Deplaning.

*ducks*

Reasons:
1. Because Safari after a few hours of use consumes a couple Gigs of RAM even if you close every window. Chrome does not. 250GB for me for the parent process plus whatever tabs i still have open.

2. Because Safari loves to crash, especially when running in 64-bit mode on Snow.

3. Because Safari uses the retarded dialog box to offer to save passwords, before you're sure you've entered the right password, unlike Chrome and Firefox 3 who present a "ribbon" after you log in offering to save it.

4. Because Chrome is WAY FASTER and doesn't beach ball all the time the way Safari does.*

5. Finally, because ever since I've tried Chrome on Windows when it first came out, I have detested having to use the slow, bloated Safari. I've been counting the days until at least a usable beta would be available for Mac. I'm never going back!

*All these things are on my 2.5Ghz machine so no, it's not just that my computer sucks. Safari sucks.

Damn! I knew I had something wrong, because it actually wouldn't work, as soon as I added the host header. (and without the host header it just sent me a 301.)

Thanks for the correction.

Telnet is not just port 23. Telnet lets you send and receive text to any port including those used for other protocols like HTTP. For example, on a UNIX machine you can do this:

$ telnet slashdot.org 80
Trying 216.34.181.45...
Connected to slashdot.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
Host: slashdot.org
GET / HTTP/1.1
... and press return twice, then the server will respond with the HTML page you requested.

The GP's point was, you could telnet to the HTTP port and post SQL injection. Not that using telnet on port 23 is common anymore.

Thanks for the insightful reply. I didn't know about most of what you said and I appreciate the information.

I don't understand that part, but it's clear that you know what you're talking about so I assume it's a valid point ;)

I live 15 minutes away from work by car and 45 minutes away by CalTrain. I calculated that if I took CalTrain I would save $3 a month, in exchange for sacrificing 20 hours of my time a month.

And CalTrain is the only public trans that wouldn't require a transfer onto the accursed MUNI for me. BART, as you probably know, has a grand total of 6 stations in SF, four of which are on Market Street.

I think the poster I replied to must work in the financial district. If your destination is right there in those 4 blocks or so where BART goes, and you're lucky enough to have BART nearby where you live... then I agree, it is great. Except it costs so damn much, but parking downtown is obviously even worse (more costly). If you happen to live right next to a Muni train line, well, as long as you don't mind getting robbed, or at minimum crammed literally like sardines with a bunch of rude, smelly people, then that's also more convenient than driving across SF.

I bet plenty of people who work downtown take BART into the city.

But I'd bet that the majority of Bay Bridge commuters work pretty far away from SF's pitiful subway network, and would have to take a train and one or more buses, requiring 1-2 hours to get to work, compared to the half hour or 45 minutes (or less!) to drive in.

Furthermore, I think at least some of the "drivers" are former public-transit riders who originally wanted to "do the green thing" but just got fed up with how bad the public transportation is in the Bay Area.

you do realize that there are a LOT of non-ascii characters which look up to 100% the same as the real latin characters but have different unicode representations.

Once it's possible to do so, you can bet your ass that the first domain registered will be citibank.com (but with a Unicode 1D694, the "mathematical monospace small k". Then the phishers can send you an email saying "Please log in at citiban.com and folks will hover, check the URL, say "nope, no funny business there, that's clearly Citibank, and get phished.

Or how about slashdot.org ? The "Latin Small Letter S With Dot Below" won't look all that different when it's underlined!

Any browser I use will have IDN completely disabled if at all possible, and anyone else in an English locale would do well to do the same. Don't blame me, blame the scammers and phishers.

Fortunately for you, on preview i found out Slashdot's filter blocks the unicode characters, so you can't see the intended effect--I had to fake it. But try it yourself. It's amazing how many duplicate or near-duplicate characters there are in Unicode.

Why drive into SF?

Because living there costs twice as much as a similarly-appointed apartment anywhere else in the galaxy.

Combine that with the utter ghettoness of the whole city--even the new fancy million-dollar condo towers are surrounded by panhandlers and smash-and-grab thieves.

Combine that with the fact that anyone who lives in the whole western half of the city takes 45+minutes of hilly, car-destroying, non-freeway driving to get to the eastern half (where all the jobs are)...whereas on a good traffic day, Oakland is only 20 minutes from work, and most of the peninsula is only 15 minutes away. All of which is freeway. Thank the hippies (the 50s freeway revolt) for that one.

And finally, despite these things, companies still insist on putting jobs there. Lots of jobs.

San Francisco: Thousands of jobs for the taking, but not one nice place to live for less than $5,000 a month.

I agree with the rest of your post except this part. Why would a second bridge made for redundancy need to connect to the unimportant rock of YBI or Treasure Island? The 500 or whatever people who live on TI certainly don't need a second bridge. Once is certainly enough.

