Since Firefox and its addons are mostly written in Javascript, that should contribute to a faster browser. Depending on your definition of "bloat", it might qualify.
For instance on Firefox, I can type Q[tab] and have my comments page up. sl[tab] is slashdot....
On Chrome, s[enter] is Slashdot. What's your point?
I have to type sl[right arrow]/[down arrow][right arrow] to get to my comments page.
Or you could just hit the down arrow a few times...
If I don't add the/, Chrome lists only list two options: slashdot.org and search google for slashdot.org.
Not my Chrome -- how do you have it configured?
The other thing is Nuke Anything, which I can't find anything like it for Chrome.
Well, there's adblock...
Or, for the temporary effect, right-click anything, inspect. From there, you can arbitrarily edit the source of the current page (though mostly as a tree, to keep it sane), including right-click -> delete node.
ISPs seeing how many systems you have running on their network
What's wrong with that? Most ISPs have to visit your house to set something up anyway. Really, what do you care and what do they care?
If you're that paranoid, you can do NAT, and obfuscate your headers, and deny all cookies, and block software updates (or distribute them locally), etc, etc, and make it absolutely certain your ISP can't tell how many computers you have -- they can just tell everything you do on the Internet with a vast amount of precision.
Worst case, they try to charge extra for plugging in too many computers, and people respond by plugging their old Linksys routers in.
no more "hardware firewall" that I can see.
Erm, what? Sure you can. Firewall != NAT -- there's no reason you can't build an ipv6 firewall.
The logic in fact seems to be nothing but a really big switched network.
Even if that were true -- and it's not (hint: ipv4 has routers that aren't NAT routers, learn something about subnetting) -- it's entirely possible to build a firewall into a bridge, also, even if it's easier to do with a router.
There is just no reason to run IPv6 on an internal network...
As long as it's "internal", sure. One reason might be to give each machine on that network a real IP (instead of NAT), and having your firewall be just that -- a firewall.
the providers would need to invest in bandwidth tracking
Oh, they have. How else would they implement those monthly caps? Or, before that, how would Comcast have been able to consistently find and ban their top bandwidth hogs for violating an imaginary cap?
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has wrestled with sales/customer service reps to get money refunded for one cock up or another.
"Better Business Bureau" are the magic words.
Is metered bandwidth better for providers? For consumers?
Yes.
I guess it comes down to rates,
Well, yes, but metered bandwidth is better for two reasons: It makes consumers conscious of how much bandwidth they're wasting (and thus put some effort into limiting it), and it means at least we know what we're getting.
there will be outcry for Federal subsidy for a net meter in every home.
Ok, first off, why would you place that in every home, where it can be easily tampered with? Especially in the case of fiber, wouldn't it be easier to have the meter be at the ISP?
And second, how expensive is this, really? At least some "modems" have taken on the responsibilities of being a NAT router, if not also a wireless router. Most off-the-shelf Linksys routers have QoS and such built in. How hard would it be to add instrumentation to these? It'd be a firmware patch at worst, I'd think.
DSL gives a dedicated phone line for every home, where cable has a shared line (broadcast to everyone). So if the kid next door starts downloading a Bluray, that will slow your cable internet too.
However, both ultimately share one or two lines upstream to eventually connect with a backbone -- so it might take more, but if enough of your neighbors are torrenting, that certainly can affect your DSL.
I know I've always had 7Mbit/s DSL just as advertised, without any slowdown.
It's been pretty reliable for me -- but then, so has fiber. Both situations are fairly unusual -- it seems like in most of the country, they oversell their upstream bandwidth, also.
For xDSL technologies, it depends on your phone line (which the ISP can't predict obviously).
As DragonWriter points out, it may not be so "obvious" that the ISP can't predict it. Even if that's true, however, is the issue with your lines, or with them overselling and under-delivering?
For technologies where you aren't spectrum sharing (e.g. FTTN/FTTH fibre deployments), they generally won't be advertised as 'up to'. You should attain the maximum speed on fibre (to a local, fast host at least - obviously if things are slow beyond your ISP's network then no amount of fibre is going to help that).
And, more importantly, do they have enough upstream bandwidth to handle their fiber users wanting that full speed to a remote, fast host? It is cool having essentially LAN speeds within my small town in Iowa, but that's not really the point of getting fiber.
If I just ask people, I'm going to get "Yeah, my Internet is fast" or "My internet is slow", and what they really mean is "I downloaded BonziBuddy and now my whole computer is slow, but I still blame Comcast."
