Posts by RW 1097 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2007
And all the planes will stink of urine. Doesn't the TSA realize that some people suffer from incontinence? When ya gotta go, ya gotta go. To say nothing of someone suddenly afflicted with the trots (diarrhea).
I decided years ago that I wasn't going to fly anywhere for any reason. No way I'm going to subject myself to the petty napoleons the TSA hires.
Why is there not an icon denoting "adult diaper"?
Given how MS treats its customers, that sounds about right.
BTW, Gavin Clarke forgot about Linux which is, it appears, slowly but steadily encroaching on PC territory by those who care neither for the cheap hardware and horrible (both expensive and ill-conceived) software of MS Windows machines nor the expensive hardware and excellent software of Apple machines.
Linux is far from perfect, but it will sure save you a lot of money. It has its aggravations, no two ways about it, but so does Windows and so does OS/X.
@ 13:54 GMT, AC said "this lot were soooo GULLIBLE"
Not only gullible, but stupid, ignorant, and simple-minded in the bargain.
Let us all be grateful that they were (are) so! Can you imagine what would have happened if the American right wing had been staffed with astute, smart, well-informed people who understood that society is complex beyond words?
Clearly, neocon ideology (particularly as represented by "The New American Century") is yet another piece of intellectual junk to throw on the rubbish heap of history. There it can join (inter alia) the ideologies of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Henry George, Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, Wolfowitz, and any other ideologist, great or small, you care to add to the list.
It seems like every ideologist, whether of the left, right, or middle, grossly oversimplifies his understanding of society, history, economics, and politics, then comes up with a cockamamie analysis which amounts to ignoring the obvious and calls for pounding square pegs into round holes.
Ideology of all stripes: a failure from start to finish.
"the world progresses by 'men in sheds' building things like this."
Bad example. Men in sheds who build useful devices have more gumption than this old codger. Notice that the Wright brothers, the quintessential men in sheds, had the brains to do their test flights at Kitty Hawk where no one would be endangered by crashes.
And besides, the era of men in sheds building useful devices seems to be nearly over. Maybe a lot of innovative software still comes out of sheds, but at least it doesn't endanger lives by crashing on a freeway. It restricts its crashes to the guts of computers.
As for the inventor himself, the applicable platitude is "There's no fool like an old fool."
Where are the curmudgeon, bah-humbug, and Scrooge icons, pray tell?
The Coptic church has had popes several hundred years longer than the RCs.
I wonder if anyone in the frescoed halls of the Vatican was aware that this kind of thing merely induces laughter and makes the RC church ever more a risible target of sarcasm.
Given the retrogressive spirit of the current incumbent in Rome, I can easily imagine him lying awake at night wondering how the papacy can recover its temporal authority.
Big Brother since there's no "Big Papa" icon.
One of the less obvious features of online forums: requests from university students to "visit my website and fill out my survey."
Clearly, the instructors of courses under which surveys are being compiled have failed to explain a few basics of surveying to the students, to wit:
* Surveys with self-selected respondents are subject to an unknown bias and may give results wildly different from a properly constructed random sample, hence any conclusions drawn cannot be trusted.
* The students invariably fail to state the institution, the course, and other details that provide bona fides. Taken at face value, you cannot be sure that the person running the survey isn't some sort of scammer.
Given the penchant of British government at all levels to hire incompetents, it seems likely that the "researchers" who want to abuse patient privacy simply don't know what they are doing, and any results they obtain will be of dubious significance.
Even when a medical or social sciences research project has all the right bells and whistles - double-blind, perhaps matched participants, fully informed patient consent, care in statistical analysis - a great many of the end results prove on review to be complete nonsense. Getting a survey or statistical study right even under ideal conditions isn't easy. Mass digestion using Excel of data collected for other purposes and of unknown quality is not an acceptable technique, but I bet in many cases that's what's being done.
"Our users' privacy and data security have always been a priority for RockYou"
No they haven't. Clearly RockYou has no one on staff with the specific task of vetting security details. Or if they do, that person is either incompetent, or has been overruled by ignorant pointy-haired bosses or the professional liars on staff.
Fucking liars!
