Normally you have to work ( a small amount) to keep your fingers extended so you aren't constantly pressing the buttons.
Er, my main fingers on a standard mouse are completely relaxed and resting lightly on the three buttons. thumb and little finger fall naturally to either side to move it. Heel of hand rests on mouse pad providing support and a pivot for fine control, palm is on back of mouse keeping the wrist angle correct, so the only effort is keeping the hand from sliding backwards under the weight of my arm and falling off the desk to my side, and friction does most of that.
I think that a report that states that an allegation of lying is 'unfounded' is both interesting and important.
It might be if there were one. However, as you quoted, Hutton merely talked about what they knew, not what they believed. Since they were not in a position to know one way or the other, Hutton was, on this issue, just evading the question.
On the question of belief, and so of lieing, we know what relevent evidence was available to Blair, and we know what he put into the dossier. Since the former did not support the latter, he was being deeply dishonest on what he was putting forward as a key issue. I don't see any way to avoid that conclusion, other than perhaps assuming Blair is a moron, and didn't understand the caviats on what he was told, which I don't believe.
You are only putting forward your interpretation of events, and not evidence, I would suggest.
I stated the fact and drew the only conclusion I think is supported by that fact. Feel free to propose an alternative. To me, if you see someone jump rapidly out of the way of a speeding vehicle, and there is no evidence to the contrary, it is a reasonable deduction that they knew the vehicle was comeing.
"The allegation.. that the Government probably knew that the 45 minutes claim was wrong before the Government decided to put it in the dossier was an allegation which was unfounded."
Of course, that is not really interesting, since there is no way they could know it was wrong. What is interesting is whether they had reason to believe it was true when they said it.
[that they chose to invade before the weapons inspectors reported]
No, that is not evidence for anything. It is just your opinion.
I wish I had this ability to know in detail the contents of documents and reports that I have never seen!
The Hutton report is a public document and makes clear what information was available to Blair, including the fact that the 45 minute claim was made by a single, unreliable source.
If someone tells you ``Old Fred the habitual liar told me that Tony Blair is a shape changing lizard from outer space'', and then you tell me ``Tony Blair is a shape changing lizard from outer space'', then I think you are being consciously dishonest.
And, as I said earlier, we have evidence that Bush Blair did not believe WMDs would be found by the UN weapons inspectors in the form of their decision to act before the inspection report could undermine their case.
on the other side, I know of no evidence that they actually believed that there were WMDs ready to be used immediatly. There was certainly no great effort to supply British troops with protection against chemical or biological attacks before the invasion.
In so far as any such case can be, I think this one is proven.
You were saying that you couldn't prove that Blair lied in this case. It is obviously possible to prove that people lie in some cases - where there is evidence of a conversation in which something contrary was stated.
That only proves that at two times someone held differing views. You can never prove lieing absolutely because it is a mental state and we have no access to the mental states of others. You can only prove it to the level we can prove that Blair lied -- that it is completely implausible that he could have believed what he said, given the information we know was available to him.
Look - either they are a legalistic justification or they are not. If they are believed to be a legalistic justification, then that is what they are and no lie is involved.
You have missed your own change in topic. The lie was over the 45 minute claim. The latter part of what I said was purely a reply to your comments on why they went to war. The two are related but separate. Blair would not deny that his reasons (as opposed to his justification) for going to war revolved around getting rid of Saddam, he has stated that clearly many times. He would, of course, deny he lied over the 45 minute claim.
The legal justification was that Iraq had not cooperated with the UN over weapons inspection and so was effectively still a rogue state -- basicly fair game. That doesn't require the existance of WMDs at all, let alone the 45 minute claim. However, that just allows war, justifies it to the lawyers, it doesn't motivate it and justify it to the populations of the US and UK.
The 45 minute claim was needed as a reason for war to present to those not persuaded by the moral crusade against Saddam. For that he needed a direct threat to make the proposed war one of self defence. And that is where he crossed the line. His absolute and honest belief in the moral need to get rid of Saddam (which I am actually sympathetic to) became an absolute need to make that 45 minute claim, to get the vote which would get the troops into Iraq.
As I said, I believe he believed it by the time he stood behind that dossier, I also believe he knew it was bogus. Doublethink. We could then get into a semantic argument about whether the result was a lie in the strictest sense. I think it is clear it was not a position an honest person could have taken.
