> the imagery on such sites isn't updated in real time.
It doesn't need to be updated in real time. The fact that the pictures were taken a couple of days ago is enough.
> Google maps uses satellite images that are several years old.
Err, no. The images were taken a couple of days ago. Have you not read the article, ANY of this thread OR the Amazon site? Well they're hardly going to ask everyone to look at the original 5 year old picture are they!
So why don't you actually READ the page in question and follow the instructions? Then you'd realise the silly mistake you're making. The original poster is correct - 3 interactions per page.
> Solar panels don't need high temperatures/direct sunlight to work > they just need light and they work perfectly well in the UK.
No they don't. They can *just* provide enough power to power a calculator if you're sat near a window. In the UK, photo-voltaic solar panels are almost never used for anything commercial because it just doesn't lack of direct sunlight we have over the winter months. If you go to sunny countries, you'll see solar panels powering phone masts, traffic flow monitors, road sign lighting and even traffic lights.
I find than on sensible sized screens (32" or 37" - which most people have in Europe) that you can't see a huge difference between SD and HD at normal viewing distances. Sure - it looks good in the shop when you're 4 ft away from that 42" plasma, but when you're at home and 10ft away, there isn't a huge difference. You have to sit pretty close or have a huge (50"+) screen for HD to be worthwhile. It has no point on TVs less than around 30" in size at all unless you sit very close to your screen.
To me, it's a minor upgrade on standard definition PAL and I don't see how companies like Sky can justify charging an extra £10/$20 per month just for a few more pixels. It's not like the programming is any better (in fact very few channels are even broadcast in HD on Sky).
I'm not going to buy either format of player until one of them is clearly going to die. I don't want to risk spending hundreds of pounds on a Blu-ray player and then finding that HD-DVD wins (or vice-versa). I'm sure both systems would have benefited from a merging into a single format before either system was ever released.
> It's because using a table for layout means it only makes sense when looked at visually.
Well yeah. That's kind of the entire point of web pages - you look at them visually.
> Trouble is, not everybody "receives" webpages by looking, with their eyes, > at a rendering in a fully-fledged latest-gen GUI browser.
No, but the vast majority do. In excess of 99% I'm guessing.
Regarding your last point: You're assuming that phone browsers miraculously know which bits of the CSS to change so it looks good on a phone screen. In my experience, mobile phone browsers to do not understand CSS as well as bigger browsers like Opera Mini and certainly not as well as proper bloatware browsers like Firefox 2 and IE 7. Some CSS layouts are so complicated that when rendered on a mobile phone screen, they render WORSE than if you simply ignored all the style-sheets completely. This is especially true if you've used loads of CSS hacks or negative-margin tricks to make your layout work.
I find the only thing that's important when using tables is to use as few as possible. Preferably just one or two. If you use a single table to define the layout (which probably has only 2 or 3 cells in the entire table, then most browsers - even mobile browsers, can easily move the cells around and render a good screen. If your menu is in the leftmost cell, then typically this gets rendered first and the rest of the page gets rendered below this. This is no different to how it would render on a text-based browser or mobile-browser if you implemented it in CSS.
> You mean like display:table-cell that's part of CSS since 1996, and works reliably in every browser except IE?
What on earth is the point in recommending a solution that doesn't work in IE? Do you not realise that the vast majority of people use IE? (on my particlar sites, the figure is around 80-90%).
> For constants use server-side processing.
I agree - and I do. But that solution is not available to everybody and it has many drawbacks. For example, to enable server side processing of my CSS files, I have to give them a different file extension. That means intellisense doesn't work. So I have to have a dummy css file which then gets read in by my dynamic page to have the variables replaced. Very messy.
With broadcast resolution in Europe being less than 800x600 for standard definition, I would have thought that means nearly all cameras are excluded from this tax as most digital cameras only offer PAL or NTSC quality video at best (720x576 PAL or just 640x480 for the blur-o-vision NTSC standard). Both of those resolutions are less than the 800x600 that is mentioned as the tax trigger. Very few still cameras offer 800x600 or higher video recording capabilities so I don't really see how this tax will make any difference.
It's not HTML or XHTML I have a problem with, it's CSS.
