Posts by Steve Roper 930 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2007
That varies from site to site. The most visits from IE 6 users we've had since going to W3C-only development was on our main retail site last August, with 1287 unique visits in the month out of 23,443 total, which makes it about 5% of traffic. To me, that's 5% that's a small loss, but my CEO would see that as 1287 lost customers, so while it's not a number worth caring about, I haven't exactly bragged about it to the boss! :)
Our web dev company stopped supporting IE 6 a year ago, at my vociferous and protracted insistence. Moving to W3C-only development has nearly HALVED our development costs and time-to-deployment in the year to date, for which the CEO is profoundly grateful. He took some persuading, though, and even recently he's been asking whether or not we should look more closely at how many IE 6 visitors our sites are getting. This news will vindicate me and convince him that we've made the right move.
"the planet's excess human population starves to death"
Charles Dickens had an answer for that about a century or so ago:
"If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population... Man, if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!"
1984 was a documentary on what happens when you let politicians and police gain too much surveillance and control over peoples' private lives. Have we learned from this?
Soylent Green was a documentary on what happens when we let people breed without restriction. Have we learned from this?
These "documentaries" aren't taken as warnings. They're used as instruction manuals, because people are stupid.
Or did the red rage blind you after the first line? I know when I went to a private school that while wearing the uniform your school governed your conduct - which is why I *posted* about getting home and changing out of uniform.
As to the rest, excessive authority *should* be responded to by increased abilities of evasion. Otherwise we're just slaves. Setting rules is one thing, and yes, it's necessary for civilisation to exist. But intruding into someone's private activities at home or not in your jusridiction is powerlust, plain and simple, and I stand by my statement that kids should oppose such abuses of power.
Because this is the world they'd be living in. I feel only sorrow and pity for today's children, who will grow up to inherit the Orwellian hell we've created for them. When I was a child, the school's control of my life ended the moment I got home and changed out of school uniform. And when I went to a state school which didn't require uniforms the school's control of my life ended the moment I left the school grounds. The idea that a school has taken for itself the right to govern a child's lifestyle outside of school hours is just one more example of the conditioning to live in a totalitarian society being pushed upon kids today. Preparation for future employers being able to control how you behave out of work hours, perhaps?
Children, if you are reading this, learn well how to evade detection and monitoring by authority figures. It will be your only chance for survival in the future you are facing.
because he did the modern equivalent of publicly claiming to "practice witchcraft". 500 years ago, making a public statement to the effect that you were trafficking with dark powers got you burned at the stake, regardless of your actual innocence or guilt. Today, "terrorist" and "paedophile" have replaced "witch", but the Spanish Inquisition is still alive and kicking.
No, the Berne standard copyright term is LIFE + 50 years. Which means that the Beatles songs won't go out of copyright until 50 years AFTER the last Beatle dies. Given that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are still going strong and probably will for at least the next 10-20 years, don't expect to see any Beatles songs enter the public domain until at least around 2070 - 2080.
Of course, by then Disney and its ilk will have pushed the copyright term to something like life + 500 years. As long as these greedy fucking bastards are in control of our governments, nothing created after Mickey Mouse will ever enter the public domain again.
Current copyright law is an absolute obscenity. That someone could live the parasitic life of bloody riley on the royalties from a song their great-great-grandfather wrote 120 years ago is nothing more than plain, simple greed.
Christ, we've only just found water on the damn thing and already you guys are talking about raping its resources. Granted, we might not find the Na'vi skulking around Enceladus' subsurface seas but at what point is interference with a planet's biosphere justified? Bear in mind that intelligence and sentience may occur in many forms besides the ones we recognise. Ideally any law of non-interference should extend to any planet with indigenous life, meaning that if we want to colonise and exploit other worlds we need to terraform ones that are confirmed lifeless. But that won't happen, of course.
Like 1984, Avatar is a warning about the nastier aspects of human nature, and like 1984, one that will be either ignored completely or used as an instruction manual when the time comes!
