Slashback: Porntrusion, Greenness, Rollercoaster

Tonight's Slashback includes updates on the state of MPlayer, Google's API release, DIY backyard transportation, and (thanks to politech) the "hidden camera" bill. Oh, and apparently, Mars is not the lush, green paradise you thought it might be. Read on for the details.

But what about the nude Russian girls who apparently need me? happyclam writes: "The text of the "hidden camera" bill has been posted at politechbot.com. Although we have already beat this one to death, I found the actual bill worth reading. One thing that had not been mentioned is that it allows for civil and criminal liability for spammers who email sexual advertisements without proper markings. Although I still prefer positive labeling (e.g. "kid-safe(tm)") to negative labeling (e.g. "socially questionable"), this bill does, I think, have a few good points to it. Read it."

DVDs want to be free. An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this email and the latest news the mplayer source code is finally 100% GPL compliant. Maybe an official Debian package will finally be released as well instead of the marillat release. Work on integrating the open source Xvid MPEG4 codec is coming along nicely as well."

Gravity always wins, but likes to play. mzdial writes: "On March 14 you did a piece on this Southern Indiana's man love of roller coasters and how he created his own in his backyard! The Indianapolis Star has done a wonderful story with video and photos about this wonderful contraption. You can find the article here."

They're greedy for hits. ruvreve writes "A follow-up to the recent article about Google's release of an API. This article talks about the apparent success of releasing the API. It mentions that about 10,000 people have signed up and they have received 25 implementations in the first week. It goes on to talk about how Google needs to capitalize on the ability to provide a 'profitable' web service and maintain its position as the number-one search engine."

Chasing green, wet shadows. young-earth writes "In a disappointing followup to this story, an article on astronomy.com shows that what was thought to be chlorophyll on Mars found in the Pathfinder expedition was most probably artifacts of the processing model used. However future missions will profit from the work being done now: "...developing new methods to enable future rovers to select appropriate targets on the martian surface for further spectroscopic or close-up microscopic examination". So maybe in another mission..."

Comments

Re:Speed vs. APIs

[zorba1]

(yes, mod me down, I hit submit too soon...I'm a loser).

To finish my thought: Is Google really planning on opening themselves up to the perf hit of a potentially huge amount of traffic against its web service? I imagine the resources needed to balance the demand could grow pretty quickly (while maintaining their current, excellent perf). Even if they charge money to use the service, it opens up their perf analyses to various external agents, some of which they only have partial control of.

Re:bah

[JohnnyO]

I think this is what you are looking for...

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

-- Benjamin Franklin

Sexual advertisements without proper markings

[galaga79]

I wonder if this bill comes into effect if it will make filtering out spam a lot easier. I use the very basic elm filter, which can be used to filter mail according to words in the headers, and despite it's simplicity it can be quite effective at targetting spam. Just looking for the keywords of mortgage, insurance, stocks etc it reduces my spam quite signifiantly.

Yet it's hard to catch spam of a sexual nature because that sort of mail is often quite deceptive in use of the subject headings. Quite often I open a message with innocous the subject of "Hey there" only to discover it's either some girl who likes to 'ride' horses or wants to me pay her college fees via her private webcam.

Whether this bill comes into effect, and they actually manage to enforce is a whole other issue.

DVD support in distros?

[galaga79]

Forgive my ignorance on the subject, but will the GLPing of mplayer improve the chances of default DVD support in any of the Linux distros? Or does the problem in regards to the legality of compiled DeCSS libraries/code still stop this from happening? This is not a troll by any means, I just don't fully understand the situation.

Re:DVD support in distros?

[ebyrob]

One of the primary arguments against DeCSS was that it provided no "useful" functionality other than decryption and ran on an already supported platform (Windows). Foolish as it may seem, courts don't seem to support the practice and learning that comes from such implementations. Since the mplayer stuff runs on an unsupported platform and provides a lot more functionality than DeCSS, it has a lot better chance of holding up in court.

The question is, which distribution wants to take that kind of legal risk?

Of course, no one is going to go after you for downloading or building mplayer, giants aren't very good at swatting flies. So it's only distribution that might get you into trouble.

So true

[Afrosheen]

My friend's pc is identical to mine with two exceptions: his is all scsi and runs XP. Mine runs mandrake 8.2. When we download and watch movies at the office, he always wants me to launch it in Mplayer because the playback is much cleaner and reliable. Mediaplayer will puke on the codec from time to time and give a nice 'blork' in the audio stream to boot. Mplayer never does this and is easier to skip around in during playback.

Mplayer needs to get popular on windows, it's not like it has much competition anyway.