What you do with said photos though is another mater.
It should go without saying that if your intent is to take pictures of someone's trade secrets, and exploit those somehow, that's a form of industrial espionage that's most certainly illegal in the US. I don't know if the pictures could be confiscated, but that would be the least of your worries, I think.
In too many companies, the technical direction is driven not by technical leads, but by MBAs in middle-management. If your individual contributors have to run their innovations by a non-technical manager, your organization is broken, IMO. If you empower your employees not just to "suggest innovation" but to actually innovate, you're far better off. This means putting technical people in charge of setting technical direction, and accommodating an individual's work that was not strictly prescribed at the start of the quarter.
The whole thing about submitting suggestions to a committee reeks of corporate bureaucracy, which is the antithesis of innovation. If you're going to do it like this, do it right and get upper management to buy into the whole idea. The last company I worked for did the whole suggestion-box-to-a-committee thing, but after a few months, just started dumping everyone's suggestions into the bit bucket. This is worse than not having a culture or process for encouraging innovation in the first place.
The court is not resolving scientific issues. They ruled that there is insufficient evidence to prove a causal relationship and dismissed the claim. Someone petitioned the court, and the court responded. What else are they supposed to do?
Different intersections demand different timings for lights. Different lanes in the same intersection may very well need different lead times for the red light, because the drivers may enter the intersection at different times and, consequently, may be unable to clear the intersection before the light turns red.
So setting a standard, fixed-by-law duration for yellow lights is kind of stupid. Setting a minimum could work, but I'd argue that even this is unnecessary. A judge should not permit this if you can show that a reasonable person could not safely obey the law. And if the judge and the cops are conspiring together in your locality, you have bigger problems and need to involve your state or the federal government. We already have laws about that.
IMO, the cops shouldn't even have a say in how the lights are timed.
"Increasing" the infrastructure to the point where congestion management is no longer needed would require, effectively, infinitely fast data connections for everyone. Any large transfer is going to try to go infinitely fast. But since there's no such thing as an infinitely fast connection, some link along the path from the source to the destination is going to be a bottleneck. At that bottleneck, you have congestion, and a router that's queuing up packets and deciding how best to forward or drop packets out of that queue.
It makes perfect sense to queue latency-sensitive traffic (VoIP, etc.) ahead of non-latency-sensitive traffic (BitTorrent). The impact to your BT transfer will be unmeasurable if a few of its packets get delayed briefly to allow a VoIP packet through at the point of congestion. This isn't "throttling your interwebs", it's simple basic network congestion management.
A properly implemented TOS setup would not allow large amounts of latency-sensitive traffic to strangle latency-insensitive traffic. Normally, you would set caps on the amount of latency-sensitive data passing over a particular link (or coming from a particular source). If you didn't do this, everyone would just learn how to masquerade all of their traffic as latency-sensitive, and magically get faster Internet than everyone else. Latency-sensitive implies low-bandwidth. That's the trade-off you make with a classification scheme like this.
(And, FWIW, I would classify an online game as latency-sensitive as well. I would not put web browsing in that category, though, as Cox seems to be doing here.)
I think you are confusing bandwidth (data rate) with the amount of data actually transferred. There is no such thing as an infinitely fast data connection, so it is unreasonable for anyone to interpret "unlimited" as being "infinitely fast". Every "unlimited" data connection, consequently, has caps of some kind, either technological, or policy. So long as they're giving you what they contracted to give you (say, "between 1Mbit and 5Mbit"), there's nothing wrong or misleading about this "unlimited" data connection.
I do agree, though, that capping based on the total amount transferred, either by cutting you off or limiting your data rate below what they contracted to give you, would seem to be a breach of contract and likely false advertising.
Caps on an "unlimited" connection are probably false advertising, but not providing infinite speed on an "unlimited" connection is not. It's not reasonable to expect that you will be able to access data instantaneously, even over an "unlimited" Internet connection. Why that data connection isn't infinitely fast doesn't really matter much.
Wait, so it's only porn if you get off on it? You want to make masturbation illegal?
No and no. I think you misinterpreted something I said. I'm talking about whether something becomes "not porn" if there's a context in which it could be seen as "not porn". If you seek it out because you want to get off on it (or you want to share it with others that want to get off on it), then it's porn. And if it's illegal to possess it, in part, because it's porn, then you've broken the law. I do not believe porn should be automatically illegal, nor do I necessarily agree with any of our current anti-porn laws.
