I’m just saying it’s not based on quite as much laziness as you made it seem. Yes, they’re lazy, but scraping would’ve been the wrong solution anyway: it’s too much work.
I’m not defending their choice to scrape... just pointing out that whether or not scraping was a good idea, their justification for not scraping (any longer) is perfectly reasonable.
If you’re asking “why are they scraping in the first place”... well, they found an interface to scrape from that they thought would never change... and surprisingly enough, it did.
If the connection was performed by sockets between Scroogle’s own servers and Google’s (which is what they were doing with their SSL searches to screen-scrape the results from the old/ie interface previously) it would be the same level of anonymity as before. AJAX is just a Javascript interface to open sockets and make HTTP/HTTPS requests.
It’s just a matter of server side vs. client side. The primary reason that an AJAX search is done by your browser rather than your own webpage is because it saves your server the bandwidth and time (and saves the visitor the time too) that would have been required if it was done server-side. It could be done using server-side scripting.
“Should” and “is” are the difference between theory and practice. In theory, the website should implement something that is freely accessible to everyone. In practice, people want their OS and browser to work, and that means supporting whatever the website chose to implement.
Contrast that to the Ribbon, which is no easier to actually use – once you know how – than menus were – once you knew how. It’s selling factor was that it’s easier to learn to use.
So everyone who already knew how to use the menus has to re-learn a new system, albeit one which is supposedly easier to learn than menus were. The easiest thing for them, however, would have been to not learn anything and continue using the system they already knew how to use. You force a bunch of people to re-learn something without making it any better. That’s wrong.
The Awesome Bar is actually better IMHO and that is why it was a slightly different situation... and it wasn’t even as difficult of a transition as the menu-to-ribbon switch. The Awesome Bar at least still functioned in most of the same respects that the address bar had traditionally done.
I really think the “Awesome bar” was an improvement, as different as it was. Searching the full text of the title of the page, or anywhere deep inside the URL (rather than at the beginning) – without having to open a separate history interface – is incredibly handy. At first it bothered me that you couldn’t scroll past the first 10 results, but it turns out that typing a few more characters generally brings the site you’re looking for to the top, and once you’ve been there a few times it knows that you typed “s” and you’re probably going to Slashdot, so it’s right there at the top – whereas if I typed “c”, I want my/~user/comments page.
Options that are very specific to an object can be attached to that object’s right-click menu. The right-click menu for the page in Firefox is fine as it is. Mine already has a Reload Every option (added by my Tab Mix Plus addon, I think), View Page in Coral IE Tab, a DownloadHelper submenu, RefControl options for the site, and a ScreenGrab entry. Those are all options specific to the page that I’m viewing.
File, edit, and view are better served by keyboard shortcuts and/or mouse shortcuts (e.g. ctrl-scroll zoom).
History, bookmarks, preferences not specific to the page that I’m viewing, and help should not be cluttering up the right-click menu. Give me my menu bar and leave me alone.
Dialogue boxes - including those requesting geolocation or other data - will appear as bubbles specific to individual tabs, meaning you can continue to navigate around the browser without being locked down until you've answered.
FINALLY.
Never again will I be alert-bombed.
(I looked for an add-on to change script alerts, confirms, and prompts into something non-modal. I couldn’t find anything.)
Re:What is the difference, oh wise one?
on
Hacking Vim 7.2
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· Score: 0, Redundant
Comment and subject are, or should be, distinct.
“You know you're doing something wrong when you have to hack your text editor” was his comment, not his subject.
I suppose it could also be argued that if your comment is your subject you’re doing it wrong.
Well, I’m honestly a little bit surprised. I asked why politicians felt justified to legislate on a clear morality issue, and I got moderated troll. Maybe the moderator thought I was trying to subtly argue the slippery-slope fallacy?
Yes, but didn’t it ever occur to anyone that screw-ups, or at least the ability to make your own decisions and face the legitimate consequences of your decisions, are a certain part of the learning process – possibly even an important part of it? Growth only lasts so long, and if it is stunted during that time, the child will never fully reach its potential; this is clearly evident in one’s physical development but is there any reason to believe that it’s any less true for the development of one’s brain?
