Right now, I can trap a rock in a box, so the rock thinks it is the all powerful all knowing creator of the box.
It can do anything a rock can think of!
Since I know everything a rock can perceive, I know it can't figure out how to trap me in a box.
Replace a rock with the devil, and me with god, and you have the counter to your argument.
Your gods are mere pebbles beneath the Hooves of the Invisible Pink Unicorn (MPBUHHH).
And that’s the whole point, really. You can know if you’re simulating something else — of course! What you can’t know, what Mr. Turing so elegantly proved, is that you can never be certain that there isn’t something bigger than you that’s running you in a simulation.
Folks, this is the Halting Problem. If you have a foolproof method of detecting that you’re running in a VM, you can build a special-purpose VM that watches for that method specifically to defeat it.
Similarly, you can’t ever rule out the possibility that you yourself are living in a Matrix-style (etc.) simulated world. You might be able to detect that you are under certain circumstances, but any sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality. No, really!
Oh — and all this applies equally to any supposedly “omnipotent” deities you might care to propose. After all, if “God” could trap “The Devil” (to pick the current favorite pair of arch-rival gods) in a simulated world such that The Devil thought that he (The Devil) was the all-powerful creator of life, the universe, and everything... then God has no way of knowing that The Devil hasn’t done the same to him. And if God doesn’t have any foolproof way of knowing whether or not The Devil has him trapped, and if he himself has no foolproof way of trapping The Devil, it hardly makes any kind of sense to describe God as “all-powerful,” now, does it?
So, is the BSD license viral too? It seems that if you have to maintain the same license, and cannot re-license under other terms, the BSD license IS viral, In which case, it is quite similar to the GPL, so, what is all the fuss about?
The BSD license does not make any requirements as to what you must do with other code included in the project, contrary to what the GPL does. Thus, the BSD is not “viral.” It does, of course, place some very specific and limited restrictions on what you may do with the BSD-licensed code, and those restrictions have the effect of preventing re-licensing of the BSD code itself. Again, other code is unaffected.
If this is not the case, and you can re-lincese, then, there is no problem either. I guess Apple, Microsoft etc. do re-license the software taken from BSD, and that is how most people understand the BSD license.
Apple, Microsoft, etc., most emphatically do not re-license BSD-licensed software, unless they make separate arrangements on a case-by-case basis with the authors. They follow the license precisely, which simply states that they may do with the code as the wish, so long as they acknowledge the authorship of the code as dictated by the license. They follow the terms of the license, exactly as it is intended.
“Most people,” it would seem, misunderstand the BSD license.
Since previous iterations of this discussion have been dominated by wildly inaccurate characterizations of the BSD license, it seems only proper to actually include it:
/*
* Copyright (c) CCYY YOUR NAME HERE
*
* Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
* purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
* copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
*
* THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES
* WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
* MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR
* ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES
* WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN
* ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF
* OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
*/
To break it down even further:
You must keep the text of the license intact in any copies you make.
So long as you keep the text of the license intact, you may do pretty much anything else you like with it.
Now, obviously, slapping a copy of the GPL in the file is within your rights to “use, copy modify, and distribute” the software. However, it is entirely pointless to do so: the GPL places additional restrictions on what you may or may not do with the code, yet those restrictions are voided by the fact that the BSD license — and, let’s not forget, removing the BSD license is the one thing that the license forbids — grants you those very rights that the GPL takes away. In order for the restrictions of the GPL to be effective, you must remove the BSD license, which you cannot legally do.
Now, can we please stop this nonsense about the BSD license giving you the right to re-license code under the GPL?
It seems to me that a really big reason why neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD are likely to catch on is the simple fact that sneakernet in general is going the way of the buggy whip.
Nor is it that regular DVDs are “good enough,” as some have suggested, but rather that we’re already moving beyond the station wagon filled with tapes, to simple high-bandwidth networks.
It won’t be Blu-Ray that kills HD-DVD, or vice-versa, or even regular DVDs. It’ll be YouTube, iTunes, Bittorrent, and garden variety video-on-demand from your local telco monopoly. Sure, there’re plenty of shortcomings with all of those today, from quality to DRM to “ownership” to the time it takes to acquire a movie. But neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD intrinsically offer anything better over the online equivalents for those with bandwidth.
According to AG Gonzales, Americans not only don't have a right to privacy with regards to their laptops, we don't even have a right to habeas corpus. See the FireHose for my (rejected) story submission.
I live in Tempe, which borders Phoenix. Until yesterday, when
it was stolen, I drove a '68 VW Camper. (White with a black stripe 'round the middle, pop-top, AZ Lic 828-HNG. Today or tomorrow I'll
be posting details here: http://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/album_cat.php?cat _id=53.)
And the tailgaters here are a menace you simply wouldn't
believe.
I've been driving to a gig at 7:00 on a Sunday morning. I'm in
the right-hand lane on a five-lane freeway, going the limit.
There aren't any other cars for a quarter mile either side of
me...except for a fucking asshole in an SUV yakking on a
cellphone five feet off my rear bumper.
And then said fucking asshole will pass me on the right
through a gore point.
No, I'm not exaggerating. I've actually had that happen to
me. And the exact same thing regularly happens, without the
Sunday morning nobody-else-on-the-road setting.
Frankly, I'm absolutely amazed I'm still alive.
What I also find fascinating is that nearly every single
fucking asshole who tailgates me is yakking on a cellphone and
will turn down literally dozens of opportunities to pass me,
sometimes for miles on end....
Sure makes me wish I had a rocket launcher, and the (lack of
a) moral standard to use it....
So, the whole idea of the dodge is that Microsoft and Novell have swapped some money and--in exchange--worked out an agreement whereby they won't be suing each other and their customers for violating patents the one or the other may hold.
Would anybody care to explain how that isn't just a re-wording of the textbook definition of a license?
I mean, if you explained to the judge that all you did was hold a sharpened piece of iron alloy near the upper portion of my thorax while indicating that you desired to take possession of my wallet...well, what kind of a blithering idiot of a judge wouldn't find you guilty of mugging me?
