That's simply not true. Complying with w3c standards is the best way to ensure compatibility with as many sites as possible.
Unfortunately, that's only true if sites are all coded to standards too. Sites that are coded to look correct only in IE are clearly going to be more compatible with IE. It sucks, but sticking your head in the sand and pretending there isn't a problem doesn't help address the problem in the long run.
Re:Coupled with a pay per view model...
on
Coming soon: Google TV?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If it was broadcast unencrypted over the air, I don't see why it should be illegal to download it on the net.
Easy: because you don't own the copyright and you didn't license it (unlike the TV stations, which pay for you watching shows on TV in exchange for viewer statistics, which translate to advertising dollars). Just because you can steal something doesn't mean it should be legal.
Fire *could* promise a better future. But, like anything that could potentially used as a weapon, fire could be abused on a scale never seen before.
Have you heard anything at all that mentions anything about the ability to control large fires?
Not to mention the possible side effects of smoke inhalation over long periods of time.
Abuse by evil people to torture their enemies?
The chance of abuse is too great...
That argument can be made about just about every invention, ever. Is the solution to stick our heads in the sand and say "<insert technology here> bad!", or to try to be intelligent about how technologies are used and look for ways to channel them usefully through countermeasures and legislation?
Continuously monitoring the locations of all students within the bounds of a school building is excessive, for the simple reason that the record of that location at all times is not critical to the safety of the child.
Which article did you read? All I saw was a description of badging on and off the bus in one place, and in and out of the front doors in another.
Our sources have recently discovered that for decades teachers and administrators have been monitoring our children using technology identical to that commonly used to for track freight shipments. In a process they call "taking attendence", teachers make a mark on a piece of paper next to the name of each student expected to be in class. This paper is then submitted to a central office where it is compiled to track our children. This process is disturbingly similar to the process of checking off received items in a shipment on a piece of paper.
-
That part of the article was clearly designed to rile people up--and it seems to be effective here. Badging in to get on and off the bus is equivalent to the bus attendence that's taken on field trips to make sure kids don't get left at the state capitol, and is pretty much the same as taking attendence in classes. I don't remember any massive outcry about treating our children like freight whenever attendence is taken.
"A intersects B" and "A is equivalent to B" are totally different concepts. It's certainly possible for A intersects B and A does not equal B to be true at the same time.
But how can you do that effectively if the sp4mm3rs 4r3 c0nst4nt1y m1ssp31ling w0rds in an effort to evade word-based pattern matching algorithms? My approach is immune to such chicanery because the content I 'score' on is the only content that really matters when looking for spam or 'spamlike' content--all other content is irrelevant and is used by spammers/crackers to get their content past filters and into your mailbox.
Read my other follow-up post. Other solutions, like spamassassin, can use a *wide* variety of rules, such as amount of html, amount of html to plaintext, amount of picture content to text content, general characteristics of text (all caps, etc.), and others that have *nothing* to do with spelling of words. Matching certain phrases is a) optional and b) on top of more general rules. I use an out-of-the-box, non-learning spamassassin installation and have had incredibly good results, whereas I can think of many good emails that would have been deleted at your higher settings, and many bad ones that would have gotten through on the lower setting.
The way I see it, someone sending you unsolicited email for the very first time have absolutely no need to send you file attachments, HTML (looking content), quoted printable (looking) content, percent signs, dollar signs, numbers, URLs (or URL-like content), or email addresses (or email address-like content).
Again, that's nice for you, but many, many people get attachments they want, html email they want (from webmail accounts, for example), mentions of a new email address or a sig with an email address, mention of the cost of something ("I got those tickets we talked about, and it turned out that they were only $30 after all!"), etc.
The bottom line is that your approach may work well for you, but would work very poorly for most people. Some of the solutions you critisize don't work at all the way you think--I suggest that you look at spamassassin's non-learning setup before you bash it again, for example, and find some real arguments against it. You keep saying that uncomplicated rules are unnecessary, but then point out that your method will delete emails just for happening to to contain certain charaters.
