I thought you didn't use FA any more?

Thought I'd see if my works would get any attention. From the comments I'm getting so far I'm guessing that's a resounding no

How long ago did you post this exactly?

Ok, fine. One Hour. I'm gonna give this 24 hours and see what kind of activity it attracts.

c: <3

I'm glad that you came back! DA has waaaayyyyy to many tracking beacons (over 120) for my taste.

Too bad that free fall causes nausea in half of the people who experience it. A suborbital single stage all reusable air/LOX/CH4 hypersonic ramjet/rocket could take you anywhere on earth in less than an hour - and with a short turnaround time, the capital cost could be in the several billion dollar per vehicle range and still be profitable.

Whaddya mean by Tracking Beacons? *Wears a tinfoil hat*

As awesome as that is, I bet enviros would lose their shit over that. They're already making it a living hell to expand any of London's Six Airports, despite all of them bursting at the seams and desperate for capacity (London Heathrow's Runways are at 99% capacity and plane moves on each of them every 45 seconds), and it's driving away foreign investors to rivals Paris and Frankfurt

Every 45 seconds?! Holy shit!! That is scarier, at least to me, than the idea of a suborbital flight...

Ever wonder how free websites make money? One of the most common business models is to collect information on their users and sell it to marketers. For example, Google's email service examines every word of every email that you send and receive, figures out what products you might be interested in buying, and sells that information to marketers. Another way of collecting salable information from users is with tracking beacons, cookies, and other hidden spies:

Read it and weep - and then get the latest FireFox with the Cookie Controller addon (and set it to not accept cookies except for specific exceptions that you allow, such as your banks, PayPal, Amazon, eBay, etc.):
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1725592/

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/.....okie-monsters/

This is a site that represents the cookie industry, so it only mentions the positives:
http://www.allaboutcookies.org/web-beacons/

More here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

Some sites won't load the page unless you allow cookies. I generally avoid them, but if I want to use one, I can tell Cookie Controller to trash their cookies as soon as I leave the site.

There are also Flash cookies, also called LSOs, which stands for Local Share Objects. These are files with the extension .SOL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_shared_object

Search your computer for files with the extension .SOL, and drag them into the trash. They are sneaky tattletales.

Your computer probably has literally thousands of files stored on it to track and report on your behavior that were put there by someone who didn't ask you for permission to do so. Trash them, and block new ones. Cookie Controller is a wonderful tool:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fi.....roller/?src=ss

Free - free at last!

Behold the incredible insanity of Heathrow Airport: Capable of handling over 100 flights and hour with only 2 Runways! Here's how they do it

http://youtu.be/3xcFQm3sWfw?t=1m50s

Heathrow's a bit of an urban planning error. A small airfield that was rapidly expanded for WW2 but only completed as the war ended. It was them taken over by civilian control and the rest is history. It's located at the Western Edge of Greater London, and due to the prevailing winds of Europe blowing East-West, it means planes coming in to land have to fly over the entire City. While as a visitor you get treated to a spectacular view of London, it does place restriction on the airport's operations due to noise. The airport can't operate 24/7.

Worse still, the West End of London has grown around the airport, so it's surrounded by residences on 3 sides, which is what makes desperately-needed expansion so difficult. Permission had been controversially granted for Runway 3 and Terminal 6 in the early 2000s, but the new government in 2010 cancelled it as part of an election promise. Heathrow has been increasing passenger capacity though. They've built the Brand-new Terminal 5 that can handle 30 million passengers, and are replacing the old terminals 1 and 2 with a Brand new Terminal 2 with a similar capacity. However, Runway capacity is the biggest constraint. It means that Landing slots at Heathrow are very, very scarce and expensive. Last year, British Airways actually bought out and absorbed a smaller airline, BMI just for their landing slots. Immediately after the buyout, BA announced a slew of increased frequencies and new destinations like Seoul.

Passenger numbers have still been growing though, and that's only due to airlines using bigger and bigger aircraft. The airport sees a disproportionate amount of wide-bodies, and Heathrow is serviced by more A380s than any other airport in the world (Except maybe Dubai, due to Emirates' huge fleet of A380s). I've calculated average passengers per plane at 148. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta airport, THE busiest in the world has an average of only 94 passengers per plane

Things aren't much better at Gatwick airport, either (London's 2nd-biggest airport). The airport is the busiest Single-Runway operation airport in the world, at 34 million passengers. They legally can't add any new runways till 2019 due to an agreement with the local council to build the new North Terminal. There's widespread agreement that London needs more airport capacity, but due to Enviros and NIMBYism they can't decide what to do. Meanwhile, 126 million people and growing continue to stream in and out of London through its Six airports every year, making it the world's busiest international airspace

Hmm, I knew about Cookies and how advertisements are tailored to you based on your interests, didn't know it went that far. That would explain why I get a lot of advertisements for airlines (recently bought a ticket to New York in the summer and I was researching like mad). Still, I did manage to get an amazing deal with British Airways thanks to one of their ads, so I can't complain too much. Also, it does keep all these good websites running without me having to pay for it. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to find a good article on the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal, only to be stopped and require a subscription.

Still, maybe I should switch to Firefox and use this. There are just some of my viewing habits I don't want anybody knowing

Thanks for the video link. That is totally insane! I had thought that the traffic at Atlanta and at Ohare in Chicago was bad, but this is almost dystopian science fiction.

I recommend FireFox for improved security. IE has always had a lot of holes. Google's Chrome is designed to fink on the user in many many ways. Since the FireFox code is open source, there are lots of white hat hackers looking for possible exploits - and ways to fix them! Extreme peer review!!

Use these addons: NoScript, Cookie Controller, Better Privacy, and Ghostery. All free from www.mozilla.org .

If a website doesn't work, you can first allow Java scripts via NoScript. You rarely have to allow all of what can be a very long list, which may include such notorious privacy invaders as FaceBook, various Google sites, etc.

Almost all shopping carts require allowing cookies, but Cookie Controller allows you to allow them only as you need them.

Ghostery lets you see the ghosts that are trying to track you. Of course, its entirely up to you what you allow.

Use your browser to take a look at your cookie list. You may find over a thousand of them, most from URLs that you have never heard of.

Also search your computer for supercookies; these are files that end with the filename extension .SOL Better Privacy does away with them.

You might reasonably have unprotected sex with a very close old friend, but you really wouldn't want to do that with thousands of strangers...

Yeah, Heathrow is fighting to get its third runway. Still, it's remarkable in efficiency though, says a lot when Paris CDG needs 4 runways to handle 60 MIllion Passangers. Perhaps other airports should take a playbook from Heathrow and pack the planes tighter rather than increasing the number of runways. However it does have its drawbacks: Heathrow's notorious for weather-related delays and cancellations, since such tight packing of planes leaves no flexibility to clear snow off the runways.

I have notice is lacking in certain features: Java Applets won't run in Chrome, Chrome really slows down when you have a hundred tabs open (which I often do) and it seems to be buggy with FA. Maybe I should migrate to Firefox, although I don't know whether I'd go to as extreme lengths as you to avoid cookies. Perhaps I can do general Browsing in Firefox, but anytime a site I don't have alternatives for requires cookies, I'll then use chrome. I have Chrome, Safari and Firefox so I can easily do that.

Also, those Cookies are fast. No sooner do my friend and I decide to go to Paris for a weekend next month and I research airlines for flight tickets, All my ads change from Flights to New York (which I had been previously researching) to now Flights to Paris AND Youth Hostels in the city

A plane? Can't we just hop on her back?

That's against EAA safety mandates