"HTML5 ads"

HTML5 is just HTML, y'know.

HTML5 ads are things like text and banners. You know, not godawful eyesores with background music and punch the fucking monkey bullshit.

To be fair, back in 1991, your choice of web browsers was rather limited.

This netbook you are talking about with over 1,000 vertical pixels? Who makes it?

'Cos I use a 11" laptop now, and it has 768 vertical pixels. I bloody well treasure every pixel I can shave off from bloated UI. I want less UI and more space for content. Most of the UI can be turned into keyboard shortcuts I can learn: my brain has far more space for UI than my laptop screen.

I know that's a joke, but actually the lawyer who looked over it for Wikipedia is staff counsel and gets a salary rather than bills by the hour. Geoff Brigham used to be a federal prosecutor and has worked in private practice.

He's a good guy: I've had a few dealings with him over content issues on Wikipedia - he does what a good lawyer should, tells you exactly what the legal situation is in plain, clear English without bullshit. When he says that SOPA was "a serious threat to freedom of expression on the Internet", I tend to believe him over the RIAA shill.

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.