Looking at history, I fear that once Joe Sixpack wakes up, it'll be too late.

Assuming we still have a functioning democracy.

Which can be doubted in the US, for example, where money can buy political propaganda almost without limits, and lobbyists (i.e. in the end those with lots of money) can practically buy laws, it is questionable if you can

Finland got a nationalistic right wing government after the last election, like in more countries in europe.

People are afraid due to the uncertain economy. The reflex is to trust the political right more than the left in situations like this: fear often leads to xenophoby and calls for "law and order". As a side effect, all these right wing parties mainly serve the interest of the rich and vested interests, which leads to measures like limiting free speech and accepting all kinds of collateral damage in the name of "business friendly" policies.

Why do you think office-type documents are better at capturing know how than a wiki? My experience is different. Information locked in documents if often hard to retrieve and find. Information in wiki's is searchable, can be linked and connected; it is both easier to find and easier to maintain.

I have two teenagers. But to my defence: when I joined slashdot in 1998, I didn't have any children yet.

How about tab groups? Firefox has invented many things, tab groups being the latest. I do not think Firefox is merely copying features. They have been leading in features and have been copied by the others.

I see chrome using more memory than Firefox, both including an equivalent set of (the usual) extensions. Since version 7 and 8 I think Firefox has reversed the trend of becoming bigger and slower. And it still has some extensions and tab handling that is better than any other browser.

Maybe it doesn't win benchmarks, but it is fast enough for me.

And it gives some peace of mind to use a browser that is not tied to a powerful company.

I was just thinking the same and shaking my head.

It seems that marijuana also has, very light, withdrawal symptoms. Not comparable to nicotine or cafeine, but still. Heavy users seem to feel a bit depressed and may have trouble falling asleep without.

I'm a moderate user myself, most days I'll take 1 'balloon' from my vaporizer using about 0.25 - 0.5 gram of (home grown) weed. Using this amount, I notice absolutely nothing when skipping use (e.g. when I go on vacation abroad for two weeks, not taking any weed): I look forward to go on vacation, but also have something to look out for when coming home :).

For me it is like computers or music: I can do without, but I'd rather not.

I agree. But in OSX you can use cmd+space almost like launchy.

And the windows vista and windows 7 start menu also can replace launchy.
Should windows 8 remove the start menu, I'll have to return to launchy.