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From your link, in order of appearance (Firefox, adblock, USian):

https://email.t-online.de/
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Mail
www.gmx.net/
web.de/
mail.google.com/?hl=de
www.hotmail.com/ - Diese Seite übersetzen
www.freenet.de/
de.mail.yahoo.com/
www.emailn.de/
www.email-verzeichnis.de/

*shrug*

It does happen in first world countries as well.

You haven't seen many things yet, doesn't mean they don't exist.

I met a former slave once.

I was in the same position that I considered buying a Geiger counter for testing food. I googled and found many people saying that you can't test food with a Geiger counter. The most specific reason given was that the reading from the food would be drowned out by background radiation. Being the sceptical type I didn't buy that reason just like that. I had this naive idea that I could point the counter at my food, wait a minute or 2, the point it away and compare the readings. So I actually did the maths. (If you find any mistakes in the computation, please do post them. And excuse me for not using the correct physical terms for the various kinds of radiation strength/dose/whatever.)

I based my computation on this Geiger counter, which seems to be among the most popular consumer grade devices available:

http://www.conrad.de/ce/de/product/120173/Gamma-Scout-GEIGERZAeHLER

According to the datasheet it will give you (for gamma rays) 95 pulses per minute for a radiation of 1 uSv/h.

Meaning that if I send gamma radiation of 1 uSv/h directly into the device it will give me an additional 95 "clicks" per minute in addition to background radiation.

Now for the question: Why is this not good enough to identify a contaminated orange?

We start out with the numbers from here

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Now let's assume that our acceptability threshold for radiation from a single orange is 20uSv. In other words, eating a single orange gives us the same dosage as a chest x-ray. Such an orange can definitely be seen as contaminated. You would only be allowed to eat a few such oranges per year (just like chest x-rays).

So, if our Geiger counter can not tell this orange apart from an uncontaminated orange, it is clearly useless for testing food.

So how many ticks per minute would we expect from this orange on our Gamma Scout device?

First we have to transfrom 20uSv absorbed dose into a dose rate. In other words, we need to compute how much radiation per time unit the orange emits. Let's assume our orange can completely pass on all of its radition within 10 hours. In reality of course it would take the orange (depending on the isotope) weeks, months or years to emit all of its radiation. So I grossly overestimate the radiation from the orange here. But the point is that even this grossly overestimated dose rate can not be detected with a consumer grade Geiger counter.
So our dose rate would be 2uSv/h

Now an important thing we must not overlook is that the orange is not a raygun. It doesn't emit a concentrated beam. Rather, its emission will be spread evenly across its surface.

An orange of 8cm diameter has a surface of
4*PI*4cm*4cm = 201 square cm

According to the manual, the measurement window of the Gamma Scout has a diameter of 9,1mm, meaning a surface of about half a square centimeter. Let's be generous and round that to 1 square centimeter. This means that if we actually touch our Gamma Scout to the orange it will only see 1/200th of the emitted radiation. This means that the Gamma Scout sees a dose rate from the orange of 0,01uSv/h.

And now we're beginning to see the problem. Even without background raditation that translates to only 9-10 ticks per MINUTE. You'd be waiting 6s between each tick. This is clearly not the movie-type-buzz you would expect from holding a Geiger counter to an orange as heavily contaminated as this one. And remember that I've grossly overestimated (by several orders of magnitude) the dose rate of the orange.

Now if you do not actually touch the orange but measure from several centimeters away, the strength of the radiation decreases quadratically.

But it gets worse.

According to (sorry, web site in German)

http://www.chetan.homepage.t-online.de/sonstig/DETEKT.HTM

the normal average value

The heat wave in Russia this past summer was unprecedented. A Russian scientists stated it had been at least 1000 years since such a heat wave has occurred there.

... your point being? Let's see what NOAA has to say about that heat wave:

Despite this strong evidence for a warming planet, greenhouse gas forcing fails to explain the 2010 heat wave over western Russia. The natural process of atmospheric blocking, and the climate impacts induced by such blocking, are the principal cause for this heat wave. It is not known whether, or to what extent, greenhouse gas emissions may affect the frequency or intensity of blocking during summer. It is important to note that observations reveal no trend in a daily frequency of July blocking over the period since 1948, nor is there an appreciable trend in the absolute values of upper tropospheric summertime heights over western Russia for the period since 1900.

