> If you do dispute the casual relationship between the dietary change and corresponding reduction of tendonitis
symptoms, what alternate explanation would you offer?
That it's highly probable that your tendonitis may have gotten better all by itself.
I chose the "tobacco cures the common cold" for a reason -- many people are of the opinion that taking antibiotics for a cold is a good way to cure it. If the cold is caused by a virus, as opposed to bacterial, antibiotics are useless. The overwhleming majority of colds are caused by viruses - they're self-limiting infections that go away after 7-10 days.
Joe Sixpack feels sick for 4-5 days, so he goes to the doctor and beg and screams for antibiotics. The doctor relents, prescribes, and wow, within three days of taking the antibiotics, Joe's feeling better. "Gee, those antibiotics really cleared up my cold! My doctor is the man!"
The fact is, there's a 90% chance that Joe would have been feeling better by days 7-8 with or without the antibiotics.
In your case, the pain of tendonitis may have caused you to favor the wrist (i.e. "It hurts when I do this." "Don't do that!") or do things that would otherwise alleviate your symptoms, with or without the dietary change.
Not to say that the Western diet is healthy, or that the diet change you made wasn't a Good Thing. Just to say that it probably didn't cure your tendonitis.
(I suppose you could eat a bunch of Big Macs for a week and see if it comes back... but even skeptical me wouldn't recommend that. Eating nothing but Big Macs for a week would make me yearn for tendonitis.:-)
> Should I voluntarily give up my Fourth Amendment right when I drive my car? I guess I did give that up when I
got my license and titled my car.
No, you didn't. All you did was agree to be breath-tested (depending on what state you're in) at an officer's discretion. You can still refuse the breath test, but you've agreed that refusal to take a breath test has the same consequences as a DUI conviction.
> What about when I walk down the street? After all, if I don't want to be
searched I could voluntarily return to my home never to leave again.
Not the same thing. There are no signs posted on the sidewalk that say "Entry to the sidewalk constitutes consent to search of your person and posessions".
Next time you're in an airport, look around the security checkpoint. You will find a sign that says access beyond the security checkpoint constitutes consent to search.
> If they are using [BodyScan] to scan domestic passengers, I'd cry foul. However, if they are
being used at international airports as an aid for Customs Agents, then I'm all for it.
I'll disagree with you here -- you voluntarily give up your Fourth Amendment right against search as a condition of entering the secured area of the airport.
This applies for domestic and international flights, and the signage in front of the security checkpoint is pretty clear. In exchange for the right to claim your boarding pass, you agree to be subject to search of your property (baggage X-ray, baggage bomb/dope-sniffer wand) and person (walk-through metal detector, metal-detector wand, pat-down and beyond at guard's discretion).
It's all in the fine print of the airline contract, and in the bold print of the sign in front of the checkpoint. If you decide you don't want to be searched, you're free to turn away from the checkpoint and not board an aircraft.
> I assume that based on this judgement, van Eck phreaking (as featured in Cryptonomicon, and elsewhere) would also
be considered illegal.
...because this technology is not widely-available to the public, you're right. Without a warrant, Officer Donut can't snoop your EM emissions.
Of course, at present, this technology is so not-publicly-available, that Officer Donut ain't the guy who's gonna be doing the snooping anyways. (If you're doing something for which your opponent is sniffing EM leakage, odds are your opponent doesn't need a warrant, 'cuz you're not gonna be going to trial;-)
> Are there any legal references to van Eck phreaking?
Probably not for another 10-20 years.
After that point, it may be sufficiently declassified that Officer Donut will be allowed to use it with a warrant, and yesterday's Supreme Court ruling will apply to it.
> It is possible that Republicans opposed a
Clinton-nominated judge who was black, and for liberals the only possible explanation of this is that all Republicans are
racists. Oddly, this reasoning doesn't seem to apply to Democrats who opposed Clarence Thomas.
Well, of course. To the Democrats, Clarence Thomas' sexual harassment of his subordinate was a Very Bad Thing. But Bill Clinton's sexual harassment of his subordinates was Just Fine.
(As a conservative, I can only conclude that all Democrats are racists too;-)
> The very institution of the Supreme Court is disheartening. The constitution is nothing more than whatever five of nine old
men in Washington think it is at the given moment.
Whoa, you mean you'd prefer the Constitution to mean whatever the Executive Branch thinks it means today? Or the Legislative Branch?
> The real truth is that if Antonin Scalia's Lincoln Continental was hit a by Mac truck while
he was boffing Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the back seat
Thanks for that image. I really needed that.
