Re:Misc Icons - Opera
on
Netscape 6.1
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· Score: 2
The feature I liked most about using Opera (when I used windows a few years back) was the ability to have multiple pages opened inside of the main application window.
Ick...I tried Opera a little while back, and while most of it was pretty good from what I could see, that misfeature was a showstopper for me. MDI sux. With all your browser windows in one parent window, you can't easily mix browser windows with other apps' windows, as the parent window is often maximized. Click in one of them and they'll all block other apps' windows. IIRC, you also couldn't start multiple instances of Opera to simulate SDI. Windows apps have been migrating from MDI to SDI for some time now...IE, Nutscrape, and Mozilla are examples of SDI apps (well, IE is anyway...can't speak for Nutscrape or Mozilla, but they behave like SDI apps). I don't know if other versions of Opera behave the same way...haven't tried the Mac version as they didn't have a 5.x for 68K Macs last time I checked, and my Linux box is a server with a TTL mono display (tried X11 and KDE on it once for sh*ts and grins...it worked, but I wouldn't want to use it that way on a daily basis).
If you want multiple webpages in one window, make yourself some frameset HTML and load a different page into each frame. If you always want the same set of pages to load, this will work. Since you mentioned that you use it for searching, the Google toolbar has some nice features that speed up searching (you can set it to spawn a new window for each click, for instance).
I'm stuck in a Win2k lab at the moment and the IE5 here must be different from everyone else's IE5. It crashes CONSTANTLY. It abhors PNGs.
It must be a badly broken install for it to behave like that. I use Win2K Pro SP2 and IE 5.5 at home and at work, and it almost never crashes. Come to think of it, I think IE has never crashed. I've had some weirdness at work lately with VC++ and MSDN (gonna try uninstalling and reinstalling tomorrow), but most of the rest of the time, It Just Works. It certainly doesn't have any problems with webpages (mine uses PNGs for nearly all graphics that aren't JPEGs).
well, i hate to break it to you, but you use lossy compression all the time. gif, jpeg, and mp3 are all lossy compression
Um...it looks like nobody else has already mentioned it, so I'll say it: GIF is not a lossy compression method. It uses LZW (has the patent on this run out yet?) to achieve lossless compression.
The RosettaBooks list includes...
1984 by George Orwell....
Thanks, but no thanks...I have my dead-tree copy (purchased back in '84, IIRC). The cover price was only $2.95, too, which is less than they're asking.
The name of the company is also somewhat ironic...imagine where our understanding of ancient cultures would be if the Rosetta Stone disintegrated ten hours after it was first "accessed." They're not the first company to apply the "Divx concept" to books, either...a college-textbook publisher has already tried something similar with one of its titles. If all content gets locked up like this without adequate safeguards to avoid loss of the unencumbered content, we'll all be much worse off in the long run as everyone's bits fall in the proverbial bucket, never to be retrieved again.
The big barrier to market for me will be the hardware support. I wish APEX would include that in their firmware.
Same here...but it'd involve more than a firmware upgrade. I have an AD-600A, and I don't see it supporting Ogg any time soon. MP3 support is in there because the MPEG decoder chip supports it (Layer 2 support is necessary for VCD/SVCD playback, so it probably wasn't much of a stretch to take it a little further and add Layer 3). Given that Ogg is (presumably) considerably different from MPEG audio, you'll need to convince someone like Cirrus Logic or ESS to implement Ogg in silicon if you expect to see an Ogg CD player.
Until then, I'm sticking with MP3. Even after that, I'll probably have so many MP3s piled up that switching over to Ogg wouldn't be worth it. As long as Fraunhofer doesn't turn into a bunch of dicks WRT its patents, I don't see any ongoing problem with MP3. (For patented technologies to be included in international standards, those technologies have to be made available to all comers on a nondiscriminatory basis. Hopefully, that ought to keep Fraunhofer from becoming another Rambus...um, at least we can always hope that it will, as maybe Rambus isn't the best example.:-| )
If you've ever done NAT behind a PPPoE network, you will discover how crappy it really is.
I'm using a cable-modem connection with a static IP now (woohoo), but before that, I was ipmasq'ing a 56K dialup connection (auto-dialed whenever something needed a connection). That dial-up connection was PPP, and ipmasq worked fine over it. Why would PPPoE be any different? (Not that I'm defending the use of PPPoE on a supposedly "always-on" line...but if you're going to bash it, wouldn't it make sense to bash it for something that's really screwed up?)
