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I haven't seen most of them in years. Dana has a webcam and is currently the 13th sexiest geek the whole world. Unfortunately, I've lost track of most everyone else.

The raid is what introduced me to io.com, Dana, and the rest of the coolest group of people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing.

A lot of people on Slashdot seem to think that it wasn't much of a victory. I guess they don't understand what happened then. The supreme court decided that computers were printing presses. The supreme court decided that what happened was wrong. This doesn't mean that it can't and won't happen again but it does mean that it's not acceptable. When it does happen, it's a newsworthy event, not a daily fact of life. For that alone, I consider it a victory.

There are those who think SJG should have gotten more. I don't think they understand what the fight was about in the first place. The fight was about the ability to communicate. Could we talk to people and have a right to privacy? Could we print what we wanted to in an electronic forum? Did the government have the right to harass us for doing so? These were important decisions in those days. Without that case, the Internet as we know it, may well have not come to be. The freedoms we use to post on Slashdot came from that incident.

Yeah. It's been 10 years. Some of the stuff never was returned. Rumors said that we were killed during that whole purple Nike' sneaker suicide bit. My fanzine (Second Church of Ultimate wisdom) is gone. Dana is a sexy geek, instead of just being a brilliant sexy person. And the government is still performing illegal raids.

But at least now they're illegal.

-----

You can read more about it on WIRED.

France has also complained about PROMIS.

Bill Hamilton of Inslaw Corporation who was going after the government for stealing PROMIS gave this document to each member of the House Judicary Committee.

and we must not forget that Crypto AG supplied encryption machines to over 120 countries. Officials from Iran, Iraq, and the Vatican, to name a few, relied on Crypto's tech for top secret dispatches and the NSA had a deal with Crypto, which gave them a backdoor that made those encrypted messages easy to decipher and they were not even a US company.

Also what about Lotus Notes' NSA backdoor that is in international versions of the software.

Noel

RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix

The aesthetics / ergonomics (loosely speaking) of software is a big interest of mine. That's not because I'm a software expert, but rather for the opposite reason: I can figure out a way to misinterpret or fail to comprehend directions from practically any source, and I'm sure you can think of examples where you laughed at the guy going through the door labeled "Enter other side" ass-first or whatever. Yes, that was me, and it still hurts. I've hurled a fair number of CDs across the room because of frsutration at installing the software they contained onto my standard-issue, plain-vanilla PCs.

The arguments that easy-to-use GUI tools make true, deep learning harder by eliminating the need for it have merit. But there is a threshold beneath which learning isn't even an issue, because the software (whatever software -- let's keep this agnostic!) never gets installed at all.

Remember, whatever we already know can seem pretty obvious. But the things we don't know yet can lurk tantalizingly close and remain unknown. My father, for instance, is an electrical engineer with a moderate but lengthy exposure to computers: no way could he figure out a GNU/linux install without plenty of handholding.

I offer here a small example of some documentation I've created with the intent of making the "... for Dummies" books seem positively erudite and obfuscatory, all for the purpose of getting software installed in the first place. After that we can worry about deeper learning. (Which goes for me, too.)It's specific to my present ISP. Illuminati Online (io.com), but I imagine would be easily modifiable for many others.

Hope someone finds it useful -- I like to find an excuse to post it once in a while so I can make sure the counter on my Web site works ;)

Regards,

timothy

Of course we shouldn't take it lying down. The problem is, our effectiveness is extremely limited. A boycott will probably either have no effect or kill the product line, but that isn't going to cause all of our extant D&D stuff to burst into flames, is it? There's a fair amount of good stuff out there right now, and if it comes down to it, there's any number of home-grown campaigns that could be disseminated through any number of channels.

As for the actual rules... There's not much we can do about that, short of stockpiling extra copies of the 2nd Edition rules (and perhaps the Core Rules CD-ROM) to share with the local gaming group. I can't advocate photocopying the text (because that would be illegal), but I have to wonder if some sort of D&D oral tradition could be devised-- no, wait, that's far too silly.

As for an open-source RPG... FUDGE is the closest thing that I can think of.

I think that a few good things have come out of WoTC, notably the Dragon Magazine archive which seems to contain the issues intact and with no censorship (i.e. Ed Greenwoods The Nine Hells is intact, the "naughty" art hasn't been altered.) So maybe the pessimism isn't warranted. If they decide AD&D is commercially worthless, maybe a group of fans could pool their resources, buy it, and open source it... or am I a hopeless dreamer?

