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..."
(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.
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
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!"
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
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 &