The indications are that the current blocking event is intrinsic to the natural variability of summer climate in this region, a region which has a climatological vulnerability to blocking and associated heat waves (e.g., 1960, 1972, 1988)

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/csi/moscow2010/

As far as the cold over Europe and the US it is not record setting.

You might want to revise that.

December is on course to be the coldest since records began in 1910, the BBC weather centre has said. - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12078425

Coldest December in Sweden in 110 years - http://www.thelocal.se/31072/20101226/

In Berlin gab es Anfang Dezember den absoluten Kälterekord, "seit 100 Jahren war es hier nicht so kalt wie in der ersten Dezember-Dekade", so Globig. Das gelte auch für andere Regionen Deutschlands. - http://wetter.t-online.de/winter-extrem-neue-kleine-eiszeit-ist-jetzt-moeglich-/id_43699628/index

Chicagoans shivered through the coldest December open in 27 years - http://blog.chicagoweathercenter.com/2010/12/chicago-books-its-coldest-december-open-in-27-years-highs-nearly-30-degrees-below-a-year-ago.html

Sometimes I wonder if it's really the global warming advocates who seem to ignore science, at least when it's science and data that don't fit their agenda.

I think you didn't understand. The gas pedal pivots from the floor, which means it can never be stuck under the mat.

It looks kind of like this: http://www.klawit.homepage.t-online.de/images/18_Alu-Sport-Pedalset.jpg

The brake and clutch pedals can still get stuck, but in either case the car wouldn't move, so that wouldn't be as dangerous.

Still, I don't like the design much because the gas pedal is lower than the brake pedal. I think that's also on purpose in order to distinguish both pedals better (in case of panic it's easier to press the brake).

It that makes it a bit harder to move quickly from the gas to the brake, and if you have shoes with wide soles, they can get momentarily stuck under the brake pedal.

I guess that's not a problem with automatics, but with a normal transmission, you use the break and gas with your right foot and the left foot is exclusively for the clutch.

The inventors of this projector thingy suggest, that a bike lane protects you in shared trafficspace, when there is no extra bike lane on the street.

Contrary to public belief and repeated myths there is scientific evidence, that sharing the road with the cars is definitely safer than cycling at the very right edge or even on a separate lane. This is especially because there is no absolute separation: at every crossing you "meet" the cars again and they will hardly recognize you on the bike lane.

Instead of strange devices I would invest in strong LED lights with hub generator that make you seen in darkness.

Refs: English overview
German quick risk picture

Unfortunately, Microsoft's ASL compiler allows many of these errors and warnings to sneak by.

It's a well-known fact that you never use Microsoft's compiler if you need ACPI to work under Linux. That's what the Intel compiler exists for. I will grant you that laptop vendors might simply use Microsoft's compiler because "it works" (barely), but until very recently they had no reason or incentive to cater to Linux. However, had they wished to do so, they had a readily available option. I'm pretty sure Dell is not using it for their Ubuntu laptops.

as was the case with FoxConn mainboard

That's a completely different problem, a vendor specifically excluding power management support for Linux. Once enabled with a simple BIOS hack, everything worked correctly.

I recall them trying to pay a premium to sysadmins who convince their bosses to buy MS-products

I fail to see how that is relevant here at all.

Nice idea, but someone's already thought of using that name for an album.

Unfortunately it's only noon and now you've awakened my desire to get slammed over lunch.

Funny, Paris Hilton told me the exact same thing last week after just 2 bites in to my lunch at Spago.

Here's a few apps/tweak files I haven't seen mentioned.

NTRegOpt: http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/
Defrags XP's registry, reduces the overall size.

Microsoft Bootvis: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=664
A tool made by MS specifically for optimizing XP boot up times.

MaxTweaks: http://www.tech52.com/ (scroll down page for file and description)
A cumulative XP tweak and fix install file. Highlight: Enables "Show hidden devices" in the Device Manager to display unused devices - like what you would see if you booted 98 in safe mode.

Bild and Sun

From Oxford dictionary:

noun (pl. ironies) 1 the expression of meaning through the use of language which normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous effect. 2 a state of affairs that appears perversely contrary to what one expects.