Oh yes, I have a big problem with what the Australian government deems acceptable - women with small tits and dirty Simpsons cartoons not least - but that's a whole different basket of cats. In this case, I also have a problem with the absolutism of the powers of enforcement - of which prosecuting me for publishing something in another country is one end of the spectrum, and internet censorship is the other.
I have a saying: "The people's respect for the law is only as good as the law's respect for the people." Right now, the law in Australia has very little respect for the people, so I have very little respect for the law. So when I flip the bird to the law, I object to having my circumvention loopholes closed because it means I'm spending more time developing other means of circumvention rather than just getting on with the business of flouting the law.
Like our internet censorship regime; I fully intend to circumvent it if it goes through, but then the next thing will be to crack down on circumvention methods, which means I'll end up spending more time fucking around with circumvention software than I will surfing sites the government doesn't want me to see. Am I wrong for getting pissed off at the government for making my job of defying oppression and tyranny harder, *in addition to* being pissed off at them for being tyrannical arseholes in the first place?
Your first two paragraphs - yes, I'm with you right there. But your last statement - "We should be free to make statements which may be interpreted as offensive, provided we don't instruct others to commit illegal acts." - is an example of allowing quite a lot of room for interpretation. For example: If my government passes its internet censorship law, then my showing a fellow Aussie how to circumvent said censorship falls under your remit of "instructing others in illegal acts". If you are going to put limits on free speech, you need to be VERY specific, like this:
1. No person shall make, produce, distribute or cause to be made, produced or distributed any PHOTOGRAPH of persons whose actual biological age is less than sixteen years, in which photographs said persons are engaging in explicit sexual activity of any kind.
2. No person shall instruct or provide instructions to the general public for the purpose of enabling non-qualified members of the general public to manufacture and utilise explosive, disease or toxic chemical dispersal substances and/or devices with the intention of causing harm to other members of the general public.
See what I mean? When you make these restrictions, you need to make them that specific. Anything less specific than this, such as your "illegal acts", is the thin end of a very nasty wedge.
We've had this law in place since the 90s - that publication of content by an Australian resident is subject to Australian laws, even if the content is hosted or published overseas. And it's not only on the Internet either; if I went to the Philippines, wrote a book while there that was perfectly legal there but illegal in Australia - I could still be arrested and tried under Australian law upon my return to Australia because I'm an Australian citizen.
That means if I were to post any X-rated porn, including stuff ranging from basic porn like cumshots and upskirts to hardcore stuff like bestiality or sexual activity by people who merely *appear* to be under 18 even though they're not, even if I post it on an overseas server like 4chan, I can be done for publishing lewd and licentious material. Great isn't it?
And now you in the UK have finally caught up, 12 years after our government established this principle. We're still ahead of you losers in the police state stakes though, what with our internet censorship and arresting people for emailing Simpsons porn and all.
You must be new here. You should be aware that the El Reg comments system does not support HTML, BBCode, images, videos, italics, bold or anything at all other than boring plain text.
Learn to emphasise with *asterisks* and CAPITALS, just post URLs as they are without trying to link them, and strikethrough with ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H and you'll be fine!
I'm sure he'd toss that goat-piss into the swill bucket, since the drink of choice over here is Cooper's, Southwark or Cascade. Fosters is to us what Budweiser is to the US - the best-known and most-advertised beer, but it's cheap catpiss that only bogans (chavs, white trash) drink!
Anyway, most of us here are shall we say gobsmacked by this ruling. We've had months of Conroy and his censorship, stupid laws being hurled this way and that - and suddenly a ruling that smacks of common sense? The mood here is cautiously optimistic now, some of us are hoping that this is the light at the end of the tunnel and maybe we can get the censorship bullshit overturned that same way. Others are saying it's a flash in the pan and we're going to pay for it one way or another - like the stupid copyright ruling regarding the Men At Work song.
Ah well. Can't win em all, hey!
"It's lookin' good... it's goin' good... we're gettin' great pictures here at NASA Control Pasadena! The landing craft touched down on mars 28 kilometres from the aim point. We're lookin' at a remarkable landscape, littered with different kinds of rocks... red... purple..."
...
