> Nobody had done it before because everybody thought it was > a bad idea.
actually, at the time, pretty nearly everyone was doing exactly that and had been doing it for years because they just didn't give a shit that it was a bad idea. after all, "we'll never get hacked".
Amazon's "innovation" was taking an obvious and well-known idea and claiming it as their own in order to suppress competition.
and even that wasn't an innovation. it's been SOP for decades, at least.
you wanted a moral or a legal reason? here's the legal one:
the legal reason is that you have a constitutional right to not incriminate yourself.
you don't have a right to not incriminate others.
one possible exception is a suspect's spouse. if what i've seen on TV is accurate (american TV, so it's a very low reliability reference) a married couple can't be compelled to testify against each other, in at least some parts of the US
they didn't close the schools so that socialist anti-consumer degenerates could use them, they closed them so they could sell the land off cheap to developer mates.
australia, which is unfortunately lurching rapidly to the right and will probably become even more of a mini-me to the US after the election this saturday.
BTW, one point about the piling on of resist arrest and especially assault police charges that i forgot to mention is that it has the opposite effect to the american plea bargaining - many people charged with relatively minor crimes would plead guilty just to get it over with, but have to defend themselves in court in order to avoid a conviction for the quite serious crime of assault police on their record.
cost cutting is part of the reason, but increasing the conviction rate is a much bigger part, it justifies the system because there's quantifiable "proof" that it's working - they must have been guilty, if they confessed or plead guilty.
it's also useful politically, to make people or organisations seem "tough on crime".
IMO, plea bargaining should be illegal with severe penalties for prosecutors who offer it.
at the very least, the fact that a deal was offered should be enough to reduce all charges and potential sentencing to the offer as a *maximum* - the cops/prosecutor wouldn't have offered it if they thought it was too lenient for the crime.
FWIW, I live in a country where such evil shit either doesn't happen or isn't common enough to be a noticable problem - although cops here (as everywhere) always pile on resist arrest/assault police charges just because they can - it's your word against theirs, and they are presumed to be honest by the courts.
The very thought of a "justice" system where it is considered *normal* to use the threat of insanely harsh penalties to coerce a guilty plea fills me with horror.
but then, our legal system isn't politicised - deliberately so, with clear and jealously guarded separation of powers - and we don't do stupid things like elect senior cops or judges. ours are professionals that work their way up through the ranks, not demagogues - which has problems of its own, but IMO they're nowhere near as bad as the problem of illiterate, incompent, prejudiced morons being elected just because they're popular or good at lying in public.
I remember all the american anti-russian, anti-soviet, anti-communist propaganda from when i was growing up in the 70s and 80s - there isn't a single shitful thing that the evil russians were accused of then that you americans aren't doing - or exceeding - now, and with far greater efficiency due to modern computers and technology.
there are numerous ways they can and do associate your name with your other personal info - without you having to enter any of it yourself, and without you even needing to have a facebook account. starting with:
1. your name. it's in the tagged photo of you that was uploaded.
2. someone with your name, phone number, address etc in their phone contact list and the facebook app installed - the idiot who posted the photo is a likely candidate.
facebook may flag that info as 'tentative, not confirmed 100%' but they still have it. the more people who have you in their contacts list, especially if they are connected on facebook with either you or the photo-uploader, the higher an accuracy score it will get.
additional confirmation can come from many other sources, including public data like electoral rolls and phone books, private databases like subscription lists of magazines and newspapers, information-sharing deals with credit reference agencies,direct marketing companies, etc and hoovering up any information supplied if anyone in your household has been ignorant or stupid enough to enter competitions[1] or store "loyalty" programs - these latter two were the primary ways marketing scum built personal profiles on individuals before facebook.
there's nothing really new about what facebook's doing except the scale and reach and intrusiveness of it. even the hordes of idiots not only willing but eager to supply personal information is old-hat. it used to be possible to avoid much of it simply by choosing not to enter competitions or give your information away - now the scum can get your info from people you know - friends, family, colleagues, co-workers, acquaintances. and they can do it whether those contacts know about it or not.
google has done the same, and owning the android platform (and their app store) just makes it easier for them. they *stole* my phone number out of my android phone or from the contact list of someone who knows me. i know this because I ignored their request for my phone number for over a year (they asked on the rare occassions i actually logged in to my rarely used gmail account). they stopped asking, and one day i noticed they had my phone number associated with my gmail account - a complaint and demand to remove it was completely ignored.
google also has access to your android phone/tablet's GPS data - they know where you spend your time, where you live, where you work, where you travel, what route you take, what shops you enter or walk past.
as does Apple if you have an ipad/iphone.
as does facebook if you have their app installed on your phone or tablet.
