Arbitrary

Indeed, but this depends on how good the admin is. If the admin is really careful, employees probably won't be able to gain restricted access. If the admin is an idiot...well, then no guarantees. I would try this, as I want to download IE6 and be able to read/write Chinese on my computer. But I have Windows 2000, so I don't know if this will actually work. I suppose I could always just ask the admin (my dad), since it's not like I'm doing anything illegal. But he's not anywhere within reach. XD

Hmm...that sounds interesting. But, looking at this part of the sentence: So do you mean that your extension is to get rid of the thing he doesn't want on the page, as in, say, the ads? I think there's already adBlock and RIP for that. Though that probably isn't what you meant at all, but that's how I interpreted it. As for Java, I know it...but, well, I can't exactly help you until you make it clear on what you need--as in, let's say, how exactly are you going to reduce bandwidth? By the way -- making pages load faster--that reminds me of FasterFox....

I agree about the Flash thing. Though I actually enjoy Flash, there are times when I'm in a hurry to get to the content and am not in the mood to watch whatever Flash intro you want to shove in my face, especially if that intro really sucks. Also, I think it's useful to have a liquid layout. Perhaps not entirely liquid, but at least make it liquid enough so that when users resize their browsers a little, it won't look clunky with horizontal scrollbars and that users with an 800 x 600 resolution will have no more problems viewing your site than users with 1400 x 1200 resolution. Background music is indeed VERY annoying--it slows down the site a lot. Besides, the webmaster's taste of music may not be the visitor's taste of music. Just because you like rap doesn't mean everyone else in the world has the same taste in sound. I think it's less about the wrong impression. Not all visitors prowl around and try to see what forum type you're using. (I, for one, don't bother) However, using something like vBulletin has a lot more features than phpBB or SMF. Users don't particularly care if your forum was free or paid for, but they will care if it has the functions that they want and need. If they want subforums and discover that your umodded version of phpBB doesn't have it, they're going to be annoyed an leave. If you can somehow mod phpBB to have every function your visitors need, good for you, you invested the time and effort into a free product so that it now has the quality of a paid one. I think he means not using photos as the background. As in, if you take a photo of a tree, decide it looks nice, and decide to paste it as the background. I've seen people do this before, and then they decide to use black text over the scattery tree-filled background. It totally kills me. ><

Indeed, that's very true. These tests are just supposed to be for fun. I took this test a while ago, and before I even took the test, I was quite sure I would be at least a moderate on schizoid. I'm just...not particularly inclined towards social events and very uncomfortable when forced to spend time with people. Besides, I'm sure an antisocial person would not get antisocial on the test. They'd manipulate themselves, lie on the questions, and get something akin to low on everything. Psychologists would smile, and they'd run off and do what they please. JK

Um...perhaps they were talking about IE7? Which also has tabs? Lol. linux-penguin, I love your avatar..waaaay too funny. Haha. I use Firefox, and I find it quite good. I like the tabbed interface, the added security, the addons (especially adBlock...forget ads!). The biggest problem with it is its bloatedness. It takes up around 100,000K after using it for a couple of hours, which can get really annoying. I then have to shut Firefox down, and (luckily because I have Firefox 2 Beta), it'll save the session for me so that I can reload it. If Mozilla could somehow improve the memory issue, I would be really satisfied. Of course, Firefox is free, unlike Internet Explorer, so I can't complain. And besides, Firefox is great when it comes down to standards compliance. I remember the other day when trying with a friend to design a website for our school's club--IE would just not display right. >< We called it Internet Exploder.

I do delete spam...but that's just because the spam really annoys me. It feels like it's cluttering my inbox, even though it doesn't really matter since it doesn't appear in the inbox and I have all the space I need. I end up deleting a lot because I'm sort of a neat freak and don't like random (stupid) emails lying around in my inbox. If I don't like it...it goes straight to trash. Hmm...the ability to select multiple messages? I remember that being included in the interface ever since I started using. The Select: All, None, Read, Unread, Starred, etc feature was always there...And when I first started using labels, I could easily select multiple messages. I don't get how this is recent. About the delete all button in the spam and trash folders, well, I've never actually found them. (Pitiful me) I just select all and then click 'delete forever'. My inbox size is at around 2%. I direct my subscriptions emails to another inbox so that I don't actually have to look at them. All subscriptions directed at my Gmail account I have a filter that drops them in archives under the label of subscriptions in case they ever come of any use. It's like all the clutter that comes in my normal mailbox...except that in that case I can't do a thing.

