He invents prefectly evil enemies with no redeeming qualities. They are foils; fabricated devices for creating lots of guiltless Ender vs evil battles.
At the very end of the book, Ender communicates with the last remaining Hive Queen. He learns that the buggers were not the ravaging hordes earth thought them, but intelligent beings. He learns that the war between humans and the buggers occurred because the two races could not understand each other. He then writes the book that eventually turns himself into a genocidal monster in the eyes of the public.
If I remember right, in the end Ender gets to have his cake and eat it too. He gets to be the hero for defeating those nasty nasty bugs, but he gets to remain innocent because he didn't know he was committing genocide
Except that he condemns himself as a genocide, and turns the popular opinion of him towards that pole, so that eventually his name is as reviled as Hitler's. Part of the premise of the books is the concept of a perfect general: one who shows sufficient empathy to totally understand his enemy, but one also willing to totally exterminate what he has empathy for. The only way to pull off that combination is by the trickery used by Ender's superiors. Ender doesn't get to have his cake and eat it too - he spends the rest of his very long life atoning for his cake-eating.
Card is a Mormon. Mormons love to seperate people into "worthy" and "unworthy" categories. I know because my family is mormon.
It looks like someone has a bone to pick with the Mormon religion, and is attacking Ender's Game, not because of any particular lack of literary merit, but because it happens to have been penned by a Mormon.
Because otherwise the dinosaurs wouldnt have been able to grow dicks, the chaos maths guy would have been wrong and the whole point of the story would suddenly vanish.
I'm still in denial about Brienne. There's just too much that was setup for her - Oathkeeper, and Jaime - she's got to survive. But then, I thought the same about the Hound too. And Rob. When will I learn?
I should also point out that Google has a sizable portfolio of patents, which means two things: firstly, smart and successful tech businessmen appreciate the value of patents; and secondly, in keeping with their corporate philosophy, Google does not believe software patents are evil.
Patents are a necessary evil. If you have a patented product, and a big player wants it, they can get it. Either they will just copy it, and dare you to face their lawyers in court over the period of five years it will take to be decided, or they will serve you court orders violating a number of their five hundred arcane and obscure patents - and offer to drop the case in return for a license to your product.
Ideally, patents should protect small inventors. In modern times, where large corporations have many patents, where most inventions are not entirely new, but composed of many existing parts or techniques, where the courts move incredibly slowly, and even quick cases are incredibly expensive, they don't.
Patents are a sort of Prisoner's Dilemma - if everyone used the patent system responsibly, everyone would benefit. But as soon as someone builds a patent portfolio and starts threatening people with it, everyone else needs to start building a patent portfolio to survive, which ends up locking out anyone who doesn't have one.
I agree, BloodWytch was awesome. Man, I still remember the sound of that disrupt spell. Unfortunately, I never got to play the expansion disk cause I only got my hands on it a few months before my Amiga died a very sad death. Although I think Pool of Radiance is still my favourite ol' classic. Although I don't think I RPed very well - I always created lawful good characters, but then Id go and hire a Hero mercenary, take them out into the slums, put them to sleep, chop off their heads and steal their equipment (they gave good experience too).
Geeks rarely exhibit the behaviors and habits of successful business men. Hell, if you can't even be bothered to shower, how can you be expected to bother to show up to work and meetings and run your business? Further, geeks tend to push aside the important things and focus on what (to them) are the "fun" things. That doesn't help anyone succeed...Frankly, I just don't think geeks are cut out for business and running their own companies
It depends on how you define a geek, and also what type of business their in to. While the unshaven, unwashed poorly-dressed geek stereotype is amusing, there are many people who have interest and ability in technical areas that don't buy into that stereotype.
On the other hand, the small company I used to work for (boss + programmer(me) + graphic designer) was run by a guy who had no idea about anything technical. All the company's knowledge was held by the employees. When the company had a lean month, he struggled to pay all his bills. Eventually he didn't pay us for two weeks, we quit and the business folded. A small business, however, where the business owner is also the person with the practical skills, can survive a bit easier in those circumanstances. If you do most of the work yourself, you can sub-contract in extra people to do the non-critical stuff when needed, and not have to pay them when they're not needed. Having fewer employees means you have a lower fixed-cost overhead. Of course, as business gets to the point where one person can't do everything, you'll have to make a decision. You could either hire a tech guy, hire a manager, or sell the business.
