Well, they are attempting to pull together archives from many different sources. Remember, the Usenet feed was extremely poor prior to the mid-90s (It is still poor, but it's heaven compared to the way it used it be.) You couldn't find any site with a complete feed, and if there's only one source for the archives of some of these newsgroup archives, they WILL be incomplete. And that's just blaming the newsfeed, not other possible issues.
There is a newsgroup whose history I am particularly interested in. Deja's/Google's original archive started in January 1996. With this recent update, posts have been added from May, 1994-March 1995. There is still nothing from April 1995-December 1995, and it's pretty clear to me that the "new" material came from one limited source. It consistantly lacks posts from particular posters (including every posting of the FAQ [!] which was posted by the same person for many years.) But it's more than what we had before. We've already been able to track down and verify some information. Of course, the newsgroup underwent a major change beginning in May 1995 (which was mainly complete by January 1996) and we'd love access to those posts too. But Google Groups is free, and attempting to provide access to what was a very ephemeral resource. The further back you go, the more spotty the coverage will be, due to the nature of Usenet and the older Usenet culture. If nobody was archiving the group during certain years, they're not going to be able to retrieve those posts (which I think is especially a problem in the alt hierarchy.)
*shrug* I've tried every browser under the (Windows) sun on their site over the past couple of months, and even with the "required" plugins, still can't get the bedamned thing to load properly. Since they're in our industry, they are on my boss's to-watch list--and every time I send her a report it says "broken site." Can't get past the intro screen, which usually causes my computer to yak.
It's a bad time of year. There is a certain group of people around the office who pass around screen savers and other executables (bad people! very bad people!) during the holiday season. And surprise, surprise! That group just managed to fill my inbox with copies of Goner in five minutes flat. We'd been doing so good up to this point... managed to bypass everything since ILoveYou.
Executables and screensavers should be banned at the server... no matter who whines. If someone internal *needs* to pass around an executable, that's what the intranet is for.
I've had three hotmail addresses for several years. They're all odd--longer phrases instead of words or names--and I used to rarely get spam at any of them. But I've strictly controlled my use of them.
A couple of months back, I needed to investigate the use of topica for something. I used one of those hotmail accounts to create an account, created and played with a list, then deleted the list and left. Two days later, I started receiving anywhere from 30-50 spam messages a day at that account. (Up to that point, that was my cleanest account--outside of MS 'news' junk, I had never received a spam message.)
Everyone I know makes fun of that commercial. Nobody I know drinks Budweiser. In that way, the commercial has had no effect.
We held a reception recently in which the bar had three types of beers (an import, a local microbrewery, and Budweiser). We purchased the beer through a wholesaler that would take returns of anything unopened/unused. The wholesaler insisted that we needed a large amount of Budweiser--because that's what everyone drinks! We agreed on an equal amount of all three.
We returned almost all the Budweiser. There was nothing of the other two beers left.
They are good travel (plane/car) books. Easy to pick up and get interested in, but easy to put down for a while without losing your place.
In tone, they are very similar to British young adult books of about 15 years back. (I'm thinking specifically of Dahl, but he wasn't the only ya writer with that style.) Light reading, with a bit of humor, and a decent story line.
And then my beloved Aptiva. Ah yes, while working for Big Blue I was suckered into buying one of these black beauties for a discount. The first 2 things I did was realize how AWFUL the sound and video cards really were. The website? What a joke, only 2 years old and there is nary a piece of useful info.
I would blame this on poor organization, rather than lack of information. The information on my six-year-old Aptiva is there (and there's lots of it: all sorts of driver upgrades, BIOS flashes, etc) but it took several hours of surfing to find it. The IBM site's search engine is crap... Google eventually found the section for me.
Actually, having had an Mwave card that functioned perfectly from early 1995-Dec 2000, this thread just made me go and look what the hell you were talking about;) I remember something vague about a class-action lawsuit, but the letter was misplaced in my parent's house (the Aptiva was my college computer) and I haven't a clue were it had gone.
Guess I got lucky--the mwave I had was rock-solid stable for modem connections (tended to leave it up for 2-3 days, against my ISP's rules, of course...) It got a little bratty about playing CDs when the modem was operating (jittery) but my stereo system always sounded better anyhow.