The only real alternative is likely going to be actually subscribing to each in turn and running some tests myself, which would be obnoxious in one area. The quality of ISP is a serious consideration when I look for a place to live, so how, exactly, should I do that across the country?
All of which it'd be really nice to know. But where can I get that information?
if you aren't used to that in advertising you are being willfully blind.
Being used to it doesn't mean I should tolerate it.
But you see, there are other industries where the actual specs are available, so I can actually make a comparison. I could compare model numbers of CPUs, which would be fairly stupid -- but I could also compare clock speed, cache size, wattage, etc, all of which are trivial to find, generally right there on the page that's trying to sell it to me.
You don't compare products by their advertising, but by unbiased reviews,
With better-behaved industries, like (surprisingly) computer hardware, I can also compare them by specs. That's my point -- if "up to" is meaningless, is there a spec anywhere that I can compare?
The fiber only covers the last mile -- they could just as easily oversell the same upstream connection that they oversell with Cable, DSL, and everything else.
Then Pat Robertson is all like "OMG IMMORTALITY YOU MORONS" and I was like "GIVE THAT MAN SOME MONEY".
Seriously, do you have that reaction to everyone who asks for money in exchange for immortality?
But here's the problem:
It seems like an attractive (albeit unproven) theory that our DNA determines the approximate construction of the human brain...
Actually, the article rips it to shreds. Not only is it not a theory, it's not even a decent hypothesis, and it's known to be untrue. As you say:
they do not know how the DNA itself really works, much less how it fits together to produce a working brain.
That's not quite right -- we do understand how DNA works, we just don't understand the details of things like protein folding, and how the pieces the DNA suggests actually fit together.
I'm not an engineer, so take this with a grain of salt...
They don't look terribly different than, say, a radio tower -- relatively straight, narrow, and tall, with cables coming off of them to stabilize them.
But I'm not sure how to deal with the arms -- give them six arms, and it becomes nightmare fuel.
Anyone else chuckled after reading the name Charles Nutter?
I did, but for a different reason -- he's a core developer of JRuby. I saw him demo some very cool JRuby-on-Android things this summer. If he's crazy, it's the good kind of crazy.
"civil disobedience" isn't the same as "doing it and not getting caught".
Oh, I agree...
In the original sense, "civil disobedience" means breaking the law in public, daring the police to arrest you / civil lawsuits to fly, and using the obvious injustice of the response to inflame the public against the bad law.
I suspect the public is too lazy for that to really work, but I'm also too lazy to make a huge public show of it. However, I make no secret about the fact that, for instance, I crack DVD copy protection, because my only other options are to boot Windows just to watch a DVD, or revert to an absurdly old version of Ubuntu that I got from Dell which (I think) came with legal copies of the relevant codecs and an approved player.
In other words, I'm not marching the capital steps with a movie playing on my laptop, but if anyone asks if I'm doing this, I'll say yes, and I'll give them an earful about how stupid it is that it's illegal to do so.
DeCSS in your.signature is civil disobedience,
That's actually a tempting thought. I don't use signatures at the moment, but maybe I'll do that. I might also wear it on a shirt...
But if I actually want to compare what I'm doing to civil disobedience, I'd identify a lot more with Rosa Parks than with Martin Luther King. I'm not making impassioned speeches on the streets of Washington, at least, not yet. But I'm also not giving up my seat on the bus.
we don't know if it doesn't include more stuff, like things that would be bad for privacy (but good for Google).
However, the fact that most of the code is open means we have a lot more insight into how it works, meaning if anyone wanted to reverse engineer it, it'd likely be a lot easier than, say, IE.
Also, if you look at the other things Google has released, very rarely do you find them using this pattern. It seems far more common that they either don't let you download anything, or they offer full source under a reasonable license. The "official story", boring as it is, makes sense.
if you live in the USA, isn't it a bit of a problem that your chosen media codec solution involves deliberate lawbreaking?
It is -- so I call it civil disobedience.
Except it doesn't require lawbreaking. I have a copy of Windows 7, which includes an h.264 decoder. I have an nVidia video card, which includes a hardware h.264 decoder, and a Linux driver for it. Both of these are bought and paid for, including all licensing fees.
So, if Firefox just used what my OS already had available -- if it just hooked into GStreamer, DirectShow, CoreVideo, etc -- it would Just Work, and it would be entirely legal. They refuse to do this.
if you're going to do that, shouldn't you also be willing to undergo mass arrests and trials?
