That is so low, trying to blame the reasons that hotornot is wrong on us moral relativists. Even this funked-up-in-the-head atheist can see that hotornot is awful.
Hotornot is bad because it reduces the worth of individuals to a score based upon their appearance. There is nothing wrong with appreciating physical beauty per se. There is nothing wrong with "flesh worship" such as pornography, per se. The problem is when the value of individuals is reduced to how closely their physical appearance agrees with the societal norm. There is a difference between a mag like Hustler, which portrays women as stupid sluts; and one like On Our Backs, which portrays women as, well, women, of all different shapes and sizes and kinks, etc. Of course, your "all non-marital lust is bad" worldview doesn't allow you to appreciate that difference. But I digress.
Hotornot is reflective of the lowest-common-denominator thought that marginalizes all aspects of society. Society says: women who are have unique body shapes should spend their money trying to rectify this perceived error. That major label pop music is the best there is. That sitcoms and movies should follow a standard formula so as to exact the most amount of money from the largest amount of people. Everything is reduced to a dollar figure. People don't deserve to have that done to them.
As far as I am concerned, it is this seperation of what society precieves as good and what is truly good that causes most of the problems in society, NOT the fact that that people aren't willing to supress all sexual desire for fear of going to hell.
Anyhow, if you insist on using the Bible as a guide to issues of physical appearance, consider this verse instead -- I think it allows for the condemnation of amihotornot much more eloquently than the fourth commandment:
The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.
- 1 Samuel 16:7
I'm willing to accept that just because it's in the Bible doesn't mean it's wrong. Are you willing to accept that just because it's in the Bible it doesn't mean it's right?
-Ross
P.S. Has anyone else thought it would be fun to write a bot that goes to amihotornot and randomly assigns a 9 or a 10 to every person? If everyone ran it once a day and the (perhaps already damaged) self esteem of hotornotters goes up, plus it has the added bonus of making the site worthless.
ICANN may be a pain in my ass, and stupid when it comes to policy, but when it comes to world government, it's not the first, and it's certainly not *that* bad. It's DNS, fer chrissakes. If I have to pay $1500 for rossrules.biz, I'll have a little cry, but I'll recover.
Consider, on the other hand, the World Trade Organization. Now that's unelected world government. They basically have the power to legislate trade law to any country in the world, lest that country face severe trade restrictions or fines. Appeals go to a board of trade attorneys (and you thought IP lawyers were bad.) Nobody's elected, non-trade-encouraging behavior is discouraged.
I agree that ICANN sucks, but c'mon people, have a little perspective.
Having now watched the movies, I'm starting to feel sorry for clippy. He's so eager and full of life, and yet based on that fact, he has to deal with all sorts of discrimination and even physical abuse.
Kind of like the Trix rabbit. There is absolutely *no reason* why those kids won't let him have Trix. "Trix are for kids?" What kind of excuse is that? It's blatant age and species-based discrimination. Does anyone remember the time they let kids vote if the Trix rabbit would get Trix, and kids sent in their votes, and the majority of the votes were in his favor? When he scooped up his first spoonful of Trix, the look of delight on his face; I thought it was a turning point, a veritable 19th amendment for rabbitkind. But then, a few months later, the Trix rabbit was back to being denied access to the Trix that he deserves as equally as you or I. I guess the commercial producers thought that keeping the little guy down was more important than the will of the people.
Well, I let it slide then, but I won't stand for it now. I demand Clippy's reinstatement in the Office suite.
I'd argue that d00dz are just as much creatures of a local reality consensus as the Britney-buying dupes. Both groups appear to me to be equally without critical thought. One likes Britney Spears in part because she's manufactured to be likeable. The other wants to steal software because they've misunderstood some cool-sounding line about how information wants to be free. One group conforms with the corporate-sponsored social norms, and the other conforms with the non-conformists.
Very true! However, no insightful op-ed by Rusty nor anything else will ever alter this state of affairs. Capatilism has already won the Darwinian war for the future. My point is that even a statement of beliefs as important as The GNU manifesto (something I believe in strongly, BTW) has done little more than stir academic interest in intellectual property rights. Something like the Communist Manifesto would never fly nowadays. The only way to get anything to change (outside the system at least) is to Fuck Shit Up. For the first time, computers allow FSU'ers to do so effectively, by identifying social trends and exploiting them, stealing from the capitalist's bag of tricks.