I agree. The question of whether an image should be illegal is somewhat orthogonal to the question of whether an image is porn. But if the law ties them together, it's unreasonable to say that something you used as porn shouldn't be illegal in your case, because it could be non-porn in other situations. If society wants to say that underage porn should be illegal, but underage nude art or candids shouldn't, you have to look at how you're using it to determine whether the act is illegal. And if you're spreading naked pics of yourself around, with the intention of turning someone on, it's porn, and if it's illegal as porn, then it's illegal.
That being said, all of this is far too subjective, arbitrary, and based on all sorts of assumptions that I flat out disagree with, so don't take any of this to mean that I support these child porn laws, or the way that they're being applied in this case.
No, I said some sort of intervention is probably warranted. The most heavy-handed approach to this is the absurd laws we have today, such as those being applied in this case. I don't agree with those laws and I don't think they're being used appropriately. But sure, "something like that" is what I was seriously suggesting.
What if they write some really essay that they like and the time and share with their friends, but later find extremely embarrassing
I seriously doubt one could come up with an essay, or a picture of a 17 year old boozing it up, would have remotely the same impact on the average person in American culture as it is today. Again, all of this is horribly subjective and extremely culturally-dependent. There are plenty of individuals that wouldn't be embarrassed at all about having nudes of themselves all over the Internet. (Many do it on purpose.) All I'm saying is that some of these minors will be devastated by these decisions, and I see nothing wrong with something stepping in and trying to prevent that. Again, IMO, child porn laws, as they're written and applied today, don't seem like the best approach.
The whole line of reasoning is absurd. People, including children, do things that they may later regret, and which may have adverse consequences in the future
So are you taking the position that we should effectively dial back all forms of protection-from-self laws for minors? We don't let kids gamble, drink, smoke, set up porn sites featuring themselves, get tattoos, etc. If you're trying to take the position that any protection we give minors should be consistent (though perhaps proportional), regardless of the act/harm, I would agree with that.
I also think you overestimate the potential harm from these photographs.
Well "harm" like this is a bit difficult to measure in the first place, right? Most of it is subjective and depends on how the person was raised, the community they're choosing to live in, and what they want to do later in life that might conflict with their decisions in the past. Lots of people wouldn't suffer any real "harm" at all (not even embarrassment). Others would be embarrassed and perhaps harrassed to the point of suicide. Those in the middle might be limited in their careers. Any decision to intervene should probably take all of that into account. And if that's too difficult, you have to be arbitrary, which sucks.
Please note that I'm not suggesting how much we need to intervene, just saying that I think some sort of intervention is probably warranted.
download it, and jerk off to it, suddenly that person would be in possession of child pornography
No, I said it would be porn, in my opinion. Just because it qualifies as porn in one context doesn't, in my opinion, mean it should be illegal in another. But it's disingenuous to say that pictures of a naked person, clearly intended at the time to arouse and "titillate", aren't porn, simply because you can fathom a context where it could be seen as artistic or non-sexual.
Though feel free to disagree with me on that. The very fact that there is so much disagreement on what porn is, and whether a picture of a naked minor is something that should be criminal, suggests this whole thing needs to be scrapped and approached a little more rationally.
And kids taking pictures of themselves and sharing them with friends in an environment commercial exploiting sexuality as a means of getting attention for their selling ads is just wrong.
So I largely agree that our laws about minors and porn are really weird and can't reasonably be justified, but I think you (or perhaps others) are missing something that actually does seem reasonable:
Minors are presumed to be idiots^Winnocents, and may not fully realize the ramifications of what they're doing. They like the attention, get a little frisky, and take some pictures to send to their similarly-aged boyfriends (or vice-versa). IMO, there's nothing really wrong with this. They have plenty of opportunities to do far worse than this. A picture isn't that awful in comparison. But here's the catch: Those pictures stick around. They get stolen, or shared. Once these minors reach the age of majority, they may feel considerably different about taking pictures, or how much they should safeguard them. But by this time, it may be too late. For some people, having these pictures out there in the wild could be devastating. Should minors be protected from these mistakes? If so, how?
I think some form of intervention is needed here. I think convicting them of vanilla child porn crimes is absolutely insane, but at least until they reach the age of majority, minors need to be protected from themselves when it comes to decisions that could have lasting consequences.
I think it should depend on the intent of the photograph. Mere candid pictures of someone that happens to be nude shouldn't be porn unless you're using it to get off (or help someone else get off). Given that these girls are not at a nude beach or nudist colony, and are sending these pictures to boys from school, I think it's pretty clear why they're doing it, and IMO, that makes it porn.