I wouldn't expect to see a major company have a CEO that writes and designs their own software, but we're not talking about major companies here. We're talking about small business startups, and I'd imagine quite a few do.
So, PostgreSQL gets more users, EnterpriseDB has programmers actively working on the code, and since PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed, EnterpriseDB can have a closed-source product while continuing to contribute code/docs/feedback to the project.
As far as I understand the BSD license, the problem with the above is that EnterpriseDB has no obligation to contribute the code or documents it generates back to the PostgreSQL project.I wouldn't mind a license that allowed companies to close the source, but forced them to contribute changes back to the original codebase. Of course, the problem then becomes one of detection: how do you know if they've contributed all their changes when you can't see their code?
There's a middle position between the "employee" thing and the "multi-billion sellout to Yahoo!" thing. It's called small business. I'm in Austrlia, and the business economy here might be a lot different to the US, I don't know. But just from my immediate aqaintances, I know a guy who runs his own graphic design business, a guy who does installation and setups of digital theatre systems (conference rooms, lecture halls, home theatres) and an electrician.
These people generally spent a few years working for someone else, got a knowledge of the business, then setup for themselves. In the case of the designer, when he quit, he came away with a ready-made group of clients who followed him from his last job. None of them make millions, but they each make enough to support themselves fairly well.
If you want to work for yourself, work for someone else long enough to learn the ropes. Do a quick management course to help you pickup at least the basics (book-keeping, tax, information privay laws, industry-specific legislation, etc). Save up enough money to keep your head above water for your first year should it prove to be a lean one and give it a shot.
And the really good thing is, I don't have to be worried about all the stupid industrial reforms the government just passed.
Microsoft also controls the most-used browser. Add it all up, and I can sure see why Google might want to have a (better, but less popular) browser under their control...
Wow, you're right. Google had better compete against Microsoft in every area in which Microsoft controls the dominant market share. So since MS controls the most-used desktop operating system, be on the lookout for gOS. Oh, and since it also controls the most-used office suite, gOffice is a dead cert. Ooh, ooh, and since theres so many VB programmers out there, gBASIC is probably in pre-beta already!
The more and more we limit people's freedoms, the more similar we become to the sick visions of people like Osama bin Laden. They want a world in which people have few if any freedoms, and where no one may dare diagree with Islam. We are moving in the direction of the first, and if you replace 'Islam' with 'our government', we might be headed towards that one as well.
See, judging from what I've heard of their material, what they're wanting is pretty much what most slashdotters seem to be wanting - the US government to get it's nose out of their business. What they want is the US to stop interfering in middle-eastern politics, and letting them get back to killing/getting killed by the Israelis. I'm the first to condemn terrorist methodology, but really, let's not get into demonizing our opponents. It's stupid, irrational, deceitful, and it clouds the real issues.
(Note to any outraged future posters: I am not endorsing terrorism, I am simply asking we look at their motivations analytically rather than emotionally)
The great-grandparent specifically said that PHP had poor security:
The use of PHP, on the other hand, is basically an invitation for security issues.
I want to know, what, specifically, he finds wrong with PHP in terms of security. Saying "it's so insecure, everyone knows that" doesn't prove anything, it just perpetuates a meme (that may or may not be correct). What I want is some hard and fast problems that I can check out and evaluate.
What aspects of PHP do you think increase security risks, specifically? The major one I know is was the stupid "register_global" idea, which is easily fixed - it's turned off on every host I run.
Apart from that, what security flaws do you have? SQL-Injection attacks, sure, but then, so does every other language that interacts directly with a database. There are abstraction layers around to avoid that, if you don't trust yourself to examine your incoming data properly.
I agree that PHP is a poorly designed language - it started off as a pet project and grew in a fairly ad-hoc manner. But using PHP doesn't magically open any attack vectors that were not there previously (with the exception of the afore-mentioned register_globals). What would you do to exploit a PHP site that you couldn't do to exploit, say, a Perl site?