Of course, in January, when I installed FreeBSD on it, I never even tried to get the Mwave up and operating in that environment (it's on an Enternet LAN, and doesn't need a sound card for what it's doing.)
MS was lucky that Code Red (or its like) wasn't out there before the patch. Think about the havoc that would have caused...
For instance, the week that Code Red hit, my ISP's shell servers were hacked and pretty much torn to pieces. The script kiddies used the BSD telnet daemon hole, but attacked the machines five or so days before the security hole was released (and then ignored for a while) on bugtraq. That's the worse case scenario--when the exploit is already circulating among the script kiddies but the admin doesn't have the resources (incidents/bugtraq) to easily figure out what's going on.
Never had a problem in my area (northwest Illinios). We've been using cell phones exclusively for about two years at this point.
In fact, it became so common in the area after the massive Ameritech problems a year and a half ago (Ameritech refusing to install new lines, killing old lines and taking two months to fix them, taking out voice mail boxes for months) that it's unremarkable now. I know a lot of people that were so badly burned by Ameritech that they refuse to use their service ever again.
Folks, I think that what we are seeing through many of these comments, and what my experience has been in the past is that those who research the opinion they wish to express, then write an articulate letter which is shaped by that research, has a better chance of a response than someone who tosses some type of form letter into e-mail or snail-mail.
Respectful debate will always get you further than inarticulate ranting. Or than those silly postcards that some groups pass out.
The SSSCA, (and here, by a weak link, the DMCA) is a good issue to practice these skills on. There are a lot of people and organizations speaking out against it. In fact, my expectation is that the bill isn't going to make it to the floor. But because many are publically drawing the connection between the SSSCA and the DMCA, it is also a good time to get your opinion on the DMCA heard. We may not be able to do anything about it until a case reaches the court system, but you might manage to make your representative think should a similar issue come up in the future.
So, first research. You might want to start here:
http://www.acm.org/usacm/crypto/spaf.pdf
[Yeah, I am aware there are people out there who really don't like Spaf, but his testimony on this issue is well-thought-out, and the type of information that needs to be heard.]
Use google to track down more views (I'm surprised by how quickly google's indexing information on this topic). Read them, then let them ruminate in the back of your mind while you do other work. Then sit down tonight or this weekend and come up with your own expression of the opinions. It can be short and concise--in fact, a short but memorable letter can have a greater effect than a long and wordy one. Send it to YOUR representatives.
Maybe it will be ignored. But you'll end up more educated on a topic you're interested in, and with skills that can be reused. And, if it is ignored, a strong reason to interest yourself in the next election and trot yourself over to the voting booths.
The other thing that NWU did right--at least when I was a ResCon in 97-98--was the CD Installer. Not only did it install all the commonly needed software, but it had a nice graphical tutorial to walk students (or fathers) through installing the NIC and configuring the computer.
I was in one of those hard-to-staff dorms, one person supporting ~150 (I think the ratio was supposed to be 2 ResCons per 150, but the second person never showed up for training.) But all I really ran into were those odd problems: two NIC cards in a computer (the OS knew about one, the Ethernet was plugged into another), a NIC that would only work after a warm boot, half a suite in which summer construction had destroyed their wiring, a computer show built computer that--no matter where you set the date, BIOS or Windows--eventually decided it was living in the year 2197 and managed to corrupt all the networking.
It's exponential. The difference is how the growth rates look on a graph and how quickly they increase past a certain threashold. Early on, the growth rates look relatively similar... then exponential becomes really, really bad.
*huh*./ won't let me post my little graphs for you all.
Geometric growth is a straight line headed upward at a constant pace over time.
Exponential growth is an upward curve that may look geometric in the short term, but whose pace increases greatly over time. It eventually grows at a much, much faster pace.
Code red may be a 'tempered' exponential, since reportedly some versions of it stop attacking after infecting 100 hosts. That simply means the curve isn't as extreme.
hm, for the work I've done, I usually design for browsers released by or after 1995. Anyone using technology
older than that needs to upgrade. They really are the minority of webbrowsers and it is a waste of resources (time & money) to develop a seperate site for them. Most other web developers I know will agree to this. While we (the wd'sm I know) focus most energy on the mainstream technologies support (CCS, DHTML) in the current DOM versions, a few of us do make an effort to make our sites readable by almost any browerser, even ones with . s suck anyway:P
Well, I aim to make my sites readable and understandable in lynx, which tends to make them useable in older browsers.
