When I decribe myself as a liberal to people I am most certainly not describing my position on economic issues - I am all for smaller government (I won't say "small", since that's a meaningless word without context), less taxes, a basically capitalist economy within limits, and so on. As are most American liberals. You know, the "crazy" people up here in the blue states. God forbid, we have some state regulation on health insurance premiums in Massachusetts, which means I am not getting completely gouged (only partially gouged) by my insurance company. If that makes me a commie pinko bastard then you are obviously looking cross-eyed at the world.
New York is a very liberal city, and most New Yorkers would describe themselves as liberal, and yet NYC is the home of the free market economy for the country, and the world. Almost every liberal I know is basically a social liberal and economic moderate - it's very rare outside of academia and the fringes of society to find true economic liberals in the United States. Which implies that the entire concept of using "liberal" as a defamatory to mean "socialist" or "communist" is itself a gigantic straw man, since the Republican party leadership knows damned well that the people running for national office don't meet that description.
So I return to my point - when you say that my definition is archaic and wrong because it doesn't represent the way people around YOU in the South or Midwest or whatever shitty part of the country you live in use the word, I suggest you reconsider the context in which you evaluate the English language. To people living on the coasts, it is as strange on the ear to hear liberal used as a synonym for socialist or communist as to hear Canadians or Midwesterners call soda "pop" or "coke".
Furthermore, I am not the one setting up a straw man. You are the one who seems to have intentional chosen an irrelevant definition of conservative, discussing procedures rather than values or political views.
Your general proposition that the dictionary is irrelevant for terms of broad social and political meaning is curious to me - the dictionary represents a common consensus for word meaning, outside of highly specialized areas of human knowledge. I fail to see why the fact that you have chosen to distort the meaning of the word liberal should thereby invalidate the dictionary with respect to an entire area of human thought.
No, not exactly, RDF isn't a programming language, it's a knowledge description language. You wouldn't write a C++ interpreter in RDF any more than you would write one in English, since that's not what they do. But you can describe a C++ interpreter in English and you can describe a C++ interpreter in RDF.
Everything breaks down to subject-verb-object tuples. RDF is supposed to be general enough to describe, well, any and all knowledge.
So you could imagine a description of RSA in RDF pseudo-code:
p-isA-prime q-isA-prime n-hasfactor-p n-hasfa ctor-q n-numfactors-2 phi-hasfactor-(p-1) phi-h asfactor-(q-1) phi-numfactors-2 e-greaterthan-1 e-lessthan-phi e-isRelativelyPrime-phi... and so on.
Obviously, all my RDF verbs then need to be defined - in other words, I need a basic ontology for some functions. But, yes, it's possible to describe an algorithm in RDF in a way that would theoretically allow an RDF parser to make inferences about it, or to execute the algorithm, given a sufficient understanding of the ontology.
It's just a somewhat awkward way to go about describing an algorithm, and quite time consuming.
Refutation. Say it all you want, you are still wrong. It's the conservatives who are always whining because they can never win an argument by reason alone.
Come on big boy, stop posting AC if you want to talk smack.
Yes, god damn Kerry, for actually running his presidential campaign instead of sitting around voting on every unimportant bill in the Senate like a good boy.
And it's amazing how conservatives care so much about Ted Kennedy's drinking habits, and Bill Clinton's blowjobs, but don't give a shit about our current presidents old-time predilection for nose candy, because he's accepted Jesus now. And how Mary Kopechne's life is sacred, and so are those unborn fetuses, but Iraqi lives count as about 1/100th of an American life. I'm sure Jesus would approve of those metrics.
Our President IS a nutjob. He believes that he is doing the work of god in the office of the Presidency, and that his foreign policy is effective in the Middle East. Frankly, anybody who puts religious faith ahead of rational thought probably deserves the label "nutjob".
Your comments have no relevance to mine - I have done a fair amount of work with semantic web technologies before (well, compared to most people out there anyway), my comments were a response to my personal experiences, not some random misconceptions formed by reading Slashdot articles.
1) I never said anything of the sort. RDF/Semantic Web technologies have nothing to do with inserting links into HTML.
2) I never said it was a replacement for HTML. I just said it wasn't likely to be adopted because of the difficultly of creating content in a properly structured, ontologically connected RDF format.
Of course your secretary isn't supposed to hand-edit RDF files, but somebody has to not only write code that dumps stuff from a database into RDF (easy - not really any different from dumping into any ole' XML format) but map all the stuff into relevant ontologies (not easy), where "easy" is defined in terms of being comprehensible enough to permit adoption outside of academia.
3) It's only easier for two corporations to merge databases if all the entities therein are connected by direct or indirect ontological relationships. People have to build these relationships. That was the whole point of my post.
