you can't issue a search just for usenet groups only.

Actually, you can: by restricting the query to a whole hieararchy. Just add, e.g., group:comp.* to your search.

Lately, though, I've found the results to be incomplete (by searching for my own posts).

I really wish someone got around to solve the binary problem once and for all, so Usenet again could be for discussions. By all means, it needs upgrades, like native Unicode support

Usenet is encoding-agnostic: Unicode support depends solely on your client.

and better anonymisation

Pick a server that encrypts your IP. Even some of the free ones will do this (e.g.: news.albasani.net, news.aioe.org).

I haven't seen one since '98. If it's coming back into stile, it seems nobody's bothered to tell the women ....

Have you tried clearing the cache?

>>and a crap web browser with no plugin or extension support.
>
>Flash runs like shit on netbooks.

Your only criteria for web browsers is that they run flash well????

The built in browser in the iPad is *horrible* for casual browser. It's basically unusable for me. I do like the iPad for some things, but those are very specific & constrained uses, and web browsing is certainly not one of them.

There exists a small number of physicists who are willing to entertain the idea that Nature does not, in fact, deal with any irrational numbers. If all measurable values are quantized (including time and space), then Nature need not bother with "real" numbers. Nature might be perfectly content to get by with, say, some large algebraic extension of the rationals.

I think the limiting factor is the SATA bus. Pack a 3.5-inch drive with NAND and a good controller and you will absolutely swamp a 3Gb SATA bus.

The typical IO bottleneck is due to IOPS, not bandwidth. Most people using SSDs would still see the same improvement on SATA1.

The problem today is, we aren't dealing with a government. We are dealing with idealogues, zealots, and radicals.

Now, take another look at Germany and Japan, and the rest of the Axis powers. Have the allies succeeded in stamping out the ideas of Nazism, and the divinity of the Emperor? Today, there are more skinheads, neonazis, and white supremacists here at home and around the world, than there were in 1940. Japan's Emperor is still a divine figure, if diminished in power.

No government has the power to root out an ideology, and crush it. And, I hope that no government ever does get that power.

Al Gore's "Earth in the Balance" advocates reduction of the earth's population by more than 2/3, before the end of the century. Methodology for accomplishing this is not elaborated on; yet the only way to reduce population that drastically in that short a time frame is either mass sterilization, or mass genocide.

Please quote a relevant excerpt of the book advocating genocide, not fanciful conspiracy theories.

How do you suppose THAT would effect global climate, eh?

*Global* climate ? Probably not a lot. Do you have any evidence to support your idea ? Can you propose a more effective way of reducing emissions ?

So basically you're proposing a model in which there is selection and crossover but no mutation.

In this case, the total diversity in any population (including "the total of all animals on earth") can only go down. Right?

So then why do there appear to be species around now that were not around, say, during the time of the dinosaurs (because they do not seem to appear in the fossil record). How can new things be created after the Creation, without mutation? Or is the Genesis account of Creation to be understood in a metaphorical sense, and is it still ongoing? If so, is mutation a reasonable way to explain the mechanism by which this occurs? Or is this straying too far from a literal interpretation of scripture (and do we need a literal interpretation?)?

It has only been in the past 6 months that I've thought about replacing it. It just can't handle the load of spam I get, plus spamassassin and a couple other anti-spam counter-measures. Each message takes about 5 seconds to process on this old iron

Try to replace SpamAssassin (written in Perl) with Bogofilter (written in C). You'll have to retrain the filter, but improvements in memory usage and speed are assured.