But if you're using Apache as your web server, and hosting mult. domains off one IP address, the older browsers throw fits anyhow. Even with the fancy-dancing that's supposed to help old browsers work, IE 3.0 throws a temper tantrum and doesn't show the page half the time (but NS 0.9 beta works! Yes, I have users that use NS 0.9 beta, still.)
Well, maybe someone should ask the organizers of the BSDCon what their break-even attendance is, then consider whether it's too expensive or not.
The not-for-profit association I work for runs educational conferences around the world, once conference a year in each of five "areas."
Registration fees for our members for the NA Conference were $1,300 and for non-members were $1,450. Our break-even attendence was 350 attendees. That means that we needed 350 people to attend so that we didn't end up in the red. We made it for this conference. We don't always make it for every conference.
Conferences are *expensive* especially when non-for-profit organizations run them. You don't want to be taking money away from the bottom line - in this case, that would affect the money going into the BSD development efforts. The conference has to pay for itself.
Which makes me wonder: Are users of free web sites a lot more inclined to whine and flame the people who provide them, than the users of free software? It certainly fit the way some/. posters act personally insulted, each time an/. makes an editorial choice they disagree with.
I help run a free web site (rather large for what it is, does about 22 gigs worth of transfer in text and html files a month) and I would have to say yes.
The complaints far outweigh the praise. And people can get nasty over the littlest things. I remember one recent one, which holds the record for being the longest and most un-understandable complaint - it took me almost two days to figure out what the user was cussing about! She/he didn't like the way we named our mirror sites because it was stupid. But it took her about ten paragraphs of foul language to get to that point.
Most recent is complaints from Internet Exploder users because there are a couple of Windows programs out there that are starting to hijack the extension cgi. Since Exploder uses the extension rather than the content-type to decide how to display a file, they can't use the sections of the web site that run though the cgi scripts. There's not a damn thing we can do about that - we have to send them rooting around in their extensions list to kill whichever program has taken over the cgi extension. But it's our fault - the MS browser couldn't possiblty be broken, right??? *rolls eyes*
People come to a point where they gain the attitude that they deserve the free site. I don't know why - but it happens.
A sensible paper, one might hope, would choose the more precise word (cracker when they mean "malicious slob who breaks into computer systems and causes damage" and hacker when they mean "talented computer enthusiast".
Well, I'm an editor on a security journal, and for the past year (since I got here) I've been trying to call crackers crackers.
But it's difficult. It's not a concern for the other two editors on staff, and due to the fact that we put out several publications and that I don't know which one I'll be working on during any given cycle, I might not see all of them. Last time around, I spent most of my time working on another newsletter, so "hacker" snuck through in an article on the DDoS attacks.
It's the writers and the editors that have to be convinced. Maybe in my attempts to use the "right" word when I catch the "wrong" word, I'll allow our readership to see the term cracker instead of hacker and get them to start considering the difference. Maybe, at some point, our writers will then start thinking about the difference. But it's going to take a long time to advance through those steps.
Yup - hit my computer about 8:30AM CDT. I noticed it because 1. the guy that "sent" the damn thing definitely wouldn't be sending a "love letter" to me;) and that 2. I used to share an email address with another person in the office and so received two copies.
Grabbed the server guy when he walked in a couple of minutes later and forced him to get a block enabled. We're behind a 166 DSL line and don't need that crap clogging it up for the rest of the day.
BTW, I'm US-based. We're international and work a lot with people from the UK, which is probably where it came in from, but the first guy who received it here probably spread it near and far across the US.:( His address book is probably has hundreds of people and I don't see any mention of this having a max. So it's come to the US.
The rest of the series is very different. Ender's Game is about the formation and manipulation of the boy, the power that adults have to mold children, and the ways that children both submit to that molding and overcome that molding. Ender is a confused, complex character.
The later books are more story-driven. It's more about the plot than the internals of how the characters are being shaped. Although his conversations with Jane (isn't that the name of the computer-mind?) attempt to give the same sort of insight that the first book contains, it falls a little flat.
