So by reducing the temperature of the sensor to half a degree Kelvin, they have reduced the energy level of the sensor to almost nothing. Yes, it interacts with incoming particles, but it also radiates gravitational waves that could be misinterpreted as external particles. In essence, the detector is detecting itself.
Of course, there is a 23% chance I am completely wrong.
There's a 100% chance you're wrong. Gravitational waves can't be absorbed by these detectors in any meaningful way. To notice the effects of even massive gravitational waves you need a huge detector (like LIGO). Also, gravitational waves happen when a gravitational field changes. They propagate this change through the universe. Objects at rest aren't emitting gravitational waves.
If you isolated these sensors from the universe and let them sit for a long time, they wouldn't lose their mass to gravitational radiation - they'd probably sit around until death by baryon decay in 10^33 years.
And no, they're not detecting baryon decay either.
Further proof that Hollywood is running out of good ideas, and must turn to new sources.
It's not even new - it's "War of the Worlds" and "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" mixed together.
The guy did a great job with the special effects, but story wise - meh.
Golloywierd will throw in some hot chick in short shorts and lots of cleavage and it'll make a few hundred million.
Mod parent up and GP down. It's very nicely done, but the only "good idea" here is having the robots attack South America instead of North America this time. Clearly he was doing a tech demo tribute to several large (and mediocre) recent Hollywood movies.
Either way you look at it, they pumped 3 rounds into just to be pricks and F with the girl.
Not true. I don't know why or how it works, but as an Israeli, I can tell you that it's standard procedure - they clear the area and bring in a robot that shoots the suspicious object.
Maybe they're actively trying to blow up the object ($2.5M is nothing in this regard, btw - do you have any idea how much the army spends with a much smaller ROI?), and maybe they've been fucking with the whole Israeli population for ~30 years, but it has nothing to do with this particular girl.
It doesn't work very well. In France they do it a lot more effectively: they use an explosive to blow up the potential explosive device. It either detonates or is rendered inoperative with a very high success rate. The "let's shoot it" technique isn't very effective in comparison.
It's not like Safari has been around for many years. It's not like Apple have a monopoly in the operating system market that they're using to gain marketshare in the browser market.
Seriously, you should research the original anti-trust case to see what all the fuss was about. Microsoft uses their monopoly power to subsidise functionality in a different business area in order to gain control and be anti-competitive. They came within a bush of being split up.
Safari has the vast majority of the mobile browser market share in the United States. And unlike MS, whose crime was bundling a browser with its platform, Apple won't even let competitors offer an alternative browser on the iPhone/iPod Touch.
We're hearing the account of Cory Doctorow -- who in his novel "Little Brother" had an obvious axe to grind against Homeland Security and law enforcement, to the point of suggesting "9/11 was an inside job". (Says one of the leaflets dropped by the novel's heroic protesters.
It's been awhile, but I seem to recall the protagonist being a bit unnerved by people within his group of protesters who went further than he believed was reasonable. One of the main themes was free speech, and I believe that unreasonable claims were put forward to give an example of over the top, extremist statements that should still be protected by the first amendment.
"Although the proposed engine will consume energy for manipulation of the particles, the propulsion will occur without any loss of mass," says Feigel.
I'd like to see how that works. The one thing that even non-physicists know is that energy is equivalent to mass (E=mc2). This applies to all power. However the mass loss of a battery which discharges is negligible compared to the total mass hence it is usually neglected for energies below nuclear. Unless they can show otherwise my very strong suspicion is that they energy needed to manipulate the nano-particles will be identical to the energy needed to emit a photon of the same momentum. Until they can show this I do not see anything to be excited about.
The reason our spaceships don't have flashlights in the back is that the maximum force that can be produced using small scale light sources is rather low. If this method works and allows the same momentum change as a photon drive but in 1/1000th the time, that's something to get excited about.
If you RTFA, you'll see that this is a list from Common Sense Media being reported by the NYT, not the NYT editorializing. In fact, the very first item on the list, Assassin's Creed 2, just got an almost ridiculously glowing review (that even sort of recommended it for high school students because it might enthuse them about Renaissance Italy) from the Times this week.
The Times' "conclusion" is to ask you what you think about this list and recommend discussing it below.
Apple being "secretive and playing badly with others" is the main reason we have a mostly DRM-free music market these days.
We can only hope that Amazon will be so helpfully and successfully obstinate.
