The state had better be engaged in a damn good deal of wrongdoing before you start acting up,
Your state (the US) used my state (the UK) as a bombing base for an illegal and immoral bombing raid on Libya, in an attempt to assassinate the legitimate ruler (You might not like the guy, but he's not your leader to complain about). The resultant escalation of revenge terrorism has endangered me personally.
Your state, the US, deposed and assassinated the legitimate leader of Chile, rendering friends of mine stateless refugees.
Just what does a state have to do before you recognise its actions as immoral ?
It's the very army of script kiddies and hackers out there that are FORCING major corporations to tighten up their code.
Amen to that.
Lets suppose a hole exists. Who do you want making it visible, and forcing it to get fixed ? A horde of grasshopper-minded 3L33TZ who are usually annoying, but rarely as dangerous as they could be (given the inclination), or someone who is secretive, efficient, and trying desperately hard to steal something useful.
The current SotA in security is pretty low. Major corporations use Outlook, and don't understand why this is bad. ISPs leave SMTP relays and routers wide open. We need to fix this stuff, and we need to fix it sharpish, lest something really damaging happens.
If the cost of forcing the corporate world to Get A Clue, and to employ some righteously clueful admins, is inflicting them with a plague of Script Kiddiez, then that's the price we're going to have to pay until we get it sorted. Nothing else seems to have woken them up.
Moses needed to whack the V1.0 sprogs when his plague of locusts didn't convince Pharaoh. Pay heed to the plague of K1DD13Z, or your favourite Athlon will be next !
You're falling into the trap of the Politician's Syllogism:
Something Must Be Done
This is something
Therefore this must be done.
Aren't you posting from the UK ? Right now the UK has the unedifying spectacle of a government simultaneously imposing draconian anti-privacy measures in the RIP bill, yet also having their own secrets exposed by "Benji the Binman", owing to their own complete lack of understanding on basic infosec (shred your rubbish).
We already have many defences against DDoS attacks. The best one is installing Clues in the admins of bozo ISPs (not forwarding RFC1918 is a damned good start), but more robust inbound routing helps too (stateful packet inspection still isn't commonplace, yet it kills things like SYN flooding). We can fix this. Sure, It sucks today, but let the geeks work it out and we'll get the holes patched.
So what are you suggesting instead ? Modem Licences, to go with the Modem Tax rumours you recall so fondly from the Net 10 years ago. The infrastructure is flaking, there are too many cluephobes jumping on the ISP bandwagon, yet you want to start beating up on the users ! I'm sorry if AOL doesn't meet your standards of intellectual superiority (are you a Mensa member too ?), but their cash is as good as yours or mine, and they've just as much right to be here.
If I walk into my local pub and behave like a jerk I'll be thrown out. Cross the road and the same behaviour is accepted as normal; different pubs, different communities, different standards of behaviour. How is your "global net access" going to support that ? I don't want Kansas fundies telling me that evolution doesn't work, and they probably wouldn't want me offending their local ordinances either.
Don't like Grits with your Slashdot ? Lets make moderation work better. Virtual Communities are still a pretty new concept, and we're going to have to learn how to deal with the odd Mr Bungle or BeerGuy.
Personally I think an age limit of 32 is about right. Keeps off the people who don't remember uucp and real netiquette. How do you like that idea ? 8-)
that older traffic only accounts for 10% or so of their bandwidth.
The more important question is, "How much revenue does that older traffic generate ?". Deja has turned far more commercial of late, the shopping review emphasis, the embedded advert links. We, the geeks who used it for Usenet searches, just aren't a useful revenue stream to them, so they've dumped us.
Face it guys, Deja is no longer your handy geek-friendly Usenet archive. It's now a "What HomeVideoTheatre Pork-Rind-O-Rama" review site, selling dumbed-down content and adverts to the stupids.
Indeed. If this thing could handle X.509 certificates, I'd be buying them. Plug-in crypto coprocessors are something that I (and a lot of web developers) are screaming for.
OTOH, it doesn't look very convincing and I smell (yet another) CC scam.
HR people, and even techies doing the hiring tend to have certain checkboxes that they look for on a resume.
This used to be true, but less so nowadays. My recruitment pattern for the last year or so has been project managers scratching around desperately for particular skillsets, then recruiting individuals by word of mouth. Interviews are a formality, because you basically landed the job as soon as an intermediary (who trusts your skills, because they worked with you earlier) tells the PM (who trusts the intermediary, because they've also worked together) that you have A Clue in a relevant area.