The other OSC novel that I found as good as Ender's Game was Songbird - an early novel of his that might be out of print at the moment. It is also about the shaping of a young boy through an overwhelming force, the songhouse, and how that shaping affects his life and his rebellion. Unlike EG, it contains the idea of conflicting attempts to manipulate the boy. The songhouse shapes him one way, the gov't uses that shaping and manipulates it another way... It's almost like the story of what might have happened to Ender if Peter had gotten his hands on him after the Bugger destruction. It's pretty complex.
I help run a site that has listings by new (the newest listings), title, author and date.
One AOLer - who didn't even have outside email turned on - kept complaining that her submission had been "lost." It had moved off the new page.
The pages are listed in order down a table column:
New Author Title Date
Communicating through another AOLer, we told her to find her submission using the Author or Title page. Her reponse - "I can't find the Author or Title pages!"
I couldn't figure out how to provide her with any further help. I just stopped there. Sometimes, there's no curing stupidity.
The world is always changing. What I remember from my childhood (not so long ago - just 10 years - yes, I'm a baby;)
If we talk to our grandparents, or just look back over the century, the world has been changing quickly for the past hundred years. In our grandparent's lives the airplane advanced from little planes to military planes to jets in a very short period of time. The reason the Titantic was so praised and admired prior to its sinking was because ships like the Titantic were the only way across the oceans. Now I'm planning to step on a plane next month and I'll be in Germany 11 hours later. We've seen the ongoing connection of the world - the Internet is part, but not all of that ease of connection. There's a drive to want it to be special, but it's part of an advancement that has been ongoing for the past 100 years.
Re:Most veteran fanfic writers avoid published boo
on
Fan Fiction Explained
·
· Score: 1
I agree with this - I believe that some of it comes down to a difference between mediums.
ST and XF are television shows - fanfic based upon them are written works. Anne Rice's work is written, fanfic about her characters is written as well. It presents much more of a commerical danger. That case is much more clear-cut and would be easier for the copyright holder to win. (I'm not sure of the case law on written fiction/written fanfic at the moment - I'd have to hit L-N for it.)
But...
Copyright laws are not actually based upon absolutes - the existance of Fair Use is a prime example of that. Beyond the clearly illegal (copying something word for word and publishing it without the author's consent) it's mainly dealt with on a case-to-case basis. We can take all the sides we want on the copyright issue and media-based (television) fan fiction, but it has *no* legal standing unless its number comes up in court. It has no ruling declaring it legal, no ruling declaring it illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, they are attempting to pull together archives from many different sources. Remember, the Usenet feed was extremely poor prior to the mid-90s (It is still poor, but it's heaven compared to the way it used it be.) You couldn't find any site with a complete feed, and if there's only one source for the archives of some of these newsgroup archives, they WILL be incomplete. And that's just blaming the newsfeed, not other possible issues.
There is a newsgroup whose history I am particularly interested in. Deja's/Google's original archive started in January 1996. With this recent update, posts have been added from May, 1994-March 1995. There is still nothing from April 1995-December 1995, and it's pretty clear to me that the "new" material came from one limited source. It consistantly lacks posts from particular posters (including every posting of the FAQ [!] which was posted by the same person for many years.) But it's more than what we had before. We've already been able to track down and verify some information. Of course, the newsgroup underwent a major change beginning in May 1995 (which was mainly complete by January 1996) and we'd love access to those posts too. But Google Groups is free, and attempting to provide access to what was a very ephemeral resource. The further back you go, the more spotty the coverage will be, due to the nature of Usenet and the older Usenet culture. If nobody was archiving the group during certain years, they're not going to be able to retrieve those posts (which I think is especially a problem in the alt hierarchy.)
They are one of the "Big 5" accounting (+consulting) firms. Better known in the UK and Europe than in the US.
*shrug* I've tried every browser under the (Windows) sun on their site over the past couple of months, and even with the "required" plugins, still can't get the bedamned thing to load properly. Since they're in our industry, they are on my boss's to-watch list--and every time I send her a report it says "broken site." Can't get past the intro screen, which usually causes my computer to yak.
...