WTF do you think so many shitty apps demand access to your phone state and identity, full network access, and gps data? it's so they can spy on you, you fucking moron.
and you can't even own or use an android phone or iphone without signing up for an account and giving at least an email address....well, technically you can with android if you work hard at it, but you're losing much of the functionality that makes buying a smartphone worthwhile.
i thought merging REs was standard practice by now. i've been doing it since long before I started using SpamAssassin, when I was still mostly using postfix body_checks and header_checks.
the scripts are old, but pretty close to what i actually still use today to generate postfix body/header checks and spamassassin rules.
they're not packaged software you can just install and use - think of them as examples of a particular approach to managing anti-spam rulesets.
BTW, note that with SpamAssassin, fewer and larger rules require less CPU time to run, but reduce the likelihood of multiple matches if there are multiple spammy phrases in an email - max one match per rule. this is why the scripts are configured to generate max of 500-character rule lines, when SA can easily handle 5000 or more characters per line. also, shorter lines are easier to read when debugging problems, and each rule is generated with a unique identifier so I can see which rules are matching for each msg
ask her how she'd feel if you took a photo of her, printed it with her name, address, phone number, email address and any other personal information you can think of, and then posted hundreds of copies of it on bus shelters, lamp posts, walls, bulletin boards, etc all over town.
then tell her that that is exactly what she's done to you.
if you're feeling really pissed off, don't pose it as a question, just go ahead and do it.
it *is* amazingly good at what it does. there really is nothing else that does anything close to what it does.
but Calibre's user interface is shit, and the main programmer thinks his expertise in ebook formats makes him an expert in everything else (including user-interfaces, sending email, how to use http/https proxies, security and more).
he really is an expert in ebook formats. probably one of the world's leading experts in the field.
sadly, he's not an expert - or even competent - in most of the other things he thinks he is.
worse, his initial response to almost every bug report is rude and arrogant, along the lines of "fuck off, you don't know what you're talking about. it's a user error and i'm sick of idiot users reporting bugs in my perfect program". if you persist, you might after 5 or 10 messages going back and forth eventually get him to acknowledge that he might perhaps be just ever-so-slightly wrong about something, and he may even accept the patch that fixes whatever it is you posted the bug report about (but more likely he'll just ignore it and hope you go away).
he's sort of like a dan bernstein but far more arrogant and far less likely to actually be correct in what he says and in his opinions.
i've had this response with three of my own bug reports and seen the same with dozens of others - pretty nearly every calibre bug report i've read. so i've given up reporting bugs in calibre - there's just no point and it's not worth the hassle. i still use calibre, but i'll jump ship as soon as there's an alternative.
> SpamAssassin, executed through procmail on the mail client's > email, is indeed resource intensive and does not scale well for > an organization.
it does scale much better if run through amavis as a persistent process, rather than forked from procmail for each incoming message - much of the CPU usage is from compiling (and re-compiling) the regular expressions over and over again.
pre-processing your regexp lists to consolidate them into far fewer but much longer regexps also gives huge benefits - e.g. instead of 1000 RE rules of 1 line each, join them with '|' and reduce them to 10 or 50. it's far less computational work to match against 50 long and slightly complicated REs than against 1000 simple REs.
in practice, this means generating your spamassasin local.cf file with a script, from one or more "source" files.
even without amavis, SA comes with spamd which provides the same benefit of avoiding RE-recompile - but IMO is a lot more work to configure and maintain than using amavis
even so, i try to reject as much spam as possible in the MTA before the mail gets passed to amavis & SA for final checking.
