They pirated other people's software, released a rootkit virus designed to self-install silently when the disc was accessed and then to mess with people's computers onto nearly five million CDs, two million of which were sold to unsuspecting customers.
If Homeland Security had been doing their job, the head of Sony US would have been sitting in an FBI office the day that the story was confirmed, having to explain why he thought it was a good idea to release a virus that could compromise millions of PCs and give third parties unauthorised access to their machines. G W Bush really liked his iPod, what else might have been on the computer used to rip the president's CDs?
Seriously, this was irresponsible corporate criminality. Replacing the discs when asked wasn't even the bare minimum response expected from them, they should have been ordered to take out full-page ads in the music press with a full list of all affected discs and production numbers, and issue a full recall. If that caused trouble for shops, then the shops should have then asked Sony for compensation. But is should have been done.
'This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.'
Hm. Did they recommend that their friends and families rush out and get Vista, when it first came out?
If so, their friends and families have probably already stopped listening to them. They're probably saying, pah, Microsoft people, what do THEY know about computers...
Yeah, because any religion that has its followers worship a statue of someone being tortured to death, while they symbolically eat and drink his blood and flesh, while being told that their demigod was tortured to death for their personal benefit... that's not at all a disturbing concept, is it?
I mean, I suppose that if people are really into getting off on the whole torture-someone-to-death kick, it's healthier that they get those impulses satiated in a church than going out and doing it for real, but still... it's a little creepy.
But isnt putting search-engine needs into the HTML spec sort of silly?
Not really. The web was always supposed to be semantically tagged, so that its information could be analysed and trawled and processed automatically (remember header keyword tags?). It was supposed to be one giant tagged datastore, and the sematic tagging was supposed to work as future-proofing. If the meaning of the information was unambiguous, then future systems could adapt their output to express that meaning automatically, without the original web author having to continually go back and rewrite code. The same page could be rendered for a 40-inch colour widescreen or a 1-inch monochrome watch display, or braille, or a speech interface, or anything else.
Document structure was always supposed to be transparent and machine-readable, and the original plan was always that logical structure should always take precedence over the more "trivial" matter of how the thing might display on a particular generation of browser.
When things like the "font" tag started becoming popular, there was a worry that people would start focussing too much on display specifics and would start packing their page code with twee display instructions that could screw up the structural purity of the resulting HTML.
So part of the motivation for CSS was to return HTML code to its previous state of logical purity, and exile all the visual formatting instructions to a separate section or a separate file. That way, if a computer's analysing someone's paper on particle physics, it can read the equations and attempt to understand the content and context by recognising that certain words are emphasized ("em", "strong"), rather than having to try to interpret whether there's any special significance to the idea that some words are, say, different colours or fonts or display strengths.
One of the reasons why "font" is now frowned on as a tag is because is because it doesn't have an obvious syntactical meaning - people ending up using it to//convey// meaning, but that meaning wasn't easily understandable without looking at how the output ended up being rendered on a screen. A text reader doesn't know how to interpret the additional information. To work out which words are stressed, it'd have to work out the background colour, which might be a composite of several layers of tables, munge that resulting colour with the effect sof any background bitmaps, then calculate the contrast to the specified font colour...
It was also more difficult to get information back out of the "font" tag because of the number of optional fields that might appear in any order, and because "font" contained too much data and tended to break up logical block-marks. If you used "strong" to embolden a paragraph, then that paragraph was obviously emboldened as a block, with additional formatting within the block as necessary. If you used "font" to embolden the paragraph, then every time there was a formatting change within the the paragraph that was also being rendered with "font" (subtext, italic, etc), authoring tools would tend to fracture the larger "font" command and duplicate its contents through a string of smaller font commands, destroying the original clearly-nested nested structure. It'd look the same on the page, but to parsing software, the original clear command "this whole paragraph is emboldened" would be replaced by a string of little "embolden this, and this, and this and this..." commands.
So "font" was certainly general-purpose and could be used to replace a whole slew of more dedicated syntactical commands, but that ubiquity was part of what made it Evil.
The problem that we're currently facing with HTML is that "div" (and "span") have become the new "font". Usage of the old machine-readable "hr" tag is fading away, and people are increasingly using "div" for everything. But if everything on a page is a "div", then semantically it becomes almo
Suppose that you have a long-established bi-weekly blog about tractors, and you write and post one article about traction engines. It's called "Traction Engines are Cool". You haven't mentioned traction engines anywhere in the other 300-plus posts.
Someone now does a websearch for the keyword term "traction engine" using Bing, and they find that your blog seems to have >300 posts mentioning that very subject. Then they get quite pissed off with you, because they keep visiting pages on your site and finding that the blog entries referenced don't have anything at all to say about their favourite subject. What's happened is that when you posted the article, the title got copied into the auto-maintained "recent posts" list widget on your blog's sidebar, and the Google and Bing search engines don't know how to distinguish between the linked text in your blog widgets and the contents of the main article.
And not only does Google now think that you have 300 separate pages on traction engines, but since you included that cute little widget that lists the current top ten stories on CNN, Google and Bing also thinks that you have 300 blog postings about Michael Jackson, and also about a bunch of unsavoury keyword stuff that's currently in the news.
So if someone's seriously asking, do we really need HTML5 to support a way of allowing authors and blogging engines to voluntarily tag sections as belonging to an article or just to a nav bar, then the answer is "hell yes", we certainly do if we want search engines to continue to work properly.
