[Jackson] missed a lot, he changed a lot, and despite this he still attempted to make everyone believe that his, transfer as you put it, from the print to the screen was accurate to the print.
To be fair, I don't think that's true. The movie team, up to and including Jackson, said from the start that they were going to take certain liberties in order to turn good books into good films. They've never pretending they weren't going to change anything.
I'm more surprised by how few deviations there seem to be (having never read the books all the way through before the films, but reading them now). The emphasis is different in places, a few details move to a different point in the story, and of course there are one or two glaring changes to the plot (ahem... Arwen), but the overall story arc, most of the subplots and a lot of the atmosphere are transferred very effectively, IMHO.
The interesting question, to me, is whether they did it at all. It was perhaps inevitable that conspiracy theories would arise over the origins of the script for a film like The Matrix, but some of those theories seem to have credibility this time.
I have to say that The Matrix was one of my favourite films of all time: original premise, original and not pointless special effects (and well done, too), a good cast. Did anyone else fail to spot that Elrond is Agent Smith until the closing credits of RotK, BTW? <sheepish look> That's testament to his acting ability, the make-up people on the films, how engrossed I was in both films, and my remarkably poor eyesight for you.:-)
The sequels to The Matrix would have been OK as free-standing sci-fi action flicks, but they weren't a patch on the original in terms of story or script. The ending was one of those you'll love or hate, but personally I'm in the latter camp. It was a bit like making Aliens, where the whole point is who survives at the end, and them making Alien3, where the first thing they do is... well, mess that up, frankly. I don't go for pseudo-religious tie-ins, particularly such unsubtle ones as that in the Matrix series. They had the overtones right in the first film, shoved too many random references in during the second, and then blew it in the latter half of the third.
That being the case, I have no difficult in believing that the storyline for the first film was indeed based on someone else's work, and the storyline for the second and third was based on what someone could produce for $$$s, long after the first was a done deal. I'd love to know what really happened, though I doubt we ever will; even if the first one wasn't the brothers, somebody will make enough money to support them forever in an out-of-court settlement that also includes a non-disclosure clause.
Good Lord man, the reason they got away with Keanu Reeves in the first movie is because all he really had to do in that one was act confused the whole time. They ran into trouble when they actually tried to get him to act in the second and third films.
But I'll forgive him for that because of his one-liner at the start of Reloaded, when he starts to fight the agents. It's not that funny on reflection, but at the time, I thought it was hilarious.
FWIW, a couple of the best fight scenes I've seen in movies have involved Filipino MA guys (real ones) playing with sticks. The speed they move at is awesome, you can make the sticks do the big spinny moves in a realistic context, and the body movement is surprisingly graceful and technically impressive. Sadly, I don't think we've got from Karate Kid to Kali Kid yet, although the gun kata scenes in last year's "Equilibrium" (another very good film) were on the right lines.
BT Internet (as they were before numerous name changes) are one of the big players. They advertised their dial-up (56k modem) service using the name "Anytime", and it was billed as unlimited access. What they didn't tell you was that your modem would be cut off after 2 hours (so great for games and big downloads, then), that if you were on-line for more than 12 hours out of 24 you'd immediately have your service terminated (according to large numbers of people on UK newsgroups) and that a few months later, "any time" would mean 150 hours/month and no more. And this is with a dial-up ISP whose service is crappy at the best of times. If half the universe didn't know my e-mail address from back when they were better than the other guys, I'd move in a heartbeat.
Bandwidth is pretty irrelevant if you can't get a connection.
And no, I can't get broadband.
Re:Do not give them access to your account
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Paperless Billing?
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I guess this depends on where you're coming from. In the UK, where it's quite normal for many people to pay bills by direct debit, every bank that uses the scheme provides the direct debit guarantee, which is a simple, effective and necessary safeguard for the system to be trustworthy. People do occasionally get overcharged for whatever reason, but the guarantee ensures they should suffer no long term ill effects, and I know of no-one who ever has.
'Course, it's much easier to prove that you've been overcharged if you've got a nice bill printed on utility company letterhead that disagrees with what left your account, and for this reason alone, my bills are all still the old-fashioned variety.