So, there is no excuse for throwing around accusations like 'he lied'. It is stating something you can't know and can't prove.
If you wish to eliminate the word `lie' from the English language as not useful because it can never be proved absolutely, feel free to start a campagn. I think most of us are happy with the level of proof of `clearly no one evolutionarilly higher than a liver fluke could have come to believe what this man stated'.
The UK and US went to war to get rid of Saddam Hussain.
Just personal opinion. No evidence for this at all.
Actually, they were and are quite open about that. All the rhetoric of both Bush and Blair, when they weren't carefully making a pseudo legal case, was about how evil SH was. The justifications about threats to the US and UK were only put forward when they were directly asked to provide a justification in international law.
Let's open the hourse's mouth, here is Blair's definitive account of the relationship between WMDs and his reasons for going to war.
I have never put our justification for action as regime change. We have to act within the terms set out in Resolution 1441. That is our legal base.
But it is the reason, I say frankly, why if we do act we should do so with a clear conscience and strong heart.
- Tony Blair to HoC 18/03/2003
WMDs, and the UN resulutions about them, are the legal basis, but regeme change is what makes the proposed war morally right, indeed morally required.
And that is the last mention of WMDs in the speech, a statement that they are pulrey a legalistic justification, from then on it is all about the evils of SH, the necessity not to be seen to change ones mind (a politicians argument to politicians of course), and why we must go to war to defend our `way of life' from conflicting idiologies.
Short of having the technology to take a retrospective dump of Blair's brain at the moment he made the decision to make the claim, it is impossible to prove they knew it to be false. That level of proof is just never available for this kind of issue. Maybe Comical Ali really believed the glorious Iraqi army was thrashing the decadent US forces who so laughably claimed to be holding the airport, how can we be absolutely sure? We can only say that it is implausible that anyone could actually hold that opinion at that timebplace and time.
However, we know Blair had no reason to think the 45 minute claim was true. The intelligence services clearly stated that this was an unsupported claim by an untrustworthy single source. The government put it forward as a fact. Even if you decide this isn't evidence of lieing on the issue of fact (which is to decide that Blair convinced himself of the truth of the claim on no basis), it is clearly lieing about the level of evidence.
Of course, when an inquiry finds that a government did not lie, the cynical public always call this a 'whitewash', but that does not mean the public is right.
It does not mean the public is wrong either.
Actually, I don't think this is a case of Blair being an Evil Lieing Bastard(tm) who wanted war at any cost, but of good old double-think. Blair knew the claim was bollocks, but at the same time convinced himself it was true because it was politically necessary to believe it.
The UK and US went to war to get rid of Saddam Hussain. The US blather about 9/11 and the UK blather about WMDs were attempts at providing a reason which would justify the predictable deaths.
Legalisticly, the US and UK had an argument for the legitimacy of the war. SH put Iraq outside the protection of international law when he invaded Kuwait, and since he never even seriously pretended to comply with the UN resulutions which ended the gulf war, one could argue that Iraq was still beyond the pale. After all that is how the sanctions and the no-fly zones were justified.
But a legal argument is not useful when you need to stand up and say ``I'm going to send your children to their deaths killing othe people's children, is that OK by you?''.
has anyone ever seen XP or 2000 SP3 actually BSOD on a regular basis.
yes.
My experience is that XP itself is incredibly stable. Infinitely more so than 95 or 98.
A three legged stool with one leg missing and a bad woodworm infestation standing on the back of an enraged bull being sodomised with a cheese grater in an earthquake zone is more stable than 98 or 95.
Only one known to be false claim is needed to prove the charge of lieing.
But not the key one.
Well, it was the only one which justified war, since it made it pre-emtive self defence, which makes it rather key IMO.
I remember, the final report about WMD came out sometime after the war had finished.
That is rather the point isn't it, they hurried the invasion, at the expense of alienating potential allies. Why?
If they believed in WMDs, there was clearly a really strong case for holding off a few weeks. They could have had a report backing their case to bring the Europeans and perhaps the Russians on-side and at least persuade the Arab states to passively support the invasion. Remember, waiting for that report was the demand the French were explicitly making for support in the security council.
