Is there a way to completely disable Dock? I want the Dock completely gone.  I haven't used it in the past three releases of OS X (10.5 to present).  I want it completely gone, and LaunchBar there instead.  Is there a way to kill the Dock so that it does not load or run?
This article from Lifehacker.com.au suggests setting the Dock autohide delay to 1000 seconds, like so:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 1000; killall Dock


To restore the default behavior:

defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-delay; killall Dock


The author says he sets the delay to two seconds, so he can still get to the Dock in those rare cases when it's needed.