Fixing Firefox

My Firefox has been acting up. It stopped remembering passwords and logging me into password protected sites like Facebook, Model Railroader, and this blog. Tried one thing and another thing. I just found a fix.
Firefox maintains for each user a "profile". Profile is a hard disk file folder that holds your bookmarks, your saved passwords, and a grunch of other stuff. Files in the profile can get corrupted and then Firefox starts doing weird things.
The Fix is to start up a pure clean profile. The only thing in your old profile that you care about is your book marks. So export your bookmarks to an html file and import that file into the new profile. Do this from within Firefox. Click on Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks and then click on "Import and Backup" tab. Select "export html" There is a "backup" option but that does something different and will not work here.
Exit Firefox and restart it from the "Run..." selection on the Start Menu. Enter
"firefox -ProfileManager" in the run box. This will present you with a little window with some choices in it. Pick "Create New Profile" and you are done. This starts up a new clean blank profile. All you need to do now, once you get back into Firefox proper, is import the bookmarks.html file that you created earlier.
The new clean profile lacks any saved passwords, so you will have to present your password to each website that needs a password. Keep a sharp eye on the Firefox window and you will see an inconspicuous gray bar appear briefly asking if you want to remember the just entered password. Click "yes" and Firefox will remember the password and present it automatically for you next time.

47% of US citizens pay no income tax

Article is here. This is a scandal. Every citizen should pay some income tax. The poor shouldn't pay much, but they ought to pay something. How can anyone be a responsible voter if they cannot feel the bite of the taxman?

Migration, computer to computer

Good old Blackbox, a Dell SR1750 desktop is finally back in action. It's been a couple a months. Nothing wrong with him that a new motherboard AND a new CPU didn't fix.
So now to migrate off the back up laptop. Want to get my email, my checkbook, my bookmarks and my photos back over onto Blackbox. Plus I need to do a backup anyhow. So I burn all the photo and spreadsheets to a CD. Trickier is getting the email and email address book out of Thunderbird. Thunderbird hides his stuff in c:Documents&Settings/MyUserName/Application Data/Thunderbird, where MyUserName is whatever user name Windows has for you. This way Thunderbird can have a whole separate set of files for each user.
Open the file profiles .ini. Inside it you will see something like this
[ProfileN]
Name=default
IsRelative-1
Path=Profiles/xxxxxxx.default

This means all the active stuff is in a directory named Profiles/xxxxxxx.default.
Just back up the whole directory to CD. On Blackbox I copied xxxxxx.default into the Thunderbird/profiles directory and then hand edited the profiles/ini file to point to xxxxxx/default. Note well. The Name= must be the same as the extension of the file you just loaded. This will get your address book, your email and your spam filters.
Thunderbird is user friendly. Trust me. All this backup tedium, has a reason. Not that it makes any sense to me, but I'm sure the Thunderbird folks will tell you all about it. If you mess up editing the profiles.ini file you draw an absolutely opaque error message and a suggestion to reboot windows.
For Firefox all I really want is bookmarks. From within Firefox I exported the bookmarks to a file. On Blackbox I imported the same file into Firefox.
Isn't backup fun?

Health Care according to the Wall St Journal

Good editorial on malpractice here. And another good one on selling health insurance across state lines here.

If the law that allowed inter state sale of health insurance also specified that the insurance offered only had to comply with the law of the home state, then the state mandate problem would go away. Insurance companies only have to comply with the mandates of their home state. Some state in the union has fewer mandates and hence cheaper premiums than the rest. Companies based in that state will have a competitive advantage over companies based in high mandate states.

If we just fixed malpractice and interstate sale of insurance we would lower health care costs a lot. Certainly enough progress for one year.

When in doubt, blame the pitot tube

They still don't know what caused the loss of an Air France jetliner over the south Atlantic this summer. The plane simply failed to arrive in Paris. The crew did not send out distress calls although the aircraft's computers did. The crash recorder sank to the bottom of the Atlantic and was not found. Intensive sea searches turned up some debris, but offered no clues.
A review of the aircraft's maintainance records revealed the aircraft was equipped with an older style of pitot tube. Lacking anything thing else to blame, the pitot tube became the culprit. Last week the European Aviation Safety Agency issued an emergency air worthiness directive to check the torque on the pneumatic disconnect union going to the pitot tube.
Trouble is, all the pitot tube does is make the airspeed indicator work. The plane will fly just fine without an airspeed indicator at all. The pitot tube is just a micely made bit of pipe facing forward into the airstream. Air is rammed into the opening of the pitot tube by the plane's motion thru the air and this pressure is measured by a sensitive gauge calibrated to read in knots instead of pounds per square inch. Since the tube is merely a piece of pipe, under very low pressure, it's failure modes are limited. About all it can do is ice up which makes the airspeed indicator stop working. To prevent icing, pitot tubes have electric heaters built into them. The one on the old F106 would heat the tube hot enough to burn your hand.
But the real issue is this, loss of airspeed indication is not going to crash a plane. It might possibly confuse an autopilot, but that's why the airplane carries a pilot and a co pilot.

Business Jets improve bottom line

Companies that use business jets have earnings growth 434% higher than non users. This from Aviation Week. You can believe as much of this as you like.

Universal Service bites the dust

The old Bell Telephone system had a corporate policy of universal service. Which meant running wires all over helangon to service remote farms and cabins. Bell figured universal service enhanced the worth of a telephone. Even if the remote farms never made enough calls to pay off the cost of running the wire, it was worth it in the long run. The ability to telephone anyone, no matter how far out of town they were, made possession of a telephone more valuable to everyone. Plus it is fair to offer phone service to those of us who live out of town.
Nothing last forever. The Bell system, after massive breakups, last-for-ever court cases, and a blizzard of name changes to confuse the customer, gave up on universal service. They found a bigger sucker.
Enter Fairpoint. The Bell guys (now calling themselves Verizon) figured out that providing phone service to the boonies of NH, ME, and VT was an overall loser. They offered to sell the losing phone systems to Fairpoint for an stiff sum of money. Fairpoint fell for it hook line and sinker. They borrowed a huge stack of money, at 11% if memory serves, and bought the farm.
Chickens come home to roost. Fairpoint is loosing money. Their stock has dropped from $9 to $0.90. They probably will declare bankruptcy. The Public Utility Commissions of all three states went along with this disaster.
Let's hope my phone continues to give dial tone. If it quits, I buy a cell phone.