Many CSS users want to be able to take a heading or a short piece of text in the
HTML and use CSS to replace it with an image. Users with graphical browsers
should see the image. Users with text-only browsers should see (or hear) the original text. Search robots
should also see the original text. (They often don't treat alt tags the same
as normal text.)
One popular way to do this is
Fahrer image replacement.
This technique uses a piece of HTML like this
<div>
<span>Hello world!</span>
</div>
and a piece of CSS like this
div {
background-image:url("hello_world.gif");
background-repeat:no-repeat;
height:35px;
}
The problem with Fahrer image replacement is that several screen reading
programs don't pick up the replaced text.
Many otherimage replacementtechniques
have been devised.
Which image replacement techniques do you think are okay to use?
Which, if any, do you consider abuse of CSS?
The article didn't make the point I thought it was going to make, given
the title of the post. I thought the article was going to argue that
free software needs to be easy to modify in order for it to be
truly free.
One of the primary purposes of making software free (as in speech) is
to make it possible for users of the software to examine the code and make
changes to it. This is nominally possible with all software released under
free software licenses, but some pieces of free software are easier to
modify than others.
Consider GNU Emacs (or XEmacs). It's designed to be
easy for users to modify it. Indeed, it was written in Emacs Lisp partly
to make it easier for users to modify it.
There is a tutorial
to help new Emacs users learn how to write Emacs lisp.
There are also websites people use to share
their Emacs extensions and to talk about writing Emacs lisp code.
Or take Firefox. Mozilla has set up a
website for people to share their Firefox extensions. Mozilla also provides a
tutorial
explaining how to start writing your own extensions. You don't need to study hundreds
of kilobytes of code before you can start writing simple extensions to Firefox or to Emacs.
Isn't a free software project a better free software project if the software is
designed in a way that makes extensions easy to write? Or if the developers provide
a guide for people who want to write their own extensions? Or if there are wikis or
mailing lists for discussion among people who aren't members of the development team
but want to tweak the code?
You say that you have several years more experience than your partner, but you describe the situation as a "wide gap in talent." Remember that talent and experience are not the same.
I'm not a professional programmer, so I can't speak from experience about this kind of work. But I'd think, in general, that the way to work well with a talented but inexperienced partner is very different from the way you'd want to work with an experienced but less talented partner. If lack of experience is the reason your partner can't work as effectively as you can, it's natural and in no way insulting to your partner for you to take on a mentorship role. If you and your partner are equally experienced but have a "wide gap in talent," the situation is much more delicate.
For the past two years, I've been a teaching assistant in college humanities classes. Some of my students came back to college after working in business. These students are usually highly motivated, but some of them have trouble writing clearly because the business world has taught them to write in Newspeak instead of English. I've found it helpful to show such students the Ecclesiastes example from Orwell's essay.
My mother used to use a mechanical typewriter. She was an excellent typist, but because she was so used to the way typewriters work, it was hard for her to learn how to use a word processor efficiently. Some things that took her months or years to get used to:
You don't have to hit return at the end of every line.
Backspace, delete, and left arrow do different things. None of them do what backspace does on a typewriter, unless you put the computer in overstrike mode.
If you type something in plain text and then decide you want it in italic, you don't have to backspace over everything you typed, click the "I" button, and type it over again.
In fact, you never have to type anything over again.
Part of the reason (3) and (4) were hard for her is that she was afraid to highlight text. She's gotten used to it now, but she used to react to the appearance of highlighted text as most people would react to a large spider crawling onto the monitor.
It sounds as if the system is set up to detect gravity waves by detecting microscopic changes in the distances between two mirrors and a third object. Yes?
Aren't there be lots of things that could cause a microscopic motion of one of the mirrors? (Sound? Seismic activity? Changes in temperature? The ground settling underneath the structure that supports a mirror?) How do you construct the apparatus to make sure that either (a) the mirrors move only if affected by a gravity wave, or (b) any motion due to another cause is clearly distinguishable?
Is it time to increase the default keysize in GPG?