Not without a fight -- indeed, jailbreaking is now legal, and no one had to go to trial over it.
Or you could just avoid using the broken patented technology.
What's broken about it? It's technically superior -- it's the legal situation that's broken.
Regarding Flash cookies, well, the simple/paranoid approach is to not install Flash, or any third-party proprietary plugin, without good reason.
Then fuck 'em. Visitors using those browsers can get the old Flash version.
That's not "fuck 'em", that's "oh shit, now we really do need to keep two versions around."
YouTube is big enough that they can dictate the terms here.
And yet, even you don't seem to be suggesting they can -- you're suggesting YouTube spend huge amounts on disk space, bandwidth, CDNs, etc, to keep both the old Flash version and the new HTML5 version, when they could just keep the old Flash version.
Not that this would necessarily stop them -- they do host a few WebM videos, as I said -- but you seem to be saying that they have no good reason not to do this.
But let's consider what would happen if they actually did try to dictate terms. Seems to me, they'd instantly lose the people who are "not technical" enough to install a new browser, and these are likely the same people who never try to use a higher-quality version, or can't (not enough bandwidth) yet don't realize they need more bandwidth.
In other words, the same people the low quality version is meant for would be the people least likely to have anything capable of HTML5 at all, let alone something which will play Theora in HTML5.
Web sites don't prominently display their data collection activities.
Many have "privacy policies" -- how prominent would be prominent enough?
Most people are not technical
Yes, and whose fault is that? The information they would need is readily available. Alternatives exist.
Maybe I'm being insensitive here, but I'm really sick of the meme that otherwise intelligent people should immediately be assumed to be drooling morons as soon as they're confronted with a computer -- that they need to be protected from themselves. The entire antivirus market currently thrives on this assumption, when the single best way to avoid a virus is to avoid downloading random crap.
Most people are not technical, but most people are not automotive engineers, yet most people manage to avoid driving their cars into trees.
Clearly, the implication here is that most people don't care about security or privacy, at least not enough to educate themselves about the basics -- because, frankly, most people are entirely capable of being at least technical enough to be secure and private.
Personally, I don't care much about privacy -- the few things I am private about, I do take measures to keep private, but it would also not be terribly devastating if the whole world knew. I do care that it should be possible to be private, because I do feel that's a fundamental right -- but it is possible.
The Big Brother comparison is in regards to the scope of information collecting.
Even here, it fails -- I don't have to sneak off into the woods to avoid surveillance, nor is there a hidden camera in a bed and breakfast, recording my illicit affair.
As for the transcoding, they already do it now to serve lower quality videos.
Yes, but only a single version at each quality level, to reach customers they might otherwise not be able to (slower connections).
HTML5 and the video tag is new. There's no reason that new browsers which support it shouldn't be able to display Theora.
I doubt IE will. I know Safari won't -- FUD or not, Apple refuses to touch anything their lawyers haven't told them is OK, patent-wise.
And with that, YouTube loses most of the Internet-browsing population, unless they can convince everyone to install a plugin -- which isn't viable on, say, the iPad, where even if Apple were to allow such a plugin, it wouldn't have a hardware decoder to use.
This would be especially ironic, considering Apple is one of the main reasons people are actually implementing HTML5 video -- to reach iPhone and iPad, where they can't run Flash.
Slashdot Mirror
Natural predators can become zombies, too. Then where will your living natural predators be, hmm?
Unless there are suddenly so many zombies that they're overwhelmed, those natural predators have other natural predators.
Making them deader by drying them out isn't going to affect them.... Dead is even more inert than frozen...
Then why should making them deader with a shotgun or a chainsaw affect them?
Biting works for rattlesnakes, black widow spiders, rabid dogs, and yucky girls with cooties...
No, it really doesn't -- RTFA. Biting works for rabid dogs, but it's far from an apocalyptic scenario.
There are zillions of them.
This article is about the beginning, so unless there are "zillions" on day 1...
Damage to one leaves another undamaged.
And if each of those zillions are walking into walls all the time?
You can run. You can hide.
Point isn't whether you can hide, it's whether there can be zillions of zombies wandering around.
Unless you plan to make bullets out of zombie finger bones, you're going to run out of bullets before you run out of zombies.
And baseball bats, grenades, molotov cocktails, nukes?
