RCA's Guide Plus has nothing to do with XMLTV, it's a service they've been offering for years. I believe it's exclusive to RCA and it pulls TV guide data off the air. I'm not sure of the quality of the listings or the service's reliability.
About XMLTV: Zap2it makes their listings freely accessible. As far as I'm concerned there's no contract where I agreed to view their ads as well as their content. They're free to implement technical measures to prevent people from scraping their listings, but until then I see nothing wrong with it. The one thing that concerns me is the bandwidth, I wasn't aware that the XMLTV grabber gets hundreds of pages. I might not want to put that much load on their servers.
Let's not get it in our heads that this is stealing, though. Anti-leech has the same philosophy, they consider it theft if you block a site's popups, view a site's HTML, or copy a site's download links. The same applies here, I never agreed to make sure that my browser functions a certain way or that I wouldn't do certain legal things with the information I found on a web page.
Uh oh.. Now they're gonna sue you for taking away their right to a revenue stream! You must stop your anticompetitive behavior immediately and let them sell their public domain documents for $20.
Although I suspect that your post is tongue-in-cheek, I will point out the obvious difference. Terrorism is an invasion of my rights - specifically my right to live. System administrators, on the other hand, have a right to decide who can connect to their machines. By blocking e-mail from certain sites, they aren't invading other people's rights - they are merely exercising their own rights. When I plug into the Internet, nowhere do I agree to receive all the unfiltered crap that people decide to send me.
Those are the same tired old complaints against blacklists, but now it looks like a 'visionary' has blessed them so everyone's going to ooh and aah all over again - "Now I get it, blacklists are bad!" Except they're not, and all the arguments he presents against them have been refuted in the past.
The point is, receiving mail is voluntary and blacklists are voluntary. If I'm an ISP, I damn well have a right to block all e-mail from China and Argentina and it has nothing to do with "geopolitics and democracy." Gimme a break! He's saying that developed countries are actually preventing more troubled countries from entering the democratic utopia that's supposed to be the Internet. Because 99% of the e-mail coming from those countries happens to be spam. The way he puts it, RBLs might as well be responsible for all the poverty and oppression in the world - how can we blame people, after all we took away their God-given right to send e-mail!
Listen to him complain about collateral damage - collateral damage is the point of blackhole lists! Damaging a rogue ISP's users is the solution, not the problem. If we didnt' punish these ignorant subscribers they would continue supporting spammers. Every subscriber to a spam-friendly ISP is voting with their dollars - for spam. Rogue ISPs have proven that they will not act against spammers until they are financially threatened, and the only way to do that is to damage their user base to the point that they start losing subscribers. Collateral damage IS the point of blacklists - otherwise they're useless.
He also exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding of blackhole lists, lumping them in with open relay lists. SPEWS doesn't list open relays, and this entire rant is tainted by the fact that he seems to think all blackhole lists do is block open relays. Relays are just one small source of spam. Spam-friendly ISPs are a greater threat to the well-being of e-mail, by far.
Answer me this Mr. Jacob, where will our utopian "geopolitics" be when the entire e-mail system is destroyed by spam? Hey, at least we didn't silence any of the poor starving people in third-world countries who were just dying to send their democratic message of hope and peace. Oh, what was that inspirational message from that wide-eyed Argentinian eager to join the global village? The message is "CUM-GUZZLING SLUTS LOVE THESE HORSES."
Do you even remember the 'first slashdot troll post' fiasco? When hundreds of slashdot users had their posts permanently set at -1, just for posting in a specific thread? Then the slashdot admins got defensive and blamed the users for being 'offtopic'? Right there is when I stopped respecting this site.
Windows 2000 server ships with a strong encryption library including SSL and filesystem encryption. It also has terminal server which does remote access securely. Windows XP also comes with a VPN client. I'm sorry, what version of Windows have you 'yet to see' ship with encryption?
Install a jammer? And that can't very well be violating FCC rules and interfering with legitimate GPS operations.. except it is. Installing a device that broadcast GPS signals would be a very bad idea.
No, it was actually an awful game. Download an emulator and the ROM if you want to check it out. If you don't, you're not missing much. You just move custer right, making sure not to get hit with arrows. Then you rape the woman. Repeat.
