nil.enroll(aetheric_username, quantum_class_id)

Cub Reporter: Would you care to comment on the announcement of sophocles and pinkeffigy's "something"?

adric: I'll just repeat publically what I've already said, if you'd like to take it down...

* adric looks at sophocles*

adric: Nnnnnnnnnnnno.

*adric looks at pinkeffigy*

adric: Noooooooooooo.

adric: We will not be answering any other such questions at ths time. Thank you.

For the current dominant content producers, the real threat from the Internet is probably less from piracy, and more from disintermediation. New producers can come in and, unburdened by the high overheads and obsolete habits of established players, can offer better deals to both the creative talent and the consumers.

excerpted from Snow Crash:

Hiro Protagonist and Vitaly Chernobyl, roommates, are chilling out in their home, a spacious 20-by-30 in a U-Stor-It in Inglewood, California. . . There are much worse places right here in this U-Stor-It. Only the big units like this one have their own doors. Most of them are accessed via a communal loading dock that leads to a maze of wide corrugated-steel hallways and freight elevators. . . In the center of the plastic tube is a hair-thin fiber.optic cable. The cable is carrying a lot of information back and forth between Hiro's computer and the rest of the world. . .

In the worldwide community of hackers, Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed. And a few short weeks ago, his tenure as a pizza deliverer-the only pointless dead-end job he really enjoys-came to an end.