If the party in power in the UK wants to imprison everyone whose last name begins with the letter "A", there
is nothing to stop them
This is not true. First the party in power has to write a law that makes it a crime to have such a name. Then they have to convince the democratically elected House of Commons to pass it. Then they have to convince the House of Lords to pass it. Then they have to convince the Queen to give her assent.
The party in power does not have the authority to imprison people at will without passing a law. That is a constitutionally protected right found in the Magna Carta, dating back almost eight centuries.
Did it scare anyone away from Microsoft when the Cubans were using Windows?
No, but there's a double standard at work here. When people hear "Windows", they think "Oh yeah, that thing I have on my computer". When people hear "Linux", they think "Huh? What's that? Oh yeah, isn't that the thing those commies in Cuba use?" Windows and Linux play by different rules because one is ubiquitous and the other isn't. That means any media exposure Linux has is magnified, while any media exposure Windows has evokes familiarity.
For some of the XML element names of each format, we're looking at over 16 characters overhead! When such tags are used repeatedly, especially in a large or heavily-formatted document, a lot of space ends up being wasted.
The XML is compressed before it is saved. Yes, there is redundancy in the source XML, but that doesn't mean you store the redundancy.
After all, if you are contributing patches, that means you don't have commit privileges. The people paid to work on Mozilla don't need to contribute patches because they just commit their changes.
There's a decentralised RDF-based "Semantic Web"-type version in the form of FOAF. You can already browse it with software like FOAFnautetc, and generate your own FOAF file with FOAF-a-matic. There was a crawler called Plink, but that seems to be dead now.
You're confused. "<tbody>" is a tag and is optional in both HTML and XHTML.
I'm not confused, I just use different delineation conventions to you. Talking about element type names can get confusing when they aren't set apart from the rest of the text (e.g. talking about tables as opposed to <table>s). Just because I use angle brackets, it doesn't mean I'm talking about tags — in the context of the discussion, I'm obviously talking about the element type, and I don't believe for a second you thought I was talking about tags. I mean, what on earth did you think I meant when I said:
In HTML, every table with one or more rows has a <tbody> element. Just because the tags aren't in the HTML, it doesn't mean the element isn't there.
It is not valid CSS, so it does not accurately measure how well the site adheres to CSS.
What site? Acid2 tests browsers, not sites. As such, it needs to include errors to test whether browsers handle errors correctly. This is not only acceptable, it's actually a requirement to be a proper test. CSS has defined error handling, meaning that the Acid2 test might be invalid code, but it should be parsed in one specific way.
I figured that the thead/tbody/tfoot were optional.
Well <tbody> is optional in XHTML, and <tr> elements can appear as direct children of <table> elements. This is one of the things that trips up people who think that the difference between HTML and XHTML is just in the error handling, lowercase element type names and closing every element explicitly. The following code actually means different things depending on whether it's parsed as HTML or XHTML:
<table> <tr> <td>...</td> </tr> </table>
That's why, if you are writing XHTML, you actually have to test it in both text/html and application/xhtml+xml modes before you can say with any confidence that your code is bug-free. Sure, validation helps, but a validator isn't going to catch when your JavaScript expects a <tbody> and it's only there when you serve your pages as text/html.
So before you get happy and appendChild(myrow) into the table, you gotta have a a tbody. Not sure if that's a misinterpretation of standards or what, but no other browser requires that you do this.
That actually sounds like every other browser has it wrong and Internet Explorer has it right (yes, in certain rare occasions, it has been known to happen). In HTML, every table with one or more rows has a <tbody> element. Just because the tags aren't in the HTML, it doesn't mean the element isn't there. <tr> elements cannot appear as direct children of <table> elements, the HTML parser understands that there is an implied <tbody> element and inserts it automatically. This is correct behaviour. If you don't believe me, start Firefox, open a test page, and fire up the DOM inspector. The <tbody> element will be there.
Now, that's all well and good, but the DOM doesn't have any concept of implied elements. That's a feature of the HTML parser, not the DOM. So if you are trying to table.appendChild(row), then it literally means that you want the row as a direct child of the table. That's not correct HTML.
Google used to include some of this information in their Zeitgeist, for example see December 2001. But just because they have representative users, it doesn't mean they can collect representative data from traffic analysis. Browser market share data culled from web statistics is good for entertainment, not for basing important decisions on.
How are you judging the accuracy of these statistics? I don't see any estimated error or confidence level. They don't describe their methodology. Are you doing what most people do and considering statistics "accurate" just because they reinforce your existing beliefs?
