Hmmm... seems quite a few people (judging from email I've gotten) have figured out that this week's interview guest, Clinton Ebadi, is the 'unknown_lamer' who frequents irc.openprojects.net, not that this was a great secret or anything. Anyway, Clinton has a pretty good sense of humor about himself and this whole thing, and I think it shows through clearly in his answers (below) to your questions.

These interviews have gotten pretty celebrity-oriented lately. To break the routine, this week's guest is an unknown, 15-year-old, Linux-using, Slashdot-reading high school sophomore named Clinton Ebadi I met at a local LUG meeting. Clinton's mom, who drove him to the meeting (his first), was happily surprised to find that there was a large group of people (of all ages) out there who instantly accepted and respected her son; his relatives, teachers, and classmates looked at him and saw nothing but a slightly strange, slightly pudgy loner. So ask Clinton anything you like about being a kid geek (a living, breathing Katz character, you might say) or anything else, including MentalUNIX or the ncurses-based front end he's working on for Splay. Post questions for Clinton below. We'll send him 10 selected ones by e-mail, and expect his answers within a week or so.

We put up the 'Ask TMBG' post the Friday before last (Dec. 8) . Here's their response, just in time for the major Judeo/Christian winter holidays. Enjoy!

plasmaj pointed us to this nugget: "Martin Garbus, the lawyer for the EFF in the DeCSS case, will deliver a lecture at Columbia University on Dec. 12 [ed. note: we held this submission until the Webcast was online] entitled The New Digital World: Hackers, Napster, Free Speech, and Piracy: How it Will Change the Entire Communications World Including Entertainment and Education." Garbus is an excellent speaker, discussing DeCSS, SDMI, and a host of other issues familiar to Slashdot readers. Plus, below are Mr. Garbus' responses to our long-ago interview.

Kevin Lawton, currently employed by MandrakeSoft, is the creator and driving force behind Plex86, the Open Source X86 virtualization software which runs under Linux and now boots several operating systems, including QNX and Windows 98. This is a tricky endeavor, because (among other things), as the plex86 site states: "The x86 processor is not 'naturally' virtualizable. That is to say, it was not designed to run multiple operating systems concurrently." But with enough feints and jabs, Kevin and company have cajoled it into doing so anyhow. He's agreed to answer your questions about virtualization (and / or emulation -- he is the guy behind the also-Open Source bochs project to emulate X86 processors), so please post your stumpers below. Make sure to check out the Plex86 website first, and perhaps read other things about Plex86 on Slashdot. (And "What's the point?" is not a stumper.)We'll forward the top questions on to Kevin, and hear back from him soon.

Here you go: straight answers to your questions from Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD. Read, enjoy, and comment away. (Theo might even check in with a comment or two of his own if he has time -- although he's been awfully busy lately, so please don't hold it against him if he can't, okay?)

Yes, folks, it's time for another special Slashdot music celeb interview, this time with They Might Be Giants, creators of much excellent music and the famous Dial-a-Song (which has been mentioned on Slashdot before). Anyway, TMBG is a pretty cool band, so go ahead and ask them anything you want -- about their music or Napster or their deal with eMusic or anything else. Post your questions below. Moderators will choose their favorites. Saturday afternoon we'll select 10 of the best ones, and TMBG will have their answers back in the next week or so.

OpenBSD 2.8 was released today, so this seemed like a good time to ask project leader Theo de Raadt about OpenBSD -- or anything else. He's a rather colorful person; a pizza eater, kernel hacker, and devout rock climber, so even though this is a big day for OpenBSD you might want to discuss a few other things with Theo, too. We'll choose about 10 of the highest-moderated questions and e-mail them to him shortly after noon (US EST) tomorrow. His answers will appear next week.

You asked, they answer. Jon Lasser and Jay Beale decided to kick their answers back and forth a few times in the style of Crossfire -- at least if Crossfire guests were security-obsessed, literate hackers with a knack for finding gaps in Linux and Unix security. And don't forget the book creds: Jon wrote the excellent Think Unix (want to buy it, huh?), and Jay is plugging away at (and just plain plugging) his upcoming tome from Addison-Wesley,Securing Linux the Bastille Way.

