This is tantamount to taking drinks from a bottle of water, and asking yourself if the bottle will ever become empty.

Yes, if our consumption of oil and other fossil fuels continues, unabated, they will eventually run out. You can debate when that'll happen, but it's inevitable.

You've just dismissed what is probably one of the most powerful and flexible languages ever put into practice. Congratulations on being impossibly boneheaded.

You're talking about politics and conspiracy theories in an article about big data. Yes, that is off topic.

You're living in a dreamland. Like it or not, electricity, hardware, and wires cost money.

FYI, Mozilla Foundation is funded, in large part, by Google.

And it has scant adoption. Meanwhile, the rest of us are charging ahead and getting stuff done with steadily advancing tools rather than messing around with arcane operating systems that have 10-year-old feature sets.

In addition to testing on Trident 8, 9, and 10; Gecko; and WebKit, we've now got to add Servo and Blink! to the pile. Thanks, Mozilla and Google, for making my job as a web developer much harder! Yay! Innovation! And when we come out the other end, we'll have HTML5! Well, uh, sort of, I guess. The existing engines aren't all standards compliant. But I'm sure these new ones will be better. Hurray for progress!

What concepts does Rust introduce that aren't already present in the latest C++ standard? Which aren't already present in Scala? Which aren't already present in Go? Do you really want me to believe that memory safety, concurrency, generics, and exception handling present in half-a-dozen off-the-shelf (and mature) languages weren't sufficient? (And let's not forget that every new language departs from existing tool chains that service to multiply development efforts.)

I'll say it for the umpteenth time on Slashdot: why do we need dozens of half-baked projects instead of a few that are exceptionally solid? And I'll, again, give my own answer: because every one of these geeks who designs to start his own little, duplicative project thinks he's smarter than everyone else. You know, because those guys are idiots, and we couldn't possibly build upon their work. Greenfield development is always fun! (Am I right?)

But let's forget all that for the moment, and concentrate on our shiny new browser engine. If and only if this project is successful when all is said and done, it will produce exactly the same output as its siblings and predecessors--output that's dictated by standards. Indeed, after devoting person-years worth of hard labor, we will end up with something with exactly the same functionality as what we had before.

Sigh. Obligatory XKCD.

http://xkcd.com/927/

Our wheels aren't a thousand years old. They're barely even a few.

Ignoring the fact that this analogy has broken down into uselessness, let's talk about this new browser engine. Is it going to conform to the existing standards and produce output identical to its predecessor?

An all-out sprint on a treadmill doesn't take you anywhere. Can we please stop reinventing the wheel, over and over and over again?

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3420641&cid=42739283

Moving mass requires energy. The amount of energy required increases in proportion to the mass. Energy used by an airplane is supplied by fuel that costs money. More mass, more fuel, more money. Full stop. This has nothing to do with health, or discrimination, or anything else besides the laws of physics.

My feelings tell me that nuclear power is bad and scary!

These people are trapped by their own make-believe assumptions about the technology, refuse to acknowledge that apps like Codea exist, and are convinced that using an Apple product somehow takes away their freedom. What freedom? Oh, you know, that freedom that lets you go in and modify the kernel source code to suit your own needs. Or that freedom to use whatever software you like. Or to create new content. Yeah, Apple totally destroys all that and keeps kids from learning! The iPad sucks! Fuck Apple! I want my freedom!

So tired of reading these disk destruction threads. This question comes up on Slashdot every few months and it's the same, tired, old nonsense. If you really cared about your data not falling into nefarious hands, you would've encrypted it in the first place.

There's no serious, practical reason to give a hard drive a spectacular destruction other to satisfy primitive urges.

Absolutely freaking correct. The state of open source duplicity is simply embarrassing these days.

We have redundant efforts with databases.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3590191&cid=43301755

Redundant efforts with web browsers and phones.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3420641&cid=42739283
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3457941&cid=42884767

Then waste heat on anachronistic projects.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3469697&cid=42931869

And now we have redundant efforts on display servers.

Doesn't anyone else the damn pattern here? As long as this nonsense continues, open source platforms are going to be inconsistent, slapped-together, lack-luster trash heaps without any clear focus or direction. All the while playing catch up to where desktops were over a decade ago, in an age where the desktop is rapidly diminishing into irrelevance.

Sigh.

Have fun with your fork, guys.

Because Windows is shit? Of course, Windows is quite secure these days. I already answered your point by referencing Apache HTTPD. Try again, maybe?

Again, you're using a term from an entirely different sphere that describes a phenomenon among biological organisms. Software products don't have variation from copy to copy, they don't breed, and they don't evolve through natural selection. They're designed and modified in response to specific needs and threats. Nothing could be further from how living things survive and propagate.