Google's purchase is the best thing that's happened to those archives since they were started. No, it's not open source. No, Google won't give away something they probably just spent a huge chunk of change on.
And yes, there is no doubt in my mind that the archives WILL be back.
Were any of the whiners quoted in the article actually paying attention to Deja's service? The searchable archives kept shrinking! Eventually it would have reached this point weather or not they had been bought out.
Wasn't this the magazine that included a linux disto with a EULA or something?
Anyway, while on one hand I realize that the linux magazine market is glutted, Maximum PC is the only computer-related magazine I read so I'm disappointed to see anything Imagine does fail. This unfortunately means that I am regularly disappointed because they keep trying to break into other magazine markets and failing.
Whatever you call them to differentiate them from being confused by computer/console RPGs, these games are the modern equivalent of charades. I'm actually rather suprised that you didn't immediately think of them. The point of every RPG I've ever played is to simply have fun -- there is no such thing as "winning" (although I suppose you could say that you lose if your character dies but even that depends on circumstances and how you look at it).
Unfortunately since I can't be bothered to actually wade through the commends on this node I'm sure a million people have already said this. Not like it matters anyway as this comment is so far down.
AFAIK, the WotC cuts were NOT a result of sliding sales of anything they made -- anything they lost in Magic sales was easilly recouped by the smash hit that was D&D 3rd edition.
The cuts were an across the board thing that happened as a result of an overproduction of action figures on Hasbro's part (don't remember which line but I'm sure the people who follow that end of things know).
Isn't one of the primary reasons to put your computer in a case because it contains the electromagnetic radiation generated by the computer? Wouldn't putting a window in your case partially defeat this purpose?
Granted, I've never witnessed any adverse effects from this and I've run computers without cases for years but at the same time I know that it probably makes a difference in some situations.
I used to run the distributed.net client myself but (as odd as it sounds) SETI@Home manages to be more practical. Not by very much, but there is at least a minute chance that something might someday come of it.
I ran the SETI@Home "screensaver" so long on my work machine that it burned in the cheap-ass Gateway monitor.
In asia VCD is as popular as VHS is in most other parts of the world. Something to do with the high heat and humidity wreaking havok on VHS tapes that makes them somewhat less than desirable.
If the RBL inconveniences Peacefire and the hosting company feels that their business is not as valuable as the business of a spammer then that's too bad. But please place the blame where it belongs -- on the hosting company.
By and large the RBL is not nearly stringent enough. Read some SPAM-L archives and you'll see lots of fit-pitching about how MAPS allows spammers too many chances and gives them too much time -- something I agree with. Unfortunately the RBL is not about killing spammers dead, it's about educating them -- a task made more difficult by the "Rule #1": Spammers lie.
What you seem to be ignoring is the fact that movie doesn't have to have to have bad acting, bad directing, bad dialog, bad effects and a plot that is not only bad but is blantantly ripped off from other popular (and in some cases recent) childrens films in order to still be a childrens film.
Similarly, films can be "fun" or "funny" (as opposed to "serious") without resorting to Marlon "Like Jar-Jar Without The Depth" Wayans.
Sure, you might say that the D&D movie was supposed to be "tongue-in-cheek" but if you did I would have to say that I don't think "tongue-in-cheek" means what you think it means. The movie did not make any jokes at it's own expense -- the closest it came to such self-awareness was with the two or three uses of actual D&D terminology.
I've played the game and while the acting and dialog in the movie DOES resemble the "couldn't get cast in community theater" role-playing of your average D&D session. This accuracy does not make the material worthy of the multi-million dollar special effects extravaganza treatment. Hell, the average D&D session isn't worth writing down.
It seems obvious to me that you don't buy a high-end video card because you need to run TODAY'S games at 300fps or because you need to run YESTERDAY'S games at 300,000fps -- you buy such a monstrosity so that you can run TOMMOROW'S games at 72fps!!
None of today's games even utilize all the features my GeForce2 has but I bought it when it was fairly new so that it would "last" longer.
At a local university when a student organization wants to get a speaker it's a piece of cake to fund it -- the university collects $50 from each student every quarter they attend and puts it into a fund for the student organizations. Getting a speaker is one of the easiest things to get money for from the people in charge of doling out this money.
Companies that have 1-800 numbers get charged for each call that comes in.
This is no longer true in many (most?) cases. I believe there are 800 number plans that include unlimited calls for a flat rate well within the average corporate budget.
