Sticking the word "my" in front of civil rights and further appeals to slavery and suffrage don't bolster your argument, neither do they respond to my argument about active oppression vs forcing work on others. As I said, let me know when the government makes support of braille illegal.
What was the total duration of both, and number of people killed?
There's a wide range of estimates, so I'll use one reference that is simple and looks well researched:
First World War (1914-18): 15 000 000 Second World War (1937-45): 55 000 000
Compare that to people dying of hunger and poverty thanks to US policies after WWII ended.
I'll wait for your numbers and citations to back them up.
Not only I remember it, I was on the opposite side of it.
You lived in the USSR?
Contrary to what your friendly propaganda workers told you
Just remember that propaganda is used by all parties. Why is it that the communists countries were the ones with state controlled media? Was there a single paper in the Soviet Union criticizing Stalin?
USSR, at most, occasionally jumped across its border reacting to what it perceived as a direct threat to its territory -- granted, often in a mildly assholish (Hungary, Czechoslovakia) or unsuccessful (Afghanistan) way.
I wouldn't call Cuba "across the border" from USSR. The USSR had direct influence in a large number of countries after World War II. They were also involved in conflicts like Vietnam and Korea. You seem to give the USSR a free pass for their interference "perceived as a direct threat to its territory". Anti-communist revolutions in bordering communists countries is not a direct threat. Indirect, yes, but that's the same reason why the US was fighting communism.
I read your Wikipedia link, and while Project Echo demonstrated solar sail effects, it wasn't used as a solar sail. From what I can tell, it was more of an unwanted side-effect than anything:
"As far back as 1960, photon pressure played orbital soccer with the Echo 1 thin-film balloon in orbit, pushing its orbit around with astonishing force until the balloon's skin shattered. The shards were then flung far and wide by sunlight." Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8291710/
My fat PS3 has had some overheating issues for the past year or so, not enough to melt but enough to cause artifacts player certain games (basically anything by Ubisoft).
Have you tried vacuuming the vents? Your issue reminds me of the StarCraft II story, where lots of PCs were overheating video cards from casual users who had dusty machines.
Sorry, but the Americans with Disabilities Act is clearly civil rights legislation.
As a matter of political propaganda, yes. It's a standard technique to frame your agenda in terms of a popular and accepted one. Who could be against civil rights, when it was born out of the abolishment of slavery or the right to vote?
I agree that it is not as fundamental as slavery or voting, but it is a difference of scale, not kind.
It's completely different. One is a proactive denial by the government. The other is a free business not going out of their way to make their widgets or establishment usable by blind or deaf people. You are demanding an entitlement program.
Frankly, your example of being offended is exactly why this kind of legislation is needed.
Because I find people fighting for basic rights while being actively oppressed by hostile and often violent forces, including the government, completely different from inaccessibility for disabled people? Let me know when the government makes support of braille illegal.
"Extensive history" of other governments only looks impressive if summed over millennia of their existence
Millennia? Try looking at the last 100 years. You might have missed two World Wars, followed by a cold war with the USSR over communism that spanned the globe. The United States emerged as the sole superpower, and as such in the last couple of decades had the biggest footprint in foreign meddling, but Russia is on the rise again and re-asserting its influence.
Smaller countries tend to confine their meddling to bordering countries.
US causes death, destruction and misery all over the world right now, at a scale and rate never seen before from any of the "evil empires" of the past.
You have no fucking clue. Go read some history books.
Everyone else doesn't have an extensive history of meddling? So Russia, England, Germany, France, and on and on, don't have such histories? Name a big country, there's a good chance they have a history of meddling.
So discriminating against a minority is okay if the minority is small enough?
I don't consider it "discrimination" to not go out of your way to support a tiny segment of the population.
Your freedom of expression ends at my civil rights.
I find your use of "civil rights" in this fashion ludicrous and offensive. Being treated as an unequal citizen under the law because of race or gender are what civil rights were about. I'm talking about people being classified as a slave, or denied the right to vote, or forbidden from use of government services, and so on. That's a far cry from what you are talking about.
I respectfully disagree that first-world business owners should have this same freedom.
Business owners are people going about their business.
I believe a business owner should be able to act with relative freedom. For example, even in the age of signs with "no $RACE need apply", there were other business that didn't have that policy. There were also black communities that supported each other.
