We need a demarcy. All Americans that are interested and not politically retarded (yearly tests, where you have to do shit like name the last 5 presidents or know which of Iran, Turkey and North Korea isn't a wacko regime trying to kill us) are entered into a giant lottery.
Congress consists of 500 people and each year 100 are replaced in a draw of that lottery. Members of Congress get $1m a year, tax-free, for the rest of their lives. In exchange they have to be representatives for 5 years and are strictly forbidden from ever making money any other way ever again.
No salaries, no donations, no gifts, no handouts, no speaker fees, no nothing.
Any downsides (representatives no longer answer to their voters --- hahaha that was a good one) are more than compensated by the limit it puts on corporate bribery.
No but it has a direct effect on the financial capabilities of the DoD.
If a half assed regime could down a multi-billion dollar super high tech weapon with shit bought at Home Depot, people might question if all those juicy contracts are really necessary.
You don't even need to get into specialized stuff.
If your computer operates at a pedestrian 2 GHz then 60 ns is 120 clock cycles. And it's not like we have a problem generating those frequencies.
GPS is nothing but measuring your position by detecting the differences in running time of a speed of light signal. Your unit has to be ridiculously bad nowadays to have a precision of 10m.
Yes the detectors are underground but in tunneling projects you nowadays expect deviations of less than 5cm. For the Gotthard Base Tunnel it was less than 2cm on 10km distance far underground.
Does this mean the measurements are correct? No, incompetence springs eternal. But to those people looking incredulously at the "ridiculous" precision required: Welcome to the world of tomorrow. Your cellphone could do that shit if it had a rangefinder.
So you either have a pile of ribbons, and 6 lines of spreadsheet data
? How do you get a pile of ribbons?
or a dozen clicks to jump back and forth between ribbons
Which is exactly the same as a bunch of different menus. Use the shortcuts for the different tabs or even the functions themselves or put them in the toolbar.
It's even more fun if you're trying to use a function that you can't quite remember the name of, and have to hover over a million icons to find the right one.
Everything but the most basic text editing functions is labeled.
Let's, just for the sake of argument, pretend for one moment that your charts make in any way sense. You clearly see that the debt starts to outpace the curve under Reagan, continues to do so under Bush I, and Clinton brings it back in line. This invalidates your original point that everyone increased it by the same percentage. Now back to the fundamental issues:
Of course GDP matters. No matter how you index for inflation it's obvious that the US now can shoulder a debt that would have crushed the US a hundred years ago. There's 3 times the population and every American on average is far richer.
And your stupid chart doesn't even use inflation adjusted dollars which is funny because you sure sound like one of those gold standard nutjobs. It should be obvious that a 2010 $ is worth less than a 1930 $, so $1t now is less than $1t then.
All signals are black on high speed lines, the relevant clearances are transmitted to the trains directly.
Which brings me to the main problem: I know the Chinese use the European Train Control System and not something a few interns came up with during a coffee break. I can't imagine that the system doesn't default to having all trains come to a full stop, not to mention that the system still uses blocks and the second train should never have gotten the clearance for that block unless the first train had cleared the next one. (fully, both axle counters and the data bus on the train itself is used to confirm integrity. That wasn't an issue here, my point is that it requires an active confirmation so a blackout defaults to the safe state)
Oh well, their maglev also burned down after they had done some "inspections" on the electronics.
Steve: "If we come down on joe blow hacker like big business didn't on us back in the 1980s, they won't ever get out of the garage and become serious competition."
The deficit is so large because the taxes are the lowest they've ever been since the 20s. There certainly is such a thing as too much taxes but there's also not enough. If you don't have any taxes at all the State will cease to exist and you get the equivalent of Somalia, the tea party people overlook that neither extremum of taxation produces an optimal result. It's especially funny because they're the same people who think fondly of the high tax eras like the 50s.
And yeah, when gas prices double in two years, we are going to bitch because my income has not increased to compensate. So, instead of taking my wife and child out to dinner a few times a month and giving my money to people who live near me, I have to give it to people who want to kill us all. BTW, that's another TEA Party platform; domestic energy production.
The solution would have been to increase the gas tax gradually over the last twenty years instead of leaving it unchanged since '93. The economy would have adjusted gradually as well (as it did elsewhere). And now that oil's back through the roof (how could anyone have known in the 80s that oil might become expensive? Madness, I say!) the relative increase would have been a lot smaller. In addition roads would be safer with less soccer moms in land battleships.
