Have this rating posted on each page, in some standard format (in basic HTML) that is readily parsed by search engines' spiders.
Now, when a user's search results come up, segregate them into "rated", "unrated", and "all sites". Let the user pick which set of results they want to see. At worst it's just one more click, and could be set as your personal default with a cookie (just like Google preferences are now). However, let "rated" be the default view.
As to enforcement -- frex, if a site rates itself as PG but generates a lot of complaints that it's really XXX, the search engine could banish the site to the "unrated" list for a penalty period (how long depending on how egregrious their offense).
So -- if you want to remain a "rated site", and come up in search results for a majority of users, it's in your best interests to be honest about your site's content. Because otherwise, you'll be banished to Outer NoSearchia.
This would also be useful for getting rid of link farms and other garbage content that presently flood search results.
So -- a VOLUNTARY rating program, that is utilized by search engines to improve quality of results, would be a GOOD thing for everyone (except the link farms... so sad).
But there's absolutely no need for this to be regulated by the government. All that will do is drive noxious sites overseas and out of reach.
Exactly so. Very, very scary mentality. Thanks for the quote.
And this mentality really isn't about "saving the animals" or "saving the environment" or "saving the unborn children" or whatever. It's nearly alwasy about CONTROLLING other people; the particular fanaticism is just the bandwagon they happened to latch onto. It could as easily have been ANY Puritanical prohibition against normal human activity.
That is exactly what most research into "correcting infertility" is doing -- saving nonviable fetuses, or fetuses trying to grow in a nonviable environment (which is often the same thing. Infertility is demonstrably genetic in animals, and therefore self-limiting; why do humans think they're exempt??)
But if you want to get REALLY absurd... why aren't we saving the polar bodies? not to mention the billions upon billions of spermatazoa that are doomed to an early and useless death...
I've had similar thoughts. So.. why not shoot the stuff into space, but in a trajectory toward the edge of the solar system, suitably tagged to make it easy to relocate/navigate around.
By the time we have the technology to reprocess it into something useful, we'll probably also have the tech to pop into space and pick it up. And meanwhile, the surplus radiation dissipates harmlessly into empty space.
Occurs to me that nuclear waste disposal, as a cargo pod to be ejected at the proper moment, would be a good business for the budding private space industry.
As I recall, some of the photos were determined to be setups. Regardless, http://www.kiddofspeed.com/ is a marvelously effective photo essay, so frankly I don't *care* if some parts are less than authentic.
As to the deformed calf, it's possible within the species; genes for similar deformities already exist. Could be whatever was a weak point in the genome that gave rise to similar mutations, is also a weak point that can be assaulted by radiation. (A theory I made up this very instant, but even so seems quite logical.)
Or it could be a matter of radiation exposure at a certain stage of development; frex, if you expose canine fetuses to high radiation during the first trimester, they can be born hairless and with stunted limbs.
I live in an area with relatively high levels of natural radiation due to uranium deposits. We see a lot of deformed carrion beetles (big black desert "stink beetles"), which I've never observed anywhere else. Some of the deformed beetles behave normally, others seem sluggish and confused; some have very thin shells, or are oddly shaped (some seem to get along all right, others aren't really viable), or are oversized. As I've not observed oddities in other insects, it's hard to pin this on the background radiation, but a person sure has to wonder.
Acto one study I read about, about 75% of all human fetuses are spontaneously aborted in the first three weeks, due to lethal mutations.
Since the average human carries 25 to 75 lethal genes (depending on which study you believe), a high level of spontaenous "natural selection at work" should be no surprise.
I'd laugh, but I rather suspect you've nailed it dead-on. Especially when in TFA, we read this:
He went on: "I have wondered if the small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers".
Same mentality as the whackjobs who proudly proclaim that it's better that all human children should die of some dread disease, than that one mouse should suffer in a laboratory in the name of preventing said childhood disease.
Yep, in fact I used to tease my old vet ophthalmologist about how much cheaper mine was, not to mention more portable:)
That is the drawback, tho -- with the eyeball method, you have to squirm and crane your neck to get a view much beyond the tapetum. With the 'scope, you just wave the secondary lens around.