I'm off to visit goatse.cx. To numb the pain.
Good point. Yes, it's client-side, but I wonder how many URLs in msdnodc.xml are really URLs (http://hardcoded.url.com) and how many are URLs to redirectors controlled by Micros~1.
> You could
always write a little script that detected whether a smart-tag-capable browser was accessing your page,
and redirect it to an "error" page, instructing the reader to get a different browser before visiting the
page again.
Or better yet, an ActiveX thingy that'd overwrite msdnodc.xml (the client-side file that controls smart-tag appearance) with "appropriate" smart tags.
Wouldn't be a trojan, technically speaking. You'd just pop up a dialog box saying (in typically Microsoftian language):
"This link will upgrade the file that contains your smart links. Do you want to upgrade your smart links? (Yes/No)"
> I'm sure that the meta-tag to turn off the Smart-Tags will change to a meta-tag to turn the
Smart-Tags on for the page.
Which reminds me, what's up with the opt-out crap?
(Oh right, this is Micros~1, and anticompetitive practices are their bread and butter.)
The right way to implement this crap would be for IE6 to look for a meta tag to turn ON smart tags. No meta tag? No smart tags.
This way, only site authors who wanted smart-tagging turned on would have to do work to support it. You like smart tags? Opt-in and make your site support 'em.
But the Micros~1 way was to make every site maintainer on earth jump through a hoop to add a meta tag to turn it off. Don't like the feature? It's opt-out - as in "tough titty, we're turning the smart tags on for your page unless you add the tags to make sure our browser behaves normally again."
> The redirects are defined in a client-side file called msdnodc.xml with a clearly defined and
well-documented DTD and plenty of documentation on the MSDN website.
Oh, that's fine then.
I mean, bundling IE as the default browser didn't do any harm to Netscape and other competitors, did it?
The reason msn.com is one of the top web "properties" is because most users are too clueless to realize their home page can be changed from the default.
Do you seriously expect anyone to believe that Joe Sixpack is gonna have sufficient clue to find and edit XML to remove smart tags he doesn't like and replace them with ones of his own choosing?
The whole point of "smart tags" is that they're "smart" -- as in "they do the thinking for the user". (As in, "they dumb down the user", but that's another XP thread entirely.)
>
> No longer will we need to be constrained by the linking laziness of web authors:)
Reminds me, I should write a proxy to detect Shakespeare and upgrade it to current slang.
"Yo, like, should I put a cap in my ass, or not? Dat's what I gotta aks myself."
- Hamlet.
No longer will we need to be constrained by the linguistic laziness of 16th-century authors.
When I write a web page, I, in my capacity as author and/or editor, decide what terms are worth (or not worth) linking to other sites.
If you don't like the way I write my websites, you can go fuck yourself and read someone else's stuff.
By the way, there wasn't one single hyperlink in your original post that suggested that you (or even funnier yet, an automated agent) somehow knew what the "right number" of hyperlinks per page was. What's up with that? Are you lazy, incompetent, or both?
> I would like to entreat the guiding hands behind Freenet, however, to consider the greater audience out there.
As would I.
Check out this example of what I see as a Bad Idea.
If the goal is to bring anonymous publication into the mainstream, example filenames like "Britney Spears Felch.jpg" are... well, unhelpful.
Funny as hell? Yes, to the author, and speaking as one with a sick sense of humor, I thought it was pretty damn funny too.
But is it the first thing you'd want your Congresscritter to see when he decides to find out "what this free net thing is all about?" after the local Fundie-sponsored lobby group complains that FreeNet has to be banned for the sake of the chilllldrun?
C'mon, folks, let's get real here.
milosevic-evidence.jpg - good
95_theses.txt - even better
britfelch.jpg - not bloody likely
> Wearable computing for example needs an interface for information retrieval that can be acessed by multiple
means. A voice request "compute my portfolio value if I invest $5000 in IBM in 1 hour" would need a complex
search algorithm designed to weave multiple threads of information.
Shit, I don't care if it's voice-based or not, if I can know the value of $5000 worth of IBM stock an hour from now, I want it.
(Hell, even if it costs a million bucks, all I have to do is use it often enough and it'll pay for itself;-)
> You can also change your diet; the modern Western diet is skewed towards promoting inflammation.