¿Why do corporations (and government, it seems) invariably resort to lies and spin instead of saying "We seriously fucked up and the director responsible for this fiasco has been dumped. We are going to send everyone affected £10, plus we will make good any fianancial losses that may ensue."?
Don't they realize that when platitudes such as that quoted appear, no thinking person pays the slightest attention. Gaseous feel-good messages no longer cut it, guys.
A famous book still well worth reading. The author's premise was (is) that throwing manpower at a software development project is counterproductive because the necessary channels of communication become overloaded: multiply the workforce by a factor of two, and see the necessary communications go up by a factor of four.
Brooks plumps strongly for the "chief programmer" paradigm wherein underlings only develop according to explicit directions from the head honcho. In the context of the matter at hand, it's clear that no one at RockYou was really in charge of the development effort - at least not anyone who knew what they were doing and understood that security is the single most important issue in development of interactive websites.
What I smell in all this is the usual MBA bullshit that views worker drones as interchangeable cogs in the mechanism. Thus, security issues are liable to default into the lap of some inexperienced dude who doesn't really understand them.
Without a single point of control over critical system details, any development effort is very likely to fail - as has happened in this case.
Oh, and before I forget it, let me utter that revolutionary cry "to the wall with the MBAs!".
Much the same: Big Brother (via his tentacles in local councils) runs around forbidding this, that, and the other on the grounds "someone might get hurt". It's another example of totally disproportionate response since (afaict) many of the H&S-forbidden activities have no record of anyone getting hurt, ever, at all.
Downsides: large useless bureaucracy that costs God only knows how much — a luxury a bankrupt nation can hardly afford; destruction of long-standing traditional ways of life (no three-legged races, no egg salad sandwiches, etc); and, last but far from least, so much crying "Wolf! Wolf!" that no one can tell the difference between a real threat to health or safety and a fake one.
Rather like the decay of the British police, once admired worldwide, now a laughing stock: the cops are so busy persecuting people for dropping candy wrappers and taking snapshots that they haven't time to deal with murders, armed robberies, and other serious crimes.
My own impression is that NuLabour's mindset is that a collectivist utopia is possible, if only they pass enough social-engineering laws and thereby create The New British Man (along the lines of Rhe New Soviet Man).
Another possibility, not exclusive of the preceding, is that the H&S establishment is staffed with a bunch of chicken littles who want to make life a padded wonderland where everything is just wonderful and nothing negative ever intrudes onto the scene. Well, get a grip, you jerks: life isn't perfect and never will be. And kids need to get a few cuts, bruises, skinned knees, stubbed toes, and, yes, broken bones if they're to be given a reasonable amount of freedom.
Bunch of fucking Bolshevists, if you ask me — and not very smart ones at that.
Or maybe, as someone else has proposed, they know what they're doing and they're getting the results they want. But if that's the case, then clearly NuLabour is not governing in the best interests of the country as a whole.
PS: They're liars, too, starting with Toady Tony and going right through the ranks to Gargoyle Broon and Lord Mendacious and Ed No-balls-at-all. Why anyone would stand for election under the discredited aegis of NuLabour is beyond me. Who wants to associate with deliberate liars?
Quoth he: "Google is funded by Advertising"
The laughable thing about the near-stranglehold the marketers have on Google is that advertising just doesn't work very well. Ask yourself, when was the last time you responded to an ad thrust under your nose by the Google empire? Very likely never.
The profession of professional lying (aka marketing and advertising) shot itself in the foot long ago with its distaste for the simple truth. I am sure I am not the only one who simply disregards ads — and thanks to Ad-block in Firefox, see relatively few of them online.
But on top of that, advertising is simply ineffective. A recent discussion in a Craigslist forum about advertising for a new restaurant or bakery yielded the point that local businesses really depend on word of mouth advertising, and the same is probably true of online businesses to a greater degree than generally recognized. The idea that advertising becomes more effective if targeted via incessant snooping on one's web browsing is simply false; but I suppose this myth helps Google con the advertising industry more effectively, which somehow seems like a marriage made in heaven.
I buy a great deal online, but the only role Google has played is in digging up potential sources of whatever I'm looking for via its search engine.
