Give duckduckgo.com a try.

I looked on a few of the search results and found them to be from the bing crawler. This could mean that it is simply a thin layer of alternative UI built on top of bing, in which case the search results would be the same. It may be more than a thin layer, but somehow I doubt that Microsoft gave them access to the raw crawl data in order to build an index for an alternative search engine. Either way, using data directly or indirectly from the bing crawler means that Microsoft can influence, what shows up in the results.

Just like facebook isn't so bad since you can easily switch to another social network site... oh wait what do you mean these kind of sites are basically worthless as long as only a handful of people use them?

Your comparison is totally wrong. The usefulness of a search engine does not depend on how many people use it. If a Google competitor could give me a better UI and better search results, would I stay away from them, just because nobody else used it? No, because the value of a search engine to the user is not in its number of users.

facebook OTOH would be useless without the users. If you were the only user on facebook, it wouldn't be any use. What's even worse, there is zero integration between social networking sites. At least I do not know of any two social networking sites, where a user of one site can connect to a user of the other site. And this is the main area where social networking sites as a technology is so far from mature, that I do not consider it ready for prime time, and hence I have never invited anybody to a social networking site, and I won't do until that problem is fixed. Email does not suffer from that problem. There is actually a standard for exchanging emails between sites. Social networking has more features but zero standardization. Social networking needs to get to the same level of standardization as email. And you need to be able to download a backup of all your connections and upload it to a new provider, should you wish to do so. Just like you can use IMAP to download all your email from your current provider and upload it to a new provider.

Search engines are built on open standards, and thus anybody can create a search engine and start crawling the same web as all the others. And even when the first user comes to the site, there will be content to search in.

this is the failure of the so-called american dream.

To most people the american dream is just a dream - hence the name. How large a fraction need to be able to live the dream in order for the rest to be able to keep dreaming? Is it one in a million people or perhaps only one in a hundred million? Is the american dreal really an ideal to strive for? You can work hard throughout your life, if you are lucky it pays off, and you become rich. Everybody else is just working hard without ever getting any richer. This is the american dream in a nutshell.

The only reason the countries accept it as tax payment is because they can control its value.

Does the government of a country really control the value of its currency? They can influence it, but if external factors become too strong they can no longer control the value of the currency.

The landscape has changed.

The landscape has changed, but not enough. Microsoft have engineered a situation where the majority of people have little chance of finding a PC without Windows, thus ensuring Microsoft an income which they can spend a percentage of to maintain status-quo. And based on previous stories, it appears Microsoft is even getting subsidized from the sales of certain devices with no Microsoft software on them.

Until deciding not to pay anymore money to Microsoft is a real option for consumers, I am going to see Microsoft as a problem, that needs to be solved.

They may have been fined for their practices. But the fines are not nearly as large as the value of the position they gotten themselves through those practices.

But right now it is effectively MS vs. Google, which might be much worse. Because duopolies generally are worse than monopolies.

I disagree. I believe things would have looked much worse today, if MS had not been having competition from Google.

It is much easier for a consumer not to pay any money to Google than it is for a consumer not to pay any money to Microsoft. It is also not hard to use another search engine than Google. But every time I try, I find that both the search results and the UI tend to be worse. So I always come back to the Google search engine, just because it really seems to work better for me. As long as it is that easy to switch to another search engine, I am not worried about Google being able to maintain their position simply by making a better product than their competitors.

Sure Google makes moves, I disagree with. But not enough to put them behind their competitors. I am actually more worried about Yahoo and bing getting too close, leaving us with one less competitor for Google.

if their election process at least ensures that the one to be prez gets the plurality of the votes

Be careful about cause and effect.

In some countries you may become president because you got the majority of the votes. That would be typical in a democracy.

In other countries you may get the majority of the votes because you are the president. That is definitely not a democracy.

Close to 90% of the newsletters, notification emails, etc... etc... that I subscribe to regularly end up in my spam folder, and I (for the hundredth time) have to tell Gmail that it isn't actually spam.

It's worse than that. Sometimes Gmail refuse to accept the mail in the first place, which means it will be impossible for the intended recipient to go to the spam folder and mark it as not spam. Also Gmail may refuse to accept legitimate emails even if the recipient has created a filter to never mark such messages as spam.

Money has intrinsic value.

The intrinsic value of money is less than the value of the paper it is printed on. The real value of money is entirely due to the number of people who accept it as payment. Most countries' currencies are accepted as payment by more people than bitcoin is, which is why the value of bitcoin is still quite uncertain. There may be cases where the population of a country do not accept the official currency of that country as payment. But when that happens, they tend to choose using another country's currency as payment rather than something like bitcoin. That may change in the future, but for now I have yet to hear about any person who could handle all his income and expenses in bitcoins.

at this point in the US's history, I can't tell the diff between capitalism and corruption.

I see your point.

Under Communism, man exploits man, and they censor the Internet.

I think that is not communism but rather corruption. I suspect communism might be so prone to get corrupted, that many people cannot tell the difference between communism and corruption.

In Russia suicide terrorists bomb airports.