I completely take your point about wanting to control the standards; that's why I gave Sony as an example or a company that might do it. They already make TVs, audio gear, computers and so on, all themselves. If they could establish a definitive home entertainment kit, and get everyone buying their hubs, then everyone would be buying their other kit (or somebody else's compatible kit, giving them licensing income instead) and they'd be laughing all the way to the bank.
I agree entirely. A better way forward, looking at what works at present and ideas that have stood the test of time, is a combination of two things:
individual components that do one job well
a simple, flexible architecture to connect them up.
What amazes me is that none of the big cross-media types (Sony and their like) has yet developed a central "hub" technology, and standard interfaces to connect the various components that form part of any home entertainment or computer system today. The precedents are all there: using a PC or console as a central control system, connecting up your satellite/TV/video with SCART, and so on. Surely the money will be rolling in for whoever corners the market in connectivity technology for modular home entertainment/computer systems...
Work will be created whether there is an incentive to do so or not.
No. No, it won't.
The vast majority of works covered by copyright are not mainstream. For every Robbie Williams, there are a thousand small bands playing their local bar. For every Microsoft Word, there are a thousand back-end applications end users never see. For every Terminator 3 there are zillions of small, independently produced films.
The reason that people can afford to produce all these "lesser" works is that copyright means they get credit where it's due. The independent film may only show in a dozen cinemas across the country, but at least the people who put in the time and effort to make them get paid for all those showings.
In the software world, much of the back-end stuff is custom written in-house or contracted out. It often implements a company's business plans, and probably contains lots of trade secrets. If everyone's commercial rivals could just pick it up and take the good bits for themselves without compensation, you could argue that it would mean everyone benefitted from all the developments and things would progress faster if you like. I think a more realistic perspective is that no-one's going to invest large amounts into R&D to make that progress, because there'd be no commercial advantage in doing so, and thus no-one would benefit. Obviously, the reality would lie somewhere between these extremes, but claiming that all the bespoke development would happen by magic if no-one were paying for it simply isn't credible.
Is promoting useful arts and sciences worth this price paid in freedom? Would progress really grind to a halt if, for example, non-commercial duplication of all copyrighted works were legalized?
Some people claim that the answer to those questions is obviously yes.... Counterexamples like RedHat... prove that at least some content providers can feed their families without a total ban on copying.
The problem with that reasoning, as I see it, is simply one of scale.
Red Hat produce one of the most popular and well-known OSS distributions in the world. Sure, a few people can make a living via alternative sources such as support and consultancy on a project like that (but note that even the big OSS projects have been known to ask for donations to keep them afloat, because they simply weren't generating enough revenue through those "alternative" means).
On the other hand, I bet you couldn't find more than a few thousand people in the whole world who are making a living from distributing software under such a free licence, and providing supporting services to make their money. There are probably more people than that making a living from writing software and distributing it under "non-free" agreements just in the city where I live.
The analogues of these arguments hold in other fields as well. It is hard to make a living as a professional musician if all you do is play small gigs at local bars and sell your home-made CDs afterwards. Some people can do it. Most people who play in that sort of world do it as a sideline and have another source of income to pay the bills.
On a more upbeat note, I think the success stories out there show that in the long run, our society could come back from the "must have something for nothing" low we've reached today. If the major media and technology companies could be forced to stop their abusive pricing policies, and people came to respect well made works, whether they be film, music, software or whatever, then maybe we could progress to a situation where it was the norm to release your work under some sort of free arrangement, but it was also the norm for those who benefitted to give fair compensation without being compelled to do so. Copyright would still serve useful purposes -- protecting things like the principles underlying the GPL, for example -- but it wouldn't be the big stick it so often turns into today.
Thanks for the feedback, particularly the newsgroup, which I didn't know about before.
Regarding the margins, I agree with you entirely on how the CSS should be interpreted. I've had chance to check my site in Moz 1.5 again now, and there is indeed a (small) gap between the dotted line displayed for the <hr> and the text above and below.