It really was that bad, and that's not even counting the shamefulness of the Indian-raping.
When it recommends clothing to you it says "Customers who wear clothes also bought:". Of course the recommendations are not personalized! If you've seen them on a page, it's very obvious that they're not tailored to you. This isn't some kind of big conspiracy, and yes idiot submitter they can have it both ways. The law doesn't say, "if you have a patent you have to use it all the time."
Again and again it's been proposed, and every time it is calmly explained to the proponent why it's totally unworkable. What's your idea, micropayments, public key authentication, etc.? People are always glad to hear someone's solution to all spam, but understand it's probably been posted and debunked already.
I would watch out for spammers crashing the party and trying to cause serious problems. If you read some of the rants from these people on nanae, you can see how they would be capable of causing trouble for the anti-spammers gathered at the convention. There are a ton of spammers and it only takes a few of them to file false police reports, harass attendeees, etc. They've shown again and again that they are immature. Just look at how Ralsky harassed that guy who took pictures of his house. Many prominent anti-spammers have received death threats, this shows the level of hatred that some spammers have.
Well, your example sucks. If you were running ethernet in 3 foot lengths it really wouldn't matter what you used for a cable. Barb wire would work fine actually, if you had 2 pairs.
So back to what I'm saying, audiophiles love patting themselves on the back about this shit, and you've bought it hook line and sinker. It's a piece of plastic, a damn tube that blinks bits. Although I'm not convinced, I'll give you the jitter - who knows, maybe a golden ears listener can detect it. I can't, and you probably can't either. Fine, let's talk about coax then. You'll hear audiophiles whinging about true 75 ohm cables, how RCA connectors are bad - we're talking about a two wire digital connector. Have these people heard that a $5 USB cable has more bandwidth than their precious cables? And yes, they'll actually tell you that coax has jitter too. Am I supposed to believe that the sub-nanosecond time it takes for that signal to reach my decoder, actually degrades the audio? Come on. Most audiophile stuff is pure snake oil, bought into by gullible saps who want to pretend they can 'hear the difference.'
Actually, you can't. The data has more error correction information, so you are able to store less. A 650MB data CD will actually store over 700MB of audio.
This is probably because the later tracks are closer to the edge of the CD. Normal wear and tear from handling the CD may beat up the tracks closer to the outside. I don't take any original CDs in my car, it's too easy for them to get beaten up.
Yeah, I'm going to have to call shenanigans on this. I have never heard of pressed CD's with a lower track width causing a higher rate of errors. And that's all it would be if this happened, a higher error rate causing the CD player to interpolate more samples. These errors would show up on a good ripping program such as EAC, reading in secure mode. It doesn't seem likely that the pressing process could produce a lower quality CD given a bunch of bytes.. it's not like the pressing machine secretly switches bits on and off. So maybe a longer CD has a higher chance of unreadable frames, although I've never heard of this. But to say that the pressing process creates a CD where the bytes of data on the CD do not equal the bytes on the master, is ridiculous.
Lucius, if it's true you're in recording you're in a unique position to prove/disprove this theory. Just take the master of a track, at 44/16/stereo. Then get a pristine, pressed CD containing that track. Rip it with a good program and a good CD drive, then do a comparison on the files. Except for the very beginning and end of the tracks, they should be identical. Audiophiles will tell you ridiculous things, it doesn't surprise me that someone out there thinks a CD is 'more than just bytes.' I mean, you'll meet people who say that the quality of your DIGITAL audio cable matters - as if a cheap 3 ft piece of fiber will somehow lose bytes, but an expensive 3 ft piece of fiber will get all those bytes there intact. These are the same jokers who buy the CDs that are pressed with gold.
You've demonstrated that you know little about the DMCA. The accused doesn't have to win in court, all they need to do is send you a counter-notification letter and you are required to turn their service back on.
Slashdot Mirror
The site is inaccessible.. his web server must be running Linux too!
RCA's Guide Plus has nothing to do with XMLTV, it's a service they've been offering for years. I believe it's exclusive to RCA and it pulls TV guide data off the air. I'm not sure of the quality of the listings or the service's reliability.
