It's just from breathing Google's hot air for too long. Don't worry, I've quit.

I guess you haven't tried to actually use a Google product from the inside. Fundamentally broken, obvious and repeatable bugs have gone unfixed for years, but as they tell us: "they're working on it." (cough[Shopping]cough)

If it's in a Google car, they'll claim it isn't evil, while being really underhanded (cough[IP rights]cough), but it won't work right (cough[Shopping]cough), and just as you you commit a significant amount of resources to it, they'll either discontinue it (cough[cough]cough) or sideline it. Or never, ever add the features that would make it something actually reasonable (cough[Gmail]cough) Or simply blow out the decent features (cough[Maps]cough) Or never bother to bring it to a level of performance that is even moderately reasonable (cough[Google+]cough)

Unless it never becomes popular. In that case, it might hang around forever. But still under-performing / broken / evil, etc.

No, I'm not bitter. I love when a company wastes my time as if it's worth nothing. Finally I realized that trying to work with Google was making my time worth nothing. So in a way, they had the right idea from the start.

The only car analogy I can come up with is the insufficiently Humvees the government gave our soldiers to drive over IEDs in.

Not a tech dinosaur.

A tech prokaryote-like organism from the Archean.

Even a new instance of Firefox is laggy and slow on my 8-core, 3 GHz, OS X machine. Browsing Amazon has become an extreme exercise in patience.

Starting it fresh with about 6 GB of RAM free, Firefox continuously and greedily consumes memory until I have to quit it to make it give back the gigabytes it has swallowed like an overweight, crazed hot-dog eating contest professional.

One positive thing I will say about Firefox is that even with those major warts continuously unaddressed, it still performs better than Safari. And Firefox is*much* better at dealing with the whole "outdated flash" issue. It asks me instead of smacking me in the face with "you can't do that", so I'm inspired to raise digit #3 to Firefox far less often than I am with Safari.

Sigh.

I could really give the south end of a northbound rat for Netflix on a browser. I have a capable dedicated system which is much more pleasant to watch Netflix-y things on. But I sure do wish FF could just browse places like Amazon without killing off my resources. After all, it's a browser. It seems to me, naive and unduly optimistic fool that I am, that it should be able to do such things. Well.

When will application and OS vendors ever understand that it truly is their obligation to make what they release actually work properly before they slather on more features or proceed to a new version?

I know. Never. *Sigh*

I'd demand you FF enthusiasts to get off my virtual lawn now, but FireFox has grown so large and unwieldy, I can't even tell if you're out there any longer. Hello? Hello? Oh, hey, no RAM left. Again. [gets virtual shotgun out]

"Climate change" is a term that fell into vogue after focus group studies discovered that people would worry less about "climate change" than "global warming". Can we call you a "Global Warming Denialist" instead?

I really don't see how, in an age of universally available internet pron, anyone's going to get excited enough by a picture of some tits to care.

Perhaps some time studying the works of US legislators will be of use to you, then. According to them, it's quite obvious, and You Must Be Protected From This. Also, consider that the above cases are real people doing real things. Not actors in pixel-addled MPEGs. You can actually interact with them. Much more pleasantly, too.

Having said that, I think you might want to look a little closer at the last paragraph of my post. :)

My question: Is this trend a progression to the ultimate conclusion where the browser becomes the operating system and our physical hardware becomes little more than a web appliance?

No. And the "trend" referred to here is 99.999999% junkware. Slow junkware. Junkware that typically invades privacy and/or bombards with ads. You can't compete with my image editor. You can't compete with my word processor. You can't even compete with my text editor. You can't compete with my SDR software. You can't compete with my database. You can't compete with my media center. You can't compete with my fish tank controller. You can't guarantee that you, your ISP, my ISP, the connection(s) between them, the name servers, the competition for bandwidth at any one (or more points) will work to my satisfaction. Or at all. You can't even promise the app will BE there (cough, Google, cough) when I need it. Or that it will work properly in my chosen browser. And you're almost *certain* to screw it up so badly that it does all manner of things with rollovers, popping up garbage ads and menus without an instantiating click or drag or keypress from me.

And the other .000001% ??? Minimalist web-apps that never, ever hold a candle to a real app running on your own hardware.

Seriously, even the *speculation* is ridiculous.

This is how a corporation goes to heaven: First a hedge fund manager takes out a short term high interest loan from a bank through a shell corporation, then approaches the corporation's executive management and proposes [...insert references to stuff that sounds illegal but still boring as hell...] ... and since he's the first in line to get paid, he takes his management fees out and walks away with 10% of the initial loan value after the corporation has laid everyone off and entered the afterlife.

Were slaveowners ashamed of themselves for getting free labor? Probably not, but being "ashamed of yourself" isn't really a relevant question to pose to people who are proud of what they did.

From TFS:

...detect brain activity with EEG and translate it into what someone truly thinks about, say, a new product, advertising, or packaging.

Excellent. We'll be heading back into using sex to sell, then. I look
forward to the return of everything from short skirts on pretty airline
attendants, euro-style bare-top commercials, and of course booth
babes. And they'll probably FINALLY add a cheerleader channel to
the NFL stuff. :)

Bring it on.

Yesterday, I saw the most amazing "Joe Average" used to sell something.
Hardly worth my time, much less going to catch my interest.
But if there was a hot babe... I would have paid attention.
Totally.

Really? Are you that simpleminded?

All I can tell you is stay away from ice cream stands, and prep for the apocalypse.

You have completely mis-analyzed the cause here. Socialism isn't what killed those people. Psychotic lust for power, pathological levels of racism, and a massive dose of sociopathy is what killed them (and injured many others.) Same thing for atheism. Stalin was pro-atheist; but atheism was in no way the cause for any of his evil deeds. All atheism is, is a lack of belief in a god or gods. There is no collection of tenets, no canon, no holy book of advice. Those people who like to say "oh, but atheism caused all these deaths" are making the same mistake you are.

Too convoluted to understand? Try this:

When the ice cream vendor strangles the children who show up at his stand, you don't point the finger at Ben and Jerry's.

When people do crazy and evil things, you need to look at factors that actually dictate the behaviors you are seeing. Socialism doesn't dictate killing anyone. That's your first clue -- and it's a big one. It should be sufficient.

500% underrated.

Where have you been the past 6 years?

Paying close attention and actually understanding what is going on.

A law is gone, or "rid of", when it's *gone*. Not when its enforcement is variable, low, presently ignored, or deferred.

Be precise. When your argument or implication is faulty, informed responses will disrupt your points even if the idea behind them had some merit.

Obama's been very effective at using his presidential powers in a legitimate manner. And he's not been shy about it -- unlike most presidents, his actions are published right where you can get at them. This is worth a read.

Lots of hand waving on both sides. The facts are... other.