Masonry? I bet a brick bridge works well in London or whatever, but in one of our earthquakes that whole thing would be in the bay. ;)

So, is your position that public works projects CAN safely be rushed? XPeter is right, and it doesn't matter how old he is. He's still right. Quit complaining about his "tone." You may have inferred long experience, but he did not imply it. He simply used common sense.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting--of course unless you peered with every ISP in the world your packets have to go through other people's networks besides only the origin and destination.

The difference is, the Internet is "supposed" to work on the principle that you pass packets not meant for you on towards their addressee, not parse them at a much higher layer, decide their apparent intent for yourself, carry out that intent, and then return the results, or maybe your own interpretation of the results.

> What would be the point of that?

Simple... If they proxy the results, they reserve the right to censor the result for you. Sometimes they return what the real dns server said, sometimes they decide to instead return an IP with more Comcastic(tm) content. Just because they aren't using this capability yet doesn't mean they won't use it later. Why else have it? /Still would prefer comcast to my shitty "municipal cable" ... Blecch.

Thanks for continuing the conversation.

I can understand that you enjoy practicing your faith. I can tell from your attitude and tone that it gives you a sense of fulfillment. I would like to live forever, too. It's just that it doesn't ring true for me. My mind refuses to accept the contradictions of the God that I was raised to believe in. The revelation I tossed out above was intended to be an example of something that a big-picture God would probably just leave up to his free-will-possessing creatures, you know? Consider for a moment, that to be an American in good standing is a lot more relaxed set of rules than to be LDS in good standing. To be an Iranian in good standing, on the other hand, I am told is more restrictive than LDS. As an American, I wouldn't want to move to Iran (even if I spoke Arabic) because I like having the freedom to do lots of things that may not be good for me. God apparently also gives us freedoms to do whatever we want, but if we want to be in good standing (like I would) then really you have to conform to a very strict set of rules. Not as bad as the Iranians have it, but still, less free than an American.

For me to worship a God, my heart tells me that God has to value Freedom at least as much as our mortal, imperfect founding fathers did. He ought not to mind if my wife wears a pretty summer dress (no sleeves) as is the custom in our culture. He ought not to mind if I use some of his creations (coffee beans) to make a tasty beverage (or heck, a Frappuccino or a coffee jelly bean). He ought not to want my money. He ought to grant women the same privileges I enjoy, and responsibilities I bear, as a man. He ought to never have been okay with human slavery, nor stoning as punishment for victimless crimes. (Ok, on slavery the founding fathers lost a point there too, huh. But still, I'd expect better from Almighty God.)

On to the tax point:

I agree that the ability to tax something is also the ability to kill something (although smoking doesn't seem to have died out yet)... But by that logic, the governments of every country are trying to kill all business by taxing them. I'm just saying that a church is a business. (I'm not singling out the LDS at all, I mean in general) Churches sell the service of soul-saving and enlightenment, most churches sell it on a friendly sliding scale like yours does--'Please pay whatever you can afford,' suggested donation 10% of your income. They also do two other things most businesses do: Lobby politically, and give charitable donations.

I have a warm spot in my heart for Mormons, because of how many of you guys I count as close friends, and the last thing I want to do is kill off your church because I know that it does a lot of good and the people all seem to mean well. But if Mom & Pop's Store can do just fine being taxed as a business, then why couldn't churches? Churches didn't used to be tax-exempt and they did just fine. In fact some (libertarian-type) people argue that granting that status itself was a dastardly deed because that put Uncle Sam in the business of telling you who is and is not a valid church. For example, the lobbying thing. Churches have to be careful with their political activities because if they overtly do things in support of a candidate or issue, they can lose their tax-exempt status. Isn't this itself a violation of the church members' rights? If you want to form a church that preaches overtly "Vote for Quimby" and donates part of the tithe to the Quimby campaign, why should you be treated differently from Church B which says "Vote for, uh, family values please" and donates to the "Family Values PAC."

Churches that do any real charitable donations would probably not turn much of a "profit" when classified as regular businesses, and I don't think that would hurt them at all. In fact I bet most churches run pretty much break-even.

The other fair alternative is to grant tax-exempt status to all churches, including the ones who are overtly political lobbying organizations, so basically every PAC or campaign out there -- both conservative and liberal -- would suddenly be a tax-exempt "Church" to avoid taxes and campaign finance law. Surely we don't want that, but is the current system that much better? Where Uncle Sam says "Sure, preach whatever you want but if we think it's too political we'll yank your tax exempt status"?

We might be getting too off-topic, so feel free to respond on my Journal. I've created a new post for this purpose. I do enjoy discussing this issue with someone who is rational and friendly such as yourself.