Wednesday, February 13, 2002
U.S. Considers Military Action to Remove Skating Judges
President Issues Ultimatum toAxis of Cheaters
Studios Assail ReplayTV Technology
Mark Lemley, a UC Berkeley law professor, said,It's troubling to say, This thing that everybody does has been illegal for 20 years. ... We're just getting around to catching you.
As Princess Leia said to Grand Moff Tarkin, The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers
.
Are tables really evil?
Dave Winer
Thanks to Zeldman for the pointer to a table-less three-column liquid CSS-based site that degrades gracefully (that's a mouthful). Now I've been trying to figure out why this is so important. I wrote XML-RPC for Newbies, to help people understand why it's so important to geekish Web developers. Would a designer please write a Table-less CSS Templates for Newbies, to explain why tables are evil. I don't get it. Or is this just gymnastics, which is cool, but tell us so, please.
Owen Briggs
The idea of the web is to digitalize your message for a variety of retrieval methods -- for methods we have now, and for methods that we haven't thought of yet.
Dave Polaschek
I want to make clear that I'm not saying you should never use tables. Tables are in HTML, and when you want to display tabular data, you should use them. But for layout, there are other options.
Dave Dombrowski
CSS won't buy you a great deal today. Certainly not in Radio where it's pretty easy to redo the pages it outputs. But CSS will buy you a ton in the years to come.
Brent Simmons
I don't care how Joe Blow works; I care about how I work.
Tony Collen - CSS Koolaid For Newbies
So I've sold you on CSS, right?
Dave's evil twin says No
.
Sylvain Carle
Table are evil for the same reason CORBA is evil.
Dave's evil twin says Feh
.
John Brooks
The table hack works for desktop browsers, and probably will continue to for as long as the Web exists.
John links to a really cool use of CSS to allow a visitor to change the look of the site (without involving the server).
Obviously, there are tables all over this site. I've played around with the templates a bit, but not much. There are practical arguments for and against tables (tables load slowly - but many people are still using browsers that don't support CSS at all, and even the newest browsers aren't too good). I'd like to switch to a CSS-formatted site for more philosophical reasons - it just seems more elegant to separate formatting from content, and it seems that a CMS like Radio should make it easy to do this. I need to pay closer attention to this.
Dave Winer
BTW, the RadioServices.app thing that's causing such a stir of buzz, is at its core, made possible by XML-RPC. Ta-dahh. And it's the weird kind of XML-RPC that's becoming so popular. The two processes are on the same machine, but get this, they don't have to be. Now that's flexibility that people can use. And by the way, thanks to Apple for baking XML-RPC support into the OS. That matters too, for acceptance by developers. It gets into every nook and cranny of the culture. Here at UserLand we call thatsupport from the platform vendor. Nice.
I haven't gotten this to work on my computer, but it looks promising.
Unbelievable! Woman is handcuffed and arrested for a late video rental
Laws are subject to mission creep — and their enforcement gets creepier and creepier, until you find yourself starring in the World's Most Dangerous Police Videos for forgetting to return a video.
One of the (many) problems with having too many laws on the books is that it is not possible to convert common sense
into legal language.
It's Not Reform, It's Deception
Washington thinkis less about logic than political hustle. If you favor something, you attach it to a popular cause — say, homeland security. If you oppose something, you attach it to an unpopular cause — say, Enron.
My old favorite was the argument that it's for the children
. How can you be opposed to helping children?
As for campaign finance reform. Free speech costs a lot of money these days (although the software and hosting for this website costs only $39.95). As long as the government is involved in every aspect of the economy, businesses will try to manipulate it by contributing to campaigns. Any law that attempts to prevent this will be subverted by armies of corporate lawyers, and deceptive accounting practices (as demonstrated by Enron) will continue.
Grim waiting game
If we can stop this disease from killing the other 5,999 people who have it, then we should. We should save as many lives as we can now, and then talk about doing more clinical trials.
Fabry is a rare disease that qualifys for orphan status. The Orphan Drug Act was implemented in 1983 to provide incentives for drug companies to develop treatments for rare diseases that, presumably, would otherwise not be attractive targets.
Two Cambridge companies, Genzyme Corp. and Transkaryotic Therapies Inc., have virtually identical treatments undergoing evaluation by the FDA. Unfortunately for patients who aren't eligible for participation in clinical trials, the FDA has the difficult task of determining which of the two treatments is better, because the winner gets a seven-year exclusive right to market the drug in the US.
The FDA should get out of the business of determining the efficacy of drugs.
Screening plan pushed for Logan
The Israeli security specialist hired to make Logan International Airport one of the nation's safest said yesterday he will recommend the use of behavioral analysts to screen passengers, despite growing concerns among civil libertarians about unfair profiling.
Mass. zoning overhaul recommended
[T]echniques such as encouraging dense development around transit stations, only work if statewide zoning laws that encourage conventional single-family home subdivisions and strip malls are changed, the report says.Amorello says Turnpike tolls will go up, rejects gas tax hike
Turnpike tolls are on their way up, the only question is when and by how much, Turnpike chief Matthew Amorello said Wednesday.By a quirk of history, the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority is stuck with part of the bill for the Big Dig.
Tolls vs. Taxes - two forms of usage fees. I gotta think about this...
Crazier Than Thou
No, the axis-of-evil idea isn't thought through - but that's what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals:...Meet Don Rumsfeld - he's even crazier than you are.Antibiotics in the Poultry Industry
[I]n recent decades the growth of resistance has been increased by overuse of antibiotics in agriculture, where companies routinely use the drugs to promote growth on less feed and to prevent disease in healthy animals.I don't understand how anyone ever could have thought this was a good idea.
