Keeping the people stupid

My wife was watching Real Time with Bill Maher tonight on HBO, when she heard the following statement:

I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but I swear to God, I think it's in the interest of corporations to keep the people stupid, and the best way to keep the people stupid is by having the people who inform them be even stupider.

That is perhaps one of the best quotes I've heard in a long time. For me, it ties with something I heard Dennis Miller say when I saw him live for one of my college homecoming concerts:

Life is like a big, ugly, grizzly bear. If you lock eyes with it, it will kick your ass.

Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1

IE7 RC1 is here! I've been running IE7 since the first public beta and have really liked it. If you haven't already installed it, I highly recommend it.

The RC1 build includes improvements in performance, stability, security and comparability. There have also been changes to the fit and finish of the user interface and an auto-uninstall feature in Setup, which will automatically uninstall earlier betas of IE7.

The automatic uninstall feature is very nice since it helps to streamline the install process. To get through the install I required two reboots, one to finish uninstalling the beta 3 and the other to finish installing RC1. The reboot after RC1 was automatic as the install started as soon as the system booted from the previous uninstall.

IE7 will be distributed as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates soon after the final version is released for Windows XP later this year, so you will be running it whether you want to or not. Given the number of security fixes that have been rolled in to this release of Internet Explorer, you are probably going to want to install it anyway.

Windows Live Writer

Courtesy of the latest issue of WXPNews, I came across a very cool new blogging tool, named Windows Live Writer.

This is a desktop application that makes it very easy to write new blog posts by providing a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") editor that reminds me of a slimmed down version of Microsoft Word.

Windows Live Writer has some pretty cool features, like the ability to automatically spell check your blog posts before posting them and automatically saving a draft every x minutes.

While it is primarily focused on helping you write blog posts for Windows Live Spaces, it also supports many other popular blogging sites, including Blogger.com, Community Server, dasBlog, and many others.

I used it to compose this blog post, and it rocks. I highly recommend checking it out.