I'm neither a scientist or engineer, but I find these dicussions fascinating (and somewhat technically intimidating), however, if there are other forms of life traversing the universe, exactly, HOW are they getting around?

Really? How do you explain the massive explosion of smartphones that stream video? I'd bet lots of people sacrifice nutrition (maybe even rent payments) so they can make their cell phone payment.

They should really look at forcing extension developers to optimize their code simply because poorly written extensions trump all the latest and greatest speed improvements that they're coming out with.

So I'm curious. What's the projected subscriber growth over the next five years? Is it enough to justify the development cost and investment? Or was the cost primarily aimed at NOT getting hacked?

So here's an idea. Is it too far-fetched to provide the major sections of the NYT (or any major newspaper) on an a la carte basis? For example, I only read the business and sports section and could give a crap about the rest of the newspaper, but as it is, I'm paying for something I'm never going to read.

There's a easy fix for this app (and all similar apps): Make the user *earn* the right to use the app by forcing them to prove they're not legally impaired. If they can't find Waldo, or some other such test, then they'll have to pull over or take their chances and hope they don't find the checkpoints.

There's no question that the performance has increased and pages are rendered much quicker, but it does come at a cost. Memory consumption and memory leaks are STILL a problem. Having said that, Chrome's memory usage isn't much better, and neither is IEs.

What the hell is rock-paper-scissors? Seriously. Enlighten me.

Yes, like many here, I too used to troubleshoot/repair friends/relatives computers and it got very old till I decided one day to tell the non-paying customer, "I'll troubleshoot for 15 minutes, and if I can't get it to a previously known good state, I'm going to wipe the hard drive and reload the OS, and ONLY the OS. Do you want me to continue?" Usually the answer was no. I'd recommend they take it to a computer repair shop.

It's seems the police need the consent of the citizens when using their dashboard cams as well. How do these reconcile?

I use Firefox, Chrome and IE daily, I still can't see what all the hoopla is around Chrome. Yeah, it's a nice browser, but until they support all the extensions that Firefox does, it won't be my go-to browser any time soon. On the other hand, even the latest Firefox beta is still consuming way too much memory for my taste, and now with multiple Firefox plugin containers running (why?), it's somewhat of a sore spot.

As a former employee of DEC ('79-'95), I can tell you it was a great company to work for. DEC's overall management philosophy was and is still the standard I measure other managers to, and sadly, most can't even compare. Did Ken Olsen make mistakes? Sure he did. He didn't put a lot value in marketing his products, and it cost him dearly. And DEC *was* building PCs before they were in vogue. But again, they weren't marketed (and really weren't aimed at home users), but the Robin, DECmate, Pro350 were all PCs built before their time. RIP Ken.

Way back in the day (80s and 90s) there was a markup language called SDML (structured document markup language) and was used by large corporations for writing and publishing technical documentation for their enterprise products. Extremely powerful, but like LaTex, had a large learning curve. When the WYSIWYG editors hit the streets, we realized we had nowhere near the control or flexibility of the markup language. I'd like to have that option today to produce white papers and such, but it's not cost-effective any longer.

How many more times are we going to beat this dead horse?

There are FAR more artists making little to no revenue from their artistic endeavors than your realize. Part of being an artist is the pleasure from creating the art in the first place, be it writing, painting, composing, et al.