Putting weapons in space is a bad idea for a number of reasons.
1. They are very expensive.
2. They are highly vulnerable.
3. Their effectiveness is unproven
The cost of launching and maintaining space based weapons is very high, plus all the engineering that needs to go into having them remain reliable in the harsh environment of space. I'd much rather see my tax dollars go towards proven weapons which are a hell of a lot cheaper.
Space based weapons are highly vulnerable and can be defeated with relatively low tech. All it takes would be for someone to release a few million BBs or sand or similar material in orbit. It will quickly destroy anything up there. Given the high velocities involved in orbit, it will make short work of anything up there. Also, as more satellites are destroyed, each of them releases more material, causing even more damage. I don't think it would be all that difficult to render space unusable for weapons for anybody. This would also make space unusable for non-military operations as well.
And finally, many of the weapon systems are unproven as to how effective they'd actually be. For example, the missile defense being implemented hasn't performed well in tests and would probably be ineffective against missiles from countries like North Korea, China, India or Pakistan due to the instability of the rockets compared to US and Russian rockets.
Doesn't work on Konqueror either. I get the following Javascript errors with Konqueror 3.4.1:
Error: http://www.start.com/extern/wsfw/compat/0.072605.0 /msncompat.js: SyntaxError - Parse error at line 85 Error: http://www.start.com/extern/wsfw/core/0.072605.1/m sncore.js: TypeError - Value undefined (result of expression window.attachEvent) is not an object. Cannot be called. Error: http://www.start.com/3/: TypeError - Attempted to access 'Init' property on undefined object (result of expression Msn.Runtime.Init)
I rarely have problems with Konqueror any more rendering sites.
This being the case and given how delicate the heat shield tiles are, I wonder why they don't put some protective coating over the tiles during launch and just let that coating burn off during reentry. Most of the friction is in reentry as the shuttle tries to shed velocity, not on liftoff.
Similarly for the foam I've heard people jokingly suggest a hair net... I always wondered why they can't embed some form of mesh inside the foam to add strength and help prevent it from sloughing off.
One problem is that ALSA is not available on all platforms. For example, I run KDE on Solaris and use aRTS because Solaris doesn't have any mixing capability (I wrote the original aRTS Solaris sound driver). There is talk of moving to gstreamer, but it also looks like gstreamer has a ways to go yet and the last I looked it didn't have any support for Solaris either. KDE is not Linux specific.
Fortunately though, at least in my distribution, ldd shows that zlib is dynamically linked. In other words, when zlib is fixed, a ton of applications like ssh will also be fixed.
Out of curiosity I did a check in my/usr/bin and found 351 programs with a dependency on zlib.
I actually do this. I don't know anyone in China, Korea, Nigeria, Russia or several other countries so I just block all email from them via blackholes.us. I see a ton of attempted spam connections getting dropped from this and it definitely made a big difference in the amount of spam processed. Of course I also use various other RBLs to block a lot of the spam from elsewhere.
I wonder how they'll show it. A local PBS station used to show all of it, except blank the video (leaving audio) for a few scenes. They showed the Japanese version with subtitles which I really enjoyed. Somehow I doubt the Cartoon Network will do this.
My experience is those $30 NAT/firewall boxes are usually not up to the task, especially if handling a server. I run a low traffic site with both email and web behind a NAT firewall. My old Netgear (FR314) worked fairly well but would crash and reboot every week or so. It died and I replaced it with a Netgear RT614 which would crash and lock up (not reboot) between 5 and 30 minutes. Online reviews I read after the fact reported similar problems.
I replaced it with a more expensive Linksys router RV042 which runs Linux. It has been rock solid with the latest firmware. A better choice would be to set up a Linux or BSD box with a couple of good NIC cards and use that running IP tables or whatever BSD uses. The only problem with the Linksys is that it costs more than $100 (I paid $175).
Also, the cheap firewall boxes are fairly limited in what rules you can implement. You can usually block specific port ranges, but often there is no control over IP addresses or subnets. The Linksys is good in regard that it supports all this and supports enabling logging for each rule. I.e. you can have it log any infected PCs under your domain by monitoring port traffic.
I run a personal mail server and am getting hit with up to 100,000 bounces per day because some spam gang decided they like my domain (might be due to the fact that I also report *all* spam I receive through Spamcop.
Fortunately they use random sender account names and don't hit my account and my server easily blocks the bounces, but this could be a disaster if they instead chose valid account names.