Besides that, it isn't the same thing. What you're saying is that every business should have to bear a significant and extra expense to make life easier for a tiny minority. Racial discrimination was never about that.
You present a false dichotomy. I know, for example, deaf people that live and work in deaf communities. You can provide limited support instead of forcing the whole world to cater to a very tiny portion of the population.
Many have "privacy policies" -- how prominent would be prominent enough?
You have to visit the site before you can even read the privacy policy. And who wants to read a bunch of legalize just to browse the web?
Maybe I'm being insensitive here
Yes, you are. You think people should have to walk around wearing disguises instead of having a reasonable expectation of privacy. It's as if every business you visited in public decided to identify you and report your whereabouts to a central party. That's fucked up.
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
I care about privacy, I'm technically literate, I avoid cookies, and browse with NoScript. However, even I wasn't aware until a year or two ago about Flash cookies. Expecting the average citizen to keep up in a technological arms race to avoid being spied on is unreasonable and makes excuses for those doing the massive information gathering.
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.
Then fuck 'em. Visitors using those browsers can get the old Flash version. YouTube is big enough that they can dictate the terms here. When people start switching browsers watch how fast IE and Safari turn around.
You did, with every website you visited -- though I have to wonder where you get "collusive" from.
A huge number of 3rd party sites agree to give Google data on your browsing habits. People are just trying to live their lives normally -- the web is just part of the basic infrastructure. Web sites don't prominently display their data collection activities. Most people are not technical and don't understand stuff like Google Analytics. This is a massive, data sharing program without informed consent, and Google is the ring-leader.
Yes, they could, but I think it kills your "They are evil" argument. It certainly kills any comparison with Big Brother, when they actively fight the government.
They're evil for collecting all this information where it can be misused. The Big Brother comparison is in regards to the scope of information collecting. By the way, I'm pretty sure when Google is presented with a warrant they serve it. I have to wonder what they do or have done when presented with a National Security Letter, as you're not even allowed to talk about them.
For one thing, does Google know more about you than your ISP?
It depends on what kind of logs they maintain. You're certainly right the ISP is an even bigger threat than Google, but that doesn't mean Google should collect all this information. They also pose some unique threats -- see YouTube vs Viacom, for instance, where Viacom was seeking the logs to look for evidence of copyright infringement.
So what? YouTube should deliberately drop quality? Or they should pay, again, large amounts more money on bandwidth, storage, transcoding, and CDN storage/bandwidth?
If the quality drop is insignificant, and it means an open format for the web, something which Google likes to say they support, then yes. As for the transcoding, they already do it now to serve lower quality videos.
Do you have a comparison of H.264 videos re-encoded in Theora?
Nope, but this was independent research to counter unsubstantiated and ludicrous claims by a Google employee on a standards working group. Do you have a comparison?
Are you suggesting that Theora and HTML5 should be the only option at whatever "lower quality" level they're used?
Yes, at the lower levels if Google won't re-encode H.264 at high-definition.
If so, that's a lot of browsers (new and old) which can't play them, and you can't wrap them in Flash to help those browsers out.
HTML5 and the video tag is new. There's no reason that new browsers which support it shouldn't be able to display Theora.
Google Maps didn't do much that mapquest and others weren't already doing.
Umm, you've got to be kidding me. The old map interface was a clunky, click & wait for a new page model, one that had been around for years. Google replaced that with smooth scrolling and pre-fetching so that you didn't have to wait for new data. The first half-dozen times I used it I just couldn't get over how great it was.
It was an innovation, a major innovation, a game changing innovation, because after that, everybody moved to that model, and it helped launch the whole AJAX movement. Street View was also innovative.
The idea that iPod was more innovative than Google Maps because it used a smaller and denser hard drive makes me laugh.
An "invention" like an MP3 player is a bit ridiculous anyways. It's just an obvious combination of existing technology -- really just an upgrade on Sony's Walkman.
How many of those websites jumped out of the Internet, grabbed your browser, and forced you to visit them?
And who actually consented to a massive, collusive information gathering program? People are just browsing normally for other reasons, not to be spied on. They have to go out of their way to avoid this spying. That's why it's opt-out, and not opt-in.
They have publicly fought government requests for information.
Very well, but they could always lose in such a suit.
And how do you know what procedures they have in place to prevent this situation? This isn't Facebook, where that sort of thing actually happens.