But I completely agree that this is all purely subjective and stupid.
When Google says "resolver", they're taking about your ISP's recursively-resolving DNS server. In other words, ISP customers normally have their local DNS resolver configured to point to the ISP's DNS servers. These servers then go through the act of recursively resolving your name. It is these resolvers (DNS servers) that need to be whitelisted in order to deliver you (the ISP's customer) AAAA records for names. If you run your own DNS server, and choose to resolve names yourself instead of via your ISP, then this won't work for you.
but what does "support" mean? Only addressing actual errors and software problems, or hand-holding and educating the user? This is rarely spelled out.
This should actually be an easy question: it means satisfying whatever metrics are used to judge your performance at review time. If your organization has no visibility into what you're doing and how you're doing it, they can't reasonably review you, can't meaningfully give out raises, and can't honestly justify their own existence, right? In this sort of anarchy, I suppose the only input your superiors have are the praises and complaints received by your clients, so I'd work in the manner that minimizes complaints and maximizes praise.
Profiling is effective (which I suspect is why you think "proper police work requires" it), but it is wrong because it results in a disproportionate effect on the targeted minority. If you know that 9 out of 10 car thieves are black, and target blacks, you'll find that effectively 10 out of 10 of your convictions are black, and few whites will be arrested in the first place, even though they're still committing 10% of the thefts. This effect is harmful and evil, which is why racial profiling is wrong, even though it gives you a higher success rate in catching criminals.
If you are willing to do your part, I am willing to work with you (not for you) in resolving the problem.
Even this is relative, and depends on the nature of your IT department and the nature of your clients. In some cases, IT is supporting individuals worth far more to the company than the tech is. Ridiculously more. So ridiculous, that it simply does not make sense for these individuals to even make a token effort at solving the problem, because 1 hour of the tech's time is worthless in comparison. (Though, if they can't be productive as a result of this problem, fixing it "right" here is more important, which may mean some education of the user.)
In reality, there's actually a whole spectrum here, with your clients' time being considered inferior to your own in some cases, to superior in others. I think it makes perfect sense to dump on the tech support if the needs of the business merit it.
There are two types of tech support people. You have the contractors, which spell out the limits of their support, and refuse to touch anything outside of what they are obligated to do. You seem to be one of those people. And then you have the people that actually care about their job, expect to be there a while, and are interested in doing it right.
For the latter, educating your users is a requirement of the job. You can either act like a union member, and happily do the same 5-minute fix every week for the same user for the rest of your time with the company, or you can teach the user how to do it himself, or fix the system so that the fix isn't needed. The former gives you better job security, I suppose, but the latter is better for the company and the user. I guess it all depends on the type of IT department you're working for, and the type of person you are.
The responsibilities for IT vary between companies and organizations. You may not support Office, but plenty of IT departments do. The "here's Office, but damned if I'll help you with it" folks are most likely contracted to provide specific services, and are being snippy because they feel they're being asked to do something not covered in their contract. They are probably justified in feeling this way, but this is really a business/contractual issue, so it's not really relevant to the discussion, IMO, though I would sincerely hope that any IT folks I deal with in this situation will handle it better than this. If customers are asking you to support something you haven't agreed to support, that needs to be communicated up the chain of command, contracts reworked, and the users' needs satisfied.
Point being, when a company gets too large, they start to get massive pressure from their STOCK SHAREHOLDERS, which in my opinion, makes businesses extra cut throat, in order to continue to GROW PROFITS and the stock. Google, it appears WANTS CONTROL over the web, due to the fact, without a browser, Google is NOTHING. However, Firefox has done NOTHING to harm Google, and now Google slaps mozilla in the face with a product to DIRECTLY COMPETE with an Open Source Icon (firefox)?
How does Firefox "lose" by having another competitor? Are they losing sales? Oh wait, they don't have sales. Are shares of Mozilla losing value? Oh wait, they aren't a for-profit public company. Chrome is Google's way of saying, "See, we can make the web better." There's nothing stopping Firefox from taking every one of those innovations and putting them into Firefox, because it's all open source. In fact, Google would be thrilled if this happened, because it means more people will have more powerful web browsers, which means Google can write bigger, better web applications. This is about keeping the web moving forward and not stagnating (IE).