Amazon's mp3 store really did the trick in moving the whole market (read: Apple) to DRM-free music.
a little man in Germany fifty years ago did something very similar
You're posting from 1987? And not claiming first post?
Since you have 22 years to think about it, please elaborate on how signing people up for drivers licenses and passports is similar to burning and looting their property, murdering them in the streets, and then rounding up the rest and sending them to concentration camps? I don't think that's what the Israeli government plans. If you don't like biometric databases that's fine, but at least add something intelligent to the discussion.
Good point. The funny thing is that if we consider the greater context, that's pretty much exactly what that particular government does to a certain segment of the population.
As an owner of an XO-1, the thing that keeps me using my little green laptop even though it often gets mistaken for a kid's toy is battery life.
I fly to vacation travel. (I defy anybody to drive to Hawaii.) From Boston, Honolulu is at least 12 hours away. In-flight movies being what they are, I usually read a book or two. With my XO, I can listen to MP3s, keep a journal, read an eBook or play games. (Freecell and Adventure keep me amused.) I can even use my StarChart program to plan star-gazing while out there. [shameless plug]
What I can't do in the air (yet) is browse the web. Having the necessary apps stored locally is therefore a must and a device that needs "the cloud" to function is useless for air travelers. But I digress -- I was saying that battery life is the deal-maker with respect to netbooks for me.
I have two batteries for my XO. In flight, the wifi has to be turned off, which gives the XO over three hours of playing time on one battery -- more if I turn the back-light off and use the monochrome screen mode.
If the layover is sufficiently long, I can re-charge at least one battery while waiting for the flight from the west coast to the islands. Usually, I arrive after the cross-country flight with both batteries discharged, re-charge one and get most of the way to Hawaii before I'm out of power. I know of no other netbook-like device presently on the market that can do as well.
So rather than high-speed CPU, lots of storage, the ability to play HD movies or all the other features that seem to be standard in the current crop of netbooks, give me a machine that's frugal of battery, small enough to fit in coach class and equipped with enough built-in functionality to keep a man amused for six to eight hours.
If you like battery life, you might be interested in an Asus 1005HA. Mine with Windows 7 lasted through my last 9 hour flight (I was reading pdf papers and writing a bit on it) and still had 15% battery life left when I turned it off for landing.
3. Full-sized keyboard
Some netbooks take little to inappropriate lengths, as it were, with keyboards that are just slightly smaller than full size: generally about 90 percent as large.
Wrong. My favourite 'laptop' ever was a Toshiba Libretto, about the size of a paperback book. My favourite laptop now is a Dell Inspiron Mini 9. What's great about these machines is they're small - the Libretto slipped easily into a jacket pocket, yet (running Debian) it was a full blown machine on which I ran everything from Apache to Oracle. The Mini 9 isn't as small, but it still fits easily into my bicycle bag - which wouldn't take a full laptop. Some users who are poor typists and have fat, pudgy fingers may have difficulty with small keyboards. Good typists adapt. And when on the move small trumps big every time.
A standard VGA graphics-out port is a given, since you'll want to use your smartbook as a presentation tool (although that may require running Windows -- horrors! -- in place of Android).
Wrong. It's key to giving this machine decent off-power-grid performance that it runs a processor very much more frugal than an Intel. It needs to be an ARM (my preference), or a MIPS, or something new. Whatever it is, you will be able to run presentations - either Open Office will be ported (very probable), or something new will be written. You will not run Windows.
To summarize the first point of your post:
1. Wrong. A few computer users albeit a very small minority, don't care about keyboard quality and size - they're willing to adapt to any keyboard, maybe just for the hell of it, because adapting makes them feel smart. This tiny group of users should be the focus of Google's strategy.
Tabbed browsing makes sense. You have one application, a web browser, with multiple pages, taking up less screen space. It's tabbed so you don't have to click on a bunch of minimized windows or use Expose or whatever shiny workalike the Gnome / KDE bunch has now to find what you want, and so you aren't cluttering up the desktop with a hundred web browser windows.
However, there is something to be said for separating out the different applications and simply clicking the icon or what have you, to switch between them. In fact, isn't that what Windows has had for about 15 years now? Sure, the application tab bar goes on the bottom the screen by default, and is called the "Start Menu" but it is essentially, exactly what is proposed here.
The problem is that you end up filling up the bar, and then having to collapse the bar in one of several ways, all of which are annoying.