Country music, Nashville style, was one of the early adopters of really *obnoxious* DRM. I wonder if this may be largely because country stars have historically had LESS control over their own music than any other major genre, and are more likely to get totally screwed along the way. Think of it as a custody battle of sorts, with country artists often being especially naive, a la these lines from your subject reference:
"Watch him smile, he thinks it Christmas Or his 5th Birthday And he thinks C-U-S-T-O-D-Y spells fun or play"
Okay, I think I grok what you're saying. Essentially it's a retry-until-the-server-believes-you system, yes? (My brain hurts.:)
Back to the original "lost mail" problem: my email was being sent from Earthlink and from a ktb.net subdomain (actually an old-fashioned dialup BBS with a UUCP account; KTB is a small local ISP.) The 3rd person in our project uses Sympatico (which goes thru an Aliant backbone, I think) and Hotmail. At the time there were NO spamfilters at any point. -- None of our emails sent via any of these routes were reaching our coder, who at the time only had Yahoo mail; and as we later learned, his emails weren't reaching us, either.
I know ELN sometimes gets blocked here and there, but mainly due to grudges and ancient blackhole lists that are years out of date (I've personally encountered one of those, which blocked access to my websites). However, I've only seen ELN mail blocked by private mail servers, never by an ISP. (I have a running gauge of ELN reliability, too, since much of my incoming mail is still carboned to the BBS.)
I've not seen a spam that was *actually* from an ELN account since 1998.
For that matter, spams legitimately from a real yahoo.com account are now pretty damn rare, too (when I see one, I gleefully report it), tho last year I was getting enough for-really-from yahoo.it that I finally blocked the whole domain.
Amazingly, I found some of the info I'd saved (dated 3 Dec 2000) about the original vanishing-email issue; here it is, original writer's typoes and all: ======== "I was testing some filters on my mailserver the other day, and I happened to do a test of sending an email to a Yahoo! account. After realizing the mail got stuck in the queue, I inspected Yahoo's mail servers. Unbelievable, They have 6 MX addresses, each one having 13 IP addresses (round robin). Well, I became curious after realizing the machines were up, so I whipped up a script to telnet to the SMTP port of each mail server. Only 2 were accepting SMTP commands! This was (if i remember right) of 75 mail servers. If Yahoo! were to have their network status put up, they would be utterly embarrased. All the machines were available, but either SMTP was closed down, would drop you immediatly after connection, or just not accept any commands at all. The problem now seems to be resolved, but I doubt Yahoo! would admit to such a failure, it would make them look very bad." ======== Hope that's of some use to you, tho I don't know if it's relevant to the present. I have more on it somewhere, from back-then, but gods know where I've hidden it.:/
Other people (who I had alternate contacts for) were also experiencing Vanishing Yahoo Mail at that time, which is why we were discussing it.
I understand about expiration; I seldom use my Yahoo mail account (tho it is my primary webmail, when I need that), and occasionally this makes very old mail go away. Tho I've noticed so long as *some* sort of Yahoo activity is logged, mail seems to stay put. (I also use finance, tv, movies, all much more regularly than mail.)
As noted I don't use yahoo mail account much, but my *own* account doesn't seem to lose anything. (If I used it every day, I'd have a running check by way of carbons to an unrelated address -- that's how I know my ELN acct *never* loses mail.) Tho I expect there is some variant behaviour depending on which server an account resides on.
A few other comments, since you're here:)
The #1 reason I use the various Yahoo services (and in all cases have migrated from another service that changed their interface, thus became unusable with my *preferred* older browser) is because it still works with ANY browser (even very old ones) AND without images or javascript. That means I can use it from anywhere, and am not constrained to some specific browser -- especially for webmail, where one may have little or no choice in the matter. Second, this keeps it fast (js-based, image-dependant webmail is uniformly piggy for us poor slogs stuck on dialup). Right now the "old" Yahoo interface is the only webmail I know of, other than mail2web, that hasn't become prohibitively slow. I don't use the "new" interface.
