KLB

Oh you would make for an evil, evil teacher. I love it.

Umm, no. All high schools should be blocking it because at the high school and university levels one should not be using Wikipedia to research reports. Blocking it at the high school level would eliminate one short cut to learning. Doing reports isn't just about learning about a specific subject. It is also about learning to do independent research and critical thinking. Wikipedia, however, tries to spoon feed both to the reader. Quite simply depending upon Wikipedia for one's studies is robbing one of a critical part of the educational experience.

The library blocking Wikipedia sounds plausible, especially if the library is affiliated with a school that doesn't want its students using Wikipedia for "research".

That does pose an interesting question. Can one "ground" out electronic equipment in space such that surges can be passed harmlessly to the main structure? Is there some way one could dissipate such electrical surges?

You know, even the title of threads like this make my head hurt. I get some sinking feeling I'm going to be sucked into some sort of Star Trek like paradox.

I'm sure in time it will become a very reliable and very secure browser. It is just going to have six months to a year of really bad "teething pains". If Apple throws a lot of development effort behind Safari they may be able to compress this time frame to a certain degree. It will also probably make Safari a more secure browser on OS/X as well as it will start doing things itself that it is allowing the OS to do.

Neither I nor the article are saying its Windows fault for the security issues in Safari. What was being said in the article is that Safari was depending upon APIs in OS/X that handle the security issues. Since Windows doesn't have those APIs the security issues aren't being addressed. This isn't the OSes fault, as much the Safari developers having made security assumptions that were only true on OS/X. It is a classic case of unexpected things happening when a program is broken off and separated from the OS it matured with. Safari was never truly secure in and of itself, it just happened that OS/X provided the security blanket for Safari so Safari didn't need to worry about this itself.

I absolutely agree.

Here's a good explanation of why Safari is running into problems on Windows in regards to security: http://www.betanews.com/article/Day_One_for_Safari_for_Windows_Becomes_ZeroDay_Nightmare/1181661606 Basically Safari developers are use to having the protection of OS/X and as such Safari is handing things off to the OS that OS/X would then filter, but Windows doesn't. Where as IE and Firefox would handle those things themself and would filter out the requests before sending them to the OS.

I downloaded and tested the Windows Safari today on my WinxP Pro box. It works great. Based on some testing I did with my website a month or two back on Safari 2.0 running on a Mac, it appears to me that the Mac and Windows versions of Safari will render virtually identically. As others have said this is going to be a great boon for web developers as we will finally be able to test on all major browsers at the same time without having multiple computers or parallel installs of Windows and OS/X. While Safari may not steal lots of the Windows market share, I expect it will grow its overall market share mostly at the expense of MSIE. The only thing I did not like about Safari is the way it renders text. It makes text too thick. I really think that all browsers should render text the same way and since Opera, Firefox and MSIE all handle text in the same way, Safari should adopt the same text rendering behavior.

Sayonara³ has some good observations for strengthening the structure of SFN. Moving the detritus to the bottom of the forum index can help the primary forums gain more attention. I'd also suggest people starting more threads on topical issues in the news (e.g. EPA Clean Water Act rule changes). Although not every topical issue needs to be as divisive as global warming. Topical issues can garner more search engine traffic and references from blogs. Topical discussions can broaden the appeal of SNF and draw in new members. Not everyone who has an interest in science can discuss the deeper parts of science, especially when complex mathematics becomes involved. Sysco has some good observations about homework help. I like the way SFN shifts homework help threads to a "black hole". From an academic standpoint, students should be doing their own homework and from a forum growth standpoint catering to students wanting a "free lunch" as Sysco calls it does not help build dynamic discussions. In regards to the size of one forum vs. another, don't get caught in the trap that bigger is better. What really matters is the signal to noise ratio. I participate in several webmaster related forums and it is the smallest of the forums that has the best signal to noise ratio. It is also the smallest of those forums that I participate in the most. The big forums have such a poor signal to noise ratio that I rarely find threads I'm truly interested in participating in.

A couple months ago I saw a series of different news reports citing a study that found microwaving a wet sponge for about five minutes pretty much sterilized it. Microwaving a sponge after sending it through a dishwasher along with one's dishes is apparently a very good way to keep sponges sanitary.

I can bring my eyes to a crossed position and then keep one eye "crossed" while moving the other eye independently in all directions. I can even switch between eyes by moving one eye independently then bringing it to the crossed position and moving the other eye independently. What really freaks people out is when I do a "figure eight" where by I cross my eyes, then move my right eye down, out, up and back to the center then do the same to the left eye. Learning to do this was a matter of practice (and a few headaches in the beginning). As Dhondy expressed it is simply a matter of exaggerating the convergence of focus. One way to practice is to focus on the head of a pencil and then while moving it from the far right of one's vision to one's nose and then to the far left. After awhile one can learn to "focus" on an imaginary point and do the trick without any focus aid.

I realized that was the point you were trying to make. It's another case of two people's sarcasm being lost to emotionless text. Oh well.

If maybe their stated objectives were just a ploy to gain legitimacy? Face it, without cheaters most of these paper mills would be out of business.