4) I said nothing about URIs being associated with viewable web pages. Stop inserting random straw man attacks.
Apparently you are the one who needs to RTFM instead of getting up on your high horse there, buddy. Not everybody on Slashdot is as ignorant as you presume.
Sorry, I don't think you understood my meaning, probably because you have zero familiarity with the semantic web outside of reading headlines on Slashdot.
Of course programmers are very good at being precise in describing algorithms, but describing knowledge in subject-verb-object format is not so easy. You can't just describe your algorithm, you have to relate each of the base concepts used in the algorithm to existing ontologies, or create your own ontologies for them. Describing an algorithm in pseudocode, or in a structured language with straightforward syntactic rules is relatively easy. Doing the same using RDF is HARD because you aren't just implementing the algorithm, you are describing to a computer what the algorithm does and how to use it.
I encourage you to try working with some of the semantic web technologies a little bit and form your own opinions, as I have done (admittedly 1.5-2 years back, so things may have come along a bit since then, but I doubt the fundamentals have changed).
The semantic web isn't about human usability. It's about building machine intelligence and knowledge.
Right, but the problem is if it's unusable for humans to _create_ that content, or to map it from human knowledge-space into machine-parseable format, then it doesn't matter if it's well-engineered from the machine's perspective. That's why adoption of the semantic web has been so poor (outside of applications that could just as well be filled with any ole' XML dialect, like RSS or RDF descriptors used to package Firefox extensions, and so on).
Nobody wants to hire a team of ontological engineers to map information they already have in human accessible form into some highly structured, machine parseable format, and pay them to keep that information up-to-date. Mind you, companies only started paying people to put stuff up on the web when it became clear there was demand, and the early adopters of the web were individuals and academics, but the web was accessible from day one - I put up my first personal web page when I was 15 years old or so, and it took me about an hour to figure out how to do it.
Also remember that big companies spend tens of millions of dollars hacking together some HTML for their website. Imagine how much they would have to pay to get people smart enough to construct ontologies and RDF data versions of all of their content. Yowsers!
After looking at that screenshot, it's sooo clear to me the value that the semantic web brings to us (mirrored here as their server appears to be flaking out a bit). If anything, this makes it crystal clear why the semantic web hasn't really taken off, other than in the much more limited form of RSS feeds.
A network of random connections of semantic concepts embodied as URIs is just not a friendly form of data for humans to manipulate directly, and I don't think it every will be. That's right, I don't believe this is really an issue that's solvable with slightly better tools. I think ultimately the management of and connection of ontologies is something that computers will have to learn to do themselves.
It's just too hard to expect normal human beings to describe knowledge in any way other than the way we are used to. The web is only as popular as it is because HTML is a simple, appearance-based way to markup documents (yes, I realize strictly speaking HTML isn't supposed to describe many aspects of appearance per se, but there's no denying that it comes from that root). We understand bold and italics (and even strong and em), but ask somebody to generate two concepts by constructing URIs for them and relating them in subject-predicate form and they are going to look at you and drool.
Even programmers aren't used to the idea of describing knowledge - it's one thing to tell a computer what to do, it's another thing to tell a computer how to know about something that you know.
Alright, I know I'm opening myself up to the flames here, so flame away. Anyway, I think the "semantic web" will need to wait for tools like Cyc et. al. to come along far enough to construct and relate their own ontologies out of English text, and until then all we will see is stuff like RSS or RDF files in Firefox extensions to describe deployment conditions (i.e. stuff that can be done with any arbitrary XML dialect that doesn't really qualify as the "semantic web" to me).
And literally "liberal" means "1. not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry; 2. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded".
Now try to imagine the type of person that reads that definition and says "nope, that's not me at all", or even worse, thinks that word should be used as an insult. And you get an inkling of what's wrong with America.
Gee, it must suck to have a label like "conservative" misappropriated and turned into an insult meaning "authoritarian". See how it feels when the President does the same with the word "liberal", which has been turned into an insult meaning essentially "communist"?
Cry me a fucking river. After the besmirching that my state, Massachusetts, got from nutjob Shrub, I really feel bad for the poor conservatives that their ideology has been wrested from them by authoritarian whackjobs like Ashcroft. Boo-fucking-hoo.
Re:Not to be a whore or anything but...
on
Firefox 1.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, it's pretty much impossible that it's not working, since it is just a couple lines of Javascript that gets run when the document.onload event is triggered. If you load Slashdot and see the left margin "jump" into place just as the page finishes loading, that's the Javascript working.