I can say that after having tried a new Netgear RT614 firewall router I wouldagree with you. At the advice of some friends when my old router died I bought one as a replacement... I should have paid more attention to the reviews. Most of the reviews I read reported at least one crash with this router. Anyway, I could not keep the router alive more than 30 minutes without it locking up.
I quickly replaced it with a more expensive Linksys RV042 which runs Openrp Linux. Though sadly nobody appears to have bothered hacking this like the wireless router.
The Linksys has been rock solid and had a lot more functionality, like true ACLs with logging (the ACL rules in the Netgear were a joke). It also has a lot of VPN functionality, which I don't really need at the moment, and it also can support load balancing and failover between say 2 DSL modems, or DSL and a cable modem.
I would say just the opposite. My old Netgear FR314 gave up the ghost after years of mostly flawless use where the flash memory appears to have died. I went and tried to replace it with a new Netgear RT614, thinking that in the years since that it would probably be a lot better than my old firewall. Wrong.
The new Netgear web interface would not render properly in Firefox for starters and it went downhill from there. For port forwarding, they only had a few games and HTTP in there and nothing else, and adding new entries did not work very well with Firefox.
After finally getting it configured so I could forward ports for my mail server, web server, and SSH, the router would crash anywhere between 5 and 30 minutes, and not even reboot, but just hang. Now my old Netgear would sometimes crash, but it at least had a watchdog timer and would automatically reboot, and the crashes were not that frequent, maybe once a week. This new one would crash and require me to physically power cycle it. A good firewall should not crash. The UI was also dumbed down quite a bit more than my old firewall.
After fighting it for a day I took it back to the store and replaced it with a Linksys RV042. While also being a much more expensive firewall (around $175) I found it to also be far better. Like my old Netgear, it appears to have been well built with a solid steel chasis. The new Netgear, while it looked cool, was just plastic. It has been rock solid without any hiccup since I set it up, and unlike the Netgear I could do true ACL rules, i.e. permit or deny based not just on protocol and port range, but also by IP addresses or subnets. I.e. I only want to allow SSH from a few IP addresses. I could also set logging on each ACL rule as well.
Also, I found the logging to be fairly nice as well. It supports emailing logs to me as well as logging them to the syslog daemon on my server, though I miss being able to set the time the logs were emailed on my old Netgear.
The Linksys also has IPSEC VPN support which my old Netgear also had. The new Netgear did not. While I have not yet used it, it could come in handy.
I also tried a D-Link DS-601 firewall router about a year ago but decided not to use it since the logging was better on my old Netgear. At least it didn't crash though and I think it would be more than adequate for most home users.
Now if only I could get to a bash shell on the Linksys since it is running the OpenRP Linux distribution, though sadly, unlike the wireless router, nobody has bothered yet.
As a desktop Solaris and Linux user, I would say no. At least for me, Linux, especially with the 2.6 kernel is *much* more responsive on the desktop, plus Solaris is missing many pieces that really help for the desktop (like Alsa). Granted, you can get audio running on Sun (I wrote the ARTS Solaris driver for KDE), but you're much better off under Linux.
Also, at least on Sparc, Sun's X server doesn't appear to support a number of key features useful on the desktop, and Xorg doesn't run on Sparc Solaris due to missing kernel support. X86 might be better in this regard, though.
Also, for desktop use, Solaris only has a fraction of the drivers that Linux has.
Now maybe Solaris 10 is a bit better, but Solaris is much more optimized for the server than the desktop.
One other thing to think about. California gets less federal money back per person than any other state in the nation... many states, and I wouldn't be surprised if Georgia is one of them, actually get more federal dollars back than they pay in, hence California is subsidizing many other parts of the nation. So if CA isn't getting the federal dollars, they need to make it up somehow.
Also, in CA a lot of money is tied up in voter approved bond initiatives which ties the legislator's hands. I.e. they can't cut funding of something because it's mandated by some proposition. Also, due to an early proposition it takes a 2/3s majority to raise taxes, though they recently lowered that for school bonds.
Our property taxes are also lower than many states, especially since they can only increase at a very low rate. In the years since I bought my house it has more than doubled in value, yet my property taxes haven't gone up all that much.
I have found this to be the case numerous times when working on KDE for Solaris. I've found numerous bugs, a few endian specific that were not specific to just Solaris. Supporting multiple similar platforms can be a good thing in terms of finding bugs. Some bugs will show up much more frequently on different platforms due to differences in things like memory managers or even how some APIs are implemented.