Whatever procedures they have in place, the possibility is there. And how do you know it doesn't actually happen at Google? How many years was Facebook around before you heard about data breaches? And what about China's successful hacks into Google? The data is there, it's a risk because they collect it. You're asking for trust against governments, employees, hackers, and future business decisions.
I'm not an encoding expert, but the comparison you link to actually favors H.264
Why don't you quote the rest of the paragraph?
"However, the difference is not especially great. I expect that most casual users would be unlikely to express a preference or complain about quality if one was substituted for another and I've had several people perform a casual comparison of the files and express indifference. Since Theora+Vorbis is providing such comparable results, I think I can confidently state that reports of the internet's impending demise are greatly exaggerated. "
Did you look at the comparisons yourself? Do you think the quality difference is that big of a deal? YouTube had shit quality videos for years. Theora isn't shit quality. It's comparable to H.264.
Is that really what you're suggesting -- that we should use Theora and HTML5 only for lower-quality versions? I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here.
I'm saying they should offer a low-quality version if they don't want to re-encode something that's in H.264. Of course, I'd rather they support Theora at high resolutions too. The point is it should never be a requirement that you have H.264.
Google, by contrast... "Big Brother"? Have you read 1984?
Yes I have. Obviously the current situation isn't like the brutal dictatorship in the book, but the information gathering is getting there. Not a camera in your home, but spying on all the sites you visit.
they only gather information from people who willingly donate said information, or from information already in public spaces.
"willingly" would be opt-in, instead of having to opt-out. How many web sites use Google Analytics? Google also owns DoubleClick.
by accident
There's nothing accidental about collecting all this information (ignoring the wireless case), which once collected, can be abused. If they get a National Security Letter they will have to comply with it. If a rogue employee decides to misuse the data, it's done. If Google decides to misuse the data, it's done. All this is possible because they collect the data.
By having, say, youtube.com/html5 not work at all.
It's completely Google's fault for requiring H.264. They could always fall back to another format. HTML5 does not require H.264. If you want to talk about FUD, then H.264 is where it's at, straight from Google: "If [youtube] were to switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the Internet."http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html
YouTube won't re-encode it for the high quality version.
Nothing is stopping them. At the worst, they can offer a lower-quality version, they way they do now with Flash Video. Requiring a patent-laden format to view video content on the web is evil. It's GIF all over again.
Second, only Theora might be open.
More FUD. It's been around for years, and there's no evidence that it isn't. There's no need to use scare words.
Given that Microsoft has a long track record of evil, and Google has a stated goal to not be evil, trusting them carries a bit more weight.
Actions speak louder than words. Microsoft's evil tends to revolve around vendor lock-in and unfairly stomping on their competitors. Google's evil revolves around Big Brother type information gathering. Trusting Google because of their motto is ridiculous.
And again, most of the browser is open -- how difficult is it to analyze what the rest is doing?
What are you proposing? To do a binary diff between the compiled open source version and Google version? Followed by disassembling and analyzing the diff, probably without debugging symbols? That would be a major pain in the ass, even if the two binaries were the largely the same, which I doubt would be the case anyways.
Now, consider the unfortunate alternative -- if Chromium was the only version, there'd be a scary process -- no matter how streamlined, it'd still have to present the user with scary legal warnings -- to get h.264 working, which, unfortunately, is needed for good HTML5 video support.
Firefox seems to manage. Besides, I'd prefer people actually be informed of the patent bullshit they're paying for, in one way or another. Perhaps Google could help by using non-patented formats on YouTube. Also, H.264 legal issues don't explain why Google tracking is part of the proprietary binary version.
And I am not implying that Chromium isn't a full browser. My only point is that Chrome is a proprietary, binary blob, and as such not open source. Whatever excuses Google might have for that is no better than any excuses Microsoft might put forth if they had released a similar browser. If you care about open source, then you should know that Chrome is not open source.
This sentence is plain stupid. It's implying that people who use Windows' Chrome build don't use IE because it's closed source.
I wasn't implying that. I used Microsoft as an example of a company that wouldn't get a free pass for releasing an "open source" browser consisting of a proprietary binary based on an open source base.
Slashdot Mirror
The Turing test has been around since 1950.
(Sure, the sample size is tiny, but it's better than the ass-pulled figures that the grandparent was stating)
The grandparent you mention didn't state any figures. He said "A lot of Linux users". If anybody "ass-pulled" a figure, it was the >50% guy.
