We also get a sonic boom every few weeks (Beersheba Israel, and we got them when I lived in Haifa as well). It's less noise than a car going by, and lasts for less time. I'm sure if you buzz a shack at Mach 2 the boom would be deafening, but typical combat aircraft at typical don't-SAM-me altitudes don't make much noise. I've also had the pleasure of hearing the double sonic boom from the STS orbiters coming in to land over Florida. I don't know how fast they were going, but even those booms, though a bit louder I think, were no big deal.

One or more of those words do not mean what you think they mean.

If you do that you have to double the used web space, and that can be expensive. I'm already almost at the upper limit for my site and will have to go to the next tier of hosting soon. As it is, only three of the well over a hundred pages on my site need a special mobile version, and I would imagine a lot of other folks are the same way.

Having it first look for m.sitename, falling back to mobile.html if it exists and m.sitename doesn't, then index.html if there are neither m.sitename or mobile.html might be a good idea, though.

Also, you're arguing a metaphor.

Thus, probably unwittingly, cause if your comments on the topic lack anything clearly it is having wits behind them, you go off to hide in your corner from the straw bogeymen coming for your "stuff", clutching at your gun to defend you.
Because, clearly, poor people are getting ready to take everything from you. $1000 today and other nonsense.

Here's the thing boyo...
Can you shoot viruses with them guns of yours? How bout bacteria?
Can you shoot 'lectricity into your wires and oil and water into your pipes?
How about simply shoot some bread on your table?

You know... stuff that will appear suddenly as what amounts to entire nations (there are countries with fewer people than 3.5 million truckers alone) suddenly end up without food or medicine or pot to piss in, and in the long run, without the ground to bury their dead.
Following your "Fuck them I got mine" economic policy.

How many bullets does it take to stop that guy who's off his meds and out of a job but perfectly able to steal a truck, get drunk on stolen booze and go ramming it into other people's cars?
Or simply take HIS gun (You think you're the only one with a peashooter?) and gun you down for no reason cause he's off his meds? You some gun-ninja, with a six sense for danger?
No... not fear. We know you got that covered. DANGER-sense. Like what Spiderman has. No?
Well... no wonder you're shaking in your boots then... you'd have to be shooting at everyone you don't know.
And that's a lot of boo-lets...

How about that other guy who decides to steal the copper out of them power lines and gets both himself electrocuted AND takes out half the local grid in the process?
Are YOU gonna guard all the power lines everywhere by your own lonesome, clutching your pathetic little Saturday night special?
What's that? You're gonna PAY someone to guard them? Will that be $1000, $5000 or more? Lotsa them power lines...

BTW... did you know that you can use transformer oil (from power transformers) to run engines?
Yeah... And they like have these pathetic locks on them. You just kick them a little. Then you drill a hole in the transformer, drain the oil into a can and leave it to rot or catch fire. Someone will come along and strip it of the wiring later.
You're gonna pay that? Oh right... guns... Your gonna shoot the transformer into working. No... wait... you're gonna pay more guards and police...

But fuck that... right... You know what that oil does best? It works GREAT in chainsaws.
Heatin don't come free, you know. But LANDSLIDES do!
You're gonna love those... they take out houses, roads, tear up underground pipes...
You'll be paying that shit too, I know. Right after you shoot that landslide.

But hold on... Them poor people don't have medical or any kind of insurance.
You won't mind them going around all sick and stuff... urinating in your yard... taking shit where ever they can... and eventually dying all around your place.
Right-right... you're gonna shoot that too. Shoot the sick right out of them.
Then shoot the medicine and doctors INTO hospitals to treat YOU when you need them instead of all them poor people swamping the system.
Then you're gonna pay someone to bury/burn the corpses, sanitize everything, give you daily checkups to make sure you didn't catch anything... must be great to be able to afford all that on your private tropical island.

And that's all before your next door neighbor, your huntin/fishin/masturbatin buddy, comes to your door with a plan to shoot himself some stuff.
See... his trucking business went belly up on account of all them self-driving trucks not needing his local services in your neighborhood cause nobody's buying shit there anymore. So... nothing to transport.
You and your ex-billionaire buddy are the only ones there - and you got yourself all the shit you need behind your guns and walls and moats and crocodiles and drawbridges and all that other shit you built around your personal "one-person prison".

Come on... He's your buddy. He's just gonna shoot you a little. And take your crocodiles.

Even their aircraft worked on a form of teleportation.

As for the nukes... it was actually a case of many dirty bombs exploding under an energy shield, down through a hollowed out core of the planet which was mined for hundreds of thousands of years.