The Lyrics of Ironic

http://home.t-online.de/home/volker.poehls/ironic1 .htm

I struggle to fit most of that song into either of the above definitions. Some of the lines could potentially class as ironic if more information was given about the situations but most are just examples of 'bad luck'. There is no attempt of using language to signify the opposite anywhere in the song.

It is not perversely contrary or even unexpected for a man of 98 to die, especially after the shock of winning the lottery.

Black fly in your Chardonnay? Depends on your situation. At a garden party in the summer? To be expected. Now if the person with the wine was in a hermetically sealed room in the Antarctic and had gone there with the express reason of preventing flies getting into their wine...

I could go on but I'm off to a wedding. And no it is not raining. Even it is was I live in England so it wouldn't be ironic. Basically the song is way to sparse on details for any of those situations to be classified as ironic.

plover writes "Due to Congressional legislation passed quietly in 2003, the Air Force Space Command will no longer distribute space surveillance data via NASA. There was supposedly a three year transitional period when the data was to be made available via a NASA web site, but earlier this month their transitional server went down hard. NASA has decided not to rebuild it. (It was scheduled to be shut down on 31 March 2005 anyway.) The only way to obtain satellite data now is by signing up with the official Space-Track website. Part of the agreement to necessary to obtain data from their site is not to redistribute it. Of course, amateurs are still free to redistribute their observations, including those of classified satellites."

You want this:
http://home.t-online.de/home/ChristianK./adr-proje ct/index-e.html

It worked for me in the past. All that is required is a wire running from the parallel port to the PC floppy drive.

My drive still worked after using it, although your milage may vary.

Years ago, Saturn's moon Mimas was identified as a Death Star.

AOL - one of the original online services
CompuServe predates AOL by quite a bit. CompuServe was founded in 1969. The company ("The Source") that would eventually become AOL was founded in 1978.

Intel - first microprocessor company
Sony - first widespread transistor radio company
Texas Instuments was probably the first to develop both these technologies. The microprocessor situation is fuzzy at best. TI's transistor radio predates Sony's by about three years (and Robert Denk's radio may have predated that by another 6 years). Sony's wasn't even first-to-market. That honor belonged to I.D.E.A's Regency TR-1.

Frankly, I don't think there's any 'first mover advantage' in these examples at all. On the other hand, there's a very real ability for the dominant companies to use their marketing muscle to 'rewrite' history in their favor. Few people question the 'fact' that Microsoft was the first software company, or that Intel invented the microprocessor, or that AOL was the first online service.

There's an analog plugin that supports bttv cards (Hauppauges). That might work.

A full blown RTOS is overkill for many RT applications.

Many RT tasks (like the one used in this article) can be described as:

Wait for IRQ. Do something *NOW*. Wait for IRQ

These tasks can be supported by the rtirq-patch. rt-irq is a very small patch that allows just that (and nothing more). It would be nice to add rtirq to the comparison.

I think the Illuminati is trying to do for ozone / carbon oxide as they did for sodium fluoride / calcium flouride.
They will have us mistake the effect of ozone for that of carbon oxide as they hade us mistake the effect of the poison sodium fluoride for the effect of calcium fluoride. See :
1
2
3

Oh great now I can enjoy idiots on cel phones "sharing" fine Fox programming while I'm trying to enjoy my dinner in a restaurant.

As if their pointless yattering conversations weren't enough....

It seems to me that if we're going to keep expanding capacity, we need file systems that automatically and fully index data as it's written. Otherwise, we just give Fibber McGee a bigger closet. http://home.t-online.de/home/toni.goeller/idiom_wm /id203.htm

I'm reminded of the situation with medievia in the MUD community. Someone built a MUD using code that was restricted by a license, then claimed that the whole thing had been rewritten so that the license no longer applies. His code was leaked and shown to have a good portion of the original code intact, yet he continues to deny this and keeps breaking the license. Maybe someone on slashdot knows how to rectify the situation?

on the lower right corner of that Bild.de link. ;-)

Now you can see all those small details Nasa doesnt want you to know about. Geez, this must be the lamest incarnation of digital zoom I ever saw. But then again, Bild is germanies most unreliable newssource anyway so I have to wonder why it was linked to on /.

