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I'm a member of the Virginia Piedmont Technology Council, a group of tech business owners interested in making an impact on law and business methods in Central Virginia and Virginia as a whole. There's something like half a dozen other tech councils in the state.

You'd think that an organization like the VPTC would be all about fighting a law like UCITA. Lots of small companies, like mine, have no reason to be for UCITA. And the VPTC is made up primarily of small companies.

But, nope. The VPTC has made no moves to oppose UCITA and, in fact, I've been told that the tech council is in favour of it. But no official stance has been made.

Naturally, the other tech councils, from northern Virginia, are all for UCITA. (Their members include AOL & such.)

So, why isn't VPTC yelling like crazy? Because it's a social game. Why would VPTC oppose a law that, in their (our?) eyes, will almost certainly pass? Then they'd alienate the other tech councils, and be looked down upon by them. Also, VA's Secretary of Technology (the only position like it in the US) is all for UCITA, naturally, because he probably gets political donations for his party (read as: kickbacks), which primarily come from big companies like UUNet and AOL.

So, yeah, it'll pass. Because only the consumers are willing to make a big deal about this. But the people that we have to make a big deal at just aren't interested in hearing about it.

Yep, it's lame. And I intend to let the VPTC know about how I feel. (I'd be surprised if anybody on the board reads /.) But that's politics.

Ugly, huh?

At the risk of being redundant, UUNET suffered a major backbone outage earlier today. According to their system status monitor, everything is back online now.

In full:

#include "/dev/tty"

So that your program can be interestingly formatted, like this one.

Since www.ioccc.org seems to be unreachable at the moment (at least for me), you can amuse yourself by looking at previous winning entries

Have fun :)

If I'm not mistaken, Gateway and others have, for a little while, at least, been giving a year's worth of "free" access with the purchase of certain models from them.

Like many others around here, I don't expect this trend to disappear any time soon. How many co-branded credit cards are there, anyway?

One positive thing about their service is that although you have to use Win32, you get a choice of email clients, which is more than I can say for MSN (yes, I fell for that trap). You see, I didn't like the way Outlook Express handled replies (the Right Way (IMO) is to put the reply and signature after the quoted text), so I downloaded Netscape and gave it a try. Imagine my surprise when it failed to connect and retrieve my email! I checked and compared between the MS and Netscape, and the only significant difference between the two configuration screens was an option for something called Secure Password Authentication. I later found a HOWTO-like document telling how to access MSN from Linux. (I became interested in Linux after I got my computer and fell for the trap.) It turns out that UUNet actually provides the connectivity. A couple items in the document explained things, though:

If you've ever looked at your internet address, you may have noticed that it ends in uu.net. Now we know that we don't have to deal with any proprietary Microsoft protocols (at least to connect).

Well, you should be able to enjoy most of your MSN account now. You can't get your email yet because thats hidden behind Microsoft's SPA.

Alas, I fear I've started to ramble. Perhaps a combination of sleep deprivation and caffeine OD.

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This post brought to you by the elements N, H, C, and O, and the alkaloid caffeine.

Alternative URL for this story: ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/comp.risks/r isks-20.14.Z