Here's another list of Code Red attacks for your amusement. Apache logs to MySQL here, so I have a script that queries the database and formats the results into a table. The table is then inserted into the HTML with a server-side include. As of this post, I'm up to 972 attacks. Nearly half are from other Cox Express customers, and the total count is about an order of magnitude greater than when I last checked for Code Red activity on Friday.
I sent out email a while back to the 74 hosts known to be infected at the time. Hopefully a few of them will get a clue and fix their servers. (Then again, if they're running "Internet Infection Server" on publically-available servers, they must've been clue-deficient to begin with.:-) )
Unlike wine, computers do not get more potent with age.
I beg to differ. Here's a picture of the 32K RAM expansion card (and a few other cards) in a 1981 Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Peripheral Expansion Box. Yes, they're clad in cast aluminum. Yes, the steel chassis is stamped of far thicker metal than the unibody of a Toyota Tercel.
I used to have a TI-99/4A...first computer I had at home. TI pulled out of the computer business about six months after we got it, though, so it never got beyond 16K and the hideously slow (double-interpreted?) built-in BASIC. I wonder if things would've taken a different track if we had gotten the expansion box and all the goodies for it...but we bought an Apple IIe (with 128K, a DuoDisk, and an Imagewriter) two years later and I ended up shifting most of my activity to that machine.
Maybe someone has a TI up on eBay or whatever for not much...it'd be nice to have one again, just for the hell of it. If all the goodies (more RAM, the enhanced BASIC cartridge, etc.) are also available with it, that'd be a bonus.
Getting somewhat back on-topic, that expansion box is an impressive beast...makes even my Apple II stuff look somewhat wimpy by comparison. Definitely from a time when men were men and sheep were scared...or something like that.:-)
Yes, because some stations either have their clocks set wrong or just don't care that much about start/end times, so they either start the show earlier or end it later than it's scheduled for.
Comedy Central comes to mind as an example...I don't know how many times South Park or the Man Show have been cut off at the beginning or end.
TiVo 2.0 has a feature where you can tweak the start/end time for a program so that it'll start early or end late (or whatever combination you need), which helps if a channel is consistently early or late. If they're all over the map, though, you're still SOL.
Its main use is for telephony (surprise!) but it I suppose it'll be turning up in new and exciting places.
On the radio this morning, CBS ran a short blurb about this system, including hypothetical news and sports reports. It sounded pretty good, too...if you've done anything with TTS before, the speech quality of this system was considerably ahead of what's been done before. (Light years ahead of Speak & Spell, but that's almost a given at this point. Compared to more modern systems such as Festival, it still comes out ahead quite a bit.)
The announcer posited that, one day, his job could be in danger from this kind of technology. With some broadcasters' penchants for cutting costs any way possible (somebody either here or on K5 posted a link about Clear Channel and its shenanigans a while back, but I can't find it), DJs could end up going the way of the dodo as well.
Last time I checked, CS (cable select) was still a valid option. Put both racks on the same IDE controller and just set your enclosed HDDs to CS. Then label the outer racks as master and slave.
How many computers support cable select? I've worked with Compaqs and HPs that use it, but will your run-of-the-mill clone assembled from parts support cable select?
You've provided a lot of links - tell me, are the dead tree news outlets saying the same?
Several of the links provided earlier were from newspapers. Here's the local paper's take on the matter (of course, since "local"=="Las Vegas", it follows that there'd be an article here):
What about Television - where has the DMCA and the Sklyarov arrest been mentioned?
Can't say, as most TV news is slanted so far to the left I don't waste my time with it. Local TV news might've covered it, but I couldn't say one way or the other. (Actually, someone else posted a link to KTNV's website in one of the other Sklyarov threads here on/., so I guess the local TV news media have covered the matter.) The only TV news program I follow with any regularity is Fox News Sunday, and their website indicates they didn't cover this issue.
It is a ploy to sell thousands of CDs to hackers who want the chalange.
...and they figure that if anybody succeeds, they can fire off a bunch of lawsuits to try to keep the circumvention methods a secret (a la Prof. Felten and the SDMI challenge).
I was about to say this but I'm glad someone else brought this up: what's the problem with recording the things to tape? I mean really... you're losing some quality, but people have been doing it for years. Clearly, if people want digital, unprotected copies, nine times out of ten they want to send them around the internet.