CSS is simply a horrible way for web developers to have to try and format a page. It's fine if you want to change a color or add border, but for controlling the layout of a site, it's a nightmare. I find that for most things, setting the basic site layout (eg 3 columns) is far more easily achieved with a table than by trying to float divs. Tables simply ALWAYS work in all browsers with minimal code. There are hundreds of websites which try and give you "the best possible way of making a two/three column website" and all of them have dozens of lines of CSS with loads of browser hacks. If you use a table with three columns, the code is a fraction of the size and works in all browsers.
Take slashdot for example. It's a really common site layout (header, navbar, body etc), but it has the most CSS I've ever seen on any website - purely because the author has gone out of their way to avoid using even just ONE table.
I honestly don't see the problem with using one or two tables to define the site layout. Nobody has ever given me a good reason why doing the same thing using only DIVs and CSS is better (and don't even think about using rendering speed as an argument - I've benchmarked it myself and table layouts usually render faster - probably because usually they require less code).
What CSS needs is a way of defining columns, or a way of gluing DIVs together to it's easier to stack them side by side without running into all the problems you get if you float them.
It also REALLY REALLY needs variables. Currently you have to put the same color definition into the CSS file in dozens of different places. If it had variables, you could simply define the colour scheme at the top of the CSS file and change the whole colour scheme in a few seconds without having to do loads of search and replace operations. It would be especially useful if the variable declarations were also accessible form the html. Eg <span style="color: %corporateColorDuJour%;">
I don't see how you can measure time spent on a website. HTTP is a disconnected protocol. There is no way to find out when a user stops looking at a page. If the user uses Google for 5 seconds to find a complex scientific article which they spend 15 minutes reading, how can any tracking code know that they spent more time on the article than they did on Google? You have no way to know when they left the page. Especially if the results are configured to open in a new window and/or you have cross-domain cookies turned off.
> Remember that the people who own and operate CCTV are the > same people who get to decide who is a criminal.
No. Only a jury decide that. Some security bloke sitting in an office somewhere cannot make me a criminal by just watching telly.
> Nobody knows who you are, where you've been, where you're going. > CCTV cameras have the potential of stripping us of that anonymity.
No. CCTV will not tell anyone who I am (unless I'm wearing my name on my clothing in 6 inch high letters). Unless I commit a crime, there is negligible chance of anybody bothering to find out who I am just because I appeared on CCTV. You are anonymous right up until the moment you are forced to reveal your identity to a police officer who is arresting you for a crime that has been caught on camera. As you say, you are anonymous in public and there's nothing CCTV can do to change that unless they already have my face in their database from every angle AND they have a reason to bother to perform that search in the first place. Non criminals have nothing to fear.
Even if they DID somehow have a way to automatically work out who EVERYONE is and label their screens with little yellow ToolTips of our names, unless they ACT on that information or sell it to someone who will, then it still doesn't affect me at all and I couldn't care less. Unless you perform a crime while they're watching, they will not care who you are or what your name and address are.
Isn't "hiding" text on a document using invisible inks, just security through obscurity? Once the document forgers realise it's there, they'll simply start printing this additional layer itself. It's about as effective as hiding your extranet web server by changing it's port from port 80 to something else.
> I would be EXTREMELY surprised if most government-purchased cameras were very good.
On a UK TV documentary I was watching a couple of nights ago I was very surprised with how good some of the cameras they were demoing actually were (real installed cameras in cities). They had an incredible level level of zoom and could zoom right in on someone's face from several hundred meters away. It was crystal clear - not like the blurry crap they seem to show on all those American street crime programs we seem to be importing at the moment. I'm guessing they were demoing the best cameras rather than the worst, but if many installed cameras are that good, then I wouldn't have thought the police would have too much difficulty securing a conviction if there was an attack/robbery/mugging etc within view of a camera. The high end cameras can also use microphones and 3D pattern recognition to identify the difference between say, a group of people smoking, and a group of people having a fight. It can then zoom in on the action automatically and also alert the control centre.
I know storage is a big problem with CCTV, but I've never really understood the point of camera systems that squeeze simultaneous 4 pictures onto one VHS video (which is already half broadcast resolution). It's not very easy to identify someone when you've got a blurry black and white 210 x 160 pixel video of someone. If you bear in mind a £99 ($200) hard disk recorder can record around 40 hours of broadcast quality TV it's hard to understand why people are still using video tape if they really think they might get robbed.