I was messing with mod_rewrites this morning and I couldn't manage to perform a mod_rewrite on my subdomain. I tried this: <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>RewriteEngine onRewriteCond ^feitan/info/$ feitan/info.php</IfModule> in my .htaccess file, but that was in my index directory, so I don't know if that works. Do I have to create a separate .htaccess file in my subdomain? Also, would you refer to the subdomain feitan.arbitrary.astahost.com as public_html/feitan/info or just feitan/info? Should I type out the entire url or should it just be subfolders? Thanks for any help on this matter. EDIT: Never mind, I solved the problem. Just add the .htaccess file in the subdomain. Which I apparently tried earlier, but the file was somehow corrupted, so it didn't work. xD

Hahaha...now that's funny. But of course, who said it had to be the boy scouts searching for this? Why can't it just be some robot? (I mean, any human, boy scout or not, who indulges in searching for illegal porn sites is going to get some kick outta searching...><, so it has to be a programmed robot who doesn't think consensually...)

We aren't the number one living being...(well, depending on how you look at it, a virus could easily take over a human ) It still gives us no right to control their lives. If we aren't allowed to mess with ourselves (which doesn't affect others directly anyway), we seriously should not be allowed to mess with others (especially when it does hurt them in some way). I mean, inbreeding dogs can create genetic problems that wouldn't have happened had their been no human intervention. I just don't think we should be allowed to make their lives miserable like that... Hum...but couldn't it also be argued that overpopulation is just a cycle of evolution, which is nothing short of natural? For instance, overpopulation will most likely lead to mass extinction, and we know that mass extinctions have happened in the past, when there was no human intervention. Which means that any mass extinction happening in the future as a result of overpopulation is only natural. We do something bad (i.e., have too many people), we repent for it by dying eventually anyway. No big difference in the long run.

I did a test at MySpace. (And this is a rant against the users, not MySpace ) I added a number of people to my friends list, just to see how naive these people were. (It was around 30 people. I just went randomly and picked) And surprisingly, about 20 of the people accepted my invitation. I was very shocked--hey, I don't know you. You don't know me. Why in the world are you accepting the fact that I'm adding you to my friends list? Aren't you going to possess at least an ounce of suspicion about who I am and why I'm suddenly adding a torrent of people to my friends list? And why are these same people complaining about rapists roaming MySpace? Stop adding random strangers to your friends list, for godsake! Yeah, any rant against MySpace is mostly directed at its users. I mean, MySpace could definitely have better code too...but its users are the biggest point worthy of complaint. (We get more unwanted exposure...) My MySpace complaint of the day: Every time I visit a MySpace site, it always freezes my computer. Always. I don't get it, but the users seem to feel happy uploading 50 YouTube videos without a thought in the world for their visitors. And the garish backgrounds--more often than not I can't read a word of what they're saying because of the pumpkin-halloween-ghost-monster-blah background with gray text over it. Can't they themselves see that it's insanely hard to scrutinize the contents of their site? Of course, that's not to say the makers of MySpace are stupid--they're hecka smart. They're making a lot of money, whether off of idiots or smart people.

Yeah, I agree with Quatrux, the porn sites are definitely a lot worse. They ought to focus their energy on what might be the worst form of criminal activity and trying to abolish that instead. I guess the words in that news report that scare me the most are, "expected to participate". I mean, what? Why? They're being forced to do something? It definitely does sound like Hitler--they're hiring kids to do what they don't necessarily want to do. Now...if only there were a loophole in the law. Ahh...yes! Aren't there jurisdiction issues? There are a number of countries in the world where the copyright law is highly lax--like getting a bunch of boy scouts to enforce them is going to help. Besides--there is another moot point to this. You cannot use a forum to violate copyright laws! Ever. Just because an illegal site was posted at a forum does not mean you can automatically accuse those who visited that thread of downloading! Visting doesn't equal downloading, so how is searching through forums supposed to help them figure out who downloaded and who didn't? They technically can only find the site that the illegal file was hosted at (which is better...but the site doesn't mention suing the hosters of illegal music...only the downloaders) And just because you shared a site with others through a forum doesn't mean you're doing the illegal act--the only illegal act would be hosting or downloading. There's no proof you're doing either of those just by sharing the site. So I guess you could argue the boy scouts at court...if you get a good enough lawyer. This is highly stupid anyway. So China's copyright laws are lax, and Hong Kong's just a special district in China. What the heck are they gonna do? >_> Tell the Chinese to stop pirating or else go to jail? Pssssh. Yeah right.

Um...I dunno, but maybe you could set up a filter in Gmail somehow? Like maybe you have a certain email address that sends you these things, so you could set your filter to include those emails or maybe there's certain word in that email that identify it--so filter those emails to remain inside Gmail. I guess you could set it to "archive", and then maybe set the POP3 settings to not forward mail in archives.

