I think the main reason to not make it an option is because it is such a tiny obscure detail that you wouldn't even think to look for an option in the first place.
Can't you make the area resizable by grabbign a corner and dragging ? Then simply have the auto-resize turn off if the user resizes the area. Perhaps there could be a small button below the area which turns the auto-size feature on and off and turns automatically off when you drag the are - thus drawing attention and automatically associating itself with resizing in the user's mind ?
Good usability is often about removing options and make things behave the right way at default.
No. Good usability is about making configuration and use intuitive and efficient. Removing an option "because it might confuse people" is never an improvement. It's a lazy mans way of avoiding doing the configuration right.
Just because something is the "right way" for you, doesn't mean that it is the right way for me. We aren't identical, after all.
He's not here anymore to care if you disrespect him or not.
So they all say. And then, one morning, they'll be found dead on their beds, their faces whiter than their sheets and locked into an expression of horror.
Handcoding takes far more time than is necessary in a changing scenario of today's news. Effort not proportional to returns. As a shareholder, i would sue them for wasting money.
Since a properly made page has all the representational data on a separate CSS file, the actual HTML page can be very simple - a list of articles at simplest. This makes it very easy and fast to update, either by cut'n pasting the article by hand or pulling it from a database.
I repeat: a handcoded page is faster, not slower, to update than a WYSIWYG-generated mess.
Dreamweaver allows preview easily and pretty much automates repeatable tasks. Handcoding requires a Mechanical Turk.
As noted above, hand-coding allows the stories to be kept in a database and inserted into a template HTML file from there. This process is trivial to automate, to the point where the reporter pushes a "publish" button in their text editor, and scripts take care of everything.
Sure, if you don't bother to do things right, today's major browsers will probably guess that you're an idiot and work around your bugs.
They will try to work around your bugs. There's no guarantee that the heuristics of a given browser will succeed in correctly guessing what you actually meant in a given case.
The best argument for writing bugless web pages is not that it takes less work (it does), nor that they works with more browsers (they do) and thus give you more customers. No, the best argument is simple: "Given how stupid computers are, do you really want the appearance and function of your website to be up to their guesses ?"
What is the correct value of the alt attribute for the CAPTCHA image in a "free registration required" form?
A description of the sequence of letters required to pass it, in a form which is difficult to parse by a computer ? Failing that, the CATPCHA image in SVG form ?-)
That is why, to my mind, even though it may be of limited effectiveness, it is right to make possession of this material illegal. Anything you can do to destroy or disrupt the market is attacking the revenue stream that makes the criminals do it in the first place. If you cannot persuade people that they should not pay other people to abuse, rape and beat strangers for their entertainment - then more stringent sanctions are needed.
Yeah, it's just like the drugs: after they were made illegal to possess, the profits of drug traffickers plummeted in freefall.
Making violent porn illegal will simply serve to drive the profit into the hands of criminals. Want to make a legitimate BDSM porn film by having the actors, well, act ? You can't. But the Mafia can. Only the Mafia might decide to skip getting actors, and just have their sicker members torture some poor bastard to death in front of a camera.
Basically, if sick porn is legal, people will fake it, with acting or 3D computer graphics or pen and paper. Since the stuff is available for free in the Internet, few people will buy it, making it insufficiently profitable for organized crime to bother. But make it illegal, and thus hard to get, and it becomes extremely profitable for the Mafia to get into it. And, like I already said, Mafia has no reason to play nice and fake it.
Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction normally taking less than a second, to take from four days to four years to complete.
I read this and instantly thought of applications in firefighting, rust- and corrosion proofing and spaceship heat shielding. Does that mean I'm have a high concentration of enginerium ?-)
There's lots of ways to execute a process automatically under linux. Off the top of my head I can think of several. One would be getting in one of the.login,.profile, or all the various different init scripts stored in the users home directory (and belong to the user) that get run when a user logs in.
Just install yourself as a cron job, to be run once per hour for example. That way you don't even have to stay resident and won't show up in process listing.
