A few questions, take what you will:

1) What did you think about the movie adaptation of Takedown? I know your opinion about both the book and movie being drastically dramatized, but I'm more interested in knowing how it felt seeing yourself being portrayed in a motion picture (or in a book, if you did not see the movie). What is your general opinion on books and films that attempt to portray the hacker and social engineering subcultures throughout the decades? Does the certain lack of verisimilitude in some media irk you due to having a high degree of knowledge in the field?

2) After serving time, you've turned around and made your skill set available for preventive measures. Despite both sides offering a worthy challenge, do you ever miss the other side (sans the legal issues)? Do you still get similar thrills now that you're on the other side of the proverbial wall (if such a metaphor is even valid)?

3) I know that there are a lot of "Then versus Now" questions, so I'll try to keep this one focused to one area: Do you feel a sense of overwhelming complexity and bloatedness in both tech and security compared to previous decades? Individuals and small groups may have dominated in the 80s and 90s, but now it feels more and more that it requires nation state-sized entities to carry out outstanding cracks, and it takes large-scale security firms to prevent them. Is this perhaps just a misperception? What insights do you have?

4) This is a bit inspired by some of the other questions that I've been seeing. I imagine you get a lot of goading comments from people who claim you weren't/aren't a real hacker. I'm guessing at this point you shrug it off, but just out of curiosity what goes through your mind when you hear that kind of stuff? Have these critiques/insults ever had a major impact on you? Do you think there's some legitimacy in some remarks, or maybe they're more motivated to discredit someone with some celebrity status when they feel others ought to have more of the spotlight? Maybe it doesn't matter all that much, but I'm just curious. :-)

I have all sorts of other questions, but those are the three I've always thought about asking Kevin Mitnick if I ever got the chance. I've always been a big fan of his writing, as well as his life story. Can't wait to see this interview unfold.

This deal is tantamount to Pepsi buying out Coke. On top of that, Autodesk can now offer a *complete* realistic production pipeline for studios. On top of that, not ALL of Autodesk's products are for Windows. Feel free to take a look at their post-production programs (all tend to have names related to fire and/or explosions). If they can patch Maya into a Linux pipeline, that would make studios VERY happy.

So that's great, right? Yeah, except now this deal turns Autodesk into a juggernaut that now has a balls-grip on both the film AND gaming industry. Now, as much as they like to boast 3dsmax being great for games, it's a total lie. Companies like EA use Maya and XSI. *AMATEUR GAME MODDERS* use 3dsmax and its watered down sister application, gmax. 3dsmax will have little to offer the 3d world.

Autodesk claims that they will continue to develop both packages at the present indefinite time, but don't take their words too lightly. Everything Autodesk is saying is presently geared to please the widest gamut of people. But they must be treated like a politician, so don't put any weight on what they have to say.

If I were to make a prediction, Autodesk will probably kill off one of the 3d packages, because it just doesn't make sense to have two concurrent packages. One of them ultimately will be killed off, or both of them axed to produce some sort of hybrid product under a new name. But, for the sake of not having to piss off several users of both pieces of software, I'll just assume that they'll kill off one package, and I think that will be 3dsmax. They will incorporate features of Max into Maya that will be improvements, but won't detract too much from the software. Because, if it were the other way around, people in the film industry would be far more upset about using Max than using Maya.

So, as that soggy mess is sorted out, the only major contenders will be: Softimage XSI and Lightwave; however, NewTek has been doing a good enough job killing itself off that competition will have little to worry about, so scratch Lightwave out of the picture. This leaves XSI... a lot of speculators are already moving to XSI and learning it now before it's too late.

But I really don't want to say that it'll come down to this. This is just a scenario for if things go badly within the next few years. No matter how big Autodesk is, they can't really battle both the film and game industries, so I'm hoping that users will still shape the future of Autodesk's programs.