Minecraft is sort-of-fun on its own, but the game really blossoms when you do something like run a Bukkit-based server and get a world or two going, get some of the important plugins going, and invite friends into your world. If it weren't for the Bukkit project I would have been done with Minecraft by the time Beta came out.
My greatest hope is that one day someone will bridge the gap between second-life and Minecraft and will create a game that has the flexibility and user-generated content from second-life with the simplicity and procedural block-based terrain of Minecraft. I want more blocks! I want scripted NPCs! I want Minecraft to be a MUCK!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn
FSN (File System Navigator), was a real application made by SGI for 3D viewing of file systems. That really is a real gui layer, and you can get a clone of it for linux called FSV at http://fsv.sourceforge.net/
I'm close with you on this. I have believed for a while now that the American Dream is revenge. We love revenge as a society.
Maybe humans love revenge as a species. I don't know, I'm not travelled enough to really speak about other cultures.
But from winning the lotto and quitting your job with a big "fuck you guys" to postal workers going postal, to columbine, to "nuke the entire middle east" and how we treat criminals (we want punishment a lot more than we seem to want rehabilitation), we have a guttural response to everything. We have been hurt, and thus we will seek to hurt. Perhaps we aren't strong enough (money, influence, physical strength, etc) to take our revenge, but some day... some day we'll be the badass who will lay the smack-down.
I'm going to go back to lurking for another year or so now.
Many years ago when this project was first started, it was called "GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger." AOL naturally complained, and Mark Spencer changed the name to "Gaim." AOL was appeased, and no one really ever heard of it because there were very few users back then. A few years later AOL trademarked "AIM," and started referring to their IM services using that name. They complained. The issue was brought up on Slashdot, and the Gaim developers at the time got some legal support. That legal support advised that the ongoing discussions with AOL be kept confidential until fully settled, and so it remained. The public thought the issue had gone away then. It sorta did, in that AOL stopped responding to Gaim's legal support for a while.
"At long last, I am pleased to announce that we have a signed settlement and can release our new version. There is one catch however: we have had to change the project's name. After a long, and unfortunately secret debate (as we could not say why we were looking at a name change, we ended up just doing this ourselves), we settled on the name "Pidgin" for gaim itself, "libpurple" for libgaim (which, as of 2.0.0 beta6, exists), and "Finch" for gaim-text. Yes, the spelling of "Pidgin" is intentional, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin.
"Mr. Spock succumbs to a powerful mating urge and nearly kills Captain Kirk." -- TV Guide, describing the Star Trek episode _Amok_Time_
