I don't think your examples of Islamic states are entirely fair. Or at least, they're a bit limited. I fully agree that there are no Islamic states that I would care to live in. However, secular states which happen to be Islamic, such as Turkey, seem to be a lot better.
Of course, Turkey is not without its darker side - treatment of the Kurds in particular - but I'm not convinced that's down to Islam. Plenty of other places manage to come up with attrocities of their own without recourse to Islam, or even religion; the same goes for all the lesser trials.
I run Linux on my Inspiron. One of the reasons I bought that model was that my research indicated that - generally - Dell laptops are fairly compatible with a range of Linux distros. I'm not all that interested in playing with the OS: my PC is just a tool for me to use. So if it had been available with Linux pre-installed I would almost certainly have been interested and it would certainly make it more likely that I'd buy another Dell laptop when I replace my current one.
I generally try to avoid any marketing stuff: I only subscribe if there's a decent amount of genuinely informative information.
If I've bought a product from a company, why do they need to send me anything? I already know they exist so they're just wasting their and my time. If I liked the widgits I bought last time and want some more, I'll probably go back to them. If they bombard me with SPAm I might look elsewhere no matter how good their service was.
For new products, where I don't already have a preferred supplier, I'll rely on search engines and personal recommendations. It really isn't all that difficult to find people who are selling things.
The only purpose I can see for marketing emails is to reach people who haven't considered buying your type of product. And that's very difficult to do with any discrimination, relying as it does on detailed knowledge of the individual recipients. The only truly unsolicited things I've received that I actually appreciated have been flyers from local businesses, like the gardner who noticed my lawn hadn't been mown for a while.
I haven't noticed it so much recently, but I used to see a lot of sites where you'd fill in the details and tick the "leave me the hell alone" boxes, but it would then reject it for some reason - post code missing, or something like that - and re-set the tick-boxes to the default. Of course, they'd be way off the bootom of the screen so you wouldn't realise unless you were especially careful.
Re:Real geeks only please
on
Top Ten Geek Girls
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Geek is very chic nowadays, lots of people who are not geeks *wish they were*. Geek is in.
I disagree. It's chic to say geek is chic, but it's not actually cool to be a geek. Never has been, never will be.
Some geeks may manage to be cool, but that's in spite of their geekiness, not because of it.
There may be a good argument for reducing the length of patents, but this isn't it.
If the rate of innovation is so high, lengthy patents would be irrelevent. If your invention is superseded in five years it really doesn't matter that you've got exclusive rights to it for another 15.
In fact, as this case shows innovative patents can be relevant for long periods. This one's ten years old. In areas outside IT I suspect things could be useful for even longer in many cases.
I still think some of Heinlein's early stuff, aimed at a younger market is pretty good, and I get a nostalgiaic plessure from re-reading them occasionally. Starship Troopers is a well written adventure novel, if you disregard the dodgy politics.
I remember as an adolescent being mildly titilated by some of the sex in things like "Time Enough for Love", but later works it just got grotesquely over the top and interferred witht he storey - what there was of it. Some of the books were even quite unpleasant: "Farnham's Freehold" and "The cat who walked through walls" spring to mind. I prefer to steer clear of them and just remember the works I enjoyed in my childhood.
I fist got into Bujold through the Vorkosigan novels - I thik it was an Amazon recommendation. But these days I prefer her fantasy. Apart from being generally well written, with interesting characters she's actually come up with some ideas I haven't seen in dozens of other fantasy novels; I especially like the way the gods are dealt with in "Paladin of Souls".
There seem to be a disproportionate number of female authors amongst my favourites. Plenty of men, too, but in the select group of my very favourite writers it's nearly all women. (That includes other types of fiction, not just SF/F.) It's often been suggested that women writers do a better job with characterisation, which seems to be true in my experience. (A generalisation, of course: there are some pretty poor women authors, and some men who do an excellent job with their characters.)
Reading some of the comments about Heinlein writing strong female characters, I had to wonder if people had read the same books as me. They all seem to be two-dimensional to me. Sure: competent, powerful and all that, but they seldom seem like real people. SF/F writing has moved on since Heinlein's day, thankfully.
