Sure it is. Besides, if MPs or Congressmen accept emails but don't respond to them, wouldn't that also be a way of "merely keeping the populace happy"?
Interestingly enough, the same people who built this petition system for the government also created WriteToThem — write your message in a text box on the site, and they email/fax/post it to your MP. This has the advantage of them being able to spot when an MP is ignoring people and they've published league tables and other statistics about how responsive MPs are.
As you may be aware, in December 2005 the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced that there would be a review of the intellectual property framework in the UK, led by Andrew Gowers.
The findings of this review have now been published and recommend the introduction of a private copying exception for the purposes of format shifting. This would allow individuals to copy music which they have legally bought on compact disc onto an MP3 player without infringing copyright.
The Government welcomes this recommendation and is currently considering how such an exception should be created in UK law.
Now obviously the petition didn't have a huge effect, but at least they are aware there is public demand for this, and it's helped me keep track of what they are actually doing about it.
how many Libraries of Congress you can fit into an elephant with this technology.
Well, this page estimates LoC at 10 terabytes, which works out to 81920 gigabits. According to the article, a bit density of 100 gigabits per square inch means that you'd need 819.20 square inches to store the Library of Congress.
According to this page, an elephant can reach 11 feet tall, or 132 inches, and 30 feet long, or 360 inches. According to this page, an elephant can reach 6'4" wide, or 76 inches. That's a dimension of 132 x 360 x 76 inches, or 3,611,520 square inches — assuming cubic elephants (there's a phrase you don't hear every day!).
Given these figures, a reasonable first guess would be that you could fit approximately 4,400 Libraries of Congress into an elephantine memory circuit. Or, if you prefer to work with more manageable quantities, 4.4 megalocs per kilophant.
How long before Google add LoCs to their calculator?
If you have Flash installed, we can recognize your computer in the event that you erase all your cookies.
If somebody is erasing all their cookies, chances are they don't want you hiding data elsewhere too. What happens when one of your customers wipes their cookies before selling their computer, and the buyer fishes out the sensitive data from the Flash storage instead because you've overridden their wishes?
I bet the bandwidth costs from attempted email delivery are huge even though there are no MX records and the server doesn't accept SMTP connections. In addition to spam harvesting, people like me have been using xyz@example.com to satisfy email address requirements for years.
That's what the.invalid TLD is for, also defined in RFC 2606.
".invalid" is intended for use in online construction of domain
names that are sure to be invalid and which it is obvious at a
glance are invalid.
Yes, that's totally feasible. You're mistaking the semantics of document types with the external DTD subset.
It's true that inventing new element types and putting them in your DTD isn't going to magically make software understand what those element types mean. But DTDs provide other information - for instance, what entity references expand to, which attributes are IDs, and so on. This is useful information and can be processed in a generic fashion.
Most of us hate DRM because no one has come up with that utopian DRM system.
Most of us hate DRM becuase it's impossible to come up with that utopian DRM system.
Here's the thing. Fair use is a pretty important part of copyright. But it's not defined rigidly. It depends on various things, and has to be judged by... you guessed it, a judge. This judge can use their years of experience, common law precedent and common sense to determine whether or not something falls under fair use.
To invent a DRM system that is not overly broad requires invention of a perfect artificial intelligence. There is no way around this requirement.
That is why most of us hate DRM. It necessarily requires infringement on fair use. Even in your make-believe what-ifs, it's impossible to come up with a satisfactory system.
Similarly, basic CSS pages look pretty good, but advanced ones aren't reliable. That's as much to do with CSS's failures as the browsers: designers are forced into contortions which push the edges of the implementations.
A hell of a lot of the contortions that designers go through would simply not be necessary if Internet Explorer supported CSS tabs and generated content, and Firefox supported display: inline-block.
Re:Most commercial AJAX apps have serious problems
on
Ajax Design Patterns
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Every single criticism here applies not just to typical Ajax applications, not just to typical web applications, but to typical applications. The software development industry is not focused on quality, thus quality is rare. You mention that you currently use Perl and Java-based systems. Do you write off these Perl and Java-based systems because abysmal systems have been written with those languages as well? No, you judge each application on its own merits instead of assuming that just because the average developer is incompetent that all developers using those systems are.
Now how about you stop copy & pasting this troll in every story that mentions Ajax?