> Should we stop something because it removes the basic rights of law abiding citizens? Yes.
Since when was it a right to not be seen in public? If you don't like being seen in public, then don't go out. Apart from criminals, who cares about being watched on CCTV?
> Should we stop something because it makes harassment easier? Yes.
I really really don't mind criminals being harassed. That's kind of the entire point of the cameras. People that simply walk through the shot and don't do anything (ie non criminals) are not going to get harassed for just walking down the street.
How does a new domain TLD solve the problem exactly?
All the phishing sites I've seen don't use names that even vaguely resemble the original name. The whole reason phishing sites work is that they rely on people not looking at the address bar. If you don't look at the address bar then why would you notice that it does or doesn't end in.bank? The only way to solve the phishing problem is to use some hardware solution such as a USB authentication key or something. A phishing site will not be able to make use of the key and as such, won't be able to log in as you anyway even if they get the rest of your login credentials.
The ONLY phishing scam I've ever fallen for (eBay) used a domain name that didn't even vaguely resemble the site (something like www.authorizationsuccess.com). I fell for it because the e-mail they sent was very clever. It related to an auction I had just won and even included the thumbnail photo of that item! If you're expecting the e-mail, why would you NOT follow the links inside it? Pretty much anybody can fall for a phishing scam if the e-mail is clever enough. Thankfully I noticed the domain name at the last minute and changed my login details straight away.
Everyone knows you shouldn't test drive new software until at least Service Pack 1 is out. Preferably Service Pack 1a because Service Pack 1 usually doesn't install properly on some systems.
The F-22 SR1 release of this fighter will be fine. It will also be quicker to get in the air in an emergency as you won't have to install so many critical updates when you run Fighter Update.
Of course, if you're British and you care about your every move being monitored by the government, you should sign the official petition against the GPS tracking of every single UK vehicle for the purposes of the new "pay as you drive" scheme.
This petition has been in the news a lot this week, but if you've not already signed it, you should consider doing so as it's due to close TODAY (20th Feb). So far, an incredible 1.7 MILLION people have signed.
All they need to do is disable audio commands (other than "stop" or "pause") whenever any sound is being played. That way - skype etc would continue to work normally (full duplex) and the speech recognition system wouldn't even be listening if a web page or MP3 or any other application was making noises.
Just make movies cheaper so that people can't be bothered to pirate them. This works especially well with HD films which take days/weeks to download.
If I could buy the film I want in HD for £3-£5 ($6-$10) and get it the next day, I'm hardly likely to bother downloading a 20GB torrent link am I?
Unfortunately even SD DVDs cost a ridiculous amount of money here in the UK and I don't see why I should spend £15 ($30) on a DVD when I can rent it for £3 in a few months time. I rarely watch the same film several times before it's shown anyway on sat/cable.
> you tolerate it on the DVD's you overpay for and they force you to watch them by disabling the ffwd and menu buttons.
We have to. There's no alternative.
I don't understand why nearly all DVD players are now (illegally?) region-free (or can be made so in about 10 seconds) but nobody seems to be producing firmware that allows you to skip the non-skippable bits with the remote. I find it really annoying when you're forced to watch the 30 second anti-piracy warning at the beginning of every film on discs I LEGITIMATLY OWN when the illegal versions of the disk don't even have the fscking warning on them anyway (ie the pirates don't see it, but the legal users do!). It almost makes you want to pirate the disc just so you don't have the stupid warnings and DRM crap that you get on the legal disc!
If they'd make the DVDs cheaper, nobody would bother pirating them anyway (especially the HD ones that take days to download).
Slashdot Mirror
> the imagery on such sites isn't updated in real time.
It doesn't need to be updated in real time. The fact that the pictures were taken a couple of days ago is enough.
> Google maps uses satellite images that are several years old.
Err, no. The images were taken a couple of days ago. Have you not read the article, ANY of this thread OR the Amazon site?
Well they're hardly going to ask everyone to look at the original 5 year old picture are they!
