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I predicted spammers would shift to using stolen login credentials way back in 2005.

I had two systems, both 64-bit Fedora, that I tried Chrome on. On one, Flash worked fine from the moment I installed Chrome. On the other, Chrome didn't even notice the plugin existed. Flash (32-bit, wrapped with mozilla-plugin-config) worked just fine in Firefox on both computers. When I compared the two systems, it turned out that one was missing a symbolic link. The file is in /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped, but Chrome was looking in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins.

Adding a symbolic link solved it.

More info: Getting Flash to work on Google Chrome for 64-bit Linux.

Did you report the bug?

I had two systems, both 64-bit Fedora, that I tried Chrome on. On one, Flash worked fine from the moment I installed Chrome. On the other, Chrome didn't even notice the plugin existed. Flash (32-bit, wrapped with mozilla-plugin-config) worked just fine in Firefox on both computers. When I compared the two systems, it turned out that one was missing a symbolic link. The file is in /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped, but Chrome was looking in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins.

Adding a symbolic link solved it.

More info: Getting Flash to work on Google Chrome for 64-bit Linux.

It's worth remembering that Opera's install base is only tiny when looked at as a percentage of overall web use. I'm not sure about current statistics, but a year ago they were at 10-15 million desktop users -- not counting a huge install base of Opera Mobile on phones, and millions of active Opera Mini users.

For comparison, the average U.S. state has around 6 million people. By the 2005 census, only 4 states -- California, New York, Texas and Florida -- had more than 15 million.

Admittedly, not all 15 million people are likely to be visiting your specific website (unless you're Google or MySpace or something), and it really does come down to how many Opera users are in your potential audience, but 15 million doesn't seem quite so small as 1%.

Back in February I was browsing the aisles in Micro Center and found an ancient jewel case of "Netscape Basics" that had been marked down to 42 cents. It contained a copy of Netscape 4.5 and advertised compatibility with Windows 95 and Windows 98.

They also had a somewhat less-ancient version of Opera in a box. Would you believe that 1.5 years after Opera had stopped charging for their browser, this store still wanted $39.99?

I took pictures of both as proof.

Fantastic! Maybe they could call it ... uhh... Windows Update! Or Microsoft Update! Yeah!

The problem with Windows Update / Microsoft Update is that, aside from the app that automatically checks for critical updates, it runs inside a web browser. Worse, it runs inside one specific web browser (or rather one specific engine).

By contrast, programs like yum and apt and their respetive GUIs (synaptic, etc.) don't require an HTML engine. Even Apple's software update doesn't use WebKit as far as I can tell (though I have some nitpicks with the UI design). So if you want to run, say, Konqueror, you don't need to have Firefox installed just to update your system.

The other thing is that as it stands, Microsoft's and Apple's updaters only allow access to their own software (plus the occasional third-party driver that Microsoft has agreed to distribute). It's frustrating that eveyone has to re-invent the wheel to provide automatic updates. My Windows box has updaters for Microsoft, Symantec & Apple, plus specific updaters for Firefox & Adobe Reader. My Linux box has just one updater -- yum. Fedora provides a lot of third-party software, plus some companies (like Adobe) offer their own yum repositories, so I can update Flash using the same program and mechanism that I use to update the rest of my system. (Though if you're running KDE, you pretty much have to have Konqueror installed whether you use it or not.)

Now, back to the GP post, imagine if this hypothetical software updater/installer for Windows could add channels of software from different providers?

I see you've been misled by the media coverage, which seems to be focusing entirely on the fires in Malibu. Believe it or not, there are fires spread out across Southern California, affecting a lot more than just the fabulously wealthy.

I can hardly find anything on the fire blazing through the rural areas of Orange County (and no, it's not all rich people either), which is maybe 5-6 miles from my workplace and has crept up on the borders of residential and business tracts in several cities near the hills. Except for the websites for one local newspaper and the county fire authority, I can get more information by looking out the window of a conference room and seeing which hills have smoke rising from them.

