Monthly Archives: December 2010

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A clear and present danger

There is a growing danger in this country. We are granting centralized authority to commerce and communication. Today, we are not killing people to silence them, instead we bestow a digital death upon them. Digital silence and censorship is death nun the less to net citizens.

It’s a scary time when you no longer can be assured to speak your mind. When what you say or do, could cost you your business and lively hood. It’s a sad time when just talking about legal action with the US could grant you in major trouble, an act popularized by 9/11 and the patriot act. Today it seems like the government is using the fear of prosecution as a means to silence us by proxy of our digital services.

We need to have a constant, open and fair exchange of ideas between the people and our government. It is the freedom of speech that allows each of us to be seen as valued and heard.

Using centralized services like att, gmail, facebook, amazon, twitter and others have come under threat. The government has made it quite obvious that it’s too easy to make threats at these large companies and have them compromise our constitutional rights. In the case of ATT the government admitted that it did so, and then gave them immunity. Think about that for a bit. They admitted to it being wrong, and then gave immunity to ATT for sharing data that would never have been allowed by our founding fathers.

It’s clear that the government is loosing respect for us and our rights. We need to be a country of responsible and free people. We need to respect each other.

We built a government of the people and for the people to avoid revolution, and when it becomes US vs THEM, we are in danger of creating disparity and violence. We must be vigilant and true to ourselves, we must weather the storm of truth and we need to face the facts every now and then. We need to accept our short comings and work together to resolve conflict. Silencing the voices of others is unjust, and it will rally the battle cries of the unheard. The freedom of speech is not about an individuals right to speak, it’s about a societies right to listen. We need to listen to those that want to be heard. I am not saying we need to agree, or to even act, but we do need to keep listening in the open as a united community.

Range and Replace

I would like to introduce you to the “Range” object in your browser. document.createRange() allows you to select a range of text ( even between elements, and it very well might be the basis for how the mouse is able to select text in a browser, or how chrome and firefox highlight search terms in the browser window.

Even though Range(s) seem to be used for visual elements, you can use them for less visual manipulation of the text in the page. I have also noticed that by using the range object, you can manipulate these objects much faster than you would otherwise through some other functions like ELEMENT.innerHTML() for instance.

I am still hacking on the RANGE object, but for now it’s promising. Later I will provide an update for a few tricks to use the RANGE object as I have had a few problems with the documentation. Firefox, and Chrome ( WebKit ) seem to work a bit differently, but for the most part are the same. Fortunately I am working on browser plugins at the moment so, I don’t have to worry about IE’s limited access to the object.

Here are a few links if you want to get started hacking on the RANGE object.