OTOH Yahoo groups login, and occasionally webmail login, has had problems derived from bad table structures, making part of the login structure invisible to browsers that insist on correctly closed tables. (All but Groups were okay on this as of the last time I had to log in, but it was broken for email for a LONG time, and always required some thrashing around to get to a page that worked. Yes, I did report it, several times, with screenshots no less, but without result. Groups login was still broken as of a couple months ago. -- I'm not convinced all web-form-posted complaints get where they're supposed to go.)
I've had my yahoo mail account since mid-1998. Up until the time the Marvelous New Spam Filter was announced (2003?), it had never received a single spam -- not one, ever. *After* the spam filter was implemented, it began getting a little spam (not much, but going from absolutely none to any at all is noticeable:) Why was that??
I do grok about free services vs "you get what you pay for"... Yahoo's are more like "try our free samples, aren't they great? wouldn't you like to use Yahoo *all* the time??" so naturally it's in your best interes
A clever AC replies, "You've got it backwards. The/normal/ geek has no life, but there are half baked geeks out there, some of them having girlfriends and such."
No, no, no. A normal geek is by definition abnormal, so being a half-baked geek is normal and being a normal geek is abnormal.;)
The problem was, as mentioned, documented by someone with a clue. It was not a blacklisting issue, but rather a very specific server configuration screwup. Wish I could remember exactly what, but not being my field the details failed to stick in my head.
Blacklisting would be very unlikely to affect multiple domains (national ISPs not sharing any resources), and doesn't explain why these same domains had no trouble reaching SOME Yahoo mail accounts. But others just fell off the planet.
When this mail-eating behaviour happens, it does NOT affect *all* accounts; at a guess, it depends on which server your account lives on. My own yahoo account was not affected at the time, but our coder's was.
(Opensource project, not a company; and how often does someone lose interest and just wander away? that's what we mutually thought had happened.)
Yes, tho it's more complex than that, due to the fact that many ads age out of relevance. See other reply in this thread, where I mutter a bit more about that.
Fact is, the happier the advertisers are with the whole arrangement, and the more they're willing to pay, the more such content we'll be able to download, because what commercial TV *really* wants is those advertisers' dollars.
Treating it like print ads does seem reasonable -- take best guess of total eyeballs in thrall, pay up accordingly.
If I were a paying advertiser, I'd also want either a reduced rate for fall-off (ads becoming progressively more outdated), or the ability to insert fresh ads on an ongoing basis (which could probably be charged much closer to live-broadcast rates, so the content provider would be happy too -- more money!)
I've never run into anyone else who has managed to see their own retinas either, maybe folks don't spend enough time lying on the grass gazing at the sky (which I vaguely recall was when I noticed it). And I doubt most people would know what they were seeing, even if they noticed it.
Can you see individual cells in your floaters? mine were very visible (nucleus and all) when I was younger.
Sometimes I amuse myself yanking the y-shaped floater back and forth, just because I can:)
I assume you know how the eye is constructed? there's about an inch of gap between retina at the back of the eye (the part you actually see with) and the lens (the focusing mechanism). When light hits the retina from just the right angle, it apparently reflects off the back of the lens, and then the retina picks up the reflection just like it would from any mirror surface.
I've examined enough dogs' eyes (to check breeding stock against inherited blindness) to know what I'm seeing:) The tapetum is the reflective part of the retina that surrounds the optic disk (a mushroom-coloured spot where the optic nerve enters the eye -- the retina is essentially a little piece of your brain that hangs out the front of your skull:) Blood vessels enter the retina at that point too, and branch in all directions; the pattern is unique to each eye.
Anyway, when conditions are just right, I could see all these details, and even tell one eye from the other (different blood vessel pattern).
I *think* there needs to be a fairly strong but not glarey light source hitting the eye at an oblique angle, but I haven't been able to reliably reproduce it, so can't tell you for sure.
Floaters are much easier to see, as all I need to do is relax/unfocus my eyes against a light-coloured background, and there they are.
Another side note: people who've had whiplash or a similar demonstration of the laws of physics sometimes experience an upsurge in the number of floaters (even to the point of clouding vision), as all the gunk that's settled permanently at the bottom of the eye gets stirred up. It can take months to resettle.
