This sounds a lot more like a malformed regular expression than a proper buffer overrun. Something like "" to read part of a From: address on a shared mbox file would do the trick. In that case the error would be reading the wrong data, not a memory management issue.
This particular professor was in fact an alarmist. I am not asserting that all proponents of global warming are alarmists. Also, I am not purporting that I myself have an opinion one way or another on global warming.
Now that you have Godwined this thread, I think it is officially over;->
Actually, your post is quite impressive in its thoughtfulness.
I would simply urge you to consider the role of journalism. Whereas a science textbook, as you point out, needs to focus on consensus ideas to present material coherently, a news account has almost the opposite mission: present novel, consensus changing information, because it is designed for informed people who want NEW information.
You raise the key point with this: new scientific information is extremeley suspicious. Journalists perhaps need to exercise more restraint an patience than they have. But they need less restraint than a textbook editor. Much less.
No reputable scientific journal or conference will publish work without subjecting it to a rigorous peer review process. What is peer review if not a consensus-taking operation to determine the correctness, value, novelty, and significance of a piece of scientific work?
I chose my words very carefully. I said *opinions* have no bearing on the issue. The peer review you describe is, by your own description, a review of "correctness" -- a factual review, and this is exactly what Crichton says is the basis of science.
Also, opinions on value and significance are important but they are not the core of science or the heart of peer review. Getting the facts straight is what matters.
I say this, of course, as someone entirely outside the field. But "the scientific consensus," as a phrase, is far too vague to damn some piece of research, or to elevate. Specific factual counterclaims are what should drive the evaluation of science. Crichton's point is that a vague "scientific consensus" is a matter of opinion rather than fact.
Repeatedly, one bright investigator sees a scientific truth much earlier than the rest. So what?
So journalists should be out looking for the bright investigators, because it can take decades for the scientific "consensus" to change from false to correct.
So we should not assume scientitific consensus equals scientific truth.
So quashing dissent is bad policy, because it prevents precisely the sort of follow up research you say is essentialy (as does Crichton, if you read his lecture).
It is worth noting that this is a lecture, not a scientific paper. From CalTech.edu: "The goal of the Michelin Distinguished Visitor Lecture Series--established in 1992 by designer Bonnie Cashin in memory of her uncle, James Michelin--is to promote creative interaction between the arts and sciences."
He is an MD and did a post-doctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, but he is not a PhD, so skepticism is warranted. Actually, it's warranted no matter what his credentials are.
But skepticism is not the same as dismissing something out of hand. Saying the essay should not be taken seriously -- should not even be considered -- sounds a bit extreme and might tend to make the casual observer think Chricton has a point about Global Warming being more religion than science.
Sometimes it's the consensus that's wrong, and the new idea that's right; but probably more often it's the other way around.
Do you really want journlists making this decision on your behalf? Is it really so dangerous for them to report on the other side and allow YOU, the reader, to decide? I think the harm of ignoring dissenting opinion is much greater than any harm that comes from having it aired. If the dissenting opinion is moronic, airing the opinion should only make this more apparent.
Journalists can either accelerate or retard the process of consensus change. I think they should accelerate it, and you don't do that without listening to dissenting voices.
The only "scientists" that argue that global warming isn't occuring, or that Big Oil etc. aren't involved if it is occuring are repeatedly debunked as liars or just extremely bad scientists
The difference between your worldview and mine is not that I listen to idiots while you suffer no fools. The difference between your worldview in mine, instead, is that I have a powerful sense of what I do not know.
I know that I have no hope of making an informed decision on how the temperature of our extremely complex ecosystem will react over decades to human carbon dioxide emissions. It's not just that I haven't reviewed the literature. It's not just that I have no scientific training. It's not just that I want to avoid a bad scientific consensus like "flat earth society." I have also been told by some of the best-trained and most vociferous global warming alarmists that event they cannot submit global warming as anything other than a theory -- the earth as a whole is an incredibly complex variable to be studying.
In fact, the complexity in any given situation is staggering. Scott Peterson trial? Pre-invasion evaluation of Hussein's weapons capabilities?
You have every right to pass summary judgement based on your limited review of the facts. We as citizens have to do that from time to time to make the simplest decisions (as we did on Nov. 2).
