Slashfix has been downloaded by over 5000 people in the last week. I've received dozens of messages of thanks and 3 or 4 people have complained that it didn't work. I've already explained several times that this is pretty much impossible - the fix consists of about 10 lines of Javascript. This isn't some magical complex app, it's either gonna work or not, and for 99.9% of people it works, so I must assume the problem isn't in the code.
Most likely FF is hanging on pageloads or something - are you actually waiting for the page to finish loading? Are you loading tabs in the background? Because my site already documents the limitations to the fix (it runs only when the pageload event is triggered, namely when a page finishes loading, and tabs loaded in the background never trigger a pageload). I am of course perfectly open to suggestions or enhancements. If the limitations annoy you, feel free to work around them, it's perfectly possible, just takes some effort and toiling with the Firefox extension API stuff. Maybe you should get off your butt and help instead of whining?
Many tech companies in the 95 corridor area in Boston has something that looks roughly like that makeup of young recent college grads and established married folks. People either go elsewhere or transition into different roles, or become those married established folks after a few years. There are people in their late 20s and early 30s out there, in between the two lots, though many people did flee the industry, go back to grad school and are doing other things now.
But yes, it's generally not reasonable to have a family in the relevant area in Mass with less than 120k total income.
Great post. MIT actually has an even higher percentage of male students in fraternities - was about 55% until a few years ago when the administration started getting hostile to the fraternities in the wake of the Kruger death at MIT. Anybody who went to college in the Boston area in the late 90s will remember this event, it caused the social scene in Boston to start sucking hard as all the universities cracked down on any socializing that involved underage drinking - what an anal country we live in.
Anyway, the point is that fraternities can provide a great social outlet at universities. My fraternity brothers are some of the best friends I made in college, second only to my high school friends, with whom I am still very close. There were definitely no animal house parties going on where I went to school, but we did know how to have a good time and throw a good party.
These are guys who are now (or are still studying to be) doctors, lawyers, financiers, engineers and businessmen, all of whom I can call up and will help me out whenever I need anything. I've helped some of them get jobs and with other career advice, they'll surely help me with the same if I need it in the future.
By the way - there were almost no fraternities at my college when I started there (though there are some stuffy all-male social clubs that I rather disliked). A group of us started our fraternity chapter. So as an added bonus, I get to see an organization that I helped build thrive now year after year, having grown from 7 brothers to about 45.
I agree that in theory there are legislative solutions to this problem. However I sincerely doubt the US government would be forward thinking enough to enact them (assuming the technological issues here are resolved). But hey, you never know, I'd love to be proved wrong on this.
Also - given the slow death of nuclear power generation in this country, I don't know if that example is such a good one.
First of all, you are going back to the technical issues, which I have already concurred are surmountable if difficult. Nonetheless - the F-111 doesn't need to fly within 10 feet of 5 other F-111s and respond to any of their actions too. And the kind of unplanned obstacles they have to deal with are much more limited than what you'd face potentially on a road.
Furthermore - driving in a straight line on the freeway is the simplest possible case for self-driving cars, just a step or two up from modern cruise control systems.
In any case, the issue was liability not technology. The air force pilots can't sue the government into the ground when they die in the line of duty because of their contracts and the known risks of the job.
Well, you can download my extension from the popular extensionsmirror.nl site too, not sure how much vetting they actually do of extensions, but if one was known to be spyware or a trojan I'm pretty sure they'd take it down or at least warn you.
And you are welcome to inspect the contents of the XPI - it's just a renamed ZIP file. And the JAR in there is also a ZIP file by another name. The actual code (other than some RDF packaging stuff) is about 15 lines of Javascript that even a novice can probably follow, which does one thing and one thing only (reflow after page load while surfing on Slashdot.org). No, no spyware or trojans in there.
But even if it's statistically twice as safe as a regular car, there will still be accidents. And who do you hold accountable when those accidents occur? The question isn't the rate of accidents or the safety, it's who takes responsibility when something goes wrong.
Yes, insurance companies have a role in this, but insurance companies don't assume unlimited responsibility right now, they limit their liability contractually. What happens when somebody decides that since it isn't their fault, the deductible or pain and suffering or excess, uninsured medical bills should be paid by somebody else (read: 5 minutes after these cars go on sale)? Sue the automobile manufacturer? That's why they'll never sell these things.
