Sometimes jail is actually just about punishment too you know...
You might be surprised to find out about this, but statistical evidence has shown that getting tough on crime does not drive down crime rates. The US has by far the toughest judicial system of any western democracy, and yet compared to the EU, per 100.000 citizens, the prison population, murder rate, rape rate, and various other crime rates are several times as large. This is repeated inside the US too, where the states that are toughest on crime have the highest crime rates.
It's only a correlation ofcourse, but if being tough on crime really drove down the crime rate, you would think there would be evidence of that.
Ofcourse, from that point on you have to form theories of why that is. My personal theory is that doing bad things to people does not teach them they need to do good, only that they shouldn't get caught doing bad things themselves. If the justice system humiliates a person, what kind of message does that send regarding the value of humiliation? Imho, actual positive treatment, forcing criminals to pay back their debt to society by doing good, sending them to therapy, treating crime as an illness and trying to cure it, that is what makes them stop committing crime. But then that's just my theory.
Then microsoft decides to incorporate some non-RFC "features" into IE. Developers know that 90% of the people coming to their websites will have support for this feature, and will use it on the sites they design.
There is a difference between designing primarily for something, and designing only for something. Even if gecko marketshare is in the low single digits, that could for most developers still be enough motivation to not design exclusively for IE.
IE once started out as a low single digit marketshare browser too, and people had the very same arguments as to why it wouldn't succeed. Microsoft built a better browser, netscape slacked off, and the rest is history. If microsoft doesn't fire up IE development to an adequate degree, I see history repeating itself in the reverse.
You know, this could be a great way to bring upgradeability and extreme customizeability to portable devices.
One could imagine a sleeve where you plug in a cpu card, some data storage cards, a wifi card, and so on. Sleeves could be upgraded to provide new peripherals. You would use firewire, usb or some other generic protocol to provide the interface between the sleeve, the cards, and the outside world (possibly using stub cards that transform a cf card to a usb data storage card).
That way when you need a bigger screen, you'd buy a new sleeve and dock your old cards into it. Cpu not fast enough? Just upgrade the cpu card, no problems with having to replace the entire pda.
Why hasn't this been done yet? It seems like an untapped market just waiting to be discovered.
Given how much books amazon moves, I'd say that having a wave of bad amazon reviews is a very bad thing for any book publisher. Remember all those stories about writers submitting glowing reviews for their own books? They wouldn't be doing that if amazon reviews didn't matter. I know I never buy a book on amazon if it has a lot of negative reviews, and I buy almost all my books there.
Installing into the same folder doesn't work. I had entries for Mozilla Firefox 0.9, Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 and Mozilla Firefox 0.9.3 in my registry when I cleaned it out yesterday, all installed into the same folder. Personally I consider this an installer bug, but I understand the firefox team's priorities are a little different right now.
Once IE and Office run on Linux natively then Linux can finally be branded "the Windows killer."
Two things: - IE and office already run natively on linux, through codeweavers crossover office (wine stands for wine is not an emulator, remember? it counts as native) - Historically that kind of prediction has never ever held true. Competing platforms to a monopolizing platform only manage to break through by replacing the existing tech, not by adopting it. IT history is packed with ruling products who couldn't make the jump to a new platform well enough or early enough, and became irrelevant because of it. IE and office are yesterdays products and tied much too closely to the dying windows platform. In a decade they will be irrelevant.
When we mention DVD X Copy and people immediately post about DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink (I don't see much mention of any good re-authoring tool for Linux as I don't believe there is one).
First of all, might I mention that the very link you post tells us that dvd x copy is dead. Secondly, no wonder dvd copy products are few and far between on linux, since they are illegal. Want to get dvd software on linux? Change the law.
When we mention that there is a new exploit for Windows out people for some reason feel the need to blame Windows instead of the users using it.
Well, allow me to apologise for the people out there who think you should blame faulty products for being faulty. Microsoft's security is faulty. You can look at their security model and point out the theoretical holes with ease. Now, they did it for the sake of backwards compatibility. But you're basically arguing the gas tank in the pinto should never have been changed because people could have learnt how to crash without rupturing the gas tank.
When we mention that Firefox doesn't render pages correctly we get endless people posting that yes it does and that those that post that it doesn't are wrong! Until Firefox renders every page just like IE does the public isn't going to care for it
Have you even looked at the browser wars? IE never, ever, rendered all the pages netscape did. And still it reigns supreme. It won not because it was a better netscape, but because it was a better browser (helped by microsoft's management genius and netscape's management retardedness). Total red herring. Site compatibility in firefox is good enough (better than IE ever was), what we need now is an automated way of installing security updates (so firefox is clearly perceived as the more safe product) and some big isp's and corporations adopting it.