The "MS team" studying the HTML5 draft spec is supposed to already =know= stuff like this. They're representing a company that actually owns a major search engine, for crying out loud.
Some magazines use layouts where a large article contains embedded blocks of supplementary "sidenote" information, which the main body text flows around. This sort of style is becoming increasingly common on webpages, because CSS makes it easier to do. So for search engine analysis or mobile readers or speech synthesisers, once you've tagged the navigation bar(s) and the main article and the other components, you're left with these little floating titbits, which might be potentially important to the article, but which might not correctly link to any specific point in the article (top, bottom, or middle).
So to tag them, you need something like "aside" to tag them as belonging to the article, but not belonging to any particular position in the main linear narrative. If you used "section" for them, then the order of these sections compared to the others would suggest a specific sequence to read them in, which would be wrong.
If it's accompanying explanatory information that might be useful to the reader while they're reading the main article body, you don't want it exiled to the end of the article. The "aside" tag (or something very like it) would seem to be required for short sections of supplementary narrative that are intended to be parallel to the main bodytext.
A lot of the newer HTML designers seem to have a "print media" outlook on web design. Their focus is code that produces pixel-perfect layouts that work on a known screen size or on paper (with designer-definable margins), and work in precisely the same way on all platforms. They think of HTML as a "page image" delivery system that when perfected, would be almost identical to PDF.
From that POV, HTML code that doesn't help with that, and merely allows search engines to index better or text readers to work better is irrelevant. And code that allows intelligent reflowing of pages on mobile media based on content tagging is Inherently Evil, because of course, the correct way to achieve this is not to tell software how to find and adapt to the content of the page, it's to hire lots more designers to produce separate CSS layouts for each of the target devices...
Yep. The latest semantic tags should also improve search engine accuracy, allow for automatic relayouting of pages on small mobile devices, and help with disability-friendly navigation. Me:HTML5 is -Coming.
Microsoft's guys really ought to be able to grasp that.
Well, if they implement parts of it, drop other parts, add a few bits of their own and call the result "HTML 5.2", then I hope that the standards group sue them for misrepresentation.
There are multiple news stories referenced by the article, and they give slightly different accounts.
The first linked BBC news article mentions fearful locals, and doesn't mention FaceBook.
The second linked BBC news article has a police spokesperson emphasising the information that they found about the event on FaceBook as being the justification for taking action.
"On this occasion, we were extremely concerned how the event had been advertised on the internet as an all-night party and it was therefore necessary to take the appropriate steps."
The first BBC report is unusual (especially for the BBC) in that it's significantly shorter than the other news organisations' reports, and reads almost like it's been cribbed from someone else's press release.
The limited info that they did provide appears to be slightly at odds with that of the other agencies who filed more detailed stories, as well as with their own later story, and the apparent discrepancies in the first Beeb story all seem to be more supportive of the police case.
So, did the BBC initially just get their information for the first story directly from the police's PR people?
Do a comparison. The other news service reports say that fifteen people were at the party, and the guy whose birthday it was directly quoted as stating "fifteen". They all seem to be specific about fifteen, apart from the "BBC 12th July" piece, which says that "about thirty" people turned up. Now, it's probably technically true that about thirty people turned up, but with four police cars and a riot van, half of them would have been police. Technically true, but not journalistically honest. A Beeb reporter hopefully wouldn't try to manipulate language like that, but a PR person trying to present the facts in the best possible way for their client might.
The first beeb report also says:
... local people, fearing a rave was going to take place after previous events with loud music at the same premises, alerted the police.
That information doesn't appear in the later report. "Premises" is a "police-speak" terminology that tends to be used in court (like "I was proceeding down the thoroughfare"), and a police spokesperson in the Mail report later talks more vaguely about earlier problems in "the area", which for all we know, might take in an entire village and its surrounding fields. Once the police were on the defensive, if there really//had// been previous problems at those specific "premises", you'd expect them to make a big deal of it. They didn't.
So if we discard the first, shorter Beeb report as potentially problematic and rely on the second (more considered, longer) report and the reports from the other agencies, we lose "premises" and no longer have anything to say that "this bunch" had previously done anything at all.
Another oddity is that the first BBC report stresses fearful local people, whereas those people are missing from the second report, which emphasises that the police were motivated to intervene by the nature of the FaceBook info. Now it might be that local people told the police about the facebook page (feasible), or it might be that local people told the police, and the police found the facebook page for themselves (less likely but still possible). But since the police have been saying that they've been running intensive preparation for finding and shutting down raves this summer:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolpda/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_5279000/5279088.stm
, it's also possible that they've been having somebody trawl FaceBook for keywords relating to possible raves, found this entry, decided to act on it, their PR people then made up a story about "fearful locals" for the press release because it sounded good, and that later on the PR people had to backtrack when reporters started actually looking into the story.
If you're into the forensic dissection of news, there's another thing about the first BBC article that screams that something's wrong.
It hasn't been checked by a competent news editor. Because no news editor worth their salt would have allowed that first sentence through:
Not entirely fair is it that a local pub has to spend a fortune on sound isolation but a random group can just hold a rave anywhere, break every law that exists, not pay taxes and get away with it?
