At a minimum, I'd like Firefox to have a menu-level way to disable Javascript. I'm constantly bringing up the preferences to enable it for the few sites where I need it, and then doing that again to re-disable it.
Not stated correctly. If a file has a WMF header then it isn't a JPEG, GIF, or PNG. The problem is that applications which determine type by header will accept a WMF document that's hiding behind a.jpg,.gif, or.png extension. This doesn't mean that the "disease" can be stuck into a valid document of any of these types. The terms "disease" and "infection" for malicious code are misleading anyway.
The best description I've found of the WMF format is here. Based on this information, it looks as if a filter can look at the first four bytes of a file and identify it as a WMF document with very few false positives.
Doing this with discrete files might not be too bad. Applying this check to every part of a MIME document, or to various compressed file formats, could get very painful.
The article says that gigantism happens "because of isolation and a lack of competition," and this isolation from competitors explains Kong's giant size.
The writer must be talking about some other remake of King Kong which I never heard of.
HTML is one of the worst formats for long-term archiving. Hopefully all it means is that it's the only "software language", er, format, the reporter knows by name.
The difference in response between Mac and Windows vulnerabilities is, I think, due largely to their media treatment, not just to the "zealots." Dumbed-down mass media stories treat attacks on Windows security as something magical and unstoppable, thus creating the impression that users have few or no options with which to protect themselves. Stories of Macintosh and Linux attacks don't usually make the mass media, so we hear about them from better-informed sources that discuss options. This can create the impression that Mac users have ways to secure their machines which Windows doesn't offer.
Supporting the bill has no effect on Microsoft's hiring policies; they can (and perhaps do) comply with it without its being passed. By supporting the bill, they're saying that they want to compel other companies to act in a particular way. In other words, Microsoft wants to dominate them through legislation.
Funny how such activity is considered evil -- until it's for a popular cause.
People have been clamoring on Slashdot that they have a god-given right to wireless net access at the taxpayers' expense. Now they get to see the consequence: government control over what they can access. And now they're going wah, wah, wah. What did they expect?
Well put. People now think it's their "American right" to have things at other people's expense. Businesses, they say, are evil because they charge the user for service instead of taking the money from someone else as the noble, wonderful government does.
The funny thing is, you'll hear these people screaming against censorship and government spying, but the moment they're offered something for free, they drop all their principles in a feeding frenzy and eagerly hand all their data over to governmental bodies.
It's not just the US, and not even just Christians. France recently censored an ad for "blasphemy," a Cardinal blasted The Da Vinci Code for not sticking to the Bible's story of Jesus, and the Muslim world is worse than any Christian-dominated country.
One of the worst things about lawsuits like this is the damage they do to legitimate contractors. I ran my own business as a contractor for close to 20 years, and found myself having to jump through more and more legal hoops to prove that I wasn't an employee. These hoops didn't do anything to protect me, they just made it harder to find contracts because clients were legitimately afraid a contractor could be retroactively reclassified as an employee.
The word "contract employee" is meaningless in this connection. Employees can have contracts, but someone who enters into a contractual relationship with a client is not an employee of any kind.
It takes a special kind of toughness to deal with large companies on a contract basis; you have to be willing to walk away from a bad contract, and to read it to find out whether it is bad or not. Anyone who doesn't realize that he's GOING INTO BUSINESS when he becomes a contractor has no business being a contractor.
Good point. After making my earlier post, I realized that the statement "You waive any right to privacy" in the TOS weighs heavily against the argument that "to post" means only "to post to a message board."
The Terms of Service do not define "post" anywhere. In the absence of expert legal advice, it's prudent to assume it applies in the broadest sense. AOL can easily fix the problem by adding a restrictive definition; so far they haven't.
Adding a little more context to the part you quoted, it refers to "any materials you post or make available on or through the AIM Products, including message board posts, chat participation and homepages." I'm inclined to read that as saying that "materials you post" includes "chat participation" as well as "message boards." You could counter that it's drawing a distinction between "posting" and "making available," but at best it's unclear what falls on which side of the distinction.
