News You Can Bruise for 2002 August 16

Fri Aug 16 2002 08:00: Funny random bits: The supervillain who says "permanently" when he means "for now" and vice versa:

"So, they've escaped... permanently."

"I want them eliminated... for now."

Also, the movie trailer in which the gruff-voiced male trailer narrator and the full-of-wonderment female trailer narrator argue over whether the movie takes place in a "world" or in a "land".

"In a world..."
"In a land..."
"In a world..."
"In a land..."
"In a world!"
"In a land..."
"World!"
"Land..."
"World, you cow!"
"Land, you brute..."

Fri Aug 16 2002 08:50: A ringing endorsement from Crypto-GRAM:

The best technical description [of Palladium] is the summary of a meeting with Microsoft engineers by Seth Schoen of the EFF.

Contrary to popular belief, this entry is not just an excuse to point out that I too have had something I wrote mentioned in Crypto-GRAM. It's also an excuse to quote this step from Schneier's PGP attack:

4. Eve somehow convinces Bob to send her the gibberish plaintext.

Eve is a freaking criminal mastermind.

Fri Aug 16 2002 11:01: "The semidecidable we decide right away. The undecidable takes a little longer."

Fri Aug 16 2002 20:51: I just beat Manoj pretty badly at FreeCiv. Neither of us had played against anything but AIs for a long time, {so, and} it was a lot of fun. He bribed one of my units with a diplomat and I was overjoyed at the supra-AI level of cunning required to do so. Nonetheless, I beat him, because he only built two cities (I initially backed off to give him space to expand, but he had to go get dinner so we had a big battle which I won).

I'm really bored with the FreeCiv AI; if I survive to develop gunpowder I'm pretty much guaranteed to win, so I usually lose interest around that point. Manoj and I are going to play again at some point; does anyone else want to play (with me or with the both of us)? As previously mentioned, I don't really like playing games with people I don't know, but anyone who reads NYCB could probably gain admittance into that elusive category by dropping me a line. Despite my triumph over Manoj, I'm probably easy pickings for a FreeCiv expert, because my playing style is attuned to the foolish isolationism of the AI.

I'm starting to think that the results of unit conflicts in FreeCiv should be reported as though you were hearing about them in your regime's propaganda broadcasts, eg. "Your heroic musketeers were killed defending themselves against an unprovoked attack from Manoj's explorer."