Not true. Lots of businesses hang on to your card number, especially if you will do repeat business with them, such as Amazon.

Network solutions is my registrar. They do not keep your CC by default, they ask your permission and there is a very good reason for them to do this. This is why:

My business has a few dozen domain names: our trademarks and a couple of names that are similar (typos that we don't want squatters to snatch up; .com, .net, .be, .fr variants, etc). They were all registered at different times and so there is usually one getting ready to expire every few weeks. We could make it part of the daily routine of one of our developers to check up on all of our domains and repurchase a new registration as needed. This costs money... lots of money if you add it up over a year. Besides, it introduces an element of human error: a few years ago, the company lost its primary domain name because the guy in charge of doing that had left and nobody thought to assign the job to somebody else. It cost us thousands of dollars to buy it back.

Alternatively, we can just allow Network Solutions to keep our CC number and re-register the domain automatically. It is easy and cheap. Of course, this kind of solution requires that Network Solutions not hire a retarded monkey to code its ERM...

I claim my reward, or by "this one" did you mean the gp?

The technology for this does not exist yet, but it will very soon. Look at the solar impulse aircraft, for example, that is going to attempt to fly around the world on solar power. It stores up electricity during the day so that it can fly through the night. Combine this thing with UAV technology and you have your 24/7 camera surveillance.

Another solution that pop into my mind are balloons that are tethered to the ground.

I must call attention to this!

Parent is making a valid point that every location comes with the risk of a natural disaster in response to the absurd assertion that we should never put population centers in a place that can have a storm. People in Kansas have tornadoes, people in California have earth quakes. The solution is not to smugly deny that people live in areas that are victim to the phenomenon du jour, it is to find ways to mitigate those risks.

The danger that hurricanes pose is easily mitigated, just as tornado or earthquake dangers are easily mitigated. Most of those who lost their homes in New Orleans wouldn't have if the government had been doing its job and maintaining the dikes. People in Kansas are safe when the government puts tornado-warning infrastructure in place. People in California are safe when the highways and bridges are built to withstand shock. This is what we have government for.

If we only put population centers in places with no risk of natural disaster, the habitable surface of the earth would be small indeed.

I have been living without using credit for a little over five years. It is not hard at all. The trick is this: you wait until you have the money for something before you buy it.

The hardest part is getting started. You need to build a small nest egg for capital purchases (car, house, etc) before going credit-free. Then, you need to have the discipline to replenish that nest egg once you make a capital purchase, even if it means tightening your belt sometimes.

In fact, phone plans are the only thing I can think of that I can't use. I also worry a bit about what will happen if I ever decide to go back into the credit game: voluntarily not using credit is as bad for your credit rating as a bankruptcy.

The towns around Chernoble have been abandoned for quite some time, which should satisfy your curiosity about how real cities decay if suddenly left alone.

Chernoble is also a great robotic testing ground because people still can't really go there for long periods, so no cheating.

The question of how cities would decay if humans suddenly died off en masse is moot. The reason is that before long, the world's nuclear reactors (especially the older designs) would start running out of coolant and going Chernoble themselves. Will Smith will not be fighting vampires 3 years later because radiation would have killed him already.

And, of course, we could use Chernoble for movie sets and kill off the god awful generation of actors that is plaguing American cinema.

Ah, well firefox does... awesome. My mistake.

Any idea how long the feature has been around?

I am not sure why this is news, actually. The repository for Chromium has been available for Ubuntu for some time. Instructions for adding it are here:

https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa

The big advantage to this is that you get the nightly builds automatically every time you update; no need to mess with downloading and installing debs

Speaking of browser innovation, why is it that we still don't have any major browsers that have detachable/retachable tabs? Konqueror has done this for years: you can right click on an open tab and detach it to its own window, or drag one window into another to consolidate them.

I personally find this really handy, to the point that I am willing to overlook that several popular javascript libraries (like jQuerry) are buggy in Konqueror which breaks a lot of useful websites (google aps, yahoo mail...) and I use it anyway.

Yet none of the other browser people have done this. Does anybody know why?

Talk about Goliath versus Goliath. The successful monopolist versus... the slightly less successful monopolist who can rewrite its own legal system. Time to invest in popcorn.

We as geeks really need to stop underestimating people. It reflects poorly on us.

I have worked in tech support, so I have seen the way that many people use their computers. While a few people do surf the web as you describe, their numbers are small. While it is true that most people do not see the benefit of changing browsers and therefore stick with the default, most of them can and do change their home page, most of them know what a bookmark, address bar and search box are, and most of them use google.

By the way, I have seen very few computers for the home that have a microsoft home page. In my experience the manufacturer sets it to their own page. It is only the corporate boxes that have MSN, as far as I have seen.

Funny side note, the time I told somebody to go to slashdot.org, he typed /..org in the address bar. After that I used google.