By allowing authors to benefit from their work for 70 years you do not motivate them to create more material. Hence, less material leads to stiffed creativity.

If your smartwatch has a feature that makes it beep when it's too far from your phone, you will never forget it again and you can resume wearing a watch.

Yes, but if a burglar comes in, the safe is probably the first thing he'll get...

Agreed. I use an alternative to all this: all my data is backed up on a small eeePC in my attic and send sent to a friend of mine through SSH. I have 1TB of data storage at his place, and I offer in return 1TB of data storage in my place for him to do the same.

Sensitive stuff is encrypted so I don't care if he can see all my files. The bulk of it is pictures/personal movies in terms of size. encfs works wonders for low sensitive data, the rest can go through TrueCrypt/keepass2 encryption or even PGP.

And it costs me zero (minus the 1TB I have reserved for him).

So ? Buy a bigger house if you don't have enough room.

Google didn't, Apple did. Not one iPhone ever sold has ever been touched by a carrier before getting into the hands of the final user, where the vast majority of Android devices get crapped by carriers before they get sold.

Apple said: Carriers are crap, let's protect all of our phones (and thus users) from them.
Google said: Carriers are crap, we're going to provide users that care with phones that are untouched by them.

As always, Apple forced their views on everyone while Google offered a choice. I think Apple was right on this one.

So you don't recognize YouTube brings any value to you? Shouldn't they be able to decide how to monetize it? After all, it's their website.

As for the spamming part, I don't see as spamming if you actually willfully go there al by yourself.

There is another catch to it: I will not pay a fee to all websites I visit in order to avoid ads. Not even talking about the money spent, there is just no practical way for me to micro-pay for every site I go to... Even though I think it would be a nice way to avoid ads while still giving something to the sites I visit. After all, they provide value..

In other words: it doesn't scale until there is a way to expand the model to the internet. As such, I will still have AdBlock installed for all the other sites I visit. So even if I don't pay for YouTube, I won't see any ads anyways, making the YouTube subscription of little value.

Reference needed. There is no country on earth where police, fire, health and education systems costs 30% of the GDP. Governments want that to do all sort of stuff most members of the population don't want. This is why people try to evade taxes. Because they're spent 90% on bullshit. If my country was asking for 3% of the GDP and that was it, nobody in their right mind would try to evade taxes because they would be fair: (almost) insignificant for the people and providing quality services.

Unfortunately, this is almost not true in every country. All governments are huge ballooned administration that forever wants to gobble more money to do more bullshit, most of the time orders of magnitudes less efficiently than private companies could.

Browser have shifted from document viewers to application platform quite a while ago now. I was mocking the OP because he seemed to imply that browser ARE document viewers when they're clearly more than that. Very clearly.

By the way, GMail doesn't suck. Nor does outlook365. Nor does amazon or any other e-commerce platform. Clearly they're not catalogs of online documents, so the shift might have been apparent and browsers are pretty good at it.

Also, in the wake of the NSA revelations by Snowden, I don't think anyone has any doubt that there are holes and zero-days in pretty much every stack of every OS out there. USB, Network, Browsers, Encryption libs, everywhere. Browsers are just at the top of the stack, so they get picked on more often.

Java is also a strong contender over here. I'd even argue that for headless apps (CLI or deamons) it does a better job.

Welcome to the eighties where browsers are document viewers.

You seem to forget Vista in there buddy. Also, this is the first time this is happening, so let's not get carried away.. I'll wait to see how all this rolls out.

The problem is that you need to upgrade your OS (and therefore need to pay) to get a good upgrade of your browser. No other browser vendor enforce this. THIS is why people are stuck with old versions of IE.

AND IT SUCKS.

(Was I yelling right there?)

Not quite exactly what I was talking about, but close: http://www.pcworld.com/article...