Expose, or whatever the Gnome / KDE equivalent is, is so much handier.
Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that doesn't matter!
Switcher is a Windows version of Expose which offers great customization. If you want to combine the best of OSX and Windows, you absolutely need Switcher. I find myself using the taskbar 2/3 of the time, but there are definitely times when the wonderful Expose-like behavior is the most efficient way to switch between windows. Map it to a 4th or 5th mouse button.
Really, what's the point of having windows not Maximized. As far as I can tell, you'd be better off with the taskbar in windows being like tabs, and being able to drag tabs together to form split pane views for side-by-side work. I hate having to manually drag the edges of windows, and I hate when they are not fullscreen (or minimized). Yes I know about "Tile Windows Horizontally" but it just makes extra fluff for the borders of each window compared to a tabbed/paned view. Pretty much a big failure on OS X that their Maximize doesn't even always make a window full screen.
Their public statements say that they are not linking the requests to other Google services, and that they are discarding ip addresses within a day or two.
I also go through my client list and drop those that consume more of my time and resources in favour of the easier clients who ultimately improve my business at a lesser cost. What's wrong with that? My company, my rules. "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" -- it's in every restaurant. Why would you expect a business to serve you? Why would you consider it a right?
Your company's service isn't based on federal subsidies meant to provide internet access to all citizens.
Is it really likely that the computers weren't on anyway? If not, then surely someone would have noticed the fact that the computers were running all night for no reason sometime in the past 10 years...
Plug your computer into the wall through a power meter and you'll notice the difference between idle and heavy CPU use being easily over the 40 W the GP used.
Saying that Google is abandoning Gears is not 100% accurate as it has bad connotations.
Google created Gears to fill the void until browser makers would implement HTML5. Now that they are doing so, Gears is being retired.
Afghanistan was meant to fill the void until war makers would implement Operation Relax Because the Next Election Is Three Years Away. Now that they are doing so, Afghanistan is being retired.
Offtopic? Troll? Funny? You be the judge!
Anyone else think that all this conservation, recycling, reduced pollution stuff is... well, basically just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic? I mean, it's trying to treat the symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself. The disease is overpopulation - there's just too many people on planet earth, and even if you do cut back energy usage, you can't economize fast enough to keep up with geometric population growth.
Citation needed. There is no empirical data on actual maximum sustainable human population on earth. There are theoretical maximums in the 13Billion range. Since we're at roughly half of that theoretical maximum I'd say we're not even close to dealing with the problems of "over" population. Nice try though.
You postulate that we're at half of the theoretical maximum population and you think that means we're not even close to having a problem? I'd be a lot more comfortable with 6 billion if we could reasonably expect the world and our technology to handle 50 billion in the near future. Or maybe we should wait until we have 0 surplus resources to start worrying.
What software on windows is "so great/must have" that there isn't a viable alternative for other platforms. Windows has a bunch of bullshit software that isn't worth paying for besides custom in house apps.
I've never seen an image viewer that compares with irfanview used on Mac or Linux. Then again, I rarely even see a Windows machine with irfanview.
Games.
Photoshop, to some extent, because the new version is so much faster on Windows than Mac. This will probably be fixed within a version, though.
Chrome does a much, much better job with memory handling, and Chrome does in fact have addons that are equivalent to NoScript and AdBlockPlus.
I agree that Chrome does a better memory handling, but its CPU usage (100% of a dual core) is prohibitive when you are running other applications. This is why I continue to use Firefox.
My problem with Chrome and other webkit browsers in Windows is that their non-javascript rendering is much slower than Opera, FF, and IE. Scrolling a long page in a forum drives me crazy with Chrome/Safari. Opera, surprisingly (to me), won my last rendering comparison by a significant margin, followed by the acceptable FF and IE (well, IE was acceptable in terms of rendering speed, not overall). With an i7 system, 8 gigs of RAM, and a high end gaming video card I shouldn't feel like running webkit is like running Quake at 1280x1024 on my 486 without a 3d accelerator. However, I recognize that I'm a lot more sensitive to that sort of performance issue than are most.
You object to spending something like 0.01% of the funding to evaluate how well the program worked and how to optimize government spending on science (which annually is much larger than the bit included in the stimulus bill) in the future?
Slashdot Mirror
So by reducing the temperature of the sensor to half a degree Kelvin, they have reduced the energy level of the sensor to almost nothing. Yes, it interacts with incoming particles, but it also radiates gravitational waves that could be misinterpreted as external particles. In essence, the detector is detecting itself.