Linux will be ready for the desktop when it is as easy to install, run, and care for as carelessly as Windows users demand.
Here you further the myth that windows is somehow easy to care for. Just look around. For every clueless user you see, there is someone maintaining their windows box for them. Face it: windows is harder to keep running than linux. It's just that there is a much larger existing support infrastructure and community in place for windows than for linux, ensuring that people find someone to fix their windows box more easily and at a lower price. That won't be the case forever.
Right and when you get new hardware, plug it in, and restart, what does XP do? Hey, holy shit user, you have new hardware, we need drivers! Oh wait, we have them right here, no recompiles or modules need to be loaded. It's a digital camera you say? Wow, would you like to open the files on the camera and work with Photoshop or some random preloaded Windows software or would you like to save them to a directory on your HD?
Hardware detection on modern linux distro's is generally adequate. Besides, the whole point is moot. People don't install windows on their own machines, the person who maintains the pc for them does. That person would know how to get a linux install up and running, even if it doesn't autodetect everything. And besides, I have never, ever
Being pro-business is asinine. The underlying assumption is that what is good for business is good for humans, and that can be trivially disproven. The judiciary should always be pro-human, instead of pro-business. If the two coincide, good, if they don't, humans first.
You could argue that in a lot of cases the money gotten from customers flows directly back to the investors who funded the development of the product in question.
The first reason is because they can't die. Even bankrupcy doesn't necessarily mean death to the corporation, and certainly doesn't mean death to its assets.
Corporations can outwait humans. If a human has something a corporations wants, all they have to do is wait a few decades. It's like with getting themselves declared a person. The very idea is ridiculous, but by asking for it decade after decade eventually the new humans got so used to hearing the demand their entire lives that they thought it was a reasonable one to make.
Also, corporations can more easily merge their assets. If you can do good woodwork, and a friend knows how to market woodworking products, you can't merge with that friend and become one person who knows how to market the woodwork products he made. A corporation can.
And another reason is that corporations are not slowed down by a conscience, a soul or any kind of morality. A corporation is an amoral godless soulless psychopath, and because it does not care about anything but maximizing profit it can be radically effective at what it does. Individual humans within the corporation who obstruct the aim of maximizing profit because of morality or some other silly human reason get weeded out over time. The list of CEO's who have explained that they have to make evil decisions or they get fired is long. Shareholders are generally the only ones who could enforce morality, but corporations own most of the shares, and when you trace them back to humans the humans tend to not be involved with the running of the business much, and instead just want return on investment.
In essence, the way corporations operate naturally makes them more powerful than humans. The task of government is to compensate for this and give preference to humans over corporations. But government has done the reverse, which is why the world is owned and operated by corporations.
We did it to ourselves. We designed corporations so that they would rule us. Ofcourse, we can, and will, undo this. But it will require more people to become aware of the need to radically redefine what a corporation is and does.
What he's saying is that cigarettes are so compelling that lots of people still smoke them despite being aware of the health risks. However, that does not excuse the cigarette companies from the lowly behavior of knowing their product killed people and not informing them about it. An informed consumer smoking is just making a choice, and uninformed consumer smoking is being assassinated.
It's like giving someone a drink with poison in it. If you inform them of the poison, it's their choice to drink it, if you don't, and they drink it, it's murder.
I don't know about yall, but I'd like to not have to worry about my watch battery dying in less than a week.
It's worse. I used to have a watch with a rechargeable battery. After at most a few thousand charges they die, meaning that not only do you have to spend the extra effort charging it all the time, but you have to replace it MORE often than a regular non-rechargeable watch battery.
In fact, the Word document format hasn't changed since Word 97. So any Word version from 1997 or onwards will do the job.
And changing the settings to saving in RTF format by default (enabling Word versions from Word 6.0 through 2003, as well as basically all other word processors, to read the documents) isn't all that hard. Not even in a corporate setting.
The word format is heavily platform dependent. If you embed objects into word documents, or use scripting, it's pretty much a guarantee it will not work correctly across office and windows versions. Not having the right fonts available will ruin your layout too. Word is not pdf or postscript, it is not a stable or cross-platform format.
And suggesting rtf is a stable or widely supported format is silly given how many dialects of rtf there are. Every new office version comes with a new rtf dialect.