But you are wrong, dead wrong, to ask the news media to make these decisions for us. This might be emotionally appealing -- watching the Daily Show is great fun -- but decisions and opinions need to be fueled to the greatest extent possible by information, not by OTHER decisions and opinions.
I will take media who talk to both sides -- and in a debate there ARE always two sides, or else it wouldn't be a debate -- over someone like you who presumes to know, for example, the truth on the Scott Peterson trial, based not on a courtroom review of the evidence as a juror but as a media spectator.
I will take a media who talk to both sides over someone who presumes to know the truth about global warming. Period.
I will take a stupid contrarian over an arrogant intellectual bully any day.
Perhaps if more people considered that there are often two sides to the story, and that investigating this possibility is worthwhile, even against the risk of looking stupid; and fewer people whose primary occupcation was to elevate their own reputation, by drawing laughs on television or mod points on a website, then we might avoid rushing to judgement so often.
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
"There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
"In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let's review a few cases.
"In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth . One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent "skeptics" around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.
"There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the "pellagra germ." The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called "Goldberger's filth parties." Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.
"Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.
"And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy. The list of consensus errors goes on and on. "
Your point about the easy technical workaround for SPF is well taken.
As to your continued fraud assertion: No.
Using the NYT website to forward a link is no more a fraud than using my SBC DSL account to send mail from my work account. The newspaper is not independently sending mail -- it is providing an interface through which I may send mail, just like an ISP or webmail provider.
The email address belongs to me, not the service provider, and I should be able to send from wherever I see fit. If the service provider wants to offer more restrictive terms than that, fine, but there is no fraud in what you describe.
As for privacy concerns, I agree that one must read carefully the terms and policies of any ISP, free webmail, forwarding service, photo management service, etc.
As for the rest I assume we respectfully disagree;->
If most proponets of CSS would admit CSS restricts Web compatibility to only the latest and greatest browsers on only the latest and greatest platforms, your (accurate) observation would not be so ironic. Instead they pretend it's about broadening access and criticize people for using FONT, B, TABLE, etc, as though these tags were somehow evil.
It was also nice when the Web browser could lay out the page as soon as it was downloaded, even *as* it was downloaded. Now it needs to fetch the page, parse it, request all the embedded CSS sheets and JS files, all before it can lay out a single pixel. Ick.
Also, CSS in my experience degrades far less gracefully than tables, despite all the hooplah to the contrary. Anyone who thinks CSS is cross platform should try using an iMac that can't be upgraded to Mac OS X. Yahoo Calendar was redesigned with CSS, and it actually will not display on my computer any more, even with the latest IE. Other CSS-driven sites squeeze text into columns that are two characters wide, or send images way off into space...
The problem isn't with HTML, it's with all the crap people are trying to do with the presentation layer. Everyone has to change the link colors and position things just so -- get over yourselves. Create some new tags for navigation menus and wrap everything in the tags that worked on Netscape 1.1. And keep HTML HTML.
I can't really comment on the informative and technical accuracy of what I read because well... I don't read them:)
Oh my God, I know what you're talking about. There's nothing like pictures of hot girls.
Along those lines, my favorite magazine is Governing, "the magazine of states and localities." This magazine is HOTTT!!!
If you don't believe me, or think I'm a shill for those sensationalist bastards at Congressional Quarterly Inc. (publisher), check out these scorching excerpts on some SERIOUS SEDUCTRESSES!:
*On Wisconsin tax administrator Dia-ne Hardt: "sA state tax officials from around the country niggled over hundreds of tiny details, Hardt, administrator of the Division of Income, Sales and Excise Tax in Wisconsin, kept them constantly focused on the big picture... In a cross-country blitz fueled by gallons of Diet Coke, Hardt has spoken at dozens of conferences and pressed her case before numerous state legislatures. She reminds people that sales taxes help pay for important services such as schools and police, and that taxing Internet sales is a simple matter of fairness to Main Street retailers who have always had to collect sales taxes."
*California Assemblymember Fran Pavle-y: "A former junior high school civics teacher who went on to serve as the first mayor of the Los Angeles suburb of Agoura Hills, Pavley debuted as a legislator by pressing a measure even her own staff advised her to avoid... In fact, the state just acted on one of her longtime priorities, announcing in October it would purchase the 3,000-acre Ahmanson Ranch as open space rather than let it be developed. Other issues garnering Pavley's attention: that one out of every seven schoolchildren in Fresno uses an asthma inhaler, that Los Angeles suffered through its worst smog in five years this past summer, and that air pollution now tops the list of citizens' concerns in the state's Central Valley."
