Hey, it's an amazing display of fairness for Slashdot to post a review acknowledging that IE actually has some good bits to it, let alone "is back on top." :P

Unfortunately, while I loved them at first, add-ons were the killer in my decision to switch away from Firefox to Opera. I found that even using one or two extensions (including using only Adblock, perhaps the most popular Firefox extension), my browser was bloated, slow, and prone to frequent crashing. Switching to FF3, I enjoyed none of the acclaimed new improvements in memory management once I added any extensions to the mix, and in fact, Firefox would crash constantly (every half-hour or so) under any conditions.

I'd already installed Opera so I could bring it up when I was playing memory- and CPU-hungry games and not lag them any while I had a browser idling in the background, so I just switched fulltime. Aside from noticing a few more ads (easily ignored or remedied with Opera's built-in content blocker), my browsing experience has been much improved; Opera responds far better than Firefox, and has many of the functions that Firefox only has from third-party extensions. The others, I find I don't actually miss at all.

Who knew simplicity could be so simple?

Telnet? Real men would use SSH instead of telnet, but they wouldn't really be real men, because real men disassemble Ubuntu on a friend's computer, read it, then type the commands in all over again on their own from memory.

Yes. This is why I don't get why people don't appreciate the value (at least in redundancy) of having a land line around. I'm gonna miss that when I go off to a residence hall this fall; it's very new and has all the latest amenities, Ethernet to every room, but alas, good old landlines are too old to be useful and worth supplying (or worth demanding), right?

Hooray for me, I live in one of those countries! :/ Very few people in the Midwest, including my family, are ready to listen to the idea that corn ethanol is unfeasible and bad in the long term. When corn prices go up, the farmers are happy, and there are a lot of farmers out here, so the politicians try to keep them happy by keeping corn prices up.

Unfortunately, lots of people are ignorant in that way. When they hear the term "anarchist," they think "a person who wants to blow shit up for fun" or "a threat to democracy."

Well, 8-tracks did have a theoretical advantage. They share the same track width as cassettes (1/32" per track), but the tape travelled at twice the speed (3.75"/sec vs. 1.875"/sec). All other factors being equal, this would have given 8-tracks superior audio quality hands down; however, the industry clearly focused on bringing the latest technical achievements in magnetic tape to the cassette medium, passing 8-tracks over. (For example, I've never heard of CrO2 tape manufactured for 8-track use, and both 8-track tapes and players using the Dolby process are few and far in between.) Mechanically speaking, cassettes have the reliability advantage because they don't have the quirky infinite-loop travel path (which caused a plethora of problems, each of which I've personally repaired or abandoned a tape for), and they can rewind, but 8-tracks did have some significant unrealized potential, in both the speed advantage and the brief but mindblowing experiment with quad-channel audio that CreepyCrawler mentioned. (In fairness, there were also various quad vinyl standards, but almost all of these were matrixed, versus having discrete channels.)

What they think is better for baby, anyway.

The first two sound like nice ideas, but then it occurs to me, what about the brilliant but depressed artists? Vincent Van Gogh comes to mind.

I understand that British English often uses this convention for multi-personed organizations.

I know that few straight people flaunt their orientation in social situations, but it's pretty easy to guess the sexuality of the people who call other gamers "fags" on the in-game chat.

Although I suppose they could just be suffering internalized homophobia... :P

They're not off by a full order of magnitude; they're talking in terabits. There is some loss of accuracy, though, since people like nice roundish numbers.

Please explain to me why we should keep a system where more than 50% of voters can vote for one candidate and still see him lose. That's certainly not what I call democracy.

That's exactly why the idea of a popular-vote presidency appeals to me. Back in the day, the rights of the individual states was a major concern, but these days, the federal government holds a large amount of power over all the citizens. Also, these days we seem to be a lot more integrated; if we had another civil war, it would be neighbor against neighbor rather than north against south. Given that we've all been clumped together under the domain of one major (federal) power, I think the majority popular vote, rather than the votes of electors from individual states, becomes more fair.

Example: Say 40 states award their electoral votes to Candidate A. However, in some of those states, 40% of the population voted for Candidate B, and in fact, Candidate B may have won if the national popular vote decided the election. Now a significant portion of those states' populations feels relatively unrepresented and dissatisfied with Candidate A's presidency.

Personally, it would seem nice if we required a 2/3-majority popular vote to decide offices, but that requirement alone can't guarantee that people will be happy with and support the winning candidate. I get the feeling that enough of us humans will be bitter and angry and cause problems no matter what the vote ratio is.

Very good points. I would like to say though, that I think ideally we should consciously pay for certain services, rather than throwing all the money into a tax. If you're gonna use the Internet, pay for the Internet; if you're going to use the library, pay for the library; and be aware that you are doing so, rather than having to go out of your way to figure out what of your cash is going toward what services. (Most people, since they're subsidizing such services from afar, would never have the subject of the destinations cross their mind.)

internet and phone services should be a public services just like police and fire

I have to disagree. The police keep you from getting robbed or shot; the firemen stop your house from burning down (potentially with you inside). In either case they're protecting your life. Phone could potentially be considered a public service, since it's used to contact police/fire/ambulance services, but the Internet? To communicate on the cheap, call people on your phone or write letters; to reap the benefits of free media, check out books, music, and movies from the library. While the Internet is terribly useful, it's not nearly as necessary to your wellbeing as being able to dial 911. Maybe on the day 911 centers switch to e-mail only, but until then, it's a luxury. There are significant alternatives, not any less useful just because they originated in the 19th or 20th centuries.

I love my Internet access, but I believe it's the kind of thing that is worth paying for and that you should pay for. If I couldn't afford service anymore, well hey, a library card is free.