I think the meaning here is clear: "invented" implies that mathematics is an artifact that would not exist if humans (or some other reasoning entitiy) did not create it; "discovered" implies the contrary: that mathematics does have an independent existence.
Assuming a deterministic or semi-deterministic universe, all the later states of the universe must have been contained in the initial condition, because you could in theory get determine all possible later states from that initial condition./p>
Given this, and given that we are part of the universe, I don't think it's possible for us to actually create or invent anything in the strict sense. Mathemathics were already contained in the initial condition of the universe; our brains are simply an unzip program inflating it from the there.
The same, of course, goes to this post: it was destined from the beginning that I would write it or, if one believes that quantum mechanics allow for many possible outcomes, the possibility that I would write it was included in the universe from the beginning. In other words, I'm not creating this message right now, for it has always been part of the universe; I'm merely converting it from one form to another.
All of this is, of course, splitting hairs with extreme prejudice and a glint of madness in the mind's eye, but that's philosophy for you:).
Saying an ad-hominem attack invalidates any other points that were made is also an ad-hominem attack.
Actually it's a non-sequiter - the conclusion "conclusion is wrong" doesn't follow from the premise "the argument used to defend the conclusion was wrong". While ad hominem itself is a kind of non-sequiter, merely saying that someone has made a logical fallacy is not an attack on person.
Additionally, if you're currently benefiting from what an artist did ten years ago, for instance by listening to a song he performed, why would it be unfair for him to be compensated for it?
I just returned from the bathroom. Should I send a check to whoever put the pipes in place ten years ago ?
You seem to think that pedophilia isn't actually a problem and that people are using it as a boogeyman...
No, I'm simply saying it's being exaggerated and turned into a boogeyman in an extremely cynical power-grab attempt.
but seriously, have you not been paying attention to all of the molestation happening in the Catholic Church?
Enough to know that the priests who were/are a part of it didn't find their victims through the Internet. Also enough to know that the priests got their position of trust in the first place by appeals to fear - "we are your protectors agains the forces of darkness" - just like the politicians who keep on bringing up boogeymen are trying to do.
Catholic Church's problem is that people turned out to be more loyal to the institution of the church than the principles it was supposed to stand for. Thus when they found out about their fellow priests doing bad things to defenseless children entrusted to their care, they didn't make this information public, no, they helped hide said activities. That's a very human thing to do, to stand with your fellows even when they are wrong - but it can lead straight to Hell, as it did in that case.
I run a very small blog website and I recently got some jackhole who started an "Intergenerational Love" website, which was a pedophilia advocacy blog. This problem is real and you can't just dismiss it.
I'm not, I'm simply against hysteric exaggeration of it, where anything is allowed in the name of combatting it.
But tell me: should it be illegal to start such a blog ? And if it is, should it be illegal for me to post this message, since it could be taken as defending the right of someone who advocated pedophilia to do so ? Should I be registered in a sex offender list for posting it anyway ? After all, arguing that pedophiles have rights might indicate sympathy, so better safe than sorry, right ?
I'm not commenting on what Google did or did not do wrong, I'm saying you cannot be so flippant and dismiss pedophilia as a non-problem.
I'm not commenting on Google's actions either, since there simply isn't enough information to do so, and I'm not being flippant or dismissing pedophilia as a non-problem. I'm simply pointing out that it is very rare - I mean actual pedophilia which means attraction to preteens rather than merely attraction to people under 18 - and that most pedophiles never molest children, just like most heterosexual males never rape women. And, of actual child molestation, most is done by someone who knows the child IRL, often by a family member.
Given all this, the "online sexual predator" is an absurd stereotype of a nearly nonexistent phenomenom and needs to be dismissed, so that resources can be used in a rational manner based on actual reality rather than wasted fighting a scarecrow conjured up by some ruthless politicians in order to ascend to power on the backs of raped children and innocent people falsely accused of being pedophiles, as well as actual pedophiles who have nonetheless never actually done anything to any child.
He was distributing pictures of naked children, it had nothing to do with his fiction.
The fiction is the pornography in question - you did know the term covers literature too, rather than just pictures ? From the link, with emphasis added by me for your benefit:
On Tuesday, a judge sentenced Simon Houston to 15 months in jail, to be followed by three years of probation.