Clearly its//quite// wrong that people should take part in enjoyable activities that don't generate taxable income for the government, because those activities undermine the efforts of hard-working businessmen who do pay taxes (ish). Maybe by having sex with your girlfriend, you're selfishly depriving hard-working local prostitutes and their pimps of earnings. Perhaps if you and your mates are practicing privately in a band every Wednesday round someone's house, and writing your own songs, you're selfishly depriving the music industry of the advertising revenue that they'd get if you spent that time passively watching TV or going to a movie or listening to the radio. It's not fair! And we certainly need to ban family picnics, people eating food in places that don't have paid-up restaurant licenses, unless they've paid for the picnic food to be supplied by a legitimate caterer. And we should definitely ban people growing fruit and veggies in their own back gradens and undermining the hard-working agricultural sector...
I think that you have your priorities back-to-front. People aren't supposed to exist for the benefit of corporations and governments.
Raves weren't banned because they were creating a disturbance, because usually they were held miles away from anywhere, or on industrial estates. A big part of the buildup to a rave was heading a hundred miles down a stretch of unfamiliar motorway and trying to find the damned thing. The better organisers went out of their way to make sure that not only did the raves not disturb people, but that the "neighbours" had no idea that they were even happening. That's why the police had trouble finding them. If they =had= been creating a disturbance, locating them wouldn't have been an issue, and they wouldn't have needed special laws - they could have simply charged the people with disturbing the peace. They usually found that they couldn't even do the organisers for trespass, because the organisers tended to use the brilliant strategy of doing the right thing and asking permission from a farmer first.
Seriously. Look at an aerial photo of England and see how many fields there are. If you're a farmer out in the middle of nowhere, and some guy says that he'd like to slip you a hundred quid as a goodwill gesture in return for your agreeing that you have no objection to him and his mates using one of your empty fields for one night, and he's going to clear up any litter afterwards... it's probably not too difficult to find a farmer with a suitable field who's going to say okay.
Certainly, the sites weren't authorised for things like fire safety, but open green grassy fields tend not to catch fire and kill people (unlike certain public buildings that are actually licensed). Okay, maybe field so corn stubble might, but you don't hold raves on those.
Rave organisers weren't, as you put it, "breaking every law that exists" (Nuclear proliferation? Murder? Shipping lanes?) The thing that frustrated politicians and the police was that for a lot of the rave organisers, what they were doing//wasn't// obviously breaking laws.
In cases where the organisers did comply with the law, got full council authorisation, and did everything above board and legally, they still often got shut down. One police chief went so far as to make a public statement on the radio promising all rave organisers that no raves were going to be allowed to happen in his territory, legal or not. It didn't matter if a rave was safe, licensed, tax-paying, ticketed, council-registered with nobody compaining... his men were going to use put a stop to it. Non-negotiable.
Once you had police and politicians getting together to say that they'd be using uniformed officers to crack down on activities that they disapproved of even if those activities were entirely legal, then to those involved, it almost became a moral duty to keep going.
Actually -- in a totally unconnected incident -- my grocery shopping was disrupted today because (according to the note pinned to the closed store's shutters) the store's till server was down, and they'd shut up the shop while they waited for an engineer.
I'm guessing that the server was probably local, possibly above the store, and might have gone fritzy in the heat.
So, real-world implications of computer failure. A server goes down, and suddenly Eric Cannot Buy Cheese ("Aaaaiiiieeee!"). Eric has hard cash, store (presumably) has cheese, but store can no longer sell cheese to Eric. Or anything else.
The shop "crashed".
Okay, so I trudged off and did my grocery shopping elsewhere, but it was a little disturbing to think that we've already gotten to the point where a server problem can stop you buying food, in a "real" shop, with "real" money.
There are four main factors that can take a part of a society's key infrastructure offline.
1: ACTS OF GOD Meteor strike, lightnight strike, extreme weather...
2: ACTS OF MALICE War, terrorism, extortion, employee sabotage, criminal attacks...
3: WEAK INFRASTRUCTRUCTURE Underpowered networks, inadequate UPS backups, skeleton staffing, the shaving of safety margins as an efficiency exercise, inadequate rate of replacing old hardware...
4: MANAGEMENT ARSINESS This is when a problem starts, and the people in charge either don't know how to react, don't care, or prioritise face-saving over actual problem-solving. This happens when you get an outage, and instead of system management promptly calling all their critical clients to inform them, and warn them that there's maybe twenty minutes of UPS capacity in the routers if the system's not fixed by then, they instead cross their fingers and hope that things'll work out, and worry about what to tell the clients afterwards.
Fisher Plaza seems to have suffered from a case of #4 recently, so it's not surprising that they've gone down again. The first time should have been the wakeup call to show them that their human systems were in need of an overhaul. Without that overhaul, you're setting up a dynamic in which the second time it happens, things are even worse (because now people are locked into defensive mode).
No matter how advanced your technological systems, if the people running it have the wrong mindset, you're gonna go down. And when you go down, you're gonna go down far far harder than necessary.
PS, most people don't realise that the word "naff", as popularised by Princess Anne, is actually Elizabethan backslang for "fanny". Backslang was a way of disguising obscenities by saying them backwards.
Fanny has a gynaecological meaning in the UK (from the novel "Fanny Hill", I think), but means "butt" in the US.
Hence the US term "fannypack", which has mildly amusing connotations if you're British (over here they're referred to as "bum bags").
Similar transatlantic confusion regarding "prat".
"Prat" in the US beans "buttock region", hence the US comedy term "pratfall", which is to fall on your arse in a comedic manner.