I stopped reading your comment when I saw it was copied and pasted from a comment in the article.
Sticking the word "my" in front of civil rights and further appeals to slavery and suffrage don't bolster your argument, neither do they respond to my argument about active oppression vs forcing work on others. As I said, let me know when the government makes support of braille illegal.
What was the total duration of both, and number of people killed?
There's a wide range of estimates, so I'll use one reference that is simple and looks well researched:
First World War (1914-18): 15 000 000
Second World War (1937-45): 55 000 000
Compare that to people dying of hunger and poverty thanks to US policies after WWII ended.
I'll wait for your numbers and citations to back them up.
Not only I remember it, I was on the opposite side of it.
You lived in the USSR?
Contrary to what your friendly propaganda workers told you
Just remember that propaganda is used by all parties. Why is it that the communists countries were the ones with state controlled media? Was there a single paper in the Soviet Union criticizing Stalin?
USSR, at most, occasionally jumped across its border reacting to what it perceived as a direct threat to its territory -- granted, often in a mildly assholish (Hungary, Czechoslovakia) or unsuccessful (Afghanistan) way.
I wouldn't call Cuba "across the border" from USSR. The USSR had direct influence in a large number of countries after World War II. They were also involved in conflicts like Vietnam and Korea. You seem to give the USSR a free pass for their interference "perceived as a direct threat to its territory". Anti-communist revolutions in bordering communists countries is not a direct threat. Indirect, yes, but that's the same reason why the US was fighting communism.
I read your Wikipedia link, and while Project Echo demonstrated solar sail effects, it wasn't used as a solar sail. From what I can tell, it was more of an unwanted side-effect than anything:
"As far back as 1960, photon pressure played orbital soccer with the Echo 1 thin-film balloon in orbit, pushing its orbit around with astonishing force until the balloon's skin shattered. The shards were then flung far and wide by sunlight." Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8291710/
My fat PS3 has had some overheating issues for the past year or so, not enough to melt but enough to cause artifacts player certain games (basically anything by Ubisoft).
Have you tried vacuuming the vents? Your issue reminds me of the StarCraft II story, where lots of PCs were overheating video cards from casual users who had dusty machines.
Going back to PS2
PS3. It's right in the title of this story.
...the light.
Sorry, but the Americans with Disabilities Act is clearly civil rights legislation.
As a matter of political propaganda, yes. It's a standard technique to frame your agenda in terms of a popular and accepted one. Who could be against civil rights, when it was born out of the abolishment of slavery or the right to vote?
I agree that it is not as fundamental as slavery or voting, but it is a difference of scale, not kind.
It's completely different. One is a proactive denial by the government. The other is a free business not going out of their way to make their widgets or establishment usable by blind or deaf people. You are demanding an entitlement program.
Frankly, your example of being offended is exactly why this kind of legislation is needed.
Because I find people fighting for basic rights while being actively oppressed by hostile and often violent forces, including the government, completely different from inaccessibility for disabled people? Let me know when the government makes support of braille illegal.
"Extensive history" of other governments only looks impressive if summed over millennia of their existence
Millennia? Try looking at the last 100 years. You might have missed two World Wars, followed by a cold war with the USSR over communism that spanned the globe. The United States emerged as the sole superpower, and as such in the last couple of decades had the biggest footprint in foreign meddling, but Russia is on the rise again and re-asserting its influence.
Smaller countries tend to confine their meddling to bordering countries.
US causes death, destruction and misery all over the world right now, at a scale and rate never seen before from any of the "evil empires" of the past.
You have no fucking clue. Go read some history books.
Everyone else.
Everyone else doesn't have an extensive history of meddling? So Russia, England, Germany, France, and on and on, don't have such histories? Name a big country, there's a good chance they have a history of meddling.
The protagonist was always "you", not a specific gender.
So discriminating against a minority is okay if the minority is small enough?
I don't consider it "discrimination" to not go out of your way to support a tiny segment of the population.
Your freedom of expression ends at my civil rights.
I find your use of "civil rights" in this fashion ludicrous and offensive. Being treated as an unequal citizen under the law because of race or gender are what civil rights were about. I'm talking about people being classified as a slave, or denied the right to vote, or forbidden from use of government services, and so on. That's a far cry from what you are talking about.
I respectfully disagree that first-world business owners should have this same freedom.