> My experience is that spam requires management, > not silver bullets. Layers of defense [...]
yes! SPF, greylisting (even a 5 or 10 second greylisting delay is enough to filter out a huge amount of spam), careful use of RBLs (spamhaus are ethical and have reasonable policies), RHSBLs, DULs, MX-record checks (e.g. reject mail if MX record points to 127.0.0.1), HELO/EHLO checks (block mail claiming to be from my domains or IP address), blocking mail from specific senders and sender domains, tarpitting spammers, and more.
another useful technique is to use well-crafted fail2ban rules to monitor/var/log/mail.log and create temporary iptables rules to block persistent spam sources.
on my home mail server, i also block all mail from specific countries, using IP address and TLD blocking lists - but that's not a good option when spam-filtering mail for a company or organisation.
> So, they go down to occupy wall street bitching at a very > arbitrary set of people (the top 1%, or the top 3.14159%, or > whatever) about why their life sucks and somebody else > needs to pay.
the fallacy of envy is complete bullshit. it's nonsensical propaganda pushed by those who don't want to think about how the world actually works, and by those who don't want anyone else to think about it. it's part of the same ideological blinker set that says there are no systemic problems, it's all just the fault of "a few bad apples" or "individuals making the wrong choices".
people aren't pissed off at the 1% merely because they own 99+% of the world's wealth and make 99+% of the worl'd income. we're pissed off because of *how* they do it, not just the fact of it.
we're pissed off because they're fucking thieves and parasites and when they steal trillions they then get a government handout of trillions more (all the while deriding welfare and social safety nets).
they are large-scale thieves in $10,000 suits - and far more damaging to everyone in the world than the small-time thieves in $5 kmart tracksuits.
the american obsession with humanoid robots is a harkening back to the good old days when you could own slaves - i.e. it's entirely due to the fact that they are slave substitutes who won't murder you in your sleep for mis-treating them.
in fact, due to Asimov's 3 laws, they *can't* murder you in your sleep.
zynga are scumbag parasites and marketing spies, but copying ideas is not despicable.
ideas can not be owned, so they can not be stolen.
a *specific* implementation of an idea can be patented as an invention, and a *specific* expression of an idea can be copyrighted. the idea itself can not be restricted.
this is what is wrong with the 'intellectual property' meme - it encourages dumb people to think of ideas as some form of property, and conflates the entirely separate and unrelated legal concepts of copyrights and patents.
it's like the grown-up, adult-like version of two kids arguing "i thought of it first" about something that every kid has thought of for thousands of years, but with attack lawyers. and hordes of internet morons having their 2c worth, of course.
This was prophesied in the Bible centuries ago. People throughout history before our time wondered how such a prophecy could come true, but today this is now possible. (Revelation 13:16-17)
No, it was not prophesied in the bible because the dumb-fuck yokels who wrote it couldn't even begin to conceive of the modern world or most of the things we take for granted these days.
what's in Revelations is a magic mushroom trip with all sorts of bizarre shit that can be interpreted in any way you want. the "prophecies" are about as accurate as those of nostradamus.
and there's numerological proof - the entire hoax is spelt out in encrypted text: take the ASCII value of first letter of the third word of every seventh paragraph of every page in the bible, and decrypt it with gpg.
it's worse than that - if a site uses a CDN to host javascript (e.g. common stuff like jquery) then the user has to allow javascript from that CDN.
That's not just the jquery or whatever they need to view one particular site, it's every other script hosted on that CDN by any other site they happen to visit or stumble upon.
The end result if you do this is almost identical to just enabling javascript everywhere.
it also puts the CDN operators in a privileged position of being able to spy on users across a huge and broad range of web sites.
They will spy on you for their own commercial (typically marketing and profiling) reasons, but whatever data they gather becomes a "business record" and subject to warrantless interception by american spook agencies.
This is why, for example, i disable gravatar, refuse to use forums based on disqus, and block javascript from googleapis (and many other CDNs). If I happen to need to use a site that uses js from a CDN like this, then I temporarily use a separate browser just for that session (and delete all cache, cookies, html5 storage etc afterwards).
use a separate browser (preferably on a separate machine or VM, or at least a separate login account) with js enabled for your banking.