Since my employer downgraded to Exchange we have had a major problem with calendar support. Most of the engineers on my floor run Solaris, which vastly limits us in terms of clients compared to even Linux.
Evolution is out of the question. We can't get modern versions of gnome to even compile since some of the required libraries seem hell bent on requiring the X Render extension (which is not supported in the version of Solaris [2.8] we run) and trying to figure out the dependencies seams near impossible.
While I have successfully compiled KDE for many years on Solaris, I had hoped that Kontact would be a good client for Exchange. It is barely functional.
For one, it is unable to pop up a dialog when an event occurs or even make a sound. Apparently this feature only works for locally stored events, not events stored on a remote server, i.e. Exchange.
Second, it cannot properly create new meetings and add other people. When using Outlook or the web interface, calendar events have an embedded URL which is needed for people who do not use Outlook. This is missing in events created by Korganizer. Also, for some reason Outlook does not seem to properly recognize the emails as calendar events.
Third, Korganizer frequently locks up, getting in an endless loop.
These bugs have been reported a long time ago, yet no effort has been made to fix them. I don't see Korganizer gaining wide spread use in the enterprise until Exchange interoperability is fixed. As much as Exchange sucks, it's here to stay.
The address book also seems to have problems with the Exchange LDAP server whereas Thunderbird works.
What is worse for Exchange is that the web interface is not all that useful either, since many operations will only work with Internet Explorer. Many features do not work with Firefox or Konqueror.
I would love these features to be fixed... the most pressing ones being the lockups and popping up a dialog and/or playing a sound when an event occurs (korgac does this, I think).
I will commend the KDE team on the excellent progress they are making on Kmail. While there are still a few areas that need work (i.e. a more integrated spam filter), it has come a long ways.
I'm seeing the same pattern, but in my case there's a Russian spam gang that is sending out wave after wave of spam with my domain name in the from field. My mail server is dropping upwards of 100,000 bounced emails per day when I only have maybe 100 legitimate emails per day.
In other words, 99.9% of the email at my server is dropped.
The problem I see with the bounces is the recipient mail server should validate email addresses before forwarding email to another mail server, i.e. validate it at the gateway. This way it would be rejected outright and hence would significantly reduce the number of bounced emails I see.
After reading the review that said most of the humor was missing I was unsure of what to expect, but ended up really enjoying the movie. The movie is not the book, which is different than the radio and TV series. I went with a number of friends, many of whom are also fans of the books and the general consensus is that the movie was well done.
Having developed device drivers for OS/2, I doubt there'd be that much interest in the OS/2 kernel or device drivers. Even in Warp, and OS/2 4.0, most of the device drivers were 16 bit since the device driver API was only 16 bit (except graphics drivers). I think maybe the only interesting parts would be the Workplace shell and SOM, though I wonder about the stability in today's complex environment, having remembered having issues of stability with the WPS when I loaded up all the software I ran.
There's also still a lot of Microsoft bits and pieces of code in there.
Um, actually PNG can also support 16 bits per color (48 bits per pixel) just like TIFF. It is not limited to 24 bit color. A simple google search would turn that up.
I just upgraded to SuSE 9.3 and all I can say is so far everything is working smoothly and seems stable. It comes with the 2.6.11 kernel with some nice add-ons like subfs. My setup is not typical, either.
This upgrade was actually one of the smoothest SuSE upgrades I've done.
On my work computer, a SunBlade 150, I basically have to block ads, especially the flash ones or else my computer is rendered unusable. The amount of processing power wasted on the ads brings my workstation to a halt. Now, don't get me started on how much Sun hardware and X server suck.
Ad blocking is a godsend. I run Privoxy for using Konqueror and use Adblock in Firefox.
I do not mind ads that are static, i.e. not constantly blinking or animated. It's the animated or pop-up ads that drive me crazy. Since they're so pervasive, I just block all ads, including Slashdot's. Only Google's ads get through, and I do click on them periodically.
I bought a few domains using Yahoo for $5/year and so far have had zero issues. I plan to move my domains over from Register.com to Yahoo since I'm still paying like $30/year through Register, unfortunately they still have a fair amount of time on them. Also, like Register.com, Yahoo provides DNS services.
I dropped sorbs from my RBL list a long time ago. I found the best RBLs to be cbl.abuseat.org, bl.spamcop.org and sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org. Since I run my own mail server I also block China, Russia, Nigeria and a number of other countries where I don't know anyone.
cbl.abuseat.org is an entirely automated system based only on their spamtrap so user complaints won't get someone listed and they don't do subnets.