Either there is some even stronger reason they couldn't wait, one they have not shared with us, or they believed the report would actually weaken their case, i.e. they knew there were no WMDs, at least none which could provide a legal basis for war.
Its all very fine to say what we now know. This is called 'hindsight'.
But `we' weren't desperate to act before the report came out. Well, I wasn't. One very plausible explanation for the indecent haste is that Bush and Blair were pretty sure that the report would remove one of their excuses, and the only one Blair could use.
This would only be true if it the government knew in advance that there were no weapons of mass destruction at the time of declaration of war.
Actually, they need only haver known that there were none capable of being direct threats to Britain available for use within 45 minutes. The best benefit of the doubt one can give Blair on that is that they didn't have absolute proof there were no such weapons. They don't have absolute proof that you don't have such in your bedroom under the bed, but I don't think that would justify an armed invasion of your home.
On the other hand, one can ask why the UK and US government were so desperate to have the invasion take place before the arms inspectors could report that they were willing to burn any number of important international bridges with long term allies to shift the invasion forward a few weeks. We now know the inspectors would have reported no weapons present. What did Bush and Blair believe that report would say?
Paper/similar materials has been working, oh, for a few THOSAND of year!
Also has a much better user interface, hence the, er, remarkable sucess of electronic book systems in the developed world. Also books are an environmental win, while any electronic system will be an environmental loss.
OTOH, paper has a shorter lifetime in the hands of a 10 year old than a ruggedised electronic gadget should, so it's not obvious this is a silly idea. It will depend on the costs.
These are clearly based on the old Zarus models, so the development and tooling costs to make them were presumably nil plus the ruggedisation. The networking infrastructure is now mass produced and probably relativly cheap.
So it will come down to the expected costs of supplying up to date text books in all subjects, year on year over the lifetime of the hardware.
It probably replaces some writing materials and testing/exam infrastructure too.
On the whole though I suspect they'd be better off using the money to pay the teachers more, and maybe paying the parents of older kids to allow them to stay longer in school when they could be working.
Re:The Problem With XML
on
Effective XML
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· Score: 1
The tags in the file don't magically describe the semantics...
No, but if I give you XML you will at least get the structure, and the tag names should be a hint that `this bit is the user's bank account number' or whatever. If I give you a hunk of highly optimally stored binary data, you have a major research programme in front of you. If you doubt that, take a look at the binary files makeing up a complex mysql database, and try and reverse engineer the data to the point you'd start from if it were an XML dump.
Two words for you: lex and yacc
Two words for you: Japanese and why-should-I-write-an-LALR-grammar-and-supporting- infrastructure-when-I-can-link-to-a-library-and-wr ite-one-call.
Why not use something more apt from a machine point of view (lisp s expressions?)
Have you ever tried finding where a brace has been lost in a machine produced s-expression?
Of course, you can indent the expression to make error detection and correction easier, but then you have created something with exactly the same type of redundancy as XML, for the same reason, except it's actually harder to hand edit.
Redundancy is a Good Thing in an archiveing and interchange format.
Re:The Problem With XML
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1
But what % of xml files are written or read by humans?
It should be that a reasonably high proportion of them are.
XML is for:
Interchange between systems independently developed systems.
Storage which may need to be examined by people.
Input where there may be a need for human intervention, say in an emergency situation (``argh! the system won't let me change the tax rate on this transaction and it has to go through today!'')
Of course the latter 2 are special cases of the first with a different meaning for `designed'.
So, 2/3 of the reasons to use it involve people.
If the data can never be seen by another system, nor by a person, you shouldn't be using XML, 'though you should be providing a way to export to XML.
Now, having said that, if the data is accessed rarely enough (say once per run and no more than a handful of runs per day), it may be more efficiant to store in XML and take the access overhead in exchange for not implementing export and import mechanisms. But it's a hack.
Re:The Problem With XML
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1
Of course someone else might find a good way to tell me why I should use 40 characters to transmit what should have taken 10 characters
I might need to read that data 10 years from now.
Of course, you could define a format and document it well, and provide an API to access it which will run on whatever system I am using 10 years from now, but let's face it, you won't. Even the best of us cut corners on that stuff under real world pressures.
