The entire user interface of Mozilla is defined by XUL, a markup language. But XUL only says "create a menu and add these menuitems". It does not implement any program logic, for, say, what to do when a menuitem is clicked. All actual behavior has to be implemented via Javascript. So it's not so much Gecko that needs Javascript but that the UI of Mozilla does. And that includes such things as pop-up menus when you right click.
Did you ever see Fight Club? Remember the car company's formula for doing a recall or not? If the cost of settling a class-action suit would be less than the cost of the recall, then they don't do one. So, if they are never sued, they'd never even think about doing a recall.
It's a movie; it is not real. The circumstances in Fight Club are the sort that result in punitive damages. That's what punitive damages are for: they present an unlimited liability to prevent making a calous financial judgement about an ethical decision.
Actually, I believe Google already does this to some degree, (see previous/. article on SearchKing) but the key is to only serve a truly heavy penalty if the site is both linked to from link farms and links back to them.
Alright man, I don't want to be mean, but I got greater undestanding of your post from the replies than from the post itself. This leads to two suggestions:
Post in your native language. It is clear it isn't English. Provide an English translation too, but allow people to seek out there own. Yours isn't comprehensible to me.
Perhaps your problem is you honestly don't understand what Google is doing. Seriously, this could be a communication issue. You might dislike what you think they are doing without a full comprehension of their actual actions.
Best of luck, but you've done nothing to convince me Google isn't an awesome search engine with impeccable policies.
Store (encrypted) information in cookies even before transfer to the server, so information is preserved from all but the most serious "melt-downs."
GigsVT responded:
This seems useless to me. If my computer loses power right now, I will lose this very long message I have typed into this very small box on this form on slashdot, and there's nothing the Slash devs can do to help that.
I think you missed the point. There is something the Slash devs can do as with every other web developer. Once more, it might even be wise if the Moz devs do this or an extension is created for the purpose. In the case of the Slash devs, they could use Javascript to automatically save the contents of all open forms automatically to cookies every timed period or every so many key strokes, whichever comes first. The contents could be encrypted with one's password he uses to log into the site, so that the form is still tied to the user, and even if you're on a public machine, your form data is both saved from loss, and secure from prying eyes. The data is saved, but/. doesn't need any special access to your HD, and you WON'T lose that entire post, even if your browser crashes due to some other issue, such as a plugin it spawned corrupting something it shouldn't have. When you return to the form, the cookie is recognized, and you're prompted that you can recover form data if you like.
Now, Mozilla doing this, for a secure environment, would likely require either using the master password feature it uses for saved password data already. This wouldn't work as well in kiosk mode unless everyone who came up to the kiosk was asked to create a one-time, there-only password and username so they could recover their form data, should such a problem arise. (The usernames would expire after a short period of time, and their cookies/form data thrown away as appropriate.) If you don't remember your old username and password, just make up a new one. This might be a bit more troublesome and consuming than an average user would want so this could be implemented in an extension to Mozilla which would only be activated if someone went to the trouble of going under the Tools and checking this addition to the Form Manager.
And, back on topic, Money isn't being propreitary. The format is SGML, not XML, as others have stated. You're jumping on the Microsoft-bashing bandwagon that was started by the article writers' initial ignorance. Closing tags can be mandatory, optional, or forbidden in SGML.
This looks like a false benchmark. You're keeping mixed in cache the whole time. In parsing actual XML, you'd be loading new strings in and out of the cache the whole time. As stated by grandparent, I doubt you'd be CPU bound.
Call me criminally minded, but my thoughts went straight towards this sort of approach when I read through the paper. You have the IPs of both parties involved in the call, and you have a known piece of software (Skype) on both ends. Further, you can probably query the versions of their software while you're at it. Given this information, 'all' you need at this point is some buffer overflow in Skype. Provided you can implement an exploit which does not crash Skype, you can then access the machine the data came from and where it's going to. So you could likely access the initial data, or just grab the key for decryption from the destination machine, which would probably be a more bandwidth friendly method.