As for taxes, the Democratic plan is tax the rich that would otherwise invest the money into business that would hire people and to tax large corporations who will simply raise prices on their products that everyone purchases.
Companies charge what the market will bear as long as anti-trust laws are enforced.
Unless, of course, you are GE who owned a media empire friendly to the president. They didn't have to pay taxes.
Yes, the vast left wing conspiracy. The worst part is where Planned Parenthood in conjunction with NAMBLA ensnared Republicans to refuse the elimination of tax loopholes so it would look like they were in the pockets of big business.
Yes, powering Europe with solar plants in Tunisia and Libya. What could possibly go wrong (well, there's of course other countries like Algeria, that are also known for their boundless political stability). At least with oil we have a 90 day strategic reserve (currently 140 days to be precise).
And with 400 km^2 of CSP we can power the entire world.
You should have posted the Japanese version. Japanese has a sentence structure and a way of expressing thoughts that are very different from how you'd put it in English. The result is just awful, it is so bad in fact that you turned off Kurzweil's singularity. 30 years of proselytizing and you just killed it; good job.
English->Japanese->English
Yeah, every year, machine translation, is sandwiched between the Altavista BabelFish... this is bleak for one to one conversion dictionary for translation basically hilariously bad (in many cases, without using the right definition of in), respectively.
A few years ago, Google will translate UN document (which is usually 5 + languagels) gave a big bump in the overall concept with such a reliable translation. It has got a lot of hiccups, a decent translation from the translation often reads from the bubble Babel often went to the distance so you know what you are if you put some thought into it.
Even I have been a lot of work and by the translator, because they get things right, I turned off the singularity in a way, actually I think. IMO, the end of this decade, machine translation is often enough (in fact, Google Translate and I need to start looking for clues in the context of more that 19 years away can not think) but it would be perfect does not exist, the language itself is not perfect. Look at the people to communicate one day, but it is not a strict protocol, misunderstandings may occur between the people all the time. But the machine when you get it wrong people instead of the nature of language itself, so badly that point.
Nuclear energy is quite cheap once the plant is up and running they can be run indefinitely with proper maintenance
But they shouldn't. Fukushima is part of the first wave of commercial reactors and they built to different standards then. I read the Fukushima style BWR had a core breach expectation of once every ten thousand years. There's a hundred reactors of that kind in the world so it's not even all that unexpected. A modern reactor has an expectation of up to once every 50 million years and I wouldn't even want those around indefinitely (all those probabilities are based on external factors within certain limits. In Fukushima the quake exceeded those by a factor of three).
We should be in the process of replacing all those early 70s reactors and should replace the replacements in the second half of the century (there are so many better options on the drawing board). The environmentalists have made new reactors ridiculously expensive (mainly because it takes forever to build. The opportunity costs kill you) but the power is needed and there's no real alternative consumers are willing to pay for.
Therefore we're left with the worst of both worlds. Instead of expensive but clean and "safe" ("safe" because expensive electricity has a major indirect impact) or "cheap" and safe (nukes are safer than anything in casualties per unit of power but you wouldn't wanna see insurance premiums at market rates) we have old nukes and coal.
Here's the radiation information from the NNSA and Department of Energy which have cooperated with Japanese authorities on overflights and ground measurements.
Slide 6 shows the Cesium levels which are probably the most relevant mid-term. Expect them to adjust the exclusion zone to cover anything green and up (and Iitate is right in the middle), although this being Japan they might just exchange the top soil of the outlying islands. I do wonder what they're gonna do in the 300,000-600,000 Bq/m^3 areas.
Now imagine how great the US freight rail system would be if government didn't siphon off billions of $$$ each year while at the same time subsidizing trucks.
This is not Joe Crackpot speaking, the thing is this:
The rail corporations have to maintain their tracks and pay property taxes on their rights of way. The US used to have a lot more double-tracked and electrified sections but because those are taxed heavier the companies ripped them out wherever possible. Even where it made economic sense if it wasn't for taxes. Now it's just barren strips of land next to the single track.
Trucks don't have to pay property taxes for roads. But wait, don't they pay fuel taxes? Yes, but the average truck damages the road about 1000 more than a passenger car (the number is from the industry itself). In addition the gas tax doesn't pay for the roads. Most of the gas tax is generated on local roads that aren't covered by it and spent on highways. But even then the federal highway trust fund requires yearly bailouts and it's not much better in many states.
In short, Republicans should be all for addressing this anti-business outrage and Democrats should wanna hug a tree, but both are too craven to face the lobbyists.
Each passenger train uses up the track time of six freights.
