Maybe that was true a decade ago, but not today. There's two types of people who have good reason to care about their browser choice: 1) Professionals who do much of their work through the web, and 2) people who spend a significant amount of their time online. These days, it's not that uncommon anymore for people with quite an active life to still spend a significant amount of time online. Of course, that trend is changing as web services evolve, but I think there's still enough browser interaction by normal people that a browser is an important thing.

But it's the first group that I feel is most affected. Many professionals use their browser extensively for work, and with the rise of JavaScript based web apps, I don't think that trend is shrinking anytime soon. If you spend 9+ hours a day using a piece of software to make your living, how it works is vitally important to you.

I work for a web hosting company. Obviously, many departments here view a lot of websites. However, most of our browser time is actually interacting with our internal web applications, along with a lot of googling. Depending on the department, the work can be very fast paced and can require a lot of juggling issues. TreeStyle Tabs is one extension that is irreplaceable for us, and is probably the single largest reason why most of the people here feel like we cant leave Firefox. GreaseMonkey/Scriptish is another. Of course, each person has their own personal suite of tools which they rely on to get their work done, and many of those tools are Firefox addons.

I'm not implying that we couldn't work without Firefox. Many people already gave up on Firefox a while back, and with each change, more people leave. What I am saying is that browser choice can legitimately be a huge factor for many people. If the web just isn't really your thing, that's fine, but for many of us, it's a significant piece of what we do.

That depends on how you define "failure". If you exclude normal business cycle ups and downs, the Free Market has never failed, but we haven't seen it fully at work in our lifetime. As the US founders told us, once the people learn to "vote themselves a raise", they tend to destroy the framework that makes them free. Fortunately, the free market typically works to the extent it is implemented.

I'm also not certain what you mean by "kind" in the sense that an economic system can be. In economics, kindness to one person is unkindness to another. To give somebody something that nobody wants to give him requires that somebody is forced to give up something that otherwise would have belonged to him. Overall, in more capitalist societies, there's a much greater amount of resources and luxuries available to the poor than in communist societies. For instance, I don't know any of the 99% protesters who would want to live in North Korea for better living conditions or because that economy would be more kind to them. The problem isn't an economic problem.

Here, we are seeing the market manipulated by legislation, but the market still wins out. Higher minimum wage, tougher employment laws, health care requirements, and higher taxes made it more practical to hire outside of the country. However, because there is still competition, the consumers demanded a better product, and even though it is more expensive, have decided that it's worth the cost. To the extent the market was available, it has worked. If we were to allow the market to be more free from legislation, we would be able to have even more value and a better distribution of capital. In a perfectly capitalist society, outsourcing wouldn't be a bad word. In such a society, it would only be done as long as it is an actual benefit, and wouldn't likely have ended up with the poorly performing outsourcing we know today.

I hope this finds you well, Dear. Much excessive delay response making. Clients upset and are lose much profit. Kindly return outsourcing to US at soonest. Please do the needful.

The site is little more than a series of guided form letters. It might be a useful site, but it's certainly not a "robot lawyer". It is scarcely even a chat bot.

Thanks. I had almost forgotten about my sig. Yes, I agree, and theologically, you are correct. That just isn't as funny for a quote.

I agree. Also, even if there were actually harms being done, it would still be a question of whether government involvement would be the correct action. I do not personally think that the government is the right arbiter in this issue. The government has never been in the business of promoting free and open anything. I hate Comcast as much as anybody, but these rules are going to hurt them at all.

There's no rule that says that there has to be a good internet connection. If you force all connections to be the same, then you're very likely forcing the lowest common denominator. Also, as the article summary points out, the ISPs will still be able to control connections by arguing that they are preventing piracy or other illegal activity. So, in the end, they may not be able to slow sites, but they will be able to block certain traffic outright and be able to claim that they are doing so to comply with the law. And the big ISPs win because smaller companies who cannot afford to route faster traffic to the more resource heavy locations (or afford to pay for the extra peering which will be mandated) will be forced out of business. So, less competition, more bureaucracy, and you'll still risk having sites or access methods blocked, but now with no recourse.

I think that everybody would like "neutral" net, but the question of whether the federal government is the best party to make rulings regarding fairness and technical concerns seems ridiculous. This is the same group that thought that the internet was like pipes, and is run by people who think their Yahoo mail accounts are the best places to store sensitive state emails. I don't know anybody on either side who really thinks that the government is fair. So, to have them decide this sort of thing just seems silly.

Whatever power the government uses now to pass these laws is the same power it's going to use to later restrict our internet usage. Every step we take in this direction is one more step in creating barriers to competition that would make a truly more open internet. Eventually, we'll let them make ISPs a utility, and then there will be rules on who can access the net and how. Don't be surprised if they use those same laws to make most of us criminals for accessing the net through unapproved means. Sure, all of that is still a little way off, and this doesn't directly lead to that, but it's a step in that direction, and a very hard one to reverse. Regardless, it's a step in the wrong direction. I say that we should get the government out of controlling technology.

If by "stealing" you mean, "having another exact copy of something that somebody else has", then sure, I would love it if everybody "steals" and were "stolen from". If it were possible that somebody could have my car, and I get to keep it, too, I would want as many people as wanted it to have a copy. My car, like games, are capital. A system where there is more capital is a system where we're all better off. The reason why most of us don't want people taking things from us is not because we don't want other people to have stuff, but because we don't want to lose our stuff. Gaining Intellectual Property doesn't take anything away from the person who had it. It just adds to the people who have it.