I'm sure if such a product were put together, plenty of people would find it amusing to just listen to random people's phone calls across the Internet. Once more, the paper indicates that a local list (SC host list) of what servers to initially contact is maintained. While you're listening, if you wish to hear from these two people again, you could then change this list to include you and only you, so they'd always try to connect through your machine until you suggest they use others again.
Luckily, this is all wild speculation, and it's entirely dependent on first gaining knowledge of a flaw in Skype itself.
Many common Unix application, such as tar, take a '-v' flag which asks the thing to work in verbose mode. He's saying you're the verbose man to his apropos, or something like that. It's geek humor. I laughed.
I don't think you read the whole article that you linked to. Allow me to quote the critical part at the end:
Note: If during a kickoff the kicked ball proceeds through the goal area and across the deadline or sideline in goal without being touched there shall be no score and the ball shall be awarded to the receiving team at any point between the hash marks on its own 25-yard line.
What it does mean is you can try for a field goal, and even if you miss, but get it somewhere near where you're aiming, hey, you got one point. But no kickoff, so it's a mixed bag.
I keep hoping someday, someone, somewhere will really bring all these EULA's that we are all subjected to each and everytime we install something, under a microscope and start really questioning the legality of said EULA's.
Guess what? That someone is you. In a very real sense, every time you agree to a EULA by clicking that button, you are establishing a contract. This has been tried in court and supported. If you're in the USA, unless you happen to be in Louisana, you're covered under the Uniform Commercial Code. You gain a benefit (software), the other person gains a benefit (advertises to you), there's a written statement to the terms (EULA), and both parties agree. Hell, it's a contract.
There's a problem here, yes, and that problem is you. Read your EULAs and refuse to install software whose EULA you disagree with. Refuse to install software whose EULA is too long for you to read. Another poster joked about the length of the GPL. I wouldn't joke. If those terms are put before you and you must accept them before you can use the software, you are bound by that contract. Have you honestly read the GPL? Any EULA?
No? Fine. But ignorance does not remove your contractual obligation.
How does Marketscore view encrypted packets? Is it just monitoring your keystrokes? I doubt they are cracking all your traffic.
If they are indeed "routing all internet traffic" through them, they may be operating as your proxy for HTTP and HTTPS. When you try to make a secure connection to a site, you tell them. They make an HTTPS connection to the site, their connection is encrypted to the site. The make an HTTPS connection to you. The connection between you and them is encrypted. They see the unencrypted data. So do you.
Slashdot is known to "bitchslap" (via a perl script of the same name) people who are openly yet honestly critical of the site or the editors. If I use any of my accounts I'm just asking to AT THE VERY LEAST be modded down for going against the flow on this site. I've already had other posts of mine in this thread modded down (as well as up, but only once).
You're referring to this script which you can read in the CVS. It hasn't been used in years. You would know really well if you were bitchslapped because every single one of your comments would have its score manually set to -1 and your karma would instantly be "Bad"./. editors have a few better things to do than bitchslap users.
But, anyhow, posting AC does not separate you from your comments or your actual accounts. To prevent trolling and crapflooding, the MD5'd IP of posters as well as the MD5'd subnet is stored with comments. It would be trivial for editors who wished to do so to associate a given AC with posters from the same site, unless you're using multiple proxies that don't happen to get picked up by Slash.
But, yes, such paranoia is totally unncessary. As I relayed in my previous comment, either this site is run properly with ethics or it's not. If you believe the former case, there's no bloody reason for you to be hanging around, because of all of these evil editors and mean old Tacos are out to get you. If the latter is the case, such covert attempts are at best naive and whimsical. Further, if the latter is the case, you're likely just getting modded down by other more moderately minded users of Slashdot, such as myself.
Unfortunately, I don't think I'm communicating that last point well, because you totally read past it in your response above. The last two paragraphs of your response indicate a fundamental disconnect. Do you disagree or simply not understand what I'm saying here?
