My main problem with this site in particular is that they count broken promises as "in progress" or "compromise", and they add new promises all the time. This doesn't just track promises made during the campaign: if he says (as president) he'll do something next week, and then he does it, it counts as a "Promise Kept". This ensures that their numbers always skew to the "Promise Kept" side.
That said, I find the site entertaining, if irritating. I just hate the idea that anyone things it's "Fair" or "Neutral".
I understand the desire for open government. We have Article 24 ("Sunshine Law") here in Florida, and it has done wonders for openness.
However, the solution to closed government is not blatant invasion of privacy. If the use of that email address was inappropriate, subpoena the contents. If you want to stop personal email within government offices, pass some laws that restrict it and impeach her.
In short, arguing that this is "OK" because you'd like more transparency is a joke.
My original post was (in an admittedly smarmy way) trying to help people avoid a big mistake. To do anything other than just correct it would be counter-productive.
It will block all traffic from legitimate IE6 users, and if you have a $20K router, you probably don't want to do that.
If you read the links in the article (and some comments further down), there are things you can do to block this, including blocking requests with these UAs that also have odd or missing headers, cookies, etc.
and they can easily stay in a harbor area of a major city for many months. The only trigger you need is a cell phone
Well it just so happens I'm in the market for a new cell phone this month. Can you tell me which models will last many months on a single charge? That'd be a neat feature to have. The ones you connect to a $20 car battery with a $10 adapter.
It's been a while since I've been impressed by a scam, but this one does it for me.
The owners of blackle.com created a simple rip-off of Google's Homepage in black. It's so basic that it's probably not something that Google could complain about, so they're ok there.
It's a tiny page, and it's static. All it contains is a basic Google Co-op form that serves back Google's results directly. When users click on the AdWords ads there, Blackle gets a revenue share of the ads. (Nothing too clever yet)
What's amazing is that they got in the NyTimes, the Wall Street Journal, and on Slashdot! They are making a killing!
Perhaps more irritating, Slashdot's editors allowed this statement: "In response, a new version of Google called Blackle was created," to make it through, implying that Google was involved in the creation of Blackle.
In fact, I'm so impressed that I'm going to steal his idea, and create my own!
I have been fighting these for a few months now as they tried to use a web form I managed to spread. I ended up with lots of entries like this in the "Sender" box:
\n Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=8543732eef2ac361a5574297208e707c MIME-Ve rsion: 1.0 Subject: ne chair was empty, but it was soon occupied a bcc: XXXXX@XXXXXX [removed out of kindness]
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--8543732eef2ac361a5574297208e707c Con tent-Type: text/plain; charset=\"us-ascii\" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
has made a proselyte after all, you are half a atholic hat am not answered tto, and that --8543732eef2ac361a5574297208e707c--
.
What is interesting is that all of them were from O.T. a Danish Romance which is available on Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7513.
What's MORE interesting is that each quote had been slightly modified.
Here is the exact text used above as pulled from the original text.. note that in the form submission, certain letters have been omitted/changed:
"These she also receives!" returned Wilhelm; and striking him upon the shoulder he added, with a smile, "you are, according to the Roman Catholic manner, near exalting the mother above the Son! Old Rosalie has made a proselyte; after all, you are half a Catholic!"
"That am I not!" answered Otto, "and that will I not be!"
Now, I'm not a cryptanalist (nor do I play one on TV). But I do know enough that you this looks like it could possibly be some form of Book Cipher.
However, it may just be that they have crappy software that removes capital letters and semicolons (although it isn't always that predictable). But why remove letters if you're aiming to fool Bayes filters into thinking this is real English?
Do others have the same omissions? I've thought these were weird since I first saw them.
Under the agency's longstanding rules, the N.S.A. can target for interception phone calls or e-mail messages on foreign soil, even if the recipients of those communications are in the United States. Usually, though, the government can only target phones and e-mail messages in this country by first obtaining a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which holds its closed sessions at the Justice Department.
Traditionally, the F.B.I., not the N.S.A., seeks such warrants and conducts most domestic eavesdropping. Until the new program began, the N.S.A. typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions in Washington, New York and other cities, and obtained court orders to do so.
Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to someone in Afghanistan.
So, to me, this says:
Before, if Bob in Germany called Alice in New York, the NSA could listen in to the conversation if the NSA setup its physical wiretap in Germany.
Today, For the same call, from Bob in Germany to Alice in New York, the NSA can listen in regardless of whether their physical wiretap is in Germany or the US.
You might also conclude from the TFA that they can now eavesdrop regardless of who initiates the conversation. Perhaps that adds some latitude, but it certainly isn't the huge policy change that everyone seems to be screaming about.
Of course, I may be wrong, but I'm sure there are a few people here on Slashdot who'll politely explain my error.;-)
(I was all ready to reply with a story from college about a statistics professor telling a story about Canadian forest rangers and beard growth. But I simply don't have it in me.)