I had initially, and perhaps erroneously, attributed this to the spacing properties on the text either side (where line heights and such would cause a small gap themselves). Having zoomed in to the pixel level and calculated where everything should be according to my interpretation of the CSS standards, I suspect Mozilla is at least close to correct, however, and I take back most of the nasty things I was thinking about that particular bug fix. It's still undersized by a pixel or three, and a couple of the other dimensions seem to be ignored for some reason (a font size of 110% on my heading yields exactly the same size text as my default 20px Verdana in a paragraph, which doesn't help the condensed appearance), but apparently other browsers add vast amounts more spacing implicitly than I had realised.
Now if you could just stop the Password Manager randomly prompting for my e-mail account password every time I start up and every few minutes thereafter, when it already knows the correct one, that would be just fine and dandy...:-)
Unfortunately, the UN is about as anti-US as they come.
Right now, rather a lot of the rest of the world is as anti-US as they come. Even when governments such as the UK support an official pro-US line, a large part of the population doesn't.
I'm afraid this was inevitable as soon as the isolationist policies started coming in. Why the hell should the US, and its Great Corporations(TM)(C)(Patent pending), have more right to control something as universal as the Internet than everyone else? Strangely, everyone else doesn't agree with that sentiment.
One need only look at the papers this week to see where this came from: this time it's the predictable move to secure the financial gains from Iraq invasion (sorry... the "rebuilding effort") for US-based interests. The other week it was the steel money. Before that it was Kyoto. Before that it was the ICC. The list goes on: the current US government has waved two fingers at the rest of the world ever since it was installed, just as ICANN has waved two fingers at the rest of the Internet.
What's happening now is a classical situation where a large, powerful group gets too big for its boots and tries to go it alone: ultimately, they learn the truth that hurts, and have to eat their own dog food.
Thanks for the link. FWIW, my objection to the Bugzilla bug creation system is that it wants an e-mail address, but doesn't tell me (a) what will be sent to it, with a guarantee that spam won't, and (b) whether it will be publicly visible. You're never getting a real address under those conditions, and I can't be bothered to mess around with a freebie provider when I don't know what I'm going to have to do on page 2 anyway. I'm quite willing to provide helpful information about bugs if it's relatively safe and easy for me to do so; Bugzilla currently isn't.
I have the same opinion of actually contributing fixes, BTW. I'd love to see a couple of the other bugs no-one's claimed yet fixed, and I'm a professional software developer with web design experience, so hopefully I could help. Unfortunately, if you have a non-Linux system, the effort required to set up a development environment for Moz is... prohibitive. I'm sure it can be done, but I have two near-full-time jobs, and I'm not going to waste hours of my precious spare time trying to work out how.
Anyway, to abate your curiosity for the immediate future, the offending (validating CSS) is this:
We use the border attributes to get the dotted effect we want. Obviously there are other attributes that we probably should set explicitly, but until Moz 1.5, I hadn't found any recent browser on which this didn't work. There are some odd renderings for this I could understand, but a correctly displayed line with no space above or below isn't one of them.
Are you referring to the bug where sometimes the content area would be pushed waaaaay off to the right?
The table bug? I'm not sure whether it's the same one. You can see the one I'm talking about often when visiting Slashdot using Moz 1.5/Win: the right-hand side of the left column (with links to sections, etc.) overlaps the left-hand side of the main column, but a quick font resize fixes the layout. I stuck a note about this in my sig for a few days, and had several reports from other people with the same problem, so it's definitely a browser issue and not unique to my system.
Good to hear they're tidying up 1.6 anyway. I don't generally use beta builds, particularly of things like Moz where even the final releases haven't been great for stability recently, but I'll look forward to that particular irritation disappearing, if it is indeed the same bug.
Actually, in 1.5 was changed to work correctly; before that it was horribly broken.
I'm sorry, but in what way is honouring explicitly requested margin dimensions "horribly broken", and how is ignoring top and bottom margins because the left and right margins happen to be "auto" working correctly?
Are you arguing that an <hr> is an inline element, and as such margin specs don't apply? I think that would be, at best, an unhelpful approach: <hr> is pretty much universally used as a block element to divide material vertically.
If that's not your argument, I don't see how your claim doesn't conflict with the W3C standards, though if you could explain my mistake and how to fix it, I'm sure everyone reading my web site in Moz 1.5 would be grateful.
If there is a problem, make sure you file a bug. Have you?