So, you're saying that "Occam's razor" tells you that the United States government flew two remotely controlled military aircraft (or the actual commercial planes; you haven't told me which conspiracy theory you believe) into two buildings, demolished them with explosives, destroyed a third in such an outrageous way as to be obviously demolition even to a child, fired a missle (or flew a drone) at the Pentagon, diverted one (or three) aircraft to secret locations, had agents of the US government actively murder all of the passengers, and then made it appear that it was all to blame almost exclusively on Saudi nationals, masterminded by a Saudi, and then used it as an excuse to warmonger in almost completely unrelated countries on unrelated evidence?
Will you please stop burning that damned straw man you're so fascinated with?
Because, unlike in your oh-so-black-and-white-world, there is a damned huge difference between ``the official explanations have huge, gaping holes you could fly a 757 through'' and ``ZOMG! Teh Men in Black teleported Elvis into teh cockpits!!!1!''
Look. It's simple, really. We have building 7, which collapsed so perfectly it would have made a 30-year demolition veteran proud. Yet there was no significant damage visible to witnesses on the ground or in still or video images we have of the building, and fires were visibly minor. Worse, the damage the official explanation says was responsible for the collapse not only would have caused a radically different collapse from what happened, it would have caused a radically different collapse from what the official explanations says happened--the damage on the south side, yet it collapsed inward with a slight west-to-east slumping.
That's all stuff that's uncontested, unquestioned, and plainly obvious from the first glance through the last final minute examination.
And we know that the explosion and resulting damage to the Pentagon looks absolutely nothing whatsoever like what we've repeatedly seen when a 757 hits a building. And that any camera pointed in the right general direction will very clearly show a plane hitting a building. And that the Pentagon's security was supposed to be far better than any civilian office building's--yet every office building I've ever seen has a plethora of plain ol' security cameras that would trivially capture something that was about to hit the second floor of the building. And that those same defenses, designed to protect the building in the event of attack from the evil Russkies, completely and utterly failed to even sound the alarm--let alone fire off anti-aircraft, anti-missile, anti-whatever defenses--even when the people in the building were supposedly coordinating our response to an air attack. And nobody in the administration appears upset in the slightest at that profoundly abysmal failure of the most important military defensive systems in the world.
That's all I'm saying. The facts are quite clear, and they don't even pretend to support the official position. I'm not saying that people were unloaded from the planes and then murdered in order to more easily fake their murders halfway across the country, or any of the rest of the bullshit you're accusing me of making up about the ``real truth.''
What I'm really saying, when it comes right down to it, is that the administration's explanations hold no more water than the nutjob conspiracy theorists'.
Oh--and nice job at playing the party line with respect to whitewashing the administration's anti-Semitism. Sure, they're happy to welcome selected Westernized Muslim religious leaders to be token house niggers alongside Condi. But the war is against Islamofascists, the extremists are all towelheads and sand niggers, and white Christian men's terrorist acts are completely ignored in the War on Terror. Bush's only beef is with ``radical Muslims,'' sure--but it's a damned funny coincidence that virtually all Muslims are
"The most important thing we found was that there was, in fact, physical damage to the south face of building 7," NIST's Sunder tells PM. "On about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom--approximately 10 stories--about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out."
I'm sorry, but I just have to call bullshit on this one.
That kind of damage would have been blindingly obvious to even the most casual observer. I mean, a third of the building scooped out to a quarter of the depth? That's the very definition of a gigantic, huge, gaping hole.
So why didn't anybody at all notice it? Why doesn't it show up on any of the photographs or videos of the building?
And why, oh why, did the building not topple to the south when it finally did collapse, as it must have if a quarter of its support on that side had long since vanished?
And if you start with such obvious bullshit--a giant invisible hole that nobody noticed and whose inescapable consequences failed to materialize--why should I even pretend to give the rest of your bullshit any serious consideration?
Oh, why the fuck not.
The entire building fell in on itself, with the slumping east side of the structure pulling down the west side in a diagonal collapse.
See? You(r source) contradicts the theory in the very next paragraph. Massive damage on the south side would cause the building to fall in that direction. In a big way, in fact, as is obvious to anybody who's ever watched a lumberjack or somebody with a wrecking ball at work. And it most emphatically would not ``fall in on itself,'' which only happens when everything goes right in a controlled demolition. (Think about it for a moment: if that weren't the case, all you'd have to do is hit the thing with a few wrecking balls, start a few fires, and your demolition job takes care of itself.) Yet instead we got ``slumping'' in the exact opposite plane of motion.
Honestly, this analysis wouldn't even pass the scrutiny of a junior high science fair. NIST, Popular Mechanics, and you should all be deeply ashamed of yourselves for either a terminally broken bullshit detector, or complicity in perpetuating the most obviously barefaced of lies.
I'd offer you some sort of a point-by-point rebuttal...save for the fact that you didn't do me the same courtesy. In fact, not only is your post a tirade against a whole shitload of conspiracy theories I didn't mention at all, you failed to address even one of the points I made.
Well, you kinda came close when you asked what the motive would be for destroying WTC #7. And I'll admit that I don't have a stunning answer for that, other than an observation that there were lots of government (including CIA) and financial offices there, presumably with all sorts of goodies in them that would become awfully convenient to loose.
The reason I mentioned WTC #7?
The collapse was characteristic of a perfect demolition job: the center collapsed a fraction before the outside; the whole thing came down in unison; and the rubble pile was perfectly neat and didn't stray outside the confines of the building itself. Even seasoned demolition pros have been known to fuck up jobs and have the building fall to one side, leave parts standing, or even severely damage surrounding buildings. In an uncontrolled collapse, a perfect collapse would be physically impossible. A perfect collapse requires all major structures to fail in a perfectly coordinated and timed manner, not randomly as would result from some parts burning longer or hotter than others.
WTC #7 would have been the first--and only--steel-frame skyscraper to have been brought down by fire alone. And the fires were visibly minor and insignificant--just some small office fires. Many other skyscrapers have had entire ranges of floors completely gutted and not suffered any structural damage.
Notwithstanding the previous point and the overwhelmingly important need to carefully investigate the collapse in order to determine the implication for the thousands of other buildings that are (presumably) at risk for similar catastrophe from nothing more than a few small fires, the official investigation team was an ad-hoc group of volunteers who were prohibited from examining the scene or even much of the evidence, aside from a couple pieces at a landfill that had been carefully picked for them. Shit, they weren't even given access to the building's blueprints for security reasons. The evidence was quickly destroyed, the steel beams shipped overseas for recycling.
Those are all uncontested matters of public record, confirmed by official government documents and / or obvious from the actual footage. Make of them what you will.
