Well, well - hello, Louise. A pleasant surprise to see you here .... ;o) By the length of what I wrote, you can tell I'm as snowbound as you. Louise (I'll let the cat out of the bag and tell you that's her middle name, so it sounds foreign to me) and I are good friends. We've traveled together to far parts of the country, mostly in search of knowledge, but for new experiences too. We've also attended dozens & dozens of educational events together. She is (next to the 'Fred' we both mention) probably the best person I've yet met at identifying plants by name and being able to tell you what their cultural wants/needs are. I wouldn't think of going on my spring pilgrimage to Detroit to buy all my plants for the dozens of containers I put together each year as garden display plantings without her. She's a skilled plantsman & is always very eager to learn. ;o) I really intended for the thread to address keeping up with what's new, and being open to new ideas, techniques, innovations - not being stuck in the rut of being insistent that there is only one way to do something and that change is bad, but it looks like the experience:knowledge thing is winning out, so we'll go there. Louise asked: "Als friend Fred, and mine, at 94, is still learning, and hes thoroughly enjoying every moment. To me, that is poignant proof that seeking knowledge has some interesting, and beneficial, side effects. What do you think, Al?" I thought Fred was 92 and here I find he is 94. I was at his 90th b-day party, but I guess the years are passing more quickly than I realize - and women are sooo much better than I, at keeping track of important things like birthdays, anniversaries, and other important dates. Why is that ......? I think that Fred has passion. He is passionate about people and he is passionate about his plants. He loves nothing more than to be among his plant friends, learning and teaching. He was the first person to actually give me any guidance in my bonsai endeavors, and the thing he told me, tried most to impress upon me, didn't sink in at first. I don't remember his exact words, some 15+ years ago, but what he told me was: if I want to be successful in growing bonsai, I MUST learn about plants. I must learn how they work and how soils work - otherwise my efforts will be, at best, only frustrating. I didn't have the sense to believe him then, so I jumped right into bonsai & soon learned he was right. It took only a few short months for experience to teach me just how much I didn't know. I could have plowed blindly ahead & depended on experience and trial & error to guide me, but I started studying, and I can say that (like Louise asked about) the side effects of what I learned have been so very beneficial. I NEVER could have come to where I am today as a plant person w/o my focus being primarily on knowledge. That doesn't mean I'm inexperienced, at all, and every day my experiences validate some piece of knowledge I already have. It's the same for you guys. You can read something in these forums that one of us has learned and all of a sudden, a light goes on, or you might retain it in your memory & a month from now, your experiences might cause you to recall what you read & you say "Oh Yeah! NOW, I get it." This is another case of experience validating knowledge. Louise & Mentha both mentioned cooking as an analogy, so let me paint a picture: Imagine two people who know nothing about cooking - no experience whatsoever. The first person (I'm going to make him a guy, because I'm the cook around here) ;o) is put in a huge kitchen with all the utensils & everything needed to create a 10 course gourmet meal including a fancy desert for Louise and Mentha. Not gonna happen - right? The second person is schooled in all the cooking techniques - knows how to make the sauces, studies presentation, knows exactly how baking powder makes the biscuits rise and how proteins in meat break down to make it tender - this person is essentially an educated idiot. So, if you put him in the same kitchen ...... It prolly STILL ain't gonna happen - right? Which will come closer to being able to present an edible meal ... The person with no experience or knowledge, or the educated idiot with no experience? Let's take it a step further. The person with no experience or knowledge is left to his own devices, but he doesn't seek knowledge beyond what he learns by his own experience. He plods through the kitchen day after day making mistake after mistake ruining meal after meal and having failure after failure, until after a lifetime of trying he might have figured out how to make a presentable gourmet meal. Back to the educated idiot now .... ;o) He keeps studying & studying - learning fresh, new things & techniques. His first meal was a dismal failure, but a week later, he makes a meal that's pretty good. A year later, he is still studying and making fancy dinners with wonderful presentations. 5 years later he's a chef at a fancy restaurant. 10 years later, he has his own cooking school and is teaching other chefs what he's learned so they can benefit from his knowledge and experience. Why is this? His meager, but growing experience is validating time after time what he already knows and he has eliminated 90% of the trial and error mistakes the other cook depends on almost exclusively for knowledge. Where is the cook who embraces nothing new & refuses to learn? Still stuck in a rut, plodding along and unable to even make proper sense of the results of his actions or what he observes in the kitchen. I could easily have made the analogy about greenhouse operators or hobby growers like us, but as a friend is fond of saying, "We work with what we have." and a cook is what I was given. ;o) Al