Even those not directly theatened by fires are inhaling smoke, or dealing with sporadic power outages, or dealing with damage from the high winds.

The 300,000+ people evacuated from their homes in San Diego County (you don't think they're all millionaires, do you?) are finally getting some attention, but somehow a few movie stars manage to outrank the rest of the region's population in terms of newsworthiness.

In case anyone's interested, I've been blogging the OC fire... from a distance.

A couple of years ago, I tried googling my name and a co-worker's name. For both, there was a sponsored link to eBay with the caption 'buy {name}! Get {name} on eBay!'

I had that same experience once, looking for the phrase, "nigerian scam". It brought up this convenient advertisement:

Nigerian Scam
Looking for Nigerian Scam?
Find exactly what you want today.
www.eBay.com

I found that "419 scam" also displayed one of the ads, but "advance fee fraud" did not. And when I searched for "random stuff," eBay claimed they had that too!

>>and also the story says they filled-in some holes in the dino DNA with grod DNA

No wonder the dinos went nuts and started killing people. You mixed in DNA from evil villian and Legion of Doom member Gorilla Grodd?!

Somebody links to a blog article, which just links to another blog article, which in turn links to the actual story that everyone is talking about. Quit trying to drive visitors to your Blogspot account and just show me what you really wanted me to see.

Yeah. I remember finding some post on The Cure for Information Overload, and it took forever to get to the actual story!

Not checking that site at work, but do they have a picture of the statue where she's holding a pike? 'Cause I don't think Lucas intended to make her look like a pole dancer.

Now Star Trek: TNG -- that is like Guiness. Great at any time! Always aged to perfection!

TNG came out not too long after Coca-Cola experimented with the disaster that was "New Coke." The original series and Next Gen were often compared to Coca-Cola Classic and New Coke. Around the time DS9 came out, I recall someone talking about "Classic Trek, New Trek, and Diet Cherry Trek."

A while back I was involved in a discussion on what soft drinks Voyager and Enterprise were. We came up with Voyager being store-brand soda, and Enterprise being carbonated water (i.e. bland), with Babylon 5 being Pepsi (for the intense Trek/B5 rivalry) and Farscape being Mountain Dew (since it's so vastly different.)

I had the same opinion until retarded eBay ads started showing up everywhere. No, just because I'm browsing an article about "postfix bugs" doesn't mean I want to buy a "BUG COLLECTION GUIDE at eBay" or "POSTFIX FOR DUMMIES EBOOK at eBay", etc.

I was once looking for information on Nigerian scams, a.k.a. 419 scams, a.k.a. advance fee fraud scams. And, I kid you not, among the ads on the Google results page for "nigerian scam" was an ad that read:

Nigerian Scam
Looking for Nigerian Scam?
Find exactly what you want today
www.ebay.com

I found the same type of ad for "419 scam," then did some random searches, and at the time, eBay seemed to have picked up a whole bunch of two-word phrases.

To me, this indicates that people who use AOL to search do not know the difference between a search box and a URL bar.

Semi-off-topic, but there do seem to be an awful lot of people who get input fields mixed up. I run a comic book fan site that profiles characters connected to the Flash. The character has been around since 1940, so there are a lot of villains, supporting characters and guest stars to add. I've tried to make finding specific characters as easy as possible for multiple styles of navigation and search.

A bit over a year ago, I added a suggestion box to the home page. One of the odd things I found was that people were seemingly requesting that I add profiles for characters who were already on the site. After a while, I realized that people were seeing the suggestion box and treating it as a search box -- despite the fact that there was a search box in the sidebar on every page.

In response, I made two changes: First, I changed the "Thanks for your suggestion!" page to incorporate any hits from the site search on the terms entered. Eventually, I redesigned the site layout to make the search field more noticeable.

Your IE/FF figures of 70/20 and 40/44 are actually plausible for (relatively) normal sites that will work properly in all the major browsers and don't actively promote or relate to any one of them.