Re:"Disagreement on Terminology"
on
Ajax Design Patterns
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I just don't put Usability "patterns" in the same category as the GoF patterns
Just because they are applied to a different concept, it doesn't mean that they aren't patterns. If you object to the leap from programming to usability, then surely you must also object to the term being used for programming in the first place, seeing as the term "design pattern" originated not in computing, but rather in architecture.
The basic concept of a design pattern is that there's a standard approach to solving a common problem, and you describe it and name it. By giving them names, you can talk about the thing you are working on at a higher level and you don't need to worry about the specifics as much when thinking about the overall project architecture. The term "design pattern" is valid for many different areas, basically anywhere where there's something too complex to keep entirely in your head in one go. As part of a web application, various solutions to usability problems certainly qualify for the "design pattern" moniker.
As you can see, none of the major free operating environments use the GPL exclusively, in fact half of them don't use it at all. Hell, GNOME is part of the GNU project, the FSF recommends the GPL instead of the LGPL, and GNOME ignores them and use the LGPL anyway.
I just don't see how anybody can think this is a good idea for debugging websites. If you see problems with a design, how on earth are you going to be able to tell which are caused by bugs in Internet Explorer and which are caused by bugs in WINE? I know Internet Explorer is exceptionally buggy, but in my experience, WINE is a hundred times worse.
If you're going to need to test in Internet Explorer on Linux, then full-machine virtualisation with a genuine copy of Windows is going to be far more reliable than a partial implementation of the Windows libraries. Yes, it uses more resources, but at least it's not likely to make you chase phantom bugs. The article points out that there are already problems with displaying GIFs - how many other problems like this are lurking waiting to be discovered?
This hack is useful if you really need to use an Internet Explorer-only website, but it just seems crazy to think this is useful for debugging websites.
Where is Gerald Ford when our nation needs him to rescue us from a cowboy?
Mods, are you kidding? Insightful? This should be +5, Funny. Ford's the guy that pardoned Nixon for things like this. Don't be fooled into thinking a bit of posthumous criticism means he's Bush's nemesis, actions speak louder than words, and Ford's actions clearly put him on Bush's side, not ours.
Brass Eye was the first thing I thought of as well.
Viewers were also told by MP Syd Rapson that paedophiles were using "an area of Internet the size of Ireland", and by Richard Blackwood that internet paedophiles can make computer keyboards emit noxious fumes in order to subdue children (Blackwood even sniffed a keyboard and claimed to be able to smell the fumes, which he said made him feel "suggestible").
For the people who haven't seen it, Brass Eye was a spoof documentary series, where celebrities were conned into saying outrageously stupid things by provoking their "think of the children" knee-jerk attitudes.
XML has no special cross-domain security over plain JSON.
It's not XML that is special, it's JSON, because it can be parsed as JavaScript.
Since you cannot receive or send data via XmlHttpRequest to a domain other than the one that served up the HTML, you will not be at risk if only JSON is returned.
You misunderstand, the whole point is that you don't need XMLHttpRequest if the data can be parsed as JavaScript. You just need to include it with a <script> element.
GMail. JSON should not be used for sensitive data because any old website can reference it simply by including it as an external script. The Google developers should not have used JSON for this information, they did, and that is why this information leak exists. There are ways to protect JSON from this (e.g. nonces) but you have to actually add this security yourself, rather than relying on the browser's built-in cross-domain security like you could if you were using XML etc.
However, the WHATWG specifies that HTML is no longer a formulation of SGML.
No, the WHATWG specifies that HTML 5 is not a formulation of SGML. They can't change the meaning of the HTML 2, 3.2 and 4 specifications. Pay close attention to the emphasised part of your quote:
The resulting confusion -- with validators claiming documents to have one representation while widely deployed Web browsers interoperably implemented a different representation -- has resulted in this version of HTML returning to a non-SGML basis.
They have every right to publish their own specification and have documents of that type parsed as they wish. But that's a far cry from retroactively changing the parsing rules for document types they did not create.
The WHATWG also specifies that all "text/html" documents should be treated as HTML5
I think that's pretty ludicrous. I also believe that they don't have the authority until they a) finish HTML 5 and b) get the IETF to publish a new RFC, stating this requirement, that obsoletes RFC 2854. Think about what that requirement entails: it effectively bans people from using other forms of HTML on the web.
