Forgive me if I post comments covered better by smarter people but I have just spent the past hour pacing in the hallway after reading this.

My initial reaction was "Non-free JavaScript? RMS must have glaucoma because his herbal remedy is really impacting his judgement". JavaScript is open source. As a computer security duck I can tell you that JavaScript is easily altered on any page you visit, and only a fool would license their JavaScript code... or worse "open source" it like Al Gore did to his web page just before we found out what a "chad" was. Calling a set of JavaScript code "closed source" is similar to closing the source on a batch file or shell script, or trademarking/copyrighting an arrangement of flowers or dead bees. It is possible to lay claim to such a "design" but as to how it could be enforced is beyond me.

Then I read some comments and people seemed to think this had to do with the readability of the JavaScript as "minified" JavaScript is too obfuscated to read by a lay person (by lay person I mean non-JS compiler). But this is silly as many plugins that allow you to alter the JavaScript you run on your browser when you visit a page will also easily de-obfuscate the JavaScript. So readability is more about presentation and the presentation can be trivially altered.

But, I have come to peace with the basis of the article, that there exists something called "non-free JavaScript" and that pages can implement such a thing. Here is how one can implement Non-Free JavaScript, if you use a JS library such as Sencha ExtJS (with the commercial license) and offer no alternate HTML only page. Sencha ExtJS with the commercial license is not GPL, so the license is not "free". And with the lack of an HTML page (where you kill off your search engines and section 508 ADA usability compliance), then RMS can't use the page in the pristine "free" form he desires as a nutty free software advocate.

This issue is a lot like having a "death and murder-free dinner party" for insane vegans. Normal people would be happy to throw a burger on the grill and drink some beer but people like RMS would amplify decisions like eating meat kills everything and hurts the environment and that beer prevents kids in Iceland from learning to read (with a 2 hour explanation as to why). Why can't the FSF install Firefox and use the web the way a given developer intended is beyond me. People who block JavaScript are jerks and people who block ads are theives. If you don't like a given web page, don't go there. The rest of us are sick of hearing you old coots yelling "get off my lawn", or more accurately quoting Sheldon "you are in my spot". Take some lithium and enjoy 2013.

I actually came back to Linux under this Gnome 3 controversy and really don't mind it. The reactions to this post are as predictable as the post itself, a developer gets sick of providing something for nothing and has a public rage-quit, the self-hating Linux users cry out "why do people hate Linux".

None of it is true!

I formatted my Windows 7 laptop and joyfully have Ubuntu 12.04 on it. My son's Window 7 netbook was running slow and as an experiment I put Ubuntu 12.04 on that , he loves it. He has less problems than he did under Windows 7. Everyone is accustomed to an "app store" in their phones and Linux is the only OS out there that really has the same type of resource.
There has never been a better time for Linux on the desktop! With Windows 8 about to mess everyone up and a leaderless Apple (let's face it)... Ubuntu, Mint and a dozen other distros are fantastic! Ausus' latest EeePc netbook is currently shipping with Ubuntu because of Windows 8 being a mess.
Linux on the desktop is the best option right now.

WTF? So we banned CFCs in the 80s to save the ozone layer but in a cruel twist of fate the increase in CO2 causes the air down here to get warmer and the air way up there to get colder and that makes the CFCs more efficient and therefore better at destroying the ozone? Yeah? So we are supposed to... do... what? How do we know that banning all carbon would not have some other unforeseen issue? These people have no idea what they are talking about or they do but are not saying anything productive. It will be news if one of these guys knew how to fix any of this mess or had something productive to say. The truth is that we are fracked no matter what and we should really focus upon what we will leave in the fossil record and enjoy the time we have left!

I, for one, welcome our formerly frozen overlords.
Stuff is melting. Ice that had been there for thousands of years went away "quickly". We really don't know why, an honest person will tell you that. A hack with an ideology/theology will say different...
Things we should do anyhow:
-Be more energy efficient - would it hurt us to have lower energy bills and not buy so much gasoline?
-Get energy from cleaner sources - would it hurt to not burn things in a way that produced hazardous fine particulates into the air people breathe?

No one needs to live in a cave in order to pollute less. Look at Al Gore, he still flies in a private jet. These climate scientists still put carbon in the air (don't give me offset BS, we all know that is a gimmick). I would not mind driving an electric car, if it was more or less the cost of a regular car and could perform in more or less the same way as a regular car. If these clean and green technologies could compete with the old way today then we will all move to them, while they are just fancy science experiments or amount to a ton of rocket fuel in your basement I and many others will stay away.

Faith in a religion is separate from scientific fact. They are not possible to reconcile. A literal interpretation of the bible flies in the face of all scientific evidence. Fundamental issues that hold back all religions such as the existence of a soul can not be answered scientifically. What is the weight of a soul? The escape velocity of a soul as a person dies? You can't measure these things.

That is where faith comes in. Religious people have faith in a soul, a God and that their religion gives them purpose and comfort when science can't. For every person who thinks that evolution is a total myth there is a scientist that thinks we are just meat. It is a matter of where you put your faith and therefore find a purpose in your life. I would say that an evangelical evolutionary biologist is the ultimate oxymoron. For a true Christian, if you call a single part of the bible out as less than a literal account of history then the whole things comes into question. If no literal Adam and Eve then no literal original sin and no need for a literal messiah in the form of Jesus.