But "prat" in the UK is again gynaecological. However, the UK meaning has become a bit obscure over the years (with the derivative, slightly comedic meaning of "a person who can't help doing stupid things" becoming dominant), and the understood core meaning is now getting a bit blurred with the US version.
I think "pranny" is probably a merging of "prat" and "fanny" specially invented for television ("Only Fools and Horses"?)
The government should be run much like a business in the fact that if I don't use it, I shouldn't have to pay, and I should have a right to not use it. Just like I have a right not to eat at McDonalds, if I don't eat, McDonalds doesn't get my money.
In a civilised society, citizens have rights and expectations, and those rights and expectations buy loyalty, stability and social cohesion. And there are other considerations and costs: for instance, in a first-world society that tries to be a meritocracy, a child should have the right to decent healthcare and education regardless of who their parents are. They shouldn't have to pay for their own primary school care, and they shouldn't have to depend on their parents being willing and able to pay for it on their behalf. A basic education should be their right, and society should pay for it.
What society gets by encouraging education is reduced crime and a better use of the available human talent pool. If a decent education is the preserve of a smaller pool of people whose parents can afford to give them a good start in life, then key decision-making posts in society end up only being occupied by people who have sufficiently competent parents. If we waste talent then society wastes resources by allowing rotten decisions to be made by key people, and this also encourages social unrest in the general population, as people wonder who the hell the idiots are who're running the country, and why they ought to be committed to preserving such a society (or supporting it, or fighting for it, or enduring hardships to help it through difficult times instead of just looking out for themselves).
So stuff like basic education for kids has to be paid for from a common resource-pool.
That usually has to come out of taxation. Now, someone who doesn't have kids and has no intention of having kids might say: "Why are some of my tax dollars going to pay for the education of other people's children? Why can't I opt out of paying the "education" piece of my tax bill, since I'm never going to benefit from it myself?"
And the answer is - you've already been opted-in by an accident of birth, by being born into a civilised society where a certain degree of risk is pooled, and where society provides a certain degree of protective infrastructure. You've probably already reaped the advantages of being born into a society that's relatively well-educated and relatively peaceful, and where you wouldn't have been left to die if your parents hadn't been able to buy food or hire a midwife, or take you to a doctor. You probably also benefited from being brought up in a society where your parents weren't likely to have died of malnutrition or any easily-avoidable diseases before you reached adulthood, where you didn't have to fear being abducted by roving bands of outlaws or eaten by wild animals. You might have been born in a different country or time without those benefits, and yes, their taxation might have been lower, but lower tax isn't so great if you're dead or crippled, or illiterate.
If you're such A-grade material that you reckon that you'd have been able to succeed even without any of those social benefits, then this society still allows A-graders in business to become multi-billionaires, and earn so much money that personal taxation isn't really an issue. Steve Ballmer's recently griped about how high tax makes it difficult to run a business in the US - yet somehow MS have over twenty billion in petty cash sitting in the bank despite the fact that everybody seems to hate their current flagship product, and Ballmer himself is supposed to be worth 11 billion. Now, is Ballmer underperforming as a CEO because he doesn't make enough money from his job, because of the greedy tax-man?
I mean, if he rationed himself to spending a mere million dollars per day on buying cars and planes and hookers covered in gold leaf, he has enough cash to do that seven days a week for the next thirty-something years b
But perhaps his comments are actually hurting the value of the company?
He's alienating the business and personal user buyers ("Everyone's working together in these difficult economic times.... except Microsoft"), he's damaging future military sales ("If we continue committing stategically to this company's products, there's no guarantee that the support for these systems won't be under the jurisdiction of a foreign power in five years' time"), and he's also damaging Microsoft's influence over governmental sales and government legislation ("Now we're finally free to pass laws and directives that might hurt Microsoft sales (such as deciding to move to open-source), because if anyone complains that we're risking US jobs, we can now reply that Microsoft's CEO has suggested that those US jobs are liable to disappear anyway, at short notice").
Or, how will US government (e.g. its military) view the idea of using a 'foreign' OS?
Absolutely.
If Microsoft moves their jobs out of the US, the US government and military should decide that there's no longer a good reason not to announce a new long-term strategy of migrating all new systems and system upgrades to open-source by default, whenever there's not a good reason to do otherwise. Microsoft will cease to be a strategic US company with the governmental&CIA support that goes with that status. Pres. Obama can announce the strategic move to open source as part of his cuts programme for eliminating wasteful government spending, and declare that part of the new US healthcare initiative is the condition that the main software that runs the system be open-source.
It sounds like a sensible populist move - an accountant can probably calculate how many copies of Windows there are in use in the US governement and military and estimate how much the US taxpayer spends per year on buying proprietary operating systems and office software... and that big number (or a proportion of it) can be announced as an immediate saving for next year onwards, without the White House having to do a thing except issue a couple of federal directives and notifying state governments that they're expected to follow suit.
The only reason not to do that//now//, is that Microsoft would cry foul and complain that the decision would hurt a flagship US company and cost US jobs. But if the jobs have already been moved out of the US, and the company is currently so successful partly becuase they channel so much paperwork to a foreign tax haven to avoid paying US taxes, then really, who's really being protected other than the company's owners?
If MS move those jobs out of the US, then fuck them. Seriously. Fuck them. Default patriotic behaviour then switches from supporting them to making sure that they're penalised for trying to screw the society that made them successful. Eliminate all US government money that's going their way, as soon as possible, and divert it to people who actually need it, or who are actually trying to make a positive difference to the US economy.