*Former Texas chief information officer Carolyn Purce ll: "During her nine years as the state's top technology official, Purcell improved the state's record for delivering projects on time and on budget, connected state services to citizens through a user-friendly Web portal, focused on security before it popped up on the national agenda, and developed a money-saving procurement program."
I know, I know -- that's all a little too racy to be reading at work. But if you subscribe, you'll be getting the magazine at home, and you won't be able to *help* but tear into stories on "expanding privatization beyond service delivery," "brownfields and urban land recycling," and "the tax-avoidance games corporations play."
Just remember to hide all your copies before you bring your dates home!!
Well I know the story is already two hours old (gasp), but it appears to be ill-supported. The linked article plainly states...
1. That this warship class will enter service in 2011: "When the U.S. Navy's first integrated power system (IPS)/electric drive warship arrives in 2011 as the DD(X), the service will mark a technological breakthrough..."
2. That this warship class will debut without a rail gun or any other advanced weapon system: " When the new ship arrives in service it will be armed with very advanced, but conventional weaponry, including two United Defense 155mm Advanced Gun System cannons and an 80-cell vertical launch system for various guided missiles. But these systems are stepping stones to greater capabilities..."
3. The Navy won't even decide whether to fund a rail gun for years: "Whatever investment decisions are made for weapons the next several years, the Navy already is engineering the potential these technologies require, according to Collins and his IPS/electric drive team for DD(X)."
The speculative linked white paper goes no further, advocating that a rail gun *proof of concept test* *could* happen by 2008:
"A focused technology development program that leads to a series of experiments that culminate in a full-scale extended-range naval rail gun proof-of-concept demonstration in fiscal year 2008 is a sensible approach."
Re:TechnoAntiBlogDystopia
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Meet Joe Blog
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· Score: 1
There were at *least* two ounces of truth in that little bile bucket!!
Anyway, your counterargument is actually really sharp. I remember picking up the local BBS directory when I was in high school and even just reading the titles of the forums it was clear this was not really a technical environment.
And yes I should have had a detour into Shirky's "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" and talked about how politicking and arguing and seducing and so forth are a part of any group creativity and explained that's why I ignored that stuff.
Ultimately my only defense to your post is that I was really trying to talk about the Web. And if you look at what I wrote, I used that actual word, "Web." Because it's the only online medium where I can say I have been using it for at least the majority of its life (I have been using it since 94).
I'm going to take your "please go away" in the best possible spirit and note that I love the stuff here. Except I've had it with people here (and elsewhere, but the same technically oriented group of "I know what the Web is all about" elitists) getting on about how much l4m3r all the weblog stuff is (as if posting on Slashdot were up there with composing Ulysses).
Re:TechnoAntiBlogDystopia
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Meet Joe Blog
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· Score: 2, Insightful
don't try to pretend that you, or your chosen style of writing, has any sort of exclusive right to this medium; for that assumption is as mistaken as it is arrogant.
I'm not saying "ban things I find boring from the Internet." Otherwise all my own pap would be banned, because it is boring as hell, including the post in question.
I'm saying what you're saying. This is an Internet for all of us. I am not a second class citizen because I write something silly about cheese and you write something boring about XML-RPC! To some people your XMLRPC thing will help them whup an integration project and for some people my cheese thing might help them plan a wicked picnic.
And every time blogs make it on Slashdot I have to read all this bashing of what everday people write about online, as though Slashdot is universally regarded as unboringashell.
I would boil my boring post down as, "I am sick of the engineers who run the Internet judging and bitching about how I am using this fabulous network infrastructure they have built, when they're not exactly writing universally fascinating stuff."
I suppose that message would have gotten through if I hadn't sounded so arrogant;->
TechnoAntiBlogDystopia
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Meet Joe Blog
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I can imagine all the kvetching we're about to hear about how mundane and pointless the vast majority of weblogs and personal websites are (ala this and this), and how too many people are jumping online to post what they had for lunch or what they thought of Lord of the Rings or what they did over the weekend or pictures of themselves drinking a beer, and how it's all a bunch of crap. Someone will use the term "signal to noise ratio," someone will use the word "dreck," someone else will say "mundane."