I could name three things that come to mind that mozilla did in the past year, and are underrepresented among other OSS projects:
- Focus on performance, make it faster with every release (granted, the mozilla project has been doing this for years) - Do not treat any platform in an inferior way, focus on providing quality products on all platforms, including windows and mac. - Have a visual design policy and team, redesigning the apps for improved ease of use, look and feel. Make sure the apps can be used easily by more than geeks. Make sure there is a fitting design for every platform the app runs on.
One thing's for certain: fossil fuel cars are inseperably tied to oil.
Diesel engines can run on vegetable oil, which is a non-fossil fuel. In fact, if they run on vegetable oil they produce less emissions than if they run on fossil fuel, and the carbondioxide they produce comes from plants, so doesn't add pollution to the atmosphere. The engines running on vegetable oil supposedly get less wear too.
The only reason we're not all using vegetable oil is because it's more expensive than fossil fuel, but some government involvement to make fossil fuel cost reflect its full cost could fix that. The full cost would include the cost of military involvement in the middle east and south america to stabilise the region and keep the oil flowing (200 billion usd for getting rid of saddam, which would not have been necessary had he had no oil income to fund his evil plans), not to mention the vast environmental cost of burning fossil fuel.
Most of the effort that's gone into hardware and software development, has been aimed at doing the same things faster.
The irony ofcourse being that things don't really get that much faster. A secretary will still take roughly the same time to type out a letter as a decade ago. The current weakest link in the speed chain is the human, and computers spend their time waiting on us.
What we need are interfaces that behave like humans, so people no longer need to learn how to use a computer but can interact with it using the knowledge they already have for regular social interactions.
Not that I expect it to happen soon, but it would be nice if more effort went into computational linguistics.
the handwriting recognition had little to nothing to do with the success of the pilot. The pilot was an order of magnitude smaller and lighter, and as a result it was truly a portable digital assistant, while the newton required a backpack or a reserved for comfortably lugging it around, instead of being able to use a coat pocket or belt clip like the pilot.
Most non-techie people I know with palmpilots have not learned graffiti, and input text with the on-screen keyboard.
No, you are fundamentally wrong in your assumption. Taxes are not meant to re-distribute wealth; they are for essential services such as defense of the country and major infrastructure.
And you are fundamentally wrong in your assumption that your view of what taxes are is the only one, or even the biggest one.
The view of people who support taxes as wealth redistribution mechanisms, is that everybody should get an equal or adequate opportunity in life. If you screw it up, fine, your fault, but if you are born in a poor family and you can't afford the education which would get you a decent job, the transportation which would get you to that job, or the outfit which would keep you that job, that's not your fault, and it's the government's job to rectify that situation.
Your view that poverty is a moral failing shows that you have never known real poverty.
You sound quite socialist to me. Don't you know that socialism has failed every single time it's been tried? It takes away a person's ambition to better himself.
Modern socialism is not incompatible with capitalism. It is simply the effort to give everyone an adequate opportunity in life. The old socialism was a mechanism to achieve communism, and you are right in claiming that communism has always failed. You don't seem to understand what modern socialists want. They think the market is generally a good thing, but that it inherently funnels money to those who already have it, decreasing the quality of life of those who don't, and so there must be some sort of compensating system to make sure everyone gets a fighting chance at living a good life.
The nglayout setting actually increases total page load time, but decreases time until first paint to zero, so that you see the page loading instead of staring at a blank page for a while during the page load. It seems faster, but it isn't. You have to decide what speed matters to you more, real speed or perceived speed.
And the pipelining setting doesn't work with some proxies as well as some webservers. But like the other poster said, they're quite rare.
Actually, it is not illegal to be a brutal dictator. It may be immoral, but it really is up to the people of that country to decide whether or not they want to be dictated (as has been shown over and over, you can not rule an unwilling populace). And if you're going to change international law to dictate all nations must be democratic, there are a lot of bigger fish to fry than Iraq and Saddam, not to mention that democracy must be decided by the grassroots, not dictated from above.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes jail is actually just about punishment too you know...
You might be surprised to find out about this, but statistical evidence has shown that getting tough on crime does not drive down crime rates. The US has by far the toughest judicial system of any western democracy, and yet compared to the EU, per 100.000 citizens, the prison population, murder rate, rape rate, and various other crime rates are several times as large. This is repeated inside the US too, where the states that are toughest on crime have the highest crime rates.
It's only a correlation ofcourse, but if being tough on crime really drove down the crime rate, you would think there would be evidence of that.
