…because they support teh gayz! No, really, I’m serious. These guys said so.
Randomosity at its randomest
Monthly Archive for January, 2008
Page 2 of 5
Alliteration for the win! No doubt you’ve heard of the war on Scientology now going on. If not, I think Skip Jenkins can fill you in, since I’m too lazy to write out my own post.
Let’s just say that I may or may not have come across some rather interesting (albeit confusing and freakin’ weird) documents swiped directly from the Servers of Scientology. Note to any Scientologist lawyer-like persons reading this: I “don’t” have any of these documents. And by “don’t”, I mean “might”. And…damn, I think I need to come up with a more convincing secret code. Or a life.
You know what I really hate? Those annoying scripts some people use on their websites to somehow prevent copyright infringement by either removing your right-click functionality and replacing it with a message along the lines of “No can click right! Copy is righted, please!” or forbidding you to copy without a message. Admittedly, the last is nicer and a bit surprising (I didn’t even know it was possible), but it’s still irritating. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to select text and copy it. Perhaps you’re quoting from a site, or maybe you just want to copy a hard-to-spell word or name to search for in Wikipedia or Google. I do the latter quite a lot, just because it’s easier to copy a name than try to remember how it’s spelled while in another browser tab.
But it’s not just the annoyances that make this practice silly. It’s the fact that it’s so easily subverted. Much like car ignitions and government encryption, you can get around the anti-right-click with a minimum of technical know-how. For most, simply using a keyboard shortcut to copy (Ctrl+C for Windows, Cmd+C for Mac) will get you the goods. But fancier scripts can prevent even that from working. In such a case, you can easily view the web page’s source code in any major browser and copy text from there. In Firefox, there are three ways to do this: right-click on the page and select “View Page Source”, select “Page Source” from the View menu, or simply press Ctrl+U (Cmd+U on Mac) on the keyboard. The process is pretty much the same in Internet Explorer. If you use Opera, I can’t help you. I’m not about to install another browser just to see how you can view the page source code. Tough noogies.
There may be ways to prevent viewing the source code entirely, but I’ve never heard of any such thing, and anyone who would be that paranoid about people copying their content probably doesn’t have a web site at all.
In short, preventing people from right-clicking or copying from a web page is irritating and pointless, especially when you consider that a determined thief could just use their eyes to copy content into a text document…alas, nature has once again bested technology. Perhaps one day, web site owners will be able to prevent even the eyes from copying their content. Won’t that be a rather ironic day…
I’ve decided that I’m not going to pay any more attention to the presidential race until September. Maybe October, if I’m still feeling jaded. I simply don’t care about the candidates right now. It’s still way too early for me to do anything about it. Sure, I suppose I could vote in Washington State’s primary and caucus, but I refuse to vote when third parties aren’t acknowledged. Washington forces you to pick a party to vote for in the primary and caucus. You can’t vote for the other party once you’ve chosen one and there’s no mention at all of parties other than the Democrats and Republicans. I suppose this is the concession made for not having any party registration…
So, I will deal with the flood of political news in the media, but aside from that, you’ll see no posts related to the primaries and I won’t look further into the issues. Once the parties choose their nominations and things really start to matter, I’ll come out of my hole. Until then, I’m ignoring politics like I ignore that Britney girl. And hygiene.
Instead, I’ll renew my interest in football just in time for the Super Bowl. A warning: I’m rooting for the Patriots. Let the hate mail commence!
There are few things I hate more than people who are jerks. Not the usual kind of jerk that leaves trash on a fast food restaurant table or cuts in front of you in line at the store. Well, those people suck too, but not as bad as people who are jerks about opinions. These are the people who believe something very strongly and then make fun of you or insult you if you believe differently. Immature jerks.
I will freely admit that I am very opinionated. Go ahead, read almost any article on this site and you’ll understand that I have a strong opinion on just about everything. But there is one thing I will never do and that is force my opinion on people who disagree. I may come close from time to time, but I don’t treat my personal beliefs as fact. Unfortunately, there are a great many people out there who do treat their opinions as fact and will not hesitate to explain that to you, usually in an insulting fashion. I hate people like that.
Am I complaining? Yes, I am. This is my blog and I’ll whine about whatever I see fit, dammit. Don’t like it? I have something to say to that: I do not care for your attitude, good sir. There’s the door. My opinion may be different than yours, but I have every right to express it.
This has been an angry emo post, brought to you by Mad Rants, the makers of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes.
