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Heresies

In no particular order.

I have no credit cards.

I have no Paypal account.

The identity thieves use my identity more than I do.

I have no ebay account.

I almost always vote second party (Sorry, folks; at this point, the Demolicans are a single party; their mascot is half elephant, half ass. And both halves are the posterior halves.).

I don't believe that Microsoft is a monopoly. I mean, they don't even have a monopoly on Windows.

My goddess is a crazy woman.

I don't believe in the economy.

I've never bought anything from Amazon.

I think ID cards are a plot of an evil conspiracy.

I think XML is overrated.

... and the same goes for Java.

I think objects are overused.

I think the absurd system requirements of many recent programs are signs of programmer incompetence rather than progress.

I'd rather use a keyboard than a mouse.

I've actually written a utility in Vertica Smile. (Well, technically that's more of an 'obscenity' than a 'heresy'.)

Politics: left-wing or right-wing, it's the same vulture.

Your masters plot against you. Otherwise, they would never have become your masters.

I support the US second amendment. And feel that 'well-regulated militia' makes it fairly clear that assault weapons and tanks fall under the category of privately posessable weaponry.

I support the US first amendment. And note the conspicuous absence of the phrase 'except obscenity' anywhere in it.

I oppose drug prohibition.

I do not believe that the government has the right to protect us from ourselves against our will.

I think that vim is the best text editor for most purposes.

I think most websites are broken if they don't work in Lynx. (The one exception being visual art galleries in their various forms.)

I think that "best viewed in whatever" banners, announcements, and the like are stupid. If your site doesn't work in browsers that you've never heard of, much less tested it in, then you probably don't understand HTML.

"4.0 browser required" is a shorter way of typing "I do not know anything about the web". 'Firefox 1.0' and 'Konqueror 2.2' both support newer features than IE 4 or Netscape 4. Please, STOP assuming that version numbers are all going to follow the pattern for Netscape and Internet Explorer.

Carefully detecting the browser version in Javascript and then puking up a 'sod off and get a better browser' message is a much longer way of saying "I do not know anything about the web, and neither does the guy whose site I pasted this Javascript from.". If your Javascript is that sensitive to subtle browser differences, it's broken for several MILLION potential viewers of your site.

Portable and backwards compatible means LESS WORK LATER. If you're a business, it means not having as many STUPID QUESTIONS that turn out to translate into 'the user does not know that AOL 5.0 is not a 5.0 browser.', and not as much work unbreaking things when IE 8 turns out not to like whateveritisyoudid anymore. (And, a few years after writing this, IE 8 came out. And broke several of the out-of-spec websites that had previously only worked in IE.)

I don't think websites should be asking me for private information to use them.
'Name', 'Continent', and 'Email address' are all private information.

I usually don't bother entering fake information into nosy sites. Doing so only encourages them to believe that their questions are acceptable, which would in turn inspire them to work on technical and legal ways to ensure that their data is accurate.

I don't trust publically traded companies.

I believe that the most effective way to enforce ethics in business is to refuse to do business with companies whose ethics one finds distasteful.

I find abortion repugnant.

I find forcing a person to remain pregnant against their will more repugnant.

I find many decisions in Unicode character selection rather dubious.

I don't like content encoding tagging.

I don't like MIME and mime-types.

I find the Gimp more user-friendly than Photoshop.

I don't give a damn about warezd00dz, as long as they aren't making money off of it. (Ads on the warez page *are* making money.)

I didn't weep for Napster. They were, after all, selling adspace and hence making money off of it, if I recall correctly.

I think the word 'Broadband' is stupid, lame marketerspeak.

I find marketing in general rather distasteful.

I don't like itsybitsy fonts on webpages.

I think the acronym 'P2P' is stupid. Not to mention also used in an inaccurate manner much of the time.

While some grammar books apparently claim that apostrophes after acronyms are an appropriate way to announce an impending plural, I don't like it. 'BBSes' reads better than 'BBS's'.

I just don't get what it is that so many people see in Star Wars (which I've seen), Harry Potter (which I haven't seen or read, so I suppose I could be missing something. Though it doesn't seem like it), Buffy (which I've been tempted into watching a fair chunk of), Sailor Moon, or Dragon Ball Z (which last I've seen part of a powering-up sequence from, which is to say, about an episode.)

I don't understand what the point of watching sports is. Nor, for that matter, of playing sports games.

I am not a Team Player. I prefer everyone-on-everyone deathmatch to capture-the-flag.

I've got a low commercial tolerance.

I see unsubtle pro-order, pro-police-state propaganda lurking in what most people seem to see as entertainment.

Collecting confuses me.

I don't understand what people see in the 1950s.

I'm not monogamous.

I don't buy CSS-encoded DVDs, as a protest against the CSS cartel's attempt (Which was SUCCESSFUL in the US) to render it illegal to play DVDs on Linux. CSS encoding does not interfere with commercial software piracy; its only purpose is to render it difficult for people to re-import cheap foreign versions of domestically produced videos. I believe that anyone who blathers about DeCSS being good and the DMCA being evil and then proceeds to buy CSS-encoded content is a gormless arse.

I think unwillingness to suffer inconvenience to make a point is the mark of the patsy.

I ignore theatreside movies.

I read things before signing them. Especially 'Standard Contracts'.

I don't trust trust.

I think paid certification regimes provide little to no protection.

I am suspicious of Big Charities.

I think everything should be encrypted whenever possible.