The long and short of this is that any statistics that have been dumbed down to the point where the unwashed masses can follow it are generally more slant than science.
This leads to a downward spiral where the masses don't trust the statistics, since they can always wait a week and get the opposite side of the debate to run a study.
First, Microsoft gets to make a show of killing off the spyware vendor (and its products)...
Microsoft today announced the discontinuation of spyware system Claria (formerly Gator). "While we've been delighted with the knowledge and technical abilities of the Claria staff," said Mr. Ballmer, "However, Microsoft always puts its user base first: in this case, it was clear that the demand for an instrusive browsing optimization system was simply not there."
Second, they get access to all that data Gator collected over the years! This is exactly how you catch Google!
Finally, they take that technology and expertise from Claria, and simply build a Gator++ version that isn't visible and push it out via Windows Update!
Some of us on the right call that "Investment.":-)
Seriously, the idea of non-taxable church organizations is that the government should not be able to create rules and regulations that allow only "rich" churches to survive. If that was the case, a community with 80% population in one faith could quickly create taxes that only the popular faith could afford.
Now, are there abuses of this? Sure. But the solution is not to force transfer of private property to another private organization just because they are more willing or able to pay taxes!
If a property has fallen into disrepair, it can be condemned by the city, and existing laws of expropriation allow it to be siezed by the city due to "blight". That's not the case in Connecticut. There, the Supreme Court admits that the homes were not a blight and were not in disrepair, but that the property was simply better suited for other (people's) use.
That's Horrible. And it's horrible whether the property is owned by an individual or a church. My only reason for bringing the churces into this discussion is the massive opportunity for deception, fraud, discrimination, and corruption this opens up.
"Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power. Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded--i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public--in the process."
The sole argument for the misappropriation of these properties seems to be that the overall tax coffers would benefit. That is, there will be higher property, income, and sales taxes due to the economic development.
Now, I'm as pro-business as you'll find on/. (I've been hammered here before for it.). But what about private property that simply doesn't generate tax revenue?
Churches would be poster-children here: they provide no tax revenue (property, sales, etc), and generally, they exist in spite of popular opinion: a 80% baptist (or catholic/muslim/jewish/etc) community could very easily decide that the property of a minority religion's church is simply expendable.
This opens doors of corruption, discrimination, and hatred on a scale that simply frightens me.
I hope they designate a church on one of those properties quickly (before the bulldozers get there) so that this goes back up on a (slightly) stronger ammendment claim (the First!).
One final thought: I have yet to find ANYONE who thinks this is a good idea! I've heard people blame it on the "corporate elite" (presumably right-wing), and on the "socialists and statists", but nobody's claiming this as their own! How do we get a majory of justices on the SCOTUS that nobody agrees with??
Not only did they not post the submission above (from a non-Anonymous reader with multiple sources), they chose to post THIS DRIVEL from an anoymous poster.
I'm sorry, but as much as I like the information on Slashdot, I'll be browsing elsewhere until after the election. I'm afraid your advertisers (I'm a big ThinkGeek fan) will also not be seeing any more of my cash.
See you in January
Once again, we have an abysmal editorial decision on Slashdot.
A submission from Indomitus, a left-leaning reader (nothing wrong with that) comes in citing the dailyKOS as a source of news, and the editor doesn't even explain that that site is so unbelievably slanted as to be unreadable.
Just as a test, I've submitted the following story just to see what response I get. I'll be FLOORED if it gets through, although it is at least as accurate as the post Michael approved.
The excerpt calls election workers to issue press releases and give interviews about voter suppression, and that, "If no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a pre-emptive strike".
I find it interesting that the concept of a "Conservative bias" survived the Slashdot editors and made it to the blurb. Certainly anyone who read the article found that the interesting part was that the Google News algorithm(s) simply didn't apply the same rules as the stylebooks of the major news media.
A simple test is to run the phrase "Geroge Bush" through Google News: you'll find an equally slanted list of news including sites like:
Which certainly are NOT unbiased.
It's a good article, and I'm glad it was posted, but I wish the submitter (and/. editor) had written up what was important (the flaw/quirk that was shown) and not what was explained away in the article (the "conservative bent").
I'm sorry to say that I agree with most of these posts: you didn't find out what your client cared about before you started coding.
However, to hopefully help you out of this mess, here is some light reading that you might find useful:
1) Read Don't Make Me Think (not on safari yet) by Steve Krug. It's the best web usability book out there and will take you all of two hours to go through. His usability testing alone would have found your problem earlier.
2) Read Eric Meyer on CSS(no safari) to find out how to make your site look better. If you can find/afford a designer, use them, but learn how to abstract your design from your code and your life will be much easier. (If you like it, there is More Eric Meyer on CSS(safari) as well.