Slashdot Mirror
Putting weapons in space is a bad idea for a number of reasons.
1. They are very expensive.
2. They are highly vulnerable.
3. Their effectiveness is unproven
The cost of launching and maintaining space based weapons is very high, plus all the engineering that needs to go into having them remain reliable in the harsh environment of space. I'd much rather see my tax dollars go towards proven weapons which are a hell of a lot cheaper.
Space based weapons are highly vulnerable and can be defeated with relatively low tech. All it takes would be for someone to release a few million BBs or sand or similar material in orbit. It will quickly destroy anything up there. Given the high velocities involved in orbit, it will make short work of anything up there. Also, as more satellites are destroyed, each of them releases more material, causing even more damage. I don't think it would be all that difficult to render space unusable for weapons for anybody. This would also make space unusable for non-military operations as well.
And finally, many of the weapon systems are unproven as to how effective they'd actually be. For example, the missile defense being implemented hasn't performed well in tests and would probably be ineffective against missiles from countries like North Korea, China, India or Pakistan due to the instability of the rockets compared to US and Russian rockets.
Doesn't work on Konqueror either. I get the following Javascript errors with Konqueror 3.4.1:
0 /msncompat.js: SyntaxError - Parse error at line 85m sncore.js: TypeError - Value undefined (result of expression window.attachEvent) is not an object. Cannot be called.
Error: http://www.start.com/extern/wsfw/compat/0.072605.
Error: http://www.start.com/extern/wsfw/core/0.072605.1/
Error: http://www.start.com/3/: TypeError - Attempted to access 'Init' property on undefined object (result of expression Msn.Runtime.Init)
I rarely have problems with Konqueror any more rendering sites.
This being the case and given how delicate the heat shield tiles are, I wonder why they don't put some protective coating over the tiles during launch and just let that coating burn off during reentry. Most of the friction is in reentry as the shuttle tries to shed velocity, not on liftoff.
Similarly for the foam I've heard people jokingly suggest a hair net... I always wondered why they can't embed some form of mesh inside the foam to add strength and help prevent it from sloughing off.
-Aaron
One problem is that ALSA is not available on all platforms. For example, I run KDE on Solaris and use aRTS because Solaris doesn't have any mixing capability (I wrote the original aRTS Solaris sound driver). There is talk of moving to gstreamer, but it also looks like gstreamer has a ways to go yet and the last I looked it didn't have any support for Solaris either. KDE is not Linux specific.
One thing I might mention is that SuSE is usually very good about providing the latest version of KDE on their FTP site.
E /update_for_[version] and you will find the RPMs.
Go to ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/KD
For example, they will probably have 3.4.2 within a day or two after it being officially released.
Fortunately though, at least in my distribution, ldd shows that zlib is dynamically linked. In other words, when zlib is fixed, a ton of applications like ssh will also be fixed.
/usr/bin and found 351 programs with a dependency on zlib.
Out of curiosity I did a check in my
I actually do this. I don't know anyone in China, Korea, Nigeria, Russia or several other countries so I just block all email from them via blackholes.us. I see a ton of attempted spam connections getting dropped from this and it definitely made a big difference in the amount of spam processed. Of course I also use various other RBLs to block a lot of the spam from elsewhere.
I wonder how they'll show it. A local PBS station used to show all of it, except blank the video (leaving audio) for a few scenes. They showed the Japanese version with subtitles which I really enjoyed. Somehow I doubt the Cartoon Network will do this.
My experience is those $30 NAT/firewall boxes are usually not up to the task, especially if handling a server. I run a low traffic site with both email and web behind a NAT firewall. My old Netgear (FR314) worked fairly well but would crash and reboot every week or so. It died and I replaced it with a Netgear RT614 which would crash and lock up (not reboot) between 5 and 30 minutes. Online reviews I read after the fact reported similar problems.
I replaced it with a more expensive Linksys router RV042 which runs Linux. It has been rock solid with the latest firmware. A better choice would be to set up a Linux or BSD box with a couple of good NIC cards and use that running IP tables or whatever BSD uses. The only problem with the Linksys is that it costs more than $100 (I paid $175).