I don't know why I'm bothering. You keep pasting in chunks of other emails that are unrelated (critiques of baysian filtering, which I'm not even talking about, legality, which I'm not even talking about) and quoting only the very specific parts of my post you can address and ignore my more important, specific points. The only conclusion I can draw is that you prefer to keep your head in the sand and post PR statements rather than increase your knowledge of the solutions you are competing with and address the real shortcomings of your program, so that you can blame your lack of fame and success on conspiracy theories. That's a workable solution only if your goal is to continue not to be taken seriously.
So my simple, effective approach languishes in obscurity while bigger, more complicated, CPU-intensive approaches are featured on Slashdot.
My approach lets *YOU* decide what kinds of content you want in your email while the other approaches I've seen here use complicated rules to try to flag an email as spam or not.
I should add that I don't see anything new in "your" approach. It sounds like a very simple version of the non-learning setup of spamassassin, which:
Assigns a point value to various content triggers.
Scans the email for those triggers, keeping a point sum.
Marks anything over a threshhold value as spam.
The only difference I see is that instead of using 8 very broad rules, spamassassin uses hundreds, and the point values are configurable so that anyone can tailor the scores to correspond to their spam/ham experience patterns.
So how is your solution, which seems to be equivalent to a rigid and narrowly defined spamassassin configuration (which happens to work for you, but not in a more general usage case)?
So my simple, effective approach languishes in obscurity while bigger, more complicated, CPU-intensive approaches are featured on Slashdot.
My approach lets *YOU* decide what kinds of content you want in your email while the other approaches I've seen here use complicated rules to try to flag an email as spam or not.
Or possibly your approach languishes because people aren't interested in an approach with a staggering potential for false positives in identifying spam? You say that other systems have 'complicated rules' like that's a bad thing--they are complicated in an attempt to actually separate spam from ham intelligently. It's not like there is some conspiracy to promote other solutions over yours.
It's nice that your approach works for you, but for the incredibly large portion of the population that occasionally recieves legitimate emails with attachments, html, or % or $ signs, it's worthless compared to most of the other spam filtering approaches.
Exactly. Same with things like muggings, too; so long as the social problem of poverty exists, there will be muggings, armed robbery, etc. Clearly they shouldn't be illegal either.
A few extra spaces can really help you catch mistakes when your using a lot of nested parenthesies. ( ( (th) ( (i)(s) ) ) is much easier to read than (((th)(i)(s))) if your trying to make sure you don't screw up your parenthesies.
Personal preference, I guess. I was able to almost immediately tell that the tighter set was correctly balanced, but I had to spend a lot more effort to determine that the first set is missing a closing parenthesis.
I can't help but wonder if your mistake was intentional humor, or unintentional irony.
Not everybody who supports any war, fights in it. And there's nothing wrong with that no matter how many liberals scream otherwise. It's idiotic to assume that you can't support anything dangerous if you don't put your neck on the line yourself.
Clearly people can support something without putting their neck on the line. But in the case of war, there are compelling arguments that they shouldn't. Ignoring other issues for a moment, what's illogical about saying that people shouldn't have a right to say, "This is important enough to me that I think a bunch of people I've never met should be sent to die while I sit at home risk-free"? Wouldn't it be nice if people had to really weigh the importance of a war to them before saying "Invade the suckers, it won't hurt me!" in the next opinion poll?
Comparing soldiers to practitioners of extreme sports is nonsensical. Unlike soldiers, athletes aren't likely to suddenly be confronted with a sporting event that they might be morally opposed to. If you want to, say, jump a bunch of flaming trucks on a motorcycle, you can pretty much expect that's what you'll be doing. Soldiers who signed up to make the country safer might find themselves being shipped out to fight for lower oil prices.
Seriously, can you - or anyone else - name one major incompatiblity between MSVC's implementation of C or C++ and the most commonly used ANSI standard?
I haven't used VC in a while, so I can't swear to the latest version, but last time I used in (VC6, I bevieve), the following would refuse to compile:
for (int i = 0; i < 10 ++i) { }
for (int i = 0; i < 10 ++i) { }
But this would compile with no problems:
for (int i = 0; i < 10 ++i) { }
for (i = 0; i < 10 ++i) { }
Having completely wrong scoping means headaches when trying to move any code to/from VC++, which I would call a major incompatibility.
Who among you REALLY believes that the sea of secretaties and accountants and lawyers and paralegals who actually use a word processor every day would prefer to use LaTex over Word?