Wikipedia is a good starting point for finding out information about a certain topic. It's not a good ending point. If I want to start learning about, say, Edgar Allen Poe, where do I start? If I just typed in "Edgar Allen Poe" into Google, I'd get sites selling his work, sites selling biographies, poetry appreciation sites, crib notes for students studying his work, etc. With Wikipedia, I can go straight to the article, and get a brief overview of his life.
Then down the bottom of that article, there's a list of reference books and external sites, which I can then go and check out. At this point, I can make the transfer between the "unreliable" Wikipedia into the "reliable" medium of published literature. But using Wikipedia, I now have a good idea of just which books to look up, and a basic understanding of some of the things I'm likely to encounter.
Now, this example is probably not the best, as Edgar Allen Poe will probably be listed in most print encyclopedias. But say I wanted to find out about some wierd race from Babylon 5. Good luck finding that in a print encyclopedia. But if I check Wikipedia, I can get the basic facts, and some links to more authoritive sources.
Re:JavaScript code is the core code - What???
on
Mastering Ajax Websites
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Depending on JavaScript could be its downfall, since JavaScript has so many functional work-arounds for each browser. Even the article mentions (but dismisses) this problem.
From the article (again):
Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer, uses the MSXML parser for handling XML (you can find out more about MSXML in Resources). So when you write Ajax applications that need to work on Internet Explorer, you need to create the object in a particular way.
"Particular Way" for browser one... "Particular Way" for browser two...
Sounds like in an inherently poor design.
Im not a huge fan of AJAX, but this is one criticism you can't honestly level at it. Browser incompatibilities exist for pretty much all client-side, web-based technologies, and AJAX has only a single minor change to work around, as opposed to getting a complex CSS layout to work cross-browser. *shudder*
The simplest AJAX app relies on one piece of javascript functionality - the ability to make an http request through script. I've used this a number of times to submit data to a server when I didn't want to update the page.
Most AJAX then also relies on the ability of javascript to parse an XML document (to examine the results of the post) and some form of dynamic page-rewriting to change the current page based on the XML document (generally object.InnerHtml for content changes, or object.style for stylistic ones).
These features are fairly static - there's no need for them to change often. Simple AJAX - which is simply just offloading form submission - is good, useful, and most users don't even know it's there. As long as javascript keeps these three features, AJAX won't have major browser compatibility problems.
AJAX which rearranges the page after each XmlRequest is a bit more troublesome. It's also the flashy bit, which means its the bit every man and his dog tries to do. Using this technique, it is easy to write an entire site in one page - that is, there's one page the user visits, and the page rewrites itself based on their clicks. This is the stupidity of taking AJAX too far; you end up breaking basic functionality of the web (back buttons, refreshing, bookmarking, opening in new windows/tabs).
I don't know much about bit comet, but there is a part of the bittorrent specification that sends an identifier that is supposed to indicate the bittorrent client during the handshake. You might have to change bitcomet in source and recompile to be able to change it though. Im not sure if these private trackers rely on this, or if they do some other analysis to double-check the value given them by the client.
I find using a grid-based layout (which is what a table is) fairly intuitive, and I don't really see cell-spanning as a hack. Spacer images and cut-up images are a bit of a hack, but combining tables and CSS, I don't think I've had to cut-up an image for a good few years, and margin/padding settings replace spacers. I quite like CSS in most respects, but I find doing positioning using pure CSS to be a major pain in the backside, especially when trying to maintain browser compaitibility.
My ideal positioning syntax for CSS would be the ability to setup a grid in any container object (grid-width: 10; grid-height: 10; to setup a 10 by 10 grid) and then be able to specify grid co-ordinates in any objects within that container (position: grid; grid-x: 1; grid-y:1 width: 1cells; height: 10cells;). Bingo, there's a column layout that will resize with it's parent container, with separation of form and content, and semantically valid for all the purists out there (it uses the word "grid" instead of "table").
