old jelly donuts.

Maybe not, but they did get a six-figure settlement that turned them into a large ISP and sustained them through a dip in the gaming industry, allowing them to keep producing new material at a blistering pace while other companies were cutting back.

All in all, Uncle Sam did 'em a favor. :-)

For those of you who have clueless friends out there, I've been doing a Jargon of the Day feature in my Weblog: http://www.io.com/persist1/log.php... for those who need a gentle introduction.

I was completely uphauled by this, and so promptly turned around and tried to get as many people interested as I could in Linux.

I guess I've been reading too many Aubrey/Maturin novels lately but I pondered that for a couple of minutes before realizing it wasn't meant to be a nautical metaphor...

Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.

They aren't likely to merge/get bought out any time soon. And they DO give shell access, but I'm not so sure about the multi-GIG user space mentioned in the original request. That kind of shopping list sounds more like a co-loc than a conventional ISP to me.

They aren't likely to merge/get bought out any time soon. And they DO give shell access, but I'm not so sure about the multi-GIG user space mentioned in the original request. That kind of shopping list sounds more like a co-loc than a conventional ISP to me.

Hey, you forgot about io.com in Houston and Austin. They also do strictly telnet[/ssh] accounts, and provide web space, anonymous FTP, and POP. They're a Linux shop with one host running FreeBSD.

Never used them, but I know people who did, and were generally happy about it.

How much does it cost to recompile a piece of code after modifying the source? Basically nothing. How much does it cost to fab a new chip after modifying the design? Millions of dollars.

I'm not saying that there aren't advantages to open source hardware (and there are precedents). But the advantages aren't as big as for software because not as many people can realistically participate. Let's look at some of the classic stated advantages of open source software:

• Anybody can fix it when it breaks. Not so with hardware. Even if you could identify the problem in the hardware description (which is often very difficult, even for people with an intimate knowledge of the design and more debugging resources than the Joe Average Hacker), writing a patch gets you nothing. You're not going to pay to fab a new run of wafers, so you still have to wait for the vendor. Plus, they will still have to verify that your patch works in all cases and doesn't cause new problems, and design verification takes more time than design itself.
• You can tweak it for your needs. Again, are you going to pay to fab custom chips with that hardware gnutella client? I don't think so. There's also the problem of verification, which is really difficult and time consuming.
• "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (Linus' law). Given that you don't have either the above two advantages, how many of you are going to take the time to a) learn Verilog/VHDL and b) get to know the code well enough to debug hardware failures? Also, how many of you have a logic analyzer, oscilloscope, etc.? I'm thinking the number of eyeballs involved from the general hacker community will be within epsilon of zero.

Of course if you're talking about reconfigurable computing then everything changes.

[Just in case you're wondering, I work in the Alpha mciroprocessor group at Compaq. Read into that whatever you like.]

'Cuz if double DES and triple DES were just as strong, then nobody would consume the extra CPU cycles or hardware traces to do 50% more computation, just to have the same results.
--

When I first read Chapter 1, I found myself reliving the past. I felt not only deja vu about the events, but of the emotions and the energy of those insane days in 1989. It freaked me out to replay those days nine years previous so clearly and completely. By the end of the chapter it was clear Suelette had captured the essence of what had happened at NASA and that she could tell it to others through the written word.

Download this book, you WILL NOT be disappointed.
If you like it, buy a hardcopy to support a really spiffy and clueful author.

Just in case we don't have enough mirror sites yet, here is another mirror site for the text version.

Cheers,
John "FuzzFace" McMahon
Pr. Security Engineer
Cable & Wireless GNO
(Previous life: Assistant DECnet Protocol Manager, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

They have everything you've asked for. My only real gripe is the relatively small disk quota that comes with the basic shell account.

See http://www.io.com/io/history.html for the details of their stance on privacy.

Steve Jackson Games got a court settlement from the Secret Service over their unlawful asset seisure and parlayed it into an ISP business. More about that here.

They've had their rights wrongly abridged by the government before, so they've been extra vigilant ever since.

I use them for shell-only access from a different part of the US. I get my dial-up (not springing for better bandwidth until it gets cheaper) from someone local. But they have services to suit most any need.

