This would be awesome for the first person to use it. They'd have a pretty sweet advantage in finding a spot.

Once everyone has it, it will doubtfully make a difference.

Even if it isn't a competitor now, it could certainly become one. "Built into the OS" isn't so much a good thing, although having access to everything it needs, is. If this service can do the hard part, it isn't that big a deal for Android to add API's to allow apps like this to work as seamlessly as Siri.

I don't agree with the OP, but I also don't agree with calling affirmative action "racist." Racism isn't just treating different races differently, a typical definition (wikipedia) is "the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination".

Affirmative action is the opposite, it is based on the idea (flawed or not) that 1) groups should be treated the same, 2) the current situation is that they are not, and 3) the most effective way to move things toward equal treatment is to compensate by giving extra advantages to those who are otherwise disadvantaged due to racism.

Whether or not you agree with this, it is not racist. But it does indeed distort the free market, which often is a bad thing.

You are assuming the supply of each movie is fixed. They can change the supply by modifying the number of theaters each is shown in. Movies that are unpopular play for shorter periods.

I think it would be smart if theaters did variable pricing, but it wouldn't necessarily mean Mission Impossible would be more expensive (since it would probably play longer). But in the most efficient world, there would be lower prices in play to lessen the number of empty seats, which could be considered waste.

That's absolutely untrue. For it to be a commodity, the consumer should not care which item they buy, they should only care about price. Are you going to see Young Adult simply because it is 50 cents cheaper than Mission Impossible? Probably not. Hence, not commodity.

Probably because dec 31, 2011 is in lots of legal contracts. If you eliminate that date, you have a lot more chances for people to try to weasel their way out of contracts, and more work for courts.

For how many thousands of years have there been greater than one billion people on the planet?

About 0.2 thousand, actually.

Your employer also has the right to give all the raise or bonus money to the guy who is more willing to comply. I'm not saying it is right, but it is reality.

Actually that's a really smart thing to do from a bandwidth point of view. There are all kinds of reasons not to do that (some of those are gradually disappearing, since now Google's crawler is starting to run some javascript to build the page as the user will see it), but if you are concerned about bandwidth, having javascript build your page for you is a very good way to do it.

Yeah but you are missing the point. The important thing is, the more donations come in to a particular cause, the more money they should be spending on that particular cause. If they have any credit (which obviously, the Red Cross does), they can do this before the "cash" is technically available.

I don't see how you can say that. There are lots of things that could happen. The nice thing about WebOS is that its API is pretty standard Javascript/HTML5 stuff, so people don't have to invest so much in developing for it, as much of their work can apply elsewhere. Also, if it can be easily loaded on hardware sold with Android, it's pretty nice to have a platform that is more open than Android, and arguably, built in a more modern and future-compatible way.

People might even modify it to work on windows-oriented hardware, such as tablets or even laptops. Who knows. We need something like this.

Are you sure about this? I understand that IE9 is not available for XP NOW, but certainly they could make it work on XP if they wanted to. Maybe certain things would be turned off, or maybe their would be code added to the OS to support those features, or something. But I can't see it being impossible to support the most important things in IE9 on XP. The important thing is to support the features that cause web sites to break, anyway.

Microsoft probably knows that would be a waste of money. The people who are likely to put a non-IE browser on their PC's are pretty likely to know how to, and be inclined to, switch the default search engine.

I think the implication is, the more the two trash-talk one another, the sooner Google stops writing the checks.

Far as I know, QT is not portable to browser. And I don't know anyone who recommends doing web apps in C++. And it's not generally appropriate for Android. C++ (minus the qt part) might be ok on iPhone for libraries that don't call directly into the Cocoa API.

So I'm having trouble seeing how it is so vastly portable to some of the platforms that are most relevant.