10 years from now when you are struggling to decode some bizzare, but efficiant, data format created by someone who read your comment, please don't beat your head on the desk too hard:-).
The whole concept was definitely good for a lot of programmer payroll time.
Having implemented more or less the same data storage API on top of simple text files and XML, I can state that XML eats much less programmer time. All the parsing and worrying about funny characters was done for me by a library.
I do agree with more or less everybody that XML as a specific instance of a generic markup is a bit of a pig. However, a standard pig is better than 10000 neat non standard solutions for some things.
I think the idea behind keeping the law secret is that it would prevent a terrorist organization from analyzing it to figure out a weakness and exploit it.
Seems unlikley. What terrorist is going to turn up and draw attention to themselves by arguing that clause 37.982 of the law says that if they have a red hat and pink socks on they don't need to show ID?
More likely, it is for the traditional reason that if you don't let people know the law, they can't tell when you are acting outside it.
and a threshold to get articles to the front page.
Having been modded down as -2:Troll for posting a Marvin quote to a HHGG story the other day, I'm not sure I want the/. hoards selecting stories for me.
It has always seemed strange to me that encryption via SSL and verification of your business identity were rolled into the same system.
If you are worried enough to want encryption, then you should be worried about man in the middle attacks. No point telling people their credit card details or email will be encrypted if it just gets sent to a random criminal who can read it, re-encrypt it and send it on to you.
If users can verify the identity of the far end point some other way, perhaps because they have previously connected to it, or because they are within a trusted environment, you don't need the signing, or can self-sign. This is how ssh works, you're supposed to check the server ID the first time you use it and then at least simple MITM attacks result in a warning.
But HTTPS is more about reassuring end users than any significant security concern in most situations, and knowing who they are talking to is part of that.
[imaginge Dilbert cartoon with credit card, waitress and fur coat here]
And if you actually looked hard, and compared the repaint behaviour of XFree86/X.org to something like OS X's Aqua, you would see the problem too.
Homestly, shaped icon over opera, no visible flicker, just the occasional small jerk in the movement. The only way I can get visible refresh is by dragging over a VNC window, where there is an excuse. If it's so small I can't see it, ISTM there are more important things to deal with.
The biggest problem I have with X is that it's single threaded:
No it isn't. Or rather not in the way you mean. The server may or may not be multithreaded, I really have no idea these days, but since it is a separate process from all the clients, that wouldn't have the effect you describe.
Your window manager is telling the X server not to update. That's an optimisation from back when the hardware really was much slower. It should be an option on any reasonable WM, and it should be off by default these days.
Drag a smaller window across a large window and you will see trails as X struggles to repaint constantly, and resize a window and you will see flicker as X struggles to repaint constantly.
Er, no.
Watch... pick up shaped icon... drag over opera... no flicker. That is the hard case where the smaller window has an arbitrary shape defined by a bitmap mask.
Sounds to me like your server is not using save-unders and backing store apropriatly for some reason.
Slashdot Mirror
What a horrible thing to say to someone you don't know!
Er, my main fingers on a standard mouse are completely relaxed and resting lightly on the three buttons. thumb and little finger fall naturally to either side to move it. Heel of hand rests on mouse pad providing support and a pivot for fine control, palm is on back of mouse keeping the wrist angle correct, so the only effort is keeping the hand from sliding backwards under the weight of my arm and falling off the desk to my side, and friction does most of that.
They may have believed anything.
I think that a report that states that an allegation of lying is 'unfounded' is both interesting and important.
It might be if there were one. However, as you quoted, Hutton merely talked about what they knew, not what they believed. Since they were not in a position to know one way or the other, Hutton was, on this issue, just evading the question.
On the question of belief, and so of lieing, we know what relevent evidence was available to Blair, and we know what he put into the dossier. Since the former did not support the latter, he was being deeply dishonest on what he was putting forward as a key issue. I don't see any way to avoid that conclusion, other than perhaps assuming Blair is a moron, and didn't understand the caviats on what he was told, which I don't believe.
You are only putting forward your interpretation of events, and not evidence, I would suggest.
I stated the fact and drew the only conclusion I think is supported by that fact. Feel free to propose an alternative. To me, if you see someone jump rapidly out of the way of a speeding vehicle, and there is no evidence to the contrary, it is a reasonable deduction that they knew the vehicle was comeing.
