Even if I have a firm belief, I always remember that my own opinion may be based upon faulty logic, conclusions, observations and other factors of human error. I'm actually looking for opinions that DISPROVE my conclusion and consider whether my argument would still stand in light of the new perspective/fact/etc.
Clearly, man, you've, um, lost control. Seek help immediately!
Defense costs will not change. They will still be high as long as we have lawyers. Still need the ability to get the patent.
No, you're confused. There are four possible cases:
obtaining and defending are affordable. Patent is worthwhile.
obtaining is affordable, defending is not: Can't defend. Patent is worthless.
obtaining is not affordable, defending is: Can't obtain. Patent is worthless.
obtaining is not affordable, defending is not either. Can't do anything. Patent is worthless.
Look into the costs as they stand now. You'll soon realize that only someone with very deep pockets (and that includes large corporations, of course) presently fits into category #1. So until #1 is the default condition for any person with a legitimately patentable idea, the system is unfair based on the inventor's resources rather than when he invented, or when he filed. This of course ignores the unfairness of two or more people who independently invent. But the point is, the system cannot even do what it says it is supposed to do (protect those who are first to invent, or file if these changes go through) as long as the costs are allowed to set the limits for who can play the game for either obtaining or defending.
I suspect there is an entire world of things out there you've never thought of. And public, unsecured networks intended for everyone's use are quite common -- and my ISP, a co-op BTW, is just fine with that. I'm in a hotel right now, using what? An open, unsecured network. I was at a coffee shop yesterday doing the same thing (City Brew.) So can the whole silly "you should be held liable" nonsense. No one with an IQ above room temperature should be spouting such poorly thought-out dreck.
There are problems a-plenty with this whole "require everyone to lock the doors" idea. First, we have a technology problem. With a linux laptop and a couple of readily available utilities, I can get into your "secure" network. Quickly and easily. So you can "protect" it all you want, and still, you're not actually protected. IOW, locks are for honest people.
Second, the idea that securing networks - if you could really secure them, which you can't - would stop access of porn (or anything else) is blatantly false. What you end up with then is (somewhat) secure access to porn (and anything else.) Encrypting a network (especially when done very poorly, as wireless is) in no way controls what type of data passes over it - the very idea is silly. So what actually happens is some dimwit in Washington (such as congress's head Internet guy, Ted "Tubes" Stevens) decides that now that your networks have to be "secure", it makes "sense" that you should be held liable for things other people might transfer over your network.
Third, the idea that information censorship of public data on public networks is OK is the fruit of a diseased mind. In the case of child porn or snuff, for instance, it is 100% sufficient that making the photos is illegal. Bump the penalty up to death (please!) but don't make laws where people can be made victims of those laws because some photo they probably are appalled by suddenly appeared in their mailbox.
In an ideal world, you'd just be held liable for being too stupid to secure your access point.
In an ideal world, you'd have your stupid ideas on a cardboard sign and be shouting them from a street corner.
I run an open, free, isolated wireless network specifically for the convenience of others. What the hell business is it of yours if it is open, other than if you want to use it? How about, you look at your instincts to regulate other people's choices of sharing resources and realize they are the cries of our worst enemy, the mommy-government proponent?
Man I am sick and tired of people who think its OK to force others to do what they think is right in areas where no harm is being done to anyone else.
Why don't you admit that the government is operating outside its constitutionally derived authority, and that such operation represents` major problems we need to fix? No matter what your reasoning, if you can't present a cogent case for it, you're going to be ignored and relegated to the ranks of the confused.
Will you say "absurd" if I take the time to lay out the major constitutional violations that are currently ongoing? Will you say "absurd" if I show, right here, that all that underlies legislation which is unconstitutional, is coercion, the 100% illegitimate use of force by government? If "absurd" is all you have to rebut with, then you have nothing. Which in turn means your blind faith in the government is misplaced.
You think you have the facts and figures to take down my position? Let fly. Otherwise, we both know who is being "absurd." That'd be you.
If only that were the case. Patents are the least of pharma's issues. Liability is the number one reason that new drugs are not being developed or released. There is a whole industry of class action lawyers constantly searching for the next company to attack, and a drug's purported side effect can result in jury-awarded damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
So... which part of "just take most of the damned legislation and regulation off pharma companies, and they'd be fine" did you not understand? I mean come on, you even quoted me!