This is one of the few areas where I see the legal barriers as nearly insurmountable. What happens when the automatic driving system screws up? Whose insurance kicks in? Who assumes responsibility? It seems like the liability to automobile manufacturers who installed such systems would be huge. Would an insurance company really be willing to underwrite a system like this? Are you willing to assume responsibility yourself for the failure of an automated driving system?
Furthermore, you need black boxes and monitoring/recording systems - how do you know who was driving in an accident, the autopilot or the human driver?
Sure, planes have "autopilots" but there's very little stuff in the air to avoid, and lots of air traffic controllers and rules to basically make flying in a straight line in your own empty area of airspace possible.
Technical and psychological issues aside (and those issues are still huge), unless the system was flawless and perfect (which it won't be) I see the legal morass here as nearly insurmountable.
Yes, QAM decoding capabilities. The PCHDTV only decodes raw OTA HD broadcasts, and that's what it assumes is on the coax input. Unfortunately, the raw cable signals sent by cable companies over their coax use QAM encoding, as well as encryption for premium channels. And none of the digital HD cable boxes they give you output an OTA-style signal, they output DVI, component or something similar (which is, I guess, uncompressed HD video).
So in short, your method doesn't work and cannot work.
Thats extremly bad measure, since the books you read are mostly written by his enemies.
Maybe because he had no friends? Seriously though, plenty of other conquering peoples aren't in my nation-states' direct lineage, like the Ottoman Turks, and while they did plenty of nasty things too, I don't think they were on the level of Genghis Khan.
Depends how you define that. Genghis Khan is one of the few people in history who managed to make his memory universally loathed in EVERY region he ruled over, except in his native Mongolia. If you measure your success as a ruler by how you are remembered in the history books after you die, then he was a reather unsuccessful ruler indeed.
Other great imperial rulers have their checkered histories, and probably had to kill a few people and piss some off to maintain order, but Genghis Khan is more like a Hitler than an Alexander the Great or a Caesar Augustus. Not all the great empire builders followed a strict regimen of rape, pillage and slaughter.
As the other response points out, no overhead from Slashfix when you aren't on Slashdot (well, other than one Javascript method invocation and one string comparison to check the current URL, but I'm sure you can spare a couple CPU cycles for this).
The whole point of this extension was to avoid having to sit there doing the Vulcan mind grip on your keyboard every 30 seconds while surfing Slashdot, which is what most of us who've used Firefox over the last few months since this bug first got really bad have been doing. The saved strain on my wrist alone is worth its weight in gold.
That's hard to believe. There is a bug (if you want to call it that) in Firefox that prevents the pageload Javascript event from getting triggered when a page opens in a tab in the background, which prevents my script from getting invoked in that case, but there's nothing I can do about that as far as I know.
But aside from that known limitation, the code for Slashfix is so simple I can't imagine how it could be broken, assuming the extension is properly installed and shows up in your Extensions window. It literally just detects one Javascript event (pageload), checks your current browser location to see if you are on Slashdot, and if so, runs two or three lines of code to force a reflow.
I wrote Slashfix, and I've been using it all the time for the last week and a half now, and it has worked 100% of the time, with the exception of background tab loads as mentioned above, and "hung" page loads that occur every once in a while when some errant image is taking forever for Slashdot to serve up.
Too bad your story is apocryphal. As any good Harvard grad knows, the Harvard bridge was built in 1891, about 20 years before MIT even existed at its current location. So ha!
Or rail gun (i.e. electromagnetic propulsion launch) for the first stage. That would be frickin' cool. Rail gun->scramjet->rocket. And as a bonus, we could put Fed Ex out of business with a rail gun->scramjet unmanned terrestrial package delivery system using the same infrastructure.
Bah, the whole Smoots thing is just MIT's way of distracting your attention from the fact that the bridge immediately adjacent to their school is properly called the "Harvard Bridge".
While that is true, this is the first real scramjet implementation. Apparently, people think scramjets will go up to about Mach 15, or over 10,000 miles per hour. While still not low earth orbital velocity, it doesn't have to get there to be useful in getting to orbit.
