I spent a while with it, trying to give its "all browsing is sub-windows inside the one "Web Browser" window" model a fair shake. It was no use. I just plain detest that way of doing web browsing. I want separate windows for each web page. YMMV
Other than that, it seemed nice, pretty stable, and I really liked the ability to scale the magnification on web pages. That's a feature I really want to see in a "separate windows" type browser.
Is Netscape 6.1 worth my time? The previous version most emphatically was not. I basically stick with Netscape 4.7x by default, even though it's a buggy piece of crap, because Explorer, of course, is Evil.
Andromeda is uneven - the good episodes are really good, and they have done some nice worldbuilding which I want to see more of on screen. (When do we get to see a Vedran?)
The bad episodes have been unspeakably putrid. (That prison planet one, for instance.)
But still, I make a point of catching the new episodes, and I'm looking forward to the next season. They seem to have a pretty strong "story arc" like Babylon 5. (No way of knowing if the series is working up to a definite ending of the story, though, since the producers aren't on the net talking about it much.)
Farscape, I gave up on about midway through the first season.
The supposed Great Klingon Transmogrification would have happened in Kirk's era, between the series and the first movie. Not a line in any movie mentioned anything funny happening to Klingon foreheads. When asked, Roddenberry said that Klingons always had bumpy foreheads, but they didn't have the makeup budget back in 1969.
What they should do is go with Roddenberry's explanation.
The two strains of Klingons theory is inconsistent with the DS9 episode where three individual Klingons, shown in the original series with smooth foreheads, were shown with forehead bumps.
Of course, doing it the Roddenberry way will be inconsistent with the "Gump Trek" episode of DS9, but Worf's "We don't talk about that" brushoff, and everyone's surprise at smooth-foreheaded Klingons, was a stupid way of dealing with the problem anyway. The transition from smooth to bumpy foreheads happened within the memory of many people alive at the time of DS9, specifically, Dax and the three Klingons mentioned above. It's as if Communism caused Russians to have bumpy foreheads, and no one remembered that Russians had normal foreheads before 1917.
(What they ought to have done for "Gump Trek" was digitally bumpify the foreheads of the "original series" Klingons. Except Darvin, of course. Alternatively, leave off Michael Dorn's makeup and never mention it, but have everyone on the space station immediately recognize him as a Klingon.)
(Lest anyone think I hated the "Gump Trek" episode, no, I thought it was a hoot. I just thought they botched the Klingon thing.)
Nuclear waste falls into two categories: Transuranics (including plutonium) which have very long half-lives, but are weakly radioactive, and fission products, which are intensely radioactive, but have short half-lives.
Plutonium, actually, is kind of intermediate - radioactive enough to be a serious problem, but not so radioactive that it's all gone quickly.
However, plutonium is not waste, not in any sane fuel cycle. Plutonium is fissionable, and works just fine in a power reactor. By the time a fuel rod is so full of neutron-absorbing fission products that it can't produce power any more, a significant percentage of its power output is due to plutonium fission. I'm talking about ordinary reactors here, not breeders.
Reprocess the spent fuel rods and put the plutonium into new fuel rods, and all the scaremongering about the unspeakable evils of plutonium is irrelevant. It's getting burned up.
Current thinking is that the other transuranics can also be put into new fuel rods. They'll alternately absorb neutrons and decay into other things until they hit a fissionable isotope of something, at which time they cease to be transuranics, and become fission products.
Fission products are the really nasty stuff. You can't run fast enough to reach the unshielded spent fuel rod alive nasty. But that's only true of freshly-removed spent fuel rods. That stuff decays fast. In 300 years (not 3 thousand, much less 30 or 300 thousand years) there is less total radioactity in the fission products than there was in the uranium ore that was originally mined to make the fuel rods.
The "thousands and thousands of years" scaremongering is entirely based on the half-lives of the transuranics.
Fuel is not a limiting factor. There have been "30 years proven reserves" since forever. That is based on the current insanely wasteful "once-through" fuel cycle, in which most of the uranium and fissionable plutonium is thrown away as "waste". Simple reprocessing, to separate out the unburned uranium and plutonium to burn in new fuel elements, extends that a lot. (A reactor, at the end of its fuel cycle, is producing a significant percentage of its power from fissioning the plutonium bred in its fuel rods.) And I'm not talking specialized breeder reactors, here. If you do build breeder reactors, you're talking about 1000 years of proven reserves. And when uranium starts getting low, you can breed fissionable U233 from thorium. According to the CRC Handbook, thorium is "about as common as lead", and "there's probably more energy available from thorium in the Earth's crust than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together."