That's a meaningless question--LaTeX is essentially a file format, whereas Word is both a GUI editor and a file format. Given a front-end equivalent to Word's that used LaTex source behind the scenes, do you think most people who use a word processor every day would say, "Gee, I don't want to use this because the binary blob XML format of Word is more comforting and familiar when I view it in pico?"
Most Americans NO LONGER get their news from a "major network".
Do you have sources or justification for that stament? It seems highly unlikely... unless it's simply that most American's don't even follow news, which I could certainly believe.
I think it's telling (aka depressing) that MIT didn't get a female president from their engineering department.
I doubt that's really telling--Every university president whose hiring I am at least somewhat familiar with (granted, that's not too many) has been hired from another university, usually from a Provost or similar position. Department chair to university president is a pretty big jump.
The progression I've always seen is something along the lines of Professor (-> Dept chair) -> some kind of dean -> higher up dean -> provost -> president. Very often the last couple of transitions happen across universities. It would probably be much more telling if they had recruited their president from their engineering department, in that it might indicate that they were trying to hard to find a female candidate.
You aren't using "predict" correctly in your examples. In each case what you would have to say is something like "I predict that this water sample will turn out to contain an unsafe level of arsenic". You can't predict the past or present; you can only predict our future understanding of current or past events.
My question is this: Are we so anti-Microsoft that we'll settle for clunkier software without complaint, just because it's not made by Microsoft? Where is the hue and cry for a faster, more responsive Firefox? Why do we accept things without complaint just because we admire the politics of the developers?
The answers to your questions are, respectively, "no", "www.mozillazine.org (and tons of blogs)", and "They don't; the drivers and developers of Mozilla family products get flamed all the time".
Seriously, if you think all the Firefox developers get is praise, spend some time on the MozillaZine forums.
Currently if a passenger disappears between checkin and departure, the plane cannot leave with their luggage on board. This proceedure predates recent security improvements.
In theory, that's true. In practice, I can tell you it isn't. A year and a half ago, I had to cancel the second half of a two-part flight and drive instead. So when I landed, I told a gate attendant that I wouldn't be getting on my next flight (for which I was already checked through), and I'd need my baggage pulled. She phoned down and put in a request, along with a description of my baggage. A couple of hours later, they told me that my baggage had gone on without me, because they were too busy to get it.
More recently, the plane for second leg of a trip never showed up, so instead of flying me to San Jose, they flew me to San Francisco. They happily put my luggage on the next plane to San Jose though, even though they knew I wasn't on it.
Gives you a great sense of confidence, doesn't it?
This article isn't for Joe Sixpack. It's for Linux users who want a filtering solution.
Right: and the point the poster was making is that providing filtering solutions for tech-savvy, Linux-using parents isn't going to make much of a dent in the nationwide demand for laws. Helping tiny tiny fractions of the population helps those specific people, but Congress isn't likely to notice any difference in demands for government solutions.
If non-IE browsers gain too much market share, more and more web sites will make pages that are standards-compliant (as opposed to IE-compliant).
No, if non-IE browsers gain too much market share, more and more web sites will be standards compliant, but with lots of hacks to look fine on IE as well. IE will never (in the forseeable future) fall into such a marginal market share that it would be ignored by developers. Even if it were suddenly 50/50 overnight, or 75/25 in favor of FF, sites would still make IE-compliant pages, because nobody can affort to write off 25% of the market.
You are clearly talking about a larger issue, which I can't really speak to, but I can definitely say that the thread you linked to does *not* support your case.
I read it through, and here's what I saw: 1) A professional email from Ben Gooder saying that Firefox was taking a new direction due to a combination of licencing and UI considerations 2) A less-than-polite response from the Qute designer, with both the original and the reply posted to a public forum in violation of basic decency 3) A lot of ignorant flaming of the decision and back-seat driving from people who were not privy to the details of the decision and ignored what they were told about it by Ben Gooder's follow-up post. Interestingly, the people doing said flaming all seemed coincidentally to prefer the Qute theme. 4) Many people who either didn't like Qute or were reserving judgement one way or the other until they had time to make an informed decision based on the complete theme and actual use. 5) The Qute fanatics almost exclusively ignoring the people in 4) and claiming that everyone likes Qute better, and that ignoring "the preferences of the end users" was completely against what Firefox should be about (I'll leave the hypocricy in that as an excercise for the reader).
