There's a wonderful bio here that kind of expands on a lot of those points.

With the advent of multimedia webpages it's hard to lock down what exactly is meant by "browsing the web". For most modern sites to work correctly you need to be able to process and display: HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, HTML, JPEG,GIF, BMP, PNG, h.264, .wav, .mp3, .avi, Flash, SilverLight, Java, and so on. So many protocols/formats that may pop up and you have to handle them all. Is it any wonder browsers got so bloated over the years?

If you just run a silent install of the offline installer it doesn't install ASK either. Granted getting to the offline installer is not exactly obviously presented on their download page, but it is available. And corporations have been using that for years.

It really hasn't been necessary to have a browser toolbar since search was integrated into the main UI for basically all modern browsers. I briefly had a Google toolbar intentionally installed 5+ years ago, but now I just have my search provider set to Google and I never even thought about a toolbar since. I've removed a lot of them from friends and family PC's though.

Oh my god, MyWebSearch...I had almost forgotten about those douchebags. There was a time about 3-4 years ago where I was removing it from some secretary's computer every week. "But I like the smilies!" "Not on a corporate machine you don't. Stop it."

Doesn't matter. Most of those toolbars can install in a purely user context. Otherwise how would they infect...I mean...assist corporate users.

Now you're just being a pedantic assclown.

It's pretty obvious to me that her boss was a sociopath. They're hard to nail down because they can be rather charming. If you can't get away from them your best bet is to convince them that they have power and make a show of it in their presence. Their only real weakness is their ego. That won't stop the random humiliations from them (which also strokes their ego), but it can make them marginally more tolerable to work with.

You, with a conscience, can't win a straight up fight with a sociopath, they will lie convincingly about everything to cover their backsides and if they're even modestly intelligent that can be amplified into a lot of problems for you. Even when they are obviously in the wrong your most likely best outcome is that you don't get hit with whatever they intended to harm you. They won't face consequences, but you may just make it out minimally scathed.

I'm sorry, but even reverse osmosis plants use chemicals to prep and clean the water and to protect their equipment. Sea water is astoundingly corrosive, so if you don't want to be replacing all the core parts of your plant every year you have to treat it to prevent that damage. Those chemicals are not typically filtered out before being dumped back into the ocean.

But let's just assume they filtered out all those chemicals and only dumped saltier concentrated sea water back into the ocean. The area around the dump site would still be a death pit for any and all marine life very close by. Now you can get away with a few of these plants, sure. But if you start trying to provide enough water for, say, the entire state of California, through desalination alone, you're going to absolutely murder the coastal ecology.

Again, I'm not an eco-freak. I think we should have maybe a dozen or so such plants (maybe a few more) to help offset the drought and tough beans for some of the sea life involved. But if you scale it out too much you will wreck the coast.

Unfortunately this is very much not cost efficient nor scalable. To give you an idea, there's a desalination plant recently built in Carlsbad, CA that is designed to produce 50,000 acre-feet of potable water a year. This is enough to supply roughly 200,000 homes with water. This means that plant is pushing out 44.6 *million* gallons of water each day to keep up.

If you personally had a reasonably sized beachfront house you could probably produce enough organic desalinated water for your family, but on a large scale it's not feasible as a municipal water source.

There are ways to do it chemical-free, though concentrating the salt and whatever else in the water before dumping it out into the ocean again will still be of some minor environmental impact. A lot of desalination plants still do use chemicals, and there's a breakdown of some of the impacts here

It's hit or miss. Some dentists in Mexico are very capable and reasonably priced. But some of them are hacks with a pretty looking office. My relatives have had it go both ways.

Exactly. Weren't we trying to build a monorail that was going to cost something stupid like $9 billion+? Seems you could run this for a lot of years before you even got close to that budget...

Desalination plants are NOT clean. The pollute the heck out of the ocean around them. It's not like you just produce pure salt and water out of those things. You produce clean water and as a byproduct you get a slurry of super salty brine mixed with all kinds of chemicals that speed up the desalination process and then you dump that slurry back out into the ocean because that's the most economical way to do it.

Ack, did NOT pass out. Stupid no edit button.