Back to retinas and dogs: I've found that if I shine a flashlight toward my OWN eye, but at an angle where I don't see the bright point of the lightbulb, and peer into the dog's eye from as close as I can get, I can get a good view of the dog's retina -- sufficient to see fine detail. A Rube-Goldberg version of a biomicroscope.:)
Well, that probably explains why my Yahoo account (now 8 years old) gets spam seldom to never. Tho ironically, it never got a single spam until AFTER Yahoo started filtering!
However -- sometimes Yahoo just plain EATS mail without a trace (both incoming and outgoing), and when that happens the problem will persist for months. Someone with a clue who checked into one such incident concluded that some of their servers are just plain misconfigulated.
That's all well and good, but over the years I've seen Yahoo have several spasms of just plain EATING email both incoming and outgoing (including for paying customers on Yahoo-partnered DSL). And such incidents persist for months.
Someone knowledgeable who looked into one such incident concluded that some of Yahoo's mail servers are just plain misconfigured, making them act like no mail was received nor sent.
I first became aware of the problem in 1999 -- our project LOST our coder (who used yahoo for mail) because we could not reach him for months at a time, and meanwhile he thought the rest of us had fallen off the planet and had no idea we couldn't reach him either. Mail didn't bounce going either direction, it just vanished without a trace.
Yahoo is presently having another of these mail-eating spasms, and it's been going on for a couple months now.
In my case, because my eyes are VERY sensitive to bright light, and I can find neither flip-downs nor prescription lenses of sufficient darkness, plus the lenses would have to be quite large to cover the required area -- AND they have to be glass, because I can SEE plastic lenses (even the best ones *always* look slightly fogged to me), and that drives me nuts.
With age my eyes have become more glare-sensitive, to the point where I'm thinking about contacts -- because the only practical solution to the glare problem is contacts plus regular sunglasses (noncorrective glass can be much thinner/lighter than corrective glass).
Interesting trick -- I'm thinking about contacts -- I'm only a little nearsighted, but as my eyes age they've become much more glare-sensitive, and prescription lenses of sufficient darkness are between absurdly expensive and not available at any price.
But my problem is that when my eyes are both corrected for distance vision, I can't read. And I'm a left-eyed reader (that is my more myopic eye, too), but right-eyed for everything else.
So your odd suggestion might be just what I need to try! Thanks for the idea (you'd think it would be obvious, but apparently not!)
Silly Eyeball Tricks: using your own lenses as a bio-microscope!
If I'm gazing into space, I can see my floaters; one is a fairly long Y-shaped string, anchored well enough that it's been in the same spot since I first noticed it at age 4. When the light is just right, I can even see individual cells in the string, nucleus and all.
Over the years (I'm now 50) this long floater has deteriorated from clearly-visible, completely intact individual cells, down to really obvious cellular junk. Most of its cells have lost their nucleus, and many have ruptured and are now just a deflated piece of cell wall. It's not nearly as interesting to watch (and play with making it "swim" back and forth:) as it used to be!
(Why, yes, I am easily amused; why do you ask?:)
Side note: when the light is *exactly* right, I can see my own retina (or tapetum to be precise), apparently as a reflected image against the backside of the lens (IOW, as if my lens was a mirror so the retina can "look at itself").
That's what -ebay, -consumerguide, -cnet, -consumersearch, -bizrate are for... use that little minus sign to exclude 'em. Helps a lot when you're trying to pin down something that includes a term beloved of marketing.
It would be nice if Google would let users set some words as "always-exclude" in our preferences...
Not really. I used to have Google set to 100 per page, but I still seemed to look at about the first 3 pages before giving up and trying again -- same as I do with just 10 results per page! (Google lost my settings and I haven't bothered to change it back, which I suppose says something about the typical uselessness of anything beyond the first 30 results.)
So... I think it's a matter of the number of times people are willing to go to the NEXT page before giving up, rather than the absolute number of results -- a matter of perception for each page of results viewed: 1) try, 2) try again, 3) bah humbug start over.
Slashdot Mirror
Let websites VOLUNTARILY rate themselves.
Have this rating posted on each page, in some standard format (in basic HTML) that is readily parsed by search engines' spiders.