You then went on to rail against the usual round of conspiracy arguments. Yet you completely failed to note that I didn't cite a single one of the examples you so vigorously argue against. So take a moment to re-read my original post, and also ask yourself: what happened to the Pentagon's air defense systems that they didn't even sound a warning, let alone do anything to protect the building? Remember, this is after Bush had been told that the US was under attack. And how could it possibly be true that none of those defense systems--let alone a regular ol' surveillance camera mounted on the outside of the Pentagon itself--saw what was coming straight at them? Or, why would the administration prefer letting conspiracy theories run wild instead of showing the exact same kind of thing we get from ``embedded'' reporters in Iraq almost daily?
Also, watch the footage of the planes hitting the towers. Both towers, we see the same basic thing. We all know exactly what it looks like when a 757 hits a building, and what the building looks like afterwards. We saw it twice, after all.
Now watch the footage of the impact of the Pentagon. It looks nothing at all like what we know happens when a 757 hits a building. Look at the pictures of the aftermath of both: again, no comparison. A 757 leaves a narrow wedge of destruction, with the wings doing almost as much damage as the fuselage. On the Pentagon...there was a big, round hole. Much bigger than the
What if the conspiracy nutjobs are right, and 9/11 was, in some way, a deliberate action by the Bush administration in exactly the same way that Hitler was behind the burning of the Reichstag?
That assumes that the Bush administration had the competance to pull off such a delicate scheme. That flies in the face of everything we know about them.
I'll be the first to accuse the Bush administration of gross incompetence--but let's also not forget several stunning displays of true competence, including examples eerily similar to what would be required to pull off a Reichstag-esque plot.
I mean, we've got the lead-up to the Iraq War (Remember Colin Powell? Valerie Plame and the aluminum tubes? Condi's smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud?) for one very obvious example. And who could forget the Swift Boat Veterans, or the similar job done on McCain? Not to mention, of course, the whole Lewinsky affair....
And, before you dismiss the administration's conducting of the Iraq war as gross incompetence, ask yourself three questions: Is there anything that they've done that hasn't been the textbook example of how not to conduct this kind of a war? Is there any chance that Rumsfeld et al. have not studied the textbooks? And, finally, which is more beneficial to a cynical Orwellian regime: success in Iraq...or the spectacular failure (complete with the worst possible breeding ground for terrorists) we have there now?
Like I said in my original post: I'm not one for conspiracy theories. All I'm doing here is applying Occam's Razor, and feeling like we're experiencing the death of a thousand cuts.
The administration's actions in Iraq and elsewhere make absolutely no sense whatsoever not only if you grant them the benefit of the doubt, but even if you take their stated claims perfectly at face value: their actions are not only spectacularly counterproductive, but glaringly obviously so, and repeatedly, and often excessively.
They do, however, make perfect sense if you assume that Bush & co. is another Hitler & Nazis, and that they're doing all of this consciously, intentionally, and with malice aforethought.
Never forget that Hitler sincerely believed that all he did was not only in his country's best interests, but in God's and Christ's best interests, too. (Re-read Mein Kampf if you've forgotten.) Or that he had all sorts of seemingly-legitimate reasons and excuses for all his excesses. He really thought that Poland was a direct threat to German sovereignty, that a cabal of Jews controlled world finances and were committed to usurping German authority...and that Germany really was the best nation on Earth, the greatest hope for the human race and salvation, and that the power of the state and of the corporations was necessary to ensure the common security and welfare.
And he had lots of convincing evidence to back up all those beliefs! In the abstract, you're certainly more ``secure'' if you control not only your side of your borders, but the other side, as well--and Germany and Poland had long been rivals. There were disproportionate numbers of Jews in international finance, and a non-trivial number had Bolshevik and other ``left'' leanings antithetical to Hitler's (and many other German's) ideas of how to run an economy, which made for a natural enmity. Hitler could easily point to all sorts of great advancements in the arts, science, culture, and Christianity (think of the amazingly anti-Semitic Martin Luther, amongst others) to demonstrate just how formidable Germany had been historically. And lots of people to this day still believe that a strong central government with expansive policing powers is necessary for personal security, and that a strong corporate culture is necessary for economic security.
Video cameras in stores and petrol stations rarely record continous video in crisp high-definition.
Do you really think that there wasn't even a single camera on the Pentagon itself pointed in that direction? Do you really think that none of the Pentagon's anti-aircraft, anti-missile, anti-tank, anti-troop, anti-burglar, or other anti-whatever defense systems have any kind of a record of what happened? Are you really that impressed that pretty much everybody with a cheap video camera in downtown Manhattan who had it running and pointing in the direction of the towers caught footage of the airliners?
In short, do you really believe that the only video surveillance of the most high-profile military target on the planet comes from nearby stores and ``petrol'' stations?
Just for a moment, let's play a game of ``What if?''
What if the conspiracy nutjobs are right, and 9/11 was, in some way, a deliberate action by the Bush administration in exactly the same way that Hitler was behind the burning of the Reichstag? (Godwin, I know--so sue me.) After all, the conspiracy theorists have some compelling points--the collapse of WTC #7, that none of the released footage of the Pentagon attack shows what actually hit the building, the striking dissimilarity of the appearance between the two impacts on the WTC and the impact on the Pentagon, the complete and utter lack of response by NORAD or the Pentagon's own on-site defense systems....
What scares the shit out me is that this article is perfectly consistent with the theory that the Bush administration knew just what bin Laden was up to, and chose to ignore it: the CIA (whom Bush, Jr., has always publicly kept at arm's length or further) told the administration, repeatedly and emphatically...and the administration most pointedly ignored everything the CIA had to say.
Of course, this could also be after-the-fact CYA by the CIA...but, then again, WTC 7 could have been the first skyscraper in history to collapse for no good reason whatsoever, and there could have been a massive and completely hushed-up malfunction in the anti-aircraft defensive systems in the most heavily protected building on the planet, and there could have been....
Honestly, I'm about as anti-conspiracy as one can get. There's just so damn much about 9/11 that's so glaring, so obvious, so uncomplicated, that I'm left with two conclusions: massive unprecedented incompetence by a team headed by some of the most competent political operatives in America (Cheney, Rove, etc.)...or a conspiracy. A conspiracy that would perfectly fit with the actions of an administration with decided totalitarian fascist tendencies, such as one that would strip civil liberties in the name of protecting the homeland, which would endorse and actually use torture and commit other atrocities, which supports big business at every opportunity over all else domestically, which would invade sovereign nations on trumped-up pretenses, which is accompanied by unprecedented corporate corruption, which wears its Christianity on its sleeve....