Also, the cheap firewall boxes are fairly limited in what rules you can implement. You can usually block specific port ranges, but often there is no control over IP addresses or subnets. The Linksys is good in regard that it supports all this and supports enabling logging for each rule. I.e. you can have it log any infected PCs under your domain by monitoring port traffic.
I run a personal mail server and am getting hit with up to 100,000 bounces per day because some spam gang decided they like my domain (might be due to the fact that I also report *all* spam I receive through Spamcop.
Fortunately they use random sender account names and don't hit my account and my server easily blocks the bounces, but this could be a disaster if they instead chose valid account names.
I quickly replaced it with a more expensive Linksys RV042 which runs Openrp Linux. Though sadly nobody appears to have bothered hacking this like the wireless router.
The Linksys has been rock solid and had a lot more functionality, like true ACLs with logging (the ACL rules in the Netgear were a joke). It also has a lot of VPN functionality, which I don't really need at the moment, and it also can support load balancing and failover between say 2 DSL modems, or DSL and a cable modem.
After finally getting it configured so I could forward ports for my mail server, web server, and SSH, the router would crash anywhere between 5 and 30 minutes, and not even reboot, but just hang. Now my old Netgear would sometimes crash, but it at least had a watchdog timer and would automatically reboot, and the crashes were not that frequent, maybe once a week. This new one would crash and require me to physically power cycle it. A good firewall should not crash. The UI was also dumbed down quite a bit more than my old firewall.
After fighting it for a day I took it back to the store and replaced it with a Linksys RV042. While also being a much more expensive firewall (around $175) I found it to also be far better. Like my old Netgear, it appears to have been well built with a solid steel chasis. The new Netgear, while it looked cool, was just plastic. It has been rock solid without any hiccup since I set it up, and unlike the Netgear I could do true ACL rules, i.e. permit or deny based not just on protocol and port range, but also by IP addresses or subnets. I.e. I only want to allow SSH from a few IP addresses. I could also set logging on each ACL rule as well.
Also, I found the logging to be fairly nice as well. It supports emailing logs to me as well as logging them to the syslog daemon on my server, though I miss being able to set the time the logs were emailed on my old Netgear.
The Linksys also has IPSEC VPN support which my old Netgear also had. The new Netgear did not. While I have not yet used it, it could come in handy.
I also tried a D-Link DS-601 firewall router about a year ago but decided not to use it since the logging was better on my old Netgear. At least it didn't crash though and I think it would be more than adequate for most home users.
Now if only I could get to a bash shell on the Linksys since it is running the OpenRP Linux distribution, though sadly, unlike the wireless router, nobody has bothered yet.
As a desktop Solaris and Linux user, I would say no. At least for me, Linux, especially with the 2.6 kernel is *much* more responsive on the desktop, plus Solaris is missing many pieces that really help for the desktop (like Alsa). Granted, you can get audio running on Sun (I wrote the ARTS Solaris driver for KDE), but you're much better off under Linux.
Also, at least on Sparc, Sun's X server doesn't appear to support a number of key features useful on the desktop, and Xorg doesn't run on Sparc Solaris due to missing kernel support. X86 might be better in this regard, though.
Also, for desktop use, Solaris only has a fraction of the drivers that Linux has.
Now maybe Solaris 10 is a bit better, but Solaris is much more optimized for the server than the desktop.
One other thing to think about. California gets less federal money back per person than any other state in the nation... many states, and I wouldn't be surprised if Georgia is one of them, actually get more federal dollars back than they pay in, hence California is subsidizing many other parts of the nation. So if CA isn't getting the federal dollars, they need to make it up somehow.
Also, in CA a lot of money is tied up in voter approved bond initiatives which ties the legislator's hands. I.e. they can't cut funding of something because it's mandated by some proposition. Also, due to an early proposition it takes a 2/3s majority to raise taxes, though they recently lowered that for school bonds.
Our property taxes are also lower than many states, especially since they can only increase at a very low rate. In the years since I bought my house it has more than doubled in value, yet my property taxes haven't gone up all that much.
I have found this to be the case numerous times when working on KDE for Solaris. I've found numerous bugs, a few endian specific that were not specific to just Solaris. Supporting multiple similar platforms can be a good thing in terms of finding bugs. Some bugs will show up much more frequently on different platforms due to differences in things like memory managers or even how some APIs are implemented.
Since my employer downgraded to Exchange we have had a major problem with calendar support. Most of the engineers on my floor run Solaris, which vastly limits us in terms of clients compared to even Linux.
