Gah. Previewed several times, and still overlooked something. Make that: "With IE, the default font size seems to be ...". Obviously, IE users can and do set their font sizes just as easily as users of any other brower.
Linkmeister, leading in typography is what you'd probably call linespacing. It is the distance between the baselines of two successive lines of text. See, for instance, here for more details on how to choose leading.
Lisa, one problem with expressing sizes in terms of an em or as a percentage is that browser settings vary so much. With IE in particular, the default font size is not the user's preference, but an inane factory default. As a result, the layout that you pick so that you yourself can easily read your own blog looks rather poor by default on most people's screens. Thus, many layouts choose to force specific font sizes in order to avoid that particular mess.
Michael, I'd actually argue that the reason that mailfrontier.com gives to trust #9 is not valid; the last four or five digits of credit card numbers and such are too often sent through insecure channels to then be trusted as a means of authentication; in the case of #9, it is the only means of authentication, with the actual URL of the link being a strong counter-indicator. Thus, I'd say that mailfrontier.com is giving bad advice.
Unfortunately, sometimes even reputable companies use URLs that look fishy, but are legitimate. For example, the first time I encountered an online merchant that was using "Verified by VISA", I was sent to a URL that smelled like something straight out of a phishing scam (apparently due to VISA outsourcing the verification to individual financial institutions that sometimes use generic third-party domain names for hosting). And then I was asked for my SSN and some other personal information to verify that it was me (date of birth and last four digits of my home phone number, I think). My immediate reaction was, "yeah, right", but after clicking through from visa.com I ended up at the exact same address. Scary.
What Clark just said; an 11px font naturally looks larger on my iBook's built-in 14" screen than when I read it at work on a 20" 1600x1200 monitor, because the two monitors have different values of dots per inch (dpi), and a pixel is bigger on the former. Note that is not just the resolution; it is the resolution relative to the monitor size.
Unfortunately, there's no easy solution to that problem, at least as far as web publishing is concerned. One might think that specifying font sizes in points is a solution, because 1 point is 1/72 of an inch these days and would scale up accordingly. Unfortunately, neither Microsoft's nor Apple's OS offerings provide good support for that approach. If I recall correctly, Microsoft either believes your display to be 96 dpi or 72 dpi, following some arcane rules and settings. In Apple's case, one inch is equal to 72 pixels, regardless of what the actual size of the display is. This seems to be an ironclad rule, inherited from the time of the original Mac. As a result, it is all but impossible to set font sizes to a value that works well on all displays and operating systems, simply because the OS does not provide accurate information on how large a pixel actually is on screen.
Kip, Verdana looks good at certain pixel sizes, because Monotype spent months optimizing the hinting for those pixel sizes and making sure that they perfectly matched Matthew Carter's bitmapped specimens. Naturally, as you increase the size, it becomes less likely to hit one of those optimized resolutions.
Alison, the effect is more generally known as the Spiral of Silence. It is worth noting, however, that it is a somewhat controversial theory.
L.N. Hammer: As I understand it, Maine and Nebraska (the two states you are referring to, I believe) pick two electors via a statewide popular vote and then one elector per congressional district based on the popular vote in each such district. So, no, they do not select electors in proportion to the popular vote.
Hey, does Rush's idea mean that I should be allowed to vote in US elections? Foreigner, living in Michigan, paying income, FICA and Medicare taxes just like your typical American. No taxation without ... eh, nevermind.
(Yes, I'm being facetious.)
What worries me a bit is the continuing demonization of the Bush administration. It's not as though I think it is entirely undeserved: heck, I consider Kerry a clear rightwing candidate; imagine what I think of Bush, especially given his and his administration's tendencies to play fast and loose with democratic traditions and the rule of law.
The problem is that digging trenches isn't going to get the Democrats anywhere. Notwithstanding rumors and/or conspiracy theories regarding voter fraud in Ohio, the majority of American voters consciously chose to cast their vote for Bush; no amount of arguing will make that go away. In other words, the Republicans have a very substantial base of voters that consider a Bush administration the superior option. And demonizing the president will not move a single one of of these votes from the Republican into the Democratic column at the next election, nor will it make any message more believable that the Democracts want to convey to these voters; instead, any such message will be greeted with doubt. To convince somebody who has a different opinion, you have to earn credibility with them first, and antagonizing them is generally not a good way to do it.
This is particularly troublesome because I believe that the majority of people who voted for Bush did so being unaware of many of the positions that the president holds on important issues. But how do you inform them if at the beginning of a conversation you have already claimed that both they and the president are idiots? Your arguments will almost instantly be dismissed as self-serving partisan chatter.