OldMiner wrote:
Slashdot continues to be run in many ways like the hobbyist site it was originally.
AC wrote:
No, it's much worse than it was. I've been here since 1998. It was a hobbyist site then. It isn't now, given the OSDN-now-OSTG sponsorship.
Just because the site was bought up by OSDN doesn't mean the place is run differently. I'd appreciate any evidence to the contrary. Heck, if your presumption that the site is "a geek circlejerk" is correct, it would indicate that the site is more the same hobbyist, small time affair it's always been.
elevating those that agree (moderation) and filtering out those who are GENUINELY dissenting (not trolling).
Those of us who came here and stayed, stayed because we liked what we found. Those of us who moderate, moderate the way we think is correct. Any community is going to be self-reinforcing, including this one. So, yes, if you scream against the status quo, you will be modded down unless the quality of your posts is above par. If you want to criticise what most others think is working just fine, it would behoove you to not be an ass about it. It would behoove you because you're trying to convince everyone else here that they're wrong, and you're right.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
(WTF do you want to be AC for this sort of stuff? The purpose of AC is (1) to make comments that might be sensitive if traced back to you and (2) trolling. It sure doesn't look like you're after (1), so...why?)
Then why don't the editors have the sack to come out and post an official Slashdot guideline on such posts? This story's submitter represents the freakin' site! If there is any sort of agreement with this site's staff and a linked site via a story submission then it should be mentioned in the write-up. It's basic "journalistic" ethics.
First of all, since that disclosure is given, (Granted, it's given by carefully noticing the submitter's email address.) isn't that journalistic responsibility being displayed?
But moreover, Slashdot continues to be run in many ways like the hobbyist site it was originally. The editors post stories they find interesting and expect to be interesting to others. It's the first half of that criteria that I'm sure hit home with CmdrTaco. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a similarly done story on Happs wouldn't have done just as well. Perhaps if someone wrote a cleverly crafted advertisement to sell something based on that sabatoging the website of a not-for-protif group, it might get michael's attention.
Now, call me too trusting, but I think all of these conspiracy theories about planted ads are a bit ridiculous. Slashdot editors just aren't that devious, or have you noticed the number of fake stories that get posted? I think it's just as likely, if not more so, that Happs employees are astroturfing the fuck out of the comments on this story. Perhaps doing so as ACs to make those whoe agree with them seem more numerous... Oh, but that is paranoid.
Whether or not such a proper editorial/advertisement policy was posting as you suggest wouldn't mean much. Honorable journalistic behavior, as you note, is somewhat expected. So, with or without a stated policy, the key is whether you actually trust the Slashdot editors to provide you with that unbiased viewpoint. I'm not sure a stated policy would make any difference.
This gentleman is a troll. He's referencing an April Fools' story from a couple years back, intended to be ridiculous and poke fun at such buffoonery. Any time a product is mentioned in a/. story, there are boobs accusing the editors of accepting paid advertisement. Let's face it: almost any news story is going to be potentially beneficial to some businesses. Sometimes, more than others.
One of our devels had major problems with it and now we're living with both a cvs and a darcs repository, and noone really knows where to send patches. I think it's safe to say that our project is dying, if not dead already.
Isn't the problem that you didn't make a firm commitment one way or another at that juncture? You had the option of either going all darcs or all CVS. It seems like instead of confronting the issue at the time, you let your project self destruct.
You could have chosen to switch to CVS and accepted losing the features of darcs.
You could have set an ultimatum for that developer. It's a small project, and you can't afford to be split. Most large projects can't. Offer a Knoppix CD, a shell account somewhere, to take patch files, or help getting the Windows binary working. Or give them the option of developing a fork on their own. I find it unlikely your developer would have left, and even if she had, your project might be better off for the lack of division. Meanwhile, a bug report might get the Win32 port fixed. But what was broken with it exactly which made it so bad?
