So, you think there are no experts at all? That's bullshit. It may take work to identify experts, but they do exist: Stephen Hawking does know more about physics than some random kid on the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee does know more about the process of creating the World Wide Web than pretty much anyone else.
That's not to say they are infallible sages, gods or geniuses. But there are people who know what they are talking about a lot better than others. It seems ridiculous not to build that principle into online knowledge communities like Wikipedia.
"Close it off"? Anyone can edit on Citizendium. The expert Editors just play the role of judging whether or not material in their particular area of expertise is accurate or not.
There is a simple reason for this: Stephen Hawking knows more about astrophysics than me or most other dorks who hang out on the Interwebs all day long.
I'd say give out lots of small donations. One group worth targeting in your donation are college students - often they are short on cash, and if they are trying to make the decision about whether to spend an hour hunting a bug in some open source code or get a crappy McJob flipping hamburgers, your donation may flip the balance for them. Having good experiences contributing to the free software world in one's formative years may also help a person avoid the temptation of crappy development jobs in the future.
Absolutely true. One situation where unit testing is even more important is when writing in dynamically-typed scripting languages like Ruby and PHP. I tend to find that if I'm writing a small Java class, I don't really need to write tests, since I can rely on the compiler to pick up any type flubs I make - while in scripting languages, it's very useful to have the tests to make sure one doesn't screw up the typing.
In Ruby, I've been getting into the 'BDD' side of things on an open source project - using RSpec. It's pretty cool, actually. You write your tests so that they describe the behaviour (using brackets rather than do-end so that non-Ruby folks can read it):
describe "Cars" { it "should have four wheels" { car = Car.new; car.wheels.should == 4 } it "should have a reverse gear" { lambda { car = Car.new; car.reverse_gear! }.should_not raise_errors } it "should have reclinable seats" { car = Car.new; car.driver_seat.recline!; car.driver_seat.location.should ==:reclined } }
What's cool about this is that the code describes what the class should do and is a lot more readable than the standard xUnit tests (is it assert_equal(expected, actual) or assert_equal(actual, expected)?), it forces you to write tests for the actual behaviour - the things that the code is doing! - and it also makes a really pretty HTML output that has each description and behaviour listed - coloured with red (if the test is written and fails), yellow (if the test hasn't been written) or green (if it works). The BDD approach is extremely hyped up and trendy in the Ruby community, but is actually well worth pursuing. Especially now JBehave exists.
# I thought I would express the desire of a geek to shack up with another # geek and make babies through the expressive power of a SPARQL CONSTRUCT # query. Just run it through your favourite query processor and savour the # result (the kid will end up drinking coffee if you use the Java processor)
# Namespaces omitted. Code is released under the GNU General Public License. # TODO: add divorce inference mode for v. 2
Depends. To test this hypothesis would be pretty easy. Compare rates of RSI in suburban/rural computer users (including both office workers and geeks) with those who work in large metro urban areas. If driving is a significant cause, then people who live in places where it's impractical to drive but who still use computers should have lower incidence rates.
A completely unscientific survey (sample size: 1). I live in the rural suburbs outside London. I haven't taken a driver's test. I travel primarily by commuter rail (~65 minutes each way). I'm 22. Just finished a Bachelor's degree, and write software. I've had RSI (or at least the symptoms thereof) for a few months. Just battling to get the National Health Service to recognise that, yes, RSI exists, and that I should see a specialist now and risk a false negative than sit back, wait and risk a false positive. I attribute my RSI symptoms to mouse use.
It is an interesting hypothesis, though. Some other people have suggested stress, and exercise. Those are probably good explanations. Causes of RSI need better investigation, and treatment needs to be far more quick. Also, teaching kids in school things like touch typing and typing posture would probably be a good idea. Two-finger hunt-and-peck is, alas, far too common.
You confuse descriptive and prescriptive linguistics. A descriptive linguist says "this is how $language is used". Someone upbraiding another on a forum is saying "this is how I consider $language should be used". Different animal. The difference is like that between an anthropologist and an art critic. Whether the art critic is making valid points or not is up to your interpretation of the rules of $language.