If a traditional rocket kicks in at Mach 15 to get the rest of the way to orbit, the savings in launch weight and thus cost from not having to carry all that oxidizer to get up to Mach 15 could still be quite large.
I am still not clear as to what Mitchell Baker knew about this. But if this was done with her knowledge (Mitchell Baker is a woman, despite the name), I would suggest she should personally apologize, if not tender her resignation.
Her blog makes a vague reference to revenue opportunities from the searchbar going forward. I am not sure how I feel about this idea in general, as the general concept blurs Mozilla's role - I don't want my Firefox search bars to be like the zillions of "helpful" IE toolbars out there that direct your search.
But clearly if this is what she meant, deceptively redirecting searches through intermediaries who monitor your searching habits in exchange for money, I oppose it entirely.
I would have a little faith in the community, as it is huge, strong and very passionate. There may be a few bad apples in the Mozilla organization, but I can assure you that the community will push to get Mozilla.org to deal with this issue appropriately. There's already an increasingly angry thread over on the MozillaZine forums.
The power of Open Source... if you stop trusting the people in charge of the software, you can always fork it and maintain your own distribution. Obviously, that's about 10 degrees of overreaction at this point, but I suspect you'll see a statement either clearing up this issue soon enough, or a cleaning of house in the Mozilla Europe group.
Re:Complacency? Probably not in this case...
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Firefox News Roundup
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· Score: 2, Informative
Funny, as has been pointed out many times and the other replier pointed out, MS is already advertising on their site the tabbed browsing features that Longhorn will have. So your explanation is rather hard to swallow.
Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware
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Firefox News Roundup
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· Score: 4, Informative
After doing some recursive Babelfishing of some of the forum links in that article, it looks like the FF devs in charge of the German release stuff intentionally put this in there as part of a contract with the company to earn money for Mozilla Europe... but I can't really tell given the quality of translations there.
Very disheartening if true, and I would hope that the main Mozilla Foundation folks and Firefox dev team would disavow this and take measures to make sure it doesn't happen again. Mozilla are supposed to be the good guys, and I appreciate their need to support their activities, but there are lots of people willing to help with that - witness the massive turnout of donations for the SpreadFirefox advertising effort. Spyware in official Firefox builds is NOT the way to do this.
Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware
on
Firefox News Roundup
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· Score: 3, Informative
Well, it's certainly not impossible that something like this could have slipped into a foreign language build of Firefox. But it's hard to imagine given the scrutiny that was given to all the aviary-branch-1.0 checkins that it got into 1.0, given how many patches people were trying to get in and the devs refused to move into the 1.0 branch. I don't know the details of Mozilla development procedures, but I do follow some Bugzilla reports for issues near and dear to my heart, and I know that Firefox in general is fairly tightly controlled by the devs (more so than the Mozilla Suite ever was).
Do you have a reference to any bugzilla reports or any other English language reporting on this? Perhaps more careful oversight of the localization team is required. It's important to figure out if this was an accidental move by a localization team that accepted a patch that they shouldn't have or if an insider with commit access intentionally did this and needs to be booted out.
About 10 minutes after your post, Patrick himself posted to this thread clearly indicating that the Cipro he is taking has been prescribed and taken under the supervision of doctors all along. So it doesn't appear that your criticism is well placed here.
Nonetheless, I agree with you in general, you shouldn't be self-prescribing antibiotics (well, unless you're a doctor), especially not those like Cipro.
And taking antibiotics unnecessarily or without taking a full course of them does your body and the rest of the world more harm than good by creating more antibiotic resistant bacteria.
No, because I just pointed him to a bunch of resources. Don't accept my conclusions or summary, read the link I posted, the other link posted and do what I said to do (Google for "marijuana glaucoma" and look for the research reports from valid scientific sources and come to your own conclusions). My summary was just what I got out of doing that, but I already encouraged you and others to repeat my simple research and see if you don't find the same conclusions.
Asking someone with glaucoma is interesting, but nowhere near as interesting as the results of a thorough scientific study where intraocular pressure, side-effects and disease progression are measured over a reasonable period of time in a larger population. Not that these studies are perfect, but they are certainly more authoritative than a single anecdotal experience.