Here's the thing: Even the most mundane minutae of human existence if fascinating compared with the prevailing (but fading) obsession with network topology and computer technology. The Web was not invented so people could talk about the Web. You People -- the technologists on Slashdot -- have had control of the vast majority of original Internet writing for the past ten years, and it's been nothing but CSS this, or XML that, or RPC SOAP OSS GNU GPL PHP this, or PGP that, SSL HTTP HTML DOM.NET blah blah blah... Webmonkey stuff.
Does technical discussion have its place on a network first used to distribute physics papers and so forth? Of course. Is talking about the network by definition the most boring thing to do on the network? Absolutely. Do I like asking myself easy, rhetorical questions? YES!!!
My point is, people are going to post baby pictures and bad cryptical poetry about their personal lives and recipes for pulled pork and shallow reviews of episodes of popular mindless TV shows, and I think that's brilliant. It means the network is finally open -- FOR WRITING -- by the masses. By people who are not engineers. It means everday people are CREATING media rather than just consuming it. You might think it's dreck, but their friends and family will get something out of it, and every now and then we'll discover someone writing (or singing or designing or photographing or filming) something brilliant and posting it on their blog, and we'll get something the likes of Viacom or Time Warner wouldn't have put in front of us if we paid them to.
And there will finally be more to the Web than tech talk and old media shovelware.
The only reasons to use perl over PHP for web development are 1.) familiarity with perl (slashdot), and 2.) security (to avoid "today's php upload root exploit").
So PHP is ideal unless, you know, you don't want to be rooted...
Slashdot Mirror
woops, that malformed regex should be:
"<(.+?)>"
or just
(.+?)
surrounded by angle brackets
This sounds a lot more like a malformed regular expression than a proper buffer overrun. Something like "" to read part of a From: address on a shared mbox file would do the trick. In that case the error would be reading the wrong data, not a memory management issue.
This particular professor was in fact an alarmist. I am not asserting that all proponents of global warming are alarmists. Also, I am not purporting that I myself have an opinion one way or another on global warming.
;->
Now that you have Godwined this thread, I think it is officially over
Actually, your post is quite impressive in its thoughtfulness.
I would simply urge you to consider the role of journalism. Whereas a science textbook, as you point out, needs to focus on consensus ideas to present material coherently, a news account has almost the opposite mission: present novel, consensus changing information, because it is designed for informed people who want NEW information.
You raise the key point with this: new scientific information is extremeley suspicious. Journalists perhaps need to exercise more restraint an patience than they have. But they need less restraint than a textbook editor. Much less.
No reputable scientific journal or conference will publish work without subjecting it to a rigorous peer review process. What is peer review if not a consensus-taking operation to determine the correctness, value, novelty, and significance of a piece of scientific work?
I chose my words very carefully. I said *opinions* have no bearing on the issue. The peer review you describe is, by your own description, a review of "correctness" -- a factual review, and this is exactly what Crichton says is the basis of science.
Also, opinions on value and significance are important but they are not the core of science or the heart of peer review. Getting the facts straight is what matters.
I say this, of course, as someone entirely outside the field. But "the scientific consensus," as a phrase, is far too vague to damn some piece of research, or to elevate. Specific factual counterclaims are what should drive the evaluation of science. Crichton's point is that a vague "scientific consensus" is a matter of opinion rather than fact.
Repeatedly, one bright investigator sees a scientific truth much earlier than the rest. So what?
So journalists should be out looking for the bright investigators, because it can take decades for the scientific "consensus" to change from false to correct.
So we should not assume scientitific consensus equals scientific truth.
So quashing dissent is bad policy, because it prevents precisely the sort of follow up research you say is essentialy (as does Crichton, if you read his lecture).
It is worth noting that this is a lecture, not a scientific paper. From CalTech.edu: "The goal of the Michelin Distinguished Visitor Lecture Series--established in 1992 by designer Bonnie Cashin in memory of her uncle, James Michelin--is to promote creative interaction between the arts and sciences."
He is an MD and did a post-doctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, but he is not a PhD, so skepticism is warranted. Actually, it's warranted no matter what his credentials are.
But skepticism is not the same as dismissing something out of hand. Saying the essay should not be taken seriously -- should not even be considered -- sounds a bit extreme and might tend to make the casual observer think Chricton has a point about Global Warming being more religion than science.
