Non-Disclosure Agreements Have No Saving Throw
Last Friday, Wizards of the Coast published the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the first major release of the game in eight years. During the development of the game, the company has been so generous with confidential information that it got almost 1,000 people locked under non-disclosure agreements.
The company has followed this up with a friendly warning that in spite of the game's release, these people are bound until the end of time by the agreement:
Q: Can I talk about my playtest experiences, or about the playtest versions of the rules?
A: No. That information is still considered confidential and may not be discussed, shared, or distributed in any way.
Q: Now that 4th Edition is on sale, is my NDA void?
A: Absolutely not. Your Non-Disclosure Agreement with Wizards of the Coast still obligates you to "keep strictly confidential all Confidential information" in your possession.
Q: But how is 4th Edition still considered confidential?
A: Once a product is published, the information presented in that product is no longer confidential. However, all prior versions of the rules (as well as playtest instructions and all other correspondence between you and Wizards of the Coast, Inc. regarding your playtest experiences) is still considered confidential.
In the new edition of the game, people who employ excessive secrecy are likely to be followers of Vecna, the chaotic evil god of necromancy and secrets. "He rules that which is not meant to be known and that which people wish to keep secret," according to page 163 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. "Evil spellcasters and conspirators pay him homage. He commands them to: Never reveal all you know" and "Find the seed of darkness in your heart and nourish it; find it in others and exploit it to your advantage."
Better Than Cup of Pizza
Onion News Network: New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less.
-- Via Weighty Matters
Everybody Hates Scott McClellan
Robin D. Laws has a great take on Scott McClellan's tell-all book:
Even in the depths of his tenure as Bush press secretary, Scott McClellan always seemed to me like the most likely administration official to write a scathing tell-all. His divided consciousness was always visible as a series of tells that would have led him to the slaughter at any poker table. McClellan's deer-meets-headlights demeanor at tough press conferences signaled a lack of belief in his own statements—a fear that he might be caught out. Contrast this to the airy control of his predecessor, Ari Fleischer. Now he was a master. After an Ari Fleischer press conference, there was less information in the world than there had been before it.
Sure, McClellan is moving some books. Still, I can't help feeling a little sorry for him, and admiring the thoroughness with which he’s donned the hair shirt. His basic thesis couldn’t wring more hatred from all sides if it were calculated for that purpose. For the rightosphere, there’s the obvious act of betrayal of the team when it's already down. He assures the continued teeth-grinding of the leftosphere by insisting on a shred of personal admiration for the president they despise. And for failing to time his epiphany for greater strategic impact. If that's not enough, he poxes both ideological houses, blaming a culture of lawyerly spin, which he traces to the beginning of the Clinton era.
He calls this the permanent campaign, but the idea that a press secretary's chief function is not that of truth-teller of course predates this considerably. (See the Yes Minister episode where Sir Humphrey patiently explains to Hacker that one does not tell the truth, one expresses one's position.)
Just in case he might have an ally left in Washington, McClellan goes on to blame the press for its supine acceptance of the patent balderdash he guiltily dished at them.
I have trouble buying the argument that McClellan wrote his book for the money. The one-time windfall of a best-seller can't possibly compete with the lifelong opportunities that are available to top White House staffers after they escape. The disloyalty he's shown by being so frank in his criticisms blows his chance to make serious money working on GOP campaigns; delivering speeches; serving on corporate boards, think tanks and PACs; or gladhanding leaders as a lobbyist. Republicans won't hire him now and Democrats would be leery of trusting a guy who worked over his last boss.
The only place where the book helps McClellan's job prospects is at Media Matters for America, the liberal hell-raising group founded by fellow Republican turncoat David Brock.
LiveJournal May Be Unsuitable for Minors
While reading roleplaying game designer Chris Pramas' blog this morning, I discovered that LiveJournal can display an "adult content notice" when one of its bloggers is talkin' dirty:
In this case, Pramas was discussing a fight that took place at his bus stop between a drunk and a middle-aged Native American with a walker. This paragraph contains a gerund that could potentially be unsuitable to minors:
As we were finding seats, somehow the tide turned. Walker guy had gotten his arms around the drunk and body slammed him head first into the wall. The whole bus went, "Whoah!" Drunky ended up on all fours, with the other guy on top of him. The last thing we saw was the now walkerless guy reaching up between the drunk's legs and cockpunching him. Can't say he didn't deserve it. Then the bus roared away.