I'm not against CSS, I think the concept is great, and the styling part of it works wonderfully. I think the positioning method sucks and should be scrapped, and the alignment method should be fixed - vertical-align working on more objects than just table cells, and being able to center table/fixed-width block elements without resorting to margin hacks.
I wouldn't imagine it works in IE - it doesn't cope with other margin methods of centering. But that's not really the thing I was getting at. The very idea of using margin settings to center align something - vertically or horizontally - is counter-intuitive.
How intuitive. Of course, if I want to centre something I should make it render as a table-cell. Even though it's not in a table. And while we're on the subject of tables-cells, why can only table-cells have a vertical-align specified? And why is the horizonal align called text-align and not horizontal-align, so as to be nice and consistent.
It depends what's in your contract. If you are contracted to give 4 weeks notice, and you only give 1, well, there's nothing they can really do about it. Give you a bad reference.
But if you give the full 4 weeks, and they kick you out as soon as you hand in your resignation, then they are obliged to pay you out that extra 4 weeks in lieu of notice (assuming, that is, that the contract states that the employer has to give the same amount of notice as the employee - all ones that Ive signed have said that). And you don't get a black mark against your name when someone rings up to check on you after you apply for your new job.
So while giving them the finger and a day's notice might be psychologoically satisfying, your bank account and future prospects will be much happier with full notice.
This situation has come about because the Australian people were duped into voting for a totally unevenly balanced parliament, railroaded into this vote by a series of lies and distortions and scare tactics at the last election.
While I agree with of most of what you say, in my opinion, the reason the Liberals has such a landslide victory was because the Labour party was too concerned with bickering and backstabbing amongst themselves to launch a credible campaign, When you've only got two parties that have more than a snowball's chance in hell of getting the top job, and one of the parties is changing leaders every time you turn around, the result was obvious. The unfortunate fact is that Labour's incompetence lead to the Liberals dominating both houses, and being able to push through pretty much any bill they like. This is what happens to a political system when the division of power is removed.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you even read the book?
He invents prefectly evil enemies with no redeeming qualities. They are foils; fabricated devices for creating lots of guiltless Ender vs evil battles.
At the very end of the book, Ender communicates with the last remaining Hive Queen. He learns that the buggers were not the ravaging hordes earth thought them, but intelligent beings. He learns that the war between humans and the buggers occurred because the two races could not understand each other. He then writes the book that eventually turns himself into a genocidal monster in the eyes of the public.
If I remember right, in the end Ender gets to have his cake and eat it too. He gets to be the hero for defeating those nasty nasty bugs, but he gets to remain innocent because he didn't know he was committing genocide
Except that he condemns himself as a genocide, and turns the popular opinion of him towards that pole, so that eventually his name is as reviled as Hitler's. Part of the premise of the books is the concept of a perfect general: one who shows sufficient empathy to totally understand his enemy, but one also willing to totally exterminate what he has empathy for. The only way to pull off that combination is by the trickery used by Ender's superiors. Ender doesn't get to have his cake and eat it too - he spends the rest of his very long life atoning for his cake-eating.
Card is a Mormon. Mormons love to seperate people into "worthy" and "unworthy" categories. I know because my family is mormon.
It looks like someone has a bone to pick with the Mormon religion, and is attacking Ender's Game, not because of any particular lack of literary merit, but because it happens to have been penned by a Mormon.
Yeah, but he only had one - it was a genetic fluke that he couldn't reproduce despite promises to investors, and it was psycho besides.
Because otherwise the dinosaurs wouldnt have been able to grow dicks, the chaos maths guy would have been wrong and the whole point of the story would suddenly vanish.
Neither was the hound when we left him :/
I love Martin's books :)
I'm still in denial about Brienne. There's just too much that was setup for her - Oathkeeper, and Jaime - she's got to survive. But then, I thought the same about the Hound too. And Rob. When will I learn?
Something doesn't have to be original to be effective
I should also point out that Google has a sizable portfolio of patents, which means two things: firstly, smart and successful tech businessmen appreciate the value of patents; and secondly, in keeping with their corporate philosophy, Google does not believe software patents are evil.
