coyul

I think of this as analogous to the way computers have increased productivity at work. It's not necessarily that you get your work done faster, it's that you can have a better product in the same amount of time. So instead of wondering about the stuff that's easy to look up, wonder about deeper things. I love Tom Waits, but he's off the mark here: like so many other things, a "deficit of wonder" is a social problem, not a technological one.

Why not?

I find it strange that you refer to comments starting with # as Ruby-style comments.

If you haven't quit the browser in awhile, this can happen. The good news is that in Chrome you can kill just the flash plugin without losing the rest of your browsing session (I usually do this by opening the Activity monitor and killing it from there; usually at that point you can see that the Flash plugin has gone completely nuts eating memory...)

Once the Flash plugin is dead, you can reload any open tab that needs Flash and it will come back better behaved. Until the next time it gets into whatever state causes that complete non-responsiveness.

Note that the alternative to this -- at least in Safari -- is just to have the browser crash completely occasionally. If you look at the crash dump, it's still the Flash plugin doing it, though.

I'm not sure how Chrome's treatment of custom search engines differs from Firefox's. In Chrome, you can associate a URL with a keyword so that when you type "keyword query" into the address bar, the %s parameter in the associated URL is replaced with your query. In what way is Firefox's better?

Talking publicly about that paper is why David Nutt was fired last year from his post as technical chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in the UK. I suspect that's the answer to your question, sadly...

Here's a recent interview with him: http://news.google.ca/news/url?sa=t&ct2=ca%2F0_0_s_0_0_t...

IKEA does not have to be "in the philanthropic business" to benefit the countries in which they have operations. The fact that they make a profit does not preclude other people (the landlords, contractors and employees in the post you replied to, among others) from benefiting. Economics is not a zero-sum game. Wealth can be created. More at http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/04/wealth_creatio...