Absolutely. I don't understand what's so hard about saying "regardless of its source, all of your income just counts as income, minus some deductions, and you pay a percentage in tax based on these brackets". No special taxes, no loopholes, you just take your total income, put it in brackets, and pay the percentages required. I'm far from an expert so maybe I'm missing something, but I'd love to hear it. This seems so clear cut and simple.

Or simple marketing. Being able to say your product is not manufactured in China is probably worth something these days, rightly or wrongly. There's also a possibility of environmental concerns. Though I admit ignorance as to whether Brazil is actually better in that area, China has quite a rep for pollution. Apple gets a well deserved bad rep for a lot of things, but I think they do legitimately care about the environment to some extent and, again, environmentally friendly is also good for marketing.

I've always thought a forced sunset provision for every bill would be a good idea, perhaps with it being made permanent after being passed a number of times. Something like 5 years for the first, 10 for the second, permanent after that. Or whatever. Just the idea of revisiting laws after them being in force for some number of years would greatly improve the whole law making process IMO.

I think that greatly undersells the difficulty in taking the input of millions or billions of people and turning it into output that is useful to every one of them with little or no human tweaking involved. Plus, they're essentially paying us back by giving us the majority of that output for free.

Strongly agreed. I'm far, far from a libertarian, but this is the idea of the free market at work here. We give our money to the companies that give us what we want and the rest go out of business. Copyright is a disruption of the free market, but one we deem acceptable given the theoretical benefit of encouraging new artwork. The problem here is that the recording industry is trying to push copyright way past it's intended use in order to simple prop up their own companies and business models.

This strategy has been hugely successful for them in the past because it never directly affected consumers. It may have prevented consumers from doing certain things, but only by not allowing the technology, not by taking anything away. Now we have the internet which allows us to do all kinds of things and the recording industry is trying to artificially limit and take those things away. This has a different effect on the public consciousness than does simply not giving them the technology in the first place, and I think it makes it very dangerous for the copyright industries to go after music lockers and the like too hard.

Having large, popular, powerful companies like Google and Amazon against you is going to be bad enough for these relatively small corporations, but if public opinion aligns in the same way I think they're going to be in big, big trouble. They have lots of friends in Washington, but if this becomes a real issue I think most of that support will evaporate in the face of elections.

IIRC, the new release cycle also involves moving to Chrome's three channel system. Essentially an alpha, beta, and stable channel. New features are introduced to the alpha channel and move through beta and into stable as they reach the necessary maturity. Releases are essentially just snapshots of the stable channel at predetermined points. So instead of no testing you are in fact getting the opposite: continuous testing. And, even better, it's actual user testing, as each channel will have users who are not associated with Mozilla.

As for the auth and admin issues, those are simply not an issue for the vast majority of users. The opposite even. Most people will want the most up to date browser at all times and the easier it is to maintain that the better. Not having to actually go and download new versions will be a bonus for them, not a drawback.

I agree. It doesn't appear that they thought this out very well, and they were probably a bit premature in moving to this release model. However, on the bright side, these problems can all be fixed relatively simply, and I have hope that they'll have the kinks worked out by FF6. Once we get past the transition issues I think the new release model will be excellent for Firefox, just as it has been for Chrome (IMO anyway).

Again, think Chrome-like. Chrome has automatic silent updates without a problem. The only way you know is when the little up arrow appears on your toolbar to let you know an update will be installed on next restart. Firefox needs to be similar. And don't actually get rid of version numbers, just stop using them for anything besides bug reports and stop publicizing them. Instead, relegate them to the about dialog. Like Chrome.

This isn't to say that Chrome is perfect and every browser should follow its lead, but if Firefox is going to follow its lead it needs to not stop halfway.

But the idea is to speed up the release cycle into what is almost a "rolling release" style. And, in fact, this is exactly what the Ars article is arguing is a good thing (which I agree with). I think if they're going to follow Chrome's release style, though, they need to get the rest of what makes it work for Chrome. By that I mean automatic, almost silent updates and an almost total disregard for the version number. Chrome still has versions, but they don't really mean anything significant. Firefox needs to stop calling this Firefox 5 and start calling it just Firefox. The version is no longer important. Similarly, extension support needs to stop being based on the version number and go to some other system. My initial thought would be to assume all extensions will work and allow the community of users to report broken extensions which can be automatically tallied and turned into a warning of some sort when you install. Think something like: "This extension has been reported to be incompatible with Firefox since dd/mm/yyyy."

Why not just not put that info up there in the first place? The only info I put on my facebook profile (or anywhere online, really) is info that I don't mind being public. I'd prefer that some of it stay private (email address for instance), but nothing in my profile is truly sensitive. Ergo, I don't even really have to care about the privacy dance while still being able to maintain my connections and event invitations and the like. Win-win.

While the caps are lower than I'd like, when the penalty for going over is throttling instead of overage charges it at least feels a lot less like a pure cash grab.

Right, I wasn't trying to argue that all tablets are equal. It's just statements like "If the iPad 2 had the problems and deficiencies the Xoom and PlayBook have, these same reviewers would (rightly) trash it" that irk me. Just flatly stating it like that totally ignores the pros that bring the scores back up. Essentially it feels like he's saying that the other tablets don't do the things Apple does well as well as Apple does (woah), so they deserve to be trashed. Apple prides itself on "look and feel", so look and feel is what gets reviewed heavily. Google pushes different features, so trashing it because the "look and feel" isn't Apple quality isn't fair. Or, another example, BlackBerry seems to care about integration with their phones, and the consensus seems to be that they put a lot of effort into that and did a reasonably good job. "Trashing" them for lacking an email client isn't fair because it ignores the features they actually focused on.

That's not to say that we should ignore the negatives, just that we shouldn't also ignore the positives.

Right, comparisons are fine. They compete in the same space against each other, so it's helpful to compare them in certain areas. I don't take issue with comparisons and I don't take issue with knocking the review scores down because of the various problems/missing features. What I do take issue with is saying things like "they're bad tablets" because they don't compare favorably to a specific product on a specific feature. I take issue with "They should be judged by the same standards". Apple doesn't get to set what standard tablets are judged by.

For example, you could argue that Apple's browser is more stable, but Google's browser has more features and a nicer interface. Why does Apple necessarily win that comparison? If you are only concerned about stability, sure, but that's just one consideration. Google's is plenty stable for me and the interface makes it better overall IMO. Or, similarly, the Playbook lacks an email client, but it has the Bridge software. I've never used an email client on my tablet or phone, I just use gmail, so that's not necessarily a big deal. Now, I'm just one person, but that's exactly the point. Just because the occasional crash or missing piece of software completely ruins your experience doesn't mean that it ruins it for everyone. These other tablets shouldn't be "trashed" just because they have different pros and cons, and if someone can't recognize that there are pros and cons to every product then they're just blinded by fanboyism.

Fair enough, I get the point. All I'm saying is that, while you can ding them for missing features or bugs or whatever, you can't just ignore the additional features that do exist. You can't just say something like "they're bad tablets" and point to a lack of an email client (for example). Some people don't care so much about an email client. For some people, the bridge is more than enough. You can't point out that the sd card doesn't work on launch while ignoring the fact that the iPad will never have an sd card and complain about unfair relative review scores. There are positives and negatives to all products, and you can't just "trash" one product because its positives and negatives don't match up with your favorite product. It has its own set of ups and downs to be weighed.

Precisely!

But honestly, it still has 32gb of space built in, so the sd card expandability is (or, more accurately, will be) a nice bonus, not a requirement. They're certainly taking their sweet time with it, though.