Google had some of its IP stolen too. It's hard to do business in a country where the government has no qualms about stealing your stuff and hurting your customers.

Not to be a party pooper, but you are faulting China for doing something congress tries hard at every opportunity it can to do as well: force government procurement to buy American first. And lets not get started on agricultural subsidies.

The Buy American Act

Sections 10 (a-d) of Title 41 of the United States Code are known as the Buy American Act (BAA). U.S. government exceptions under NAFTA Chapter 10 and the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement allow for such procurement preferences.

The Buy American Act applies to all U.S. federal government agency purchases of goods valued over the micropurchase threshold, but does not apply to services. Under the Act, all goods for public use (articles, materials, or supplies) must be produced in the U.S., and manufactured items must be manufactured in the U.S. from U.S. materials. Many states and municipalities include similar geographic production requirements in their procurements.

Damnit, apparently the earth is running OSX and somebody has tried to "undo" the last ten years; this has resulted in the spinning beach ball of death.

It should also be pointed out that Microsoft bundled its own store entry point as part of Vista called Windows Marketplace, where downloadable software for purchase is available. Actually as I check my "Windows Marketplace" link in the Windows (to make sure I have the names right) Control Panel, I see that the store has possibly not been successful as I am now greeted with: "Windows marketplace has transitioned from an e-commerce site to a reference site". I wonder what happens to the digital locker on my PC if I upgrade to Windows 7.

Firefox has crashed a bit more lately, but I suspect it might be flash that is to blame, not Firefox. I use Firefox on Linux, Windows and the Mac. The extensions I use and the ability to maintain bookmarks and preferences across computers are simply so awesome that I can put up with the occasional crash.

The GPL is in fact quite useful to people interested in charging for the commercial/proprietary use of their work. If that is less accomodating to people wanting a free ride, that's their problem.

It may be popular. But in my limited sample of the world, on my server, there is a lot of frustration with the way the game is currently being developed. Many of the long standing players I know quite frankly are already bored just months after the last expansion. Bored because in five years, Blizzard hasn't changed the formula of the game on bit. Bored and frustrated with the way Blizzard is managing changes to character classes.

Ultima Online, back in 1997, had more variety for game content and far less resources.

In addition, Blizzard appears to be getting quite a bit more touchy dealing with community feedback. Mass deletions of forum posts that are complaining about an issue might look good for forum maintenance, but it doesn't actually stop the bitching.

Maybe it's arrogance from their successes.. who knows. What I do know is that it's currently debatable whether many of the people I know will still be around when the Lich King content is introduced. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised to see a collapse in their subscribed base over the next year for Warcraft.

The problem is that this is going to change my paren't computer to use IE after they've been using Firefox for years. This is yet another in a long list of Microsoft annoyances.

At this rate I'm going to have to write a script that forces the browser to be Firefox at every reboot.