[Dragaera] it's late and i'm a little punchy

[Scott Schultz via Dragaera]

> I had to look up DDOS.  Not to pick nits about a term I just learned, but
is that
> "distributed denial of service"?  Doesn't "distributed" mean that there
are
> attacks from many sources?
> 

It's just a colorful metaphor. As readers who are not themselves
practitioners of pre-Empire sorcery, we have no real clue just what Adron
did to the orb except attack it using the tools that created it. I'd say the
nearest actual way to look at it in  programming terms is that he hacked in
using the SNMP remote system management hooks  to gain a foothold and then
he logged in as an administrator and attempted to patch the existing
operating system with his own overrides. If you prefer a MS Windows
perspective, he exploited the Remote Assistance/Remote Desktop feature to
gain admin privileges and then he tried to install his own DLL's on top of
the system DLL's but unexpected interactions between the native code and the
hacked code caused a core meltdown.

The whole thing is really Mario's fault. If he hadn't been trying to impress
a woman, Adron would probably have succeeded without destroying the seat of
the Empire. Then again, maybe not. Maybe it was inevitable that there would
be an instant during the transfer from Tortaalik to Adron where a confused
Orb would deem that $currentEmperor =$newEmperor and the feedback loop would
be initiated regardless of whether Tortaalik was actually alive or dead. 

Perhaps the rise and fall of the Cycle itself at the end of a Great Cycle is
just as inevitable as the rise and fall of the houses according to the
progression of the Cycle. Adron believed that a new Cycle could be created
but he didn't understand that such creation was itself a normal part of the
life and rebirth of a Great Cycle. He believed himself to be liberating the
world from the Cycle but in the end he was just the flashiest tool in its
toolbox.