Robotopult: [link]

My favorite part of that, other than the utter absurdity, is the disclaimer at the end.

Which part of California was it that they were lucky to not set ablaze?

I've always wondered what the people who set off the big fires were doing--I'm assuming it's rarely as big as this.

Yeah, I was definitely thinking during a part of that, "I hope you're planning on cleaning up after yourselves, young man."

Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data

Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, [link] will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.

Building on the company's acquisition of the data visualization technology, Trendalyzer, from the oft-lauded, TED presenting Gapminder team, Google will also be offering algorithms for the examination and probing of the information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.

The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount of data to explore. For example, two planned datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the images from the Archimedes Palimpsest, the 10th century manuscript that inspired the Google dataset storage project.

FTR, Hubble data is at almost 32 terabytes (virtual, the actual volume is smaller ).They are talking the Hubble Legacy Archive, which is underway, but barely started.

Internet explorer freezes when I load it. It is not do a domain - my home page on explorer is set to "about blank" since I never use except for windows update and few pages which are evil and require it.

I know it is explore not my connection, because I can ping fine, and all other browser work fine. system is windows XP, with all security updates up to when the freeze happened.

Have you checked processes to make sure that there isn't an instance running and stuck?

Not only checked processes but rebooted. Interestingly enough the IExplorer process shows zero cpu usage unless I move the task manager, then it creeps up to 99%.

I updated McAfee to 2008 versions. Only thing that really changed. I tried removing site advisor, bu that did not accomplish much. I"m going to try temporarily disable firewall and anti-virus, which is something I should have thought to begin with.

Nope - with all of Mcafee disabled, iexplorer still locks up. I'm going to wait until Monday to worry about this further. Automatic updates peretty much keep me patched without having to go into explorer, and there are not that many MS only web sites I need to worry about. But if anyone has thoughts I'll try them Monday.