24 Jan 2005 Ankh   » (Master)

I'm back from Brisbane, but (as expected) fairly tired. Kudos to DSTC for hosting us. (Us here is the XML Query, XSL and XML Schema Working Groups of the W3C, maybe a total of under 30 people working on Schema 1.1, XML Query, XSLT 2.0, and a number of shared specs between XSL and XQuery such as XPath and the Formal Semantics document). The meetings went pretty well, although it was a lot of work.

I've been wondering if I have the energy to go to Guadec this year. Probably not, unfortunately, although I'll be at XTech (used tobe called XML Europe) and very possibly at the WWW conference in Japan. I might also go to Doors of Perception, a conference on design that's interested me for overa decade.

A lot of talkback today...

nutella, yes, zhaoway's link was very interesting. I've also been reading Anthony Hall's The American Empire and the Fourth World [referrer link; see also www.goodminds.com for the Native-owned booksellers where I bought my copy], a book that I recommend, although I found I had to ask someone from the US to explain terms with which I was unfamiliar from time to time, such as Manifest Destiny. I don't think a conspiracy theory is needed - I agree with Noam Chomsky (e.g. see his essay reproduced in You are being lied to) - you only need to believe in the idea that wealth and power often (sometimes?) lead to greed and ruthlessness. I've often thought that people elected into power should lose all their possessions and monies, so that gaining personal wealth could never be a reason to stand for election. The main problem with that idea is that if you make politicians go naked then the politicians who would be elected would mostly be porn stars, I suppose. But California seems to be discovering that film stars aren't always entirely bad news, and maybe it'd help the US get over it's inexplicable fascination with and simultaneous disapproval of sex and nudity.

badvogato - I remember a breakfast conversation between Tim Berners-Lee and Alan Kay (and I think connolly and some others, maybe Yuri Rubinsky was there although I'm not sure now) as a result of Alan Kay saying in his keybote that HTML was the MS-DOS of the Web. There was no resolution, but I'll note in passing that the strength of marked-up text is that the reader, the user, the consumer, says how they want to use the text, not the author or producer.

dcoombs, if your socks are frictionless how do they stay on your feet? Maybe it would be safer if you were to work barefoot?

elanthis don't worry, you're still young :-) Arpeggios are closely related to broken chords; I'm not sure if there's really a difference at all in practice except that "broken chord" doesn't sound as pertentious! Morals as preached are, however, clearly different from morals as practiced. Sometimes this can be good (e.g. the Roman Catholic Church may have been responsible for tens of millions of deaths in Africa by telling lies about condoms; if the people had not gone with the morals the priests espoused, they'd perhaps be uninfected today; similarly Augustine's teaching that the christians needed to keep the Jews around as a reminder that "they" killed Christ, but not let them have power, may have been a major factor in the preaching that led to the massacres of Jews by so-called Christians in the Crusades (literally, Cross Wars) and later. Moral teaching must, it seems to me, be limited to general principles: absolutism in details is barely distinguishable from fanaticism. the Puritans whom you mention chose to forget that Jesus is described in the Gospels as turning water innto wine, and actually instructing his followers to drink wine. He also received an erotic massage from a prostitute, and it would be pretty weird to believe that someone who hung out with prostitutes would be a virgin. The "morality" of abstaining from sex and drugs (including alcohol) is mostly about trying to enforce a "work ethic" to keep poor people busy and productive. Harm no-one, love those around you, and try to accept people as they are, and everything else falls into place, I think. But it's easier to say than to accomplish.

deekayen, neat, the BBC survey said I'm a spatial thinker. If that's so, how come I get lost so easily? :-)

cdfrey, I think most people read http://www.advogato.org/recentlog.html once every day or two, or use the RSS feed. I suppose you could then search that page for your advogato nickname if you're too busy to read all the diaries :-)

dwmw2, although that old "why not SPF" article reappears every now and again, it's not at all clear that the arguments in it are sound. Certainly the author does not substantiate them very well. Neither a whitelist nor a blacklist seems to solve all use cases.

I personally continue to believe that the first step in addressing spam is actually for ISPs to be liable for forged src addresses in IP packets that they forward, and for forged email to be treated as fraud. If a cable modem sends a packet from a home computer up to the ISP, the ISP should check that the src field of the packet is correct before accepting the packet. This is a low cost thing to do and would make fake email headers massively easier to deal with.

This, combined with disallowing a direct connection to or from port 25 except by arrangement, which would remove the ability in most cases for a virus or worm to send or receive email, would make the use of armies of trojan'd Windows XP sysetms (or Linux systems or MacOS systems) to send spam pretty much a non-stater.

For now, SPF represents a good step forward, although it's true that there can be problems with people who use forwarding services that don't themselves publish SF records.

We do publish an SPF record at W3C although I don't yet do so on the server that I share with my brother (holoweb.net) because of a (cough) difference of opinion between Network Solutions and my brother. If solutions are liquids that dissolve things, network solutions are presumably things thet take away networking, and our expectations at times have been met :-)

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