Because (1) you're usually nearer to the dongle than the router, and (2) light (including radio waves) travels in straight lines. At any one time the RF field (which had a certain amount of energy pumped into it) is spreading out over the surface of a sphere. This means that the signal intensity varies inversely with the square of the distance from the antenna.
At 1m. from the antenna, the signal strength is a quarter of what it was at 50cm. from the antenna. At 1m50 from the antenna, it is one-ninth of what it was at 50cm. At 5m. from the antenna, it is 1/100 of what it was at 50cm. from the antenna.
That original house is now worth more than 50% what I sold it for too
I hope you meant "more than 50% more than what I sold it for" ! (or "more than 150% what I sold it for too" would work, too.)
I bought not long after you. That was when houses were cheap and mortgages were expensive (although they never imagined the bank base rate falling as low as it eventually did). Over the years, houses have gone up and mortgages have come down. Now mortgages are starting to go up again.
I'm not going to lose out, I don't think; my house is still very unlikely to fall below what I paid for it, and I'll own it outright soon enough to beat interest rate rises. The neighbourhood is a good one (if you can conveniently ignore the fact that you have to walk slightly uphill to reach the river) and it's not as though I need a bigger place, so I won't be needing to move anytime soon. But I feel for anybody buying now, because they are at serious risk of being stuck with a house that's worth less than they paid for it. I don't know what you can do in that situation really, apart from economise like mad and try to ride it out, hoping for the market to pick up again.
Better than non-transferrability would be limited transferrability. You should be allowed to use your rights in a song as collateral for a loan, but they should revert to you as soon as the debt is paid (or pass to the public domain if any debt is still outstanding at the end of the copyright term; lenders should bear in mind that rights are essentially perishable goods).
As for the incentive-to-murder bit, murder is already illegal. To determine whether copyright expiring on death really creates such an incentive, we need only look back at the experience from recent history when copyright terms were cut short by the death of the author.
Nobody. Read the article again -- it's 5 ares. An are is 100 square metres (ten by ten). A hundred ares are a hectare (a hundred by a hundred).
5 acres would be five times as much land as a team of oxen could plough in a good day, but I don't have a team of oxen handy so I couldn't tell you how many square metres that is.
It happens all the time in Britain. The "buy to let" brigade are despised by pretty much everyone. The working class don't like them, because the rent charged by private landlords often exceeds the cost of a mortgage on a similar property -- except that there are no similar properties available to buy, because they've all been bought up by "buy-to-let" speculators. And the middle class don't like them, because they resent the thought of living next door to students, immigrant workers and assorted proles.
Fortunately, the bottom is about to drop right out of the UK property market anytime soon. Maybe then we'll get a government with the balls to tax the rich and spend it on Council houses.
For how many years after installing a combi-boiler can a plumber expect to continue to get paid every time the householder turns on a hot tap or the radiators?
For how many years after repairing a car can a garage mechanic expect to continue to get paid every time the owner drives it?
For how many years after hanging wallpaper can a decorator expect to continue to get paid every time the householder looks at it?
For how many years after putting up a set of shelves can a handyman expect to continue to get paid every time someone puts something on or takes something off the shelves?
For how many years after having sex with a punter can a prostitute expect to continue to get paid every time the punter cracks a stiffie?
In the Real World, you do a job, you get paid for it, and that's it until the next job you do.
Not quite -- it's all relative. Sure you can hear anything above 0dB, and you are unlikely to suffer permanent damage from anything less than 140dB. But that isn't the same as having 140dB of dynamic range.
If you are hearing a sound at a certain volume, you won't hear be able to anything else that is more than 20dB quieter than the louder sound. That's part of the basis of how lossy audio codecs work.
Most people can hear the difference between 16bit and 24bit audio, assuming they are listening to it on a device capable of producing the full dynamic range.
Anything beyond the 16th bit will be below the noise floor with ordinary-quality components at human temperatures. Well-controlled double-blind trials will show that you don't need more than 16 bits.