There Are Only Twelve People Working In (UK) Ecommerce (tm). The usual question now is "Who did you work with at boo / Nationwide / Virgin?", then a quiet phonecall afterwards.
I think you're wrong in assuming that small B2C sites are viable in the long term
Why on earth not ? I think the key here is "frictionless". OK, so that's yet-another piece of Marketroid-speak, but there's a core of truth in it. On the web, the little guy is nothing like as disadvantaged against the big guy as for IRL commerce. If you have a product, web commerce might be just the way to sell it. It's really not that hard to find a product niche that's narrow enough to make you a serious player in that field and the costs of getting on-line are now small.
I think we're going to see a resurgence in small scale manufacturing or importing. One or two people make a product that's distinctive, or can buy a cheap Chinese version of it and sell it with Western marketing (ie marketing by people who understand the Western consumer, not necessarily Western-style). The web hosting gets outsourced, and maybe even much of the fulfillment. Easier than running a physical shop, and you don't have to spend all day sitting behind the counter waiting for customers.
A useful parallel is Japanese outsourced manufacturing in the '70s. Much of the component production or module assembly was done by small family businesses, working in a space the size of a garage. Traditions were such that even large corporates weren't afraid to buy from a tiny supplier, if they could make a product worth buying. In the West we threw these people out of the manufacturing chain from Ford's day to their eventual extinction in WW2.
Microcode might be software, but software isn't all microcode.
If I was feeling really bitchy I'd insert some comment about pizza making fat, bloated Americans in the way that microcode makes for fat, bloated CISC architectures, as opposed to UK - Scandanavian tie-ups with ARM
but you could go into the library, make a list of the books contained there, and freely distribute that list without violating any copyrights,
Yes, absolutely.
There is no copyright on book titles. This is because the existing laws already recognise that the metadata on a book is different from the core data and should be treated differently. A library loses by having its data (book contents) stolen, but it gains by having its metadata (the catalogue of the content it can offer for sale) distributed.
At eBay, they don't have so much metadata. Data (for them) is the items they have for sale, their prices, and the contact details for buyers and sellers. eBay's business (in an RDF sense) is statements of the form, "I, Fred, agree to buy this gold-plated spork from you, Bill, for $52". All of these are core data to their business, valuable to competitors (and compilers of price guides).
I'm always being asked to define what "metadata" is (I'm an RDF geek, so this happens a lot). A reasonable definition in some circumstances is that it's the data you don't mind publishing to your competitors.
Robots.txt makes no distinction between usages. We say that sites won't want to be comparison shopped if they're not the cheapest price, but what if they are the cheapest site ? There are many instances where spidering is beneficial to eBay, just as there are instances where it's against their interest.
I agree that robots.txt should be observed. Anything other than that is simply anarchy (in the sense of destructive nihilism, rather than the anarcho-syndicalism that built the Net).
Robots.txt isn't enough though. We're now into issues of usage, and (much as the Libertarians might not like it), that's where an appropriate level of legislation comes in. Indexing sites should have legal redress against others stealing their databases, vendors should be protected from customer poaching, customers should be protected from invasion of privacy.
I'm tired of saying this on Slashdot, but Go and read Lessig ! He explains why there isn't a "Law of the Horse", because pre-existing laws turned out to be perfectly adequate to regulate the appropriate use of horses, and the prevention of rustling. Similarly, the Net changes the context for many things, but the basic premises stay the same; businesses have various relationships with their customers, and we already have laws to protect these relationships, to the benefit of both business and customer.
Is there an XML robots.txt working group ? I suppose (grudgingly) I ought to join it, as this is almost exactly what we're working on these days.
If you allow the public free access to your property, it essencially becomes public domain
No. You are completely wrong, and this muddle-headed thinking amongst geeks is what gives Slashdot a bad name. I can go to a library and read a book. I can't however copy out that same book, and claim it as my own work. I can't even copy it out, put the original author's name on the front, and open my own lending library with it. Please go and learn something about copyright before pontificating about it (and the moderators shoudl be more careful too).
In practice, an awful lot of what you describe has gone on in the past. This is "Posession is the law", applied to IP rights. In law though, we can't do this. As money gets more and more interested in the Web, we'll find that this gets stamped upon.
These people are shutting down real businesses and costing people real money
So get a police force, not a journalist.