Really, I thought those were pingbacks? I'm kinda confused, I always thought that whenever they quote, that's supposed to be a pingback, as whenever that happens on my site, it always turns out to be a pingback. But yeah, that is quite annoying. However, if you do keep up on your blog (aka, check it every once in a while, preferably daily), then you shouldn't have this problem. You should be able to filter out and delete the stupid spammy comments and not fall under the at-risk or even banned list at Google. If you don't keep track of your blog, you probably won't have a high PageRank at Google anyway. Moreover, even if you didn't have WordPress (though I do), I'm sure you could find a way to one of those common-spam word lists and then use those to make a script to filter out the comments with those words. I guess it's hard to say...but I've never thought that when people say, "Nice website" it's comment spam. I usually think of comment spam as something that's related to "FREE online poker" or "FREE law services" etc. I always thought of praise as just a comment. And this is the hard part--how is any spam filtering service supposed to determine if the person who commented is a real person or a spam bot? I mean, the person behind the comment could be well-meaning and just trying to praise. But the penalization is important to consider. No one wants to be lowered in ranking because of a risk they never knew of, especially a risk that, had they known of earlier, could've been prevented.

This is true. Most of it is bad. Yet, it's really not too hard to just filter out the bad stuff--just look at the daily favorites on the front page (or the daily deviations, for that matter)--those are usually good. If you try to browse, though, most of the art there is bad. Sometimes you can find good art by browsing, but that usually takes a lot of searching, which most people aren't willing to do. And a lot of comments are cheesy--they don't really serve the purpose of helping the artist improve. People simply don't want to comment with concrit. I think some of it might have something to do with their being scared of starting a flame war with a criticizing comment.

Well, I remember quite a while ago when I played this game called SmartMonsters. From what I recollect of the game, you role play as a character, try to earn money, skills etc. Then, based on those skills, you can chose a profession, such as a lawyer, or a politician (in order to achieve these, you'd have to learn skills in backstabbing, apparently ) or a real-estate agent, etc. The game is fun and it seems to be constantly renovating itself. At first the game is a bit confusing, and I'd recommend not getting out of the Sanctuary Island until you've familiarized yourself with what to do. Usually the players there will guide you and you can always ask for help through the chat system. (Everyone's in-character and are really helpful) Meanwhile, it's also useful to look over the different commands. For instance, you want to type pick pear in order to grab a pear off a pear tree or laugh to show other players your feelings about a certain thing. You gain experience points by looking around the place, so the look command is very important. Using that often will make you gain experience faster. Most players there will recommend that you don't leave Sanctuary Island until you reach level 5, but that's virtually impossible. You can't gain that much experience at Sanctuary Island. It's probably better to gather a large amount of food and then head off either north or south. Once you start moving off of Sanctuary Island, it's good to look at the maps, as things will get confusing. The maps are written by players, but can help you get out of some predicaments rather quickly.

