and take malaria-prevention meds. You may need to start them a couple of weeks before your trip, depending on which meds they're using these days.

Also, anywhere that has malaria issues usually has other diseases that you'll need to get immunized for, so expect some fun shots.

Similarly to the "Your Tivo Thinks You're Gay" problem, Disney might decide that you like "It's a Small World", and have its pinkness follow you around on TV screens and its music playing on any nearby speakers. And imagine(er) that they sell that information to the Hello Kitty people so it also follows you around the mall next time you're there.

I'm much more bothered by the California Transportation department's FastTrack than by Disney's. I don't need them tracking me fast, and they already charge $1 more for paying cash, and they're going to start making Fastrack use mandatory on the Golden Gate Bridge (or take your license plate photo and send you a bill.) I use that bridge 2-3 times a year, so buying a surveillance appliance is annoying. On the other hand, Disney World FastTracks were somewhat useful, not that I plan to go back. (I saw "It's a Small World" at the 1964 New York World's Fair, and once was really enough :-)

Look at the original - the source data was ~/mail/contacts/* , which is potentially multiple files.

The original command line we're flaming about started with " cat ~/mail/contacts/* | grep [...] ", so assuming there's more than one file in that directory, you can't just use
Also, "cat ~/mail/contacts/* | grep [...] " produces different results than "grep [...] ~/mail/contacts/* " - either RTFM or try it. Pay attention to the filename: at the beginning of each line. Maybe you want it, maybe you don't.

At $DAYJOB, the IT department policy used to be "IE6 Only", which everybody ignored and installed Firefox. Eventually they finally decided to support IE7 (and now support IE8, at least on Win7), and they installed Firefox on our machines the middle of this year. Unfortunately, it's the FF10 ESR, which broke my working environment (FF13 really did do a much better job of memory management, and since IT only supports 32-bit Win7, I can't just fix the problem by installing more RAM.) So I'm hoping they'll get moving and let us upgrade to 17 ESR real soon. (And given the latest IE bugs, I'm hoping they'll let us upgrade to IE9 or IE10 soon?)

My lab machines are mostly running Linux, where this is of course not a problem. And the Linux virtual machines on my desktop run relatively current FF, but there's not really enough room for a big enough VM. One of my coworkers installed native Linux on his laptop with a VMware Windows machine on top that's running the IT department official versions, which let him max out the hardware RAM and lets him do most of his work from Linux, which was at least somewhat helpful.

Dr. Who has (at least usually) been recorded in Cardiff Wales, with a mostly-Welsh cast. The Seventh and Tenth Doctors were played by Scottish actors, but the other main-sequence and alternate doctors have almost all been played by Englishmen (some women, one British-Swazi, and a few who Wikipedia doesn't give enough information about.)

Unless things have changed since the last time this story came around, the synthetic meat stuff is still grown using meat-based nutrients (chicken broth, etc.), so it's still not vegetarian even if you aren't counting the animal cells that were used to start the culture growing. So I still won't be eating it, unless they can feed it veggies instead, but even for carnivores, it'll be pretty much a lab curiosity unless they can do that anyway. (I suppose it's possible that they could get some economic benefits by feeding it the leftover animal bits that would otherwise have become Pink Slime (TM) or Animal Byproducts, but not much.)

As far as yuck factor of some processed animal products goes, if you eat microbially-modified foods like cheese or tempeh or beer, you don't really get to complain. (I'd include natto in that list, but it's pretty gross.) There are some vegetarians who object to vegetarian fake meats because "Eww, yuck, how can you eat anything that's trying to be fake dead animal!", but I'm not usually bothered by that - we've evolved as omnivores that use fire, so cooked dead animals are tasty even though we can now choose not to eat them, and most fake meats are really just patties or chunks of vegetable protein with optional umami flavors that can be used in traditional recipes.

3 academic jobs for every 10 PhDs granted? So the academic job market has gotten better, then? (:-)

Back in the early 90s, a friend of mine tried to get a job as a physics professor, after doing electronics-related physics in industry for a while. First try got him into the top 3 of 600 applicants for small state college, and the next year (when candidate#1 had flaked out or gotten a better offer), he finally got the position. Paid dirt, and was totally out in the sticks (which did at least mean he could afford to live there.) On the other hand, back in the mid-80s, physics PhDs were getting jobs as quants on Wall Street, and the military-industrial complex was still hiring rocket scientists, so there weren't quite as many applicants for the academic jobs.