What you are probably seeing is that document.onload doesn't get triggered until the pageload is 100% completed, and this is mentioned on my website on believe. Occasionally (usually when under heavy load, or when you are on a slow/shitty connection) Slashdot seems to hang just before it finishes loading in Firefox, and the pageload never finishes, or takes an absurdly long time to finish loading. In this case, the "fix" Javascript never gets triggered. This has happened a couple of times to me since installing my own Slashfix extension, but the situation is far, far better than it was before (it happens on maybe 3-4% of Slashdot pageviews for me, versus 70-75% of pageviews).
If I could figure out how to write a chunk of Javascript into the page mid-page load, or to do pseudo-HTML-rewriting-proxy stuff like Adblock, then the fix would be perfect. If you know how to do this, please submit a patch to me, or just let me know, I will gladly include it in an update of Slashfix.
Did I forget to mention how atrocious the documentation on writing Firefox extensions is? Yes, it's pretty atrocious, just figuring out how to do something as trivial as attach to the document.onload events was nowhere to be found in documentation, had to find an example in somebody else's extension.
The problem is the cable companies are bitches about this. They don't want to share profits with anybody - neither does Microsoft, really, for that matter. Tivo apparently tried to negotiate deals with cable companies to bundle Tivo systems built into cable boxes, but Tivo wanted too much money for software that the cablecos figured they could get Scientific Atlanta and the other shitty settop cable box manufacturers to clone for much cheaper.
Of course the result of such cheapness is that the packaged cable DVR systems are pure ass and nobody I know uses they for such (a lot of people seem to use the VOD features, on the other hand). People who want to record shows and timeshift seem to still by and large go with Tivo, ReplayTV or similar boxes.
It would really make me cry to see Microsoft underprice Tivo into this market, but unlike Tivo, Microsoft can afford to give their base software away at cost, assuming they get something out of the deal. The problem is that Microsoft wants to commoditize the cable company itself, and make their OS the source of on demand media. MS doesn't want to sell software TO the cable companies, they want to BE the cable company (well, they don't want to run lines to your home, they just want to control the content pipe so they get a cut of everything).
To be honest, I don't think I've ever met a really great programmer who described himself as an "IT worker". The term "IT" has come to mean managing computer systems and infrastructure, not creation of new technology. Numerically, the majority of people working with technology interact with it on that level. But real programmers are far more likely to describe themselves as programmers, software engineers, software developers, etc.
A real software company won't refer to their software developers as "IT workers" either, of course - their software developers are the people that create their core value, the software they sell. The only place I've ever worked that had "IT workers" was a large, unpleasant financial firm, and I did my damnedest to get out of there as soon as possible.
Bug 217527 (that screenshot is a pretty severe case). Look it up in Bugzilla for more screenshots and discussion (Bugzilla links from/. don't work so I won't bother with linking to it). I'm not sure, but it may be worse in Windows, I don't recall whether it happens in Linux since I usually use Mozilla Suite when I'm in Linux.
The bug is definitely still present in 1.0 final since the devs decided to keep the fix out of the 1.0 branch, which is what prompted me to package up the extension.
Perhaps a third of computers seem to not be affected at all by this problem, at least judging from my small sample set (I have one friend who uses FF 1.0PR and browses Slashdot and says it doesn't happen at all for him). For me, it happens on both my desktops and my laptop, so I'm 3 for 3 on my computers, and it happens on at least 75% of/. pageviews.
Of course you can, that just manually forces a reflow. The whole point of the extension is to automatically force a reflow.
When you are browsing around on Slashdot it gets to be a huge pain in the butt to press CTRL-mousewheel or CTRL-+/- for every page you visit (and the bug is severe enough for many of us now that it happens on almost every single Slashdot pageview). Writing this extension took about half an hour (10 lines of Javascript code or so), and was well worth the frustration I personally saved alone.
Furthermore, it's all good and well to say "the bug will be fixed in the next release", but many people will only try Firefox once, and version 1.0 is being advertised extremely heavily. There are a lot of people who might see that Firefox renders one of their favorite sites incorrectly and ditch it. I thought this bug should be a 1.0 blocker, and so did quite a few other people. Since we were unable to convince the devs that it should be, I decided releasing a quick hack to fix the problem was the next best thing I could for for the FF 1.0 release.
As for the real fix, it will hopefully find its way into the FF 1.1 release, but that's not due until March 2005. It won't be in any bugfix releases before that, since it was intentionally kept out of the 1.0 branch. Personally, I'd rather not be annoyed by this problem for the next 4 or 5 months.
That is not a bug with my extension, it's a Firefox issue. My extension is most likely too simple to have any real bugs of its own, the actual code is about 10-15 lines of Javascript.
When you get that problem while installing any extension, it usually means there is a hanging Firefox process on your computer that you need to manually kill (CTRL-ALT-DELETE, find it, kill it on Windows). Now restart Firefox and the extension should be installed. Now check Slashdot.org to see if it's working (and validate that it is actually installed in the Tools->Extensions menu.