Otherwise why would spammers hand out 800 numbers so often?
America is built on the strength of its corporations. The question is, what are corporations built on? The answer is operating systems. Ordinary operating systems. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, Windows 2000 and Windows ME. Operating systems like yours. Operating systems like mine.
As I speak, there is a new and ominous danger facing our corporations. It is a danger facing every CEO, CTO and CIO. And only a handful of Americans even know it's out there.
What menace am I speaking of? The greatest scourge of the twenty-first century. My friends, I'm talking about mutants.
The versions of Windows we all use have been replaced, with tragic consequences. There is a growing number of operating systems out there that are impure at their most basic level. They are not, technically speaking, Windows.
The threat that these operating systems pose to our way of doing business cannot be underestimated. It touches every facet of our daily jobs. And unless we take a stand now, our corporations will face an uncertain future where the rules of the game are not dictated by us. A world where no computer runs Windows: not your server, not your workstation, not even the proprietary architecture of your own laptop.
So who will save us? The listless bureaucracy that we call our government is asleep at the wheel. By failing to defend our "right to innovate", the President has neglected the first business of government -- protecting the rights and liberties of American corporations. Thus, we must take matters into our own hands.
That's why we've created the mutation advertisement: to inform our customers about the true nature of this mutant menace, and to give us a weapon in our battle for the preservation of our innovation rights. Only browse our web site to avoid propaganda for mutant operating systems. Use any and all resources at your disposal to disparage, discredit and belittle suspected mutant operating systems wherever you may hear of them.
Require the use of our operating systems now. Tomorrow, it will be too late.
America is built on the strength of its corporations. The question is, what are corporations built on? The answer is operating systems. Ordinary operating systems. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, Windows 2000 and Windows ME. Operating systems like yours. Operating systems like mine.
As I speak, there is a new and ominous danger facing our corporations. It is a danger facing every CEO, CTO and CIO. And only a handful of Americans even know it's out there.
What menace am I speaking of? The greatest scourge of the twenty-first century. My friends, I'm talking about mutants.
The versions of Windows we all use have been replaced, with tragic consequences. There is a growing number of operating systems out there that are impure at their most basic level. They are not, technically speaking, Windows.
The threat that these operating systems pose to our way of doing business cannot be underestimated. It touches every facet of our daily jobs. And unless we take a stand now, our corporations will face an uncertain future where the rules of the game are not dictated by us. A world where no computer runs Windows: not your server, not your workstation, not even the proprietary architecture of your own laptop.
So who will save us? The listless bureaucracy that we call our government is asleep at the wheel. By failing to defend our "right to innovate", the President has neglected the first business of government -- protecting the rights and liberties of American corporations. Thus, we must take matters into our own hands.
That's why we've created the mutation advertisement: to inform our customers about the true nature of this mutant menace, and to give us a weapon in our battle for the preservation of our innovation rights. Only browse our web site to avoid propaganda for mutant operating systems. Use any and all resources at your disposal to disparage, discredit and belittle suspected mutant operating systems wherever you may hear of them.
Require the use of our operating systems now. Tomorrow, it will be too late.
Gygax and TSR put out such hack-and-slash dreck that "roll playing games" made a better label than "role playing" did.
Maybe that's just because he didn't have you around to point out all the flaws! No, I'm semi-serious -- where were all the modern RPG gods when TSR was pumping out this awful tripe? I'll tell you: they were either in the basement with their D&D books or they thought "D&D" stood for "Death and Dismemberment" and had something to do with insurance.
Whatever your feelings on the "hack and slash" style of play that Gary Gygax implemented in D&D (and promotes to this day despite it's obvious obsolescence) the fact is that early TSR products were pioneering a large number of concepts that are still in use today even in fully modern RPGs. Do you mock the simplistic and primitive Pong or Space War? I think not -- these games not only created the concept of the video arcade game but proved that it was commercially viable to create such a thing.
Despite your lack of respect for the primordial ooze that TSR's early products are to the RPG industry as a whole, I have to agree with you on one point -- TSR's utter lack of appropriate response to the religious zealots who targeted them. Rather than use some of the cash in their (at the time) overflowing coffers to buy some good lawyers and conjure up a defamation suit or four, TSR just rolled over and took it square in the jaw -- giving the religion industry a perfect villian for their sheep to hate.