Two more presidential aspirants have sent answers to Slashdot questions: Republican Party candidate George W. Bush and Natural Law Party candidate John Hagelin. Not surprisingly, there are many issues on which they don't agree.

We've gotten no direct responses from either Gore or Bush, even though we sent our questions not only to their public e-mail addresses but also privately to their Webmasters (both of whom read Slashdot). So let's try something a little different: Since Bush and Gore apparently don't want to answer, you do it for them. If nothing else, your answers are sure to be funnier than theirs would have been, and we could certainly use a few laughs to liven up an otherwise bitter, almost entirely humorless election season.

Today we have Ralph Nader's -- or at least his staff's -- answers to your questions. And, as a little bonus, one Slashdot reader's question we sent over to WebWhite&Blue (at their request) was answered by both Gore and Bush, neither of whom has yet seen fit to answer Slashdot questions directly.

You've heard about Bastille Linux 'round these parts before (on July 17 of this year) -- it's a set of scripts bundled to create (in combination with a base install of a distribution like Red Hat) a much more secure box than would be the default. The basic philosophy behind Bastille seems to be "It shouldn't be difficult to lock down your Linux box." Now, here's your chance to ask Bastille gurus Jon Lasser and Jay Beale about the project.You'll want to check out the project's main page, first, and also some of the security articles Jay's written as well as the additional information on his personal page. (And if that Lasser fellow's name is familiar, it should be -- he's also the author of the excellent Think Unix reviewed a few weeks ago.) So post your questions below, and Jay and Jon will soon respond in depth.

Okay, here (as a refreshing break from all the political stuff) is what amounts to one of the most lucid primers on software development management I've ever seen, contained in NEdit leader Mark Edel's answers to your questions. If you ever expect to lead an Open Source project (or a closed source one, for that matter), you need to read this from start to finish, possibly even print out a copy and read it over and over. Great stuff!

Recently you asked Indrema founder John Gildred about the Linux-based console system his company plans to introduce. Here's what he has to say about its hackability, strategy, developers and more -- thanks for the in-depth answers, John.

NEdit is a Linux/Unix "point and click" text editor that gets almost no press but has a dedicated (if small) band of devoted users, including rusty at kuro5hin and myself. We get lots of news about high-profile Open Source and free software projects, but rarely hear about ones like NEdit or the people who lead them -- like Mark Edel, NEdit's original author, who is still the project's integration "gatekeeper." This is a good opportunity for anyone who is thinking about starting a free software project to ask what it's like to toil in the shadow of giants. Please post your questions below. We'll forward about 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Mark tomorrow, and will post his answers next week.

Okay, we've gotten about a billion (or at least a few hundred) requests for this: a chance to subject U.S. presidential candidates to a Slashdot grilling. As usual with our interviews, please post your questions below. 24 hours after this notice, we'll select 10 of the highest-moderated ones and send them to some of the highest-profile people running for the U.S. presidency this year to answer or ignore as they choose.

On October 5th we put out a call for questions about the FBI's Carnivore boxen that we could send off to Dean Henry H. Perrit, Jr. of the Illinois Institute of Tech [IIT] Chicago-Kent College of Law, who is overseeing the legal side of the Carnivore review. If you didn't read the call for questions, please check it now, and even follow a few of the links. Then read Dean Perrit's answers, which were not written or checked by the FBI or DoJ, whose agents can read them here for the first time just like anyone else, assuming they have nothing better to do than read Slashdot.

All right, this FBI Carnivore thing and the review it's undergoing at the Illinois Institute of Tech [IIT] has been getting lots of press and lots of flack. The person overseeing the legal end of the process is Dean Henry H. Perritt, Jr. of the IIT's Chicago-Kent College of Law. Ask Dean Perritt any question you want. Tomorrow afternoon we'll forward 10 of the highest-moderated ones to him, and we expect his answers back sometime next week. Note: Before you start questioning Dean Perritt, you may want to check this story in Slashdot's Your Rights Online section, which links to some interesting new Carnivore information. (Special thanks to pridkett for arranging this interview.)

You've been hearing about it (and hearing about it) for months -- the Linux-based gaming console in the works from a company called Indrema. Now you can ask the questions that are on your mind about it (like when it will really and truly arrive, in the hooked-up-and-running-Quake sense, say) and get answers from company founder and CEO John Gildred. (More below.)