Too late.
http://labs.mozilla.com/prism/
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/
http://silverlight.net/
http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop.html
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/
http://widgets.yahoo.com/
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/sidebar-gadgets.aspx
http://www.screenlets.org/index.php/Screenshots

Sure you can - at least while the paint is still wet. And, after that, there are techniques to re-wet paint to smear it around (I think). I'm reaching. Maybe you're right. I'm not a painter, but the analogy seemed apt at the time.

Sun's JDK 6 and later are all Open Source as is Eclipse. Those combined are the primary environment for Java developers. They are both free as in speech and free as in beer. There isn't anything proprietary or expensive about them.

Neither Sun's Java SDK (as of version 6) nor Eclipse, the most popular development environment for Java applications, are propritary or expensive. Both are free as in speech and beer.

Statically typed languages allow for some very aggressive refactoring tools. Modern software engineers that work all day in a programming environment can easily move code around as if it were paint on a canvas using good modern refactoring tools. Pushing methods in, out, and across interfaces, changing the type of a method return, or it's name, and altering the design of a complex inheritance hierarchy are all done with simple keyboard shortcuts in Eclipse when programming in Java. While I've not used it, I understand that C# developers have access to some similarly complex tools.

And, the compiler can act as a first line of defense, alerting the user of bugs before an executable is even created. All of these refactoring tools work to refactor the unit tests as well, so code written using TDD isn't harmed by all of these changes.

This kind of stuff I just haven't been able to replicate using Dynamic languages, which is why I choose them for my small personal project, and am glad I use a statically typed language that scales to hundreds of developers and millions of lines of code at work.

I wonder how much of this problem is negated by the fact that startups are increasingly turning to cloud computing as a way to manage the server infrastructure. Amazon and the like have servers in many locations making them relatively immune from these kind of demand shortages.

Even if that wasn't true, and like others have said, if the cost of storing your server is too high in San Fransisco, just drive it over to Sacramento (less than two hours drive) or down to Los Angeles (less 5 hours away if you take i5 like a proper Californian). Or heck, even Texas or NY. Who cares. Just have enough backups to handle the hardware failures properly.

Isn't it the case that Opera Mini is to Opera as the Android browser is to Chrome?

Visual voicemail is considered a "value add" for the iPhone and is one of the selling points for the phone. Apple has an incentive to keep users away from the non-apple (and in my opinion, superior) visual voicemail service offered for free by Google.

But to your point. I think AT&T has a much stronger incentive to disallow Google Voice, (no more SMS, no more long distance fees, less of a reason to charge extra for a special iPhone package that includes Visual Voicemail, potential to have voice calls driven over the cheaper data network).

Microsoft claims that the creators of open source software are at risk of a lawsuit due to copyright violations, yet here they seem to be indicating that commercial software creators are at the same risk if they choose to violate those same copyright laws.

I think that Ubuntu contains a lot of Debian Testing and even some Debian Unstable packages. Perhaps Ubuntu is to Debian as Fedora is to RHEL? Or, maybe Ubuntu is to Ubuntu LTS as Fedora is to RHEL?

Either way, comparing Ubuntu and Fedora is a pretty good comparison to me. Both Fedora and Ubuntu claim to be stable and for mass consumption by the end user.

I don't think that this argument holds water. In 1999, I had to choose what image format to use, and I didn't have enough space to store two copies of all of my images. Sometimes I used PNG, and sometimes I used JPEG (depending on if I needed lossy or lossless) or if I needed transparent images. And, even then, I had to use a hack to get the transparent PNGs to work properly in IE. Today's cheap storage is...

That sounds a lot like what we are proposing now with this H.264 and Theora battle. And, just like ten years ago, everything was OK even though it wasn't as efficient as it could have been.

In 1999 storage cost was 3.2 cents/megabyte, now it's about 0.00953 cents/megabyte (1tb for $100). What is that, over 300x cheaper now. How much larger is a typical 20mb video clip vs a typical 0.3mb family photo? Only 66x?

Or, maybe we should compare a nice 2MB PNG and a 700MB streaming movie? About 350x difference. And storage space continues to drop, and our streaming movies will grow to 6GB HD mosters. But, the cost will remain about the same.

I have to agree with you, but for a different reason. There is more information about the study in the New York Times, but even accounting for smoking and other behaviors, there is a chance that what people are doing to get thin may be unhealthy in general. In this case, doing less of that and getting a little chubbier may be healthier than starving yourself instead of exercising little.

But, government has access to theoretically limitless funding. The government could literally give away 100mbit data connections and jack up taxes to pay for it. In that case, the consumer has no reason to choose the private service because he would then be paying for both services. That could drive the private organization away.

No matter how fat, how inefficient the government is, it still may create a situation where the consumer is getting shafted because the only logical choice us to use the government's service simply because the consumer is being forced to pay for it through taxes. This could have nothing to do with regulation, and could cost the consumer more because the consumers choice will have been taken from him and placed in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians.