This is just wrong. By now, each browser has copied a lot of features from the others, but all of the major browsers had a "killer feature" that caused a lot of people to switch and allowed it to gain traction.

Firefox: very lightweight, excellent extension support
Opera: rendering speed, some advanced features
Chrome: stability (separate process for each tab, plugin), JavaScript speed
IE, Safari: come preinstalled with the OS, well integrated

Note that none of this is unique to the particular browser anymore, and some of those don't even apply anymore.

This is consistent with what TFA says:

There's more to an ad than its bare essence. Probably their most famous campaign presents Mac as "the cool guy" as opposed to PC. Most of the ads focus on features, but the message is still there. Even in the ads that focus on people using Apple products in various way, it's always cool people using them.

Now, I agree that Apple has a lot of high quality products, but there are other companies that sell high quality, well-designed products, and Apple is clearly trying to get an edge over them by "selling a lifestyle". There's nothing wrong with this, most companies that sell high quality products are trying to do that (with various levels of success) -- fashion ads are another good example (wearing Victoria's Secret lingerie doesn't make you a supermodel, but they'd like you to believe so anyway).

I need to friend you on faceb00c::

It's not even a public place, it's their private place. I don't see any problem with them tracking their customers, as long as they're on their property. If you don't like it (I don't), just don't shop (or don't park your car) there.

You mean, like, in decimal notation?

Also by the same guy: "Nine Current Flame Wars in Open Source", "FOSS, Business, and Psychopathy" and "Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?" (which IIRC was recently featured on Slashdot and described as bullshit as pretty much everyone who bothered to RTFA).

No thanks, I think I'll wait for an actual review.

Mod this up! Passive eavesdroping is MUCH easier and much more common than active MITM attack (see Firesheep etc.). Nobody's saying that MITM is impossible, but I'd go so far as to say that the difference between plain HTTP and self-signed HTTPS is greater and more important than the difference between self-signed and CA verified HTTPS (and all the fake certificate scandals only confirm this).

My computer does that, it calls them "windows". I hear there's even an operating system named after them!

Actually, it was pretty well explored in the latest of Whedon's comic books.

That actually happens, which is why Google actively prevents spreading of the verb "to google".

What makes you think the retail stores have any advantage over digital stores? Nothing stops game developers from following the same model -- as far as I'm concerned, developers of the Humble Bundle games did just that -- all of the games were sold for several months for their full prices before they went "on sale" in the Humble Bundle.

The "pay as you want" could just be considered some kind of a "last tier" in the tiered system you described -- instead of selling products for some minimal price like $1, you can let people pay what they want, which probably gets you more money anyway.

If you access your home router administration interface from work, the attacker will be able to sniff the communication (including the password), even if you access the administration interface via SSL.

The attacker will not be able to sniff the communication between you and your bank (or any other SSL website) -- the SSL private key stored in your router (and now published) does not play any part in this.

A hexadecimal dollar is 100 hexadecimal = 256 decimal cents. There's a semantic difference in "1 (hexadecimal dollar)" (Knuth's version) vs "(1 hexadecimal) dollar" (your version).

See Donald Knuth's FAQ.

Also, it's a joke, so there's probably no point in arguing technicalities.