Currently, the default key generation method in GPG is to create a 1024 bit DSA master key and Elgamal subkeys. The GNU Privacy Handbook admits that a key size of 1024 bits is "not especially good given today's factoring technology."
If the authors of GPG know that 1024 bits is not a good key length for an asymmetric cipher, why not set the default length for the master key at 2048 bits? If that would require switching to RSA as the default signing algorithm, why not do it?
So suppose Big Brother collects lots of information about what everybody is doing online. How does Big Brother use this to achieve "absolute social control" without letting people realize they are no longer "free-as-in-speech"?
Having the information doesn't give you any control by itself. You need to do something with it. You could prosecute people. You could give information about people to their business rivals. You could just let people know that you've got all their secrets and threaten to release those secrets if they don't do what you say. But if you do any of these things on a regular basis, people will realize that you're using collected information to control them.
Comment on "six months" rule misleading
on
Google Never Forgets
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The article says that "a 1986 law gives less protection from government searches to messages more than six months old." This is misleading. IANAL, but here's my understanding of the law:
Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, email that is still in transmission receives a higher level of protection than email that the recipient has opened and has left in storage on a remote computer. If you have unopened email on, say, Gmail, and it has been in electronic storage for 180 days or less, then law enforcement cannot obtain the contents without a search warrant. If you have messages on email that are either (a) opened OR (b) older than 180 days, a warrant is not required; a subpoena or court order with notice to the subscriber is sufficient. (Sometimes delayed notice is allowed.)
Since most people check their email more than twice a year, the 6-month rule isn't much of an issue. The read vs. unread rule is much more important.
(Note that this book is specifically about the privacy laws relevant to law enforcement. The book doesn't cover the law that governs wiretaps by intelligence agencies.)
I was tempted by the hype about Ubuntu, so I tried installing Hoary Hedghog. It looked great, and everything Just Worked...except for sound. Hours of plowing through the forums and tweaking settings didn't solve the problem. My computer was silent.
I reinstalled sarge a few days later (this was early May), and the sound worked fine. Printing took a while to set up, and it also took some time to get the resolution right under X Windows. But I've been using Debian for a year, and I know how to deal with these problems.
Ubuntu is on its way to being a great distribution, but there are some kinks that still need to be worked out. If it works for your hardware, and you're a beginner, it's probably a better choice than Debian. But if you're using Debian now, and you're comfortable with it, I don't see a compelling reason to switch.
Don't take a contrary opinion to the professor
or to popular opinion on the college campus.
I'm a philosophy TA. If you're in a philosophy class, don't follow this advice.
Philosophy instructors are looking for three things when they read a student's paper: clear writing, an accurate explanation of a published argument, and (if the assignment calls for it) a reasoned response to that argument. Most students in intro philosophy classes have trouble presenting other people's views. When I get a paper that explains a published view clearly and offers a well-reasoned critique, I am shocked and awed.
Do I care whether I agree with the paper's conclusion? Not really.
Suppose I believe that P, and you don't understand why I think P. In fact, you think you have an argument that P is false. What happens if you try to write a paper arguing that P is true? Well, you're not going to offer good reasons to believe that P, because you don't understand why someone would believe that P. Your paper will be mud. Better to explain your reasons for thinking not-P. Then you'll have at least a fighting chance of writing something coherent.
Most Americans' taxes are taken out of their paychecks. But the amount that's withheld is only an estimate. The exact amounts people owe depend on things that an employer couldn't be expected to know, such as how much they earn on investments and how much they donate to charity. (If you donate money to certain charitable organizations, you can deduct the donations from your income when you calculate your tax.) Americans file income tax returns in order to tell the government about non-wage income and to take deductions. If the amount withheld from wages wasn't exactly right (it rarely is), we pay the difference or receive refunds
So, now I'm curious--does Ireland have no taxes on interest and other investment income? If investment income is taxed, who has to figure the tax? I don't see how the bank could figure the tax, unless you have a flat income tax rate. Banks don't necessarily know how much their customers earn from work, so they couldn't apply the right tax rate to the interest they pay their customers.