Unfortunately, JavaScript has become a necessity for the Web.
not quite a necessity, but many sites are over-using jquery and other javascript toolkits (even for basic stuff like links that can and should be done a a href tags) and the web is *far* worse for it. it makes the web slow, frequently causes 100% CPU utilisation (which is no easy task on a modern 4 or 6 core machine), and breaks basic functionality like the Back button.
in fact, all this javascript excressence and the very meme of "web apps" is fucking up the web and turning it into heap of shit...and none of the javascript bling is essential, very little of it adds *any value* at all to a web site. it's only done for two purposes, either or both of:
1. because fuckwit designers think it looks pretty 2. because arsehole marketers want to spy on everyone.
I can't think of any website that actually worked without it.
many sites work perfectly well with javascript disabled. the site you're on now (slashdot) for example.
the last time i saw fish and chips - or meat from a butcher - wrapped in a newspaper would have been the late 70s or early 80s.
the practice was banned around then, due to the risk from toxic ink...so even the little corner shops had to start using the fancy clean and white butchers paper.
personally, i think chips taste better without little smudges of ink on them.
yes, this works for the water supply too. it's exactly why we have huge water pipes to every street corner and the people - the consumers - get to decide whether they want a cheap garden hose to connect up their house or a more expensive fancy metal pipe.
Slashdot Mirror
Ban guitars, drums, and keyboards for anyone without a professional music license, with harsh penalties for possession and usage.
round up all instrument dealers, go after the king-pins of the manufacturing and importing industry, lock 'em up and throw away the key.
and execute school music teachers for corrupting the children.
must. protect. industry. profits!
> Nobody had done it before because everybody thought it was
> a bad idea.
actually, at the time, pretty nearly everyone was doing exactly that and had been doing it for years because they just didn't give a shit that it was a bad idea. after all, "we'll never get hacked".
Amazon's "innovation" was taking an obvious and well-known idea and claiming it as their own in order to suppress competition.
and even that wasn't an innovation. it's been SOP for decades, at least.
what threat? i didn't see any threat, or even the faintest hint of one.
a threat is when you tell someone "i'm going to beat you up / kill you /etc".
drawing pictures on a photo does not qualify.
even if it is done on a *gasp* computer.
you wanted a moral or a legal reason? here's the legal one:
the legal reason is that you have a constitutional right to not incriminate yourself.
you don't have a right to not incriminate others.
one possible exception is a suspect's spouse. if what i've seen on TV is accurate (american TV, so it's a very low reliability reference) a married couple can't be compelled to testify against each other, in at least some parts of the US
and the errors are probably deliberate - maybe you'll get annoyed enough by them to correct the information.
they didn't close the schools so that socialist anti-consumer degenerates could use them, they closed them so they could sell the land off cheap to developer mates.
australia, which is unfortunately lurching rapidly to the right and will probably become even more of a mini-me to the US after the election this saturday.
BTW, one point about the piling on of resist arrest and especially assault police charges that i forgot to mention is that it has the opposite effect to the american plea bargaining - many people charged with relatively minor crimes would plead guilty just to get it over with, but have to defend themselves in court in order to avoid a conviction for the quite serious crime of assault police on their record.
cost cutting is part of the reason, but increasing the conviction rate is a much bigger part, it justifies the system because there's quantifiable "proof" that it's working - they must have been guilty, if they confessed or plead guilty.
it's also useful politically, to make people or organisations seem "tough on crime".
IMO, plea bargaining should be illegal with severe penalties for prosecutors who offer it.
at the very least, the fact that a deal was offered should be enough to reduce all charges and potential sentencing to the offer as a *maximum* - the cops/prosecutor wouldn't have offered it if they thought it was too lenient for the crime.
FWIW, I live in a country where such evil shit either doesn't happen or isn't common enough to be a noticable problem - although cops here (as everywhere) always pile on resist arrest/assault police charges just because they can - it's your word against theirs, and they are presumed to be honest by the courts.
