The Ultimate Off-Grid Computer.

Too cool.

This one might have gone over slighly better had I not failed at hyperlinking. I wanted to link the last two words to this.

When an inmate at the Riverhead County Jail in Southampton, NY, commits a crime, they are arraigned for it at the Southampton Town Hall. Concerns about overcrowding the Town Hall with prisoners awaiting arraignment, and the fact that it is next to a school, have led to a plan to conduct future inmate arraignments via Internet-based video conferencing.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to be arraigned over a webcam. I never look good in those things.

Just finding a safe space for the link to my local Slashdot party, since it'll scroll out of my recent threads soon.

I look forward to it, I'm always happy to put faces to screennames.

Khan Paul in 2008!

PC Pro reports on Linden Lab's recent announcement that wagering will no longer be allowed in Second Life. This follows on their ban on casino-related advertisements back in April.

The ban has predictably caused an outcry among a large portion of Second Life's residents. Casino fans now have nowhere to openly indulge their gambling habits, and the casino operators (many of whom have considerable amounts of real money invested in what they do) have seen their virtual business made instantly worthless, with no reimbursement from Linden.

I've gleaned from a few random in-world conversations that residents who aren't all that into gambling are, like me, generally applauding the move. While this means an end to the somewhat common practice of virtual homes and shops having one slot machine off in a corner serving as a somewhat interesting "tip jar," it also means many positive changes for the non-gambler residents. When a casino would set up shop, the in-world lag caused by the massive amounts of scripted gambling machines and the huge influx of players hoping to hit a jackpot, and the good old-fashioned noise levels, would basically render the local area unusable. The casino's neighbors would often be forced to sell their virtual land (often to the casino itself, and often at a loss) and move on.

It's very much worth noting that online gambling has been illegal in the US, and therefore in Second Life, for quite some time. It's only now that Linden Lab are enforcing that particular law. So, the ban should not really have come as a surprise to anyone.

I will, however, miss being able to gather a few friends, put on our Dalek avatars, and zoom around the casinos, rambling in all-caps about the latest batch of human slaves being prepared by superior Dalek technology for the final phase.

One of the many reasons my pal Murd0c is awesome.

So we've got a frontpage story about how the firstborn gets the brains.

As a firstborn, I can't wait to show this to my family and gloat. I wonder, though, if this can be attributed at all to parents slowly getting worn out by successive kids.

As the first child of a single mom, I think I caught the brunt of that whole "new super parent who intends to do everything right, dammit!" thing.

"You won't eat your vegetables? Well, then.. no TV for you.. for a week! Super-mom commands it!!"
"But mom!"
"No buts! You're grounded, as well! Go to your room!"

When my younger sister came around to the same point, mom was a bit older and a bit more tired thanks to all my crap, and things got a little less strict.

"You started a fight in school? Erm... just don't do it again. Or I'll... um... be more disappointed in you than I already am."
"Yeah, whatever."
"Don't 'whatever' me! You're grounded for, um, a day or something."

By the time the third kid came along, mom was much more jaded, and my youngest sister could pretty much get away with anything.

"Why the hell are you here? Get outta my face, go sleep with your boyfriend or something."
"Uh, mom? I'm eight years old."
"Yeah, whatever."

I wrote this up for the IMDb message board for the film Hackers, which I hang around on. On the off-chance any folks around here are anywhere near as much of a shameless fan of that particular b-movie as I am, I'll repost it here..

If you're like me (and I know I am!) you like to collect novelizations of movies you're into. For those unfamiliar, the novels have to hit store shelves near the movie's release date. So, they're often adapting the movie while the crew are still making it. The novelists are usually given an earlier draft of the script to work from than the final product. The novel will also lack last-minute changes made by the director, and often contain alterations or whole new sequences of the writer's own creation to flesh things out.

So, I finally got around to reading my copy of the paperback novelization of this movie, by David Bischoff (incidentally, the same guy who novelized WarGames.) I thought I'd mention some of the differences between the book and the film it was based on, and other assorted trivia, in case anyone else finds it interesting.

In the novel...

