It's my understanding that the CC companies are moving towards what you are talking about (store transaction tokens, not CC details). But the CC companies are very reluctant to really push all the merchants to upgrade their systems.

The merchants, of course, don't want to spend any money updating their systems. And the CC companies can't afford to simply cut off large numbers of merchants that won't upgrade or comply to guidelines.

I'll have to disagree with you there. The Communist Party of China absolutely wants to retain political control over China.

The problem they face, which causes things like the Google situation, is that they in order to avoid large scale revolt, they need to maintain a high economic growth rate. And totalitarian economies aren't particularly good at getting economies to grow. So the Party is trying to have a sort-of free market economy while still denying the Chinese people political choice.

But having economic freedom but not political freedom naturally creates friction and strange situations. Like the Google one.
 

When a true random sampling of internet users shows 80%+ of those users using browsers with good HTML 5 support, then I'll start using HTML 5.

Until then, as an internet developer for a small business, it's still HTML 4. We don't have the money to do both and we have to go where the users are.

I'm tired of all these artist/journalist GGs. Let's get the job back to it's proper political patronage role. Forget about political correctness, the criteria should be: which old white guy raised the most money for the party in power.

The thing is, Google wasn't really making money in China. They failed to take much search market share from the incumbents (particularly Baidu) and their China operations were costly.

This has led many, myself included, to think that the whole free speech and hacking angle that Google is now adopting is just a smokescreen. It lets them save face and leave a market they've failed in while getting kudos from the internet community for standing up to censorship.

The primary evidence for this idea is that China has the same censorship and government hacking policies today as it did years ago when Google entered the China market, so why leave now? Because they've failed to meet market share and profit targets.

It's hard to get too excited about new web stuff because as a web developer, the answer to "when can I start using the new stuff in my sites" is always "when 90%+ of my visitors have browsers that support it."

And given the excruciatingly slow rates of: IE losing market share, MS implementing new technologies in IE, and users upgrading to newer versions of IE; the answer to that 90%+ question for HTML5 will be measured in years from now.

Note that the Torvalds article referenced is one year old (2 Oct 2008). The SSD space has, of course, changed a lot in the past year.

Well, it's sort of a moot question because we're moving towards drive-by-wire cars even if we keep the wheel and two pedals interface. Mechanical linkage between steering wheel and wheels will be gone in a decade or so.

Hey, Miguel, just to balance things out, how about you discuss a few Microsoft products/technologies/protocols that you think are utter crap, that you'd never touch with a 1000-foot pole, and that you think the Open Source community would be crazy create an open source implementation of.

In preparing your argument, you did cherry-pick your units a bit. For a counter example, explain to me how the ratio of yards in a mile is a useful, everyday ratio.

If the older systems consistently used ratios of 2, or 12, or 16, your argument would have some real merit. But the historical hodge-podge of ratios make comprehensive use of them very problematic.