Whether for good reason or not, frankly, I'm scared shitless.
It is impossible to disprove the non-existance of an omnipotent being (A lot of negatives, I know.) To disprove the non-existance of omnipotence, you would have to observe omnipotence.
Observation in the case of omnipotence is completely irrelevant. We know for a fact that there exists no such thing as, for example, a geometric figure in Euclidean space with four right angles such that every point on the figure is equidistant from some other point--that is, dey ain't no such thang as a square circle. You don't have to examine all the geometric figures in existence to know that none of them--past, present, future, potential, or otherwise--are circular squares.
``Omnipotence'' suffers from the exact same problem. It's a self-contained oxymoron. See my.sig for the one-line poetic version, but the long and short of it is that all those intractable problems of modern logic, computer science, information theory, and the like, are absolutes that even a supposedly all-powerful superbeing couldn't worm its way around. Just as the halting problem, for example, means you can't create a computer program (algorithm) to determine whether or not any given computer program will ever terminate, it's impossible for ``God'' to know whether or not he's the all-powerful creator of the universe...or the Devil is, and the Devil is just playing God for a fool.
And everywhere you turn, all sorts of variations on that theme pop up. ``Tell me, God, `yes' or `no,' will you answer, `no'?'' And so on.
So, if any given god is nothing if it's not omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, the creator of the universe, or any of those classic ``omni-'' properties...then that god is nothing. Period.
If you're wondering why this is pure bullshit, this might help.
Lossless compression is nothing more than an algorithmic lookup table. It's a substitution cipher like what you find in famous quote puzzles.
Take two different messages. Compress each. When you decompress them, you have to get two different messages back, right? So you need two different messages in compressed form. If your compressed message uses the same symbolic representation as the uncompressed message--and, since we're talking ones and zeros here with computers, that's exactly the case--then it should quickly be apparent that, for any given length message, there're so many possible permutations of symbols to create a message...and you need exactly that same number of permutations in compressed form to be able to re-create any possible message.
Compression is handy because we tend to restrict ourselves to a tiny subset of the possible number of messages. If you have a huge library but only ever touch a small handful of books, you only need to carry around the first drawer of the first card cabinet. You can even pretend that the other umpteen hundred drawers don't even exist.
It's the same with text. You only need six bytes to store most of the frequently-used characters in text, but we sometimes use a lot more than just the standard characters so they get written on disk using eight bytes each. English doesn't even use every permutation of two-letter words, let alone twenty-letter ones, so there's a lot of wasted space there. You only need about eighteen bits to store enough positions for every word in the dictionary. A good compression algorithm for text will make that kind of a look-up table optimized for written English at the expense of other kinds of data. ``The'' would be in the first drawer of the cabinet, but ``uyazxavzfnnzranghrrt'' wouldn't be listed at all. If you actually wrote ``uyazxavzfnnzranghrrt'' in your document, the compression algorithm would fall back to storing it in its uncompressed form.
Also, don't overlook the overhead of the data of the algorithm itself. If you've got a program that could compress a 100 Mbyte file down to 1 Mbyte...but the compression software itself took several gigabytes of space, that ain't gonna do you much good. It's sometimes helpful to think of it in terms of the smallest self-contained program that could create the desired output. An infinite number of threes is easy; just divide 1 by three. Pi is a bit more complex, but only just. The complete works of Shakespeare is going to have a lot more overhead for a pretty short message. And ``uyazxavzfnnzranghrrt'' might even have so much overhead for such a short message that ``compression'' just makes it bigger.
The name of the quasar and time to start monitoring are the cryptographic keys. That doesn't sound like a lot of bits in the keyspace.
This was discussed the last time this article came 'round. You're right in your summary, but not in your assessment. The number of quasars, window of time to start monitoring, available bandwidth of random data from the quasars, etc., all make such attacks essentially impractical. Remember that shifting a one-time pad by even one bit renders the decryption unintelligible. If you're talking about gigabits per second from a random source--and, in the case of even a single quasar, we are--then simple timing becomes a formidable part of the key all unto itself.
The real weakness in this system is that it should be pretty easy to poison the well--that is, to for an attacker to overpower the signal received at the radio dish in such a way as to force the victim to use a key chosen by the attacker. Doing so would likely be far cheaper than maintaining recordings of all quasars, or than a brute-force attempt to match those recordings to an encrypted stream.
Worse, the proposal isn't for both ends to have their own radio telescopes, but for them to rely upon Internet broadcasts from a worldwide network of radio telescopes....
Might even work in the short term. But the recording industry is already dead--the body just hasn't stopped twitching yet, is all.
How to pay people to create ``intellectual property'' is going to be quite a challenge. Unless somebody comes up with something better, we're stuck as using the ``property'' itself as a loss leader to sell tickets to concerts, lectures, and the like on the one hand and commissions / works for hire on the other. Both are the traditional models that worked for centuries, if not millennia, before the advent of publishing in its various forms. It'll be painful for many to go back there...but I think it'll be better for society as a whole in the long term.
Anytime anybody asks these kinds of questions, it's just a vivid demonstration of how clueless said person is when it comes to just what this Intarweb thing is.
Rather than beat you over the head with your misunderstandings, let me just skip to the chase.
Design your sites in this order, and you'll never be concerned with these kinds of questions again.
Design your site in valid XHTML / HTML 4.0 / whatever that looks good in lynx.
Knock yourself out with CSS to make it look fantastic in your personal favorite choice of Firefox, Safari, Mozilla, Konqueror, etc.
Add just enough <!--[if IE]>blah<[endif]--> statements to make it look good in all versions of IE that're still supported by Microsoft.
If somebody points out handheld devices, screen readers, etc., that understand CSS but do a poor job of rendering the CSS you used on your site, create a custom stylesheet just for them.
That's it. That's all there is to it. When you're done, you've got a Web site that looks great on all platforms and validates to all meaningful standards. And, if it weren't for Microsoft, you could reasonably forget the last two steps.
So, out of curiosity, what's the difference between:
burning a CD;
copying to a flash drive;
copying to a hard drive;
copying to RAM;
copying to a monitor / TV;
printing;
copying from one 'Net router to another?