Blaming the Western Diet for all that ails you sets off my quackometer;-)
>
I've changed my diet, and my
tendonitis has gone down considerably. Typing less would eliminate the problem, but hey... > >
http://www.drweil.com/database/display/0,1412,72,0 0.html
Stephen Barret (operator of Quackwatch) on Weil in an interview is particularly caustic:
Barrett: His advice is an unsortable mixture of sense and nonsense. For example, he says in one of his books that bloodroot, a caustic herb which burns
your skin, can kill skin-cancer cells without injuring the surrounding normal cells. That's absurd. It burns everything it touches. It can't tell the difference.
On his Web site, which is owned by Time magazine, he has a questionnaire you fill out, and he'll tell you what ten vitamin and herbal products to take.
And there's no foundation for such recommendations. Then you click on a link, mid you'll go to an online "store" to buy them. The "Ask Dr. Weil" Web
site is brought to you by The Vitamin Shoppe, a company paying over a million dollars for the privilege of placing its link next to Weil's stupid advice.
Color me skeptical.
(I don't dispute that your symptoms went away after you changed your diet. I do dispute that this implies a causal relationship between your dietary change and your tendonitis relief.)
Me? I had RSI in my right hand from wanking far too often. I tried my left hand, but it wasn't the same. So I got a g/f who'd give me head six times a day while I reconditioned the muscles in my right hand by repeatedly lifting 12-oz weights (usually Guinness, but sometimes Murphy's Stout), and the pain went away after a few weeks. Alcohol consumption and blowjobs are the obvious cure for RSI. (Just don't tell her I'm cured!)
> the VDT gave off more radiation when it was turned off than when it was turned on.
Interesting - and it makes sense. Turn it off, you measure the background/ambient radiation. Turn it on, and perhaps some sort of Deep Magic from EM fields around the monitor is deflecting stray betas (i.e. electrons) away from the detector.
(While I think RSI is a real, albeit preventable problem, the "radiation" scare from VDTs was hogwash, perpetrated by scaremongers who didn't know (or deliberately obscured, because they knew the public didn't know) the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.)
What was important about my atrocious posture at work was that (for me), it's comfortable.
If it ceases to be comfortable, I change it or rejig my workspace until it is comfortable.
I'd also like to modify my conclusion somewhat. I'd originally written: >
Conclusion: RSI and other ergo problems are real. They are also entirely preventable.
I'd like to add one thing -- RSI is entirely preventable in my office.
A few posts ago, someone made a comment to the effect that many RSI sufferers were just lookin' for a settlement. While I somewhat sympathize with the sentiment, I'd like to take issue with it.
While I have no doubt that some RSI sufferers are (I'm using the stereotype for a reason, bear with me) lazy, good-fer-nuthin' civil-servant clerks or other data entry drones just lookin' for a fat disability check or settlement, I'd point out that it's precisely those low-skill, high-stress, Dilbertian-work-environment jobs where the workers are the least likely to be able to fix their ergonomic problems.
At my office, I'll ask a few cubemates if they hate fluorescents. If enough of us in a given cube-grouping agree they suck, we come to a consensus about which bulbs we can yank without disturbing those who do like lots of light, and we yank the offending bulbs. Likewise, if there's glare from a nearby window making it hard to read the monitor, we block the window. Or we move the gear around the cube so the window's no longer a factor. Presto-changeo, no more eyestrain.
Doing either of these things at a government workplace would probably be grounds for termination.
I have a hunch that for RSI, it's the same deal. My posture sux0rz, but I feel more comfortable that way than The Right Way? My employer doesn't care. I get tired and want to walk away from the desk for a while? I will.
If I worked for the government, I'd probably have the Ergo Police writing me up for violations and forcing me to configure my workspace in a way that would give me an RSI, and my manager writing me up for taking 10.5 minutes, rather than 4.2 minutes, whenever I take a dump.
The next time you think most RSI complainants are BSing, consider the working environment of the typical RSI complainant.
If the typical low-level gummint data entry drone is more likely (by virtue of being $STEREOTYPICAL) to exaggerate their symptoms, keep in mind that (by virtue of being supervised by equally-$STEREOTYPICAL managers!) they're also more likely to have the symptoms as a direct result of their employer's poor working environment.
> I have always had terrible posture when typing at my computer. Considering the way I sit, and the fact that my keyboard is not an
ergonomic keyboard, the fact that I do not have RSI leads me to believe that a lot of the problem is somewhat hysterical. Every once
in a while, after a long session of typing in a bad position, I will feel some pain. If I simply take a break for a few minutes, or adjust
my position, I am fine.
Ditto here.
Most frequent problem: pain on the back of my right wrist caused by excessive mouse activity during marathon sessions (2-3 days of 6-12 hours) of real-time-strategy games, which require repetitive and accruate drag-and-drop operations.