One possible solution mentioned recently in alt.comp.periphs.cdr has been to hook the digital output from a CD player to a digital-in jack on a soundcard (or possibly do the same with a CD-ROM drive with a digital audio output). The player will deal with the intentional brokenness (which is what this really is, from what I've read) and provide a relatively clean signal which can then be captured, stored, folded, spindled, mutilated, etc. Since the signal never leaves the digital domain, it ought to be as good as ripping the CD by the usual means. The only advantage ripping would have is that it's faster, but recording a CD this way wouldn't be too much different than ripping tapes or vinyl.
I could easily fill up many megabytes with text files of various sorts... references that I would always want to have with me.
Maybe so...though the one document (I think it was the Linux Ethernet HOWTO, to give you an idea of the size) carried around for a while with Peanut Reader was crunched down to a fairly small size. I think I eventually dumped it, though; most of the places where I might need that info will have a computer with a net connection available.
C'mon...movies and music on a handheld? Once the novelty wears off, does anybody continue using one of those devices for those purposes?)
Are you serious? You've never seen anyone using a portable music device? Music playback is one of the most compelling features for me.
With only 32-64 megs of fixed storage (barely enough for one CD if you crunch it down enough)and either no removable storage or access to (expen$ive) CompactFlash and/or SmartMedia removable storage, the typical WinCE PDA would make a poor choice for portable music. (If you have it loaded up with MP3s, where are you going to put those several megs of text files you also want to haul around?) I'm not that impressed with the memory-based MP3-player gadgets for the same reason...the only portable MP3 player I'd consider would be one that uses either a hard drive (OK) or CD-R (better) for storage.
(Not that I have one of those either...if I take MP3s with me, it's usually on tape. It's low-tech, but it's cheap, it's ubiquitous, and it works well enough. I might pick up a portable MP3 CD player one of these days...it's not that high a priority, though, as the auto-reverse Walkman I have is still in decent shape and I usually listen to radio while driving.)
Uhhh, last time I checked, the Palm and clones maxed out at 8MB of RAM, which actually is fairly limiting.
In what way? I have 2 megs in mine, and I don't think I've ever come close to using all of it. It has some notes and addresses in it, and I've loaded up a few games, and I usually have no more than half of the memory in use.
You have to realize that the IPAQ can do many things that the best Palm can't do. Complex font and format support for texts, music, movies, full color pictures, etc...
Most of those sound like tasks for a computer or a dedicated device such as a portable CD player or DVD player, not a handheld. (C'mon...movies and music on a handheld? Once the novelty wears off, does anybody continue using one of those devices for those purposes?) Instead of doing one thing well, you end up doing several things poorly. While a Palm might not do all that an iPaq does, it does what it does considerably better.
What you are about to see is the reason why Pocket PCs will rule the world one day!
What...that they can run old versions of PalmOS at (probably) a slower speed than a real Palm, while chewing through batteries more rapidly? If I wanted to run PalmOS stuff, I would've bought a Palm...uh, wait a minute, I did. I have PalmOS v3.5 (not v1 or v2) running on a Palm III, which goes two or three months on a pair of AAAs and runs PalmOS apps natively. Sorry, but I've never seen much in WinCE to write home about...shoehorning a desktop interface into a handheld doesn't make as much sense as designing an OS for handheld use. The hardware may be more powerful, but what good is better hardware if the software that runs on it isn't up to scratch?
SuSE is too reliant on YAST, which will ultimately be their downfall as a distribution. That, and lack of sales/profit, of course.
...and what is wrong with YaST? It's one-stop shopping for package management and system configuration. I've set up primarily SuSE boxen at my previous jobs; coming into a new job where the alleged sysadmin went with Redh*t (7.0, no less...isn't that the one with the borken gcc?) is a bit of a culture shock.
I use LFS at home as you can build the lightest, fastest system that way (and it's not that big a deal if I screw something up on my own boxen), but I wouldn't consider anything other than SuSE for a business system. I've used SLS and Slackware in the past, I have Debian on an old Mac as it's the only game in town, and I appear to be stuck with Redh*t at work (until I take over as sysadmin, at least). From what I've seen, SuSE beats them all.
With a starting price of $1649.00, why not get an imac which comes with a monitor, faster processor, and viseo card? I guess if you really need to rack mount these babies....
Rackmount? It looks like you could use a few Briqs to build a cluster in an ordinary mid-tower or full-tower case...use an ordinary x86 system as a front end to half-a-dozen or so of these. Try doing that with the same number of iMacs (or even the guts of those iMacs).