You give me an interface where I can file a simple bug without wondering what those 17,562 options mean and whether I've got them right, and I'll file you a bug report. Fair?
There were several unfortunate bugs that crept in with 1.5, and as far as I'm aware haven't been fixed yet, e.g.,
Mozilla mail pops up asking some people for their password all the time, even if they tell Password Manager to remember it
Gecko still renders some page layouts (like Slashdot) badly first time out, IIRC due to some bug with the box layout code
they've messed up a couple of things with the CSS code while trying to fix other bugs, e.g., margins around HR tags don't work properly now.
These are annoyances more than critical faults, but bring down the general quality. Given that the functionality used to work until 1.3 or 1.4 in each case, they're also regressions, which suggest weaknesses in the code introduced inadvertently and best fixed before building on it further for Thunder/Firebird.
It could also be the issue of profile migration. AFAIK, there are still no solid tools available to move a profile from Moz to the next generation alternatives, nor any easy way to move back if you don't like the change. The Thunderbird download pages are covered in warnings about this. If you're relying on Moz for more than toy use, for example if you have thousands of e-mails filed away that you want to keep, that alone might be enough to prevent you considering an upgrade, and thus to justify continued development of the original Mozilla tools in parallel with the new work.
It's interesting to read this thread. Cliff says in his editorial:
It sounds good, but reality has a tendency of getting in the way of good ethics.
Almost all of the readers' comments, however, boil down to one or more of the following.
A well-treated employee is a productive employee.
It's hard to beat an honest man.
Honour among thieves.;-)
I've gotten to where I automatically reject as dishonest EVERY ad I see on TV or read anywhere.
You're not the only one. In fact, some research strongly suggests that users discount any text on a web page that comes across as marketese, even if it's not explicitly in an ad.
These ideas of eliminating online anonimity need to be offset against the benefits this anonimity brings.
OK, let's suppose for a moment that all Internet activity is traceable under judicial supervision by the legal authorities, and no-one else.
Now, the following people will have to take responsibility for their actions, and one way or another, those actions will stop:
spammers
crackers
kiddie porn merchants
on-line credit card fraudsters
people who libel others anonymously
mass copyright infringers
fake doctors giving out harmful medical advice
fake academics giving out bogus qualifications
and so the list continues.
That's a whole lotta benefit for giving up true anonymity in favour of legitimate traceability on the same terms as you'd have it in real life.
Anonymity's only real benefit is that it lets you make a genuine complaint without fear of reprisal. Of course, no-one sensible will take an anonymous source seriously; how do you know that girl was an ethnic Albanian, and not a spook working for the other side?
Actually, the big problem is that so many people do take it seriously, hence all the problems listed above. With freedom of speech must come responsibility for what you say. It does in the real world, so why should you get away with it on the Internet?
Such a law would need to... make the software supplier liable for consequential losses... THEN you would see Windows getting a proper rewrite.
No, then you'd never see another version of Windows. Or Linux. Or Microsoft Office. Or OpenOffice. Or any mainstream software produced by anyone, ever.
Where did Brook get that idea from? The Bill you mention is currently awaiting Royal Assent (i.e., it has effectively passed the legislature and will soon become law), but I see nothing obvious that would support the claim by Brook that you quoted. Perhaps I'm missing something -- I certainly didn't read it all or in any great detail -- or maybe their concerns were addressed in later debate after the article you linked to was written.
Either way, that position is completely counter to the prevailing public opinion here, and any law attempting to do that would be taken about as seriously as the current proposals to reform tuition fees, i.e., zip, nada, zilch, go directly to opposition front benches, do not pass laws, do not collect Prime Minister's salary. It would also be quite remarkable that such an absurd piece of legislation made it through a year in Parliament without a high profile discussion about it in the media.
Can you provide a citation from the final wording of the Bill that supports the silliness you mentioned?
I was even more unpopular when I pointed out that the regulators in Europe would blast this type of thing on privacy grounds. [...] I pointed out that my cousin, one of those regulators has survived two assasination attempts and may have an opinion about a technology that gives away his position. In Europe privacy is not something that you muck arround with.