Didn't someone once say that writing about revolution was like dancing about sauerkraut or something?
It's not that I disagree with his points - it is indeed true that peer-to-peer communication allows us to bypass Chomskian media filters.
But this article is clearly preaching to the choir. Even if it is disseminated to a larger audience, the language is the kind that tends to attract English majors to the scene (just what we need, an army of Jonkatzes preaching the virtues of p-2-p to people who have been living it since the day they discovered that what ATS0=1 did.)
Linux and Napster has already proven that the era of manifestos is over. Actions (or shipping code, rather) speaks louder than any words ever could. Linux may be GPLed, but if that was enough, HURD would be the next big thing. Napster arrived with little fanfare, it was just software that filled a desire so strong, people were willing to ignore some of the crappier parts of the interface. DivX:-) was a hack, *still* is a hack, but by sheer strength of 14-year olds d00dz who want a free copy of The Matrix, it may be the end of the movie industry.
Indeed, the era of the manifesto is over. "Smash the state" is even beginning to look a bit wordy. Here is our future: an army of silent coders - fighting battles won by the quality of their code, by the savvyness of their program logic, and their abject glee at throwing rocks at a hornet's nest and seeing what happens.
I also have a proposal for improving the quality of web pages everywhere: stop using Javascript in your pages. Really -- DHTML is cool and all, but IMO not worth the price of wrestling control of web development away from non-professional HTML coders. The web is a revolution because anyone can do it - anyone can understand HTML with a little work. The ability of people to publish their own content unrestricted to an unlimited audience is unprecidented, and should not be ignored.
Recent complications to HTML - CSS1 + 2, XHTML, DHTML; have not made things easier and cleaner as they should have. Rather, they raise the enterence requirements for beginning coders. HTML had the potential to break the "leave it to the professionals" attitude that is one of the worst aspects of IT and CS. These additions threaten to move us back to the stone age.
If Tim really wanted to make the web a better place, he should push to get rid of the requirements for XHTML to be properly nested, well-formed, and closed. It may seem like a good idea to us coders, but a bad idea to people who find HTML confusing enough already.
Here's the part I have trouble with, correct me if I'm mis-reading it:
From http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1
(from the definitions section)
Should
With respect to implementations, the word "should" is to be interpreted as an implementation recommendation, but not a requirement. With respect to documents, the word "should" is to be interpreted as recommended programming practice for documents and a requirement for Strictly Conforming XHTML Documents
Must
In this specification, the word "must" is to be interpreted as a mandatory requirement on the implementation or on Strictly Conforming XHTML Documents, depending upon the context. The term "shall" has the same definition as "must".
__________________________
4.1 Documents must be well-formed
Well-formedness is a new concept introduced by [XML]. Essentially this means that all elements must either have closing tags or be written in a special form (as described below), and that all the elements must nest.
Although overlapping is illegal in SGML, it was widely tolerated in existing browsers.
CORRECT: nested elements.
<p>here is an emphasized <em>paragraph</em>.</p>
INCORRECT: overlapping elements
<p>here is an emphasized <em>paragraph.</p></em>
4.2 Element and attribute names must be in lower case
XHTML documents must use lower case for all HTML element and attribute names. This difference is necessary because XML is case-sensitive e.g. <li> and <LI> are different tags.
4.3 For non-empty elements, end tags are required
In SGML-based HTML 4 certain elements were permitted to omit the end tag; with the elements that followed implying closure. This omission is not permitted in XML-based XHTML. All elements other than those declared in the DTD as EMPTY must have an end tag.
CORRECT: terminated elements
<p>here is a paragraph.</p><p>here is another paragraph.</p>
INCORRECT: unterminated elements
<p>here is a paragraph.<p>here is another paragraph.
4.4 Attribute values must always be quoted
All attribute values must be quoted, even those which appear to be numeric.
CORRECT: quoted attribute values
<table rows="3">
INCORRECT: unquoted attribute values
<table rows=3>
4.5 Attribute Minimization
XML does not support attribute minimization. Attribute-value pairs must be written in full. Attribute names such as compact and checked cannot occur in elements without their value being specified.
CORRECT: unminimized attributes
<dl compact="compact">
INCORRECT: minimized attributes
<dl compact>
4.6 Empty Elements
Empty elements must either have an end tag or the start tag must end with/>. For instance, <br/> or <hr></hr>. See HTML Compatibility Guidelines for information on ways to ensure this is backward compatible with HTML 4 user agents.