Grammar trolling can be good for "lulz" and the suchlike. I don't really do it any more. I did send a somewhat pissy e-mail to a list a while back after some folks had a seemingly never-ending back and forth (in full colour HTML) about the nature of consciousness without figuring out how to trim one another's messages or grokking top- and bottom-posting. In retrospect, I think my RSI may be due to constant exposure to people incapable of figuring out how to send a decent e-mail - and thus trying subconsciously to find a way out of ever having to read and write e-mail.
I've thought about this a lot recently, and am now periodically running MD5 hashes across all the executables on my machine and storing the results on a USB stick. Every week, just check to make sure nothing has changed (except where there are valid cases - e.g. I've installed a software update or a new application).
As for hardware? Get a laptop and don't let it out of your sight. Figure out how to do a temporary password suspend*. Call me paranoid, but if I need to go to the toilet, I lock my machine. If I go for a drink, I lock my machine. Paranoia in security is just another name for good practice.
* if you are an OS X user, execute "/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend" whenever you leave your machine - stick it in an AppleScript, call it Lock and then make it executable from QuickSilver and you are only a key press or two away. You can also add a few other conveniences to the AppleScript - tell iTunes to pause, lock your keychains and tell Adium or iChat to set an away message etc. If you carry a mobile phone on your person, you can also set it up with one of the Bluetooth presence utilities to run the Lock script whenever you go out of range of your machine.
Innocuous emails are the ones best deserving of encryption. That's because it normalizes it. If everyone sends their private emails and IM conversations using GPG or OTR encryption just for chatty, MySpace stuff, it normalizes it so that when you have a good use for encryption (oh, getting the word out about human rights abuses - for instance), it passes under the radar. I am a peaceful person, and abide by mostly all the laws of this country. I don't use e-mail to send anything that may get me locked up. But I still use encryption where possible. If everybody else did so, it would normalize it and make it more difficult for governments to pass bad laws like this. Encryption, anonymity and things like Tor need to become normalized so that when people really need it, it's still available.
What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If some brave soul tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their E-mail, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their E-mail privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.
Well, if you have a policy like I do for my personal GPG key - whereby you provide an explanation for all key revocations (eg. "This was just a test key", "I forgot the password" or something similar), except where you are not legally allowed to do so, then one can make a reasonable inference why I have revoked my key. According to an advisory notice from the Home Office (which I can't find, but I have seen reference to), apparently this kind of thing is legal under RIPA3.
Just as a point of interest, how does proving that something came from a particular computer herald in a new world of truth and justice as opposed to encrypting it with a public key. If my bank sent me, say, a signed, encrypted XML file containing my statement, I could forward the relevant components to a lender with a session key.
I'm not sure how Trusted Computing reintroduces trust to computing. Being able to prove that a file came from a particular computer doesn't prove much to me. Surely, we can do most of the nice things that is planned for TC with public key encryption - albeit without the dubious DRM benefits that the TC platform could potentially inflict upon us?
I can see advantages in the TC approach, but I don't know how this protects us against abuse by the hardware manufacturers working in concert with the large software manufacturers. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin) Comment: http://firegpg.tuxfamily.org/
The iPlayer is basically a distraction. It keeps the BBC Management from realising the rampant use of BitTorrent for BBC content. The folks at the BBC have their hands tied behind their back by legalities. That said, a huge chunk of people who work at the BBC are tech savvy and use BitTorrent to download their shows. The iPlayer is just fine. Everyone will just use BitTorrent instead. The BBC have pretty much adopted a "live and let live" policy with regards to BitTorrent. Unless you do something really stupid (oh, you know, break into Television Centre, steal and leak a new Doctor Who ep), you will have no trouble from the BBC Legal Department.
So, feel free to open up Azureus and enjoy. You may find the websites uknova.com and thebox.bz quite educational, entertaining and informing. Which is funny, because that's exactly the motto of the BBC.;)
I wrote a script recently that took MySpace comments and turned them into RSS. Unfortunately, the instance I ran of it on my server got so popular that I had to turn it back off again... (open source version to be released soon).
As for the "Wall", I despise the whole idea. It's like a mixture between e-mail, blog and IM, albeit without the benefits of any of them. If you wanna talk to me, send me an e-mail. If you send me a Facebook message, I then have to go and log in to Facebook to read it. It's the best way to get to the bottom of the pile.