If you want to see more pictures, you can find them here.

Sub7 and Netbus have been able to do this for _years_. What's the big deal?

See here. :)

1) WSFU is faster (IO/API/...)
2) WSFU is better integrated with win32 architecture (OLE/ODBC/...)
3) WSFU make a lot of things easier than cygwin with windows

BUT, i wouldnt trade cygwin for it, note that i have both installed here. I just isolated what i needed from WSFU and was better than cygwin and added them last in my path. I dont have any preferences, but cygwin is waaay more complete, and you have the +/- the same versions of the application that runs on linux. Same config files work fine, same behaviours (which isnt the case with WSFU), etc.

For me, WSFU is just a little + to cygwin.

Now bout your particular problem (prod env, 24x7), I've experienced very few problems running CygWin in such an environment. I use it since at least 5 years (I remember downloading it at 56k, so it's probably more), but there's some things you need to be aware with cygwin:

• Versions of the applications you run: they often differs from what you're used to. Sometimes I ended up with different settings between solaris, linux, win32, etc. This is generally fixed with a recompile of the common denominator version, possibly the latest one.
• Performances: As you probably noticed from the other posts, cygwin is an emulation layer. It is slow. And I really mean slow. Something you usually do in nunux in a few seconds might take a few minutes on win32 depending on how it is coded. Forks and threads are really badly implemented. Yet nobody else did better.
• Alternatives: Frequently natives win32 programs are faster, better, or both. Have a look on google after alternatives (adding +win32 +unix, and +free if money is a problem). It will save you some time. Maintaining several branches of your scripts might be a good investment, if you factor out the common base, and manage to get them do what they should on different platforms while compiling/installing (and anyway if you start nunux/win32, you might as well just do that, you'll end up with the pot). Though it perhaps require another employee, it's worth it. For cygwin alternatives I'd recommend the SFU (of course), Mingw, GNU utilities for Win32
• The DLL Nightmare (Take II): If you dont need too much apps (.exe) relative to cygwin it could be good to just use those. Compile the stuff you want in cygwin, and modify the $INSTALL path, so you can just take that to another machine. The DLL hell here is that you'll probably not only need the cygwin dll but some more... If you have quickview installed on your machine, you can see what DLLs a program use in its Import Section (from the PE header). Else i would recommend OllyDBG (free) or PE Explorer ($$$). Both can lists what DLLs an app use, just find them, and copy them in the folder, et voila! you can use it elsewhere.
• Perl: DO NOT USE the cygwin version of perl, unless you have a really good reason to do so. Instead use Active Perl It's damn faster. If it's called from bash then put #!/c:/perl/bin/perl5 -- or where ever you installed it). Some other things to know about active state perl on win32:
  • Hiding the cmd.exe box when running a script: Instead of putting '.pl' at the end of your scripts, try '.wsf' and have a look at the examples given by ActiveState:
    <Job ID="MyJobID">
    <script language=PerlScript>
    # ... your code here ...
    </script

the PDP-8/e Simulator for Macintosh is a LOADED system (up to 32K words of memory, KE8-E Extended Arithmetic Element, ASR 33 Console Teletype, ASR 33 Auxiliary Teletype, PC8-E High Speed Paper Tape Reader and Punch, RK8-E Disk Cartridge System, LP8-E Line Printer, and a KC8-EA Programmer's Console) that runs a quite a bit faster than the original - fastest benchmark is a G4/450 at about 22x; my 2x1.25 runs the tests well under 1sec. If you need to support an -8 legacy, this seems like the logical way to go.

the PDP-8/e Simulator for Macintosh is a LOADED system (up to 32K words of memory, KE8-E Extended Arithmetic Element, ASR 33 Console Teletype, ASR 33 Auxiliary Teletype, PC8-E High Speed Paper Tape Reader and Punch, RK8-E Disk Cartridge System, LP8-E Line Printer, and a KC8-EA Programmer's Console) that runs a quite a bit faster than the original - fastest benchmark is a G4/450 at about 22x; my 2x1.25 runs the tests well under 1sec. If you need to support an -8 legacy, this seems like the logical way to go.