Once upon a time, the site did work
It's a bad time of year. There is a certain group of people around the office who pass around screen savers and other executables (bad people! very bad people!) during the holiday season. And surprise, surprise! That group just managed to fill my inbox with copies of Goner in five minutes flat. We'd been doing so good up to this point ... managed to bypass everything since ILoveYou.
... no matter who whines. If someone internal *needs* to pass around an executable, that's what the intranet is for.
Executables and screensavers should be banned at the server
I've had three hotmail addresses for several years. They're all odd--longer phrases instead of words or names--and I used to rarely get spam at any of them. But I've strictly controlled my use of them.
A couple of months back, I needed to investigate the use of topica for something. I used one of those hotmail accounts to create an account, created and played with a list, then deleted the list and left. Two days later, I started receiving anywhere from 30-50 spam messages a day at that account. (Up to that point, that was my cleanest account--outside of MS 'news' junk, I had never received a spam message.)
Lesson learned--don't use topica!
Everyone I know makes fun of that commercial. Nobody I know drinks Budweiser. In that way, the commercial has had no effect.
We held a reception recently in which the bar had three types of beers (an import, a local microbrewery, and Budweiser). We purchased the beer through a wholesaler that would take returns of anything unopened/unused. The wholesaler insisted that we needed a large amount of Budweiser--because that's what everyone drinks! We agreed on an equal amount of all three.
We returned almost all the Budweiser. There was nothing of the other two beers left.
They are good travel (plane/car) books. Easy to pick up and get interested in, but easy to put down for a while without losing your place.
In tone, they are very similar to British young adult books of about 15 years back. (I'm thinking specifically of Dahl, but he wasn't the only ya writer with that style.) Light reading, with a bit of humor, and a decent story line.
I would blame this on poor organization, rather than lack of information. The information on my six-year-old Aptiva is there (and there's lots of it: all sorts of driver upgrades, BIOS flashes, etc) but it took several hours of surfing to find it. The IBM site's search engine is crap ... Google eventually found the section for me.
*blink*
;) I remember something vague about a class-action lawsuit, but the letter was misplaced in my parent's house (the Aptiva was my college computer) and I haven't a clue were it had gone.
...) It got a little bratty about playing CDs when the modem was operating (jittery) but my stereo system always sounded better anyhow.
Actually, having had an Mwave card that functioned perfectly from early 1995-Dec 2000, this thread just made me go and look what the hell you were talking about
Guess I got lucky--the mwave I had was rock-solid stable for modem connections (tended to leave it up for 2-3 days, against my ISP's rules, of course
Of course, in January, when I installed FreeBSD on it, I never even tried to get the Mwave up and operating in that environment (it's on an Enternet LAN, and doesn't need a sound card for what it's doing.)
MS was lucky that Code Red (or its like) wasn't out there before the patch. Think about the havoc that would have caused ...
For instance, the week that Code Red hit, my ISP's shell servers were hacked and pretty much torn to pieces. The script kiddies used the BSD telnet daemon hole, but attacked the machines five or so days before the security hole was released (and then ignored for a while) on bugtraq. That's the worse case scenario--when the exploit is already circulating among the script kiddies but the admin doesn't have the resources (incidents/bugtraq) to easily figure out what's going on.
Never had a problem in my area (northwest Illinios). We've been using cell phones exclusively for about two years at this point.
In fact, it became so common in the area after the massive Ameritech problems a year and a half ago (Ameritech refusing to install new lines, killing old lines and taking two months to fix them, taking out voice mail boxes for months) that it's unremarkable now. I know a lot of people that were so badly burned by Ameritech that they refuse to use their service ever again.
Folks, I think that what we are seeing through many of these comments, and what my experience has been in the past is that those who research the opinion they wish to express, then write an articulate letter which is shaped by that research, has a better chance of a response than someone who tosses some type of form letter into e-mail or snail-mail.
Respectful debate will always get you further than inarticulate ranting. Or than those silly postcards that some groups pass out.
The SSSCA, (and here, by a weak link, the DMCA) is a good issue to practice these skills on. There are a lot of people and organizations speaking out against it. In fact, my expectation is that the bill isn't going to make it to the floor. But because many are publically drawing the connection between the SSSCA and the DMCA, it is also a good time to get your opinion on the DMCA heard. We may not be able to do anything about it until a case reaches the court system, but you might manage to make your representative think should a similar issue come up in the future.