Of course, that is not really interesting, since there is no way they could know it was wrong. What is interesting is whether they had reason to believe it was true when they said it.
[that they chose to invade before the weapons inspectors reported]
No, that is not evidence for anything. It is just your opinion.
Er, no, it is a fact.
The Hutton report is a public document and makes clear what information was available to Blair, including the fact that the 45 minute claim was made by a single, unreliable source.
If someone tells you ``Old Fred the habitual liar told me that Tony Blair is a shape changing lizard from outer space'', and then you tell me ``Tony Blair is a shape changing lizard from outer space'', then I think you are being consciously dishonest.
And, as I said earlier, we have evidence that Bush Blair did not believe WMDs would be found by the UN weapons inspectors in the form of their decision to act before the inspection report could undermine their case.
on the other side, I know of no evidence that they actually believed that there were WMDs ready to be used immediatly. There was certainly no great effort to supply British troops with protection against chemical or biological attacks before the invasion.
In so far as any such case can be, I think this one is proven.
That only proves that at two times someone held differing views. You can never prove lieing absolutely because it is a mental state and we have no access to the mental states of others. You can only prove it to the level we can prove that Blair lied -- that it is completely implausible that he could have believed what he said, given the information we know was available to him.
Look - either they are a legalistic justification or they are not. If they are believed to be a legalistic justification, then that is what they are and no lie is involved.
You have missed your own change in topic. The lie was over the 45 minute claim. The latter part of what I said was purely a reply to your comments on why they went to war. The two are related but separate. Blair would not deny that his reasons (as opposed to his justification) for going to war revolved around getting rid of Saddam, he has stated that clearly many times. He would, of course, deny he lied over the 45 minute claim.
The legal justification was that Iraq had not cooperated with the UN over weapons inspection and so was effectively still a rogue state -- basicly fair game. That doesn't require the existance of WMDs at all, let alone the 45 minute claim. However, that just allows war, justifies it to the lawyers, it doesn't motivate it and justify it to the populations of the US and UK.
The 45 minute claim was needed as a reason for war to present to those not persuaded by the moral crusade against Saddam. For that he needed a direct threat to make the proposed war one of self defence. And that is where he crossed the line. His absolute and honest belief in the moral need to get rid of Saddam (which I am actually sympathetic to) became an absolute need to make that 45 minute claim, to get the vote which would get the troops into Iraq.
As I said, I believe he believed it by the time he stood behind that dossier, I also believe he knew it was bogus. Doublethink. We could then get into a semantic argument about whether the result was a lie in the strictest sense. I think it is clear it was not a position an honest person could have taken.
If you wish to eliminate the word `lie' from the English language as not useful because it can never be proved absolutely, feel free to start a campagn. I think most of us are happy with the level of proof of `clearly no one evolutionarilly higher than a liver fluke could have come to believe what this man stated'.
The UK and US went to war to get rid of Saddam Hussain.
Just personal opinion. No evidence for this at all.
Actually, they were and are quite open about that. All the rhetoric of both Bush and Blair, when they weren't carefully making a pseudo legal case, was about how evil SH was. The justifications about threats to the US and UK were only put forward when they were directly asked to provide a justification in international law.
Let's open the hourse's mouth, here is Blair's definitive account of the relationship between WMDs and his reasons for going to war.
WMDs, and the UN resulutions about them, are the legal basis, but regeme change is what makes the proposed war morally right, indeed morally required.
And that is the last mention of WMDs in the speech, a statement that they are pulrey a legalistic justification, from then on it is all about the evils of SH, the necessity not to be seen to change ones mind (a politicians argument to politicians of course), and why we must go to war to defend our `way of life' from conflicting idiologies.
Short of having the technology to take a retrospective dump of Blair's brain at the moment he made the decision to make the claim, it is impossible to prove they knew it to be false. That level of proof is just never available for this kind of issue. Maybe Comical Ali really believed the glorious Iraqi army was thrashing the decadent US forces who so laughably claimed to be holding the airport, how can we be absolutely sure? We can only say that it is implausible that anyone could actually hold that opinion at that timebplace and time.