He pleaded guilty earlier this year to distributing child pornography.
Court heard Houston posted stories about having sex with children on a website called the North American Man-Girl Love Association.
In his decision, the judge said pornographic fictional stories stimulate pedophiles and place children at risk in the real world.
However, privacy and yadda yadda yadda. Pedophiles are the lowest of the lowest in my book. Why not use social networking sites as tools to catch those guys? If anything it'll deter them from using those sites to chase their prey.
Apart from the fact that "pedophiles" and "child molesters" aren't the same group, but two partially overlapping groups, the chances are that you are the lowest of the low in someone's book. If it's okay to ignore someone's rights because he's a pedophile, then it's also okay to ignore someone's rights because that someone happens to be you. Sure, you'd disagree - but then again, the people who's rights you refused to defend also disagreed, and it didn't do them much good, so it won't do much good for you either.
Child molesters are certainly scum. However, if you allow them to be deprived of their rights - including the right to privacy - then you are eroding the rights of both them and the children. Please think of the children and nip this in the bud !
Please also understand that "pedophiles" are, as far as authorities are concerned, no different than "terrorists" - a convenient boogeyman to keep people scared and act as X in "if we don't pass this law, the X win". It's a lot easier to turn the Internet into a tighly-controlled channel - and thus unable to threaten the status quo by letting people publish leaked information anonymously - if you can sell it as protecting children rather than protecting politicians.
Finally, the pedophilia boogeyman is already starting to hurt the very children supposedly protected; as an extreme example, there was a teen who got busted for uploading her own pictures, not to mention the couple who were arrested for sending each other pictures of themselves. Of course it hurts everyone else too - for example, this guy was thrown to prison and put to sex offender register for writing fiction.
Still, I think in retrospect, they must be a little disappointed in the lack of desktop applications written in the language.
Which is their own damn fault. Every new version has its own collection of Swing bugs to work around; my favorite one at the moment is a weird one which causes a component to somehow combine a redrawn version of itself with the old one, like the Opaque setting was falsely set to true (it isn't), resulting in garbled screen. I'm guessing it's caused by some overly aggressive optimization somewhere in the drawing code.
The thief is producing nothing of value and only taking from society. He's a drain. If half the population didn't work but only stole, do you think that there would be the same amount of wealth if only 5% did?
Whether the thief contributes or not is irrelevant to whether thievery is a zero-sum game or not.
For the record, I think that the RIAA, MPAA, other copyright organizations and patent trolls are a far greater drain on economy than all the non-incorporated thieves combined. And of course they have a chilling effect on culture and technology too, aside from purely monetary damage they cause.
Of course, virtually all CAPTHCAs currently in use are image-based, so this is more of an academic distinction right now.
True, but it is still an important one to make, for how else can the situation be amended ? If all you've ever seen are image-based CAPTHCAs, then when you are tasked with designing a CAPTHCA, you will automatically start thinking of image-based ones; in your mind, CAPTHCA is a distorted image computers (and humans too, nowadays) have trouble interpreting. It takes a leap of abstraction to realize that it doesn't need to be; with any luck, stating it in a popular online forum makes some people start thinking such schemes.
Thats just how the number infinity works. It is an unbound limit, so you Can slice it up and each piece, while not making each piece larger, each piece will however remain the same size as before being sliced.
But you aren't slicing up infinity, you are slicing up the finite integer 1.
With no upper bound, it does appear at first that if you divide infinity by two, that for those two halves to be the same size as the original, it would have to double. But you cant add to infinity either, so that does not happen.
You aren't dividing infinity, you are dividing by infinity. You aren't dividing infinity to equal pieces, you are dividing 1 into infinitely many pieces.
Basically, your formula is the exact opposite of the situation you described.
The math is sound. The only real question is if the universe itself is infinite or not, which could make the math moot. And that question might not be provable at all (it most certainly isn't right now)
No, your math is not sound. You confused the divisor and divided.
Third, even though the physical TV may be the same, the *value* is not. Try selling a TV you bougth yesterday in the shop, you won't get back even -close- to the entire price, not even -with- a receipt and the original packaging.