Playing the attribution game:
What is genius, but the power of expressing a new individuality? -- Henry Jekyll, MD
Destiny is a matter of choice, not chance. -- Capt. John Yossarian
There is no such thing as a self-made man. You will reach your goals only with the help of others. -- Charles Ponzi
The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another. -- Boxer from Animal Farm
Together we are winners. -- Jack Merridew
It is a sad fact that regardless of effort or talent, second place really means you are first in a long line of losers. -- Louis XIV, King of France
We make way for the one who pushes past us. -- Wilhelm Voigt
What would you not attempt to achieve, if you believed it was impossible to fail? -- Croesus, King of Lydia
Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. -- Macbeth
You have to know you can win. You have to think you can win. You have to feel you can win. -- Pyrrhus, King of Epirus
Speaking of evil, authority, and mass psychology, I think it's worthwhile mentioning "The Wave" here (see also this page for an overview). It was not a controlled psychological experiment, which makes it even more chilling.
Dan, Epacris – would it be terribly rude of me to point out that the genitive singular of lumen is luminis, not lumina?
Graydon, if a file contains several messages, you should give the --mbox option to sa-learn so that it knows that the file is not just a single message. Otherwise, it won't properly weigh spam probabilities. (I'm assuming here that the file is in the conventional UNIX mbox format.) Also, don't forget to likewise train it with the --ham option on your non-spam messages so that it will know about things that make a message "good".
Adrian asks: Can a foreign national like me donate to a US political party?
No. It's against the law. You must be a US citizen or a permanent resident. (And it's a good thing that there is such a law -- just think of Sir Henry Deterding.)
Dream on. When the GOP in the House, voting by party lines, refuses to accept California's EC votes, and awards the presidency to Bush, what are you going to do?
Erik, what evidence can you provide that something like this is even remotely likely to happen?
Tina, luckily the wonderful owners of this site have made it easy to regurgitate old material.
Now, could I have some popcorn, too?
A slight tangent here, but the following caught my eye.
Mitch wrote: I was taught in high school that the Roman Emperor Justinian was the first person to set down a code of law, and that’s pretty late in the civilizaton game.
Just off the top of my head, there is the Codex Hammurabi, the Solonian Constitution, the Lex Duodecim Tabularum. All of them predate Justinian's code (which was mostly a consolidation of existing statutes into a single code, too). Did you have an implicit additional requirement here that I am missing?
Jason,
assuming that you have an appropriately configured Apache, the following lines in your .htaccess will block the given addresses from submitting any forms (that includes posting comments). They will still be able to read from your site.
<Limit POST>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
Deny from 61.11.26.134
Deny from 63.226.96.246
Deny from ...
</Limit>
Addresses should be numeric IP addresses. You can also block entire subnets. Consult the Apache documentation on how to do that. Access control can be even more fine-grained, blocking only access to certain URIs (cf. the Location, Directory and Files directives). This may be necessary if the spammers use GET instead of POST requests to insert their spam.
While I don't have a weblog, I run a few wikis, and some of them got recently hit by spam attempts as well. And as with weblogs or guestbooks, it is hard to keep wikis from being abused by bots. Now, I have developed some techniques to keep them out, several of which are probably also used by weblogs.
Most importantly, however, I am formatting all external URIs so that they go through a redirector instead of referencing the target page directly. The URI for the redirector (such as http://www.example.com/redirect?uri=http://target.example.org/) is not accessible to Google and other search engines (blocked in /robots.txt). Thus, links to external sites (except where explicitly approved) do not do anything for the pagerank of the external sites, rendering googlespamming ineffective.
Naturally, that doesn't help a lot if only a few individual sites do it. But if such techniques were widely deployed, comment spamming would become essentially a pointless exercise. It would not prevent the spam, but there wouldn't be anything to be gained from it, either.
The downside is of course that URIs become longer, less readable and require an additional server access (unless you augment the A element with Javascript). There are probably also other problems that I haven't figured out yet. But at least I have the satisfaction that any spammer who gets through my defenses won't gain anything from it.
Paula,
I don't know about Italy, but German copyright law allows quoting a work in its entirety ("Grodfzitat") in a scientific work for the purpose of discussing or analyzing the quoted work, if that purpose requires the unabridged inclusion of the work.
Now, that doesn't cover including a work in a textbook for the purpose of simple duplication, but Italian law may be different again. Continental European copyright law is substantially different in nature from traditional American copyright law. It is generally an "author's right", rather than a copyright. Authors tend to have more protection than under American law, but there are also usually more express limitations on the scope of exclusive rights to balance the author's right over his or her work with the public good. So, it may theoretically be perfectly legal under Italian law to include whole works in limited cases (such as for textbooks).
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 19 |
| 2003 | 18 |
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