My hope is that the need to prevent advertisements from being stripped out is one of the things that causes the adoption of XHTML to stall. HTML is a programming language for non-programmers, and by raising the bar for what is acceptable, it widens the gap of elitism that currently confronts people trying to learn HTML on their own. HTML is designed for ordinary folks to be able to code in (and they can!), but code generation WYSIWYG programs tend to generate code so un-readable that it defeats the whole point of HTML being easy to read in the first place. XHTML makes this worse by basically forcing everyone to code every page with perfect syntax. For most people, this means that they can no longer use Notepad or Ultraedit to make webpages, they HAVE to use Frontpage or some such nonsense. At that point, web traffic might as well just be packed binary, it would be more efficient.
In fact XHTML encourages binary formats by discouraging people from coding by hand. "Why not use flash, it's prettier," people will ask, and I will be able to give them a good answer other than "it's proprietary." That's dumb.
My dismay with XHTML and some of the stupider parts of CSS2 have really caused me to lose a lot of faith in the w3c to endorse non-stupid standards.
It's bad enough you can do it with JavaScript. What they should really do is not design resolution/color depth/etc specific HTML pages. The W3C should have opposed those additions to Javascript (and Javascript in its current form in general) as well as these stupid HTTP headers.
Sigh. I'm a geezer at 20.
This, BTW, is why "the browser is the platform" is perhaps not the best idea. CSS2 widgets encourage browsers to be uniform, but it's browser diversity that encourages people to not code for a specific platform. HTML just wasn't designed to do this faux bitmap garbage that passes for a website nowadays, nor should it have.
On the other hand, perhaps people who use phrases such as "Da Bomb" should be prosecuted as severly as terrorists and child pornographers. Along with the "Hella cool," "Whaaazzupp," and "Oh no you di-int" folks. I wouldn't half mind the anti-speech laws congress is so fond of passing if they focussed less on restricting the speech of bomb-makers and copyright violators and more on restricting the speech of people who still use the phrase "You go girl" on a regular basis.
One of the marketing guys here at work (we resell for IBM) got some of the promo materials for the campaign, and I have to say the bumper stickers at least rock. I don't have a scanner, so I'll describe them: There are three different bumper stickers. They're completely black and white, with the funny e in the "IBM e Server" logo red. The background is black, and there are three white circles with the peace sign, a heart and Tux's head on them, respectively. On one of the stickers, Tux is huge, no logo. One the other two, the white circles are all the same size, and they say either LINUX LIVES or LINUX POWER in huge letters.
Still, they're very plain and non-detailed. There's no flower power feeling. In fact, the impression I get is more making fun of the sterotype of Linux hippies, especially on the one with Tux dwarfing the peace and love signs, kind of a manic celebration of the fact that yes, Linux was founded on the principles of sharing and goodwill, but it makes a damn good solid OS right now for your business.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it:-).
Still, the one with the big Tux is going on the car.
I have to disagree with this assumption. When the district is held liable, it encourages other districts to change their policy to avoid lawsuits. The people involved in punishing this student were most likely following a misguided interpretation of ambigious school district policy. A principal can always say "I was doing what I thought was the best for the school, and it fell within district guidelines, you can't fire me for that" but rarely, "School district policy and job be damned, I'll do what's best for this school." Had there been a stipulation in the rules explicitly granting students the right to free criticism of the school outside the school environment, this never would have happened in the first place.
######## TERMINAL TYPE DESCRIPTIONS SOURCE FILE
#
# Version 11.0.1
# $Date: 2000/03/02 15:51:11 $
# termcap syntax
#
# Eric S. Raymond (current maintainer)
# John Kunze, Berkeley
# Craig Leres, Berkeley
#
# Please e-mail changes to terminfo@thyrsus.com; the old termcap@berkeley.edu
# address is no longer valid. The latest version can always be found at
# .
You'll see it from time to time, Eric did this little bit, Eric did this little bit. He shows up on linux-kernel from time to time. It adds up. Have you looked at termcap recently? JHC, I wouldn't touch that nonsense with a 10 foot pole. But he does. Same goes for his rewrite of the kernel configuration file system. Nutso stuff that is way beyond either of our abilities (admit it, you lamer), and he's working on it right now. I may not be the biggest ESR fan on the planet, but he has made many positive contributions, and his heart is in the right place.