Beyond that, there's a Japanese ion-exchange process for extracting uranium from sea water at a cost of about $200/pound. That's too expensive to be economical now, but if fissionables are not available from other sources, it's not too expensive to rule it out for power generation.
Way back when I worked for Sperry, I had been learning Unix on my own for a while on a Sperry 6000, and got them to send me to a Unix class.
The class was kind of low-level the first day, stuff I already knew, and out of boredom, I set my prompt to "# ", just getting what idle amusement was available at the moment.
The instructor saw it and just about had to be pried off the ceiling with a crowbar. It took nearly five minutes to convince him that I had not cracked root.
Today, my prompt at work(csh) is
set prompt="! `uname -n`../$cwd:t > "
command history number, host name, and the last part of the current directory. (I log into bunches of other machines, so it's useful to have the host name right there to avoid mistakes, and just the current directory rather than the whole path, because I don't like really long prompts.)
Spam will destroy email if not stopped
on
ORBS Forks
·
· Score: 2
How many people are on this planet? It's about six billion now, right?
How many of them have something to sell? What if it's only one person in a thousand?
People who naively say "spam is free speech, just delete it" are fundamentally missing the point. If you get six million spam messages in your inbox daily (and based on the above "one person in a thousand has something to sell", that's what you'll get if spam is "OK")then email has ceased to be a usable communications medium.
I am postmaster@the.company.I.work.for, and I see a continuous flood of spam - dozens of emails a day - to the address of one person who left the company over ten years ago. For ten years, this email was all bounced "No such user", but since the return addresses on the spam are forged, they never see it, and the address remains on all the spam lists. (I'm now using his old address as a "spam poison pill" address.)
The postmaster mailbox gets hundreds of megabytes of "no such user" bounces a day. In an ideal world, I would scan the "no such user" bounces and facilitate legimate senders of email getting their mail to its intended recipient. In the spam world, all I can do is procmail all "no such user" mail into a separate mailbox that is deleted daily, and never looked at. (No, I am *not* exaggerating when I say "hundreds of megabytes per day.")
Contrary to Gillmore's naive ideological purist anarchism, spam is not a trivial problem, and the volume is such that it constitutes a Denial of Service attack. It must be treated as such.
Re: book about three kids with a "flying saucer" time machine.
This rings a bell... Was there a sentient wolf, and a "kid from the future"? At one point, one of the kids tries to "stop time" by putting ring over the hour/minute hand of the time control, and it works -- briefly, before blowing a rather large fuse? (I think this was in the Revolutionary War story. And I think the fuse was a foot-thick silver bus bar.)
I recall reading these stories in "Boys' Life", the Boy Scout magazine, way back in the mid '60s or so. They were serialized, and I seem to recall I kept missing pieces of them.
Boys' Life had some decent YA SF from time to time. There was another on-again off-again series about some kids on a multi-generation interstellar ship which is about to reach its destination; they're learning to operate BRTs, "body reaction tools". Think Heinlein's power armor scaled up to about 12 feet tall. This was also mid-'60s.
Adaptec (now Roxio) never offer an upgrade price. "Oh, you upgraded your OS? Where's our $100?"
Yeah... I've got "EZ CD Creator" 3.something, which came with my CD burner, and it's not what I would have bought if it weren't bundled with the burner, but it works OK... except MicroSlough's latest version of Windows Media Player is incompatible with it being installed. I figured, like every decent company out there, I could get a bug fix (yeah, it's MicroSlough's bug, but...) from their web site...
Nope. Pay full price for 4.0.
No. Not just no, but Hell no! Not now, not ever. Millions for defense, but not one penny for tribute. I can easily live without Windows Media Player 8. If I ever decide otherwise, I'll buy Nero Burning ROM, or something else from one of (any of) Roxio's competitors. It's not the money, it's the principle of the thing.
(Even if the Roxio software were better, which, by all acounts, it most emphatically is not.)