AOL issued these TOS fairly recently, didn't they? Does that mean that they're retroactively applying the terms to anyone who downloaded AIM software in the past year? I don't think ex post facto TOS will hold up in court.
In Ohio, a charity auction, such as the one at the Ohio Valley Filk Festival, has to pay a licensed auctioneer. They've been lucky enough to get a good one, or so I've heard, so that it's still fun rather than been a dreary professional auction.
The purpose of the law is simple: to provide income to the auctioneers' cartel. With the eBay regs, licensed auctioneers will have a huge new source of income as they sell eBay items which people are perfectly capable of selling for themselves. And the auctioneers' lobby undoubtedly provides a nice source of income for legislators who vote the way they like.
Nicely put. Lots of people want free stuff paid for by taxing someone else, and don't bother to think ahead to the consequences. Nor will they ask why they're entitled to a free ride at someone else's expense; waving the word "public good" around is a sufficient justification -- after all, those other people are too dumb to realize the benefit they're getting, so they have to be forced to pay for it.
With the government as the wireless carrier, the opportunities for governmental censorship and spying are much higher. But with the sweet smell of someone-else-paying waved in their noses, people will cheerfully walk into the socialist pen.
(Check your spelling; I can wave the law around all I want to.:)
Yes, it passed the House with that provision. Our Representatives in Washington voted to exempt Homeland Security from all legal constraints in building an Iron Curtain around the US.
If they're saying, "We're going to conform to standards in the final version, even though we're using non-standard techniques in the beta," they're using sloppy design techniques and painting themselves into a corner. If they're saying, "Standards be damned," then they can go their own way, and I'm not going to waste any effort making my browser compatible with their bad code.
No, because others may not want, use and enjoy the same things. It should be used only for things which require the special nature of government. In particular, it should not be used to give the government control over our communications media.
If the new word processor uses OpenOffice as its native format, I'll be very happy. If it can export to OpenOffice, I'll be happy. My greatest fear with my current AppleWorks documents is that they'll become unreadable when some OS upgrade makes AppleWorks unusable.
What's amusing is that I'm a programmer for the Harvard libraries, and I only found out about it this morning in the Globe. They're going to tell us about it officially in a meeting this afternoon.
Slashdot Mirror
At a minimum, I'd like Firefox to have a menu-level way to disable Javascript. I'm constantly bringing up the preferences to enable it for the few sites where I need it, and then doing that again to re-disable it.
It's still doing the same thing two days later. I don't think it can be slashdotting at this point.
The best description I've found of the WMF format is here. Based on this information, it looks as if a filter can look at the first four bytes of a file and identify it as a WMF document with very few false positives.
Doing this with discrete files might not be too bad. Applying this check to every part of a MIME document, or to various compressed file formats, could get very painful.
The article says that gigantism happens "because of isolation and a lack of competition," and this isolation from competitors explains Kong's giant size. The writer must be talking about some other remake of King Kong which I never heard of.
HTML is one of the worst formats for long-term archiving. Hopefully all it means is that it's the only "software language", er, format, the reporter knows by name.
Of course they wouldn't. To eulogize is to praise.
The difference in response between Mac and Windows vulnerabilities is, I think, due largely to their media treatment, not just to the "zealots." Dumbed-down mass media stories treat attacks on Windows security as something magical and unstoppable, thus creating the impression that users have few or no options with which to protect themselves. Stories of Macintosh and Linux attacks don't usually make the mass media, so we hear about them from better-informed sources that discuss options. This can create the impression that Mac users have ways to secure their machines which Windows doesn't offer.
Supporting the bill has no effect on Microsoft's hiring policies; they can (and perhaps do) comply with it without its being passed. By supporting the bill, they're saying that they want to compel other companies to act in a particular way. In other words, Microsoft wants to dominate them through legislation.
Funny how such activity is considered evil -- until it's for a popular cause.
Tiger Direct has had a bad reputation on Usenet for many years.
People have been clamoring on Slashdot that they have a god-given right to wireless net access at the taxpayers' expense. Now they get to see the consequence: government control over what they can access. And now they're going wah, wah, wah. What did they expect?
