I have just settled into handling the previous week’s snail mail this afternoon, and have found that the concepts of making spam cost companies money has me stuffing every credit card application that I receive with the latest grocery store ads, trash, and even other credit card companies inserts. It actually allows me to acheive a zen-like calmness, knowing that if enough people also do this (they must be, since I sometimes have to cut a bar code off of the return envelope), then spam will cost quite a bit more. I know most of America must be tired of it, but since it takes an act of GOD to get anyone to write their congressman to change the situation legally, we must change it at the basest of levels.
I now return to my afternoon of envelope stuffing for a better America 
Update: now if there were something to do to get AT&T wireless to stop sending me spam to get a phone. They send no return envelope, so they got off too easy.
Popularity: 9%
Say it ain’t so
From XML is a stupid transport, comes this gem:
Great XML Rant
Yet day after day, thousands of people are engaged in mapping their objects to xml, transmitting said xml through every medium conceivable to man, then changing this selfsame xml into the objects it supposedly encapsulates. Along the way, chances are you have a whole bunch of things happen to this xml. Transformations, mappings, and other such stains caused by developers masturbating wildly onto this poor ill-begotten xml document.
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Even worse is when your genius ‘architect’ feels that xml and dtd’s just aren’t sufficient, that xml schemas must get a look in too. So now you’re passing complicated xml documents backed by schemas and you have two choices. Either you don’t validate against the schemas (basically you slurp up anything well-formed), or you validate against this lovely schema.
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is now something that takes days while your validator hmm and ahhs over whether your document is valid. If you’re going to be validating every xml document against its schema at runtime then you really are better off just dictating the xml document to the other side, it’d be faster.
Popularity: 8%
