JavaScript is actually quite easy to debug in IE 9, Firefox with Firebug, or Chrome, all of which contain debugging environments. CoffeeScript is harder to debug because it compiles to JS first. Python is harder to debug than JS because the debugging environment sucks by comparison.

You think the people implementing fast calculations for financial firms, can't and aren't using the knowledge and source code for projects in other areas ?

Correct. Do you think they are? That would almost certainly be in violation of their contracts...

But without rapid release, apparently.

I'm talking out of my ass here, but I was under the understanding that OpenJDK (or at least IcedTea) has the same field of use restrictions as any other Java implementation, which come from Sun's patent licensing, and can't be avoided by building a clean room implementation.

It seems highly unlikely that Apple would lock down the Mac to only App Store apps. It would really piss off both users and developers. I think Apple is more interested in (slowly) moving to a world where the Mac doesn't exist, and everyone uses an iPad or derivative.

PLoS ONE is a peer-reviewed journal. The point is that they will publish anything as long as it passes peer review and promise a quick review process, not that they publish things before they are peer reviewed.

There are places online that will publish manuscripts before they are reviewed (arXiv.org, Nature Precedings, etc.). PLoS ONE isn't one of them.

Actually, PLoS One is a peer-reviewed journal, as you would know if you were actually qualified to review it.

The bar code where the license plate would have been is Jobs's VIN.

Why? You need to have the copyright to begin with to be able to make it closed source. And if you have the copyright, you can do pretty much anything with your software, including distribute it through the App Store while simultaneously licensing the source under any open source license you want.

This is just stupidity on the part of the Growl developers. Developers added support for Growl to their products because it was FOSS. The net effect of selling Growl and making it closed source is going to be that developers either won't support Growl, or they will support the older version of Growl that's still FOSS.

What!? You mean that "Classic Scheme benchmarks, translated to JavaScript by Florian Loitsch's Scheme2Js compiler" don't capture the use cases of modern websites?

What tasks greatly benefit from more CPUs in the same machine, as opposed to getting more machines with more CPUs and writing software that scales across them? You can put 80 Westmere-EX cores into one machine. To me, that seems like a fuckton. But I admit that I don't know much about scaling systems, so I'm curious why you would need more.

Buy a new SSD? SSD failure is predictable. If you're lucky, your firmware will not try to write to blocks that are past their rated # of write cycles and so when your SSD reaches the end of its lifespan, your data will become read only. Even if not, you can still tell very easily if you're approaching end of lifespan using SMART status. I suspect that SSD death is much more predictable than HD death...

This exists/existed. Jaxer was supposed to be able to do this, but I never used it, and I've never met anyone who has.

What you are suggesting has existed since Netscape 4, and it's called LiveConnect. The problem is that the Java plug-in is slow as all fucking hell to start, which makes this approach very unpleasant. The other problem is that no one can make the Java plug-in any faster, because it's closed-source.

Flash (ActionScript) is JavaScript with a few non-standard extensions. It exposes very different APIs, but the APIs are not part of the language.

Virtually everyone agrees that the DOM (the set of APIs available to JavaScript running on a webpage) sucks. The debate is about whether JavaScript itself should be replaced with a different programming language.