Why Cadillac chose to dim their LED taillights this way is beyond explanation. It makes the cars look cheap, but it can't be a cost saving, because you can dim an LED array with a simple resistor and eliminate the PWM circuit altogether. LED taillights for heavy trucks use a diode and a resistor for the lower light output level and they look great.
Efficiency? PWM switches the current, while a resistor just converts some of the "excess" energy to heat. With a lot of LEDs, this wastage may have a noticeable effect on fuel economy. It's entirely possible to use PWM at a high frequency, though, and essentially eliminate the apparent strobing.
If it were truly under a dangerous amount of pressure, wouldn't this borehole have become another volcano? The fact that it traveled only a short distance before solidifying suggests the pressure isn't a concern.
Slashdot Mirror
It should go without saying that if your intent is to take pictures of someone's trade secrets, and exploit those somehow, that's a form of industrial espionage that's most certainly illegal in the US. I don't know if the pictures could be confiscated, but that would be the least of your worries, I think.
In too many companies, the technical direction is driven not by technical leads, but by MBAs in middle-management. If your individual contributors have to run their innovations by a non-technical manager, your organization is broken, IMO. If you empower your employees not just to "suggest innovation" but to actually innovate, you're far better off. This means putting technical people in charge of setting technical direction, and accommodating an individual's work that was not strictly prescribed at the start of the quarter.
The whole thing about submitting suggestions to a committee reeks of corporate bureaucracy, which is the antithesis of innovation. If you're going to do it like this, do it right and get upper management to buy into the whole idea. The last company I worked for did the whole suggestion-box-to-a-committee thing, but after a few months, just started dumping everyone's suggestions into the bit bucket. This is worse than not having a culture or process for encouraging innovation in the first place.
The court is not resolving scientific issues. They ruled that there is insufficient evidence to prove a causal relationship and dismissed the claim. Someone petitioned the court, and the court responded. What else are they supposed to do?
Different intersections demand different timings for lights. Different lanes in the same intersection may very well need different lead times for the red light, because the drivers may enter the intersection at different times and, consequently, may be unable to clear the intersection before the light turns red.
So setting a standard, fixed-by-law duration for yellow lights is kind of stupid. Setting a minimum could work, but I'd argue that even this is unnecessary. A judge should not permit this if you can show that a reasonable person could not safely obey the law. And if the judge and the cops are conspiring together in your locality, you have bigger problems and need to involve your state or the federal government. We already have laws about that.
IMO, the cops shouldn't even have a say in how the lights are timed.
Citation needed?
So turn this feature off in your browser and don't use Google to search. How is this involuntary?
"Increasing" the infrastructure to the point where congestion management is no longer needed would require, effectively, infinitely fast data connections for everyone. Any large transfer is going to try to go infinitely fast. But since there's no such thing as an infinitely fast connection, some link along the path from the source to the destination is going to be a bottleneck. At that bottleneck, you have congestion, and a router that's queuing up packets and deciding how best to forward or drop packets out of that queue.
It makes perfect sense to queue latency-sensitive traffic (VoIP, etc.) ahead of non-latency-sensitive traffic (BitTorrent). The impact to your BT transfer will be unmeasurable if a few of its packets get delayed briefly to allow a VoIP packet through at the point of congestion. This isn't "throttling your interwebs", it's simple basic network congestion management.
A properly implemented TOS setup would not allow large amounts of latency-sensitive traffic to strangle latency-insensitive traffic. Normally, you would set caps on the amount of latency-sensitive data passing over a particular link (or coming from a particular source). If you didn't do this, everyone would just learn how to masquerade all of their traffic as latency-sensitive, and magically get faster Internet than everyone else. Latency-sensitive implies low-bandwidth. That's the trade-off you make with a classification scheme like this.
(And, FWIW, I would classify an online game as latency-sensitive as well. I would not put web browsing in that category, though, as Cox seems to be doing here.)
I think you are confusing bandwidth (data rate) with the amount of data actually transferred. There is no such thing as an infinitely fast data connection, so it is unreasonable for anyone to interpret "unlimited" as being "infinitely fast". Every "unlimited" data connection, consequently, has caps of some kind, either technological, or policy. So long as they're giving you what they contracted to give you (say, "between 1Mbit and 5Mbit"), there's nothing wrong or misleading about this "unlimited" data connection.
I do agree, though, that capping based on the total amount transferred, either by cutting you off or limiting your data rate below what they contracted to give you, would seem to be a breach of contract and likely false advertising.
