The Habitat Thing:

Most interesting thing about this article to me was that the designers sounded a bit surprised that someone would want to sit and dissect Commodore 64 code just to gain some real or percieved advantage in the Habitat space. I thought, 'well no kidding'. It seems naive to think that a designer could design a system so "perfect" that no one would want to creep around in the nuts and bolts and deconstruct it. Indeed, this may be part of the reason people "enter" the cyberspace in the first place. There is a literary analogy that can be useful here. They call it suspended disbelief, the idea that even though you KNOW that there are no Aliens, you still feel tense when Sigorney Weaver is getting drooled on in Aliens 3. The writers of the Habitat thing seem to think that members of Habitat didn't like it when they were allowed to see the little man behind the curtain. I think that finding the little man behind the curtain, seeing the zipper on the Alien suit, is preciesly the motivation of many of the Habit users.

Paul Medenwaldt