I don't really care about cloning. Those scientists can do as they please--if they manage to achieve this, fine. Yet I doubt any of this will happen any time soon. It's hard to make old genes from 10 years ago will fare well in a new environment--one good reason why many clones die early. Moreover, I don't think cloning has anything to do with controlling which genes are put into a human being. Cloning is just copying another being, with the same genes as that being. And cloning gives the organism traits that make it harder to survive rather than easier to survive. On the other hand, personally I find that much of this controlling what genes are in a newborn to be mcuh worse. Perhaps some of it can be balanced out by the fact that evolution is change--and by striving for this new breakthrough, we are still just acting natural. On the other hand, filtering out undesirable genes can lead to a lot of discrimination. Even with our current technology of being able to test what genes are in a human, many people are already complaining about possible discrimination from insurance companies. With the ability to filter out undesirable genes, people will expect perfection to be the norm, and when anyone isn't perfect, discrimination will result. A lot of it will turn out to be like what was displayed in GATTACA, where the people who have disabilities are looked down upon entirely and are expected to perform menial tasks. With this, we could just be adding more social castes to the fire. Also, the gap between the rich and the poor will be widened--this time not only by money, but also by a number of factors. The poor will not have the money to spend on some expensive gene surgery so that their babies can be perfect. Which means that the next generation of the poor will fall prey to sickness more easily (relatively, that is, compared to the rich) and be less competent at jobs etc. In other words, it just makes it harder for someone who cannot afford the filtering of genes, as they have 100 times worse competition to deal with. Thus, filtering out genes isn't necessarily a great breakthrough for everyone--only for those who can afford it. On a different plane, I think we have the right to do whatever we wish. It's just the consequences that we have to consider. I mean, sure, we have the right to kill other people, but we must consider that we'll probably end up in jail or with the death penalty. Before we start randomly deciding to filter our undesirable genes out, we should think about whether it's needed, and whether or not its positive traits outdo its negative traits. Moreover, succeeding in filtering out undesirable genes can have other affects. For instance, what if this newborn whom you filled with the genes you liked isn't liked by them? Isn't that not like violating what they want? Just because you enjoy a certain trait (this especially applies to beauty, as trends will change over time) doesn't mean that your children will. In response to this, I think that perfection is only a relative matter. Our current ideals of perfection may be the achievement of wealth, beauty, physical strength, intelligence, health etc, but once we gain those traits, we'll have other, loftier views of perfection and wish that we could achieve those. Competition will still exist--just competition on a higher level. I mean, think back to the cavemen versus modern humans. Their view of a perfect life was probably to succeed at every hunt and bring food so that they can survive. Yet, our current view of success is less about survival, and more about...pleasure. Thus, what is perfection to them (survival) may not be perfection to us. The same goes for the future. Also, about our filtering out undesirable traits--we've been doing that for a long time with other animals. So what gives us the right to breed certain dogs together just because we want certain traits from them? Why should we be allowed to control their lives? At least in the case of filtering out undesirable human genes we're only controlling our lives (though this may affect others' lives too, but I mean of immediate relevance), but with breeding dogs, we're manipulating others to fit our needs. Btw, yeah, the clones could overthrow the ones who created them, but this all depends on what kind of education is going on. I still believe that environment has some root in determining a person's life, and that it's not all about genetics. Thus, if the clones were taught by their creators to have a certain view of life (that is, to be obedient and not rebellious), then they're more than likely to live a life of slavery. People won't think there's a better world when they have no access to knowledge. They'll assume what they have is the best they can get. Cloning organs, well, I think that's fine, as long as that's used for good purposes. Yet, the poor-rich idea once again applies. It'll be a breakthrough, yes, but considering that it won't be commonplace, only the rich will be able to afford it. Thus, it'll only be helpful to the rich when the socioeconomically disadvantaged were probably the ones who needed it the most in the first place. So unless we can have equal access (which I find impossible), it won't be as good as it sounds.

Yep, there isn't a best programming language. Never will be. Language wars kind of scare me, and remind me of certain other "fandoms" that I'd rather leave in the dust. Each language has their own uses. No language can take over all other languages, except for in a small sector of life. Anyways, I have to go with a lot of people here that PHP is truly very easy. It took me very little time to learn it. Apparently I accredited this to previous experience with Java, but that seems to not be the case, as everyone procclaims PHP is easy. Precisely because of this ease, it happens to be my favorite. But favorites don't mean much; it's not as if my favorite is the best of the best. It's not. Javascript is useful too, but I just didn't find it as easy as PHP. Java and C++ were fun, but well, they're not that easy. I'm just one of those lazy folk that prefer easy languages, so...well, that's that.

Yeah, that's definitely true. I would only recommend templates if for some reason you're in a hurry to get a site up and need a design right now, then, okay, go ahead and use a template. And perhaps think about changing the template later. The best way is to create your own template. First of all you learn something, so you won't always be dependent on other people's work and limited to their style. Secondly, your website will be more unique and noticeable in the web world. People don't want to see a million of the same websites--the design factor is somehow stripped and gone. I do things from scratch in Notepad. Part of the reason might be that I can't afford something like Dreamweaver, and after using it a couple of times at school, I did notice it created excess code. (Although the person who introduced me to using it said otherwise...but bah, he was just lying). Of course there are some things (such as positioning) that I wish I had a program to help me out on, but besides that, it's fine. Also, I think for the most part Dreamweaver implements tables, which makes it hard to make standards compliant HTML. And for the recommending to beginners part, well, I partially agree. It kind of depends on the beginner's purpose. If all they expect to do is set up one website and not really get into designing websites, then it's fine to use a template. If they actually want to get into creating more websites, then they ought to learn everything from scratch.

Truth is, I don't hate IE, but I sure as heck dislike it. I only have IE 5 on my computer, and Microsoft won't let me install IE 6 (because of administrative privileges, apparently), so I had to install Firefox in order to satisfy my needs on certain websites that required IE 6 or higher. Of course, FF has been really useful--especially the tabs feature. And I haven't gotten any spyware at all, another good notion. After a certain amount of time of using FF, though, it suddenly started getting very slow and using up a lot of memory. I got slightly annoyed and downloaded Opera. Opera was fast and didn't use that much memory, so I stuck with it for a while. However, when I discovered Opera's find feature, I suddenly switched back to FF because Opera's find feature annoyed me a lot. To fix the memory problem, I uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox, and then redownloaded all my extensions, which apparently fixed the problem.So, in short, yes I do dislike IE, but I wouldn't mind supporting either Firefox or Opera. Both are better choices than IE.

