Posts in the Politics Category

I’m trying to find out if there’s a country or other region in this world whose annual, monthly, or daily bandwidth consumption is in the vicinity of 700 terabytes (5.6 petabits).  Searches for this type of information have so far come up empty; I was pointed to the Internet Traffic Report but its figures are too abstract to be useful to me, plus they seem to be based on ping times instead of actual bandwidth.  Anyone have a pointer to freely available information along those lines?

Yesterday’s mail contained a copy of the shiny new book Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer’s Edge by Molly Holzschlag.  It’s very, um, red.  It’s also in full color throughout, chock full o’ information, presents some case studies of CSS-driven design, and talks about CSS and design as if they go together, which of course they do.  I did technical editing and wrote the Foreword, where I said:

…CSS is a visual language, one that was meant to be used by designers from the beginning.  Books aimed at that particular audience are long overdue, frankly, and I’m thrilled to see them emerging at long last.  I’m even more thrilled that we’re getting one from Molly Holzschlag.

Personally I think Molly’s a really truly wonderful person and my wife agrees with me, so if you’re particularly worried about bias, there’s mine.  One of them, at any rate.  I also have a fondness for hot chai drinks, in case anyone’s keeping track.

Dear God, but this is just so wrong.  That damn song they sing is still stuck in my head, which I’m sure was the point, but the visuals are even more vividly seared upon my memory.  Requires Flash to actually see the full extent of the wrongness.  Also requires that you not be at work or some other place of propriety, or in the presence of people who are easily offended, or be easily offended yourself.

Then again, far worse things are looming in the real world, and it won’t be cuddly cartoon characters who pay the price when the storm finally breaks.

• Close to the Edge was published on Wednesday, March 19th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

There’s an interesting review of Eric Meyer on CSS at Linux Journal.  Instead of just reviewing the book, Russell Dyer also asked me some interview questions and wove my responses into the review.  I really like the format; it allows him to make points about how and why the book was written in a certain way without just guessing.  It also means that a reader will get a better sense of the book’s purpose through the author’s words.

Thanks to Nick, I found out what operating system I am.    I’m wondering how much time constitutes a passage, since I don’t feel that old.  Yet.  As for few understanding me, that’s no surprise.  Nobody gets me.  I’m the wind, baby.

I thought about incorporating a graphic displaying the current U.S. Homeland Security Advisory System level into my site design, but in the end decided I didn’t want John Ashcroft getting anywhere near my Web site.  Thus I continue to shore up a pleasant illusion that he couldn’t have someone crack into the server’s file system and download everything in about nine seconds if he felt like it.  All in the interests of defending liberty from those who would destroy it, of course.

Although it occurs to me to wonder who that someone might be.  The Department of Justice?  The National Security Agency?  (Side note: one of the funniest things I’ve seen lately is that the NSA has a privacy and security notice on their Web site, and it’s sort of a shame that it doesn’t just say: “You have none.  Get over it.”)  The Department of Homeland Security?  Probably any of them.  It bothers me that the only safeguard to my personal privacy could well be an interdepartmental fight over who gets to invade it first.

• New Review, Old Author? was published on Monday, February 10th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Books, Humor, Politics, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

The files I used for last Thursday’s presentation are now available on the Speaking page.  The presentation space that COMMUG uses is, in a word, awesome.  Picture a large lounge-type setup with three wall-height projection screens, each of which can be devoted to any of the video input signals.  I was able to set it up so the slides (an OperaShow document running on my Windows laptop) were in the center screen, and the examples (which came off the TiBook) were on the left and right screes.  Beforehand I decided to have some fun; running three fifteen-foot-tall iTunes visualizations of “Block Rockin’ Beats” is a sight to behold.  I felt like a real rock star for a moment there.

In my post last Thursday, I referred to the XHTML 2.0 element nl as meaning “nested list,” when in fact it stands for “navigation list.”  My bad.  I’ve corrected the original entry as well.  It’s another data point in the topic of markup, semantics, and semantic overloading, but not one I’m currently prepared to explore in detail.  Meanwhile, I’ll just increase my Buzzword Rating by saying “Semantic” a lot.  Semantic semantic semantic.