Now, when a user's search results come up, segregate them into "rated", "unrated", and "all sites". Let the user pick which set of results they want to see. At worst it's just one more click, and could be set as your personal default with a cookie (just like Google preferences are now). However, let "rated" be the default view.
As to enforcement -- frex, if a site rates itself as PG but generates a lot of complaints that it's really XXX, the search engine could banish the site to the "unrated" list for a penalty period (how long depending on how egregrious their offense).
So -- if you want to remain a "rated site", and come up in search results for a majority of users, it's in your best interests to be honest about your site's content. Because otherwise, you'll be banished to Outer NoSearchia.
This would also be useful for getting rid of link farms and other garbage content that presently flood search results.
So -- a VOLUNTARY rating program, that is utilized by search engines to improve quality of results, would be a GOOD thing for everyone (except the link farms... so sad).
But there's absolutely no need for this to be regulated by the government. All that will do is drive noxious sites overseas and out of reach.
Exactly so. Very, very scary mentality. Thanks for the quote.
And this mentality really isn't about "saving the animals" or "saving the environment" or "saving the unborn children" or whatever. It's nearly alwasy about CONTROLLING other people; the particular fanaticism is just the bandwagon they happened to latch onto. It could as easily have been ANY Puritanical prohibition against normal human activity.
[replying to both brainburger and networkBoy]
That is exactly what most research into "correcting infertility" is doing -- saving nonviable fetuses, or fetuses trying to grow in a nonviable environment (which is often the same thing. Infertility is demonstrably genetic in animals, and therefore self-limiting; why do humans think they're exempt??)
But if you want to get REALLY absurd... why aren't we saving the polar bodies? not to mention the billions upon billions of spermatazoa that are doomed to an early and useless death...
I've had similar thoughts. So.. why not shoot the stuff into space, but in a trajectory toward the edge of the solar system, suitably tagged to make it easy to relocate/navigate around.
By the time we have the technology to reprocess it into something useful, we'll probably also have the tech to pop into space and pick it up. And meanwhile, the surplus radiation dissipates harmlessly into empty space.
Occurs to me that nuclear waste disposal, as a cargo pod to be ejected at the proper moment, would be a good business for the budding private space industry.
As I recall, some of the photos were determined to be setups. Regardless, http://www.kiddofspeed.com/ is a marvelously effective photo essay, so frankly I don't *care* if some parts are less than authentic.
As to the deformed calf, it's possible within the species; genes for similar deformities already exist. Could be whatever was a weak point in the genome that gave rise to similar mutations, is also a weak point that can be assaulted by radiation. (A theory I made up this very instant, but even so seems quite logical.)
Or it could be a matter of radiation exposure at a certain stage of development; frex, if you expose canine fetuses to high radiation during the first trimester, they can be born hairless and with stunted limbs.
I live in an area with relatively high levels of natural radiation due to uranium deposits. We see a lot of deformed carrion beetles (big black desert "stink beetles"), which I've never observed anywhere else. Some of the deformed beetles behave normally, others seem sluggish and confused; some have very thin shells, or are oddly shaped (some seem to get along all right, others aren't really viable), or are oversized. As I've not observed oddities in other insects, it's hard to pin this on the background radiation, but a person sure has to wonder.
Acto one study I read about, about 75% of all human fetuses are spontaneously aborted in the first three weeks, due to lethal mutations.
Since the average human carries 25 to 75 lethal genes (depending on which study you believe), a high level of spontaenous "natural selection at work" should be no surprise.
I'd laugh, but I rather suspect you've nailed it dead-on. Especially when in TFA, we read this:
He went on: "I have wondered if the small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers".
Same mentality as the whackjobs who proudly proclaim that it's better that all human children should die of some dread disease, than that one mouse should suffer in a laboratory in the name of preventing said childhood disease.
Yep, in fact I used to tease my old vet ophthalmologist about how much cheaper mine was, not to mention more portable :)
That is the drawback, tho -- with the eyeball method, you have to squirm and crane your neck to get a view much beyond the tapetum. With the 'scope, you just wave the secondary lens around.