If you confuse journalism and policing, pretty soon everyone is playing Sherlock and no-one writes journalism any more. You still don't seem to get it -- there are often long-term issues more important than single short-term issues, even if those issues are themselves quite serious.
Here in the UK, a current topic is that of Jack Straw's RIP Bill. If you look at this one way, it's an Orwellian invasion of on-line privacy. If you present it in another, it's the "Pedophile and Terrorist Tracking Bill", which of course no right-thinking person could be against. So, is it worth sacrificing a large number of basic freedoms for a one-issue campaign, no matter how worthy ?
I hope the Crackers are busted. Maybe the journo hopes they're busted too. The important thing to protect is that the journalist takes no part in busting them.
Sentient readers can probably see why, but you appear not to. It's not a "Slashdot are geeks, Crackers are geeks, Slashdot supports Crackers" false syllogism, and it's nothing to do with condoning the actions of Crackers or these two in particular. Simply, if journos can't use anonymous sources, pretty soon journalism will simply become the recycling of press releases.
Just when the Tuvalunese start getting an income stream that doesn't involve having their islands, or their neighbours', trashed by phosphate mining, ICANN wipe them out with the.tel TLD !
Why on earth should it be ? DHTML and XML are practically orthogonal. If you write DHTML under XHTML, then it's perfectly compliant to XML. If you write DHTML under HTML 4 and use a "data island", then you can use XML tools.
Data Islands and the <XML> are one of those M$oft innovations that I like. They're useful, desired by the concensus of developers, and will almost certainly become a standard in the near future, with minimal change.
XSLT (frequently referred to as XSL)
XSLT is only referred to as XSL by the hard-of-thinking, the Microserfs, and those who don't appreciate just how different they are. Again, I applaud M$oft for their efforts in early adoption of XSL, and their even more laudable efforts to dump it ASAP as soon as XSLT became viable and vaguely stable.
You haven't looked around if you believe IE is the only XML tool around
So what else is there that is an XML client-side browser ? It needs a workable DOM and XSL(T), because CSS just does not cut it for a whole pile of useful things you might want to do.
Anyhow, you may be interested to know that smil, a pretty cool language, is what RealPlayer
Oh really ? Guess that one must have kinda slipped by me.... 8-(
In certain cases, authors may specify the value of an attribute without any quotation marks. The attribute value may only contain letters (a-z and A-Z), digits (0-9), hyphens (ASCII decimal 45), periods (ASCII decimal 46), underscores (ASCII decimal 95), and colons (ASCII decimal 58). We recommend using quotation marks even when it is possible to eliminate them.
I think this is possibly Cringeworthy getting beyond the bounds of his knowledge. Promiscuity on a box like that should get the plug pulled pronto. OTOH, installing Carnivore has to be somewhat promiscuous, or otherwise the ISP knows who is being tapped as much as the Feds do. At the customer's level, there isn't much difference between Carnivore being non-promiscuous at the IP level (but seeing all the SMTP server's traffic) and being full-blown promiscuous.
Similarly, how is Carnivore going to shut down an ISP, unless it's either in-line with the main upstream router(s), or it's going to start some DoS flood (maybe we should christen this the "DoJ Flood" attack now ?).
You can also put an animated menu bar into 800K, stick it on a homepage and be too dumb to realise that this is A Bad Thing.
Flash encourages bad, bloatware pages. Maybe a good and useful animation in 20K is appropriate somewhere. I've no problem with that; that's only the same volume as a decent size JPG. -- but can you really say that the vast majority of Flash usage isn't huge, bloated crap that adds absolutely nothing useful to a site.
Personally I stopped writing HTML in '99 and since then everything has been XHTML. My XML parse tools like it, validation is easy, and I haven't had a single compatibility problem (although I avoid <?xml?> prologs, as Macs don't like them).
Slashdot Mirror
The state had better be engaged in a damn good deal of wrongdoing before you start acting up,
Your state (the US) used my state (the UK) as a bombing base for an illegal and immoral bombing raid on Libya, in an attempt to assassinate the legitimate ruler (You might not like the guy, but he's not your leader to complain about). The resultant escalation of revenge terrorism has endangered me personally.
Your state, the US, deposed and assassinated the legitimate leader of Chile, rendering friends of mine stateless refugees.
Just what does a state have to do before you recognise its actions as immoral ?
"Toonami" ? What the hell is this ?
Big budget CGI-ed anime about huge-eyed Geordie football supporters and the 'Toon Army ?