This idea of Apple acting as the info-police for what apps people are allowed to run on their new information gadget reminded me of something, and I've just remembered what it was:
" Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives.
We have created for the first time in all history a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests of any contradictory true thoughts.
Our unification of thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on Earth.
We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause.
Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion.
We shall prevail! "
It was from a rather famous advert in the 1980s, and the quote was supposed to represent an evil dictatorship that needed to be smashed so that people could be free. The company spouting this anti-totalitarian philosophy?
Apple(source)
Slashdot Mirror
So how many Sony staff went to prison for it?
They pirated other people's software, released a rootkit virus designed to self-install silently when the disc was accessed and then to mess with people's computers onto nearly five million CDs, two million of which were sold to unsuspecting customers.
If Homeland Security had been doing their job, the head of Sony US would have been sitting in an FBI office the day that the story was confirmed, having to explain why he thought it was a good idea to release a virus that could compromise millions of PCs and give third parties unauthorised access to their machines. G W Bush really liked his iPod, what else might have been on the computer used to rip the president's CDs?
Seriously, this was irresponsible corporate criminality. Replacing the discs when asked wasn't even the bare minimum response expected from them, they should have been ordered to take out full-page ads in the music press with a full list of all affected discs and production numbers, and issue a full recall. If that caused trouble for shops, then the shops should have then asked Sony for compensation. But is should have been done.
But will the disc play in Mars-region players?
'This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.'
Hm. Did they recommend that their friends and families rush out and get Vista, when it first came out?
If so, their friends and families have probably already stopped listening to them. They're probably saying, pah, Microsoft people, what do THEY know about computers ...
Yeah, because any religion that has its followers worship a statue of someone being tortured to death, while they symbolically eat and drink his blood and flesh, while being told that their demigod was tortured to death for their personal benefit ... that's not at all a disturbing concept, is it?
I mean, I suppose that if people are really into getting off on the whole torture-someone-to-death kick, it's healthier that they get those impulses satiated in a church than going out and doing it for real, but still ... it's a little creepy.
" Who are your competitors? Hang on, let me grab a pen. Do you have any of their phone numbers? Are they hiring? "
Not really. The web was always supposed to be semantically tagged, so that its information could be analysed and trawled and processed automatically (remember header keyword tags?). It was supposed to be one giant tagged datastore, and the sematic tagging was supposed to work as future-proofing. If the meaning of the information was unambiguous, then future systems could adapt their output to express that meaning automatically, without the original web author having to continually go back and rewrite code. The same page could be rendered for a 40-inch colour widescreen or a 1-inch monochrome watch display, or braille, or a speech interface, or anything else.
Document structure was always supposed to be transparent and machine-readable, and the original plan was always that logical structure should always take precedence over the more "trivial" matter of how the thing might display on a particular generation of browser.
When things like the "font" tag started becoming popular, there was a worry that people would start focussing too much on display specifics and would start packing their page code with twee display instructions that could screw up the structural purity of the resulting HTML.
So part of the motivation for CSS was to return HTML code to its previous state of logical purity, and exile all the visual formatting instructions to a separate section or a separate file. That way, if a computer's analysing someone's paper on particle physics, it can read the equations and attempt to understand the content and context by recognising that certain words are emphasized ("em", "strong"), rather than having to try to interpret whether there's any special significance to the idea that some words are, say, different colours or fonts or display strengths. //convey// meaning, but that meaning wasn't easily understandable without looking at how the output ended up being rendered on a screen. A text reader doesn't know how to interpret the additional information. To work out which words are stressed, it'd have to work out the background colour, which might be a composite of several layers of tables, munge that resulting colour with the effect sof any background bitmaps, then calculate the contrast to the specified font colour ...
One of the reasons why "font" is now frowned on as a tag is because is because it doesn't have an obvious syntactical meaning - people ending up using it to
It was also more difficult to get information back out of the "font" tag because of the number of optional fields that might appear in any order, and because "font" contained too much data and tended to break up logical block-marks. If you used "strong" to embolden a paragraph, then that paragraph was obviously emboldened as a block, with additional formatting within the block as necessary. If you used "font" to embolden the paragraph, then every time there was a formatting change within the the paragraph that was also being rendered with "font" (subtext, italic, etc), authoring tools would tend to fracture the larger "font" command and duplicate its contents through a string of smaller font commands, destroying the original clearly-nested nested structure. It'd look the same on the page, but to parsing software, the original clear command "this whole paragraph is emboldened" would be replaced by a string of little "embolden this, and this, and this and this ..." commands.
So "font" was certainly general-purpose and could be used to replace a whole slew of more dedicated syntactical commands, but that ubiquity was part of what made it Evil.
The problem that we're currently facing with HTML is that "div" (and "span") have become the new "font". Usage of the old machine-readable "hr" tag is fading away, and people are increasingly using "div" for everything. But if everything on a page is a "div", then semantically it becomes almo
Someone now does a websearch for the keyword term "traction engine" using Bing, and they find that your blog seems to have >300 posts mentioning that very subject. Then they get quite pissed off with you, because they keep visiting pages on your site and finding that the blog entries referenced don't have anything at all to say about their favourite subject. What's happened is that when you posted the article, the title got copied into the auto-maintained "recent posts" list widget on your blog's sidebar, and the Google and Bing search engines don't know how to distinguish between the linked text in your blog widgets and the contents of the main article. And not only does Google now think that you have 300 separate pages on traction engines, but since you included that cute little widget that lists the current top ten stories on CNN, Google and Bing also thinks that you have 300 blog postings about Michael Jackson, and also about a bunch of unsavoury keyword stuff that's currently in the news.