"Religious fanatics assasinating our character? OH NO! QUICK, change the names of the demons in our monster manual! Issue press releases about how we don't promote satanism! Retreat! RETREAT!"
I firmly believe that it was this lack of any serious effort to defend their products when it mattered most that triggered the beginning of TSR's slide into bankruptcy. TO THIS DAY there are LARGE numbers of non-religious-extremist people who "know" NOTHING about the game other than that it "caused some kid to commit suicide"! They obviously heard or read about some distorted report of the Egbert case and never heard anything after that. What's wrong with this picture?? Can you imagine GM not saturating the media with ads full of James Earl Jones listing off car safety features after Nader's successful recall lawsuit? What was TSR doing while their game was being crucified by critics with pathetic credentials for crimes it never had anything to do with?? Certainly not enough, otherwise I wouldn't be meeting all these people who had their only opinion of D&D shaped by some shitty TV "news" magazine that's been off the air for years.
9/2 - irc.core.com leaves EFNet. According to the news item, this server handled over 15% of of EFNet's user load.
9/7 - irc2.home.com is shut down due to DoS attacks against it and the "chance is not great" that it will return.
9/12 - irc.lsl.com is pronounced dead.
9/19 - irc.ef.net goes down. Admins of the server refuse to comment on weather or not it will return.
The official page doesn't even talk about how far the connection policies on most of the remaining U.S. servers have been tightened! From what I've seen and heard, most people these days only have a hope in hell of using east/west glbx.net, prison.net and emory.edu. This is not just "business as usual".
Why not write a patch for WinAmp that enables writing MP3 streams to disk?
I was severly pissed off the day I wanted to save the stream from an interview conducted live on a college radio station and found out at the last minute that post-AOL-buyout versions of WinAmp can't do this due to the "potential for copyright violations".
This has got to be the most ridiculously improbable story I have ever read on Slashdot.
Warez is a competitive sport. If one group stops releasing another will immediatly take their place. Will Sega then buy the next group off as well? The stock won't be worth much if this keeps happening -- who wants shares in a company that knuckles under to pirates?
How is Sega going to stop ALL the members of this (likely large) group of (likely anonymous) people from changing nyms and joining some other group? Do they ALL get stock options? Maybe they get tickets to Disneyland too? Free lollypops? Give me a fucking break.
Mage and "Shadowrunner" (sic) are great RPGs but like most RPGs they make piss-poor literature -- witness the many crappy pulp novels based on both games (alright, so that's a straw man but you get my point so don't make me go there). None of the parallels you draw between these games and the current state of technology are non-portable, so why use RPGs? Why not do some actual research and use literature that can actually be taken seriously by anyone who didn't sleep through high school?
To make sure you understand where I'm coming from -- Mage and SR are my two favorite RPGs and I only wish I could find more people to play them with. HOWEVER I can't read your articles on these games without wondering if your next theses will be on an "amazing" bodice-ripper romance novel or maybe some dimestore sci fi that was written under a contract with the term "per word" in it.
People don't take the backstories of RPGs seriously for a reason -- they aren't meant to be taken seriously. Sure, all White Wolf games have that pretentious sheen to them but that's just because the market WW has chosen is largely impressed with such "fake deep" prose. Most game developers will tell you that they write RPGs because they think the games will be fun to play. NOT because they have any illusions about creating great (or even above average) works of literary art.
What I don't understand is how it is that WotC can continue to run these conventions every year (and not just GenCon but Origins and Winter Fantasy as well) yet every time it's like they threw it together at the last minute.
Nobody knows what's going on, necesary equipment goes AWOL for hours, the computers, network and the printers are always going down, none of the temps have been briefed on anything outside of how to operate the database front end (and half the time they need supervision to even do that), Microsoft products are always being used, etc. etc.
This year's GenCon was different though -- not only did they hide a RANDOM ASSORTMENT of the tickets for the people who pre-registered at an understaffed table in a darkened hallway far away from the long row of lighted "PRE-REGISTERED" signs above the tables staffed with temps but they managed to keep it a SECRET from almost the ENTIRE STAFF including the WotC employees and volunteers assisting said temps! This fiasco is even more impressive than the missing cash register (and lack of network connectivity for said register once it was finally located) that caused a two hour wait at the GenCon gift shop last year.
Slashdot Mirror
"I challenge Google" ?!?
Google's purchase is the best thing that's happened to those archives since they were started. No, it's not open source. No, Google won't give away something they probably just spent a huge chunk of change on.