Most effective solution: Stop when it starts to hurt. Duh. I lay off the games for a week. Pain goes away within 24 hours.
At the orkplace, my posture is atrocious - wrists resting on the desk in front of my non-ergo keyboard. Screen is dead-center at eye-level, 18 inches away from me. Seat is typically tilted backwards by about 5-10 degrees. Feet are resting on a footrest, as opposed to dangling in midair (OK, I do one thing right!). Elbows typically sit on chair arms. 8 hours a day, 10 years, no problems. Lighting? I'm a cave-dweller, yanking out fluorescents on sight. The 21" screen provides most of the light for my workspace. 1280x1024 and small fonts, woo-hoo! More stuff to read on each screenful of information. (OK, I do one other thing right - rather than reading screens in landscape mode, e.g. 80x24, I read in portrait, e.g. 80x80 strips. Eyes scan down the screen, not across. Feels like reading a book.)
Conclusion: RSI and other ergo problems are real. They are also entirely preventable.
> How about during
downloads? You can point ANY application that plays MP3 files (Winamp, mplayer2.exe, XMMS, etc.)
to an MP3 file that has been partially downloaded by a download utility (specifically, one that puts the
file in the final destination even while it's still downloading), and it'll play perfectly, up until the current
end of the file, at which point you can play again, and it'll be further down because of the download.
Good point.
If I run a streaming radio station, it looks like I owe Thompson $BIGNUM bucks. Clearly, I need to stop running a streaming radio station.
So I'll say "Click here to download the first segment. Please wait 5 minutes", and it spends 5 minutes downloading in full the first 10 minutes of my show, and then calls WinAMP to play back the complete file, stored locally on my hard drive called "1200-1209h.mp3"...
...and in the background, my application starts downloading the next file, "1210-1219h.mp3", which takes another 5 minutes to download, and 10 minutes to play...
...well, I'm not really "streaming", am I? I mean, you're listening to an MP3 stored on your hard drive, and you happen to be downloading another one while you listen to the first one. Thompson sure as fsck can't patent that.
> You only have to enable ActiveX control downloading in order to install
Bugnosis -- you can disable it after installation. That makes it really no
different than downloading an.exe from us.
So why won't they just let me download the.EXE and run it at my leisure?
Everyone who shows up at my cubicle at work marvels at how "fast" my web surfing is.
It's amazing what a difference it makes on some sites when you're downloading 3K of text content, 20K of surrounding Javshit (which I've disabled), and about 20K of site graphics, but at least I can skip the 60K of banner ads.
(Most of the time, I surf with images off and skip the site graphics too:)
> The government is passing laws that you must give your real identity when sending email... This is going to set a president
againt future legislation... Next anonymous emailers will go, then companies like yahoo mail will have to ask for identification.
This ruling does no such thing.
Quoth the court:
When a spammer
distorts the point of origin or transmission path of the message, e-mail
recipients cannot promptly and effectively respond to the message (and
thereby opt out of future mailings); [...and many other costs are imposed upon the user. Spam is like getting collect calls from telemarketers and you can't refuse the charges. This cost-shifting is a Bad Thing ]"
If the headers weren't forged (i.e., if the spammer had sent them through yahoo.com, even if he used a pseudonymous account at Yahoo), recipients could reply to him and effectively opt-out. (Not that this would be a smart thing to do, but I digress.)
This is a precedent against forgery with intent to deceive, not anonymity.
If I mail you through an anonymous remailer, the headers are stripped and re-inserted to facilitate anonymity, not to deceive you about my identity. Indeed, I'm quite capable of sending a PGP block through an anon-remailer that proves to you who I am, while making it impossible for any other reader of the message to know who I am or read its contents.
The talk about the "Pike balancing test" is important here:
If a
legitimate local purpose is found, then the question becomes one of degree.
And the extent of the burden that will be tolerated will of course depend
on the nature of the local interest involved, and on whether it could be
promoted as well with a lesser impact on interstate activities
WA spam law:
Legitimate local purpose: Stopping the cost-shifting burden imposed on ISPs, users, and owners of forged domain names. By requiring non-forged headers in spam, we decrease the economic value of spamming, and thereby reduce the amount of spam, and the amount of shifted cost.
Could we do it with less impact on interstate activities? Maybe, but probably not. The impact isn't that large because it applies to in-state and out-of-state spammers.
