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So a few days in Londinium for the Internet Show at the Aggie (now the Business Design Centre) in the People's Republic of Islington. While I was in town, Tony Blair's voicemail was hacked (it wasn't me) and we discovered that he is a politician trying to fool the voters. Also, a public domain game called "Schoolyard Slaughter" written for an obsolete computer system and awarding points for head shots to children was attacked in the press. It was distributed on shareware disks and CDs and not on the dreaded Net but they talked about the net in any case. The interesting thing about "Schoolyard Slaughter" is that similar games involving adult males and aliens ("Doom" par example) have been around for a long time. The lesser controversy surrounding games like Doom suggests that the commentators (and perhaps the public) are guilty of speciesism, ageism, and gender bias. After all, the fictional slaughter of adult males and aliens should be just as bad as the fictional slaughter of children. None of the ISPs represented at the Internet Show would comment on whether or not they were going to ban customers who refused to rate their sites or news posts. But they were just sales types. I did teach a young lady working at the UUNET/Pipex booth how to telnet. She'd never done so before. DCF
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Duncan Frissell wrote:
So a few days in Londinium for the Internet Show at the Aggie (now the Business Design Centre) in the People's Republic of Islington. While I was in town, Tony Blair's voicemail was hacked (it wasn't me) and we discovered that he is a politician trying to fool the voters. Also, a public domain game called "Schoolyard Slaughter" written for an obsolete computer system and awarding points for head shots to children was attacked in the press. It was distributed on shareware disks and CDs and not on the dreaded Net but they talked about the net in any case. The interesting thing about "Schoolyard Slaughter" is that similar games involving adult males and aliens ("Doom" par example) have been around for a long time. The lesser controversy surrounding games like Doom suggests that the commentators (and perhaps the public) are guilty of speciesism, ageism, and gender bias. After all, the fictional slaughter of adult males and aliens should be just as bad as the fictional slaughter of children.
Really? You mean *all* of us people could "come together" (like the media says so much) and give up all of our sacred cows at once? I suggest to you that certain sacred cows will NEVER be given up, until there is no longer any "milk" in those particular cows. [add'l text deleted]
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Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com> writes:
[whilst in London...] The interesting thing about "Schoolyard Slaughter" is that similar games involving adult males and aliens ("Doom" par example) have been around for a long time. The lesser controversy surrounding games like Doom suggests that the commentators (and perhaps the public) are guilty of speciesism, ageism, and gender bias. After all, the fictional slaughter of adult males and aliens should be just as bad as the fictional slaughter of children.
May be you knew this. A few months back in the UK, some nut flipped and shot up a school full of kids, finishing up by shooting himself (sadly for the press, his second cousin once removed, did not have an internet account). Much media teeth gnashing about hand guns, and tighter gun laws ensued. (The guy had a gun license, something which is needed to legally own a gun in the UK.) The Schoolyard Slaughter game is I think a joke by someone with a funny sense of humor, playing on this incident. Adam -- #!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1 lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)
participants (3)
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Adam Back
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Dale Thorn
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Duncan Frissell