About XMLTV: Zap2it makes their listings freely accessible. As far as I'm concerned there's no contract where I agreed to view their ads as well as their content. They're free to implement technical measures to prevent people from scraping their listings, but until then I see nothing wrong with it. The one thing that concerns me is the bandwidth, I wasn't aware that the XMLTV grabber gets hundreds of pages. I might not want to put that much load on their servers.
Let's not get it in our heads that this is stealing, though. Anti-leech has the same philosophy, they consider it theft if you block a site's popups, view a site's HTML, or copy a site's download links. The same applies here, I never agreed to make sure that my browser functions a certain way or that I wouldn't do certain legal things with the information I found on a web page.
Uh oh.. Now they're gonna sue you for taking away their right to a revenue stream! You must stop your anticompetitive behavior immediately and let them sell their public domain documents for $20.
Although I suspect that your post is tongue-in-cheek, I will point out the obvious difference. Terrorism is an invasion of my rights - specifically my right to live. System administrators, on the other hand, have a right to decide who can connect to their machines. By blocking e-mail from certain sites, they aren't invading other people's rights - they are merely exercising their own rights. When I plug into the Internet, nowhere do I agree to receive all the unfiltered crap that people decide to send me.
Those are the same tired old complaints against blacklists, but now it looks like a 'visionary' has blessed them so everyone's going to ooh and aah all over again - "Now I get it, blacklists are bad!" Except they're not, and all the arguments he presents against them have been refuted in the past.
The point is, receiving mail is voluntary and blacklists are voluntary. If I'm an ISP, I damn well have a right to block all e-mail from China and Argentina and it has nothing to do with "geopolitics and democracy." Gimme a break! He's saying that developed countries are actually preventing more troubled countries from entering the democratic utopia that's supposed to be the Internet. Because 99% of the e-mail coming from those countries happens to be spam. The way he puts it, RBLs might as well be responsible for all the poverty and oppression in the world - how can we blame people, after all we took away their God-given right to send e-mail!
Listen to him complain about collateral damage - collateral damage is the point of blackhole lists! Damaging a rogue ISP's users is the solution, not the problem. If we didnt' punish these ignorant subscribers they would continue supporting spammers. Every subscriber to a spam-friendly ISP is voting with their dollars - for spam. Rogue ISPs have proven that they will not act against spammers until they are financially threatened, and the only way to do that is to damage their user base to the point that they start losing subscribers. Collateral damage IS the point of blacklists - otherwise they're useless.
He also exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding of blackhole lists, lumping them in with open relay lists. SPEWS doesn't list open relays, and this entire rant is tainted by the fact that he seems to think all blackhole lists do is block open relays. Relays are just one small source of spam. Spam-friendly ISPs are a greater threat to the well-being of e-mail, by far.
Answer me this Mr. Jacob, where will our utopian "geopolitics" be when the entire e-mail system is destroyed by spam? Hey, at least we didn't silence any of the poor starving people in third-world countries who were just dying to send their democratic message of hope and peace. Oh, what was that inspirational message from that wide-eyed Argentinian eager to join the global village? The message is "CUM-GUZZLING SLUTS LOVE THESE HORSES."
I'm surprised you fell for that, it's a really bad attempt at a troll.
NO TEXT
Do you even remember the 'first slashdot troll post' fiasco? When hundreds of slashdot users had their posts permanently set at -1, just for posting in a specific thread? Then the slashdot admins got defensive and blamed the users for being 'offtopic'? Right there is when I stopped respecting this site.
And you post this on Slashdot? As an AC? Talk about irony..
Windows 2000 server ships with a strong encryption library including SSL and filesystem encryption. It also has terminal server which does remote access securely. Windows XP also comes with a VPN client. I'm sorry, what version of Windows have you 'yet to see' ship with encryption?
Install a jammer? And that can't very well be violating FCC rules and interfering with legitimate GPS operations.. except it is. Installing a device that broadcast GPS signals would be a very bad idea.
That is all.
No, it was actually an awful game. Download an emulator and the ROM if you want to check it out. If you don't, you're not missing much. You just move custer right, making sure not to get hit with arrows. Then you rape the woman. Repeat.
