Agree. Glad to see someone of Stallman's stature say what I'm thinking. I'm more of a pessimist, though. I'm not sure Jobs' malign influence will now be gone.

The fallback is to use Google servers. Are there any guarantees Google can't track that data is some way? I don't know enough about how this works to have any idea what's technically feasible. If it is feasible, is this another one of those things where people will say, "Well, they're a private company. They can do anything they want"? Who's looked at this? What have they found?

That's a fairly minor wrinkle on the main one. Setting up browser control of OS may not be that big a deal on the tech supporter side. The tech supportee could be another story.

"A bad one makes it so hard that you just want to reach for a bash prompt."

So true in both the computerese and the English sense of the word "bash."

I want him to live forever. And prosper. I guess you can't have everything. /*goes off into corner for a quiet little moan*/

It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure it was in one of their reports on the FCC web site, buried in the interminable methodology section. I'll try to find the time to get the link.

Before participation: Time Warner/Roadrunner here in Southern California gave me less than a tenth of advertised speeds. Officially 7mbits down, 1mb up, the actual service was more like 400kbits. Up to 800kb, sometimes even over a whole megabite early in the morning. (Exciting!) After the initial burst, which hit over a megabit down fairly often, there were times when it slowed all the way to single digits in KB.

Under the Sam Knows program, the FCC lets the ISPs know which subscribers are part of the test. (Bit of a problem right there, I'd say.) A few days before we had the government router hooked up, no doubt when Time Warner got word of our new "status," our speeds suddenly shot up into the advertised range. I nearly swooned the first time I saw a download go by at over a megabyte. And, interestingly enough, they've stayed there. It wasn't just some random thing. We don't usually get 7mb, but 5-6mb is the norm now.

So the info that ISPs aren't delivering stated speeds even in the FCC study is interesting, given that they seem to be jimmying the results for all they're worth.

(Speed tests before the FCC program would show us getting multi-megabits that we never saw in real life. Two things there: burst-shaping, no doubt, and I've heard that ISPs have ways of recognizing speed test traffic and giving it bandwidth.)

All the search engines now generally available use tag-based methods. Among librarians -- who are the real professionals at information searches -- that's a method for quick superficial results.

Promoting deeper research and understanding is best done with subject-based methods. E.g. the way libraries are organized, Library of Congress cataloguing system, etc.

Problem is, AI is nowhere near good enough to do that yet. So you need to hire humans, lots of humans, to actually think about the information. Which is way too expensive.

Another tag-based search engine, even if it's Etzioni's own, is just one more look-alike in the crowd.

Unbunch your own knickers. Mozilla puts the stuff out there for comment. People comment. Many don't like it. That's the whole point of putting it out for comment early enough in the design process to be able to change things.

(Now all Mozilla needs to do is actually listen to the comments, and stop trying to imitate Chrome, Mac, or cellphone UIs. But, as another commenter said, so long as I can change the default, I'm not hopelessly hot and bothered.)

Actually, as the AC at 4:23 says, stupid trolling on news sites is a feature, not a bug. It increases page views and potentially clicks, which allows the news organization to charge more for ads. The "news" is just a loss leader in that model.

I'm *not* saying it's a good model. As far as I'm concerned, we should scrap the whole monetize-everything-in-sight idea and start over.