A: Oh. I guess my neighbor is nothing to worry about, then.
See the problem with your reasoning now? Our government is corrupt, operating outside the bounds of its constituting authority, and no pointing fingers at other countries can make that OK. The only thing that will make it OK is to curb the illicit behavior.
It is nice that it is file first, but the costs have to be low enough that plain folks can file. Otherwise, it is the larger and richer ppl who win out.
It has nothing to do with the cost of filing. It is the cost of defense that you should be concerned about. Compared to that, the cost of filing is nothing.
I smell large amounts of money, and am wondering which person in Washington D.C. suddenly has a huge wad of cash to spend.
It isn't just money, you know. It is the promise of jobs after government employment. Low-rate loans. "Speaking" engagements. Lecture tours. Book deals. Boats. Houses. Sex. Vacations, junkets and "fact-finding" missions. Access to people in power. Tips - market and otherwise. All manner of free dinners and drinks. Power for its own sake. Oh, and of course - money.
There is no more corrosive environment than a political position in Washington DC. It's a wonder our representatives don't outright grow horns the first day on the job. Sadly, a 100% corrupt person looks just like one that isn't.
Why don't they do something useful like void software and business method patents while they're at it?
They never do anything useful, you silly person. They're the federal government. They're operating largely outside the bounds of the constitution and their primary foci are to (a) consolidate power, and (b) accrue money and distribute it to the power holders. See their current "interpretation" of the commerce clause for details. I'll give you a capsule: The constitution says the feds can govern INTERstate commerce. The feds say that means they can govern INTRAstate commerce. See how that works? Black is white, white is black, and your complaints are double-plus ungood. Now go back to sleep like a good citizen.
It's more when two inventors develops something novel at the same time. Who gets the patent? First to invent - or first to file?
It has never been first to invent anyway -- that's just a red herring. The entire question is, who has the money to defend the patent in court. Because if you don't, the odds are, you're going to lose it as soon as someone wants it. It's a corporate favoritism scam. It's always been a scam. It's not just a scam because of this, either. If we both invent something, you might take ten times the resources that I did, going about it methodically, where I might just stumble into it... an idea, a test, and viola! Your efforts are 100% wasted, even though you invented it just as legitimately as I did. Further, some wag down the line doesn't know about our work, and a year later, he invents it too. Boy, has he got a nasty surprise waiting for him. For all of these reasons, and more, the patent system is one that mainly spreads disadvantage. The underlying idea is false too - the idea that "we need to be encouraged." Tell that to the OO authors, the Gimp authors, to all the inventors and authors without patents. We don't need encouragement. We just need to be left alone!
As far as I'm concerned, the only legitimate use of an idea is to turn it into a product or use it to make more ideas. You can make money by selling just the idea now, because patents create artificial scarcity. Better if you sold something made from your idea, or just published for everyone's benefit. And before the pharma trolls come out of the woodwork, just take most of the damned legislation and regulation off pharma companies, and they'd be fine. We'd get new drugs at a much higher rate, and yes, just as happens now, sometimes there would be problems, despite testing.
If keeping an idea secret long enough to get it out on the market isn't enough to make you a decent profit with the aid of marketing... then maybe you should be flipping burgers and let the real entrepreneurs get to work.
Reminds me of conversations I had with a mate in the navy
So, how long had you been mating? Or... er, you mean like a 1st mate or a boatswain's mate, a rank? Um... or did you mean like an English person's friend (which I guess doesn't rule out the 1st meaning)... what the hell did you mean?
Ok, I know this is tough, but go back, actually READ my post. Look for this: "Get licensed. Practice. Carry." I don't advocate carrying unless you train. I've said this over and over again. So grab that strawman, stuff it under your arm, and go home.
I just think some of the arguments about guns for self defense in a 9am german class in buttfuck virginia are pretty silly.
Yes. So did the administration of the school. Now the kids are dead. Consequently, I think your arguments are pretty silly.
And of course part of, "A well regulated militia" I am sure you just forgot that part.
No, I didn't forget it, I simply understand it, and you don't. Would you like to understand it? Here, read what the US Court of Appeals has to say. Isn't it fascinating?
You've never read the Second Amendment, have you, dear child?
I am quite familiar with it.
You see, the first clause...
