Interesting Links for 11-8-2011

[andrewducker]

• British riots mean Cameron must go, says Libya
  (tags: Funny libya uk riots)
• Census 2011: Australia - notable for the nice way the infographics respond to mouseover.
  (tags: statistics census australia visualization history demographics)
• GPRS Encryption broken.
  (tags: mobile_phones encryption)
• Bottom posting FAQ
  (tags: ettiquette internet faq)
• Top posting FAQ
  (tags: faq ettiquette writing)
• Marvel inducing retailers to destroy DC Comics
  (tags: comics marvel dc wtf)
• Time Warner Cable’s Porn Problem: It Isn’t Selling Enough Porn
  (tags: porn tv business)
• A new way of looking at history, inspired by the CiF section of the Guardian online this morning...
  (tags: history riots politics funny)
• Afghanistan gets new TV satire influenced by The Office
  (tags: tv comedy afghanistan)
• Evidence-based public order policing. An approach that actually works!
  (tags: police riots science psychology)
• New drug could cure nearly any viral infection.
  (tags: science drugs infection virus health disease)
• What turns people into looters?
  (tags: psychology riots uk)
• Labour leader speaks out against simplistic explanations for the riots.
  (tags: riots labour uk)
• The Conservatives react to the riots in exactly the way you'd expect.
  (tags: conservatives society OhForFucksSake uk politics)
• Paris gets its first 24-hour baguette dispenser
  (tags: food france technology awesome)
• Austerity Leads To Political Unrest (with graphs!)
  (tags: money poverty riots)
• Here's how easy it is to get someone thrown off Google+ for identity fraud (and how easy it is to get back on)
  (tags: googleplus identity fraud EpicFail)
• The TSA are sounding _slightly_ less ridiculous
  (tags: tsa terrorism usa)

Comments

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

Yes, I had already thought of the riots could be interpreted as "overthrow the government" by other countries, and that our heavily government controlled media is just reporting it as something different. Thankfully I don't think that's the case (or maybe they've just been successful).

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

I really agree with the top posting/bottom posting FAQ. Bottom quoting can be infuriating when abused.

If your email consists of one line of new text, and pages of old quotes for me to scroll through, and there are another 15 just like it, stick it at the top where I can find it, and allow my threading capable email client to handle the rest.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Bottom quoting only works in conjunction with appropriate editing - getting rid of unnecessary stuff that everyone's read already, removing sigs, fixing editing issues.

Top quoting is easier, but a) falls apart when you need to reply inline, and b) only preserves the entire contents of the conversation if everyone replies to the last post in the thread only. As soon as the thread forks, each message contains a slightly different version of the thread history.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I think it's dependant on the nature of both medium and message.

At work when dealing with idiots, it seems best to top-post and preserve the entire chain. Then when you get the 'I never agreed to X' argument, one's able to Show Logs. (Mind you, the passive-aggressive rules of intra-business mail drive me bugfuck)

Proper conversations via mail are damn well going to be quoted-and-inline because they are actual conversations rather than 'Ha Ha! Business!'-style exchanges of pontification.

Things like LJ and Bix/Cix/CoSy that do threading and store/display of the complete state do not need quoting unless you're making a tiresome usenet-style (tautology) rhetorical point.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I was especially amused by the last question "Is there a better way? Yes, but apparently its bad".

Do people really stick new responses at the bottom of pages of text? I assumed in that case you were supposed to delete most of it.

It seems like the algorithm is something like "Are you responding to a specific part of a post? Then quote that and reply below. If not, post without extensive quoting (and delete everything else or leave it at the bottom)" And if you're on a message board where you're always supposed to do one or the other, then the other technique _is_ simply generating noise, and no-one bothers to make explicit the assumption in what sort of reply you should be making..

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

Back when Edinburgh Gamesoc communicated heavily by email (5--8 years ago now), there were sometimes arguments about top posting vs bottom posting. Discussions could get long, and people would routinely fail to cut anything out of previous messages, meaning that you would have a huge number of messages to read through, and would need to scroll through several screens worth of previous message in order to get to the actual response.

Having to do this repeatedly massively slowed down the rate at which you could read emails, and became really annoying -- especially when the bottom posters posted the top/bottom posting FAQ, and took great joy in failing to snip any of the previous text. We were not routinely being joined by new members, and there was no particular need to have this information repeated every single time. This deliberate antagonism against what seems to be a sensible system put me off bottom posting in emails for life.

Having said that, I tend to read forums much more these days, and top posting in a forum message just seems wrong. Some forums by default only quote one level (i.e. quotes of quotes get automatically cut), which seems quite sensible to me (you can add previous stuff in manually if you really need it). However, some don't do this, which seems pointless considering the same bit of information can end up being repeated multiple times on a single page due to repeated quoting in successive posts!

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Agh. Being smug while deliberately making things harder to read seems worse than all the other solutions rolled together!

I agree it's pretty pointless on forums. If the messages will all be displayed together, the default should be nothing (if it's a reply to everything generally, or the comments are displayed as threaded), or headed by a snippet of the comment its replying to, or interleaved with a snippets its replying to in turn. And most forums I see DO follow this, the worst sin being people who unnessecarily quote a whole message to reply (bottom) to it, or a comment replying to something without clear attributiojn.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

"Evidence-based public order policing. An approach that actually works!"

Of course, it may be malice _and_ incompetence. If "police clash with rioters!" headlines weren't more grabby than "police stand back and everything is calm" headlines, there would be less incentive to have the police provoke mostly-peaceful protestors.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

"Census 2011: Australia - notable for the nice way the infographics respond to mouseover."

That's really pretty!

[akicif.livejournal.com]

The bread machine's not new at all. They were all over France back in 2002: I took this picture in Albert, near the Somme, in July of that year:

[andrewducker]

Interesting. I wonder why it's being seen as a new thing now. Marketing?

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I thought that the standard CiF version of history was always "It was the fault of the Jew"...

[andrewducker]

Well, the chosen people are always at fault.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Lately it's been the disabled a lot more.