I'm all against exploiting children, but let's not destroy the law in the process, hmmm? Stretching (breaking, really) the law like this to go after a bad guy does more to harm the law--and thus society, and thus children--than the act this man was convicted of. If we want to make a law against duplicating child porn, that's one thing...this, however, is exactly what neocons should be upset about when they rant about ``legislating from the bench.''
Gimme the connect-the-line ballots any day. At the very least, they'd be harder for the morons who deal with this sort of thing to fuck up.
Sadly, this is not the case.
Those pieces of paper with lines get fed into optical scanners which then tabulate the ballots. Unless there's a recount--and that only happens when the results are close enough--nobody ever even touches the paper ballots again.
And who do you think makes most of these optical scan machines? Yup. You guessed it.
Really, you should think of the ballots you're using as nothing more than a very klunky kind of a computer mouse wirelessly attached to a Diebold computer.
First, create your site in well-formed XHTML that looks good in Lynx.
Next, add as much CSS as you like to make it gee-whiz pretty in whichever of Firefox, Safari, or Opera that you personally prefer most.
Finally, add in enough <--[if IE]>...<![endif]--> statements to make it look good in the latest version of IE, and tolerable in the oldest version still getting ``support'' from Microsoft.
If you develop that way, your site will be accessible to virtually everybody and look good to everybody who expects it to look good.
Of course, you'll want to check all the other browsers just to make sure you didn't trigger some obscure bug along the way...and all bets are off if you're trying to do some sort of COMET 3.2 Intarweb thingie.
Slashdot Mirror
Feel free to pass these and other fonts around as you wish, entirely guilt-free.
Federal Register, Vol. 53, No 189 (coralized 4 Mbyte PDF)
Cheers,
b&
An Anonymous Coward wrote:
Your gods are mere pebbles beneath the Hooves of the Invisible Pink Unicorn (MPBUHHH).
And that’s the whole point, really. You can know if you’re simulating something else — of course! What you can’t know, what Mr. Turing so elegantly proved, is that you can never be certain that there isn’t something bigger than you that’s running you in a simulation.
Cheers,
b&
Folks, this is the Halting Problem. If you have a foolproof method of detecting that you’re running in a VM, you can build a special-purpose VM that watches for that method specifically to defeat it.
Similarly, you can’t ever rule out the possibility that you yourself are living in a Matrix-style (etc.) simulated world. You might be able to detect that you are under certain circumstances, but any sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality. No, really!
Oh — and all this applies equally to any supposedly “omnipotent” deities you might care to propose. After all, if “God” could trap “The Devil” (to pick the current favorite pair of arch-rival gods) in a simulated world such that The Devil thought that he (The Devil) was the all-powerful creator of life, the universe, and everything ... then God has no way of knowing that The Devil hasn’t done the same to him. And if God doesn’t have any foolproof way of knowing whether or not The Devil has him trapped, and if he himself has no foolproof way of trapping The Devil, it hardly makes any kind of sense to describe God as “all-powerful,” now, does it?
Cheers,
b&
brunos wrote:
The BSD license does not make any requirements as to what you must do with other code included in the project, contrary to what the GPL does. Thus, the BSD is not “viral.” It does, of course, place some very specific and limited restrictions on what you may do with the BSD-licensed code, and those restrictions have the effect of preventing re-licensing of the BSD code itself. Again, other code is unaffected.
Apple, Microsoft, etc., most emphatically do not re-license BSD-licensed software, unless they make separate arrangements on a case-by-case basis with the authors. They follow the license precisely, which simply states that they may do with the code as the wish, so long as they acknowledge the authorship of the code as dictated by the license. They follow the terms of the license, exactly as it is intended.
“Most people,” it would seem, misunderstand the BSD license.
Cheers,
b&
Since previous iterations of this discussion have been dominated by wildly inaccurate characterizations of the BSD license, it seems only proper to actually include it:
http://ftp.bg.openbsd.org/OpenBSD/src/share/misc/license.template
To break it down even further:
Now, obviously, slapping a copy of the GPL in the file is within your rights to “use, copy modify, and distribute” the software. However, it is entirely pointless to do so: the GPL places additional restrictions on what you may or may not do with the code, yet those restrictions are voided by the fact that the BSD license — and, let’s not forget, removing the BSD license is the one thing that the license forbids — grants you those very rights that the GPL takes away. In order for the restrictions of the GPL to be effective, you must remove the BSD license, which you cannot legally do.
Now, can we please stop this nonsense about the BSD license giving you the right to re-license code under the GPL?
Cheers,
b&
It seems to me that a really big reason why neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD are likely to catch on is the simple fact that sneakernet in general is going the way of the buggy whip.
Nor is it that regular DVDs are “good enough,” as some have suggested, but rather that we’re already moving beyond the station wagon filled with tapes, to simple high-bandwidth networks.
It won’t be Blu-Ray that kills HD-DVD, or vice-versa, or even regular DVDs. It’ll be YouTube, iTunes, Bittorrent, and garden variety video-on-demand from your local telco monopoly. Sure, there’re plenty of shortcomings with all of those today, from quality to DRM to “ownership” to the time it takes to acquire a movie. But neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD intrinsically offer anything better over the online equivalents for those with bandwidth.
Cheers,
b&
According to AG Gonzales, Americans not only don't have a right to privacy with regards to their laptops, we don't even have a right to habeas corpus. See the FireHose for my (rejected) story submission.
Cheers,
b&
I live in Tempe, which borders Phoenix. Until yesterday, when it was stolen, I drove a '68 VW Camper. (White with a black stripe 'round the middle, pop-top, AZ Lic 828-HNG. Today or tomorrow I'll be posting details here: http://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/album_cat.php?cat _id=53.)
And the tailgaters here are a menace you simply wouldn't believe.
I've been driving to a gig at 7:00 on a Sunday morning. I'm in the right-hand lane on a five-lane freeway, going the limit. There aren't any other cars for a quarter mile either side of me...except for a fucking asshole in an SUV yakking on a cellphone five feet off my rear bumper.
And then said fucking asshole will pass me on the right through a gore point.
No, I'm not exaggerating. I've actually had that happen to me. And the exact same thing regularly happens, without the Sunday morning nobody-else-on-the-road setting.
Frankly, I'm absolutely amazed I'm still alive.