One of the main purposes of this space station is to learn how to do all those "mudane tasks", and how to perform all "the daunting logistics of keeping numerous humans in space". The only way to learn how to do this is by doing it. Yeah, that's not science, it's boring engineering, but we've had the science to do this for a long time. It's long past time to reduce it to engineering. Once we learn how to live and work in space on a larger scale, we'll be able to do more science.
Yeah, it'd be better if the CRV, SSTO, and other things hadn't been proxmired out of the budget.
I suspect Tito is probably in more or less agreement with this, but I wouldn't be surprised if he finds the chance to tweak NASAs nose difficult to resist, after the full-blown tantrum worthy of a spoiled 2-year-old NASA management pitched about his trip. It's going to take NASA a while to overcome the PR hit they've taken from that -- assuming they ever figure out that they have taken a PR hit from their tantrum, and take steps to overcome it. Evidence that they have a clue is yet to become evident.
Plutonium is bred in ordinary nuclear reactors in the course of operation. By the time the fuel elements are nearing their end of use (mostly due to accumulation of neutron-absorbing fission products) some significant fraction of the reactor's power output is from the fission of plutonium, not uranium. (I think I recall about 30%.)
So, sure, power plants can burn plutonium. There are, no doubt, some engineering details, but it obviously can be done because it is being done, every day, in every nuclear power plant on the planet.
That's the appropriate way to dispose of unwanted plutonium, I say, as I sit here in California waiting for another rolling blackout.
There's a pretty neat "view from the inside" set of reports on the DS-1 project at this JPL site. One of the more amazing parts is where the DS-1's star tracker quit working, so they've written software to take the picture from their main imaging camera, and search for guide stars in it.
To make it really fail-safe, make some critical part of the microwave generating equipment up on the satellite powered by power beamed back up from the ground station. And that is powered by the power from the satellite. So, if the beam from the satellite ever leaves the receiver, the power quits going back up to power the first-stage oscillator or whatever, and it shuts down automatically.
A: None whatsoever. The various ISPs and other sites which freely choose to use RBL blocked the IP traffic, because they trust the judgement of those who put sites on the RBL.
This was probably just a mistake, like we all make from time to time. If RBL lists too many sites that too many of its customers and users want to exchange mail and IP packets with, then those sites will cease to use RBL for filtering.
Why is this a big deal? Presumably, Vixie and the RBL folks want people to use their service, so they'll list sites that do things that their customer really want blocked. If they fail to do this, their service won't be used any more, and they will become irrelevant.
Opera's "page scale factor" is really nice.
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
·
· Score: 1
I did just discover a marvelous feature of Opera -- When I go to a web page that has some absurdly tiny font, I can just hit that scale factor in the upper right hand corner of the window, and expand that sucker into readability!! I was just at a page (the gracenote.com "open letter") which was a teensy unreadable blurry font in Netscape, even when I told it to USE MY (#*$*(@#$ FONTS NO MATTER WHAT THE @#($&(@#(@ DOCUMENT SAYS, AND I MEAN IT WHEN I SAY 72 POINT!! but it didn't change the font from their "Flyspeck 2". In Opera, the page was readable at the "normal" size. A bit smaller than I'd like but fine. And I could make it bigger with a single click and drag on the top of the window, not trudging around in menus to get to the font select.
So I guess I'll keep Opera around. Maybe it will grow on me.
But if the effect doesn't show up until somewhere past Pluto's orbit... (I know the probes aren't yet beyond Pluto's apehelion... but there's still an unexplained anomaly in Pluto's orbit, isn't there? And we haven't observed Pluto for a full orbit yet.)
If they're slowing as they get very far from the Sun, that seems to imply that the force of gravity is not dropping of quite as fast as 1/r^2. If the strength of gravity is higher than inverse square and great distances, perhaps that effect would explain the "missing mass" problem? There isn't really any missing mass. This effect makes it look like the galaxies are more massive than they really are.
Plus, launching them into the sun takes a huge amount of delta-V. It's more expensive to drop something into the sun than to launch it to solar escape velocity. One of the strange-but-true facts of orbital mechanics.
Personally, when it comes to spammers, my thoughts run more to something lingering but amusing involving boiling oil and molten lead.
I guess it's a matter of what you're used to. I might give it another try.
I didn't know that it remembered what windows were open when it crashed. Given that there are crashes, this is a major improvement! I really hate it when I've browed through Slashdot and done "open in another window" on all the stories of interest, and just start to read them when GAAK!! Netscape crashes.