I certainly did see a lot of disrespect in that thread, but it was all *toward* Ben Gooder, and not *by* him. After reading that thread, what I'm left with is a lack of respect for people who lash out ignorantly and disrespectfully against someone who spends a whole lot of time working on a browser that they all use and enjoy.
Slashdot Mirror
That's simply not true. Complying with w3c standards is the best way to ensure compatibility with as many sites as possible.
Unfortunately, that's only true if sites are all coded to standards too. Sites that are coded to look correct only in IE are clearly going to be more compatible with IE. It sucks, but sticking your head in the sand and pretending there isn't a problem doesn't help address the problem in the long run.
If it was broadcast unencrypted over the air, I don't see why it should be illegal to download it on the net.
Easy: because you don't own the copyright and you didn't license it (unlike the TV stations, which pay for you watching shows on TV in exchange for viewer statistics, which translate to advertising dollars). Just because you can steal something doesn't mean it should be legal.
That argument can be made about just about every invention, ever. Is the solution to stick our heads in the sand and say "<insert technology here> bad!", or to try to be intelligent about how technologies are used and look for ways to channel them usefully through countermeasures and legislation?
Which article did you read? All I saw was a description of badging on and off the bus in one place, and in and out of the front doors in another.
BREAKING NEWS!
Our sources have recently discovered that for decades teachers and administrators have been monitoring our children using technology identical to that commonly used to for track freight shipments. In a process they call "taking attendence", teachers make a mark on a piece of paper next to the name of each student expected to be in class. This paper is then submitted to a central office where it is compiled to track our children. This process is disturbingly similar to the process of checking off received items in a shipment on a piece of paper.
-
That part of the article was clearly designed to rile people up--and it seems to be effective here. Badging in to get on and off the bus is equivalent to the bus attendence that's taken on field trips to make sure kids don't get left at the state capitol, and is pretty much the same as taking attendence in classes. I don't remember any massive outcry about treating our children like freight whenever attendence is taken.
"A intersects B" and "A is equivalent to B" are totally different concepts. It's certainly possible for A intersects B and A does not equal B to be true at the same time.
But how can you do that effectively if the sp4mm3rs 4r3 c0nst4nt1y m1ssp31ling w0rds in an effort to evade word-based pattern matching algorithms? My approach is immune to such chicanery because the content I 'score' on is the only content that really matters when looking for spam or 'spamlike' content--all other content is irrelevant and is used by spammers/crackers to get their content past filters and into your mailbox.
Read my other follow-up post. Other solutions, like spamassassin, can use a *wide* variety of rules, such as amount of html, amount of html to plaintext, amount of picture content to text content, general characteristics of text (all caps, etc.), and others that have *nothing* to do with spelling of words. Matching certain phrases is a) optional and b) on top of more general rules. I use an out-of-the-box, non-learning spamassassin installation and have had incredibly good results, whereas I can think of many good emails that would have been deleted at your higher settings, and many bad ones that would have gotten through on the lower setting.
The way I see it, someone sending you unsolicited email for the very first time have absolutely no need to send you file attachments, HTML (looking content), quoted printable (looking) content, percent signs, dollar signs, numbers, URLs (or URL-like content), or email addresses (or email address-like content).
Again, that's nice for you, but many, many people get attachments they want, html email they want (from webmail accounts, for example), mentions of a new email address or a sig with an email address, mention of the cost of something ("I got those tickets we talked about, and it turned out that they were only $30 after all!"), etc.
The bottom line is that your approach may work well for you, but would work very poorly for most people. Some of the solutions you critisize don't work at all the way you think--I suggest that you look at spamassassin's non-learning setup before you bash it again, for example, and find some real arguments against it. You keep saying that uncomplicated rules are unnecessary, but then point out that your method will delete emails just for happening to to contain certain charaters.
I don't know why I'm bothering. You keep pasting in chunks of other emails that are unrelated (critiques of baysian filtering, which I'm not even talking about, legality, which I'm not even talking about) and quoting only the very specific parts of my post you can address and ignore my more important, specific points. The only conclusion I can draw is that you prefer to keep your head in the sand and post PR statements rather than increase your knowledge of the solutions you are competing with and address the real shortcomings of your program, so that you can blame your lack of fame and success on conspiracy theories. That's a workable solution only if your goal is to continue not to be taken seriously.