I'm glad you delineate killing in to monsters, people and cops. I've always thought cops have an other-than-human aspect to them. Perhaps it's their belief that they themselves are above the law. Never try to reason with a cop, it'll leave you in a box. If a cop says 2 + 2 = 5, then 2 + 2 does = 5, at least until he's out of sight.
These people are more equivalent to monsters than people, in my experience.
My country has not decided that drug laws are pointless.
My country's leaders would also probably tell you that there are WMD in Iraq and that Guantanamo is necessary. That's why I don't put much stock in what my country and it's leaders think. Morality is a far better guide to this kind of thing than politicians.
How about 'liberty'? You know, that thing that the Constitution (or European Convention on Human Rights if you are a EUian) was supposed to protect? It's not your right or the government's or the British Board of Film Classification to decide what books I read, what games I play, what music I listen to, who I talk to, what type of weapon I use to defend myself with or who the fuck I freely associate with. Get the fuck out of my life and I'll stay the fuck out of yours.
It's called freedom. And it's in danger of extinction.
You make a very good point. I guess ODF is okay, although it's quite a bit more complex than I would like and the RELAX NG schema for ODF doesn't 'just work' in my XML editor. It's not something I've ruled out.
Agreed on toilets being too low, although I find it's geographically distributed. In the US, toilets seem to be a lot lower than in Europe. I'm 5'11" and I find American toilets to be extremely low. I can't imagine how bad it would be if I was any taller.
Give a Slashdotter a problem, and they will come up with a solution - impractical and abtruse though it may be. We had a discussion of this a while back at BarCamp London in a session called "ludicrous overengineering". The 'toilet door' preference is an obvious solution. The solution we came up with was as follows:
1. Assign every common user of the toilet a profile and tie that profile to an RFID and fingerprint detector. When someone approaches the door of either the bathroom or cubicle, try to read some kind of biometric from the person. If a positive ID is made, flip toilet to preferential option for that user.
2. If no ID is present, then have a weight sensor on the ground outside the door and a touch sensor attached to the door, so that when someone approaches the door and pushes it open, it can calculate at what level their arm is (so you can estimate their height) and their weight. Then calculate based on their height and weight compared to the surrounding culture whether they are a male or female - storing specific cases along with their eventual preference in a database.
3. Since the database of toilet uses could also keep date and time stamps, it would be possible to mix in time to a Bayesian calculation of gender. For instance, if in a household, a male member often brings back a group of male friends after the local beverage-serving institutions has closed for the evening, it could take that in to account and assign a higher probability of a certain toilet being used for a certain action at certain times of day. Similarly, if the last five uses of the toilet have been by a female, it may be because the male user is out, and it should then be based on that person's preferences.
Obvious design issues:
If one wanted to make this information available for multiple households, hashing and anonymisation may be desirable. Having your toilet visits become like the next blogging or Twitter is probably not desirable.
If a Bayesian approach is taken, it should have the starting position set as 'seat down' - for obvious reasons. The cost of making a false positive (ie. leaving the seat down when it ought to be up) compared with a false negative (ie. leaving the seat up when it ought to be down) is negligible, while vice versa can lead to earth-shatteringly unstable consequences.
That is mega-cool-awesemo! This means that I'll finally be able to take what few Word documents I have and convert them to well-formed, non-insane XHTML! If you want to make your eyes sore, take a look at the result of Word HTML export - it's *messy* as hell.
I find it somewhat ironic that the Microsoft Spaces link returns a parsing error - apparently, MS are trying to serve HTML 4.0 as application/xhtml+xml which completely borks in Firefox - it is also amusing since IE doesn't support application/xhtml+xml which means this page would probably not work in IE either, unless it ignored it and just opened it as tag soup. Microsoft's Next-Generation Blogging Environment: Doesn't Work In ANY Browser, for your convenience!
Slashdot Mirror
So, you think there are no experts at all? That's bullshit. It may take work to identify experts, but they do exist: Stephen Hawking does know more about physics than some random kid on the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee does know more about the process of creating the World Wide Web than pretty much anyone else.
That's not to say they are infallible sages, gods or geniuses. But there are people who know what they are talking about a lot better than others. It seems ridiculous not to build that principle into online knowledge communities like Wikipedia.
"Close it off"? Anyone can edit on Citizendium. The expert Editors just play the role of judging whether or not material in their particular area of expertise is accurate or not.
