You're right, but it amounts to the same thing: "I don't care about privacy because I don't think a lack of privacy could negatively affect me." You should only be willing to give up privacy after considering the potential consequences.

"I don't have anything to hide" is an extremely common and misguided attitude towards privacy. I won't rehash the problems with it here, because it's been done millions of times. Read up on it a bit.

I wouldn't use a free netbook from Google because I'm a developer. I also play games, use Photoshop, and other things that are out of the scope of web apps. However, the primary audience of Chrome OS (people who just need to do word processing, spreadsheets, email, check the internet, etc.) would probably love it. They're already used to their computer being full of ads from the spyware they don't know how to avoid, so a free computer with (theoretically) nicer ads is probably infinitely preferable to a $300+ computer that still has ads for them.

It is definitely not as powerful as vi or emacs, but it is still plenty powerful, and is much easier to learn for someone who has only started appreciating the command line in the last 18 months.

I do plan to spend some time learning vi or emacs (or both), but for now, I haven't found anything with as great a combination of power and ease-of-use as TextMate.

Except for where speed is of the utmost importance (in which case you're limited to C/C++, and possibly just assembly language), anything you can do in one language, you can pretty much do in any language. The question is, how EASY is it to do it in a certain language.

There may be no web app you can create in Ruby that you can't also create in PHP, but that doesn't mean PHP is always equally suitable to the job at hand. You may find that Ruby allows you to complete certain projects much faster, saving you a LOT of money. And in those cases, that would be a big advantage for using it over PHP.

So wait, let me make sure I understand:

Your beef with Firefox 3 is that the single feature you don't like takes too much effort to turn off?
I suppose that could possibly be considered valid, if either of these two cases were true:

1. If the change didn't save, and you had to do it again every time you used Firefox.
2. If it was REALLY, REALLY hard to turn off; as in, you need a Master's Degree in Computer Science to be able to do it.

However, neither of these are the case.

1. The preference most certainly does save itself.
2. The first search on Google for "firefox turn off awesome bar" (no quotes) returned this site. Essentially, you type "about:config" in the address bar, find the "Browser.urlbar.maxRichResults" setting (they are in alphabetical order, and if that's still too many hoops, you can use the config search bar at the top), and change its value from 12 to 0. If that's too difficult for you to do (once), then I'm impressed you knew how to install Firefox in the first place.