"The best player for video on the internet is still embedded Windows Media Player. It's just a shell around DirectShow"
That wont work on an iOS device.
The issue is hardware acceleration as WMP is accelerated on modern desktops. Firefox and Chrome are starting to implement hardware acceleration, but the canvas is still 2D. Android and iOS are accelerated and smooth in comparison. IE 9 is the only browser that looks smooth on a decent GPU as it uses DirectWrite for almost all elements. It still is not perfect. The desktop browsers are behind but Firefox is showing signs of improving. Video needs to be accelerated as well. Flash is under Windows and I think MacOSX under the latest release.
There are millions who use IE 8 and earlier who can't use the HMTL5 video tag. Flash wont go away for a couple more years as I strongly prefer HTML 5 too. Codec wars are problems over h.264 licensing as only IE 9 has it directly inside the browser due to patents. Of course if you have Windows 7 you can use any browser but that means it is just as proprietary as flash.
There are several million homes foreclosed and therefore not using power. Of course that will bring it down. Economic problems also lower electricty as average users are more willing to put their thermostats to 76 rather than 68 during the summer to save money.
Still if the injured party feels that this is beyond a civil act and is a criminal one, the MPAA can get the FBI to confiscate your computers in the name of obtaining evidence of course.
They could even seize the apartment which would scare the shit out of the landlord. For example, if you someone smoked a join in a rented home, the police take the home away agaisnt your will and sell it for their own financial gain. If you own the home and have a mortgage you are SOL. Pretty scary and I am shocked it is illegal but true. The police love seizures as it is a great way to raise money.
Massive crimes are scary and you need to take responsibility. Kick the roomate out and tell the landlord how he will be liable or leave yourself. Of course if you own the place and need a roomate for some extra cash then kick his ass out and cancel the internet subscription and use a competitor. Remember, even after he leaves you still could be hunted down.
"Who says "you are liable"??? IANAL, but it's pretty obvious you aren't, either"
I am no lawyer, but I do remember from a few law classes that there are 2 things that determine if you are liable:
1. Duty of care. Do you have a duty to protect those who are injured, phyiscally, emotionally, or financially? 2. Foreseeable: Was it foreseeable that this action could cause it?
It is reasonable that the owner of the internet connection had a duty of care to protect others from financial harm by his connection. Since he had a letter already by the MPAA, he told his roomate to stop sharing, and to top it off he asked slashdot and now has a record on it. Therefore, it is 100% foreseeable.
So is he liable? My answer would be 100% yes.
Solution: Jave his roomate pay for the connection and switch the service in his name or if the other guy owns the place kick him out.
"It's probably illegal to sell the european one in the USA. Not FDA approved and all that.
"
It is also illegal to pirate software. However, when you are out of work or live in a poor country like China people do not care and do what they need to do. The drug companies and the US government can kiss my ass if they expect me to go in debt and starve if I can't hear because MegaCorp wants a higher price so the CEO can get his bonus.
Collusion is illegal and highly unethical. Yet colluded by bribing US politicians to screw people over with silly laws insuring monopolistic prices at the tax payer and non insured expense is somehow ok.
Everything has been going in price related to medicine over the cost of inflation, whether it is a hip replacement, basic painkillers, to hospital stays.
They are expensive because people have insurance and the government covers it. Therefore, free money = raising the price as high as humanly possible and expect Bernanke to pay for it by printing more money to Medicaid or having your $800 monthly HMO plan. Patents as well insurre monopolies on all parts so they can charge as high as the sky.
This is one of the biggest reasons why social security is in trouble. Not from hearing aids particularly, but because it is a common practice to price gouge and patent the hell out of everything to raise profits.
If no one had health insurance, I would bet the medical industry would make cheaper products. Alternatively, if we had a socialistic system with price controls where everyone was insured the problem would go away as well. Like that is going to happen with the Tea party in the US.
Apple is suing because it has a rectangular screen and icons. That simple, so to me it is the same. A round Tab would not sell which is what Apple wants. They parented a standard much like Ford patenting a steering wheel and four wheels for a vehicle. I see no difference and it is extortion and abuse
SSDs have a history of unreliability. THey die fast if you page a lot or if the disk is near full as then each sector gets written many times over again and there is a limit to the amount of writes.
I wont replace them until they approach the reliability of mechanical drives.... of course I do not have the luxury of tape backup or a nice automated backup service on my home pc or at work.