3) If you're trying to do public sites, I've found Submit Now(safari)by Andrew Chak to be an excellent read. It's common sense, but its good to be reminded.
I hope this helps, and good luck salvaging the gig.
Slashdot Mirror
Repeatdly actually -- and I've never dried it out!
However, it's a Casio Boulder (water/shock proof) because I killed the last 3 jumping out of the boat ;-)
My camera's the same way (Canon D10)
Perhaps I Mis-Grunted!
I was trying to keep my head from exploding.
ACK! ACK ACK ACK!
Living in Clearwater (and having the St. Pete Times as my newspaper), I assure you that they are NOT neutral in any sense of the word.
In addition to their editorial page being constantly slanted left, they regularly spin their new stories in the same way.
I have been following the politifact.com site since I found it weeks ago. In fact, I subscribe to the RSS feed here: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/feeds/updates/
My main problem with this site in particular is that they count broken promises as "in progress" or "compromise", and they add new promises all the time. This doesn't just track promises made during the campaign: if he says (as president) he'll do something next week, and then he does it, it counts as a "Promise Kept". This ensures that their numbers always skew to the "Promise Kept" side.
That said, I find the site entertaining, if irritating. I just hate the idea that anyone things it's "Fair" or "Neutral".
I understand the desire for open government. We have Article 24 ("Sunshine Law") here in Florida, and it has done wonders for openness.
However, the solution to closed government is not blatant invasion of privacy. If the use of that email address was inappropriate, subpoena the contents. If you want to stop personal email within government offices, pass some laws that restrict it and impeach her.
In short, arguing that this is "OK" because you'd like more transparency is a joke.
Thanks, I appreciate that.
My original post was (in an admittedly smarmy way) trying to help people avoid a big mistake. To do anything other than just correct it would be counter-productive.
Yes, I know
Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa
Hate to reply to my own post, but as pointed out below, I missed the "Accept-Encoding" line and was focused on the UA Strings.
*dons Ass Hat*
Sorry about that!
Fair enough, my bad!
For the record, this is a REALLY bad idea.
It will block all traffic from legitimate IE6 users, and if you have a $20K router, you probably don't want to do that.
If you read the links in the article (and some comments further down), there are things you can do to block this, including blocking requests with these UAs that also have odd or missing headers, cookies, etc.
It's been a while since I've been impressed by a scam, but this one does it for me.
The owners of blackle.com created a simple rip-off of Google's Homepage in black. It's so basic that it's probably not something that Google could complain about, so they're ok there.
It's a tiny page, and it's static. All it contains is a basic Google Co-op form that serves back Google's results directly. When users click on the AdWords ads there, Blackle gets a revenue share of the ads. (Nothing too clever yet)
What's amazing is that they got in the NyTimes, the Wall Street Journal, and on Slashdot! They are making a killing!
Perhaps more irritating, Slashdot's editors allowed this statement: "In response, a new version of Google called Blackle was created," to make it through, implying that Google was involved in the creation of Blackle.
In fact, I'm so impressed that I'm going to steal his idea, and create my own!
If you really think this will save energy, feel free to use: SearchForHearts.com which has a dark background and gives 100% of its revenue to support kids with congenital heart defects
While the term "shithole country" is a bit degrading, I actually have a bit of skepticism about this myself.
I recently got a real eye opening while watching this documentary from the History Channel about Liberia. It shows how horribly wrong well-meaning "social experiments" can go. I later checked out additional information about Liberia from PBS - America's Stepchild and Wikipedia - Liberia.
When society breaks down, all manner of tools become weapons. It will be interesting to see how these (quite powerful) tools are used.
I have been fighting these for a few months now as they tried to use a web form I managed to spread. I ended up with lots of entries like this in the "Sender" box:
What is interesting is that all of them were from O.T. a Danish Romance which is available on Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7513.What's MORE interesting is that each quote had been slightly modified.
Here is the exact text used above as pulled from the original text.. note that in the form submission, certain letters have been omitted/changed:
Now, I'm not a cryptanalist (nor do I play one on TV). But I do know enough that you this looks like it could possibly be some form of Book Cipher.However, it may just be that they have crappy software that removes capital letters and semicolons (although it isn't always that predictable). But why remove letters if you're aiming to fool Bayes filters into thinking this is real English?
Do others have the same omissions? I've thought these were weird since I first saw them.
-Bill
So, to me, this says:
Before, if Bob in Germany called Alice in New York, the NSA could listen in to the conversation if the NSA setup its physical wiretap in Germany.
Today, For the same call, from Bob in Germany to Alice in New York, the NSA can listen in regardless of whether their physical wiretap is in Germany or the US.
You might also conclude from the TFA that they can now eavesdrop regardless of who initiates the conversation. Perhaps that adds some latitude, but it certainly isn't the huge policy change that everyone seems to be screaming about.