When I read the text of the gov's rebuttal and hit the word "methodology" I recognized a characteristic of NuLabour's propaganda arm: an inexplicable infatuation with high falutin' terms they, in fact, haven't a clue about, viz.
"Technology".
"Methodology".
"Transparency".
"Accountability".
"Database".
"Safety".
"Security".
etc.
These terms, which one and all have genuine meaning, are, in NuLabour's hands, about as meaningful as the use of "new and improved", "all natural", "organic", and "green" on boxes of breakfast cereal.
The objections to the methodology of the Rowntree report indirectly outline what NuLabour's flunkies think methodology is: a rigid, inflexible, box-ticking system that substitutes a mechanical approach for genuine analysis. This kind of thinking is about what you'd expect from a 15 year old less well versed in the nature of human society than the average 15 year old.
And then there's this report: 'minister of state at the Ministry of Justice Michael Wills [said] "In such a fast changing environment, the Government is happy to change policy in response to well founded criticism"'.
Huh?
If anything, NuLabour, particularly Mr. Broon and Lord Mendacious, has demonstrated total inflexibility of opinion. They've made up their minds and NO criticism of their position is well founded as a result.
NuLabour: when they're not pathetic, they're disgusting. And when they're neither they demonstrate a pettiness and greediness perhaps unprecedented in public life outside the more corrupt dictatorships.
Why all the bepuzzlement over this?
What we are seeing here is merely another example of those in charge being totally allergic to the idea that they may be criticized for any reason at all, justified or unjustified. Hence, they prefer to hide, suppress, and deny evidence of their actions and inactions, not because they know they've fucked up, but because someone might interpret the facts as signs of a fuckup.
"We can't have any criticism!" is the motto, it seems.
The ultimate outcome of this attitude in a more everyday context is a form of organizational paralysis. If you make no decisions whatsoever, the strongest criticism that can be leveled at you is that you are indecisive. Some criticism! But if you are decisive and active, you are guaranteed to make mistakes from time to time, human nature being what it is.
I blame the media for this attitude, not just the chicken-livered attitude of management types who know in their hearts they are amateurs and not worth even a quarter of what they earn.
Readers may apply this lesson freely to any group of "people in charge." I will name no names.
"The real fault is assuming it's OK to need a fancy GUI on your POS terminals"
Here in western Canada, a significant fraction of the population is evidently literate only in Chinese, hence ATMs have to be able to display Chinese text, as well as in Canada's two official languages, English and French. The latter is easy, but the former not so easy.
A graphical display is therefore essential.
I don't know if POS key pads know Chinese, however; suspect not.
To take the example of someone who regularly clicks on links to epicurious.com when searching for recipes: They already know about epicurious.com and epicurious.com has its own site-specific search, so promoting epicurious links toward the top of the hit list is exactly what you wouldn't want. You would want to see recipes at sites *other* *than* the ones you usually click, no?
The whole point of search engines is to point you to sites you don't already know about.
Google has it backwards.
To repeat what others have said, but in (hopefully) stronger language you can't dodge the meaning of: any male over the age of puberty who doesn't look at porn once in a while has a seriously malformed sexual nature.
I suppose you could work up an index that takes into account serum testosterone level, megabytes of porn stored on HD, megabytes of porn actually looked at in the last month, frequency of getting laid, We can call this the "look out, he's gonna snap" index, and those with a high level (e.g. Harriet Harman) could be led away for intensive, if involuntary, sexual therapy involving lots of porn and lots of naked ladies or gents, as the preference may be.
As for the Harriet Harmans and the Andrea "all intercourse is rape" Dworkins of the world, it's clear that they too are majorly sexually maladjusted and would probably benefit from a good screwing in the backseat of an old Oldsmobile (as a saintly retired math professor once attributed to her late husband Jack).
mfraz: "Why don't they just send emails in plain text?"
I purposely use an ancient email client that allows you to turn off HTML rendering (Pegasus 3.12). Most emails with an HTML version also include a text version, but a few don't; and some simply reiterate the HTML as text, which produces an unreadable result.
