ubuntu.com is kind of interesting... http://colrgrabr.swissamigos.com/#http://ubuntu.com
213 karma · joined June 15, 2009
That's true in the sense that mercury thermometers do not measure temperature -- they measure the height of a column of mercury.
"The decrease in the number of disease carriers is vital to the prevention of bacterial infections. Vaccines are never 100% effective. Some people are genetically unable to respond to the vaccine, some have immunodeficiencies that preclude receiving vaccines or developing a response to the vaccine, some haven’t gotten around to vaccination or are too young to receive a vaccine. If you vaccinate a large number of people, besides preventing disease in an individual, it helps protect the vulnerable in a population. Vaccines prevent disease propagation."
"The vaccine [for whooping cough] is good, but not perfect. Vaccine efficacy is 64% for cases defined by mild cough, 81% for paroxysmal cough, and 95% for severe clinical illness (11). Note the vaccine is good for attenuating the disease, not preventing it entirely."
Seriously, I can't think of a single good reason why you would want to check whether an email address is "valid". What you should be concerned about is whether or not the address works (and usually, can/does the person who just signed up actually read and reply to email to that address).
Hypothetically, if an invalid address works (due to bugs in mail systems) -- then it works, and the only problem with accepting such an address is that the bugs might get fixed. If an address is valid, there's no reason to assume that it will work or that it belongs to the person who signed up. It isn't even a good way of detecting typos; transpose two characters in an email address and it will most likely still pass your validation.
> Whois:
> IP Address: 204.236.225.207
> Maximum Daily connection limit reached. Lookup refused.
More examples: http://mysite.verizon.net/astronaut/vim/align.html#Examples
Of course, I really hope nobody's coding like that. I've never seen anyone who's been able to maintain that kind of formatting consistently.
I don't see any reason why proportional fonts shouldn't work for most programming styles. The problem is that most existing proportional fonts aren't very well suited for programming. At the very least, you need a font with unambiguous shapes for similar glyphs, like 1lI0oO`',.;:
It's hard to tell from those small images, but what are those strange boils on the Windows 7 logo supposed to be?
Of course, in the best of all possible worlds, you'll end up with a perfect abstraction layer which is powerful enough to allow you to do everything you need, while hiding all of the the gory details. In the worst case, you end up with a leaky abstraction. Suddenly you need to know not only the underlying language, but also how the compiler works.
That's not to say that all abstraction layers are evil. C vs. machine code is an example of an abstraction that works well. You rarely need to dive down into the machine code and you can, to a large extent, be ignorant of how the compiler works and still be able to be a decent C programmer.
There's no doubt that developing for the web can be quite hairy and sometimes you wish you didn't have to deal with all of the compatibility issues etc. It's possible that the solution is something like Vaadin, which lets you develop web applications as if they were Java desktop applications. But I'm not convinced just yet.
I guess the real question is, what exactly is the problem with HTML? If the problem is that HTML isn't abstract enough, then yes, an abstraction layer would be the answer. But if the problem is something else then slapping an extra layer of complexity on top of HTML won't magically solve those problems.