Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Porntrusion, Greenness, Rollercoaster
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..."
That is disappointing about mars... I was really hoping to take my naked russian girls there with my dvd's and ride my rollercoaster.. oh.. I need some coffee....
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
(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.
It's Real, so the 'video quality' sucks, but it's a really nicely done piece - well worth tracking down a Win or Mac box to see. As you see the builder creeping to the top of the hill on his little 'car' I was totally psyched to see the drop! While they tease you for a while, you do get to see the loop in action - it's real!
Here's another DYI project that might be of interest to some people. A true 6.0 Litre, tuned exhaust, pimped out Rice Toilet . Some people really have too much time.
Tcl my Pico! There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
On March 14 you did a piece on this Southern Indiana's man love of roller coasters
There's a Freudian slip if there ever was one.
As written, this is laughably vague. Clearly, no company's primary business would be distributing harmful material to minors. For one thing, the lil' buggers don't have credit cards, so profits might be somewhat hard to come by at first. (Dang, there goes the IPO, Chester. Did you save the receipts on that new office furniture?) More appropriate would be to call it "material intended for adults but which may be judged to have a harmful effect on minors".
Here's something even more troubling. In the section where they attempt to define what's "harmful to minors", here's one of the acceptable standards:
Again, incredibly vague and open to abuse. Under this definition, material which does have scientific, etc. value for adults but doesn't for minors would be fair game, right?
Shit! Time to pull down that AARP website fellers!
Scientists should stop realeasing info like that to the stupid press before their results are confirmed.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but still. Suppose the research was suppressed due to lack of supporting evidence. The conspiracy theorists would have a field day with "the government" keeping news of "Martian chlorophyll" under wraps -- which means of course that there are secret Martian farms feeding an intelligent super-race, who built the Mars face, and so on. (Just imagine the Fox specials.) The point is that the scientists can't win, so they might as well disclose everything, even their screwups.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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
Money talks, meaning: That for scientists to get cash to keep investigating the asteroid and see if there is indeed a chance it will hit, they need to stir things up. If they'd said that they believe that there might be a million to one chance that an asteroid will pass earth in 20 years, who'd have funded continued research? But if they say that it is likely it will pose a serious threat, here, have another 50 million and some better equipment.
Now, a cynic might say that this kinda thing happens all the time after 9-11...Attack imminent, gimme money!
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
From the FAQ on Google:
7. What happens if I go over my limit of 1,000 queries?
If you make more than 1,000 queries in a day, our server will respond with a SOAP Fault stating that you exceeded your daily query total. You might want to get some sleep and start querying again tomorrow.
* * *
My first reaction on hearing about these APIs, where that they might be an attempt on Google's part to cut down on automated searching without getting a lot of bad PR. They're providing limits in the guise of generosity.
The fact is, it was already pretty trivial to search Google using plain old HTML (via Perl or Java, or whatever).
But now, if Google starts prohibiting folks from using such search-bots (that use the HTML interface to Google), they can say "Look, we provided an API for this purpose!"
That's not flamebait, although he is mistaken. Immature, wrong press releases cost you funding. {JOKE}Science is not like IT, where famous screwups are more fundable than competent nobodies (anyone else remember that Dilbert episode?){/JOKE}
That said, I see no reason (I'm a biologist, not an astronomer) why alien cells would have chlorophyll. If they did find chlorophyll, it woul be a sign that we'd contaminated Mars with terrestrial cells.
Even if a Martian cell where photosynthetic, I would not expect it to express chlorophyll! Chlorophyll is long, big and complicated. An independently evolved protein, from an alien organism, would never look much like chlorphyll - the odds against such a coincidence are astronomical. Assuming the alien life had membranes, photosynthetic aliens MIGHT use a membrane-bound light-dependent electron pump like the ones found in chloroplasts and their bacterial cousins; however, since there are many, many classes of both light reactive molecules and of redox proteins (electron pumps) in terrestrial organisms, many of these proteins are not-at-all similar to one another, so even if an alien organism "worked the same" as a terrestrial chlorplast (chloroplasts are the cellular organelles in plants that harvest light) it'd have independently evolved proteins with similar functions, they wouldn't be chlorophyll, and they wouldn't be similar to chlorphyll in terms of sequence or overall shape. The odds are incredibly small! Even the twenty amino acids we use are a result of the original molecular evolution of terrestrial life; an alien organism might not have the same twenty (assuming that it had amino acids at all; we don't know enough to make a definitive conclusion, but nucleic acids and amino acids may be the only molecules in existence that could make a biological organism.)
All musings aside, the original poster was correct. Chlorophyll on Mars was a stupid thing to expect.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
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.
aus.music.scrapbook
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.
aus.music.scrapbook
And now, Yahoo has shut down the pictures due to exceeded bandwidth.
Cry Havoc! And let loose the DoS of Slashdot!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The Xine video player has a feature set similar to MPlayer, but also comes with courteous developers and a ton of RPMs for easy installation on a variety of Linux distros. DEBs too.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
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.
Yeah, screw the founding fathers. What did they know anyway, people act like they built the foundation for america or something. Retards.
This means that it can now be integrated in all distributions without packagers worrying of legal problems (which obviously includes Debian). A side effect (and equally important, in my opinion) is that this move makes this player available to a larger audience (exposing its remaining bugs and lack of portability to more people) and, of course, benefiting a larger part of the people that install Linux.
So, please, if you can download it, compile it and report bugs that you find (including people using different architectures). This way, we can all have a first-class, flexible, free movie player for many Operating Systems.
And contrary to popular belief, if you make a good bugreport, the mplayer team is very friendly fixing the bugs you find.
Of course, nobody would see a Doctor saying only "Hey, Doc, I am sick." and expecting a complete diagnostic. The same applies, evidently, to software development.
Isn't science supposed to be testable? With Mars close enough that testing is within the realm of possibility, why publish this type of nearly-tabloid-like supposition prematurely?
Is real research really that hard up for media attention? Is science not "sellable" unless is about transporters and FTL devices?
That's my theory, which might also explain why charlatans such as John Edward and James von
Praagh receive such consistently high ratings...
The Gates Testimony - Why Microsoft Will Win
Neopets - the best free game on the Int