Sometimes it's the consensus that's wrong, and the new idea that's right; but probably more often it's the other way around.
Do you really want journlists making this decision on your behalf? Is it really so dangerous for them to report on the other side and allow YOU, the reader, to decide? I think the harm of ignoring dissenting opinion is much greater than any harm that comes from having it aired. If the dissenting opinion is moronic, airing the opinion should only make this more apparent.
Journalists can either accelerate or retard the process of consensus change. I think they should accelerate it, and you don't do that without listening to dissenting voices.
The only "scientists" that argue that global warming isn't occuring, or that Big Oil etc. aren't involved if it is occuring are repeatedly debunked as liars or just extremely bad scientists
The difference between your worldview and mine is not that I listen to idiots while you suffer no fools. The difference between your worldview in mine, instead, is that I have a powerful sense of what I do not know.
I know that I have no hope of making an informed decision on how the temperature of our extremely complex ecosystem will react over decades to human carbon dioxide emissions. It's not just that I haven't reviewed the literature. It's not just that I have no scientific training. It's not just that I want to avoid a bad scientific consensus like "flat earth society." I have also been told by some of the best-trained and most vociferous global warming alarmists that event they cannot submit global warming as anything other than a theory -- the earth as a whole is an incredibly complex variable to be studying.
In fact, the complexity in any given situation is staggering. Scott Peterson trial? Pre-invasion evaluation of Hussein's weapons capabilities?
You have every right to pass summary judgement based on your limited review of the facts. We as citizens have to do that from time to time to make the simplest decisions (as we did on Nov. 2).
But you are wrong, dead wrong, to ask the news media to make these decisions for us. This might be emotionally appealing -- watching the Daily Show is great fun -- but decisions and opinions need to be fueled to the greatest extent possible by information, not by OTHER decisions and opinions.
the consensus of 50% of the population in the US was able to see that the false pretenses for the Iraq war
The word "consensus" does not mean what you think it means.
I will take media who talk to both sides -- and in a debate there ARE always two sides, or else it wouldn't be a debate -- over someone like you who presumes to know, for example, the truth on the Scott Peterson trial, based not on a courtroom review of the evidence as a juror but as a media spectator.
I will take a media who talk to both sides over someone who presumes to know the truth about global warming. Period.
I will take a stupid contrarian over an arrogant intellectual bully any day.
Perhaps if more people considered that there are often two sides to the story, and that investigating this possibility is worthwhile, even against the risk of looking stupid; and fewer people whose primary occupcation was to elevate their own reputation, by drawing laughs on television or mod points on a website, then we might avoid rushing to judgement so often.
Yes, we're talking science -- not politics. The aggregate opinions of the community have no bearing on the issue. Data does.
From Aliens Cause Global Warming By Michael Crichton:
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with
consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary,
requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he
or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In
science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.
The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke
with the consensus.
"There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't
science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
"In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is
nothing to be proud of. Let's review a few cases.
"In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following
childbirth . One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon
of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was
able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes
claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence.
The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary
techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his
management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him
from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the
start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and
twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of
the prominent "skeptics" around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and
ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.
"There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of
thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra.
The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary
was to find the "pellagra germ." The US government asked a brilliant young
investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded
that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ
theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through
diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the
blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other
volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and
swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called
"Goldberger's filth parties." Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus
continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social
factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because
it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until
the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took
years to see the light.
"Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit
together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the
continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental
drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great
names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were
spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what
any schoolchild sees.
"And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and
smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory,
fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy. The list of consensus
errors goes on and on. "
Thank you for your intelligent reply. I couldn't have said it better myself.
Your point about the easy technical workaround for SPF is well taken.
;->
As to your continued fraud assertion: No.
Using the NYT website to forward a link is no more a fraud than using my SBC DSL account to send mail from my work account. The newspaper is not independently sending mail -- it is providing an interface through which I may send mail, just like an ISP or webmail provider.
The email address belongs to me, not the service provider, and I should be able to send from wherever I see fit. If the service provider wants to offer more restrictive terms than that, fine, but there is no fraud in what you describe.
As for privacy concerns, I agree that one must read carefully the terms and policies of any ISP, free webmail, forwarding service, photo management service, etc.
As for the rest I assume we respectfully disagree
Right, because unless you're at home when you put a return address on an envelope, you are engaging in forgery.
