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I'm not sure what site it is, but I'm pretty sure one of them that I need to access requires a 6-8 character password.

American Express, for one. Here's a fun screenshot I took a while back. The "password strength" meter is also humorous; it just chooses the number of bars based on how many letters and numbers there are; it doesn't bother checking if the password itself is strong. For example, it gives "aaaaa555" the highest rating.

There's some other site I use regularly that also has the same policy, but I can't think of what it is at the moment.

I've never understood this "no spaces" rule that seems to be mentioned everywhere. You're going to hash the string anyway, and spaces are as hashable as anything else, so why prohibit them? I should be able to use a full limerick as my password, spaces and punctuation included...

USPS works but is slow as molasses.

I've had pretty good luck having USPS-mailed packages arrive fairly quickly, especially considering those packages are usually free shipping from Amazon.

On the other hand, the one time I paid extra to have a giant red "NON-MACHINABLE" stamp put on my envelope, it was returned to me a few days later (contents intact, fortunately) torn in half, in a plastic cover labelled "We Care". I even took a picture for posterity (addresses censored for obvious reasons). I made them send it again for free; as far as I'm aware, it arrived without incident.

On one hand there is data and publications from thousands of scientists. On the other side there is very .... little. Taking one person from each side is irrelevant.

Two things.

First, I'm not just taking one person from each side, I'm using an example from each side, and prominent ones at that. When you compare viewpoints in any other field, it's common to use the prominent members of that field as examples of each viewpoint. Why is that suddenly unacceptable here?

Second, if it's as clear-cut as you seem to think it is, why does even the head of the CRU think there isn't sufficient data for the debate to be considered over?

My opinion is that the political momentum behind AGW is such that they (politicians) have put more scientific weight behind the idea than it actually has, and the general public has simply accepted it as fact when in truth it's just a theory.

Hey, I thought I heard scraping sounds. Those were the goalposts being moved. Now it's "disasterous" warming, eh?

No. But it's disastrous warming that pro-AGW people want me to be worried about! It's never "OH NOES THE WORLD WILL GET WARMER BY ONE DEGREE!" Instead, they go off on how the ice caps will melt, species will die off, etc etc etc. In other words, disaster.

You seriously don't believe the pro-AGW crowd is pushing the disaster angle? I suggest you crawl out from under that rock.

First you say it doesn't matter how many scientists believe what, then you say a consensus is important.

It seems you misunderstood me. I meant that the precise ratio of pro:anti is irrelevant to my argument, not irrelevant in general. Specifically, if one of the more prominent pro-AGW people doesn't think the issue is sufficiently settled (the debate is not over, he said), then clearly there is not a scientific consensus on the matter, despite what our political leaders want us to believe!

Do you doubt me? How about I quote Obama's press secretary: "Uh, I don’t think [global warming is], uh, anything that is quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore." (I'd link directly to the youtube video I transcribed that from, but it was taken down.)

Another issue you're ignoring is that as divided as scientists are regarding global warming, even among the "the climate is changing" crowd there isn't a consensus that it's our fault. (That is, the "A" in "AGW" is still in dispute even among those who believe the "GW" in "AGW".)

At any rate, as I've mentioned before, we have plenty of reasons to switch to "greener" power sources and reduce pollution - reasons which have nothing to do with climate change - so it's dumb to postpone all action until after the AGW debate is settled. Why can't we switch to nuclear merely because it's cleaner than coal, regardless of what effect coal plant emissions have on the climate?

We're basically postponing a solution most of us agree is necessary in order to argue about which problem we're going to use the solution to solve. Who cares? Let's just agree on the solution, and move on.

There are plenty of reasons to switch away from fossil fuels as it is, so it's stupid to hang the whole thing on something as controversial as AGW.

But now, instead of just working on switching to e.g. nuclear power we're wasting tons of time and money arguing on a global scale about what exactly (if anything) we want to do about global warming or climate change or whatever they're calling it these days.

I don't think it's true that the "vast majority" of scientists support the AGW theory. But don't ask me, ask the CRU's Phil Jones:

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view.

Having been the director of the CRU, Phil Jones is definitely in a position to know whether "the vast majority" of scientists support AGW - and here he is, publicly stating that he does not believe the vast majority of climate scientists think the debate is over, nor does he himself think so!

What I gather from this is that the scientists actually researching climate change are not nearly as sure about its cause as their political supporters want us to believe.

I elaborated a bit on this very point back in February.

And yes, you are going to get a virus/malware, unless you disable all USB ports, ethernet ports, modems, cd rom drives, etc.

I think you're being far too pessimistic.

Tell you what. One year from today -- I've put it on my calendar -- I'll post on my blog the results of a virus scan and a malware scan. We'll see whether I can stay virus-free for a year.