[T]he U. S. should have adopted PAL instead of NTSC
Actually, the UK's independent TV stations very nearly adopted NTSC on 405 lines / VHF in the early 1960s. The government of the day stepped in to stop them; the BBC were ready to run trials with PAL on 625 lines / UHF, which would have been completely incompatible with the ITV system. (They were keen to avoid a repeat of previous issues with Baird's 240-line mechanical system vs. Blumlein's 405-line electronic system). 625 won in the end. Note also that a cathode ray tube tended to act like a loudspeaker; 405 lines per frame at 25 fps produced an annoying 10.125kHz whistle, whereas 625 lines at the same frame rate produced 15.625kHz which is inaudible to most adults.
[T]o save [the 8-track format], all he would need to do is go back to the groovy 60s and introduce home recorders so people can make their own compilations.
The programme lengths are fixed by the length of the loop. Recording on 8-track is possible, if you use tape salvaged from a cart (it's got a special low-friction backing) and a two-track open reel stereo machine running at 9.5 cm/sec (all 4 programmes will be the same). Winding it back into the cart is very tricky and the special low-friction backing can cause serious wow and flutter during recording.
Oh, and having rewind and fast-forward on the decks would help sell a few more players.
You can't rewind an 8-track cartridge. The tape is pulled from the centre of the single spool and taken up on the outside. Each turn deposited on the outside requires pulling several turns from the centre, hence the need for low-friction backing and permanent twists in the tape. There's no way to poke it back into the centre! You can have fast-forward, but only up to about 4X speed otherwise the tape will break.
From the section on HD Audio:
The copy protection is good too, which means less of that pesky piracy the music industry keeps banging on about.
Punters won't be interested if they can't get their money's worth out of a purchase. And it's the punter, not the record companies, that decides what a recording is worth. A £15 CD isn't so bad when you can get an extra copies; it's a bit more like three identical CDs for £5 each.
From the section on DTS:
[I]t greatly simplifies the process of releasing movies worldwide because, unlike Dolby, the sound isn't stored on the film print, but instead on a CD-ROM that's synchronised to the film using a timecode.
Introducing more things that can go wrong is hardly "simplifying things". They tried synchronised discs a long time ago -- just before they found out why printing the soundtrack alongside the pictures would have been a better idea. See "Vitaphone".
From the section on the Atari ST:
[A]mazing sound and graphical capabilities.
Oh, yeah, 16 colours chosen from a palette of 512 at 320x200. No vertical extension to x256 on PAL machines. The sound ("it can recreate 21 musical instruments!" -- yeah, maybe 18 casio PT-10s, two penny whistles and a kazoo) may have been amazing if all you'd ever heard was a Speccy, but the Commodore 64 had a better sound chip and was only an 8-bit processor. The Atari ST was built straight from various application notes. It sucked donkey balls. </amiga owner>
MiniDisc lost out because it was proprietary and too expensive. In 1998 I was actually seriously thinking of buying a MiniDisc recorder, but I ended up buying my first CD-R drive (the choice was made on the basis that I would be able to play my home-recorded CDs anywhere there was a CD player, and not have to carry around such an expensive piece of kit). I know MiniDisc users who swore by the format and still do; but the only way I would buy one today would be if I had a very specific job in mind..... such as portable hi-fi recording from stereo analogue sources.
In the EU and UK, it is not illegal to use DeCSS to watch a DVD that you rightfully own. The content is encrypted, for sure, but the owner of the disc is the rightful recipient of the encrypted message and therefore is entitled to perform any necessary act in order to view it. Anyone attempting to stop them is almost certainly violating consumer protection law.
Actually, the easiest way to get a legal DVD or MP3 player for your Linux computer is just not to live in the USA. DeCSS is legal in at least Norway, and probably the EU and the UK.