Your supposed "you must always use your real identity when mailing anyone, anonymous remailers will be illegal" law:
Local public interest: Not much that I can see. What's threatened by anonymous mail? OK, trot out the usual "Druggies, pedophiles and terrorists use it", but any lawyer will also tell you that anonymous speech is protected. (Anonymous commercial speech, much less so!)
Could this also be done with less impact on interstate commerce? Well, probably not.
The balance here could go either way, depending on the judge. But it's a much closer call to make. The cost-shifting imposed by spam is well-established, and has no public benefit; prohibiting it is (by definition) a Good Thing. Pseudonymous (and anonymous) speech, while they can be abused (the Government will trot out the usual Three Horsemen: terrorists, druggies, and pedophiles), also has a rich history in our country - and protecting pseudonymous and anonymous speech has a public benefit. It's far from clear that a law prohibiting all anon/pseudon speech has sufficient public benefit to justify any impact on commerce whatsoever.
Basically, it's even farther from clear that the Pike test would apply to your proposed law, because the First Amendment issues might trump Commerce Clause issues altogether.
(And to the obligatory spammer who says "but my spam is frea speach", I point out that non-commercial speech has consistenly been afforded greater First Amendment protection than commercial speech. Deal.)
> The Washington Supreme Court held
that requiring accurate identification information actually facilitates interstate commerce rather than burdening it.
Whoa, a court exhibits clue! Not lying to your customers is a Good Thing!
> The decision is interesting, because several state internet
censorship laws have been struck down due to their effects on residents of other states - it's worth reading for anyone interested in internet legal issues.
Interesting reading, yes, but I don't see the interstate commerce clause implications here as having any bearing on censorship cases.
Censorship can be bad for interstate commerce. 50 states, thousands of communities, and thousands of decency standards. (How can anyone sell pr0n across state lines in that environment?;-)
Not lying to your customers about your business is good for interstate commerce.
IANAL, and courts have made some pretty illogical decisions in the past, but I don't see how requiring someone not to forge headers (which has been ruled as something that facilitates interstate commerce) strengthens the (IMHO insane) argument that a patchwork of mutually-conflicting decency standards (whether in law books or in RSACi-style webpage ratings) also facilitates interstate commerce. It's a total non-sequitur.
> Is this some sort of cruel fun, to take somebody with obvious mental problems, and gather around them to make fun of them?
Yes, it is.
Doesn't make it any less fun;-)
Schadenfreude is an art form. For an example, watch Jerry Springer, particularly the last 20 minutes of the show, in which audience members rediscover the Elizabethan art of bear-baiting.
(Side note. Yeah, we gotta get an interview with Jack Chick. I like this "Loon of the Month" idea.)
Slashdot Mirror
That it's highly probable that your tendonitis may have gotten better all by itself.
I chose the "tobacco cures the common cold" for a reason -- many people are of the opinion that taking antibiotics for a cold is a good way to cure it. If the cold is caused by a virus, as opposed to bacterial, antibiotics are useless. The overwhleming majority of colds are caused by viruses - they're self-limiting infections that go away after 7-10 days.
Joe Sixpack feels sick for 4-5 days, so he goes to the doctor and beg and screams for antibiotics. The doctor relents, prescribes, and wow, within three days of taking the antibiotics, Joe's feeling better. "Gee, those antibiotics really cleared up my cold! My doctor is the man!"
The fact is, there's a 90% chance that Joe would have been feeling better by days 7-8 with or without the antibiotics.
In your case, the pain of tendonitis may have caused you to favor the wrist (i.e. "It hurts when I do this." "Don't do that!") or do things that would otherwise alleviate your symptoms, with or without the dietary change.
Not to say that the Western diet is healthy, or that the diet change you made wasn't a Good Thing. Just to say that it probably didn't cure your tendonitis.
(I suppose you could eat a bunch of Big Macs for a week and see if it comes back... but even skeptical me wouldn't recommend that. Eating nothing but Big Macs for a week would make me yearn for tendonitis. :-)
No, you didn't. All you did was agree to be breath-tested (depending on what state you're in) at an officer's discretion. You can still refuse the breath test, but you've agreed that refusal to take a breath test has the same consequences as a DUI conviction.
> What about when I walk down the street? After all, if I don't want to be searched I could voluntarily return to my home never to leave again.
Not the same thing. There are no signs posted on the sidewalk that say "Entry to the sidewalk constitutes consent to search of your person and posessions".
Next time you're in an airport, look around the security checkpoint. You will find a sign that says access beyond the security checkpoint constitutes consent to search.
I'll disagree with you here -- you voluntarily give up your Fourth Amendment right against search as a condition of entering the secured area of the airport.