Unfortunately, it appears to be sponsored by Lamar Smith, one of the BSA fascist go-to-boys. I found this link, which seems to show that none of the cosponsors are from my state either, so not too much I can do directly to vote them out.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashfix has been downloaded by over 5000 people in the last week. I've received dozens of messages of thanks and 3 or 4 people have complained that it didn't work. I've already explained several times that this is pretty much impossible - the fix consists of about 10 lines of Javascript. This isn't some magical complex app, it's either gonna work or not, and for 99.9% of people it works, so I must assume the problem isn't in the code.
Most likely FF is hanging on pageloads or something - are you actually waiting for the page to finish loading? Are you loading tabs in the background? Because my site already documents the limitations to the fix (it runs only when the pageload event is triggered, namely when a page finishes loading, and tabs loaded in the background never trigger a pageload). I am of course perfectly open to suggestions or enhancements. If the limitations annoy you, feel free to work around them, it's perfectly possible, just takes some effort and toiling with the Firefox extension API stuff. Maybe you should get off your butt and help instead of whining?
Many tech companies in the 95 corridor area in Boston has something that looks roughly like that makeup of young recent college grads and established married folks. People either go elsewhere or transition into different roles, or become those married established folks after a few years. There are people in their late 20s and early 30s out there, in between the two lots, though many people did flee the industry, go back to grad school and are doing other things now.
But yes, it's generally not reasonable to have a family in the relevant area in Mass with less than 120k total income.
Great post. MIT actually has an even higher percentage of male students in fraternities - was about 55% until a few years ago when the administration started getting hostile to the fraternities in the wake of the Kruger death at MIT. Anybody who went to college in the Boston area in the late 90s will remember this event, it caused the social scene in Boston to start sucking hard as all the universities cracked down on any socializing that involved underage drinking - what an anal country we live in.
Anyway, the point is that fraternities can provide a great social outlet at universities. My fraternity brothers are some of the best friends I made in college, second only to my high school friends, with whom I am still very close. There were definitely no animal house parties going on where I went to school, but we did know how to have a good time and throw a good party.
These are guys who are now (or are still studying to be) doctors, lawyers, financiers, engineers and businessmen, all of whom I can call up and will help me out whenever I need anything. I've helped some of them get jobs and with other career advice, they'll surely help me with the same if I need it in the future.
By the way - there were almost no fraternities at my college when I started there (though there are some stuffy all-male social clubs that I rather disliked). A group of us started our fraternity chapter. So as an added bonus, I get to see an organization that I helped build thrive now year after year, having grown from 7 brothers to about 45.
I agree that in theory there are legislative solutions to this problem. However I sincerely doubt the US government would be forward thinking enough to enact them (assuming the technological issues here are resolved). But hey, you never know, I'd love to be proved wrong on this.
Also - given the slow death of nuclear power generation in this country, I don't know if that example is such a good one.
First of all, you are going back to the technical issues, which I have already concurred are surmountable if difficult. Nonetheless - the F-111 doesn't need to fly within 10 feet of 5 other F-111s and respond to any of their actions too. And the kind of unplanned obstacles they have to deal with are much more limited than what you'd face potentially on a road.
Furthermore - driving in a straight line on the freeway is the simplest possible case for self-driving cars, just a step or two up from modern cruise control systems.
In any case, the issue was liability not technology. The air force pilots can't sue the government into the ground when they die in the line of duty because of their contracts and the known risks of the job.
Well, you can download my extension from the popular extensionsmirror.nl site too, not sure how much vetting they actually do of extensions, but if one was known to be spyware or a trojan I'm pretty sure they'd take it down or at least warn you.
And you are welcome to inspect the contents of the XPI - it's just a renamed ZIP file. And the JAR in there is also a ZIP file by another name. The actual code (other than some RDF packaging stuff) is about 15 lines of Javascript that even a novice can probably follow, which does one thing and one thing only (reflow after page load while surfing on Slashdot.org). No, no spyware or trojans in there.
But even if it's statistically twice as safe as a regular car, there will still be accidents. And who do you hold accountable when those accidents occur? The question isn't the rate of accidents or the safety, it's who takes responsibility when something goes wrong.