That's exactly what they've done. The numeral 1 key is EWQ. The general relationships are the same as the QWERTY layout - QWE in the top left, ZXC in the bottom left - but not the exact sequence.
I love Heinlein, and I think it is ironic that Lois McMaster Boujold (a woman and my favorite author) has in some respects picked up the mantle for Heinlein IMHO. For those who enjoy Heinlein, you will love Boujold... It is Heinlein with more distinct characters.
That's strange. Like a number of people here, I quite enjoyed Heinlein's juvenile books - some of the first SF I read as a kid - but find most of his later works to be unsatisfactory or even pretty poor, (especially Number of the Beast: possibly the worst book I've ever read all the way through).
I really like Bujold's works. I only really got into them quite recently but I've spent a fair bit on Amazon since discovering them. I don't see any close similarities between the two, beyond what you could find in any writers working in the same genre.
Are you thinking of both her SF and fantasy? There are more similarities with her SF stuff, but only really because it's got lots of spaceships and guns and stuff. I find her characterization to be much better and the plots generally more sophisticated, (!=complicated).
Someone much closer to Heinlein I think would be David Weber. Curiously, he seems to have a disporportionate number of strong - or at least powerful - female characters, especially in the Honor Harrington books. Fortunately, he doesn't have the same bizarro sex and politics that RAH descended into. Maybe that'll come in a decade or two.:-)
But even when that's necessary, it's usually pretty easy to go to the hardware manufacturer's website and quickly download the necessary drivers and installation instructions. None of the Linux problem of trying to figure out if there even is a driver.
This is my biggest problem. I installed Linux on my laptop at home a couple of years ago as my version of Windows was out of data and I wasn't prepared to pay the cost to upgrade to a current version, and I wanted some extra tools. However, if I replace my laptop, (it's getting on a bit) I'd be strongly tempted to revert to Windows.
I want a wireless PCMCIA card that will work. But it's not obvious (to me) what will work, where I get it, and how I configure it. I want a USB DVD writer: same applies.
None of this is beyond me - I've been working in the IT industry for many years, most recently as a UNIX administrator. But that's my day job. When I come home I just want things to work and I've got better things to do with my limited free time than faff around with my PC trying to get it to do things which a Windows machine would manage with minimal effort on my part.
I would have siad it was not so much a review of the store, as of the manufacturer's quality control.
If I buy a new product, I want to be confident that it will work as advertised. I don't want to run the risk that it'll be in some way defective. Sure, I'd be able to get it replaced, or get a refund from the store but frankly I don't want the hassle.
VAT is 17.5%. If a business is VAT registered it does not pay VAT on the materials and services which it buys, specifically so that consumers don't get charged twice. A small business may choose not to be VAT registered, (although there's a maximum turnover, above which they don't get a choice). In that case, their customers are effectively paying VAT twice, but the company saves the effort of dealing with HMC&E. The threshold is quite low, I believe.
Some categories of goods have a reduced rate, e.g. domestic fuel. Some goods are zero-rated, e.g. food, (although that doesn't include snack foods, restuarants and a few other things). The full details are available on the Customs and Excise site, here: http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/
Your knowledge of our income tax is also clearly quite flawed. Everyone gets a tax-free allowance of about £5k - more for married people and the elderly, plus there are other allowances available for various things. Starting rate on income above this is 10%, on the next couple of thousand income. Basic rate is 22%. Then you pay 40% on income above about £40k. You don't pay income tax on pension contributions, and a bunch of other stuff paid directly from your sallary. Nor do you pay income tax on the returns from certain types of investments, (ISAs).
There's National Insurance, too, which is not paid by the lowest earners, (effectively those on less than the £5k income tax allowance), then at 11% on upto £645 per week, and 1% on anything above that. This is specifically to cover the state pension and other social benefits, so once you reach the state retirement age you stop paying it - even if you're still working.
