No, I'm defending Firefox's stance because it's moral, and branding it a lost cause doesn't make it idiotic. And no, I'm working around Flash, as I have before with http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50771

Nice straw man though. Maybe I should pull a Godwin on you: joining the German Resistance was obviously idiotic, right?

Please do. In case you haven't figured out, you're 100% free to switch to a different browser, or fork Firefox and port the Fennec changes you seem so familiar with. Would you now please let "the rest of us" make our own choices too?

I hope you do realise you sound like a desperate guy ditched by his girlfriend, who's screaming out loud how his life will be great without her, while she'll suffer like hell because he was the best thing that ever happened to her...

Lieber Herr Gott mach mich stumm
Daß ich nicht nach Dachau komm.

Yes, but the "overnight" part gives them slack to rock the boat some.

Maybe, but (IMO) it's not that dangerous -- not until IE9 is about to ship, anyway.

About other issues they want to raise awareness about, I come short trying to find others as important. The browser wars are on again, and this time with more and stronger players. IE is going standards-compliant for fear of irrelevance, the EU spanked MS hard (10 years too late), and Google is here to stay... So you could say they already did their job wonderfully on that front.

Yes.

Guess what, I'm using it.

And the sites using those features are... http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/demos/round/index.xhtml ? As far as non-Windows users are concerned, the most painful problem is Flash being crap for video playback, and the fix for that is one add-on or greasemonkey script away.

The battle may be lost, but that doesn't change a thing. No, garbage is saying the war is over, and then crying foul when someone else has the balls to take a stand.

I rather suspect they decided to not do that *right now* for political reasons.

Right now html5 video is not widespread, and their purpose is still chewing at the IE marketshare. If the world embraces html5 video overnight and everybody and their dog switches to Chrome because of its h264 support, you can be damn sure they'll fold. The same if IE9 comes out with html5 support.

Right now they have nothing to worry about (except maybe inconveniencing some foul-mouthed slashdot poster that can't be bothered to search for solutions, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/83149/ ).

So as long as there's no real threat of pushing Firefox towards irrelevance, *now* is the right time to make a stand and raise awareness about how detrimental patents are to free software. Thank you, developers with a backbone!

It's hosted on yahoo servers. That's more than unfortunate... it's sad.

You can mitigate that with knockd. Or if you're paranoid enough stick to knockd all the way...

I for one left password authentication enabled in sshd, and made all user passwords unusable (passwd -l). Let the bots have their fun and waste time.

The only improvement to this would be fail2ban with a tarpit rule...

No, it's marked as "cached". Try `free -m` in the command line: the "free" column reports the _real_ free memory. Many new Windows converts fall for that and go berserk about why their machine eats up all RAM, failing to read the 2nd line that presents the free memory including buffers/cache.

It was high time Windows started caching data from disk more aggressively, but if it starts swapping because of that, they obviously got it wrong.

The new market is hot. D'oh.

Blah, blah straight out of the *AA indoctrination manual. BitTorrent facilitates piracy. Control over the content you buy facilitates piracy. Control over your hardware facilitates piracy.

Got news for you: crossing the street facilitates getting run over by a car. Drinking water facilitates choking to death. Guns facilitate... you get the point.

Of course jail-breaking facilitates piracy, because it facilitates freedom. And freedom of the little person facilitates corporations making less profit. You see, when the customer is in control you have to do things deeply annoying to your shareholders, like staying competitive without vendor lock-in, spending money on R&D, and providing quality products.

For some freedom-loving nerds, the iPhone is a quality product only if they can do whatever they please with it, not what the turtle-necked Jesus dictates. Hardware-wise it's an excellent product, but that doesn't change the fact that it's artificially crippled to maximise profits.

One app at a time, lack of bluetooth profiles that could be available in software, locked tethering, impossibility to install whatever application you wish, impossibility to use whatever application you want on your computer to access the device, the list goes on. Some people find such artificial crippling just as unethical as IP piracy. But hey, screw ethics, right?