Hopefully this will just put people off using Linspire, which is no big deal in the long term. Last I checked, Linspire was full of all manner of nasty closed-source shite which the world would be better off without. If the Debian developers aren't pissed off to the back teeth at the way some people (and not just Linspire) have bastardised their "100% i-tal forever" distro, they deserve sainthood in at least as many religions as there are platforms on which Debian runs.
Never forget, it was Linspire who provided a lot of the funding for Pidgin when it was called Gaim (which was so staunchly GPL that they didn't even make the usual OpenSSL exception; it was GNUTLS or no MSN), then -- as soon as they realised that the terms of the GPL meant they could never get the code all to themselves, cage it up and take away the Source Code -- left the developers right in the lurch with the AOL lawsuit.
Fortunately, the GPL prevailed; the developers were able to fork their own code and give it a new name, but it just goes to show how some people will double-cross you at the last minute.
..someone downloaded a ROM of a NES game he has in his basement at home? Is it a copyrighted piece of software? If so it is still illegal despite the individual still owning an original cartridge, doesn't allow him to download a copy of it from another cartridge. The "backup" has to be made from his legally owned one.
Technically, maybe. However, the two are utterly indistinguible and the law demands proof beyond reasonable doubt. The fact of having another copy of the same information somewhere in their possession casts reasonable doubt on whether the copy was obtained illegally, since it's possible -- unlikely, but the business of the courts is not to determine what is more likely, but to establish facts beyond reasonable doubt -- that the copy in question could have been made from that.
Bollocks. Rule by fear always breaks down, sooner or later, because fear can be overcome. This is something that authoritarians don't seem to get. Fear of getting caught is not what demotivates the majority of people from committing crime. That's just a Tory oversimplification. If someone is really determined, they will analyse the balance of probabilities purely in terms of a favourable vs. unfavourable outcome with a cool head.
Once you force someone into a corner, where the choice is "do something that you fear or die", they will choose to live, because they're more afraid of dying than of whatever you were going to do to them. In fact, the whole "overcoming fear" thing is how cave-men evolved into us. Oh, wait, you said Kansas.....
Using more decks doesn't alter the relative proportions of cards (and hence the probability of any particular value turning up). In fact, if anything, it makes the probabilities conform better to the empirical expectation. Since card-counting is all about calculating the probability that any particular card will help you (by increasing your score without busting you) or hinder you (by taking you over 21), anything that makes the observed probability closer to the expected possibility favours you.
Most probability studies assume that the random-number generating mechanism has no memory. This is usually correct. Throwing six sixes with a die does not alter the probability of throwing a six next time: it's still 1/6. But when playing 21, there is a sort of memory effect going on; because cards that have already fallen will not show up again. And it's upon precisely this memory that the card-counter relies. Once KS has been drawn, the probability of the next card being KS is zero. If you have an infinite number of decks (equivalent to returning each card to a random position within the deck after use), the probability of any random card being the KS is always 1/52. With a finite number of decks, the memory effect is reduced as compared to a single deck but not eliminated altogether.
You can memorise the order of a single deck, but that's not the way most people do it. The "classic" method is mentally to divide the card ranks into "high" (8-K, likely to bust you whatever you've got), "low" (A-3, good for completing a five-card trick) and "middling" (4-7). Now you know in any deck there are 24 high cards, 12 low cards and 16 middling cards. By knowing how many cards within each band have fallen, you can determine how likely you are to get a card you want. If, say, a bunch of high cards come up, it's not unreasonable -- because of the memory effect -- to expect the next card to be low or middling. And you can bet accordingly; low when the cards don't favour you (or when they favour the dealer), high when they do (or the dealer stands a good chance of being busted on the next card).
The only way to disrupt card-counting (unless you have an infinitely large casino with room for an infinite number of cards; but then, you'd have no room for any players to sit at the card table -- even if you had an infinite number of seats, they would all be full of nothing but stacks of cards) is to return each card to the deck immediately it has been played, and always draw each card from a random position (or shuffle between each deal).
