Fully googlable...still

1. This one's so simple that it's more for the humour than the funda. What is being talked about here?

Bill Gates gets the credit but somebody else did most of the work.
For the first time in this decade something from Microsoft has been shipped on time.
Regardless of the problems with this one calling Microsoft Support won't help.
For at least another year it'll suck.

2. Jean Baptiste Travernier wrote in 1650 about the 3 methods in which this was done. In Gujarat, Agra and Delhi, it happens in a 12 ft by 12 ft hut made of reeds and faggots. In the Coromandel it was done in a large hole of 9 ft depth.In Bengal it was carried out in the open on the banks of the Ganges. What is he describing?

3. An old one from my room quiz back when we were in second year. So, Ranjiv and co, kindly let the juniors answer this:

The bimetallism issue [silver vs gold] dominated the US presidential election of 1896. William McKinley, the Republican nominee, campaigned on a platform of preserving the gold standard. William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic nominee, supported the bimetallic standard. In a famous speech, Bryan proclaimed, "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.'' Not surprisingly, McKinley was the candidate of the conservative Eastern establishment, whereas Bryan was the candidate of the Southern and Western populists. However, his presidential campaign was ultimately unsuccessful due to an economic upturn caused in part by the failure of Russian harvests and the resultant increase in commodity prices.
Name the famous book which is supposed to have been written as an allegory to these events.

4. Another simple one. Some popular hypotheses for the origin of the legend are

* The children fell victim to an accident, either drowning in the river Weser or being buried in a landslide.
* The children contracted some disease during an epidemic and were led out of town to die in order to protect the rest of the city's population from contracting it.
* The children willingly abandoned their parents in order to become the founders of their own villages during the colonization of Eastern Europe. Several European villages and cities founded around this time have been suggested as the result of their efforts as settlers.

5. Identify this pioneering book. Very guessable.

Chapter 1: The sporty Corvair
Chapter 2: Disaster deferred
Chapter 3: The second collision
Chapter 4: The power to pollute
Chapter 5: The engineers
Chapter 6: The stylists
Chapter 7: The traffic safety establishment
Chapter 8: The coming struggle for safety

6. From The New York Evening Post, 1877

A X is a young man, not over twenty-five, who may be seen on Fifth Avenue between the hours of three and six, and may be recognized by the following distinguished marks and signs. He is dressed in clothes which are not calculated to attract much attention, because they are fashionable without being ostentatious. It is, in fact, only to the close observer that the completeness and care of the costume of the X reveals itself. His trousers are very tight; his shirt-collar, which must be clerical in cut, encircles his neck so as to suggest that a sudden motion of the head in any direction will cause pain; he wears a tall black hat, pointed shoes, and a cane (not a “stick”), which should, we believe, properly have a silver handle, is carried by him under his right arm, (projecting forward at an acute angle, somewhat in the manner that a sword is carried by a general at a review, but with a civilian mildness that never suggests a military origin for the custom). When the X takes off his hat, or when he is seen in the evening at the theatre, it appears that he parts his hair in the middle and “bangs” it. There is believed to be a difference of opinion among Xs as to whether they ought to wear white gaiters.