Damn skippy.
Elsewhere on the Internet, an astonishing tribute to New Orleans by Laura Misch, a former Playboy Bunny (and Miss February 1975 — NSFW) who lived there in the 1970s. Well worth sitting through the Salon Site Pass ad to read. (I always knew that Playboy Playmates were really articulate and intelligent, no matter what anyone might say!)
I don’t believe New Orleans is gone for good. For one thing, dealing with watery tragedy is something that people on the Gulf Coast are used to — while the aftermath of Katrina is horrible, I suspect its horror looks a lot worse to those unused to hurricanes, like my wife.
Secondly, New Orleans is too much of a tourist destination to not be rebuilt by various hustlers, crooks and stubborn old SOBs, which is approximately the same set of ingredients that gave us the original New Orleans (although New Orleans has flooded and burned down more than once in the past).
And finally, I haven’t seen it yet. It’s yet another thing that I’ve put off seeing, even though I really want to visit, because “it’ll be there.” You’d think I’ve had learned my lesson when I turned down a chance to see the Berlin Wall (oops), visit the Soviet Union (oops) or see the Grateful Dead in concert (oops).
No more delays: When they reopen for business, I’ll be bringing my tourist dollars to help with the effort.
This wasn’t a surprise to me: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has struck a deal with two tribes to build casinos in the High Desert city of Barstow.
This was, however:
September 9, 2005
Honorable Arnold Schwarzenegger
Governor, State of California
State Capitol Building, First Floor
Sacramento, CA 95814
Dear Governor Schwarzenegger:
I am writing regarding your announcement of new state tribal gaming compacts with the Big Lagoon Rancheria of Humboldt County, and the Los Coyotes Band of Cahuilla and Cupeno Indians of San Diego County.
Both of these tribes are located more than one hundred miles away from the sites of the proposed casinos within the City of Barstow that has a direct impact on the communities of the High Desert which I represent.
Additionally, your proclamation issued on May 18, 2005 expressly states that you would not allow a tribe to conduct gaming on newly acquired land, unless there was a vote of the local jurisdiction and a local advisory vote of the local community.
I believe that off-site gaming is such an extraordinary expansion of gaming and it includes impacts beyond just the directly affected community that any demonstration of local support must be through an advisory vote that includes surrounding affected communities. Due to the controversial nature of this vote, I actually feel the threshold should be more than a simple majority vote.
Therefore, I will be authoring legislation in January 2006, which clearly defines the parameters for these situations. Please feel free to contact me in the future regarding this issue.
Sincerely,
George C. Runner, Jr.
Senator, 17th District
So much for my being able to accurately read the local political landscape with any sort of accuracy.
And yes, the Timbisha Shoshone tribe are located more than 100 miles from Hesperia, although the land they want to build their casino on here would be added to their reservation lands, under a provision in the Timbisha Homeland Act.
All of Hesperia is within Runner’s district.
Interesting times …
The Daily Press story on the Barstow casino decision and Runner’s reaction.
The LA Times story.
The San Bernardino County Sun’s take.
As part of my trying to learn how to be a better journalist, I’m trying to do more follow-up stories. The next edition of the Star, I’ll have a follow-up on last week’s story about the animal shelter fund-raiser, saying what happened to some of the pets featured in the article. And, of course, that meant taking new pictures. More will appear on Page B2 of the September 13 edition of the paper.
Some pictures from the last time I visited the shelter can be found here and here.
The September 13 story.
In a sinister attempt to keep me buying nothing but Hondas the rest of my life, Apple Computers has announced that, starting later this year, Hondas (along with Acuras, Audis and Volkswagens) will feature iPod integration with their cars.
To date, I have owned four Honda Civics, all used but the latest one, ranging from a 1979 to my current 1999. My one flirtation with another car company ended poorly, and we will speak of it no more.
(Source.)
Less than a year after I received my iPod for Christmas, I’m something like four or five models out of date, with my enormous monochrome edition that I love so dearly. The newest iPod is the Nano, which is approaching the insanely small point. It’ll be interesting to see what iPods will look like at this point in 2006.
 After several years, there has finally been a decision about the Bnetd “unofficial” Battle.net-like servers. This began during my tenure at Blizzard and I got called an awful lot of bad names at the time in my dealings with Blizzard fans.
For those who didn’t keep up on the situation, a group of hackers/Blizzard enthusiasts (depending on which side of the fence you were on) did some reverse engineering on Blizzard games, specifically Warcraft III, as I recall, but my memory could be playing tricks on me. This allowed them to cook up their own version of Battle.net, Blizzard’s free peer-to-peer multiplayer network, called bnetd.
If you were in favor of the project, you pointed out that this allowed players to connect to a network with far fewer players and thus faster connections and so on. If you were against the project, you pointed out that this allowed pirated copies of the games to be used in multiplayer games — not being able to play on Battle.net has historically been one of the big disincentives against using pirated versions of Blizzard software. Both of these were true, as was the fact that a lot of bnetd spoke to the hacker mania of “look at this cool thing I was able to do.”
The real motives of those behind the project will probably remain murky forever, due to the heated emotional climate surrounding the issue. (The religion of Open Source gets invoked almost immediately in that Slashdot thread, for instance, which is pretty much the end of substantive discussions in my experience. You either believe in Open Source, or you don’t. Neither side tends to want to talk to each other in any meaningful way, most of the time.)
The legal argument, of course, was that monkeying with Blizzard games like this violated federal law, in particular the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (That link is a PDF file.) And that’s what the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with last week.
(It shouldn’t need to be said, but none of the above, to my knowledge, represents the opinions of Blizzard or their parent company, Vivendi-Universal. I haven’t discussed this issue with anyone there in years and have no idea what their lawyers were saying behind closed doors or even what employees thought other than “wow, this case sure is going on a long time,” which is sort of obvious.)
Penny Arcade weighed in on the issue back in 2002.
Reading some blogs, I remembered some more key details. Yes, the bnetd guys did ask to be able to connect to Blizzard’s software that verifies authentic copies. Yes, Blizzard turned them down, meaning that cracked games were going to be able to freely run on bnetd. But left out of the current coverage that I’ve seen so far is why: Blizzard felt, probably correctly, that giving access to the verification system would just make it easier to reverse engineer how the CD-keys and such were generated to begin with. You’re not going to find a lot of companies trying to combat piracy by handing over the keys to the vault.
Speaking of virtual worlds and users going beyond what the companies creating them intended, On the Media addresses buying and selling virtual gold for real money in their September 2nd edition, “The Unasked Question.”
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