Who reads Slate? I do...obsessively. Some reasons why:
Dahlia Lithwick's blow-by-blow accounts of
Supreme Court arguments provide much more
detail and insight than you'll find in a
newspaper. Take a look at this report on the
medicinal marijuana case.
"Explainers" provide interesting background
information on recent news, such as this
article on
dioxin poisoning, published after the
recent events in the Ukraine.
Their editorials and analyses are both
carefully thought out and bolder than
what you'll typically see in print--sometimes
to the point of being a bit disturbing, like
this article advocating
"minimally invasive" interrogation techniques.
(For the record, I don't agree with this
article, but I found it thought-provoking.)
Slate isn't a substitute for reading a newspaper, but if you want to get more insight into what's going on, it's a good place to look.
Search for "human rights" on Google, and the first links you get are to Human Rights Watch, the UN, and Amnesty International. The sponsored links are clearly relevant.
What do you get when you search Accoona for "human rights"? "Human rights on eBay. Find human rights items at low prices." The first non-sponsored link is to holysmoke.org, which doesn't appear to be about human rights.
I don't know if this is censorship, but it is a crappy search engine.
A woman who is sexually free determines the success or failure of the males around her by her choice and that takes away from the alpha male's power over his lessors.
Alpha males are available for rent? I thought that was illegal.
Mr. Badnarik, it has been
reported
that you believe that the federal government has no authority to collect income taxes, that felons should be forced to serve the first month of their sentences in bed, causing muscle atrophy, and that a Libertarian Party administration should blow up the United Nations building in New York. Does this report accurately represent your views? If so, do you feel that your views are representative of Libertarian Party members or, more broadly, of libertarians in America?
There's quite a lot of
information about Operation Buccaneer
at the DOJ web site. It includes an overview of the investigation, a chart listing defendants' conviction dates, and past press releases.
I don't see Ashcroft's name on these webpages, but they do all spell "warez" with a "z".
Will it let me set an appointment for December 3rd by typing "M-e C-f M-e C-f C-f C-f i d Important Meeting C-x C-s"? Will it tell me when sunset will be in Dublin, Georgia exactly forty-seven weeks from today when I type ". C-u 47 C-n S -82.9 RET +32.33 RET"? Will it schedule a monthly appointment on the fifth day of every month of the Hebrew lunar calendar when I type "g h RET Tishri RET 5 RET i h m It's the fifth day of the month! C-x C-s"?
I live in an apartment building with about twenty residents. I feel guilty that I don't know my neigbhors (I don't even know their names). But I feel it would be an intrusion to knock on doors and introduce myself.
Miss Manners has a
good idea about how to introduce yourself to people in a large apartment building, but my building is too small for this to work. (The relevant letter is the second one in this column. It's possibly the best two-word reply ever written by an advice columnist.)
Could i-neighbors help break the ice in my building? Maybe a flyer posted by the mailboxes would do the trick. But it could just as easily be an invitation to a Labor Day party, instead of an invitation to join a website.
Objective Caml has an arrow stretching from 1996 to 2002. The arrow for bash is very short (1989 to 1990). Why this difference? Is the chart saying that O'Caml has been more popular or more successful than bash? Is it saying that the development of O'Caml ended in 2002, or that it stopped being important in 2002?
The last new version for Basic listed on the chart is VB.NET (2000), but the arrow keeps going until 2003. The arrow for Javascript stops immediately after the latest version (1.5, 2000).
Does it mean anything that the arrow for Basic goes past the arrow for Javascript?
My guess is that the chart's creator(s) chose the lengths of the arrows for purely aesthetic reasons: if all the arrows for currently used languages went to the right edge of the chart, it would have been a less attractive diagram. But designing the chart this way is very misleading.
The election in which voters were clearly disenfranchised was the March election (presidential primary and ballot initiatives), not the October race for governor. Among the problems: several thousand voters in Orange County were given ballots for the wrong districts, and problems with the system kept thirty-six precincts from opening on time in San Diego. Neither San Diego nor Orange County used the Diebold touch screen machines in elections last year.
Not true; Lessig clerked for Justice Scalia on the Supreme Court, and for Richard Posner on the Seventh Circuit.