OK. Theft is defined as unlawfully taking something that belongs to another person, with intent permanently to deprive them of it. The important words being "deprive" and "permanently" (which is why it's a valid defence if you knew or had reason to believe that the person intended to destroy the article, since in effect you are only temporarily depriving them of it for the time it would have taken them to destroy it, after which they wouldn't have it anyway).
Now we've got the definition out of the way, please tell me: What is it that someone will not have after you download a copy of a piece of music, that they did have before you downloaded it (the "deprive" bit) and there is no way for them to get back (the "permanent" bit)?
Suppose you own a restaurant in a part of town where there is a large population whose language you do not speak -- and, crucially, most of whom do not speak English. Now you ask one of the tiny bilingual minority to make up a sign saying in both languages "FOR THE ORPHANS - DONATIONS WELCOME" which you will prop up on the counter next to a basin of coins; but, due to some sort of misunderstanding between you and your signwriter, the notice actually reads "FREE MONEY - PLEASE TAKE SOME" in the language you don't understand. (The English portion is fine, requesting donations for the orphans.)
Is it the customers' fault if they do what the sign told them to do and take some money out of the basin?
Yeah, I know -- I never use myself; I define a class with {text-align: center}, or jujst make all my
s or whatever have that style. But even CSS won't accept "centre". Doesh't mind me naming the class "centre", though, so
works. If you have.centre {text-align: center} in your stylesheet, of course.
The point of using nano is that it's small, and it doesn't use X so you can run it in an ssh session. And it's similar to pico, which I already knew from when I used to use pine. I've forgotten too much of vi to be comfortable with vim (afraid I'm no emacs user). It's rather old-fashioned, though; I suppose I should try using kate with a fish:// URL more often.
Why do you Brits always insist on using French spellings?
Because some of our language is borrowed from French, and we retain the spelling and pluralisation rules of the donor language until the word earns a new meaning; in which case, when used in the new sense, it's considered to be an English word which happens to share its spelling with a Foreign word, so the usual English pluralisation rules apply. Hence beetles have antennae, but radios have antennas. Unless they're small, covert transmitters..... because then they would be bugs. (Chad image, caption "What no rimshot?")
Anyway, the fact remains that it was us who stole..... er..... borr..... er..... invented it. You septics were the ones who had to change it. I'll grant that there might have been more pressing concerns than a copy of the O.E.D. when the Mayflower first set sail out of Plymouth -- and the passengers' apparent inability to think of a better name for the place where they had just landed than the place where they had just come from is evidence for that. But there's no excuse for that sort of behaviour nowadays.
Let's have HTML5 exactly like XHTML, but make it case-insensitive. Especially ditch the awful tag. And allow "centre" to be spelt correctly!
The thing that ruined XHTML was that it introduced case-sensitivity to a system which had previously been case-insensitive. This is a recipe for breakage. Case-sensitive behaviour is fine in its own right -- after all, just because the dollar sign and the figure 4 come from the same key on the keyboard, they aren't interchangeable, so why should the letter "z" and the letter "Z" be thought of so? -- but not when it's introduced suddenly where it never existed before. That is a blatant contradiction of the Principle of Least Surprise.
It could be argued that removing case-sensitivity which had existed previously would create even more breakage; suddenly, <BR/>, <Br/>, <bR/> and <br/> would no longer be four different tags; and if they had ever had different meanings, it would have cocked things up. Of course, assigning different meanings to differently-cased versions of the same phrase was itself a Least Surprise Violation in the first place, unless all but one version are considered errors.....
At any rate, capitalised tags make it easier when you're editing HTML on the web server using nano.
People who need e-mail can always set up their own little closed networks (or pay someone else to set up closed networks for them), where only the people from whom they have chosen in advance to receive messages can contact them. And all this can be done in such a way as it can be read and responded to through a simple web browser.