That was basically the idea behind China's high speed lines. Separate freight and high-speed traffic. They got side-tracked by the usual Chinese gigantomania, but the basic plan is sound. The problem is that you can't construct a sensible *mass transport* system in the US because North Dakota (no masses to transport) hates the idea of subsidizing New York even though New York pays billions each year to North Dakota for all kinds of shit (Interstates, agriculture, whatever) but they never make the connection. So you need "high speed" trains in the heartland where no one rides them. Amtrak would be profitable, too, if it didn't have to service all 50 states.
They *are* in bed with big business. You should neither try to pretend that Democrats are actually good, nor that just because both parties are shit, the GOP can't be a whole lot worse than the Dems.
And I'm not a hardcore Dem. Imho Reagan was a good, perhaps even a great president. Republicans, WTF happened?
Well, there's apparently enough difference that those "modern" Liberals voted against this fuck up in a 5:4 decision while the Conservatives thought it was only fair.
It was the same 5:4 for the money=free speech fuck up and you can bet your ass that corporations are gonna use billions of free speech to convince you that there's no difference between Libs and Cons.
Roberts+Alito always rule corporations>government>people, Thomas votes for whatever he thinks will piss off Democrats and Scalia goes by his conscience and strictly texturalist world view which, funny thing, just about always is the reactionary side. Kennedy is the "swing vote" but the swing is broken.
Let's take the article. Roughly 75% of my screen real estate is wasted. About 5% of those 75% is by the browser controls and the rest is white space because I like the majority of people out there have a widescreen monitor. They're not especially well-suited to text (unless you place a bunch of documents next to each other) with either
lots of white space,
hard to read lines of text that go on forever or
a cacophony of content next to each other. (A dynamic multi-column layout like a newspaper would be interesting but normally it's just three columns of ads)
So why are browsers locked in a fight towards absurd minimalism when there's huge amounts of space to go around. And with more and more screens going for 16:9 instead of 16:10 it's getting worse, not better.
Miguel de Icaza is absolutely psyched about this deal. It's a great day for OSS, not only is MeeGo effectively canned, Windows Phone 7 might just become a serious Android competitor. No wonder Miguel can't contain his glee.
If the Gnome founder can do it, why not some Symbian developer?
Oregon is well aware that Intel contributes way more to the state of Oregon than Nike. Trying to "Tax them fairly" will result in the loss of Intel in Oregon. Intel is by no means getting no taxes. Intel contributes heavily to the local infrastructure and education.
Maybe, just maybe, the Glorious State of Oregon should just get rid of stupid taxes and replace them with more sensible ones. Applying taxes fairly is in our best interest because I'm pretty sure we couldn't negotiate with the state to lower our taxes.
If applying a tax lawfully, equally and fairly leads to disastrous outcomes then you should get rid of the tax and pass a new one.
Is DRM worth it? It's easily cracked (although the first week of sales generally dwarfs all others, so even a few days are nice) and it punishes paying customers while the pirates are unaffected.
On the other hand no DRM seems to have a detrimental effect on sales. Point in case: Ubisoft. First they used the usual crap, then they tried DRM-free games for a while. The lesson? Well, they built the most draconian DRM regime ever devised which should tell you something.
Pirates are cheap. Many may say that they don't buy a game just because of its DRM but if you get rid of it they'll just think of something else. Too many bugs, not enough money, "testing" it for 40+ hours, they'll always find a reason.
Pirates are also lazy. Yeah, it can be cracked but piracy is a numbers game and if you have to jump through hoops for one game and not for others then it'll reduce piracy for your game.
Pirates are also vain, juvenile and really lazy. So Steam with its easy of use and achievements works great, as do systems that require you to register and log-in online for "free" DLC as well as regular patches that add functionality (so pirates want them) and break known cracks.
DRM may be necessary but with a bit of lipstick and some makeup that pig can look really good. The trick is to implement it in a form that appears to give honest buyers more value than the pirates instead of less.
Firefox is the lazy and slow loser next door that's nevertheless lovable. Chrome is rich, refined and snappy but slightly creepy. It doesn't make you wanna leave it alone with your kids.
