I find the price difference for storing more than just images to be pretty steep. Wouldn't it save money to use stenography to store your files inside of some images so you could get around their stupid rule?

It's not a stupid rule. Pictures are small, so they can guess that the storage use of your "all-you-can-store" buffet will be smaller. The fact that it breaks down in edge cases isn't terribly relevant.,/p>

Well, art is different from many goods in that no one knows if anyone will want it until it's created. It's a high-risk high-failure business model. And the government reducing the risk has been showed to pay net dividends to society.

None of what you went through in any way seems onerous. The use-case is when someone is buying a new property, not every six months. It's a big deal.

And, I don't see what's even marginally offensive about what happened to you. You call N providers to get quotes. All tell you the same thing you quoted. You start with the best choice at a one-year contract. If that fails, you call the second best, and so on.

Then have the homeowner (after seeking a court order allowing him to do so) run the fiber at his expense, and the company pays 125% of the cost. Companies paying what courts dictate is already a solved problem.

As for them hooking up a paying customer when the additional cost is almost nothing? I'd imagine a relatively small fine ($500/day) would be sufficient if you allow like a week or something reasonable before it kicks in.

billions of people will be considered based on race, gender, social position and annual income as potential revenue factors when subscribing or continuing to use the product

No they won't. Facebook wants to say X% of the world is on Facebook. This is to boost marketshare, not money.

The argument to the stock market is then, X/2% led to a market cap of Y. X% should lead to a market cap of 2Y.

It's just the way motivations are aligned when "users" and "active users" are metrics given real importance.

The touchscreen devices seem to have some kind of extra allure, which I associate with the fact that they have a tactile component different than a game controller or keyboard/mouse.

It probably has something to do with advances (from both theory and datamining) in creating addicting experiences. A 10-year-old vs. a group of adults conspiring to get him addicted barely stands a chance. Hell, based on what I've seen, most adults barely stand a chance.

I think it's fairly likely that all of those hurt children (depending on their age, psychology, etc.) If only there was system for allocating one or more adults to watch what children do, have unilateral authority to veto certain actions of the child, and be responsible for taking into account the specific child's development. And responsible for explaining things in context, etc. We could even give them authority to punish the children to ensure lessons get taught.

Sadly, those adults would have to bear some responsibility... and they'd probably blame society for their failings.

Now, I could get behind preventing the advertising of those things to children (just like cigarettes and alcohol), but I think all advertising designed to appeal to children is evil.

The amount you have to download as markup is small compared to the CSS/images.. and the increase compared to delta-JSON is negligible.

I should note that all those executions are all (a) local only (b) based on URL parsing, not HTML and (c) only had user level access (except for one bug in developer mode.)

Data that gets rendered is not equal to a Turning complete code set. And I'm not 100% on what the Turning complete machine adds.

First off, although I totally understand that your religious* beliefs were insulted. But you didn't really respond to my point about identity. By religious I mean your dogmatic, unsupported claim that personal liberty is paramount.. in a conversation about personal liberty. That's the kind of circular reason that usually only comes up when talking about how the Bible is real, because Jesus said so, and Jesus is awesome because see Bible..

My point was, remaining a part of a society is agreeing to be bounds by certain codes of behavior. If you do not wish to be bound by your obligations to society, please feel free to depart. If you agree that past-you, who did not leave society, can bind current-you behaviors, then it seems like you agree you shouldn't be allowed to proceed.

And the hungover-you was all about binding decisions about you, and your future. Nothing to do with prohibition or non-future yous.

It's a common rhetorical technique, to provide you with options and ask you to expound on how your philosophy works, and draw lines in the gray. Not engaging is... well... deciding you don't want to communicate on that issue.

I understand what a natural monopoly is. Natural monopolies (Microsoft, Google) are totally, and explicitly, not allowed to use their monopoly powers in one industry (OS, Search) to promote their power in another (Internet Browsers, Travel). They also are pretty regulated in behavior and prices(ala AT&T).

The only advantage a natural monopoly has over a non-natural monopoly is that it won't be broken up.

You really should do some research, because your ideas are incorrect.

There are many ways to get applications that work on any OS. There's the Java/.NET model, where you can use any language that runs on a virtual machine. You can do a thin client. You can just use POSIX commands and compile C code for various platforms.

(Note: Browsers aren't 100% interchangeable.)

Further, I'll contend that it just pushed all the security issues from the OS... where there was a decent amount of control over what code you ran, to a dynamic linking opaque collection of code, making malware far easier to spread.

Other than the part where they have competition, you are in no way obliged to use them, they aren't restraining anybody from going elsewhere for search

You're confused. Obviously, I, as an individual, can use Bing, DDG or others. However, I, as a member of a company that wants to make money, have to make sure that when the 95% of people who use Google try to find [X], they can find me. It's a monopoly of eyeballs for their true customers.

It's a network effects problem.

You brought up the question of identity. But let's start with your "hangover-you". Can "hangover-you" make a commitment that prevents "going-out-later-you" from drinking. Hence, forbids any "future-you" from drinking? If yes, how is this different from "didn't-move-to-a-different-society-you" binding "suicidal-you". If no, how is this different from "suicidal-you" binding "over-it-you" that will exist 15 minutes from now (absent suicide).

Given, among other things, the above, I'll grant it's a tricky issue. But can we get on board that your "principle" is really just a thinly disguised slippery slope argument. And we totally prevent people from doing things because their future self wouldn't want it done. For example, we don't allow 17-year-olds to enter into contracts. We don't allow people to contractually give up certain rights. We don't allow you to be forced to repay debts instead of starting over cleanly. We force you to set aside money to pay your income tax so you don't end up in debt to the country. I'm sure I could think of other examples.

A proof for "All men are created equal" seems easier, as there's a lot more agreement on that point. (Although you do have to argue against the "I'm the only person/a brain in a jar" line of reasoning).

I know about some of the features, among other things, canvas and local storage. I wasn't saying "what technical features" I was saying "why do I, as a consumer, want this". It's unclear to me what value Canvas will supply. Nor do I particularly want local storage from websites. One of the first things I did on new installations of flash was turn off it's local storage. Again, I see why developers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H advertisers want it. But I have no idea why I as a consumer would.

To be honest, I have no idea why I, as a developer, want any of the new features.