Not to doubt you or anything, but that sounds pretty heavy. Who's trying so hard to assassinate a telecomms regulator? I've worked in the business, and never found that the regulators had much real power, so it would seem an odd choice on the face of it...
These systems usually use either the phase angle of arrival or the time difference of arrival method to determine your location and don't require a GPS in the phone.
As far as I'm aware, they all still require multiple nearby base stations. Typically, there's not much directional about the comms at those stations; it would be unreliable anyway, given the nature of mobile phone signals. Hence you still need to triangulate, or use some variation on the theme. The question is more the accuracy with which you can do it.
IOWs, these services work much better in some places than others. Not a great surprise, given the nature of mobile phones, but worth pointing out, particularly if they're being advertised as a way to track missing things.
They also need the mobile to be switched on, of course. Again, pretty obvious, but a fairly significant drawback if it were claimed to be useful in cases of abduction.
(Incidentally, to the AC grandparent: at least on the major networks I've had experience with, the system hasn't automatically triangulated in the past. The switch to a new base station is indicated simply by the relative signal strengths on some sort of control channel; when the signal from your current station gets too weak, you switch to a more viable alternative if there's one available.)
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, I don't think that's true. The movie team, up to and including Jackson, said from the start that they were going to take certain liberties in order to turn good books into good films. They've never pretending they weren't going to change anything.
I'm more surprised by how few deviations there seem to be (having never read the books all the way through before the films, but reading them now). The emphasis is different in places, a few details move to a different point in the story, and of course there are one or two glaring changes to the plot (ahem... Arwen), but the overall story arc, most of the subplots and a lot of the atmosphere are transferred very effectively, IMHO.
The interesting question, to me, is whether they did it at all. It was perhaps inevitable that conspiracy theories would arise over the origins of the script for a film like The Matrix, but some of those theories seem to have credibility this time.
I have to say that The Matrix was one of my favourite films of all time: original premise, original and not pointless special effects (and well done, too), a good cast. Did anyone else fail to spot that Elrond is Agent Smith until the closing credits of RotK, BTW? <sheepish look> That's testament to his acting ability, the make-up people on the films, how engrossed I was in both films, and my remarkably poor eyesight for you. :-)
The sequels to The Matrix would have been OK as free-standing sci-fi action flicks, but they weren't a patch on the original in terms of story or script. The ending was one of those you'll love or hate, but personally I'm in the latter camp. It was a bit like making Aliens, where the whole point is who survives at the end, and them making Alien3, where the first thing they do is... well, mess that up, frankly. I don't go for pseudo-religious tie-ins, particularly such unsubtle ones as that in the Matrix series. They had the overtones right in the first film, shoved too many random references in during the second, and then blew it in the latter half of the third.
That being the case, I have no difficult in believing that the storyline for the first film was indeed based on someone else's work, and the storyline for the second and third was based on what someone could produce for $$$s, long after the first was a done deal. I'd love to know what really happened, though I doubt we ever will; even if the first one wasn't the brothers, somebody will make enough money to support them forever in an out-of-court settlement that also includes a non-disclosure clause.
Would that be Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil...?
But I'll forgive him for that because of his one-liner at the start of Reloaded, when he starts to fight the agents. It's not that funny on reflection, but at the time, I thought it was hilarious.
[Aged, wise voice] You're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view...
FWIW, a couple of the best fight scenes I've seen in movies have involved Filipino MA guys (real ones) playing with sticks. The speed they move at is awesome, you can make the sticks do the big spinny moves in a realistic context, and the body movement is surprisingly graceful and technically impressive. Sadly, I don't think we've got from Karate Kid to Kali Kid yet, although the gun kata scenes in last year's "Equilibrium" (another very good film) were on the right lines.
Take a look at the UK dial-up ISP market.
BT Internet (as they were before numerous name changes) are one of the big players. They advertised their dial-up (56k modem) service using the name "Anytime", and it was billed as unlimited access. What they didn't tell you was that your modem would be cut off after 2 hours (so great for games and big downloads, then), that if you were on-line for more than 12 hours out of 24 you'd immediately have your service terminated (according to large numbers of people on UK newsgroups) and that a few months later, "any time" would mean 150 hours/month and no more. And this is with a dial-up ISP whose service is crappy at the best of times. If half the universe didn't know my e-mail address from back when they were better than the other guys, I'd move in a heartbeat.