There is a simple reason for this: Stephen Hawking knows more about astrophysics than me or most other dorks who hang out on the Interwebs all day long.
That's definitely a boomer thing. Now that education actually costs significant amounts of money, we need money and not just alcohol.
Online Rights Canada.
How about your local Internet cyberfreedom group? That means EFF (US), Open Rights Group (UK), European Digital Rights Initiative, Digital Rights Ireland, Free Software Foundation or other civil liberties/human rights groups. Just an idea.
I'd say give out lots of small donations. One group worth targeting in your donation are college students - often they are short on cash, and if they are trying to make the decision about whether to spend an hour hunting a bug in some open source code or get a crappy McJob flipping hamburgers, your donation may flip the balance for them. Having good experiences contributing to the free software world in one's formative years may also help a person avoid the temptation of crappy development jobs in the future.
Absolutely true. One situation where unit testing is even more important is when writing in dynamically-typed scripting languages like Ruby and PHP. I tend to find that if I'm writing a small Java class, I don't really need to write tests, since I can rely on the compiler to pick up any type flubs I make - while in scripting languages, it's very useful to have the tests to make sure one doesn't screw up the typing.
In Ruby, I've been getting into the 'BDD' side of things on an open source project - using RSpec. It's pretty cool, actually. You write your tests so that they describe the behaviour (using brackets rather than do-end so that non-Ruby folks can read it):
What's cool about this is that the code describes what the class should do and is a lot more readable than the standard xUnit tests (is it assert_equal(expected, actual) or assert_equal(actual, expected)?), it forces you to write tests for the actual behaviour - the things that the code is doing! - and it also makes a really pretty HTML output that has each description and behaviour listed - coloured with red (if the test is written and fails), yellow (if the test hasn't been written) or green (if it works). The BDD approach is extremely hyped up and trendy in the Ruby community, but is actually well worth pursuing. Especially now JBehave exists.
# I thought I would express the desire of a geek to shack up with another
:hasOffspring ?it . :Offspring;
:hasFather ?me . :hadSexWith :spouse .
:objectiveBeautyRating ?rating;
:textEditorPreference ?pref. :hasFather :me;
:hasMother ?spouse . . .
# geek and make babies through the expressive power of a SPARQL CONSTRUCT
# query. Just run it through your favourite query processor and savour the
# result (the kid will end up drinking coffee if you use the Java processor)
# Namespaces omitted. Code is released under the GNU General Public License.
# TODO: add divorce inference mode for v. 2
CONSTRUCT
{
?me
?it a
}
WHERE
{
?me
?spouse foaf:gender "female";
?it
}
FILTER ( ?rating > 7 )
FILTER ( ?pref != "emacs" )
Depends. To test this hypothesis would be pretty easy. Compare rates of RSI in suburban/rural computer users (including both office workers and geeks) with those who work in large metro urban areas. If driving is a significant cause, then people who live in places where it's impractical to drive but who still use computers should have lower incidence rates.
A completely unscientific survey (sample size: 1). I live in the rural suburbs outside London. I haven't taken a driver's test. I travel primarily by commuter rail (~65 minutes each way). I'm 22. Just finished a Bachelor's degree, and write software. I've had RSI (or at least the symptoms thereof) for a few months. Just battling to get the National Health Service to recognise that, yes, RSI exists, and that I should see a specialist now and risk a false negative than sit back, wait and risk a false positive. I attribute my RSI symptoms to mouse use.
It is an interesting hypothesis, though. Some other people have suggested stress, and exercise. Those are probably good explanations. Causes of RSI need better investigation, and treatment needs to be far more quick. Also, teaching kids in school things like touch typing and typing posture would probably be a good idea. Two-finger hunt-and-peck is, alas, far too common.
You confuse descriptive and prescriptive linguistics. A descriptive linguist says "this is how $language is used". Someone upbraiding another on a forum is saying "this is how I consider $language should be used". Different animal. The difference is like that between an anthropologist and an art critic. Whether the art critic is making valid points or not is up to your interpretation of the rules of $language.