Naturally, I don't know the details, so pardon me if darcs ate your developer's favorite president and she was sworn to revenge. But, it doesn't sound like the current state of events is very positive either.
I'm not sure you read my second paragraph in its entirety. I was not suggesting Javascript. I was suggesting a better method to do exactly what you say you claim you are trying to do -- "show a 'Get Firefox!' image or link to...IE users." You might check it again.
For those who are browser agnostic and simply wish for a browser to work on their web pages, it's more useful to check for the existence of a feature. Since Javascript allows you to check whether a function or object is defined without causing an error, one can gracefully fail -- simply don't use a feature if it's not available -- instead of trying to respond properly to innumerable browser versions. Feel free to read more on this from Quirks Mode.
As a side note, if all one wishes to do is detect Internet Explorer, even clever Javascript is more work than necessary, let alone server side shenanigans. IE supports conditional comments which can easily provide for any sort of IE criticism you want. And last I checked, Opera doesn't see these things (correct me if I'm wrong), so it would be more useful if all you were doing was haranguing people for using the default browser of their OS.
I checked about:config on an old version of Firefox I had lying around and saw that, indeed, browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled no longer existed (neither did browser.urlbar.autofill, but it appears that the behavior for that it is now fixed to its default "false"). So the answer to this is, it's possible, but you would have to play with XUL. If someone would care to make a plugin to do this, you could get the feature that way.
Short of that, you can reduce the annoyance by setting browser.urlbar.matchOnlyType to true. It appears to default to false.
Your sig mentions that Slashdot is standards compliant in Japan. Perhaps I'm missing the joke, but Slashdot Japan seems to use about the same slashcode version, and has all the same non-standard body tag attributes, excessive table tags, and unescaped ampersands in URLs. Could you clarify your sig?
You probably already read the AUP for MSUnet. It specifically addresses the issue of NAT devices, a common concern at universities. The issue is that normally a person must register their MAC on the network to gain access. Then any nefarious activity that occurs on the network can be tracked to the individual user who registered that MAC address. For now, let's ignore the possibility of being able to change the MAC address on some ethernet cards.
By introducing a NAT'd device, you open an entry point to the network to anyone, even those not with proper access, and you rely on the good will of these nameless souls not to do bad things in your name. So if anyone ever becomes evil while connected to your basepoint, it becomes your responsibility to deny access to your AP or remove it from the network.
In relativity, "simultaneous" means an event occurs at the same time in the same reference frame. Where a (inertial) reference frame is one that is not accelerating -- all objects in the frame are at the same velocity. If you add acceleration, you hit general relativity which is beyond my understanding at present.
For every reference frame, we have a set of coordinate axes (x_frame12345, y_frame12345, z_frame12345). An event can be described as a coordinate and a time in a given frame (x_frame12345, y_frame12345, z_frame12345, t_frame12345). Simultaneous is meaningful only when you're talking about the simultaneous events in one frame. So, say you're in frame12345 and two events occur in the frame (0, 0, 0, 0) and (0, 0, -5, 0), so they'd be simultaneous in that frame. But in frame12346, those events may be something like (0, 0, 0, 0) and (0, 3, -8, 10). So in that frame they would not be simultaenous. Therefore, any observer must be assigned to a frame for his observations to be useful.
The difference between general and special relativity: General relativity has acceleration. The twins paradox has a rocket ship turning around, which means its velocity changes, which means acceleration must occur. This makes it a general relativity problem.
But one thing physicists do well is neglect values which are insignificant. When doing the twins paradox problems, we make the reasonable (within the context of learning the stuff) presumption that the time to turn around is not significant. But this is, of course, within the world in which it is reasonable to make a spaceship going a significant portion of the speed of light.
I always took these paradoxes as a good way of illustrating that the math works if you're consistent, even if you can't visualize or get a more "core" understanding of it, because the math is the core of it. After all, you can't actually visualize the wave nature of matter. People/draw/ it like a particle running along a sinsoidal path, but that's not accurate. It's a visual aid whereas the underlying math is accurate.