Ok, here we go with the argument from the prefatory clause, ignoring the operative clause. Rather than debunk your position myself, I'll let the United States Court of Appeals do it for me. Suffice it to say that your argument begins to fail with your misunderstanding of what the authors of the 2nd amendment meant when they wrote "milita", and that I concur with the majority opinion.
As for self-defense, any competent self-defense instructor will tell you that facing an armed opponent who has the drop on you is foolish.
Look at the URL at the top of my posts. Do you think that might be a hint as to my bonafides? I've been teaching martial arts for many years. And your contrivance isn't what we're talking about here. We're talking about one armed person - with pistols - facing over thirty people, and as a reasonably competent instructor, my input is, if everyone can shoot back, a lot fewer people will be likely to die, but one of them will almost certainly be the perp. Therefore, my input is also that everyone should be trained and armed.
I'm not sure if I could kill a man -- and I challenge you to prove that you are capable of doing the same. None of us will ever know unless we're put in that situation, and Odin willing, none of us ever will be.
As for killing, I spent a while (two tours) in Viet Nam doing exactly that. It wasn't pleasant, but then again, it beat hell out of being killed, and having (more of) my friends killed. As should be obvious even to someone like yourself, if less than 30 of these kids had died, the outcome would have been better by the only metric that counts. Finally, these kids were put in that situation, and like almost everyone, they would likely find that when the choice comes down to letting the perp kill the kid next to you or shooting him now, it's not all that tough a decision. It is one hell of a lot harder to reconcile the idea that you didn't act when you could have. Of course, these kids never had that opportunity: because the law and the school rules ensured that they were unarmed victims.
Once again, the movies/tv shows have lead the way to developing new technology!
No. Once again, science fiction writers far predating TV shows and movies such as EE "Doc" Smith and his many predecessors, peers and those that followed led the way, and TV lamely followed. But that's OK. You go back to watching TV. Books might make your head hurt. Full of words, they are. Very annoying. And that whole "theater of the mind" thing... I mean, what if you blow a projector bulb in your cerebrum?
Real is spectacular. These silicone-stuffed ladies are operating under entirely false pretenses. if silicone is what you like, buy a RealDoll. Guaranteed less expensive than the real thing over time, and those breasts are just what you want.
Look, Einstein attracts kooks. Bush attracts kooks. Actors attract kooks. The local street corner attracts kooks. I attract kooks (just check my posting history.) Basically, if you have somewhere to stand and you say something definitive, you're going to attract kooks. Its 100% irrelevant that Tesla attracts kooks. Remember the man for what he did for us and what he tried to do for us (a great deal), ignore the kooks, difficult as that may be (again, check my posting history) and get on with your life. Go read something about Tesla. Margaret Cheney's "Tesla: Man out of time" is a great read, and a real eye-opener for those who don't know much about the man.
You had a real number? Hell, we only had an integer, and it was a short, and every time we wanted to use it, we had to assemble it out of bits. And then there were fights over the signed and unsigned bits; why, when we wanted to divide or multiply, we had to work in shifts! We had to factor uphill, both ways, and our buckets overflowed constantly. You'd try to carry, and you'd end up with a half-carry, and the supervisor didn't like that, no sir. Real numbers. Bah. That won't float around here.
All of that may have various degrees of truth to it, but you're being quite unfair by not mentioning that another key factor was that the things Tesla actually accomplished and demonstrated, many of which have found their way into our current common base of technology, were quite spectacular in terms of utility, innovation, and being leading edge for the time.
Many researchers, academic and independent, spend their entire lives trying to come up with just one useful idea. Tesla produced them regularly and dependably.
I often wonder what Tesla would have come up with if he was living and working in our current technological / scientific environment. In my view, the man seemed to think so far "out of the box" that you couldn't even find the box from where he was.
I test my web pages for correct display in Opera, Firefox, IE, Safari, Camino, Mozilla, and OmniWeb. I usually work with my Macbook Pro laptop, upon which I run OSX, Linux, and XP (these last two virtualized under Parallels — Bootcamp is useless to me because it only allows running one OS at a time.) I keep Firefox on the XP and Linux operating systems and it does a very good job there, giving me something serious to use under Linux if need be, and saving XP from its innate vulnerability to malware.
Most of my browsing is done under OSX / OmniWeb though, for the simple reason that I spend most of my time there.
