SlashNOT

An anonymous reader writes: The RIAA is continuing its campaign of lawsuits. The latest victims are several companies that make hearing aids. The RIAA is apparently concerned about the “temporary analog copy” of music that passes through the devices. “Music is being rebroadcast without permission, this time within the ear canal. We just want the royalties we’re due,” says an RIAA spokesman.

The famous linux portal Slashdot was brought down by excessive traffic when it was linked to from the infamous slashnot.com, in this very submission.
“Due to excessive bandwidth that their servers were unable to respond to, slashdot sysadmins probably had to throttle bandwidth, leaving many slashdot users unable to view the website”, says slashnot founder Capt. Tako.
“This effect happens frequently when sites are listed on slashnot” he continues. “It’s really a tremendous compliment. It means that your site has ‘arrived’ in the consciousness of the linux community, even though users only see an error page.” “When we link to a site, we’re directing upwards of seven people directly at it, so it’s not surprising that many sites simply can’t handle the load. Frankly, if they linked to us at the same time as we linked to them, it would probably take down the Internet.” When asked if Slashdot’s failure to deliver pages might be caused by some other technical glitch, Capt. Tako. explained that it wasn’t a likely explanation, considering the high quality and availability that Slashdot has traditionally maintained. “No, it’s definitely our community. Or it might be my DNS settings.”

ID software, innovators of the first person shooter video game genre with the release of Wolfenstein 3D, set the gaming world on fire with Doom. To follow it up, they were the first to release a truly three dimentional environment with Quake.

How can they top all this? With their next breakthrough, the ethically nonviolent Quaker.

In Quaker, you roam through a 19th century countryside trading platitudes with bucolic peasants and townspeople. Armed with nothing but a sense of moral fortitude and a love of your fellow man, you steadfastly refuse various temptations and live a Christlike existence. “We wanted to break the mold again, by removing the necessity for violence and a goal.”

Oracle has further restricted it’s “Find a faster database, win a million dollars” contest to exclude all open source databases, databases that start with the letters “D”, “S” or “I”, and Microsoft Access. Quotes Oracle CEO Larry Elison: “These aren’t really restrictions–we’re just trying to compare apples to apples here. Oh, and we’re not accepting any results from databases that run on Apple products either.”

Looks like Math prodigies are getting younger all the time. This story tells of a 3 year old boy who encrypted his father’s work with a red marker. His father developed the decryption technology, which consists of a key made of red cellophane. They are persuing a patent right now. Can anyone think of any existing art that might cover this? Read the rest of this entry »

The slashdot.org parody site SlashNOT.com debuted this week. Featuring “Gnus for Gnerds, Stuff that Mattress”, Slashnot co-founder Captian Tako explains: “Our primary goal was to be at least as funny as slashdot, but on purpose”. Accepting tech interest parody submissions from the teeming millions, the staff at SlashNOT plan to operate their site basically the same way that slashdot operates, except that no submissions by anyone surnamed “Katz” will be accepted.

Submission by Cpt. Tako

“It was a sight out of Day of the Night of the Living Dead. There were zombies everywhere”–Area resident. Last week’s nationwide Zombie attack turned out to be caused by an AOL outage. Apparently, the “zombies” were still-living AOL subscribers who hadn’t seen sunlight since 1994. Most of the AOL subscribers have been rounded up and returned to their parent’s basements, but officials warn that there may be hundreds of thousands of subscribers still wandering the countryside. “They’re mostly harmless, but don’t make any movements that could be misconstrued as affection.”

Submission by Cpt. Tako

U.S. Secretary of Treasury Paul O’Neil today announced that the U.S. would be adding a “simple” End User License Agreement to all denominations of American currency. “The basic idea is to make sure that people know that they can’t copy money. We’ve also added some liability protections.” When pressed about the clause stating that “users” agree to be subject to “compliance searches” by treasury department officials at any time, Sec. O’Neil referred reporters to the Department of Justice. “Look, we’re not putting a gun to anyone’s head. If you don’t like the EULA, don’t use the currency. It’s that simple.” When reporters pointed out that it is illegal to trade in foreign currencies inside the U.S., and that the IRS requires taxation on barter to be paid in Dollars, and that city code prevents most citizens from growing their own food and manufacturing their own durable goods, O’Neal again referred them to the DoJ for clarification.

Intel has released this statement on their new Sexium processors, which will debut at 5 GHz. “We’ve easily surpassed the performance level of the Pentium III 1GHz (but not the 1.13GHz) with our new .32 Angstrom architecture. By reducing the amount of work done per cycle until we could get the clock up to 5GHz, we’ve made significant gains in ancillary features sets such as ambient room comfort for colder climates. Also, the processors appear to generate hydrogen from atmospheric moisture.”

Submission by Cpt. Tako

The NYTimes (free registration, blah blah blah) is reporting that Congress has finally passed legislation to limit greenhouses. “We realized we were never going to stem the tide of greenhouse gasses
unless we stemmed the tide of greenhouses themselves. We’re now working to
encourage our major trading partners to reduce the number of greenhouses
they build, and also to look for other tides to stem.”