Whoops, missed the last word. That should read: "How is your solution, ..., better?
So my simple, effective approach languishes in obscurity while bigger, more complicated, CPU-intensive approaches are featured on Slashdot.
My approach lets *YOU* decide what kinds of content you want in your email while the other approaches I've seen here use complicated rules to try to flag an email as spam or not.
I should add that I don't see anything new in "your" approach. It sounds like a very simple version of the non-learning setup of spamassassin, which:
The only difference I see is that instead of using 8 very broad rules, spamassassin uses hundreds, and the point values are configurable so that anyone can tailor the scores to correspond to their spam/ham experience patterns.
So how is your solution, which seems to be equivalent to a rigid and narrowly defined spamassassin configuration (which happens to work for you, but not in a more general usage case)?
So my simple, effective approach languishes in obscurity while bigger, more complicated, CPU-intensive approaches are featured on Slashdot.
My approach lets *YOU* decide what kinds of content you want in your email while the other approaches I've seen here use complicated rules to try to flag an email as spam or not.
Or possibly your approach languishes because people aren't interested in an approach with a staggering potential for false positives in identifying spam? You say that other systems have 'complicated rules' like that's a bad thing--they are complicated in an attempt to actually separate spam from ham intelligently. It's not like there is some conspiracy to promote other solutions over yours.
It's nice that your approach works for you, but for the incredibly large portion of the population that occasionally recieves legitimate emails with attachments, html, or % or $ signs, it's worthless compared to most of the other spam filtering approaches.
Exactly. Same with things like muggings, too; so long as the social problem of poverty exists, there will be muggings, armed robbery, etc. Clearly they shouldn't be illegal either.
Just because you don't agree with the premise of socialism doesn't mean that everyone who thinks that pure capitalism is a bad idea is an idiot.
A few extra spaces can really help you catch mistakes when your using a lot of nested parenthesies. ( ( (th) ( (i)(s) ) ) is much easier to read than (((th)(i)(s))) if your trying to make sure you don't screw up your parenthesies.
Personal preference, I guess. I was able to almost immediately tell that the tighter set was correctly balanced, but I had to spend a lot more effort to determine that the first set is missing a closing parenthesis.
I can't help but wonder if your mistake was intentional humor, or unintentional irony.
Not everybody who supports any war, fights in it. And there's nothing wrong with that no matter how many liberals scream otherwise. It's idiotic to assume that you can't support anything dangerous if you don't put your neck on the line yourself.
Clearly people can support something without putting their neck on the line. But in the case of war, there are compelling arguments that they shouldn't. Ignoring other issues for a moment, what's illogical about saying that people shouldn't have a right to say, "This is important enough to me that I think a bunch of people I've never met should be sent to die while I sit at home risk-free"? Wouldn't it be nice if people had to really weigh the importance of a war to them before saying "Invade the suckers, it won't hurt me!" in the next opinion poll?
Comparing soldiers to practitioners of extreme sports is nonsensical. Unlike soldiers, athletes aren't likely to suddenly be confronted with a sporting event that they might be morally opposed to. If you want to, say, jump a bunch of flaming trucks on a motorcycle, you can pretty much expect that's what you'll be doing. Soldiers who signed up to make the country safer might find themselves being shipped out to fight for lower oil prices.
Seriously, can you - or anyone else - name one major incompatiblity between MSVC's implementation of C or C++ and the most commonly used ANSI standard?
I haven't used VC in a while, so I can't swear to the latest version, but last time I used in (VC6, I bevieve), the following would refuse to compile:
But this would compile with no problems:
Having completely wrong scoping means headaches when trying to move any code to/from VC++, which I would call a major incompatibility.
Who among you REALLY believes that the sea of secretaties and accountants and lawyers and paralegals who actually use a word processor every day would prefer to use LaTex over Word?
That's a meaningless question--LaTeX is essentially a file format, whereas Word is both a GUI editor and a file format. Given a front-end equivalent to Word's that used LaTex source behind the scenes, do you think most people who use a word processor every day would say, "Gee, I don't want to use this because the binary blob XML format of Word is more comforting and familiar when I view it in pico?"