The point of the competition, as I see it, would be to make it clear that (1) certain expectations seem reasonable (additive velocity), invariance of Maxwell's laws, (2) these things break down with traditional viewpoints (Maxwell's laws and Gallilean transformations), and (3) we resolve this problem through the application of math doing even stranger things (lose invariance of additive velocity, get Maxwell's laws back). It no longer seems reasonable to our everyday experiences, but it works mathematically.
Incorrected. Building designs can be trademarked. I clearly remember seeing a trademark notice at the end of a film I saw recently, probably Spiderman 2, which stated that a certain design was trademarked. See This page from the US Patent and Trademark Office. Please don't assume ignorance on the part of others when you haven't done the research yourself.
I was going to be slanderous with this, but I'll just take the time to say I could have been slanderous, and then decided just to mildly dilute the value of this message with this addendum.
Slashdot Mirror
The entire user interface of Mozilla is defined by XUL, a markup language. But XUL only says "create a menu and add these menuitems". It does not implement any program logic, for, say, what to do when a menuitem is clicked. All actual behavior has to be implemented via Javascript. So it's not so much Gecko that needs Javascript but that the UI of Mozilla does. And that includes such things as pop-up menus when you right click.
One problem. It's betta fish. Pronounced like "better" by a Bostonian, not like a Greek letter. You got a high ranking for a common typo.
It's a movie; it is not real. The circumstances in Fight Club are the sort that result in punitive damages. That's what punitive damages are for: they present an unlimited liability to prevent making a calous financial judgement about an ethical decision.
Actually, I believe Google already does this to some degree, (see previous /. article on SearchKing) but the key is to only serve a truly heavy penalty if the site is both linked to from link farms and links back to them.
Alright man, I don't want to be mean, but I got greater undestanding of your post from the replies than from the post itself. This leads to two suggestions:
Best of luck, but you've done nothing to convince me Google isn't an awesome search engine with impeccable policies.
The site recommended:
GigsVT responded:
I think you missed the point. There is something the Slash devs can do as with every other web developer. Once more, it might even be wise if the Moz devs do this or an extension is created for the purpose. In the case of the Slash devs, they could use Javascript to automatically save the contents of all open forms automatically to cookies every timed period or every so many key strokes, whichever comes first. The contents could be encrypted with one's password he uses to log into the site, so that the form is still tied to the user, and even if you're on a public machine, your form data is both saved from loss, and secure from prying eyes. The data is saved, but /. doesn't need any special access to your HD, and you WON'T lose that entire post, even if your browser crashes due to some other issue, such as a plugin it spawned corrupting something it shouldn't have. When you return to the form, the cookie is recognized, and you're prompted that you can recover form data if you like.
Now, Mozilla doing this, for a secure environment, would likely require either using the master password feature it uses for saved password data already. This wouldn't work as well in kiosk mode unless everyone who came up to the kiosk was asked to create a one-time, there-only password and username so they could recover their form data, should such a problem arise. (The usernames would expire after a short period of time, and their cookies/form data thrown away as appropriate.) If you don't remember your old username and password, just make up a new one. This might be a bit more troublesome and consuming than an average user would want so this could be implemented in an extension to Mozilla which would only be activated if someone went to the trouble of going under the Tools and checking this addition to the Form Manager.
And, back on topic, Money isn't being propreitary. The format is SGML, not XML, as others have stated. You're jumping on the Microsoft-bashing bandwagon that was started by the article writers' initial ignorance. Closing tags can be mandatory, optional, or forbidden in SGML.
This looks like a false benchmark. You're keeping mixed in cache the whole time. In parsing actual XML, you'd be loading new strings in and out of the cache the whole time. As stated by grandparent, I doubt you'd be CPU bound.