Well, I currently use Gmail, so I guess I'm not on the worry list, yet. I also have a Hotmail account, but I don't use that anymore, so it's basically useless. On the other hand though, keeping passwords long definitely does make a difference. It's also better to have a combination of letters, numbers and symbols and not just something like "thisistheworstdayofmylife". Long, yes, but "ei-2404f-skl3fde" might be a lot harder to guess. At least brute force attacks are easier to avoid than certain other ones. Just keep your guard up. And there's a lot of argument about writing those long passwords down versus not making long passwords at all. Truth is, writing down is definitely a whole lot safer. Sure, some people might see it, but at least that's only the people who have direct access to your house. So it's a lot easier to monitor those people and change your password periodically accordingly. On the other hand, if someone remote manages to get your password...you're, well, stuck. It's a lot more dangerous. And of course, that means changing your password every so often as well. Also, I remember reading somewhere (can't find the forum) that someone would make formulas for all their passwords so that it's easier to remember. For instance, take the word "tactics" and add my hotel room number of last year's vacation at the end, then shift the first letter forward one, the second letter backward one, so on. Of course, the more complicated the formula the better, but that means that each different account you have will have a different password, and you just need to write down the base word for each account and apply your memorized formula. That way, even if a person had access to your sheet of written passwords, they'd have a hard time figuring out your real password.

@seec77, we had a club like that at our school. Though it wasn't really for the gifted, the founder of the club said that anyone could attend. Although I didn't really attend, from what I speculated, there wasn't anything done in the club that actually required a lot of thinking. Most of the people just followed what the club leader said (the algorithms he proposed, that is) and finished the cube. Then, after some practice they finished faster and faster, and so forth. I don't think any of them actually try to develop their own algorithms, although my scope is only limited to my friends who are in the club.

Like a number of people who posted before me, I'm also a WinRAR user. WinRAR basically covers my needs, and I haven't really delved in depth into the service, so I wouldn't know if there's anything not offered by it that you would need. From what I know, everything about it is perfectly fine. Of course, it's major downfall is that it is shareware, so you'd get annoying recommendations to pay, and it's probably illegal to not pay after thirty days as well.

Well, I live in the U.S., but since I'm not old enough to be getting a job, I'll just talk about my dad. It's Silicon Valley here...where all the housing and living prices are rocketing through the roof ($900,000 for an indecent 2 bedroom house? What in the world?!), so most programmers don't make enough money to actually buy a house. We rent. It usually takes two people in a household both working high-profile jobs to buy a house. Obviously the pay he gets would be more than sufficient if we had lived elsewhere, like maybe in Arizona.As for getting hired, he's been offered a number of jobs. People contact him a lot to ask him for if he wants this job or that job. So, I suppose the job crisis isn't as bad now as it was before. (I mean, back in year 2000 the economy was down in the dumps and most programmers were afraid of being fired, especially if they didn't contribute enough to the company) Sill, despite the current improvements of the economy, there is plenty of competition, so if you're in a managerial position with no real connection to the work, you could get fired easily. I know a couple of people who work at Google too. But they don't say it's the best thing in the world like all that hype does. It's just like any other corporation--there's plenty of work to be done, and working over normal hours isn't abnormal. I don't know about pay...as that isn't discussed much. I'm sure much of the hype comes from the obvious high-profile workers there, who are bound to earn (and rest) more than average.On the other hand, I suppose if we lived elsewhere in the country with similar incomes, we would be thriving.

Ahhh, well, don't you have to get it before you can get used to the interface? I used GIMP and found that it was quite good considering that its freeware. On the other hand, I do have Photoshop, so there's no point in messing with GIMP. I just use it at school when there's no other choices possible. Pixia sounds interesting, but is it as good as GIMP? I mean, if its worse than Paint Shop Pro, GIMP is probably better than Pixia. To tell the truth, PaintShop Pro is truly not that worth it for a paid product. Better to get GIMP. Or Photoshop, if you're willing to pay.

Same here. I was quite confused when I first used cPanel. I kept on clicking on the folders and noticing that it never went into the folder but just showed some folder settings in a frame to the right of it. Then, out of some accident, I clicked on a folder icon and realized that that was the pathway to the inside of the folder. They should probably have instructions that say, "Click on the folder icon to access the folder" or something. Much easier that way.