You *do* pay your state use tax for all those things you order over the Internet, right?

Then again, I'd have less sympathy for them if avoiding paying taxes wasn't a universal pastime for corporations and individuals alike.

Nobody wants hot water in the summer?

But security, reliability, and other factors seem to defeat any advantages. I wonder who their customers will be.

You don't want... this is a question...well, it's like a horror movie when a character is standing in a dark room, hears a scary noise, and asks "Who's there?". It's one of those type of questions.

Because it is inefficient. In addition to higher energy bills, a less efficient architecture means shorter battery life in a mobile device, more noise in a desktop PC, and fewer servers per rack in a datacenter.

Did you ask it?

Because dragons are really cool.

Let's use a more practical example. If you wrote an elaborate version of ELIZA which produced output indistinguishable from a human, but which you knew was merely a algorithm operating deterministically on outside input with data structures and subroutines for emotions, concerns, thoughts, and motivations, would it be immoral for you to shut your program off? To delete any of its data? To rewrite it and make improvements to it?[1]

And if you know a Human is also a deterministic machine, do you feel any differently about it?

[1] I suppose you could ask your algorithm for permission first, but if it is deterministic, you could simply examine its state and design your query in a way you know the algorithm will respond 'yes'...but at that point, why bother asking?

Probably because the notion of consciousness as a physical, deterministic property is also messy, leading to conscious arrangements of gears and the ultimate conclusion that you are simply an automaton programmed to believe it is conscious, awake and self-determinate by an elaborate and pointless lie created through the cruelty and caprice of evolution.

My take is we're no better than ancient Greek philosophers arguing over the properties of atoms. We can debate it until we're blue in the face, but we simply don't have the technology or foundation of understanding to discern the truth. It is unfortunate that Humans have a deep need to believe they understand The Truth About Things no matter how little they really know, and this has led to millennia of dogma and persecution.

I'd guess because it's the only US state on the pacific coast with no sales tax.

I agree, albeit in the general sense. There's a group of mentally deranged humans that make the other 5% look bad.

Nice idea, but I can't afford to keep eating out this giraffe.

No, the "Your-Mom" hypothesis for gravitational discrepancy in the universe has already been debated at length by many of the world's foremost astrophysicists.

I'd say quite a few casual programmers use Javascript, though many of them surely do their best to ignore its functional aspects.

But you're right in that casual and beginning programmers, or experienced programmers when they're only throwing together something quick and dirty, may be drawn to more forgiving languages or the languages they were taught in school/university, and this would bias the projects written in those languages.

Statistics is hard. You can't simply use a random selection, or else you might conclude children with large feet have better reading skills.