Call me criminally minded, but my thoughts went straight towards this sort of approach when I read through the paper. You have the IPs of both parties involved in the call, and you have a known piece of software (Skype) on both ends. Further, you can probably query the versions of their software while you're at it. Given this information, 'all' you need at this point is some buffer overflow in Skype. Provided you can implement an exploit which does not crash Skype, you can then access the machine the data came from and where it's going to. So you could likely access the initial data, or just grab the key for decryption from the destination machine, which would probably be a more bandwidth friendly method.
I'm sure if such a product were put together, plenty of people would find it amusing to just listen to random people's phone calls across the Internet. Once more, the paper indicates that a local list (SC host list) of what servers to initially contact is maintained. While you're listening, if you wish to hear from these two people again, you could then change this list to include you and only you, so they'd always try to connect through your machine until you suggest they use others again.
Luckily, this is all wild speculation, and it's entirely dependent on first gaining knowledge of a flaw in Skype itself.
Many common Unix application, such as tar, take a '-v' flag which asks the thing to work in verbose mode. He's saying you're the verbose man to his apropos, or something like that. It's geek humor. I laughed.
Different kind of Free. BSD license instead of GPL. The OS X kernel, Darwin, is based upon BSD Unix.
I don't think you read the whole article that you linked to. Allow me to quote the critical part at the end:
What it does mean is you can try for a field goal, and even if you miss, but get it somewhere near where you're aiming, hey, you got one point. But no kickoff, so it's a mixed bag.
Guess what? That someone is you. In a very real sense, every time you agree to a EULA by clicking that button, you are establishing a contract. This has been tried in court and supported. If you're in the USA, unless you happen to be in Louisana, you're covered under the Uniform Commercial Code. You gain a benefit (software), the other person gains a benefit (advertises to you), there's a written statement to the terms (EULA), and both parties agree. Hell, it's a contract.
There's a problem here, yes, and that problem is you. Read your EULAs and refuse to install software whose EULA you disagree with. Refuse to install software whose EULA is too long for you to read. Another poster joked about the length of the GPL. I wouldn't joke. If those terms are put before you and you must accept them before you can use the software, you are bound by that contract. Have you honestly read the GPL? Any EULA?
No? Fine. But ignorance does not remove your contractual obligation.
If they are indeed "routing all internet traffic" through them, they may be operating as your proxy for HTTP and HTTPS. When you try to make a secure connection to a site, you tell them. They make an HTTPS connection to the site, their connection is encrypted to the site. The make an HTTPS connection to you. The connection between you and them is encrypted. They see the unencrypted data. So do you.
</wild speculation>.
You're referring to this script which you can read in the CVS. It hasn't been used in years. You would know really well if you were bitchslapped because every single one of your comments would have its score manually set to -1 and your karma would instantly be "Bad". /. editors have a few better things to do than bitchslap users.
But, anyhow, posting AC does not separate you from your comments or your actual accounts. To prevent trolling and crapflooding, the MD5'd IP of posters as well as the MD5'd subnet is stored with comments. It would be trivial for editors who wished to do so to associate a given AC with posters from the same site, unless you're using multiple proxies that don't happen to get picked up by Slash.
But, yes, such paranoia is totally unncessary. As I relayed in my previous comment, either this site is run properly with ethics or it's not. If you believe the former case, there's no bloody reason for you to be hanging around, because of all of these evil editors and mean old Tacos are out to get you. If the latter is the case, such covert attempts are at best naive and whimsical. Further, if the latter is the case, you're likely just getting modded down by other more moderately minded users of Slashdot, such as myself.
Unfortunately, I don't think I'm communicating that last point well, because you totally read past it in your response above. The last two paragraphs of your response indicate a fundamental disconnect. Do you disagree or simply not understand what I'm saying here?
Just because the site was bought up by OSDN doesn't mean the place is run differently. I'd appreciate any evidence to the contrary. Heck, if your presumption that the site is "a geek circlejerk" is correct, it would indicate that the site is more the same hobbyist, small time affair it's always been.