Ofcourse, from that point on you have to form theories of why that is. My personal theory is that doing bad things to people does not teach them they need to do good, only that they shouldn't get caught doing bad things themselves. If the justice system humiliates a person, what kind of message does that send regarding the value of humiliation? Imho, actual positive treatment, forcing criminals to pay back their debt to society by doing good, sending them to therapy, treating crime as an illness and trying to cure it, that is what makes them stop committing crime. But then that's just my theory.
Then microsoft decides to incorporate some non-RFC "features" into IE. Developers know that 90% of the people coming to their websites will have support for this feature, and will use it on the sites they design.
There is a difference between designing primarily for something, and designing only for something. Even if gecko marketshare is in the low single digits, that could for most developers still be enough motivation to not design exclusively for IE.
IE once started out as a low single digit marketshare browser too, and people had the very same arguments as to why it wouldn't succeed. Microsoft built a better browser, netscape slacked off, and the rest is history. If microsoft doesn't fire up IE development to an adequate degree, I see history repeating itself in the reverse.
I always use lynx to test my sites in, for the simple reason that if it works in lynx, it works everywhere.
OK, so you can't use tables, frames or javascript. But that's really not as bad as it seems. Most sites use those for spurious reasons anyway.
You know, this could be a great way to bring upgradeability and extreme customizeability to portable devices.
One could imagine a sleeve where you plug in a cpu card, some data storage cards, a wifi card, and so on. Sleeves could be upgraded to provide new peripherals. You would use firewire, usb or some other generic protocol to provide the interface between the sleeve, the cards, and the outside world (possibly using stub cards that transform a cf card to a usb data storage card).
That way when you need a bigger screen, you'd buy a new sleeve and dock your old cards into it. Cpu not fast enough? Just upgrade the cpu card, no problems with having to replace the entire pda.
Why hasn't this been done yet? It seems like an untapped market just waiting to be discovered.
Given how much books amazon moves, I'd say that having a wave of bad amazon reviews is a very bad thing for any book publisher. Remember all those stories about writers submitting glowing reviews for their own books? They wouldn't be doing that if amazon reviews didn't matter. I know I never buy a book on amazon if it has a lot of negative reviews, and I buy almost all my books there.
On the other hand, slashdotters will long remember that Penguin acted in an unethical manner. Perhaps they might even avoid buying books from them.
But then they might also think "hey, penguin got the message, they're not so bad after all"
Installing into the same folder doesn't work. I had entries for Mozilla Firefox 0.9, Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 and Mozilla Firefox 0.9.3 in my registry when I cleaned it out yesterday, all installed into the same folder. Personally I consider this an installer bug, but I understand the firefox team's priorities are a little different right now.
Once IE and Office run on Linux natively then Linux can finally be branded "the Windows killer."
Two things:
- IE and office already run natively on linux, through codeweavers crossover office (wine stands for wine is not an emulator, remember? it counts as native)
- Historically that kind of prediction has never ever held true. Competing platforms to a monopolizing platform only manage to break through by replacing the existing tech, not by adopting it. IT history is packed with ruling products who couldn't make the jump to a new platform well enough or early enough, and became irrelevant because of it. IE and office are yesterdays products and tied much too closely to the dying windows platform. In a decade they will be irrelevant.
When we mention DVD X Copy and people immediately post about DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink (I don't see much mention of any good re-authoring tool for Linux as I don't believe there is one).
First of all, might I mention that the very link you post tells us that dvd x copy is dead. Secondly, no wonder dvd copy products are few and far between on linux, since they are illegal. Want to get dvd software on linux? Change the law.
When we mention that there is a new exploit for Windows out people for some reason feel the need to blame Windows instead of the users using it.
Well, allow me to apologise for the people out there who think you should blame faulty products for being faulty. Microsoft's security is faulty. You can look at their security model and point out the theoretical holes with ease. Now, they did it for the sake of backwards compatibility. But you're basically arguing the gas tank in the pinto should never have been changed because people could have learnt how to crash without rupturing the gas tank.
When we mention that Firefox doesn't render pages correctly we get endless people posting that yes it does and that those that post that it doesn't are wrong! Until Firefox renders every page just like IE does the public isn't going to care for it
Have you even looked at the browser wars? IE never, ever, rendered all the pages netscape did. And still it reigns supreme. It won not because it was a better netscape, but because it was a better browser (helped by microsoft's management genius and netscape's management retardedness). Total red herring. Site compatibility in firefox is good enough (better than IE ever was), what we need now is an automated way of installing security updates (so firefox is clearly perceived as the more safe product) and some big isp's and corporations adopting it.