Since this thread began, I've been thinking about what really draws me to OmniWeb and I think its pretty safe to say that of all the features, the scalable, always-there visuals that the tabs provide are reason #1, and the site-by-site preferences #2. The built-in spelling checker for CGI text fields (conspicuously missing from the OSX Firefox builds I've looked at in the past), an easily implemented OSX feature, lands at #3. I'm a lot more prone to typos than I am actual spelling errors, but the end result is the same, a poorer presentation of what I'm trying to say... so a high powered and convenient as-you-type spelling checker will always count for a lot with me.
Sure. I have absolutely no resistance to paying for software (especially $15 software) that offers me something I will actually use. I like Firefox, and Safari is OK if a bit dull, but frankly, OmniWeb has a far superior tab model for the way I work and think, as well as other built-in capabilities I don't have to go and hunt down. It just works, and better yet, it just works the way I like it to work.
I have OmniOutliner too — truly great software. Worth every penny.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly, man, you've, um, lost control. Seek help immediately!
This cry for civility from the same person who said "In an ideal world, you'd just be held liable for being too stupid to secure your access point"?
No, you're confused. There are four possible cases:
Look into the costs as they stand now. You'll soon realize that only someone with very deep pockets (and that includes large corporations, of course) presently fits into category #1. So until #1 is the default condition for any person with a legitimately patentable idea, the system is unfair based on the inventor's resources rather than when he invented, or when he filed. This of course ignores the unfairness of two or more people who independently invent. But the point is, the system cannot even do what it says it is supposed to do (protect those who are first to invent, or file if these changes go through) as long as the costs are allowed to set the limits for who can play the game for either obtaining or defending.
I suspect there is an entire world of things out there you've never thought of. And public, unsecured networks intended for everyone's use are quite common -- and my ISP, a co-op BTW, is just fine with that. I'm in a hotel right now, using what? An open, unsecured network. I was at a coffee shop yesterday doing the same thing (City Brew.) So can the whole silly "you should be held liable" nonsense. No one with an IQ above room temperature should be spouting such poorly thought-out dreck.
There are problems a-plenty with this whole "require everyone to lock the doors" idea. First, we have a technology problem. With a linux laptop and a couple of readily available utilities, I can get into your "secure" network. Quickly and easily. So you can "protect" it all you want, and still, you're not actually protected. IOW, locks are for honest people.
Second, the idea that securing networks - if you could really secure them, which you can't - would stop access of porn (or anything else) is blatantly false. What you end up with then is (somewhat) secure access to porn (and anything else.) Encrypting a network (especially when done very poorly, as wireless is) in no way controls what type of data passes over it - the very idea is silly. So what actually happens is some dimwit in Washington (such as congress's head Internet guy, Ted "Tubes" Stevens) decides that now that your networks have to be "secure", it makes "sense" that you should be held liable for things other people might transfer over your network.
Third, the idea that information censorship of public data on public networks is OK is the fruit of a diseased mind. In the case of child porn or snuff, for instance, it is 100% sufficient that making the photos is illegal. Bump the penalty up to death (please!) but don't make laws where people can be made victims of those laws because some photo they probably are appalled by suddenly appeared in their mailbox.
In an ideal world, you'd have your stupid ideas on a cardboard sign and be shouting them from a street corner.
I run an open, free, isolated wireless network specifically for the convenience of others. What the hell business is it of yours if it is open, other than if you want to use it? How about, you look at your instincts to regulate other people's choices of sharing resources and realize they are the cries of our worst enemy, the mommy-government proponent?
Man I am sick and tired of people who think its OK to force others to do what they think is right in areas where no harm is being done to anyone else.
Why don't you admit that the government is operating outside its constitutionally derived authority, and that such operation represents` major problems we need to fix? No matter what your reasoning, if you can't present a cogent case for it, you're going to be ignored and relegated to the ranks of the confused.
Will you say "absurd" if I take the time to lay out the major constitutional violations that are currently ongoing? Will you say "absurd" if I show, right here, that all that underlies legislation which is unconstitutional, is coercion, the 100% illegitimate use of force by government? If "absurd" is all you have to rebut with, then you have nothing. Which in turn means your blind faith in the government is misplaced.
You think you have the facts and figures to take down my position? Let fly. Otherwise, we both know who is being "absurd." That'd be you.
So... which part of "just take most of the damned legislation and regulation off pharma companies, and they'd be fine" did you not understand? I mean come on, you even quoted me!