• Young Dade apparently created that virus to "map out" the Wall Street systems, not intending to crash them.
• The TV station Dade hacks is NBC. Dade replaces the music video for the Beach Boys' "California Girls" with a "Get Smart" episode.
• Joey's last name is Hardcastle instead of Pardella.
• Phreak's handle is spelled "Fantom Phreak" throughout the book.
• When Phreak is talking long distance on payphones, it's to his girlfriends in Venezuela and Buenos Aires.
• Kate rides a motorcycle with a teddy bear attached to the front. The teddy bear's name is Trent Reznor.
• While Stuyvesant High School isn't named in the film, in the book it's identified as "Stanton High School" and described as a gifted school for kids from all over the City. In other words, Stuyvesant.
• The "pool on the roof" prank is Kate's work alone, she isn't egged into it by that guy in the hallway. She further bamboozles Dade by promising that she'll be in the pool doing laps.
• The book mentions the phone company as "New York Telephone" throughout, although Phreak still calls himself "the king of NYNEX." (In real life, NYNEX was the incarnation of the phone company that came after New York Telephone, later to become Bell Atlantic which even later became Verizon.)
• Phreak doesn't take Dade to Cyberdelia right away. Instead, the whole first meeting of the hackers takes place at a diner called "Round the Clock," which seems to be very loosely based on a real-life diner and longtime post-2600-meeting hangout called "Around the Clock."
• The book mentions real online services such as GEnie, Compuserve, and AOL. Joey in particular remembers "graduating" from those to Netcom and the Internet.
• Cereal sells his bootleg cassettes in Chinatown rather than in front of Cyberdelia.
• Later, at Nikon's place, Nikon and Cereal describe how they're generating credit card numbers to scam the Home Shopping Network. It's here that Dade decides to identify himself as "Crash Override," because he isn't comfortable enough with everyone to give out his "true hacker name." They drink beer, which makes Dade uncomfortable. Later they watch "Hack the Planet" which is described as the work of rich twin brothers who hack their show into the satellite feed.
• Phreak took Dade to Nikon's as a trade for the principal's password which Dade had figured out. Dade accomplished this master feat because he noticed a Giants pennant on the principal's wall, and the password was "GIANTS."
• Dade cooks gourmet dishes for his mom. He got into it because cooking is just like hacking.
• While Joey hacks the Gibson, Hal the Sysop plays "Mortal Kombat" on a Game Boy.
• The image of the Da Vinci virus is a digitized picture of Leonardo's self-portrait rather than his Vitruvian Man drawing. When it speaks, the image's mouth flaps like a Terry Gilliam animation from Monty python.
• The written descriptions of hacking are slightly more realistic than expected, with terms like "closing ports" being thrown around.
• Joey's computer "Lucy" runs Windows.
• Lucy's specs are as follows, and I quote: "a Pentaflex 486/50MHz with three hundred and twenty meg hard drive, 16-bit ROM, quadra-speed CD-ROM, and all the peripheral trimmings."
• Joey's interrogation scene is quite grim, with the poor guy crying and dripping snot all over the place. It takes place in a Secret Service base in the World Trade Center. (The selection of photos from the film in the middle of the book includes one from this scene, so it's a safe bet that it was actually in the film at some point.)
• The "Conscience of a Hacker" quote is read by Phreak, who reads it to Dade out of an issue of "2600 Hacker Quarterly." [sic] While the film gave the Mentor aka Loyd Blankenship proper credit for writing it, the book does not.
• The novel is explicit that an SS agent is in fact dancing undercover at Kate's party. (In the film it's the agent played by Marc Anthony, but you only see him for a split second.) Dade nearly recognizes him before being distracted.
• At Kate's party it's Phreak who claims the "curse" of a photographic memory and recites a woman's number out of the phone book, which means it makes no sense later when Nikon wanders around memorizing passwords, and when he quotes the day and date of the Zero Cool news article (exclaiming the sensible "You had braces then!" instead of the cheap laugh "I thought you was black!") For that matter, Nikon's handle no longer makes as much sense either.
• Dade meets Kate's mom at the party. She asks him if he was bottle-fed or went the natural route before he escapes.
• Phreak says Burn's laptop is insanely great because of its "28.8-kilobaud modem."
• On matchmaker Phreak's urging, the rest of the hackers keep judging the Crash vs Burn contest a tie on purpose, waiting for chemistry to take over.