For the record, the 70/20 site is Hyperborea.org. The biggest draw there is a comic book fan site I've been running since 1996, which gets a mainstream, perhaps slightly geeky audience. It also contains my blog, some photos from conventions, my wife's website, and some smaller sites I built back in college. The 40/44 site is the Alternative Browser Alliance, a site promoting the use of non-IE browsers and cooperation (or at least civility) among their supporters. Most of its traffic comes from searches for alternative browsers, from technically-oriented sites, and from (interestingly enough) StumbleUpon.

According to the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, Dreamworks actually reported a $25-million loss on Wallace & Gromit . (If that link locks you out, the relevant quotes are in the next one.)

Since I remembered Wallace & Gromit opening at #1 and staying in the top 5 for about a month, I did the same kind of math you did, using IMDB figures. Even looking at the domestic figures, W&G pulled in $56 million -- that's $26 more than the movie's budget. I doubt they spent $50 million advertising a $30 million movie, so I really have to wonder where the money went. Factor in the overseas gross and it looks like a healthy success.

My best guess is that they charged the Flushed Away losses against Wallace and Gromit to make them look like two flops instead of one success and a flop.

Tried looking for it today in the Orange County, CA area. Despite the air being unusually clear (as it has been for the last few weeks), I just could not spot the comet. Chalk it up to being close to sea level and in the suburbs, I guess.

Oh, well, I was at least able to see it at sunset the last two nights.

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!

(Oddly enough, a nearby city actually has a councilman running for re-election named Kang)

I'll agree with the author on a number of things. Most critical is that IE7 requiring XP or later is an opportunity for other browsers, particularly Firefox and Opera. The majority of Windows users out there are on XP, but Windows 2000 and Windows 98 are sizable minorities. I know one site's stats aren't enough to judge the whole internet by, but my own site, with ~92% Windows users, shows 83% on XP, 5% on Win2k, 2.2% on Win98, and 1% on WinME. (That 1% on Windows Me is scary -- I'd almost rather run Windows 98.)

Firefox will go through the same thing next year, since Firefox 3 won't run on Windows 98 or Me, but it'll still run on Windows 2000. Of course, that's another 8-10 months for some users to upgrade (those percentages are about a third of what they were a year ago) -- and if you've gotten them hooked on Firefox while they're on Win98, they'll probably stick with it when they move to a new machine with XP/Vista. And in a year or two, as IE7 supplants IE6 and websites start targeting it, those holdout Windows 98 users might decide they're better off with a slightly-outdated Firefox 2 than a massively-outdated IE6.

You want 'em, you got 'em.

Site 1: Hyperborea. Mix of personal website and comic book fan site. Lots of traffic to the comic book section. General audience, but still higher-than-typical Firefox and Opera usage.
MSIE: 69.7%
Firefox: 22.4%
Safari: 3.4%
Opera: 1.2%

Site 1: Alternative Browser Alliance. Highly tech-oriented.
Firefox: 42%
MSIE: 42%
Opera: 7.7%
Safari: 2.3%

The results aren't terribly surprising, given that Site 2's audience is made up of the people most likely to use a third-party browser.

An actual sighting of STFU in the wild.

Symantec has always been in bed with IE

Could be worse. Could be McAfee. You can run, configure, and update Norton Antivirus or even Norton Internet Security without loading a web browser. McAfee actually relies on IE --and IE specifically -- to handle parts of its interface, including the updater. In fact, some of the early IE7 betas actually broke the McAfee updater.

Yes, those posts are old, but a co-worker of mine just installed the latest version of McAfee on his computer last week, and it does still use IE internally.

I don't know about you, but I think relying on one of the most notoriously insecure pieces of software to handle updates for a security program doesn't sound like the greatest idea since sliced bread.

Arr! Ye'd best not ferget about yer pirate software!

'Course, ye might navigate around that maelstrom if ye rely on open-seas, such as FyreFawkes.

It's what he gets for using a pirated version of Firefox! ;)

Is that the new Fi-arr-fox I keep hearing about?