So it looks as though the Northwest Passage will open up in our lifetimes, but I’m sure there’s no such thing as global warming.  After all, the Republican News Cha—er, I mean, Fox News Channel said so.  It’s all just a fantasy of radical environmentalists who don’t have anything better to do, apparently.  Which makes sense, because obviously there isn’t anything else to get upset about, like widespread deformities in amphibians.  Oh wait!  Sorry, the FNC gurus have said that last one is all made up as well.  Too bad nobody told Scientific American before they published an article about an eight-year scientific investigation of amphibian deformations.  Oh, those wacky scientists.  When will they learn that science is only valid if its conclusions agree with certain political agendas?

Which, oddly, reminds me: ever noticed how when a judge rules in a manner favorable to conservatives, it’s hailed as respect for the rule of law, but when the ruling leans to the left, that’s called judicial activism?  Maybe it’s time to turn the terms around, just to see how the right wing likes it.  After all, there’s nothing like extremist apoplexy to brighten one’s day.

• Talking, Correcting, Ranting was published on Monday, January 27th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Politics and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

Just when I thought it was all going to go to smash (and of course it probably will anyway), a tiny sign of sanity has peeked its head out of the murk to give me a moment of hope.  A lawsuit alleging McDonald’s is responsible for two consumers’ obesity has been dismissed.  Oddly enough, suddenly I have a craving for a McDonald’s hamburger.  With fries.  Mmmmm….

Of course, it’s absurd to think that fast food is good for you, and I’m not trying to say that it is.  I worked at a very busy McDonald’s for a couple of years, so I know what goes into that stuff.  It’s not healthy.  I don’t think it’s supposed to be, and in fact the offering of salads and yogurt at McDonald’s still gives me moments of cognitive dissonance.  The whole super-sizing trend isn’t the greatest thing to hit the waistline, either, and it seems to be moving into the home.  But nobody’s forcing us to super-size anything.  We choose to go for the Big Gulp, and Value Pack, the Combo Deal, the what-have-you outsized portion.  We could as easily choose not to go for them, if it were important to us.  In the meantime, people should stop blaming nebulous external forces for everything wrong in their lives.  Personal responsibility may be a neglected art these days, but it’s one well worth reviving.

Speaking of junk-ish food, did you know that if you leave rainbow sprinkles in a vanilla milkshake overnight (in the refrigerator, of course!), they semi-disintegrate into a sort of sandy, crusty consistency?  Neither did I, until lunch today.  And for those wondering why I would be drinking a milkshake in our current weather, the nightly lows are still positive Fahrenheit values, so it’s not all that cold.  Besides, a really good milkshake is worthwhile in any weather, and Dottie’s makes really good milkshakes.  Not quite as good as Tommy’s, perhaps, but still really darned good.

If you’re in the central Ohio area and would like to see some fun stuff done with lightweight markup and creative CSS, remember that I’ll be speaking at the Central Ohio Macromedia User Group meeting tomorrow evening at 7:00pm.  We’ve made sure to leave time for audience questions, so come on down!

• Hold the Pickles was published on Wednesday, January 22nd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Politics and Speaking categories.
• There have been no replies.

So last night Kat and I headed down to the Cinematheque to meet up with Ferrett, Gini, and Jeff to see Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.  Wow!  It was… well, it was… I mean to say, it… it’s not really describable.  But it was quite funny.  I might pick it up on DVD if it ever comes available.  As Ferrett said on the way out, “Oh, I can’t wait for the commentary track for that one.”

Meantime, the recent ruling on Eldred v. Ashcroft sparked a lot of debate on a computer book authors list to which I belong.  I stayed out of it for a while, because I didn’t have much to say, and then suddenly—as is often my wont—I realized I had something to say after all.  So I said it, and I figured, what the heck, I could say it here too.  So if you want to know what I think about copyright terms, feel free to read away.  If not, no sweat.  It’s automatically copyrighted either way, as it happens, and now nobody else can say the same thing for more than a century, or something like that.  How much sense does that make?

I still don’t know why I think so, but this is darned cool.  I’m probably just jealous I didn’t think of it first.

• Oh, There’ll Be Plenty was published on Sunday, January 19th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Personal, and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

First Nike claimed (so far as I can tell) a right to deceive the public under the First Amendment, and now Citrix is claiming that paying taxes violates its First Amendment rights.  I find it odd and faintly troubling  that I keep finding references to these cases on the O’Reilly Network, and not via more traditional news sources like CNN.