Slashdot Mirror
Because (1) you're usually nearer to the dongle than the router, and (2) light (including radio waves) travels in straight lines. At any one time the RF field (which had a certain amount of energy pumped into it) is spreading out over the surface of a sphere. This means that the signal intensity varies inversely with the square of the distance from the antenna.
At 1m. from the antenna, the signal strength is a quarter of what it was at 50cm. from the antenna. At 1m50 from the antenna, it is one-ninth of what it was at 50cm. At 5m. from the antenna, it is 1/100 of what it was at 50cm. from the antenna.
I bought not long after you. That was when houses were cheap and mortgages were expensive (although they never imagined the bank base rate falling as low as it eventually did). Over the years, houses have gone up and mortgages have come down. Now mortgages are starting to go up again.
I'm not going to lose out, I don't think; my house is still very unlikely to fall below what I paid for it, and I'll own it outright soon enough to beat interest rate rises. The neighbourhood is a good one (if you can conveniently ignore the fact that you have to walk slightly uphill to reach the river) and it's not as though I need a bigger place, so I won't be needing to move anytime soon. But I feel for anybody buying now, because they are at serious risk of being stuck with a house that's worth less than they paid for it. I don't know what you can do in that situation really, apart from economise like mad and try to ride it out, hoping for the market to pick up again.
Better than non-transferrability would be limited transferrability. You should be allowed to use your rights in a song as collateral for a loan, but they should revert to you as soon as the debt is paid (or pass to the public domain if any debt is still outstanding at the end of the copyright term; lenders should bear in mind that rights are essentially perishable goods).
As for the incentive-to-murder bit, murder is already illegal. To determine whether copyright expiring on death really creates such an incentive, we need only look back at the experience from recent history when copyright terms were cut short by the death of the author.
Nobody. Read the article again -- it's 5 ares. An are is 100 square metres (ten by ten). A hundred ares are a hectare (a hundred by a hundred).
5 acres would be five times as much land as a team of oxen could plough in a good day, but I don't have a team of oxen handy so I couldn't tell you how many square metres that is.
It happens all the time in Britain. The "buy to let" brigade are despised by pretty much everyone. The working class don't like them, because the rent charged by private landlords often exceeds the cost of a mortgage on a similar property -- except that there are no similar properties available to buy, because they've all been bought up by "buy-to-let" speculators. And the middle class don't like them, because they resent the thought of living next door to students, immigrant workers and assorted proles.
Fortunately, the bottom is about to drop right out of the UK property market anytime soon. Maybe then we'll get a government with the balls to tax the rich and spend it on Council houses.
For how many years after installing a combi-boiler can a plumber expect to continue to get paid every time the householder turns on a hot tap or the radiators?
For how many years after repairing a car can a garage mechanic expect to continue to get paid every time the owner drives it?
For how many years after hanging wallpaper can a decorator expect to continue to get paid every time the householder looks at it?
For how many years after putting up a set of shelves can a handyman expect to continue to get paid every time someone puts something on or takes something off the shelves?
For how many years after having sex with a punter can a prostitute expect to continue to get paid every time the punter cracks a stiffie?
In the Real World, you do a job, you get paid for it, and that's it until the next job you do.
Not quite -- it's all relative. Sure you can hear anything above 0dB, and you are unlikely to suffer permanent damage from anything less than 140dB. But that isn't the same as having 140dB of dynamic range.
If you are hearing a sound at a certain volume, you won't hear be able to anything else that is more than 20dB quieter than the louder sound. That's part of the basis of how lossy audio codecs work.
TOS. As in "Toss, heap of".
From the section on HD Audio: Punters won't be interested if they can't get their money's worth out of a purchase. And it's the punter, not the record companies, that decides what a recording is worth. A £15 CD isn't so bad when you can get an extra copies; it's a bit more like three identical CDs for £5 each.
From the section on DTS: Introducing more things that can go wrong is hardly "simplifying things". They tried synchronised discs a long time ago -- just before they found out why printing the soundtrack alongside the pictures would have been a better idea. See "Vitaphone".