Grammar trolling can be good for "lulz" and the suchlike. I don't really do it any more. I did send a somewhat pissy e-mail to a list a while back after some folks had a seemingly never-ending back and forth (in full colour HTML) about the nature of consciousness without figuring out how to trim one another's messages or grokking top- and bottom-posting. In retrospect, I think my RSI may be due to constant exposure to people incapable of figuring out how to send a decent e-mail - and thus trying subconsciously to find a way out of ever having to read and write e-mail.
Grab yourself FireGPG - http://firegpg.sourceforge.net/ - and encrypt the problem away.
I've thought about this a lot recently, and am now periodically running MD5 hashes across all the executables on my machine and storing the results on a USB stick. Every week, just check to make sure nothing has changed (except where there are valid cases - e.g. I've installed a software update or a new application).
As for hardware? Get a laptop and don't let it out of your sight. Figure out how to do a temporary password suspend*. Call me paranoid, but if I need to go to the toilet, I lock my machine. If I go for a drink, I lock my machine. Paranoia in security is just another name for good practice.
* if you are an OS X user, execute "/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend" whenever you leave your machine - stick it in an AppleScript, call it Lock and then make it executable from QuickSilver and you are only a key press or two away. You can also add a few other conveniences to the AppleScript - tell iTunes to pause, lock your keychains and tell Adium or iChat to set an away message etc. If you carry a mobile phone on your person, you can also set it up with one of the Bluetooth presence utilities to run the Lock script whenever you go out of range of your machine.
Innocuous emails are the ones best deserving of encryption. That's because it normalizes it. If everyone sends their private emails and IM conversations using GPG or OTR encryption just for chatty, MySpace stuff, it normalizes it so that when you have a good use for encryption (oh, getting the word out about human rights abuses - for instance), it passes under the radar. I am a peaceful person, and abide by mostly all the laws of this country. I don't use e-mail to send anything that may get me locked up. But I still use encryption where possible. If everybody else did so, it would normalize it and make it more difficult for governments to pass bad laws like this. Encryption, anonymity and things like Tor need to become normalized so that when people really need it, it's still available.
As Phil Zimmerman puts it:
Well, if you have a policy like I do for my personal GPG key - whereby you provide an explanation for all key revocations (eg. "This was just a test key", "I forgot the password" or something similar), except where you are not legally allowed to do so, then one can make a reasonable inference why I have revoked my key. According to an advisory notice from the Home Office (which I can't find, but I have seen reference to), apparently this kind of thing is legal under RIPA3.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Just as a point of interest, how does proving that something came from a particular computer herald in a new world of truth and justice as opposed to encrypting it with a public key. If my bank sent me, say, a signed, encrypted XML file containing my statement, I could forward the relevant components to a lender with a session key.
I'm not sure how Trusted Computing reintroduces trust to computing. Being able to prove that a file came from a particular computer doesn't prove much to me. Surely, we can do most of the nice things that is planned for TC with public key encryption - albeit without the dubious DRM benefits that the TC platform could potentially inflict upon us?
I can see advantages in the TC approach, but I don't know how this protects us against abuse by the hardware manufacturers working in concert with the large software manufacturers.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
Comment: http://firegpg.tuxfamily.org/
iD8DBQFG7jftmxsZOKak9U4RAilRAJ491PI7YxDjNa1CNhhxe3tCXUw3KACffl+E
gO5AjL6KBQs75oabqZoETRM=
=cW4K
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
To me, the truth is not a threat.
Okay, can I read your bank statements? Or maybe the passwords for your porn site memberships? The truth isn't a threat, remember. So why not tell us?
There's some adblocking plugins for Safari too. Surely, this idiotic douchebag needs to start up whyeverybrowserisblocked.com
The iPlayer is basically a distraction. It keeps the BBC Management from realising the rampant use of BitTorrent for BBC content. The folks at the BBC have their hands tied behind their back by legalities. That said, a huge chunk of people who work at the BBC are tech savvy and use BitTorrent to download their shows. The iPlayer is just fine. Everyone will just use BitTorrent instead. The BBC have pretty much adopted a "live and let live" policy with regards to BitTorrent. Unless you do something really stupid (oh, you know, break into Television Centre, steal and leak a new Doctor Who ep), you will have no trouble from the BBC Legal Department.
;)
So, feel free to open up Azureus and enjoy. You may find the websites uknova.com and thebox.bz quite educational, entertaining and informing. Which is funny, because that's exactly the motto of the BBC.