What a crock.
If most proponets of CSS would admit CSS restricts Web compatibility to only the latest and greatest browsers on only the latest and greatest platforms, your (accurate) observation would not be so ironic. Instead they pretend it's about broadening access and criticize people for using FONT, B, TABLE, etc, as though these tags were somehow evil.
IE for Mac is a fairly nice browser actually. And the Mozilla team stopped supporting my platform long ago.
Agreed. And I do remember those days.
...
It was also nice when the Web browser could lay out the page as soon as it was downloaded, even *as* it was downloaded. Now it needs to fetch the page, parse it, request all the embedded CSS sheets and JS files, all before it can lay out a single pixel. Ick.
Also, CSS in my experience degrades far less gracefully than tables, despite all the hooplah to the contrary. Anyone who thinks CSS is cross platform should try using an iMac that can't be upgraded to Mac OS X. Yahoo Calendar was redesigned with CSS, and it actually will not display on my computer any more, even with the latest IE. Other CSS-driven sites squeeze text into columns that are two characters wide, or send images way off into space
The problem isn't with HTML, it's with all the crap people are trying to do with the presentation layer. Everyone has to change the link colors and position things just so -- get over yourselves. Create some new tags for navigation menus and wrap everything in the tags that worked on Netscape 1.1. And keep HTML HTML.
I can't really comment on the informative and technical accuracy of what I read because well... I don't read them :)
... In a cross-country blitz fueled by gallons of Diet Coke, Hardt has spoken at dozens of conferences and pressed her case before numerous state legislatures. She reminds people that sales taxes help pay for important services such as schools and police, and that taxing Internet sales is a simple matter of fairness to Main Street retailers who have always had to collect sales taxes."
... In fact, the state just acted on one of her longtime priorities, announcing in October it would purchase the 3,000-acre Ahmanson Ranch as open space rather than let it be developed. Other issues garnering Pavley's attention: that one out of every seven schoolchildren in Fresno uses an asthma inhaler, that Los Angeles suffered through its worst smog in five years this past summer, and that air pollution now tops the list of citizens' concerns in the state's Central Valley."
Oh my God, I know what you're talking about. There's nothing like pictures of hot girls.
Along those lines, my favorite magazine is Governing, "the magazine of states and localities." This magazine is HOTTT!!!
If you don't believe me, or think I'm a shill for those sensationalist bastards at Congressional Quarterly Inc. (publisher), check out these scorching excerpts on some SERIOUS SEDUCTRESSES!:
*On Wisconsin tax administrator Dia-ne Hardt: "sA state tax officials from around the country niggled over hundreds of tiny details, Hardt, administrator of the Division of Income, Sales and Excise Tax in Wisconsin, kept them constantly focused on the big picture
*California Assemblymember Fran Pavle-y: "A former junior high school civics teacher who went on to serve as the first mayor of the Los Angeles suburb of Agoura Hills, Pavley debuted as a legislator by pressing a measure even her own staff advised her to avoid
*Former Texas chief information officer Carolyn Purce ll: "During her nine years as the state's top technology official, Purcell improved the state's record for delivering projects on time and on budget, connected state services to citizens through a user-friendly Web portal, focused on security before it popped up on the national agenda, and developed a money-saving procurement program."
I know, I know -- that's all a little too racy to be reading at work. But if you subscribe, you'll be getting the magazine at home, and you won't be able to *help* but tear into stories on "expanding privatization beyond service delivery," "brownfields and urban land recycling," and "the tax-avoidance games corporations play."
Just remember to hide all your copies before you bring your dates home!!
(Seriously, though, Governing really does rock, and I really am a paid subscriber. If you don't trust me, trust your favorite ex-Slashdot pundit!)
Well I know the story is already two hours old (gasp), but it appears to be ill-supported. The linked article plainly states ...
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1. That this warship class will enter service in 2011:
"When the U.S. Navy's first integrated power system (IPS)/electric drive warship arrives in 2011 as the DD(X), the service will mark a technological breakthrough
2. That this warship class will debut without a rail gun or any other advanced weapon system:
" When the new ship arrives in service it will be armed with very advanced, but conventional weaponry, including two United Defense 155mm Advanced Gun System cannons and an 80-cell vertical launch system for various guided missiles. But these systems are stepping stones to greater capabilities
3. The Navy won't even decide whether to fund a rail gun for years:
"Whatever investment decisions are made for weapons the next several years, the Navy already is engineering the potential these technologies require, according to Collins and his IPS/electric drive team for DD(X)."