So if someone's seriously asking, do we really need HTML5 to support a way of allowing authors and blogging engines to voluntarily tag sections as belonging to an article or just to a nav bar, then the answer is "hell yes", we certainly do if we want search engines to continue to work properly.
The "MS team" studying the HTML5 draft spec is supposed to already =know= stuff like this. They're representing a company that actually owns a major search engine, for crying out loud.
Some magazines use layouts where a large article contains embedded blocks of supplementary "sidenote" information, which the main body text flows around. This sort of style is becoming increasingly common on webpages, because CSS makes it easier to do. So for search engine analysis or mobile readers or speech synthesisers, once you've tagged the navigation bar(s) and the main article and the other components, you're left with these little floating titbits, which might be potentially important to the article, but which might not correctly link to any specific point in the article (top, bottom, or middle).
So to tag them, you need something like "aside" to tag them as belonging to the article, but not belonging to any particular position in the main linear narrative. If you used "section" for them, then the order of these sections compared to the others would suggest a specific sequence to read them in, which would be wrong.
If it's accompanying explanatory information that might be useful to the reader while they're reading the main article body, you don't want it exiled to the end of the article. The "aside" tag (or something very like it) would seem to be required for short sections of supplementary narrative that are intended to be parallel to the main bodytext.
A lot of the newer HTML designers seem to have a "print media" outlook on web design. Their focus is code that produces pixel-perfect layouts that work on a known screen size or on paper (with designer-definable margins), and work in precisely the same way on all platforms. They think of HTML as a "page image" delivery system that when perfected, would be almost identical to PDF.
From that POV, HTML code that doesn't help with that, and merely allows search engines to index better or text readers to work better is irrelevant. And code that allows intelligent reflowing of pages on mobile media based on content tagging is Inherently Evil, because of course, the correct way to achieve this is not to tell software how to find and adapt to the content of the page, it's to hire lots more designers to produce separate CSS layouts for each of the target devices ...
Yep. The latest semantic tags should also improve search engine accuracy, allow for automatic relayouting of pages on small mobile devices, and help with disability-friendly navigation.
Me: HTML5 is -Coming.
Microsoft's guys really ought to be able to grasp that.
Well, if they implement parts of it, drop other parts, add a few bits of their own and call the result "HTML 5.2", then I hope that the standards group sue them for misrepresentation.
The first linked BBC news article mentions fearful locals, and doesn't mention FaceBook.
The second linked BBC news article has a police spokesperson emphasising the information that they found about the event on FaceBook as being the justification for taking action.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/8146490.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/8155441.stm
The first BBC report is unusual (especially for the BBC) in that it's significantly shorter than the other news organisations' reports, and reads almost like it's been cribbed from someone else's press release.
The limited info that they did provide appears to be slightly at odds with that of the other agencies who filed more detailed stories, as well as with their own later story, and the apparent discrepancies in the first Beeb story all seem to be more supportive of the police case.
So, did the BBC initially just get their information for the first story directly from the police's PR people?
Do a comparison. The other news service reports say that fifteen people were at the party, and the guy whose birthday it was directly quoted as stating "fifteen". They all seem to be specific about fifteen, apart from the "BBC 12th July" piece, which says that "about thirty" people turned up. Now, it's probably technically true that about thirty people turned up, but with four police cars and a riot van, half of them would have been police. Technically true, but not journalistically honest. A Beeb reporter hopefully wouldn't try to manipulate language like that, but a PR person trying to present the facts in the best possible way for their client might. The first beeb report also says:
That information doesn't appear in the later report. "Premises" is a "police-speak" terminology that tends to be used in court (like "I was proceeding down the thoroughfare"), and a police spokesperson in the Mail report later talks more vaguely about earlier problems in "the area", which for all we know, might take in an entire village and its surrounding fields. Once the police were on the defensive, if there really //had// been previous problems at those specific "premises", you'd expect them to make a big deal of it. They didn't.
So if we discard the first, shorter Beeb report as potentially problematic and rely on the second (more considered, longer) report and the reports from the other agencies, we lose "premises" and no longer have anything to say that "this bunch" had previously done anything at all.
Another oddity is that the first BBC report stresses fearful local people, whereas those people are missing from the second report, which emphasises that the police were motivated to intervene by the nature of the FaceBook info. Now it might be that local people told the police about the facebook page (feasible), or it might be that local people told the police, and the police found the facebook page for themselves (less likely but still possible). But since the police have been saying that they've been running intensive preparation for finding and shutting down raves this summer: http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolpda/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_5279000/5279088.stm , it's also possible that they've been having somebody trawl FaceBook for keywords relating to possible raves, found this entry, decided to act on it, their PR people then made up a story about "fearful locals" for the press release because it sounded good, and that later on the PR people had to backtrack when reporters started actually looking into the story.
If you're into the forensic dissection of news, there's another thing about the first BBC article that screams that something's wrong.