Those of us who came here and stayed, stayed because we liked what we found. Those of us who moderate, moderate the way we think is correct. Any community is going to be self-reinforcing, including this one. So, yes, if you scream against the status quo, you will be modded down unless the quality of your posts is above par. If you want to criticise what most others think is working just fine, it would behoove you to not be an ass about it. It would behoove you because you're trying to convince everyone else here that they're wrong, and you're right.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
(WTF do you want to be AC for this sort of stuff? The purpose of AC is (1) to make comments that might be sensitive if traced back to you and (2) trolling. It sure doesn't look like you're after (1), so...why?)
First of all, since that disclosure is given, (Granted, it's given by carefully noticing the submitter's email address.) isn't that journalistic responsibility being displayed?
But moreover, Slashdot continues to be run in many ways like the hobbyist site it was originally. The editors post stories they find interesting and expect to be interesting to others. It's the first half of that criteria that I'm sure hit home with CmdrTaco. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a similarly done story on Happs wouldn't have done just as well. Perhaps if someone wrote a cleverly crafted advertisement to sell something based on that sabatoging the website of a not-for-protif group, it might get michael's attention.
Now, call me too trusting, but I think all of these conspiracy theories about planted ads are a bit ridiculous. Slashdot editors just aren't that devious, or have you noticed the number of fake stories that get posted? I think it's just as likely, if not more so, that Happs employees are astroturfing the fuck out of the comments on this story. Perhaps doing so as ACs to make those whoe agree with them seem more numerous... Oh, but that is paranoid.
Whether or not such a proper editorial/advertisement policy was posting as you suggest wouldn't mean much. Honorable journalistic behavior, as you note, is somewhat expected. So, with or without a stated policy, the key is whether you actually trust the Slashdot editors to provide you with that unbiased viewpoint. I'm not sure a stated policy would make any difference.
This gentleman is a troll. He's referencing an April Fools' story from a couple years back, intended to be ridiculous and poke fun at such buffoonery. Any time a product is mentioned in a /. story, there are boobs accusing the editors of accepting paid advertisement. Let's face it: almost any news story is going to be potentially beneficial to some businesses. Sometimes, more than others.
Isn't the problem that you didn't make a firm commitment one way or another at that juncture? You had the option of either going all darcs or all CVS. It seems like instead of confronting the issue at the time, you let your project self destruct.
You could have chosen to switch to CVS and accepted losing the features of darcs.
You could have set an ultimatum for that developer. It's a small project, and you can't afford to be split. Most large projects can't. Offer a Knoppix CD, a shell account somewhere, to take patch files, or help getting the Windows binary working. Or give them the option of developing a fork on their own. I find it unlikely your developer would have left, and even if she had, your project might be better off for the lack of division. Meanwhile, a bug report might get the Win32 port fixed. But what was broken with it exactly which made it so bad?
Naturally, I don't know the details, so pardon me if darcs ate your developer's favorite president and she was sworn to revenge. But, it doesn't sound like the current state of events is very positive either.
I'm not sure you read my second paragraph in its entirety. I was not suggesting Javascript. I was suggesting a better method to do exactly what you say you claim you are trying to do -- "show a 'Get Firefox!' image or link to...IE users." You might check it again.
Your signature line:
For those who are browser agnostic and simply wish for a browser to work on their web pages, it's more useful to check for the existence of a feature. Since Javascript allows you to check whether a function or object is defined without causing an error, one can gracefully fail -- simply don't use a feature if it's not available -- instead of trying to respond properly to innumerable browser versions. Feel free to read more on this from Quirks Mode.
As a side note, if all one wishes to do is detect Internet Explorer, even clever Javascript is more work than necessary, let alone server side shenanigans. IE supports conditional comments which can easily provide for any sort of IE criticism you want. And last I checked, Opera doesn't see these things (correct me if I'm wrong), so it would be more useful if all you were doing was haranguing people for using the default browser of their OS.
