KLB

As the say here in New England, that was "wicked good." Often times weird eye trick pictures don't work with my eyes but this one worked very well. What I found weird was that there wasn't a fadding of color, but the picture switched from color to black and white as if a switch had been flipped after a few seconds. Dak thanks for the explaination.

Those other Explorer shells are nothing more than skins that run on top of Explorer. As a result whatever Explorer is vaulnerable to they are also vaulnerable to. The only way to avoid this risk is to use browsers that have their own rendering engines like Firefox or Opera.

Then just alternate between the two quotes switching one out for the other every few weeks or so. I participate in around a half dozen different forums including two I own or am coowner of. All of those forums have some kind of signature limitation of a similar size to SFN's limitation. It isn't really a big deal, nor is it out of the norm.

That case involved Win95, which had been replaced by the time that case had ended. WinXP is a totally different beast. For starters Win95 ran on top of MS-DOS. WinXP does not have DOS, only a DOS emulating shell. The best sollution for dealing with MSIE is to require your firewall to ask for permission to allow IE to access the Internet every time MSIE starts and to place the Internet Zone on high security.

Although I make use of sigs in all the forums I participate in to promote my sites, I agree with others. The length of the sig allowance here is just fine. I've seen forums that don't reign in sigs and they can get very out of control. A sig requirement of 250 characters forces people to prioritize what they put in their sigs and helps keep some sanity in forums.

That's how I first learned about favicon.ico. Years ago when Microsoft first implemented it, I started to notice 404s for favicon.ico, so I investigated to find out what it was.

I've seen a lot of speculation on this on History shows as shown on the History Channel. I have a feeling that if there had been an attempt to surrender it was done in a way that wasn't understood by American intelligence gatherers or the message didn't get relayed up the chain of command fast enough. Given the state of technology in those days, a surrender couldn't be trusted to a quiet back channel coded in diplomatic language. It had to be broadcast as loudly as possible across as many forms of communication as possible and using very clear language. Unfortunately for the Japanese their culture tended to use a lot of ceremonial subtly that Americans just didn't understand.

Un-friggen believable. If there are people who actually buy off on those ads, be afraid; be very afraid...

The only time I use the '<link rel="icon".....' comment is if I want to use different icons on different sections of the site. Otherwise I simply drop a "favicon.ico" file into the root directory as described above. As long as the "favicon.ico" file is placed in the root directory in this way most browsers will automatically find it. For those who use Photoshop CS2 they can find free plugin for Photoshop that allows one to save graphics files as ICO files. My advice is to create them as 32x32 images and convert them to indexed color with no more than 32 colors. This can significantly reduce the file size.

Actually at Oppenheimer's request, Einstein wrote letters to President Roosevelt encouraging him to take Oppenheimer's ideas seriously. Oppenheimer wrote the letters, Einstein signed them and I believe a NY congressman or business person with access to the oval office presented them to Roosevelt. I can't remember exactly who presented the letters to Roosevelt, but I recently saw a History Channel presentation on this issue. It was really quite interesting. It is kind of ironic that the most destructive weapons on earth essentially invented by a pacifist (Oppenheimer) and promoted by another pacifist (Einstein).

It all depends on the context of the situation. A well written article that gets published on a respected website can lead to professional opportunities. In the scientific and many professional fields getting published is a very important way to enahance one's career and status.

A lot of good scientists like to put their work on the Internet, heck this is why the Internet was invented, to share scientific ideas; granted originally with a military slant. I personally buy articles from science professionals on a regular basis and get inquires from very qualified writers.

For those who are considering buying a new car, one stop in researching your car buying decission should be http://www.fueleconomy.gov. This site is by the EPA and it has lots of great information about all makes and models of cars sold in the U.S. It will help you choose the most fuel efficent vehicle for the class of vehicle you are interested in buying and help you compare the amount of emissions and green house gasses each vehicle produces. One thing I discovered is that within one car model there may be several different emissions standards the car is being designed to meet. This site will tell you how to tell which emissions standards the individual car you are buying is designed to meet. You can even do side by side comparisons of different vehicles and links are provided to the NTSA crash test ratings from the side by side comparisons. This is a really useful site.