Lemme know if you have any problems, nobody has reported any real issues with SlashFix yet.
SlashFix is a quick workaround to resolve this problem. Not as good as a real fix to the underlying reflow/threading issues, but it works today with 1.0PR (and ought to work just fine with 1.0, though I haven't been able to d/l 1.0 yet to test).
Not to be a whore or anything but...
on
Firefox 1.0 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
If you are a regular Slashdot surfer, you might want to check out my extension, SlashFix which fixes the very annoying Slashdot rendering errors in the Firefox 1.0 branch.
These errors are fixed in the Mozilla trunk source code, but for apparently sound reasons, the developers didn't want to check the fixes into the 1.0 branch, apparently because they caused problems with some other, unnamed web sites. SlashFix is a good interim solution so you don't feel compelled to start up IE just to surf your favorite geek time-waste.
Thanks so much, glad you like it! You can post a comment on my site here if you want to post a comment on the extension where a lot of people will read it. Endorsements are heartily appreciated.:)
250 downloads of the XPI from my site already, and probably quite a few more from ExtensionsMirror.nl. Guess a lot of people were annoyed by this. Once I thought about it, I realized how easy it should be to fix, and I was genuinely surprised that nobody had done this previously.
You are jumping to a conclusion that the people that live in the rural parts of central florida are all registerd Democrat
No I'm not, I'm looking at the numbers from the link that was posted in the story. A lot of the most rural counties seem to have a large number of registered Democrats, but also seemed to have a large Republican majority in the Presidential election. Those are facts, not in dispute as far as I know.
Also, many parts of Florida that were rural 10 years ago are now filled with Retirees from the North. The I-4 corridor for example has had a tremendous amont of growth in just the past 5 years.
Okay, well this may be true or may not, but if these voters were all transplanted Northerners, their voting patterns certainly didn't look like it - now maybe that's fraud, or maybe you're mistaken. Maybe the demographics really have changed in that area massively over the last 5 years - in which case I would expect a substantial shift in the number of registered Democrats vs. Republicans since the last election, and substantially different results overall in the those areas in these two elections. So if these counties have really become much more Democratic over the last 5 years, but there was still a massive Republican victory in those areas, then one would have to presume that there was massive voting fraud in that area.
In which case, I guess we can expect to hear a big stink any day now from the Democratic Party in Florida, right? I mean, I'd expect them to know the demographics of their state well enough to spot something that obvious.
Yes, I am trying to imply that in parts of the South, Democrats frequently vote Republican in national elections, since it's a commonly known fact. Go type "southern conservative democrat" into Google, read the Wikipedia entry on Dixiecrat, and you'll begin to get a clue why this is the case, historically and that it is a statement of fact.
I'm certainly not making this stuff up, as I am a Democrat myself. I'd love to discover that the numbers in these Florida counties are all wrong, and point to massive electrion fraud, and wake up tomorrow morning to find that Kerry is going to be President. But I'll need better numbers than this, more side-by-side historical and demographic data for these counties, and detailed exit poll results before I can conclude that.
See what I said here. There is an obvious way to correct for this kind of reticence (as pointed out in the blog post I linked to). Obviously, you still can't correct for people who outright lie, but it should be pretty easy to eliminate much of the selection bias on both sides, if any such consistent bias actually exists.
No, I don't think Florida is the "real South", but I don't think those Florida RedNecked Hicks are comparable to Northeasterners, nor do they vote the same way that people in West Palm or Ft. Lauderdale do.
Furthermore, while there are well-educated Dixiecrats out there, I'm pretty sure there are also lots of RedNecked Hicks elsewhere in the "true South" that are registered Democrat and vote Republican. You can't explain the large numbers and consistent voting behavior of people in Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama by a small number of well educated conservative Democrats - if those were the only "Dixiecrats" out there, then they wouldn't wield much political power at all.
I already responded to that piece of information. No, I wasn't aware that the founders and original CEOs of the two companies were brothers when I made that comment, and if you don't know that one piece of information, it does seem quite hard to believe that two otherwise directly competitive companies could collaborate in such a way.
In any case, as you can see, I withdrew that objection entirely. Just so you're clear, I'm a moderate Democrat and a social liberal, and I despise Diebold, so obviously I'd love to be proven wrong about this. I still don't see enough data there to conclude that fraud is the most likely explanation for the results, but I do now acknowledge that it is one possible explanation.
I was under the impression that exit polling methodology had been subjected to extensive review by statisticians since 2000 due to some of the previous problems with it. This was what the news networks were claiming anyway.
