[OT] Free software versus software idea patents

[Ian Kelly]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 12:04 AM, harrismh777 <harrismh777 at charter.net> wrote:
>    How mamy times have you altered the identity of your web browser so that
> the web site would 'work'? You know, stupid messages from the server that
> say, "We only support IE 6+, upgrade your browser...",  so you tell it
> you're using IE 6 and, well no problem.

I actually can't even recall the last time I had to deal with that
problem, although occasionally I find myself forced to use IE because
the site really, truly doesn't work in Firefox.  It might work in some
other browser, but I'm not going to spend the time trying every FOSS
browser in existence just to avoid using IE.  Anyway, I would hope
that the statisticians who gather this data would be smart enough to
discard any site that was reporting 100% usage of one particular
browser.

Note that user-agent masking is also a rather tech-savvy thing to do.
I sincerely doubt that more than a couple percent of the population
actually does this.  The rest would either grumble about it and start
up IE, or just leave the site without looking back.

Cheers,
Ian