I'll agree with you on the Dragon Magazine Archive; I snagged a copy of that the first time I saw it. I'm inclined to believe that they didn't censor it mostly for legal reasons (ownership of art and ads), and because it would have been too much effort-- I get the distinct feeling that they sat a couple of interns down with a stack of mags, a scanner, and a copy of Acrobat Distiller. If I was in that situation, I wouldn't go out of my way to glue a strip of black cardboard across someone's bits and pieces.

Open source D&D would be pretty cool, but I don't think it's going to happen, regardless of its financial viability.

This trademark stuff will go on and on as long
LINUX isnt protected internationally.
So it would IMHO a strong move into the new
millenium (coming next year :) to protect the
LINUX trade mark world wide.

OT side note:
One nice thing about Linux and friends: if a
company tries to get the monopoly for a Linux
distribution by covering the rights to import a
dedicated commercial Linux distribution (say
SuSE for Uruguay) and tries to sell at high price
levels without offering some reward (support...),
other distributions with better performance/price
ratios can take over.

So Charles Darwin is our friend :)

And we should therefore take care of our beloved
Debianistas. It's always nice to have a backup ace
sitting in your sleeve.

BTW: Who takes care to protect the DEBIAN
trade mark world wide?

--gfish666

A lot of time, you're working at someone else's desk in someone else's office. In my case, I have my home computer which is in heavy use by two different people and a cubicle which is covered in printouts.
A friend of mine, Dana wears Soft Flex Gloves. At about $25 a pair, it's a very cheap portable solution.

Oh, lots of them. Here's one:

http://www.io.com/~snewton/zen/diamndi x.html

Cheers,
-j.

I even previewed, I swear it! How did that closing dissapear?! I don't know.

My bad. But the page still works, I think. If not, it's here.

humbly,

timothy

(I am on the far left of the slashdot bellcurve, so pretend I am Aunt Helga for a moment ...)

I wrote the directions on
this page for anyone interested in connecting to an ISP using kppp.

They're not perfect, I but I meant them to be lighthearted and easy to follow.

Even still, there is an undeniable catch-22 in that someone who wanted to use these directions or any other online documentation won't have it to use from home. This is getting to be less and less of a problem as Internet access gets more and more ubiquitous - hopefully soon we'll all have DSL and kppp will be only a memory ... :) But hopefully someone could print this out at a friend's house or the library, or print it using the OS that came with their Compaq Presario before reformatting and installing something better.

Cheers,

timothy

However, I was surprised to see a banner ad for specials at Austin area stores -- a convenience store chain, I think -- on the banner. So either I had some very inventive cookies, or they were making a guess based on my ISP, Illuminati Online which only covers two cities in Texas, Austin & Houston, in terms of dialup.

Your 80-person class needs to work a little harder to do some authoritative research. There are a number of factual errors in your long reply. I shall address a few of them.

I did not say that the LoC was breached in 1972. I said it was demarcated in 1972. Since then, the border has always been in a state of tension. Both sides shell each other regularly. The line is often breached by Pakistan-trained terrorists trying to sneak into the state of Jammu and Kashmir. You don't have to take my word for it. Read the report Pakistan, Kashmir and the Trans-Asian Axis. The author, Yossef Bodansky, is currently Director of the Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional warfare for the U.S. Congress, as well as a contributing editor of Defense & Foreign Affairs: Strategic Policy. He has written widely for such specialized journals as Jane's Defense Weekly and Global Affairs.

So what's the deal with Kashmir? Both Pakistan and India claim Jammu & Kashmir.

Pakistan's claim, as you stated, is on the basis of it being a Muslim majority state. Indeed, that is Pakistan's raison d'etre - the idea that Muslims of the sub-continent require a separate country to protect their interests. India is a democratic, secular state. It is host to all major and several minor religions, and provides freedom of expression to all religions. Incidentally, it has a higher Muslim population than Pakistan.

When the British left India in 1947, the princely states were given a choice of joining either India or Pakistan. Except for those states that were on the border, there was effectively no choice. The Maharaja of Jammu & Kashmir(J&K) chose to defer accession. Then, as now in '99, the state was invaded by the Pakistan army in mufti - in the garb of ``armed tribesmen''. The Maharaja of J&K immediately signed the Instrument of Accession and the state became part of the Indian Union. An elected state assembly later confirmed the accession to India. These circumstances are very similar to the manner in which Texas became part of the United States in 1845. Pakistan's claim on J&K has as much legal standing as does Mexico's on Texas. The border as it exists today is roughly at the point when a UN-mandated cease-fire came into effect. If interested, you can look at all the legal documents related to this.