Tried Opera, didn't like it.
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
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· Score: 1
The browser environment I'm used to, with (buggy, constantly crashing) Netscape, and (in moments of weakness and desperation, forgive me!) Explorer, is to open web pages in separate windows, where I can move the windows around with other, non-browser windows.
Opera does not use this model. In Opera, you have a "browser" window, and all the web pages you're browsing are inside this "Opera" master window.
This wastes screen real estate, and is far less flexible. Perhaps if I'd started using this model, I'd like it and hate the Netscape/Explorer way, but there it is. I much prefer the separate window per web page model.
Perhaps there's an option in Opera to do it the Netscape/Explorer way, but I didn't spend much time with it. It crashed on me within a half hour of starting to use it, and I haven't used it since. The only reason I was interested in it in the first place was the promise of more stability. (Explorer is pretty stable, but it is, of course, Evil.)
If I had any moderator points today, I'd moderate this guy up with a "funny". Classic!
(This is what I want for spammers!)
No, we won't run out of uranium
on
Fission in a Box
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· Score: 1
That's "proven reserves", which are 30-40 years today, were 30-40 years... uh, 30-40 years ago, and will probably still be 30-40 years "proven reserves" 30-40 years from now as more is discovered.
Beyond that, if we just reprocessed the spent fuel rods, we'd have about 100 years proven reserves. Breeders take that to several hundred years.
And beyond that, you can breed fissionable U233 from thorium. According to the CRC Handbook, thorium is "about as common as lead", and "there is probably more energy available from thorium in the earth's crust than from uranium and all fossil fuels combined."
And beyond that... The Japanese have demonstrated a technique using ion exchange resins to extract uranium from seawater at a cost of about $200/pound in 1970-something dollars, which was when I read about it. Grossly too expensive now, but if we really needed the uranium...
Not a parabolic mirror -- a corner cube. Dead simple to make, just the inside of a box lined with foil. And no need to aim. Incoming microwaves will automatically be directed right back where they came from.
I don't find ads objectionable in and of themselves. What does annoy me greatly, though is when a web page (actually or apparantly) holds its content hostage while waiting for some massive animated advertisement to download, especially when the ad is for something I would never have the slightest interest in.
Display the web page content first, then, when I'm finished, if the ad is there, I may even click on it.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried Opera.
I hated it.
I spent a while with it, trying to give its "all browsing is sub-windows inside the one "Web Browser" window" model a fair shake. It was no use. I just plain detest that way of doing web browsing. I want separate windows for each web page. YMMV
Other than that, it seemed nice, pretty stable, and I really liked the ability to scale the magnification on web pages. That's a feature I really want to see in a "separate windows" type browser.
Is Netscape 6.1 worth my time? The previous version most emphatically was not. I basically stick with Netscape 4.7x by default, even though it's a buggy piece of crap, because Explorer, of course, is Evil.
Andromeda is uneven - the good episodes are really good, and they have done some nice worldbuilding which I want to see more of on screen. (When do we get to see a Vedran?)
The bad episodes have been unspeakably putrid. (That prison planet one, for instance.)
But still, I make a point of catching the new episodes, and I'm looking forward to the next season. They seem to have a pretty strong "story arc" like Babylon 5. (No way of knowing if the series is working up to a definite ending of the story, though, since the producers aren't on the net talking about it much.)
Farscape, I gave up on about midway through the first season.
The supposed Great Klingon Transmogrification would have happened in Kirk's era, between the series and the first movie. Not a line in any movie mentioned anything funny happening to Klingon foreheads. When asked, Roddenberry said that Klingons always had bumpy foreheads, but they didn't have the makeup budget back in 1969.
What they should do is go with Roddenberry's explanation.
The two strains of Klingons theory is inconsistent with the DS9 episode where three individual Klingons, shown in the original series with smooth foreheads, were shown with forehead bumps.
Of course, doing it the Roddenberry way will be inconsistent with the "Gump Trek" episode of DS9, but Worf's "We don't talk about that" brushoff, and everyone's surprise at smooth-foreheaded Klingons, was a stupid way of dealing with the problem anyway. The transition from smooth to bumpy foreheads happened within the memory of many people alive at the time of DS9, specifically, Dax and the three Klingons mentioned above. It's as if Communism caused Russians to have bumpy foreheads, and no one remembered that Russians had normal foreheads before 1917.