Anyway, it seems pretty trivial to construct a better methodology not subject to these weaknesses (take this proposal for instance). Not hard at all now, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
When I decribe myself as a liberal to people I am most certainly not describing my position on economic issues - I am all for smaller government (I won't say "small", since that's a meaningless word without context), less taxes, a basically capitalist economy within limits, and so on. As are most American liberals. You know, the "crazy" people up here in the blue states. God forbid, we have some state regulation on health insurance premiums in Massachusetts, which means I am not getting completely gouged (only partially gouged) by my insurance company. If that makes me a commie pinko bastard then you are obviously looking cross-eyed at the world.
New York is a very liberal city, and most New Yorkers would describe themselves as liberal, and yet NYC is the home of the free market economy for the country, and the world. Almost every liberal I know is basically a social liberal and economic moderate - it's very rare outside of academia and the fringes of society to find true economic liberals in the United States. Which implies that the entire concept of using "liberal" as a defamatory to mean "socialist" or "communist" is itself a gigantic straw man, since the Republican party leadership knows damned well that the people running for national office don't meet that description.
So I return to my point - when you say that my definition is archaic and wrong because it doesn't represent the way people around YOU in the South or Midwest or whatever shitty part of the country you live in use the word, I suggest you reconsider the context in which you evaluate the English language. To people living on the coasts, it is as strange on the ear to hear liberal used as a synonym for socialist or communist as to hear Canadians or Midwesterners call soda "pop" or "coke".
Furthermore, I am not the one setting up a straw man. You are the one who seems to have intentional chosen an irrelevant definition of conservative, discussing procedures rather than values or political views.
Your general proposition that the dictionary is irrelevant for terms of broad social and political meaning is curious to me - the dictionary represents a common consensus for word meaning, outside of highly specialized areas of human knowledge. I fail to see why the fact that you have chosen to distort the meaning of the word liberal should thereby invalidate the dictionary with respect to an entire area of human thought.
No, not exactly, RDF isn't a programming language, it's a knowledge description language. You wouldn't write a C++ interpreter in RDF any more than you would write one in English, since that's not what they do. But you can describe a C++ interpreter in English and you can describe a C++ interpreter in RDF.
a ctor-qh asfactor-(q-1) ...
Everything breaks down to subject-verb-object tuples. RDF is supposed to be general enough to describe, well, any and all knowledge.
So you could imagine a description of RSA in RDF pseudo-code:
p-isA-prime
q-isA-prime
n-hasfactor-p
n-hasf
n-numfactors-2
phi-hasfactor-(p-1)
phi-
phi-numfactors-2
e-greaterthan-1
e-lessthan-phi
e-isRelativelyPrime-phi
and so on.
Obviously, all my RDF verbs then need to be defined - in other words, I need a basic ontology for some functions. But, yes, it's possible to describe an algorithm in RDF in a way that would theoretically allow an RDF parser to make inferences about it, or to execute the algorithm, given a sufficient understanding of the ontology.
It's just a somewhat awkward way to go about describing an algorithm, and quite time consuming.
Refutation. Say it all you want, you are still wrong. It's the conservatives who are always whining because they can never win an argument by reason alone.
Come on big boy, stop posting AC if you want to talk smack.
Yes, god damn Kerry, for actually running his presidential campaign instead of sitting around voting on every unimportant bill in the Senate like a good boy.
And it's amazing how conservatives care so much about Ted Kennedy's drinking habits, and Bill Clinton's blowjobs, but don't give a shit about our current presidents old-time predilection for nose candy, because he's accepted Jesus now. And how Mary Kopechne's life is sacred, and so are those unborn fetuses, but Iraqi lives count as about 1/100th of an American life. I'm sure Jesus would approve of those metrics.
Our President IS a nutjob. He believes that he is doing the work of god in the office of the Presidency, and that his foreign policy is effective in the Middle East. Frankly, anybody who puts religious faith ahead of rational thought probably deserves the label "nutjob".
Your comments have no relevance to mine - I have done a fair amount of work with semantic web technologies before (well, compared to most people out there anyway), my comments were a response to my personal experiences, not some random misconceptions formed by reading Slashdot articles.
1) I never said anything of the sort. RDF/Semantic Web technologies have nothing to do with inserting links into HTML.
2) I never said it was a replacement for HTML. I just said it wasn't likely to be adopted because of the difficultly of creating content in a properly structured, ontologically connected RDF format.
Of course your secretary isn't supposed to hand-edit RDF files, but somebody has to not only write code that dumps stuff from a database into RDF (easy - not really any different from dumping into any ole' XML format) but map all the stuff into relevant ontologies (not easy), where "easy" is defined in terms of being comprehensible enough to permit adoption outside of academia.
3) It's only easier for two corporations to merge databases if all the entities therein are connected by direct or indirect ontological relationships. People have to build these relationships. That was the whole point of my post.
