What is this, FUD about FUD? I've never heard of Microsoft actively discouraging Firefox use in the last few years. Sure, they recommend their own browser, over it, but that's hardly surprising.

I don't think that you understand the benefits of that regulation.

If people could buy insurance policies across state lines, states would have no ability to force insurance providers to conform to certain standards of service. Instead of each state being able to mandate certain minimum standards, insurance companies could locate only in the state which has the lowest bar and the most loopholes in regulations. Much like how all patent lawsuits are filed in Texas, there could be a 'race to the bottom' between states, with each trying to give companies the most incentives to locate in the states and benefit from the tax revenue.

This is beneficial to just the one state, and hurts all other states which then 1) do not benefit from tax revenue and 2) screws over everyone by offering subpar care.

Basically, instead of having an issue in the one city, it spreads to the whole nation.

Welcome to a world of corporations willing to let customers go bankrupt and suffer through illness to increase their profit margins.

In space.

Pandora. I pay for it. Media as a service works as long as the media is actually a service, not a more obnoxious way to get something that you could store locally anyway. The whole point of SaaS is to provide added benefit at the expense of requiring an internet connection. It's why WoW works, and why Steam works, but why Ubi's DRM doesn't. With WoW, you get other players by connecting to the server. With Steam, you can host your games in the cloud. With Pandora, you can take advantage of their algorithms. With DRM, you just have to connect to the internet without any additional benefit.

Except, I'm sure, in airports.

I really don't think it makes sense to say that Bing is better than Google. It seems to be a decent engine, but they haven't published their algorithms and thus we really have no idea what's going on behind the scenes. Google, on the other hand, has refined PageRank for a while and I can say with certainty that the math behind it is pretty clever and makes a lot of both intuitive and mathematical sense. Also, Google didn't buy off everyone and his brother for 10% market share. Honestly, if Apple seriously goes down this path it would probably be the worst choice they've made about the iPhone since slaving it to AT&T's botched network, but it might just be like letting the music labels get variable pricing for songs on iTunes. We got DRM removed and some cheaper songs, Apple looked good for ditiching DRM, and -surprise surprise- no one bought the 1.29 songs. Could be an easy way to get the phone further subsidized, and then have 99.9% of the userbase go through an extra step during setup to reconfigure the search engine when they buy their new, cheaper phone.