(What they ought to have done for "Gump Trek" was digitally bumpify the foreheads of the "original series" Klingons. Except Darvin, of course. Alternatively, leave off Michael Dorn's makeup and never mention it, but have everyone on the space station immediately recognize him as a Klingon.)
(Lest anyone think I hated the "Gump Trek" episode, no, I thought it was a hoot. I just thought they botched the Klingon thing.)
Nuclear waste falls into two categories: Transuranics (including plutonium) which have very long half-lives, but are weakly radioactive, and fission products, which are intensely radioactive, but have short half-lives.
Plutonium, actually, is kind of intermediate - radioactive enough to be a serious problem, but not so radioactive that it's all gone quickly.
However, plutonium is not waste, not in any sane fuel cycle. Plutonium is fissionable, and works just fine in a power reactor. By the time a fuel rod is so full of neutron-absorbing fission products that it can't produce power any more, a significant percentage of its power output is due to plutonium fission. I'm talking about ordinary reactors here, not breeders.
Reprocess the spent fuel rods and put the plutonium into new fuel rods, and all the scaremongering about the unspeakable evils of plutonium is irrelevant. It's getting burned up.
Current thinking is that the other transuranics can also be put into new fuel rods. They'll alternately absorb neutrons and decay into other things until they hit a fissionable isotope of something, at which time they cease to be transuranics, and become fission products.
Fission products are the really nasty stuff. You can't run fast enough to reach the unshielded spent fuel rod alive nasty. But that's only true of freshly-removed spent fuel rods. That stuff decays fast. In 300 years (not 3 thousand, much less 30 or 300 thousand years) there is less total radioactity in the fission products than there was in the uranium ore that was originally mined to make the fuel rods.
The "thousands and thousands of years" scaremongering is entirely based on the half-lives of the transuranics.
Fuel is not a limiting factor. There have been "30 years proven reserves" since forever. That is based on the current insanely wasteful "once-through" fuel cycle, in which most of the uranium and fissionable plutonium is thrown away as "waste". Simple reprocessing, to separate out the unburned uranium and plutonium to burn in new fuel elements, extends that a lot. (A reactor, at the end of its fuel cycle, is producing a significant percentage of its power from fissioning the plutonium bred in its fuel rods.) And I'm not talking specialized breeder reactors, here. If you do build breeder reactors, you're talking about 1000 years of proven reserves. And when uranium starts getting low, you can breed fissionable U233 from thorium. According to the CRC Handbook, thorium is "about as common as lead", and "there's probably more energy available from thorium in the Earth's crust than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together."
Beyond that, there's a Japanese ion-exchange process for extracting uranium from sea water at a cost of about $200/pound. That's too expensive to be economical now, but if fissionables are not available from other sources, it's not too expensive to rule it out for power generation.
Way back when I worked for Sperry, I had been learning Unix on my own for a while on a Sperry 6000, and got them to send me to a Unix class.
../$cwd:t > "
The class was kind of low-level the first day, stuff I already knew, and out of boredom, I set my prompt to "# ", just getting what idle amusement was available at the moment.
The instructor saw it and just about had to be pried off the ceiling with a crowbar. It took nearly five minutes to convince him that I had not cracked root.
Today, my prompt at work(csh) is
set prompt="! `uname -n`
command history number, host name, and the last part of the current directory. (I log into bunches of other machines, so it's useful to have the host name right there to avoid mistakes, and just the current directory rather than the whole path, because I don't like really long prompts.)
How many people are on this planet? It's about six billion now, right?
How many of them have something to sell? What if it's only one person in a thousand?
People who naively say "spam is free speech, just delete it" are fundamentally missing the point. If you get six million spam messages in your inbox daily (and based on the above "one person in a thousand has something to sell", that's what you'll get if spam is "OK")then email has ceased to be a usable communications medium.
I am postmaster@the.company.I.work.for, and I see a continuous flood of spam - dozens of emails a day - to the address of one person who left the company over ten years ago. For ten years, this email was all bounced "No such user", but since the return addresses on the spam are forged, they never see it, and the address remains on all the spam lists. (I'm now using his old address as a "spam poison pill" address.)
The postmaster mailbox gets hundreds of megabytes of "no such user" bounces a day. In an ideal world, I would scan the "no such user" bounces and facilitate legimate senders of email getting their mail to its intended recipient. In the spam world, all I can do is procmail all "no such user" mail into a separate mailbox that is deleted daily, and never looked at. (No, I am *not* exaggerating when I say "hundreds of megabytes per day.")