Patents are a necessary evil. If you have a patented product, and a big player wants it, they can get it. Either they will just copy it, and dare you to face their lawyers in court over the period of five years it will take to be decided, or they will serve you court orders violating a number of their five hundred arcane and obscure patents - and offer to drop the case in return for a license to your product.
Ideally, patents should protect small inventors. In modern times, where large corporations have many patents, where most inventions are not entirely new, but composed of many existing parts or techniques, where the courts move incredibly slowly, and even quick cases are incredibly expensive, they don't.
Patents are a sort of Prisoner's Dilemma - if everyone used the patent system responsibly, everyone would benefit. But as soon as someone builds a patent portfolio and starts threatening people with it, everyone else needs to start building a patent portfolio to survive, which ends up locking out anyone who doesn't have one.
Who wants to bet it will register "Mortal Peril" whenever someone sits down in front of a linux terminal?
Im with the node :)
I agree, BloodWytch was awesome. Man, I still remember the sound of that disrupt spell. Unfortunately, I never got to play the expansion disk cause I only got my hands on it a few months before my Amiga died a very sad death. Although I think Pool of Radiance is still my favourite ol' classic. Although I don't think I RPed very well - I always created lawful good characters, but then Id go and hire a Hero mercenary, take them out into the slums, put them to sleep, chop off their heads and steal their equipment (they gave good experience too).
Geeks rarely exhibit the behaviors and habits of successful business men. Hell, if you can't even be bothered to shower, how can you be expected to bother to show up to work and meetings and run your business? Further, geeks tend to push aside the important things and focus on what (to them) are the "fun" things. That doesn't help anyone succeed...Frankly, I just don't think geeks are cut out for business and running their own companies
It depends on how you define a geek, and also what type of business their in to. While the unshaven, unwashed poorly-dressed geek stereotype is amusing, there are many people who have interest and ability in technical areas that don't buy into that stereotype.
On the other hand, the small company I used to work for (boss + programmer(me) + graphic designer) was run by a guy who had no idea about anything technical. All the company's knowledge was held by the employees. When the company had a lean month, he struggled to pay all his bills. Eventually he didn't pay us for two weeks, we quit and the business folded. A small business, however, where the business owner is also the person with the practical skills, can survive a bit easier in those circumanstances. If you do most of the work yourself, you can sub-contract in extra people to do the non-critical stuff when needed, and not have to pay them when they're not needed. Having fewer employees means you have a lower fixed-cost overhead. Of course, as business gets to the point where one person can't do everything, you'll have to make a decision. You could either hire a tech guy, hire a manager, or sell the business.
I wouldn't expect to see a major company have a CEO that writes and designs their own software, but we're not talking about major companies here. We're talking about small business startups, and I'd imagine quite a few do.
So, PostgreSQL gets more users, EnterpriseDB has programmers actively working on the code, and since PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed, EnterpriseDB can have a closed-source product while continuing to contribute code/docs/feedback to the project.
As far as I understand the BSD license, the problem with the above is that EnterpriseDB has no obligation to contribute the code or documents it generates back to the PostgreSQL project.I wouldn't mind a license that allowed companies to close the source, but forced them to contribute changes back to the original codebase. Of course, the problem then becomes one of detection: how do you know if they've contributed all their changes when you can't see their code?
There's a middle position between the "employee" thing and the "multi-billion sellout to Yahoo!" thing. It's called small business. I'm in Austrlia, and the business economy here might be a lot different to the US, I don't know. But just from my immediate aqaintances, I know a guy who runs his own graphic design business, a guy who does installation and setups of digital theatre systems (conference rooms, lecture halls, home theatres) and an electrician.
These people generally spent a few years working for someone else, got a knowledge of the business, then setup for themselves. In the case of the designer, when he quit, he came away with a ready-made group of clients who followed him from his last job. None of them make millions, but they each make enough to support themselves fairly well.
If you want to work for yourself, work for someone else long enough to learn the ropes. Do a quick management course to help you pickup at least the basics (book-keeping, tax, information privay laws, industry-specific legislation, etc). Save up enough money to keep your head above water for your first year should it prove to be a lean one and give it a shot.