Conservative judges can, and do, hire liberal clerks, and vice versa. Scalia, in particular, is known for hiring liberal clerks regularly. Lessig wrote an article for The Industry Standard about why there's nothing odd about this.
Lessig's latest book, Free Culture, is available online for free (both as in speech and as in beer). It was reviewed on Slashdot two weeks ago. I haven't read it yet, but I've read one of his earlier books, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, and thought it was excellent.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops. I left out the most important part of the CSS:
Many CSS users want to be able to take a heading or a short piece of text in the HTML and use CSS to replace it with an image. Users with graphical browsers should see the image. Users with text-only browsers should see (or hear) the original text. Search robots should also see the original text. (They often don't treat alt tags the same as normal text.)
One popular way to do this is Fahrer image replacement. This technique uses a piece of HTML like this
and a piece of CSS like thisThe problem with Fahrer image replacement is that several screen reading programs don't pick up the replaced text. Many other image replacement techniques have been devised.
Which image replacement techniques do you think are okay to use? Which, if any, do you consider abuse of CSS?
The article didn't make the point I thought it was going to make, given the title of the post. I thought the article was going to argue that free software needs to be easy to modify in order for it to be truly free.
One of the primary purposes of making software free (as in speech) is to make it possible for users of the software to examine the code and make changes to it. This is nominally possible with all software released under free software licenses, but some pieces of free software are easier to modify than others.
Consider GNU Emacs (or XEmacs). It's designed to be easy for users to modify it. Indeed, it was written in Emacs Lisp partly to make it easier for users to modify it. There is a tutorial to help new Emacs users learn how to write Emacs lisp. There are also websites people use to share their Emacs extensions and to talk about writing Emacs lisp code.
Or take Firefox. Mozilla has set up a website for people to share their Firefox extensions. Mozilla also provides a tutorial explaining how to start writing your own extensions. You don't need to study hundreds of kilobytes of code before you can start writing simple extensions to Firefox or to Emacs.
Isn't a free software project a better free software project if the software is designed in a way that makes extensions easy to write? Or if the developers provide a guide for people who want to write their own extensions? Or if there are wikis or mailing lists for discussion among people who aren't members of the development team but want to tweak the code?
You say that you have several years more experience than your partner, but you describe the situation as a "wide gap in talent." Remember that talent and experience are not the same.
I'm not a professional programmer, so I can't speak from experience about this kind of work. But I'd think, in general, that the way to work well with a talented but inexperienced partner is very different from the way you'd want to work with an experienced but less talented partner. If lack of experience is the reason your partner can't work as effectively as you can, it's natural and in no way insulting to your partner for you to take on a mentorship role. If you and your partner are equally experienced but have a "wide gap in talent," the situation is much more delicate.
You can read Orwell's essay here.
For the past two years, I've been a teaching assistant in college humanities classes. Some of my students came back to college after working in business. These students are usually highly motivated, but some of them have trouble writing clearly because the business world has taught them to write in Newspeak instead of English. I've found it helpful to show such students the Ecclesiastes example from Orwell's essay.
My mother used to use a mechanical typewriter. She was an excellent typist, but because she was so used to the way typewriters work, it was hard for her to learn how to use a word processor efficiently. Some things that took her months or years to get used to:
Part of the reason (3) and (4) were hard for her is that she was afraid to highlight text. She's gotten used to it now, but she used to react to the appearance of highlighted text as most people would react to a large spider crawling onto the monitor.
It sounds as if the system is set up to detect gravity waves by detecting microscopic changes in the distances between two mirrors and a third object. Yes?
Aren't there be lots of things that could cause a microscopic motion of one of the mirrors? (Sound? Seismic activity? Changes in temperature? The ground settling underneath the structure that supports a mirror?) How do you construct the apparatus to make sure that either (a) the mirrors move only if affected by a gravity wave, or (b) any motion due to another cause is clearly distinguishable?
Is it time to increase the default keysize in GPG?
Currently, the default key generation method in GPG is to create a 1024 bit DSA master key and Elgamal subkeys. The GNU Privacy Handbook admits that a key size of 1024 bits is "not especially good given today's factoring technology."