The very thought of a "justice" system where it is considered *normal* to use the threat of insanely harsh penalties to coerce a guilty plea fills me with horror.
but then, our legal system isn't politicised - deliberately so, with clear and jealously guarded separation of powers - and we don't do stupid things like elect senior cops or judges. ours are professionals that work their way up through the ranks, not demagogues - which has problems of its own, but IMO they're nowhere near as bad as the problem of illiterate, incompent, prejudiced morons being elected just because they're popular or good at lying in public.
I remember all the american anti-russian, anti-soviet, anti-communist propaganda from when i was growing up in the 70s and 80s - there isn't a single shitful thing that the evil russians were accused of then that you americans aren't doing - or exceeding - now, and with far greater efficiency due to modern computers and technology.
you have no clue what you're talking about.
there are numerous ways they can and do associate your name with your other personal info - without you having to enter any of it yourself, and without you even needing to have a facebook account. starting with:
1. your name. it's in the tagged photo of you that was uploaded.
2. someone with your name, phone number, address etc in their phone contact list and the facebook app installed - the idiot who posted the photo is a likely candidate.
facebook may flag that info as 'tentative, not confirmed 100%' but they still have it. the more people who have you in their contacts list, especially if they are connected on facebook with either you or the photo-uploader, the higher an accuracy score it will get.
additional confirmation can come from many other sources, including public data like electoral rolls and phone books, private databases like subscription lists of magazines and newspapers, information-sharing deals with credit reference agencies,direct marketing companies, etc and hoovering up any information supplied if anyone in your household has been ignorant or stupid enough to enter competitions[1] or store "loyalty" programs - these latter two were the primary ways marketing scum built personal profiles on individuals before facebook.
there's nothing really new about what facebook's doing except the scale and reach and intrusiveness of it. even the hordes of idiots not only willing but eager to supply personal information is old-hat. it used to be possible to avoid much of it simply by choosing not to enter competitions or give your information away - now the scum can get your info from people you know - friends, family, colleagues, co-workers, acquaintances. and they can do it whether those contacts know about it or not.
google has done the same, and owning the android platform (and their app store) just makes it easier for them. they *stole* my phone number out of my android phone or from the contact list of someone who knows me. i know this because I ignored their request for my phone number for over a year (they asked on the rare occassions i actually logged in to my rarely used gmail account). they stopped asking, and one day i noticed they had my phone number associated with my gmail account - a complaint and demand to remove it was completely ignored.
google also has access to your android phone/tablet's GPS data - they know where you spend your time, where you live, where you work, where you travel, what route you take, what shops you enter or walk past.
as does Apple if you have an ipad/iphone.
as does facebook if you have their app installed on your phone or tablet.
WTF do you think so many shitty apps demand access to your phone state and identity, full network access, and gps data? it's so they can spy on you, you fucking moron.
and you can't even own or use an android phone or iphone without signing up for an account and giving at least an email address....well, technically you can with android if you work hard at it, but you're losing much of the functionality that makes buying a smartphone worthwhile.
i thought merging REs was standard practice by now. i've been doing it since long before I started using SpamAssassin, when I was still mostly using postfix body_checks and header_checks.
here's some of my anti-spam stuff.
the scripts are old, but pretty close to what i actually still use today to generate postfix body/header checks and spamassassin rules.
they're not packaged software you can just install and use - think of them as examples of a particular approach to managing anti-spam rulesets.
BTW, note that with SpamAssassin, fewer and larger rules require less CPU time to run, but reduce the likelihood of multiple matches if there are multiple spammy phrases in an email - max one match per rule. this is why the scripts are configured to generate max of 500-character rule lines, when SA can easily handle 5000 or more characters per line. also, shorter lines are easier to read when debugging problems, and each rule is generated with a unique identifier so I can see which rules are matching for each msg
ask her how she'd feel if you took a photo of her, printed it with her name, address, phone number, email address and any other personal information you can think of, and then posted hundreds of copies of it on bus shelters, lamp posts, walls, bulletin boards, etc all over town.
then tell her that that is exactly what she's done to you.
if you're feeling really pissed off, don't pose it as a question, just go ahead and do it.
that is the tragedy and beauty of Calibre.
