Redirecting a GeoCities (Yahoo!) web-page

Like many folks, I created a personal web-page many years ago using Yahoo's GeoCities service. They finally closed down around about the end of 2009. I had already saved my web pages and started converting them for use on my ISP - cox.com. I reserved my own domain name for this site a few years ago and pre-paid for it through 2014. Now that name pointed to a generic Yahoo! business site.

My domain name is paid for through Network Solutions, so I logged onto the account and tried changing the DNS to point to cox - rookie mistake - now that domain name pointed nowhere. In frustration, I typed redirect in their search box and at the bottom was an entry for Domain Name Forwarding. They charge $12 per year and it works perfectly. You even get the option to mask the site name, so it looks like my own domain rather than a members.cox.net site.

Network Solutions offers many more services for the professional web developer than I'll ever need, but I'm glad they also support casual users with simple vanity pages.
I'm sure a simple Google search can find many other solutions for redirecting a domain or web-page. Very helpful if you dread retraining family members to find your site.

Has the Industrial Age just been a long economic bubble?

Interesting thoughts from a guy who made some very serious money betting on technology . . .

Utopian Pessimist Calls on Radical Tech to Save Economy | Magazine

. . .

Wired: You say that we have big problems in the US economy and that investors have unrealistic expectations. We’ve certainly been through a major crisis, but over the long term the stock market seems to grow fairly reliably.

Thiel: People take it for granted that their retirement funds can earn 8.5 percent a year. That’s what their financial planners tell them. And sure, you look back over the past 100 years, the stock market has generally gone up 6 to 8 percent a year. But in a larger historical perspective, that kind of growth is exceptional. If you had done the equivalent of investing in the stock market from, say, 1000 to 1100 AD, you would not have made 8 percent a year. During the fall of the Roman Empire, you’d have been lucky to get zero. We’ve been living in a unique period of accelerating technological progress. We’ve gone from horses to cars to planes to rockets to computers to the Internet in a very short time. It’s not automatic that that continues.

Wired: What happens if we don’t get the growth everyone expects?

Thiel: If it doesn’t happen, people will go bankrupt in retirement. There are systemic consequences, too. If we don’t have enough growth, we will see a powerful shift away from capitalism. There are good things and bad things about capitalism, but inequality becomes completely intolerable to society when everything’s static.

Wired: You’re worried about economic stagnation, but you’re optimistic about artificial intelligence and space?

Thiel: I think we have to make those things happen. We should be looking at technologies that might lead to really big breakthroughs. As a starting point, let’s just go back to the science fiction novels of the 1950s and ’60s and try to run the past 40 years again.

Wired: We need underwater cities and flying cars, otherwise we’re going bankrupt?

Thiel: We go bankrupt if radical progress doesn’t happen and we don’t realize it’s not happening. That’s a dangerous combination.

Wired: We’ve had tremendous growth in the Internet, which is how you made your fortune. Why not look there?

Thiel: Obviously we’ve done well online. But how much more progress is there going to be? How many big new Internet companies are there? In the ’90s we had Netscape, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon. In the past eight years there have been only two: Google and Facebook.

Wired: Twitter?

Thiel: Possibly. Still, the numbers suggest a maturing industry. The Internet may be culturally important, just as the automobile was culturally more important in the ’50s than the ’20s, as we got suburbia and built the Interstate Highway System. But the last successful car company started in the US was Jeep in 1941.

Emphasis added

Teleportation of Energy Is Possible

This is the kind of discovery that takes a while to percolate before useful technologies come from it. The implications of teleporting information and/or energy are enormous. Imagine living on Mars with all the connectivity we enjoy in one of Earth's major cities.

Physicists Prove Teleportation of Energy Is Possible | Popular Science
"Over five years ago, scientists succeeded in teleporting information. Unfortunately, the advance failed to bring us any closer to the Star Trek future we all dream of. Now, researchers in Japan have used the same principles to prove that energy can be teleported in the same fashion as information. Rather than just hastening the dawn of quantum computing, this development could lead to practical, significant changes in energy distribution."

2009 - A Bad Year For Biofuel

This article says a lot about the viability of the natural gas & petroleum industries. Every time our government invests in alternative fuels (do you remember oil-shale during the Carter administration?) they fail to create an industry that can survive without subsidies. At least we're adding to our knowledge and should be able to produce commercial quantities of alternative fuels if they're ever needed.


I think government efforts produce better results when they concentrate on the demand side of energy consumption. Today's cars, home, and industries use less energy and produce less pollution than they did a generation ago. We don't celebrate these victories much, but they've dramatically improved life in the US and other developed countries.

Bad Year For Biofuel Ends On Dour Note - Money News Story - KPHO Phoenix
"An alternative fuel for diesel engines is off to a shaky start this year though it emits fewer pollutants and cuts down on petroleum use because it's made from environmentally friendly waste and vegetable oil.

A federal tax credit that provided makers of biodiesel $1 for every gallon expired Friday. As a result, some U.S. producers say they will shut down without the government subsidy.

Biodiesel's woes come on top of a year of problems for the fledgling biofuel industry -- an irony given the push to cut down on greenhouse gases and ease the nation's need for foreign oil. A key driver for the alternative fuel -- the high cost of oil -- disappeared as diesel prices dropped 18 percent since the beginning of the recession. Then in March the European Union placed import-killing tariffs on biodiesel and other biofuels.

It was a huge hit for U.S. biofuel makers, with Europe taking 95 percent of all global exports.

Biodiesel, which is usually blended with traditional fuel, had over the past few years been the fastest growing fuel among fleet vehicles like buses, snow plows and garbage trucks.

Those fleets, however, can shift to traditional fuel, as some have, when the prices of diesel drops.
. . .

"By the time you buy the feedstock and the chemicals to produce the fuel, you have more money in it than you get for the fuel without the tax credit," Francis said. "We won't be producing any without the tax credit."