Bandwidth is pretty irrelevant if you can't get a connection.
And no, I can't get broadband.
I guess this depends on where you're coming from. In the UK, where it's quite normal for many people to pay bills by direct debit, every bank that uses the scheme provides the direct debit guarantee, which is a simple, effective and necessary safeguard for the system to be trustworthy. People do occasionally get overcharged for whatever reason, but the guarantee ensures they should suffer no long term ill effects, and I know of no-one who ever has.
'Course, it's much easier to prove that you've been overcharged if you've got a nice bill printed on utility company letterhead that disagrees with what left your account, and for this reason alone, my bills are all still the old-fashioned variety.
I completely take your point about wanting to control the standards; that's why I gave Sony as an example or a company that might do it. They already make TVs, audio gear, computers and so on, all themselves. If they could establish a definitive home entertainment kit, and get everyone buying their hubs, then everyone would be buying their other kit (or somebody else's compatible kit, giving them licensing income instead) and they'd be laughing all the way to the bank.
I agree entirely. A better way forward, looking at what works at present and ideas that have stood the test of time, is a combination of two things:
What amazes me is that none of the big cross-media types (Sony and their like) has yet developed a central "hub" technology, and standard interfaces to connect the various components that form part of any home entertainment or computer system today. The precedents are all there: using a PC or console as a central control system, connecting up your satellite/TV/video with SCART, and so on. Surely the money will be rolling in for whoever corners the market in connectivity technology for modular home entertainment/computer systems...
No. No, it won't.
The vast majority of works covered by copyright are not mainstream. For every Robbie Williams, there are a thousand small bands playing their local bar. For every Microsoft Word, there are a thousand back-end applications end users never see. For every Terminator 3 there are zillions of small, independently produced films.
The reason that people can afford to produce all these "lesser" works is that copyright means they get credit where it's due. The independent film may only show in a dozen cinemas across the country, but at least the people who put in the time and effort to make them get paid for all those showings.
In the software world, much of the back-end stuff is custom written in-house or contracted out. It often implements a company's business plans, and probably contains lots of trade secrets. If everyone's commercial rivals could just pick it up and take the good bits for themselves without compensation, you could argue that it would mean everyone benefitted from all the developments and things would progress faster if you like. I think a more realistic perspective is that no-one's going to invest large amounts into R&D to make that progress, because there'd be no commercial advantage in doing so, and thus no-one would benefit. Obviously, the reality would lie somewhere between these extremes, but claiming that all the bespoke development would happen by magic if no-one were paying for it simply isn't credible.
The problem with that reasoning, as I see it, is simply one of scale.
Red Hat produce one of the most popular and well-known OSS distributions in the world. Sure, a few people can make a living via alternative sources such as support and consultancy on a project like that (but note that even the big OSS projects have been known to ask for donations to keep them afloat, because they simply weren't generating enough revenue through those "alternative" means).
On the other hand, I bet you couldn't find more than a few thousand people in the whole world who are making a living from distributing software under such a free licence, and providing supporting services to make their money. There are probably more people than that making a living from writing software and distributing it under "non-free" agreements just in the city where I live.
The analogues of these arguments hold in other fields as well. It is hard to make a living as a professional musician if all you do is play small gigs at local bars and sell your home-made CDs afterwards. Some people can do it. Most people who play in that sort of world do it as a sideline and have another source of income to pay the bills.
On a more upbeat note, I think the success stories out there show that in the long run, our society could come back from the "must have something for nothing" low we've reached today. If the major media and technology companies could be forced to stop their abusive pricing policies, and people came to respect well made works, whether they be film, music, software or whatever, then maybe we could progress to a situation where it was the norm to release your work under some sort of free arrangement, but it was also the norm for those who benefitted to give fair compensation without being compelled to do so. Copyright would still serve useful purposes -- protecting things like the principles underlying the GPL, for example -- but it wouldn't be the big stick it so often turns into today.
Thanks for the feedback, particularly the newsgroup, which I didn't know about before.