When I say “legitimate” consequences, I mean natural ones, not unnatural consequences imposed by us to force someone to comply and essentially take away the difficulty of the decision process. If you’ll go to jail for something, it’s (usually) a pretty easy decision to not do it, but making certain difficult decisions might be an important part of learning to be responsible and make difficult decisions, and adding unnatural repercussions prevents this from happening to some extent.
If you’re training a child and you never let him hurt himself, what does that teach him? No, he’ll never be scalded by a pot of boiling water because you’d never dream of leaving the handle pointed outward... but he’ll also not properly realise that certain rules are there for his protection and violating them will cause painful consequences that you won’t always be able to shield him from, and the older he gets the more such rules he’ll be faced with. If mommy doesn’t always come running the instant he does something he knows he isn’t supposed to and she allows him to occasionally meet some mildly painful and unpleasant consequences he’ll much quicker learn that breaking rules is a risky business and he’ll learn to be more cautious.
Yes, exercising their sexuality is something that’s very easy for kids to screw up, particularly when it’s just beginning and they don’t know much better. Screw-ups are not the end of the world, and they don’t have to scar someone for life... if we let every screw-up be a life-ruining event none of us would ever be able to function.
Well, the argument goes that an animal isn’t mentally cognizant enough to consent or not to a sexual act. Just like a 15-year-old isn’t considered mentally cognizant enough (in all of the US and many other parts of the world), or a person who is physically of age but who has a mental retardation isn’t considered mentally cognizant enough to make that decision.
However then you’re in a very gray area that I frankly don’t like. Why is statutory rape called statutory rape? Because it isn’t just plain ol’ regular “rape”; it’s only statutory rape. Statutory = “the law says it”. They basically made up a new crime called “the law calls this rape”. Well, the law already called certain things rape, and they are just referred to as plain jane “rape”; isn’t statutory rape by its very name redundant? The very existence of its name implies that it isn’t rape... it’s just legally categorized as a form of rape because it creeps us out and we think it should be made illegal.
No, we have to protect 15-year-old girls from creepy 40-year-old men, because they aren’t smart enough to know that they should never have sex with a 40-year-old man (even if they for some reason want to), and if they did like the guy a whole lot and for some reason decided to have sex with the guy and enjoyed it just fine, it would later end up scarring them for life because it should scar anyone for life – merely a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s the power of suggestion.
Then when she turns 17, or 18, or whatever the magical age may be, she’s suddenly old enough to be treated like dirt by the 21-year-old asshole she’s somehow been attracted to, and when she regrets that abusive relationship five or ten years down the line, it’s her own fault for being such a slut because she should’a known better.
There are at least a few directions I could take this argument.
Consent? You’re concerned about animals giving consent? We don’t seem to have that hang-up when we’re subjecting them to medical treatments or drugs. You don’t have to worry about getting your dog’s consent before the vet cuts his balls off, do you?
Rape? That is the forcible commission of an act of sexual intercourse upon a human without their consent. Just like killing an animal isn’t called murder, sexual intercourse with an animal without its consent (which it isn’t of a high enough mental state to properly give, according to the argument) shouldn’t be called rape. That takes you outside of the realm of loaded language such as “rape” and into a matter of whether or not you did physical harm or caused mental trauma. If the animal obviously wasn’t harmed and enjoyed it, then it wasn’t cruel or abusive.
When schools opened in Texas this fall, some favorites were missing from the cafeteria menus: sodas and candy bars had been banned for grade schoolers; chips and cookies were mini-size. And that perennial favorite, the French fry, was given just one more year before it too will be banned.
I did notice, but only because I had already figured that a 3rd grader should be about 8, and was rather surprised when my assumption was two years off. (I can’t remember if a 3rd grader would be 7-8 or 8-9, depending on when the child’s birthday occurred in the school year or summer holiday. Either way, being one year off wouldn’t have been as surprising.)
I guess she’d been held back a grade, or she’d started a year later than usual...
I don’t see how it’s terribly relevant to this situation, though.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can prove otherwise, I’m sure that a few people from Scroogle would be hauled into court and possibly jailed.
Proving it might actually result in you being jailed too, though, so good luck with that.
Alt still makes it temporarily appear, and you might as well just go all the way: Alt-T, O.
I really can’t say I disagree.
I’m just saying it’s not based on quite as much laziness as you made it seem. Yes, they’re lazy, but scraping would’ve been the wrong solution anyway: it’s too much work.