They have a sterring wheel AND They have four wheels AND THeir engines have cylnders AND They use timing belts AND They use a liquid cooling system and a radiator AND They muffle the sound coming out of the engine by using something called a muffler AND They have an internal combustion engine using gasoline for propulsion AND... why am I wasting time writting to this troll.
These are all generic things and standards. Maybe if Ford developed a new kind of hybrid engine that it spent large amounts of money developing then that could be patented. But using standard HD resolution which determines the shape and implementing them and using icons are not patents.
Windows won over Apple because it was not identical and the courts ruled in Microsoft's favor. THis is redicolous and an abuse of the patent system to overcome this. I am so glad I stuck with Windows and did not get an iMac and iPhone last fall. I would feel very dirty
That particular design for a rectangle screen is a standard because of the way video is played and apps are displayed. HD formats have a certain ratio that are rectangular and Apple does not own them.
What is next all TVs not made by Sony have to be round?
That is BS. So Apple looked at the standard and made a patent to ban anyone but them for from following a standard Apple doesn't even own. That is extortion. If I were Samsung I would halt all production of the screens for Iphones and give Apple much pain regardless of the contract.
Why not get a security and bug fix that is not a product update?
IE has these. I do admit even with the latest patches IE 6 can only get so secure compared to IE 8 due to design but still. Many corporate users are downgrading from Firefox 5 to 5 year old IE 7 because one is still patched and more secure.... up to date they are not though
"Admins like you need to quit being lazy shits and let go of the moldy dead corpses of outdated software.
" Do you have any idea what the demands are for being an Admin?
I can tell you I have seen Lan admins fired first hand, by going with the latest greatest software like Novel Netware 5. 1 week later it crashes causing a 6 hour outage while a major client came over and a $12 million deal fell through because the file server to show the documents was down! Ouch...
(l)user is a term, for our cranky users. If they see a big change like Firefox 4 from Firerox 3, when logging in they will do a double take and go WTF! They will start calling your phone and whinning for you to fix your mistake and making your life hell. (Notice I said yours and not Mozilla's?) May God help you if it is an executive whining about the change who can go 3 levels above you and file a complaint due to this weirdish Foxfire thingie where his options are missing etc.... If you do not get noticed, you keep your job.
It is more customer service than technical.
This is why WindowsXP is still around. I laugh at slashdotters who whine about IE 9, USB 3, or the Kinetix SDK not working in a 10 year old kernel, but that is extreme. It is gradually being replaced as I type this at most fortune 500 companies. But 6 months releases being too old? Get real. Several year old software works well and is not that out of date. If you support users this shit can't break as they blame you and not Ubuntu. One out of 5 users in the US still uses 10 year old operating systems and 1 out of 15 still use the 5 year old IE 7.
"Part of the golden parachute is being a fall guy for things you did not cause.
"
Here is the difference. 25 years ago that was true while the average Joe like ourselves had full job security. We don't anymore! If they want to boost there shareprice $.50 more because they made record revenue, but not meet expectations they will fire our butts out on the curb faster than you can say layoff.... One difference. We make 300x less money and have mortgages. How is that fair?... ok 2 differences we get fired too for mistakes someone else did like the CEO or CFO. They keep their jobs and just do cost cutting and do not care about us.
Do you or anyone reading this get a severance package? No. A letter of recommendation if we did good on the job and that is it.
Either we encourage our legislators to write laws banning this or we get severance packages as well to be fair. The fact is no job is secure yet we are still judged by how well we keep up with our 30 year mortgages and our job history and credit rating. CEOs can pay for homes in cash and often another job will pay to buy their previous homes and pay for all moving costs. We do not get that either
"Require a CEO to buy a large chunk of your company. IT's why the people that built the company are always far more successful at running it than some idiot that got his masters in Business Administration, and has connections."
Wrong, the goal is to boast its share price. Icahn wants it sold to boast his income and this was why founder Yang was fired. He wanted it sold for less so the share price would go up and he and Wall Street can get rich. Running a company successfully and profitable is not what is in the best interests to the shareholders in this day and age of micro second evalations and selling and buying.
She didn't sell it to Microsoft so that was a failure as anyone would have given Icahn and the big banks a large amount of money per share.
Well in Kansas City Red Lobster has a Zagots rating of great... or so I was told.
That is because people who vote there do not know any better or know about quality salt water sea food. They think fried is good and so is the atmosphere of family style.In Boston you would be caught dead seeing Red Lobster rated!