Firefox is slower (in my case it currently hangs for roughly a minute on start-up. Keep those windows open), has better extensions and the best memory management I've ever seen in a browser (used to be a pet peeve of mine, when they still sold memory leaks as features). Chrome has some great features if you connect to the cloud to socialize your AJAX relationships or something (e.g. you can treat browser pages like apps with start menu entries and stuff - although I always have to reload many manually after launch for it to work properly). It's fast and it will always be up-to-date. That's because Google puts its update service (pray to god that that's all it does) everywhere you can fit that stuff on Windows. There's the Autostart entry, the delayed start, the service, the IE plugin, the Firefox plugin, the Opera plugin and probably a few I missed. But don't be afraid that it's gonna spy on you. Many of the bleeding edge features (Google's new app-store) only work if you log-in with your Google account so they're gonna know every thing about you anyway.
That's what I mean with slightly creepy. Your neighbor might have never given you any reason to question his integrity but if he insists on going through your trash and wants to install a camera in your bathroom you're probably gonna be suspicious.
Oh, you still use a "desktop" or a "laptop". How quaint. Modern displays are 768p or less.
You have to go with the times, connect to the Cloud, man! If your browser doesn't run on something with net or smart in the name and a random vowel as prefix, they aren't interested in you. If you don't immediately shout every lifestyle choice from the roofs with Twitter and Facebook updates you are just not relevant.
I don't think that's the issue because it's not limited to cold startups. Launching Firefox repeatedly brings no improvement. It's also not the profile or the session because it also happens with a new profile for a new user.
Again, wouldn't it be nice if Firefox had a log file? Nothing fancy just the major steps? Yeah, I could get a debug version and run a trace and whatever but I don't see why I should jump through all those hoops. Instead, I'm gonna wait till full release and just switch to Chrome if it still persists.
Slashdot Mirror
Congress consists of 500 people and each year 100 are replaced in a draw of that lottery. Members of Congress get $1m a year, tax-free, for the rest of their lives. In exchange they have to be representatives for 5 years and are strictly forbidden from ever making money any other way ever again.
No salaries, no donations, no gifts, no handouts, no speaker fees, no nothing.
Any downsides (representatives no longer answer to their voters --- hahaha that was a good one) are more than compensated by the limit it puts on corporate bribery.
If a half assed regime could down a multi-billion dollar super high tech weapon with shit bought at Home Depot, people might question if all those juicy contracts are really necessary.
English is my third language. I'm sorry, I will buy everyone a pack of Ned Flander's eye soap.
Don't worry, we forgive you. Just try to be more careful next time.
Remember, there are no editors here to do basic fact checking and proof reading.
If your computer operates at a pedestrian 2 GHz then 60 ns is 120 clock cycles. And it's not like we have a problem generating those frequencies.
GPS is nothing but measuring your position by detecting the differences in running time of a speed of light signal. Your unit has to be ridiculously bad nowadays to have a precision of 10m.
Yes the detectors are underground but in tunneling projects you nowadays expect deviations of less than 5cm. For the Gotthard Base Tunnel it was less than 2cm on 10km distance far underground.
Does this mean the measurements are correct? No, incompetence springs eternal. But to those people looking incredulously at the "ridiculous" precision required: Welcome to the world of tomorrow. Your cellphone could do that shit if it had a rangefinder.
So you either have a pile of ribbons, and 6 lines of spreadsheet data
? How do you get a pile of ribbons?
or a dozen clicks to jump back and forth between ribbons
Which is exactly the same as a bunch of different menus. Use the shortcuts for the different tabs or even the functions themselves or put them in the toolbar.
It's even more fun if you're trying to use a function that you can't quite remember the name of, and have to hover over a million icons to find the right one.
Everything but the most basic text editing functions is labeled.
Bullshit 2.0.
Of course GDP matters. No matter how you index for inflation it's obvious that the US now can shoulder a debt that would have crushed the US a hundred years ago. There's 3 times the population and every American on average is far richer.
And your stupid chart doesn't even use inflation adjusted dollars which is funny because you sure sound like one of those gold standard nutjobs. It should be obvious that a 2010 $ is worth less than a 1930 $, so $1t now is less than $1t then.
Bullshit.
Which brings me to the main problem: I know the Chinese use the European Train Control System and not something a few interns came up with during a coffee break. I can't imagine that the system doesn't default to having all trains come to a full stop, not to mention that the system still uses blocks and the second train should never have gotten the clearance for that block unless the first train had cleared the next one. (fully, both axle counters and the data bus on the train itself is used to confirm integrity. That wasn't an issue here, my point is that it requires an active confirmation so a blackout defaults to the safe state)
Oh well, their maglev also burned down after they had done some "inspections" on the electronics.
Steve: "If we come down on joe blow hacker like big business didn't on us back in the 1980s, they won't ever get out of the garage and become serious competition."