Which sucks for you but is good for whoever buys from you. To use an extreme example, if you spent $1000 on the TV and someone purchases it from you for $100, you've down $900 but that other guy has just saved $900 dollars. In other words, zero-sum. The amount of goods and the amount of money in the economy is unchanged, so the economy is unaffected.
After all, no one purchases TVs for their resale value. They purchase TVs to watch TV (or DVDs or whatever). TVs aren't like gold, which only has value because people think it has; a TV is an utility who's value rises from the use you can get out of it. Since that utility is identical in two physically identical TVs, the real value is identical too.
Thing is. A stolen TV is worth less money (to everyone!) than a legal TV in a shop. Even if the two are -physically- identical.
But since the value of the TV is in what you can do with it, rather than how much you can get from it, this doesn't matter.
Besides, a legal TV in a shop is worth nothing to a penniless druggie, while one stolen by him might be worth hundreds of dollars. That's another way of looking at this:).
The blind are able to use braille displays and screen readers to access well-designed sites. The whole point of CAPTCHAs, however, is to have images that computers are unable to read. Accessible design and CAPTCHAs have exactly opposite goals.
No, the point of a CAPTCHA is to have a test which a human can pass easily, but a computer can't. Most current CAPTCHAs are image-based, since that is simple to implement, but this is by no means a requirement.
If sex was used to diffuse social tension, I think you'd see people start arguments over nothing just to end up in bed after their night at the bar.
Isn't this almost a stereotype in many forms of fiction ? Two people meet, can't stand each other, but eventually end up becoming a couple. Belgarion & C'Nedra, Han & Leia, almost all anime that has couples period... Sure, these aren't real-world examples, but since this stereotype is so wide-spread and apparently cross-cultural, I can't help but think it has some basis in reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't you make the area resizable by grabbign a corner and dragging ? Then simply have the auto-resize turn off if the user resizes the area. Perhaps there could be a small button below the area which turns the auto-size feature on and off and turns automatically off when you drag the are - thus drawing attention and automatically associating itself with resizing in the user's mind ?
No. Good usability is about making configuration and use intuitive and efficient. Removing an option "because it might confuse people" is never an improvement. It's a lazy mans way of avoiding doing the configuration right.
Just because something is the "right way" for you, doesn't mean that it is the right way for me. We aren't identical, after all.
So they all say. And then, one morning, they'll be found dead on their beds, their faces whiter than their sheets and locked into an expression of horror.
Sure. If they find out, they can make sure that he's not buried within 100 kilometers of any schools. Just in case he, you know, rises as a zombie.
You know that somewhere a politician is thinking of it just now.
Since a properly made page has all the representational data on a separate CSS file, the actual HTML page can be very simple - a list of articles at simplest. This makes it very easy and fast to update, either by cut'n pasting the article by hand or pulling it from a database.
I repeat: a handcoded page is faster, not slower, to update than a WYSIWYG-generated mess.
As noted above, hand-coding allows the stories to be kept in a database and inserted into a template HTML file from there. This process is trivial to automate, to the point where the reporter pushes a "publish" button in their text editor, and scripts take care of everything.
They will try to work around your bugs. There's no guarantee that the heuristics of a given browser will succeed in correctly guessing what you actually meant in a given case.
The best argument for writing bugless web pages is not that it takes less work (it does), nor that they works with more browsers (they do) and thus give you more customers. No, the best argument is simple: "Given how stupid computers are, do you really want the appearance and function of your website to be up to their guesses ?"
A description of the sequence of letters required to pass it, in a form which is difficult to parse by a computer ? Failing that, the CATPCHA image in SVG form ?-)
Yeah, it's just like the drugs: after they were made illegal to possess, the profits of drug traffickers plummeted in freefall.
Making violent porn illegal will simply serve to drive the profit into the hands of criminals. Want to make a legitimate BDSM porn film by having the actors, well, act ? You can't. But the Mafia can. Only the Mafia might decide to skip getting actors, and just have their sicker members torture some poor bastard to death in front of a camera.