What I also find fascinating is that nearly every single fucking asshole who tailgates me is yakking on a cellphone and will turn down literally dozens of opportunities to pass me, sometimes for miles on end....
Sure makes me wish I had a rocket launcher, and the (lack of a) moral standard to use it....
Cheers,
b&
So, the whole idea of the dodge is that Microsoft and Novell have swapped some money and--in exchange--worked out an agreement whereby they won't be suing each other and their customers for violating patents the one or the other may hold.
Would anybody care to explain how that isn't just a re-wording of the textbook definition of a license?
I mean, if you explained to the judge that all you did was hold a sharpened piece of iron alloy near the upper portion of my thorax while indicating that you desired to take possession of my wallet...well, what kind of a blithering idiot of a judge wouldn't find you guilty of mugging me?
Cheers,
b&
daveschroeder wrote:
Will you please stop burning that damned straw man you're so fascinated with?
Because, unlike in your oh-so-black-and-white-world, there is a damned huge difference between ``the official explanations have huge, gaping holes you could fly a 757 through'' and ``ZOMG! Teh Men in Black teleported Elvis into teh cockpits!!!1!''
Look. It's simple, really. We have building 7, which collapsed so perfectly it would have made a 30-year demolition veteran proud. Yet there was no significant damage visible to witnesses on the ground or in still or video images we have of the building, and fires were visibly minor. Worse, the damage the official explanation says was responsible for the collapse not only would have caused a radically different collapse from what happened, it would have caused a radically different collapse from what the official explanations says happened--the damage on the south side, yet it collapsed inward with a slight west-to-east slumping.
That's all stuff that's uncontested, unquestioned, and plainly obvious from the first glance through the last final minute examination.
And we know that the explosion and resulting damage to the Pentagon looks absolutely nothing whatsoever like what we've repeatedly seen when a 757 hits a building. And that any camera pointed in the right general direction will very clearly show a plane hitting a building. And that the Pentagon's security was supposed to be far better than any civilian office building's--yet every office building I've ever seen has a plethora of plain ol' security cameras that would trivially capture something that was about to hit the second floor of the building. And that those same defenses, designed to protect the building in the event of attack from the evil Russkies, completely and utterly failed to even sound the alarm--let alone fire off anti-aircraft, anti-missile, anti-whatever defenses--even when the people in the building were supposedly coordinating our response to an air attack. And nobody in the administration appears upset in the slightest at that profoundly abysmal failure of the most important military defensive systems in the world.
That's all I'm saying. The facts are quite clear, and they don't even pretend to support the official position. I'm not saying that people were unloaded from the planes and then murdered in order to more easily fake their murders halfway across the country, or any of the rest of the bullshit you're accusing me of making up about the ``real truth.''
What I'm really saying, when it comes right down to it, is that the administration's explanations hold no more water than the nutjob conspiracy theorists'.
Oh--and nice job at playing the party line with respect to whitewashing the administration's anti-Semitism. Sure, they're happy to welcome selected Westernized Muslim religious leaders to be token house niggers alongside Condi. But the war is against Islamofascists, the extremists are all towelheads and sand niggers, and white Christian men's terrorist acts are completely ignored in the War on Terror. Bush's only beef is with ``radical Muslims,'' sure--but it's a damned funny coincidence that virtually all Muslims are
cold fjord wrote:
I'm sorry, but I just have to call bullshit on this one.
That kind of damage would have been blindingly obvious to even the most casual observer. I mean, a third of the building scooped out to a quarter of the depth? That's the very definition of a gigantic, huge, gaping hole.
So why didn't anybody at all notice it? Why doesn't it show up on any of the photographs or videos of the building?
And why, oh why, did the building not topple to the south when it finally did collapse, as it must have if a quarter of its support on that side had long since vanished?
And if you start with such obvious bullshit--a giant invisible hole that nobody noticed and whose inescapable consequences failed to materialize--why should I even pretend to give the rest of your bullshit any serious consideration?
Oh, why the fuck not.
See? You(r source) contradicts the theory in the very next paragraph. Massive damage on the south side would cause the building to fall in that direction. In a big way, in fact, as is obvious to anybody who's ever watched a lumberjack or somebody with a wrecking ball at work. And it most emphatically would not ``fall in on itself,'' which only happens when everything goes right in a controlled demolition. (Think about it for a moment: if that weren't the case, all you'd have to do is hit the thing with a few wrecking balls, start a few fires, and your demolition job takes care of itself.) Yet instead we got ``slumping'' in the exact opposite plane of motion.
Honestly, this analysis wouldn't even pass the scrutiny of a junior high science fair. NIST, Popular Mechanics, and you should all be deeply ashamed of yourselves for either a terminally broken bullshit detector, or complicity in perpetuating the most obviously barefaced of lies.
Cheers,
b&
Fascinating.
I'd offer you some sort of a point-by-point rebuttal...save for the fact that you didn't do me the same courtesy. In fact, not only is your post a tirade against a whole shitload of conspiracy theories I didn't mention at all, you failed to address even one of the points I made.
Well, you kinda came close when you asked what the motive would be for destroying WTC #7. And I'll admit that I don't have a stunning answer for that, other than an observation that there were lots of government (including CIA) and financial offices there, presumably with all sorts of goodies in them that would become awfully convenient to loose.
The reason I mentioned WTC #7?
Those are all uncontested matters of public record, confirmed by official government documents and / or obvious from the actual footage. Make of them what you will.
You then went on to rail against the usual round of conspiracy arguments. Yet you completely failed to note that I didn't cite a single one of the examples you so vigorously argue against. So take a moment to re-read my original post, and also ask yourself: what happened to the Pentagon's air defense systems that they didn't even sound a warning, let alone do anything to protect the building? Remember, this is after Bush had been told that the US was under attack. And how could it possibly be true that none of those defense systems--let alone a regular ol' surveillance camera mounted on the outside of the Pentagon itself--saw what was coming straight at them? Or, why would the administration prefer letting conspiracy theories run wild instead of showing the exact same kind of thing we get from ``embedded'' reporters in Iraq almost daily?
Also, watch the footage of the planes hitting the towers. Both towers, we see the same basic thing. We all know exactly what it looks like when a 757 hits a building, and what the building looks like afterwards. We saw it twice, after all.