I've spent a great deal of time over the past couple of weeks trying to find ways to maximize the fuel efficiency of our new car and add longevity to its functional life. Its really interesting that synthetic lubricants can not only reduce wear on the engine, transmission and differential (for rear wheel drive vehicles), but can also improve fuel economy by reducing parasitic friction. When looking at the economics of synthetic lubricants, one should also consider reduced long term maintenance costs associated with reduced parts wear and greater time between oil changes. If you are like me and keep vehicles for the majority of their usable service life long term maintenance costs really matter. From an environmental point of view the longer the service life of parts and vehicle, the fewer natural resources that are consumed replacing parts and the vehicle. Some interesting articles on this topic are: http://www.et.anl.gov/sections/tribology/highlights/parasitic_engine_losses.html http://www.advanceautoparts.com/english/youcan/html/ccr/ccr20030101gm.html http://www.performanceoiltechnology.com/gaugingfueleconomyimprovements.htm (it is a little self promotional, but still informative)

First more needs to punish employers who hire illegal aliens. Right now the whole system is a joke and there are no real reprecussions for hiring illegal aliens. Too often sleezy employers hire illegals not because no body else would do the job, but because nobody else would do the job at the poverty level wages they want to pay and because they know illegals can't really complain about bad working conditions. Yes shutting down illegal labor would increase the cost of goods due to increased labor costs, but maybe people should be paid a living wage to begin with so that they aren't forced to live in poverty. Second illegals broke our laws getting into this country. Why should we reward people who broke our laws the moment they set foot on U.S. soil when there are so many law abiding people who are trying really hard to get into this country legally and are being denied access. Imigration reform need to make it easier to get into this country legally and create greater punishments for entering this country illegally. If we really need imigrant labor then we need to make it easier to get into this country legally. All the current system does is reward the law breakers and punish the lawful.

One small part of social collapse I see is a general loss of civility in public discourse and a general loss of social manners. Examples would be people leaving cell phones on in movies, cutting each other off in traffic, any political discussion turning into a Fox News style personal attacks, parents yelling, screaming and assaulting others at little league games, people shooting kids because they walk across their well manicured lawn (http://abclocal.go.com/wtvg/story?section=state&id=4011091) or shooting kids model planes out of the sky (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060325/ap_on_fe_st/model_plane_shooting). The best example of this is most forums or comment threads at the end of any political article at Yahoo News. The rudeness we see in forum discussion spills into every day life and it just seems people get ruder every day. Children saying sir and ma'am may seem quaint to others here in northern states, but there is something to be said for social courtesies and manners and it just seems the loss of these things is a sign of a breaking down of other social mores.

I'd love to by a hybrid car if I could afford it. I've driven a Prius and I really liked it. The problem is it is so expensive compared to the improvement in fuel economy it provides. The thing is I know I'd never recoup the extra cost in fuel savings and there are some very fuel efficient "normal" cars on the market that are almost as clean as the hybrid, are assured to last for many years and cost so much less. While the extra fuel economy is great, I often wonder what the total environmental impact of a hybrid is compared to a really reliable and fuel efficient car that is sure to last for 250,000 miles with proper care? Are hybrids really more environmentally friendly overall or is their only benefit better fuel economy at the expense of other environmental impacts (like a shorter useable life)?

In regards to the poll attached to this thread, I think there is little doubt that what we are expierencing is a combination of natural cycles made worse by what we do. For about 150 years we have been coming out of a little ice age (http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/little_ice_age.html). What worries me is what is going to happen as all of the CO2 is released from the arctic and sub-arctic tundra as the permafrost melts.

Now that is just plain weird. I guess they told the DNS server to simply point to 127.0.0.1 for that domain instead of pointing to a "real" Internet IP address. I wonder why someone did that?

You'd think this, but I've seen stranger things happen. Especially with default pages for websites. The problem is there are a lot of spam bots and scrapper bots that try really hard to find "hidden" pages in order to scrape content or email addresses. Even Google has stumbled upon odd pages like indexing and featuring a confidential document from Dell highlighting an unannounced lap top a couple weeks ago. Security through obfusification is not security.

If one doesn't want the wrong people to see a page, this is an exceedingly bad method of "protecting" a page. Search engine bots and site scraping bots have an incredible knack for stumbling upon unpublished site/pages. Once a webpage starts to get indexed by search engine bots it becomes nearly impossible to keep a page "hidden." The only way to protect pages that one doesn't want the wrong people to see or find is to password protect said pages.

Hi all, I publish the website EnvironmentalChemistry.com. I'm joining these forums in hopes of participating in interesting discussions, learning something new and maybe finding new writers. I may not post a lot in the beginning, but in time as I have something to contribute I will try to participate more.