And the really good thing is, I don't have to be worried about all the stupid industrial reforms the government just passed.
Microsoft also controls the most-used browser. Add it all up, and I can sure see why Google might want to have a (better, but less popular) browser under their control...
Wow, you're right. Google had better compete against Microsoft in every area in which Microsoft controls the dominant market share. So since MS controls the most-used desktop operating system, be on the lookout for gOS. Oh, and since it also controls the most-used office suite, gOffice is a dead cert. Ooh, ooh, and since theres so many VB programmers out there, gBASIC is probably in pre-beta already!
The more and more we limit people's freedoms, the more similar we become to the sick visions of people like Osama bin Laden. They want a world in which people have few if any freedoms, and where no one may dare diagree with Islam. We are moving in the direction of the first, and if you replace 'Islam' with 'our government', we might be headed towards that one as well.
See, judging from what I've heard of their material, what they're wanting is pretty much what most slashdotters seem to be wanting - the US government to get it's nose out of their business. What they want is the US to stop interfering in middle-eastern politics, and letting them get back to killing/getting killed by the Israelis. I'm the first to condemn terrorist methodology, but really, let's not get into demonizing our opponents. It's stupid, irrational, deceitful, and it clouds the real issues.
(Note to any outraged future posters: I am not endorsing terrorism, I am simply asking we look at their motivations analytically rather than emotionally)
The great-grandparent specifically said that PHP had poor security:
The use of PHP, on the other hand, is basically an invitation for security issues.
I want to know, what, specifically, he finds wrong with PHP in terms of security. Saying "it's so insecure, everyone knows that" doesn't prove anything, it just perpetuates a meme (that may or may not be correct). What I want is some hard and fast problems that I can check out and evaluate.
What aspects of PHP do you think increase security risks, specifically? The major one I know is was the stupid "register_global" idea, which is easily fixed - it's turned off on every host I run.
Apart from that, what security flaws do you have? SQL-Injection attacks, sure, but then, so does every other language that interacts directly with a database. There are abstraction layers around to avoid that, if you don't trust yourself to examine your incoming data properly.
I agree that PHP is a poorly designed language - it started off as a pet project and grew in a fairly ad-hoc manner. But using PHP doesn't magically open any attack vectors that were not there previously (with the exception of the afore-mentioned register_globals). What would you do to exploit a PHP site that you couldn't do to exploit, say, a Perl site?
Wikipedia is a good starting point for finding out information about a certain topic. It's not a good ending point. If I want to start learning about, say, Edgar Allen Poe, where do I start? If I just typed in "Edgar Allen Poe" into Google, I'd get sites selling his work, sites selling biographies, poetry appreciation sites, crib notes for students studying his work, etc. With Wikipedia, I can go straight to the article, and get a brief overview of his life.
Then down the bottom of that article, there's a list of reference books and external sites, which I can then go and check out. At this point, I can make the transfer between the "unreliable" Wikipedia into the "reliable" medium of published literature. But using Wikipedia, I now have a good idea of just which books to look up, and a basic understanding of some of the things I'm likely to encounter.
Now, this example is probably not the best, as Edgar Allen Poe will probably be listed in most print encyclopedias. But say I wanted to find out about some wierd race from Babylon 5. Good luck finding that in a print encyclopedia. But if I check Wikipedia, I can get the basic facts, and some links to more authoritive sources.
Depending on JavaScript could be its downfall, since JavaScript has so many functional work-arounds for each browser. Even the article mentions (but dismisses) this problem. From the article (again): Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer, uses the MSXML parser for handling XML (you can find out more about MSXML in Resources). So when you write Ajax applications that need to work on Internet Explorer, you need to create the object in a particular way. "Particular Way" for browser one ... "Particular Way" for browser two ...
Sounds like in an inherently poor design.
Im not a huge fan of AJAX, but this is one criticism you can't honestly level at it. Browser incompatibilities exist for pretty much all client-side, web-based technologies, and AJAX has only a single minor change to work around, as opposed to getting a complex CSS layout to work cross-browser. *shudder*
The simplest AJAX app relies on one piece of javascript functionality - the ability to make an http request through script. I've used this a number of times to submit data to a server when I didn't want to update the page.