I often listen to Pacifica Radio (KPFA, WBAI, etc.), the leftist radio news network, and they've been working with Al Jazeera for a year or so. It's an interesting source of alternative coverage.

This mailing list has been around since the mid-80s (on several different hosts over the years. Most recently we moved it to gmail, after the elderly residential Linux box it ran on lost a disk drive. And we get to use mailman, instead of being the probably-last users of an old version of majordomo!)

Nobody does want spammers in residential accounts (and yes, I know you were trolling), and occasionally we've had people who had to get the host machine whitelisted or use their other account, but it's been on machines with static addresses, which helps, and they've all been run by people who know how to configure their reverse DNS properly, etc. Most of the time the worst that happens is we get greylisted, so some people get announcements a bit late, or somebody moves hosts again and the chain of forwarding they've had since college breaks somewhere. We had one round of spamming a few years back, so we had to make the list subscribers-only, which adds to list-admin work (thanks, Richard and Michael), and a while back it got split into two lists (announcements and discussion) after a flamewar, and keeping the two functions separate has been generally useful if a bit complex.

A deep link where they can buy a clue. URLs are in general neither copyrightable nor trademarkable, and if they wish to limit what visitors can see on their web pages, there are many ways to do so, such as having your web server check the REFERER value, which was designed for applications such as this, or having it check for appropriate cookies.

I seem to remember that one news site told Google to stop indexing their web server, so Google did. Traffic dropped off radically; I forget if they'd notified Google via robots.txt (so they could fix it themselves once they realized what a mistake they'd made), or it they'd used some kind of Stupid Lawyer Tricks, in which case they'd have had to ask Google nicely to start indexing them again.

Probably it was the late 80s? Anyway, scanner-OCR things were about $10,000, and I worked for a large bureaucratic company with a large bureaucratic purchasing department, and my department wanted to buy one for our lab. After wrangling the usual bureaucratic issues about capital vs. expense budgets, when we eventually to buy it, our purchasing department considered this to be a computer system, and tried to get the vendor to sign the same kind of contract we'd have for a multi-million dollar mainframe from IBM, except that IBM had as many lawyers as we did so they'd have thrown out most of the stupid stuff. It wasn't just the issue of workmen's comp insurance that bothered them (look, we'll ship it to you by UPS, so we won't be suing you if our guy trips in the mailroom.) It was the patent indemnification that killed the deal - the vendor was a small business and wasn't going to be able to insure against any possible lawsuits (even though they didn't expect there to be any of them.)

Unfortunately for the prior art claims with the current idiots, this thing didn't trigger the magic "business method for doing [something standard] over the Internetz!" patent approach; it probably did 9600 baud RS232 or something.

I don't understand the bit about N different randomly-named companies sending out demands for payment - which one of them really owns it? Presumably not more than one at a time? If there's some question about it, presumably the first thing you'd do in a court action would be to subpoena the plaintiff and all their records to get them to demonstrate that they were really the current and One True Owner, and while you're at it get them to specify exactly what they're claiming.

Meanwhile, this chain of spinoffs nonsense sounds like it's a crude attempt at some of the shell games in Charlie Stross's Accelerando...

You might be, but they're more likely to be either evolutionary dead ends or things that other current species are descended from but not mammals. Why? Just numbers, most species that ever existed died out, and there were a number of huge die-backs that killed off large fractions of Earth's life forms.

But as the parent posted says, it's a mistake to think of the evolution of bacteria as having stopped.

Any respectable ISP should never block inbound tcp/25, and shouldn't block outbound tcp/25 for people who want to use it. In practice, of course, 99.99% of outbound residential port 25 traffic is spam from infected machines, so it's good to make blocking the default behaviour for users who don't ask you to turn it off, but the primary reason for using an ISP smart mail server for your outbound email is also long obsolete, since most people have full-time internet connections instead of dialup modems on not-always-on computers at home these days.

My home PC has about 5000x the CPU horsepower and 300x the network speed of the VAX I used to manage as a departmental mail server, and by running a mail server myself I can theoretically have much better control over my outgoing mail, and Linux comes with several mail systems that are better than the mid-80s versions of sendmail. (In my case, I don't actually bother, because inbound mail service is a lot harder than outbound, and the service providers who do the first few steps of inbound filtering for me do a good enough job on my outbound mail.) It's certainly powerful enough for me to run a mailing list to send party announcements to a few hundred friends.