Imagine a novelist, trapped in a nightmarish world of credit cards and micropayments, facing devilish odds and the belligerent stares of publishers everywhere ... picture a team of hackers brazen enough to break into dozens of secure government sites without incurring a single lawsuit ... scream in terror at the thought of mutant penguin-kangaroo hybrids swimming deviously onto our shores ...

Welcome to another episode of Slashback, laden with bits about the psychology of the Apple Cube, damage-control parity among handhelds, mourning the passing of a Linux-friendly ISP, technicalities of credit, and aliens. Can you ever read enough about aliens, anyhow? Enjoy.

I get a steady trickle of e-mail from Microsoft employees who dislike many of their employer's actions, and I know many good, concerned reporters who work at ZDNet, the Washington Post, USA Today, and other media outlets who do not follow any secret "editorial agenda." There are plenty of real conspiracies out there. We shouldn't waste our time making up fake ones, and we should never assume that all employees or associates of a company or government agency are part of a faceless, marching mass that always does exactly what its leaders want.

More on the conflict of interest in the 2600 / DeCSS case. More on the South African penguins trapped in a world of petroleum, currents and love beneath the panopticon world of satellite observation. And congratulations to Distributed.Net for setting in place their new milestone. All below!

Updates below await your raw, chafed eyeballs anxious for information about new domain names (more than you can eat), developers eating bugs in contrition (more than you want to eat), a question about the EULA bundled with the new Larry Ellison toy (to chew on), and RSM's [Oops. That's "RMS's" -- timothy] reaction to the Qt / TrollTech take on software freedom. MMMmmmmm.

Updates on Tom's detective work, Kevin's touchy look-but-don't touch semi-citizen status, and last but not least a word from the elusive printman, here folded, spindled and mutilated for your edification.

If you've tossed and turned wondering whether the Plan 9 License is Free or merely free, or tossed back the warm milk and cookies waiting for the first stabilizations for XFree86 4.0 to arrive, or counted sheep as you daydream about a cheap Linux-based terminal without monthly fees, or forced deep breathing exercises to get over the thought that perhaps you could doing something to stamp out discourteous Web page behavior ... relax. Go to sleep right after you read these updates.

Do you want an i-Opener, and for how much? Are space-vehicle rescues "your thing"? Does your cute iMac suffer from a video-game-violence deficiency? Do your Web habits stray to courtroom and crime-scene voyeurism? Do you think that online privacy agreements must of needs outlive the dot-com-ephemera which offer them? If Yes to any or all, you've come to the right place.

Back for more already? Good. Today's early dinner of information includes humble pie baked by NASA, quantities of penguins rescued from roiling in oil, a morsel about sex discrimination in the computer world, and a take-out order of XF86 for the diners in our Slackware booth.

"Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue." No, that's for a wedding. For Slashback, try something more like "Something about Intel, something about Mattel, something about TiVO,something about England." Much less romantic, but quite a bit more fun to read.

In this episode of slashback, there's more on NanoStuff, censorship in various forms and venues, and further proof that the word "upstart" uttered or tapped in computer journalism regarding Linux is ever so much twaddle. You have been warned.

Toy companies sending data (no matter how innocuous) from your hard drive out into the wide world might not be such a hot idea, and it looks like that realization has spread. Virginia and D.C. residents (and truthfully, many others as well) may be ubterested in upcoming UCITA action. AT&T has won another round in the regulation / deregulation scuffle, and there's a suprize bit of tasty news to top to wash those down with.

Read on for clarification about the alleged Gnome/KDE collaboration reported a few days ago, which ... ain't. And about the project to put Linux on the Royal DaVinci, which promises slow but steady progress. There's also infernally good news for anyone intrigued by the recent open-source Plan 9 release.

Whatever happened to those drives at Los Alamos? Is my Mattell software worse than Back Orifice? Have the French courts cowed Yahoo!? Did I or didn't I buy a license for Windows? These and other ponderables have been glued in place below for your leisurely weekend perusal.

Thanks to all of the fine folks who contributed these updates, you are in for another illuminating, invigorating, inspiring round of fruity nuggets picked from the tree of wisdom, irradiated, waxed, polished, chilled, packaged and shipped (metaphorically) to your browser. Swallow two of these a week, call if symptoms recur.

Tirelessly flogging the dead horses of industry, crunching gravel where Angels fear to tread past sundown, gathering wool that no sheep has ever known, and shooting nanodarts packed with moss spores deep into any stones which happen to roll by, here's another helping -- Large but not SuperSized -- of assorted errata and addenda. Even some lizards.

More information below -- for your edification and amusement -- on black holes (if they exist), Napster (a happy outcome for once), comparitive computer languages (after Chris Rijk's Java / C comparison) and more. Even a (gasp) positive statement about Microsoft. Hope you enjoy it.

Beating plows into ploughshares, turning lead into gold, casting new light through windows opened only just last week, it's another spellbinding outbreak of Slashback. Stand back, breathe slowly as the scent of humble correction wafts over you, mingling with the essence of new and perhaps intriguing information. Bruce Perens, too.

Your calendar works fine. This episode of Slashback hits midweek instead of Saturday because we'd like to keep our facts straight and your mind alert. So (read more) below for assorted updates on everything from GRAND LARCENY to THE DONUT CRISIS. Actually, those are still secret, but the things we can tell you are below.

Welcome again to Slashdot's continuing education program. Take a seat, say hello to your neighbor (using #slashdot might help), pretend we never said that other stuff. Here's another smidgeon of truth, clarification and equivocation we've spritzed over the usual mishmash of lies, intentional misstatements and strained obfuscation that is the Slashdot home page. Enjoy!