Regarding the margins, I agree with you entirely on how the CSS should be interpreted. I've had chance to check my site in Moz 1.5 again now, and there is indeed a (small) gap between the dotted line displayed for the <hr> and the text above and below.
I had initially, and perhaps erroneously, attributed this to the spacing properties on the text either side (where line heights and such would cause a small gap themselves). Having zoomed in to the pixel level and calculated where everything should be according to my interpretation of the CSS standards, I suspect Mozilla is at least close to correct, however, and I take back most of the nasty things I was thinking about that particular bug fix. It's still undersized by a pixel or three, and a couple of the other dimensions seem to be ignored for some reason (a font size of 110% on my heading yields exactly the same size text as my default 20px Verdana in a paragraph, which doesn't help the condensed appearance), but apparently other browsers add vast amounts more spacing implicitly than I had realised.
Now if you could just stop the Password Manager randomly prompting for my e-mail account password every time I start up and every few minutes thereafter, when it already knows the correct one, that would be just fine and dandy... :-)
Right now, rather a lot of the rest of the world is as anti-US as they come. Even when governments such as the UK support an official pro-US line, a large part of the population doesn't.
I'm afraid this was inevitable as soon as the isolationist policies started coming in. Why the hell should the US, and its Great Corporations(TM)(C)(Patent pending), have more right to control something as universal as the Internet than everyone else? Strangely, everyone else doesn't agree with that sentiment.
One need only look at the papers this week to see where this came from: this time it's the predictable move to secure the financial gains from Iraq invasion (sorry... the "rebuilding effort") for US-based interests. The other week it was the steel money. Before that it was Kyoto. Before that it was the ICC. The list goes on: the current US government has waved two fingers at the rest of the world ever since it was installed, just as ICANN has waved two fingers at the rest of the Internet.
What's happening now is a classical situation where a large, powerful group gets too big for its boots and tries to go it alone: ultimately, they learn the truth that hurts, and have to eat their own dog food.
Thanks for the link. FWIW, my objection to the Bugzilla bug creation system is that it wants an e-mail address, but doesn't tell me (a) what will be sent to it, with a guarantee that spam won't, and (b) whether it will be publicly visible. You're never getting a real address under those conditions, and I can't be bothered to mess around with a freebie provider when I don't know what I'm going to have to do on page 2 anyway. I'm quite willing to provide helpful information about bugs if it's relatively safe and easy for me to do so; Bugzilla currently isn't.
I have the same opinion of actually contributing fixes, BTW. I'd love to see a couple of the other bugs no-one's claimed yet fixed, and I'm a professional software developer with web design experience, so hopefully I could help. Unfortunately, if you have a non-Linux system, the effort required to set up a development environment for Moz is... prohibitive. I'm sure it can be done, but I have two near-full-time jobs, and I'm not going to waste hours of my precious spare time trying to work out how.
Anyway, to abate your curiosity for the immediate future, the offending (validating CSS) is this:
We use the border attributes to get the dotted effect we want. Obviously there are other attributes that we probably should set explicitly, but until Moz 1.5, I hadn't found any recent browser on which this didn't work. There are some odd renderings for this I could understand, but a correctly displayed line with no space above or below isn't one of them.
And, for most of the world, they are right...
...as long as the modems go that fast in your country.
Not everyone has free local phone calls and 1MB/s or faster ADSL, y'know.
The table bug? I'm not sure whether it's the same one. You can see the one I'm talking about often when visiting Slashdot using Moz 1.5/Win: the right-hand side of the left column (with links to sections, etc.) overlaps the left-hand side of the main column, but a quick font resize fixes the layout. I stuck a note about this in my sig for a few days, and had several reports from other people with the same problem, so it's definitely a browser issue and not unique to my system.
Good to hear they're tidying up 1.6 anyway. I don't generally use beta builds, particularly of things like Moz where even the final releases haven't been great for stability recently, but I'll look forward to that particular irritation disappearing, if it is indeed the same bug.
I'm sorry, but in what way is honouring explicitly requested margin dimensions "horribly broken", and how is ignoring top and bottom margins because the left and right margins happen to be "auto" working correctly?
Are you arguing that an <hr> is an inline element, and as such margin specs don't apply? I think that would be, at best, an unhelpful approach: <hr> is pretty much universally used as a block element to divide material vertically.