Yes, plain text would solve a lot of problems. Too bad that Dear Redmond thoroughly muddied the waters years ago by allowing html in the body of an email.
this: "...I love it when they phone you up out of the blue and immediately start asking you security questions to prove *your* identity. I always ask them how do I know they're who they say they are as my phone says 'number withheld' and they generally get put out by my effrontery."
I have to give credit to my bank: when their CC security called to verify the validity of a charge, I did the same thing, and got the reply "If you prefer, you can call the toll free number on the back of the card." That was enough to okay it in my eyes, but it was also noticeable that the gal on the phone had merely asked if I was so-and-so, then if a CC charge for X euros to such-and-such place was valid. (Which it was, as it happens, but better safe than sorry.)
Clearly, somebody at my bank has a clue and has properly trained the security folks.
A ray of sunshine on an otherwise dark and cloudy scene.
I agree. Wikipedia gets a lot of bad press, but most of the articles are just fine, thankyouverymuch. Where else can you find an in depth discussion of Dutch royal palaces?
There are two types of flaws that wannabe-wikipedians can help correct, even if they are know very little about the subjects concerned, viz.
[1] A certain fraction of the articles on the English language Wikipedia were clearly written by someone for whom English is a second language, and are sprinkled with unidiomatic expressions.
[2] And, many articles are repetitive to a degree: they say the same thing more than once, perhaps because of un-thorough editing.
In the US, failure to pay federal income tax is a criminal offense. Here in Canada, it's merely a civil offense, like any other debt.
Why the difference? Because in the 1930s, it was the only way they could nail Al Capone. The cops were too stupid, lazy, corrupt or something to do their job and nail him for his actual crimes, so a new crime was invented, the evidence for which was all your luxurious possessions - where'd the money come from?
Nowadays, Americans fear the IRS - no way to run a democracy, imho.
"MS is no longer a leader in the industry but rather an example of greed."
Nothing unusual there. It seems like the standard corporate business model these days involves making as much money as you can outside the normal exchange of money for specified goods or services. Forced upgrades, hidden fees, charging for things formerly provided free as a matter of course, lies, distortions, and untruths.
All to provide the dickheads in charge with unjustifiably extravagant salaries. Tell me, Mr. Corporate Hotshot, just what do you do that justifies your salary?
Quote: "What is the point of representative democracy when there is a whip telling the MPs how they must vote? This is a party overriding the wishes of the constituents."
Define "party".
It appears that under the current British political structure, "party" means "a group of anonymous men in gray suits who dictate government policy without regard to (and generally contrary to) the wishes of the populace."
Once again, I am persuaded that the key to returning Britain to democracy lies in breaking the back of party discipline in Commons. When MPs listen to their constituents and tell the whips to fuck off, things will be a little better than the current Stalinist sideshow.
And since there's really no fundamental difference between "real" marketing types and dirt-common spammers, not deep down in their disgusting little hearts, the reaction to ads like this will be just like the reaction to spam: do nearly anything to get away from it and ignore it.
For example, there's an ongoing spam campaign in the Craigslist discussion forums from some dimwit outfit calling itself "Toptog.com". They've been spamming for weeks, and their spam has been deleted as fast as it's flagged, but what apparently is over the head of the brains behind this spam campaign (one Amy Chen, one gathers) is that by now Toptog.com has alienated all their potential customers. The harder you spam, the poorer the results - and the same is true of advertising in general. The marketers will claim otherwise, but they're professional liars and can be expected to lie about something as close to their own vested interests.
If Rupert Murdoch wants to charge to look at his not-very-good news sites (Have you read The Times lately? It's pathetic!) all he has to do for widespread uptake is get rid of the ads - especially those disguised as news, for example the Times' endless articles on travel, where to stay, where to eat, and how to get there. That kind of news is little more than pimping for the businesses mentioned and one can't help but wonder what the price for inclusion is.
Sorry for the rant, o Divine Moderatrix!
...So disconnected that they don't realize that not only users, but browsers-by-default view third-party cookies like someone sneezing H1N1 virus around?
Doesn't anyone at MS keep on eye on what competing browsers are doing these days? Or is the use of Firefox etc forbidden in Redmond?