I do agree that it can be manipulated. When I lived in NYC a decade ago I wanted the best Pizzeria in Manhatten. One of them had a great rating but it was TERRIBLE. Just a tiny dirty place that had a regular metal oven and canned pizza sauce etc. However tied to it was a place that invented pizza in 1906 and has a coal fired oven and is 4 generations old and running that is the best I ever had. About the same rating. It is my guess one had fake reviews while the other was genuine.
Overall I had good luck with it but some people rate places like chains too high that drown out the rare gems. I still find it usefull and much better than Yelp.
Oh no only $5 billion how will they afford anything but Top Rameon noodles to the cofounders.
Please... Ego must be insane in these clowns! If I were offered $25 million... that is hundres of times less... I would smile and say yes and retire rich. That is a ton of money. $5 billion is what the Google CEO's are probably really worth if you count their actual revenue rather than Wall Street valuations. Seriously even if they only owned 10% of the company that is $500 million in cash.
I would be happy and use that money for another startup or 4 vaction homes and no more work again in my life. The founders are not worth it one bit. It is just insane what some people think they are getting paid compared to what most people struggling in this economy make as the value they provide.
"... but it's in very poor taste, and heinously unprofessional. Even worse, the fact that they weren't willing to do it in person can make it look like they were trying to hide something,"
Yep
I am sure a employment lawyer would be drooling over this. I do not know how CEOs are treated compared to us, but my guess is you still need to prove why they were fired. Maybe the severance package is a way to shut them up so they wont sue etc. She might get a really big one because of the way she was terminated. The fact that she is a woman could be a case if they can find a single instance of sexual harrasement or porn on someone's computer. Sleazy yes but lawyers getting paid big bucks will find anything.
Maybe it was a bad phone argument in a heated discussion?
I wish you nor I could get something like that other than GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE or please leave immediately.
Most great companies know who they are and do not void in other areas. What is Yahoo? Yahoo was Yang's cool internet links.
10 years ago they were the internet yellowpages with awesome links to cool sites and a huge resource for information. Back then before slashdot I used Yahoo for tech news and reading and discovering computer related things. They had stuff for auto enthusiasts and for many different subjects. You didn't need to search unless it was something very specific. It was a great resource for the undeveloped internet to get around in. A cooler version of AOL for tech grownups. Yahoo search was not too bad either if you needed to find other things. They were THEE portal.
Today the portal SUCKS. It was crippled around 2003/2004 ish. They tried to imitate Google first with focusing users on the search page instead of the portal links and communities. Then No NO we are advertisers put HUGE AD on page. Make Yahoo default homepage!! etc
Yahoo also had a great IM program (back then) and chat rooms and forums before porn spammers bugged you every 3 minutes with private messages and before spyware/malware was installed in the bloated Yahoo IMs of today.
To this day they could make a comeback as no one has replaced them yet as a cool portal for communities, groups, and cool links. Google is mostly minimalistic to find something new and that is it. But like HP and and a skeleton of companies that died before them they tried to focus on the dollars and change who they are until they are a no one. Yahoo could have turned into the facebook with Yahoo 360 and into something that still is a void in the market. Mainly a cool portal for everything you need or want that is managed.
But that is going to be very hard. Ask.com is still around believe it or not but the term Yahoo might as well mean MSN or RealPlayer. They left their roots and focused on cost accounting. They could have bought out Google if they were smart back in 2005 before the IPO. That would have saved them but still. Bad UI designers and wrong focus on ads crippling the portal was their mistake.... and a bad search engine too
SecureDNS has been in the RFC stage for awhile. But guess who is in charge of the DNS servers? The american government. If they became a CA as well they would have immense powers that other countires would not like.
Also DNS cache poisoning attacks could put in fake CA and fingerprints redirecting users to fake bank sites and things of that nature. True you can do that today and man in the middle attacks have been done successfully before but a CA is used as a weapon agaisnt this. I remember 6 to 8 years ago that one site with the correct URL would look funny. I would do a IPconfig/renew all and then the correct site showed up for the url! Most ISPs have better security but still that is an issue that a CA can help with. Now it is one source and would get a fake CA on top of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Well he gave permission for his roomate to use it. Therefore he is authorized.
"The best player for video on the internet is still embedded Windows Media Player. It's just a shell around DirectShow"
That wont work on an iOS device.
