You sound like a typical Democrat voter: anyone who disagrees with the Democrat party line is automatically a "nutcake gun-owning, violent conservative", Obama somehow isn't at fault for anything his administration does but Bush can be blamed for all current Democrat policies, and calling Obama on his pro-Bush policies is somehow "hatred of technology and science" and makes one a Holocaust denier.

Honestly, I used to think the Republicans were the nutty ones, but these days I'm starting to believe it's really the Democrats who are insane.

You are misinformed and ignorant.

Sounds like a typical American.

I wonder if it fell victim to the Capacitor Plague. It might have just needed some new electrolytic caps.

We already have what you're asking for: it's called "QML", which is part of the Qt toolkit.

All these puns suck.

Still why people live in such places

Because that's where they're allowed to live. You think some European country with a nice, mild climate is willing to give up a large fraction of its territory so that the entire population of the UAE can relocate their country there?

How does one embed "JavaScript URLs" in CSS?

Very easily, and because so few people know it is possible, it's a rather nasty vector for cross-site scripting attacks.

Also you seem to have no idea about where the web is headed or have heard about responsive design and SPA.

I'm well aware of responsive design. I think it's an abomination, because all it does is make it take two page loads to view your site instead of one, by ensuring that I have to first load your broken mobile site, then click the "full version" link. Every single freaking time I end up on a "responsive" mobile version of a website, I find myself locked out of features that I regularly use, and end up having to switch to the full desktop version of the site.

If you need much more than a couple lines of JavaScript and a custom stylesheet to support mobile devices, it invariably means that your site is badly designed (too complex) to begin with, and as soon as you release the mobile version of your site, you're almost certainly going to make me hate your guts and curse your name.

And SPA is even worse. If your site loads significantly faster as a web app, there's something wrong with your site. 99% of the time, most of the resources should be shared across pages, and only the text of the page should be changing. There's usually not an appreciable difference between the "load the full page" case and the "load the body of the page" case from a performance perspective unless something is very, very wrong. There are exceptions, such as storefronts that use precisely the same page layout for every page, but these are exceptions, not the rule, and even then, the extra savings in initial page load time just result in a customer sitting there wondering why there's no data on the page, and thinking your site is broken. The real problem is that every web engineer thinks their site is the exception to this rule, but most of those engineers are wrong.

More to the point, if I'm accessing your site often enough to care about performance, I'm going to download your native app instead of using your mobile site, because it will always be much, much more functional, with fewer limitations, more features, and better performance. If I'm going to your website, it's either because I don't care about performance or, more commonly, it is because your native app is missing features that are only on the full version of your site. Giving me a mobile version won't help with the second case, and the first case is largely unimportant for everybody but the site designers who are trying desperately to shave off a few bytes from their data bill.

BTW, it's possible to do a manifested web app (giving you all the advantages of heavy-duty caching of shared content) without using JavaScript for all your navigation. You just specify the base path of the content directory as an external URL (I forget the details) in the web app manifest. This approach is much, much more user-friendly than a SPA in my experience.

But the cost of providing those services isn't the same. First, the probability of a forest fire is roughly proportional to the area of land, because lightning doesn't care.

You are missing a key point. the land does not disappear if one person owns 50 acres or if 50 people own 1 acre each right next to each other. It is still there and still costs the same. Like you said, lightning doesn't care.

No, you are missing a key point. If it costs a million dollars to protect a city block that contains 50 homes, the cost per home is $20,000 per home. If it costs a million dollars to protect a city block that contains only one home, the cost per home is a million bucks. It is only fair that a homeowner in the second block should pay more, because the cost of defending his or her home is 50 times as much as the cost of defending a home in the first block. The more people that bear the burden, the less the burden for each person. This is just common sense.

Also, from a fire management perspective, the land does disappear if nobody builds on it. So that first house in a rural area imposes a much bigger burden on the system than subsequent homes. Unless there are homes that could eventually be at risk, modern fire management policies typically recommend letting forest fires burn themselves out. The reason fires get out of control is that we've spent decades over-managing forest fires, and we really need to stop doing that, or else they're just going to be worse the next time around.

Not really. Expensive homes are more likely to have high dollar security systems, cameras, and serial numbers recorded. Middle class homes would be a more probable target. Slums of course are still there as opportunity remains and according to the data, people with income of 7.500 or less are victims of theft and violent crimes like assault more than people with incomes over 75k.

Serial numbers don't make much difference if the person pawns it before you detect the theft. And security cameras don't help if the burglar knows they exist, because they'll just wear a mask to hide their faces, and park their car a block away or cover their plate.

Even things like utilities cost more for larger pieces of land, because the utility companies have to run their cables past your property to get to the next potential customer, and the longer your property is, the more it costs to do so. They only get one customer per property, so larger properties effectively raise the installation cost for everyone on your block.

They must do it different where you live. In my neck of the woods, the utility company will come a maximum of 25 feet into the property for their demarcation point. Anything after that and it is up to the property owner to run.

I'm talking about the length of the property, not the depth. And even for the depth, that's only true if there isn't a street behind you. Otherwise, at some point, they're going to have to make at least one run the entire depth of the piece of land to connect over to the next street. The cost to wire an area is proportional to the area. There's just no way to get around that. :-)

Only if you start with incorrect assumptions in the first place. But please tell me, how likely is it that someone would have a million dollar home on 50 acres of land with a falling down shack that someone thinks is stuffed full of goodies? The falling down shack is more likely on less expensive property or maintained. You see, rich people don't like looking at the trash we regular people have to put up with. The shack would likely either be repaired, removed, or replaced before it appears falling down.

Come again? As I said, house fires are inversely proportional to the cost of the home, which is precisely what you said while arguing with me....

Nobody minds CSS much, so long as you don't allow embedding JavaScript URLs in it (which, unfortunately, browsers do).

The problem is not JavaScript, per se, so much as the fact that it is massively overused, breaking links, breaking back buttons, etc. Your documentation viewing experience does not demand a web app. It might benefit from some intelligent links that do special stuff if JS is enabled, but if you cannot make your site work with JS disabled, you're abusing JavaScript.

There are exceptions, mind you—sites where the core functionality is unavoidably tied to JavaScript (e.g. Google Docs). And I can even accept JavaScript for other content on that site that isn't tied to JavaScript, because after all, you can't avoid JS on such a site. The farther you get away from that scenario, the more annoying it is. And even on those sites, I expect the developers to have taken the time to ensure a good user experience—effort that, sadly, most web developers don't put in.

And yes, I've developed some pretty complex sites that use lots of JS code, but I've always made sure that at least the basic stuff doesn't require it, to the maximum extent practical.

Amirite... a bluish purple crystal that turns pink in the presence of sarcasm. First described in a Kenny Loggins song:

Amirite. Donut buddy worry 'bout me.

Unfortunately, very few people who complete a PhD in this country go on to acheive much financially. Even as the chair of a math department his salary was dwarfed by that paid to the football coach of the same university. It is sad that research pays so poorly in this country in spite of its great benefits.

The insurance industry has owned Washington for some time now. Naturally they would be able to get away with this kind of invasion of privacy with zero backlash. In 2010 the insurance industry started cashing in on their investment by pushing through the ACA bill, but that is only the start of it.

Interesting point, but be that as it may, our southern border is completely wide-open so it'd be trivial for them to sneak across with all the guns they want.

The overwhelming majority of CSci graduates that I have known started undergrad by learning Scheme. IIRC that language was actually built for the purpose of teaching the fundamentals of programming. Why was it replaced (beyond the fact that hardly anyone in the real world uses it)?