Nay, that would be the grand ship FyreFawkes, matey.

"After a long day of coding, I like to kick back and sip an ice-cold bottle of Mozilla..."?

Actually, there was a time a few years ago that you could brew up a cup of Mozilla to keep yourself going through that coding session. Sadly, the company that used to do it (and contributed a percentage of his profits to Mozilla) has long since closed up shop.

And raze ewe won Tweeze Denied Beef Worker Isthmus.

I haven't seen any big differences between beta 2 and beta 3 (though of course there was a huge jump between IE6 and IE7 beta 2), but they did at least fix one obscure bug I'd reported back in March.

Under very specific circumstances, hovering over a link in IE7b2 could cause floated objects further up the page to disappear. Ironically, I discovered the bug on a page using a floated Get Firefox button. Yes, you read that right: a bug in IE caused a Firefox link to disappear.

Yeah, people had the same reactions to Windows XP Service Pack 2. Everyone spent years telling Microsoft to improve security. Security was more important than convenience and compatibility, why couldn't they see that? So finally, Microsoft sacrificed compatibility for the sake of improved security*, and what happened? Suddenly, everyone was complaining about broken apps in SP2, and how dare Microsoft ship something that screwed up.

*XP SP2 security is still swiss cheese, but it's better than the soap bubbles you get with XP SP1.

I was going to update my nofollow story from a year ago, but it seems nothing's changed

Heh. I know what you mean. I just re-read your post and followed a pingback to my own comments and realized that I said pretty much the same thing last year that I posted above.

I'm not sure why they want to target people looking for outcasts...

Or Nigerian scams.

My old theory was that they had a blanket deal on two-word combinations, until I found some combos that didn't show an ebay ad.

Now I think they dumped the contents of a spellcheck dictionary, removed the obvious bad ideas, and submitted it as their keyword list.

Had BlueSecurity chosen to temporarily route their domain name to empty IP space, or to localhost, they could have mitigated the attack on their servers without offloading the problem onto someone else's network. Yes, they would still have been offline, but at least their servers wouldn't be melting, and Six Apart wouldn't have been taken down with them.

Now, I've read several articles on this, and it's not clear whether (a) Blue knew that the DDoS was targeting them by domain name (rather than by IP), or (b) whether they redirected their website before or after that phase of the DDoS started.

The way I see it -- assuming Blue did this with thir eyes open -- it's like deflecting a punch. You can deflect a punch so that it doesn't hit you, and deal with where it does hit later. Or, if you're in a kung fu movie, you can deflect the punch specifically so that it hits someone else instead. Pointing the domain name at Six Apart's network was deflecting the attack with the intention that someone else would get it.

Maybe they figured 6A had enough resources to handle it. (Hmm, anyone remember whether ./ has ever been DDoSed?) Maybe they figured the attack wouldn't follow the DNS change. While Blue Security is not responsible for launching the attack, they are arguably responsible for where the attack ended up. And that's something that could be the target of a civil lawsuit, even though it's (probably) not a criminal offense.

Would Six Apart would want to sue? Would a judge accept the case? Would a jury would actually award them anything? Who knows.

Wow. Reading that I suddenly remembered my own experience providing a lyrics service on the web.

Back in 1995, I put together a website that cross-referenced the lyrics to Les Misérables in English, French and German (all typed in by hand from the CD liner notes). At first it was hosted on webspace at AOL, but I later moved it to some space I had at college. From 1996-2000 I added songs in more and more languages, each time carefully cross-referencing and linking so that you could jump from each song straight to the same song in each other language. I had a modern French version (the original was considerably different from the show as it opened in London and Broadway) in all-caps, and a French speaker agreed to provide all the accents and diacritical marks. People sent me, sometimes one song at a time, lyrics in Hungarian, Norwegian, and Swedish. I tracked down import CDs of more languages that I could type myself. People even started sending me songs in Chinese and Japanese, first as GIF images, later in text. I learned a lot about cross-platform use of character encodings and fonts, and about website accessibility.