Caps on an "unlimited" connection are probably false advertising, but not providing infinite speed on an "unlimited" connection is not. It's not reasonable to expect that you will be able to access data instantaneously, even over an "unlimited" Internet connection. Why that data connection isn't infinitely fast doesn't really matter much.
No and no. I think you misinterpreted something I said. I'm talking about whether something becomes "not porn" if there's a context in which it could be seen as "not porn". If you seek it out because you want to get off on it (or you want to share it with others that want to get off on it), then it's porn. And if it's illegal to possess it, in part, because it's porn, then you've broken the law. I do not believe porn should be automatically illegal, nor do I necessarily agree with any of our current anti-porn laws.
I agree. The question of whether an image should be illegal is somewhat orthogonal to the question of whether an image is porn. But if the law ties them together, it's unreasonable to say that something you used as porn shouldn't be illegal in your case, because it could be non-porn in other situations. If society wants to say that underage porn should be illegal, but underage nude art or candids shouldn't, you have to look at how you're using it to determine whether the act is illegal. And if you're spreading naked pics of yourself around, with the intention of turning someone on, it's porn, and if it's illegal as porn, then it's illegal.
That being said, all of this is far too subjective, arbitrary, and based on all sorts of assumptions that I flat out disagree with, so don't take any of this to mean that I support these child porn laws, or the way that they're being applied in this case.
No, I said some sort of intervention is probably warranted. The most heavy-handed approach to this is the absurd laws we have today, such as those being applied in this case. I don't agree with those laws and I don't think they're being used appropriately. But sure, "something like that" is what I was seriously suggesting.
I seriously doubt one could come up with an essay, or a picture of a 17 year old boozing it up, would have remotely the same impact on the average person in American culture as it is today. Again, all of this is horribly subjective and extremely culturally-dependent. There are plenty of individuals that wouldn't be embarrassed at all about having nudes of themselves all over the Internet. (Many do it on purpose.) All I'm saying is that some of these minors will be devastated by these decisions, and I see nothing wrong with something stepping in and trying to prevent that. Again, IMO, child porn laws, as they're written and applied today, don't seem like the best approach.
So are you taking the position that we should effectively dial back all forms of protection-from-self laws for minors? We don't let kids gamble, drink, smoke, set up porn sites featuring themselves, get tattoos, etc. If you're trying to take the position that any protection we give minors should be consistent (though perhaps proportional), regardless of the act/harm, I would agree with that.
Well "harm" like this is a bit difficult to measure in the first place, right? Most of it is subjective and depends on how the person was raised, the community they're choosing to live in, and what they want to do later in life that might conflict with their decisions in the past. Lots of people wouldn't suffer any real "harm" at all (not even embarrassment). Others would be embarrassed and perhaps harrassed to the point of suicide. Those in the middle might be limited in their careers. Any decision to intervene should probably take all of that into account. And if that's too difficult, you have to be arbitrary, which sucks.
Please note that I'm not suggesting how much we need to intervene, just saying that I think some sort of intervention is probably warranted.
No, I said it would be porn, in my opinion. Just because it qualifies as porn in one context doesn't, in my opinion, mean it should be illegal in another. But it's disingenuous to say that pictures of a naked person, clearly intended at the time to arouse and "titillate", aren't porn, simply because you can fathom a context where it could be seen as artistic or non-sexual.
Though feel free to disagree with me on that. The very fact that there is so much disagreement on what porn is, and whether a picture of a naked minor is something that should be criminal, suggests this whole thing needs to be scrapped and approached a little more rationally.
So I largely agree that our laws about minors and porn are really weird and can't reasonably be justified, but I think you (or perhaps others) are missing something that actually does seem reasonable:
Minors are presumed to be idiots^Winnocents, and may not fully realize the ramifications of what they're doing. They like the attention, get a little frisky, and take some pictures to send to their similarly-aged boyfriends (or vice-versa). IMO, there's nothing really wrong with this. They have plenty of opportunities to do far worse than this. A picture isn't that awful in comparison. But here's the catch: Those pictures stick around. They get stolen, or shared. Once these minors reach the age of majority, they may feel considerably different about taking pictures, or how much they should safeguard them. But by this time, it may be too late. For some people, having these pictures out there in the wild could be devastating. Should minors be protected from these mistakes? If so, how?
I think some form of intervention is needed here. I think convicting them of vanilla child porn crimes is absolutely insane, but at least until they reach the age of majority, minors need to be protected from themselves when it comes to decisions that could have lasting consequences.