In case you're moderating and missed the on-topic point: Gygax is a pretty sad spokesman for supposedly persecuted game companies. If anything, TSR capitalized on the free publicity that D&D got when kids' suicides were blamed on it and religious nuts claimed it taught Satanism. For a more relevant, more persecuted game designer's perspective, talk to somebody at Steve Jackson Games. If that rings a bell, it may be due to the uproar when the US Secret Service raided the company, nearly put them out of business, but never brought charges.

Jim McCoy, Mojo Nation and the Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow are obviously just tools of the Illuminati.

Fnord.

Drug use is so much a part of the engineering and technology culture that at least one company has recognized the inevitability of drug use, and has codified policies and procedures for drug use and abuse. It's just a matter of time before this kind of thing is commonplace.

"I see programmers who start their day by stirring meth into their cup of coffee," said the Rev. Katherine O'Connell, a clinical psychologist and interfaith minister in Capitola, Calif., who has treated thousands of high-tech workers, politicians and executives for drug addiction since 1970.

This is the rather naive and complacent attitude of the general populus that the MPAA is counting on. In reality it really is a "slippery slope" kind of proposition that you have bought off on.

First, you can not figure what kind of enhancements can be made by knowing the encryption scheme. That is akin to what a patent examiner said at the turn of the century - "that everything that will be invented has been invented". Needless to say he was dead wrong. It is presumptuous to say that there can't be enhancements because you can't think of any off hand.

Secondly, why do we have to buy DVD players from select manufacturers in the first place? Maybe that's why you can't afford one. Why is the MPAA even involved in hardware anyway??? They make movies, they shouldn't have control over the devices that play them. If you doubt this, the government already bitched slapped them in the fifties. The U.S. Department of Justice' antitrust division filed suit against the eight major studios, accusing them of 'monopolizing the distribution of their films.' Gee, I guess history does repeat itself. They were forced to give up control of the theatre chains.

Third, the MPAA would rather dismantle the internet rather than lose their 'precious' encryption scheme. I take it you like to use the net now? How about when they come after slashdot because they might find DeCSS here? AKA Microsoft and the Kerberos scam (do a search if you don't know). The real croak is that in Taiwan there are so called 'legit' dvd disc makers by day and pirate houses by night stamping out bit by bit copies (it's far easier than hassling with DeCSS)
See here.

Fourth, government has already bowed to companies. That's how they were able to pass the DMCA in the dead of night with no debate and a voice vote (so nobody would be on record). That's why my own congressman (senator Hatch) tried to attach anonymously (at the request of a company, because their drug patent is about to expire) a bill to extend the length of drug patents. He had to do it anonymously because he knows voting seniors who can't afford drugs as it is would be really pissed. They are.

It's an academic excercise that is best left up to people who actually will explain it better for people like me.

Fifth, you don't mind that other people control what you can and cannot see. I do. This is a constitutional excercise. Otherwise you have other people explain better to you what may and may not do/see/read. It's called freedom.

Sixth, everybody knows that the best random numbers comes from shot noise generated from a reversed biased zener diode. See here.

I could go on, but I believe I have dismantled your post sufficiently.

Commercial OSes have to adopt the same official stance towards errors as Communist countries had towards poverty. For doctrinal reasons it was not possible to admit that poverty was a serious problem in Communist countries, because the whole point of Communism was to eradicate poverty. Likewise, commercial OS companies like Apple and Microsoft can't go around admitting that their software has bugs and that it crashes all the time, any more than Disney can issue press releases stating that Mickey Mouse is an actor in a suit.

According to the Cryptography FAQ , differential cryptanalysis was first discovered by the NSA, then rediscovered by Shamir. Quoting from the FAQ:

IBM has classified the notes containing the selection criteria at the request of the NSA.... `The NSA told us we had inadvertently reinvented some of the deep secrets it uses to make its own algorithms,' explains Tuchman.

Another view is taken by Terry Ritter, of Ciphers By Ritter.

His article Cryptography: Is Staying with the Herd Really Best? questions that; his view is that there should be a framework for there to be a rich set of ciphers in use, and that systems should readily, and dynamically, be able to shift to new ones should an older one be broken.

There are, widely stroking with the brush, two major approaches to security:

• Create "heavily armoured elephants," with comprehensive, well-understood sets of defenses.

  It is fairly well guaranteed that the armour will prove challenging to would-be attackers, whether we're talking about a crypto system, or a B1-certified version of Unix.

  Unfortunately, since such systems are big, heavy, and complex to assemble, if they do have weaknesses, they will prove extremely vulnerable to attack at that weak point.