Linux will be ready for the desktop when it is as easy to install, run, and care for as carelessly as Windows users demand.
Here you further the myth that windows is somehow easy to care for. Just look around. For every clueless user you see, there is someone maintaining their windows box for them. Face it: windows is harder to keep running than linux. It's just that there is a much larger existing support infrastructure and community in place for windows than for linux, ensuring that people find someone to fix their windows box more easily and at a lower price. That won't be the case forever.
Right and when you get new hardware, plug it in, and restart, what does XP do? Hey, holy shit user, you have new hardware, we need drivers! Oh wait, we have them right here, no recompiles or modules need to be loaded. It's a digital camera you say? Wow, would you like to open the files on the camera and work with Photoshop or some random preloaded Windows software or would you like to save them to a directory on your HD?
Hardware detection on modern linux distro's is generally adequate. Besides, the whole point is moot. People don't install windows on their own machines, the person who maintains the pc for them does. That person would know how to get a linux install up and running, even if it doesn't autodetect everything. And besides, I have never, ever
But there are multiple entries in the add/remove programs dialog on windows. Still, that's nothing a quick regedit job won't fix.
Being pro-business is one thing
Being pro-business is asinine. The underlying assumption is that what is good for business is good for humans, and that can be trivially disproven. The judiciary should always be pro-human, instead of pro-business. If the two coincide, good, if they don't, humans first.
You could argue that in a lot of cases the money gotten from customers flows directly back to the investors who funded the development of the product in question.
Why are corps so much better off then people?
Many reasons.
The first reason is because they can't die. Even bankrupcy doesn't necessarily mean death to the corporation, and certainly doesn't mean death to its assets.
Corporations can outwait humans. If a human has something a corporations wants, all they have to do is wait a few decades. It's like with getting themselves declared a person. The very idea is ridiculous, but by asking for it decade after decade eventually the new humans got so used to hearing the demand their entire lives that they thought it was a reasonable one to make.
Also, corporations can more easily merge their assets. If you can do good woodwork, and a friend knows how to market woodworking products, you can't merge with that friend and become one person who knows how to market the woodwork products he made. A corporation can.
And another reason is that corporations are not slowed down by a conscience, a soul or any kind of morality. A corporation is an amoral godless soulless psychopath, and because it does not care about anything but maximizing profit it can be radically effective at what it does. Individual humans within the corporation who obstruct the aim of maximizing profit because of morality or some other silly human reason get weeded out over time. The list of CEO's who have explained that they have to make evil decisions or they get fired is long. Shareholders are generally the only ones who could enforce morality, but corporations own most of the shares, and when you trace them back to humans the humans tend to not be involved with the running of the business much, and instead just want return on investment.
In essence, the way corporations operate naturally makes them more powerful than humans. The task of government is to compensate for this and give preference to humans over corporations. But government has done the reverse, which is why the world is owned and operated by corporations.
We did it to ourselves. We designed corporations so that they would rule us. Ofcourse, we can, and will, undo this. But it will require more people to become aware of the need to radically redefine what a corporation is and does.
What he's saying is that cigarettes are so compelling that lots of people still smoke them despite being aware of the health risks. However, that does not excuse the cigarette companies from the lowly behavior of knowing their product killed people and not informing them about it. An informed consumer smoking is just making a choice, and uninformed consumer smoking is being assassinated.
It's like giving someone a drink with poison in it. If you inform them of the poison, it's their choice to drink it, if you don't, and they drink it, it's murder.
Don't forget the cd insert creation functionality. Very smooth, very easy to use, very pretty.
I don't know about yall, but I'd like to not have to worry about my watch battery dying in less than a week.
It's worse. I used to have a watch with a rechargeable battery. After at most a few thousand charges they die, meaning that not only do you have to spend the extra effort charging it all the time, but you have to replace it MORE often than a regular non-rechargeable watch battery.
In fact, the Word document format hasn't changed since Word 97. So any Word version from 1997 or onwards will do the job.
And changing the settings to saving in RTF format by default (enabling Word versions from Word 6.0 through 2003, as well as basically all other word processors, to read the documents) isn't all that hard. Not even in a corporate setting.
The word format is heavily platform dependent. If you embed objects into word documents, or use scripting, it's pretty much a guarantee it will not work correctly across office and windows versions. Not having the right fonts available will ruin your layout too. Word is not pdf or postscript, it is not a stable or cross-platform format.
