jesusandmo.net (just click "ok" when it prompts you to accept the browser helper to improve your experience)

Unless this Iranian troll was naive enough to open one of those "e-cards" that required a little "browser helper", this strongly suggests that Yahoo complied with the government's request to push spyware onto a specific member's computer. They could do this through the ad mechanism, or perhaps the all-new Yahoo! Email! has an embedded Patriot! Patch! facility built-in?

It doesn't sound like too crazy of an idea to me, that these apparently precocious supermassive black holes were just left over from an earlier universe. Suppose our Big Bang erupted into a preexisting space, and these awaiting black holes significantly accelerated the galaxy-making schedule this time around. Yes, this time around.

Instead of hyperinflation expanding faster than light in the first microseconds, perhaps our Bang opened into a pre-existing "cavity" of a few light-minutes across. Perhaps we burst out of a dimple in the wall of a larger space; an ancient, nearly-collapsed universe, breathing new life into it and restarting inflation. Expansion was at purely Einsteinian speeds (is there such a term?), but an illusion was created of superluminal motion.

I've also got a theory that the acceleration of inflation is less due to mysterious 'dark energy' than to our halo of "new" matter approaching a halo of really, really old cold matter and inactive black holes that exists beyond the Hubble radius. The Great Attractor may just be a lump that is a bit closer than the rest.

Or acceleration may be due to our 3-dimensional universe passing over and through higher-dimensional topologies that are invisible to us but for their gravity. We've begun to roll downhill, for reasons of absolutely no significance, and we'll just continue to do so until things level out. The higher-dimension topologies being invisible to us, we just have to take them as we get 'em, like unexpected waves.

Bad news; chances are, they moved your wire pair to the same box your uverse neighbors run through anyway. Your connection is crummy because they make it so. See if you can verify the configuration of your modem at 192.168.0.1. If you're getting 50% or less of what your tier is supposed to provide, they will have to fix it. And they can throttle it transparently by "misconfiguring" upstream equipment. Happened to us once a year. Level II has to "fix" that since the lines will "check out ok".

This is true. We were told we couldn't get higher speeds than "Pro 3Mbps" because we had "legacy DSL". Our speeds sucked even though we were only 4000' from the nearest central office. One tech we had out here told us that really, we were wired into the DSLAM 1500' away just like the uverse in the area. So, we were getting a miserable 2.5Mbps while only 1500' away from where our wires joined the fiber just because we wouldn't "upgrade" to a different brand of service.

"should read that the people should have near unlimited access to any government records"

So what exceptions would you gladly like to see the government routinely classify EVERYTHING under ever after?

Whenever I log onto Slashdot, my firewall immediately reports Slashdot servers sniffing a bunch of my ports. I use DD-WRT with logging enabled and WallWatcher to display events.

There's no way nor reason to launch most of the building material from Earth. In a boot-strappy way, we'll be mining the moon to build orbital solar power stations. The power stations and mining efforts will need larger and better living quarters for the workers, so we'll build habitats in the Earth-Moon area. The first big habitats will be built mostly out of crud launched from the Moon. Pulverized rock will be sintered into great tubes using focused sunlight, like a gigantic 3D printer. Unlimited material, unlimited energy. The colonies will become self-sufficient, and their people comfortably well-off providing power to Earth, perhaps exchanging rare materials, exporting the biological elements of Earth's many environments. But even if we build space elevators, the vast majority of Earth's inhabitants will never leave; space will not be an outlet for overpopulation.

Colonies will probably pop up around moon-sized Mercury next, then Mars' asteroid moons, and eventually the dark, distant asteroid belt. There is ample room and materials for millions of habitats, each essentially self-sufficient, once built. Robotics would mostly automate agriculture. Mining and habitat construction might be largely automated, too. There will be far more humans living in space than on crowded Earth. It will be too expensive and time consuming to bother colonizing the other planets. There is room and resources to continue growing unchecked for thousands of years, if not millions. Our race really never needs to leave the solar system.

