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.

Or any other language that denotes comments with an octothorpe, but I opted for brevity.

I'm pretty sure Ruby is bigger than Perl and sh put together now, at least in mindshare.

python and PHP also support # for making comments. It could be argued that python has just as much if not more mindshare than ruby. :)

I agree. I think "Python-style comments" would be just as reasonable a term. My impression was that the comment I was responding to was objecting on historical grounds, since Ruby and Python borrowed that comment style from Perl, which in turn borrowed it from shell scripts.

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?

In Firefox, I can type any of the following into the awesome bar:

   "d victual"  -> looks up "victual"
   "j joust"    -> gets "joust" in a Japanese dictionary
   "wp Boron"   -> displays the wikipedia page "Boron"
   "hn patio11" -> displays HN comments of "patio11"

How can I do this in Chrome? Last time I checked, it wasn't possible. If it is now, then I might start using Chrome for more resource intensive flash games.

You can do the same in Chrome. Check under Options ("Basic" tab) > "Manage" next to Default Search. You should see a list of search engines. If you've already used the search engine and Chrome has picked it up, just select it from the list, "Edit", and customize what keyword you want to use (by default it uses the basic URL). If it's not there, "Add" to make a new one.

For example, for Wikipedia I use: Keyword: wp URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&...

Here's the Chrome help page about it: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=95... It tells you to use Tab to search, but typing just the keyword and search term works fine (e.g. "wp Google" to look up Google on Wikipedia).

I see from your responses why I couldn't find that-- you're all talking about search engines! I wasn't thinking of HN or bi-lingual dictionaries as search engines and I never even considered managing search engine options rather than just adding a keyword to a bookmark (which Chrome won't let you do).

It's definitely a weird interface and a lot of menus to go through, but once it's set up, it's pretty much the same as FF's search bookmarks. Thanks.

Go into your search engine manager (via options or the omnibox's context menu) and edit the keywords for your chosen engine - note that we automatically add engines here with the keyword as the domain, so if you do a search on amazon.com, we'll automatically add amazon with the keyword 'amazon.com' - with autocomplete, this lets you type 'am', then press tab to search (or space-separate the keywork from the term).

This can also be done in Chrome, see other responses here. What Chrome also does is that it discovers searches by itself, so that when I type "im" and the autocomplete brings up imbd.com I can press tab, my search word and enter. There is no need to manually add the keywords.

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...