The speculative linked white paper goes no further, advocating that a rail gun *proof of concept test* *could* happen by 2008:
"A focused technology development program that leads to a series of experiments that culminate in a full-scale extended-range naval rail gun proof-of-concept demonstration in fiscal year 2008
is a sensible approach."
For a sense of how little this means, consider there was a successful "proof of concept" demonstartion for airborne anti-laser systems -- "Star Wars" SDI technology -- in 1984.
There were at *least* two ounces of truth in that little bile bucket!!
Anyway, your counterargument is actually really sharp. I remember picking up the local BBS directory when I was in high school and even just reading the titles of the forums it was clear this was not really a technical environment.
And yes I should have had a detour into Shirky's "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" and talked about how politicking and arguing and seducing and so forth are a part of any group creativity and explained that's why I ignored that stuff.
Ultimately my only defense to your post is that I was really trying to talk about the Web. And if you look at what I wrote, I used that actual word, "Web." Because it's the only online medium where I can say I have been using it for at least the majority of its life (I have been using it since 94).
I'm going to take your "please go away" in the best possible spirit and note that I love the stuff here. Except I've had it with people here (and elsewhere, but the same technically oriented group of "I know what the Web is all about" elitists) getting on about how much l4m3r all the weblog stuff is (as if posting on Slashdot were up there with composing Ulysses).
I'm not saying "ban things I find boring from the Internet." Otherwise all my own pap would be banned, because it is boring as hell, including the post in question.
I'm saying what you're saying. This is an Internet for all of us. I am not a second class citizen because I write something silly about cheese and you write something boring about XML-RPC! To some people your XMLRPC thing will help them whup an integration project and for some people my cheese thing might help them plan a wicked picnic.
And every time blogs make it on Slashdot I have to read all this bashing of what everday people write about online, as though Slashdot is universally regarded as unboringashell.
I would boil my boring post down as, "I am sick of the engineers who run the Internet judging and bitching about how I am using this fabulous network infrastructure they have built, when they're not exactly writing universally fascinating stuff."
I suppose that message would have gotten through if I hadn't sounded so arrogant ;->
I can imagine all the kvetching we're about to hear about how mundane and pointless the vast majority of weblogs and personal websites are (ala this and this), and how too many people are jumping online to post what they had for lunch or what they thought of Lord of the Rings or what they did over the weekend or pictures of themselves drinking a beer, and how it's all a bunch of crap. Someone will use the term "signal to noise ratio," someone will use the word "dreck," someone else will say "mundane."
Here's the thing: Even the most mundane minutae of human existence if fascinating compared with the prevailing (but fading) obsession with network topology and computer technology. The Web was not invented so people could talk about the Web. You People -- the technologists on Slashdot -- have had control of the vast majority of original Internet writing for the past ten years, and it's been nothing but CSS this, or XML that, or RPC SOAP OSS GNU GPL PHP this, or PGP that, SSL HTTP HTML DOM .NET blah blah blah ... Webmonkey stuff.
Does technical discussion have its place on a network first used to distribute physics papers and so forth? Of course. Is talking about the network by definition the most boring thing to do on the network? Absolutely. Do I like asking myself easy, rhetorical questions? YES!!!
My point is, people are going to post baby pictures and bad cryptical poetry about their personal lives and recipes for pulled pork and shallow reviews of episodes of popular mindless TV shows, and I think that's brilliant. It means the network is finally open -- FOR WRITING -- by the masses. By people who are not engineers. It means everday people are CREATING media rather than just consuming it. You might think it's dreck, but their friends and family will get something out of it, and every now and then we'll discover someone writing (or singing or designing or photographing or filming) something brilliant and posting it on their blog, and we'll get something the likes of Viacom or Time Warner wouldn't have put in front of us if we paid them to.
And there will finally be more to the Web than tech talk and old media shovelware.
Just had to get that off my chest.
The only reasons to use perl over PHP for web development are 1.) familiarity with perl (slashdot), and 2.) security (to avoid "today's php upload root exploit").
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So PHP is ideal unless, you know, you don't want to be rooted
Noted.
(Backs away slowly