From the section on the Atari ST: Oh, yeah, 16 colours chosen from a palette of 512 at 320x200. No vertical extension to x256 on PAL machines. The sound ("it can recreate 21 musical instruments!" -- yeah, maybe 18 casio PT-10s, two penny whistles and a kazoo) may have been amazing if all you'd ever heard was a Speccy, but the Commodore 64 had a better sound chip and was only an 8-bit processor. The Atari ST was built straight from various application notes. It sucked donkey balls. </amiga owner>
MiniDisc lost out because it was proprietary and too expensive. In 1998 I was actually seriously thinking of buying a MiniDisc recorder, but I ended up buying my first CD-R drive (the choice was made on the basis that I would be able to play my home-recorded CDs anywhere there was a CD player, and not have to carry around such an expensive piece of kit). I know MiniDisc users who swore by the format and still do; but the only way I would buy one today would be if I had a very specific job in mind
Seeing as your ears cannot hear more than 20dB of dynamic range and 15 kHz of bandwidth, 14 bits / 44.1kHz actually seems quite reasonable.
In the EU and UK, it is not illegal to use DeCSS to watch a DVD that you rightfully own. The content is encrypted, for sure, but the owner of the disc is the rightful recipient of the encrypted message and therefore is entitled to perform any necessary act in order to view it. Anyone attempting to stop them is almost certainly violating consumer protection law.
Actually, the easiest way to get a legal DVD or MP3 player for your Linux computer is just not to live in the USA. DeCSS is legal in at least Norway, and probably the EU and the UK.
Hopefully this will just put people off using Linspire, which is no big deal in the long term. Last I checked, Linspire was full of all manner of nasty closed-source shite which the world would be better off without. If the Debian developers aren't pissed off to the back teeth at the way some people (and not just Linspire) have bastardised their "100% i-tal forever" distro, they deserve sainthood in at least as many religions as there are platforms on which Debian runs.
Never forget, it was Linspire who provided a lot of the funding for Pidgin when it was called Gaim (which was so staunchly GPL that they didn't even make the usual OpenSSL exception; it was GNUTLS or no MSN), then -- as soon as they realised that the terms of the GPL meant they could never get the code all to themselves, cage it up and take away the Source Code -- left the developers right in the lurch with the AOL lawsuit.
Fortunately, the GPL prevailed; the developers were able to fork their own code and give it a new name, but it just goes to show how some people will double-cross you at the last minute.
Bollocks. Rule by fear always breaks down, sooner or later, because fear can be overcome. This is something that authoritarians don't seem to get. Fear of getting caught is not what demotivates the majority of people from committing crime. That's just a Tory oversimplification. If someone is really determined, they will analyse the balance of probabilities purely in terms of a favourable vs. unfavourable outcome with a cool head.
.....
Once you force someone into a corner, where the choice is "do something that you fear or die", they will choose to live, because they're more afraid of dying than of whatever you were going to do to them. In fact, the whole "overcoming fear" thing is how cave-men evolved into us. Oh, wait, you said Kansas
Using more decks doesn't alter the relative proportions of cards (and hence the probability of any particular value turning up). In fact, if anything, it makes the probabilities conform better to the empirical expectation. Since card-counting is all about calculating the probability that any particular card will help you (by increasing your score without busting you) or hinder you (by taking you over 21), anything that makes the observed probability closer to the expected possibility favours you.
Most probability studies assume that the random-number generating mechanism has no memory. This is usually correct. Throwing six sixes with a die does not alter the probability of throwing a six next time: it's still 1/6. But when playing 21, there is a sort of memory effect going on; because cards that have already fallen will not show up again. And it's upon precisely this memory that the card-counter relies. Once KS has been drawn, the probability of the next card being KS is zero. If you have an infinite number of decks (equivalent to returning each card to a random position within the deck after use), the probability of any random card being the KS is always 1/52. With a finite number of decks, the memory effect is reduced as compared to a single deck but not eliminated altogether.