4) I said nothing about URIs being associated with viewable web pages. Stop inserting random straw man attacks.
Apparently you are the one who needs to RTFM instead of getting up on your high horse there, buddy. Not everybody on Slashdot is as ignorant as you presume.
Sorry, I don't think you understood my meaning, probably because you have zero familiarity with the semantic web outside of reading headlines on Slashdot.
Of course programmers are very good at being precise in describing algorithms, but describing knowledge in subject-verb-object format is not so easy. You can't just describe your algorithm, you have to relate each of the base concepts used in the algorithm to existing ontologies, or create your own ontologies for them. Describing an algorithm in pseudocode, or in a structured language with straightforward syntactic rules is relatively easy. Doing the same using RDF is HARD because you aren't just implementing the algorithm, you are describing to a computer what the algorithm does and how to use it.
I encourage you to try working with some of the semantic web technologies a little bit and form your own opinions, as I have done (admittedly 1.5-2 years back, so things may have come along a bit since then, but I doubt the fundamentals have changed).
The semantic web isn't about human usability. It's about building machine intelligence and knowledge.
Right, but the problem is if it's unusable for humans to _create_ that content, or to map it from human knowledge-space into machine-parseable format, then it doesn't matter if it's well-engineered from the machine's perspective. That's why adoption of the semantic web has been so poor (outside of applications that could just as well be filled with any ole' XML dialect, like RSS or RDF descriptors used to package Firefox extensions, and so on).
Nobody wants to hire a team of ontological engineers to map information they already have in human accessible form into some highly structured, machine parseable format, and pay them to keep that information up-to-date. Mind you, companies only started paying people to put stuff up on the web when it became clear there was demand, and the early adopters of the web were individuals and academics, but the web was accessible from day one - I put up my first personal web page when I was 15 years old or so, and it took me about an hour to figure out how to do it.
Also remember that big companies spend tens of millions of dollars hacking together some HTML for their website. Imagine how much they would have to pay to get people smart enough to construct ontologies and RDF data versions of all of their content. Yowsers!
After looking at that screenshot, it's sooo clear to me the value that the semantic web brings to us (mirrored here as their server appears to be flaking out a bit). If anything, this makes it crystal clear why the semantic web hasn't really taken off, other than in the much more limited form of RSS feeds.
A network of random connections of semantic concepts embodied as URIs is just not a friendly form of data for humans to manipulate directly, and I don't think it every will be. That's right, I don't believe this is really an issue that's solvable with slightly better tools. I think ultimately the management of and connection of ontologies is something that computers will have to learn to do themselves.
It's just too hard to expect normal human beings to describe knowledge in any way other than the way we are used to. The web is only as popular as it is because HTML is a simple, appearance-based way to markup documents (yes, I realize strictly speaking HTML isn't supposed to describe many aspects of appearance per se, but there's no denying that it comes from that root). We understand bold and italics (and even strong and em), but ask somebody to generate two concepts by constructing URIs for them and relating them in subject-predicate form and they are going to look at you and drool.
Even programmers aren't used to the idea of describing knowledge - it's one thing to tell a computer what to do, it's another thing to tell a computer how to know about something that you know.
Alright, I know I'm opening myself up to the flames here, so flame away. Anyway, I think the "semantic web" will need to wait for tools like Cyc et. al. to come along far enough to construct and relate their own ontologies out of English text, and until then all we will see is stuff like RSS or RDF files in Firefox extensions to describe deployment conditions (i.e. stuff that can be done with any arbitrary XML dialect that doesn't really qualify as the "semantic web" to me).
And literally "liberal" means "1. not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry; 2. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded".
Now try to imagine the type of person that reads that definition and says "nope, that's not me at all", or even worse, thinks that word should be used as an insult. And you get an inkling of what's wrong with America.
Gee, it must suck to have a label like "conservative" misappropriated and turned into an insult meaning "authoritarian". See how it feels when the President does the same with the word "liberal", which has been turned into an insult meaning essentially "communist"?
Cry me a fucking river. After the besmirching that my state, Massachusetts, got from nutjob Shrub, I really feel bad for the poor conservatives that their ideology has been wrested from them by authoritarian whackjobs like Ashcroft. Boo-fucking-hoo.
Well, it's pretty much impossible that it's not working, since it is just a couple lines of Javascript that gets run when the document.onload event is triggered. If you load Slashdot and see the left margin "jump" into place just as the page finishes loading, that's the Javascript working.