If the authors of GPG know that 1024 bits is not a good key length for an asymmetric cipher, why not set the default length for the master key at 2048 bits? If that would require switching to RSA as the default signing algorithm, why not do it?
Who's Steve?
So suppose Big Brother collects lots of information about what everybody is doing online. How does Big Brother use this to achieve "absolute social control" without letting people realize they are no longer "free-as-in-speech"?
Having the information doesn't give you any control by itself. You need to do something with it. You could prosecute people. You could give information about people to their business rivals. You could just let people know that you've got all their secrets and threaten to release those secrets if they don't do what you say. But if you do any of these things on a regular basis, people will realize that you're using collected information to control them.
The article says that "a 1986 law gives less protection from government searches to messages more than six months old." This is misleading. IANAL, but here's my understanding of the law:
Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, email that is still in transmission receives a higher level of protection than email that the recipient has opened and has left in storage on a remote computer. If you have unopened email on, say, Gmail, and it has been in electronic storage for 180 days or less, then law enforcement cannot obtain the contents without a search warrant. If you have messages on email that are either (a) opened OR (b) older than 180 days, a warrant is not required; a subpoena or court order with notice to the subscriber is sufficient. (Sometimes delayed notice is allowed.)
Since most people check their email more than twice a year, the 6-month rule isn't much of an issue. The read vs. unread rule is much more important.
If you're interested in the details of the law, you can read Section III of the USDOJ's manual Searching and Seizing Computers and Obtaining Electronic Evidence in Criminal Investigations. The text of the Wiretap Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is available on the same website.
(Note that this book is specifically about the privacy laws relevant to law enforcement. The book doesn't cover the law that governs wiretaps by intelligence agencies.)
I was tempted by the hype about Ubuntu, so I tried installing Hoary Hedghog. It looked great, and everything Just Worked...except for sound. Hours of plowing through the forums and tweaking settings didn't solve the problem. My computer was silent.
I reinstalled sarge a few days later (this was early May), and the sound worked fine. Printing took a while to set up, and it also took some time to get the resolution right under X Windows. But I've been using Debian for a year, and I know how to deal with these problems.
Ubuntu is on its way to being a great distribution, but there are some kinks that still need to be worked out. If it works for your hardware, and you're a beginner, it's probably a better choice than Debian. But if you're using Debian now, and you're comfortable with it, I don't see a compelling reason to switch.
Don't take a contrary opinion to the professor or to popular opinion on the college campus.
I'm a philosophy TA. If you're in a philosophy class, don't follow this advice.
Philosophy instructors are looking for three things when they read a student's paper: clear writing, an accurate explanation of a published argument, and (if the assignment calls for it) a reasoned response to that argument. Most students in intro philosophy classes have trouble presenting other people's views. When I get a paper that explains a published view clearly and offers a well-reasoned critique, I am shocked and awed. Do I care whether I agree with the paper's conclusion? Not really.
Suppose I believe that P, and you don't understand why I think P. In fact, you think you have an argument that P is false. What happens if you try to write a paper arguing that P is true? Well, you're not going to offer good reasons to believe that P, because you don't understand why someone would believe that P. Your paper will be mud. Better to explain your reasons for thinking not-P. Then you'll have at least a fighting chance of writing something coherent.
Most Americans' taxes are taken out of their paychecks. But the amount that's withheld is only an estimate. The exact amounts people owe depend on things that an employer couldn't be expected to know, such as how much they earn on investments and how much they donate to charity. (If you donate money to certain charitable organizations, you can deduct the donations from your income when you calculate your tax.) Americans file income tax returns in order to tell the government about non-wage income and to take deductions. If the amount withheld from wages wasn't exactly right (it rarely is), we pay the difference or receive refunds
So, now I'm curious--does Ireland have no taxes on interest and other investment income? If investment income is taxed, who has to figure the tax? I don't see how the bank could figure the tax, unless you have a flat income tax rate. Banks don't necessarily know how much their customers earn from work, so they couldn't apply the right tax rate to the interest they pay their customers.