Pramas would be in a better position to judge, but it appears to me that the drunk's armor class was adversely affected by his inebriation. I'm not surprised that the Native American, even with his reduced Dexterity, could succeed with a grappling attack.
Content notices were added last November and can be triggered by the blogger on a voluntary basis or by LiveJournal admins. There are two levels of warning -- the one on Pramas' blog and another for pages that may contain material only suitable for adults and are restricted to people 18 and up.
So if I understand LiveJournal's content filtering system, cockpunching is OK for 14-year-olds.
Importing a Multiple-Author Blog to TypePad
I'm paying Six Apart $300 a year for a premium subscription to TypePad, which gives me an unlimited number of multiple-author weblogs that can be hosted on my own domains. I recently decided to move Watching the Watchers to TypePad, because I'd like the site's writers to have a more friendly user interface, but I've run into a dealbreaker -- the software doesn't import the authors of blog entries. All 1,400 articles on the site are stored in my name.
TypePad supports multiple authors and Six Apart's weblog import format, which has an Author field, but the software ignores this information when you import:
TypePad is unable to import posts from different authors. If a post was created by a different author, it will be associated with the weblog's owner instead. This would require that TypePad create the authors during the import process and this feature is currently unavailable.
I can probably work around this by making each author a category, but that's a clumsy kludge, so I'm going to bang on Six Apart first and see if they might change this policy. I've opened up a support ticket and contacted some of my homies at the company.
Et Tu, Scott McClellan?
I'm currently reading What Happened, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's 323-page stab in the back to the Bush administration. The book wasn't supposed to be out until June 1, but the publisher lifted the embargo yesterday and I grabbed a copy at Barnes & Noble.
Current and former Bush administration officials are playing dumb on McClellan's motive for writing the book, but he makes it crystal clear in the preface: Valerie Plame leakers in the White House used him to pass along lies to hide the truth and save their own asses, and Scotty don't play that way.
I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, Vice President Cheney, the president's chief of staff Andrew Card, and the president himself.
For my next two years as press secretary, the false words I uttered at that Friday's briefing would stand as the official White House position on the Plame case.
I'll say more on the book later, since I'm just 66 pages in, but the chapter where McClellan tells his life story makes him sound hopelessly out of his depth as a senior White House official. In a place you'd normally expect a 40-year-old man to describe the intellectual and professional accomplishments that had brought him to such an esteemed position in government, McClellan focuses almost entirely on his childhood.
He mentions that he graduated in the "with honors in the top 20 percent" of his high school class, waged an unsuccessful battle to stop his University of Texas fraternity from paddling, guided his high-school tennis team to second place in state, visited Six Flags over Georgia, and dated a Hispanic in elementary school. He even names her.
Before she lost interest in me, my smart, pretty sixth grade girlfriend was Camille Mojica, a Hispanic girl. Such a relationship was considered unusual in those days.
Mojica appears to have grown up to be a science reporter. Apparently they had a lot of chemistry.
Indian Teen's New Blog Crunches Numbers
Yuvi Pandian's a 17-year-old in Chennai, India, whose interests in statistics and tech have combined, in true "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" fashion, to form Stat Bot, a blog that crunches numbers to produce graphs, pies, and other visualizations of our sad corner of the web. I discovered Pandian today when he turned up in my Meme13 feed.
In the four weeks since he began the site, Pandian has shown us how Digg headlines have changed over time, which Twitter clients are favored by Twitter obsessives, and how often TechCrunch pimps TechCrunch.
His most promising field of study has been the gluttonous online activity of Robert Scoble. Thanks to Pandian, we now know when Scoble sleeps, based on an analysis of the 10,598 Twitter messages he posted over a 523-day period:
Scoble never lets you down, especially when it comes to providing data: He's on twitter, friendfeed, flickr, qik, a blog and god-knows-how-many-other-services. I will be analysing the rest of his "Online Life", with posts about them on regular intervals, starting now with his Twitter Stream. ...
As you can see, tweeting gets going at around 7 PM and goes on till 12 AM, and slowly dies down at 1 AM. Usually sleeps from 2 AM to 7 AM, and Twittering picks up again after 9AM.
Though I'm frightened at the prospect of learning more about Scoble, it's cool that a teen in India can worm his way into the tech blogosphere through sheer love of numbers. Sometimes the world is pleasantly small.
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