Since Firefox and its addons are mostly written in Javascript, that should contribute to a faster browser. Depending on your definition of "bloat", it might qualify.
why does the browser not allow Javascript to access lower level system resources (such as drawing routines)
HTML5 Canvas?
But there are decided advantages for not doing everything that way.
Any examples of pages which scroll that badly? I honestly haven't run into this problem.
For instance on Firefox, I can type Q[tab] and have my comments page up. sl[tab] is slashdot....
On Chrome, s[enter] is Slashdot. What's your point?
I have to type sl[right arrow]/[down arrow][right arrow] to get to my comments page.
Or you could just hit the down arrow a few times...
If I don't add the /, Chrome lists only list two options: slashdot.org and search google for slashdot.org.
Not my Chrome -- how do you have it configured?
The other thing is Nuke Anything, which I can't find anything like it for Chrome.
Well, there's adblock...
Or, for the temporary effect, right-click anything, inspect. From there, you can arbitrarily edit the source of the current page (though mostly as a tree, to keep it sane), including right-click -> delete node.
ISPs seeing how many systems you have running on their network
What's wrong with that? Most ISPs have to visit your house to set something up anyway. Really, what do you care and what do they care?
If you're that paranoid, you can do NAT, and obfuscate your headers, and deny all cookies, and block software updates (or distribute them locally), etc, etc, and make it absolutely certain your ISP can't tell how many computers you have -- they can just tell everything you do on the Internet with a vast amount of precision.
Worst case, they try to charge extra for plugging in too many computers, and people respond by plugging their old Linksys routers in.
no more "hardware firewall" that I can see.
Erm, what? Sure you can. Firewall != NAT -- there's no reason you can't build an ipv6 firewall.
The logic in fact seems to be nothing but a really big switched network.
Even if that were true -- and it's not (hint: ipv4 has routers that aren't NAT routers, learn something about subnetting) -- it's entirely possible to build a firewall into a bridge, also, even if it's easier to do with a router.
There is just no reason to run IPv6 on an internal network...
As long as it's "internal", sure. One reason might be to give each machine on that network a real IP (instead of NAT), and having your firewall be just that -- a firewall.
the providers would need to invest in bandwidth tracking
Oh, they have. How else would they implement those monthly caps? Or, before that, how would Comcast have been able to consistently find and ban their top bandwidth hogs for violating an imaginary cap?
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has wrestled with sales/customer service reps to get money refunded for one cock up or another.
"Better Business Bureau" are the magic words.
Is metered bandwidth better for providers? For consumers?
Yes.
I guess it comes down to rates,
Well, yes, but metered bandwidth is better for two reasons: It makes consumers conscious of how much bandwidth they're wasting (and thus put some effort into limiting it), and it means at least we know what we're getting.
there will be outcry for Federal subsidy for a net meter in every home.
Ok, first off, why would you place that in every home, where it can be easily tampered with? Especially in the case of fiber, wouldn't it be easier to have the meter be at the ISP?
And second, how expensive is this, really? At least some "modems" have taken on the responsibilities of being a NAT router, if not also a wireless router. Most off-the-shelf Linksys routers have QoS and such built in. How hard would it be to add instrumentation to these? It'd be a firmware patch at worst, I'd think.
DSL gives a dedicated phone line for every home, where cable has a shared line (broadcast to everyone). So if the kid next door starts downloading a Bluray, that will slow your cable internet too.
However, both ultimately share one or two lines upstream to eventually connect with a backbone -- so it might take more, but if enough of your neighbors are torrenting, that certainly can affect your DSL.
I know I've always had 7Mbit/s DSL just as advertised, without any slowdown.
It's been pretty reliable for me -- but then, so has fiber. Both situations are fairly unusual -- it seems like in most of the country, they oversell their upstream bandwidth, also.
For xDSL technologies, it depends on your phone line (which the ISP can't predict obviously).
As DragonWriter points out, it may not be so "obvious" that the ISP can't predict it. Even if that's true, however, is the issue with your lines, or with them overselling and under-delivering?
For technologies where you aren't spectrum sharing (e.g. FTTN/FTTH fibre deployments), they generally won't be advertised as 'up to'. You should attain the maximum speed on fibre (to a local, fast host at least - obviously if things are slow beyond your ISP's network then no amount of fibre is going to help that).
And, more importantly, do they have enough upstream bandwidth to handle their fiber users wanting that full speed to a remote, fast host? It is cool having essentially LAN speeds within my small town in Iowa, but that's not really the point of getting fiber.