Don't worry - the plane wasn't 22". It was 22' :)
22' = inches.
22" = feet.
So why don't you actually READ the page in question and follow the instructions? Then you'd realise the silly mistake you're making. The original poster is correct - 3 interactions per page.
> Solar panels don't need high temperatures/direct sunlight to work
> they just need light and they work perfectly well in the UK.
No they don't. They can *just* provide enough power to power a calculator if you're sat near a window. In the UK, photo-voltaic solar panels are almost never used for anything commercial because it just doesn't lack of direct sunlight we have over the winter months. If you go to sunny countries, you'll see solar panels powering phone masts, traffic flow monitors, road sign lighting and even traffic lights.
I find than on sensible sized screens (32" or 37" - which most people have in Europe) that you can't see a huge difference between SD and HD at normal viewing distances. Sure - it looks good in the shop when you're 4 ft away from that 42" plasma, but when you're at home and 10ft away, there isn't a huge difference. You have to sit pretty close or have a huge (50"+) screen for HD to be worthwhile. It has no point on TVs less than around 30" in size at all unless you sit very close to your screen.
To me, it's a minor upgrade on standard definition PAL and I don't see how companies like Sky can justify charging an extra £10/$20 per month just for a few more pixels. It's not like the programming is any better (in fact very few channels are even broadcast in HD on Sky).
I'm not going to buy either format of player until one of them is clearly going to die. I don't want to risk spending hundreds of pounds on a Blu-ray player and then finding that HD-DVD wins (or vice-versa). I'm sure both systems would have benefited from a merging into a single format before either system was ever released.
> It's because using a table for layout means it only makes sense when looked at visually.
Well yeah. That's kind of the entire point of web pages - you look at them visually.
> Trouble is, not everybody "receives" webpages by looking, with their eyes,
> at a rendering in a fully-fledged latest-gen GUI browser.
No, but the vast majority do. In excess of 99% I'm guessing.
Regarding your last point: You're assuming that phone browsers miraculously know which bits of the CSS to change so it looks good on a phone screen. In my experience, mobile phone browsers to do not understand CSS as well as bigger browsers like Opera Mini and certainly not as well as proper bloatware browsers like Firefox 2 and IE 7. Some CSS layouts are so complicated that when rendered on a mobile phone screen, they render WORSE than if you simply ignored all the style-sheets completely. This is especially true if you've used loads of CSS hacks or negative-margin tricks to make your layout work.
I find the only thing that's important when using tables is to use as few as possible. Preferably just one or two. If you use a single table to define the layout (which probably has only 2 or 3 cells in the entire table, then most browsers - even mobile browsers, can easily move the cells around and render a good screen. If your menu is in the leftmost cell, then typically this gets rendered first and the rest of the page gets rendered below this. This is no different to how it would render on a text-based browser or mobile-browser if you implemented it in CSS.
> You mean like display:table-cell that's part of CSS since 1996, and works reliably in every browser except IE?
What on earth is the point in recommending a solution that doesn't work in IE? Do you not realise that the vast majority of people use IE? (on my particlar sites, the figure is around 80-90%).
> For constants use server-side processing.
I agree - and I do. But that solution is not available to everybody and it has many drawbacks. For example, to enable server side processing of my CSS files, I have to give them a different file extension. That means intellisense doesn't work. So I have to have a dummy css file which then gets read in by my dynamic page to have the variables replaced. Very messy.
With broadcast resolution in Europe being less than 800x600 for standard definition, I would have thought that means nearly all cameras are excluded from this tax as most digital cameras only offer PAL or NTSC quality video at best (720x576 PAL or just 640x480 for the blur-o-vision NTSC standard). Both of those resolutions are less than the 800x600 that is mentioned as the tax trigger. Very few still cameras offer 800x600 or higher video recording capabilities so I don't really see how this tax will make any difference.
It's not HTML or XHTML I have a problem with, it's CSS.
CSS is simply a horrible way for web developers to have to try and format a page. It's fine if you want to change a color or add border, but for controlling the layout of a site, it's a nightmare. I find that for most things, setting the basic site layout (eg 3 columns) is far more easily achieved with a table than by trying to float divs. Tables simply ALWAYS work in all browsers with minimal code. There are hundreds of websites which try and give you "the best possible way of making a two/three column website" and all of them have dozens of lines of CSS with loads of browser hacks. If you use a table with three columns, the code is a fraction of the size and works in all browsers.