If that's not your argument, I don't see how your claim doesn't conflict with the W3C standards, though if you could explain my mistake and how to fix it, I'm sure everyone reading my web site in Moz 1.5 would be grateful.
You give me an interface where I can file a simple bug without wondering what those 17,562 options mean and whether I've got them right, and I'll file you a bug report. Fair?
There were several unfortunate bugs that crept in with 1.5, and as far as I'm aware haven't been fixed yet, e.g.,
These are annoyances more than critical faults, but bring down the general quality. Given that the functionality used to work until 1.3 or 1.4 in each case, they're also regressions, which suggest weaknesses in the code introduced inadvertently and best fixed before building on it further for Thunder/Firebird.
It could also be the issue of profile migration. AFAIK, there are still no solid tools available to move a profile from Moz to the next generation alternatives, nor any easy way to move back if you don't like the change. The Thunderbird download pages are covered in warnings about this. If you're relying on Moz for more than toy use, for example if you have thousands of e-mails filed away that you want to keep, that alone might be enough to prevent you considering an upgrade, and thus to justify continued development of the original Mozilla tools in parallel with the new work.
It's interesting to read this thread. Cliff says in his editorial:
Almost all of the readers' comments, however, boil down to one or more of the following.
You're not the only one. In fact, some research strongly suggests that users discount any text on a web page that comes across as marketese, even if it's not explicitly in an ad.
OK, let's suppose for a moment that all Internet activity is traceable under judicial supervision by the legal authorities, and no-one else.
Now, the following people will have to take responsibility for their actions, and one way or another, those actions will stop:
and so the list continues.
That's a whole lotta benefit for giving up true anonymity in favour of legitimate traceability on the same terms as you'd have it in real life.
Anonymity's only real benefit is that it lets you make a genuine complaint without fear of reprisal. Of course, no-one sensible will take an anonymous source seriously; how do you know that girl was an ethnic Albanian, and not a spook working for the other side?
Actually, the big problem is that so many people do take it seriously, hence all the problems listed above. With freedom of speech must come responsibility for what you say. It does in the real world, so why should you get away with it on the Internet?
No, then you'd never see another version of Windows. Or Linux. Or Microsoft Office. Or OpenOffice. Or any mainstream software produced by anyone, ever.
Where did Brook get that idea from? The Bill you mention is currently awaiting Royal Assent (i.e., it has effectively passed the legislature and will soon become law), but I see nothing obvious that would support the claim by Brook that you quoted. Perhaps I'm missing something -- I certainly didn't read it all or in any great detail -- or maybe their concerns were addressed in later debate after the article you linked to was written.
Either way, that position is completely counter to the prevailing public opinion here, and any law attempting to do that would be taken about as seriously as the current proposals to reform tuition fees, i.e., zip, nada, zilch, go directly to opposition front benches, do not pass laws, do not collect Prime Minister's salary. It would also be quite remarkable that such an absurd piece of legislation made it through a year in Parliament without a high profile discussion about it in the media.
Can you provide a citation from the final wording of the Bill that supports the silliness you mentioned?
Not to doubt you or anything, but that sounds pretty heavy. Who's trying so hard to assassinate a telecomms regulator? I've worked in the business, and never found that the regulators had much real power, so it would seem an odd choice on the face of it...
As far as I'm aware, they all still require multiple nearby base stations. Typically, there's not much directional about the comms at those stations; it would be unreliable anyway, given the nature of mobile phone signals. Hence you still need to triangulate, or use some variation on the theme. The question is more the accuracy with which you can do it.
IOWs, these services work much better in some places than others. Not a great surprise, given the nature of mobile phones, but worth pointing out, particularly if they're being advertised as a way to track missing things.
They also need the mobile to be switched on, of course. Again, pretty obvious, but a fairly significant drawback if it were claimed to be useful in cases of abduction.
(Incidentally, to the AC grandparent: at least on the major networks I've had experience with, the system hasn't automatically triangulated in the past. The switch to a new base station is indicated simply by the relative signal strengths on some sort of control channel; when the signal from your current station gets too weak, you switch to a more viable alternative if there's one available.)