I think it should depend on the intent of the photograph. Mere candid pictures of someone that happens to be nude shouldn't be porn unless you're using it to get off (or help someone else get off). Given that these girls are not at a nude beach or nudist colony, and are sending these pictures to boys from school, I think it's pretty clear why they're doing it, and IMO, that makes it porn.
But I completely agree that this is all purely subjective and stupid.
When Google says "resolver", they're taking about your ISP's recursively-resolving DNS server. In other words, ISP customers normally have their local DNS resolver configured to point to the ISP's DNS servers. These servers then go through the act of recursively resolving your name. It is these resolvers (DNS servers) that need to be whitelisted in order to deliver you (the ISP's customer) AAAA records for names. If you run your own DNS server, and choose to resolve names yourself instead of via your ISP, then this won't work for you.
This should actually be an easy question: it means satisfying whatever metrics are used to judge your performance at review time. If your organization has no visibility into what you're doing and how you're doing it, they can't reasonably review you, can't meaningfully give out raises, and can't honestly justify their own existence, right? In this sort of anarchy, I suppose the only input your superiors have are the praises and complaints received by your clients, so I'd work in the manner that minimizes complaints and maximizes praise.
Profiling is effective (which I suspect is why you think "proper police work requires" it), but it is wrong because it results in a disproportionate effect on the targeted minority. If you know that 9 out of 10 car thieves are black, and target blacks, you'll find that effectively 10 out of 10 of your convictions are black, and few whites will be arrested in the first place, even though they're still committing 10% of the thefts. This effect is harmful and evil, which is why racial profiling is wrong, even though it gives you a higher success rate in catching criminals.
Even this is relative, and depends on the nature of your IT department and the nature of your clients. In some cases, IT is supporting individuals worth far more to the company than the tech is. Ridiculously more. So ridiculous, that it simply does not make sense for these individuals to even make a token effort at solving the problem, because 1 hour of the tech's time is worthless in comparison. (Though, if they can't be productive as a result of this problem, fixing it "right" here is more important, which may mean some education of the user.)
In reality, there's actually a whole spectrum here, with your clients' time being considered inferior to your own in some cases, to superior in others. I think it makes perfect sense to dump on the tech support if the needs of the business merit it.
There are two types of tech support people. You have the contractors, which spell out the limits of their support, and refuse to touch anything outside of what they are obligated to do. You seem to be one of those people. And then you have the people that actually care about their job, expect to be there a while, and are interested in doing it right.
For the latter, educating your users is a requirement of the job. You can either act like a union member, and happily do the same 5-minute fix every week for the same user for the rest of your time with the company, or you can teach the user how to do it himself, or fix the system so that the fix isn't needed. The former gives you better job security, I suppose, but the latter is better for the company and the user. I guess it all depends on the type of IT department you're working for, and the type of person you are.
The responsibilities for IT vary between companies and organizations. You may not support Office, but plenty of IT departments do. The "here's Office, but damned if I'll help you with it" folks are most likely contracted to provide specific services, and are being snippy because they feel they're being asked to do something not covered in their contract. They are probably justified in feeling this way, but this is really a business/contractual issue, so it's not really relevant to the discussion, IMO, though I would sincerely hope that any IT folks I deal with in this situation will handle it better than this. If customers are asking you to support something you haven't agreed to support, that needs to be communicated up the chain of command, contracts reworked, and the users' needs satisfied.
Bonuses are taxed exactly the same as your other income. You may have more withheld, but that doesn't mean you will have lost more of it come Tax Day.
How does Firefox "lose" by having another competitor? Are they losing sales? Oh wait, they don't have sales. Are shares of Mozilla losing value? Oh wait, they aren't a for-profit public company. Chrome is Google's way of saying, "See, we can make the web better." There's nothing stopping Firefox from taking every one of those innovations and putting them into Firefox, because it's all open source. In fact, Google would be thrilled if this happened, because it means more people will have more powerful web browsers, which means Google can write bigger, better web applications. This is about keeping the web moving forward and not stagnating (IE).
(IMO.)
Efficiency? PWM switches the current, while a resistor just converts some of the "excess" energy to heat. With a lot of LEDs, this wastage may have a noticeable effect on fuel economy. It's entirely possible to use PWM at a high frequency, though, and essentially eliminate the apparent strobing.
If it were truly under a dangerous amount of pressure, wouldn't this borehole have become another volcano? The fact that it traveled only a short distance before solidifying suggests the pressure isn't a concern.