Several people have voiced a worry about errors in the database. If they have errors, it's libel, pure and simple. You can then sue them out of existence (which I hope will happen). It would be best if they pissed off someone rich first (i.e. Rupert Murdoch:), so that person could clean their chronometers. A poorer person may have trouble closing the company down.
Don't wish to return to such barbaric countries as Australia, eh? My, aren't we doing the world a favour. Australia has such harsh laws - no death penalty, and in some states they won't even prosecute for marijuana possession. For all you geeks, reverse engineering is legal, as is crypto export. Oh, silly me - I forgot the law that foribids hosting of some restricted internet content. Time to burn my passport. Oh yeah, we trample on our indigenous population too, but the good ol' US of A would never even dream of trampling on the native Americans, let alone blacks or hispanics. Since you are so benevolent, I imagine that you wouldn't visit a country in which people are executed for crimes commited when they are a minor (or executed at all), that has broken the Geneva convention in the last 15 years ('Highway of Death', 'Chinese Embassy', 'Iraqi Civilian Shelter Bombings'), that allows its corporations to use third world cash crops and vastly underpaid labour overseas. Of course, most (all) other western nations are just as bad (if not worse). The USA is a great nation, with a great constitution, but you should pull your head out of the sand, and stop believing that the USA never tramples on human rights (Amnesty recently produced a report on human rights in the USA, and it wasn't pretty). If you have this 'everyone is inferior to us great 'mericans, cos 'merica never does anything wrong' attitude, perhaps it's better if you never travel. Europeans don't take kindly to this, and it may ruin your holiday.
That's right folks... It has now been scientifically demonstrated that it is possible to infer more about the world by staring at the contents of a rubbish tip, than reading slashdot. Rubbish tips contain the remains of societies most used goods, including discarded packaging indicating useful things such as food content, the largest corporates in the world (their names are printed on the side), and so on. In addition, staring at garbage can teach you a lot about the people who produced it. Staring at Slashdot teaches you that the people who run it are clueless nerds who have $old Out bigtime, and will publish anything to attract readers. $elling out is fine, but please people, stop reading Slashdot. It's now worse than garbage, and by you reading it, the crazy crew get more money from Andover (advertising).
A poster in a previous article was right. Slashdot has achieved the quality of weekly world news. The submissions often have spelling and grammatical errors, and I think pretty much everyone, however idle they may be, has something better to do than look at this tosh. Maybe if I write up a dodgy page about free energy machines using some error ridden maths (remember folks, often mathematical errors are difficult to find), and explain how men in black helicopters are stopping me from saving the world with it, I'll get slashdotted. Of course, these men in black helicopters are hired by the EVIL M$, who the Slashdot crowd ridiculously seem to believe to be worse than mining companies, agri-business, banks, and military-industrial complex corporations.
This is odd - this Slade guy has guts - the type of guts that make people run at a machine gun nest when they've only got a.22 rifle (with 1 old, wet and possibly faulty bullet left) - the outcome is Darwinian evolution in action, folks. He has taken a piece of software released by a reasonably large company, and is re-distributing contrary to the license agreement. It doesn't really matter that it's GPL. What would happen if he took Adobe Photoshop, stripped out its default filters, added some of his own, and put it up for re-distribution on his web site? He could then mumble that he can break Adobe's license agreement, because if he didn't, he wouldn't be able to distribute his plug-ins in a functional form (i.e. surrounded by photoshop), and so the Adobe license agreement is violating his right to free speech. Tosh! He obviously can't - he must get a special license from Adobe to do this. Likewise, he must get a special license from Id if he wants to redistribute in violation of their original license (it has been pointed out that the original license could require him to pour cherry slurpees on his head - no slurpee pouring, no redistribution). Personally, I think the instant that he sees anything printed on a letterhead from Carmack's legal firm, he'll give in. If he doesn't, he'll get what's coming to him (expensive legal fees, fun in court, and a possible large personal financial loss from a civil suit), and we can all have a good old chuckle.
I personally use windows media player because it's small, un-obtrusive, and more flexible than the others. Apple's quicktime 4 player is a great example of bad design, and real-player is quite simply a bloated, ugly, advertisement ridden, difficult to use pig. Of course, Windows Media player can (and does) support Quicktime, MP3, etc... (but not RealNetworks, at least on my setup). It doesn't really matter what player people are using, as long as the player supports different media drivers. I think it is useful to avoid players that aren't extensible (only support 1 format). If people only use easily extensible players, the most successful streaming format will hopefully be the best one. I am also somewhat biased agains Real Networks - their codecs look and sound awful, their player is ugly and obtrusive. What less could you want?