Tax is complicated stuff - perhaps needlessly so - but I'm prety sure those details are correct, since I just looked them up on http://www.direct.gov.uk/. (And I must remember to complete my tax return soon.)
Your comments on illegal immigrants are just as ludicrous: the sort of misleading garbasge spewed out by the most reactionary tabloids.
For a start, you're probably confusing illegal immigrants with assylum applicants - or more likely don't understand the difference. Illegal immigrants won't be getting any handouts because they're not known to the system! Assylum applicants don't have an easy time of it and certainly don't get "dole", if by that you mean job-seeker's allowance, (what used to be Unemployment Benefit). They do get some social security payments, because we're not the sort of country that would let them starve to death whilst their application is considered - nothing to do with being racist or not. Some will be accepted, some will be kicked out, (the majority). Being a bureaucratic process it takes a while.
There are quite a lot of perfectly legitimate workers coming in from outside the UK, but at the moment most of those are from Eastern Europe - new members of the EU like Poland - and they're providing valuable services to the UK economy, and paying UK taxes. Plenty of good Polish builders around at the moment, which is great for us homeowners who need roofs fixing and the like.
I'm glad you're happy in the USA, and I don't care too much what you think of the UK, but please, if you're going to slag us off take the trouble to make your claims at least vaguely resemble reality.
Sex is what creates genetic variants (through blending of the parent's genotypes), not magical influence from cosmic rays and whatnot). Which is why sexual species change at a much greater rate than others.
You're mistaken. The genetic changes are indeed created by cosmic rays and other mutagenic agents: sexual reproduction does not change the chemical composition of the genes.
What it can do is ensure that new, beneficial genes can spread amongst the population more quickly, although it's not even strictly true to say that the overall rate of change is any greater: new genotypes will occur just as often in an asexual species as in a sexual one, it just takes a tiny bit longer for them to spread.
That's a big part of the problem: people can buy a PC which does not include all of the necessary patches. Unless they've got some sort of external firewall in place, they're doomed to infection.
If you let people out of the store - virtual or physical - with an unpatched Windows PC it's too late. A large number of them are going to hook it up to the Internet before it's patched; possibly in order to get it patched.
Make retailers at least somewhat liable. At the least, they should be issuing dire warnings of what could happen, in giant day-glo letters - not just some stupid click-through thing. And they can always offer patching as an extra-charge option.
It might be possible to prosecute UK retailers under our existing law. If I buy a faulty product, my claim is usually against the retailer, not the manufacturer. Selling me a PC which doesn't have the latest available patches ought to be considered negligence.
Another useful option might be to do away with very basic DSL modems. Don't sell any consumer modem that doesn't have a firewall built in. Convince ISPs to make it part of their T&Cs.
By the time these machines are infected, it's too late. Removing all the trojans, adware, spyware and whatever else has been put on there can be a nightmare task, which is seldom practical at all, let alone with some sort of "good" script.
If one wanted to do something like this, I think a far better approach would be to check very carefully for the undesirable infections and if they're found, shut-down the machine. That disruption would prompt the user to get it looked at by somebody with half a clue and hopefully at least get it re-installed with the latest patches.
Of course, there could be very little doubt at all that such an action would be illegal, and it could be more than simply inconvenient to some people.
If they weren't needed for making paper, most of trees wouldn't be there in the first place: there's no CO2 problem from that. Making paper is quite a strain on the environment but the biggest problem is its use of water.
I'd need to see a lot more information to be convinced that this sort of device is environmentally beneficial. Generally, creating electronic devices uses quite a lot of resources and produces some nasty polutants. You've also got to consider the cost of re-charging the battery. A paperback may take energy, water etc to produce, but once it's there you don't need any power to run it.
I normally use a laptop at work, with a large(ish), external monitor. I quite liked the idea of being able to use my laptop display at the same time: mostly so I could have documentation open on one whilst I did actual work on the other. I could never get it to work the way I wanted with W2K but maybe it's time I had another go at it. Ideally, though, I'd want something with a portrait orientation, to display A4 pages nice and clearly.