It hasn't been checked by a competent news editor. Because no news editor worth their salt would have allowed that first sentence through:
Clearly its //quite// wrong that people should take part in enjoyable activities that don't generate taxable income for the government, because those activities undermine the efforts of hard-working businessmen who do pay taxes (ish). Maybe by having sex with your girlfriend, you're selfishly depriving hard-working local prostitutes and their pimps of earnings. Perhaps if you and your mates are practicing privately in a band every Wednesday round someone's house, and writing your own songs, you're selfishly depriving the music industry of the advertising revenue that they'd get if you spent that time passively watching TV or going to a movie or listening to the radio. It's not fair! And we certainly need to ban family picnics, people eating food in places that don't have paid-up restaurant licenses, unless they've paid for the picnic food to be supplied by a legitimate caterer. And we should definitely ban people growing fruit and veggies in their own back gradens and undermining the hard-working agricultural sector ...
I think that you have your priorities back-to-front. People aren't supposed to exist for the benefit of corporations and governments.
Raves weren't banned because they were creating a disturbance, because usually they were held miles away from anywhere, or on industrial estates. A big part of the buildup to a rave was heading a hundred miles down a stretch of unfamiliar motorway and trying to find the damned thing. The better organisers went out of their way to make sure that not only did the raves not disturb people, but that the "neighbours" had no idea that they were even happening. That's why the police had trouble finding them. If they =had= been creating a disturbance, locating them wouldn't have been an issue, and they wouldn't have needed special laws - they could have simply charged the people with disturbing the peace. They usually found that they couldn't even do the organisers for trespass, because the organisers tended to use the brilliant strategy of doing the right thing and asking permission from a farmer first.
Seriously. Look at an aerial photo of England and see how many fields there are. If you're a farmer out in the middle of nowhere, and some guy says that he'd like to slip you a hundred quid as a goodwill gesture in return for your agreeing that you have no objection to him and his mates using one of your empty fields for one night, and he's going to clear up any litter afterwards ... it's probably not too difficult to find a farmer with a suitable field who's going to say okay.
Certainly, the sites weren't authorised for things like fire safety, but open green grassy fields tend not to catch fire and kill people (unlike certain public buildings that are actually licensed). Okay, maybe field so corn stubble might, but you don't hold raves on those.
Rave organisers weren't, as you put it, "breaking every law that exists" (Nuclear proliferation? Murder? Shipping lanes?) The thing that frustrated politicians and the police was that for a lot of the rave organisers, what they were doing //wasn't// obviously breaking laws.
In cases where the organisers did comply with the law, got full council authorisation, and did everything above board and legally, they still often got shut down. One police chief went so far as to make a public statement on the radio promising all rave organisers that no raves were going to be allowed to happen in his territory, legal or not. It didn't matter if a rave was safe, licensed, tax-paying, ticketed, council-registered with nobody compaining ... his men were going to use put a stop to it. Non-negotiable.
Once you had police and politicians getting together to say that they'd be using uniformed officers to crack down on activities that they disapproved of even if those activities were entirely legal, then to those involved, it almost became a moral duty to keep going.
I'm guessing that the server was probably local, possibly above the store, and might have gone fritzy in the heat.
So, real-world implications of computer failure. A server goes down, and suddenly Eric Cannot Buy Cheese ("Aaaaiiiieeee!"). Eric has hard cash, store (presumably) has cheese, but store can no longer sell cheese to Eric. Or anything else.
The shop "crashed".
Okay, so I trudged off and did my grocery shopping elsewhere, but it was a little disturbing to think that we've already gotten to the point where a server problem can stop you buying food, in a "real" shop, with "real" money.
1: ACTS OF GOD ...
Meteor strike, lightnight strike, extreme weather
2: ACTS OF MALICE ...
War, terrorism, extortion, employee sabotage, criminal attacks
3: WEAK INFRASTRUCTRUCTURE ...
Underpowered networks, inadequate UPS backups, skeleton staffing, the shaving of safety margins as an efficiency exercise, inadequate rate of replacing old hardware
4: MANAGEMENT ARSINESS
This is when a problem starts, and the people in charge either don't know how to react, don't care, or prioritise face-saving over actual problem-solving. This happens when you get an outage, and instead of system management promptly calling all their critical clients to inform them, and warn them that there's maybe twenty minutes of UPS capacity in the routers if the system's not fixed by then, they instead cross their fingers and hope that things'll work out, and worry about what to tell the clients afterwards.
Fisher Plaza seems to have suffered from a case of #4 recently, so it's not surprising that they've gone down again. The first time should have been the wakeup call to show them that their human systems were in need of an overhaul. Without that overhaul, you're setting up a dynamic in which the second time it happens, things are even worse (because now people are locked into defensive mode).
No matter how advanced your technological systems, if the people running it have the wrong mindset, you're gonna go down. And when you go down, you're gonna go down far far harder than necessary.
So if we take the film "Carry on up the Khyber" (a film stuffed with double-entendres) and translate the title:
"Khyber" = "Khyber Pass" (a strategic location on what's now the Afghan-Pakistan border)
= "arse".
"Fanny magnet".
A fanny magnet is something that attracts women (as in, "Check out my new car, its a real fanny-magnet!").
Obviously, "fanny magnet" only makes sense with the UK meaning of "fanny" as being something specific to women.
PS, most people don't realise that the word "naff", as popularised by Princess Anne, is actually Elizabethan backslang for "fanny". Backslang was a way of disguising obscenities by saying them backwards.
Hence the US term "fannypack", which has mildly amusing connotations if you're British (over here they're referred to as "bum bags").
Similar transatlantic confusion regarding "prat". "Prat" in the US beans "buttock region", hence the US comedy term "pratfall", which is to fall on your arse in a comedic manner.