Yes, insurance companies have a role in this, but insurance companies don't assume unlimited responsibility right now, they limit their liability contractually. What happens when somebody decides that since it isn't their fault, the deductible or pain and suffering or excess, uninsured medical bills should be paid by somebody else (read: 5 minutes after these cars go on sale)? Sue the automobile manufacturer? That's why they'll never sell these things.
This is one of the few areas where I see the legal barriers as nearly insurmountable. What happens when the automatic driving system screws up? Whose insurance kicks in? Who assumes responsibility? It seems like the liability to automobile manufacturers who installed such systems would be huge. Would an insurance company really be willing to underwrite a system like this? Are you willing to assume responsibility yourself for the failure of an automated driving system?
Furthermore, you need black boxes and monitoring/recording systems - how do you know who was driving in an accident, the autopilot or the human driver?
Sure, planes have "autopilots" but there's very little stuff in the air to avoid, and lots of air traffic controllers and rules to basically make flying in a straight line in your own empty area of airspace possible.
Technical and psychological issues aside (and those issues are still huge), unless the system was flawless and perfect (which it won't be) I see the legal morass here as nearly insurmountable.
Is there something I'm missing?
Yes, QAM decoding capabilities. The PCHDTV only decodes raw OTA HD broadcasts, and that's what it assumes is on the coax input. Unfortunately, the raw cable signals sent by cable companies over their coax use QAM encoding, as well as encryption for premium channels. And none of the digital HD cable boxes they give you output an OTA-style signal, they output DVI, component or something similar (which is, I guess, uncompressed HD video).
So in short, your method doesn't work and cannot work.
Thats extremly bad measure, since the books you read are mostly written by his enemies.
Maybe because he had no friends? Seriously though, plenty of other conquering peoples aren't in my nation-states' direct lineage, like the Ottoman Turks, and while they did plenty of nasty things too, I don't think they were on the level of Genghis Khan.
made him a very successful ruler
Depends how you define that. Genghis Khan is one of the few people in history who managed to make his memory universally loathed in EVERY region he ruled over, except in his native Mongolia. If you measure your success as a ruler by how you are remembered in the history books after you die, then he was a reather unsuccessful ruler indeed.
Other great imperial rulers have their checkered histories, and probably had to kill a few people and piss some off to maintain order, but Genghis Khan is more like a Hitler than an Alexander the Great or a Caesar Augustus. Not all the great empire builders followed a strict regimen of rape, pillage and slaughter.
As the other response points out, no overhead from Slashfix when you aren't on Slashdot (well, other than one Javascript method invocation and one string comparison to check the current URL, but I'm sure you can spare a couple CPU cycles for this).
The whole point of this extension was to avoid having to sit there doing the Vulcan mind grip on your keyboard every 30 seconds while surfing Slashdot, which is what most of us who've used Firefox over the last few months since this bug first got really bad have been doing. The saved strain on my wrist alone is worth its weight in gold.
That's hard to believe. There is a bug (if you want to call it that) in Firefox that prevents the pageload Javascript event from getting triggered when a page opens in a tab in the background, which prevents my script from getting invoked in that case, but there's nothing I can do about that as far as I know.
But aside from that known limitation, the code for Slashfix is so simple I can't imagine how it could be broken, assuming the extension is properly installed and shows up in your Extensions window. It literally just detects one Javascript event (pageload), checks your current browser location to see if you are on Slashdot, and if so, runs two or three lines of code to force a reflow.
I wrote Slashfix, and I've been using it all the time for the last week and a half now, and it has worked 100% of the time, with the exception of background tab loads as mentioned above, and "hung" page loads that occur every once in a while when some errant image is taking forever for Slashdot to serve up.
Too bad your story is apocryphal. As any good Harvard grad knows, the Harvard bridge was built in 1891, about 20 years before MIT even existed at its current location. So ha!
Or rail gun (i.e. electromagnetic propulsion launch) for the first stage. That would be frickin' cool. Rail gun->scramjet->rocket. And as a bonus, we could put Fed Ex out of business with a rail gun->scramjet unmanned terrestrial package delivery system using the same infrastructure.
Bah, the whole Smoots thing is just MIT's way of distracting your attention from the fact that the bridge immediately adjacent to their school is properly called the "Harvard Bridge".
While that is true, this is the first real scramjet implementation. Apparently, people think scramjets will go up to about Mach 15, or over 10,000 miles per hour. While still not low earth orbital velocity, it doesn't have to get there to be useful in getting to orbit.