Well put. People now think it's their "American right" to have things at other people's expense. Businesses, they say, are evil because they charge the user for service instead of taking the money from someone else as the noble, wonderful government does.
The funny thing is, you'll hear these people screaming against censorship and government spying, but the moment they're offered something for free, they drop all their principles in a feeding frenzy and eagerly hand all their data over to governmental bodies.
It's not just the US, and not even just Christians. France recently censored an ad for "blasphemy," a Cardinal blasted The Da Vinci Code for not sticking to the Bible's story of Jesus, and the Muslim world is worse than any Christian-dominated country.
One of the worst things about lawsuits like this is the damage they do to legitimate contractors. I ran my own business as a contractor for close to 20 years, and found myself having to jump through more and more legal hoops to prove that I wasn't an employee. These hoops didn't do anything to protect me, they just made it harder to find contracts because clients were legitimately afraid a contractor could be retroactively reclassified as an employee.
The word "contract employee" is meaningless in this connection. Employees can have contracts, but someone who enters into a contractual relationship with a client is not an employee of any kind.
It takes a special kind of toughness to deal with large companies on a contract basis; you have to be willing to walk away from a bad contract, and to read it to find out whether it is bad or not. Anyone who doesn't realize that he's GOING INTO BUSINESS when he becomes a contractor has no business being a contractor.
Good point. After making my earlier post, I realized that the statement "You waive any right to privacy" in the TOS weighs heavily against the argument that "to post" means only "to post to a message board."
The Terms of Service do not define "post" anywhere. In the absence of expert legal advice, it's prudent to assume it applies in the broadest sense. AOL can easily fix the problem by adding a restrictive definition; so far they haven't.
Adding a little more context to the part you quoted, it refers to "any materials you post or make available on or through the AIM Products, including message board posts, chat participation and homepages." I'm inclined to read that as saying that "materials you post" includes "chat participation" as well as "message boards." You could counter that it's drawing a distinction between "posting" and "making available," but at best it's unclear what falls on which side of the distinction.
AOL issued these TOS fairly recently, didn't they? Does that mean that they're retroactively applying the terms to anyone who downloaded AIM software in the past year? I don't think ex post facto TOS will hold up in court.
The purpose of the law is simple: to provide income to the auctioneers' cartel. With the eBay regs, licensed auctioneers will have a huge new source of income as they sell eBay items which people are perfectly capable of selling for themselves. And the auctioneers' lobby undoubtedly provides a nice source of income for legislators who vote the way they like.
Nicely put. Lots of people want free stuff paid for by taxing someone else, and don't bother to think ahead to the consequences. Nor will they ask why they're entitled to a free ride at someone else's expense; waving the word "public good" around is a sufficient justification -- after all, those other people are too dumb to realize the benefit they're getting, so they have to be forced to pay for it. With the government as the wireless carrier, the opportunities for governmental censorship and spying are much higher. But with the sweet smell of someone-else-paying waved in their noses, people will cheerfully walk into the socialist pen.
(Check your spelling; I can wave the law around all I want to. :)
Yes, it passed the House with that provision. Our Representatives in Washington voted to exempt Homeland Security from all legal constraints in building an Iron Curtain around the US.
Sickening.
If they're saying, "We're going to conform to standards in the final version, even though we're using non-standard techniques in the beta," they're using sloppy design techniques and painting themselves into a corner. If they're saying, "Standards be damned," then they can go their own way, and I'm not going to waste any effort making my browser compatible with their bad code.
No, because others may not want, use and enjoy the same things. It should be used only for things which require the special nature of government. In particular, it should not be used to give the government control over our communications media.
Just think of the possibilities -- a lunar flight, with a gender-diverse crew. Yes, we could have Amazon Women on the Moon!
If the new word processor uses OpenOffice as its native format, I'll be very happy. If it can export to OpenOffice, I'll be happy. My greatest fear with my current AppleWorks documents is that they'll become unreadable when some OS upgrade makes AppleWorks unusable.
No, I just don't check my work mail at night.
What's amusing is that I'm a programmer for the Harvard libraries, and I only found out about it this morning in the Globe. They're going to tell us about it officially in a meeting this afternoon.