So, first research. You might want to start here:
http://www.acm.org/usacm/crypto/spaf.pdf
[Yeah, I am aware there are people out there who really don't like Spaf, but his testimony on this issue is well-thought-out, and the type of information that needs to be heard.]
Use google to track down more views (I'm surprised by how quickly google's indexing information on this topic). Read them, then let them ruminate in the back of your mind while you do other work. Then sit down tonight or this weekend and come up with your own expression of the opinions. It can be short and concise--in fact, a short but memorable letter can have a greater effect than a long and wordy one. Send it to YOUR representatives.
Maybe it will be ignored. But you'll end up more educated on a topic you're interested in, and with skills that can be reused. And, if it is ignored, a strong reason to interest yourself in the next election and trot yourself over to the voting booths.
dew
The other thing that NWU did right--at least when I was a ResCon in 97-98--was the CD Installer. Not only did it install all the commonly needed software, but it had a nice graphical tutorial to walk students (or fathers) through installing the NIC and configuring the computer.
I was in one of those hard-to-staff dorms, one person supporting ~150 (I think the ratio was supposed to be 2 ResCons per 150, but the second person never showed up for training.) But all I really ran into were those odd problems: two NIC cards in a computer (the OS knew about one, the Ethernet was plugged into another), a NIC that would only work after a warm boot, half a suite in which summer construction had destroyed their wiring, a computer show built computer that--no matter where you set the date, BIOS or Windows--eventually decided it was living in the year 2197 and managed to corrupt all the networking.
It's exponential. The difference is how the growth rates look on a graph and how quickly they increase past a certain threashold. Early on, the growth rates look relatively similar ... then exponential becomes really, really bad.
*huh* ./ won't let me post my little graphs for you all.
Geometric growth is a straight line headed upward at a constant pace over time.
Exponential growth is an upward curve that may look geometric in the short term, but whose pace increases greatly over time. It eventually grows at a much, much faster pace.
Code red may be a 'tempered' exponential, since reportedly some versions of it stop attacking after infecting 100 hosts. That simply means the curve isn't as extreme.
Well, I aim to make my sites readable and understandable in lynx, which tends to make them useable in older browsers.
But if you're using Apache as your web server, and hosting mult. domains off one IP address, the older browsers throw fits anyhow. Even with the fancy-dancing that's supposed to help old browsers work, IE 3.0 throws a temper tantrum and doesn't show the page half the time (but NS 0.9 beta works! Yes, I have users that use NS 0.9 beta, still.)
Well, maybe someone should ask the organizers of the BSDCon what their break-even attendance is, then consider whether it's too expensive or not.
The not-for-profit association I work for runs educational conferences around the world, once conference a year in each of five "areas."
Registration fees for our members for the NA Conference were $1,300 and for non-members were $1,450. Our break-even attendence was 350 attendees. That means that we needed 350 people to attend so that we didn't end up in the red. We made it for this conference. We don't always make it for every conference.
Conferences are *expensive* especially when non-for-profit organizations run them. You don't want to be taking money away from the bottom line - in this case, that would affect the money going into the BSD development efforts. The conference has to pay for itself.
I help run a free web site (rather large for what it is, does about 22 gigs worth of transfer in text and html files a month) and I would have to say yes.
The complaints far outweigh the praise. And people can get nasty over the littlest things. I remember one recent one, which holds the record for being the longest and most un-understandable complaint - it took me almost two days to figure out what the user was cussing about! She/he didn't like the way we named our mirror sites because it was stupid. But it took her about ten paragraphs of foul language to get to that point.
Most recent is complaints from Internet Exploder users because there are a couple of Windows programs out there that are starting to hijack the extension cgi. Since Exploder uses the extension rather than the content-type to decide how to display a file, they can't use the sections of the web site that run though the cgi scripts. There's not a damn thing we can do about that - we have to send them rooting around in their extensions list to kill whichever program has taken over the cgi extension. But it's our fault - the MS browser couldn't possiblty be broken, right??? *rolls eyes*
People come to a point where they gain the attitude that they deserve the free site. I don't know why - but it happens.