Now watch the footage of the impact of the Pentagon. It looks nothing at all like what we know happens when a 757 hits a building. Look at the pictures of the aftermath of both: again, no comparison. A 757 leaves a narrow wedge of destruction, with the wings doing almost as much damage as the fuselage. On the Pentagon...there was a big, round hole. Much bigger than the
ObsessiveMathsFreak wrote:
I'll be the first to accuse the Bush administration of gross incompetence--but let's also not forget several stunning displays of true competence, including examples eerily similar to what would be required to pull off a Reichstag-esque plot.
I mean, we've got the lead-up to the Iraq War (Remember Colin Powell? Valerie Plame and the aluminum tubes? Condi's smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud?) for one very obvious example. And who could forget the Swift Boat Veterans, or the similar job done on McCain? Not to mention, of course, the whole Lewinsky affair....
And, before you dismiss the administration's conducting of the Iraq war as gross incompetence, ask yourself three questions: Is there anything that they've done that hasn't been the textbook example of how not to conduct this kind of a war? Is there any chance that Rumsfeld et al. have not studied the textbooks? And, finally, which is more beneficial to a cynical Orwellian regime: success in Iraq...or the spectacular failure (complete with the worst possible breeding ground for terrorists) we have there now?
Like I said in my original post: I'm not one for conspiracy theories. All I'm doing here is applying Occam's Razor, and feeling like we're experiencing the death of a thousand cuts.
The administration's actions in Iraq and elsewhere make absolutely no sense whatsoever not only if you grant them the benefit of the doubt, but even if you take their stated claims perfectly at face value: their actions are not only spectacularly counterproductive, but glaringly obviously so, and repeatedly, and often excessively.
They do, however, make perfect sense if you assume that Bush & co. is another Hitler & Nazis, and that they're doing all of this consciously, intentionally, and with malice aforethought.
Never forget that Hitler sincerely believed that all he did was not only in his country's best interests, but in God's and Christ's best interests, too. (Re-read Mein Kampf if you've forgotten.) Or that he had all sorts of seemingly-legitimate reasons and excuses for all his excesses. He really thought that Poland was a direct threat to German sovereignty, that a cabal of Jews controlled world finances and were committed to usurping German authority...and that Germany really was the best nation on Earth, the greatest hope for the human race and salvation, and that the power of the state and of the corporations was necessary to ensure the common security and welfare.
And he had lots of convincing evidence to back up all those beliefs! In the abstract, you're certainly more ``secure'' if you control not only your side of your borders, but the other side, as well--and Germany and Poland had long been rivals. There were disproportionate numbers of Jews in international finance, and a non-trivial number had Bolshevik and other ``left'' leanings antithetical to Hitler's (and many other German's) ideas of how to run an economy, which made for a natural enmity. Hitler could easily point to all sorts of great advancements in the arts, science, culture, and Christianity (think of the amazingly anti-Semitic Martin Luther, amongst others) to demonstrate just how formidable Germany had been historically. And lots of people to this day still believe that a strong central government with expansive policing powers is necessary for personal security, and that a strong corporate culture is necessary for economic security.
If you sta
An anonymous coward wrote:
Do you really think that there wasn't even a single camera on the Pentagon itself pointed in that direction? Do you really think that none of the Pentagon's anti-aircraft, anti-missile, anti-tank, anti-troop, anti-burglar, or other anti-whatever defense systems have any kind of a record of what happened? Are you really that impressed that pretty much everybody with a cheap video camera in downtown Manhattan who had it running and pointing in the direction of the towers caught footage of the airliners?
In short, do you really believe that the only video surveillance of the most high-profile military target on the planet comes from nearby stores and ``petrol'' stations?
If so...save your sympathy for yourself.
Cheers,
b&
Just for a moment, let's play a game of ``What if?''
What if the conspiracy nutjobs are right, and 9/11 was, in some way, a deliberate action by the Bush administration in exactly the same way that Hitler was behind the burning of the Reichstag? (Godwin, I know--so sue me.) After all, the conspiracy theorists have some compelling points--the collapse of WTC #7, that none of the released footage of the Pentagon attack shows what actually hit the building, the striking dissimilarity of the appearance between the two impacts on the WTC and the impact on the Pentagon, the complete and utter lack of response by NORAD or the Pentagon's own on-site defense systems....
What scares the shit out me is that this article is perfectly consistent with the theory that the Bush administration knew just what bin Laden was up to, and chose to ignore it: the CIA (whom Bush, Jr., has always publicly kept at arm's length or further) told the administration, repeatedly and emphatically...and the administration most pointedly ignored everything the CIA had to say.
Of course, this could also be after-the-fact CYA by the CIA...but, then again, WTC 7 could have been the first skyscraper in history to collapse for no good reason whatsoever, and there could have been a massive and completely hushed-up malfunction in the anti-aircraft defensive systems in the most heavily protected building on the planet, and there could have been....
Honestly, I'm about as anti-conspiracy as one can get. There's just so damn much about 9/11 that's so glaring, so obvious, so uncomplicated, that I'm left with two conclusions: massive unprecedented incompetence by a team headed by some of the most competent political operatives in America (Cheney, Rove, etc.)...or a conspiracy. A conspiracy that would perfectly fit with the actions of an administration with decided totalitarian fascist tendencies, such as one that would strip civil liberties in the name of protecting the homeland, which would endorse and actually use torture and commit other atrocities, which supports big business at every opportunity over all else domestically, which would invade sovereign nations on trumped-up pretenses, which is accompanied by unprecedented corporate corruption, which wears its Christianity on its sleeve....
Whether for good reason or not, frankly, I'm scared shitless.
Cheers,
b&
19thNervousBreakdown wrote:
Observation in the case of omnipotence is completely irrelevant. We know for a fact that there exists no such thing as, for example, a geometric figure in Euclidean space with four right angles such that every point on the figure is equidistant from some other point--that is, dey ain't no such thang as a square circle. You don't have to examine all the geometric figures in existence to know that none of them--past, present, future, potential, or otherwise--are circular squares.
``Omnipotence'' suffers from the exact same problem. It's a self-contained oxymoron. See my .sig for the one-line poetic version, but the long and short of it is that all those intractable problems of modern logic, computer science, information theory, and the like, are absolutes that even a supposedly all-powerful superbeing couldn't worm its way around. Just as the halting problem, for example, means you can't create a computer program (algorithm) to determine whether or not any given computer program will ever terminate, it's impossible for ``God'' to know whether or not he's the all-powerful creator of the universe...or the Devil is, and the Devil is just playing God for a fool.