• The other approach might be described as a "herd of gazelles."

  Gazelles are not heavily armoured; they depend on moving quickly to avoid capture by those that would eat them.

  More importantly, they are "physically independent." If a lion is busy chasing one gazelle, he can't catch any of the others.

The history of major Internet security breaches demonstrates that putting all the eggs in one "pot" is dangerous:

• The Morris "worm" only affected systems running Ultrix and SunOS
• The Melissa "virus" affected only those running Microsoft apps
• Ditto for ILOVEYOU

Another view is taken by Terry Ritter, of Ciphers By Ritter.

His article Cryptography: Is Staying with the Herd Really Best? questions that; his view is that there should be a framework for there to be a rich set of ciphers in use, and that systems should readily, and dynamically, be able to shift to new ones should an older one be broken.

There are, widely stroking with the brush, two major approaches to security:

• Create "heavily armoured elephants," with comprehensive, well-understood sets of defenses.

  It is fairly well guaranteed that the armour will prove challenging to would-be attackers, whether we're talking about a crypto system, or a B1-certified version of Unix.

  Unfortunately, since such systems are big, heavy, and complex to assemble, if they do have weaknesses, they will prove extremely vulnerable to attack at that weak point.

• The other approach might be described as a "herd of gazelles."

  Gazelles are not heavily armoured; they depend on moving quickly to avoid capture by those that would eat them.

  More importantly, they are "physically independent." If a lion is busy chasing one gazelle, he can't catch any of the others.

The history of major Internet security breaches demonstrates that putting all the eggs in one "pot" is dangerous:

• The Morris "worm" only affected systems running Ultrix and SunOS
• The Melissa "virus" affected only those running Microsoft apps
• Ditto for ILOVEYOU

Actually, according to this thesis, classic trolls (see the jargon file definition) generally have higher-than-normal intelligence. For some reason, a disproportionate number are also english. Go fig...

What do I do, when it seems I relate to Judas more than You?

The Atari 2600 console had only 128 bytes of RAM and extremely simplistic graphics hardware; it pretty much had to generate each pixel in software as it was being drawn to the screen. There were only six objects (two sprites, three squares, and a horizontal strip of background) that could not be told to "draw at (x, y)" like on the Nintendo but instead to "draw at the current electron beam position."

Here's how it worked, roughly, and from memory of many years ago [before I turned into a stereotypical unix geek, and everything was still somewhat mystical to me]:

In everyone's home directory were a variety of .snapshot-* directories, which automagically stored archives of various timespans of files which had been deleted or modified. IIRC (once again, it's been awhile), these archives were on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. So, if your .newsrc were to get hosed, you could just go back a day and retreive it. Or, suppose an untested change to your procmail configs starts sending everything to /dev/null, and you don't notice for several days because you don't get much mail - just go back a week and snag the old, working copy. Only changed/deleted files showed up in the snapshot directories, so it was fairly space-efficient.

The system seemed to work pretty well, though I only made use of it a few times. I've got no idea if this is a standard NetApps-specific thing, or supplied by some third-party daemon, and I've certainly never noticed anything of this sort for Linux or the BSDs.

If anyone has any specifics about this sort of thing, I'd love to see them.

[Ob-OnTopic: Since this already exists, Dumpster and Landfill icons already have the needed back-end support, though possibly only on a very sheltered platform...]

In the slashdot tradition of insisting upon the distinction (that no one else at all ever bothers to make) between "crackers" and "hackers," may I insist, in the cause of verbal precision, that we now also distinguish between "trolls" and "spammers"?

By the commonly accepted definition, a troll is someone looking to stir up a heated discussion by posting messages which aren't quite, ah, sincere. There may be, no there is, a certain degree of dishonesty in the composition of a traditional troll; however, the fact remains, if no one gets excited enough to respond, then the troll must be held a failure. Now isn't that the essence of a web log, to stimulate readers to participate? Isn't this the very reason why it is better to prowl slashdot than to sit and soak up TV? A successful troll on a weblog like this one is typically followed by many responses and rebuttals. And indeed, often what a troller has to say is often intellectually stimulating; on other occasions the substance of a troll is garbled, absurd rubbish, but at least it gets people to laugh, and while laughter may be officially verboten and verba non grata at the otherwise excellent Kuro5hin, I hope no one reading this here has a soul so dead that he decries the value of laughter. So at the very least, a troll has a certain definite value.