You should be able to upgrade Adblock Plus w/o upgrading all of FF. Worth a try. lower risk of any problems and very quick to see. Best to close FF and re-open just in case afterwards. A new Adblock+Easylist may fix your intellinks. hard to say for sure. I didn't use FIreshot that time for the screenshot. sometimes I do. I discovered a cool feature of Picasa 3 (desktop app). If Picasa3 is open while I do Alt-PrintScreen, it automagically captures it to a "Screen Captures" folder with a little systray popup that says "screenshot captured. click here to view". Then I save as a JPG and FireFTP it to my webspace. Its a little faster than FireShot. FireShot has other features though that Picasa does not have. choices, choices, choices... I never have uninstalled the old browser. See if you can Update FF right from inside FF under Help/Update. Thats generally preferred method. If not, you can just download the latest from FF and run it. It should take care of putting it in a new place and give you a new shortcut to get to it. There may be Apple/Windows diffs here that I am not aware of, so YMMV. The "profile" is just a collection of files in a special place about things you have done to customize your usage of the browser. If you get a new FF version, the new browser looks at your old profile so it sets it up the same as you had it. (as best it can LOL) Its in a different place than the browser. If you can find your bookmarks.html file just copy it somewhere else for safekeeping. But this should not be necessaryy. It will probably be fine.

FWIW, I didn't really pay too much attention to the aesthetic changes, since I realized immediately that the lack of compatibility with many of my 20 or so add-ons would make upgrading at this time more pain than gain. But in my case I already have done some customizing of the look with FF3: Tabs on Top (I guess I was way ahead of FF4 with that one ;-). When using Iron/Chrome I liked that compact feeling and tried to imitate it, using also the add-ons below:) Tiny Menu Hide GUI Bars (hides, among other things, the status bar, making it a pop-up at the bottom left that display only when needed) Hide Caption Title Bar (The title bar in any browser has always seemed like a big waste of space to me.) As I say, I didn't look too closely at the new look of FF4, so it's possible that some of these add-ons are incompatible precisely because they are no longer necessary. (Like the hidden status bar ? Does it pop-up on FF4 when needed ? Or maybe show in the address bar as in Opera ?) But others of my add-ons (Favicon Picker, Text Link, and some others) are also incompatible. Perhaps their functionality has also been incorporated into the default behaviour of FF 4 as well. Or not. Maybe I'll get brave enough to try upgrading again next week. For now it's a waiting game..... As the OP, I appreciate the continued comments. Thanks ! :-)

Banning assault style weapons would not reduce these numbers hugely but would still be meaningful. And it seems like pretty low-hanging fruit, too, when you consider all the other guns do have some arguable use. Not sure what the legit argument for having military-type weapons is. Remember that the United States does NOT have an official manner to track gun deaths. There is no mandatory reporting guidelines by law enforcement agencies to give a true number. So it's probably worse than the charts show. Studies suggest that suicide by methods other than gun are often failures and the person usually regrets the attempt and sometimes even gets help. (Otherwise, why bother with the oops net under the Golden Gate bridge?) Nobody knows if gun attempts would be regretted cuz...they work better. Suicides by gun is a problem. It's a different problem than assault-style weapons being used for mass random murder. They can't be addressed the same way but they shouldn't be forgotten. Shame the CDC can't support studying gun violence or suicides. So yeah, my kids' schools have drills. The middle school might have a security guard; the elementary school doesn't. The typical mid-century California suburban school has no inner halls. It's just a conglomeration of buildings. If you didn't feel like entering by the kindergarten or the front office or the library, you could enter from the other side by sneaking through the backyard of one of the 20 or so homes that back onto the field.