However, we know Blair had no reason to think the 45 minute claim was true. The intelligence services clearly stated that this was an unsupported claim by an untrustworthy single source. The government put it forward as a fact. Even if you decide this isn't evidence of lieing on the issue of fact (which is to decide that Blair convinced himself of the truth of the claim on no basis), it is clearly lieing about the level of evidence.
Of course, when an inquiry finds that a government did not lie, the cynical public always call this a 'whitewash', but that does not mean the public is right.
It does not mean the public is wrong either.
Actually, I don't think this is a case of Blair being an Evil Lieing Bastard(tm) who wanted war at any cost, but of good old double-think. Blair knew the claim was bollocks, but at the same time convinced himself it was true because it was politically necessary to believe it.
The UK and US went to war to get rid of Saddam Hussain. The US blather about 9/11 and the UK blather about WMDs were attempts at providing a reason which would justify the predictable deaths.
Legalisticly, the US and UK had an argument for the legitimacy of the war. SH put Iraq outside the protection of international law when he invaded Kuwait, and since he never even seriously pretended to comply with the UN resulutions which ended the gulf war, one could argue that Iraq was still beyond the pale. After all that is how the sanctions and the no-fly zones were justified.
But a legal argument is not useful when you need to stand up and say ``I'm going to send your children to their deaths killing othe people's children, is that OK by you?''.
yes.
My experience is that XP itself is incredibly stable. Infinitely more so than 95 or 98.
A three legged stool with one leg missing and a bad woodworm infestation standing on the back of an enraged bull being sodomised with a cheese grater in an earthquake zone is more stable than 98 or 95.
Only one known to be false claim is needed to prove the charge of lieing.
But not the key one.
Well, it was the only one which justified war, since it made it pre-emtive self defence, which makes it rather key IMO.
I remember, the final report about WMD came out sometime after the war had finished.
That is rather the point isn't it, they hurried the invasion, at the expense of alienating potential allies. Why?
If they believed in WMDs, there was clearly a really strong case for holding off a few weeks. They could have had a report backing their case to bring the Europeans and perhaps the Russians on-side and at least persuade the Arab states to passively support the invasion. Remember, waiting for that report was the demand the French were explicitly making for support in the security council.
Either there is some even stronger reason they couldn't wait, one they have not shared with us, or they believed the report would actually weaken their case, i.e. they knew there were no WMDs, at least none which could provide a legal basis for war.
How is this relevant?
Because that is the claim the UK government made.
Its all very fine to say what we now know. This is called 'hindsight'.
But `we' weren't desperate to act before the report came out. Well, I wasn't. One very plausible explanation for the indecent haste is that Bush and Blair were pretty sure that the report would remove one of their excuses, and the only one Blair could use.
Actually, they need only haver known that there were none capable of being direct threats to Britain available for use within 45 minutes. The best benefit of the doubt one can give Blair on that is that they didn't have absolute proof there were no such weapons. They don't have absolute proof that you don't have such in your bedroom under the bed, but I don't think that would justify an armed invasion of your home.
On the other hand, one can ask why the UK and US government were so desperate to have the invasion take place before the arms inspectors could report that they were willing to burn any number of important international bridges with long term allies to shift the invasion forward a few weeks. We now know the inspectors would have reported no weapons present. What did Bush and Blair believe that report would say?
Like Democrats and Republicans you mean?
Maybe if they had more resort beaches in Africa people would get upset at the "disruption" a little "war" can cause...
Er which war would that be? So far as I can remember, kenya has been involved in fewer wars recently than, for instance, the USA.
Also has a much better user interface, hence the, er, remarkable sucess of electronic book systems in the developed world. Also books are an environmental win, while any electronic system will be an environmental loss.
OTOH, paper has a shorter lifetime in the hands of a 10 year old than a ruggedised electronic gadget should, so it's not obvious this is a silly idea. It will depend on the costs.
These are clearly based on the old Zarus models, so the development and tooling costs to make them were presumably nil plus the ruggedisation. The networking infrastructure is now mass produced and probably relativly cheap.
So it will come down to the expected costs of supplying up to date text books in all subjects, year on year over the lifetime of the hardware.
It probably replaces some writing materials and testing/exam infrastructure too.
On the whole though I suspect they'd be better off using the money to pay the teachers more, and maybe paying the parents of older kids to allow them to stay longer in school when they could be working.
