Which is hilarious, since Firefox is now implementing acceleration through DirectX/Write stuff on windows. So, its ok to depend on OS services, except when its not.

They still have the fundamental similarity in that they are easily duplicated but require a lot of up front funding/resource to be sunk into their construction. Software requires either a lot of time and/or money to produce the first build. Music/movies require a lot of up front funding to produce the master copy. The investment has to be recouped somehow. Sure, in the case of small free software projects the authors have no desire to recoup the investment, but I'm sure they would be a little more interested in doing so if they had donated several million dollars worth of their time to something.

And how precisely does that work when svchost works by loading other .dll's and executing them?

I used to get the 6ish hours of battery use by carrying around a travel battery. I got a new Macbook. Now, I get the same battery life without an extra battery and I'm sure that I was a minority use case even carrying one spare battery around. I can't imagine many people carry 2 or more spare batteries around.

No it can't be forked. If you fork it, you've modified the standard making a new codec.

Consider the flipside, designing a codec is Really Hard Work. Google also has Really Deep Pockets. By doing this they have effectively dumped a codec that is good enough onto the market. While part of me is cheering that Google is taking one of the team in terms of opening their codec up they have basically ensured that only someone else with equally deep pockets has the time and money to engineer something so clearly better that they can recoup the time investment by surpassing VP8.

Legitimate points. However, I'm more inclined to put the blame on Flash, since Silverlight somehow doesn't seem to have any of these problems on Mac.

I don't think its nearly as simple as you claim. Having read this piece. It made me re-evaluate the point of it. To basically sum up, yes, this locks developers on the iPhone OS. On the other hand, these meta-platforms hurt Apple's ability to improve their devices. It makes them depend on a 3rd party runtime too to actually provide support for the new features. As we've all see with flash, Adobe has no desire to provide runtimes on time that actually work. So yeah, its platform lock-in. But it's also more than that. Apple hates being beholden to anyone else and this move could be seen as ensuring their independence.

There is a similar method currently in effect. It is possible to convene a caucas of state representatives in order to ammend the consitution. I believe the bar is set at 3/4ths but if enough states felt strongly enough they could ammend the constitution in such a way to guarantee that the law would be declared unconstituional.

I would think even better than unique IP addresses would be something like requests for an update to a component guaranteed to be installed in the base system like say grub or the kernel. That way, if you have 3 computers behind a NAT you will, hypothetically, eventually get 3 counts.

Its playing catch-up to google in some areas, but some of the new interface tweaks in google as of late are highly reminiscent of Bing at launch. Bing still has some cool features like searching for plane tickets. I did it once just to see and clicking on links will take you directly to the carriers sign up page with the relevant flight information filled in. Plus, it gives you trends on the ticket prices. While Bing still needs to catch up on the general goodness of its results, to think Bing hasn't done anything clever or innovative at all is just silly.

You've never seen the political spectrum represented as a circle before?

I'm pretty sure that is a myth for complicated stuff. Otherwise the ATI drivers that are open source wouldn't be crap and Intel's drivers would break every other version.

Uh? You entered government property. Just as you have the right to subject anyone entering your own house to whatever probing you desire before admittance so too does the government before you enter its property. You were not in public; you were in a government owned building. The government cannot randomly search you out on the street because it feels like it.

Google for Cornhusker kickback for 1 reason why it is extremely controversial. The short story is that the rest of the country is now subsidizing healthcare in Nebraska.