The issue is hardware acceleration as WMP is accelerated on modern desktops. Firefox and Chrome are starting to implement hardware acceleration, but the canvas is still 2D. Android and iOS are accelerated and smooth in comparison. IE 9 is the only browser that looks smooth on a decent GPU as it uses DirectWrite for almost all elements. It still is not perfect. The desktop browsers are behind but Firefox is showing signs of improving. Video needs to be accelerated as well. Flash is under Windows and I think MacOSX under the latest release.
There are millions who use IE 8 and earlier who can't use the HMTL5 video tag. Flash wont go away for a couple more years as I strongly prefer HTML 5 too. Codec wars are problems over h.264 licensing as only IE 9 has it directly inside the browser due to patents. Of course if you have Windows 7 you can use any browser but that means it is just as proprietary as flash.
There are several million homes foreclosed and therefore not using power. Of course that will bring it down. Economic problems also lower electricty as average users are more willing to put their thermostats to 76 rather than 68 during the summer to save money.
Still if the injured party feels that this is beyond a civil act and is a criminal one, the MPAA can get the FBI to confiscate your computers in the name of obtaining evidence of course.
They could even seize the apartment which would scare the shit out of the landlord. For example, if you someone smoked a join in a rented home, the police take the home away agaisnt your will and sell it for their own financial gain. If you own the home and have a mortgage you are SOL. Pretty scary and I am shocked it is illegal but true. The police love seizures as it is a great way to raise money.
Massive crimes are scary and you need to take responsibility. Kick the roomate out and tell the landlord how he will be liable or leave yourself. Of course if you own the place and need a roomate for some extra cash then kick his ass out and cancel the internet subscription and use a competitor. Remember, even after he leaves you still could be hunted down.
Kicking him out would be responsible. I do assume he owns the apartment and if not then leave and get a new place.
"Who says "you are liable"??? IANAL, but it's pretty obvious you aren't, either"
I am no lawyer, but I do remember from a few law classes that there are 2 things that determine if you are liable:
1. Duty of care. Do you have a duty to protect those who are injured, phyiscally, emotionally, or financially?
2. Foreseeable: Was it foreseeable that this action could cause it?
It is reasonable that the owner of the internet connection had a duty of care to protect others from financial harm by his connection. Since he had a letter already by the MPAA, he told his roomate to stop sharing, and to top it off he asked slashdot and now has a record on it. Therefore, it is 100% foreseeable.
So is he liable? My answer would be 100% yes.
Solution: Jave his roomate pay for the connection and switch the service in his name or if the other guy owns the place kick him out.
"It's probably illegal to sell the european one in the USA. Not FDA approved and all that.
"
It is also illegal to pirate software. However, when you are out of work or live in a poor country like China people do not care and do what they need to do. The drug companies and the US government can kiss my ass if they expect me to go in debt and starve if I can't hear because MegaCorp wants a higher price so the CEO can get his bonus.
Collusion is illegal and highly unethical. Yet colluded by bribing US politicians to screw people over with silly laws insuring monopolistic prices at the tax payer and non insured expense is somehow ok.
Everything has been going in price related to medicine over the cost of inflation, whether it is a hip replacement, basic painkillers, to hospital stays.
They are expensive because people have insurance and the government covers it. Therefore, free money = raising the price as high as humanly possible and expect Bernanke to pay for it by printing more money to Medicaid or having your $800 monthly HMO plan. Patents as well insurre monopolies on all parts so they can charge as high as the sky.
This is one of the biggest reasons why social security is in trouble. Not from hearing aids particularly, but because it is a common practice to price gouge and patent the hell out of everything to raise profits.
If no one had health insurance, I would bet the medical industry would make cheaper products. Alternatively, if we had a socialistic system with price controls where everyone was insured the problem would go away as well. Like that is going to happen with the Tea party in the US.
How about you suck it instead being a mac user.
I prefer my freedom
Apple is suing because it has a rectangular screen and icons. That simple, so to me it is the same. A round Tab would not sell which is what Apple wants. They parented a standard much like Ford patenting a steering wheel and four wheels for a vehicle. I see no difference and it is extortion and abuse
SSDs have a history of unreliability. THey die fast if you page a lot or if the disk is near full as then each sector gets written many times over again and there is a limit to the amount of writes.
I wont replace them until they approach the reliability of mechanical drives. ... of course I do not have the luxury of tape backup or a nice automated backup service on my home pc or at work.
These are not patentable. Copyrighted perhaps.
I think Europe should ban all non Ford cars.
They have a sterring wheel ... why am I wasting time writting to this troll.