India's PR, unlike what you state, is laughably poor. It's pursual of influence via lobbying members of Congress within the US is virtually non-existent. It's managing of the media is something out of the stone age. An example of this is the propagation of this absurd idea of a bunch of ``freedom fighters'' in rag-tag clothes and poor equipment taking on the Indian army. The invading Pakistani army was equipped with the best snow gear, sophisticated equipment such as Stinger missiles, communication equipment capable of switching frequencies on the fly, and backed by logistics that would have taken several months to prepare. A good PR machine would have paraded all the evidence - captured documents, Pak army pay books, weapons with Pakistani factory markings - before the foreign media camped in Srinagar. What did the Indian government do? Bring it all down to Delhi and called some foreign ambassadors to see it.

Your writing about Bombay and East Pakistan was the biggest faux-pas. Bombay is a city on the west coast of India. It never had anything to do with Pakistan. Perhaps you refer to Bangladash, the erstwhile East Pakistan. It is an independent country today, not ``reintegrated'' with India. This is another good example of the canard spread about religious conflict. The Muslim population of East Pakistan was oppressed by their own countrymen and fellow-Muslims from West Pakistan. About a million people were massacred by the army and at one point 10 million refugees fled to India. That is a staggering number. The refugee crisis in Kosovo involved a few hundred thousand. The United States has admitted some 500,000 refugees in the last fifty years. The Indian army was forced to intervene and helped form the state of Bangladesh in 1971. Yes, Bangladesh suffers flooding and is hit by typhoons regularly. As is India, incidentally. Can India provide aid that would match what the United States can? Of course not. India's per capita GDP is $1720 compared to the US' $31500. The notion that India somehow persecutes Bangladesh on the basis of religion is absurd. India, Bangladesh and the other South Asian nations(Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives) have set up SAARC, an association that promotes and facilitates trade and other forms of cooperation between its member countries.

About the third-world banding together to overthrow the bosses, it's going to happen sometime. There is a large number of nations(India included) whose days of pre-eminence are long gone. The pendulum swings slowly, though. It's unlikely to happen in your lifetime or mine.

I've been with them for about 5 years, and they've been great, but I'm leaving soon for more bandwidth. But they're a good shop - runs on Linux & Apache, EFF supporters... I'll miss 'em.

Their bulletin board evolved into Illuminati Online, one of the early commercial ISP's, several years ago. I've been using my IO account for a permanent e-mail drop (although in the era of Spam, I've gotten cautious about handing that address out), a good Usenet feed, and occasional web hosting since 1993.

Lars Eighner's online writer's guide says that the normal royalty rate for hardback books is 10%, and an "average" first novel will bring an up-front advance payment against royalties of anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000. This is not great money, but it's probably a lot better than you will get from online vanity publishing.

Think about it. All ISPs have the email address of all their customers. They generally have a list set up to inform people of scheduled outages or special offers or whatever. It would have been EASY to send a mass eamil out and say "Your site is probably blocked."

Which is, in fact, what Illuminati Online did when they were blocked by CYBERsitter in April 1997.

Just because some ISPs think that security through obscurity is how to run a business doesn't mean they all do.

Think about it. All ISPs have the email address of all their customers. They generally have a list set up to inform people of scheduled outages or special offers or whatever. It would have been EASY to send a mass eamil out and say "Your site is probably blocked."

Which is, in fact, what Illuminati Online did when they were blocked by CYBERsitter in April 1997.

Just because some ISPs think that security through obscurity is how to run a business doesn't mean they all do.

http://www.io.com/~wwagner/pics/linux-ad2.gif

If there's a downside, it's not immediately apparent.

Implicitly portable drivers can only be good for the consumer. If hardware manufacturers choose (correctly) to free their drivers then the consumer's realm of bootable OSes is broadened.

One of the excellent points made in "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" was that hardware manufactures will always write drivers for the Windows family of products. Microsoft doesn't have to lift a finger. Linux relies on volunteers to reverse engineer new devices. Be must hire people to do write drivers in-house.

How would the landscape change if every "alternative" OS was on equal footing with Microsoft in this respect?

I saw a Dreamcast a few weeks ago at Katsucon. I saw some fighting game, a Godzilla game, and a demo that had deck guns on a ship firing into the air.

I really wasn't impressed. The graphics were good, but not that much better than Playstation 1 or N64. The Godzilla game, in particular, looked REALLY REALLY polygonal, like the T-Rex in TOMB RAIDER. And, I have yet to see a game for it that I'd actually want to play. I hear that the Sonic game for Dreamcast is good, though.

PSX2 looks like more of a quantum leap forwards, versus a small evolutionary leap for Dreamcast. Though we'll have to see screen shots of actual games to know what it'll really do when it has to work hard.

Hey!! It's RMS!