Then again, a bunch of rackmount cases would let you combine several of these. Imagine a Beowulf cluster...of Beowulf clusters.
And if you really want to get the story in the Top 10, mod down the other stories on their top 10 list. It might not be nice, but if it gets more of the mainstream readers of msnbc reading this, it helps.
It's already at #1 with a 6.64 rating (out of 7) based on 137 votes, so there's no need to do that. More votes to keep bumping the score up would be a Good Thing, though. (The next highest score is 6.16 with 1272 votes, so unless Jack and Hilary send their minions in to try to spike the story, this article's score is somewhat safe.)
And I wondered why my little apache running on almost unknown site got so much hits today with strange shellcode...
I don't know about strange shellcode, but you made me curious...I browsed the log for my personal webserver (Apache running on LFS) and saw a suspicious request for/default.ida at 16:49 PDT from a site in Taiwan. Searching for that request on the rest of the webserver log (going back maybe a year or so at this point) turned up 21 other requests for the same thing, all earlier today. The requests were coming in from around the world...but the last one was from Taiwan and the two before it were from Red China. These last three requests were within one hour of the beginning of whitehouse.gov's problems./default.ida sounds like something one might request from an IIS box (instead of/index.html, they usually use/default.htm as the homepage)...would this have been a probe from the punks who pulled this stunt?
(FWIW, other countries that appeared in the log are (in the order they appeared) South Korea, Canada, Japan, and Germany. Several American sites were also on the list (many of them on cable-modem or DSL connections).)
...but it's only off by about one order of magnitude instead of two. Their 10x13' dimensions yield a diagonal measurement of about 197 inches. A cluster (Beowulf, perhaps?) of maybe a few dozen of these would get you the drive-in-movie-in-your-own-living-room experience...
Re:READ THE ARTICLE before you dismiss this!
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Search Engine Payola
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· Score: 1
As is the fashion on/. now, the first +3 posts are all slam and (incorrectly) attempt to debunk the posted article without ever having apparently *read* it.
Given the subject of the article (a Nader operation), is it really necessary to read the article? Considering the source, it's practically a given that it's more than likely much ado about nothing. After all, if a search engine gives you bad links, are you going to continue using it? (I've been using Google more and AltaVista less in the past few months; Google has fewer dead links, and even if a link is dead, you can bring up the page copy that was cached.)
About the only good thing Ralph Nader has ever done is siphon enough votes away from Algore to practically hand the election to Dubya. Beyond that, he's a whiner and a loser who should've dropped off the scene eons ago.
What kind of orbit is that exactly that it stays on the sunny side? Not geosynchronous since that follows the same global spot around.
Same orbit as the moon.
Guess again...the moon is dark for roughly two weeks at a time. There's one side that always faces us as a result of the moon making one orbit and one revolution in about the same amount of time, but it still passes behind us and is therefore cut off from the sun. That's what accounts for the phases of the moon and the occasional lunar eclipse.
Anything that orbits the earth will, by definition, be blocked from the sun at some point. If it's a really big orbit, the time in which it's blocked will be a small percentage, but you won't get access to the sun 100% of the time. If you put it into a solar orbit with an orbital period of one year, it might be doable...but would the sun exhibit enough of a pull on something as lightweight as a satellite to keep it on course? IANAOME ("OME"="orbital mechanics expert"), so I could be completely off-base on this...
Slashdot Mirror
If you want multiple webpages in one window, make yourself some frameset HTML and load a different page into each frame. If you always want the same set of pages to load, this will work. Since you mentioned that you use it for searching, the Google toolbar has some nice features that speed up searching (you can set it to spawn a new window for each click, for instance).
The name of the company is also somewhat ironic...imagine where our understanding of ancient cultures would be if the Rosetta Stone disintegrated ten hours after it was first "accessed." They're not the first company to apply the "Divx concept" to books, either...a college-textbook publisher has already tried something similar with one of its titles. If all content gets locked up like this without adequate safeguards to avoid loss of the unencumbered content, we'll all be much worse off in the long run as everyone's bits fall in the proverbial bucket, never to be retrieved again.