The other big problem is (physical) desk space. With comopanies trying to cram more and more people into the same office space I don't have as large a desk as I used to. I'm not too badly off, but it might be a bit tricky to arrange multiple displays so that I can use them effectively yet still have room for the countless bits of paper, notebooks, phones etc which clutter up the place at the moment.
That went waaay beyond self defense. Shooting someone in the back, from a considerable distance when he tried to run away and could not conceivably have been considered an immediate threat is not acceptable behaviour.
Tony Martin got what he deserved and the whole thing got grotesquely distorted in the press as they tried to make him out to be something other than the nutter he really was for the sake of a good story. Unfortunately, it's made a lingering impression on the public consciousness and still gets trotted out from time to time as an example of how the law is failing us, sob.
There was some back-bencher tried to get a law through earlier this year to enshrine the right to defence in law. A pathetic attempt to garner votes, as the law already makes it clear that you're allowed to defend yourself pretty much however you see fit. (All the stuff about having to lose less force than your attacker is complete nonsense, although like all law it's all pretty complicated and you don't have a completely free hand: killing people is always frowned upon and using an illegal weapon won't do you any favours.)
There was an interestsing one locally (to me - not you) recently. Woman woke up to find a burglar in her bedroom. She dashed into the kitchen and grabbed a saucepan and proceeded to beat him about the head. When the pan broke (!) she got another one and continued, eventually chasing him down the street.
When the burglar reached court, the judge appluaded the woman's actions. Contrary to the image the UK tabloid press like to present, it is not illegal to defend your person or property with force in the UK.
You're quite right, of course, that this is nothing that you can't do with other browsers. However, I think that this might have a couple of advantages. One is that it might reach users who haven't thought about these things before. Sure: that's preying on potential customers' ignorance but some of them might be interested in a solution which doesn't require them to fiddle with browser settings. It could be useful if you're on someone else's machine - maybe even a Cybercafe or something like that. Gives a little added peace of mind. The small size of the download helps there. Cookies and history and such are actually pretty useful most of the time. I wouldn't want to do without them but I might be inclined to use something like this in addition to my normal browser(s) for those occasions when I want to be a little more discrete.
Main thing to remember is that this isn't really aimed at the more technically capable users, who can do these things already if they want to.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think your examples of Islamic states are entirely fair. Or at least, they're a bit limited. I fully agree that there are no Islamic states that I would care to live in. However, secular states which happen to be Islamic, such as Turkey, seem to be a lot better.
Of course, Turkey is not without its darker side - treatment of the Kurds in particular - but I'm not convinced that's down to Islam. Plenty of other places manage to come up with attrocities of their own without recourse to Islam, or even religion; the same goes for all the lesser trials.
I disagree. Science relies not on faith, but on trust.
I run Linux on my Inspiron. One of the reasons I bought that model was that my research indicated that - generally - Dell laptops are fairly compatible with a range of Linux distros. I'm not all that interested in playing with the OS: my PC is just a tool for me to use. So if it had been available with Linux pre-installed I would almost certainly have been interested and it would certainly make it more likely that I'd buy another Dell laptop when I replace my current one.
I generally try to avoid any marketing stuff: I only subscribe if there's a decent amount of genuinely informative information.
If I've bought a product from a company, why do they need to send me anything? I already know they exist so they're just wasting their and my time. If I liked the widgits I bought last time and want some more, I'll probably go back to them. If they bombard me with SPAm I might look elsewhere no matter how good their service was.
For new products, where I don't already have a preferred supplier, I'll rely on search engines and personal recommendations. It really isn't all that difficult to find people who are selling things.
The only purpose I can see for marketing emails is to reach people who haven't considered buying your type of product. And that's very difficult to do with any discrimination, relying as it does on detailed knowledge of the individual recipients. The only truly unsolicited things I've received that I actually appreciated have been flyers from local businesses, like the gardner who noticed my lawn hadn't been mown for a while.
I haven't noticed it so much recently, but I used to see a lot of sites where you'd fill in the details and tick the "leave me the hell alone" boxes, but it would then reject it for some reason - post code missing, or something like that - and re-set the tick-boxes to the default. Of course, they'd be way off the bootom of the screen so you wouldn't realise unless you were especially careful.