And everywhere you turn, all sorts of variations on that theme pop up. ``Tell me, God, `yes' or `no,' will you answer, `no'?'' And so on.
So, if any given god is nothing if it's not omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, the creator of the universe, or any of those classic ``omni-'' properties...then that god is nothing. Period.
Cheers,
b&
If you're wondering why this is pure bullshit, this might help.
Lossless compression is nothing more than an algorithmic lookup table. It's a substitution cipher like what you find in famous quote puzzles.
Take two different messages. Compress each. When you decompress them, you have to get two different messages back, right? So you need two different messages in compressed form. If your compressed message uses the same symbolic representation as the uncompressed message--and, since we're talking ones and zeros here with computers, that's exactly the case--then it should quickly be apparent that, for any given length message, there're so many possible permutations of symbols to create a message...and you need exactly that same number of permutations in compressed form to be able to re-create any possible message.
Compression is handy because we tend to restrict ourselves to a tiny subset of the possible number of messages. If you have a huge library but only ever touch a small handful of books, you only need to carry around the first drawer of the first card cabinet. You can even pretend that the other umpteen hundred drawers don't even exist.
It's the same with text. You only need six bytes to store most of the frequently-used characters in text, but we sometimes use a lot more than just the standard characters so they get written on disk using eight bytes each. English doesn't even use every permutation of two-letter words, let alone twenty-letter ones, so there's a lot of wasted space there. You only need about eighteen bits to store enough positions for every word in the dictionary. A good compression algorithm for text will make that kind of a look-up table optimized for written English at the expense of other kinds of data. ``The'' would be in the first drawer of the cabinet, but ``uyazxavzfnnzranghrrt'' wouldn't be listed at all. If you actually wrote ``uyazxavzfnnzranghrrt'' in your document, the compression algorithm would fall back to storing it in its uncompressed form.
Also, don't overlook the overhead of the data of the algorithm itself. If you've got a program that could compress a 100 Mbyte file down to 1 Mbyte...but the compression software itself took several gigabytes of space, that ain't gonna do you much good. It's sometimes helpful to think of it in terms of the smallest self-contained program that could create the desired output. An infinite number of threes is easy; just divide 1 by three. Pi is a bit more complex, but only just. The complete works of Shakespeare is going to have a lot more overhead for a pretty short message. And ``uyazxavzfnnzranghrrt'' might even have so much overhead for such a short message that ``compression'' just makes it bigger.
Cheers,
b&
homer_ca wrote:
This was discussed the last time this article came 'round. You're right in your summary, but not in your assessment. The number of quasars, window of time to start monitoring, available bandwidth of random data from the quasars, etc., all make such attacks essentially impractical. Remember that shifting a one-time pad by even one bit renders the decryption unintelligible. If you're talking about gigabits per second from a random source--and, in the case of even a single quasar, we are--then simple timing becomes a formidable part of the key all unto itself.
The real weakness in this system is that it should be pretty easy to poison the well--that is, to for an attacker to overpower the signal received at the radio dish in such a way as to force the victim to use a key chosen by the attacker. Doing so would likely be far cheaper than maintaining recordings of all quasars, or than a brute-force attempt to match those recordings to an encrypted stream.
Worse, the proposal isn't for both ends to have their own radio telescopes, but for them to rely upon Internet broadcasts from a worldwide network of radio telescopes....
Cheers,
b&
It ain't about stopping ``piracy.'' Not even in the slightest.
It's all about control, and the power that goes with it.
Cheers,
b&
...for your car.
Might even work in the short term. But the recording industry is already dead--the body just hasn't stopped twitching yet, is all.
How to pay people to create ``intellectual property'' is going to be quite a challenge. Unless somebody comes up with something better, we're stuck as using the ``property'' itself as a loss leader to sell tickets to concerts, lectures, and the like on the one hand and commissions / works for hire on the other. Both are the traditional models that worked for centuries, if not millennia, before the advent of publishing in its various forms. It'll be painful for many to go back there...but I think it'll be better for society as a whole in the long term.
Cheers,
b&
Anytime anybody asks these kinds of questions, it's just a vivid demonstration of how clueless said person is when it comes to just what this Intarweb thing is.
Rather than beat you over the head with your misunderstandings, let me just skip to the chase.
Design your sites in this order, and you'll never be concerned with these kinds of questions again.
That's it. That's all there is to it. When you're done, you've got a Web site that looks great on all platforms and validates to all meaningful standards. And, if it weren't for Microsoft, you could reasonably forget the last two steps.
Cheers,
b&
So, out of curiosity, what's the difference between:
I'm all against exploiting children, but let's not destroy the law in the process, hmmm? Stretching (breaking, really) the law like this to go after a bad guy does more to harm the law--and thus society, and thus children--than the act this man was convicted of. If we want to make a law against duplicating child porn, that's one thing...this, however, is exactly what neocons should be upset about when they rant about ``legislating from the bench.''
Cheers,
b&
Skyshadow wrote:
Sadly, this is not the case.
Those pieces of paper with lines get fed into optical scanners which then tabulate the ballots. Unless there's a recount--and that only happens when the results are close enough--nobody ever even touches the paper ballots again.
And who do you think makes most of these optical scan machines? Yup. You guessed it.
Really, you should think of the ballots you're using as nothing more than a very klunky kind of a computer mouse wirelessly attached to a Diebold computer.
Cheers,
b&
Three browsers, that is.
First, create your site in well-formed XHTML that looks good in Lynx.
Next, add as much CSS as you like to make it gee-whiz pretty in whichever of Firefox, Safari, or Opera that you personally prefer most.
Finally, add in enough <--[if IE]>...<![endif]--> statements to make it look good in the latest version of IE, and tolerable in the oldest version still getting ``support'' from Microsoft.
If you develop that way, your site will be accessible to virtually everybody and look good to everybody who expects it to look good.
Of course, you'll want to check all the other browsers just to make sure you didn't trigger some obscure bug along the way...and all bets are off if you're trying to do some sort of COMET 3.2 Intarweb thingie.
Cheers,
b&
ethanrider wrote:
Actually, they should be taken off-site to be shot--it's easier to clean up that way.
Cheers,
b&
P.S. Dig the hole first.