Hopefully this one will have some cool merchandise.
Merchandise? From Paramount? Not likely. Call Paramount a lot of things... but not sellouts.
Nosiree - Paramount has been careful about who it licenses the Star Trek name to. So far, they've carefully limited themselves to posters, books, flashlights, magazines, pencils, cereals, pretend phasers, Christmas ornaments, lunchboxes, action figures, clocks, calendars, buttons, feminine napkins, crappy ceramic figurines, decorative plates, jackets, cheese doodles, pretend communicators, aerosol sprays, hot water bottles, trading cards, toothpaste, children's vitamins, AOL CDs, video games, role playing games, board games, snow domes, playing cards, cheap jewlery, dolls, hats, keychains and mugs that make Mr. Spock disappear when you add hot water. So don't expect them to start licensing the name to just anyone who offers them $20 and a bottle of Jack Daniels. The asking price is $40 and two bottles.
You'd be right if this case was merely two morally equal entities squabbling over IP rights. But it's not. Etoy is old Internet. Etoy was just minding their own, doing the Internet-is-all-commercialized-but-we're-still-a-b unch-of-weird-tech-art-people thing, and then Etoys went "Money+Internet=good" and decided to walk over the good guys. It's so clear cut, it's symbolic. Which is why this lawsuit is important.
Those of us who remember the Internet of olde and still hold some hope for the future that medium promised need to send a clear message to those who seek to profit through its exploitation:
Even nudie magazines like Playboy are not considered obscene because they have at least some (however miniscule) literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Please. This is the 21st century. Magazines like Barely Legal XXX Hardcore are sold all over the country without legal challenge. I mean for the court to find this website obscene, it's gonna have to be pretty damn obscene. So, unless the main page is a doctored image of the police commisioner recieving a Triple Master Blaster, or a deputy sheriff giving the goatse.cx guy a rim job, they're going to have a pretty hard time in court.:)
Seriously, though, this pisses me right off. You would hope that when initiating people into the EXECUTIVE FUCKIN' BRANCH OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, fer chrissake, they would at least make them watch a 5 minute video expaining the founding priniples of our nation rather than the "Making Teargas Work For You" instructional seminar they currently would appear to be getting. You would hope that the people whose job is to (in the end) preserve the American way of life would give a half damn about the bill of rights. Apparently this is not the case. It's a sorry state of affairs that it will take the multimillion lawsuit against the department (that I'm sure is forthcoming) to knock some sense into these asswipes.
Actually, there once was a time when/. was pretty devoid of trolls. Taco and Hemos used to post in open forums. People posted patches in response to Ask Slashdot questions. Technical arguments by industry experts were common.
Then the trolls arrived. At first they posted genuinely - and since everything they said was mindless drivel, they decided that/. was lame and that trolling was okay.
So trolls will tell you that they're doing a good job saving/. from lameness. I wish they could know that/. wasn't dumb until they arrived. But I can understand - I didn't have much perspective when I was 14 either.
This whole aspect of the internet is very mysterious. I mean, I can understand TCP/IP - the packets go from hop to hop, network to network and it just gets from place to place. Everyone buys bandwidth from upstream until there is no farther upstream. Then, networks have to peer with each other.
That's where I get bewildered. How does peering work, at a physical level, and a practical level?
Physically, I'm imagining two shacks (let's say they're respectively owned by MCI Worldcom and AT&T) next to each other in in the woods with a CAT-5 cable snaked between them. I'm sure it's something more fancy than this, but am I basically right?
Practically, if you're an ISP, how many other "big players" do you have to make sure you're peered with in order to make it so your users can always get to any other part of the Internet whenever they want to? Who governs this interaction? From some of the other posts here, I'm getting the impression that the almighty dollar is the governing party.
And what's the history of peering? How was it in the early days? How did it get to where it is now?
Does anyone know of a website, or perhaps a book that explains this aspect of the Internet? It's endlessly fascinating to me, and it's one of a few areas of the Internet I don't get. That and the inner mysteries of Usenet. But that's another post for another time.