Conversely, a spammer is an odious fellow who overloads communication channels with innumerable copies of a message which no rational person has the slightest interest to read. The essence of spam is that it is something which emburdens you with the task of throwing it in the garbage.

osm is a troll, a damn good one. streetlawyer is a fucken troll. 80md is a troll, and so is Jon Ericson, and so is gnarphlager, and so is spiralx, and so, logging in from Chiapas, is Estanislao Martinez (andale! andale! arribe! viva Che!). The guy who penned this swell little piece of nuttiness is a troll. I'm sure if you peruse slashdot regularly you can think of other favorites of your own. Did you ever see any of these guys flood a thread with copy after copy of their works? No, you have not. These are funny guys, and their light and wacky humor is nothing but good news here in slashdot. I don't propose that we hand slashdot over to the true troll underground entirely, much as they'd probably like it, but I do say that slashdot can and should tolerate their eccentric literary troll art, in the reasonably small doses they supply.

But now compare these artists to beer mug man, or penis bird guy, or this fellow who has posted, out of the 141 comments here, 40 (as of my last count) pointless content-free comments titled "NOBODY" to this article. The basic difference is, their posts are all empty and all the same, i.e. boring, and they repeat and repeat and repeat themselves. That, fellow readers, is nothing more nor less than pure spam.

Please refrain from insulting osm by comparing his creative stuff with repetitive boring crap such as that. Hormel Spam(tm) is actually pretty tasty pan-fried with poached eggs and wheat bread toast - try it sometime - but weblog spam is naught but slop, fit only for the garbage pail.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Please read.

That answer your question?

Then again, IO, formerly part of Steve Jackson Games knows all about abuse of the law.

As soon as they start bulking Technics bricks, axels, and the jointed plates I can finally start building my Robotech Valkyrie and Optimus Prime!

After reading your TOS I have become rather curious in regards to the following cluase:

Unacceptable publications include, but are not limited to:

1. Material that is ruled unlawful in the jurisdiction of the originating server (Such as child pornography, in the case of our flagship Sealand datacenter)

In the case of the Sealand datacenter, what are some of the limitations?

Please note that in the following examples I am not equating one example with any other or implying that any of the following should be censored; rather they are examples of what I would consider sticky wickets when running a "data haven" and wonder how such things will be handled.

Imagine the following:

I am a rabid anti-choice activist in the United States. I wish to post a site with a hit list of doctors performing abortions in the United States. After each "accident" I wish to mark them with a big red X. I publish detailed information on how to find each of these doctors.

Is this site permitted?

I am a hacker who wants to play DVDs on my Linux box and I want to use free software. I want to place source code on my website. The United States says this violates some stupid law and some annoying people object.

Is this site permitted?

I am a devote Iron Chef fan and Fuji TV has just sent me a cease and desist order. I wish to move my materials to Sealand.

Is this site permitted?

I am a regular guy in the UK creating a website about my daily life. Some people don't like the way I talk about them and my site is pulled.

Is this site permitted?

Will you allow sites advocating the overthrow of rival goverments, challenged uses of intellectual property, bomb making instructions, and other information that will get other nation-states panties in a twist?

http://www.io.com/~sluggo/ironchef/ic wavs.htm had a .wav of Kaga saying "Mango"...only he said it like this:
"Maahn-goooh."
Funniest damn thing I've ever heard, I swear...

"The tree of liberty must be periodically watered with the blood of patriots" -Benjamin Franklin

Not to be picky or anything, but that was actually Thomas Jefferson. And he was right... and so are you. When a law is wrong, it MUST be challenged and destroyed; that's why they saw fit to include a little thing known as "Jury Nullification" in the founding laws of this nation. Basically, it means that a jury can find a defendant fully and completely guilty of a violation of law, but refuse to punish him for it because they don't think that law should BE a law. And you will NEVER hear it mentioned in a court of law, on TV, or anywhere except in a few books and movies (and, now, a few websites). Try to guess why. That's right: if We, the Sheeple, knew about it, why, we'd be chopping down laws all over the place! Can't have THAT, now can they? Undermining their hard-fought-for and bought-with-lobbyists laws like that would take away some of Their power, now wouldn't it?

So what better forum to spread knowledge of its existence than right here on good old slashdot?