Of course, MS's failings in this instance are merely the tip of the iceberg. A surprising number of websites demand you allow cookies even to browse, thanks to bright ideas like using cookies to keep track of scrolling through user comments. (Hello, www.cbc.ca!) Others, if cookies are enabled, fire a surprisingly large number of cookies at your browser for all sorts of strange domains you've never heard of. Haven't the designers of these brain-dead systems heard that the internet is a hostile environment where unknown domains are viewed with extreme suspicion?
However, a demand that one enable cookies is usually indicative of an inferior website anyway; it's like a popup message saying "don't waste your time here."
Then there's the wonderful message "Please enable cookies in your browser" which invariably tells you how to enable cookies globally, instead of for selected domains only. I suspect this is a holdover from some version of IE that doesn't allow selective dis- and enablement of cookies, never mind that this capability hit the streets long ago.
Memo to all website designers: make sure your site operates correctly with all cookies disabled. Yes, even if someone is ordering goodies and needs to use your shopping system. It can be done; your inability to figure out how is a sign of your own incompetence or laziness.
Headlined: Not all people declared innocent actually innocent
You are wrong, vile AC. Innocence or guilt is a legal matter. Until a competent court finds you guilty you are innocent, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Underlying principle: it is better to let a thousand criminals go unpunished than to punish one innocent. This principle seems to have been jettisoned by gov.uk, I must add, which is a tribute to the inefficacy of its police force. The coppers are simply too lazy to compile the evidence needed for a conviction; it's far easier on the poor dears to lower the standard to be met.
Quoth he: "a better system for maintaining representative democracy"
From where I sit in my eyrie on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, what I see as fundamentally wrong with the British political system is the centralization of power within the political parties. This is expressed in two primary ways: one, the central committee decides who will stand for election in each riding; and, two, party discipline in Commons is very strong and ruthlessly enforced by the respective whips. There are also issues about who really makes party policy, but the details are too well hidden for certainty.
Now I know that many proponents of reform think a fundamental change to elections is the cure, usually either the STV (single transferrable vote) or proportional representation. It is by no means certain that either of these would cure the serious sickness of the British Parliament and government. They are, to be blunt, unproven pie in the sky. Moreover, neither of them attacks the issue of centralization of political power in the hands of obscure, largely anonymous, evil men in gray suits.
I offer as the first step in the cure the introduction of primary elections modeled explicitly on the American system. This entails, incidentally, opening party membership to all and sundry instead of a small coteries of party faithful. In the States, voters "register" - in effect, choosing which party's primaries they will vote in. The parties have no say in who votes in their primaries. In some states, you don't make your decision until you are in the voting booth. You may be registered as a Republican but vote in the Democratic primary elections, which leads to some interesting complexities. However, I don't think that detail is worth emulating.
Suddenly, the "selection" of candidates is taken out of the hands of the eminences grises and put in the hands of the people. Since MPs would then owe their presence in Commons to the electorate, rather than to an unnamed central committee, they would have considerably more freedom and the power of the whips correspondingly reduced.
Leave everything else alone and in twenty years, review the situation.
The American system is far from ideal: elections seem often to be won by simply spending more money than one's opponent. It may be that expenditures by candidates need to be strictly limited, ditto for any contributions made to political war chests. However, these are refinements that can wait in the wings.
Unless you are a true revolutionary, a one-step-at-a-time reform of the system seems to be more suitable than completely overthrowing it.
Steven Jones wrote:
It is also worth noting that "less" is commonly used for some countable items, such as "less than four weeks", although perhaps those are justified by the actual underlying quality (time in this case) being effectively continuous in nature.
"Less" is the right word in that case because you are measuring a continuous quantity, viz. time. "Fewer" would be correct in a context where the time period referred to was quantized in one-week periods, but you'd probably have to be pretty specific in that case if you wanted to avoid being charged with "failure to pedanticize".¹ "Getting the LHC up and running should take fewer than 1000 one-week time slots."
I drank less than six gallons of beer.
I drank fewer than six one-gallon bottles of beer.
¹ Though given NuLabour's chronic distrust of anything with a whiff of elitism about it (e.g. talent, experience, education, intelligence, smarts, gumption, having the chops, consistency, subtlety, etc), pedantry may be on the list of thought crimes to be outlawed.