I disagree. It's chic to say geek is chic, but it's not actually cool to be a geek. Never has been, never will be.
Some geeks may manage to be cool, but that's in spite of their geekiness, not because of it.
There may be a good argument for reducing the length of patents, but this isn't it.
If the rate of innovation is so high, lengthy patents would be irrelevent. If your invention is superseded in five years it really doesn't matter that you've got exclusive rights to it for another 15.
In fact, as this case shows innovative patents can be relevant for long periods. This one's ten years old. In areas outside IT I suspect things could be useful for even longer in many cases.
I still think some of Heinlein's early stuff, aimed at a younger market is pretty good, and I get a nostalgiaic plessure from re-reading them occasionally. Starship Troopers is a well written adventure novel, if you disregard the dodgy politics.
I remember as an adolescent being mildly titilated by some of the sex in things like "Time Enough for Love", but later works it just got grotesquely over the top and interferred witht he storey - what there was of it. Some of the books were even quite unpleasant: "Farnham's Freehold" and "The cat who walked through walls" spring to mind. I prefer to steer clear of them and just remember the works I enjoyed in my childhood.
I fist got into Bujold through the Vorkosigan novels - I thik it was an Amazon recommendation. But these days I prefer her fantasy. Apart from being generally well written, with interesting characters she's actually come up with some ideas I haven't seen in dozens of other fantasy novels; I especially like the way the gods are dealt with in "Paladin of Souls".
There seem to be a disproportionate number of female authors amongst my favourites. Plenty of men, too, but in the select group of my very favourite writers it's nearly all women. (That includes other types of fiction, not just SF/F.) It's often been suggested that women writers do a better job with characterisation, which seems to be true in my experience. (A generalisation, of course: there are some pretty poor women authors, and some men who do an excellent job with their characters.)
Reading some of the comments about Heinlein writing strong female characters, I had to wonder if people had read the same books as me. They all seem to be two-dimensional to me. Sure: competent, powerful and all that, but they seldom seem like real people. SF/F writing has moved on since Heinlein's day, thankfully.
You still haven't looked at the article, and the links to the actual keypad, have you?
RTFA.
That's exactly what they've done. The numeral 1 key is EWQ. The general relationships are the same as the QWERTY layout - QWE in the top left, ZXC in the bottom left - but not the exact sequence.
That's strange. Like a number of people here, I quite enjoyed Heinlein's juvenile books - some of the first SF I read as a kid - but find most of his later works to be unsatisfactory or even pretty poor, (especially Number of the Beast: possibly the worst book I've ever read all the way through).
I really like Bujold's works. I only really got into them quite recently but I've spent a fair bit on Amazon since discovering them. I don't see any close similarities between the two, beyond what you could find in any writers working in the same genre.
Are you thinking of both her SF and fantasy? There are more similarities with her SF stuff, but only really because it's got lots of spaceships and guns and stuff. I find her characterization to be much better and the plots generally more sophisticated, (!=complicated).
Someone much closer to Heinlein I think would be David Weber. Curiously, he seems to have a disporportionate number of strong - or at least powerful - female characters, especially in the Honor Harrington books. Fortunately, he doesn't have the same bizarro sex and politics that RAH descended into. Maybe that'll come in a decade or two.
But even when that's necessary, it's usually pretty easy to go to the hardware manufacturer's website and quickly download the necessary drivers and installation instructions. None of the Linux problem of trying to figure out if there even is a driver.
This is my biggest problem. I installed Linux on my laptop at home a couple of years ago as my version of Windows was out of data and I wasn't prepared to pay the cost to upgrade to a current version, and I wanted some extra tools. However, if I replace my laptop, (it's getting on a bit) I'd be strongly tempted to revert to Windows.
I want a wireless PCMCIA card that will work. But it's not obvious (to me) what will work, where I get it, and how I configure it. I want a USB DVD writer: same applies.