• Plague doesn't smash Dade's stereo. While propositioning Dade, Plague pulls up Zero Cool's virus on Dade's computer, and fixes a misplaced > in it.
• In a fit of anger after being forced to turn over the disk, Dade smashes the clear laptop Plague gave him.
• In addition to his bootleg audiotapes, Cereal sells re-edited videotapes such as "Godfather versus Scarface. Pacino versus Pacino. Who is the baddest Al?"
• Novel Kate is generally a lot less hostile to Dade, smiling where movie Kate scowled. However, when people start getting busted, Kate suspects Dade since everything started happening roughly when they met him. Cereal talks her out of it because he has a good feeling about Dade.
• Margo got the idea to hook up with Plague and perpetrate that scam after reading "The Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Sterling.
• The nightclub Razor and Blade are at is called "Robot's Revolt."
• Razor and Blade's robot gun is a water pistol instead of a cigarette lighter.
• Razor and Blade give the hackers a stack of laptops for the Gibson-hacking, and they give Dade the eyepiece. Apparently it's called a "Pirate Eye" and it shortens your reaction time somehow.
• While setting up their gear in Grand Central, Cereal decides the group needs a name. He suggests "F.O.D.," and then he and Nikon discuss what it could stand for. Possibilities include "Flowerpickers Of Doom," "Free Our Data," "Fathers On Drugs," and "Friends Of Dogs." The book refers to the group as the F.O.D. from then on, and later in a cushy ending scene (transcribed below) Dade decides it stands for "Friends Of Dade."
• In the Grand Central scene, the full garbage file takes up two floppies, not just one. Dade chucks both of them in the trash when busted.
• Cereal comes back after "fixing" the phones. He continues to scout around while the rest of the crew are hacking, and warns them when the cops arrive.
• The full address of the garbage file is "/root/.workspace/.garbage." It's helpfully labelled "EYES ONLY: EUGENE BELFORD, COMPUTER SECURITY OFFICER" within the system.
• Among the witticisms displayed by Gibson-hacking viruses:
  FRANK ZAPPA LIVES!
  FUGS OF THE WORLD UNITE!
  OFF OUR CYBERBACKS!
  VIVA REVOLUTION!
  BUILD ME A MATE!
  I'M HUNGRY, INSERT HAMBURGER INTO DRIVE.
• Cereal doesn't immediately grasp the significance of Dade's "Trashing!" shouts. It takes him a while to realize what he meant.
• When interrogating Dade, Gill informs Dade that the program code for the Da Vinci virus was found on his computer, meaning the clear laptop Dade smashed earlier. When Dade replies that Plague gave him the lappy, Gill says "not according to your mother's credit card receipt!" He then displays the receipt, with the signature Dade wrote on the electronic UPS clipboard when accepting the package. This probably explains the presence of that odd lingering closeup in the film of Dade signing for the package - it was meant to set up this gag.
• Eugene escapes on a British Airways flight, but it's a bit different than the film. He is wearing sunglasses and a spangled cowboy hat and shirt, speaks with a Texan drawl, and calls himself "Mr. O'Reilly." And he is not caught by Gill at the last minute. Instead, he is simply escaping to Tokyo and planning his revenge on the good hackers, probably in hopes that there would be a sequel for him to do it in.
• While getting ready for her date with Dade, Kate breaks up with Curtis over the phone.
• Kate and Dade float around on some convenient rafts before rolling into the pool.
• Dade is the one who sets up the "CRASH + BURN" lightshow.

And there's this one particular Scooby-Doo scene before Kate and Dade's date, after they are released. It's so mind-boggling I'll just transcribe the whole thing here. I swear this is exactly how it reads in the book. I am not exaggerating any of it in the slightest.

This takes place in the book directly between Plague leaving on a jet plane, and Kate preparing for her date with Dade...

I am actually aware of the technical things wrong with this statement.

If all the jokes were winners, I'd be George Carlin. *shrug*

*snort*

Whenever I post in a Second Life related discussion I get an email or two asking who I am in-world.

So, in case anyone is interested, my name in Second Life is Rob Triskaidekaphobia.

Feel free to say "hi" to me in-world any time but be warned, my alter ego is steeped in massive amounts of nerdy scifi fandom. For instance, I'm rather proud of the TARDIS my avatar lives in.

I've just been called a nerd on Slashdot.

This has totally lifted my spirits! It was a perfect cure for the brooding case of "the Mondays" I woke up with. Thank you, AC!

If you're interested in my ramblings, I have a journal here, a head-vent of a zine here, a dream log here, and other stuff you can find riiight about here.