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News Yearbook

EARTHDATE: February 2005

OFFICIAL NEWS
by Hazed

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In the Official News for February 2005:
THE MONTH IN BRIEF
CHANGE TO TAX RULES
THE TRUTH ABOUT AUTO-MAPPING
CANTINA MANAGEMENT BANS ROWDY PARTIES
REAL LIFE NEWS: EAT THIS PAGE
REAL LIFE NEWS: SWAP YOUR TOETAG FOR A BARCODE
REAL LIFE NEWS: WEBCAM SNAPS BURGLER IN THE ACT
REAL LIFE NEWS: TEENAGE NAPALM


THE MONTH IN BRIEF

The taxman decided to be nice and stopped confiscating all excess groats, instead just taxing them once a day. What a shock! He must have been drinking!

The 'BUY FOOD' command was put in, allowing you to feed yourself without having to provide nosh for everyone else in the bar. This cut down on pizza scroll immensely.

The way factory efficiency works was changed but that's quite boring so we won't go into the details.

The ability to upgrade depots was added.

Diesel came out of her backroom and started to talk. And boy, does she talk - sometimes it's hard to shut her up!

The new version of FedTerm was released with the graphic interface that we now take for granted - with auto-mapping and character pictures. This was radically different from the old version, and was greeted with great enthusiasm by players.

Fed DataSpace saw its first bunch of Manufacturers - the test team were promoted en masse so they could test out the code as Bella coded it.

Developments in holo technology allowed players to hug each other remotely. The software that runs the holo units has been hedged around with restrictions to prevent these remote hugs from turning into something even more intimate!

The Encyclopedia Galactica published new entries on Heisenberg's warehouse, navigational computer software and customs exception certificates.

CHANGE TO TAX RULES

The tax rules have changed, with immediate effect. The taxman will no longer seize all your excess groats, but will instead take 20% of the excess once a day, the first time you log on after the game resets. The limits remain the same.

So if an Adventurer logs on with 580,000 IG in her bank account, the taxman will substract the limit of 500,000 IG leaving an excess of 80,000 IG, then take 20% of that sum - 16,000 IG.

Why this sudden change? What made the taxman become so much less rapacious?

Everybody hates the taxman, from the lowest workthing to the highest bureacrat. Nobody likes to give any of their hard-earned groats to the government, and since the Galactic Administration was formed, one of the favorite pastimes of all the denizens of Fed DataSpace has been grumbled about the onerous tax burden imposed by the revenue men.

Usually, this grumbling amounts to no more than the discontent people aim at the weather, but recently, as the taxman has tightened his grip, the unrest has increased. The fact that the taxman confiscates such a large amount of money outrages people; they consider that it removes the incentive to work hard, since any groats they make above the artificial limits set for each rank are just stolen away by the Internal Revenue.

Finally, the unrest became so great that the Galactic Administration was forced to take notice. They set up an official inquiry to examine the operations of the Internal Revenue, and an inside source has told us they were shocked by what they discovered. They concluded that the revenue had amassed far too much power, thanks to the enormous sums of money the organization was raking in. The natural rivalry between different departments of the government was set aside, and the other ministries united to condemn the activities of the Internal Revenue. The chief taxation officer has been removed from his position and may face criminal charges; the whole taxation organization has been scaled down, throwing many bureaucrats out of work; and the way tax is levied on citizens has been changed, much to the relief of groat-earners everywhere.

Of course, this hasn't stopped the grumbling about tax; nobody likes to pay tax. But it has made it harmless grumbling again.

THE TRUTH ABOUT AUTO-MAPPING

A group of old-time Fedders were gathered in a bar, discussing the new front-end.

"Auto-mapping!" exclaimed Trader Oldster. "We never had auto-mapping in my day. We had to explore each location and try out all the different possible exits to see if there were any hidden locations."

"That's right," replied Industrialist Ancientone. "We had to draw our own maps, using pencil and mapping paper."

"You were lucky," said Adventurer Decrepit. "We couldn't afford mapping paper; we had to make do with whatever scraps of paper we could find lying around."

"Paper!" added Merchant Dodderer. "We used to dream of having paper. We had to draw maps on the back of our hands with a biro."

"Luxury!" declaimed Oldster. "There were no biros in our house, we had to carve the maps into our flesh using a knife..."

Ok, that's quite enough bad Monty Python parodies for one week, thank you! But I have heard some grumbling from old players that having auto-mapping makes things too easy - for example, it makes the Martian ruins simple to explore. Well that's not quite true, because you still have to read the room descriptions in order to figure out which locations you don't want to walk into - the auto-mapping displays the exit leading to the deep pit in just the same way as any other exit.

It's also worth remembering that the Up and Down exits are not shown, so anybody who relies solely on the visible links on the map is going to miss any place that can only be reached by going up stairs, down a gravshaft, or into a hole in the wall. It will still be possible to have "hidden" exits using those non-compass directions.

Anyone who has already mapped Fed II the hard way is going to be able to whizz around all the planets and get FedTerm to auto-map without much effort, but that only applies if you already know your way around. New players are still going to have to think about where they are and whether a displayed exit leads to somewhere they want to go or not!