Contrary to Gillmore's naive ideological purist anarchism, spam is not a trivial problem, and the volume is such that it constitutes a Denial of Service attack. It must be treated as such.
Ha. When I was sysadmining, I added Hindi, Mandarin, and Cantonese dictionaries to my regular Crack run. I caught quite a few.
Re: book about three kids with a "flying saucer" time machine.
This rings a bell... Was there a sentient wolf, and a "kid from the future"? At one point, one of the kids tries to "stop time" by putting ring over the hour/minute hand of the time control, and it works -- briefly, before blowing a rather large fuse? (I think this was in the Revolutionary War story. And I think the fuse was a foot-thick silver bus bar.)
I recall reading these stories in "Boys' Life", the Boy Scout magazine, way back in the mid '60s or so. They were serialized, and I seem to recall I kept missing pieces of them.
Boys' Life had some decent YA SF from time to time. There was another on-again off-again series about some kids on a multi-generation interstellar ship which is about to reach its destination; they're learning to operate BRTs, "body reaction tools". Think Heinlein's power armor scaled up to about 12 feet tall. This was also mid-'60s.
Yeah... I've got "EZ CD Creator" 3.something, which came with my CD burner, and it's not what I would have bought if it weren't bundled with the burner, but it works OK... except MicroSlough's latest version of Windows Media Player is incompatible with it being installed. I figured, like every decent company out there, I could get a bug fix (yeah, it's MicroSlough's bug, but...) from their web site...
Nope. Pay full price for 4.0.
No. Not just no, but Hell no! Not now, not ever. Millions for defense, but not one penny for tribute. I can easily live without Windows Media Player 8. If I ever decide otherwise, I'll buy Nero Burning ROM, or something else from one of (any of) Roxio's competitors. It's not the money, it's the principle of the thing.
(Even if the Roxio software were better, which, by all acounts, it most emphatically is not.)
One of the main purposes of this space station is to learn how to do all those "mudane tasks", and how to perform all "the daunting logistics of keeping numerous humans in space". The only way to learn how to do this is by doing it. Yeah, that's not science, it's boring engineering, but we've had the science to do this for a long time. It's long past time to reduce it to engineering. Once we learn how to live and work in space on a larger scale, we'll be able to do more science.
Yeah, it'd be better if the CRV, SSTO, and other things hadn't been proxmired out of the budget.
I suspect Tito is probably in more or less agreement with this, but I wouldn't be surprised if he finds the chance to tweak NASAs nose difficult to resist, after the full-blown tantrum worthy of a spoiled 2-year-old NASA management pitched about his trip. It's going to take NASA a while to overcome the PR hit they've taken from that -- assuming they ever figure out that they have taken a PR hit from their tantrum, and take steps to overcome it. Evidence that they have a clue is yet to become evident.
Plutonium is bred in ordinary nuclear reactors in the course of operation. By the time the fuel elements are nearing their end of use (mostly due to accumulation of neutron-absorbing fission products) some significant fraction of the reactor's power output is from the fission of plutonium, not uranium. (I think I recall about 30%.)
So, sure, power plants can burn plutonium. There are, no doubt, some engineering details, but it obviously can be done because it is being done, every day, in every nuclear power plant on the planet.
That's the appropriate way to dispose of unwanted plutonium, I say, as I sit here in California waiting for another rolling blackout.
There's a pretty neat "view from the inside" set of reports on the DS-1 project at this JPL site. One of the more amazing parts is where the DS-1's star tracker quit working, so they've written software to take the picture from their main imaging camera, and search for guide stars in it.
To make it really fail-safe, make some critical part of the microwave generating equipment up on the satellite powered by power beamed back up from the ground station. And that is powered by the power from the satellite. So, if the beam from the satellite ever leaves the receiver, the power quits going back up to power the first-stage oscillator or whatever, and it shuts down automatically.
Q: What IP traffic did Vixie block?
A: None whatsoever. The various ISPs and other sites which freely choose to use RBL blocked the IP traffic, because they trust the judgement of those who put sites on the RBL.
This was probably just a mistake, like we all make from time to time. If RBL lists too many sites that too many of its customers and users want to exchange mail and IP packets with, then those sites will cease to use RBL for filtering.