No, but if I give you XML you will at least get the structure, and the tag names should be a hint that `this bit is the user's bank account number' or whatever. If I give you a hunk of highly optimally stored binary data, you have a major research programme in front of you. If you doubt that, take a look at the binary files makeing up a complex mysql database, and try and reverse engineer the data to the point you'd start from if it were an XML dump.
Two words for you: lex and yacc
Two words for you: Japanese and why-should-I-write-an-LALR-grammar-and-supporting- infrastructure-when-I-can-link-to-a-library-and-wr ite-one-call.
OK, I cheated.
Have you ever tried finding where a brace has been lost in a machine produced s-expression?
Of course, you can indent the expression to make error detection and correction easier, but then you have created something with exactly the same type of redundancy as XML, for the same reason, except it's actually harder to hand edit.
Redundancy is a Good Thing in an archiveing and interchange format.
It should be that a reasonably high proportion of them are.
XML is for:
- Interchange between systems independently developed systems.
- Storage which may need to be examined by people.
- Input where there may be a need for human intervention, say in an emergency situation (``argh! the system won't let me change the tax rate on this transaction and it has to go through today!'')
Of course the latter 2 are special cases of the first with a different meaning for `designed'.So, 2/3 of the reasons to use it involve people.
If the data can never be seen by another system, nor by a person, you shouldn't be using XML, 'though you should be providing a way to export to XML.
Now, having said that, if the data is accessed rarely enough (say once per run and no more than a handful of runs per day), it may be more efficiant to store in XML and take the access overhead in exchange for not implementing export and import mechanisms. But it's a hack.
I might need to read that data 10 years from now.
Of course, you could define a format and document it well, and provide an API to access it which will run on whatever system I am using 10 years from now, but let's face it, you won't. Even the best of us cut corners on that stuff under real world pressures.
10 years from now when you are struggling to decode some bizzare, but efficiant, data format created by someone who read your comment, please don't beat your head on the desk too hard:-).
The whole concept was definitely good for a lot of programmer payroll time.
Having implemented more or less the same data storage API on top of simple text files and XML, I can state that XML eats much less programmer time. All the parsing and worrying about funny characters was done for me by a library.
I do agree with more or less everybody that XML as a specific instance of a generic markup is a bit of a pig. However, a standard pig is better than 10000 neat non standard solutions for some things.
Seems unlikley. What terrorist is going to turn up and draw attention to themselves by arguing that clause 37.982 of the law says that if they have a red hat and pink socks on they don't need to show ID?
More likely, it is for the traditional reason that if you don't let people know the law, they can't tell when you are acting outside it.
Having been modded down as -2:Troll for posting a Marvin quote to a HHGG story the other day, I'm not sure I want the /. hoards selecting stories for me.
Perhaps the moderation system needs to be extended to stories, and karma for the editors.
If you are worried enough to want encryption, then you should be worried about man in the middle attacks. No point telling people their credit card details or email will be encrypted if it just gets sent to a random criminal who can read it, re-encrypt it and send it on to you.
If users can verify the identity of the far end point some other way, perhaps because they have previously connected to it, or because they are within a trusted environment, you don't need the signing, or can self-sign. This is how ssh works, you're supposed to check the server ID the first time you use it and then at least simple MITM attacks result in a warning.
But HTTPS is more about reassuring end users than any significant security concern in most situations, and knowing who they are talking to is part of that.
Homestly, shaped icon over opera, no visible flicker, just the occasional small jerk in the movement. The only way I can get visible refresh is by dragging over a VNC window, where there is an excuse. If it's so small I can't see it, ISTM there are more important things to deal with.
No it isn't. Or rather not in the way you mean. The server may or may not be multithreaded, I really have no idea these days, but since it is a separate process from all the clients, that wouldn't have the effect you describe.
Your window manager is telling the X server not to update. That's an optimisation from back when the hardware really was much slower. It should be an option on any reasonable WM, and it should be off by default these days.
Er, no.
Watch... pick up shaped icon... drag over opera... no flicker. That is the hard case where the smaller window has an arbitrary shape defined by a bitmap mask.
Sounds to me like your server is not using save-unders and backing store apropriatly for some reason.