It's not quite a dissassembler, it's primarily a debugger, but it's still a good dissassembler, and really very excellent for nearly any use. Check out ollydbg. Great stuff.

Combined with a safe vmware work area, it's indespensible for analysis of just about anything

Shoen had gotten his PhD from germany already and he was a postdoctoral researcher at bell labs (which is not a university)

The only "peer review" at that point that needed to be done was in the journals he was publishing in. He had, before the hoaxes were caught, already published in both nature and science, two of the more preeminent (and most rigorously peer reviewed) journals in the international community. In fact before the hoaxes were caught, there were quite a few famous people tallking about him being a Nobel Prize candidate.

Try reading this or this old ny times article -bloo

Shoen had gotten his PhD from germany already and he was a postdoctoral researcher at bell labs (which is not a university)

The only "peer review" at that point that needed to be done was in the journals he was publishing in. He had, before the hoaxes were caught, already published in both nature and science, two of the more preeminent (and most rigorously peer reviewed) journals in the international community. In fact before the hoaxes were caught, there were quite a few famous people tallking about him being a Nobel Prize candidate.

Try reading this or this old ny times article -bloo

Ok, this being slashdot and so on - I know lots of people like to make claims without checking any background first. Many people here claim the retraction of his PHD title is either insignificant or not justifified. In fact this is a pretty large science scam. I challenge you to actually read some background information:

Comprehensive background information

AT THE height of his career in 2001, Hendrik Schön was producing papers at the remarkable rate of one every eight days" New Scientist: With hindsight, it was a hell of a lot of papers

The Hoaxes of Jan Hendrik Schoen

AT THE height of his career in 2001, Hendrik Schön was producing papers at the remarkable rate of one every eight days" New Scientist: With hindsight, it was a hell of a lot of papers

The Hoaxes of Jan Hendrik Schoen

Other DNS software

Management tools

twa lets authorized browsers edit the tinydns data file.

ldap2dns converts an LDAP DNS database to a tinydns data file. tinyadmin is a graphical interface to the LDAP DNS database used by ldap2dns.

mkdns converts a MySQL DNS database to a tinydns data file. It lets authorized browsers edit the MySQL DNS database.

sql2tinydns is similar to mkdns.

dhcp_dns watches dhcpd for new DHCP address assignments, and publishes those addresses through tinydns.

tinydyndns publishes dynamic IP addresses authenticated through POP connections.

Servers

ldapdns publishes DNS information from an LDAP database.

MyDNS publishes DNS information from a MySQL database.

Posadis publishes DNS information from BIND-style zone files. Security history: Buffer overflow, allowing attackers around the Internet to take control of the server; fixed in m5pre2 (2002.03.30). Someone announced an exploitable buffer overflow in m5pre2 a few weeks later; the history here isn't clear from the Posadis web pages.

NSD publishes DNS information from BIND-style zone files. Security history: Unclear. The NSD documentation includes bugs like ``Very strange coredump in hash_destroy() that happens sometimes'' without any analysis of their security impact. Is that an exploitable buffer overflow?

PowerDNS publishes DNS information from MySQL databases, PostgreSQL databases, Oracle databases, IBM databases, LDAP databases, or BIND-style zone files. Security history: Unclear, like the NSD security history.

MaraDNS is a general-purpose DNS server.

lbnamed is a load-balancing DNS server.

lbdns is another load-balancing DNS server.

Oak DNS Server is a good example of why novices shouldn't try to write DNS software. The digitallumber.net domain, served by Oak DNS Server 1.0, is inaccessible to a huge number of clients that try AAAA lookups before A lookups: the server incorrectly returns NXDOMAIN for AAAA, effectively wiping out its own A record.

Caches

pdnsd is a DNS cache. Security history: Remotely exploitable buffer overflow; fixed in 1.1.7a (2002.01.18).

MaraDNS can act as a cache.

I don't know why anyone would want to use these caches in place of dnscache .

DNS clients

adns is a DNS client library.

ares is a DNS client library.

perldns is a DNS client library for Perl.