You know, I’m a big fan of capitalism.  It’s the one form of economics I’ve ever seen that best fits with basic human nature.  It allows capital to move around freely, which is the key to a healthy economy.  It’s based on currency, which is a very useful way to abstractly (and yet tangibly) represent the effort one expends in doing a task, and the worth of that effort.  It’s one step up from the barter system, but it’s an unimaginably powerful step.  It makes possible everything we take for granted in Western society.

Nonetheless, I do not and will not ever accept that capitalist actors—companies as well as individuals—should be totally unfettered and untaxed by government entities.  The government provides very useful services, ones I wouldn’t want to live without and that I can’t reasonably perform myself.  Like the people who inspect food to make sure it’s not going to kill me, for example.  They’re sort of important.  They aren’t perfect, but without them around I suspect food poisoning deaths would be a great deal more common in America.  After all, cleanliness is expensive.  Similarly, I think the EPA is useful, or would be if allowed to do its job.  In any case, taxes support those services.  Not to mention the military, which I’ve been given to understand is a popular institution with the American people these days.  No taxes?  No military.

I can hardly believe that any company has the gall to claim that they have First Amendment rights to not pay taxes.  Maybe, just maybe, the cumulative effect of these cases will be to have the Supreme Court definitively rule that corporations do not have rights, but are instead accorded privileges.  Am I dreaming?  Yeah, probably.

Meanwhile, I’ve heard credible rumors that Apple, while it was working on Safari, filed Bugzilla evangelism bugs so that the Standards Evangelists at Netscape (of which I’m one) would get the sites to fix their code to work with Gecko and other standards-compliant browsers.  This would then, they apparently hoped, get the sites working in Safari as well.  If this turns out to be true, I’m going to be furious; just the idea that it could be true makes me angry.  I don’t mind helping out Apple.  I’m a Macintosh guy and have been for more than a decade now.  I do mind being tricked into doing their work for them.  Hey, guys, what’s wrong with saying, “We’re both working on standards-based browsers, so let’s work together to get sites to support standards?”  You know, being honest?  How about that?  Anyone think of that?

The more I learn about corporate behavior these days, the more I think about becoming a hermit.  A high school friend of mine always said he could easily see me being a backwoods hermit philosopher, muttering about the Deep Mysteries to a bunch of squirrels and throwing a waist-length beard over my shoulder while munching wild strawberries.  Maybe he was just being prescient.

• Beyond the Pale was published on Wednesday, January 8th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

At least one good thing has come out of the apparently-ending-soon thread on www-style: Robin Berjon posted a link to the specification for Ook!, which I hadn’t encountered before.  It was so beautiful, I shed a tear of joy.  Great domain name, too.

As I read How to Write Like a Wanker (thanks to Simon for the pointer), for some strange and obscure reason I found my thoughts once more turning to the aforementioned www-style thread.  I really have to find something else to occupy my mind.  I hear girls are a very popular mental obsession for some people; maybe I’ll try that.  I’m sure my wife will be just thrilled.

Carol Spears wrote in to share some CSS magnetic poetry with me, so I’m sharing it with you.  There are some other interesting CSS examples on the same page, so check them out.  They remind me a little of my one bout of noodling.  (Suddenly I wonder if I should shift that into css/edge.)

Here’s something interesting: Now Corporations Claim The “Right to Lie”.  I found the link at the O’Reilly Network, so you’ve probably already seen it, but if not I highly recommend a reading.  The historical information alone was quite fascinating.  For another side to the story, there’s a wire piece from last November over at CNN Money that concerns me as well.  I don’t believe corporations should ever have a right to lie, and it appalls me that we’ve come to that even being a question.  But is there a right to restrict what news organizations (even those owned by huge media conglomerates) can say, or what corporate members can say to the press, about politics or corporate behavior?  Does the actual ruling mean that?  I don’t know, but the whole thing bothers me.

• Elegance and Eloquence was published on Monday, January 6th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Humor, and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

I swore I was going to continue to stay out of the whole sorry mess (after my one post, I mean), but Ian‘s injunction brought the following passage to mind:

“You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason—if you pick the proper postulates.  We have ours and Cutie has his.”

“Then let’s get at those postulates in a hurry.  The storm’s due tomorrow.”

Powell sighed wearily.  “That’s where everything falls down.  Postulates are based on assumptions and adhered to by faith.  Nothing in the Universe can shake them. I’m going to bed.”

Please note that absolutely no other correlations between the cited story and the situation at hand are intended, and should probably not be inferred.  (Like that will stop anyone.)

• Suppostulatory Arguments was published on Sunday, January 5th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.