Because 99% of the time, there's a perfectly good attribute that already exists for the purpose. In this case, it's class. No extension to HTML is necessary.
The rel attribute is designed to specify a forward relationship with the current document. Google broke that when they proposed 'nofollow'
If it were "unendorsed" instead of "nofollow", then the Googlebot could act in exactly the same way and it would be semantic (the relationship being stated is that the page's author has not necessarily approved the link). People were talking about this months before Google launched it on the world as a fait accompli, it's just a shame that they didn't listen.
There was a guy who proposed something called RSS-mail a few years back. It was the same guy who came up with SPF I think.
Quite possibly you are thinking of Dan Bernstein, the guy behind QMail, and his Internet Mail 2000.
He now has to store all of them on his server for some period of time so that you can pick them up.
Actually, no, all he has to do is implement a server that emits the same message every time somebody asks for one. You don't have to store a million emails to send a million emails, you just have to store one.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly enough, the same people who built this petition system for the government also created WriteToThem — write your message in a text box on the site, and they email/fax/post it to your MP. This has the advantage of them being able to spot when an MP is ignoring people and they've published league tables and other statistics about how responsive MPs are.
I signed a petition to add an exception to copyright law for personal use a month or two ago. A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from the system notifying me of the government's response:
Now obviously the petition didn't have a huge effect, but at least they are aware there is public demand for this, and it's helped me keep track of what they are actually doing about it.
Well, this page estimates LoC at 10 terabytes, which works out to 81920 gigabits. According to the article, a bit density of 100 gigabits per square inch means that you'd need 819.20 square inches to store the Library of Congress.
According to this page, an elephant can reach 11 feet tall, or 132 inches, and 30 feet long, or 360 inches. According to this page, an elephant can reach 6'4" wide, or 76 inches. That's a dimension of 132 x 360 x 76 inches, or 3,611,520 square inches — assuming cubic elephants (there's a phrase you don't hear every day!).
Given these figures, a reasonable first guess would be that you could fit approximately 4,400 Libraries of Congress into an elephantine memory circuit. Or, if you prefer to work with more manageable quantities, 4.4 megalocs per kilophant.
How long before Google add LoCs to their calculator?
From this article:
From the article you point to:
If somebody is erasing all their cookies, chances are they don't want you hiding data elsewhere too. What happens when one of your customers wipes their cookies before selling their computer, and the buyer fishes out the sensitive data from the Flash storage instead because you've overridden their wishes?
That's what the .invalid TLD is for, also defined in RFC 2606.
Yes, that's totally feasible. You're mistaking the semantics of document types with the external DTD subset.
It's true that inventing new element types and putting them in your DTD isn't going to magically make software understand what those element types mean. But DTDs provide other information - for instance, what entity references expand to, which attributes are IDs, and so on. This is useful information and can be processed in a generic fashion.
It's called a non-validating processor and it's totally compliant with the XML 1.0 specification.
SHATNER IS KIRK
Most of us hate DRM becuase it's impossible to come up with that utopian DRM system.
Here's the thing. Fair use is a pretty important part of copyright. But it's not defined rigidly. It depends on various things, and has to be judged by... you guessed it, a judge. This judge can use their years of experience, common law precedent and common sense to determine whether or not something falls under fair use.
To invent a DRM system that is not overly broad requires invention of a perfect artificial intelligence. There is no way around this requirement.
That is why most of us hate DRM. It necessarily requires infringement on fair use. Even in your make-believe what-ifs, it's impossible to come up with a satisfactory system.
A hell of a lot of the contortions that designers go through would simply not be necessary if Internet Explorer supported CSS tabs and generated content, and Firefox supported display: inline-block.
Every single criticism here applies not just to typical Ajax applications, not just to typical web applications, but to typical applications. The software development industry is not focused on quality, thus quality is rare. You mention that you currently use Perl and Java-based systems. Do you write off these Perl and Java-based systems because abysmal systems have been written with those languages as well? No, you judge each application on its own merits instead of assuming that just because the average developer is incompetent that all developers using those systems are.
Now how about you stop copy & pasting this troll in every story that mentions Ajax?
Just because they are applied to a different concept, it doesn't mean that they aren't patterns. If you object to the leap from programming to usability, then surely you must also object to the term being used for programming in the first place, seeing as the term "design pattern" originated not in computing, but rather in architecture.