Basically, if sick porn is legal, people will fake it, with acting or 3D computer graphics or pen and paper. Since the stuff is available for free in the Internet, few people will buy it, making it insufficiently profitable for organized crime to bother. But make it illegal, and thus hard to get, and it becomes extremely profitable for the Mafia to get into it. And, like I already said, Mafia has no reason to play nice and fake it.
To be fair, not many people can tell the two apart ;).
I read this and instantly thought of applications in firefighting, rust- and corrosion proofing and spaceship heat shielding. Does that mean I'm have a high concentration of enginerium ?-)
Just install yourself as a cron job, to be run once per hour for example. That way you don't even have to stay resident and won't show up in process listing.
Assuming a deterministic or semi-deterministic universe, all the later states of the universe must have been contained in the initial condition, because you could in theory get determine all possible later states from that initial condition./p>
Given this, and given that we are part of the universe, I don't think it's possible for us to actually create or invent anything in the strict sense. Mathemathics were already contained in the initial condition of the universe; our brains are simply an unzip program inflating it from the there.
The same, of course, goes to this post: it was destined from the beginning that I would write it or, if one believes that quantum mechanics allow for many possible outcomes, the possibility that I would write it was included in the universe from the beginning. In other words, I'm not creating this message right now, for it has always been part of the universe; I'm merely converting it from one form to another.
All of this is, of course, splitting hairs with extreme prejudice and a glint of madness in the mind's eye, but that's philosophy for you :).
Actually it's a non-sequiter - the conclusion "conclusion is wrong" doesn't follow from the premise "the argument used to defend the conclusion was wrong". While ad hominem itself is a kind of non-sequiter, merely saying that someone has made a logical fallacy is not an attack on person.
I just returned from the bathroom. Should I send a check to whoever put the pipes in place ten years ago ?
How do you know this automagic system doesn't have a bug in it which makes it skip the tests and mark them as succeeded ?-)
Of course, you could make another system to watch the first one, but then that system could have a bug in it...
Just out of curiosity: how the heck do you backup a 500 GB hard disk ?
No, I'm simply saying it's being exaggerated and turned into a boogeyman in an extremely cynical power-grab attempt.
Enough to know that the priests who were/are a part of it didn't find their victims through the Internet. Also enough to know that the priests got their position of trust in the first place by appeals to fear - "we are your protectors agains the forces of darkness" - just like the politicians who keep on bringing up boogeymen are trying to do.
Catholic Church's problem is that people turned out to be more loyal to the institution of the church than the principles it was supposed to stand for. Thus when they found out about their fellow priests doing bad things to defenseless children entrusted to their care, they didn't make this information public, no, they helped hide said activities. That's a very human thing to do, to stand with your fellows even when they are wrong - but it can lead straight to Hell, as it did in that case.
I'm not, I'm simply against hysteric exaggeration of it, where anything is allowed in the name of combatting it.
But tell me: should it be illegal to start such a blog ? And if it is, should it be illegal for me to post this message, since it could be taken as defending the right of someone who advocated pedophilia to do so ? Should I be registered in a sex offender list for posting it anyway ? After all, arguing that pedophiles have rights might indicate sympathy, so better safe than sorry, right ?
I'm not commenting on Google's actions either, since there simply isn't enough information to do so, and I'm not being flippant or dismissing pedophilia as a non-problem. I'm simply pointing out that it is very rare - I mean actual pedophilia which means attraction to preteens rather than merely attraction to people under 18 - and that most pedophiles never molest children, just like most heterosexual males never rape women. And, of actual child molestation, most is done by someone who knows the child IRL, often by a family member.
Given all this, the "online sexual predator" is an absurd stereotype of a nearly nonexistent phenomenom and needs to be dismissed, so that resources can be used in a rational manner based on actual reality rather than wasted fighting a scarecrow conjured up by some ruthless politicians in order to ascend to power on the backs of raped children and innocent people falsely accused of being pedophiles, as well as actual pedophiles who have nonetheless never actually done anything to any child.