It really was that bad, and that's not even counting the shamefulness of the Indian-raping.
When it recommends clothing to you it says "Customers who wear clothes also bought:". Of course the recommendations are not personalized! If you've seen them on a page, it's very obvious that they're not tailored to you. This isn't some kind of big conspiracy, and yes idiot submitter they can have it both ways. The law doesn't say, "if you have a patent you have to use it all the time."
I've never heard of anti-spammers sending death threats. Care to back that up?
Again and again it's been proposed, and every time it is calmly explained to the proponent why it's totally unworkable. What's your idea, micropayments, public key authentication, etc.? People are always glad to hear someone's solution to all spam, but understand it's probably been posted and debunked already.
I would watch out for spammers crashing the party and trying to cause serious problems. If you read some of the rants from these people on nanae, you can see how they would be capable of causing trouble for the anti-spammers gathered at the convention. There are a ton of spammers and it only takes a few of them to file false police reports, harass attendeees, etc. They've shown again and again that they are immature. Just look at how Ralsky harassed that guy who took pictures of his house. Many prominent anti-spammers have received death threats, this shows the level of hatred that some spammers have.
Geez, don't say it again if you're just going to get it wrong the second time.
You said it, it's compression plain and simple. Today's CDs have no dynamic range, in an effort to be the loudest song on the radio.
Well, your example sucks. If you were running ethernet in 3 foot lengths it really wouldn't matter what you used for a cable. Barb wire would work fine actually, if you had 2 pairs.
So back to what I'm saying, audiophiles love patting themselves on the back about this shit, and you've bought it hook line and sinker. It's a piece of plastic, a damn tube that blinks bits. Although I'm not convinced, I'll give you the jitter - who knows, maybe a golden ears listener can detect it. I can't, and you probably can't either. Fine, let's talk about coax then. You'll hear audiophiles whinging about true 75 ohm cables, how RCA connectors are bad - we're talking about a two wire digital connector. Have these people heard that a $5 USB cable has more bandwidth than their precious cables? And yes, they'll actually tell you that coax has jitter too. Am I supposed to believe that the sub-nanosecond time it takes for that signal to reach my decoder, actually degrades the audio? Come on. Most audiophile stuff is pure snake oil, bought into by gullible saps who want to pretend they can 'hear the difference.'
Actually, you can't. The data has more error correction information, so you are able to store less. A 650MB data CD will actually store over 700MB of audio.
This is probably because the later tracks are closer to the edge of the CD. Normal wear and tear from handling the CD may beat up the tracks closer to the outside. I don't take any original CDs in my car, it's too easy for them to get beaten up.
Yeah, I'm going to have to call shenanigans on this. I have never heard of pressed CD's with a lower track width causing a higher rate of errors. And that's all it would be if this happened, a higher error rate causing the CD player to interpolate more samples. These errors would show up on a good ripping program such as EAC, reading in secure mode. It doesn't seem likely that the pressing process could produce a lower quality CD given a bunch of bytes.. it's not like the pressing machine secretly switches bits on and off. So maybe a longer CD has a higher chance of unreadable frames, although I've never heard of this. But to say that the pressing process creates a CD where the bytes of data on the CD do not equal the bytes on the master, is ridiculous.
Lucius, if it's true you're in recording you're in a unique position to prove/disprove this theory. Just take the master of a track, at 44/16/stereo. Then get a pristine, pressed CD containing that track. Rip it with a good program and a good CD drive, then do a comparison on the files. Except for the very beginning and end of the tracks, they should be identical. Audiophiles will tell you ridiculous things, it doesn't surprise me that someone out there thinks a CD is 'more than just bytes.' I mean, you'll meet people who say that the quality of your DIGITAL audio cable matters - as if a cheap 3 ft piece of fiber will somehow lose bytes, but an expensive 3 ft piece of fiber will get all those bytes there intact. These are the same jokers who buy the CDs that are pressed with gold.
You've demonstrated that you know little about the DMCA. The accused doesn't have to win in court, all they need to do is send you a counter-notification letter and you are required to turn their service back on.
It's as slow and useless as a Mac, and as ugly as a PC! Where do I sign up?