"Hey wait a minute, now I'm losing one of the craft. Hey Houston, you getting this?"
...
WEEEEEooooooooo, WEEEEoooooooo, WEEEEEooooooo....
(+1 internets to anyone old enough to pick the reference!)
An antelope watching its calf get pulled down by a lion is no different than a human losing a child in the same way.
Sorry AC, but we are predators and we eat meat. Our teeth and digestive tract establish this fact biologically. Why do you think vegetarians and vegans have to eat "meat substitutes" like soy-based products and tofu and such like? It's because our bodies need the proteins found in meat.
And I for one take extreme exception to being compared to a baby-killer because I like eating veal. Because that's what you imply in your post. Attitudes like that are why the majority of us have such contempt for PETA and its adherents and will quite happily do such things as file complaints against your advertising just to shut you fuckers up.
Let's see... Possession of pictures of childlike cartoon characters is child pornography. Child pornography is the exploitation of children. REAL children. Therefore, a cartoon child is now recognised in law as having the same rights as a real child.
OK. I have a number of Poser renders of 3D models including some of children and young people (not doing anything immoral mind!). I have stories of the lives of the people depicted in these images. That means, that if imaginary characters are now accorded the same rights of protection under Australian law as real people, that means I could theoretically register them with Centrelink (Australia's social security department) as dependents and receive welfare payments for them.
And when I'm arrested for welfare fraud, I can rightly point out to the judge that since possession of images of my own imaginary characters doing immoral acts constitutes possession of child pornography, then those characters must by definition be protected by the same human rights legislation as protects real children and are therefore entitled to welfare payments.
It would be an interesting court case. I would lose, of course, but turning the result into a media circus would then severely damage the agenda of these fucking witch-hunting bastards in the eyes of the public.
I'll see your Welsh dictionary and raise you my personal conlang!
Take words from my conlang like Kaseryndhalan, Dwimmathdene and Khatalinlat, replace the vowels with numbers - K4s3ryndh4l4n, Dw1mm4thd3d3 and Kh4t4l1nl4t - and I have easy-to-remember passwords that nobody's going to guess... :)
Conlangs are an awesome and uncrackable means of encryption too if you take the time and effort to develop one. For example, I can guarantee that there are only 3 people, including myself, on this planet who would be able to translate this statement:
Hyarin marhyad thiel ke koyanad kya shariadi adawaya kya khanya kha simain. Saeli tielyad kya kelduran kha sharath kya tunai anlani re shalayneth lamanya dawya gharan.
is coming to pass.
In his 90s cyberpunk novel "Slant" he describes a world about 500 years from now in which the Internet has become a full-immersion experience (whimsically called "yox") in which everything, absolutely everything, is trademarked, patented, copyrighted, registered and controlled by big media which charges by the second for everything you do online. He called it a "dataflow economy" and described it as a dystopian future in which the common people were systematically bled dry paying for sensational garbage while the real news and entertainment had become a prerogative of the rich.
With Murdoch and his paywalls, and now this - here it comes...
Now that he's been acquitted, if they continue hounding him he probably now has a good case for harassment against the BPI/IFPI. I don't know exactly what the law is in the UK, but if it's anything like Australian law (which it most likely is since our laws are based heavily on the UK's) then if you win a case against an accuser who then continues to press the case against you, you can apply for a restraining order or court order enjoining said accuser from contacting you or pursuing you further on the matter. If the accuser continues the harassment after that, not only do they go down for contempt of court but you also stand to win substantial damages from them. Of course, this only becomes possible after the accuser has exhausted all avenues of appeal (e.g. Magistrates Court -> Federal Court -> High Court), but once an appeal has been denied then he's clear to apply for this order.
And that would be the icing on the cake in this case - a torrent site operator not only winning a harassment injunction, but being awarded thousands or even millions in damages against the copypigs!
If you have Firefox you can install the CustomizeGoogle plugin which filters selected domains from appearing in search results. I'll just be adding Murdoch's sites to my CustomizeGoogle domain blacklist along with experts-exchange and the other SEO-scam-driven shitsites already on there.