LOL, so, in stages, the spam flood finally forced you to configure the email server properly? It could have been one of your colleagues who you were ignoring. ;)

Well, including using free subdomain services for the same purpose, I've been doing this since around 1999. I worked for a local ISP and learned lots of neat tricks. I also have noticed a short list of weird, specific address names which I know I've never used before, but still revisit me every once in a while. The disadvantage with my use of a catch-all mailbox is that any random string@ will produce a deliverable email -except- for the blacklisted ones. My guess is someone once made some random email names, which they expected to be rejected, to get a baseline on my email server's behavior towards truly unknown recipients. Somehow they didn't realize I simply had a catch-all, and start bombarding me with spam. But perhaps the test email addresses still got shuffled into a list of valid, delivered ones and then got redistributed for general spamming. Oddly, few others have ever tried sending to random addresses at my domains, so the list, all blacklisted, rarely grows. This suggests that spammers actually avoid domains with catch-alls because they can't be bothered to generate a few thousand random email addresses to sell. If that changes, I'll have to switch to a whitelist scheme and set up disposable email addresses before I use them.

I create unique email addresses too. I run a catch-all mailbox, so my scheme doesn't do much to prevent me getting spam. It tells me who has been compromised and I can be a good citizen and let them know. I give them one fair chance, and if they don't respond, or if they're retaliatory towards me, then feck 'em. Nobody ever gets my "real" email address. Most websites simply never respond to my information. If it's a blogger, they infrequently respond, but just to express doubt, and interrogate me about my unique email policy on the grounds that I'm violating some unwritten "real identity" rule of theirs. They can be real jerks to me, the friendly messenger. One major website swore they were secure but had been compromised once over a year before. Since my email naming convention is websitenameyeardate@mydomain, I could prove my email had been harvested much more recently. They still flat out said "didn't happen". Otherwise, almost none of my spam comes from "unique" addresses.

There is a small handful of once-valid addresses I used as a blogger and forum commenter which continue to get email after many years, even though my email server properly rejects them as unknown mailboxes. Strangely, most spam sent to me is constructed using common names like admin@ contact@ info@ and a short list of asian firstnames@ of all things. If a particular address gets enough activity, I will add it to my blacklist. Setting the server to reject connections from unregistered email servers actually blocks far more spam than complex rules could.

The most interesting episode was when I kept getting repeated attempts to relay an email to a particular address. I could see by that address, that the recipient was local to me and contacted him. He found his mailbox maxed out with these test emails from servers which -were- relaying. He'd registered at websites using that email address and used the same password everywhere, so when one website was eventually compromised, they tried his password on Road Runner, and had themselves a handy mailbox to dump email relay test results into.

I read about this very thing in the news 15 years ago! I half expect now, to learn that some surgeon in the 1700's was already using it experimentally. Get off your ass, medical science!

I suspect that if this asteroid were to land gently in a valley somewhere, and we were to exploit all of it's resources conventionally, we'd find considerably less mineral wealth. The $195B figure is probably about saving the cost of launching comparable amounts of metals and water, minus the cost of developing infrastructure to mine in space. Mining in space is going to be about building in space, folks. The only thing we'll be sending back home is beams of space-generated power and research data. We'll spend the next million years filling the solar system with miles-long solar heat-sintered concrete cylinders to live in. There will be far more humans in space than on Earth, and we'll rarely mingle in person. Maybe someday we'll have the skill and energy to visit other stars (we quasi-already have the technology), but it won't be to bring back dilithium crystals and chests of gold-pressed latinum.

This wouldn't work for me, because the only thing that keeps some of my servers from misbehaving is the fact that they know I can drop-kick it down the stairwell if it acts up one more time.

The sad thing is, they probably stopped routing your DSL connection all the way to the central office, but connected it at the same sidewalk DSLAM box that your U-verse connects at. You've had a "classic" DSL connection that could achieve U-verse speeds, which they just wouldn't give it to you unless you paid for the conversion.