And suggesting rtf is a stable or widely supported format is silly given how many dialects of rtf there are. Every new office version comes with a new rtf dialect.
I could name three things that come to mind that mozilla did in the past year, and are underrepresented among other OSS projects:
- Focus on performance, make it faster with every release (granted, the mozilla project has been doing this for years)
- Do not treat any platform in an inferior way, focus on providing quality products on all platforms, including windows and mac.
- Have a visual design policy and team, redesigning the apps for improved ease of use, look and feel. Make sure the apps can be used easily by more than geeks. Make sure there is a fitting design for every platform the app runs on.
One thing's for certain: fossil fuel cars are inseperably tied to oil.
Diesel engines can run on vegetable oil, which is a non-fossil fuel. In fact, if they run on vegetable oil they produce less emissions than if they run on fossil fuel, and the carbondioxide they produce comes from plants, so doesn't add pollution to the atmosphere. The engines running on vegetable oil supposedly get less wear too.
The only reason we're not all using vegetable oil is because it's more expensive than fossil fuel, but some government involvement to make fossil fuel cost reflect its full cost could fix that. The full cost would include the cost of military involvement in the middle east and south america to stabilise the region and keep the oil flowing (200 billion usd for getting rid of saddam, which would not have been necessary had he had no oil income to fund his evil plans), not to mention the vast environmental cost of burning fossil fuel.
Most of the effort that's gone into hardware and software development, has been aimed at doing the same things faster.
The irony ofcourse being that things don't really get that much faster. A secretary will still take roughly the same time to type out a letter as a decade ago. The current weakest link in the speed chain is the human, and computers spend their time waiting on us.
What we need are interfaces that behave like humans, so people no longer need to learn how to use a computer but can interact with it using the knowledge they already have for regular social interactions.
Not that I expect it to happen soon, but it would be nice if more effort went into computational linguistics.
the handwriting recognition had little to nothing to do with the success of the pilot. The pilot was an order of magnitude smaller and lighter, and as a result it was truly a portable digital assistant, while the newton required a backpack or a reserved for comfortably lugging it around, instead of being able to use a coat pocket or belt clip like the pilot.
Most non-techie people I know with palmpilots have not learned graffiti, and input text with the on-screen keyboard.
If microsoft really stole code, you'd think they'd steal the really good stuff. Past experience with microsoft products would indicate otherwise.
No, you are fundamentally wrong in your assumption. Taxes are not meant to re-distribute wealth; they are for essential services such as defense of the country and major infrastructure.
And you are fundamentally wrong in your assumption that your view of what taxes are is the only one, or even the biggest one.
The view of people who support taxes as wealth redistribution mechanisms, is that everybody should get an equal or adequate opportunity in life. If you screw it up, fine, your fault, but if you are born in a poor family and you can't afford the education which would get you a decent job, the transportation which would get you to that job, or the outfit which would keep you that job, that's not your fault, and it's the government's job to rectify that situation.
Your view that poverty is a moral failing shows that you have never known real poverty.
You sound quite socialist to me. Don't you know that socialism has failed every single time it's been tried? It takes away a person's ambition to better himself.
Modern socialism is not incompatible with capitalism. It is simply the effort to give everyone an adequate opportunity in life. The old socialism was a mechanism to achieve communism, and you are right in claiming that communism has always failed. You don't seem to understand what modern socialists want. They think the market is generally a good thing, but that it inherently funnels money to those who already have it, decreasing the quality of life of those who don't, and so there must be some sort of compensating system to make sure everyone gets a fighting chance at living a good life.
Clippy is actually the evolved version of bob, so that only counts as one idea.
But in all honesty, microsoft research is doing some interesting work. Too bad very little of it flows back to the actual products.
The nglayout setting actually increases total page load time, but decreases time until first paint to zero, so that you see the page loading instead of staring at a blank page for a while during the page load. It seems faster, but it isn't. You have to decide what speed matters to you more, real speed or perceived speed.
And the pipelining setting doesn't work with some proxies as well as some webservers. But like the other poster said, they're quite rare.
Actually, it is not illegal to be a brutal dictator. It may be immoral, but it really is up to the people of that country to decide whether or not they want to be dictated (as has been shown over and over, you can not rule an unwilling populace). And if you're going to change international law to dictate all nations must be democratic, there are a lot of bigger fish to fry than Iraq and Saddam, not to mention that democracy must be decided by the grassroots, not dictated from above.