Dude, Firefox has worked as well as it always has. Just because its not your cup of tea doesn't make it crappy. One could say the same about IE if you really liked the product differentiation(I'd never, but I can understand the argument) then who am I to say differently.

Should we all go out and use Unity, Gnome3, Windows8 just because its new and shiny? No. We use what works for us, and if you don't like it then at least keep the smug to yourself.

Just look at the new G-talk to Hangouts conversion. Big shot in the face there. I've talked to insiders and even they're irrate over the changes.. you know its bad when...

Gold surely has an innate value, but it isn't nearly as high as it's current asset value which relies on people valuing its ability to 'hold' wealth, like land, jadda jadda... any other asset.

But certainly, people wear gold, and electronics and various other industries use gold for its amazing maliability and conductivity.

I know diff's occasionally get metal filings inside, and I can't tell the true harm, but I imagine early wear is a likely result.

I've been driving my Subaru going on 10 years and by sticking roughly to their replacement schedule I've never had anything outside of free recalls deal with. I could be lucky, or it could be a matter of keeping the car in good shape. Who's to tell.

If you don't want to upgrade every 2-3 years you could always:

  - You're a small shop with no money and the equipment is doing business critical work: Carry a spare and possibly arrange in redundant configurations
  - You're a small shop with no money and the equipment is doing nothing critical: Possibly carry a spare
  - You're a large shop with 'too much' money and the equipment is doing business critical work: Carry spare(s) and arrange in redundant configurations
  - You're a large shop with 'too much' money and the equipment is nothing critical: Carry spare

Never buy equipment that can't be vendor/product line swapped unless you're seriously in bed with the vendor and have an iron clad support contract. Best to mix up equipment from time to time just to make sure that your IT people CAN adapt to other vendors if the sh hits the fan.

Well devil's advocate here, the URI string wouldn't be sent over the air unencrypted, so one could consider that more secure assuming you forget the fact that 99% of received email is also sent over the wire un-encrypted.

Maybe there is a common conception that Skype is a secure connection and one wouldn't have to worry about sending such a damning web link. If anything though, this article lays out quite clearly, that there are at least automated taps on Microsoft's end scanning all input messages.

True enough, but I'd say they have no grounds for safe harbour in this case, so wouldn't that leave them open as being a copyright infringement provider?

Well, without looking into the matter, it sounds like a TOS issue here. Its either against the terms of service or not.

Imagine getting your apple account pulled.
Imagine getting your google Account pulled (with Android)
Imagine getting your dropbox/amazon/netflix/slashrant/etc account pulled.

You have all the right in the world to not trust companies, and by and large, you have -some- justification in it. Don't buy them. There's plent of other people who will take your place, and you can be happy in the fact that there's no way that you'll ever loose your data except through your own personal neglect.

Sometimes, its the abuse that makes life worth living!

You're right. Cars do suck, and if you're looking for exponential consumer adoption over the long term you're going to cry. For the price of a moderate car (no gas/insurance), I could get a transit pass for 6.5 years, or a few bikes and a very nice supplement into my retirement savings. Unfortunately for your silly comparison, in most places, cars are essential to one's livelihood, and basically all personally owned computers aren't.

For most people (subsidized), phones are cheap and do a large amount of what tablets do. Low end laptops are very competitive for tablets in terms of cost, so tablets will a niche that some want and some don't. I bought a tablet as a toy for 259, and it was nice for what it does, but it isn't something I need, and I most likely won't bother replacing when it dies. That's not an if, its a fact. I have an e-reader which is the best book reading experience (on the go especially), a PC because I like to game and browse the web, a smart phone because I like to answer phone calls as well as browsing the web while on the can.

Bit torrent is a good data -distribution- tool, not a data -mover-, and it would be lousy to play that role. There are at least a dozen possible open solutions for moving data from point to point, but I have no idea why you'd use a protocol/tool stack that are designed for broadcast/graph distribution to do so.

An off the top list:
      1. NFS
      2. SMB
      3. FTP
      4. SFTP/SCP/rsync
      5. HTTP/HTTPS
      6. sz/rz
      7. iscsi
      8. DFS
      9. AFS
      10. UFTP/XFTP

The question should really be what exactly do you see ad being deficient about all these protocols that deems it necessary to re-invent the wheel yet again?

So big media sits in a vacuum in the web for your argument to hold water? Sounds pretty flimsy.

Put another way, if media companies didn't care about controlling media in any sort of effective way, why not remove all artificial limitations on skipping and have unlimited region support for the media in question? By your argument, these mechanisms cause zero benefit for them, and substantially reduce the enjoyment of their viewing public.

When we have the panacea of web DRM, will that mean I'll have first day access to new shows anywhere in the world? Will I be able to fast-forward, pause, rewind, skip, bookmark, comment on, etc.. these videos? Will I be able to legally transfer my right to watch purchased videos to a peer? Legally take excerpts from the video for humour / reviewing / commenting / archival purposes?

Put more pointedly, why would I support a framework that grants no new rights, and restricts ones I still currently have away? People bought into steam because they 'did it right', and the platform offers value. People bought into Google to browse and share data, because generally Google adds value to your browsing experience. You think Bing or Google's numerous past competitors couldn't catch up to Google eventually? Sure. But Google continually uses the data that YOU give it to make the service a better one.

Media corps on the other hand continually ask for more and give less, so I (and many others it seems) have decided to stop supporting their business model.

Much unlike MPEG, there are no trade requirements that requires these specifications to be followed. They throw them up, and the organization lives and dies by adoption, not because we have to. If W3C wants to release yet another specification that members or the general public decide not to adopt, nobody gets sued, and the specification most likely stick into the vestigial category of web crap thrown in that seemed like a good idea at the time, like VRML or the likes.

Now as stated, W3C is essentially as relevant as the works they publish. If they abandon the wishes of their general community, why would people consider them a good source evolving web standards if they push the platform into areas that nobody cares about? Is a DRM 'specification' relevant because half the browsers support it? Doubtfully.

Who the hell cares if DRM is solved or not. We can't even agree for a set of video codecs to use on it, and that just puts us back to where we are today with plugin platforms that sit on top of the basic web specs, which IMHO isn't a bad thing.

And when it invariably takes them 4 hours to implement the feature and their sales 'win' ends up costing them more than the value of the contract, natural selection works its way though and they can instead estimate how long it'll take to find a new job.