What you are probably seeing is that document.onload doesn't get triggered until the pageload is 100% completed, and this is mentioned on my website on believe. Occasionally (usually when under heavy load, or when you are on a slow/shitty connection) Slashdot seems to hang just before it finishes loading in Firefox, and the pageload never finishes, or takes an absurdly long time to finish loading. In this case, the "fix" Javascript never gets triggered. This has happened a couple of times to me since installing my own Slashfix extension, but the situation is far, far better than it was before (it happens on maybe 3-4% of Slashdot pageviews for me, versus 70-75% of pageviews).
If I could figure out how to write a chunk of Javascript into the page mid-page load, or to do pseudo-HTML-rewriting-proxy stuff like Adblock, then the fix would be perfect. If you know how to do this, please submit a patch to me, or just let me know, I will gladly include it in an update of Slashfix.
Did I forget to mention how atrocious the documentation on writing Firefox extensions is? Yes, it's pretty atrocious, just figuring out how to do something as trivial as attach to the document.onload events was nowhere to be found in documentation, had to find an example in somebody else's extension.
The problem is the cable companies are bitches about this. They don't want to share profits with anybody - neither does Microsoft, really, for that matter. Tivo apparently tried to negotiate deals with cable companies to bundle Tivo systems built into cable boxes, but Tivo wanted too much money for software that the cablecos figured they could get Scientific Atlanta and the other shitty settop cable box manufacturers to clone for much cheaper.
Of course the result of such cheapness is that the packaged cable DVR systems are pure ass and nobody I know uses they for such (a lot of people seem to use the VOD features, on the other hand). People who want to record shows and timeshift seem to still by and large go with Tivo, ReplayTV or similar boxes.
It would really make me cry to see Microsoft underprice Tivo into this market, but unlike Tivo, Microsoft can afford to give their base software away at cost, assuming they get something out of the deal. The problem is that Microsoft wants to commoditize the cable company itself, and make their OS the source of on demand media. MS doesn't want to sell software TO the cable companies, they want to BE the cable company (well, they don't want to run lines to your home, they just want to control the content pipe so they get a cut of everything).
To be honest, I don't think I've ever met a really great programmer who described himself as an "IT worker". The term "IT" has come to mean managing computer systems and infrastructure, not creation of new technology. Numerically, the majority of people working with technology interact with it on that level. But real programmers are far more likely to describe themselves as programmers, software engineers, software developers, etc.
A real software company won't refer to their software developers as "IT workers" either, of course - their software developers are the people that create their core value, the software they sell. The only place I've ever worked that had "IT workers" was a large, unpleasant financial firm, and I did my damnedest to get out of there as soon as possible.
Bug 217527 (that screenshot is a pretty severe case). Look it up in Bugzilla for more screenshots and discussion (Bugzilla links from /. don't work so I won't bother with linking to it). I'm not sure, but it may be worse in Windows, I don't recall whether it happens in Linux since I usually use Mozilla Suite when I'm in Linux.
/. pageviews.
The bug is definitely still present in 1.0 final since the devs decided to keep the fix out of the 1.0 branch, which is what prompted me to package up the extension.
Perhaps a third of computers seem to not be affected at all by this problem, at least judging from my small sample set (I have one friend who uses FF 1.0PR and browses Slashdot and says it doesn't happen at all for him). For me, it happens on both my desktops and my laptop, so I'm 3 for 3 on my computers, and it happens on at least 75% of
Of course you can, that just manually forces a reflow. The whole point of the extension is to automatically force a reflow.
When you are browsing around on Slashdot it gets to be a huge pain in the butt to press CTRL-mousewheel or CTRL-+/- for every page you visit (and the bug is severe enough for many of us now that it happens on almost every single Slashdot pageview). Writing this extension took about half an hour (10 lines of Javascript code or so), and was well worth the frustration I personally saved alone.
Furthermore, it's all good and well to say "the bug will be fixed in the next release", but many people will only try Firefox once, and version 1.0 is being advertised extremely heavily. There are a lot of people who might see that Firefox renders one of their favorite sites incorrectly and ditch it. I thought this bug should be a 1.0 blocker, and so did quite a few other people. Since we were unable to convince the devs that it should be, I decided releasing a quick hack to fix the problem was the next best thing I could for for the FF 1.0 release.
As for the real fix, it will hopefully find its way into the FF 1.1 release, but that's not due until March 2005. It won't be in any bugfix releases before that, since it was intentionally kept out of the 1.0 branch. Personally, I'd rather not be annoyed by this problem for the next 4 or 5 months.
That is not a bug with my extension, it's a Firefox issue. My extension is most likely too simple to have any real bugs of its own, the actual code is about 10-15 lines of Javascript.
When you get that problem while installing any extension, it usually means there is a hanging Firefox process on your computer that you need to manually kill (CTRL-ALT-DELETE, find it, kill it on Windows). Now restart Firefox and the extension should be installed. Now check Slashdot.org to see if it's working (and validate that it is actually installed in the Tools->Extensions menu.