After I graduated from college, a friend at the lab agreed to keep my site running for a few months while I found new hosting. In January 2000, I bought a domain name. In February, I transferred my entire website from www.arts.uci.edu to hyperborea.org. In March I received a cease-and-desist letter. Knowing I had no legal right to keep the lyrics online, I took the Les Mis section down that afternoon, leaving only the parts that weren't subject to copyright.

Now, keep in mind that I ran this site for five years at AOL and UCI, making no effort to hide it. Within a month of setting up my own domain name, suddenly the lawyers were after me? It seemed too much of a coincidence.

Even today, there are still pages on the net that link to "Les Mis: The Complete Multilingual Libretto." (Of course, many of them are Geocities sites that haven't been updated since 1997, or exported bookmarks files languishing on some university server.) And I still get the occasional request for lyrics by email.

Wow. Reading that I suddenly remembered my own experience providing a lyrics service on the web.

Back in 1995, I put together a website that cross-referenced the lyrics to Les Misérables in English, French and German (all typed in by hand from the CD liner notes). At first it was hosted on webspace at AOL, but I later moved it to some space I had at college. From 1996-2000 I added songs in more and more languages, each time carefully cross-referencing and linking so that you could jump from each song straight to the same song in each other language. I had a modern French version (the original was considerably different from the show as it opened in London and Broadway) in all-caps, and a French speaker agreed to provide all the accents and diacritical marks. People sent me, sometimes one song at a time, lyrics in Hungarian, Norwegian, and Swedish. I tracked down import CDs of more languages that I could type myself. People even started sending me songs in Chinese and Japanese, first as GIF images, later in text. I learned a lot about cross-platform use of character encodings and fonts, and about website accessibility.

After I graduated from college, a friend at the lab agreed to keep my site running for a few months while I found new hosting. In January 2000, I bought a domain name. In February, I transferred my entire website from www.arts.uci.edu to hyperborea.org. In March I received a cease-and-desist letter. Knowing I had no legal right to keep the lyrics online, I took the Les Mis section down that afternoon, leaving only the parts that weren't subject to copyright.

Now, keep in mind that I ran this site for five years at AOL and UCI, making no effort to hide it. Within a month of setting up my own domain name, suddenly the lawyers were after me? It seemed too much of a coincidence.

Even today, there are still pages on the net that link to "Les Mis: The Complete Multilingual Libretto." (Of course, many of them are Geocities sites that haven't been updated since 1997, or exported bookmarks files languishing on some university server.) And I still get the occasional request for lyrics by email.

Luke warm maybe, but Leia in slave-dress is hot.

Indeed.

Maybe, if you can avoid 20+ minutes of annoying ads followed by 15 minutes of previews. And if you manage to get an audience where people don't spend the entire movie yakking on cell phones or narrating the action to their friends "Later in the movie you find out that 'Rosebud' is his sled. But this is the part where..."

A good trip to the movie theater is much better than just watching TV because it's a communal experience. It's the modern equivalent of sitting around a campfire listening spellbound to a good storyteller. When you interfere with that experience -- by playing obnoxious ads or by talking -- you make it worse than the solitary experience of the living room. People are less inclined to go to the effort to risk all that frustration.

What can theaters do?

1. Ditch or majorly cut down on the ads.
2. Limit the previews. 3 per film is a good balance between showing people what's coming up and actually getting to the even they came in for.
3. Enforce policies. If audience members can ignore three "Please silence your cell phones" announcements and a cutesy short film clip telling them the same thing, they need a little more persuasion.

And if rude audience members would just be a little more polite, and studios would make better movies, the rest of us would be more inclined to go in the first place.

mkdir -p /usr/X11R6/lib/X11
cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11
ln -s /etc/X11/fs
ln -s /usr/share/X11/fonts

chcon -t texrel_shlib_t /path/to/libflashplayer.so

Anyway, I'd argue that Thunderbird needs it much more than Firefox. Most phishing starts with the inbox. Links in email that use dodgy hex encoding, raw IPs, IPv6, point to domains that differ than the anchor text etc. should be highlighted.