Slashdot Mirror
Hotornot is bad because it reduces the worth of individuals to a score based upon their appearance. There is nothing wrong with appreciating physical beauty per se. There is nothing wrong with "flesh worship" such as pornography, per se. The problem is when the value of individuals is reduced to how closely their physical appearance agrees with the societal norm. There is a difference between a mag like Hustler, which portrays women as stupid sluts; and one like On Our Backs, which portrays women as, well, women, of all different shapes and sizes and kinks, etc. Of course, your "all non-marital lust is bad" worldview doesn't allow you to appreciate that difference. But I digress.
Hotornot is reflective of the lowest-common-denominator thought that marginalizes all aspects of society. Society says: women who are have unique body shapes should spend their money trying to rectify this perceived error. That major label pop music is the best there is. That sitcoms and movies should follow a standard formula so as to exact the most amount of money from the largest amount of people. Everything is reduced to a dollar figure. People don't deserve to have that done to them.
As far as I am concerned, it is this seperation of what society precieves as good and what is truly good that causes most of the problems in society, NOT the fact that that people aren't willing to supress all sexual desire for fear of going to hell.
Anyhow, if you insist on using the Bible as a guide to issues of physical appearance, consider this verse instead -- I think it allows for the condemnation of amihotornot much more eloquently than the fourth commandment:
I'm willing to accept that just because it's in the Bible doesn't mean it's wrong. Are you willing to accept that just because it's in the Bible it doesn't mean it's right?
-Ross
P.S. Has anyone else thought it would be fun to write a bot that goes to amihotornot and randomly assigns a 9 or a 10 to every person? If everyone ran it once a day and the (perhaps already damaged) self esteem of hotornotters goes up, plus it has the added bonus of making the site worthless.
ICANN may be a pain in my ass, and stupid when it comes to policy, but when it comes to world government, it's not the first, and it's certainly not *that* bad. It's DNS, fer chrissakes. If I have to pay $1500 for rossrules.biz, I'll have a little cry, but I'll recover.
Consider, on the other hand, the World Trade Organization. Now that's unelected world government. They basically have the power to legislate trade law to any country in the world, lest that country face severe trade restrictions or fines. Appeals go to a board of trade attorneys (and you thought IP lawyers were bad.) Nobody's elected, non-trade-encouraging behavior is discouraged.
I agree that ICANN sucks, but c'mon people, have a little perspective.
Having now watched the movies, I'm starting to feel sorry for clippy. He's so eager and full of life, and yet based on that fact, he has to deal with all sorts of discrimination and even physical abuse.
Kind of like the Trix rabbit. There is absolutely *no reason* why those kids won't let him have Trix. "Trix are for kids?" What kind of excuse is that? It's blatant age and species-based discrimination. Does anyone remember the time they let kids vote if the Trix rabbit would get Trix, and kids sent in their votes, and the majority of the votes were in his favor? When he scooped up his first spoonful of Trix, the look of delight on his face; I thought it was a turning point, a veritable 19th amendment for rabbitkind. But then, a few months later, the Trix rabbit was back to being denied access to the Trix that he deserves as equally as you or I. I guess the commercial producers thought that keeping the little guy down was more important than the will of the people.
Well, I let it slide then, but I won't stand for it now. I demand Clippy's reinstatement in the Office suite.
TRIX ARE FOR EVERYONE! VIVA LA REVOLUTION!
Hey, maybe we can spin that into a new slogan for getting people to switch to Linux:
"LINUX: We don't even have unified copy and paste, let alone a stinkin' anthropomorphized paperclip"
Very true! However, no insightful op-ed by Rusty nor anything else will ever alter this state of affairs. Capatilism has already won the Darwinian war for the future. My point is that even a statement of beliefs as important as The GNU manifesto (something I believe in strongly, BTW) has done little more than stir academic interest in intellectual property rights. Something like the Communist Manifesto would never fly nowadays. The only way to get anything to change (outside the system at least) is to Fuck Shit Up. For the first time, computers allow FSU'ers to do so effectively, by identifying social trends and exploiting them, stealing from the capitalist's bag of tricks.
Didn't someone once say that writing about revolution was like dancing about sauerkraut or something?
:-) was a hack, *still* is a hack, but by sheer strength of 14-year olds d00dz who want a free copy of The Matrix, it may be the end of the movie industry.
It's not that I disagree with his points - it is indeed true that peer-to-peer communication allows us to bypass Chomskian media filters.
