3: Get rid of the so called MotoBlur or make it an option.

Forget all the others, just do this! (I have an Atrix, so I have at least some experience with this)

Senator Hatch, is that you?

Nothing but undeveloped, unevolved, barely conscious pond scum, totally convinced of their own superiority, as they scurry about their short pointless lives.

Did anybody else hear this in Edgar's voice as they read it?

I'm a firm believer in blunt honesty and would rather someone thought of me as an ass-hole than as an ass-kisser... If you value my friendship, you'll get over any "hurt" that may cause.

That's a false dichotomy. You don't have to be either a full blown ass-hole or a full blown ass-kisser, you can be somewhere in between.

It's true that some people take offense when none was meant. I assume those are the people you don't want as friends.

There is a subtle difference between being mean-spirited and being blunt. Often, people will say things meant to hurt another and attempt to justify it by saying "I'm just being blunt".

Having the skill to know exactly how blunt you can be without being mean spirited is called "tact".

As always, a balance has to be made between public good and the freedom to act under your own conscience. In the case of backyard nukes, it is obvious that the potential public danger is high. With the case of vaccination, however, because of herd immunity, the potential public danger is not as high (though not non-existent).

Where do you draw the line? To use an exaggerated claim (though on the opposite end of the spectrum from yours), consider this: Falls are a significant source of injury, especially to the very young and very old. Would you have the government regulate shoe tread in an effort to reduce the number of injuries?

So, this isn't a choice that parents make that subject only their own children to risk, but it affects everybody. That makes it everybody's business, and hence in the realm of government regulation.

The same essential argument was used by the supreme court in Wickard V. Filburn. Unfortunately, IMHO, it is a line of reasoning that can be too easily abused to enforce by law certain viewpoints over others.

With credit cards, though, the cost of fraud is passed on to the merchant (apparently in an attempt to motivate them to improve their CC acceptance policies and procedures).

The actual cost is passed on to other customers of the defrauded merchants, NOT (as is commonly believed) to the pool of borrowers.

That's being pedantic. Whenever I hear HTML5, I don't think of just a document marked up with the 5th major revision of HTML, I think of a DOM (defined using the 5th revision of HTML) and enriched by functionality provided by one or more turing complete languages (usually javascript), and with presentation dictated by style rules (defined using CSS).

Does HTML5 mean to include CSS and javascript? Strictly speaking, no. But in practical usage, yes.

And what's with the firmware updates that are needed for some disks to work!? My 8 year old DVD player has never needed a firmware update and it plays all of the DVDs I own but I've already run into a couple disks that refused to work without a bluray player firmware update.

Most of those firmware updates just add extra keys to your bluray player. Newer disks often have newer keys that hadn't been generated when your player was manufactured, so you have to download the update to play the content.

DVDs don't have the concept of newer keys so you never need to update it.

"I'm gonna write myself a new minivan this afternoon!"

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/

Also:

http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/The-Defect-Black-Market.aspx

Wouldn't that be ARMbidextrous?

Congratulations. You've invented the laser guided missile launcher.

Technically, it's a ballistic missile since it doesn't carry it's own fuel. A laser guided ballistic missile launcher. Sounds cool!

I want backwards compatiblity as much as you, but the unfortunate reality of computing is that you can't quickly translate code that was custom-written for 1 architecture into another architecture. Console game developers do an awful lot of fine-tuning to achieve the performance you see, and much of it relies on the specific design of the chip being used in the previous system.

To whit, even emulating the N64 (16 years old) takes a reasonably beefy modern machine!

Simply put, the easiest way to emulate the previous generation is to include its hardware in the new generation.

Even when you use these technologies you are still writing a standard web app and it still runs on all browsers - just without the Chrome optimizations. For NaCl for example, the primary use case (according to Google) is that you take your bundle of HTML/CSS/Javascript and replace pieces of the javascript with native code. When deployed to other browsers your app uses the original javascript instead of the optimized NaCl alternative.

So I have to write my stuff twice? I barely have enough time to write what's needed once!

No thanks, I'd rather continue to write once and run everywhere-- That's what javascript + existing cross platform libraries provide.

I'll start using these, though, If any of these solutions (thanks to their open specifications) get picked up by a majority of browsers.

Groupon should care about the merchant because a happy merchant will work with Groupon again; An unhappy merchant will not.