And what do you mean by "research"?
If I just ask people, I'm going to get "Yeah, my Internet is fast" or "My internet is slow", and what they really mean is "I downloaded BonziBuddy and now my whole computer is slow, but I still blame Comcast."
The only real alternative is likely going to be actually subscribing to each in turn and running some tests myself, which would be obnoxious in one area. The quality of ISP is a serious consideration when I look for a place to live, so how, exactly, should I do that across the country?
latency, peering, uptime, etc.
All of which it'd be really nice to know. But where can I get that information?
if you aren't used to that in advertising you are being willfully blind.
Being used to it doesn't mean I should tolerate it.
But you see, there are other industries where the actual specs are available, so I can actually make a comparison. I could compare model numbers of CPUs, which would be fairly stupid -- but I could also compare clock speed, cache size, wattage, etc, all of which are trivial to find, generally right there on the page that's trying to sell it to me.
You don't compare products by their advertising, but by unbiased reviews,
With better-behaved industries, like (surprisingly) computer hardware, I can also compare them by specs. That's my point -- if "up to" is meaningless, is there a spec anywhere that I can compare?
The fiber only covers the last mile -- they could just as easily oversell the same upstream connection that they oversell with Cable, DSL, and everything else.
And how do we compare plans? If one ISP has "up to" 10 mbits, and another has "up to" 20 mbits, which one is faster?
Not lying, but not in any way honest.
You'd think that'd be a mutually beneficial arrangement of the sort that would make Adam Smith proud...
But no, it seems they want to keep my money and their bandwidth, so fuck 'em.
Well, it is being applied -- think of what the children might be up to, or who might be taking advantage of them, when we're not looking?
It's basically a profound lack of ability to perceive irony...
Then Pat Robertson is all like "OMG IMMORTALITY YOU MORONS" and I was like "GIVE THAT MAN SOME MONEY".
Seriously, do you have that reaction to everyone who asks for money in exchange for immortality?
But here's the problem:
It seems like an attractive (albeit unproven) theory that our DNA determines the approximate construction of the human brain...
Actually, the article rips it to shreds. Not only is it not a theory, it's not even a decent hypothesis, and it's known to be untrue. As you say:
they do not know how the DNA itself really works, much less how it fits together to produce a working brain.
That's not quite right -- we do understand how DNA works, we just don't understand the details of things like protein folding, and how the pieces the DNA suggests actually fit together.
I'm not an engineer, so take this with a grain of salt...
They don't look terribly different than, say, a radio tower -- relatively straight, narrow, and tall, with cables coming off of them to stabilize them.
But I'm not sure how to deal with the arms -- give them six arms, and it becomes nightmare fuel.
Anyone else chuckled after reading the name Charles Nutter?
I did, but for a different reason -- he's a core developer of JRuby. I saw him demo some very cool JRuby-on-Android things this summer. If he's crazy, it's the good kind of crazy.
"civil disobedience" isn't the same as "doing it and not getting caught".
Oh, I agree...
In the original sense, "civil disobedience" means breaking the law in public, daring the police to arrest you / civil lawsuits to fly, and using the obvious injustice of the response to inflame the public against the bad law.
I suspect the public is too lazy for that to really work, but I'm also too lazy to make a huge public show of it. However, I make no secret about the fact that, for instance, I crack DVD copy protection, because my only other options are to boot Windows just to watch a DVD, or revert to an absurdly old version of Ubuntu that I got from Dell which (I think) came with legal copies of the relevant codecs and an approved player.
In other words, I'm not marching the capital steps with a movie playing on my laptop, but if anyone asks if I'm doing this, I'll say yes, and I'll give them an earful about how stupid it is that it's illegal to do so.
DeCSS in your .signature is civil disobedience,
That's actually a tempting thought. I don't use signatures at the moment, but maybe I'll do that. I might also wear it on a shirt...
But if I actually want to compare what I'm doing to civil disobedience, I'd identify a lot more with Rosa Parks than with Martin Luther King. I'm not making impassioned speeches on the streets of Washington, at least, not yet. But I'm also not giving up my seat on the bus.
we don't know if it doesn't include more stuff, like things that would be bad for privacy (but good for Google).
However, the fact that most of the code is open means we have a lot more insight into how it works, meaning if anyone wanted to reverse engineer it, it'd likely be a lot easier than, say, IE.