But this article is clearly preaching to the choir. Even if it is disseminated to a larger audience, the language is the kind that tends to attract English majors to the scene (just what we need, an army of Jonkatzes preaching the virtues of p-2-p to people who have been living it since the day they discovered that what ATS0=1 did.)
Linux and Napster has already proven that the era of manifestos is over. Actions (or shipping code, rather) speaks louder than any words ever could. Linux may be GPLed, but if that was enough, HURD would be the next big thing. Napster arrived with little fanfare, it was just software that filled a desire so strong, people were willing to ignore some of the crappier parts of the interface. DivX
Indeed, the era of the manifesto is over. "Smash the state" is even beginning to look a bit wordy. Here is our future: an army of silent coders - fighting battles won by the quality of their code, by the savvyness of their program logic, and their abject glee at throwing rocks at a hornet's nest and seeing what happens.
I think his point is that the basic hello world program:
int main(void}
(
printf ["hello, worldn\'),
}
will always be considered practically bug free. Jeez - some people never catch a joke.
I also have a proposal for improving the quality of web pages everywhere: stop using Javascript in your pages. Really -- DHTML is cool and all, but IMO not worth the price of wrestling control of web development away from non-professional HTML coders. The web is a revolution because anyone can do it - anyone can understand HTML with a little work. The ability of people to publish their own content unrestricted to an unlimited audience is unprecidented, and should not be ignored.
Recent complications to HTML - CSS1 + 2, XHTML, DHTML; have not made things easier and cleaner as they should have. Rather, they raise the enterence requirements for beginning coders. HTML had the potential to break the "leave it to the professionals" attitude that is one of the worst aspects of IT and CS. These additions threaten to move us back to the stone age.
If Tim really wanted to make the web a better place, he should push to get rid of the requirements for XHTML to be properly nested, well-formed, and closed. It may seem like a good idea to us coders, but a bad idea to people who find HTML confusing enough already.
Here's the part I have trouble with, correct me if I'm mis-reading it:
/>. For instance, <br/> or <hr></hr>. See HTML Compatibility Guidelines for information on ways to ensure this is backward compatible with HTML 4 user agents.
From http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1
(from the definitions section)
Should
With respect to implementations, the word "should" is to be interpreted as an implementation recommendation, but not a requirement. With respect to documents, the word "should" is to be interpreted as recommended programming practice for documents and a requirement for Strictly Conforming XHTML Documents
Must
In this specification, the word "must" is to be interpreted as a mandatory requirement on the implementation or on Strictly Conforming XHTML Documents, depending upon the context. The term "shall" has the same definition as "must".
__________________________
4.1 Documents must be well-formed
Well-formedness is a new concept introduced by [XML]. Essentially this means that all elements must either have closing tags or be written in a special form (as described below), and that all the elements must nest.
Although overlapping is illegal in SGML, it was widely tolerated in existing browsers.
CORRECT: nested elements.
<p>here is an emphasized <em>paragraph</em>.</p>
INCORRECT: overlapping elements
<p>here is an emphasized <em>paragraph.</p></em>
4.2 Element and attribute names must be in lower case
XHTML documents must use lower case for all HTML element and attribute names. This difference is necessary because XML is case-sensitive e.g. <li> and <LI> are different tags.
4.3 For non-empty elements, end tags are required
In SGML-based HTML 4 certain elements were permitted to omit the end tag; with the elements that followed implying closure. This omission is not permitted in XML-based XHTML. All elements other than those declared in the DTD as EMPTY must have an end tag.
CORRECT: terminated elements
<p>here is a paragraph.</p><p>here is another paragraph.</p>
INCORRECT: unterminated elements
<p>here is a paragraph.<p>here is another paragraph.
4.4 Attribute values must always be quoted
All attribute values must be quoted, even those which appear to be numeric.
CORRECT: quoted attribute values
<table rows="3">
INCORRECT: unquoted attribute values
<table rows=3>
4.5 Attribute Minimization
XML does not support attribute minimization. Attribute-value pairs must be written in full. Attribute names such as compact and checked cannot occur in elements without their value being specified.
