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December 2002 round-up

Catching up with all the noteworthy stuff that happened while I was gone...

Politics

BBC News: 'No basis' for Iraq war now.

Browsers

Mozilla makes CNET's top ten downloads in 2002 list (via MozillaZine).

Politics

How to convince the US not to go to war:

...mandatory draft would coerce other members of Congress not to support war, as their own sons and daughters would likely be fighting it.

History

Dee Brown, author of 'Bury my heart at Wounded Knee' died in December. His most well-known book tells the story of the conquest of the American West from the point of view of the Native Americans. It was an eye-opener for me in my youth. If you are more interested in a bit of real history (i.e. not written by the victors) make sure to pick it up in a second hand bookstore some time.

Internet history

Google's 2002 Year-End Zeitgeist.

The Germans might not want to be part of America's wars but Google's 2002 timeline reveals in October that US cultural imperialism is still massively successful in Germany:

Halloween searches in Germany were nearly five times more than Spain, three times more than the UK, and two times more than France.

Human rights

Kuro5hin discussion about the US torturing of terrorist suspects.

Health education / misinformation

The Bush administration is revising sexual health information to push its conservative "abstinence-only" agenda.

As for the disease control centers' fact sheet on condoms, the old version focused on the advantages of using them, while the new version puts more emphasis on the risk that such use may not prevent sexually transmitted diseases, and on the advantages of abstinence.

Environment

The Poison called water privatisation, in Information for Social Change No. 16, Winter 2002/2003.

96.5% of the water on earth is sea and salty water and only 3.5% is fresh water. And of this 3.5% only 0.8% is available for us to use, the difference being accounted for by the permanent icebergs of the South and North poles.

[...]

The World Bank has even predicted that by 2025, two-thirds of the world's population will run short of fresh drinking water.

[...]

...very few people in most of the developed and developing countries will partake in the privatisation exercise. Only the rich and the strong will enjoy the 'scramble and partition of all the "for sale" properties of the government'

Gun control

Judge Dredd comes to New Jersey (once the technology has been developed):

New Jersey became the first US state to enact "smart gun" legislation that would eventually require new handguns to have a mechanism that allows only their owners to fire them.

Advertising

They just won't give up. The next generation pop-up advertising will take you to a site you didn't want to go to when you just happen to move the mouse cursor over the advert. Wouldn't this be the true meaning of 'mis-leading'?

Evil empire

The Register claims that Microsoft has an eye on Macromedia. They'd better be joking.

Web design

Uncle Jakob publishes the Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002. No suprises. But then... it's probably not aimed at me.

Web design

The Aging Net:

Each year more and more seniors are using the Internet. Web designers should take notice.

021219 16:59 Corporate

Another example of corporate arrogance: Nestle is demanding 6 million dollars in compensation from famine-stricken Ethiopia, compensation for the nationalization of their property under the previous communist government, and they are being real bastards about it.

According to poverty relief organisation Oxfam, the Ethiopian Government has offered to pay Nestle about $1.5m (£930,000) - a figure based on the current exchange rate between the dollar and the Ethiopian birr.

But the food giant is pushing for a payment of $6m, a sum based on the exchange rate in force at the time of the nationalisation.

021218 09:21 Copyright

DMCA beaten again. ElcomSoft found not guilty!

...the judge told jurors that in order to find the company guilty, they must agree that company representatives knew their actions were illegal and intended to violate the law. Merely offering a product that could violate copyrights was not enough to warrant a conviction...

021212 18:28 Web design : Accessibility

Don't miss: Joe Clark, bad boy of accessibility and author of the recently released book 'Building Accessible Websites' (which must be brilliant because it took such a long time to write and which should soon sit on every web designer's shelf), answers 10 questions put to him by slashdot readers. And he does it in his usual style: Joe Clark's Answers -- In Valid XHTML.

I emphasize coding to standards. Unless you have an airtight reason (like you’re stuck using an old content-management system you cannot afford to replace), I really don’t want to have anything to do with you unless you’reproducing valid HTML. Now, tiny invalidities are just that, tiny: <hr> and <hr /> really are the same thing. And I’m sure that ultra-purist geeks will now launch a hypocrisy hunt and comb through my entire Web presence to locate pages with non-valid markup. (Knock yourselves out. I make small mistakes, and have not updated scores of very old pages. I’m also a vegan with some shoes and accessories made of leather. Complete purity is sometimes unattainable.) In one of the many ironies of Web development, it is indie developers like me who have a higher success rate in achieving valid, accessible sites even though larger commercial operations are the ones where valid HTML and accessibility are more urgently needed.

[...]

I think it’s ridiculous that the only really effective way to override a page author’s CSS is for you, the harried, humble Web-surfer, to write your own CSS declarations (don’t forget !important!) and activate the file in your browser, if that’s even possible. This is the sort of thing that should be built into browser preferences, available for easy use. The first time you start up a browser, it should explicitly ask you if you have any accessibility requirements; a lot of people don’t even know about what few customization features browsers currently offer.

021212 18:09 Technology

No profit in WIFI moan industry analysts. Good! Keep your hands off it. Just once.

021212 17:56 SciFi

New Mad Max in planning. Yippie! Finally Mel Gibson in a role that suits him again. He just can't pull off a priest. Sorry. Totally unbelievable. And his attractive days are over too. The aging road warrior might just work.

021212 17:47 Cartoon

I am not a number!

021203 23:21 SciFi

The fans will finance Farscape.

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