[citation needed]

No, really. I'm not flaming you, I'm just curious. What do you base this on?

A laptop generally isn't designed to be left running 24/7 and can supposedly catch fire if, say, the fan stops working and the CPU doesn't. Even if the fire doesn't spread, the toxic fumes from all that plastic can really ruin your day.

Still, it can be done, of course. But you may not want to put it near where somebody sleeps.

Hmm, I think you're setting the bar too low. I think the ambition of AI should be to produce automata that are capable of independently fighting forest fires, cleaning up after environmental accidents, exploring Mars... Anything that's too dangerous for humans to do, but that requires planning and adaptability. Hell, even picking up my dry-cleaning is way beyond the AI of today.

Um, no. IE was and is utter crap at least up to and including the 6.x versions. Netscape 4 was pretty good, actually, from a user's perspective (it was the first browser to have some sort of sane support for CSS, for one thing).

IE killed Netscape by being (a) free and (b) preinstalled with Windows (beginning with some version or other of Win95, IIRC). Netscape (AOL) tried to respond by open-sourcing the Gecko rendering engine, but for one thing, they did this too late. For another, it turned out that Gecko had devolved into a festering, unmaintainable mess that had to be more or less completely rewritten, compounding the "too late" problem.

Yet another case of a decent product taking a harsh beating from a crappy one due to strategical and political factors. C'est la vie.

I can't believe no one has mentioned that guy whose boss came in and saw the "impressive visualization of server load" and who didn't have the heart to tell the boss it was a Winamp visualization. It was on TheDailyWTF, I think, but I can't find it.