At one time I had a blog on blogger.com. Then Google assimilatedd blogger.com. In order to get at my blog, I had to set up a Google account. Ugh. Double ugh. My existing blogger.com log in no longer worked to actually log in.
So I registered with Google and retrieved the blog. But in the process, I tried to cut the balls off Google's snoopiness by setting their cookie permissions to "session only". Aha! Didn't work! Google dislikes session cookies. They want to put a cookie on your machine and have it stay there. We can all guess why, I'm sure.
I got rid of the blog (no one was reading it afaict), then got rid of the Google id, then set Google's cookie permissions to none whatsoever.
If you feel you must use those Google facilities that demand a login, when you log out, delete all Google cookies. It's a pain in the ass, but Google and their corny "do no evil" mantra are unpersuasive. They are snoops, plain and simple, and people do not like being snooped on.
I often use Ixquick instead of Google for searches.
With an explicit platform of repealing all of the insane Stalinist legislation NuLabour has imposed on the country. The country is worse of for NuLabour's cack-handed attempts at social engineering, so turn the clock back.
Neither the Tories nor the LibDems have the balls to state that this is one of their goals because neither of those parties has clean hands in the matter.
NuLabour's actions remind me of nothing so much as Stalin and Lysenko, whereby a quack "scientist" was given the authority to gut the Russian scientific community of its genetics experts, setting back Russian expertise in biology and agriculture for decades.
The details are different, of course, but the spirit of NuLabour in this situation is closely akin to Stallin's.
What to watch for: NuLabour attempting to pack "independent scientific panels" with pet lapdogs guaranteed to toe the party line. A clever journalist might find some interesting material by investigating the academic and scientific credentials of any "scientist" henceforth appointed to an advisory board by NuLabour.
Moral to the whole story? Never appoint real experts to supposed panels of "experts".
Fail icon, but I really wish El Reg had the old Soviet Union flag as an icon.
Not all animals have single explosive ejaculations. Even the common dog, once mounted on a female and locked in place, steadily dribbles semen for a protracted period. The longer copulation takes, the more semen is secreted, and the greater the chance of impregnating the female.
Quote:
The Home Office said it is "determined to crack down on all illegal substances and minimise their harm to health and society as a whole".
Sounds like circular reasoning to me, the implication of this remarkable piece of NewSpeak being that the illegality of drugs justifies cracking down on them - in other words, their illegality justifies making them illegal.
I think I've fallen down a rabbit hole into Wonderland!
For some mysterious reason, I smell very strongly the waft of "the cops think they should make the law as well as enforce it", plus "marijuana users are all dirty, long-haired, would-be revolutionary hippies and must be strictly controlled lest they overturn the State."
Does NuLabour have any awareness that a great many of their portentous announcements are sheer piffle? (Answer: almost certainly not, having long ago confused the sizzle with the steak.)
"Just where does Labour get off thinking we want or need this constant monitoring?"
Are you clueless about the nature of NuLabour? Evidently yes; so let me enlighten you.
NuLabour is in many respects as bolshevist and collectivist as any political organization ever was. They have all the respect for the law that any totalitarian system has: when it's in the way, to be ignored or overturned by diktat; when useful, to be waved around as a weapon against enemies of the system. In particular, legal limitations on the powers of government are viewed as bourgeois, obstructionist, obsolete, politically naIve, and contrary to Correct Thought and Party Loyalty.
I'm convinced that one of NuLabour's overarching goals is the reform of the British populace to create The New British Man, an entity generally resembling The New Soviet Man (or whatever the Russians termed it). To do this requires that all signs of deviancy from the Party Line be detected and noted for future rectification.
Hence the need for 24/7 monitoring of the population. How else can the Thought Polilce do their job, pray tell?
NuLabour's one and only saving grace is that they are as stupid as all get-out and invariably make a hash of things while they thrash around trying to be proper bolshevists.
If you do, everyone living in an above-average town will automatically go onto some goddamned database, perhaps called "potential preverts". (The misspelling is deliberate.) I can just see the usual smarmy NuLabour PR gush about the government working to prevent sexual terrorism.