The basic concept of a design pattern is that there's a standard approach to solving a common problem, and you describe it and name it. By giving them names, you can talk about the thing you are working on at a higher level and you don't need to worry about the specifics as much when thinking about the overall project architecture. The term "design pattern" is valid for many different areas, basically anywhere where there's something too complex to keep entirely in your head in one go. As part of a web application, various solutions to usability problems certainly qualify for the "design pattern" moniker.
I don't think that's remotely true.
GNOME is LGPL, not GPL. In fact, they consider it an advantage to not use the GPL.
KDE libraries are LGPL, KDE applications are GPL.
XFCE uses a mixture of the GPL, LGPL and BSD licenses.
Enlightenment uses the BSD license.
GNUStep uses the LGPL.
As you can see, none of the major free operating environments use the GPL exclusively, in fact half of them don't use it at all. Hell, GNOME is part of the GNU project, the FSF recommends the GPL instead of the LGPL, and GNOME ignores them and use the LGPL anyway.
I just don't see how anybody can think this is a good idea for debugging websites. If you see problems with a design, how on earth are you going to be able to tell which are caused by bugs in Internet Explorer and which are caused by bugs in WINE? I know Internet Explorer is exceptionally buggy, but in my experience, WINE is a hundred times worse.
If you're going to need to test in Internet Explorer on Linux, then full-machine virtualisation with a genuine copy of Windows is going to be far more reliable than a partial implementation of the Windows libraries. Yes, it uses more resources, but at least it's not likely to make you chase phantom bugs. The article points out that there are already problems with displaying GIFs - how many other problems like this are lurking waiting to be discovered?
This hack is useful if you really need to use an Internet Explorer-only website, but it just seems crazy to think this is useful for debugging websites.
Mods, are you kidding? Insightful? This should be +5, Funny. Ford's the guy that pardoned Nixon for things like this. Don't be fooled into thinking a bit of posthumous criticism means he's Bush's nemesis, actions speak louder than words, and Ford's actions clearly put him on Bush's side, not ours.
Brass Eye was the first thing I thought of as well.
For the people who haven't seen it, Brass Eye was a spoof documentary series, where celebrities were conned into saying outrageously stupid things by provoking their "think of the children" knee-jerk attitudes.
It's not XML that is special, it's JSON, because it can be parsed as JavaScript.
You misunderstand, the whole point is that you don't need XMLHttpRequest if the data can be parsed as JavaScript. You just need to include it with a <script> element.
GMail. JSON should not be used for sensitive data because any old website can reference it simply by including it as an external script. The Google developers should not have used JSON for this information, they did, and that is why this information leak exists. There are ways to protect JSON from this (e.g. nonces) but you have to actually add this security yourself, rather than relying on the browser's built-in cross-domain security like you could if you were using XML etc.
No, the WHATWG specifies that HTML 5 is not a formulation of SGML. They can't change the meaning of the HTML 2, 3.2 and 4 specifications. Pay close attention to the emphasised part of your quote:
They have every right to publish their own specification and have documents of that type parsed as they wish. But that's a far cry from retroactively changing the parsing rules for document types they did not create.
I think that's pretty ludicrous. I also believe that they don't have the authority until they a) finish HTML 5 and b) get the IETF to publish a new RFC, stating this requirement, that obsoletes RFC 2854. Think about what that requirement entails: it effectively bans people from using other forms of HTML on the web.
Because 99% of the time, there's a perfectly good attribute that already exists for the purpose. In this case, it's class. No extension to HTML is necessary.
You mean like PICS?
Magic URIs are a poor design. robots.txt was a mistaken hack, not something to be emulated.
If it were "unendorsed" instead of "nofollow", then the Googlebot could act in exactly the same way and it would be semantic (the relationship being stated is that the page's author has not necessarily approved the link). People were talking about this months before Google launched it on the world as a fait accompli, it's just a shame that they didn't listen.
There's plenty of places where NSFW is specified in link text already. This is just a way of making it machine-readable.
Such shortcuts have already existed since HTML 2. These have been universally ignored by browser developers.
Quite possibly you are thinking of Dan Bernstein, the guy behind QMail, and his Internet Mail 2000.
Actually, no, all he has to do is implement a server that emits the same message every time somebody asks for one. You don't have to store a million emails to send a million emails, you just have to store one.