Evolution is out of the question. We can't get modern versions of gnome to even compile since some of the required libraries seem hell bent on requiring the X Render extension (which is not supported in the version of Solaris [2.8] we run) and trying to figure out the dependencies seams near impossible.
While I have successfully compiled KDE for many years on Solaris, I had hoped that Kontact would be a good client for Exchange. It is barely functional.
For one, it is unable to pop up a dialog when an event occurs or even make a sound. Apparently this feature only works for locally stored events, not events stored on a remote server, i.e. Exchange.
Second, it cannot properly create new meetings and add other people. When using Outlook or the web interface, calendar events have an embedded URL which is needed for people who do not use Outlook. This is missing in events created by Korganizer. Also, for some reason Outlook does not seem to properly recognize the emails as calendar events.
Third, Korganizer frequently locks up, getting in an endless loop.
These bugs have been reported a long time ago, yet no effort has been made to fix them. I don't see Korganizer gaining wide spread use in the enterprise until Exchange interoperability is fixed. As much as Exchange sucks, it's here to stay.
The address book also seems to have problems with the Exchange LDAP server whereas Thunderbird works.
What is worse for Exchange is that the web interface is not all that useful either, since many operations will only work with Internet Explorer. Many features do not work with Firefox or Konqueror.
I would love these features to be fixed... the most pressing ones being the lockups and popping up a dialog and/or playing a sound when an event occurs (korgac does this, I think).
I will commend the KDE team on the excellent progress they are making on Kmail. While there are still a few areas that need work (i.e. a more integrated spam filter), it has come a long ways.
-Aaron
I'm seeing the same pattern, but in my case there's a Russian spam gang that is sending out wave after wave of spam with my domain name in the from field. My mail server is dropping upwards of 100,000 bounced emails per day when I only have maybe 100 legitimate emails per day.
In other words, 99.9% of the email at my server is dropped.
The problem I see with the bounces is the recipient mail server should validate email addresses before forwarding email to another mail server, i.e. validate it at the gateway. This way it would be rejected outright and hence would significantly reduce the number of bounced emails I see.
After reading the review that said most of the humor was missing I was unsure of what to expect, but ended up really enjoying the movie. The movie is not the book, which is different than the radio and TV series. I went with a number of friends, many of whom are also fans of the books and the general consensus is that the movie was well done.
Having developed device drivers for OS/2, I doubt there'd be that much interest in the OS/2 kernel or device drivers. Even in Warp, and OS/2 4.0, most of the device drivers were 16 bit since the device driver API was only 16 bit (except graphics drivers). I think maybe the only interesting parts would be the Workplace shell and SOM, though I wonder about the stability in today's complex environment, having remembered having issues of stability with the WPS when I loaded up all the software I ran.
There's also still a lot of Microsoft bits and pieces of code in there.
-Aaron
Um, actually PNG can also support 16 bits per color (48 bits per pixel) just like TIFF. It is not limited to 24 bit color. A simple google search would turn that up.
I upgraded using the DVD.
I just upgraded to SuSE 9.3 and all I can say is so far everything is working smoothly and seems stable. It comes with the 2.6.11 kernel with some nice add-ons like subfs. My setup is not typical, either.
This upgrade was actually one of the smoothest SuSE upgrades I've done.
-Aaron
On my work computer, a SunBlade 150, I basically have to block ads, especially the flash ones or else my computer is rendered unusable. The amount of processing power wasted on the ads brings my workstation to a halt. Now, don't get me started on how much Sun hardware and X server suck.
Ad blocking is a godsend. I run Privoxy for using Konqueror and use Adblock in Firefox.
I do not mind ads that are static, i.e. not constantly blinking or animated. It's the animated or pop-up ads that drive me crazy. Since they're so pervasive, I just block all ads, including Slashdot's. Only Google's ads get through, and I do click on them periodically.
I bought a few domains using Yahoo for $5/year and so far have had zero issues. I plan to move my domains over from Register.com to Yahoo since I'm still paying like $30/year through Register, unfortunately they still have a fair amount of time on them. Also, like Register.com, Yahoo provides DNS services.
-Aaron
I dropped sorbs from my RBL list a long time ago. I found the best RBLs to be cbl.abuseat.org, bl.spamcop.org and sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org. Since I run my own mail server I also block China, Russia, Nigeria and a number of other countries where I don't know anyone.
cbl.abuseat.org is an entirely automated system based only on their spamtrap so user complaints won't get someone listed and they don't do subnets.