AND
They have four wheels
AND
THeir engines have cylnders
AND
They use timing belts
AND
They use a liquid cooling system and a radiator
AND
They muffle the sound coming out of the engine by using something called a muffler
AND
They have an internal combustion engine using gasoline for propulsion
AND
These are all generic things and standards. Maybe if Ford developed a new kind of hybrid engine that it spent large amounts of money developing then that could be patented. But using standard HD resolution which determines the shape and implementing them and using icons are not patents.
Windows won over Apple because it was not identical and the courts ruled in Microsoft's favor. THis is redicolous and an abuse of the patent system to overcome this. I am so glad I stuck with Windows and did not get an iMac and iPhone last fall. I would feel very dirty
That particular design for a rectangle screen is a standard because of the way video is played and apps are displayed. HD formats have a certain ratio that are rectangular and Apple does not own them.
What is next all TVs not made by Sony have to be round?
That is BS. So Apple looked at the standard and made a patent to ban anyone but them for from following a standard Apple doesn't even own. That is extortion. If I were Samsung I would halt all production of the screens for Iphones and give Apple much pain regardless of the contract.
Why not get a security and bug fix that is not a product update?
IE has these. I do admit even with the latest patches IE 6 can only get so secure compared to IE 8 due to design but still. Many corporate users are downgrading from Firefox 5 to 5 year old IE 7 because one is still patched and more secure. ... up to date they are not though
"Admins like you need to quit being lazy shits and let go of the moldy dead corpses of outdated software.
"
Do you have any idea what the demands are for being an Admin?
I can tell you I have seen Lan admins fired first hand, by going with the latest greatest software like Novel Netware 5. 1 week later it crashes causing a 6 hour outage while a major client came over and a $12 million deal fell through because the file server to show the documents was down! Ouch ...
(l)user is a term, for our cranky users. If they see a big change like Firefox 4 from Firerox 3, when logging in they will do a double take and go WTF! They will start calling your phone and whinning for you to fix your mistake and making your life hell. (Notice I said yours and not Mozilla's?) May God help you if it is an executive whining about the change who can go 3 levels above you and file a complaint due to this weirdish Foxfire thingie where his options are missing etc .... If you do not get noticed, you keep your job.
It is more customer service than technical.
This is why WindowsXP is still around. I laugh at slashdotters who whine about IE 9, USB 3, or the Kinetix SDK not working in a 10 year old kernel, but that is extreme. It is gradually being replaced as I type this at most fortune 500 companies. But 6 months releases being too old? Get real. Several year old software works well and is not that out of date. If you support users this shit can't break as they blame you and not Ubuntu. One out of 5 users in the US still uses 10 year old operating systems and 1 out of 15 still use the 5 year old IE 7.
Well they deserve what they get which is 0 then.
Good rockstar CEOs and businessman and leaders horde cash too
More likely it is included with their IE 6 homepages from their 8 year old computers.
These people do not like change and no littler how to change things back so they do not mess with things.
"Part of the golden parachute is being a fall guy for things you did not cause.
"
Here is the difference. 25 years ago that was true while the average Joe like ourselves had full job security. We don't anymore! If they want to boost there shareprice $.50 more because they made record revenue, but not meet expectations they will fire our butts out on the curb faster than you can say layoff. ... One difference. We make 300x less money and have mortgages. How is that fair? ... ok 2 differences we get fired too for mistakes someone else did like the CEO or CFO. They keep their jobs and just do cost cutting and do not care about us.
Do you or anyone reading this get a severance package? No. A letter of recommendation if we did good on the job and that is it.
Either we encourage our legislators to write laws banning this or we get severance packages as well to be fair. The fact is no job is secure yet we are still judged by how well we keep up with our 30 year mortgages and our job history and credit rating. CEOs can pay for homes in cash and often another job will pay to buy their previous homes and pay for all moving costs. We do not get that either
"Require a CEO to buy a large chunk of your company. IT's why the people that built the company are always far more successful at running it than some idiot that got his masters in Business Administration, and has connections."
Wrong, the goal is to boast its share price. Icahn wants it sold to boast his income and this was why founder Yang was fired. He wanted it sold for less so the share price would go up and he and Wall Street can get rich. Running a company successfully and profitable is not what is in the best interests to the shareholders in this day and age of micro second evalations and selling and buying.
She didn't sell it to Microsoft so that was a failure as anyone would have given Icahn and the big banks a large amount of money per share.