Of course, there is a 23% chance I am completely wrong.
There's a 100% chance you're wrong. Gravitational waves can't be absorbed by these detectors in any meaningful way. To notice the effects of even massive gravitational waves you need a huge detector (like LIGO). Also, gravitational waves happen when a gravitational field changes. They propagate this change through the universe. Objects at rest aren't emitting gravitational waves.
If you isolated these sensors from the universe and let them sit for a long time, they wouldn't lose their mass to gravitational radiation - they'd probably sit around until death by baryon decay in 10^33 years.
And no, they're not detecting baryon decay either.
Further proof that Hollywood is running out of good ideas, and must turn to new sources.
It's not even new - it's "War of the Worlds" and "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" mixed together.
The guy did a great job with the special effects, but story wise - meh.
Golloywierd will throw in some hot chick in short shorts and lots of cleavage and it'll make a few hundred million.
Mod parent up and GP down. It's very nicely done, but the only "good idea" here is having the robots attack South America instead of North America this time. Clearly he was doing a tech demo tribute to several large (and mediocre) recent Hollywood movies.
Either way you look at it, they pumped 3 rounds into just to be pricks and F with the girl.
Not true. I don't know why or how it works, but as an Israeli, I can tell you that it's standard procedure - they clear the area and bring in a robot that shoots the suspicious object.
Maybe they're actively trying to blow up the object ($2.5M is nothing in this regard, btw - do you have any idea how much the army spends with a much smaller ROI?), and maybe they've been fucking with the whole Israeli population for ~30 years, but it has nothing to do with this particular girl.
It doesn't work very well. In France they do it a lot more effectively: they use an explosive to blow up the potential explosive device. It either detonates or is rendered inoperative with a very high success rate. The "let's shoot it" technique isn't very effective in comparison.
Safari has under 4% marketshare.
Good luck proving a monopoly with that fact.
It's not like Safari has been around for many years. It's not like Apple have a monopoly in the operating system market that they're using to gain marketshare in the browser market.
Seriously, you should research the original anti-trust case to see what all the fuss was about. Microsoft uses their monopoly power to subsidise functionality in a different business area in order to gain control and be anti-competitive. They came within a bush of being split up.
Safari has the vast majority of the mobile browser market share in the United States. And unlike MS, whose crime was bundling a browser with its platform, Apple won't even let competitors offer an alternative browser on the iPhone/iPod Touch.
We're hearing the account of Cory Doctorow -- who in his novel "Little Brother" had an obvious axe to grind against Homeland Security and law enforcement, to the point of suggesting "9/11 was an inside job". (Says one of the leaflets dropped by the novel's heroic protesters.
It's been awhile, but I seem to recall the protagonist being a bit unnerved by people within his group of protesters who went further than he believed was reasonable. One of the main themes was free speech, and I believe that unreasonable claims were put forward to give an example of over the top, extremist statements that should still be protected by the first amendment.
"Although the proposed engine will consume energy for manipulation of the particles, the propulsion will occur without any loss of mass," says Feigel.
I'd like to see how that works. The one thing that even non-physicists know is that energy is equivalent to mass (E=mc2). This applies to all power. However the mass loss of a battery which discharges is negligible compared to the total mass hence it is usually neglected for energies below nuclear. Unless they can show otherwise my very strong suspicion is that they energy needed to manipulate the nano-particles will be identical to the energy needed to emit a photon of the same momentum. Until they can show this I do not see anything to be excited about.
The reason our spaceships don't have flashlights in the back is that the maximum force that can be produced using small scale light sources is rather low. If this method works and allows the same momentum change as a photon drive but in 1/1000th the time, that's something to get excited about.
If you RTFA, you'll see that this is a list from Common Sense Media being reported by the NYT, not the NYT editorializing. In fact, the very first item on the list, Assassin's Creed 2, just got an almost ridiculously glowing review (that even sort of recommended it for high school students because it might enthuse them about Renaissance Italy) from the Times this week. The Times' "conclusion" is to ask you what you think about this list and recommend discussing it below.
Apple being "secretive and playing badly with others" is the main reason we have a mostly DRM-free music market these days. We can only hope that Amazon will be so helpfully and successfully obstinate.
Amazon's mp3 store really did the trick in moving the whole market (read: Apple) to DRM-free music.
a little man in Germany fifty years ago did something very similar
You're posting from 1987? And not claiming first post?