I’m not defending their choice to scrape... just pointing out that whether or not scraping was a good idea, their justification for not scraping (any longer) is perfectly reasonable.
If you’re asking “why are they scraping in the first place”... well, they found an interface to scrape from that they thought would never change... and surprisingly enough, it did.
If the connection was performed by sockets between Scroogle’s own servers and Google’s (which is what they were doing with their SSL searches to screen-scrape the results from the old /ie interface previously) it would be the same level of anonymity as before. AJAX is just a Javascript interface to open sockets and make HTTP/HTTPS requests.
It’s just a matter of server side vs. client side. The primary reason that an AJAX search is done by your browser rather than your own webpage is because it saves your server the bandwidth and time (and saves the visitor the time too) that would have been required if it was done server-side. It could be done using server-side scripting.
Not sure if they keep logs to subpoena
“We don’t use cookies, we don’t save search terms, and logs are deleted within 48 hours.” – graphic on their homepage.
Sounds to me like they are too lazy to adjust their service.
...at the whim of an update schedule that is irregular, unannounced, and liable to massive changes that would break scraping.
“Should” and “is” are the difference between theory and practice. In theory, the website should implement something that is freely accessible to everyone. In practice, people want their OS and browser to work, and that means supporting whatever the website chose to implement.
View -> Toolbars -> Menu bar.
You’re welcome. Now I’ll be keeping it turned on, because I like it that way.
Whoops. I wasn’t done.
Contrast that to the Ribbon, which is no easier to actually use – once you know how – than menus were – once you knew how. It’s selling factor was that it’s easier to learn to use.
So everyone who already knew how to use the menus has to re-learn a new system, albeit one which is supposedly easier to learn than menus were. The easiest thing for them, however, would have been to not learn anything and continue using the system they already knew how to use. You force a bunch of people to re-learn something without making it any better. That’s wrong.
The Awesome Bar is actually better IMHO and that is why it was a slightly different situation... and it wasn’t even as difficult of a transition as the menu-to-ribbon switch. The Awesome Bar at least still functioned in most of the same respects that the address bar had traditionally done.
I really think the “Awesome bar” was an improvement, as different as it was. Searching the full text of the title of the page, or anywhere deep inside the URL (rather than at the beginning) – without having to open a separate history interface – is incredibly handy. At first it bothered me that you couldn’t scroll past the first 10 results, but it turns out that typing a few more characters generally brings the site you’re looking for to the top, and once you’ve been there a few times it knows that you typed “s” and you’re probably going to Slashdot, so it’s right there at the top – whereas if I typed “c”, I want my /~user/comments page.
You call it clever, I call it ugly (i.e.: clippy. “It looks like this site is trying to alert-bomb you, can I help?”).
Make the alerts non-modal, and if you want to make a right-click option to disable script alerts from the site, that would be fine too.
F11
No, dammit. Someone shoot this guy.
Options that are very specific to an object can be attached to that object’s right-click menu. The right-click menu for the page in Firefox is fine as it is. Mine already has a Reload Every option (added by my Tab Mix Plus addon, I think), View Page in Coral IE Tab, a DownloadHelper submenu, RefControl options for the site, and a ScreenGrab entry. Those are all options specific to the page that I’m viewing.
File, edit, and view are better served by keyboard shortcuts and/or mouse shortcuts (e.g. ctrl-scroll zoom).
History, bookmarks, preferences not specific to the page that I’m viewing, and help should not be cluttering up the right-click menu. Give me my menu bar and leave me alone.
Then I guess it still wouldn’t work for you, but at least it could work for people whose OS has already paid the royalties to support it.
No, I don’t want someone to tell me that Opera already had that feature. It obviously wasn’t a selling point, but I did want it fixed.
FINALLY.
Never again will I be alert-bombed.
(I looked for an add-on to change script alerts, confirms, and prompts into something non-modal. I couldn’t find anything.)
Comment and subject are, or should be, distinct.
“You know you're doing something wrong when you have to hack your text editor” was his comment, not his subject.
I suppose it could also be argued that if your comment is your subject you’re doing it wrong.
Well, I’m honestly a little bit surprised. I asked why politicians felt justified to legislate on a clear morality issue, and I got moderated troll. Maybe the moderator thought I was trying to subtly argue the slippery-slope fallacy?
So... I’m curious. If someone had sex with a 15-year-old dead dog, would it be rape, bestiality, necrophilia, or pedophilia?