I checked about:config on an old version of Firefox I had lying around and saw that, indeed, browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled no longer existed (neither did browser.urlbar.autofill, but it appears that the behavior for that it is now fixed to its default "false"). So the answer to this is, it's possible, but you would have to play with XUL. If someone would care to make a plugin to do this, you could get the feature that way.
Short of that, you can reduce the annoyance by setting browser.urlbar.matchOnlyType to true. It appears to default to false.
Your sig mentions that Slashdot is standards compliant in Japan. Perhaps I'm missing the joke, but Slashdot Japan seems to use about the same slashcode version, and has all the same non-standard body tag attributes, excessive table tags, and unescaped ampersands in URLs. Could you clarify your sig?
You probably already read the AUP for MSUnet. It specifically addresses the issue of NAT devices, a common concern at universities. The issue is that normally a person must register their MAC on the network to gain access. Then any nefarious activity that occurs on the network can be tracked to the individual user who registered that MAC address. For now, let's ignore the possibility of being able to change the MAC address on some ethernet cards.
By introducing a NAT'd device, you open an entry point to the network to anyone, even those not with proper access, and you rely on the good will of these nameless souls not to do bad things in your name. So if anyone ever becomes evil while connected to your basepoint, it becomes your responsibility to deny access to your AP or remove it from the network.
In relativity, "simultaneous" means an event occurs at the same time in the same reference frame. Where a (inertial) reference frame is one that is not accelerating -- all objects in the frame are at the same velocity. If you add acceleration, you hit general relativity which is beyond my understanding at present.
For every reference frame, we have a set of coordinate axes (x_frame12345, y_frame12345, z_frame12345). An event can be described as a coordinate and a time in a given frame (x_frame12345, y_frame12345, z_frame12345, t_frame12345). Simultaneous is meaningful only when you're talking about the simultaneous events in one frame. So, say you're in frame12345 and two events occur in the frame (0, 0, 0, 0) and (0, 0, -5, 0), so they'd be simultaneous in that frame. But in frame12346, those events may be something like (0, 0, 0, 0) and (0, 3, -8, 10). So in that frame they would not be simultaenous. Therefore, any observer must be assigned to a frame for his observations to be useful.
Hope this helps.
The difference between general and special relativity: General relativity has acceleration. The twins paradox has a rocket ship turning around, which means its velocity changes, which means acceleration must occur. This makes it a general relativity problem.
But one thing physicists do well is neglect values which are insignificant. When doing the twins paradox problems, we make the reasonable (within the context of learning the stuff) presumption that the time to turn around is not significant. But this is, of course, within the world in which it is reasonable to make a spaceship going a significant portion of the speed of light.
I always took these paradoxes as a good way of illustrating that the math works if you're consistent, even if you can't visualize or get a more "core" understanding of it, because the math is the core of it. After all, you can't actually visualize the wave nature of matter. People /draw/ it like a particle running along a sinsoidal path, but that's not accurate. It's a visual aid whereas the underlying math is accurate.
The point of the competition, as I see it, would be to make it clear that (1) certain expectations seem reasonable (additive velocity), invariance of Maxwell's laws, (2) these things break down with traditional viewpoints (Maxwell's laws and Gallilean transformations), and (3) we resolve this problem through the application of math doing even stranger things (lose invariance of additive velocity, get Maxwell's laws back). It no longer seems reasonable to our everyday experiences, but it works mathematically.
Incorrected. Building designs can be trademarked. I clearly remember seeing a trademark notice at the end of a film I saw recently, probably Spiderman 2, which stated that a certain design was trademarked. See This page from the US Patent and Trademark Office. Please don't assume ignorance on the part of others when you haven't done the research yourself.
I was going to be slanderous with this, but I'll just take the time to say I could have been slanderous, and then decided just to mildly dilute the value of this message with this addendum.