Lemme know if you have any problems, nobody has reported any real issues with SlashFix yet.
SlashFix is a quick workaround to resolve this problem. Not as good as a real fix to the underlying reflow/threading issues, but it works today with 1.0PR (and ought to work just fine with 1.0, though I haven't been able to d/l 1.0 yet to test).
If you are a regular Slashdot surfer, you might want to check out my extension, SlashFix which fixes the very annoying Slashdot rendering errors in the Firefox 1.0 branch.
These errors are fixed in the Mozilla trunk source code, but for apparently sound reasons, the developers didn't want to check the fixes into the 1.0 branch, apparently because they caused problems with some other, unnamed web sites. SlashFix is a good interim solution so you don't feel compelled to start up IE just to surf your favorite geek time-waste.
Thanks so much, glad you like it! You can post a comment on my site here if you want to post a comment on the extension where a lot of people will read it. Endorsements are heartily appreciated. :)
250 downloads of the XPI from my site already, and probably quite a few more from ExtensionsMirror.nl. Guess a lot of people were annoyed by this. Once I thought about it, I realized how easy it should be to fix, and I was genuinely surprised that nobody had done this previously.
You are jumping to a conclusion that the people that live in the rural parts of central florida are all registerd Democrat
No I'm not, I'm looking at the numbers from the link that was posted in the story. A lot of the most rural counties seem to have a large number of registered Democrats, but also seemed to have a large Republican majority in the Presidential election. Those are facts, not in dispute as far as I know.
Also, many parts of Florida that were rural 10 years ago are now filled with Retirees from the North. The I-4 corridor for example has had a tremendous amont of growth in just the past 5 years.
Okay, well this may be true or may not, but if these voters were all transplanted Northerners, their voting patterns certainly didn't look like it - now maybe that's fraud, or maybe you're mistaken. Maybe the demographics really have changed in that area massively over the last 5 years - in which case I would expect a substantial shift in the number of registered Democrats vs. Republicans since the last election, and substantially different results overall in the those areas in these two elections. So if these counties have really become much more Democratic over the last 5 years, but there was still a massive Republican victory in those areas, then one would have to presume that there was massive voting fraud in that area.
In which case, I guess we can expect to hear a big stink any day now from the Democratic Party in Florida, right? I mean, I'd expect them to know the demographics of their state well enough to spot something that obvious.
Yes, I am trying to imply that in parts of the South, Democrats frequently vote Republican in national elections, since it's a commonly known fact. Go type "southern conservative democrat" into Google, read the Wikipedia entry on Dixiecrat, and you'll begin to get a clue why this is the case, historically and that it is a statement of fact.
I'm certainly not making this stuff up, as I am a Democrat myself. I'd love to discover that the numbers in these Florida counties are all wrong, and point to massive electrion fraud, and wake up tomorrow morning to find that Kerry is going to be President. But I'll need better numbers than this, more side-by-side historical and demographic data for these counties, and detailed exit poll results before I can conclude that.
See what I said here. There is an obvious way to correct for this kind of reticence (as pointed out in the blog post I linked to). Obviously, you still can't correct for people who outright lie, but it should be pretty easy to eliminate much of the selection bias on both sides, if any such consistent bias actually exists.
No, I don't think Florida is the "real South", but I don't think those Florida RedNecked Hicks are comparable to Northeasterners, nor do they vote the same way that people in West Palm or Ft. Lauderdale do.
Furthermore, while there are well-educated Dixiecrats out there, I'm pretty sure there are also lots of RedNecked Hicks elsewhere in the "true South" that are registered Democrat and vote Republican. You can't explain the large numbers and consistent voting behavior of people in Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama by a small number of well educated conservative Democrats - if those were the only "Dixiecrats" out there, then they wouldn't wield much political power at all.
I already responded to that piece of information. No, I wasn't aware that the founders and original CEOs of the two companies were brothers when I made that comment, and if you don't know that one piece of information, it does seem quite hard to believe that two otherwise directly competitive companies could collaborate in such a way.
In any case, as you can see, I withdrew that objection entirely. Just so you're clear, I'm a moderate Democrat and a social liberal, and I despise Diebold, so obviously I'd love to be proven wrong about this. I still don't see enough data there to conclude that fraud is the most likely explanation for the results, but I do now acknowledge that it is one possible explanation.
I was under the impression that exit polling methodology had been subjected to extensive review by statisticians since 2000 due to some of the previous problems with it. This was what the news networks were claiming anyway.
Anyway, it seems pretty trivial to construct a better methodology not subject to these weaknesses (take this proposal for instance). Not hard at all now, is it?