Now that these guys and Steven Hawking have disproven most religions we can now live in a scientific utopia or moralistic atheism, right? I prefer not to think of myself as just meat. I prefer to live in a world where suffering has a purpose and it is noble to give up one's life. I think that just as you can't see an atom with a magnifing glass you can't see a soul with one either. Perhaps our technology fails us, perhaps the world is more magical than we can currently understand. Maybe no one is wrong. And maybe faith is important.

For those in the USA speaking their mind on the US Cyber capability: They are talking about the British, so move along..

A military in general preparing for "Cyberwar" will not have every grunt learn metasploit. There will be a few ultra bright people who get access to all the intelligence related to the enemy capability and develop recommendations based upon current threats and capabilities. These recommendations will be taken to the IT management and they will balance everything together to decide what is an acceptable risk so they can do their mission safely. Once such balance is using Windows because we all know how much cheaper a contract for thousands of windows admins vs thousands of Linux admins (plus the endless turf wars of what distro/version/etc). Yes Windows is buggy and less secure, but it is more well known and therefore cheaper when you are contracting support for an entire military.

In this new age of "cyberwar", there will be hacks and these hacks will not indicate anyone "winning" or "loosing". Just like in real war there will be casualties, but hopefully people are learning from mistakes. "Cyberwar" is also highly misunderstood, by EVERYONE. Anonymous getting 90,000 email addresses and passwords to a website is not a major "win" for them. They hacked the hell out of that site, but if the site was to register for some bullshit mandatory class run by contractors and was a one use deal? What did they really gain? Not much except to learn a bunch of email addresses and maybe try the passwords in case of re-use. No warfighting infrastructure was lost yet the media would lean toward calling it a "cyberwar win" for anonymous.

Any military is as ready for cyberwar as Sony, AT&T and any other ultra large organization.

I am laughing so hard! This needs a "funny", amirite?

It sounds like marketing. Build up product, talk of how modern/new/shiny product is. Pick one aspect superior product from competition where there might be an advantage, and pretend that alone, that one feature makes the product superior to everything.

"With all this IE9 talk, I am constantly surprised by how textual Lynx is. The latest version of Lynx is the most text-oriented of all the Lynx versions. IE9 lacks a decent text-only interface... it is really at a disadvantage over Lynx." I might not have an interest in getting you download and install Lynx (I know you already have it), but it sure seems like it.

I am sure you are not a shill or paid marketer, if you were there would be a link to this amazingly plugin-sandboxed web browser that makes Firefox look like IE8 in comparison.

I am dying.. you have killed me. Way too funny for a Monday morning. Now I am at work literally laughing out loud and I can't explain what is funny to anyone who will get it... I am dead inside, killed by your humorous post...

The ads on the TeeVee.. for Bing (or any Microsoft product in general). It is like they specialize in making ads that are more annoying than the products they are selling. The latest Bing Ad I have watched is the "Animal House" food fight in the grocery store.. so Google makes you a meme shouting zombie? And the Windows Phone ads.. other phones are so sexxy you prefer it to your hot wife in lingerie? (Then that would say the Windows phone is so un-sexy that you have no problem putting it down?) Then the "To the cloud" nonsense? Windows 7 is where users are supposed to discover what *everyone else* has been doing for years?

No, the ads on the TV are worse than any Microsoft product EVER.. the are the visual entertainment equivelent of Windows Me or even (dare I say it) Bob..

Horrible.. I can't visit a URL because of bad feelings I have about it from TV watching.

I think it is the advertising.

I would use Bing at least once in a while but they have such awful ads that I can't bring myself to even see those letters in that order...

Search plagiarism aside.. If even they are copying Google search results then you know why they can only get 4%...

Exactly, I have since moved on from that job a few years ago. Server density has gone up dramatically since then, I would not be surprised to see 50 servers at that location. Waay, way back spending your time "figuring things out" was more important. We should all face software is more complex now but easier to manage. Thanks to tools like Google and automatic updates, administrator's lives are very different now.

I am thinking this writer is a shill who is trying to drum up controversy to increase page views on his magazine web site.

Sure it was cool, back in the day, to spend 72 hours working on "the server" because even rebooting was not an option. Back then I had 3 servers, 10 years later I had 15. I didn't have the time to get into why each little snowflake of a problem was happening, I knew reinstalling and upgrading components would be a more prudent use of time. If I can rebuild a server and restore a data backup in 4 hours or I can spend an infinite amount of time "fixing" the existing install, which option do you think my PHB would prefer? It is not bad administration, it is just different.

Isn't it time to get rid of the Borg Microsoft Icon? How about a flying chair? Just wondering...

Google's biggest threat is the ability to hit "like" to a search result?

The ability to "like" search results will cause people to stop using Google appliances to search documents on corporate networks, stop the use of Google Applications in schools/governments/companies, stop people from advertising on adsense, stop the sale of Android-based phones?

I think you overestimate the appeal of "Bing"-ing for things...

Wow... are those the only choices? No!

Javascript and HTML do well in a modern browser. That is the first choice.

Flash would be the second choice, that at least has multiple platforms it can run on. You only exclude the iCrap...

Silverlight? NOT the 3rd choice. The third choice is Java (and I hate Java). It is multiplatform but developing for it requires you to be a Java Developer and that is a bridge too far.

Silverlight would be behind Hypercard, RealPlayer, Quicktime and other things that could in no way make a RIA.. because guess what? Silverlight might be able to make a RIA but only on 2 platforms and one of them is worthless...