This applies for domestic and international flights, and the signage in front of the security checkpoint is pretty clear. In exchange for the right to claim your boarding pass, you agree to be subject to search of your property (baggage X-ray, baggage bomb/dope-sniffer wand) and person (walk-through metal detector, metal-detector wand, pat-down and beyond at guard's discretion).
It's all in the fine print of the airline contract, and in the bold print of the sign in front of the checkpoint. If you decide you don't want to be searched, you're free to turn away from the checkpoint and not board an aircraft.
Of course, at present, this technology is so not-publicly-available, that Officer Donut ain't the guy who's gonna be doing the snooping anyways. (If you're doing something for which your opponent is sniffing EM leakage, odds are your opponent doesn't need a warrant, 'cuz you're not gonna be going to trial ;-)
> Are there any legal references to van Eck phreaking?
Probably not for another 10-20 years.
After that point, it may be sufficiently declassified that Officer Donut will be allowed to use it with a warrant, and yesterday's Supreme Court ruling will apply to it.
Well, of course. To the Democrats, Clarence Thomas' sexual harassment of his subordinate was a Very Bad Thing. But Bill Clinton's sexual harassment of his subordinates was Just Fine.
(As a conservative, I can only conclude that all Democrats are racists too ;-)
Whoa, you mean you'd prefer the Constitution to mean whatever the Executive Branch thinks it means today? Or the Legislative Branch?
> The real truth is that if Antonin Scalia's Lincoln Continental was hit a by Mac truck while he was boffing Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the back seat
Thanks for that image. I really needed that. I'm off to visit goatse.cx. To numb the pain.
Good point. Yes, it's client-side, but I wonder how many URLs in msdnodc.xml are really URLs (http://hardcoded.url.com) and how many are URLs to redirectors controlled by Micros~1.
(Any of you XP-beta-h4x0ring d00dz know offhand?)
Or better yet, an ActiveX thingy that'd overwrite msdnodc.xml (the client-side file that controls smart-tag appearance) with "appropriate" smart tags.
Wouldn't be a trojan, technically speaking. You'd just pop up a dialog box saying (in typically Microsoftian language):
"This link will upgrade the file that contains your smart links. Do you want to upgrade your smart links? (Yes/No)"
(OK, I'm in an evil mood today. Deal.)
Which reminds me, what's up with the opt-out crap?
(Oh right, this is Micros~1, and anticompetitive practices are their bread and butter.)
The right way to implement this crap would be for IE6 to look for a meta tag to turn ON smart tags. No meta tag? No smart tags.
This way, only site authors who wanted smart-tagging turned on would have to do work to support it. You like smart tags? Opt-in and make your site support 'em.
But the Micros~1 way was to make every site maintainer on earth jump through a hoop to add a meta tag to turn it off. Don't like the feature? It's opt-out - as in "tough titty, we're turning the smart tags on for your page unless you add the tags to make sure our browser behaves normally again."
Fuck 'em.
Oh, that's fine then.
I mean, bundling IE as the default browser didn't do any harm to Netscape and other competitors, did it?
The reason msn.com is one of the top web "properties" is because most users are too clueless to realize their home page can be changed from the default.
Do you seriously expect anyone to believe that Joe Sixpack is gonna have sufficient clue to find and edit XML to remove smart tags he doesn't like and replace them with ones of his own choosing?
The whole point of "smart tags" is that they're "smart" -- as in "they do the thinking for the user". (As in, "they dumb down the user", but that's another XP thread entirely.)
Reminds me, I should write a proxy to detect Shakespeare and upgrade it to current slang.
"Yo, like, should I put a cap in my ass, or not? Dat's what I gotta aks myself."
- Hamlet.
No longer will we need to be constrained by the linguistic laziness of 16th-century authors.
When I write a web page, I, in my capacity as author and/or editor, decide what terms are worth (or not worth) linking to other sites.
If you don't like the way I write my websites, you can go fuck yourself and read someone else's stuff.
By the way, there wasn't one single hyperlink in your original post that suggested that you (or even funnier yet, an automated agent) somehow knew what the "right number" of hyperlinks per page was. What's up with that? Are you lazy, incompetent, or both?
As would I.
Check out this example of what I see as a Bad Idea.
If the goal is to bring anonymous publication into the mainstream, example filenames like "Britney Spears Felch.jpg" are... well, unhelpful.
Funny as hell? Yes, to the author, and speaking as one with a sick sense of humor, I thought it was pretty damn funny too.