Since you have 22 years to think about it, please elaborate on how signing people up for drivers licenses and passports is similar to burning and looting their property, murdering them in the streets, and then rounding up the rest and sending them to concentration camps? I don't think that's what the Israeli government plans. If you don't like biometric databases that's fine, but at least add something intelligent to the discussion.
Good point. The funny thing is that if we consider the greater context, that's pretty much exactly what that particular government does to a certain segment of the population.
As an owner of an XO-1, the thing that keeps me using my little green laptop even though it often gets mistaken for a kid's toy is battery life.
I fly to vacation travel. (I defy anybody to drive to Hawaii.) From Boston, Honolulu is at least 12 hours away. In-flight movies being what they are, I usually read a book or two. With my XO, I can listen to MP3s, keep a journal, read an eBook or play games. (Freecell and Adventure keep me amused.) I can even use my StarChart program to plan star-gazing while out there. [shameless plug]
What I can't do in the air (yet) is browse the web. Having the necessary apps stored locally is therefore a must and a device that needs "the cloud" to function is useless for air travelers. But I digress -- I was saying that battery life is the deal-maker with respect to netbooks for me.
I have two batteries for my XO. In flight, the wifi has to be turned off, which gives the XO over three hours of playing time on one battery -- more if I turn the back-light off and use the monochrome screen mode.
If the layover is sufficiently long, I can re-charge at least one battery while waiting for the flight from the west coast to the islands. Usually, I arrive after the cross-country flight with both batteries discharged, re-charge one and get most of the way to Hawaii before I'm out of power. I know of no other netbook-like device presently on the market that can do as well.
So rather than high-speed CPU, lots of storage, the ability to play HD movies or all the other features that seem to be standard in the current crop of netbooks, give me a machine that's frugal of battery, small enough to fit in coach class and equipped with enough built-in functionality to keep a man amused for six to eight hours.
If you like battery life, you might be interested in an Asus 1005HA. Mine with Windows 7 lasted through my last 9 hour flight (I was reading pdf papers and writing a bit on it) and still had 15% battery life left when I turned it off for landing.
Wrong. My favourite 'laptop' ever was a Toshiba Libretto, about the size of a paperback book. My favourite laptop now is a Dell Inspiron Mini 9. What's great about these machines is they're small - the Libretto slipped easily into a jacket pocket, yet (running Debian) it was a full blown machine on which I ran everything from Apache to Oracle. The Mini 9 isn't as small, but it still fits easily into my bicycle bag - which wouldn't take a full laptop. Some users who are poor typists and have fat, pudgy fingers may have difficulty with small keyboards. Good typists adapt. And when on the move small trumps big every time.
Wrong. It's key to giving this machine decent off-power-grid performance that it runs a processor very much more frugal than an Intel. It needs to be an ARM (my preference), or a MIPS, or something new. Whatever it is, you will be able to run presentations - either Open Office will be ported (very probable), or something new will be written. You will not run Windows.
To summarize the first point of your post: 1. Wrong. A few computer users albeit a very small minority, don't care about keyboard quality and size - they're willing to adapt to any keyboard, maybe just for the hell of it, because adapting makes them feel smart. This tiny group of users should be the focus of Google's strategy.
Tabbed browsing makes sense. You have one application, a web browser, with multiple pages, taking up less screen space. It's tabbed so you don't have to click on a bunch of minimized windows or use Expose or whatever shiny workalike the Gnome / KDE bunch has now to find what you want, and so you aren't cluttering up the desktop with a hundred web browser windows.
However, there is something to be said for separating out the different applications and simply clicking the icon or what have you, to switch between them. In fact, isn't that what Windows has had for about 15 years now? Sure, the application tab bar goes on the bottom the screen by default, and is called the "Start Menu" but it is essentially, exactly what is proposed here.
The problem is that you end up filling up the bar, and then having to collapse the bar in one of several ways, all of which are annoying.
Expose, or whatever the Gnome / KDE equivalent is, is so much handier.
Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that doesn't matter!
Switcher is a Windows version of Expose which offers great customization. If you want to combine the best of OSX and Windows, you absolutely need Switcher. I find myself using the taskbar 2/3 of the time, but there are definitely times when the wonderful Expose-like behavior is the most efficient way to switch between windows. Map it to a 4th or 5th mouse button.
