Pangloss

Well I'm back online. Hurricane Wilma knocked us out early Monday morning. Of all the storms we've had lately, that was the most severe. We had some generator power but no phone so no Internet. Thankfully no serious damage to the house. I spent all day Monday and Tuesday dragging debris out to the street. It's crazy all the stuff we've been having lately. I saw maybe a couple of hurricanes from 1995 (when I moved down here) to 2004, and since then it's just been insane. In fact, we've had three eyes pass within a couple of miles of our house in the past three months. Unbelievable.

You be nice, or I'll use my secret American Internet power to erase your IP from all historical existence! Everyone will be like "bascule who?" ICANN do it, too! ;-) Just trying to add a little levity since I don't think this discussion will be going far. I agree with you (kinda dull, I know) -- internationalization of the Internet is far more likely to ensure happy and free computing over the long haul than absolute (such as that is) American control. I just don't think the UN is the answer. Maybe in a few years, if they can get their act together. In the meantime, some sort of independent consortium with representation based on the G8 (and their FTA-related friends; say ~20 countries) would probably make more sense at the moment. Such would be focused on commerce and freedom, and less likely to be influenced by geo-politics. Give them a freedom/commerce charter, add in a few watchdog incentives to deal with things like the military-industrial complex, and you have a winner. Hand it to the UN, and what you'll end up with is some African or South American official who's never used a computer, couldn't worm his way onto the Olympic committee, and is more interested in getting his friends and relatives into Cadillacs than whether or not you can surf the web without being observed. Be careful what you wish for, huh?

I don't know what that story is supposed to be telling me. Perhaps you could clarify? It's bad enough with US bureaucrats in charge, Bascule, but can there be any question that it would be worse under UN control? The Bush ADDministration is bad enough. Why would anybody in their right mind hand the Kof-it-up administration control of *anything*?

There are programs out there that visit web sites (ostensibly to check them for functionality but in reality just to drive up their hit counts) automatically. There are scams all over the place that will actually PAY you to run such a program 24/7, and there's a very popular ponzi-like scheme that involves paying into an account which drives up your daily hit-count allowance, letting you (in theory) eventually rack up huge numbers which you can then (in theory) earn a profit from. Isn't the Internet a nice place?

Another old Seinfeld joke: "Yup, my parents just moved to Florida. They didn't want to go, but, you know, they turned 65 and that's the law!"

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/florida/sfl-1021body,0,282956.story?track=mostemailedlink

I always enjoy these "we're all about to die horribly" predictions. Especially the ones that are decades old. (chuckle)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051021/wl_mideast_afp/egyptreligiondemo http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=17950_It_Was_a_Dark_and_Stormy_Night...&only

Brought to you by the ADDministration and CONgress.

I like that. "Trust but verify." (hehe)

<reminds Douglas that we're not talking about the next Playboy centerfold>

Actually it's not quite that bad. Even advanced scientific theories can be boiled down by skilled writers/analysts into something understandable by less knowledgable readers. You can call that "faith", and there's a certain validity to that, but accepting a scientific analysis that falls shy of mathematical proof is a long way from saying the same words every Sunday because you're afraid a lightning bolt will strike you if you don't. I don't mean to turn this into a science-v-religion thread, I'm just pointing out that we can follow and support science without fully grokking its most detailed inner-workings and without resorting to religion-style faith.

I often feel the same way as Bascule. That was an interesting post. In a sense we can only do what we can do -- no sense losing sleep over it. But it can be painful to be a "fan" of something and know that you can't contribute to it in any meaningful way, except as a "fan". Can I have a cookie too, please?

Why haven't you visited Grain-of-Sand#40,657,453,987 on Miami Beach? And does your lack of having visited that grain of sand constitute proof that you do not exist?

You might try this web site: http://www.afterdawn.com/ Lots of tutorials and such.

Yeah, ouch Bascule, we'll have to discuss that one in a separate thread. (chuckle) I'd vote for IMM, but I'd have to have some good transparency on her ties to the animal-right. (grin) (Get it? Religious-right... animal-right.... oh never mind!) ;-)

I appreciate the info on 1.5 hopefully fixing the 1.07 issues. I haven't been following Moz development at all. Thanks! There's no question in my mind that Moz as pushed (if not completely upended) IE development. Even die-hard Microsoft evangelists should look at this as a good thing.

Firefox has really had a lot more problems recently than IE. It's a shame, I see it crash a lot under heavy usage and the exploits have been too frequent. It's still my preferred browser (using it right now), but I'm keeping a solidly open mind about IE7. (Remember, competition is what works, not faithful dedication to one product over another. At the very time when you most love a program, THAT's the time when you need to think about its competition. When competition exists WE WIN, and that's every bit as true for Firefox as it is for Microsoft.)

Was really into it for a while right when it came out, but I lost interest after a couple of months. Seems to be a common theme. It's a nice game but it just didn't quite tip. I had a 65 ENC on Karana (discontinued account) in the old game. I was (and still am, really) in one of those "uber guilds", and I stopped playing not long after we conquered the Plane of Time.

The Wikipedia has a good summary and photos, as well as some good starting-point links, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Buran

This has been making the rounds of various aircraft/spaceflight discussion forums lately, but I don't have a good news link for the story, I'm afraid. If I run across something direct I'll pass it along. As I said back when Discovery flew in August, I believe we've already seen the last shuttle flight. A lot of observers have noted what appears to be further confirmation that NASA has no intention of flying another mission, in spite of this this week's announcement of a May launch window. Recent news that leans in the direction of "the fat lady's already back in the dressing room" include a plethora of candid-but-off-the-record comments to reporters, complaints about lack of money to pay for shuttle missions (which have mysteriously doubled in cost *aside* from the post-Columbia safety changes), stories about an apocalyptic "brain drain" allegedly underway within NASA, rumors of pending layoffs, and so forth. One of the more blatant PR moves has been the way they're handling the end-of-flight schedule. You may have heard that the plan is for all shuttle flights will end in 2010. What you may not have heard was that that date was arrived at not by calculating the life expectency of the shuttles, or by analyzing safety factors, but by simply adding up the number of flights they needed to complete the International Space Station. What's amusing (and sad) about that is that now they've begun to call that a hard deadline, regardless of the status of ISS. This began happening before the recent Discovery flight, so it's pretty obvious that once they had a deadline in place, and knew that nobody understood (or cared) how that deadline was arrived at, they could simply shift the way they talked about that deadline, and voila -- instant termination date. It's worth noting that that deadline is not for December 31st, 2010. It's for September 30th, 2010. That, of course, the end of the fiscal year. As one aviation writer put it, "apparently keeping the paperwork neat is more important than anything else."

I've been thinking it's kinda baked for a couple days now, for what it's worth.

Just to give an amusing counter example, I showed my wife a couple episode of "Space: 1999" the other night. I hadn't seen them in 30 years but they were just as vapid and laughable as they were when I was ten. Fun stuff to whip out at movie parties, though. I think that show may have possibly had the most dramatic opening credits of any program in the entire history of television. (hehe)

Oh no! I just took a closer look at the screen that operator is working, and look what I found!

I want to know why that officer on the right's hand is so close to the passenger's rear end. I think she's getting a little suspicious, too....