People who want to use websites that require Facebook login. It is impossible to post on Answers.com or The Huffington Post without having a Facebook account that is "verified" (tied to the unique number of a phone capable of sending and receiving SMS messages). Spotify used to be the same way.

Copyright is similar in effect to an "exclusive supply contract". If the article you're interested is on a scriptwalled site, and no other article is authorized to carry the article, too bad.

Until you find that all the different web sites don't have the information you're looking for, or cite the same source that has the scriptwall, or have paywalls, or got taken down on a copyright infringement claim.

Good luck running, say, any browser-based video game without Flash or JavaScript, and good luck running non-browser-based video games that aren't made for your computer's operating system. Or do you claim that all browser-based video games are inherently not worth my time?

I agree, as does the featured article: "In addition, users who dislike the distraction of Flash-based advertising can install browser add-ons that just block Flash content, such as Flashblock for Firefox and Chrome." Flashblock for Firefox is the middle ground that I've been choosing for years. And before that became available, I had a practice of hosts-blocking any ad server that served SWF on a site. Slashdot was surprisingly one of the first sites I saw that showed an SWF ad for Splunk log analysis software, and whatever server was serving it was the first to get 0.0.0.0'd in my hosts file.

Yeah, the article quotes the VP of some web advertising consulting firm who whines that static ads have an unviably low CPM. Boo hoo.

Not all of them do. Contributors might have a decoder for use with their cameras but not a licensed encoder to encode footage to the correct bitrate, profile, etc. Besides, the thumbnailer on Wikimedia's servers (for resizing HD video down to SD and LD) still needs an encoder.

That'd be fine if it were a programmable DSP or a pixel shader doing most of the work. But I've read that a lot of MPEG ASICs have the entropy codes, pixel predictors, transforms, and other parts of an MPEG codec baked directly into the silicon. Some of them just take an MPEG bitstream as input and spit out pixels and audio samples as output.

Is it also royalty-free to obtain a lawfully made copy of the encoder software in the first place? Wikimedia is a U.S. company.

H.264 would require Wikimedia Foundation to utilize more of the resources (that is, money) donated to it.

Though the GIF battle ended, the war continues on the MPEG-LA front.

You must not have a lot of friends with land-line phones (which can't text) or flip phones (on whose numeric keypad texting is incredibly tedious).

The HTC Dream didn't exist when the original iPhone came out, and when Android came out, iPod and iPhone were still using DRM on music. What viable alternative was there when people first started to get locked into the iEcosystem?

One reason is battery life, as it'd have to be decoded on the CPU instead of on the dedicated MPEG ASIC. When you really need to make a call, you don't want to lose touch after having watched a bunch of videos earlier in the day. The other is Nokia's decision to assert its patents against the use of VP8.

Apple has been strongarming on its mobile platform since around 1998 when the MessagePad 2000 came out.

Does "purely philosophical" include the simple fact that nobody has yet donated an encoder license to Wikimedia Foundation?