It strikes me that what Britain needs, desperately, is a government that doesn't take itself so seriously. Bring back the Monster Raving Loony Party!
I have to wonder if NuLabour's love of quangos has something to do with this. Every time a new quango is erected, it needs an IT department, and there simply aren't enough good IT people to fill all the slots Britain already has. Hence IT positions in quangos (and other tentacles of government) tend to be occupied by second-rate people for whom the words "encryption" and "security" might as well be in a foreign language.
I also wonder if the prevalence of the faux-credential MCSE has something to do with incompetents being hired by stupid HR departments.
U+0041 (Latin)
U+0391 (Greek)
U+410 (Cyrillic)
U+13AA (Cherokee)
U+15C5, U+15CB (Canadian syllabics)
U+1D00 (Latin small capital)
U+1DC2 (Latin superscript)
U+FF21 (Latin full-width)
And this list is probably incomplete, and certainly doesn't include the innumerable accented versions of A.
Unicode is a mess, frankly. It's a noble effort, but its foundations lack logical consistency: it includes typographical (stylistic) variants (the last three items in this list) as well as authentic letters. If the ICANN proposal allows any Unicode character, we are in trouble. If, on the other hand, it specifies that only certain characters may be used (iow forbids the stylistic variants), we're still in trouble because the coding will be horrendously complex and prone to errors.
In addition, the Unicode mechanism of using another font if the one chosen lacks a given character (an effect readily seen in the Character Map applet under Ubuntu Linux - right click a few obscure characters and they're quite likely NOT from the font chosen) means it's difficult to prevent display.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the gurus who have worked out the internationalization of domain names are six or seven jumps ahead of my small mind and have figured out effective solutions to such issues.
"it [prostitution] is a way of life that is a sensible economic choice for some, and the source of oppression and abuse for others."
That statement could describe nearly any occupation, with the possible exception of the seriously over-paid fat cats at the top of the corporate heap. One might also add that many jobs (quite possibly including prostitution) are both a sensible economic choice *and* a source or oppression and abuse. After all, it's called "work" for a good reason, and we are paid to do it.
More tellingly, this whole dispute reveals once again that NuLabour is driven by ideological biases that are based on fantasy. In the particular case of prostitution, one can't help but have a sneaking suspicion that the strong anti-sex bias of NuLabour, personified especially by Harriet Harman, is behind the proposed legislation.
It seems like many, most, perhaps all politicians enter office full of preconceptions and biases (this is called ideology), then spend their time trying to pound square pegs into round holes and trying to solve what they think are major problems while ignoring the real problems. I am reminded of a comment by the wartime mayor of (iirc) Tokyo who said that the #1 issue for his office was feces: getting rid of human waste. Indeed, most of government is (or should be) devoted to such mundane matters: getting rid of wastes, cleaning streets, changing the lamps in streetlights, delivering the mail quickly and efficiently, and so on. Very rarely is it given to a government to solve some Major Problem of Society.
The real issue with prostitution is simply that it is illegal; most of the evils associated with it arise from that single fact. Legalize it and there will still be evils associated with prostitution, but at least they will be fewer, more manageable evils than those caused by illegality.
I've always thought of Wiccans and other neo-pagans as pretty much "fringe", but I'll make this concession: at least they're harmless, unlike the crazies among the fundamentalists. Talk about a lunatic fringe! They make the Wiccans and their ilk look quite middle of the road.
I must add that many fundamentalist beliefs are actually not Christian in any sense. The fundies generally have a very poor understanding of the Bible and are blindly unaware of the many contradictions, ambiguities, and lacunae in the text. A classic example is "prosperity theology" which asserts that God will favor believers by giving them riches on this earth. Meanwhile, Christ himself pointed out that the rich will have a difficult time getting into heaven.
Also notably absent from fundie ravings are charity, love of their fellow man, and similar virtues.
I can't help but think that the fundies' obsession with how other people have fun, particularly when it comes to sex, demonstrates that they have very dirty minds obsessed with sex - normal people take sex as simply part of life and don't waste their time obsessing over it at all.
Sickening hypocrites, one and all: that's the fundies.
The Australian version is especially disgusting.