Who reads Slate? I do...obsessively. Some reasons why:
Slate isn't a substitute for reading a newspaper, but if you want to get more insight into what's going on, it's a good place to look.
Search for "human rights" on Google, and the first links you get are to Human Rights Watch, the UN, and Amnesty International. The sponsored links are clearly relevant.
What do you get when you search Accoona for "human rights"? "Human rights on eBay. Find human rights items at low prices." The first non-sponsored link is to holysmoke.org, which doesn't appear to be about human rights.
I don't know if this is censorship, but it is a crappy search engine.
A woman who is sexually free determines the success or failure of the males around her by her choice and that takes away from the alpha male's power over his lessors.
Alpha males are available for rent? I thought that was illegal.
Mr. Badnarik, it has been reported that you believe that the federal government has no authority to collect income taxes, that felons should be forced to serve the first month of their sentences in bed, causing muscle atrophy, and that a Libertarian Party administration should blow up the United Nations building in New York. Does this report accurately represent your views? If so, do you feel that your views are representative of Libertarian Party members or, more broadly, of libertarians in America?
There's quite a lot of information about Operation Buccaneer at the DOJ web site. It includes an overview of the investigation, a chart listing defendants' conviction dates, and past press releases.
I don't see Ashcroft's name on these webpages, but they do all spell "warez" with a "z".
Will it let me set an appointment for December 3rd by typing "M-e C-f M-e C-f C-f C-f i d Important Meeting C-x C-s"? Will it tell me when sunset will be in Dublin, Georgia exactly forty-seven weeks from today when I type ". C-u 47 C-n S -82.9 RET +32.33 RET"? Will it schedule a monthly appointment on the fifth day of every month of the Hebrew lunar calendar when I type "g h RET Tishri RET 5 RET i h m It's the fifth day of the month! C-x C-s"?
I'll be sticking with the Emacs calendar, thanks.
I live in an apartment building with about twenty residents. I feel guilty that I don't know my neigbhors (I don't even know their names). But I feel it would be an intrusion to knock on doors and introduce myself.
Miss Manners has a good idea about how to introduce yourself to people in a large apartment building, but my building is too small for this to work. (The relevant letter is the second one in this column. It's possibly the best two-word reply ever written by an advice columnist.)
Could i-neighbors help break the ice in my building? Maybe a flyer posted by the mailboxes would do the trick. But it could just as easily be an invitation to a Labor Day party, instead of an invitation to join a website.
Objective Caml has an arrow stretching from 1996 to 2002. The arrow for bash is very short (1989 to 1990). Why this difference? Is the chart saying that O'Caml has been more popular or more successful than bash? Is it saying that the development of O'Caml ended in 2002, or that it stopped being important in 2002?
The last new version for Basic listed on the chart is VB.NET (2000), but the arrow keeps going until 2003. The arrow for Javascript stops immediately after the latest version (1.5, 2000). Does it mean anything that the arrow for Basic goes past the arrow for Javascript?
My guess is that the chart's creator(s) chose the lengths of the arrows for purely aesthetic reasons: if all the arrows for currently used languages went to the right edge of the chart, it would have been a less attractive diagram. But designing the chart this way is very misleading.
The election in which voters were clearly disenfranchised was the March election (presidential primary and ballot initiatives), not the October race for governor. Among the problems: several thousand voters in Orange County were given ballots for the wrong districts, and problems with the system kept thirty-six precincts from opening on time in San Diego. Neither San Diego nor Orange County used the Diebold touch screen machines in elections last year.
Not true; Lessig clerked for Justice Scalia on the Supreme Court, and for Richard Posner on the Seventh Circuit.
Conservative judges can, and do, hire liberal clerks, and vice versa. Scalia, in particular, is known for hiring liberal clerks regularly. Lessig wrote an article for The Industry Standard about why there's nothing odd about this.
Lessig's latest book, Free Culture, is available online for free (both as in speech and as in beer). It was reviewed on Slashdot two weeks ago. I haven't read it yet, but I've read one of his earlier books, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, and thought it was excellent.