"utilizing multiple IPv6 addresses per interface inside your LAN" Have you ever actually tried that

Not on my own LAN. But I have been using my laptop on LANs which were configured like that.

with increasing numbers of per-interface addresses?

Who says the number has to increase? Each interface should only have one static and a handful of temporary addresses. The temporary addresses are removed at the same rate at which they are added.

increasing numbers of AAAA RRs?

You don't put temporary addresses in your AAAA records. If something need a AAAA record, you use a static address for that. So it is static address on the server side and temporary address on the client side.

NAT66, adjusting only the high order ("prefix") bytes at the external gateway is vastly more simple

Sure that is the simplest form of NAT, which you can possibly do. However it does not give you any of the anonymity or topology hiding, which is often given as motivations for using NAT in the first place.

Yes, you can avoid renumbering that way. But there are drawbacks as well. You will break any protocol, which is not strictly a client-server protocol. And you will break any algorithm, which looks at assigned addresses and behaves differently depending on whether you have a routable IP address or not. Is this breakage of protocols you may be using on a daily basis really worth it, in order to avoid a bit of extra work in the rare case, where you may have to renumber your network?

the only requirement for NAT-friendliness is that the host implementations do not tell higher layer protocols the truth about what's in the high order bytes.

How would you make anything but a strictly client-server protocol work with that requirement? Let's keep it simple and consider just the following scenario. Two clients (which could be both on the same LAN or on separate LANs far from each other) each resolve the IP address of a single server. Each client contact the server and indicate they want to communicate with each other. The server informs each client about the address of the other, such that a direct communication channel can be established between the clients.

Linux IP Tables has all kinds of cool stuff to overcome that issue.

With lots of configuration, you can overcome some of the problems. But you'll never get it working as smooth as it would without NAT.

B/c neither device can host a server

And the reason for that is NAT. Also, the definition of a server is unclear in the first place. Not all protocols are client-server protocols. Do you call every listening end of a TCP connection a server? Historically some protocols including FTP and X11 have been listening for connections on the client device. And peer-to-peer protocols need to transfer data between two devices, neither of which would be considered a server. In many cases UDP has been used in scenarios, where TCP would have been better suited. The only reason being, that it is easier to punch holes in a NAT, if you are using UDP than if you are using TCP.

You obviously do not understand NAT very well.

I have written a NAT implementation from scratch. What background do you have, which gives you more knowledge about NAT than writing a NAT implementation from scratch?

A correct design would be to use a service that you can query quickly using disparate network connections

Such a design is never going to work. What are you going to do once you face the requirement of notifying the user about an incoming message within a five second deadline, while your power budget does not allow you to send packets more frequently than once every 30 seconds during idle time?

that is all handled transparently by the network, and the software should be able to manage keeping itself going even as its IP address changes

With current network design, changing the IP address is not going to be transparent to the application. Change of IP address will cause ongoing communication to break (or even worse - stall). The best you can do is for the application to notice the IP change and establish a new connection. That will however only work reliably in the absence of NAT. You can do it more transparently to the application, if you are using MPTCP. But that doesn't change any of my points, it just moves some of the logic one layer down the stack.

NAT also has a lot of benefits - including privacy.

Another common misconception. All of the perceived privacy you would get from using NAT can be achieved from IPv6 privacy addresses. You get additional privacy that way, because moving from IPv4 to IPv6 eliminates the leaks you'd otherwise get from the IPID field in the IPv4 header.

You seem to believe that everyone shares your opinion about the "good"ness of the results of the current extremely widespread adoption of NAT44.

No. I am perfectly aware that lots of people disagree. However so far none of the people who disagree with my view have shown me a technically sound reasoning for their position. Generally you can do better by simply using a firewall, that passes or rejects packets without mangling them, combined with utilizing multiple IPv6 addresses per interface inside your LAN. Those two methods cover all of the perceived advantages of NAT44, which I remember having heard about.

Except of course for the problems of getting legacy IPv4 hosts to talk to each

I was explaining why leaving NAT out of the IPv6 specification was a sensible decision. The question was whether native IPv6 without NAT or NAT66 was a better choice. Now you bring up the challenge of getting two legacy IPv4 hosts to talk to communicate with each other. Which technology is better for that purpose NAT66 or IPv6 without NAT? The answer is, neither will do that particular job. So that is by no means an argument in favor of NAT66.

Except of course for the problems of getting legacy IPv4 hosts to talk to each other in the presence of site renumbering or deliberate site-local topology information hiding.

As a matter of fact, I have developed a system, which does all of that. On the edge between the LAN and the internet backbone, there is one or more gateways translating between IPv4 and IPv6. Whether the other end of the connection is using translation as well is transparent to the hosts. With this system it is possible to communicate between two LANs using IPv4 only through an IPv6 backbone. Topology hiding is achieved through an optional encryption of addresses on the edge. Using IPv6 across the backbone eliminates a bunch of the scaling issues a traditional NAT44 suffers from. Finally I support automatic fallback to tunnelling in case the native IPv6 link goes down.