The Buggy Internet Name Daemon [how very professional... *sigh*]

BIND is a monolithic server/cache; it also includes a client library, libresolv. Security history: IQUERY buffer overflow in BIND before 8.1.2-T3B (1998); NXT buffer overflow in BIND before 8.2.2-P4 (1999); nslookupcompla

That certainly isn't the only problem with Medievia.

Flying vehicles should look like a Messerschmitt Me-262, otherwise it has nothing to do in our airspace. This thing does not look like an Me-262. Stay on the ground!

It's highly unlikely a fatal dose would make it into anybody's single glass of water before the alert got out.

Why do you assume that the goal is to kill? Imagine if you could give the entire city of Chicago diarrhea for two weeks.

Cryptosporidiumparvum is something that can be grown near the site of deployment. No need to go about sneaking huge volumes of it across the country.

Most of its victims make it not too much worse for the wear, but just think. If they could deliver it to a city like Chicago(I left out LA and NYC because of all of the bottled water drinkers in those places), what do you think it would mean to them? Remember the cheering in the streets on 9-11? Imagine the entire world laughing at us because everyone in the Windy City has the shits.

LK

Here you can find a (german) TV-Newsclip.

Great idea! That's what we do. ;) I'm involved in a startup called Listen Digital that's getting into both online distribution of live shows and onsite CD burning. We've got a store called Download Live Music that lets artists sell downloads of their show online right after it's over.

Basically, we're a bunch of guys who are sick of the whole top 40 shit and sick of the fact that a lot of great artists aren't able to support themselves in mainstream distribution channels. The main thing that we're interested in is creating a new form of production and distribution that's viable for local bands local bands who have great live shows and a dedicated fan base but haven't made it big yet, not just the Phish's and DMB's.

This USB keychain idea is going to be a fad. People going to check out small bands aren't going to want to drop $30 to get a recording of it, and even at larger ones, as geeky-cool as having a USB keychain with the band's logo on it may be, it doesn't have the same wide appeal of a high-fidelity CD recording with customized artwork. Quality-wise, unlike the uncited claim that 192 kbps audio is indistinguishable from CDs, there are plenty of studies that show otherwise.

One of those universe/solar system simulations - I forget the name.
Possibly because there's more than one name to forget... (=

Let's see, for general touring around the Solar system and neighborhood, there's nothing quite like Celestia. Hours of fun, and very pretty to look at.
Noctis is also similar, but set in a fictional universe.
For more pretty pictures, but less interactivity, see The Solar Journey homepage or the Solar System Simulator. Also The Nine Planets for Kids.
Naturally, kids aren't that interested in just flying around. Well, Orbit lets them blow each other up in space, but with realistic physics and visuals. Once that gets boring, you can let them fly a space shuttle to the ISS with Orbiter. Beware, though. Orbiter is no simple game - you actually need to know how space flight works. There's also the Microsoft Space Simulator, which Orbiter has more or less superseded.

If you're not looking to get that far off the ground, FlightGear's an excellent flight simulator in which you can fly everything from the original Wright Brothers' craft right up to concept superplanes.

More links, mainly astronomy related, here, here, here, here, and here.

Finally, you might wish to try browsing the Tucows Games site and Freshmeat's game section (you'll need to login to make full use of Freshmeat).

Good luck, have fun searching.

I've actually had good luck with SysInternal's Page Defrag program for getting back that "fresh from the install" feeling. Defrags both the paging files and the registry files.

It only defrags the files the registry is stored in; you want to use ntregopt to defrag the registry itself. The registry is a kind of filesystem-in-a-file; deleted registry keys does not free up information, the space is just marked as available, and so the thing fragments.

Running a registry cleaner like regseeker and then using ntregopt made a 15-20% difference in my case. Not bad.

People who read slashdot know what a desktop pager is. If not, they can learn. It's the standard name.

As the -1 replies demonstrate, Medievia is helped out greatly by people like AxL and such who manage to inspire a near universal hatred for medievians, such that, when they are discovered they are sometimes (perhaps more often than I think) told to go back from whence they came.

The Medievia debacle demonstrates how fiercely protective coders are of code, even of code that isn't actually their own. (AxL, unless I am mistaken, has taken up a crusade on behalf of the DIKU team, not as a member of it.)