Business owners are people going about their business.
I believe a business owner should be able to act with relative freedom. For example, even in the age of signs with "no $RACE need apply", there were other business that didn't have that policy. There were also black communities that supported each other.
Besides that, it isn't the same thing. What you're saying is that every business should have to bear a significant and extra expense to make life easier for a tiny minority. Racial discrimination was never about that.
You present a false dichotomy. I know, for example, deaf people that live and work in deaf communities. You can provide limited support instead of forcing the whole world to cater to a very tiny portion of the population.
Many have "privacy policies" -- how prominent would be prominent enough?
You have to visit the site before you can even read the privacy policy. And who wants to read a bunch of legalize just to browse the web?
Maybe I'm being insensitive here
Yes, you are. You think people should have to walk around wearing disguises instead of having a reasonable expectation of privacy. It's as if every business you visited in public decided to identify you and report your whereabouts to a central party. That's fucked up.
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
I care about privacy, I'm technically literate, I avoid cookies, and browse with NoScript. However, even I wasn't aware until a year or two ago about Flash cookies. Expecting the average citizen to keep up in a technological arms race to avoid being spied on is unreasonable and makes excuses for those doing the massive information gathering.
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.
Then fuck 'em. Visitors using those browsers can get the old Flash version. YouTube is big enough that they can dictate the terms here. When people start switching browsers watch how fast IE and Safari turn around.
You did, with every website you visited -- though I have to wonder where you get "collusive" from.
A huge number of 3rd party sites agree to give Google data on your browsing habits. People are just trying to live their lives normally -- the web is just part of the basic infrastructure. Web sites don't prominently display their data collection activities. Most people are not technical and don't understand stuff like Google Analytics. This is a massive, data sharing program without informed consent, and Google is the ring-leader.
Yes, they could, but I think it kills your "They are evil" argument. It certainly kills any comparison with Big Brother, when they actively fight the government.
They're evil for collecting all this information where it can be misused. The Big Brother comparison is in regards to the scope of information collecting. By the way, I'm pretty sure when Google is presented with a warrant they serve it. I have to wonder what they do or have done when presented with a National Security Letter, as you're not even allowed to talk about them.
For one thing, does Google know more about you than your ISP?
It depends on what kind of logs they maintain. You're certainly right the ISP is an even bigger threat than Google, but that doesn't mean Google should collect all this information. They also pose some unique threats -- see YouTube vs Viacom, for instance, where Viacom was seeking the logs to look for evidence of copyright infringement.
So what? YouTube should deliberately drop quality? Or they should pay, again, large amounts more money on bandwidth, storage, transcoding, and CDN storage/bandwidth?
If the quality drop is insignificant, and it means an open format for the web, something which Google likes to say they support, then yes. As for the transcoding, they already do it now to serve lower quality videos.
Do you have a comparison of H.264 videos re-encoded in Theora?
Nope, but this was independent research to counter unsubstantiated and ludicrous claims by a Google employee on a standards working group. Do you have a comparison?
Are you suggesting that Theora and HTML5 should be the only option at whatever "lower quality" level they're used?
Yes, at the lower levels if Google won't re-encode H.264 at high-definition.
If so, that's a lot of browsers (new and old) which can't play them, and you can't wrap them in Flash to help those browsers out.
HTML5 and the video tag is new. There's no reason that new browsers which support it shouldn't be able to display Theora.
Google Maps didn't do much that mapquest and others weren't already doing.
Umm, you've got to be kidding me. The old map interface was a clunky, click & wait for a new page model, one that had been around for years. Google replaced that with smooth scrolling and pre-fetching so that you didn't have to wait for new data. The first half-dozen times I used it I just couldn't get over how great it was.
It was an innovation, a major innovation, a game changing innovation, because after that, everybody moved to that model, and it helped launch the whole AJAX movement. Street View was also innovative.
The idea that iPod was more innovative than Google Maps because it used a smaller and denser hard drive makes me laugh.
An "invention" like an MP3 player is a bit ridiculous anyways. It's just an obvious combination of existing technology -- really just an upgrade on Sony's Walkman.
How many of those websites jumped out of the Internet, grabbed your browser, and forced you to visit them?
And who actually consented to a massive, collusive information gathering program? People are just browsing normally for other reasons, not to be spied on. They have to go out of their way to avoid this spying. That's why it's opt-out, and not opt-in.