Well, I'm an editor on a security journal, and for the past year (since I got here) I've been trying to call crackers crackers.
But it's difficult. It's not a concern for the other two editors on staff, and due to the fact that we put out several publications and that I don't know which one I'll be working on during any given cycle, I might not see all of them. Last time around, I spent most of my time working on another newsletter, so "hacker" snuck through in an article on the DDoS attacks.
It's the writers and the editors that have to be convinced. Maybe in my attempts to use the "right" word when I catch the "wrong" word, I'll allow our readership to see the term cracker instead of hacker and get them to start considering the difference. Maybe, at some point, our writers will then start thinking about the difference. But it's going to take a long time to advance through those steps.
Yup - hit my computer about 8:30AM CDT. I noticed it because 1. the guy that "sent" the damn thing definitely wouldn't be sending a "love letter" to me ;) and that 2. I used to share an email address with another person in the office and so received two copies.
:( His address book is probably has hundreds of people and I don't see any mention of this having a max. So it's come to the US.
Grabbed the server guy when he walked in a couple of minutes later and forced him to get a block enabled. We're behind a 166 DSL line and don't need that crap clogging it up for the rest of the day.
BTW, I'm US-based. We're international and work a lot with people from the UK, which is probably where it came in from, but the first guy who received it here probably spread it near and far across the US.
The rest of the series is very different. Ender's Game is about the formation and manipulation of the boy, the power that adults have to mold children, and the ways that children both submit to that molding and overcome that molding. Ender is a confused, complex character.
... It's almost like the story of what might have happened to Ender if Peter had gotten his hands on him after the Bugger destruction. It's pretty complex.
The later books are more story-driven. It's more about the plot than the internals of how the characters are being shaped. Although his conversations with Jane (isn't that the name of the computer-mind?) attempt to give the same sort of insight that the first book contains, it falls a little flat.
The other OSC novel that I found as good as Ender's Game was Songbird - an early novel of his that might be out of print at the moment. It is also about the shaping of a young boy through an overwhelming force, the songhouse, and how that shaping affects his life and his rebellion. Unlike EG, it contains the idea of conflicting attempts to manipulate the boy. The songhouse shapes him one way, the gov't uses that shaping and manipulates it another way
I help run a site that has listings by new (the newest listings), title, author and date.
One AOLer - who didn't even have outside email turned on - kept complaining that her submission had been "lost." It had moved off the new page.
The pages are listed in order down a table column:
New
Author
Title
Date
Communicating through another AOLer, we told her to find her submission using the Author or Title page. Her reponse - "I can't find the Author or Title pages!"
I couldn't figure out how to provide her with any further help. I just stopped there. Sometimes, there's no curing stupidity.
The world is always changing. What I remember from my childhood (not so long ago - just 10 years - yes, I'm a baby ;)
If we talk to our grandparents, or just look back over the century, the world has been changing quickly for the past hundred years. In our grandparent's lives the airplane advanced from little planes to military planes to jets in a very short period of time. The reason the Titantic was so praised and admired prior to its sinking was because ships like the Titantic were the only way across the oceans. Now I'm planning to step on a plane next month and I'll be in Germany 11 hours later. We've seen the ongoing connection of the world - the Internet is part, but not all of that ease of connection. There's a drive to want it to be special, but it's part of an advancement that has been ongoing for the past 100 years.
I agree with this - I believe that some of it comes down to a difference between mediums.
...
ST and XF are television shows - fanfic based upon them are written works. Anne Rice's work is written, fanfic about her characters is written as well. It presents much more of a commerical danger. That case is much more clear-cut and would be easier for the copyright holder to win. (I'm not sure of the case law on written fiction/written fanfic at the moment - I'd have to hit L-N for it.)
But
Copyright laws are not actually based upon absolutes - the existance of Fair Use is a prime example of that. Beyond the clearly illegal (copying something word for word and publishing it without the author's consent) it's mainly dealt with on a case-to-case basis. We can take all the sides we want on the copyright issue and media-based (television) fan fiction, but it has *no* legal standing unless its number comes up in court. It has no ruling declaring it legal, no ruling declaring it illegal.