CORRECT: unminimized attributes
<dl compact="compact">
INCORRECT: minimized attributes
<dl compact>
4.6 Empty Elements
Empty elements must either have an end tag or the start tag must end with
CORRECT: terminated empty tags
<br/><hr/>
INCORRECT: unterminated empty tags
<br><hr>
Hopefully not. (IMHO, of course :-))
My hope is that the need to prevent advertisements from being stripped out is one of the things that causes the adoption of XHTML to stall. HTML is a programming language for non-programmers, and by raising the bar for what is acceptable, it widens the gap of elitism that currently confronts people trying to learn HTML on their own. HTML is designed for ordinary folks to be able to code in (and they can!), but code generation WYSIWYG programs tend to generate code so un-readable that it defeats the whole point of HTML being easy to read in the first place. XHTML makes this worse by basically forcing everyone to code every page with perfect syntax. For most people, this means that they can no longer use Notepad or Ultraedit to make webpages, they HAVE to use Frontpage or some such nonsense. At that point, web traffic might as well just be packed binary, it would be more efficient.
In fact XHTML encourages binary formats by discouraging people from coding by hand. "Why not use flash, it's prettier," people will ask, and I will be able to give them a good answer other than "it's proprietary." That's dumb.
My dismay with XHTML and some of the stupider parts of CSS2 have really caused me to lose a lot of faith in the w3c to endorse non-stupid standards.
It's bad enough you can do it with JavaScript. What they should really do is not design resolution/color depth/etc specific HTML pages. The W3C should have opposed those additions to Javascript (and Javascript in its current form in general) as well as these stupid HTTP headers.
Sigh. I'm a geezer at 20.
This, BTW, is why "the browser is the platform" is perhaps not the best idea. CSS2 widgets encourage browsers to be uniform, but it's browser diversity that encourages people to not code for a specific platform. HTML just wasn't designed to do this faux bitmap garbage that passes for a website nowadays, nor should it have.
On the other hand, perhaps people who use phrases such as "Da Bomb" should be prosecuted as severly as terrorists and child pornographers. Along with the "Hella cool," "Whaaazzupp," and "Oh no you di-int" folks. I wouldn't half mind the anti-speech laws congress is so fond of passing if they focussed less on restricting the speech of bomb-makers and copyright violators and more on restricting the speech of people who still use the phrase "You go girl" on a regular basis.
One of the marketing guys here at work (we resell for IBM) got some of the promo materials for the campaign, and I have to say the bumper stickers at least rock. I don't have a scanner, so I'll describe them: There are three different bumper stickers. They're completely black and white, with the funny e in the "IBM e Server" logo red. The background is black, and there are three white circles with the peace sign, a heart and Tux's head on them, respectively. On one of the stickers, Tux is huge, no logo. One the other two, the white circles are all the same size, and they say either LINUX LIVES or LINUX POWER in huge letters.
:-).
Still, they're very plain and non-detailed. There's no flower power feeling. In fact, the impression I get is more making fun of the sterotype of Linux hippies, especially on the one with Tux dwarfing the peace and love signs, kind of a manic celebration of the fact that yes, Linux was founded on the principles of sharing and goodwill, but it makes a damn good solid OS right now for your business.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it
Still, the one with the big Tux is going on the car.
I have to disagree with this assumption. When the district is held liable, it encourages other districts to change their policy to avoid lawsuits. The people involved in punishing this student were most likely following a misguided interpretation of ambigious school district policy. A principal can always say "I was doing what I thought was the best for the school, and it fell within district guidelines, you can't fire me for that" but rarely, "School district policy and job be damned, I'll do what's best for this school." Had there been a stipulation in the rules explicitly granting students the right to free criticism of the school outside the school environment, this never would have happened in the first place.
How about this: /etc/termcap
$less
######## TERMINAL TYPE DESCRIPTIONS SOURCE FILE
#
# Version 11.0.1
# $Date: 2000/03/02 15:51:11 $
# termcap syntax
#
# Eric S. Raymond (current maintainer)
# John Kunze, Berkeley
# Craig Leres, Berkeley
#
# Please e-mail changes to terminfo@thyrsus.com; the old termcap@berkeley.edu
# address is no longer valid. The latest version can always be found at
# .
You'll see it from time to time, Eric did this little bit, Eric did this little bit. He shows up on linux-kernel from time to time. It adds up. Have you looked at termcap recently? JHC, I wouldn't touch that nonsense with a 10 foot pole. But he does. Same goes for his rewrite of the kernel configuration file system. Nutso stuff that is way beyond either of our abilities (admit it, you lamer), and he's working on it right now. I may not be the biggest ESR fan on the planet, but he has made many positive contributions, and his heart is in the right place.