Most AJAX then also relies on the ability of javascript to parse an XML document (to examine the results of the post) and some form of dynamic page-rewriting to change the current page based on the XML document (generally object.InnerHtml for content changes, or object.style for stylistic ones).
These features are fairly static - there's no need for them to change often. Simple AJAX - which is simply just offloading form submission - is good, useful, and most users don't even know it's there. As long as javascript keeps these three features, AJAX won't have major browser compatibility problems.
AJAX which rearranges the page after each XmlRequest is a bit more troublesome. It's also the flashy bit, which means its the bit every man and his dog tries to do. Using this technique, it is easy to write an entire site in one page - that is, there's one page the user visits, and the page rewrites itself based on their clicks. This is the stupidity of taking AJAX too far; you end up breaking basic functionality of the web (back buttons, refreshing, bookmarking, opening in new windows/tabs).
I don't know much about bit comet, but there is a part of the bittorrent specification that sends an identifier that is supposed to indicate the bittorrent client during the handshake. You might have to change bitcomet in source and recompile to be able to change it though. Im not sure if these private trackers rely on this, or if they do some other analysis to double-check the value given them by the client.
I find using a grid-based layout (which is what a table is) fairly intuitive, and I don't really see cell-spanning as a hack. Spacer images and cut-up images are a bit of a hack, but combining tables and CSS, I don't think I've had to cut-up an image for a good few years, and margin/padding settings replace spacers. I quite like CSS in most respects, but I find doing positioning using pure CSS to be a major pain in the backside, especially when trying to maintain browser compaitibility.
My ideal positioning syntax for CSS would be the ability to setup a grid in any container object (grid-width: 10; grid-height: 10; to setup a 10 by 10 grid) and then be able to specify grid co-ordinates in any objects within that container (position: grid; grid-x: 1; grid-y:1 width: 1cells; height: 10cells;). Bingo, there's a column layout that will resize with it's parent container, with separation of form and content, and semantically valid for all the purists out there (it uses the word "grid" instead of "table").
I'm not against CSS, I think the concept is great, and the styling part of it works wonderfully. I think the positioning method sucks and should be scrapped, and the alignment method should be fixed - vertical-align working on more objects than just table cells, and being able to center table/fixed-width block elements without resorting to margin hacks.
I wouldn't imagine it works in IE - it doesn't cope with other margin methods of centering. But that's not really the thing I was getting at. The very idea of using margin settings to center align something - vertically or horizontally - is counter-intuitive.
How intuitive. Of course, if I want to centre something I should make it render as a table-cell. Even though it's not in a table. And while we're on the subject of tables-cells, why can only table-cells have a vertical-align specified? And why is the horizonal align called text-align and not horizontal-align, so as to be nice and consistent.
It depends what's in your contract. If you are contracted to give 4 weeks notice, and you only give 1, well, there's nothing they can really do about it. Give you a bad reference.
But if you give the full 4 weeks, and they kick you out as soon as you hand in your resignation, then they are obliged to pay you out that extra 4 weeks in lieu of notice (assuming, that is, that the contract states that the employer has to give the same amount of notice as the employee - all ones that Ive signed have said that). And you don't get a black mark against your name when someone rings up to check on you after you apply for your new job.
So while giving them the finger and a day's notice might be psychologoically satisfying, your bank account and future prospects will be much happier with full notice.
This situation has come about because the Australian people were duped into voting for a totally unevenly balanced parliament, railroaded into this vote by a series of lies and distortions and scare tactics at the last election.
While I agree with of most of what you say, in my opinion, the reason the Liberals has such a landslide victory was because the Labour party was too concerned with bickering and backstabbing amongst themselves to launch a credible campaign, When you've only got two parties that have more than a snowball's chance in hell of getting the top job, and one of the parties is changing leaders every time you turn around, the result was obvious. The unfortunate fact is that Labour's incompetence lead to the Liberals dominating both houses, and being able to push through pretty much any bill they like. This is what happens to a political system when the division of power is removed.