None of this is beyond me - I've been working in the IT industry for many years, most recently as a UNIX administrator. But that's my day job. When I come home I just want things to work and I've got better things to do with my limited free time than faff around with my PC trying to get it to do things which a Windows machine would manage with minimal effort on my part.
I would have siad it was not so much a review of the store, as of the manufacturer's quality control.
If I buy a new product, I want to be confident that it will work as advertised. I don't want to run the risk that it'll be in some way defective. Sure, I'd be able to get it replaced, or get a refund from the store but frankly I don't want the hassle.
What a load of ignorant nonsense.
VAT is 17.5%. If a business is VAT registered it does not pay VAT on the materials and services which it buys, specifically so that consumers don't get charged twice. A small business may choose not to be VAT registered, (although there's a maximum turnover, above which they don't get a choice). In that case, their customers are effectively paying VAT twice, but the company saves the effort of dealing with HMC&E. The threshold is quite low, I believe.
Some categories of goods have a reduced rate, e.g. domestic fuel. Some goods are zero-rated, e.g. food, (although that doesn't include snack foods, restuarants and a few other things). The full details are available on the Customs and Excise site, here: http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/
Your knowledge of our income tax is also clearly quite flawed. Everyone gets a tax-free allowance of about £5k - more for married people and the elderly, plus there are other allowances available for various things. Starting rate on income above this is 10%, on the next couple of thousand income. Basic rate is 22%. Then you pay 40% on income above about £40k. You don't pay income tax on pension contributions, and a bunch of other stuff paid directly from your sallary. Nor do you pay income tax on the returns from certain types of investments, (ISAs).
There's National Insurance, too, which is not paid by the lowest earners, (effectively those on less than the £5k income tax allowance), then at 11% on upto £645 per week, and 1% on anything above that. This is specifically to cover the state pension and other social benefits, so once you reach the state retirement age you stop paying it - even if you're still working.
Tax is complicated stuff - perhaps needlessly so - but I'm prety sure those details are correct, since I just looked them up on http://www.direct.gov.uk/. (And I must remember to complete my tax return soon.)
Your comments on illegal immigrants are just as ludicrous: the sort of misleading garbasge spewed out by the most reactionary tabloids.
For a start, you're probably confusing illegal immigrants with assylum applicants - or more likely don't understand the difference. Illegal immigrants won't be getting any handouts because they're not known to the system! Assylum applicants don't have an easy time of it and certainly don't get "dole", if by that you mean job-seeker's allowance, (what used to be Unemployment Benefit). They do get some social security payments, because we're not the sort of country that would let them starve to death whilst their application is considered - nothing to do with being racist or not. Some will be accepted, some will be kicked out, (the majority). Being a bureaucratic process it takes a while.
There are quite a lot of perfectly legitimate workers coming in from outside the UK, but at the moment most of those are from Eastern Europe - new members of the EU like Poland - and they're providing valuable services to the UK economy, and paying UK taxes. Plenty of good Polish builders around at the moment, which is great for us homeowners who need roofs fixing and the like.
I'm glad you're happy in the USA, and I don't care too much what you think of the UK, but please, if you're going to slag us off take the trouble to make your claims at least vaguely resemble reality.
But don't you have state purchase taxes in most places?
You're mistaken. The genetic changes are indeed created by cosmic rays and other mutagenic agents: sexual reproduction does not change the chemical composition of the genes.
What it can do is ensure that new, beneficial genes can spread amongst the population more quickly, although it's not even strictly true to say that the overall rate of change is any greater: new genotypes will occur just as often in an asexual species as in a sexual one, it just takes a tiny bit longer for them to spread.
That's a big part of the problem: people can buy a PC which does not include all of the necessary patches. Unless they've got some sort of external firewall in place, they're doomed to infection.
If you let people out of the store - virtual or physical - with an unpatched Windows PC it's too late. A large number of them are going to hook it up to the Internet before it's patched; possibly in order to get it patched.
Make retailers at least somewhat liable. At the least, they should be issuing dire warnings of what could happen, in giant day-glo letters - not just some stupid click-through thing. And they can always offer patching as an extra-charge option.
