for those interrested, in order for a company to be called a "local phone service provider", the phone service must be up for 99.9% of the time

I am very interested in this statement. Is that per customer or per area? Verizon disconnected my line (no dialtone) for 2 days last month. What is the penalty to them?

People can send me email attachments of any size and because of how POP3 works, I have no way to know I do or don't want the file until after it's downloaded.

I agree with everything you said, Tony, but I wanted to point out that POP3 isn't the culprit in that case, it's your mail client software.

I use a program called PopTray to check my mail, and it will show me the message headers (and also indicate whether or not the message has a file attachment) without downloading the whole message. Most of the time, I can tell if the messages contain desirable content just from a quick scan of the from/to/subject fields. I can then delete any of the messages from the server before launching my e-mail client and actually starting a download.

Isn't bureaucracy grand? (for those who benefit from it!)

I'm sure for every one of you, there's three schmucks who are overpaying due to screwed up billing or bait-and-switch tactics. So enjoy it while it lasts!

Yeah I know of such programs, but the POP3 spec doesn't really let you grab just the header. I think the LIST command just lists message #'s and sizes, I think your program needs to at least begin message retrieval to see the headers, at which point it can always close the socket once the message data starts coming over. But most clients don't support anything like this.

IMAP is a different story, of course.

How do you turn it on ? (I can't find an option for that in the toolbar options)

Are you sure you have the latest version? I think it might be a beta...not sure though...

I went to Google and tried to download the latest version, it said I already had it.

Megan on The Screen Savers says:

Get the Google Toolbar's new features

• If you already have the Google Toolbar, you'll have to uninstall and reinstall to get these extra features.
• After you've reinstalled, click the Google icon on your toolbar and choose Toolbar Options.
• Scroll down to the heading "Experimental Features" at the bottom of the page.
• Click the Experimental Features link.
• Select the features you'd like to add.
• Click OK.

Ha, that's exactly where I heard about it too, Rob

Yeah, that show is not half bad...

Too bad Comcast doesn't give the Philly area TechTV.

Yeah, I'm at the folks' house right now with sattelite. I severely doubt that the Williamsburg area Cox Cable will carry TechTV on their basic package. Hell, the people around here hardly know what a computer is.

And yeah, the Screen Savers isn't half bad. Sometimes I wonder who it's aimed at, though. I mean, at one point they're giving their little tips like "you can delete that icon with the arrow on it, because it's just a shortcut", then Leo shows you how to make your own Perl script. Huh?

Sometimes I wonder who it's aimed at, though. I mean, at one point they're giving their little tips like "you can delete that icon with the arrow on it, because it's just a shortcut", then Leo shows you how to make your own Perl script. Huh?

Good point. I think that's part of the show's charm, it runs the gamut. And they handle the softball topics with the same style and ease as they handle the hardcore stuff.