it *is* amazingly good at what it does. there really is nothing else that does anything close to what it does.
but Calibre's user interface is shit, and the main programmer thinks his expertise in ebook formats makes him an expert in everything else (including user-interfaces, sending email, how to use http/https proxies, security and more).
he really is an expert in ebook formats. probably one of the world's leading experts in the field.
sadly, he's not an expert - or even competent - in most of the other things he thinks he is.
worse, his initial response to almost every bug report is rude and arrogant, along the lines of "fuck off, you don't know what you're talking about. it's a user error and i'm sick of idiot users reporting bugs in my perfect program". if you persist, you might after 5 or 10 messages going back and forth eventually get him to acknowledge that he might perhaps be just ever-so-slightly wrong about something, and he may even accept the patch that fixes whatever it is you posted the bug report about (but more likely he'll just ignore it and hope you go away).
he's sort of like a dan bernstein but far more arrogant and far less likely to actually be correct in what he says and in his opinions.
i've had this response with three of my own bug reports and seen the same with dozens of others - pretty nearly every calibre bug report i've read. so i've given up reporting bugs in calibre - there's just no point and it's not worth the hassle. i still use calibre, but i'll jump ship as soon as there's an alternative.
> SpamAssassin, executed through procmail on the mail client's
> email, is indeed resource intensive and does not scale well for
> an organization.
it does scale much better if run through amavis as a persistent process, rather than forked from procmail for each incoming message - much of the CPU usage is from compiling (and re-compiling) the regular expressions over and over again.
pre-processing your regexp lists to consolidate them into far fewer but much longer regexps also gives huge benefits - e.g. instead of 1000 RE rules of 1 line each, join them with '|' and reduce them to 10 or 50. it's far less computational work to match against 50 long and slightly complicated REs than against 1000 simple REs.
in practice, this means generating your spamassasin local.cf file with a script, from one or more "source" files.
even without amavis, SA comes with spamd which provides the same benefit of avoiding RE-recompile - but IMO is a lot more work to configure and maintain than using amavis
even so, i try to reject as much spam as possible in the MTA before the mail gets passed to amavis & SA for final checking.
> My experience is that spam requires management,
> not silver bullets. Layers of defense [...]
yes! SPF, greylisting (even a 5 or 10 second greylisting delay is enough to filter out a huge amount of spam), careful use of RBLs (spamhaus are ethical and have reasonable policies), RHSBLs, DULs, MX-record checks (e.g. reject mail if MX record points to 127.0.0.1), HELO/EHLO checks (block mail claiming to be from my domains or IP address), blocking mail from specific senders and sender domains, tarpitting spammers, and more.
another useful technique is to use well-crafted fail2ban rules to monitor /var/log/mail.log and create temporary iptables rules to block persistent spam sources.
on my home mail server, i also block all mail from specific countries, using IP address and TLD blocking lists - but that's not a good option when spam-filtering mail for a company or organisation.
yeah, i agree too. and it's good to see you've changed your mind when presented with compelling info.
"what a shitty idea" is about as much detail in response that a shitty idea like that deserves. in fact, it's more than what it deserves.
> So, they go down to occupy wall street bitching at a very
> arbitrary set of people (the top 1%, or the top 3.14159%, or
> whatever) about why their life sucks and somebody else
> needs to pay.
the fallacy of envy is complete bullshit. it's nonsensical propaganda pushed by those who don't want to think about how the world actually works, and by those who don't want anyone else to think about it. it's part of the same ideological blinker set that says there are no systemic problems, it's all just the fault of "a few bad apples" or "individuals making the wrong choices".
people aren't pissed off at the 1% merely because they own 99+% of the world's wealth and make 99+% of the worl'd income. we're pissed off because of *how* they do it, not just the fact of it.
we're pissed off because they're fucking thieves and parasites and when they steal trillions they then get a government handout of trillions more (all the while deriding welfare and social safety nets).
they are large-scale thieves in $10,000 suits - and far more damaging to everyone in the world than the small-time thieves in $5 kmart tracksuits.
