Remember that this article is advising that you upgrade to the most recent version. That means if your parents are running IE 6, let it update itself.
Although I agree with you're point about not contract work, I think that upgrading to a newer version of the same software holds low enough liability (esp when compared with changing to Firefox/Opera/Chrome)
I don't think you can argue that the money that NASA spends does not circulate here on earth, NASA spends all there money on things like salary materials and other services that all exist here on earth. Sure its largely a different sector than grandma's pension gets spent on but it still positively impacts our economy.
I'm surprised that wsj is portraying that Apple is the driving force between HTML5. It seems to me to be a much more "grassroots" level idea than one coming from the top down.
Why is it that Canada is consistently getting better or equal performance than the US? I would think that most traffic requests from Canada are routed through the US.
The thing that scares me most about this redesign is that Facebook is spending resources making half baked UX changes instead of focusing energy into doing something new an innovative.
Lists might have their place in the future, and somehow users might get used to a more cluttered design. Ultimately, these types of features are tweaks on a product and not a game changer.
If legislation like this passed, I wonder how it would effect relations with the US and the US tech industry. Its all fine and good to try and subvert the Egyptian government during a revolution, but what happens if the tech companies try to subvert another first world country?
Mozilla is supporting a new version of websockets (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=640003) that as of a week ago did not work with a lot of popular libraries yet (socket.io). Its awesome to see better security features in place and I hope that library distributors are fast to follow up with changes in their library.
I wonder if joint support with somebody like heroku is coming. Being able to develop and deploy all from your web browser would be a very cool feature.