So is a web browser, which is exactly my point.

That's why I don't want every random site creating its own app. When I said those words, it was in the context of a general-purpose mobile app, not a niche app for a single small website.

Web browsers on mobile devices don't provide facilities for downsampling the images, though, which makes standalone apps rather useful for sites that rely on photo uploading over slow cellular connections.

I think it starts with the idea that one knows best usually combined with a ridiculously oversimplified model of how things work.

Why would I be predicting that? To claim that die-offs are necessary for prosperity is in my view a non sequitur, another sort of fallacy.

Correlation doesn't imply causation. And really, die offs are associated in Chinese history with chaotic periods which don't have prosperity.

That's a lot of vague talk. What are "many people"? What are "screw ups"? And what is "better" versus "lot worse"?

There we go. With a "short time" being anywhere from a short time to a very long time.

For the OECD, it's 35% (from countries like Mexico and Estonia) to 70% of the US's spending per GDP (France and Netherlands). It's considerably better than the absolute worst, but it's still a big and growing problem.

Or you can have both or neither. There are four states after all, depending on which bits you set. Note here that by definition, democratic republics decide a number of things by collective agreement.

And I'm sure there's some dumbshit in your country that I'd rather have running things.

My view is that the US has better things to do with itself than to heavily subsidize Chinese solar power manufacturers.

It could be a bit better I suppose. But really, what is stable about the current public spending schemes? There isn't a stable public pension fund out there in the developed world, for example. Medical care takes an increasing portion of the developed world's economies. Businesses become more and more risk clueless due to (often highly profitable) government nannying.

We all have mental reaction times measured in microseconds. As I understand it, the current expectation is that you can react to an accident in about half a second, which is only a half million microseconds. That's quite ample for vehicle control as we demonstrate every day.

And why wouldn't we continue to insure humans? It's far riskier now to insure people, what changes to make insurance not viable?

Sure there is. That's exactly what RSS [wikipedia.org] was made to do. Not only can you visit a site, get a feed, and add it yourself, but there are also applications that curate and categorize popular RSS feeds so that you can search for and add them without having to visit the websites first.

The problem is that RSS is one-directional. If I want to post, I still have to go back to a browser window and use whatever random, horrible, non-mobile-friendly interface the site designers came up with. And posting is usually the part where a native app would be beneficial; the reading part is easy by comparison....

And despite what you say, the facebook app is pretty much standard on every user's smart phone, and the app only shows content from facebook ...

... and is used exclusively by people who have accounts on the site. That's a completely different usage model than just going to a website and browsing it, which is to say that you didn't really contradict my main point with that example.

Facebook is also a bit of an exception because of the sheer amount of time that many people spend on it, the potential benefits of tighter integration with the operating system (background notifications), etc.

But for every exception, there are a thousand non-exceptions. Even though I have the FB app installed, I wouldn't really consider installing a Slashdot app; the way I interact with the site is completely different, with my FB interaction being a lot more active, and involving a lot more photo uploads and other such activities that web browsers do pretty badly in the mobile world.

During your rant, I couldn't help but think, 'But they DO have a standardized app for accessing all the websites', and it's called the browser!

The problem is, mobile devices don't handle web forums very well. Web designers don't design their themes with mobile devices in mind, resulting in text that's too small to read, text entry fields that are too wide for the screen, etc. That's not true for every site, but it is pretty common.

An actual native app, by contrast, is likely to be designed by people who actually understand the platform and its limitations, its screen size, etc. So potentially, if done properly, it can produce a much better user experience than a browser is likely to produce (though a browser could produce a similarly good experience if all the web designers took the time to design their sites properly for mobile devices... and I want a pony...).

Not really. My TV takes uncompressed data. Once an encoder is available, the only things that matter these days are whether the following things support the codec:

• Chrome
• Safari
• Firefox
• iOS
• Android
• YouTube
• to a lesser extent, OS X, Windows, and Internet Explorer

If you cover those, all other clients of the codecs are lost in the noise, so it is probably safe to use it on your own site for your own content.

It doesn't really matter at all whether the codec used to encode the content for delivery is the same as the codec used to encode it during production. In fact, I would seriously hope that 100% of video production is being done with a higher quality codec than the low-bitrate crap that is being used to deliver content over the 'net. Therefore, whether Mitsubishi et al choose to support a codec or not is mostly irrelevant.

In practice, only three companies actually need to work together to make such a patent-free codec happen: Apple, Microsoft, and Google. Firefox would quickly adopt any patent-free codec that those three got behind. That makes the entire rest of the industry pretty much completely irrelevant. Those three companies could mandate a transition to a new, patent-free codec, and the entire world would practically trip over themselves to make it happen.

So no, those industrial giants aren't really a problem. In fact, they aren't even relevant in the grand scheme of codecs except to the extent that the big three graciously allow them to be.