JURY NULLIFICATION

JURY NULLIFICATION

JURY NULLIFICATION

JURY NULLIFICATION

JURY NULLIFICATION

There. Now go do some research on the topic, and shudder with anger when you realize how you've been lied to all these years by judges and lawyers...

The Fully Informed Jury Association's website
Read some more about it
A list of books on the subject
Even more
More
MORE
MORE MORE MORE

As you can see if you read the links above and fully understand them, the power of Jury Nullification is about the only power left to We the People. We don't have enormous wealth, we aren't in positions of political power, we don't have adequate representation in the legislative bodies of the government (meaning, of course, we can't be taxed either, but that's a whole 'nuther post), we don't have a stranglehold on any particular commodity or service (though think what would happen if we all suddenly configured our firewalls and BGP routers to stop letting packets through :)... Jury Nullification was GIVEN to us by the founding fathers because they knew in their wisdom that we would never have as much power as those who are so easily corrupted by it. It Is Our ONLY Weapon Against Them And Their Evil, People!! Do not let it fall by the wayside again. Tell everyone you know about it. Print out all the above webpages I linked to in 48-point Arial and paste them all up and down the streets of your cities. Don't Let THEM Win!!!

Thank you.

http://www.cryptome.org
http://jya.com/crypto-free.htm
Learning About Cryptography
Ritter's Crypto Glossary and
Dictionary of Technical Cryptography
Encryption & Security Tutorial
N.A. Crypto Archives
International PGP site
NSA National Cryptologic Museum
EFF
attrition.org crypto archive
Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram

and last, but not least (the archive i developed) ....

PacketStorm Crypto Archives

there are lots and lots of excellent tutorials, docs, glossaries, and links to many of the great crypto sites in the world at all of the URLs above.

for the best info on NSA, ECHELON, misc paranoia, you should first check out Cryptome/JYA. i archived quite a bit of stuff related to your questions at the packetstorm site too - packetstorm.securify.com/crypt/nsa/.

feel free to email me directly if you like too. over the years, i have had some interesting experiences with the NSA, BXA, etc - primarily regarding my hosting of crypto archives, and personal investigations of NSA, ECHELON. if you want to discuss these things, get the pgp key for ken.williams@ey.com from www.keyserver.net, and send your key(s) and crypted msgs to tattooman@genocide2600.com

http://www.cryptome.org
http://jya.com/crypto-free.htm
Learning About Cryptography
Ritter's Crypto Glossary and
Dictionary of Technical Cryptography
Encryption & Security Tutorial
N.A. Crypto Archives
International PGP site
NSA National Cryptologic Museum
EFF
attrition.org crypto archive
Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram

and last, but not least (the archive i developed) ....

PacketStorm Crypto Archives

there are lots and lots of excellent tutorials, docs, glossaries, and links to many of the great crypto sites in the world at all of the URLs above.

for the best info on NSA, ECHELON, misc paranoia, you should first check out Cryptome/JYA. i archived quite a bit of stuff related to your questions at the packetstorm site too - packetstorm.securify.com/crypt/nsa/.

feel free to email me directly if you like too. over the years, i have had some interesting experiences with the NSA, BXA, etc - primarily regarding my hosting of crypto archives, and personal investigations of NSA, ECHELON. if you want to discuss these things, get the pgp key for ken.williams@ey.com from www.keyserver.net, and send your key(s) and crypted msgs to tattooman@genocide2600.com

• FUDGE
• SORD

RPG.NET has a list of 100 free games on their website and other free directories exist on the web. These range from the above games to jokes to GUPRS lite.

Finally, this idea was mentioned in Pyramid Online about two months ago with speculation that in five years all RPG material would be world based using one of:

• D20
• GURPS
• FUDGE

I think that the license FUDGE is released under is very close in spirit to the GPL. Grey Ghost Games publishes FUDGE and FUDGE supplements, but the system itself is free to download and distribute. Check out Steffan O'Sullivan's website; he wrote FUDGE with the help and feedback of gamers on rec.games.design. You can find many websites with supplements, modified versions, etc. The author encourages this.

This is winning ? 5 times as much goes to lawyers as to the injured parties. Something in the US legal system needs to be changed to enable real people to combat big brother, be they the goverment or big company X.

All that aside, as I understand it, the feds have never stopped harrassing SJ Games, or at least have never stopped (in)conspicuous surveillance of them and Illuminati Online.

A personal note from Steve Jackson can also be found here.