No. A hardened service for their own software, AND anybody who has a much worse service (significant part of the world). I am in Europe outside EU, and I frankly do not trust my ISP more than Google. I use my ISP's DNS because I don't care, and is slightly faster.

Anything can be used for good and evil. Not to sound like a Google fanboy, but by setting default primary/secondary DNS to a hardened, cache poison (and other stuff) secured and properly maintained DNS service, their ChromeOS / Android / people-who-trust-them customers could be better off than relying on some unsecured local ISP DNS.
If I was paranoid (or had a reason), I would trust Google more than my ISP - my ISP's DNS belongs to my ISP. Which is subject to my country's law. Google is not, and getting any info from them is at least bit harder than asking local company - who also does not have a clear policy on logging and sharing my data.
And yes, in my case also its fast but not as local ISP DNS, but no big trade off since I use BIND to cache anyway. So primary and secondary are my ISP's, and tertiary and quadriary Google's.
What I learned from all this is that second(ary) DNS IP your ISP gives you is sometimes bit (lot?) faster, and better used as Primary DNS under Windows.

Yes but this 0.7 version is just a repacked / modded FreeBSD 7.2, OS that's been in development since 1993 - and that itself was a fork of older projects. Much better than software embedded some hastily released commercial NAS.

Your argument is invalid. Yes, it might not be 100% draft compatible, but at least its SVG files are perfectly readable in all the software I ever tried... from Firefox, Opera, to Photoshop and whatnot. As far as I know, Word HTML is actually readable mostly in IE. It does so on purpose - 1. Get monopoly 2. Break standards 3. Get people to use your proprietary formats / equipment 4. Profit!

As a person who uses vector drawing programs from time to time, this program was a great find. Having pirated Corel Draw installed, mostly for rubbish reasons, was also bad - for bloat reasons, law reasons - and sanity reasons. I remember that Corel then (>5 years ago) had so much bugs, slow and unresponsible, bad support for local fonts, unstable. For all my purposes Inkscape is by far better program - compact, standards compliant, fully functional, and frankly I enjoy using it much better than Corel Draw. Couple bugs yes, but brilliantly reliable compared to horrible nightmare that is (was?) Corel Draw.

Yes - but this means they might want to make it ISO standard, which is ruled out if there is no alternative implementation. Once there is (not possible without opening up), there is nothing stopping them to push international standardization, to make EU (and other) shut up even more.

People who program different migration utilities benefit from this, and of course users of such tools. Even wild ideas like Fuse filesystem that mounts it as Maildir.
So, converters, importers, exporters, indexing tools, repair/forensics, optimize/defragment/find duplicates tools, sort, grep.
Also, if its a standard than it needs to be STANDARDIZED, so no special treatment for own products.

Step 1 in saving the environment in the short run should probably be spending money on reducing pollution where it also brings reasonable savings, as the effect on nature is cumulative on the world.
And less coal used means less need to dig it out, which means less coal miners in the long run. "In [USA] 2006, 72 miners lost their lives at work, 47 in coal mining", "an average of 21,351 injuries per year between 1991 and 1999". Which means this actually saves lives, not to count expenses of compensations to those hurt or families of killed.

disclaimer: i am not a gamer.
i personally know about 5 people that lost their girlfriend/boyfriend for being too hooked up to wow, and ~3 for fps games.
since you cant (yet) make real babies inside a game, darwin wins!

Democratic regimes that see their own countries' intellectual elite as an enemy are not really democratic. If you're trying to make your own people dumber by average so you could rule them more easily .. that is base premise for any authoritarian / fascist / fanatic form of government. Not (true) democracy.
Government in my (small European) country recently spent millions of euros for building number of sport arenas we don't need. Now, crisis is here, and they are "cutting corners" by stopping the free school book program for primary schools. Go taem!

"China has several gigabytes per second of traffic to deal with and has a lot more international businesses," he says. "They can't be as heavy-handed with their filtration. The Iranians aren't as concerned about that⦠so they get to use all these fancy toys that, if the Chinese used them, could cripple their economy."

I myself ordered Chinese products from sites using SSL. I don't think even they would be crazy enough to turn down money - but it seems Iran's leaders are. Are they going North Korea style? At least Chinese have a positive side to their repressive government. They have the money, they'll transform that to power and influence. Iran's policy is VERY bad for business - who seem to really WANT their people to be poor and unemployed. Which also leads to emigration of smart, competent and anybody willing to work. So yes, killing protesters and having a idiotic clerical fascistic system will make Iran poor and irrelevant in time. Countries with saner systems will benefit from importing their disgruntled intellectual elite - because smart people might be more tolerant by average, but also have lower tolerance for being served hypocritical crap.

It's a nice dream. But what strikes me as bit weird - is that there are AFAIK huge natural resources on the moon. It's basically a goldmine! So what is stopping today's multinational super-corporations from exploiting it? No natives to subdue?
And lets be realistic - only way human race is getting to moon again is commercialization.

Trolls and cheaters in online games are kinda what made me quit. And yes, from people threatening to find and kill me FOR NO REASON, flying immortal enemies with all the best weapons...
Since I stopped, I've made something out of my life - finished college, got a decent job, great girlfriend, and lost those extra ponds. I thank those jerks every day!
But then, what works for me, might not work for you. You might not NEED a life!

This is great for business mail too... small company where I work was literally BURIED with spam until we moved to gmail. Since their mail addresses were "in the open" on our website for years, some of them get 200+ spams a day. Now, if 1 in 1000 passes, it's a bad day. Also, in my private inbox, I had an VERY old mail address still redirected to gmail address... turned out that was the source of 1/2 spams (100+ / day). But those were filtered too without problem. So far so good... not a single false detection for ham. Nothing but praise so far. Disclaimer: I do not work for gmail. I am the genuine satisfied customer with smile on my face, from "after" picture, as seen on TV!

Nothing like good ol' time vendor lock-in! Now let me just replace my dying generic proprietary hardware stuff by paying my vendor outrageous sums of money! Whoops. Seems like company moved to a place called Narnia and accepts only calls made though their proprietary DRM enabled inter dimensional subconscious interface.