Also, if you look at the other things Google has released, very rarely do you find them using this pattern. It seems far more common that they either don't let you download anything, or they offer full source under a reasonable license. The "official story", boring as it is, makes sense.
if you live in the USA, isn't it a bit of a problem that your chosen media codec solution involves deliberate lawbreaking?
It is -- so I call it civil disobedience.
Except it doesn't require lawbreaking. I have a copy of Windows 7, which includes an h.264 decoder. I have an nVidia video card, which includes a hardware h.264 decoder, and a Linux driver for it. Both of these are bought and paid for, including all licensing fees.
So, if Firefox just used what my OS already had available -- if it just hooked into GStreamer, DirectShow, CoreVideo, etc -- it would Just Work, and it would be entirely legal. They refuse to do this.
if you're going to do that, shouldn't you also be willing to undergo mass arrests and trials?
Not without a fight -- indeed, jailbreaking is now legal, and no one had to go to trial over it.
Or you could just avoid using the broken patented technology.
What's broken about it? It's technically superior -- it's the legal situation that's broken.
You think people should have to walk around wearing disguises instead of having a reasonable expectation of privacy.
And where did I say that?
It's as if every business you visited in public decided to identify you and report your whereabouts to a central party.
Do you use a credit card? They do.
Expecting the average citizen to keep up in a technological arms race...
Not particularly -- pick a few reputable sources and follow them.
Regarding Flash cookies, well, the simple/paranoid approach is to not install Flash, or any third-party proprietary plugin, without good reason.
Then fuck 'em. Visitors using those browsers can get the old Flash version.
That's not "fuck 'em", that's "oh shit, now we really do need to keep two versions around."
YouTube is big enough that they can dictate the terms here.
And yet, even you don't seem to be suggesting they can -- you're suggesting YouTube spend huge amounts on disk space, bandwidth, CDNs, etc, to keep both the old Flash version and the new HTML5 version, when they could just keep the old Flash version.
Not that this would necessarily stop them -- they do host a few WebM videos, as I said -- but you seem to be saying that they have no good reason not to do this.
But let's consider what would happen if they actually did try to dictate terms. Seems to me, they'd instantly lose the people who are "not technical" enough to install a new browser, and these are likely the same people who never try to use a higher-quality version, or can't (not enough bandwidth) yet don't realize they need more bandwidth.
In other words, the same people the low quality version is meant for would be the people least likely to have anything capable of HTML5 at all, let alone something which will play Theora in HTML5.
Web sites don't prominently display their data collection activities.
Many have "privacy policies" -- how prominent would be prominent enough?
Most people are not technical
Yes, and whose fault is that? The information they would need is readily available. Alternatives exist.
Maybe I'm being insensitive here, but I'm really sick of the meme that otherwise intelligent people should immediately be assumed to be drooling morons as soon as they're confronted with a computer -- that they need to be protected from themselves. The entire antivirus market currently thrives on this assumption, when the single best way to avoid a virus is to avoid downloading random crap.
Most people are not technical, but most people are not automotive engineers, yet most people manage to avoid driving their cars into trees.
Clearly, the implication here is that most people don't care about security or privacy, at least not enough to educate themselves about the basics -- because, frankly, most people are entirely capable of being at least technical enough to be secure and private.
Personally, I don't care much about privacy -- the few things I am private about, I do take measures to keep private, but it would also not be terribly devastating if the whole world knew. I do care that it should be possible to be private, because I do feel that's a fundamental right -- but it is possible.
The Big Brother comparison is in regards to the scope of information collecting.
Even here, it fails -- I don't have to sneak off into the woods to avoid surveillance, nor is there a hidden camera in a bed and breakfast, recording my illicit affair.
As for the transcoding, they already do it now to serve lower quality videos.
Yes, but only a single version at each quality level, to reach customers they might otherwise not be able to (slower connections).
HTML5 and the video tag is new. There's no reason that new browsers which support it shouldn't be able to display Theora.
I doubt IE will. I know Safari won't -- FUD or not, Apple refuses to touch anything their lawyers haven't told them is OK, patent-wise.
And with that, YouTube loses most of the Internet-browsing population, unless they can convince everyone to install a plugin -- which isn't viable on, say, the iPad, where even if Apple were to allow such a plugin, it wouldn't have a hardware decoder to use.
This would be especially ironic, considering Apple is one of the main reasons people are actually implementing HTML5 video -- to reach iPhone and iPad, where they can't run Flash.