gorilla player: brief trip report

[Parker]

> I had you on_the_underlining, didn't even
> notice the IEs. Good call.

Back in the Usenet Newsgroup days, when everything was in ASCII text, this was a common practice. In situations where the writer wished to underline, a line was placed on either side of the word, _thusly_. Bold type was indicated by placing an *asterisk* on either side of the word one wished to emphasize.

Nowadays, we have HTML coding, so bold and underlined words are no problem, nor are italics. Seeing someone use the aforementioned conventions simply indicates (to me, anyway) that that person has been around the Internet since the "early days," and would not necessarily identify a specific individual. I still use these conventions myself in e-mail (I refuse to use HTML in e-mail).

The use (misuse, actually) of "IE" is an entirely different matter.

[stainless steel rat]

> I had you on_the_underlining, didn't even
> notice the IEs. Good call.

I got _the_ from a well-known person. "Linux Torvalds".

As I said, main reason for changing was to decouple my handle from my office email... No doubt I'll say many things that will lead people to me if they are _really_ interested in finding me. Doesn't bother me however. Anyone that posts here can be "found out" if someone has the interest, the time, and the money... And since casinos are not lacking in money, worrying about it is not worth the energy...

[Parker]

> I got _the_ from a well-known person.
> "Linux Torvalds".

Someone will probably accuse me of being nitpicky (wouldn't be the first time), but the man's name is Linus. The operating system he invented is called Linux, which is some sort of contraction of "Linus' Unix."

> As I said, main reason for changing was to
> decouple my handle from my office email...
> No doubt I'll say many things that will lead
> people to me if they are _really_ interested
> in finding me. Doesn't bother me however.
> Anyone that posts here can be "found
> out" if someone has the interest, the
> time, and the money... And since casinos are
> not lacking in money, worrying about it is
> not worth the energy...

Faulty logic. Given sufficient time, tools and expertise, I'm sure that someone could break into my house. Doesn't mean I should leave the front door unlocked.

[stainless steel rat]

> Back in the Usenet Newsgroup days, when
> everything was in ASCII text, this was a
> common practice. In situations where the
> writer wished to underline, a line was
> placed on either side of the word, _thusly_.
> Bold type was indicated by placing an
> *asterisk* on either side of the word one
> wished to emphasize.

> Nowadays, we have HTML coding, so bold and
> underlined words are no problem, nor are
> italics. Seeing someone use the
> aforementioned conventions simply indicates
> (to me, anyway) that that person has been
> around the Internet since the "early
> days," and would not necessarily
> identify a specific individual. I still use
> these conventions myself in e-mail (I
> refuse to use HTML in e-mail).

Thanks, Parker. If you used HTML in email, I'd be forced to post "Parker's mother wears army shoes." If you remember the ancient insult from (at least for me) grammar-school days.

Microsoft thinks the entire world revolves around Redmond. It doesn't. HTML (or anything else) in a facility designed around pure ASCII is ridiculous...

I hate to date myself, but yes, I was one of the early Arpanet users. IE in the days before Al Gore "invented" the internet.

> The use (misuse, actually) of "IE"
> is an entirely different matter.

As I said previously, i.e. has often been shortened to ie and IE to avoid excessive typing, and hitting the "." slows my typing down quite a bit. It simply dates to the early days of unix, where most of us believed anything that saved a single keystroke was good. Whether it really was or not. After doing it for 30+ years, it is not an easy habit to change, not that I am really worried about changing it. If the merit of any post I write hangs on the correctness or incorrectness of i.e. vs IE vs in other words vs for example, etc. then the post wasn't worth the effort in the first place...

I suffer through posts (here) with things like "rediculous" (ridiculous), "your going to be late" (you're), mistakes with "their", the list goes on and on. I've personally learned to read through the quirks, and get to the meat.

Of course, that is just me...

Last time I saw a real good "grammar" discussion, one person told the other to try visiting "alt.grammar.bullshit" on usenet, and get on with the newsgroup topic where the current discussion was going on...

Worrying about typos, grammer issues, punctuation issues, etc. is really a waste when the entire world watches and posts in one central place. Makes the internet more interesting, so long as you can see the forest in spite of all the damned trees.

[stainless steel rat]

> Someone will probably accuse me of being
> nitpicky (wouldn't be the first time), but
> the man's name is Linus.

I know. I have communicated with him off and on for years. However, my fingers don't know as much as I know, and I type "linux" about 1000 times more often than Linus... and since s and x use the same finger for me, it's an easy mistake to make... at least for me it is easy...

> The operating
> system he invented is called Linux, which is
> some sort of contraction of "Linus'
> Unix."

> Faulty logic. Given sufficient time, tools
> and expertise, I'm sure that someone could
> break into my house. Doesn't mean I should
> leave the front door unlocked.

No, it means you are protecting the house against those that really don't want to break in. Even the unsophisticated criminal simply slams the door in, breaking that $300 dead-bolt right out of that soft pine/fir door jamb. But internet security is a bit different, in that most here are more worried about protection from the casino, not from the casual user. Protection from the casino is non-existant if they want to know. There's little doubt that had the MIT team posted a lot of stuff, they would have been caught a _lot_ quicker...

With a door lock, you are really keeping the kids out. Not the professional criminal. I could show you how one (or more) ripped the core out of a good dead-bolt in a steel outside door. They were pretty stupid in that this was done after they bought this house, before they moved in, so there was _nothing_ to steal except for maybe the dishwasher which was not bothered...

I have also done this (the internet) side myself, tracking a hacker back from our machine to the University of California Davis, after going through several anonymous email systems, an anonymous remailer, etc, with proper court orders in some cases, by asking politely (or not so politely) in other cases. Had I been able to offer reasonable sums of money, I have no doubt it would have been far easier and faster. Some of the sysadmins went so far as to tell me that, in fact. (pay me for my time and I'll get that for you quickly. "how much are you talking about?" How about $1000 per hour, where this will take 2-3 hours to sort thru the various logs to correlate incoming and outgoing IPs...) It happens regularly...