I wrote a script recently that took MySpace comments and turned them into RSS. Unfortunately, the instance I ran of it on my server got so popular that I had to turn it back off again... (open source version to be released soon).
As for the "Wall", I despise the whole idea. It's like a mixture between e-mail, blog and IM, albeit without the benefits of any of them. If you wanna talk to me, send me an e-mail. If you send me a Facebook message, I then have to go and log in to Facebook to read it. It's the best way to get to the bottom of the pile.
I'm glad you delineate killing in to monsters, people and cops. I've always thought cops have an other-than-human aspect to them. Perhaps it's their belief that they themselves are above the law. Never try to reason with a cop, it'll leave you in a box. If a cop says 2 + 2 = 5, then 2 + 2 does = 5, at least until he's out of sight.
These people are more equivalent to monsters than people, in my experience.
My country has not decided that drug laws are pointless.
My country's leaders would also probably tell you that there are WMD in Iraq and that Guantanamo is necessary. That's why I don't put much stock in what my country and it's leaders think. Morality is a far better guide to this kind of thing than politicians.
How about 'liberty'? You know, that thing that the Constitution (or European Convention on Human Rights if you are a EUian) was supposed to protect? It's not your right or the government's or the British Board of Film Classification to decide what books I read, what games I play, what music I listen to, who I talk to, what type of weapon I use to defend myself with or who the fuck I freely associate with. Get the fuck out of my life and I'll stay the fuck out of yours.
It's called freedom. And it's in danger of extinction.
You make a very good point. I guess ODF is okay, although it's quite a bit more complex than I would like and the RELAX NG schema for ODF doesn't 'just work' in my XML editor. It's not something I've ruled out.
Agreed on toilets being too low, although I find it's geographically distributed. In the US, toilets seem to be a lot lower than in Europe. I'm 5'11" and I find American toilets to be extremely low. I can't imagine how bad it would be if I was any taller.
Give a Slashdotter a problem, and they will come up with a solution - impractical and abtruse though it may be. We had a discussion of this a while back at BarCamp London in a session called "ludicrous overengineering". The 'toilet door' preference is an obvious solution. The solution we came up with was as follows:
1. Assign every common user of the toilet a profile and tie that profile to an RFID and fingerprint detector. When someone approaches the door of either the bathroom or cubicle, try to read some kind of biometric from the person. If a positive ID is made, flip toilet to preferential option for that user.
2. If no ID is present, then have a weight sensor on the ground outside the door and a touch sensor attached to the door, so that when someone approaches the door and pushes it open, it can calculate at what level their arm is (so you can estimate their height) and their weight. Then calculate based on their height and weight compared to the surrounding culture whether they are a male or female - storing specific cases along with their eventual preference in a database.
3. Since the database of toilet uses could also keep date and time stamps, it would be possible to mix in time to a Bayesian calculation of gender. For instance, if in a household, a male member often brings back a group of male friends after the local beverage-serving institutions has closed for the evening, it could take that in to account and assign a higher probability of a certain toilet being used for a certain action at certain times of day. Similarly, if the last five uses of the toilet have been by a female, it may be because the male user is out, and it should then be based on that person's preferences.
Obvious design issues:
If one wanted to make this information available for multiple households, hashing and anonymisation may be desirable. Having your toilet visits become like the next blogging or Twitter is probably not desirable.
If a Bayesian approach is taken, it should have the starting position set as 'seat down' - for obvious reasons. The cost of making a false positive (ie. leaving the seat down when it ought to be up) compared with a false negative (ie. leaving the seat up when it ought to be down) is negligible, while vice versa can lead to earth-shatteringly unstable consequences.
That is mega-cool-awesemo! This means that I'll finally be able to take what few Word documents I have and convert them to well-formed, non-insane XHTML! If you want to make your eyes sore, take a look at the result of Word HTML export - it's *messy* as hell.
I find it somewhat ironic that the Microsoft Spaces link returns a parsing error - apparently, MS are trying to serve HTML 4.0 as application/xhtml+xml which completely borks in Firefox - it is also amusing since IE doesn't support application/xhtml+xml which means this page would probably not work in IE either, unless it ignored it and just opened it as tag soup. Microsoft's Next-Generation Blogging Environment: Doesn't Work In ANY Browser, for your convenience!