Why is this a big deal? Presumably, Vixie and the RBL folks want people to use their service, so they'll list sites that do things that their customer really want blocked. If they fail to do this, their service won't be used any more, and they will become irrelevant.
I did just discover a marvelous feature of Opera -- When I go to a web page that has some absurdly tiny font, I can just hit that scale factor in the upper right hand corner of the window, and expand that sucker into readability!! I was just at a page (the gracenote.com "open letter") which was a teensy unreadable blurry font in Netscape, even when I told it to USE MY (#*$*(@#$ FONTS NO MATTER WHAT THE @#($&(@#(@ DOCUMENT SAYS, AND I MEAN IT WHEN I SAY 72 POINT!! but it didn't change the font from their "Flyspeck 2". In Opera, the page was readable at the "normal" size. A bit smaller than I'd like but fine. And I could make it bigger with a single click and drag on the top of the window, not trudging around in menus to get to the font select.
So I guess I'll keep Opera around. Maybe it will grow on me.
But if the effect doesn't show up until somewhere past Pluto's orbit... (I know the probes aren't yet beyond Pluto's apehelion... but there's still an unexplained anomaly in Pluto's orbit, isn't there? And we haven't observed Pluto for a full orbit yet.)
If they're slowing as they get very far from the Sun, that seems to imply that the force of gravity is not dropping of quite as fast as 1/r^2. If the strength of gravity is higher than inverse square and great distances, perhaps that effect would explain the "missing mass" problem? There isn't really any missing mass. This effect makes it look like the galaxies are more massive than they really are.
Plus, launching them into the sun takes a huge amount of delta-V. It's more expensive to drop something into the sun than to launch it to solar escape velocity. One of the strange-but-true facts of orbital mechanics.
Personally, when it comes to spammers, my thoughts run more to something lingering but amusing involving boiling oil and molten lead.
I guess it's a matter of what you're used to. I might give it another try.
I didn't know that it remembered what windows were open when it crashed. Given that there are crashes, this is a major improvement! I really hate it when I've browed through Slashdot and done "open in another window" on all the stories of interest, and just start to read them when GAAK!! Netscape crashes.
The browser environment I'm used to, with (buggy, constantly crashing) Netscape, and (in moments of weakness and desperation, forgive me!) Explorer, is to open web pages in separate windows, where I can move the windows around with other, non-browser windows.
Opera does not use this model. In Opera, you have a "browser" window, and all the web pages you're browsing are inside this "Opera" master window.
This wastes screen real estate, and is far less flexible. Perhaps if I'd started using this model, I'd like it and hate the Netscape/Explorer way, but there it is. I much prefer the separate window per web page model.
Perhaps there's an option in Opera to do it the Netscape/Explorer way, but I didn't spend much time with it. It crashed on me within a half hour of starting to use it, and I haven't used it since. The only reason I was interested in it in the first place was the promise of more stability. (Explorer is pretty stable, but it is, of course, Evil.)
If I had any moderator points today, I'd moderate this guy up with a "funny". Classic!
(This is what I want for spammers!)
That's "proven reserves", which are 30-40 years today, were 30-40 years ... uh, 30-40 years ago, and will probably still be 30-40 years "proven reserves" 30-40 years from now as more is discovered.
Beyond that, if we just reprocessed the spent fuel rods, we'd have about 100 years proven reserves. Breeders take that to several hundred years.
And beyond that, you can breed fissionable U233 from thorium. According to the CRC Handbook, thorium is "about as common as lead", and "there is probably more energy available from thorium in the earth's crust than from uranium and all fossil fuels combined."
And beyond that... The Japanese have demonstrated a technique using ion exchange resins to extract uranium from seawater at a cost of about $200/pound in 1970-something dollars, which was when I read about it. Grossly too expensive now, but if we really needed the uranium...
Not a parabolic mirror -- a corner cube. Dead simple to make, just the inside of a box lined with foil. And no need to aim. Incoming microwaves will automatically be directed right back where they came from.
I don't find ads objectionable in and of themselves. What does annoy me greatly, though is when a web page (actually or apparantly) holds its content hostage while waiting for some massive animated advertisement to download, especially when the ad is for something I would never have the slightest interest in.
Display the web page content first, then, when I'm finished, if the ad is there, I may even click on it.