The Fat Slags, in little sailor suits ?
Look, if you're a Yank, just forget it. It's Brit humour and it doesn't travel
It's the very army of script kiddies and hackers out there that are FORCING major corporations to tighten up their code.
Amen to that.
Lets suppose a hole exists. Who do you want making it visible, and forcing it to get fixed ? A horde of grasshopper-minded 3L33TZ who are usually annoying, but rarely as dangerous as they could be (given the inclination), or someone who is secretive, efficient, and trying desperately hard to steal something useful.
The current SotA in security is pretty low. Major corporations use Outlook, and don't understand why this is bad. ISPs leave SMTP relays and routers wide open. We need to fix this stuff, and we need to fix it sharpish, lest something really damaging happens.
If the cost of forcing the corporate world to Get A Clue, and to employ some righteously clueful admins, is inflicting them with a plague of Script Kiddiez, then that's the price we're going to have to pay until we get it sorted. Nothing else seems to have woken them up.
Moses needed to whack the V1.0 sprogs when his plague of locusts didn't convince Pharaoh. Pay heed to the plague of K1DD13Z, or your favourite Athlon will be next !
You're falling into the trap of the Politician's Syllogism:
Aren't you posting from the UK ? Right now the UK has the unedifying spectacle of a government simultaneously imposing draconian anti-privacy measures in the RIP bill, yet also having their own secrets exposed by "Benji the Binman", owing to their own complete lack of understanding on basic infosec (shred your rubbish).
We already have many defences against DDoS attacks. The best one is installing Clues in the admins of bozo ISPs (not forwarding RFC1918 is a damned good start), but more robust inbound routing helps too (stateful packet inspection still isn't commonplace, yet it kills things like SYN flooding). We can fix this. Sure, It sucks today, but let the geeks work it out and we'll get the holes patched.
So what are you suggesting instead ? Modem Licences, to go with the Modem Tax rumours you recall so fondly from the Net 10 years ago. The infrastructure is flaking, there are too many cluephobes jumping on the ISP bandwagon, yet you want to start beating up on the users ! I'm sorry if AOL doesn't meet your standards of intellectual superiority (are you a Mensa member too ?), but their cash is as good as yours or mine, and they've just as much right to be here.
If I walk into my local pub and behave like a jerk I'll be thrown out. Cross the road and the same behaviour is accepted as normal; different pubs, different communities, different standards of behaviour. How is your "global net access" going to support that ? I don't want Kansas fundies telling me that evolution doesn't work, and they probably wouldn't want me offending their local ordinances either.
Don't like Grits with your Slashdot ? Lets make moderation work better. Virtual Communities are still a pretty new concept, and we're going to have to learn how to deal with the odd Mr Bungle or BeerGuy.
Personally I think an age limit of 32 is about right. Keeps off the people who don't remember uucp and real netiquette. How do you like that idea ? 8-)
that older traffic only accounts for 10% or so of their bandwidth.
The more important question is, "How much revenue does that older traffic generate ?". Deja has turned far more commercial of late, the shopping review emphasis, the embedded advert links. We, the geeks who used it for Usenet searches, just aren't a useful revenue stream to them, so they've dumped us.
Face it guys, Deja is no longer your handy geek-friendly Usenet archive. It's now a "What HomeVideoTheatre Pork-Rind-O-Rama" review site, selling dumbed-down content and adverts to the stupids.
Time for pastures new. Maybe Dogpile.
OTOH, it doesn't look very convincing and I smell (yet another) CC scam.
HR people, and even techies doing the hiring tend to have certain checkboxes that they look for on a resume.
This used to be true, but less so nowadays. My recruitment pattern for the last year or so has been project managers scratching around desperately for particular skillsets, then recruiting individuals by word of mouth. Interviews are a formality, because you basically landed the job as soon as an intermediary (who trusts your skills, because they worked with you earlier) tells the PM (who trusts the intermediary, because they've also worked together) that you have A Clue in a relevant area.
There Are Only Twelve People Working In (UK) Ecommerce (tm). The usual question now is "Who did you work with at boo / Nationwide / Virgin?", then a quiet phonecall afterwards.
I think you're wrong in assuming that small B2C sites are viable in the long term
Why on earth not ? I think the key here is "frictionless". OK, so that's yet-another piece of Marketroid-speak, but there's a core of truth in it. On the web, the little guy is nothing like as disadvantaged against the big guy as for IRL commerce. If you have a product, web commerce might be just the way to sell it. It's really not that hard to find a product niche that's narrow enough to make you a serious player in that field and the costs of getting on-line are now small.