And yeah, when gas prices double in two years, we are going to bitch because my income has not increased to compensate. So, instead of taking my wife and child out to dinner a few times a month and giving my money to people who live near me, I have to give it to people who want to kill us all. BTW, that's another TEA Party platform; domestic energy production.
The solution would have been to increase the gas tax gradually over the last twenty years instead of leaving it unchanged since '93. The economy would have adjusted gradually as well (as it did elsewhere). And now that oil's back through the roof (how could anyone have known in the 80s that oil might become expensive? Madness, I say!) the relative increase would have been a lot smaller. In addition roads would be safer with less soccer moms in land battleships.
As for taxes, the Democratic plan is tax the rich that would otherwise invest the money into business that would hire people and to tax large corporations who will simply raise prices on their products that everyone purchases.
Companies charge what the market will bear as long as anti-trust laws are enforced.
Unless, of course, you are GE who owned a media empire friendly to the president. They didn't have to pay taxes.
Yes, the vast left wing conspiracy. The worst part is where Planned Parenthood in conjunction with NAMBLA ensnared Republicans to refuse the elimination of tax loopholes so it would look like they were in the pockets of big business.
Yes, powering Europe with solar plants in Tunisia and Libya. What could possibly go wrong (well, there's of course other countries like Algeria, that are also known for their boundless political stability). At least with oil we have a 90 day strategic reserve (currently 140 days to be precise).
And with 400 km^2 of CSP we can power the entire world.
You fail 5th grade math.
English->Japanese->English
Yeah, every year, machine translation, is sandwiched between the Altavista BabelFish ... this is bleak for one to one conversion dictionary for translation basically hilariously bad (in many cases, without using the right definition of in), respectively.
A few years ago, Google will translate UN document (which is usually 5 + languagels) gave a big bump in the overall concept with such a reliable translation. It has got a lot of hiccups, a decent translation from the translation often reads from the bubble Babel often went to the distance so you know what you are if you put some thought into it.
Even I have been a lot of work and by the translator, because they get things right, I turned off the singularity in a way, actually I think. IMO, the end of this decade, machine translation is often enough (in fact, Google Translate and I need to start looking for clues in the context of more that 19 years away can not think) but it would be perfect does not exist, the language itself is not perfect. Look at the people to communicate one day, but it is not a strict protocol, misunderstandings may occur between the people all the time. But the machine when you get it wrong people instead of the nature of language itself, so badly that point.
But they shouldn't. Fukushima is part of the first wave of commercial reactors and they built to different standards then. I read the Fukushima style BWR had a core breach expectation of once every ten thousand years. There's a hundred reactors of that kind in the world so it's not even all that unexpected. A modern reactor has an expectation of up to once every 50 million years and I wouldn't even want those around indefinitely (all those probabilities are based on external factors within certain limits. In Fukushima the quake exceeded those by a factor of three).
We should be in the process of replacing all those early 70s reactors and should replace the replacements in the second half of the century (there are so many better options on the drawing board). The environmentalists have made new reactors ridiculously expensive (mainly because it takes forever to build. The opportunity costs kill you) but the power is needed and there's no real alternative consumers are willing to pay for.
Therefore we're left with the worst of both worlds. Instead of expensive but clean and "safe" ("safe" because expensive electricity has a major indirect impact) or "cheap" and safe (nukes are safer than anything in casualties per unit of power but you wouldn't wanna see insurance premiums at market rates) we have old nukes and coal.
Here's the radiation information from the NNSA and Department of Energy which have cooperated with Japanese authorities on overflights and ground measurements. Slide 6 shows the Cesium levels which are probably the most relevant mid-term. Expect them to adjust the exclusion zone to cover anything green and up (and Iitate is right in the middle), although this being Japan they might just exchange the top soil of the outlying islands. I do wonder what they're gonna do in the 300,000-600,000 Bq/m^3 areas.
This is not Joe Crackpot speaking, the thing is this:
In short, Republicans should be all for addressing this anti-business outrage and Democrats should wanna hug a tree, but both are too craven to face the lobbyists.
Each passenger train uses up the track time of six freights.
That was basically the idea behind China's high speed lines. Separate freight and high-speed traffic. They got side-tracked by the usual Chinese gigantomania, but the basic plan is sound. The problem is that you can't construct a sensible *mass transport* system in the US because North Dakota (no masses to transport) hates the idea of subsidizing New York even though New York pays billions each year to North Dakota for all kinds of shit (Interstates, agriculture, whatever) but they never make the connection. So you need "high speed" trains in the heartland where no one rides them. Amtrak would be profitable, too, if it didn't have to service all 50 states.