If a traditional rocket kicks in at Mach 15 to get the rest of the way to orbit, the savings in launch weight and thus cost from not having to carry all that oxidizer to get up to Mach 15 could still be quite large.
I am still not clear as to what Mitchell Baker knew about this. But if this was done with her knowledge (Mitchell Baker is a woman, despite the name), I would suggest she should personally apologize, if not tender her resignation.
Her blog makes a vague reference to revenue opportunities from the searchbar going forward. I am not sure how I feel about this idea in general, as the general concept blurs Mozilla's role - I don't want my Firefox search bars to be like the zillions of "helpful" IE toolbars out there that direct your search.
But clearly if this is what she meant, deceptively redirecting searches through intermediaries who monitor your searching habits in exchange for money, I oppose it entirely.
I would have a little faith in the community, as it is huge, strong and very passionate. There may be a few bad apples in the Mozilla organization, but I can assure you that the community will push to get Mozilla.org to deal with this issue appropriately. There's already an increasingly angry thread over on the MozillaZine forums.
The power of Open Source... if you stop trusting the people in charge of the software, you can always fork it and maintain your own distribution. Obviously, that's about 10 degrees of overreaction at this point, but I suspect you'll see a statement either clearing up this issue soon enough, or a cleaning of house in the Mozilla Europe group.
Funny, as has been pointed out many times and the other replier pointed out, MS is already advertising on their site the tabbed browsing features that Longhorn will have. So your explanation is rather hard to swallow.
After doing some recursive Babelfishing of some of the forum links in that article, it looks like the FF devs in charge of the German release stuff intentionally put this in there as part of a contract with the company to earn money for Mozilla Europe... but I can't really tell given the quality of translations there.
Very disheartening if true, and I would hope that the main Mozilla Foundation folks and Firefox dev team would disavow this and take measures to make sure it doesn't happen again. Mozilla are supposed to be the good guys, and I appreciate their need to support their activities, but there are lots of people willing to help with that - witness the massive turnout of donations for the SpreadFirefox advertising effort. Spyware in official Firefox builds is NOT the way to do this.
Well, it's certainly not impossible that something like this could have slipped into a foreign language build of Firefox. But it's hard to imagine given the scrutiny that was given to all the aviary-branch-1.0 checkins that it got into 1.0, given how many patches people were trying to get in and the devs refused to move into the 1.0 branch. I don't know the details of Mozilla development procedures, but I do follow some Bugzilla reports for issues near and dear to my heart, and I know that Firefox in general is fairly tightly controlled by the devs (more so than the Mozilla Suite ever was).
Do you have a reference to any bugzilla reports or any other English language reporting on this? Perhaps more careful oversight of the localization team is required. It's important to figure out if this was an accidental move by a localization team that accepted a patch that they shouldn't have or if an insider with commit access intentionally did this and needs to be booted out.
About 10 minutes after your post, Patrick himself posted to this thread clearly indicating that the Cipro he is taking has been prescribed and taken under the supervision of doctors all along. So it doesn't appear that your criticism is well placed here.
Nonetheless, I agree with you in general, you shouldn't be self-prescribing antibiotics (well, unless you're a doctor), especially not those like Cipro.
And taking antibiotics unnecessarily or without taking a full course of them does your body and the rest of the world more harm than good by creating more antibiotic resistant bacteria.
No, because I just pointed him to a bunch of resources. Don't accept my conclusions or summary, read the link I posted, the other link posted and do what I said to do (Google for "marijuana glaucoma" and look for the research reports from valid scientific sources and come to your own conclusions). My summary was just what I got out of doing that, but I already encouraged you and others to repeat my simple research and see if you don't find the same conclusions.
Asking someone with glaucoma is interesting, but nowhere near as interesting as the results of a thorough scientific study where intraocular pressure, side-effects and disease progression are measured over a reasonable period of time in a larger population. Not that these studies are perfect, but they are certainly more authoritative than a single anecdotal experience.
Unfortunately, it appears to be sponsored by Lamar Smith, one of the BSA fascist go-to-boys. I found this link, which seems to show that none of the cosponsors are from my state either, so not too much I can do directly to vote them out.