Still, that's spooky. "The Ratings Police" is the impression you get.
Merchandise? From Paramount? Not likely. Call Paramount a lot of things... but not sellouts.
Nosiree - Paramount has been careful about who it licenses the Star Trek name to. So far, they've carefully limited themselves to posters, books, flashlights, magazines, pencils, cereals, pretend phasers, Christmas ornaments, lunchboxes, action figures, clocks, calendars, buttons, feminine napkins, crappy ceramic figurines, decorative plates, jackets, cheese doodles, pretend communicators, aerosol sprays, hot water bottles, trading cards, toothpaste, children's vitamins, AOL CDs, video games, role playing games, board games, snow domes, playing cards, cheap jewlery, dolls, hats, keychains and mugs that make Mr. Spock disappear when you add hot water. So don't expect them to start licensing the name to just anyone who offers them $20 and a bottle of Jack Daniels. The asking price is $40 and two bottles.
I deserved that flamebait. Bill Joy is a good guy, and I should have put it a little nicer. Still thought it was funny though.
You'd be right if this case was merely two morally equal entities squabbling over IP rights. But it's not. Etoy is old Internet. Etoy was just minding their own, doing the Internet-is-all-commercialized-but-we're-still-a-b unch-of-weird-tech-art-people thing, and then Etoys went "Money+Internet=good" and decided to walk over the good guys. It's so clear cut, it's symbolic. Which is why this lawsuit is important.
Those of us who remember the Internet of olde and still hold some hope for the future that medium promised need to send a clear message to those who seek to profit through its exploitation:
WE WERE HERE FIRST, SO FUCK OFF!
Please. This is the 21st century. Magazines like Barely Legal XXX Hardcore are sold all over the country without legal challenge. I mean for the court to find this website obscene, it's gonna have to be pretty damn obscene. So, unless the main page is a doctored image of the police commisioner recieving a Triple Master Blaster, or a deputy sheriff giving the goatse.cx guy a rim job, they're going to have a pretty hard time in court.
Seriously, though, this pisses me right off. You would hope that when initiating people into the EXECUTIVE FUCKIN' BRANCH OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, fer chrissake, they would at least make them watch a 5 minute video expaining the founding priniples of our nation rather than the "Making Teargas Work For You" instructional seminar they currently would appear to be getting. You would hope that the people whose job is to (in the end) preserve the American way of life would give a half damn about the bill of rights. Apparently this is not the case. It's a sorry state of affairs that it will take the multimillion lawsuit against the department (that I'm sure is forthcoming) to knock some sense into these asswipes.
Actually, there once was a time when /. was pretty devoid of trolls. Taco and Hemos used to post in open forums. People posted patches in response to Ask Slashdot questions. Technical arguments by industry experts were common.
/. was lame and that trolling was okay.
/. from lameness. I wish they could know that /. wasn't dumb until they arrived. But I can understand - I didn't have much perspective when I was 14 either.
Then the trolls arrived. At first they posted genuinely - and since everything they said was mindless drivel, they decided that
So trolls will tell you that they're doing a good job saving
Just like the Canadian commercials:
"2**3021377 - 1, a prime number to call our own"
This whole aspect of the internet is very mysterious. I mean, I can understand TCP/IP - the packets go from hop to hop, network to network and it just gets from place to place. Everyone buys bandwidth from upstream until there is no farther upstream. Then, networks have to peer with each other.
That's where I get bewildered. How does peering work, at a physical level, and a practical level?
Physically, I'm imagining two shacks (let's say they're respectively owned by MCI Worldcom and AT&T) next to each other in in the woods with a CAT-5 cable snaked between them. I'm sure it's something more fancy than this, but am I basically right?
Practically, if you're an ISP, how many other "big players" do you have to make sure you're peered with in order to make it so your users can always get to any other part of the Internet whenever they want to? Who governs this interaction? From some of the other posts here, I'm getting the impression that the almighty dollar is the governing party.
And what's the history of peering? How was it in the early days? How did it get to where it is now?
Does anyone know of a website, or perhaps a book that explains this aspect of the Internet? It's endlessly fascinating to me, and it's one of a few areas of the Internet I don't get. That and the inner mysteries of Usenet. But that's another post for another time.