Thunderbird 1.5 doesn't highlight the individual links, but those are its exact criteria for scam detection (plus embedded forms in HTML). It puts a warning bar at the top of the message that "Thunderbird thinks this message might be an email scam."

Unfortunately the false positive rate is annoyingly high, especially with mailings that include feedback forms. I think your idea of specifically identifying popular targets would be much more effective.

Show me a standards-compliant page that renders differently in Opera.

It all depends on which subset of the standards you use.

A while back, I ran into some bugs with :first-line in Opera 8. Fully validating code, but styles would persist incorrectly and, in one case, text would disappear. One's fixed in Opera 9 TP2, the other is still around. Sure, this was real edge-case stuff, but it happens.

Here's a more practical example going the other way: creating frames with generated content. It works handily in Opera, not at all in IE, and can be made to almost-work in Firefox (it comes down to positioning on generated content based on different versions of the CSS spec).

Standards compliance in a browser isn't a matter of working down a checklist from item #1 to item #1000, and counting complaince based on whether you get to item #800, #900, or #999. You look through the standards and prioritize. Maybe both browsers fulfill 900 of those items -- but maybe item #723 is only implemented in one of them, because one browser picked it as a priority, and the other put it off.

Stepping away from standards-compliance for a moment, you also have to take into account things like XMLHTTPRequest, contentEditable, and so on. Most rich text editors (popular in webmail apps) couldn't run on Opera until they released the Opera 9 previews, because the required features weren't there. And every minor version of Opera from 8 on has made more adjustments for AJAX apps.

Even within standards -- both de facto and de jure -- you need to find a common subset. Validating the code doesn't guarantee that other browsers will behave the way you expect.

As long as MoveOn and other organizations practice responsible mailing list management, their delivery will be unchanged from the way it is today. So they're not fighting what they think they're fighting.

This is a whitelist that bypasses filters, not a whitelist that is the only way to get through. Bulk mailers who don't pay up will still be able to send to AOL, and can still participate in AOL's other whitelists.

And Goodmail's service isn't a matter of "pay and we'll let you in" so much as it's "pay and we'll do a background check to see if you're a spammer, and if you pass our criteria we'll put you in the fast lane." Hmm, that sounds a lot like Bonded Sender and Habeas. Remember the controversy here on /. when Hotmail started using Bonded Sender two years ago? How exactly did that play out?

But why let the facts get in the way of a good knee-jerk reaction? We like placing AOL as the big corporate enemy. They often are, of course, but in this case? It's all overreaction and misinformation stemming from mistakes in the initial press.

Check out some of the commentary at Planet Antispam to get some views from the anti-spam community. You'll be surprised to find most of them siding with AOL on this one.

Meanwhile, charity groups, e-zines, and other legitimate free mailing lists that people sign up for will be screwed.

How?

No, really, how?

Where has AOL said that people who don't sign up for this list will be blocked?

This is a whitelist that bypasses filters, not a whitelist that is the only way to get through. Bulk mailers who don't pay up will still be able to send to AOL. Their mail will be subject to more scrutiny, sure. It'll be subject to as much scrutiny as... well, as it is today.

And as I recall, the Certified Email whitelist isn't a matter of "pay and we'll let you in" so much as it's "pay and we'll do a background check to see if you're a spammer, and if you pass our criteria we'll put you in the fast lane." Why, that sounds like Bonded Sender and Habeas. Remember the controversy here on /. when Hotmail started using Bonded Sender two years ago? How exactly did that play out?

But looking at it logically like this gets in the way of a good knee-jerk reaction.

--- Ahh, but such is the strategy of war. War, is not fair. Neither is gaming which is a sort of warfare played over a ficticious landscape or even anything else.

The cold war was nothing more than a mental psych-out between Russia and America. Who had the bigger.... you know...

playground antics... different playing field.

And profanity. Really, who cares? I am profane. I've allways been profane. I come with my own parental warning. Of course, when I'm at work, it's another story entirely.

