Yes, but there is certainly some ideological differences between those who rigorously demand evidence and insist on controlling for cognitive bias, and those who are more prone to accept things on intuition and hearsay.

why shouldn't Wal-Mart be allowed to choose which customers it sells to on any grounds whatsoever?

Because we live in a society with rules. Although it's very indirect, ultimately those rules are chosen by the people (all the way back to the people that chose to ratify the Constitution). And those people don't want Wal-Mart to be allowed to do that.

I think you missed his point. Apple isn't under any obligation to help you to use their product outside of their intended use for it, but Europe isn't under any obligation to let Apple sell iPhones in Europe. If you don't want to go by Europe's rules, you can do business in another continent. Works both ways.

There are many users who view Javascript as inherently evil and think the Web would be better off without it.

How many, really? Are these the same users who think the web would be better off without any advertising? Just a guess, but those users probably don't weigh heavily in google's priorities.

Its *my* PC and should only be running open source code which many eyes have looked at (not true for a majority of Javascript loose in the wild).

If you apply that to sandboxed, interpreted languages....you might as well also apply it to html. Html, while not really a programming langage per se, does instruct your computer what to do. If the browser has a bug, malicious html can cause harm to your computer or compromise your privacy. What it the difference?

Unless Lua runs in all popular web browsers as a replacement for Javascript, using it as for the Android SDL would defeat much of the purpose of what I suggested.

Well aware of phonegap. It works by doing everything in WebViews, which makes it slow, clunky, and unable to do a lot of things that you can do in native views. For what it's worth, I do a lot of work on WebViews with javascript in Android apps (without phonegap), but it is a hacky solution at best.

Since Android already has Google's JS engine (in the browser), why not make it so you can write native apps in it? As in, ones that can access everything you can access from java. It might be slightly slower, but I doubt by much....especially since most of the intensive stuff (say, animations) can be done by OS. I work with both languages on the platform, and having to use java is just painful for the stuff that is so easy in javascript. Javascript may not be a perfect language, but its got so many advantages over java in a mobile device. Also the relationship of Java to XML/view layout on Android is so close to the relationship of Javascript to HTML/DOM in browsers.

The other obvious benefit would be that with Chrome OS and Android being effectively competitors, this would help tie the two together....easier to write apps for both if they use the same language. (and then there's that Oracle thing)

The whole comment about the number of users not mattering must be bupkus.

There can be any number of users, but they all have to be looking at the same part of the internet.

Why is it silly to fear the former? Fear of death is of course deep in us for obvious Darwinian reasons....there is no real "rationality" behind wanting to continue living except that natural selection put it at the very center of our motivational system. And there was no reason for evolution to make us *only* fear early death.....the important thing was that we do everything in our power to avoid death. -- no good reason to have it be selective between early or late death.

When a web developer speaks in terms of which browsers they do and don't support that is a direct indication that they don't understand even the most basic and fundamental concepts of website design.

Well, with the exception of IE6. I wouldn't fault a site for not caring anymore if their site looks crappy on IE6.

when you browse with Javascript enabled -- you are allowing websites to run essentially arbitrary code on your computer.

Wow, really? That's pretty scary. I guess no one has ever thought about the implications of that, or considered putting it in a sandbox so it can't do anything it wants to your computer. I think a strongly worded letter to the browser makers is in order!

Luckily, supreme court justices, who have read the constitution carefully, don't agree with your assessment.

Regardless you lose all credibility when you say evolution is a religion. Nothing in science is "proven", of course. Are you suggesting that "being convinced based upon the evidence" makes something a religion? I believe a mouse was in my kitchen because I saw what appeared to be poop on the counter. Is my belief a religion?

I like autocomplete, it saves me typing a lot of the time and I'd miss it if it were gone. Then again, if a few words are missing, it's not worth getting worked up over.

Good luck with that boycott. (BTW, does altavista even have auto-complete?)

We've already seen it, over and over again.

Oh I'm sorry, you are talking about reality, not science fiction...? Yeah. 50 years. Sure. And you forgot using people as batteries.