It might be possible to prosecute UK retailers under our existing law. If I buy a faulty product, my claim is usually against the retailer, not the manufacturer. Selling me a PC which doesn't have the latest available patches ought to be considered negligence.
Another useful option might be to do away with very basic DSL modems. Don't sell any consumer modem that doesn't have a firewall built in. Convince ISPs to make it part of their T&Cs.
By the time these machines are infected, it's too late. Removing all the trojans, adware, spyware and whatever else has been put on there can be a nightmare task, which is seldom practical at all, let alone with some sort of "good" script.
If one wanted to do something like this, I think a far better approach would be to check very carefully for the undesirable infections and if they're found, shut-down the machine. That disruption would prompt the user to get it looked at by somebody with half a clue and hopefully at least get it re-installed with the latest patches.
Of course, there could be very little doubt at all that such an action would be illegal, and it could be more than simply inconvenient to some people.
If they weren't needed for making paper, most of trees wouldn't be there in the first place: there's no CO2 problem from that.
Making paper is quite a strain on the environment but the biggest problem is its use of water.
I'd need to see a lot more information to be convinced that this sort of device is environmentally beneficial. Generally, creating electronic devices uses quite a lot of resources and produces some nasty polutants. You've also got to consider the cost of re-charging the battery. A paperback may take energy, water etc to produce, but once it's there you don't need any power to run it.
I normally use a laptop at work, with a large(ish), external monitor. I quite liked the idea of being able to use my laptop display at the same time: mostly so I could have documentation open on one whilst I did actual work on the other. I could never get it to work the way I wanted with W2K but maybe it's time I had another go at it.
Ideally, though, I'd want something with a portrait orientation, to display A4 pages nice and clearly.
The other big problem is (physical) desk space. With comopanies trying to cram more and more people into the same office space I don't have as large a desk as I used to. I'm not too badly off, but it might be a bit tricky to arrange multiple displays so that I can use them effectively yet still have room for the countless bits of paper, notebooks, phones etc which clutter up the place at the moment.
That went waaay beyond self defense. Shooting someone in the back, from a considerable distance when he tried to run away and could not conceivably have been considered an immediate threat is not acceptable behaviour.
Tony Martin got what he deserved and the whole thing got grotesquely distorted in the press as they tried to make him out to be something other than the nutter he really was for the sake of a good story. Unfortunately, it's made a lingering impression on the public consciousness and still gets trotted out from time to time as an example of how the law is failing us, sob.
There was some back-bencher tried to get a law through earlier this year to enshrine the right to defence in law. A pathetic attempt to garner votes, as the law already makes it clear that you're allowed to defend yourself pretty much however you see fit. (All the stuff about having to lose less force than your attacker is complete nonsense, although like all law it's all pretty complicated and you don't have a completely free hand: killing people is always frowned upon and using an illegal weapon won't do you any favours.)
There was an interestsing one locally (to me - not you) recently. Woman woke up to find a burglar in her bedroom. She dashed into the kitchen and grabbed a saucepan and proceeded to beat him about the head. When the pan broke (!) she got another one and continued, eventually chasing him down the street.
When the burglar reached court, the judge appluaded the woman's actions. Contrary to the image the UK tabloid press like to present, it is not illegal to defend your person or property with force in the UK.
You're quite right, of course, that this is nothing that you can't do with other browsers. However, I think that this might have a couple of advantages.
One is that it might reach users who haven't thought about these things before. Sure: that's preying on potential customers' ignorance but some of them might be interested in a solution which doesn't require them to fiddle with browser settings.
It could be useful if you're on someone else's machine - maybe even a Cybercafe or something like that. Gives a little added peace of mind. The small size of the download helps there.
Cookies and history and such are actually pretty useful most of the time. I wouldn't want to do without them but I might be inclined to use something like this in addition to my normal browser(s) for those occasions when I want to be a little more discrete.
Main thing to remember is that this isn't really aimed at the more technically capable users, who can do these things already if they want to.