It's not faster loading webpages that keeps me on Chrome. It's the faster, smoother UI.

Exactly. And, WHY did it reduce piracy? Was it truly because of the highly restrictive DRM making it "harder" for pirates? Or was it because not even pirates decided the game was worth the trouble, let alone the average gamer? I know I certainly didn't (and won't) buy any Ubisoft games. And EA is next on my list of "publishers not to give money to."

Who said your router has to keep logs? I'm pretty sure I've disabled that lovely little gem. Also, I find it good practice to spoof the MAC address of every computer that connects to the network.

In other news, scientists in Kansas have completed an experiment and determined that water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, is a liquid at room temperature, and that water is, in fact, wet. We can only ponder the implications this has for the human race and life on Earth.

I don't care about SYSmark telling me whether any given Intel CPU is better than any given AMD CPU or vice versa. What I really care about is finding out if the newly released Intel/AMD [insert arbitrary name here] CPU/GPU is truly better than the old Intel/AMD [insert arbitrary name here] CPU/GPU. By the time I get to the point of looking into concrete numbers from benchmarks, I've already decided whether I'm going to get an AMD or an Intel processor. The real problem that I have with all this benchmarking crap is why these manufacturers don't just provide us with coherent naming schemes for their CPU's (and GPU's too) so we as customers can fully understand the product they're trying to sell us.

Now if they could figure out how to let me take my phone anywhere, i.e. a cell phone, and keep the same service, features, and prices, we could finally have a cell phone carrier in the U.S. worth having.

I guess no one bothered to look in the options when they created their Google Profile and uncheck the "Make my profile visible to search" box. Don't blame Google for your own misdoings.

I would imagine that by 2015, the mining for bitcoin will have slowed quite a bit. But, by then it should have hopefully gained enough popularity that it can function as just a p2p economy.

My mistake then. I was basing my information off of this: http://www.bitcoinminer.com/post/5622597370/hashing-difficulty-244139

Either the network strength has significantly increased in the past week, or one of those two sites shouldn't be trusted. Your source looks more reliable.

Ok, yes, but the difficulty would increase for everyone mining as well. Last I checked, the entire bitcoin network had a mining strength of 1,747 Ghash/s. The Kraken alone has about 367 Ghash/s. That's 21% of the entire network. With all that power coming into the network at once, you're still bound to make a TON of bitcoins, because you're essentially taking a substantially large portion of bitcoins from other miners. I did neglect to factor in the scaling of difficulty (and that's why I said it was a rough calculation. Maybe I should've emphasized "rough" more), so you may not make as much as 1,511.61 BTC/day, but you're still going to make quite a bit (no pun intended).

I did some rough calculations regarding NICS's Kraken Cray XT5 and bitcoin mining. FYI, The Kraken was the 8th fastest supercomputer in Novermber of 2010. I determined that if the supercomputer put forth all of it's resources to mine bitcoins, it could generate 1,511.61 per day (or about $8,450.53/day). Granted, the Kraken has just regular CPU's doing the calculations. I could only imagine what a Cray supercomputer with GPU's in it would be capable of...

Well, now, I wouldn't speak too soon. There will undoubtedly be a beta release or a leak which will give malware authors ample time to develop zero-day viruses. And with Windows 8 exploring very different terrain this time around, there's bound to be a plethora of exploits just waiting for someone to coax them out of hiding (or plain sight).

Ok, I see those numbers. I can comprehend them. I understand that Firefox may be technically "faster," but at what cost? I'd like to see a benchmark that measures UI responsiveness. Because, I don't know about you, but I'm OK with sacrificing a few milliseconds of rendering speeds if it means that I get a faster, responsive UI.
As a test, I ran the Kraken javascript benchmark on Chrome 12.0.712.0 with extensions and about 10 tabs open and a clean install of Firefox 4.0 with a single tab open. I was still able to load new tabs and browse to other sites smoothly on Chrome, whereas Firefox began behaving extremely sluggishly. Because of this, Chrome felt like it was going faster even when Firefox completed the benchmark about 100ms faster. Isn't that all that really matters? If I feel like my browser is going faster than another, then I don't care that it's actually going slower, and I doubt that most other users would care either.

Firefox has better memory usage than Chrome? Yes, to an extent.
Firefox has better performance than Chrome? No, absolutely not.

Fact is, memory is cheap these days. I'd be willing to sacrifice an extra 500MB~1GB of memory to have a fast, smooth browsing experience. Chrome gives me that and with out memory leaks. I can keep an extension loaded Chrome open for about a week until I start noticing that it's leaking memory. I can't keep a clean install of Firefox open for more than a day without a memory leak.
Face it people. Firefox is like your grandmother's basement and Chrome is like a beach-side mansion.
Firefox might take up a smaller space, but it's dank and pipes are leaking everywhere.
Chrome is a bit more taxing, but your overall experience is going to be better.

Haha. Well, my demo isn't going to be anything too special. Sure, the songs mean stuff to me, but it's not the overall sound I'm looking for in the long run. It's just something to get some attention and maybe get my name out there so that I may progress further. And referring to the "blank tapes," if I get my way, my band's stance on piracy will be lax. We'd probably even end up releasing a few free albums. In fact, I know how Waters feels about this whole just buying a single song thing. In my opinion, I'd rather someone pirate my whole album instead of buying just one song. They'd get a better experience that way, and that's what artists should want. Make music to make others happy, not to make money :P