It’s worth saying, from time to time, that while our world is often harsh and cold, it’s better than it was. The slow progress of humanity seems painful to us, but it inevitably leads to a newer and brighter place.

This is why I’m always so shocked when people reject without any thought the idea of living forever. I’ll never see my world truly become the world I want it to be, I’ll never see humanity spread out into the stars; but it will happen, and that’s something I’d give anything to see.

There has been a lot of talk about how Google’s decision to remove H.264 support from Chrome will end up regressing the progress HTML5 <video> tag has made thus far, but I find a lot of it is too short-sighted and doesn’t consider the implications of H.264 remaining the de facto web standard video format.

People argue that dropping H.264 is going to lead to an increase of Flash. News Flash: Flash is already active on every browser that matters. Flash will stay there until there is a convenient usable alternative for its biggest use cases: specifically video and graphical rendering. HTML5 handles those through the <video> and <canvas> tags. The problem is that having a video tag doesn’t mean people can use it, because not all browsers support the same codecs and nobody wants to go around encoding their videos in half a dozen different formats for each browser permutation.

H.264 costs money for distributors and producers. In a world where we’re all slowly becoming producers this is troubling. It also has a deep patent pool backed by dozens of large companies waiting to sue someone.

WebM is open, unencumbered by patents, and royalty free. Hardware acceleration is being built into the next generation of CPUs. It has quality comparable to H.264 and has fewer caveats.

The truly baffling thing about defending H.264 is that it is equivalent to arguing for the death of Firefox. I mean this. H.264, as a closed source patented video format, cannot legally be included in Firefox because of its licensing model. If you want everyone to standardize around H.264, you don’t want Firefox to be a player in the web browser game any longer.

Some people argue that they’re not “backing” H.264, they’re simply against Flash. I don’t really know what to say about that; Flash is all-pervasive right now. H.264 didn’t make it magically disappear, precisely because it wasn’t allowed in one of the more popular browsers. For Flash to disappear, it needs viable alternatives that are as simple. When you put the burden on the user to make sure they have the right codecs installed and they’re using the right browser for the right website, that’s not as easy as Flash.

Here’s something maybe people don’t know: Google, Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft have all promised WebM support in their browsers. The odd man out here is H.264 proponent (and patent-holder) Apple. Apple has made no comment on WebM, but they will soon have to; IE9, Firefox 4, Opera 11, and Google Chrome will all have WebM support this year.

Of course, the mobile landscape is different — Apple is dominating there at the moment — and tied relatively tightly to hardware cycles, but chips are already being prepared for hardware accelerated WebM video, so if Apple really cared about making HTML5 the Next Big Thing, it would start looking into integrating WebM for their next generation of chips. Then we can finally start the work of obsolescing Flash for good.

I wrote a while ago about why I didn’t see the need for marriage. I don’t think, like some, that marriage is an expression of “doth protest too much” insecurity, but I also don’t see the need for marriage. I have a bunch of reasons, but the one relevant to this post is the sterility of marriage. We do the same things our parents did, because that’s what their parents did and so on. Most weddings aren’t expressions of love because there’s nothing about them that expresses that love except ritualistic ceremony and attendance.

But this video I came across today offers a counter argument to that. I’m still against marriage in general, but this video has given me an example of a wedding I wouldn’t mind having. Weddings can be whatever you want them to be, because we’re the grownups now:

Once again, Shep Smith cuts through the bullshit at Fox News. It doesn’t matter if the torture worked. You don’t fucking do it.

And yet, these numskulls he’s surrounded by continue to parrot idiotic talking points. There aren’t two schools of thought about any of this. Torture is wrong. Even if it worked (which it doesn’t) it is still wrong.

Why is this guy still working with Fox News? He should join a real news organization.

For all you Middleman fans out there (and for the rest of you who don’t know what the fuck Middleman is but like absurdity):

This video is much much funnier (and cuter and awesomer) without the background music.