But, isn't that taking the potential away from another person to make money? Yes, it is. However, there are lots of things that take away a person's ability to make money. If everybody makes horse carts and I make a car, I reduce the ability of horse cart manufacturers to make money. But what if they're really good at it and really really like to make money from it? I don't think that most people would consider that a good enough reason to not make cars. If your business model or current occupation doesn't give you profit that you want, then it's not up to other people to help you make it work. Just find another industry. Remove the artificial barriers and let people decide if and how they would like to support your work. So, reducing the ability for somebody to make money off a product by itself is not good reason to restrict an action. Creating artificial barriers to access something for the sole sake of creating a market is a bad idea and reduces overall capital. If a product is good, then there will be a natural model for it to make money.

So, what about the incentive to create good works of art or games, etc.? I believe that thinking is a more recent invention. There has been literature, works of art, games, and many other types of intellectual exchange long before there was a government restricting access to it. People sometimes make these things for fun, or as a hobby, or by commission from somebody who just wants them to exist. However, not everything that is free as in liberty is free as in beer. There's lots of FOSS out there which is made by people who do get paid for their work. Sometimes, the software is made by people who just want it to exist and be shared. Sometimes, it's to share support. Another example is convenience. I just bought a book the other day from a book store that contained nothing but works in the public domain. I knew that I could just as easily go home, take a copy of the table of contents, and download the whole thing myself and print it out if I wanted and be completely within my legal rights. But the book was there, and at a good price, and I liked it. They made a profit, and no copyright law would have been required.

Sure, there's content out there that may be better because the extra funding that copyright laws provide. Also, I think that maybe having some protections for inventors to allow them to recoup cost of development can help provide an incentive. However, I would rather have both those good things gone than to have to endure the current copyright situation where Disney holds copyrights on things generations after the creator it is dead (which they copied originally from the public domain). However, even in the most proper use of copyrights, you aren't exactly taking away a thing. It may be illegal, and that may make it wrong by definition, but it certainly is not harmful in the same sense as stealing a car, and may instead actually benefit society as a whole.

You thought, even for a moment, that a government legislation affecting the market would actually hurt big business? Why? Is that what you think usually happens?

Of course they fought it. It takes work and money to re-structure your company to compensate for new rules like that. However, in the end, any time you make more laws that restrict the freedom of buyers and sellers to freely exchange capital, somebody is going to try to use those rules to their advantage, and the winner will likely be the group with most capital and interest in directing that system. At the very least, the laws will create a further barrier to entry into the market, thus preventing competition, which is the one tool that would cause them to cater to their customers.

Expect to see more of this. At some point, people will get mad and they'll try to make more laws to stop this, and then these companies will re-structure to take advantage of those laws. At some point, people will get mad, and they'll convince the government to declare internet as a utility, and then these companies will gain government funding and become completely immune to customer complaints. What does customer satisfaction matter when there's no competition?

There are all sorts of people, and there are many people who don't follow what their religion teaches. If you picked about any random belief, you might find people of every religion who agree with that belief. However, you're missing a very critical fact. The people who are killing people in the name of Allah are generally doing so in perfect agreement with Islamic teaching and the Quran. There are few religions out there which truly demand that you kill people. Most consider it a sin or place other heavy restrictions on it. To the contrary, devout following of the Quran means that you should be seeking total subjection of other religious people and even killing them. The "good" people who you speak of may in fact not view these actions as acceptable, but when they disagree with Jihad, they disagree with Muhammad, and they disagree with their holy book, and their disagreement is not based on religion, but personal preference.

One other difference with their religion and our culture's expectation is that their religion does not teach honesty, but deception. They believe that Allah is a trickster type of god who has no problem causing deception or allowing his followers to deceive. I don't believe this is one of his most notable attributes, but you can find indication in the Quran where he caused deception and you can find where Muslims are instructed to deceive where it accomplishes a goal in line with their teaching. Therefor, it is quite possible that some of them, even the ones who seem sincere, are deceiving you because they believe fervently that such deception is the truly good thing to do. Most of the time, the liars we know of would also be people without much of a moral framework. It would be harder for us to detect deception from people who fervently think it's a good thing.

Once again, the difference is whether the "extreme" behavior is inspired by the religious belief or in contradiction to it. Yes, a person can kill and claim it to be caused by any religion. They could kill and claim Dr. Sues told them. But these extreme Muslims can give good, solid, and complete explanations from their holy book which not only point to historical example, but direct scripture which tells them to do so. Christians could, at best, use some very fuzzy logic and have to ignore massive amounts of their holy book to be able to excuse killing somebody, and I don't even know the fuzziest of logic they could use to justify terrorist activity. The same is probably true of many religious groups other than Muslims.

They are a private industry, so I suppose that I support their right to do something as horrible as limit speech. However, I think it's time that we much more loudly call for a new medium to host and share video content.

Google won't be alone. Pressure will mount inside the industry and at some point from the government, etc. to try to limit certain types of content. As that happens, or hopefully in anticipation of that happening, I recommend a new paradigm of free, and open video sharing, perhaps powered by TOR networks and/or torrent. I would recommend it would be:

• Open - Any video subject can be shared.
• Distributed - No single point of failure, or few, and no one system handling the resource usage for all content.
• Free to the end user - Perhaps being distributed can spread resource costs sufficiently to make this practical.
• Homogenous - Simple, specific video formats to make acquiring the media simple and to prevent abuse.
• Browsable - Should be easy to find content, especially by search, but also good recommendations.

If something like this already this already exists, I would love to know about it. If not, maybe it's time to start gauging interest for one.