"This is another power grab by the religious right"

I think this is just a bunch of politicians spending money and time on something stupid. Politicians either trying to grab votes from the more radical religious voters or just radical religious politicians trying to force their world view on other people. I don't think these people can be considered one coherent group like your statement suggests.

Good code has comments for edge cases, I mean "why the fuck are you checking if foo is less than bar?" with "//checking if foo will not overflow because ..."

Edge cases are by definition very unlikely, usually the code that handles them are bugfixes. Too many times I come across code that is full of bugfixes for those edge cases but no comments whatsoever, to me those kind of comments are more important than method comments (aka javadoc).

As opposed to what? Subversion would be completely unusable in this situation, at least git users can push and pull from each other peer to peer, which you would only do if you REALLY need it, because it is kinda of a pain in the ass compared to push/pulling to origin. Plus you CAN carry on your own work keeping a normal commit history as long as you don't want to share it with anyone until the servers come back online.

Really, it is "the greatest thing ever (for source control)".

Not being great does not mean you are not above average. The average is just very, very low.

Looks like someone forgot to use StringBuilder

You got a good point, but is the amount of money and effort wikimedia is putting on this venture be that big? To me it seems most of the work is being done by Facebook and the Indian Carriers themselves.

A band-aid is better than nothing. Global, free, uncensored internet will arrive (eventually).

For several versions Android required that too, until they came up with fragments in (if I am not mistaken) Android 4.0 which works well enough for touch (and touch only) devices.

I don't think stuff actually loads that much faster with ghostery because those analytics scripts and facebook buttons are really small and the browser makes up to X connections (8 usually) per domain at the same time. BUT sometimes the page hangs waiting for a third party domain to respond, this rare cases don't happen anymore.

The thing I don't get is the analytics scripts, do you really need that many? One or two I can understand, but with that many you won't even have the time to look at all the graphs they can throw at you. It is not like they are generating revenue for your website...

This is true, I was amased at how much crap ghostery caught. At first I thought that a common news website would have ads from two or tree domains and a couple of analytics scripts from third parties, it filters around 50 different stuff from third parties, the chance of any single one of them being compromised is pretty big...

If you tell your devs to do something they don't want to do they will do a mediocre job, this is true to any kind of development. Only committed people can produce excellent work.

I was talking only about brand, not if it was good or if there was any good alternatives. Today the windows brand is not AS bad as it once was, the IE brand could pull the same stunt if the browser actually got on par with the competition.

Back in windows98 and windows ME days the windows brand was pretty tainted as well. You know the good old days when you did not need a faulty hardware to get a blue screen of death. Today the windows brand is not exactly good, but it is not derided by the common folk either

Actually IE6 was really good when it released, the problem was that standards were beginning to take form and MS simply (maliciously) stopped updating the browser.