The entire business model of Google is "Web as a Platform."

Of course they're trying to increase the web and make it better, faster. They're trying to make the web compete with full-fledged Operating Systems. Google doesn't care what browser you use, as long as you're using one that lets them develop their own infrastructure and deploy their own products.

Google has no reason to try and "crush" Firefox. Firefox is irrelevant to them. What they're really after is killing Microsoft, Internet Explorer, and getting their services such as Google Docs, GMail and more into businesses. They don't care about the browser as much as they want to compete in an area where they know they will win. Such an area would be web apps and web infrastructure.

Don't think about this as a browser war as much as a platform war. Microsoft's platform is Windows, Google's is the Web. Google just realizes that if the web was better and more fluent, they'd have a larger market and a bigger piece of that cookie.

That's my 2 cents, at least.

I guarantee nobody on here used geodesic distance over a great circle.

Until I have no more need for a keyboard. I don't see that in the foreseeable future, so I'm sticking with my netbook for university. You lug a 15" computer 2km back and forth every day and tell me you don't want something lighter.

The battery life is where most of the value lies anyways. 9 hours of battery life means I can leave the damn thing on all day and never have to worry about running low.

Bah! You newfangled kiddies and your tablets sicken me!

This is an important part of the "Theory of my Wife's Acceptance to Technology," or as I like to call it, T.W.A.T.

If you master your wife's T.W.A.T., you'll make money and be happy. Or at least have shiny toys.

People still BUY music!?

Whatever happened to that confunded P2P thing that everyone was crazy about a couple years back?

About the 3-5 range, which includes:

smartphone
netbook
main computer
school/work computer

Occasionally I need to touch an extra keyboard or two to help someone fix something on their computer. I'm aiding them in their issues, so I usually refer to this act as transfering e-AIDS. That's what we call it, right?

I counter this with the notion that at least Google is (relatively and to my knowledge) transparent with the way they handle your data. See: https://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/

Better to go with the devil you know than the devil you don't.

Harper can't hear you over the sound of his resounding majority.

Seriously though, who elected these asshats? As if Harper wasn't a big enough embarrassment to the rest of the world, he borders on Bush levels of stupid some days. Sometimes I think it might be better to have 100% of the country vote whether or not to kill the 30% of the country that keeps dicking us over.

Just how far CAN Ballmer throw a chair?

I'm skeptic, mostly because I haven't seen any data that I've personally worked on, but I'm all for cleaner air, unpolluted water and having some goddamn trees in the forest.

Regardless of whether climate change is real, we should be enforcing ways to maintain the planet for the next 7 Billion monkeys that will follow us. Hell, the fact we have 7 billion monkeys now is probably the reason why everything is breaking. The planet was likely never able to manage this many organisms. We consume too much of certain resources, while not consuming others. At the same time, we've knocked natural selection right out of the ring, and the decision makers almost never think about sustainability before money.

At the end of the day, we need to stop worrying about the economy of Big Oil and we need to start making some decisions that won't leave Earth a barren wasteland of steel in 200 years.

There are ways to maintain the way of life we have now, and stop destroying things so haphazardly. It's just more profitable to take a quick buck from Big Oil and leave things the way they are.

Skype seems to work on my computer and doesn't have a battery?

Am I doing something wrong?

I can see this as being valuable for corporate and academic use, as often having direct metadata can really help, especially if small changes to a file can wipe the metadata completely.

For that matter, if you take a look at certain types of files, such as ESRI shapefiles, picking out and parsing metadata is a chore, since it's all in XML and the schema is hardly ever 100% consistent. Having some form of implementation for metadata to be tagged into the files would be useful for this sort of thing. It would make projects such as GIS in the cloud a much more feasible system to create, support and scale. I used to work on a project where we needed to upload a lot of Geographical/geospatial data to a server, and the hardest part was always collecting and re-working the metadata. I think a structure like this could work, provided the service itself doesn't imply that users should own what they are using.

While I agree that cloud style data shouldn't be implemented for regular users (not counting services like dropbox, where it's a minor component), I do think that this sort of file restructuring can be beneficial for businesses and academics, and likely save a lot of money.