I actually found this and wrote a blog entry about it before I saw the article on slashdot. I discussed creating an account, and then trying and failing to actually USE the email service, and point out some odd things in the registration, like the bizarre password hint questions, all concerned with either Kim Jong Il's movie obsession or reunification of the country, and the fact that Taiwan is listed as a choice of nationality on the official web site of a government that has China as perhaps its only ally!
Completely false. I've seen both of them on talk shows, and they don't look or speak anything alike. Bruce Sterling has a noticable Texas accent (I think he lives in Austin), and Gibson is a Canadian. And wouldn't it be weird to co-write a book with yourself for double billing?
According to that book I read, they won a bunch of radio call in contests like that. By the way, it's pretty funny that Justin Peterson became an FBI snitch and was one of the people who helped track down Kevin Mitnick.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet, but Poulsen himself (that article's author) was involved in almost an identical scheme to the one he's writing about. At least according to the book "The Watchman" by Jonathan Littman. In the book Littman describes an operation in which Kevin Poulsen rerouted the phone numbers of escort services which had been advertised in the yellow pages in California but had since been shut down by police to the offices of a pimp/escort agency that he was partnered with.
I respect Mr. Poulsen for his current work (and his younger exploits if true are pretty damn cool), but what he's writing about here is so similar to something he used to be involved in may warrant some disclosure on his part, or just passing the article to someone else to write.
By the way, one notable difference between the article and his own actions is that he was only supposed to have rerouted abandoned phone lines, not currently active ones.
I had a PC JR for a while when I was a kid (got it slightly than my C=64, although that was kept running next to it) and I don't understand how it's anythingl like what you're describing. From a software standpoint, the Jr was a completely ordinary IBM-PC, that ran MS-DOS and any software you happened to have. True, it had a bizarre hardware setup and much weaker support for third party hardware addins (which is also true of the later PS/2 models from IBM, really), but the JR could run all the standard PC/DOS software that ran on the earliest DOS machines.
I definitely agree, writing well for children takes a mindset that very, very few good adult writers can pull off, and what impresses me about Pratchett is that he can write equally well for adults and children using almost the same style.
Other fantasy for children that's worth looking at is E. Nesbit's books, CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, and Harry Potter. This is just off the top of my head, there's more, but most of it is so inferior. Xanth comes to mind; even though I loved it in middle school, trying to read it now is painful.
I have to say that I'm a huge fan of Terry Pratchett and I do still enjoy the Discworld series, including The Truth, but tacpprm does have some valid criticism, even if I don't completely agree. The Truth definitely isn't the best book in the series, but it also isn't the worst, and it's always nice to see new main characters introduced.
I saw an interview with Terry Pratchett a couple of years ago where he promised he would alternate between Discworld and non-Discworld novels in the future, but he doesn't seem to have quite stuck by that.
His non-Discworld stuff is also very entertaining, such as Good Omens, co-written by Neil Gaiman, soon to be a Terry Gilliam movie. Johnny and The Dead trilogy, which is very good fantasy for children/young adults is worth checking out, as good as Discworld can be it would be nice for him to produce more other stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually found this and wrote a blog entry about it before I saw the article on slashdot. I discussed creating an account, and then trying and failing to actually USE the email service, and point out some odd things in the registration, like the bizarre password hint questions, all concerned with either Kim Jong Il's movie obsession or reunification of the country, and the fact that Taiwan is listed as a choice of nationality on the official web site of a government that has China as perhaps its only ally!
Well, you could possibly explain the difference. I mean, really...
I'm pretty sure those are just 30 random requests grabbed from the search monitor, not actually the most popular 30 of the day.
Completely false. I've seen both of them on talk shows, and they don't look or speak anything alike. Bruce Sterling has a noticable Texas accent (I think he lives in Austin), and Gibson is a Canadian. And wouldn't it be weird to co-write a book with yourself for double billing?
According to that book I read, they won a bunch of radio call in contests like that. By the way, it's pretty funny that Justin Peterson became an FBI snitch and was one of the people who helped track down Kevin Mitnick.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet, but Poulsen himself (that article's author) was involved in almost an identical scheme to the one he's writing about. At least according to the book "The Watchman" by Jonathan Littman. In the book Littman describes an operation in which Kevin Poulsen rerouted the phone numbers of escort services which had been advertised in the yellow pages in California but had since been shut down by police to the offices of a pimp/escort agency that he was partnered with. I respect Mr. Poulsen for his current work (and his younger exploits if true are pretty damn cool), but what he's writing about here is so similar to something he used to be involved in may warrant some disclosure on his part, or just passing the article to someone else to write. By the way, one notable difference between the article and his own actions is that he was only supposed to have rerouted abandoned phone lines, not currently active ones.
I had a PC JR for a while when I was a kid (got it slightly than my C=64, although that was kept running next to it) and I don't understand how it's anythingl like what you're describing. From a software standpoint, the Jr was a completely ordinary IBM-PC, that ran MS-DOS and any software you happened to have. True, it had a bizarre hardware setup and much weaker support for third party hardware addins (which is also true of the later PS/2 models from IBM, really), but the JR could run all the standard PC/DOS software that ran on the earliest DOS machines.
I definitely agree, writing well for children takes a mindset that very, very few good adult writers can pull off, and what impresses me about Pratchett is that he can write equally well for adults and children using almost the same style. Other fantasy for children that's worth looking at is E. Nesbit's books, CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, and Harry Potter. This is just off the top of my head, there's more, but most of it is so inferior. Xanth comes to mind; even though I loved it in middle school, trying to read it now is painful.
I have to say that I'm a huge fan of Terry Pratchett and I do still enjoy the Discworld series, including The Truth, but tacpprm does have some valid criticism, even if I don't completely agree. The Truth definitely isn't the best book in the series, but it also isn't the worst, and it's always nice to see new main characters introduced. I saw an interview with Terry Pratchett a couple of years ago where he promised he would alternate between Discworld and non-Discworld novels in the future, but he doesn't seem to have quite stuck by that. His non-Discworld stuff is also very entertaining, such as Good Omens, co-written by Neil Gaiman, soon to be a Terry Gilliam movie. Johnny and The Dead trilogy, which is very good fantasy for children/young adults is worth checking out, as good as Discworld can be it would be nice for him to produce more other stuff.