A: My neighbor is a murderer
B: Well, my neighbor is a mass murderer!
A: Oh. I guess my neighbor is nothing to worry about, then.
See the problem with your reasoning now? Our government is corrupt, operating outside the bounds of its constituting authority, and no pointing fingers at other countries can make that OK. The only thing that will make it OK is to curb the illicit behavior.
It has nothing to do with the cost of filing. It is the cost of defense that you should be concerned about. Compared to that, the cost of filing is nothing.
It isn't just money, you know. It is the promise of jobs after government employment. Low-rate loans. "Speaking" engagements. Lecture tours. Book deals. Boats. Houses. Sex. Vacations, junkets and "fact-finding" missions. Access to people in power. Tips - market and otherwise. All manner of free dinners and drinks. Power for its own sake. Oh, and of course - money.
There is no more corrosive environment than a political position in Washington DC. It's a wonder our representatives don't outright grow horns the first day on the job. Sadly, a 100% corrupt person looks just like one that isn't.
They never do anything useful, you silly person. They're the federal government. They're operating largely outside the bounds of the constitution and their primary foci are to (a) consolidate power, and (b) accrue money and distribute it to the power holders. See their current "interpretation" of the commerce clause for details. I'll give you a capsule: The constitution says the feds can govern INTERstate commerce. The feds say that means they can govern INTRAstate commerce. See how that works? Black is white, white is black, and your complaints are double-plus ungood. Now go back to sleep like a good citizen.
It has never been first to invent anyway -- that's just a red herring. The entire question is, who has the money to defend the patent in court. Because if you don't, the odds are, you're going to lose it as soon as someone wants it. It's a corporate favoritism scam. It's always been a scam. It's not just a scam because of this, either. If we both invent something, you might take ten times the resources that I did, going about it methodically, where I might just stumble into it... an idea, a test, and viola! Your efforts are 100% wasted, even though you invented it just as legitimately as I did. Further, some wag down the line doesn't know about our work, and a year later, he invents it too. Boy, has he got a nasty surprise waiting for him. For all of these reasons, and more, the patent system is one that mainly spreads disadvantage. The underlying idea is false too - the idea that "we need to be encouraged." Tell that to the OO authors, the Gimp authors, to all the inventors and authors without patents. We don't need encouragement. We just need to be left alone!
As far as I'm concerned, the only legitimate use of an idea is to turn it into a product or use it to make more ideas. You can make money by selling just the idea now, because patents create artificial scarcity. Better if you sold something made from your idea, or just published for everyone's benefit. And before the pharma trolls come out of the woodwork, just take most of the damned legislation and regulation off pharma companies, and they'd be fine. We'd get new drugs at a much higher rate, and yes, just as happens now, sometimes there would be problems, despite testing.
If keeping an idea secret long enough to get it out on the market isn't enough to make you a decent profit with the aid of marketing... then maybe you should be flipping burgers and let the real entrepreneurs get to work.
So, how long had you been mating? Or... er, you mean like a 1st mate or a boatswain's mate, a rank? Um... or did you mean like an English person's friend (which I guess doesn't rule out the 1st meaning)... what the hell did you mean?
Ok, I know this is tough, but go back, actually READ my post. Look for this: "Get licensed. Practice. Carry." I don't advocate carrying unless you train. I've said this over and over again. So grab that strawman, stuff it under your arm, and go home.
Yes. So did the administration of the school. Now the kids are dead. Consequently, I think your arguments are pretty silly.
No, I didn't forget it, I simply understand it, and you don't. Would you like to understand it? Here, read what the US Court of Appeals has to say. Isn't it fascinating?
I am quite familiar with it.
Ok, here we go with the argument from the prefatory clause, ignoring the operative clause. Rather than debunk your position myself, I'll let the United States Court of Appeals do it for me. Suffice it to say that your argument begins to fail with your misunderstanding of what the authors of the 2nd amendment meant when they wrote "milita", and that I concur with the majority opinion.
Look at the URL at the top of my posts. Do you think that might be a hint as to my bonafides? I've been teaching martial arts for many years. And your contrivance isn't what we're talking about here. We're talking about one armed person - with pistols - facing over thirty people, and as a reasonably competent instructor, my input is, if everyone can shoot back, a lot fewer people will be likely to die, but one of them will almost certainly be the perp. Therefore, my input is also that everyone should be trained and armed.