That means a signal travelling between New York and Adelaide (about as far apart as you can get) is facing a hop of 35,700 km up to GEO, 132,200 km halfway around the Earth at GEO radius, and another 35,700 km back down, for a total of 203,600 km one way, giving a final round-trip distance of 407,200 km. With the signal travelling at c, that's a ping of 1.37 seconds. Given that there's currently approximately 30,000 km (allowing for all the convolutions) of cable between me and New York, my best current ping with the signal travelling at c would be 0.1 seconds. In reality it comes out at between 0.2 and 0.7 seconds depending on traffic.
I think I'll stick with the wires, thanks :)
if you're debugging a website, but as a means of selectively blocking content I can tell you now it would suck. Most websites, even if the front page looks fairly simple, often assemble the graphical layout from dozens of tiny image files arranged in divs or tables (ugh!), and often use component files for common parts of the site; e.g. the header, navigation bar, sidebar, footer, promo boxout, and main content sections are fetched separately as component HTML files.
For example, our company website, on its home page alone, fetches 78 images (most of which are only a few hundred bytes here and there), 8 CSS files, 14 Javascripts and 6 HTML component files on page load. Were you to visit our home page using the system you describe, you'd be looking at 106 yes/no/block clicks before you were done. And that's just the home page. And our site is conservative compared to some of the sites I've seen!
So, nice idea, but would be incredibly annoying to use in practice.
Karmic Koala... now that one they had to scrape around for. So far we've had: Warty Warthog, Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger, Dapper Drake, Edgy Eft, Feisty Fawn, Gutsy Gibbon, Hardy Heron, Intrepid Ibex, Jaunty Jackalope, and Karmic Koala.
Next off the rank is Lucid Lynx.
In the spirit of open source and just because I don't want to wait to see what else they come out with for the rest of the alphabet, here are my predictions (and suggestions!) for future releases of Ubuntu:
Moody Moose, Nifty Newt, Ornery Ostrich, Pesky Pigeon, Quizzical Quail, Raunchy Rhino, Saucy Seagull, Trendy Tiger, Uppity Urchin, Valiant Viper, Weighty Walrus, Xanthic Xenurine (ok, that one really is reaching!), Yappy Yeti, and Zesty Zebra.
As to what they do when they reach the end of the alphabet... remains to be seen. Oh, and they forgot A and C, so here's some tips for next time round: Active Antelope and Crafty Camel!
...about things like this is that when 20 million people stand up and complain about something like Internet censorship in Australia or ID cards in Britain, they are completely ignored and ridden over. But when ONE person complains to get something banned or censored the powers-that-be fall over themselves backwards to comply.
If ever you needed proof that the powers of today are determined to rob us all of the last vestige of freedom, it is in that fact right there.
is one of Australia's national but unofficial heroes, for doing much the same thing and for much the same reason.
We all live in a prison these days, my friend. So when someone escapes the domineering clutch of authority it's by no means unusual to cheer them on. Because no matter what he did, it comes nowhere near to the crimes and atrocities our governments are committing against the people these days.
There's no bloody way I'm ever buying a Kindle. I don't care if Amazon swear on their CEO's mother's grave and promise us the moon wrapped in cellophane, they've demonstrated the ability to delete stuff from your library and not for all the promises in heaven, earth and hell can they avoid doing it again the moment a judge tells them to.
The damage is done, Amazon. Not even a Dremel can put enough spin on that to fix it. I'll look for a reader that doesn't allow it's manufacturer to delete or modify what I put in it, thanks.
...this is a reaction to the excesses of corporate greed, consumerism, political correctness and oppressive laws that are increasingly hemming in our daily lives. The despair comes from a sense of hopelessness that anyone can ever change it. With the advent of technology, crowd psychology and advanced policing/enforcement methods resistance and revolution have become impossible. Protest against government and corporate excesses now falls on deaf ears. Advertising has reached such a level of mind control to make people buy, buy, buy that mass consumerism and materialism has become inescapable - witness the determined desire of today's children to have Brand Name Products, not no-name copies. And this awareness of a dark and dystopian future being inevitable, and the hopelessness of opposing it, is finally coming home to roost.
