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.

Bullshit. I would gladly pay google for higher placement in their results, and I have the money to do it. Show me the form where I can sign up, please.

Yup, but if the content is the same as somebody else's, then google uses the domain name to tell the difference. For people who sell real products and services, there often just is not that much content to put on the site. Then, things like the domain name make a difference.

Those are all sites that are successful because they have regular readers/frequently repeating customers. If you sell widgets, and people only buy widgets once a year, people will go to your site once a year. Nobody links to widgets on their blogs. A lot of companies sell things that you buy once or twice in your life. Unless you want to get billions of dollars of capital together to build a company that immediately dominates your sector (it is spurious to claim that you could repeat google or amazon on a startup budget today) good SEO is really the only path.

This is my point. In the case of the OP, the trademarked name is already registered. This is a serious problem.

When was the last time you purchased something from a company on the fifth page of Google? A small company I worked for paid thousands of euros to an SEO get first page google ranking. Our business (which was already pretty good) doubled immediately. Our main competitor had a position called Vice President of Search Engine Optimization, that is how important this is in a sector that has real, physical products (cheap consumer goods don't count).

Of course, the name does enormous things for your placement in google. Just do a google search for "buy flowers": at least half the results have the search the search terms right in the domain name. This is not a coincidence. If the name describes what you do and is also your branded name, your success in google is almost guaranteed.

Having a domain name that describes your company is tremendously important for a variety of reasons, not least of which is google ranking. Further, with modern browsers, the address bar searches your history. If you have your name or your product in the domain, this helps people find you a second time. Google Chrome is even better: search and address bar are the same. While I despise these people who park pages, their price is usually worth it if you are a company and the name is good.

So, in the cyber-world, picking the name actually does make a big difference in the amount of traffic you get. Having "widgets.com" really is the equivalent of being off of the highway, while "example.com/widgets" is really miles down the road.

Also, giving up domain names means completely abdicating your surfing to search engines and people who know SEO. Not a good idea.