Take slashdot for example. It's a really common site layout (header, navbar, body etc), but it has the most CSS I've ever seen on any website - purely because the author has gone out of their way to avoid using even just ONE table.
I honestly don't see the problem with using one or two tables to define the site layout. Nobody has ever given me a good reason why doing the same thing using only DIVs and CSS is better (and don't even think about using rendering speed as an argument - I've benchmarked it myself and table layouts usually render faster - probably because usually they require less code).
What CSS needs is a way of defining columns, or a way of gluing DIVs together to it's easier to stack them side by side without running into all the problems you get if you float them.
It also REALLY REALLY needs variables. Currently you have to put the same color definition into the CSS file in dozens of different places. If it had variables, you could simply define the colour scheme at the top of the CSS file and change the whole colour scheme in a few seconds without having to do loads of search and replace operations. It would be especially useful if the variable declarations were also accessible form the html. Eg <span style="color: %corporateColorDuJour%;">
Please explain how is more intrusive than <div style="text-align: center;>.
The latter simply makes your code harder to read (as with most aspects of XHTML vs HTML).
I don't see how you can measure time spent on a website. HTTP is a disconnected protocol. There is no way to find out when a user stops looking at a page. If the user uses Google for 5 seconds to find a complex scientific article which they spend 15 minutes reading, how can any tracking code know that they spent more time on the article than they did on Google? You have no way to know when they left the page. Especially if the results are configured to open in a new window and/or you have cross-domain cookies turned off.
> Remember that the people who own and operate CCTV are the
> same people who get to decide who is a criminal.
No. Only a jury decide that. Some security bloke sitting in an office somewhere cannot make me a criminal by just watching telly.
> Nobody knows who you are, where you've been, where you're going.
> CCTV cameras have the potential of stripping us of that anonymity.
No. CCTV will not tell anyone who I am (unless I'm wearing my name on my clothing in 6 inch high letters). Unless I commit a crime, there is negligible chance of anybody bothering to find out who I am just because I appeared on CCTV. You are anonymous right up until the moment you are forced to reveal your identity to a police officer who is arresting you for a crime that has been caught on camera. As you say, you are anonymous in public and there's nothing CCTV can do to change that unless they already have my face in their database from every angle AND they have a reason to bother to perform that search in the first place. Non criminals have nothing to fear.
Even if they DID somehow have a way to automatically work out who EVERYONE is and label their screens with little yellow ToolTips of our names, unless they ACT on that information or sell it to someone who will, then it still doesn't affect me at all and I couldn't care less. Unless you perform a crime while they're watching, they will not care who you are or what your name and address are.
Isn't "hiding" text on a document using invisible inks, just security through obscurity? Once the document forgers realise it's there, they'll simply start printing this additional layer itself. It's about as effective as hiding your extranet web server by changing it's port from port 80 to something else.
> I would be EXTREMELY surprised if most government-purchased cameras were very good.
On a UK TV documentary I was watching a couple of nights ago I was very surprised with how good some of the cameras they were demoing actually were (real installed cameras in cities). They had an incredible level level of zoom and could zoom right in on someone's face from several hundred meters away. It was crystal clear - not like the blurry crap they seem to show on all those American street crime programs we seem to be importing at the moment. I'm guessing they were demoing the best cameras rather than the worst, but if many installed cameras are that good, then I wouldn't have thought the police would have too much difficulty securing a conviction if there was an attack/robbery/mugging etc within view of a camera. The high end cameras can also use microphones and 3D pattern recognition to identify the difference between say, a group of people smoking, and a group of people having a fight. It can then zoom in on the action automatically and also alert the control centre.
I know storage is a big problem with CCTV, but I've never really understood the point of camera systems that squeeze simultaneous 4 pictures onto one VHS video (which is already half broadcast resolution). It's not very easy to identify someone when you've got a blurry black and white 210 x 160 pixel video of someone. If you bear in mind a £99 ($200) hard disk recorder can record around 40 hours of broadcast quality TV it's hard to understand why people are still using video tape if they really think they might get robbed.