Of course, I may be wrong, but I'm sure there are a few people here on Slashdot who'll politely explain my error. ;-)
I love the fact that someone modded parent Funny!
(I was all ready to reply with a story from college about a statistics professor telling a story about Canadian forest rangers and beard growth. But I simply don't have it in me.)
The long and short of this is that any statistics that have been dumbed down to the point where the unwashed masses can follow it are generally more slant than science.
This leads to a downward spiral where the masses don't trust the statistics, since they can always wait a week and get the opposite side of the debate to run a study.
First, Microsoft gets to make a show of killing off the spyware vendor (and its products)...
Second, they get access to all that data Gator collected over the years! This is exactly how you catch Google!
Finally, they take that technology and expertise from Claria, and simply build a Gator++ version that isn't visible and push it out via Windows Update!
As I said... makes sense to me!
Some of us on the right call that "Investment." :-)
Seriously, the idea of non-taxable church organizations is that the government should not be able to create rules and regulations that allow only "rich" churches to survive. If that was the case, a community with 80% population in one faith could quickly create taxes that only the popular faith could afford.
Now, are there abuses of this? Sure. But the solution is not to force transfer of private property to another private organization just because they are more willing or able to pay taxes!
If a property has fallen into disrepair, it can be condemned by the city, and existing laws of expropriation allow it to be siezed by the city due to "blight". That's not the case in Connecticut. There, the Supreme Court admits that the homes were not a blight and were not in disrepair, but that the property was simply better suited for other (people's) use.
That's Horrible. And it's horrible whether the property is owned by an individual or a church. My only reason for bringing the churces into this discussion is the massive opportunity for deception, fraud, discrimination, and corruption this opens up.
From the dissent:
/. (I've been hammered here before for it.). But what about private property that simply doesn't generate tax revenue?
"Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power. Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded--i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public--in the process."
The sole argument for the misappropriation of these properties seems to be that the overall tax coffers would benefit. That is, there will be higher property, income, and sales taxes due to the economic development.
Now, I'm as pro-business as you'll find on
Churches would be poster-children here: they provide no tax revenue (property, sales, etc), and generally, they exist in spite of popular opinion: a 80% baptist (or catholic/muslim/jewish/etc) community could very easily decide that the property of a minority religion's church is simply expendable.
This opens doors of corruption, discrimination, and hatred on a scale that simply frightens me.
I hope they designate a church on one of those properties quickly (before the bulldozers get there) so that this goes back up on a (slightly) stronger ammendment claim (the First!).
One final thought: I have yet to find ANYONE who thinks this is a good idea! I've heard people blame it on the "corporate elite" (presumably right-wing), and on the "socialists and statists", but nobody's claiming this as their own! How do we get a majory of justices on the SCOTUS that nobody agrees with??
Not only did they not post the submission above (from a non-Anonymous reader with multiple sources), they chose to post THIS DRIVEL from an anoymous poster.
I'm sorry, but as much as I like the information on Slashdot, I'll be browsing elsewhere until after the election. I'm afraid your advertisers (I'm a big ThinkGeek fan) will also not be seeing any more of my cash. See you in January
A submission from Indomitus, a left-leaning reader (nothing wrong with that) comes in citing the dailyKOS as a source of news, and the editor doesn't even explain that that site is so unbelievably slanted as to be unreadable.
Just as a test, I've submitted the following story just to see what response I get. I'll be FLOORED if it gets through, although it is at least as accurate as the post Michael approved.
Submission:
The DNC has now confirmed that the excerpt from their Training Manual reported on the Drudge Report is authentic.
The excerpt calls election workers to issue press releases and give interviews about voter suppression, and that, "If no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a pre-emptive strike".
Obviously, that should be "George Bush". You get results like these for George Bush and these for George W. Bush
A simple test is to run the phrase "Geroge Bush" through Google News: you'll find an equally slanted list of news including sites like:
- http://www.dailykos.com/
- and
- http://www.opednews.com/
Which certainly are NOT unbiased.It's a good article, and I'm glad it was posted, but I wish the submitter (and
However, to hopefully help you out of this mess, here is some light reading that you might find useful:
1) Read Don't Make Me Think (not on safari yet) by Steve Krug. It's the best web usability book out there and will take you all of two hours to go through. His usability testing alone would have found your problem earlier.
2) Read Eric Meyer on CSS(no safari) to find out how to make your site look better. If you can find/afford a designer, use them, but learn how to abstract your design from your code and your life will be much easier. (If you like it, there is More Eric Meyer on CSS (safari) as well.
3) If you're trying to do public sites, I've found Submit Now (safari)by Andrew Chak to be an excellent read. It's common sense, but its good to be reminded.
I hope this helps, and good luck salvaging the gig.