Upwards of $250k is a rather generous estimate. It would require at /least/ 5000 purchased items be sold every year to a playerbase composed of around 1250 donating players, or roughly 4 donation items per year per person spending about $200. That isn't to say it's not profitable, it most certainly is. However, the profit is more akin to that derived from a convenience store than that of the country club it is often accused of being.

The question of Medievia asks "Whats fair?" versus "Whats legal?" If Medievia did nothing more than cosmetic alterations, why has it persisted as a profitable online game? Certainly, it had roots in the DIKU framework and the legality of that is dubious at best. However, the licence proved neigh undefendable, whether the reasons behind that were a lack of funds to spend on trial or the relative strength of Mr. Krause's (Vryce) case, the reality is the same.

And what good would have come if the DIKU team could have up-held their copyright? Not much. The internet would have one less service that people were willing to use and support. There would be fewer MUDs stealing Medievia's good ideas (turnabout is fair play, after all.) And undoubtedly other (supposedly "clean") muds that get away with this without the rabble rousing of people like AxL and KaVir would never have started.

Example given: Materia Magica, formerly known as Moongate. Its sin is the exact same as Medievia's, of course AxL and the like never went after them because M.M.'s administrators learned how to obfuscate the fact from Medievia's example. Strange indeed, since a history of the admins involved in both MUDs reveals that they are, in many cases, the exact same people. This explains how Circle of Power moved their entire clan with ease between the two games before they had both developed beyond being similar games.

So yes, it is illegal, albeit a civil crime the developers and rabble-rousers are content to let pretty much everyone else get away with. The presence of Medievia in the MUD community has had an over-all positive effect, despite the attempts of AxL and others to harm it (efforts which have done more to harm the MUD "community" at large than Medievia).

On KaVir's Medievia licence page, he asks himself, "Who cares?" He responds to himself by saying "Many of us." I question the truth of the assertion, given the sheer apathy he and his group have for attacking "the problem" past this one mud. Given the sheer inability of most of the parties to conduct a serious discussion of the license past a flamewar or pre-written FAQ's about DIKU code, we shouldn't be amazed that nothing has come from the "debate" other than bile.

The reason of course, is that the writers of these codebases tend to be college kids who do it as a hobby, and don't have the money to pursue legal action. The aforementioned Medievia is actually a huge racket, and according to some estimates they've made >$250K over the years by selling items to addicted players. See his link for more information, as well as this one.

So... am I going to be tracked if I post an url to the source code?

Here ya go... http://home.t-online.de/home/510060750544/source.h tml

Hehe...

In case it gets slashdotted, here are the first few lines:

/*
Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) XP Source Code
(c)copyright 1998 Microsoft Corporation
This is closed-source software.
Distribute it and die.
*/

#include "dos30.h"
#include "win31.h"
#include "win95.h"
#include "workst~1.h"
#include "evenmore.h"
#include "oldstuff.h"
#include "billrulz.h"
#include "monopoly.h"
#define INSTALL HARD

char make_prog_look_big[16000000];

ASSIMILATION_CLASS main(int argc, char * argv)
{
char * eat_up_all_avail_mem;
eat_up_all_avail_mem = (char *)malloc(sizeof(free_mem()));

if (free_HD_space() > 0)
create_swap_file(NULL, free_HD_space());

if (!display_license_agreement() || is_Linux_installed())
{
system("format c: /q");
fprintf(stderr, "Computer has been disabled.");
exit(0);
}

while(!CRASHED)
{
display_copyright_message();
display_bill_rules_message();
do_nothing_loop();

---
Dave

I know it's a joke, but I'll bite anyway:

They already do

It's right here for the taking...

Here's an excerpt:

/*
Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) XP Source Code
(c)copyright 1998 Microsoft Corporation
This is closed-source software.
Distribute it and die.
*/

#include "dos30.h"
#include "win31.h"
#include "win95.h"
#include "workst~1.h"
#include "evenmore.h"
#include "oldstuff.h"
#include "billrulz.h"
#include "monopoly.h"
#define INSTALL HARD

char make_prog_look_big[16000000];

ASSIMILATION_CLASS main(int argc, char * argv)
{
char * eat_up_all_avail_mem;
eat_up_all_avail_mem = (char *)malloc(sizeof(free_mem()));

...see the URL for more...

/Dave