And yes, there is no doubt in my mind that the archives WILL be back.
Were any of the whiners quoted in the article actually paying attention to Deja's service? The searchable archives kept shrinking! Eventually it would have reached this point weather or not they had been bought out.
Wasn't this the magazine that included a linux disto with a EULA or something?
Anyway, while on one hand I realize that the linux magazine market is glutted, Maximum PC is the only computer-related magazine I read so I'm disappointed to see anything Imagine does fail. This unfortunately means that I am regularly disappointed because they keep trying to break into other magazine markets and failing.
Whatever you call them to differentiate them from being confused by computer/console RPGs, these games are the modern equivalent of charades. I'm actually rather suprised that you didn't immediately think of them. The point of every RPG I've ever played is to simply have fun -- there is no such thing as "winning" (although I suppose you could say that you lose if your character dies but even that depends on circumstances and how you look at it).
Unfortunately since I can't be bothered to actually wade through the commends on this node I'm sure a million people have already said this. Not like it matters anyway as this comment is so far down.
AFAIK, the WotC cuts were NOT a result of sliding sales of anything they made -- anything they lost in Magic sales was easilly recouped by the smash hit that was D&D 3rd edition.
The cuts were an across the board thing that happened as a result of an overproduction of action figures on Hasbro's part (don't remember which line but I'm sure the people who follow that end of things know).
Isn't one of the primary reasons to put your computer in a case because it contains the electromagnetic radiation generated by the computer? Wouldn't putting a window in your case partially defeat this purpose?
Granted, I've never witnessed any adverse effects from this and I've run computers without cases for years but at the same time I know that it probably makes a difference in some situations.
If I were a moderator you would have my vote.
That was definitly (+3, Funny) at least.
I used to run the distributed.net client myself but (as odd as it sounds) SETI@Home manages to be more practical. Not by very much, but there is at least a minute chance that something might someday come of it.
I ran the SETI@Home "screensaver" so long on my work machine that it burned in the cheap-ass Gateway monitor.
In asia VCD is as popular as VHS is in most other parts of the world. Something to do with the high heat and humidity wreaking havok on VHS tapes that makes them somewhat less than desirable.
If the RBL inconveniences Peacefire and the hosting company feels that their business is not as valuable as the business of a spammer then that's too bad. But please place the blame where it belongs -- on the hosting company.
By and large the RBL is not nearly stringent enough. Read some SPAM-L archives and you'll see lots of fit-pitching about how MAPS allows spammers too many chances and gives them too much time -- something I agree with. Unfortunately the RBL is not about killing spammers dead, it's about educating them -- a task made more difficult by the "Rule #1": Spammers lie.
What you seem to be ignoring is the fact that movie doesn't have to have to have bad acting, bad directing, bad dialog, bad effects and a plot that is not only bad but is blantantly ripped off from other popular (and in some cases recent) childrens films in order to still be a childrens film.
Similarly, films can be "fun" or "funny" (as opposed to "serious") without resorting to Marlon "Like Jar-Jar Without The Depth" Wayans.
Sure, you might say that the D&D movie was supposed to be "tongue-in-cheek" but if you did I would have to say that I don't think "tongue-in-cheek" means what you think it means. The movie did not make any jokes at it's own expense -- the closest it came to such self-awareness was with the two or three uses of actual D&D terminology.
I've played the game and while the acting and dialog in the movie DOES resemble the "couldn't get cast in community theater" role-playing of your average D&D session. This accuracy does not make the material worthy of the multi-million dollar special effects extravaganza treatment. Hell, the average D&D session isn't worth writing down.
It seems obvious to me that you don't buy a high-end video card because you need to run TODAY'S games at 300fps or because you need to run YESTERDAY'S games at 300,000fps -- you buy such a monstrosity so that you can run TOMMOROW'S games at 72fps!!
None of today's games even utilize all the features my GeForce2 has but I bought it when it was fairly new so that it would "last" longer.
At a local university when a student organization wants to get a speaker it's a piece of cake to fund it -- the university collects $50 from each student every quarter they attend and puts it into a fund for the student organizations. Getting a speaker is one of the easiest things to get money for from the people in charge of doling out this money.
Companies that have 1-800 numbers get charged for each call that comes in.
This is no longer true in many (most?) cases. I believe there are 800 number plans that include unlimited calls for a flat rate well within the average corporate budget.
Otherwise why would spammers hand out 800 numbers so often?