But is it the first thing you'd want your Congresscritter to see when he decides to find out "what this free net thing is all about?" after the local Fundie-sponsored lobby group complains that FreeNet has to be banned for the sake of the chilllldrun?
C'mon, folks, let's get real here.
milosevic-evidence.jpg - good
95_theses.txt - even better
britfelch.jpg - not bloody likely
Shit, I don't care if it's voice-based or not, if I can know the value of $5000 worth of IBM stock an hour from now, I want it.
(Hell, even if it costs a million bucks, all I have to do is use it often enough and it'll pay for itself ;-)
Blaming the Western Diet for all that ails you sets off my quackometer ;-)
> I've changed my diet, and my tendonitis has gone down considerably. Typing less would eliminate the problem, but hey...0 0.html
> > http://www.drweil.com/database/display/0,1412,72,
You mean this Dr. Andrew Weil, as featured on Quackwatch.
Stephen Barret (operator of Quackwatch) on Weil in an interview is particularly caustic:
Color me skeptical.
(I don't dispute that your symptoms went away after you changed your diet. I do dispute that this implies a causal relationship between your dietary change and your tendonitis relief.)
Me? I had RSI in my right hand from wanking far too often. I tried my left hand, but it wasn't the same. So I got a g/f who'd give me head six times a day while I reconditioned the muscles in my right hand by repeatedly lifting 12-oz weights (usually Guinness, but sometimes Murphy's Stout), and the pain went away after a few weeks. Alcohol consumption and blowjobs are the obvious cure for RSI. (Just don't tell her I'm cured!)
Interesting - and it makes sense. Turn it off, you measure the background/ambient radiation. Turn it on, and perhaps some sort of Deep Magic from EM fields around the monitor is deflecting stray betas (i.e. electrons) away from the detector.
(While I think RSI is a real, albeit preventable problem, the "radiation" scare from VDTs was hogwash, perpetrated by scaremongers who didn't know (or deliberately obscured, because they knew the public didn't know) the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.)
What was important about my atrocious posture at work was that (for me), it's comfortable.
If it ceases to be comfortable, I change it or rejig my workspace until it is comfortable.
I'd also like to modify my conclusion somewhat. I'd originally written:
> Conclusion: RSI and other ergo problems are real. They are also entirely preventable.
I'd like to add one thing -- RSI is entirely preventable in my office.
A few posts ago, someone made a comment to the effect that many RSI sufferers were just lookin' for a settlement. While I somewhat sympathize with the sentiment, I'd like to take issue with it.
While I have no doubt that some RSI sufferers are (I'm using the stereotype for a reason, bear with me) lazy, good-fer-nuthin' civil-servant clerks or other data entry drones just lookin' for a fat disability check or settlement, I'd point out that it's precisely those low-skill, high-stress, Dilbertian-work-environment jobs where the workers are the least likely to be able to fix their ergonomic problems.
At my office, I'll ask a few cubemates if they hate fluorescents. If enough of us in a given cube-grouping agree they suck, we come to a consensus about which bulbs we can yank without disturbing those who do like lots of light, and we yank the offending bulbs. Likewise, if there's glare from a nearby window making it hard to read the monitor, we block the window. Or we move the gear around the cube so the window's no longer a factor. Presto-changeo, no more eyestrain.
Doing either of these things at a government workplace would probably be grounds for termination.
I have a hunch that for RSI, it's the same deal. My posture sux0rz, but I feel more comfortable that way than The Right Way? My employer doesn't care. I get tired and want to walk away from the desk for a while? I will.
If I worked for the government, I'd probably have the Ergo Police writing me up for violations and forcing me to configure my workspace in a way that would give me an RSI, and my manager writing me up for taking 10.5 minutes, rather than 4.2 minutes, whenever I take a dump.
The next time you think most RSI complainants are BSing, consider the working environment of the typical RSI complainant.
If the typical low-level gummint data entry drone is more likely (by virtue of being $STEREOTYPICAL) to exaggerate their symptoms, keep in mind that (by virtue of being supervised by equally-$STEREOTYPICAL managers!) they're also more likely to have the symptoms as a direct result of their employer's poor working environment.
Ditto here.
Most frequent problem: pain on the back of my right wrist caused by excessive mouse activity during marathon sessions (2-3 days of 6-12 hours) of real-time-strategy games, which require repetitive and accruate drag-and-drop operations.
Most effective solution: Stop when it starts to hurt. Duh. I lay off the games for a week. Pain goes away within 24 hours.