Which is why I refused to have children. It was my only way of striking back at the system - knowing that no progeny of mine will ever have to suffer the mind-control, slavery and oppression that is now upon us, and will be for the foreseeable future.
If Google pull out of China on principle (thus reducing their market in breach of their mandate to shareholders) I may have to re-evaluate my flagging opinion of them... unless the Chinese operation is proving unprofitable and Google are simply trimming deadwood under the guise of upholding human rights - which is more likely, methinks.
to simply post the location of CCTV cameras, such a system would also need to display the direction of the cameras as well. For example, a camera pointing south might be marked by a red circle with a line pointing southwards from it, or just an isosceles triangle with the base facing the direction of the camera. Even better would be FoV cones showing the area covered by the camera - but I realise that without access to the footage such a feature would be largely a matter of guesswork. But with such a thing, you could work out interesting statistical stuff, like what percentage of the country is covered by CCTV cameras...
as I entered the page and started to read the article, that the first picture I saw was of a professional-looking upright camera that could not have less suited a juvenile name like the "Bloggie". My first thought on seeing that picture was that I wanted some of whatever Sony's marketing department was on. With a name like that surely the thing should come in pink since it has to be targeted at teenage girls. WTF is that black professional-looking thing doing with a name like that?
...Scroll down....
Ah, that's more like it! A pretty pink Bloggie. I'm sure my 13-year-old niece would love one for her birthday, coming soon...
will benefit from this. What's the bet that companies will start issuing their employees (those that require mobiles) with phones subject to the same system? What this is doing is teaching kids to expect being monitored, spied on, controlled and regulated throughout their lives.
To those helicopter parents who are so paranoid, I say YOU are the primary reason our civil liberties are being eroded away. If you're so terrified your little precious might get hurt, maybe you shouldn't have had them. No wonder kids today are so rebellious and anti-social. You reap what you sow.
I brew my own. You think you have it bad? Our government in Australia hikes the price of alcohol every year and sometimes more often to try to curb "binge drinking". A pint of Guinness costs around $8 AUD (so nearly FIVE quid to you) and a six-pack is now around $35-$40 AUD (that's around 6 pints). For about that amount and a couple of weeks in the fermenter I can produce 40+ pints of very passable Guinness. Enough for me and all my mates to enjoy at home; it's been months since any of us set foot in a pub (except my brother who works in one) with the high prices, drink limits, smoking bans and all. Better to come round my place, where we can smoke, get pissed as we want, for bugger-all, and stay overnight to avoid drink-driving (Ah, the benefits of not being married! 8-) ).
Brewing your own takes a bit of care, you have to make sure everything is sterile, mix your ingredients properly at the right temperatures, and ferment at the proper temperature, but once you get it down pat as I have it's well worth the effort. Protip: Don't buy the cheap brewing kits you see in supermarkets. Go to a specialty home-brewing shop, it's not that much more expensive and the improvement in quality is WELL worth it.
All this price-hiking and other anti-alcohol/anti-smoking/anti-anything-fun crap has done is drive people like me and my mates to start brewing our own booze and staying away from the pubs. The world is no longer a friendly place.
Damn I hate how the Reg comments lands on the second page first... missed this post when I posted mine!
I suggest Munton's Stout brewing kits if you can get them over there - it's the one most like Guinness I've found. And to the AC who uses CO2 canisters: Don't. Use carbonation drops when you bottle up and let the remaining yeast do the carbonation naturally. The result is much smoother and you get a much creamier head instead of a hissing pile of froth!
Our government banned laser pointers because some little shits were shining them at the cockpit windows of aircraft taking off at airports. I give these things a month before they go the same way - as soon as these same little shits start using them to project porn onto the end-walls of trains and other public places.
Which is both a good and bad thing, I suppose. It's a pity that such a potentially useful technology will inevitably find its way into the hands of stupid little bastards who will wreck it for everybody. If only our government allowed mature members of the public to carry out summary executions instead... ;)
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