Word: mudding
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...waste, fraud and abuse, Congress and the Executive Branch enmesh operating personnel in endless spider webs of rules. Line-item budgets allow no flexibility in shifting money from one use to another. Two areas of one military base boasted well-maintained sidewalks, while in another area, personnel walked in mud because the base commander's budget contained money only for repairing sidewalks, not for building any. Government employees who need to travel must get approvals from many superiors and superiors' superiors, and then often have to deal with a single airline under contract to their agency; they cannot snap...
...panic. Just hang up, take a deep breath, and log on again. You're not going to Panama, after all, just to a machine somewhere in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And what you are exploring is not an exotic ecosystem but a computer system called a MUD...
...MUDs (the name stands for Multi-User Dungeons) are the latest twist in the already somewhat twisted world of computer communications. A sort of poor man's virtual reality -- created by using words, not expensive head-mounted displays -- MUDs are a quantum leap over computer bulletin boards, where you not only meet and interact with other computer users from all over the world but build your own imaginary worlds as well. The first MUD was invented in 1979 as a way for British university students to play the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons by computer. But in the past few years...
...Some MUDs are fashioned after medieval villages, with town squares, blacksmiths and churches. Others re-create science-fiction and fairy-tale settings, like C.S. Lewis' Narnia, Frank Herbert's Dune and the universe of Star Trek. Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have built a MUD model of their famous Media Lab, with offices and corridors corresponding to the real thing. One intrepid group of computer users constructed a section of the London Underground, complete with a virtual subway. MUDs come and go, drifting in and out of favor, but the current count is estimated at 300 worldwide, most of them...
Playing in a MUD is like wandering through a literary maze. Scenes are sketched out in a phrase or two -- a woody glade, a drafty cave -- and you move from one to the other by typing commands: go west, climb up, enter castle. In your travels, you run into various objects (a giggling robot, a sleeping sloth) as well as other characters. These can be other players, logging on from a remote computer, or cleverly designed computer programs masquerading as humans. You can communicate with anyone you meet by either speaking (typing a message that appears on the other player...