Kids, this is what happens when you have too many Slashdot stories open at once.
Don't do it!
America is built on the strength of its corporations. The question is, what are corporations built on? The answer is operating systems. Ordinary operating systems. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, Windows 2000 and Windows ME. Operating systems like yours. Operating systems like mine.
As I speak, there is a new and ominous danger facing our corporations. It is a danger facing every CEO, CTO and CIO. And only a handful of Americans even know it's out there.
It hides inside the computer of your co-worker, your bowling buddy, even your trusted family physician. It's sitting on your PTA board. It's waiting in the hallways of your neighborhood parish. It may even be watching your children as they sleep.
What menace am I speaking of? The greatest scourge of the twenty-first century. My friends, I'm talking about mutants.
The versions of Windows we all use have been replaced, with tragic consequences. There is a growing number of operating systems out there that are impure at their most basic level. They are not, technically speaking, Windows.
The threat that these operating systems pose to our way of doing business cannot be underestimated. It touches every facet of our daily jobs. And unless we take a stand now, our corporations will face an uncertain future where the rules of the game are not dictated by us. A world where no computer runs Windows: not your server, not your workstation, not even the proprietary architecture of your own laptop.
So who will save us? The listless bureaucracy that we call our government is asleep at the wheel. By failing to defend our "right to innovate", the President has neglected the first business of government -- protecting the rights and liberties of American corporations. Thus, we must take matters into our own hands.
That's why we've created the mutation advertisement: to inform our customers about the true nature of this mutant menace, and to give us a weapon in our battle for the preservation of our innovation rights. Only browse our web site to avoid propaganda for mutant operating systems. Use any and all resources at your disposal to disparage, discredit and belittle suspected mutant operating systems wherever you may hear of them.
Require the use of our operating systems now. Tomorrow, it will be too late.
--- Stolen from MutantWatch and mangled.
America is built on the strength of its corporations. The question is, what are corporations built on? The answer is operating systems. Ordinary operating systems. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, Windows 2000 and Windows ME. Operating systems like yours. Operating systems like mine.
As I speak, there is a new and ominous danger facing our corporations. It is a danger facing every CEO, CTO and CIO. And only a handful of Americans even know it's out there.
It hides inside the computer of your co-worker, your bowling buddy, even your trusted family physician. It's sitting on your PTA board. It's waiting in the hallways of your neighborhood parish. It may even be watching your children as they sleep.
What menace am I speaking of? The greatest scourge of the twenty-first century. My friends, I'm talking about mutants.
The versions of Windows we all use have been replaced, with tragic consequences. There is a growing number of operating systems out there that are impure at their most basic level. They are not, technically speaking, Windows.
The threat that these operating systems pose to our way of doing business cannot be underestimated. It touches every facet of our daily jobs. And unless we take a stand now, our corporations will face an uncertain future where the rules of the game are not dictated by us. A world where no computer runs Windows: not your server, not your workstation, not even the proprietary architecture of your own laptop.
So who will save us? The listless bureaucracy that we call our government is asleep at the wheel. By failing to defend our "right to innovate", the President has neglected the first business of government -- protecting the rights and liberties of American corporations. Thus, we must take matters into our own hands.
That's why we've created the mutation advertisement: to inform our customers about the true nature of this mutant menace, and to give us a weapon in our battle for the preservation of our innovation rights. Only browse our web site to avoid propaganda for mutant operating systems. Use any and all resources at your disposal to disparage, discredit and belittle suspected mutant operating systems wherever you may hear of them.
Require the use of our operating systems now. Tomorrow, it will be too late.
--- Stolen from MutantWatch and mangled.
Gygax and TSR put out such hack-and-slash dreck that "roll playing games" made a better label than "role playing" did.
Maybe that's just because he didn't have you around to point out all the flaws! No, I'm semi-serious -- where were all the modern RPG gods when TSR was pumping out this awful tripe? I'll tell you: they were either in the basement with their D&D books or they thought "D&D" stood for "Death and Dismemberment" and had something to do with insurance.
Whatever your feelings on the "hack and slash" style of play that Gary Gygax implemented in D&D (and promotes to this day despite it's obvious obsolescence) the fact is that early TSR products were pioneering a large number of concepts that are still in use today even in fully modern RPGs. Do you mock the simplistic and primitive Pong or Space War? I think not -- these games not only created the concept of the video arcade game but proved that it was commercially viable to create such a thing.