However, as it is, all I can see is that they removed LAN, an unnecessary, obsolete, redundant feature and now everybody is making an awful lot of noise as if it's the end of the world.

I see you've fallen into the classic trap of thinking that "I don't need it anymore" is equivalent to "nobody needs it anymore".

It's not really worth trying to argue against people who think that way, so I guess I'll stop trying.

If you don't like the AC2 DRM, why not complain about AC2 first?

I've known about Starcraft 2 longer than I've known about Assassin's Creed 2.

Furthermore, I did complain about Assassin's Creed 2. I realize AC2's DRM is stronger than SC2's, which is why I said "it could be worse".

Blizzard's stated purpose in removing LAN play was to combat piracy. Of course removing it won't help reduce piracy at all, but why should that matter? *eye roll*

For the gf -> wife upgrade, all you have to do is procure the right parts when you first start putting together the system.

My wife has always enjoyed Age of Empires II, but after two and a half years of marriage I finally got her to play through Diablo II. It's been a few weeks since she finished it, but she's still not sure whether she liked it. She won't play FPSs, though, and she leaves the room whenever I play Left 4 Dead (zombies of any form, except as in Plants Vs Zombies, are too scary for her). Anyway... she already had the right parts, from that perspective ;)

Our daughter is getting a good start, though. Sometimes I sit her in my lap while I play TF2... she gets somewhat mesmerized by the colors. It's almost as good as the bouncing-DVD-symbol screensaver on the TV in the living room.

(Also see my latest blog post for my comments about video game cost.)

*ahem* </shamless-blog-plug>

For the gf -> wife upgrade, all you have to do is procure the right parts when you first start putting together the system.

My wife has always enjoyed Age of Empires II, but after two and a half years of marriage I finally got her to play through Diablo II. It's been a few weeks since she finished it, but she's still not sure whether she liked it. She won't play FPSs, though, and she leaves the room whenever I play Left 4 Dead (zombies of any form, except as in Plants Vs Zombies, are too scary for her). Anyway... she already had the right parts, from that perspective ;)

Our daughter is getting a good start, though. Sometimes I sit her in my lap while I play TF2... she gets somewhat mesmerized by the colors. It's almost as good as the bouncing-DVD-symbol screensaver on the TV in the living room.

(Also see my latest blog post for my comments about video game cost.)

*ahem* </shamless-blog-plug>

I'm a former 1&1 customer for a reason... and I used to love them. Turns out they decided to really prove they don't care about their customers.

Others have answered your question... most of the limits are listed in your admin control panel. However, over the years I had my account with 1&1, they raised the price on me once without notification, and they regularly changed my bandwidth limits, database limits, e-mail account limits, and so on. By "changed" I mean "sometimes up, sometimes down".

One limit that you should be aware of is the unpublished "12 concurrent apache process" limit. Their techs won't check for it, but if your sites are down (giving 500 errors) that might be the cause. Runaway PHP processes are troublesome.

Another thing to be aware of is that if you go over the 100MB database size limit, they won't do anything about it until you hit 150MB or so; at that point, they'll make your db read-only (with delete permissions). Say you've got a large blog storing data there - if your blog software writes to the db at login, you'll be unable to log in (and, therefore, unable to delete anything to get back under the limit).

If you do somehow manage to get back under the limit (say, by deleting things manually in phpMyAdmin), your db account is not given write access again. The easiest thing to do at that point is export the db, create a new one, import the data to the new one, and delete the old one. It's not worth your time trying to talk to their techs.

But, why am I giving you advice on using 1&1 properly? You should leave 1&1 entirely ;)

Rule 1: Never use 1and1 or as it's know in germanny 1und1. They are the shittiest company ever.

Seconded.

They count on the fact that most people won't use their full quota because there's no way they could deliver what they promise to every user without ending up WAY in the red.

Not only that, but shared hosts put limits on customer accounts that they don't tell customers about.

For example, 1&1 puts a limit of 12 apache processes on each shared hosting account. What does that mean? It means if you have a PHP website, and 13 people connect to any domain on the account within the same second, at least one of them will get a 500 server error.

That might not seem so bad, but if something breaks and PHP processes start freezing up, then apache will spawn new processes to serve new visitors, and if those freeze up, your entire site goes down for apparently no reason - and since they don't tell you about the limit, and the first-tier tech support people don't check for it, you're going to waste hours on the phone with them until finally one of the second or third level techs says "we need your FTP password to check on things and oh by the way you're hitting your process limit". (Yes, they actually asked me for my username and password to their own system.)

It was this same incident that proved that when 1&1 techs say "I'm having the system reboot the server" they're flat-out lying.

I wrote a lengthy blog post about why I left 1&1, if anyone's really bored.