Unlike a certain dictatorial and litigious cellphone manufacturer, Google is giving their users a choice. Flash haters certainly have reason for their dislike, but I think the decision of whether to use it or not should be left in the hands of users and webmasters, where it belongs. Good move on this, Google.

So only "rich people" can afford hobbies? Only "rich people" are motivated to do something for any reason beyond financial gain? What a dreadfully perverted view of human nature you have. The existence of legions of unpublished or published-but-financially-unsuccessful authors out there is proof of how wrong you are. People have been motivated to create things for far longer than the relatively recent existence of mass media.

Creators who are prospering in a the internet and digital economy are learning ways of making a living that do not depend on charging a fee for every digital copy of their work that exists. Cory Doctorow himself is a success story in the digital economy. The geek-chic musician Jonathan Coulton is another. Neither man will ever have the riches of a Stephen King, say, or a Paul McCartney. But do we really want to cripple the distribution of digital copies of all their work with DRM, solely to create the artificial scarcity to give them a chance - and only a chance, mind - at King-like riches?

Today the music industry is dying, mostly because they add little to the success of a musician in a digital world. The physical product the have traditionally depended on for their income - a circular disc of plastic housed inside an annoying plastic case that is too easily broken - holds little intrinsic appeal for most people. Hence the success of downloadable distribution for music - including both legal distribution through iTunes and friends and illicit distribution through bittorrent and peer-to-peer networks.

The book publishing industry is in a lot better shape, solely because the physical product they depend on has a lot more intrinsic appeal for their customers. I, with lots of bookshelves throughout my house, can testify to that myself. As long as people find books pleasing to hold, browse through, or cuddle up with, book publishers will be all right despite the existence of the Kindle and its competitors.

No need to waste time with a slow IE any more, kidz! With the all-new blazing fast IE9, your computer will be pwned in no time flat! Really!

They rolled Steve out of his iron lung for this tame stuff? Even the fanboys must have been falling asleep at the event. Today's non-news was very much of a piece with the Snow Leopard glorified-service-pack-for-$30. C'mon Steve, give us the damn tablet already!

I was using a Dell P1130 CRT from January 2004, when I bought it used, until last January when I finally made the move to an LCD, a Samsung 2443BW. The Dell is still going strong, although not used often nowadays as it's attached to my spare desktop. I ran the Dell at 1600x1200 resolution and I was loath to give up screen real estate, especially precious vertical resolution. As I found out, almost all monitors today are widescreen to better fit today's movie and HD TV content, even though the resulting sacrifice in vertical resolution is a step backward for most uses of a computer, IMHO. A year or two ago, most 24" widescreen LCDs did 1900x1200 resolution, but starting late last year many manufacturers substituted cheaper models that do 1900x1080, matching HD TV resolution without any letterboxing. I shopped around until I found a deal on this Samsung which does do the 1900x1200 I was looking for. And it also has vertical height adjustment, something that's very important in LCD monitors with limited viewing angles and which is getting as hard to find as 1200 vertical resolution. Caveat emptor on the Samsung, btw: they sell monitors with and without height adjustment under the same model numbers. I'm relatively satisfied with my choice some 7 months later. My Dell CRT was a nominal 21" and its actual diagonal picture size was about 18-1/2". The Samsung is a nominal 24" and I measure its picture at 23-3/4" or so - widescreen, of course. Not only are things on screen much sharper as expected with an LCD, but they're a tad bigger as well. Colours on my LCD aren't bad but cheap TN technology LCDs don't render colours very subtly so a graphic artist or photographer would probably spring for a monitor using IPS or VA technology costing several times as much. Bottom line: don't be afraid of the move to LCD. You'll burn a lot less electricity than a CRT and the LCD will be much less bulky on your desktop despite being a widescreen. In my own case the biggest losers were my cats who loved to lie on the hot top of the Dell CRT and have no corresponding perch on top of my thin LCD, which runs a lot cooler anyway.

So Google's doing their own OS and partnering with Adobe, the purveyors of the biggest, buggiest and least secure bloatware on your computer. Great. Given the business Google is in - advertising, and the more of it the better - they're likely to take steps to make sure that all those slippery users out there do their patriotic duty and view all ads sent their way, no matter how obnoxious. Is there even an Adblock for Chrome?

The Conservative party consists of a large caucus holding the overwheliming majority of seats from Western Canada and a smaller rump from populous Ontario (which elects almost 1/3 of the parliamentary seats). In order to have a political future the Cons need to grow in Ontario - they can't expect much more in the West and they burned their bridges with the Quebec electorate in last December's coalition crisis. But the cabinet pickings are slim from the Ontario Con group, most of whom are cretinous hard-right retreads from the old Mike Harris provincial government in power here in the late 90s. Peter Van Loan is perhaps the dumbest of the bunch - his talent seems to consist of partisan brawling at the gutter level and not much else. Like most of the Ontario Conservative members, he represents a rural riding. Minister of Public Safety? His title should really be Minister of the Public Be Damned. I don't know what to make of Van Loan being the front man for this initiative by the Conservative government. Either his political star is rising, or the Conservatives don't really expect the initiative to pass and are hanging Van Loan out to dry since he's one of the more expendable cogs in their machine.

I think the integration and interface complexity pitch this more toward corporate users and other organized groups who want to brainstorm and develop policies together. There is growing dissatisfaction with the amount of employee time that is sucked away by email. This could make in-house discussions much more effective. For individuals I think this is a better replacement for things like message boards and email lists.

Maybe the best thing Wave has going for it it the openness and extensibility. If it does turn out to be a game changer, the change will come from outside developers who will use it in ways its inventors hadn't thought of. Twitter is simple, yes, but that simplicity limits the blue-sky possibilities compared to Wave.

Didn't Ellison and McNealy try to sell us this pig in a poke years ago? They got nowhere with their initiative, and the current "cloud computing" nonsense won't replace local apps and data any time soon, either. What stopped this tired old notion before was lack of bandwidth - lots of people were on dialup, and it would have been painfully slow for them. Nowadays most are on broadband, but how much bandwidth do we REALLY have to play with? Not all that much, according to the Comcasts, Rogers, Bell Canadas and Verizons of this world. Do we really want to rely on online access going through an ISP which is counting every kilobyte of traffic and choking it off as it sees fit? Not to mention spyong on its customers on behalf of various shadowy government agencies.

Also, isn't the browser itself becoming another big choke point in all this? Security vulnerabilities, remote exploits, memory hogging, reliance on add-on technologies like Flash and Java with their own security problems - and of course, all this is built on the shaky foundations of browser scripting, which can never be made completely secure.

Forget it, boys. This turkey STILL won't fly.