Kids know curse words at freaking 2 years old!!! My cousin greg used to fall down and say oh Shit! And my friend's kid Aubrey says fuck you, and she's 2.

They'll pick up on it, and the taboos when it comes down to it. It's all society imprinting anyway.

its the first time the graphical web is begin used as more than a browser page.

Umm... what about Dashboard widgets in Mac OS X tiger? They also are built out of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (in that case, using Safari's WebKit rather than Opera's engine). In fact, the main differences seem to be that they use a different config file and the zipped bundles use a different structure.

There's been some discussion on the Opera forums as to compatibility, and last I looked the running theory was that it should be really simple to convert most widgets between Dashboard format and Opera format.

What is new is that this is (AFAIK) the first platform of its type that works on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Dashboard is Mac-only, Konfabulator is Windows/Mac (and I beleive it's possible to write Windows-only or Mac-only Konfabulator -- excuse me, Yahoo Widgets). But you can write an Opera widget and run it on Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. Add in the fact that Opera's big in the mobile market, and you've got a very wide non-web platform availble using web technologies.

They seem to be very similar to Mac OS X's widgets -- HTML/CSS/JavaScript -- with a few differences. Namely the config file is a differnt format, and while Dashboard widgets are put in a widgetname.wdgt folder and then zipped, Opera widgets are put in a zip file that's renamed as widgetname.wdgt.

In theory, as long as you're not doing anything Mac-specific, you could write one widget and use a Makefile or script to automatically create both Opera and Dashboard versions.

D'oh! Forgot the link in the last post:

Rummy Caption Contest

You *will* use Preview.... You *will* use Preview...

I could not log back into Gmail no matter what I did

I used to have problems with logging into sites on Opera. There was a period of time when I had to log into my.opera.com using Firefox (oh, the irony!). It turns out that Opera's behind-the-scenes cookie management is not always intuitive.

I wrote up my findings last summer, but the basic issue is with cookie permissions. "Treat as specified in Server Manager" seems to ignore any cookies that you haven't explicitly allowed in the Manage Cookies dialog, and some sites require you to accept third-party cookies. From what I can tell, there are situations in which site1.example.com sets a cookie for example.com (so that site2.example.com can read it), but the cookie is interpreted as a third-party cookie, so if you have told Opera to block third-party cookies it'll just ignore the cookie, preventing you from logging in.

Hope this helps

Agreed. If you're not getting anything out of it, stop or take a break. If it's your hobby, let it stay your hobby. Once it becomes an obligation, it becomes a chore, and once it becomes a chore... why are you doing it in the first place?

I've got a blog which is basically a place for me to post interesting stuff or sound off. I like getting readers and comments, but that's not the purpose. I post what I want, when I want, and I haven't lost interest.

I've also got a long-running (i.e. 9.5 years now) comic book fan site. I've found that the more people ask me to add things, the less interested I am in working on it. It's a strange, somewhat perverse reaction, but I think it comes down to hobby vs. work. When I'm just doing it for myself, it's fun and I put a lot more into the site, but when it's an obligation, it's work, and I dig in my heels and spend my time doing something else. I've already got a job, why should I do more work at home?

Nah, it's not a problem. They're not numerous enough to fight us, (but quite clearly this article doesn't tell the whole story...we only really need to worry about evil gorilla despots rising up and enslaving human and gorilla kind.

By the time the gorillas rise up to enslave humanity, we'll all have robot bodies, chainsaw hands, and the strength of five gorillas. What will really need to worry about is all the normal humans trying to kill off all the cyborgs.

Stinkin' humans.

You sound just like a little kid arguing with the neighbor kid over who's faster, Superman or The Flash.

[comic book guy]
Clearly, despite several ties and the interference of other Galactic Super Beings the Flash was faster.

Worst... argument... ever...
[/comic book guy]

(ps, I thought your argument was spot on)

...Microsoft! At this rate, IE will soon be as good as Dillo! ;)