Here:

In the book, teleporters all check in with the homeworld at a set date to send back ore and to replenish their atmosphere, food and workforce stock.
As there is no hyperspace communication or FTL travel, once the Psychlo world gets turned into a "radioactive sun", everyone just keeps checking in, one at a time, and blowing themselves up.

To clear up...
Not every planet got turned into a sun. That happens only to the main planet which had that special breathing-gas of theirs which reacted violently to uranium.
On other planets, only their central mining camps around the teleporting platforms explode - with all their remaining supplies of atmosphere and food.
Which they can only get from their home planet.

Thanks, I'm exploring your suggestions on Youtube now. The first few remind me of Charlie Daniels Band.

You brought up a great point, one that I've been noticing for quite some time. To find good new music, one needs to jump genres. Not necessarily because any particular genre has dried up, but possibly because more of the same genre sounds like it is either "missing the mark" it it's bad, or "copying the old" if it's good.

Thanks! If you want to try something new as well, search Youtube for Furtwrangler. He's a German conductor and his interpretations of Beethoven are absolutely amazing. The restored 1940's and 50's recordings of Beethoven's 5th and 9th symphonies conducted by him are completely amazing. There are a few of them, recorded in different years, and they are all a bit different, like different photographs of the same beautiful woman. They take a long time to listen to, the 5th is 30 minutes and the 9th is twice that, but you more "experience" them than listen to them. Try this one for starters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

If you want to explore the ninth symphony, I suggest just listening to the second movement first. It is far more approachable than the rest of the symphony, especially if you don't like the chorus.

Go to Red Letter Media (of the Mr. Plinkett Star Wars prequels reviews fame) and check out their Best of The Worst episodes.

Or just check out the Things review.

Battlefield Earth is Oscar-worthy compared to some schlock out there.

You just have to read it early enough... Like when you're 11-14.
Old enough to be interested in SciFi beyond simple space opera but not yet learned enough to be repelled by bad or pulpy writing. Though Hubbard sorta-kinda covered his ass there by claiming in-universe that the book was intentionally written that way.

E.g. On the inside cover of my library copy someone wrote "money is an idea backed with confidence".
Someone found that information so novel and fascinating, they had to write it down.
On the inside cover of the book they've read it from.

Just try imagining what could someone write on the inside of the DVD case of the movie.

Also, the book is full of some really fine pulpy action and adventure.
And it even manages to make negotiations and CONTRACTS exciting.
The movie literally put me to sleep first (and only) time I saw it.
Plus, the book is not dumb enough to have them flying harriers and raiding Fort Knox and doing all other nonsense which was not in the book.

Later though... One might find the book even more fascinating, but in a different way.
Like how much it echoes stories intentionally written to be a satire of an ultra-right pulp fairytale.
All of it clearly without the author realizing how steeped in those ideas his writing was.

I'd love some suggestions for music, then. About the only two albums that I've been happy with since 2000 are The Fragile and Origin of Symmetry, and those are both over a decade old. What new music could you recommend, for someone else with a 'demanding' taste in music, such as attention to detail? I'm still listening to Meddle and Houses of the Holy on a regular basis.

Though, entertainingly, PP is close to the mark - and then he goes on the whole "Christians are being persecuted" tangent which is pure nonsense.

But he got the opening line right:

Which again proves that the truth is subversive.
Yes, we do live in a world of empiricism - because that's how the world is, whether we like it or not.
And such world will always put concepts of faith and religion under pressure. Just like it puts everything else under pressure.
It's only that PP finds the reality expressed in that sentence threatening.

I'll digress for a moment... I want to show a familiar example to point out something.
Remember how in "Godfather 2", Fredo tells Michael's son, Anthony, about a "secret" for catching fish?
How he'd always say a "Hail Mary" when throwing the line and he, out of all the kids, would catch the most fish.
Then later, we see him still doing that just before he gets "taken out" by Michael's assassin, Neri. SPOILERS!

Now, that's a '70s movie, done by a Catholic. Not very "observant" as he puts it himself, but still very "religious".
So, that is not "Fredo the idiot" - that is "Fredo the unloved child, becoming a traitor out of unrequited love and childlike innocence". And John Cazale pulled that off perfectly.

Today, that SAME character would be someone with mental issues.
Someone who does not understand the world around him, with that story hinting not at his childlike innocence but at his childlike mental capacities.

That's the '70s.
Showing that by then even for a religious Catholic director something like saying a prayer before every action that you feel is up to chance is something that only a child or someone as innocent as child might do.
An adult doing that... That's someone who's a bit iffy. One way or the other.
Cause Fredo sure as hell has issues. He's not an idiot... but he has emotional issues written all over him.