I think it's telling (aka depressing) that MIT didn't get a female president from their engineering department.
I doubt that's really telling--Every university president whose hiring I am at least somewhat familiar with (granted, that's not too many) has been hired from another university, usually from a Provost or similar position. Department chair to university president is a pretty big jump.
The progression I've always seen is something along the lines of Professor (-> Dept chair) -> some kind of dean -> higher up dean -> provost -> president. Very often the last couple of transitions happen across universities. It would probably be much more telling if they had recruited their president from their engineering department, in that it might indicate that they were trying to hard to find a female candidate.
You aren't using "predict" correctly in your examples. In each case what you would have to say is something like "I predict that this water sample will turn out to contain an unsafe level of arsenic". You can't predict the past or present; you can only predict our future understanding of current or past events.
My question is this: Are we so anti-Microsoft that we'll settle for clunkier software without complaint, just because it's not made by Microsoft? Where is the hue and cry for a faster, more responsive Firefox? Why do we accept things without complaint just because we admire the politics of the developers?
The answers to your questions are, respectively, "no", "www.mozillazine.org (and tons of blogs)", and "They don't; the drivers and developers of Mozilla family products get flamed all the time".
Seriously, if you think all the Firefox developers get is praise, spend some time on the MozillaZine forums.
Great. So all a terrorist has to do is politely ask that their bag be pulled in order to have confidence that it won't? I feel so much better now.
Currently if a passenger disappears between checkin and departure, the plane cannot leave with their luggage on board. This proceedure predates recent security improvements.
In theory, that's true. In practice, I can tell you it isn't. A year and a half ago, I had to cancel the second half of a two-part flight and drive instead. So when I landed, I told a gate attendant that I wouldn't be getting on my next flight (for which I was already checked through), and I'd need my baggage pulled. She phoned down and put in a request, along with a description of my baggage. A couple of hours later, they told me that my baggage had gone on without me, because they were too busy to get it.
More recently, the plane for second leg of a trip never showed up, so instead of flying me to San Jose, they flew me to San Francisco. They happily put my luggage on the next plane to San Jose though, even though they knew I wasn't on it.
Gives you a great sense of confidence, doesn't it?
This article isn't for Joe Sixpack. It's for Linux users who want a filtering solution.
Right: and the point the poster was making is that providing filtering solutions for tech-savvy, Linux-using parents isn't going to make much of a dent in the nationwide demand for laws. Helping tiny tiny fractions of the population helps those specific people, but Congress isn't likely to notice any difference in demands for government solutions.
No, if non-IE browsers gain too much market share, more and more web sites will be standards compliant, but with lots of hacks to look fine on IE as well. IE will never (in the forseeable future) fall into such a marginal market share that it would be ignored by developers. Even if it were suddenly 50/50 overnight, or 75/25 in favor of FF, sites would still make IE-compliant pages, because nobody can affort to write off 25% of the market.
You are clearly talking about a larger issue, which I can't really speak to, but I can definitely say that the thread you linked to does *not* support your case.
I read it through, and here's what I saw:
1) A professional email from Ben Gooder saying that Firefox was taking a new direction due to a combination of licencing and UI considerations
2) A less-than-polite response from the Qute designer, with both the original and the reply posted to a public forum in violation of basic decency
3) A lot of ignorant flaming of the decision and back-seat driving from people who were not privy to the details of the decision and ignored what they were told about it by Ben Gooder's follow-up post. Interestingly, the people doing said flaming all seemed coincidentally to prefer the Qute theme.
4) Many people who either didn't like Qute or were reserving judgement one way or the other until they had time to make an informed decision based on the complete theme and actual use.
5) The Qute fanatics almost exclusively ignoring the people in 4) and claiming that everyone likes Qute better, and that ignoring "the preferences of the end users" was completely against what Firefox should be about (I'll leave the hypocricy in that as an excercise for the reader).
I certainly did see a lot of disrespect in that thread, but it was all *toward* Ben Gooder, and not *by* him. After reading that thread, what I'm left with is a lack of respect for people who lash out ignorantly and disrespectfully against someone who spends a whole lot of time working on a browser that they all use and enjoy.