Suggestion duly made - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Response_to_NYT_piece_on_SOPA

Wikipedia admin here that was quite involved with the shutdown. RIAA guy thinks we were 'deluded'.

Here's what actually happened. We had a discussion on Wikipedia for a few weeks. We asked the Wikimedia Foundation to instruct their General Counsel to prepare us a detailed listing of exactly what the problems are for Wikipedia with the bill. He did so, and produced a document listing a variety of problems that SOPA might cause for Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. We then had a vote as to whether or not to take action.

By 'deluded', he means we as a community decided to ask a lawyer to look at the bill and tell us what he thinks, and then decided to take action. If that's delusion, I'm not sure what counts as sanity any more.

Not just steampunk. Web 2.0 Ruby on Rails hipsters with their ironic t-shirts and all that might have helped too.

I read that and before realising it was Poe's law, I grabbed an audio CD, popped it into iTunes, ripped it to WAV, turned the WAV into FLAC, then turned the FLAC back into WAV, and checked the SHA1 on the two WAV files. See https://gist.github.com/1934901

For the benefit of audiophiles everywhere, I can confirm that "lossless means that what you put in exactly matches what you put out". ;-)

User Agent strings aren't the only way of identifying browsers. Generally these days, you do UA strings and object detection. Basically the latter is running JavaScript with a whole bunch of if statements to see if certain objects are defined. document.all is an IE only thing, and window.performance only exists in IE9 for instance. window.opera only exists in Opera (duh).

With WebKit browsers (Chrome, Safari), you can detect to see if they have Canvas and WebGL support. With IE, you can even use conditional comments.

If you have a UA string claiming to be Firefox 2 but it responds to document.getElementsByClassName, you know something is lying to you. ;-)

To see how this sort of thing works, take a peek at http://www.quirksmode.org/js/detect.html

One thing I like a lot: you are reading something on a page and you want to search for it in another tab. You pop open a new tab, start typing the search or URL and then need to go back to the first tab to check something. You come back to the new tab and the partially-entered URL or search remains. This is good!

It's already been submitted 1,000 times.

Yep: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=memory+leak

Try that on OS X.

Hint: you can't.

Since when did asking my browser to not show a select list of images and other web resources count as "piracy"?

Was it about the same time as they declared it illegal to go take a piss during the commercial breaks?

The frequent browser updates over my goddamn expensive 3G connection without asking hurts in a direct, financial manner.

They have one major advantage to tap water: they are often available in places where you can't get tap water. If I'm rushing for a train, I can hop into a shop, grab a bottle of water and get on the train. Sadly, my local friendly city authorities have decided that publicly usable taps == evil socialist communism.

Glad to see you appreciate people for more than just their contribution or lack thereof to social welfare programmes.

There's already an app you can get for Windows, Linux and OS X called F.lux which changes the colour temperate of your screen based on your time and location. http://stereopsis.com/flux/

Just installed it and my screen has a very strong yellowy-pinky tint as it is 2am.

And I'm reading Slashdot.

Case closed.

Gender IS in preferences. You can choose between male, female and unspecified. This is to customise UI on the site so it has the appropriate pronouns. You can do this all over the place, like this:

{{gender:Jimbo Wales|man|woman|person}}

(replacing Jimbo Wales with your WP username (or a template that substitutes the current user's name) and the words man, woman and person with wikitext that you want returned)

This is used quite a bit for Userboxes so that they can make it text in the userbox switch dynamically between "This user lives in London and [they like/he likes/she likes] travelling on the Underground" or whatever.

The problem with the preferences route is unspecified may be because you haven't set it or it may be because you don't want to set it (or you don't fall into male/female because you are transgendered or whatever).

There have been polls and studies done though. You can read about them on http://enwp.org/WP:BIAS or http://enwp.org/WP:ACST