You can memorise the order of a single deck, but that's not the way most people do it. The "classic" method is mentally to divide the card ranks into "high" (8-K, likely to bust you whatever you've got), "low" (A-3, good for completing a five-card trick) and "middling" (4-7). Now you know in any deck there are 24 high cards, 12 low cards and 16 middling cards. By knowing how many cards within each band have fallen, you can determine how likely you are to get a card you want. If, say, a bunch of high cards come up, it's not unreasonable -- because of the memory effect -- to expect the next card to be low or middling. And you can bet accordingly; low when the cards don't favour you (or when they favour the dealer), high when they do (or the dealer stands a good chance of being busted on the next card).
The only way to disrupt card-counting (unless you have an infinitely large casino with room for an infinite number of cards; but then, you'd have no room for any players to sit at the card table -- even if you had an infinite number of seats, they would all be full of nothing but stacks of cards) is to return each card to the deck immediately it has been played, and always draw each card from a random position (or shuffle between each deal).
OK. Theft is defined as unlawfully taking something that belongs to another person, with intent permanently to deprive them of it. The important words being "deprive" and "permanently" (which is why it's a valid defence if you knew or had reason to believe that the person intended to destroy the article, since in effect you are only temporarily depriving them of it for the time it would have taken them to destroy it, after which they wouldn't have it anyway).
Now we've got the definition out of the way, please tell me: What is it that someone will not have after you download a copy of a piece of music, that they did have before you downloaded it (the "deprive" bit) and there is no way for them to get back (the "permanent" bit)?
Suppose you own a restaurant in a part of town where there is a large population whose language you do not speak -- and, crucially, most of whom do not speak English. Now you ask one of the tiny bilingual minority to make up a sign saying in both languages "FOR THE ORPHANS - DONATIONS WELCOME" which you will prop up on the counter next to a basin of coins; but, due to some sort of misunderstanding between you and your signwriter, the notice actually reads "FREE MONEY - PLEASE TAKE SOME" in the language you don't understand. (The English portion is fine, requesting donations for the orphans.)
Is it the customers' fault if they do what the sign told them to do and take some money out of the basin?
works. If you have .centre {text-align: center} in your stylesheet, of course.
The point of using nano is that it's small, and it doesn't use X so you can run it in an ssh session. And it's similar to pico, which I already knew from when I used to use pine. I've forgotten too much of vi to be comfortable with vim (afraid I'm no emacs user). It's rather old-fashioned, though; I suppose I should try using kate with a fish:// URL more often.
Anyway, the fact remains that it was us who stole
Let's have HTML5 exactly like XHTML, but make it case-insensitive. Especially ditch the awful tag. And allow "centre" to be spelt correctly!
/>, <Br />, <bR /> and <br /> would no longer be four different tags; and if they had ever had different meanings, it would have cocked things up. Of course, assigning different meanings to differently-cased versions of the same phrase was itself a Least Surprise Violation in the first place, unless all but one version are considered errors .....
The thing that ruined XHTML was that it introduced case-sensitivity to a system which had previously been case-insensitive. This is a recipe for breakage. Case-sensitive behaviour is fine in its own right -- after all, just because the dollar sign and the figure 4 come from the same key on the keyboard, they aren't interchangeable, so why should the letter "z" and the letter "Z" be thought of so? -- but not when it's introduced suddenly where it never existed before. That is a blatant contradiction of the Principle of Least Surprise.
It could be argued that removing case-sensitivity which had existed previously would create even more breakage; suddenly, <BR
At any rate, capitalised tags make it easier when you're editing HTML on the web server using nano.
People who need e-mail can always set up their own little closed networks (or pay someone else to set up closed networks for them), where only the people from whom they have chosen in advance to receive messages can contact them. And all this can be done in such a way as it can be read and responded to through a simple web browser.