Slashdot Mirror
Several people have voiced a worry about errors in the database. If they have errors, it's libel, pure and simple. You can then sue them out of existence (which I hope will happen). It would be best if they pissed off someone rich first (i.e. Rupert Murdoch :), so that person could clean their chronometers. A poorer person may have trouble closing the company down.
Don't wish to return to such barbaric countries as Australia, eh? My, aren't we doing the world a favour. Australia has such harsh laws - no death penalty, and in some states they won't even prosecute for marijuana possession. For all you geeks, reverse engineering is legal, as is crypto export. Oh, silly me - I forgot the law that foribids hosting of some restricted internet content. Time to burn my passport. Oh yeah, we trample on our indigenous population too, but the good ol' US of A would never even dream of trampling on the native Americans, let alone blacks or hispanics.
Since you are so benevolent, I imagine that you wouldn't visit a country in which people are executed for crimes commited when they are a minor (or executed at all), that has broken the Geneva convention in the last 15 years ('Highway of Death', 'Chinese Embassy', 'Iraqi Civilian Shelter Bombings'), that allows its corporations to use third world cash crops and vastly underpaid labour overseas. Of course, most (all) other western nations are just as bad (if not worse). The USA is a great nation, with a great constitution, but you should pull your head out of the sand, and stop believing that the USA never tramples on human rights (Amnesty recently produced a report on human rights in the USA, and it wasn't pretty).
If you have this 'everyone is inferior to us great 'mericans, cos 'merica never does anything wrong' attitude, perhaps it's better if you never travel. Europeans don't take kindly to this, and it may ruin your holiday.
That's right folks... It has now been scientifically demonstrated that it is possible to infer more about the world by staring at the contents of a rubbish tip, than reading slashdot. Rubbish tips contain the remains of societies most used goods, including discarded packaging indicating useful things such as food content, the largest corporates in the world (their names are printed on the side), and so on. In addition, staring at garbage can teach you a lot about the people who produced it. Staring at Slashdot teaches you that the people who run it are clueless nerds who have $old Out bigtime, and will publish anything to attract readers. $elling out is fine, but please people, stop reading Slashdot. It's now worse than garbage, and by you reading it, the crazy crew get more money from Andover (advertising).
A poster in a previous article was right. Slashdot has achieved the quality of weekly world news. The submissions often have spelling and grammatical errors, and I think pretty much everyone, however idle they may be, has something better to do than look at this tosh. Maybe if I write up a dodgy page about free energy machines using some error ridden maths (remember folks, often mathematical errors are difficult to find), and explain how men in black helicopters are stopping me from saving the world with it, I'll get slashdotted. Of course, these men in black helicopters are hired by the EVIL M$, who the Slashdot crowd ridiculously seem to believe to be worse than mining companies, agri-business, banks, and military-industrial complex corporations.
This is odd - this Slade guy has guts - the type of guts that make people run at a machine gun nest when they've only got a .22 rifle (with 1 old, wet and possibly faulty bullet left) - the outcome is Darwinian evolution in action, folks. He has taken a piece of software released by a reasonably large company, and is re-distributing contrary to the license agreement. It doesn't really matter that it's GPL. What would happen if he took Adobe Photoshop, stripped out its default filters, added some of his own, and put it up for re-distribution on his web site? He could then mumble that he can break Adobe's license agreement, because if he didn't, he wouldn't be able to distribute his plug-ins in a functional form (i.e. surrounded by photoshop), and so the Adobe license agreement is violating his right to free speech. Tosh! He obviously can't - he must get a special license from Adobe to do this. Likewise, he must get a special license from Id if he wants to redistribute in violation of their original license (it has been pointed out that the original license could require him to pour cherry slurpees on his head - no slurpee pouring, no redistribution). Personally, I think the instant that he sees anything printed on a letterhead from Carmack's legal firm, he'll give in. If he doesn't, he'll get what's coming to him (expensive legal fees, fun in court, and a possible large personal financial loss from a civil suit), and we can all have a good old chuckle.
I personally use windows media player because it's small, un-obtrusive, and more flexible than the others. Apple's quicktime 4 player is a great example of bad design, and real-player is quite simply a bloated, ugly, advertisement ridden, difficult to use pig. Of course, Windows Media player can (and does) support Quicktime, MP3, etc... (but not RealNetworks, at least on my setup). It doesn't really matter what player people are using, as long as the player supports different media drivers. I think it is useful to avoid players that aren't extensible (only support 1 format). If people only use easily extensible players, the most successful streaming format will hopefully be the best one. I am also somewhat biased agains Real Networks - their codecs look and sound awful, their player is ugly and obtrusive. What less could you want?