Country music, Nashville style, was one of the early adopters of really *obnoxious* DRM. I wonder if this may be largely because country stars have historically had LESS control over their own music than any other major genre, and are more likely to get totally screwed along the way. Think of it as a custody battle of sorts, with country artists often being especially naive, a la these lines from your subject reference:
"Watch him smile, he thinks it Christmas
Or his 5th Birthday
And he thinks C-U-S-T-O-D-Y spells fun or play"
Okay, I think I grok what you're saying. Essentially it's a retry-until-the-server-believes-you system, yes? (My brain hurts. :)
Back to the original "lost mail" problem: my email was being sent from Earthlink and from a ktb.net subdomain (actually an old-fashioned dialup BBS with a UUCP account; KTB is a small local ISP.) The 3rd person in our project uses Sympatico (which goes thru an Aliant backbone, I think) and Hotmail. At the time there were NO spamfilters at any point. -- None of our emails sent via any of these routes were reaching our coder, who at the time only had Yahoo mail; and as we later learned, his emails weren't reaching us, either.
I know ELN sometimes gets blocked here and there, but mainly due to grudges and ancient blackhole lists that are years out of date (I've personally encountered one of those, which blocked access to my websites). However, I've only seen ELN mail blocked by private mail servers, never by an ISP. (I have a running gauge of ELN reliability, too, since much of my incoming mail is still carboned to the BBS.)
I've not seen a spam that was *actually* from an ELN account since 1998.
For that matter, spams legitimately from a real yahoo.com account are now pretty damn rare, too (when I see one, I gleefully report it), tho last year I was getting enough for-really-from yahoo.it that I finally blocked the whole domain.
Amazingly, I found some of the info I'd saved (dated 3 Dec 2000) about the original vanishing-email issue; here it is, original writer's typoes and all: :/
:)
:) Why was that??
========
"I was testing some filters on my mailserver the other day, and I happened to do a test of sending an email to a Yahoo! account. After realizing the mail got stuck in the queue, I inspected Yahoo's mail servers. Unbelievable, They have 6 MX addresses, each one having 13 IP addresses (round robin). Well, I became curious after realizing the
machines were up, so I whipped up a script to telnet to the SMTP port of each mail server. Only 2 were accepting SMTP commands! This was (if i
remember right) of 75 mail servers. If Yahoo! were to have their network status put up, they would be utterly embarrased. All the machines were available, but either SMTP was closed down, would drop you immediatly after connection, or just not accept any commands at all. The problem now seems to be resolved, but I doubt Yahoo! would admit to such a failure, it would make them look very bad."
========
Hope that's of some use to you, tho I don't know if it's relevant to the present. I have more on it somewhere, from back-then, but gods know where I've hidden it.
Other people (who I had alternate contacts for) were also experiencing Vanishing Yahoo Mail at that time, which is why we were discussing it.
I understand about expiration; I seldom use my Yahoo mail account (tho it is my primary webmail, when I need that), and occasionally this makes very old mail go away. Tho I've noticed so long as *some* sort of Yahoo activity is logged, mail seems to stay put. (I also use finance, tv, movies, all much more regularly than mail.)
As noted I don't use yahoo mail account much, but my *own* account doesn't seem to lose anything. (If I used it every day, I'd have a running check by way of carbons to an unrelated address -- that's how I know my ELN acct *never* loses mail.) Tho I expect there is some variant behaviour depending on which server an account resides on.
A few other comments, since you're here
The #1 reason I use the various Yahoo services (and in all cases have migrated from another service that changed their interface, thus became unusable with my *preferred* older browser) is because it still works with ANY browser (even very old ones) AND without images or javascript. That means I can use it from anywhere, and am not constrained to some specific browser -- especially for webmail, where one may have little or no choice in the matter. Second, this keeps it fast (js-based, image-dependant webmail is uniformly piggy for us poor slogs stuck on dialup). Right now the "old" Yahoo interface is the only webmail I know of, other than mail2web, that hasn't become prohibitively slow. I don't use the "new" interface.