At the orkplace, my posture is atrocious - wrists resting on the desk in front of my non-ergo keyboard. Screen is dead-center at eye-level, 18 inches away from me. Seat is typically tilted backwards by about 5-10 degrees. Feet are resting on a footrest, as opposed to dangling in midair (OK, I do one thing right!). Elbows typically sit on chair arms. 8 hours a day, 10 years, no problems. Lighting? I'm a cave-dweller, yanking out fluorescents on sight. The 21" screen provides most of the light for my workspace. 1280x1024 and small fonts, woo-hoo! More stuff to read on each screenful of information. (OK, I do one other thing right - rather than reading screens in landscape mode, e.g. 80x24, I read in portrait, e.g. 80x80 strips. Eyes scan down the screen, not across. Feels like reading a book.)
Conclusion: RSI and other ergo problems are real. They are also entirely preventable.
Well, at least I'm more likely to find a use for that than I am for the twelve :Cue:Cats I have laying around the shop.
I say Digital :Convergence is getting better, not worse ;-)
Good point.
If I run a streaming radio station, it looks like I owe Thompson $BIGNUM bucks. Clearly, I need to stop running a streaming radio station.
So I'll say "Click here to download the first segment. Please wait 5 minutes", and it spends 5 minutes downloading in full the first 10 minutes of my show, and then calls WinAMP to play back the complete file, stored locally on my hard drive called "1200-1209h.mp3"...
So why won't they just let me download the .EXE and run it at my leisure?
Another Junkbuster plug here.
Everyone who shows up at my cubicle at work marvels at how "fast" my web surfing is.
It's amazing what a difference it makes on some sites when you're downloading 3K of text content, 20K of surrounding Javshit (which I've disabled), and about 20K of site graphics, but at least I can skip the 60K of banner ads.
(Most of the time, I surf with images off and skip the site graphics too :)
This ruling does no such thing.
Quoth the court:
If the headers weren't forged (i.e., if the spammer had sent them through yahoo.com, even if he used a pseudonymous account at Yahoo), recipients could reply to him and effectively opt-out. (Not that this would be a smart thing to do, but I digress.)
This is a precedent against forgery with intent to deceive, not anonymity.
If I mail you through an anonymous remailer, the headers are stripped and re-inserted to facilitate anonymity, not to deceive you about my identity. Indeed, I'm quite capable of sending a PGP block through an anon-remailer that proves to you who I am, while making it impossible for any other reader of the message to know who I am or read its contents.
The talk about the "Pike balancing test" is important here:
WA spam law:
Your supposed "you must always use your real identity when mailing anyone, anonymous remailers will be illegal" law:
The balance here could go either way, depending on the judge. But it's a much closer call to make. The cost-shifting imposed by spam is well-established, and has no public benefit; prohibiting it is (by definition) a Good Thing. Pseudonymous (and anonymous) speech, while they can be abused (the Government will trot out the usual Three Horsemen: terrorists, druggies, and pedophiles), also has a rich history in our country - and protecting pseudonymous and anonymous speech has a public benefit. It's far from clear that a law prohibiting all anon/pseudon speech has sufficient public benefit to justify any impact on commerce whatsoever.
Basically, it's even farther from clear that the Pike test would apply to your proposed law, because the First Amendment issues might trump Commerce Clause issues altogether.
(And to the obligatory spammer who says "but my spam is frea speach", I point out that non-commercial speech has consistenly been afforded greater First Amendment protection than commercial speech. Deal.)
Whoa, a court exhibits clue! Not lying to your customers is a Good Thing!
> The decision is interesting, because several state internet censorship laws have been struck down due to their effects on residents of other states - it's worth reading for anyone interested in internet legal issues.
Interesting reading, yes, but I don't see the interstate commerce clause implications here as having any bearing on censorship cases.
IANAL, and courts have made some pretty illogical decisions in the past, but I don't see how requiring someone not to forge headers (which has been ruled as something that facilitates interstate commerce) strengthens the (IMHO insane) argument that a patchwork of mutually-conflicting decency standards (whether in law books or in RSACi-style webpage ratings) also facilitates interstate commerce. It's a total non-sequitur.
Yes, it is.
Doesn't make it any less fun ;-)
Schadenfreude is an art form. For an example, watch Jerry Springer, particularly the last 20 minutes of the show, in which audience members rediscover the Elizabethan art of bear-baiting.
(Side note. Yeah, we gotta get an interview with Jack Chick. I like this "Loon of the Month" idea.)
Well, I suppose if you put enough pr0n on a male user's screen, something's bound to rise again...