Planet Earth, The Swine Hunt, Gaming, OS Wars

[tcpip]

This Sunday I'm giving a presentation at the Melbourne Unitarian Church on "The Future of the Planet Earth", where I discuss potential disasters in international relations, politics and especially the environment. I neither seek to alarm or to appease, but rather to give a solid presentation of factual information to the best possible knowledge provided scientific knowldge.

I was supposed to be the the poster child of the revolution in the great hunt against The Swine (those who support theory and system in RPGs). I was supposed to become 'the first stuffed pig mounted in the commemorative smoking room of the Great Swine Hunt". Instead, it seems it was a total disaster for the the RPGPunbdit and jimboboz. Read it yourself for great amusement value. My personal favourites were the enlightening "It's written on the box" and phasmaphobic's summary. When I get around to it I'll also do a write-up of the Ten Thousand Islands game too. I guess The Year of the Pig is not the time to call a Swine Hunt, eh?

In other gaming news, I've started an epic-level high fantasy HeroQuest Glorantha PBeM with eleven players. AD&D Norman Britian on Sunday will see further investigation of the slavelords of Navarre (and the tie to the historical War of the Three Sanchos). Next Friday is Everway Aesheba. Next Sunday is the first game of Dragonlords (at the moment little more than RuneQuest (3rd ed) plus house rules). Adopting a holding position in Diplomacy. I think that brings the number of people I do regular gaming with to over thirty. Oh, I've been told that my Rolemaster Companion will be re-released this year (after fourteen years!)

Senior IT security expert warns to stay away from MS-Windows Vista. ("The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history"). Eric Raymond tells Linux developers that 2008 is a hard deadline in their attempts to gain world domination.

And valedictions to the great author and discordian philosopher: Robert Anton Wilson has died.

Comments

Re: linux's killer app

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Well, given ESRs politics, do you really think you could see him supporting the "let's promote Linux in China" idea? ;-)

[decrypt-era.livejournal.com]

Certainly, th majority of th linux community would
disapprove of th policies of th Chinese govt,
but as ESR himself admitted in that essay
(and Chomsky's pointed out many a time),
your short term goals don't always match yr long term goals,
but hopefully they'l lead to them.

Guess i shoulda emphasised th diff between
distributing an idea thru th Chinese state,
and giving it directly to th Chinese populace.
Those ppl are crying out for decentralised info transmission,
it's much more meaningful to them in that situation,
and all they need is th opportunity.
It seems to me that Microsoft would assist China th state
in keeping a lid on such info freedom
(indeed, they'r doing just that over here for th corps),
but i think the state might temporarily be sold on open source
using national security paranoia (worked in Venezuela).

Also, i apologise for not including India,
who'r shapin up to be even more infotech hungry than China.

How do you think th linux community will adapt,
when it's two-thirds Asian?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I agree with what you say about India and China. Indeed, OSS may indeed be an as much as benefit to those wanting information freedom as the political leadership that wants information security. Strange that..

I think the Linux community will react quite positively. They're probably among the least racist collective group on the planet. Not exactly always culturally knowledgeably, but less likely to engage in social blunders any less than their norm ;-)