Make a javascript version and a non-js version, and if there's a browser not on the tested whilelist, go non-js.
In the particular case of JavaScript support, this is poor design. Identifying and testing in browsers is a slow, unreliable process, and needs constant maintenance as new browsers come out. It's been best practice for years to use feature/object detection.
Unless you are Google, don't worry about what Google's browser stats are. Instead, look at the browser stats of your OWN web site.
No, this is bad advice too. Walmart's just built a web service that only works in Internet Explorer. How many non-IE users do you think they are seeing in their logs compared with IE users? Looking at your current users can only tell you to keep doing more of the same.
What you need to measure is not what your current visitors use, but what your target audience uses. Unfortunately, the web wasn't built around this kind of need, HTTP is a stateless protocol with unreliable user-agent identification. What you need is good old-fashioned polling. In-band data can be skewed beyond usefulness.
...by the fact that in recent years he's reduced to trolling the Internet by making up terms like "Open Sores Movement". From Wikipedia:
The Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash [... that] reminds me of communism. [...] Linux [is like] organic software grown in utopia by spiritualists [...] When they bring organic fruit to market, you pay extra for small apples with open sores -- the Open Sores Movement. When [Windows 2000] gets here, goodbye Linux.
He might have got it right decades ago, but these days, he's just another clueless pundit troll.
Going back to OpenID, all I need to do is supply my own authentication server, and I have corroborated my own identification.
Trust and identity are two different things. You're talking about trust. The fact that you can make up multiple identities doesn't matter unless you want somebody to trust one of them for something.
Trust is a big problem; moreso than identity. Furthermore, trust systems have identity as a requirement. And identity is useful outside of any advanced trust system. It makes sense to solve the identity problem first before moving on to complicated web of trust models.
The OpenID people are careful to distinguish between identity and trust. Trust is outside the scope of OpenID, but it's likely that any worthwhile trust system can be built on top of OpenID. You shouldn't use lack of trust as a basis to reject OpenID; in fact large-scale adoption of OpenID may well be helpful in developing a decent trust system.
PS: The one organisation that I expected to support OpenID much sooner than this is Google. Anybody have any ideas why they haven't jumped on board yet?
this only provides the media companies with the means to takedown *anything*
Takedown notices are provided under penalty of perjury. In order to take things down that they don't hold the copyright to, like in this instance, they need to commit a crime.
We need to find a way to stop politicians [...] interfering with this country
It's called the House of Lords. When the House of Commons tries to do something especially daft, it's possible for the House of Lords to stop or delay them.
Oh, and "bogtha" is Irish for "intoxicated". Somebody had a sig way back that said they were convinced that people remembered sigs more often than usernames, so I just put my username in my sig. Three times to allude to Badger Badger Badger.
Conversely, your automatic dismissal of certain sites based on mentioning things in a "non-ironic manner" decreases your 'credibility of having an open mind'
Guess what? Not all claims are equal. If somebody repeatedly claims ludicrous things, then the chances of other claims they make being true drop dramatically. Your sources claim ridiculous things, so I don't trust them enough to waste my time looking through their stuff, especially when you could easily refer me directly to the articles you are thinking of.
I no longer care to provide you with such link because you would simply dismiss it if you did not agree with it.
I can't do that if they link to real sources as you claim they do. I just don't want to dig through copious amounts of drivel to get to the pages you claim reference credible sources.
I skimmed those sites. I didn't see anything about fingerprinting. I did spot that they support things like Loose Change, I did spot outright factual errors, and I did spot links to "actual articles" published by tabloids.
Perhaps you are right. But if so, you'll have no trouble providing links to those actual articles you mention, instead of vague hand-waving towards paranoid conspiracy sites that talk about the Illuminati without being ironic. I'm not going to waste my time picking through that garbage and it does your credibility damage to cite them.
I suppose you're referring to this, which affected eleven schools in a single city, and like I posted elsewhere:
Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show 11 schools in the city are using personal biometric data to identify pupils, but one said today they had suspended the practice, after a local politician voiced concerns.
A law passed by the government gave information on this to the public, and a politician acted on his constituents' behalves to stop it from continuing. Sure, it's a dumb move, but it's a dumb move that's out in the open and in the process of being corrected, and that is happening because in this case the political process is working properly.
So no, our government doesn't fingerprint children in schools, unless you count one city where it was tried and rejected by the public and politicians alike.