As for killing, I spent a while (two tours) in Viet Nam doing exactly that. It wasn't pleasant, but then again, it beat hell out of being killed, and having (more of) my friends killed. As should be obvious even to someone like yourself, if less than 30 of these kids had died, the outcome would have been better by the only metric that counts. Finally, these kids were put in that situation, and like almost everyone, they would likely find that when the choice comes down to letting the perp kill the kid next to you or shooting him now, it's not all that tough a decision. It is one hell of a lot harder to reconcile the idea that you didn't act when you could have. Of course, these kids never had that opportunity: because the law and the school rules ensured that they were unarmed victims.
No. Once again, science fiction writers far predating TV shows and movies such as EE "Doc" Smith and his many predecessors, peers and those that followed led the way, and TV lamely followed. But that's OK. You go back to watching TV. Books might make your head hurt. Full of words, they are. Very annoying. And that whole "theater of the mind" thing... I mean, what if you blow a projector bulb in your cerebrum?
Real is spectacular. These silicone-stuffed ladies are operating under entirely false pretenses. if silicone is what you like, buy a RealDoll. Guaranteed less expensive than the real thing over time, and those breasts are just what you want.
Look, Einstein attracts kooks. Bush attracts kooks. Actors attract kooks. The local street corner attracts kooks. I attract kooks (just check my posting history.) Basically, if you have somewhere to stand and you say something definitive, you're going to attract kooks. Its 100% irrelevant that Tesla attracts kooks. Remember the man for what he did for us and what he tried to do for us (a great deal), ignore the kooks, difficult as that may be (again, check my posting history) and get on with your life. Go read something about Tesla. Margaret Cheney's "Tesla: Man out of time" is a great read, and a real eye-opener for those who don't know much about the man.
Wow. So, I've impeached President George W. Bush. Repeatedly.
I'm putting that on my resume. Right now.
You had a real number? Hell, we only had an integer, and it was a short, and every time we wanted to use it, we had to assemble it out of bits. And then there were fights over the signed and unsigned bits; why, when we wanted to divide or multiply, we had to work in shifts! We had to factor uphill, both ways, and our buckets overflowed constantly. You'd try to carry, and you'd end up with a half-carry, and the supervisor didn't like that, no sir. Real numbers. Bah. That won't float around here.
All of that may have various degrees of truth to it, but you're being quite unfair by not mentioning that another key factor was that the things Tesla actually accomplished and demonstrated, many of which have found their way into our current common base of technology, were quite spectacular in terms of utility, innovation, and being leading edge for the time.
Many researchers, academic and independent, spend their entire lives trying to come up with just one useful idea. Tesla produced them regularly and dependably.
I often wonder what Tesla would have come up with if he was living and working in our current technological / scientific environment. In my view, the man seemed to think so far "out of the box" that you couldn't even find the box from where he was.
I test my web pages for correct display in Opera, Firefox, IE, Safari, Camino, Mozilla, and OmniWeb. I usually work with my Macbook Pro laptop, upon which I run OSX, Linux, and XP (these last two virtualized under Parallels — Bootcamp is useless to me because it only allows running one OS at a time.) I keep Firefox on the XP and Linux operating systems and it does a very good job there, giving me something serious to use under Linux if need be, and saving XP from its innate vulnerability to malware.
Most of my browsing is done under OSX / OmniWeb though, for the simple reason that I spend most of my time there.
Since this thread began, I've been thinking about what really draws me to OmniWeb and I think its pretty safe to say that of all the features, the scalable, always-there visuals that the tabs provide are reason #1, and the site-by-site preferences #2. The built-in spelling checker for CGI text fields (conspicuously missing from the OSX Firefox builds I've looked at in the past), an easily implemented OSX feature, lands at #3. I'm a lot more prone to typos than I am actual spelling errors, but the end result is the same, a poorer presentation of what I'm trying to say... so a high powered and convenient as-you-type spelling checker will always count for a lot with me.
Sure. I have absolutely no resistance to paying for software (especially $15 software) that offers me something I will actually use. I like Firefox, and Safari is OK if a bit dull, but frankly, OmniWeb has a far superior tab model for the way I work and think, as well as other built-in capabilities I don't have to go and hunt down. It just works, and better yet, it just works the way I like it to work.
I have OmniOutliner too — truly great software. Worth every penny.