Despite your lack of respect for the primordial ooze that TSR's early products are to the RPG industry as a whole, I have to agree with you on one point -- TSR's utter lack of appropriate response to the religious zealots who targeted them. Rather than use some of the cash in their (at the time) overflowing coffers to buy some good lawyers and conjure up a defamation suit or four, TSR just rolled over and took it square in the jaw -- giving the religion industry a perfect villian for their sheep to hate.
"Religious fanatics assasinating our character? OH NO! QUICK, change the names of the demons in our monster manual! Issue press releases about how we don't promote satanism! Retreat! RETREAT!"
I firmly believe that it was this lack of any serious effort to defend their products when it mattered most that triggered the beginning of TSR's slide into bankruptcy. TO THIS DAY there are LARGE numbers of non-religious-extremist people who "know" NOTHING about the game other than that it "caused some kid to commit suicide"! They obviously heard or read about some distorted report of the Egbert case and never heard anything after that. What's wrong with this picture?? Can you imagine GM not saturating the media with ads full of James Earl Jones listing off car safety features after Nader's successful recall lawsuit? What was TSR doing while their game was being crucified by critics with pathetic credentials for crimes it never had anything to do with?? Certainly not enough, otherwise I wouldn't be meeting all these people who had their only opinion of D&D shaped by some shitty TV "news" magazine that's been off the air for years.
A couple of servers changed their policy. As far as I understand, from my limited experience, there's nothing strange or extraordinary about that.
From the semi-official EFNet site:
The official page doesn't even talk about how far the connection policies on most of the remaining U.S. servers have been tightened! From what I've seen and heard, most people these days only have a hope in hell of using east/west glbx.net, prison.net and emory.edu. This is not just "business as usual".
Why not write a patch for WinAmp that enables writing MP3 streams to disk?
I was severly pissed off the day I wanted to save the stream from an interview conducted live on a college radio station and found out at the last minute that post-AOL-buyout versions of WinAmp can't do this due to the "potential for copyright violations".
I think you're just jealous because it's funnier than your site.
This has got to be the most ridiculously improbable story I have ever read on Slashdot.
How can this not be painfully obvious?
Mage and "Shadowrunner" (sic) are great RPGs but like most RPGs they make piss-poor literature -- witness the many crappy pulp novels based on both games (alright, so that's a straw man but you get my point so don't make me go there). None of the parallels you draw between these games and the current state of technology are non-portable, so why use RPGs? Why not do some actual research and use literature that can actually be taken seriously by anyone who didn't sleep through high school?
To make sure you understand where I'm coming from -- Mage and SR are my two favorite RPGs and I only wish I could find more people to play them with. HOWEVER I can't read your articles on these games without wondering if your next theses will be on an "amazing" bodice-ripper romance novel or maybe some dimestore sci fi that was written under a contract with the term "per word" in it.
People don't take the backstories of RPGs seriously for a reason -- they aren't meant to be taken seriously. Sure, all White Wolf games have that pretentious sheen to them but that's just because the market WW has chosen is largely impressed with such "fake deep" prose. Most game developers will tell you that they write RPGs because they think the games will be fun to play. NOT because they have any illusions about creating great (or even above average) works of literary art.
What I don't understand is how it is that WotC can continue to run these conventions every year (and not just GenCon but Origins and Winter Fantasy as well) yet every time it's like they threw it together at the last minute.
Nobody knows what's going on, necesary equipment goes AWOL for hours, the computers, network and the printers are always going down, none of the temps have been briefed on anything outside of how to operate the database front end (and half the time they need supervision to even do that), Microsoft products are always being used, etc. etc.
This year's GenCon was different though -- not only did they hide a RANDOM ASSORTMENT of the tickets for the people who pre-registered at an understaffed table in a darkened hallway far away from the long row of lighted "PRE-REGISTERED" signs above the tables staffed with temps but they managed to keep it a SECRET from almost the ENTIRE STAFF including the WotC employees and volunteers assisting said temps! This fiasco is even more impressive than the missing cash register (and lack of network connectivity for said register once it was finally located) that caused a two hour wait at the GenCon gift shop last year.
Ahh-hah, but Napster isn't trafficking in anything! Technically Napster isn't any different than a web site with links to illegal material on it.
Hah!
Two of my old e-mail addresses (that I still use today) made the list.
They probably got a lot of those from news.admin.net-abuse.email