And to think that only forty years ago, a naked child symbolized freedom and innocence!
It's time to start saying, loud and clear, that the nudity-phobes simply have dirty minds. They should all be sent away for psychological treatment of their serious sexual maladjustments. (Jacqui Smith, you'll be one of the first.)
But what about the pedophiles? the fearmongers will whine. I have it on good authority (that of a prison guard who deals with pedos and other creeps) that if the pedos can't get pictures of naked kids, they're quite happy to use pictures of kids in clothing for their focussing exercises. Collages of little girls clipped out of Walmart fliers will do very nicely.
It's not the porn that make the pedophile; it's the pedophile that turns otherwise innocent images into porn. And that, perhaps, is the greatest sin of all.
It's about funneling the proceeds from sale of broadcast rights into the pockets of the IOC and national Olympic committees. As an Italian grandmother of my acquaintance once said, members of the IOC live better than kings. Members of national Olympic committees don't do so badly either.
What I've never understood is why pols fall over themselves to be scammed by the IOC. There hasn't been an Olympic Games in recent history that hasn't run seriously over budget and left the host country's taxpayers on the hook for huge amounts of money while the IOC waltzes away with stuffed wallets.
Now if the proceeds from sale of broadcast rights were channeled into paying for the physical facilities - the stadiums, the tracks, the velodromes, etc - then maybe the Olympics would be worth a second look, but as matters stand, the real goal seems to be to enrich the members of the IOC and support their lifestyle - which is, as my Italian grandmere said, better than that of kings.
It's a corrupt affair, no two ways about it.
They not only lie to would-be consumers, but to the industries that pay for their services. They are selling to their employers a cock-and-bull story that denies the awful truth: namely, that advertising, by and large, DOES NOT WORK.
I've been web-connected for nearly 15 years, have seen endless online ads for all sorts of goods and services, and can count on the fingers of one hand (with several unused) the number of times any online ad has influenced my behavior as a consumer.
The only form of advertising online that works is Amazon's "People who bought this also bought..." system.
Madison Avenue is a house of cards, an emperor with no clothes, and I am the little boy who points out the obvious.
Quoth he: "Pretty much everyone in the US has access to electricity and the telephone, which was brought about without state ownership of the companies providing the services."
You, sir, are a vile historical revisionist. Have you never heard of the REA? The Rural Electrification Administration? Nor have you heard of the dams on the Colorado and Columbia rivers (among others) that generate large amounts of electricity and are most definitely NOT in the private sector?
In a very narrow, technical sense you may be right, but by any reasonable interpretation you are wrong-o.
Like other commentators, one can only do an eye-bulging stare at the audacity of the bureaucracy in issuing *any* document that long.
As for violating rule 2882(A)(b)(1.2)(subsection D) on page 1182, it seems to me a valid defense would be that the document is infeasibly long to read & comprehend and cannot represent any actual rules. It's just a set of pretend rules to allow victimization of selected workers at will.
The bureaucrats responsible for this nonsense will, of course, dispute this analysis, but whether intentional or not, that's the net effect.
It's a legal maxim that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" but with as many laws on the books as there are these days and as complex and detailed they are, it's time for some bold judge to accept that argument. Historically, statute law was little more than the codification of what everyone agreed was "the law" - don't rape, steal, or murder, and pay your taxes. But a great deal of modern legislation enforces principles for which there is no such consensus. Perhaps this is the great fault of NuLabour: that they have brought in law after law after law for ideological reasons, in the face of both reasoned and unreasoning opposition. Doesn't work, lads - anymore than any 2300 page book of rules works.
Maybe fax is the only conduit? Have you ever tried to notify Google, Adobe, or Ebay of a problem with their systems? All three have gone to great lengths to block complaints, and perhaps fax would be the simplest approach, instead of wading through a labyrinth of web pages and then discovering that you can't complain without "registering", which entitles you to an infinite supply of browser cookies and probably spam down the road.
I regularly notice incredible screwups on Google maps, but have stopped even thinking about trying to do my civic duty and let Google know they've made a hash of things. Clearly they don't want to hear about it.
Ditto for Adobe and problems with Flash 10.
And then there's the unspeakable Ebay.
