Probably because dec 31, 2011 is in lots of legal contracts. If you eliminate that date, you have a lot more chances for people to try to weasel their way out of contracts, and more work for courts.

For how many thousands of years have there been greater than one billion people on the planet?

About 0.2 thousand, actually.

Your employer also has the right to give all the raise or bonus money to the guy who is more willing to comply. I'm not saying it is right, but it is reality.

Actually that's a really smart thing to do from a bandwidth point of view. There are all kinds of reasons not to do that (some of those are gradually disappearing, since now Google's crawler is starting to run some javascript to build the page as the user will see it), but if you are concerned about bandwidth, having javascript build your page for you is a very good way to do it.

Yeah but you are missing the point. The important thing is, the more donations come in to a particular cause, the more money they should be spending on that particular cause. If they have any credit (which obviously, the Red Cross does), they can do this before the "cash" is technically available.

I don't see how you can say that. There are lots of things that could happen. The nice thing about WebOS is that its API is pretty standard Javascript/HTML5 stuff, so people don't have to invest so much in developing for it, as much of their work can apply elsewhere. Also, if it can be easily loaded on hardware sold with Android, it's pretty nice to have a platform that is more open than Android, and arguably, built in a more modern and future-compatible way.

People might even modify it to work on windows-oriented hardware, such as tablets or even laptops. Who knows. We need something like this.

Are you sure about this? I understand that IE9 is not available for XP NOW, but certainly they could make it work on XP if they wanted to. Maybe certain things would be turned off, or maybe their would be code added to the OS to support those features, or something. But I can't see it being impossible to support the most important things in IE9 on XP. The important thing is to support the features that cause web sites to break, anyway.

Microsoft probably knows that would be a waste of money. The people who are likely to put a non-IE browser on their PC's are pretty likely to know how to, and be inclined to, switch the default search engine.

I think the implication is, the more the two trash-talk one another, the sooner Google stops writing the checks.

Far as I know, QT is not portable to browser. And I don't know anyone who recommends doing web apps in C++. And it's not generally appropriate for Android. C++ (minus the qt part) might be ok on iPhone for libraries that don't call directly into the Cocoa API.

So I'm having trouble seeing how it is so vastly portable to some of the platforms that are most relevant.

Javascript isn't perfect, but its better than having do use a combination of PHP, Objective-C, Java, and Javascript to reach everyone.

I think that anything HP can do to move people away from platforms controlled by their competitors, the better.

If webOS has all the right things to take off in a big way, a device maker like HP can really benefit. I don't think HP likes having to pay the microsoft tax on all their PC's (they'd sell a lot more cheap pc's if they could reduce the price by the cost of windows), so if the next generation of devices are built on open standards like javascript and html5 take off, all the better for HP.

Yes it would have been great for them if the world embraced webOS while it remaining fully owned by HP, but that just wasn't going to happen. The only possibility of getting people really interested -- given the head start both Android and iOS have -- was to set it free. It may turn out to be the smartest decision HP ever made.

This is excellent news. The best thing about WebOS is that it is built on things that people are standardizing on elsewhere. Javascript, html5 etc. WebOS even has node.js built in, which really is a start at tying all these things together -- client side web development, server side development, and "native" app development.

This is clearly the direction things are heading, and like or hate Javascript, it's going to become the lingua franca for everything but system level or the most computationally intensive stuff. People get tired of reimplementing things they've already done in different languages. There are a lot of things converging right now, and this just might be something that pushes things over the top.