the american obsession with humanoid robots is a harkening back to the good old days when you could own slaves - i.e. it's entirely due to the fact that they are slave substitutes who won't murder you in your sleep for mis-treating them.
in fact, due to Asimov's 3 laws, they *can't* murder you in your sleep.
zynga are scumbag parasites and marketing spies, but copying ideas is not despicable.
ideas can not be owned, so they can not be stolen.
a *specific* implementation of an idea can be patented as an invention, and a *specific* expression of an idea can be copyrighted. the idea itself can not be restricted.
this is what is wrong with the 'intellectual property' meme - it encourages dumb people to think of ideas as some form of property, and conflates the entirely separate and unrelated legal concepts of copyrights and patents.
it's like the grown-up, adult-like version of two kids arguing "i thought of it first" about something that every kid has thought of for thousands of years, but with attack lawyers. and hordes of internet morons having their 2c worth, of course.
pointing out that what you're saying is batshit insane is not an 'ad hominem' attack.
an ad-hominem attack would be if i said that what you are saying is rubbish *because* of some personal trait of yours (your insanity, for instance).
instead, I said that what you are saying is insane (which, of course, implies that you are insane)
see the difference?
no, probably not. logic doesn't really mean much to crazy people who rant about revelations and prophecies and magical sky fathers and all that shit.
i think you must have forgotten to take your medication.
No, it was not prophesied in the bible because the dumb-fuck yokels who wrote it couldn't even begin to conceive of the modern world or most of the things we take for granted these days.
what's in Revelations is a magic mushroom trip with all sorts of bizarre shit that can be interpreted in any way you want. the "prophecies" are about as accurate as those of nostradamus.
and there's numerological proof - the entire hoax is spelt out in encrypted text: take the ASCII value of first letter of the third word of every seventh paragraph of every page in the bible, and decrypt it with gpg.
it's worse than that - if a site uses a CDN to host javascript (e.g. common stuff like jquery) then the user has to allow javascript from that CDN.
That's not just the jquery or whatever they need to view one particular site, it's every other script hosted on that CDN by any other site they happen to visit or stumble upon.
The end result if you do this is almost identical to just enabling javascript everywhere.
it also puts the CDN operators in a privileged position of being able to spy on users across a huge and broad range of web sites.
They will spy on you for their own commercial (typically marketing and profiling) reasons, but whatever data they gather becomes a "business record" and subject to warrantless interception by american spook agencies.
This is why, for example, i disable gravatar, refuse to use forums based on disqus, and block javascript from googleapis (and many other CDNs). If I happen to need to use a site that uses js from a CDN like this, then I temporarily use a separate browser just for that session (and delete all cache, cookies, html5 storage etc afterwards).
use a separate browser (preferably on a separate machine or VM, or at least a separate login account) with js enabled for your banking.
not quite a necessity, but many sites are over-using jquery and other javascript toolkits (even for basic stuff like links that can and should be done a a href tags) and the web is *far* worse for it. it makes the web slow, frequently causes 100% CPU utilisation (which is no easy task on a modern 4 or 6 core machine), and breaks basic functionality like the Back button.
in fact, all this javascript excressence and the very meme of "web apps" is fucking up the web and turning it into heap of shit...and none of the javascript bling is essential, very little of it adds *any value* at all to a web site. it's only done for two purposes, either or both of:
1. because fuckwit designers think it looks pretty
2. because arsehole marketers want to spy on everyone.
many sites work perfectly well with javascript disabled. the site you're on now (slashdot) for example.
the last time i saw fish and chips - or meat from a butcher - wrapped in a newspaper would have been the late 70s or early 80s.
the practice was banned around then, due to the risk from toxic ink...so even the little corner shops had to start using the fancy clean and white butchers paper.
personally, i think chips taste better without little smudges of ink on them.
outside of a few remnants like poems and rhymes, we don't speak or write old or middle english any more.
in any case:
poets have always felt free
to play with words in ways slightly odd
as even a young child could see
so bugger off ya curmudgeonly old sod
yes, this works for the water supply too. it's exactly why we have huge water pipes to every street corner and the people - the consumers - get to decide whether they want a cheap garden hose to connect up their house or a more expensive fancy metal pipe.