The fiction is the pornography in question - you did know the term covers literature too, rather than just pictures ? From the link, with emphasis added by me for your benefit:
Apart from the fact that "pedophiles" and "child molesters" aren't the same group, but two partially overlapping groups, the chances are that you are the lowest of the low in someone's book. If it's okay to ignore someone's rights because he's a pedophile, then it's also okay to ignore someone's rights because that someone happens to be you. Sure, you'd disagree - but then again, the people who's rights you refused to defend also disagreed, and it didn't do them much good, so it won't do much good for you either.
Child molesters are certainly scum. However, if you allow them to be deprived of their rights - including the right to privacy - then you are eroding the rights of both them and the children. Please think of the children and nip this in the bud !
Please also understand that "pedophiles" are, as far as authorities are concerned, no different than "terrorists" - a convenient boogeyman to keep people scared and act as X in "if we don't pass this law, the X win". It's a lot easier to turn the Internet into a tighly-controlled channel - and thus unable to threaten the status quo by letting people publish leaked information anonymously - if you can sell it as protecting children rather than protecting politicians.
Finally, the pedophilia boogeyman is already starting to hurt the very children supposedly protected; as an extreme example, there was a teen who got busted for uploading her own pictures, not to mention the couple who were arrested for sending each other pictures of themselves. Of course it hurts everyone else too - for example, this guy was thrown to prison and put to sex offender register for writing fiction.
Which is their own damn fault. Every new version has its own collection of Swing bugs to work around; my favorite one at the moment is a weird one which causes a component to somehow combine a redrawn version of itself with the old one, like the Opaque setting was falsely set to true (it isn't), resulting in garbled screen. I'm guessing it's caused by some overly aggressive optimization somewhere in the drawing code.
Fun fun fun.
Whether the thief contributes or not is irrelevant to whether thievery is a zero-sum game or not.
For the record, I think that the RIAA, MPAA, other copyright organizations and patent trolls are a far greater drain on economy than all the non-incorporated thieves combined. And of course they have a chilling effect on culture and technology too, aside from purely monetary damage they cause.
True, but it is still an important one to make, for how else can the situation be amended ? If all you've ever seen are image-based CAPTHCAs, then when you are tasked with designing a CAPTHCA, you will automatically start thinking of image-based ones; in your mind, CAPTHCA is a distorted image computers (and humans too, nowadays) have trouble interpreting. It takes a leap of abstraction to realize that it doesn't need to be; with any luck, stating it in a popular online forum makes some people start thinking such schemes.
But you aren't slicing up infinity, you are slicing up the finite integer 1.
You aren't dividing infinity, you are dividing by infinity. You aren't dividing infinity to equal pieces, you are dividing 1 into infinitely many pieces.
Basically, your formula is the exact opposite of the situation you described.
No, your math is not sound. You confused the divisor and divided.
Which sucks for you but is good for whoever buys from you. To use an extreme example, if you spent $1000 on the TV and someone purchases it from you for $100, you've down $900 but that other guy has just saved $900 dollars. In other words, zero-sum. The amount of goods and the amount of money in the economy is unchanged, so the economy is unaffected.
After all, no one purchases TVs for their resale value. They purchase TVs to watch TV (or DVDs or whatever). TVs aren't like gold, which only has value because people think it has; a TV is an utility who's value rises from the use you can get out of it. Since that utility is identical in two physically identical TVs, the real value is identical too.
But since the value of the TV is in what you can do with it, rather than how much you can get from it, this doesn't matter.
Besides, a legal TV in a shop is worth nothing to a penniless druggie, while one stolen by him might be worth hundreds of dollars. That's another way of looking at this :).
No, the point of a CAPTCHA is to have a test which a human can pass easily, but a computer can't. Most current CAPTCHAs are image-based, since that is simple to implement, but this is by no means a requirement.
Isn't this almost a stereotype in many forms of fiction ? Two people meet, can't stand each other, but eventually end up becoming a couple. Belgarion & C'Nedra, Han & Leia, almost all anime that has couples period... Sure, these aren't real-world examples, but since this stereotype is so wide-spread and apparently cross-cultural, I can't help but think it has some basis in reality.