OTOH Yahoo groups login, and occasionally webmail login, has had problems derived from bad table structures, making part of the login structure invisible to browsers that insist on correctly closed tables. (All but Groups were okay on this as of the last time I had to log in, but it was broken for email for a LONG time, and always required some thrashing around to get to a page that worked. Yes, I did report it, several times, with screenshots no less, but without result. Groups login was still broken as of a couple months ago. -- I'm not convinced all web-form-posted complaints get where they're supposed to go.)
I've had my yahoo mail account since mid-1998. Up until the time the Marvelous New Spam Filter was announced (2003?), it had never received a single spam -- not one, ever. *After* the spam filter was implemented, it began getting a little spam (not much, but going from absolutely none to any at all is noticeable
I do grok about free services vs "you get what you pay for"... Yahoo's are more like "try our free samples, aren't they great? wouldn't you like to use Yahoo *all* the time??" so naturally it's in your best interes
A clever AC replies, "You've got it backwards. The /normal/ geek has no life, but there are half baked geeks out there, some of them having girlfriends and such."
;)
No, no, no. A normal geek is by definition abnormal, so being a half-baked geek is normal and being a normal geek is abnormal.
The problem was, as mentioned, documented by someone with a clue. It was not a blacklisting issue, but rather a very specific server configuration screwup. Wish I could remember exactly what, but not being my field the details failed to stick in my head.
Blacklisting would be very unlikely to affect multiple domains (national ISPs not sharing any resources), and doesn't explain why these same domains had no trouble reaching SOME Yahoo mail accounts. But others just fell off the planet.
When this mail-eating behaviour happens, it does NOT affect *all* accounts; at a guess, it depends on which server your account lives on. My own yahoo account was not affected at the time, but our coder's was.
(Opensource project, not a company; and how often does someone lose interest and just wander away? that's what we mutually thought had happened.)
Yes, tho it's more complex than that, due to the fact that many ads age out of relevance. See other reply in this thread, where I mutter a bit more about that.
Fact is, the happier the advertisers are with the whole arrangement, and the more they're willing to pay, the more such content we'll be able to download, because what commercial TV *really* wants is those advertisers' dollars.
Treating it like print ads does seem reasonable -- take best guess of total eyeballs in thrall, pay up accordingly.
If I were a paying advertiser, I'd also want either a reduced rate for fall-off (ads becoming progressively more outdated), or the ability to insert fresh ads on an ongoing basis (which could probably be charged much closer to live-broadcast rates, so the content provider would be happy too -- more money!)
I've never run into anyone else who has managed to see their own retinas either, maybe folks don't spend enough time lying on the grass gazing at the sky (which I vaguely recall was when I noticed it). And I doubt most people would know what they were seeing, even if they noticed it.
:)
Can you see individual cells in your floaters? mine were very visible (nucleus and all) when I was younger.
Sometimes I amuse myself yanking the y-shaped floater back and forth, just because I can
I assume you know how the eye is constructed? there's about an inch of gap between retina at the back of the eye (the part you actually see with) and the lens (the focusing mechanism). When light hits the retina from just the right angle, it apparently reflects off the back of the lens, and then the retina picks up the reflection just like it would from any mirror surface.
:) The tapetum is the reflective part of the retina that surrounds the optic disk (a mushroom-coloured spot where the optic nerve enters the eye -- the retina is essentially a little piece of your brain that hangs out the front of your skull :) Blood vessels enter the retina at that point too, and branch in all directions; the pattern is unique to each eye.
:)
I've examined enough dogs' eyes (to check breeding stock against inherited blindness) to know what I'm seeing
Anyway, when conditions are just right, I could see all these details, and even tell one eye from the other (different blood vessel pattern).
I *think* there needs to be a fairly strong but not glarey light source hitting the eye at an oblique angle, but I haven't been able to reliably reproduce it, so can't tell you for sure.
Floaters are much easier to see, as all I need to do is relax/unfocus my eyes against a light-coloured background, and there they are.
Another side note: people who've had whiplash or a similar demonstration of the laws of physics sometimes experience an upsurge in the number of floaters (even to the point of clouding vision), as all the gunk that's settled permanently at the bottom of the eye gets stirred up. It can take months to resettle.