I think we're going to see a resurgence in small scale manufacturing or importing. One or two people make a product that's distinctive, or can buy a cheap Chinese version of it and sell it with Western marketing (ie marketing by people who understand the Western consumer, not necessarily Western-style). The web hosting gets outsourced, and maybe even much of the fulfillment. Easier than running a physical shop, and you don't have to spend all day sitting behind the counter waiting for customers.
A useful parallel is Japanese outsourced manufacturing in the '70s. Much of the component production or module assembly was done by small family businesses, working in a space the size of a garage. Traditions were such that even large corporates weren't afraid to buy from a tiny supplier, if they could make a product worth buying. In the West we threw these people out of the manufacturing chain from Ford's day to their eventual extinction in WW2.
If I was feeling really bitchy I'd insert some comment about pizza making fat, bloated Americans in the way that microcode makes for fat, bloated CISC architectures, as opposed to UK - Scandanavian tie-ups with ARM
but you could go into the library, make a list of the books contained there, and freely distribute that list without violating any copyrights,
Yes, absolutely.
There is no copyright on book titles. This is because the existing laws already recognise that the metadata on a book is different from the core data and should be treated differently. A library loses by having its data (book contents) stolen, but it gains by having its metadata (the catalogue of the content it can offer for sale) distributed.
At eBay, they don't have so much metadata. Data (for them) is the items they have for sale, their prices, and the contact details for buyers and sellers. eBay's business (in an RDF sense) is statements of the form, "I, Fred, agree to buy this gold-plated spork from you, Bill, for $52". All of these are core data to their business, valuable to competitors (and compilers of price guides).
I'm always being asked to define what "metadata" is (I'm an RDF geek, so this happens a lot). A reasonable definition in some circumstances is that it's the data you don't mind publishing to your competitors.
Robots.txt makes no distinction between usages. We say that sites won't want to be comparison shopped if they're not the cheapest price, but what if they are the cheapest site ? There are many instances where spidering is beneficial to eBay, just as there are instances where it's against their interest.
I agree that robots.txt should be observed. Anything other than that is simply anarchy (in the sense of destructive nihilism, rather than the anarcho-syndicalism that built the Net).
Robots.txt isn't enough though. We're now into issues of usage, and (much as the Libertarians might not like it), that's where an appropriate level of legislation comes in. Indexing sites should have legal redress against others stealing their databases, vendors should be protected from customer poaching, customers should be protected from invasion of privacy.
I'm tired of saying this on Slashdot, but Go and read Lessig ! He explains why there isn't a "Law of the Horse", because pre-existing laws turned out to be perfectly adequate to regulate the appropriate use of horses, and the prevention of rustling. Similarly, the Net changes the context for many things, but the basic premises stay the same; businesses have various relationships with their customers, and we already have laws to protect these relationships, to the benefit of both business and customer.
Is there an XML robots.txt working group ? I suppose (grudgingly) I ought to join it, as this is almost exactly what we're working on these days.
If you allow the public free access to your property, it essencially becomes public domain
No. You are completely wrong, and this muddle-headed thinking amongst geeks is what gives Slashdot a bad name. I can go to a library and read a book. I can't however copy out that same book, and claim it as my own work. I can't even copy it out, put the original author's name on the front, and open my own lending library with it. Please go and learn something about copyright before pontificating about it (and the moderators shoudl be more careful too).
In practice, an awful lot of what you describe has gone on in the past. This is "Posession is the law", applied to IP rights. In law though, we can't do this. As money gets more and more interested in the Web, we'll find that this gets stamped upon.
These people are shutting down real businesses and costing people real money
So get a police force, not a journalist.
If you confuse journalism and policing, pretty soon everyone is playing Sherlock and no-one writes journalism any more. You still don't seem to get it -- there are often long-term issues more important than single short-term issues, even if those issues are themselves quite serious.
Here in the UK, a current topic is that of Jack Straw's RIP Bill. If you look at this one way, it's an Orwellian invasion of on-line privacy. If you present it in another, it's the "Pedophile and Terrorist Tracking Bill", which of course no right-thinking person could be against. So, is it worth sacrificing a large number of basic freedoms for a one-issue campaign, no matter how worthy ?
