Point A: Java was standardized by a consortium as well. I believe that even the APPLET tag was standardized by the w3c. Oh, and that was before the w3c had began “standardizing” DRM hooks.
Point B: When Java was added to HTML, everyone and his dog (including Microsoft) thought that Java was the future and that every software in the world would have been rewritten in Java. Proof in the fact that the "Java" branding was added to Javascript in order to increase its appeal.
Point C: the sandbox for Java applets gave the unsigned ones even fewer permissions than the current Javascript sandbox does for the most obscure of the web pages.
Point D: Compilers have been written targeting the JVM bytecode for pretty much every modern language (Python, Ruby, Scala, Lisp and, of course, Javascript), many of them actually faster than their reference C implementations, so I don't know how much lower in level you can get.
Point E: Look, DOM manipulation from an applet. And do you know what else integrated even more with the DOM? Microsoft's ActiveX.

But above all, all points, even if they were true, are but minor differences in implementation, compared to the huge fact being the very nature of a bytecode that is supposed to be run by web pages, that alters the open nature of the web by making its pages write-only, and the introduction of a compiler into the workflow of HTML development. (Who will make the better compiler, Microsoft or Mozilla? Will php scripts output bytecode or do we have to change server-side scripting? What's the failure model for browsers implementing an older subset of the bytecodes?)

In other words, it's exactly like Java but instead of being designed by a software company, it's being introduced by personal data sellers, ad designers, NSA henchmen, DRM paladins, government lobbyists and walled-garden tenders. And unlike Java, it's going to be used by every single web page and we won't be able to uninstall it. Sounds great, what could possibly go wrong.

Have the actions of Snowden, and, apparently, the use of weak encryption, made the world less safe?

Talk about yourselves. The world isn't UK, you know. If anything, Snowden's revelations have shown that it's the UK who performed hostile acts of espionage against their European allies, together and on behalf of their trans-atlantic big buddies, not Soviet Russia.

I think it’s the same reason why often the children of successful entrepreneurs fail to keep their fathers’ empires running. When you no longer need to practice some kind of culture, you don’t, and when a culture isn’t practiced, you lose it for good, and finally competition (from other companies, from the Barbarians, from the Chinese) does the rest. Also known as “resting on your laurels”.

To be fair, the colosseum has just been restored (not rebuilt), this year, with contribution from private sponsors. There's an approved plan from the government to rebuild the inner arena to make it walkable again in five years, for 20 mln €. Piig or not, that's not much for the fourth economy of the EU; for comparison, it's 1/6 the cost of a single F-35 fighter and Italy is going to buy 90 of them from the US. However you are right, Italians just can't be bothered to spend money for the preservation of their historic heritage, and will happily watch it crumble to nothingless (see what's happening to the houses of Pompeii) while they build campy villas around and over the ruins.

I don’t know how it works in China, but in my country that’s the job of freemasonry.

What I’d like to express is that when I use dynamically typed languages, whatever they are called, I get, depending on the particular kind of dynamically typed language, little to no introspection, function prototypes and data structures that are not self-describing, and a tendence to eat my typos and turn them into insidious bugs that are a nightmare to find and only trigger at runtime, and often not by raising a proper exception, but instead causing behaviours that appear inexplicable until you hunt the bug down.

Designing a language is a matter of trade-offs; certain languages are designed to make you code quickly (VBScript), which doesn’t mean that you can’t write robust code with them, and others are designed to make you write robust code (Java), which doesn’t mean that you can’t write buggy code with them.

What happens in Python 2 if I write 3 < "3"?

Which addition operation triggers undefined operation in C because of unmatched types?

Oh, I had the same experience and I thought that it was the quality of the drives to be declining.

However, to be honest, I recall having problems with failing floppies all the way back to the 80s. On the C64, the drive would begin making a LOUD rattling sound as if its head had fallen off the disk and it was banging against the end of the rail; given my age at that time, this usually happened while a game was loading the last level that I had been playing for half a day to reach (no savegames back then). On the PC, I still remember how many times I found myself torturing the R key at the "Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail" prompt, usually to no avail. A friend of mine recommended me to put the failing floppies inside the fridge and try reading them again while they were fresh.

I know you're a troll, therefore I'm talking to the person who modded you up, since in order to get mod points he has to be at least moderately rational.

What the hell do French private labour laws have to do with the public debt crisis in Greece?

A personal rant, not related to this particular situation of which I know nothing.

The banks won't allow any flexibility about my working conditions when I ask for a mortgage to buy my house; doctors expect to be paid with no flexibility when I have to maintain the health of my family; bills needs to be paid inflexibly at the end of the month. So I have to confess that this concept of "flexibility" that we are importing from the US is starting to piss me off, because basically it means that workers, the weaker part of economy and the one that actually does the job, have to take on their shoulders the risk of entrepreneurship, which historically was the moral justification for investors to make money without working.

And hearing that this is necessity from politicians who sit on mountains of public money, and on behalf of CEOs who can earn one hundred times as much as their employees, and can take the citizenship of Monte Carlo to even avoid paying taxes on that much, is unbearable. Again, I'm not talking about the CEO of Mandriva, it's just a generic rant.