Slashdot Mirror

More news from the protecting-the-children front in Indianapolis (and it's good news, even if fleeting); bits on emulation and long-ago video games from a British perspective (and another wacky British story that you can tell your kids as a cautionary tale); and educational news of Cosmic significance, all below. And I promise, apart from this paragraph, there will be no mention of Lieberman, Gore, Cheney or Bush.

Meanwhile, kids, make sure to join the Marines! An unnamed correspondent writes: "An update on a slashdot article from Oct 14: The video game industry has obtained a stay from the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. According to the article, "the city on Wednesday was ordered to hold off enforcement, temporarily at least, of its ordinance against children under 18 using violent or sexually explicit coin-operated video games." The CNN article can be found here."

Those whom the gods would destroy ... Sacrifice writes: "The Times tells the whimsical story of an inventor too overconfident in the difficulty of a puzzle he estimated would take a genius four years of work to complete; three possible solutions are being reviewed after only 16 months, and royalties aren't enough to cover the half million pounds he pledged, so has put his 67 room mansion up for sale to make good on his pledge (Lloyd's will pony up the other half)."

.. then only criminals will play emulated videogames. Ultra-protective reader FortKnox writes: "Although we've all heard about retro-gaming emulators and copyrights, this BBC article mentions a few of the copyright holder's that waived their copyrights to emulators. Its good to finally see some of these copyrights being waived to let us retro-gamers get our fix."

quintillions and jazillions (with inflation) general_re writes: "Carl Sagan's groundbreaking series "Cosmos" is finally available on VHS/DVD after many years. Although it isn't scheduled to ship until sometime next month, there's a reasonable discount for pre-orders. Many of you probably remember how awesome this series was (I first saw it when I was 9, and still remember it), and for those of you who haven't seen it, go see it. One caveat: after hunting around Project Voyager and carlsagan.com, nobody seems to be offering an official Carl Sagan commemorative bong. ;)"

Take that, evil wicked dirty spammer scumbags! And that! And that! rhea writes: "As an update to this article, Harris dropped the lawsuit they brought against MAPS for putting them on the RBL. Read the final word from MAPS. Paul Vixie: 1; Spammers: 0." The close of that "final word" is pretty biting:

In the final analysis, it would seem that the only thing which Harris has accomplished was getting one, possibly two ISPs (depending on AOL) out of more than a dozen ISP defendants to start accepting their email traffic, something which they could quite possibly have done without the expense and complication of filing a lawsuit.

And, oh yes, they helped to prove MAPS' position that it is up to each individual subscriber to the RBL to decide for themselves whose email they will accept, and whose they will reject.

Harris remains on the RBL.

Not that there's any truly good answer to spam, but MAPS represents about the sanest approach I've ever seen -- it's voluntary, it's factual, and it makes no bones about either one of those. Congratulations, Paul. Keep up the good work.

droleary writes: "Something of an update to this Slashdot article, a Yahoo News story reports that a number of large ISPs are caving in to a massive lawsuit brought by Harris Interactive regarding the delivery of their "online polls" (aka, spam, according to MAPS). I find it disturbing that large ISPs are so willing to let external agencies control what runs through their systems."