Having auto-mapping doesn't stop you from having to explore everywhere, but it does take out the drudgery of having to draw a map of where you have been, and that's a big help for new players.

CANTINA MANAGEMENT BANS ROWDY PARTIES

The management of the Starship Cantina in Earth's spaceport wishes to make it quite clear that the days of holding rowdy, riotous parties in the bar are over. It is a sophisticated bar, and what's more it's in a very public area where it is visited by all sorts of people, including Newbods taking their first steps in Fed DataSpace. We don't want them to be frightened off before they've had a chance to find their feet (or equivalent).

So if you want to hold a wild party, find a bar on one of the other planets where you can be rowdy and riotous without causing a problem.

REAL LIFE NEWS: EAT THIS PAGE

It's a cliche of spy films that having read a secret note, the hero tears it into little pieces and then eats it, to ensure it doesn't fall into the hands of the bad guys. But paper is not usually very tasty or nourishing, and it can be hard to force it down.

Step forward Homaru Cantu. He's head chef at the Moto restaurant in Chicago, and he's modified an ink-jet printer to create dishes made of edible paper, that can taste like anything from birthday cake to sushi.

The printer's cartridges are loaded with fruit and vegetable conconctions instead of ink, and the paper tray contains edible sheets of soybean and potato starch. Cantu then prints out tasty versions of images he has downloaded from the web. When the paper comes out of the printer, he dips it in a powder made of soy sauce, sugar, vegetables or dehydrated sour cream, and then fries, freezes or bakes the sheets.

He has also started printing his menus this way, so that after they have ordered diners can rip up the menus and dunk the pieces in their soup.

Cantu has more wild ideas: he plans to cook steak by using a hand-held laser to sear the center until it is well done, while leaving the outside rare. An inside-out steak! I've heard of using lasers to cook meat before - just take a look at Orran's Ox Roast in Level 7 on Earth, where the lasers from a spaceship are used to roast the ox, but Orran prefers to char his meat from the outside...

He even envisages using the laser to bake bread with the crust on the inside. And that's not all: "Just imagine going through a magazine and looking at an ad for pizza. You wonder what it tastes like, so you rip a page out and eat it," Cantu says. Sure beats scratch-n-sniff!

Cantu isn't explaining exactly how he has modified the print heads in his ink-jet printer to cope with vegetable juice instead of ink, because he wants to patent this edible technology.

REAL LIFE NEWS: SWAP YOUR TOETAG FOR A BARCODE

The University of California is considering using barcodes and RFID tags to keep track of the bodies donated to medical research. This move away from the traditional toetags follows a series of scandals involving illegal trading in body parts.

Last year, two people at UCLA were arrested as part of an ongoing investigation into the illegal sale of bits of body, but so far nobody has been charged. People who had been planning to donate their bodies to science withdrew their offers after the news of the scandal broke. The university's response is a set of reforms to the way corpses are managed, inclduing the use of barcodes and RFID tags. Organs removed from bodies would be tagged, too.

Whether they expect this new technology to put a stop to organ-legging, or whether they just want to show the public they are acting so that the current reluctance to leave bodies to science is overcome, will have to be seen!

REAL LIFE NEWS: WEBCAM SNAPS BURGLER IN THE ACT

Sometimes high tech gadgets are used to commit crimes, but just occasionally they can be used to foil criminals. Here's a story about how a webcam caught a burglar in the act, and landed him in jail.

The burgler is called Benjamin Park, and he broke into the home of software engineer Duncan Grisby in Cambridgeshire, UK, and stole the computer. But what he didn't know is that Duncan, having been burgled before, had decided to make things more difficult for future robbers. He'd fixed up a webcam to the computer and used software that would start to take pictures if the computer was moved. The webcam snapped the burgler in the act, and emailed the pix off to a mailbox.

When he returned home and discovered his computer missing, Duncan contacted the police and told them how to retrieve the pix. They did so and were able to identify the burgler immediately.

You can read the story here - this includes a nice selection of the snaps of the unfortunate Mr Parks committing his crime. To find out how you can set your computer up to do the same, take a look here.

REAL LIFE NEWS: TEENAGE NAPALM

Here in the UK there has been much discussion in the media recently about the fact that universities are closing down their chemistry courses for lack of interest and/or funding. It seems fewer people are bothering with chemistry while still at school, and one of the reasons is that the preoccupation with health and safety has stopped chemistry teachers from demonstrating the more fun aspects of lab work, such as things that make funny smells or go bang.

This seems a shame, but it's not something that deterred a teenager from Suffolk, on England's east coast. He decided it would be fun to brew up some napalm in his parents' garage. He found instructions about how to make it on the Internet (where else!) and spent his half-term holiday making the dangerous substance.

He then took the results of this homework into school and presented it to his chemistry teacher. Not surprisingly, the schoolmaster freaked and called in the police, who in turn summoned the bomb disposal squad to deal with the noxious napalm.

Perhaps in future the boy should turn his enthusiasms to slightly less hair-raising pursuits!


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