Yes, but didn’t it ever occur to anyone that screw-ups, or at least the ability to make your own decisions and face the legitimate consequences of your decisions, are a certain part of the learning process – possibly even an important part of it? Growth only lasts so long, and if it is stunted during that time, the child will never fully reach its potential; this is clearly evident in one’s physical development but is there any reason to believe that it’s any less true for the development of one’s brain?
When I say “legitimate” consequences, I mean natural ones, not unnatural consequences imposed by us to force someone to comply and essentially take away the difficulty of the decision process. If you’ll go to jail for something, it’s (usually) a pretty easy decision to not do it, but making certain difficult decisions might be an important part of learning to be responsible and make difficult decisions, and adding unnatural repercussions prevents this from happening to some extent.
If you’re training a child and you never let him hurt himself, what does that teach him? No, he’ll never be scalded by a pot of boiling water because you’d never dream of leaving the handle pointed outward... but he’ll also not properly realise that certain rules are there for his protection and violating them will cause painful consequences that you won’t always be able to shield him from, and the older he gets the more such rules he’ll be faced with. If mommy doesn’t always come running the instant he does something he knows he isn’t supposed to and she allows him to occasionally meet some mildly painful and unpleasant consequences he’ll much quicker learn that breaking rules is a risky business and he’ll learn to be more cautious.
Yes, exercising their sexuality is something that’s very easy for kids to screw up, particularly when it’s just beginning and they don’t know much better. Screw-ups are not the end of the world, and they don’t have to scar someone for life... if we let every screw-up be a life-ruining event none of us would ever be able to function.
Well, the argument goes that an animal isn’t mentally cognizant enough to consent or not to a sexual act. Just like a 15-year-old isn’t considered mentally cognizant enough (in all of the US and many other parts of the world), or a person who is physically of age but who has a mental retardation isn’t considered mentally cognizant enough to make that decision.
However then you’re in a very gray area that I frankly don’t like. Why is statutory rape called statutory rape? Because it isn’t just plain ol’ regular “rape”; it’s only statutory rape. Statutory = “the law says it”. They basically made up a new crime called “the law calls this rape”. Well, the law already called certain things rape, and they are just referred to as plain jane “rape”; isn’t statutory rape by its very name redundant? The very existence of its name implies that it isn’t rape... it’s just legally categorized as a form of rape because it creeps us out and we think it should be made illegal.
No, we have to protect 15-year-old girls from creepy 40-year-old men, because they aren’t smart enough to know that they should never have sex with a 40-year-old man (even if they for some reason want to), and if they did like the guy a whole lot and for some reason decided to have sex with the guy and enjoyed it just fine, it would later end up scarring them for life because it should scar anyone for life – merely a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s the power of suggestion.
Then when she turns 17, or 18, or whatever the magical age may be, she’s suddenly old enough to be treated like dirt by the 21-year-old asshole she’s somehow been attracted to, and when she regrets that abusive relationship five or ten years down the line, it’s her own fault for being such a slut because she should’a known better.
There are at least a few directions I could take this argument.
Consent? You’re concerned about animals giving consent? We don’t seem to have that hang-up when we’re subjecting them to medical treatments or drugs. You don’t have to worry about getting your dog’s consent before the vet cuts his balls off, do you?
Rape? That is the forcible commission of an act of sexual intercourse upon a human without their consent. Just like killing an animal isn’t called murder, sexual intercourse with an animal without its consent (which it isn’t of a high enough mental state to properly give, according to the argument) shouldn’t be called rape. That takes you outside of the realm of loaded language such as “rape” and into a matter of whether or not you did physical harm or caused mental trauma. If the animal obviously wasn’t harmed and enjoyed it, then it wasn’t cruel or abusive.
I love playing devil’s advocate. :P
Give me a break... some school districts count Fried French fries as a serving of vegetables....
Not in Texas, I don’t think:
I did notice, but only because I had already figured that a 3rd grader should be about 8, and was rather surprised when my assumption was two years off. (I can’t remember if a 3rd grader would be 7-8 or 8-9, depending on when the child’s birthday occurred in the school year or summer holiday. Either way, being one year off wouldn’t have been as surprising.)
I guess she’d been held back a grade, or she’d started a year later than usual...
I don’t see how it’s terribly relevant to this situation, though.