And I'm not a hardcore Dem. Imho Reagan was a good, perhaps even a great president. Republicans, WTF happened?
It was the same 5:4 for the money=free speech fuck up and you can bet your ass that corporations are gonna use billions of free speech to convince you that there's no difference between Libs and Cons.
Roberts+Alito always rule corporations>government>people, Thomas votes for whatever he thinks will piss off Democrats and Scalia goes by his conscience and strictly texturalist world view which, funny thing, just about always is the reactionary side. Kennedy is the "swing vote" but the swing is broken.
Let's take the article. Roughly 75% of my screen real estate is wasted. About 5% of those 75% is by the browser controls and the rest is white space because I like the majority of people out there have a widescreen monitor. They're not especially well-suited to text (unless you place a bunch of documents next to each other) with either
So why are browsers locked in a fight towards absurd minimalism when there's huge amounts of space to go around. And with more and more screens going for 16:9 instead of 16:10 it's getting worse, not better.
Miguel de Icaza is absolutely psyched about this deal. It's a great day for OSS, not only is MeeGo effectively canned, Windows Phone 7 might just become a serious Android competitor. No wonder Miguel can't contain his glee.
If the Gnome founder can do it, why not some Symbian developer?
Oregon is well aware that Intel contributes way more to the state of Oregon than Nike. Trying to "Tax them fairly" will result in the loss of Intel in Oregon. Intel is by no means getting no taxes. Intel contributes heavily to the local infrastructure and education.
Maybe, just maybe, the Glorious State of Oregon should just get rid of stupid taxes and replace them with more sensible ones. Applying taxes fairly is in our best interest because I'm pretty sure we couldn't negotiate with the state to lower our taxes.
If applying a tax lawfully, equally and fairly leads to disastrous outcomes then you should get rid of the tax and pass a new one.
Yep, that's the way he did it. I just talked to him about it an hour ago, before I went jogging...
On the other hand no DRM seems to have a detrimental effect on sales. Point in case: Ubisoft. First they used the usual crap, then they tried DRM-free games for a while. The lesson? Well, they built the most draconian DRM regime ever devised which should tell you something.
Pirates are cheap. Many may say that they don't buy a game just because of its DRM but if you get rid of it they'll just think of something else. Too many bugs, not enough money, "testing" it for 40+ hours, they'll always find a reason.
Pirates are also lazy. Yeah, it can be cracked but piracy is a numbers game and if you have to jump through hoops for one game and not for others then it'll reduce piracy for your game.
Pirates are also vain, juvenile and really lazy. So Steam with its easy of use and achievements works great, as do systems that require you to register and log-in online for "free" DLC as well as regular patches that add functionality (so pirates want them) and break known cracks.
DRM may be necessary but with a bit of lipstick and some makeup that pig can look really good. The trick is to implement it in a form that appears to give honest buyers more value than the pirates instead of less.
Firefox is slower (in my case it currently hangs for roughly a minute on start-up. Keep those windows open), has better extensions and the best memory management I've ever seen in a browser (used to be a pet peeve of mine, when they still sold memory leaks as features). Chrome has some great features if you connect to the cloud to socialize your AJAX relationships or something (e.g. you can treat browser pages like apps with start menu entries and stuff - although I always have to reload many manually after launch for it to work properly). It's fast and it will always be up-to-date. That's because Google puts its update service (pray to god that that's all it does) everywhere you can fit that stuff on Windows. There's the Autostart entry, the delayed start, the service, the IE plugin, the Firefox plugin, the Opera plugin and probably a few I missed. But don't be afraid that it's gonna spy on you. Many of the bleeding edge features (Google's new app-store) only work if you log-in with your Google account so they're gonna know every thing about you anyway.
That's what I mean with slightly creepy. Your neighbor might have never given you any reason to question his integrity but if he insists on going through your trash and wants to install a camera in your bathroom you're probably gonna be suspicious.
You have to go with the times, connect to the Cloud, man! If your browser doesn't run on something with net or smart in the name and a random vowel as prefix, they aren't interested in you. If you don't immediately shout every lifestyle choice from the roofs with Twitter and Facebook updates you are just not relevant.
Go back to your 8-track, gramps.
Again, wouldn't it be nice if Firefox had a log file? Nothing fancy just the major steps? Yeah, I could get a debug version and run a trace and whatever but I don't see why I should jump through all those hoops. Instead, I'm gonna wait till full release and just switch to Chrome if it still persists.