Compare that to Barry Pepper's Private Jackson in "Saving Private Ryan", praying for "true aim" and "victory in battle".
Which feels completely in character AND not disparaging at all. It feels like something that a young man might do in the war, during 1940s.
And nobody invented that prayer - he's quoting Psalms.

Which are basically a collection of ready-made prayers for various "troubles" one might find themselves in, and for saying "thanks god" for being delivered from them.
There are like 150 specific ways to cry "HELP GOD!" and to say "Thanks god!" just there.
Same thing with all those saints, protectors and patrons of this and that, and their corresponding amulets.
Or with all those relics of various saints, apostles, pieces of "true cross" etc.
Or with all the gods in Hinduism, or all the kami in Shintoism.
For everything out there that may harm or benefit one's existence and/or circumstances - there is a prayer, an amulet, a saint, a kami, a god...

But none of them deal with empirically provable aspects of the thing they are supposed to be influencing.
There is no "make sure that fire has flames" god or amulets - though there are dozens of fire-gods.
Or a kami you could pray to "to make water wet". Though there is a water kami.
Or an amulet with a saint whose job it was to make sure that apples are apples and not oranges. Though there is a saint of apple orchards - St. Charles Borromeo.
There is even a "fear of mice" saint - St. Gertrude of Nivelles.

Because, when you DON'T LIVE IN AN EMPIRICAL WORLD, when you live instead in a "Demon Haunted World" - you need a protector, an amulet, a prayer for everything.
Whatever it is you're not certain of, be it fish biting on a particular day or bullets hitting their target - just use the right amulet or prayer and shift odds in your favor.
If it works you got the blessing of your deity/saint/kami - if not... ask for forgiveness. And just imagine what could have happened HAD YOU NOT prayed.

By inventing all those demons and gods, men was thus able to stay in control of the uncontrollable events in his life.
Beg for mercy and should it not work, beg for forgiveness. Problem(s) solved. ALL of them.

Until science and technology became reliable enough and advanced enough that all those demons and saints stopped mattering.
As their disciplines which became irrelevant were replaced by technology and science which didn't need saints or magic to work.
There are several saints who deal with wolves and hunters - but no saints of guns. Though some are trying to jam a gun into one of their long cold and dead hands.
There is no "elevator prayer". Or an amulet to prevent your soda/beer can from spilling when you open it.
Or the saint of Internet or the WiFi and radio kami. Faith in god(s) won't get you a better mobile signal.

Cause when all things around you work on powers you understand and according to laws of science that you don't even have to understand for them to work - that eats away at the need for supernatural forces.
Most people being flown on airplanes may not understand aerodynamics, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone who believes that they are being carried by angels or jinns in employ of their particular airline.
How would passengers on a plane today react to a pilot who crosses himself and says a prayer before takeoff?
You know... Like Fredo or Private Jackson did. For additional entertainment, imagine the pilot being a Muslim.

Faith in old "tools" for dealing with uncertainty, like prayers, gods and amulets is, by the very nature of the modern world which functions on the rules of technology and science, being replaced by TRUST in the technology and science.
With an added bonus that not only is there no punishment for not trusting science (unlike the built in punishment for the lack of faith) - the science itself DEMANDS that you question it.
And if you do prove it wrong - you just end up with more science.
Whereas if you prove faith wrong... there's nothing but a silly fairytale.

It is an unfair fight where one side always wins and the other must lose. No wonder PP feels that religion is being "pressured".
Cause it is. By the reality of the world and its "empiricism".

I'd be preaching what I don't practice; my favorite phone was the Razr. Tiny thing. Big phones are fine for those who carry purses, but mine stays in my pocket. The one I have now is about as big as I can stand.

I'm about to post a journal with a suggestion for the W3C and mobile browser makers.

It should work. I don't see how it would mess up the charging circuit unless that circuit was poorly designed. It's the same as a TV degausser.

My day was a lineman working around AC at 90,000 volts. If he wore an analog (wind up) watch to work the watch would get magnetized by those high strength magnetic fields and stop working. He probably could have fixed the watches the same way.

The "conclusions" of "abnormal behavior" were made from observations that kids would rather be at home playing instead of sitting in a class AND from the fact that young humans will seek sexual satisfaction but avoid rejection.

That sounds like something a ROBOT might find strange.
Not a human being. Particularly not one who actually went through puberty at some point in their life.

In short... like most psychology studies out there, this too is most probably bullshit.