Emojis are the 21st-century equivalent of the "blink" tag. They should be restricted to Geocities web sites.

Whenever you buy storage, you should buy the necessary backup capacity at the same time. You should never buy storage without buying backup capacity. Budget for it right from the start. If you can't afford the backup, you can't afford the storage. This may mean getting half as much storage as you'd like, but that's just the way it has to be. You probably wouldn't buy a car without an engine. It wouldn't do its job. So don't buy storage without backup. If you do, you have a storage system that can't do its job.

I'd love to see an independent elected President some day. Our country is being ground to death between the Democratic and Republican party machines. Political parties are no longer in the best interests of the citizens (if they ever were). Do parties still serve any purpose in this hyper-connected age we're living in?

Titan, by Stephen Baxter sticks in my mind as being incredibly, irritatingly depressing. Despite the "uplifting" epilog tacked on at the end, it's the story of an expedition to Titan that goes utterly, horribly wrong in every possible way that will prolong the suffering of the protagonists. It's not a novel, it's a torture fantasy that ends [spoiler alert] with the deaths of all of the characters, but only after author has exhausted all of the possible ways of degrading and abusing them. Ick.

I've been trying to contact all of my legislators, but the web page containing Virginia Senator Mark Warner's official contact form seems to be dead (see http://warner.senate.gov). Does anyone know of a good alternative way to get messages to him?

I consider myself a conservative. I believe in the rule of law. I believe in the constitution. I believe in helping others. I believe in respecting others. I believe in shared sacrifice for the common good. I believe in all of those conservative values exemplified by "the greatest generation".

All of which puts me on the far left of the current political spectrum.

The site looks fine under the current Firefox, but is badly broken under Seamonkey 1.1 (Which I still use regularly. Sue me.) See the screenshot here:

http://i.imgur.com/VePRd.jpg

From the radio show "X Minus One":

http://otr.relicradio.com/2010/03/sf94-the-category-inventor-by-x-minus-one/

OK, so we know now that just pointing out the facts doesn't work. What does? Have any studies identified techniques that actually work?

Picasa stores some things, including titles and tags, in IPTC data within the image files themselves. This is great, since it lets you carry these things around with the files when you move them to another image viewer, etc.

I wish it did the same thing with albums, but album data is stored in a separate file. In principle there are IPTC tags (like "collections") that could be used to record album-membership information within the image file itself, but Picasa doesn't do it that way.

The event horizon isn't wavelength-dependent. It's the place where the escape velocity equals the speed of light.

Black holes that evaporate due to Hawking radiation don't leave behind a naked singularity. They're just gone.

Portable VirtualBox looks interesting, but it also looks like it requires the user to have admin privileges on the Windows machine that's hosting vbox. See the documentation here:

http://www.vbox.me/?path=./Description&file=ReadMe.txt

"VirtualBox needs at least main user rights, there 4 Services
            (VBoxDRV, VBoxUSBMon and if not already installs VBoxUSB,
            the VBoxNetFLT and sun_VboxNetFLT) to be furnished and
            VirtualBox must in " Ring-3" - Mode is initiated. The drivers
            the network become with snetcfg.exe (from the ms DDK 2003)
            merged. So that they are loaded, must into that Attitudes of
            Portable-VirtualBox, under the rider " NET" , this to be
            selected. For security, which one installs, must for the
            installation be agreed. After terminating Portable-VirtualBox
            the drivers become and files again removes!"

I've used Seamonkey as my default browser for a long time now, mainly because I like the user interface better. Seamonkey 2.0 now uses Firefox's printing system, though, and this is one of the main things I don't like about Firefox. I use lpr for printing, not cups, and I liked the fact that earlier versions of Seamonkey (and "Mozilla" before it) remembered any changes I made to the "lpr command" in the print dialog. Firefox uses gtk-print, which reverts back to the default lpr command every time you click print, even in the same session. I've reported this as a bug in the Seamonkey bugzilla.

Regarding crashes, I've seen another report of this at LWN.

"an unspecified carrier" seems to be AT&T. At the bottom of this page:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/features/techspecs/

is a link labeled "Check the coverage viewer" that points to

http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer/popUp_3g.jsp