Nor are reports of intelligence agencies weakening encryption systems anything new -- concerns about NSA influence over the Data Encryption Standard (DES), reach back about four decades.

While this is true, it's a dumb example to bring up, since it turned out those concerns were misplaced. The serious concerns were that the NSA's choice of S-box values had somehow introduced a backdoor, but since the early 1990s we've known that the NSA's S-box values actualy *strengthened* DES against differential cryptanalysis (an attack which was not publicly known at the time).

I think you're confusing VP8 with VP9.

The moment they receive a National Security Letter, the backdoor is added and pushed out in a regular software update. Or, on the server side, they add a tap anywhere they touch plaintext. Or they hand over keys.

Every US corporation is an arm of the NSA, except for those that follow Lavabit and choose to shut down rather than cooperate.

Your third paragraph is quite wrong. Well, maybe some Christians believe that people wouldn't know murder is bad apart from the Bible, but traditionally Christianity teaches otherwise, via the concept of "general revelation". It's clear in the New Testament (e.g. Romans 2:15).

In the fourth and fifth paragraphs I think you vastly overplay your hand. I'm a Christian and was in the USA for 10 years and never met anyone like that, even though I did meet a good number of "creationists".

Oh please, not that again.
http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=53517

VP9 will be better than H265 for you as an end user because Youtube will support VP9 and not H265. Google has said so.

The abstract and the commentary imply the canard that faith in science and faith in religion must be at odds. This isn't the case in theory or practice. There is no philosophical incompatibility in believing that science and God both work, or even that God works through science. And in practice, most religious believers exhibit plenty of faith that science works and are comfortable with it.

Leaked IE11 builds support WebGL.

Chrome has some pretty bad bugs with the element in gaming contexts. But the real solution to audio in HTML5 games is the Web Audio API. This is still a work in progress, but we'll get there. The Citadel demo uses it. If you stand on the bridge over the river and turn around 360 degrees, you should get a nice stereo effect.

Android's entire Java stack --- Dalvik, SurfaceFlinger, stuff like that.

The reason not to run the Android user-space is footprint. If you use Android apps and a browser, you have two parallel platform stacks --- rendering, compositing, VM, networking, UI, etc both running on a phone at the same time. Getting rid of the Android Java stuff means you can use the Web and local HTML5-based apps at the same time with only one stack. Saves a lot of memory and simplifies the software design considerably.

That is not correct. When I toured the South Korean side of the DMZ the tour guide brought along an escapee from North Korea. She said that at least in her village (near the SK border) people generally had a pretty good idea of the true situation.

> Mozilla has just caved in to H.264

We don't always win our battles, unfortunately. Holding out against H.264 was doing no-one any good.

> they removed the feed button from their browser long before Google killed that feed reader

Come on, lack of a "feed button" != evil.

> and their new mobile OS comes with a paid "app store".

Supporting paid apps != evil.

Apps only available through a single app store controlled by the system vendor with obnoxious policies == evil. But FirefoxOS isn't like that at all.

We're already hurting their business and they haven't done that. Noticed how much money they're spending promoting Chrome? That would be easier if Mozilla was dead, wouldn't it?

Mozilla has plenty of clout.

Post-Opera Mozilla controls one of the three important Web engines. Any Web standard needs to be implemented by at least two engines to become a recommendation. That gives us a powerful say in what gets standardized.

We have enough Firefox users that things we do in Firefox have a real impact on the Web. For example, we introduced Do Not Track. We think Google's Native Client isn't good for the Web so we've introduced asm.js instead which is rapidly getting traction. Webkit's original CSS gradients sucked so we introduced a better alternative that is now standardized. We don't like encumbered codecs on the Web so we pushed the creation of the royalty-free Opus audio codec which is getting a lot of traction. Etc.

Having said that, we don't have infinite clout and we sometimes lose battles and have to make compromises. But then, so do our much bigger competitors.

Most importantly Mozilla is a nonprofit and promoting/protecting the open Web is a key part of our mission. We don't have shareholders or paying customers so we can pretty much do whatever we think is right as long as enough people keep using Firefox to ensure we have influence.