I work with a system like this, and you can pretty much guarantee that when something like the flu goes around, you are probably going to get it cause everyone comes into work anyway. Our management says not to come in sick, but I have yet to see them send someone home for it. It is almost counter productive cause you get people coming in and basically accomplishing nothing all day. I've witnessed the opposite abuses though, so I understand both sides. I've seen people call in sick when they were not just to use sick time. I would imagine that happens frequently in countries that mandate sick leave.

I use OpenDNS through comcast, and I still see the OpenDNS error pages and the like, I'm pretty sure it is going through. Perhaps they are looking for failure returns and hijacking those?

From Wikipedia:

Google created the problem of a trademark search resulting in a competitors link being presented first unless you pay. To me that would qualify as "a racket". If running a racket is not evil, where do I sign up?

I'm not trying to say it illegal, just evil.

I'm pretty sure if governments put their collective minds to it, they could win. Complacency leads to defeat. There are enough ignorant sheepish humans out there to go along with whatever a government wants to do. Don't be surprised when censorship comes and most people do not give a shit.

You don't use firefox with noscript/flashblock? I don't see shit. Pulling numbers out of my ass like adobe did, I would say over 50% of people reading this have some form of adblock in place. Their statistic is as real as mine, granted they might have some data they twisted to get that number, I have my gut feel!

Sadly he is correct about IE being better than netscape at one point in time. Netscape after being bought by AOL went down the tubes and IE was one of the best that was available for Windows in my opinion. Unfortunately there are still a few sites that do not work in firefox for me and I have to suffer through IE, but other than that I never use it anymore.

Vista for some uses (users) is better than Ubuntu. There are games that do not run on Ubuntu, I cannot easily update my blackberry (without hacks anyway) on Ubuntu. I still have to dual boot my laptop for a few things. It doesn't mean that Vista is a superior operating system, it just means for somethings/people it is better. If I get marked troll so be it.

Yes.

Hopefully not, I don't. Disagree strongly != hate.

Great, if I wanted it I would seek it out, download it and install it. I think most people that go with firefox understand that some MS technologies don't quite work with it in all cases. Genuine windows crap comes to mind.

Many people use firefox to get away from Microsoft. Understand that what MS is doing here is blasphemy to many. Actions like this reinforce the "MS is evil" notion. If a firefox update installed something into IE without asking or without an uninstall, I would be offended too.

The ends do not justify the means. Oh shit, I forgot this is slashdot, ignore that comment.

If it is not bad for you, good. I do not doubt that many people will not care about this. For many of us this is bad. I personally do not like anything (iTunes, Java, etc) that installs components without my approval.

If it came from Opera, no. If it came from another source, yes I would complain. Your example is a bit different. If Windows had something like Synaptic, and I got firefox through it, I wouldn't be surprised if they pushed an update that modified it. But I didn't get firefox through a MS service. Your comparison fails. I compile my own firefox for both Windows and Linux, for optimization and more control. I don't fully trust Synaptic for everything either.