Read the blog post. Needless to say, this is astounding.

This is exactly right. This simply reflects an increase in investment in OSD, an investment executives assume will pay off down the road. And even looking at Bing over the last year, they've made some pretty major improvements.

IE9 has hardware rendering as well, and it really makes a massive difference.

Not even close. Acid 3 tests various behaviors across nearly 20 different standards, most of which are hundreds of pages long.

Interestingly, this is still supported by Microsoft. Presumably there are a few customers out there with IE5 on Win2000 machines yet.

To answer your first question, no, I have yet to see any browser that is 100% compliant.

IE9: 32. Unfortunately that number is from 2 months ago after only short development. At any rate, significant progress is being made.

I use IE9 5 days a week, I promise you it's not the new IE6.

I think what info we've released publicly with IE9 is promising. New and vastly improved javascript engine, hardware accelerated rendering, lots of new standards support (and we're highly active in ECMAScript v5 and joined the SVG working group). Oh, and did I mention, we now do rounded borders?!

I've found that bing is useful in specific circumstances. For example, try searching for a restaurant in Bing. I find the interface much better, and the conglomeration of reviews to be far more helpful and interesting. This goes for most product searches as well. Bing maps also has a cool feature where you can get directions based on current traffic conditions. Handy for when you want to get someplace when the city is gridlocked in rush hour.

Searching for programming related questions, though, it's next to worthless for some reason.

If that's how you want to define emulator, then you might as well call glibc a C emulator.

Actually, Mono is completely different from Wine, and not even Wine is an emulator. It's a native implementation of the CLR and other .NET tools that run on Linux/BSD/etc. If you want to compare it to something, compare it to the JDK.

And get rid of Do? I don't think so. You can pry Do and docky from my cold, dead hands!

This is a distributed effort, and any one host will not hit your machine more than once. You could configure it to block entire country's subnets, but that's still only marginal protection.

What you want to do is disable username/password authentication on your ssh hosts. This is one of the first things I do. Set up your machine's public and private key, copy your public key to all your other machine's authorized_keys file, and edit your sshd config and add the line "PasswordAuthentication no". Now, broken crypto libraries aside, you will be safe from this sort of attack.

Why? Because the web is about much more than sending words and bytes back and forth. It's about communication, of which there are many forms. Wanting to use a certain font to convey a certain message is valid. And of course you will always have the choice of whether or not you want to display those fonts, just like you can choose to disable javascript, images, and css if you really want to. And the choice of whether or not you want to visit sites that wish to exercise greater creative control over their medium will always be yours as well.

I don't understand the objects to this all over Slashdot. Do you really want to be staring at Verdana, Arial, and Times New Roman for the next 100 years?

I think we can all agree that not providing features for creative control of a medium because some people might make a pile of feces out of it is a terrible idea.