Well in Kansas City Red Lobster has a Zagots rating of great ... or so I was told.
That is because people who vote there do not know any better or know about quality salt water sea food. They think fried is good and so is the atmosphere of family style.In Boston you would be caught dead seeing Red Lobster rated!
I do agree that it can be manipulated. When I lived in NYC a decade ago I wanted the best Pizzeria in Manhatten. One of them had a great rating but it was TERRIBLE. Just a tiny dirty place that had a regular metal oven and canned pizza sauce etc. However tied to it was a place that invented pizza in 1906 and has a coal fired oven and is 4 generations old and running that is the best I ever had. About the same rating. It is my guess one had fake reviews while the other was genuine.
Overall I had good luck with it but some people rate places like chains too high that drown out the rare gems. I still find it usefull and much better than Yelp.
Oh no only $5 billion how will they afford anything but Top Rameon noodles to the cofounders.
Please ... Ego must be insane in these clowns! If I were offered $25 million ... that is hundres of times less ... I would smile and say yes and retire rich. That is a ton of money. $5 billion is what the Google CEO's are probably really worth if you count their actual revenue rather than Wall Street valuations. Seriously even if they only owned 10% of the company that is $500 million in cash.
I would be happy and use that money for another startup or 4 vaction homes and no more work again in my life. The founders are not worth it one bit. It is just insane what some people think they are getting paid compared to what most people struggling in this economy make as the value they provide.
"... but it's in very poor taste, and heinously unprofessional. Even worse, the fact that they weren't willing to do it in person can make it look like they were trying to hide something,"
Yep
I am sure a employment lawyer would be drooling over this. I do not know how CEOs are treated compared to us, but my guess is you still need to prove why they were fired. Maybe the severance package is a way to shut them up so they wont sue etc. She might get a really big one because of the way she was terminated. The fact that she is a woman could be a case if they can find a single instance of sexual harrasement or porn on someone's computer. Sleazy yes but lawyers getting paid big bucks will find anything.
Maybe it was a bad phone argument in a heated discussion?
I wish you nor I could get something like that other than GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE or please leave immediately.
Here is a secret taught in most business schools.
Most great companies know who they are and do not void in other areas. What is Yahoo? Yahoo was Yang's cool internet links.
10 years ago they were the internet yellowpages with awesome links to cool sites and a huge resource for information. Back then before slashdot I used Yahoo for tech news and reading and discovering computer related things. They had stuff for auto enthusiasts and for many different subjects. You didn't need to search unless it was something very specific. It was a great resource for the undeveloped internet to get around in. A cooler version of AOL for tech grownups. Yahoo search was not too bad either if you needed to find other things. They were THEE portal.
Today the portal SUCKS. It was crippled around 2003/2004 ish. They tried to imitate Google first with focusing users on the search page instead of the portal links and communities. Then No NO we are advertisers put HUGE AD on page. Make Yahoo default homepage!! etc
Yahoo also had a great IM program (back then) and chat rooms and forums before porn spammers bugged you every 3 minutes with private messages and before spyware/malware was installed in the bloated Yahoo IMs of today.
To this day they could make a comeback as no one has replaced them yet as a cool portal for communities, groups, and cool links. Google is mostly minimalistic to find something new and that is it. But like HP and and a skeleton of companies that died before them they tried to focus on the dollars and change who they are until they are a no one. Yahoo could have turned into the facebook with Yahoo 360 and into something that still is a void in the market. Mainly a cool portal for everything you need or want that is managed.
But that is going to be very hard. Ask.com is still around believe it or not but the term Yahoo might as well mean MSN or RealPlayer. They left their roots and focused on cost accounting. They could have bought out Google if they were smart back in 2005 before the IPO. That would have saved them but still. Bad UI designers and wrong focus on ads crippling the portal was their mistake .... and a bad search engine too
SecureDNS has been in the RFC stage for awhile. But guess who is in charge of the DNS servers? The american government. If they became a CA as well they would have immense powers that other countires would not like.
Also DNS cache poisoning attacks could put in fake CA and fingerprints redirecting users to fake bank sites and things of that nature. True you can do that today and man in the middle attacks have been done successfully before but a CA is used as a weapon agaisnt this. I remember 6 to 8 years ago that one site with the correct URL would look funny. I would do a IPconfig /renew all and then the correct site showed up for the url! Most ISPs have better security but still that is an issue that a CA can help with. Now it is one source and would get a fake CA on top of that.