Until then, I'm sticking with MP3. Even after that, I'll probably have so many MP3s piled up that switching over to Ogg wouldn't be worth it. As long as Fraunhofer doesn't turn into a bunch of dicks WRT its patents, I don't see any ongoing problem with MP3. (For patented technologies to be included in international standards, those technologies have to be made available to all comers on a nondiscriminatory basis. Hopefully, that ought to keep Fraunhofer from becoming another Rambus...um, at least we can always hope that it will, as maybe Rambus isn't the best example. :-| )
I sent out email a while back to the 74 hosts known to be infected at the time. Hopefully a few of them will get a clue and fix their servers. (Then again, if they're running "Internet Infection Server" on publically-available servers, they must've been clue-deficient to begin with. :-) )
I used to have a TI-99/4A...first computer I had at home. TI pulled out of the computer business about six months after we got it, though, so it never got beyond 16K and the hideously slow (double-interpreted?) built-in BASIC. I wonder if things would've taken a different track if we had gotten the expansion box and all the goodies for it...but we bought an Apple IIe (with 128K, a DuoDisk, and an Imagewriter) two years later and I ended up shifting most of my activity to that machine.
Maybe someone has a TI up on eBay or whatever for not much...it'd be nice to have one again, just for the hell of it. If all the goodies (more RAM, the enhanced BASIC cartridge, etc.) are also available with it, that'd be a bonus.
Getting somewhat back on-topic, that expansion box is an impressive beast...makes even my Apple II stuff look somewhat wimpy by comparison. Definitely from a time when men were men and sheep were scared...or something like that. :-)
TiVo 2.0 has a feature where you can tweak the start/end time for a program so that it'll start early or end late (or whatever combination you need), which helps if a channel is consistently early or late. If they're all over the map, though, you're still SOL.
On the radio this morning, CBS ran a short blurb about this system, including hypothetical news and sports reports. It sounded pretty good, too...if you've done anything with TTS before, the speech quality of this system was considerably ahead of what's been done before. (Light years ahead of Speak & Spell, but that's almost a given at this point. Compared to more modern systems such as Festival, it still comes out ahead quite a bit.)
The announcer posited that, one day, his job could be in danger from this kind of technology. With some broadcasters' penchants for cutting costs any way possible (somebody either here or on K5 posted a link about Clear Channel and its shenanigans a while back, but I can't find it), DJs could end up going the way of the dodo as well.
How many computers support cable select? I've worked with Compaqs and HPs that use it, but will your run-of-the-mill clone assembled from parts support cable select?
Several of the links provided earlier were from newspapers. Here's the local paper's take on the matter (of course, since "local"=="Las Vegas", it follows that there'd be an article here):
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Jul-18-Wed-2001 /news/16563325.html
Can't say, as most TV news is slanted so far to the left I don't waste my time with it. Local TV news might've covered it, but I couldn't say one way or the other. (Actually, someone else posted a link to KTNV's website in one of the other Sklyarov threads here on /., so I guess the local TV news media have covered the matter.) The only TV news program I follow with any regularity is Fox News Sunday, and their website indicates they didn't cover this issue.
One possible solution mentioned recently in alt.comp.periphs.cdr has been to hook the digital output from a CD player to a digital-in jack on a soundcard (or possibly do the same with a CD-ROM drive with a digital audio output). The player will deal with the intentional brokenness (which is what this really is, from what I've read) and provide a relatively clean signal which can then be captured, stored, folded, spindled, mutilated, etc. Since the signal never leaves the digital domain, it ought to be as good as ripping the CD by the usual means. The only advantage ripping would have is that it's faster, but recording a CD this way wouldn't be too much different than ripping tapes or vinyl.
Maybe so...though the one document (I think it was the Linux Ethernet HOWTO, to give you an idea of the size) carried around for a while with Peanut Reader was crunched down to a fairly small size. I think I eventually dumped it, though; most of the places where I might need that info will have a computer with a net connection available.
With only 32-64 megs of fixed storage (barely enough for one CD if you crunch it down enough)and either no removable storage or access to (expen$ive) CompactFlash and/or SmartMedia removable storage, the typical WinCE PDA would make a poor choice for portable music. (If you have it loaded up with MP3s, where are you going to put those several megs of text files you also want to haul around?) I'm not that impressed with the memory-based MP3-player gadgets for the same reason...the only portable MP3 player I'd consider would be one that uses either a hard drive (OK) or CD-R (better) for storage.
(Not that I have one of those either...if I take MP3s with me, it's usually on tape. It's low-tech, but it's cheap, it's ubiquitous, and it works well enough. I might pick up a portable MP3 CD player one of these days...it's not that high a priority, though, as the auto-reverse Walkman I have is still in decent shape and I usually listen to radio while driving.)