People who aren't from the UK often get confused by this. The Queen, for all practical purposes, has no political power. No monarch has entered the House of Commons in well over three centuries.
The last time they tried it was in 1642 — Charles I tried to arrest five MPs for treason, and the House of Commons told him to bugger off. Shortly afterwards he was defeated in civil war, and parliament created a court to put a monarch on trial for the first time in history — he ended up being executed.
These days, the monarch's representatives don't even enter the House of Commons unless they have permission from the Members of Parliament. They rarely even express any political opinions.
Lots of people read history books about how kings and queens used to be dictators, but that's exactly what it is — history. The monarchy is an anachronism; a leftover we use mainly as a tourist attraction. We don't "recall" them because there's no point, not because we can't.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not true. First the party in power has to write a law that makes it a crime to have such a name. Then they have to convince the democratically elected House of Commons to pass it. Then they have to convince the House of Lords to pass it. Then they have to convince the Queen to give her assent.
The party in power does not have the authority to imprison people at will without passing a law. That is a constitutionally protected right found in the Magna Carta, dating back almost eight centuries.
No, but there's a double standard at work here. When people hear "Windows", they think "Oh yeah, that thing I have on my computer". When people hear "Linux", they think "Huh? What's that? Oh yeah, isn't that the thing those commies in Cuba use?" Windows and Linux play by different rules because one is ubiquitous and the other isn't. That means any media exposure Linux has is magnified, while any media exposure Windows has evokes familiarity.
The XML is compressed before it is saved. Yes, there is redundancy in the source XML, but that doesn't mean you store the redundancy.
After all, if you are contributing patches, that means you don't have commit privileges. The people paid to work on Mozilla don't need to contribute patches because they just commit their changes.
There's a decentralised RDF-based "Semantic Web"-type version in the form of FOAF. You can already browse it with software like FOAFnaut etc, and generate your own FOAF file with FOAF-a-matic. There was a crawler called Plink, but that seems to be dead now.
I'm not confused, I just use different delineation conventions to you. Talking about element type names can get confusing when they aren't set apart from the rest of the text (e.g. talking about tables as opposed to <table>s). Just because I use angle brackets, it doesn't mean I'm talking about tags — in the context of the discussion, I'm obviously talking about the element type, and I don't believe for a second you thought I was talking about tags. I mean, what on earth did you think I meant when I said:
What site? Acid2 tests browsers, not sites. As such, it needs to include errors to test whether browsers handle errors correctly. This is not only acceptable, it's actually a requirement to be a proper test. CSS has defined error handling, meaning that the Acid2 test might be invalid code, but it should be parsed in one specific way.
Well <tbody> is optional in XHTML, and <tr> elements can appear as direct children of <table> elements. This is one of the things that trips up people who think that the difference between HTML and XHTML is just in the error handling, lowercase element type names and closing every element explicitly. The following code actually means different things depending on whether it's parsed as HTML or XHTML:
That's why, if you are writing XHTML, you actually have to test it in both text/html and application/xhtml+xml modes before you can say with any confidence that your code is bug-free. Sure, validation helps, but a validator isn't going to catch when your JavaScript expects a <tbody> and it's only there when you serve your pages as text/html.
That actually sounds like every other browser has it wrong and Internet Explorer has it right (yes, in certain rare occasions, it has been known to happen). In HTML, every table with one or more rows has a <tbody> element. Just because the tags aren't in the HTML, it doesn't mean the element isn't there. <tr> elements cannot appear as direct children of <table> elements, the HTML parser understands that there is an implied <tbody> element and inserts it automatically. This is correct behaviour. If you don't believe me, start Firefox, open a test page, and fire up the DOM inspector. The <tbody> element will be there.
Now, that's all well and good, but the DOM doesn't have any concept of implied elements. That's a feature of the HTML parser, not the DOM. So if you are trying to table.appendChild(row), then it literally means that you want the row as a direct child of the table. That's not correct HTML.
Google used to include some of this information in their Zeitgeist, for example see December 2001. But just because they have representative users, it doesn't mean they can collect representative data from traffic analysis. Browser market share data culled from web statistics is good for entertainment, not for basing important decisions on.
How are you judging the accuracy of these statistics? I don't see any estimated error or confidence level. They don't describe their methodology. Are you doing what most people do and considering statistics "accurate" just because they reinforce your existing beliefs?