But "prat" in the UK is again gynaecological. However, the UK meaning has become a bit obscure over the years (with the derivative, slightly comedic meaning of "a person who can't help doing stupid things" becoming dominant), and the understood core meaning is now getting a bit blurred with the US version.
I think "pranny" is probably a merging of "prat" and "fanny" specially invented for television ("Only Fools and Horses"?)
In a civilised society, citizens have rights and expectations, and those rights and expectations buy loyalty, stability and social cohesion. And there are other considerations and costs: for instance, in a first-world society that tries to be a meritocracy, a child should have the right to decent healthcare and education regardless of who their parents are. They shouldn't have to pay for their own primary school care, and they shouldn't have to depend on their parents being willing and able to pay for it on their behalf. A basic education should be their right, and society should pay for it.
What society gets by encouraging education is reduced crime and a better use of the available human talent pool. If a decent education is the preserve of a smaller pool of people whose parents can afford to give them a good start in life, then key decision-making posts in society end up only being occupied by people who have sufficiently competent parents. If we waste talent then society wastes resources by allowing rotten decisions to be made by key people, and this also encourages social unrest in the general population, as people wonder who the hell the idiots are who're running the country, and why they ought to be committed to preserving such a society (or supporting it, or fighting for it, or enduring hardships to help it through difficult times instead of just looking out for themselves).
So stuff like basic education for kids has to be paid for from a common resource-pool.
That usually has to come out of taxation. Now, someone who doesn't have kids and has no intention of having kids might say: "Why are some of my tax dollars going to pay for the education of other people's children? Why can't I opt out of paying the "education" piece of my tax bill, since I'm never going to benefit from it myself?"
And the answer is - you've already been opted-in by an accident of birth, by being born into a civilised society where a certain degree of risk is pooled, and where society provides a certain degree of protective infrastructure. You've probably already reaped the advantages of being born into a society that's relatively well-educated and relatively peaceful, and where you wouldn't have been left to die if your parents hadn't been able to buy food or hire a midwife, or take you to a doctor. You probably also benefited from being brought up in a society where your parents weren't likely to have died of malnutrition or any easily-avoidable diseases before you reached adulthood, where you didn't have to fear being abducted by roving bands of outlaws or eaten by wild animals. You might have been born in a different country or time without those benefits, and yes, their taxation might have been lower, but lower tax isn't so great if you're dead or crippled, or illiterate.
If you're such A-grade material that you reckon that you'd have been able to succeed even without any of those social benefits, then this society still allows A-graders in business to become multi-billionaires, and earn so much money that personal taxation isn't really an issue. Steve Ballmer's recently griped about how high tax makes it difficult to run a business in the US - yet somehow MS have over twenty billion in petty cash sitting in the bank despite the fact that everybody seems to hate their current flagship product, and Ballmer himself is supposed to be worth 11 billion. Now, is Ballmer underperforming as a CEO because he doesn't make enough money from his job, because of the greedy tax-man?
I mean, if he rationed himself to spending a mere million dollars per day on buying cars and planes and hookers covered in gold leaf, he has enough cash to do that seven days a week for the next thirty-something years b
He's alienating the business and personal user buyers ("Everyone's working together in these difficult economic times .... except Microsoft"), he's damaging future military sales ("If we continue committing stategically to this company's products, there's no guarantee that the support for these systems won't be under the jurisdiction of a foreign power in five years' time"), and he's also damaging Microsoft's influence over governmental sales and government legislation ("Now we're finally free to pass laws and directives that might hurt Microsoft sales (such as deciding to move to open-source), because if anyone complains that we're risking US jobs, we can now reply that Microsoft's CEO has suggested that those US jobs are liable to disappear anyway, at short notice").
Absolutely.
If Microsoft moves their jobs out of the US, the US government and military should decide that there's no longer a good reason not to announce a new long-term strategy of migrating all new systems and system upgrades to open-source by default, whenever there's not a good reason to do otherwise. Microsoft will cease to be a strategic US company with the governmental&CIA support that goes with that status. Pres. Obama can announce the strategic move to open source as part of his cuts programme for eliminating wasteful government spending, and declare that part of the new US healthcare initiative is the condition that the main software that runs the system be open-source.
It sounds like a sensible populist move - an accountant can probably calculate how many copies of Windows there are in use in the US governement and military and estimate how much the US taxpayer spends per year on buying proprietary operating systems and office software ... and that big number (or a proportion of it) can be announced as an immediate saving for next year onwards, without the White House having to do a thing except issue a couple of federal directives and notifying state governments that they're expected to follow suit.
The only reason not to do that //now//, is that Microsoft would cry foul and complain that the decision would hurt a flagship US company and cost US jobs. But if the jobs have already been moved out of the US, and the company is currently so successful partly becuase they channel so much paperwork to a foreign tax haven to avoid paying US taxes, then really, who's really being protected other than the company's owners?
If MS move those jobs out of the US, then fuck them. Seriously. Fuck them. Default patriotic behaviour then switches from supporting them to making sure that they're penalised for trying to screw the society that made them successful. Eliminate all US government money that's going their way, as soon as possible, and divert it to people who actually need it, or who are actually trying to make a positive difference to the US economy.
It was from a rather famous advert in the 1980s, and the quote was supposed to represent an evil dictatorship that needed to be smashed so that people could be free. The company spouting this anti-totalitarian philosophy?
Apple (source)
Times change.