They have publicly fought government requests for information.
Very well, but they could always lose in such a suit.
And how do you know what procedures they have in place to prevent this situation? This isn't Facebook, where that sort of thing actually happens.
Whatever procedures they have in place, the possibility is there. And how do you know it doesn't actually happen at Google? How many years was Facebook around before you heard about data breaches? And what about China's successful hacks into Google? The data is there, it's a risk because they collect it. You're asking for trust against governments, employees, hackers, and future business decisions.
I'm not an encoding expert, but the comparison you link to actually favors H.264
Why don't you quote the rest of the paragraph?
"However, the difference is not especially great. I expect that most casual users would be unlikely to express a preference or complain about quality if one was substituted for another and I've had several people perform a casual comparison of the files and express indifference. Since Theora+Vorbis is providing such comparable results, I think I can confidently state that reports of the internet's impending demise are greatly exaggerated. "
Did you look at the comparisons yourself? Do you think the quality difference is that big of a deal? YouTube had shit quality videos for years. Theora isn't shit quality. It's comparable to H.264.
Is that really what you're suggesting -- that we should use Theora and HTML5 only for lower-quality versions? I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here.
I'm saying they should offer a low-quality version if they don't want to re-encode something that's in H.264. Of course, I'd rather they support Theora at high resolutions too. The point is it should never be a requirement that you have H.264.
Google, by contrast... "Big Brother"? Have you read 1984?
Yes I have. Obviously the current situation isn't like the brutal dictatorship in the book, but the information gathering is getting there. Not a camera in your home, but spying on all the sites you visit.
they only gather information from people who willingly donate said information, or from information already in public spaces.
"willingly" would be opt-in, instead of having to opt-out. How many web sites use Google Analytics? Google also owns DoubleClick.
by accident
There's nothing accidental about collecting all this information (ignoring the wireless case), which once collected, can be abused. If they get a National Security Letter they will have to comply with it. If a rogue employee decides to misuse the data, it's done. If Google decides to misuse the data, it's done. All this is possible because they collect the data.
By having, say, youtube.com/html5 not work at all.
It's completely Google's fault for requiring H.264. They could always fall back to another format. HTML5 does not require H.264. If you want to talk about FUD, then H.264 is where it's at, straight from Google: "If [youtube] were to switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the Internet." http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html
YouTube won't re-encode it for the high quality version.
Nothing is stopping them. At the worst, they can offer a lower-quality version, they way they do now with Flash Video. Requiring a patent-laden format to view video content on the web is evil. It's GIF all over again.
Second, only Theora might be open.
More FUD. It's been around for years, and there's no evidence that it isn't. There's no need to use scare words.
Given that Microsoft has a long track record of evil, and Google has a stated goal to not be evil, trusting them carries a bit more weight.
Actions speak louder than words. Microsoft's evil tends to revolve around vendor lock-in and unfairly stomping on their competitors. Google's evil revolves around Big Brother type information gathering. Trusting Google because of their motto is ridiculous.
And again, most of the browser is open -- how difficult is it to analyze what the rest is doing?
What are you proposing? To do a binary diff between the compiled open source version and Google version? Followed by disassembling and analyzing the diff, probably without debugging symbols? That would be a major pain in the ass, even if the two binaries were the largely the same, which I doubt would be the case anyways.
Now, consider the unfortunate alternative -- if Chromium was the only version, there'd be a scary process -- no matter how streamlined, it'd still have to present the user with scary legal warnings -- to get h.264 working, which, unfortunately, is needed for good HTML5 video support.
Firefox seems to manage. Besides, I'd prefer people actually be informed of the patent bullshit they're paying for, in one way or another. Perhaps Google could help by using non-patented formats on YouTube. Also, H.264 legal issues don't explain why Google tracking is part of the proprietary binary version.
And I am not implying that Chromium isn't a full browser. My only point is that Chrome is a proprietary, binary blob, and as such not open source. Whatever excuses Google might have for that is no better than any excuses Microsoft might put forth if they had released a similar browser. If you care about open source, then you should know that Chrome is not open source.
This sentence is plain stupid. It's implying that people who use Windows' Chrome build don't use IE because it's closed source.
I wasn't implying that. I used Microsoft as an example of a company that wouldn't get a free pass for releasing an "open source" browser consisting of a proprietary binary based on an open source base.