Isn't there also the problem that you need uninfected people to administer the modern medical care. Sure, that's why RNs and MDs are among the first to be immunised, but still it wouldn't take much to bring down the health systems even in an advanced country.

And it is nothing like gnome2 in terms of flexibility, configurability, support for the plugins we came to depend upon.

Gnome jumped the shark, Ubuntu followed them. I'm jumping ship.

"Some day, you will be able to carry a phone, and dock it to a keyboard, mouse and display and use it as a full desktop with all your apps and data. Or use it as a tablet, in a different dock." - M.Shuttlesworth.

This is the 'vision.' With a simple dock, and a healthy dose of kool-aid, you will be able to turn a mouse into a finger, and a big wide screen with no touch capability at all into a touch-sensitive screen. The only thing missing is the part where a mouse behaves even slightly like a finger, and a display behaves even slightly like a touch screen.

Then, instead of relaxing your forearm on a desk and making small precise hand gestures with a mouse, you will be able to either use the mouse to drag the cursor (which you can hardly see) across large distances to precisely hit a sensitive area which you can also hardly see. OR, you will be able to wave your arms around wildly while gesturing at this vertical surface with your fingers ... except of course your forearm and upper arm muscles will quickly tire from all the effort.

We tried this in the lab, and the results are in: hand-waving is the way of the FUTURE!

From the previous Slashdot article about this debacle (the one where Shuttlesworth says "power users" are all wankers for not loving the Unity) one is directed to https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/882274/comments/36 and then http://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-unity/ which states that the usability of Unity was tested on 15 people, where "Of the 15 participants recruited, 13 were Windows users, 1 was a Mac user, and 1 used both Windows and Mac. None of the participants was familiar with Ubuntu."

This is jumping the shark with *lasers*

Tested, you say? Read this and weep: http://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-unity/

It states that the usability of Unity was tested on 15 people, where "Of the 15 participants recruited, 13 were Windows users, 1 was a Mac user, and 1 used both Windows and Mac. None of the participants was familiar with Ubuntu."

No, that would be trademark infringment - the 'potentially cause confusion' test derives from the tort of 'passing off' one thing as another.

If GNU had chosen HTML instead of info for its documentation, perhaps HTML would have been alive.

No ... wait ...

A large proportion of US Aid takes the form of tied loans for the purchase of military equipment. I guess if the arms were used to liberate the oppressed (q.v. Shaw's Major Barbara) that could be considered aid, but I am pretty sure this isn't the usual practice.

Oh, one more!

* Tcl has Safe Interpreters - as someone else noted - you can selectively hide, block or emulate commands in a cascade privilege model, so you can have a sandbox within a sandbox, if you want to. You could write a safe interpreter which executed third party code in a completely untrusted environment. That was a big feature of the Tcl Plugin for FF too. Very advanced security model.

| Can someone comment on ANY technical advantages that Tcl would have over Javascript

Good question. I'll have a bash at answering this, but of course it's just personal prejudice really, and it's all arguable:

* Tcl has unicode built in from the ground up - makes a difference if you're not an English speaker.
* Tcl is string based, all values are strings, it's very good at string manipulation.
* Tcl is event driven from the ground up - good at networking and interaction. Coroutines in the core.
* Tcl isn't locked into OO, although you can use the blessed OO when you want to.
* Tcl is elegant, has truly excellent introspection, it's extensible.
* Tcl has heaps of webby and networking stuff, libraries full of it.
* Tcl has Tk - and NaTcl will soon have NaTk - which gives you a really excellent GUI definition language.
* If I had to give a beginner a task and had a choice between JS and Tcl, I think I'd go for Tcl. So much of JS is beginner code, and perhaps the world would be a better place if it weren't.
* Tcl is fast to develop in, and (contrary to some opinions) quite good at large complex systems.

I could go on about it all day, but the bottom line is I know both JS and Tcl, I would prefer to use Tcl. YMMV, and you should use whichever language suits you.

Tcl has libraries to parse, manipulate, and generate SVG. http://wiki.tcl.tk/TclSVG We find Tcl easier than Javscript to write such utilities in. YMMV, of course. Being able to bring those facilities to bear for web applications is part of the motivation for NaTcl, so there's no implied choice or preference for Canvas over SVG, just that we haven't had time to adapt and write SVG generators ... now we have that opportunity.

Tcl 8.6 has coroutines, which are also tremendously useful for interactive (and networking) programs. They function as green threads, very lightweight and fast. Closures will come, but they're not so important when you have coroutines.

Not quite. We have a Tk front-end which generates HTML and CSS sufficient to present a very nice GUI in browser-native look and feel. At the moment, it runs on the server. We will be porting it to NaTcl next. In my experience, it's much simpler and neater than DOM and HTML.

Tcl 8.6 has full native OO.

The NaTcl balls demo runs here at 40fps, as fast as the original JS version, and respectable.

So, the point of using another scripting language is that you might prefer it to JS. You might find Tcl faster and better to develop in than JS. It seems to me to give you that choice, which otherwise you did not have.

And NaTcl uses the speed of NaCl to achieve that.

It's a good thing.