> Should we stop something because it removes the basic rights of law abiding citizens? Yes.
Since when was it a right to not be seen in public? If you don't like being seen in public, then don't go out. Apart from criminals, who cares about being watched on CCTV?
> Should we stop something because it makes harassment easier? Yes.
I really really don't mind criminals being harassed. That's kind of the entire point of the cameras. People that simply walk through the shot and don't do anything (ie non criminals) are not going to get harassed for just walking down the street.
How does a new domain TLD solve the problem exactly?
.bank? The only way to solve the phishing problem is to use some hardware solution such as a USB authentication key or something. A phishing site will not be able to make use of the key and as such, won't be able to log in as you anyway even if they get the rest of your login credentials.
All the phishing sites I've seen don't use names that even vaguely resemble the original name. The whole reason phishing sites work is that they rely on people not looking at the address bar. If you don't look at the address bar then why would you notice that it does or doesn't end in
The ONLY phishing scam I've ever fallen for (eBay) used a domain name that didn't even vaguely resemble the site (something like www.authorizationsuccess.com). I fell for it because the e-mail they sent was very clever. It related to an auction I had just won and even included the thumbnail photo of that item! If you're expecting the e-mail, why would you NOT follow the links inside it? Pretty much anybody can fall for a phishing scam if the e-mail is clever enough. Thankfully I noticed the domain name at the last minute and changed my login details straight away.
> The lower oxigen content just means that fires will not selfsustain
Your post would have been so much more convincing if you knew how to spell "oxygen" and "self sustain".
Everyone knows you shouldn't test drive new software until at least Service Pack 1 is out. Preferably Service Pack 1a because Service Pack 1 usually doesn't install properly on some systems.
The F-22 SR1 release of this fighter will be fine. It will also be quicker to get in the air in an emergency as you won't have to install so many critical updates when you run Fighter Update.
Of course, if you're British and you care about your every move being monitored by the government, you should sign the official petition against the GPS tracking of every single UK vehicle for the purposes of the new "pay as you drive" scheme.
This petition has been in the news a lot this week, but if you've not already signed it, you should consider doing so as it's due to close TODAY (20th Feb). So far, an incredible 1.7 MILLION people have signed.
> dimethyl sulfide, in addition to smelling like the coast,
> also acts as a homing scent for birds
I always knew the scientists could come up with a pheromone which really does attract the birds.
Now I can smell like the sea AND get all the hot chicks.
All they need to do is disable audio commands (other than "stop" or "pause") whenever any sound is being played. That way - skype etc would continue to work normally (full duplex) and the speech recognition system wouldn't even be listening if a web page or MP3 or any other application was making noises.
Just make movies cheaper so that people can't be bothered to pirate them. This works especially well with HD films which take days/weeks to download.
If I could buy the film I want in HD for £3-£5 ($6-$10) and get it the next day, I'm hardly likely to bother downloading a 20GB torrent link am I?
Unfortunately even SD DVDs cost a ridiculous amount of money here in the UK and I don't see why I should spend £15 ($30) on a DVD when I can rent it for £3 in a few months time. I rarely watch the same film several times before it's shown anyway on sat/cable.
Is it just me or is secondlife.com slashdotted or otherwise down? It's not even linked to from the article but we can't get to it from here.
> Kevlar sails, and a 38HP engine.
Surely you need more than 38 HP to move a 40ft boat that size in water?
> you tolerate it on the DVD's you overpay for and they force you to watch them by disabling the ffwd and menu buttons.
We have to. There's no alternative.
I don't understand why nearly all DVD players are now (illegally?) region-free (or can be made so in about 10 seconds) but nobody seems to be producing firmware that allows you to skip the non-skippable bits with the remote. I find it really annoying when you're forced to watch the 30 second anti-piracy warning at the beginning of every film on discs I LEGITIMATLY OWN when the illegal versions of the disk don't even have the fscking warning on them anyway (ie the pirates don't see it, but the legal users do!). It almost makes you want to pirate the disc just so you don't have the stupid warnings and DRM crap that you get on the legal disc!
If they'd make the DVDs cheaper, nobody would bother pirating them anyway (especially the HD ones that take days to download).