I hope the Crackers are busted. Maybe the journo hopes they're busted too. The important thing to protect is that the journalist takes no part in busting them.
Sentient readers can probably see why, but you appear not to. It's not a "Slashdot are geeks, Crackers are geeks, Slashdot supports Crackers" false syllogism, and it's nothing to do with condoning the actions of Crackers or these two in particular. Simply, if journos can't use anonymous sources, pretty soon journalism will simply become the recycling of press releases.
Please ! Lots more submissions from this dipshit. Why ?, exactly because he is such a dipshit.
He's funny, pathetic and makes the rest of us (paranoid about turning into generic geek LoserGuys) feel an awful lot better about who we are.
OTOH, anyone who uses red text on a black background image, and can't even work a bgcolor atribute, deserves boiling in oil.
Just when the Tuvalunese start getting an income stream that doesn't involve having their islands, or their neighbours', trashed by phosphate mining, ICANN wipe them out with the .tel TLD !
Small idiocy found in Ziff D. article.
No-one killed, no-one injured.
Move along now, there's nothing to see here.
So why is microsoft's "DHTML" not XML compliant?
Why on earth should it be ? DHTML and XML are practically orthogonal. If you write DHTML under XHTML, then it's perfectly compliant to XML. If you write DHTML under HTML 4 and use a "data island", then you can use XML tools.
Data Islands and the <XML> are one of those M$oft innovations that I like. They're useful, desired by the concensus of developers, and will almost certainly become a standard in the near future, with minimal change.
XSLT (frequently referred to as XSL)
XSLT is only referred to as XSL by the hard-of-thinking, the Microserfs, and those who don't appreciate just how different they are. Again, I applaud M$oft for their efforts in early adoption of XSL, and their even more laudable efforts to dump it ASAP as soon as XSLT became viable and vaguely stable.
You haven't looked around if you believe IE is the only XML tool around
So what else is there that is an XML client-side browser ? It needs a workable DOM and XSL(T), because CSS just does not cut it for a whole pile of useful things you might want to do.
Anyhow, you may be interested to know that smil, a pretty cool language, is what RealPlayer
Oh really ? Guess that one must have kinda slipped by me.... 8-(
Save the Red-tailed Wambenger !
color=#123456 will need quotes, because there's a "#" in there. Dropping quotes is only valid for pure numerics.
To quote the latest HTML 4.01 spec from W3C.
In certain cases, authors may specify the value of an attribute without any quotation marks. The attribute value may only contain letters (a-z and A-Z), digits (0-9), hyphens (ASCII decimal 45), periods (ASCII decimal 46), underscores (ASCII decimal 95), and colons (ASCII decimal 58). We recommend using quotation marks even when it is possible to eliminate them.
I've never found a bug in the validator.
<br />, with the embedded space.
Works fine for me, everywhere except Slashdot !
Guns don't kill Flash developers, being bludgeoned to death with their own Macs kills Flash developers. 8-)
Sure, Flash isn't always bad. And sometimes Microsoft does something useful for the whole community.
As to "play time" vs. "download time", that's a luxury for you guys in countries with cable modems and ADSL.
I think this is possibly Cringeworthy getting beyond the bounds of his knowledge. Promiscuity on a box like that should get the plug pulled pronto. OTOH, installing Carnivore has to be somewhat promiscuous, or otherwise the ISP knows who is being tapped as much as the Feds do. At the customer's level, there isn't much difference between Carnivore being non-promiscuous at the IP level (but seeing all the SMTP server's traffic) and being full-blown promiscuous.
Similarly, how is Carnivore going to shut down an ISP, unless it's either in-line with the main upstream router(s), or it's going to start some DoS flood (maybe we should christen this the "DoJ Flood" attack now ?).
What's the 'X' stand for ? "10", as in 3L33T
You can also put an animated menu bar into 800K, stick it on a homepage and be too dumb to realise that this is A Bad Thing.
Flash encourages bad, bloatware pages. Maybe a good and useful animation in 20K is appropriate somewhere. I've no problem with that; that's only the same volume as a decent size JPG. -- but can you really say that the vast majority of Flash usage isn't huge, bloated crap that adds absolutely nothing useful to a site.
It's a bit rough, isn't it 8-)
Personally I stopped writing HTML in '99 and since then everything has been XHTML. My XML parse tools like it, validation is easy, and I haven't had a single compatibility problem (although I avoid <?xml?> prologs, as Macs don't like them).