Really, what's the point of having windows not Maximized. As far as I can tell, you'd be better off with the taskbar in windows being like tabs, and being able to drag tabs together to form split pane views for side-by-side work. I hate having to manually drag the edges of windows, and I hate when they are not fullscreen (or minimized). Yes I know about "Tile Windows Horizontally" but it just makes extra fluff for the borders of each window compared to a tabbed/paned view. Pretty much a big failure on OS X that their Maximize doesn't even always make a window full screen.
It sounds like you just want Windows 7.
Their public statements say that they are not linking the requests to other Google services, and that they are discarding ip addresses within a day or two.
Why believe Google?
I also go through my client list and drop those that consume more of my time and resources in favour of the easier clients who ultimately improve my business at a lesser cost. What's wrong with that? My company, my rules. "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" -- it's in every restaurant. Why would you expect a business to serve you? Why would you consider it a right?
Your company's service isn't based on federal subsidies meant to provide internet access to all citizens.
So we have evidence of them recognizing this
The singular of "absurdly dubious story" isn't "evidence."
Sure, but can he beat the world of breakfast sausages?
Is it really likely that the computers weren't on anyway? If not, then surely someone would have noticed the fact that the computers were running all night for no reason sometime in the past 10 years...
Plug your computer into the wall through a power meter and you'll notice the difference between idle and heavy CPU use being easily over the 40 W the GP used.
Saying that Google is abandoning Gears is not 100% accurate as it has bad connotations.
Google created Gears to fill the void until browser makers would implement HTML5. Now that they are doing so, Gears is being retired.
Afghanistan was meant to fill the void until war makers would implement Operation Relax Because the Next Election Is Three Years Away. Now that they are doing so, Afghanistan is being retired. Offtopic? Troll? Funny? You be the judge!
I always wondered why they listed the blood type for the characters in Street Fighter. Now I know. Thanks Slashdot!
Nice. But maybe that really is why it's listed in the game...
Anyone else think that all this conservation, recycling, reduced pollution stuff is ... well, basically just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic? I mean, it's trying to treat the symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself. The disease is overpopulation - there's just too many people on planet earth, and even if you do cut back energy usage, you can't economize fast enough to keep up with geometric population growth.
Citation needed. There is no empirical data on actual maximum sustainable human population on earth. There are theoretical maximums in the 13Billion range. Since we're at roughly half of that theoretical maximum I'd say we're not even close to dealing with the problems of "over" population. Nice try though.
You postulate that we're at half of the theoretical maximum population and you think that means we're not even close to having a problem? I'd be a lot more comfortable with 6 billion if we could reasonably expect the world and our technology to handle 50 billion in the near future. Or maybe we should wait until we have 0 surplus resources to start worrying.
> Palin is a small government Libertarian AHAHHAHAH
> not some maniacal power-seeking despot. AHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHH!
It must have been some OTHER Palin who screwed up her town and then her state.
The trollish AC response is pretty much on the nose.
What software on windows is "so great/must have" that there isn't a viable alternative for other platforms. Windows has a bunch of bullshit software that isn't worth paying for besides custom in house apps.
I've never seen an image viewer that compares with irfanview used on Mac or Linux. Then again, I rarely even see a Windows machine with irfanview. Games. Photoshop, to some extent, because the new version is so much faster on Windows than Mac. This will probably be fixed within a version, though.
Chrome does a much, much better job with memory handling, and Chrome does in fact have addons that are equivalent to NoScript and AdBlockPlus.
I agree that Chrome does a better memory handling, but its CPU usage (100% of a dual core) is prohibitive when you are running other applications. This is why I continue to use Firefox.
My problem with Chrome and other webkit browsers in Windows is that their non-javascript rendering is much slower than Opera, FF, and IE. Scrolling a long page in a forum drives me crazy with Chrome/Safari. Opera, surprisingly (to me), won my last rendering comparison by a significant margin, followed by the acceptable FF and IE (well, IE was acceptable in terms of rendering speed, not overall). With an i7 system, 8 gigs of RAM, and a high end gaming video card I shouldn't feel like running webkit is like running Quake at 1280x1024 on my 486 without a 3d accelerator. However, I recognize that I'm a lot more sensitive to that sort of performance issue than are most.
You object to spending something like 0.01% of the funding to evaluate how well the program worked and how to optimize government spending on science (which annually is much larger than the bit included in the stimulus bill) in the future?