Back to retinas and dogs: I've found that if I shine a flashlight toward my OWN eye, but at an angle where I don't see the bright point of the lightbulb, and peer into the dog's eye from as close as I can get, I can get a good view of the dog's retina -- sufficient to see fine detail. A Rube-Goldberg version of a biomicroscope.
Well, that probably explains why my Yahoo account (now 8 years old) gets spam seldom to never. Tho ironically, it never got a single spam until AFTER Yahoo started filtering!
However -- sometimes Yahoo just plain EATS mail without a trace (both incoming and outgoing), and when that happens the problem will persist for months. Someone with a clue who checked into one such incident concluded that some of their servers are just plain misconfigulated.
That's all well and good, but over the years I've seen Yahoo have several spasms of just plain EATING email both incoming and outgoing (including for paying customers on Yahoo-partnered DSL). And such incidents persist for months.
Someone knowledgeable who looked into one such incident concluded that some of Yahoo's mail servers are just plain misconfigured, making them act like no mail was received nor sent.
I first became aware of the problem in 1999 -- our project LOST our coder (who used yahoo for mail) because we could not reach him for months at a time, and meanwhile he thought the rest of us had fallen off the planet and had no idea we couldn't reach him either. Mail didn't bounce going either direction, it just vanished without a trace.
Yahoo is presently having another of these mail-eating spasms, and it's been going on for a couple months now.
Same with grapefruit and onions. And probably lemons and oranges too.
Trick to avoid Onion Tears: put some protectant lube (I use Refresh PM) in your eyes FIRST.
In my case, because my eyes are VERY sensitive to bright light, and I can find neither flip-downs nor prescription lenses of sufficient darkness, plus the lenses would have to be quite large to cover the required area -- AND they have to be glass, because I can SEE plastic lenses (even the best ones *always* look slightly fogged to me), and that drives me nuts.
With age my eyes have become more glare-sensitive, to the point where I'm thinking about contacts -- because the only practical solution to the glare problem is contacts plus regular sunglasses (noncorrective glass can be much thinner/lighter than corrective glass).
Interesting trick -- I'm thinking about contacts -- I'm only a little nearsighted, but as my eyes age they've become much more glare-sensitive, and prescription lenses of sufficient darkness are between absurdly expensive and not available at any price.
But my problem is that when my eyes are both corrected for distance vision, I can't read. And I'm a left-eyed reader (that is my more myopic eye, too), but right-eyed for everything else.
So your odd suggestion might be just what I need to try! Thanks for the idea (you'd think it would be obvious, but apparently not!)
Silly Eyeball Tricks: using your own lenses as a bio-microscope!
:) as it used to be!
:)
If I'm gazing into space, I can see my floaters; one is a fairly long Y-shaped string, anchored well enough that it's been in the same spot since I first noticed it at age 4. When the light is just right, I can even see individual cells in the string, nucleus and all.
Over the years (I'm now 50) this long floater has deteriorated from clearly-visible, completely intact individual cells, down to really obvious cellular junk. Most of its cells have lost their nucleus, and many have ruptured and are now just a deflated piece of cell wall. It's not nearly as interesting to watch (and play with making it "swim" back and forth
(Why, yes, I am easily amused; why do you ask?
Side note: when the light is *exactly* right, I can see my own retina (or tapetum to be precise), apparently as a reflected image against the backside of the lens (IOW, as if my lens was a mirror so the retina can "look at itself").
That's what -ebay, -consumerguide, -cnet, -consumersearch, -bizrate are for... use that little minus sign to exclude 'em. Helps a lot when you're trying to pin down something that includes a term beloved of marketing.
It would be nice if Google would let users set some words as "always-exclude" in our preferences...
Not really. I used to have Google set to 100 per page, but I still seemed to look at about the first 3 pages before giving up and trying again -- same as I do with just 10 results per page! (Google lost my settings and I haven't bothered to change it back, which I suppose says something about the typical uselessness of anything beyond the first 30 results.)
So... I think it's a matter of the number of times people are willing to go to the NEXT page before giving up, rather than the absolute number of results -- a matter of perception for each page of results viewed: 1) try, 2) try again, 3) bah humbug start over.