In what way? I have 2 megs in mine, and I don't think I've ever come close to using all of it. It has some notes and addresses in it, and I've loaded up a few games, and I usually have no more than half of the memory in use.
Most of those sound like tasks for a computer or a dedicated device such as a portable CD player or DVD player, not a handheld. (C'mon...movies and music on a handheld? Once the novelty wears off, does anybody continue using one of those devices for those purposes?) Instead of doing one thing well, you end up doing several things poorly. While a Palm might not do all that an iPaq does, it does what it does considerably better.
What...that they can run old versions of PalmOS at (probably) a slower speed than a real Palm, while chewing through batteries more rapidly? If I wanted to run PalmOS stuff, I would've bought a Palm...uh, wait a minute, I did. I have PalmOS v3.5 (not v1 or v2) running on a Palm III, which goes two or three months on a pair of AAAs and runs PalmOS apps natively. Sorry, but I've never seen much in WinCE to write home about...shoehorning a desktop interface into a handheld doesn't make as much sense as designing an OS for handheld use. The hardware may be more powerful, but what good is better hardware if the software that runs on it isn't up to scratch?
I use LFS at home as you can build the lightest, fastest system that way (and it's not that big a deal if I screw something up on my own boxen), but I wouldn't consider anything other than SuSE for a business system. I've used SLS and Slackware in the past, I have Debian on an old Mac as it's the only game in town, and I appear to be stuck with Redh*t at work (until I take over as sysadmin, at least). From what I've seen, SuSE beats them all.
Rackmount? It looks like you could use a few Briqs to build a cluster in an ordinary mid-tower or full-tower case...use an ordinary x86 system as a front end to half-a-dozen or so of these. Try doing that with the same number of iMacs (or even the guts of those iMacs).
Then again, a bunch of rackmount cases would let you combine several of these. Imagine a Beowulf cluster...of Beowulf clusters.
It's already at #1 with a 6.64 rating (out of 7) based on 137 votes, so there's no need to do that. More votes to keep bumping the score up would be a Good Thing, though. (The next highest score is 6.16 with 1272 votes, so unless Jack and Hilary send their minions in to try to spike the story, this article's score is somewhat safe.)
There ought to be a (-1, Pun) moderation available...:-)
I don't know about strange shellcode, but you made me curious...I browsed the log for my personal webserver (Apache running on LFS) and saw a suspicious request for /default.ida at 16:49 PDT from a site in Taiwan. Searching for that request on the rest of the webserver log (going back maybe a year or so at this point) turned up 21 other requests for the same thing, all earlier today. The requests were coming in from around the world...but the last one was from Taiwan and the two before it were from Red China. These last three requests were within one hour of the beginning of whitehouse.gov's problems. /default.ida sounds like something one might request from an IIS box (instead of /index.html, they usually use /default.htm as the homepage)...would this have been a probe from the punks who pulled this stunt?
(FWIW, other countries that appeared in the log are (in the order they appeared) South Korea, Canada, Japan, and Germany. Several American sites were also on the list (many of them on cable-modem or DSL connections).)
...but it's only off by about one order of magnitude instead of two. Their 10x13' dimensions yield a diagonal measurement of about 197 inches. A cluster (Beowulf, perhaps?) of maybe a few dozen of these would get you the drive-in-movie-in-your-own-living-room experience...
Given the subject of the article (a Nader operation), is it really necessary to read the article? Considering the source, it's practically a given that it's more than likely much ado about nothing. After all, if a search engine gives you bad links, are you going to continue using it? (I've been using Google more and AltaVista less in the past few months; Google has fewer dead links, and even if a link is dead, you can bring up the page copy that was cached.)
About the only good thing Ralph Nader has ever done is siphon enough votes away from Algore to practically hand the election to Dubya. Beyond that, he's a whiner and a loser who should've dropped off the scene eons ago.
Guess again...the moon is dark for roughly two weeks at a time. There's one side that always faces us as a result of the moon making one orbit and one revolution in about the same amount of time, but it still passes behind us and is therefore cut off from the sun. That's what accounts for the phases of the moon and the occasional lunar eclipse.
Anything that orbits the earth will, by definition, be blocked from the sun at some point. If it's a really big orbit, the time in which it's blocked will be a small percentage, but you won't get access to the sun 100% of the time. If you put it into a solar orbit with an orbital period of one year, it might be doable...but would the sun exhibit enough of a pull on something as lightweight as a satellite to keep it on course? IANAOME ("OME"="orbital mechanics expert"), so I could be completely off-base on this...