In the particular case of JavaScript support, this is poor design. Identifying and testing in browsers is a slow, unreliable process, and needs constant maintenance as new browsers come out. It's been best practice for years to use feature/object detection.
No, this is bad advice too. Walmart's just built a web service that only works in Internet Explorer. How many non-IE users do you think they are seeing in their logs compared with IE users? Looking at your current users can only tell you to keep doing more of the same.
What you need to measure is not what your current visitors use, but what your target audience uses. Unfortunately, the web wasn't built around this kind of need, HTTP is a stateless protocol with unreliable user-agent identification. What you need is good old-fashioned polling. In-band data can be skewed beyond usefulness.
He might have got it right decades ago, but these days, he's just another clueless pundit troll.
Trust and identity are two different things. You're talking about trust. The fact that you can make up multiple identities doesn't matter unless you want somebody to trust one of them for something.
Trust is a big problem; moreso than identity. Furthermore, trust systems have identity as a requirement. And identity is useful outside of any advanced trust system. It makes sense to solve the identity problem first before moving on to complicated web of trust models.
The OpenID people are careful to distinguish between identity and trust. Trust is outside the scope of OpenID, but it's likely that any worthwhile trust system can be built on top of OpenID. You shouldn't use lack of trust as a basis to reject OpenID; in fact large-scale adoption of OpenID may well be helpful in developing a decent trust system.
PS: The one organisation that I expected to support OpenID much sooner than this is Google. Anybody have any ideas why they haven't jumped on board yet?
Takedown notices are provided under penalty of perjury. In order to take things down that they don't hold the copyright to, like in this instance, they need to commit a crime.
It's called the House of Lords. When the House of Commons tries to do something especially daft, it's possible for the House of Lords to stop or delay them.
Thank you. Yes, I'm primarily interested in the UK. A little bit of research on that story turns up more information and a followup. It looks like MPs hassled the government, it was determined that parental consent is necessary, and the fingerprinters are backing off, or at least making parents aware of the issue.
Following it up with a better source, Greg Mulholland MP seems to be the MP that is pressing the matter the most and he's not dropping it. Seems to be a good bloke all around - against ID cards, against terrorism laws, and for an investigation into Iraq.
Oh, and "bogtha" is Irish for "intoxicated". Somebody had a sig way back that said they were convinced that people remembered sigs more often than usernames, so I just put my username in my sig. Three times to allude to Badger Badger Badger.
Guess what? Not all claims are equal. If somebody repeatedly claims ludicrous things, then the chances of other claims they make being true drop dramatically. Your sources claim ridiculous things, so I don't trust them enough to waste my time looking through their stuff, especially when you could easily refer me directly to the articles you are thinking of.
I can't do that if they link to real sources as you claim they do. I just don't want to dig through copious amounts of drivel to get to the pages you claim reference credible sources.
One of the PostgreSQL developers quoted in the article feels this article is inaccurate in some ways.
I skimmed those sites. I didn't see anything about fingerprinting. I did spot that they support things like Loose Change, I did spot outright factual errors, and I did spot links to "actual articles" published by tabloids.
Perhaps you are right. But if so, you'll have no trouble providing links to those actual articles you mention, instead of vague hand-waving towards paranoid conspiracy sites that talk about the Illuminati without being ironic. I'm not going to waste my time picking through that garbage and it does your credibility damage to cite them.
No, in the eyes of the law, you are a suspect. You aren't a criminal until you either plead guilty or are found guilty in court.
I suppose you're referring to this, which affected eleven schools in a single city, and like I posted elsewhere:
So no, our government doesn't fingerprint children in schools, unless you count one city where it was tried and rejected by the public and politicians alike.
People who aren't from the UK often get confused by this. The Queen, for all practical purposes, has no political power. No monarch has entered the House of Commons in well over three centuries.
The last time they tried it was in 1642 — Charles I tried to arrest five MPs for treason, and the House of Commons told him to bugger off. Shortly afterwards he was defeated in civil war, and parliament created a court to put a monarch on trial for the first time in history — he ended up being executed.
These days, the monarch's representatives don't even enter the House of Commons unless they have permission from the Members of Parliament. They rarely even express any political opinions.
Lots of people read history books about how kings and queens used to be dictators, but that's exactly what it is — history. The monarchy is an anachronism; a leftover we use mainly as a tourist attraction. We don't "recall" them because there's no point, not because we can't.
Here's a few that spring to mind:
Okay, so we don't have referenda for trivial stuff like pub opening hours, but we have them for the really important stuff.