The dev team didn't make any choices at all. The dev team doesn't write their own requirements.

Most of the JS that causes issues are third party scripts from various vendors, loaded from their sites. If their CDN chokes, it affects our site. All the assets we control are accessed via a CDN, and our pages are cached to the extent permissible by their content. It's the arbitrary crap loaded in from third parties (that can't be cached or handed off to our CDN because it's dynamically generated) that screws stuff up.

The javascript on the primary site I work on takes up about 50% of the page load time. None of it is to do with functionality - it's all analytics or A/B tests or performance measuring stuff. One day something broke with the tool the marketing guys use to insert all that guff, and the site performance doubled. Inspect the DOM tree after it's loaded, and there's 30-50 iframes and script tags that have been dynamically inserted on any given page.

I'm not against javascript; it's useful for making sites do useful things. But this sort of crap just drags everything down.

Pounds? I didn't even know Black Friday was a thing in Britain. It's not here in Aus.

I imagine there were three reasons:

1. You could intercept all three if you inclined the blade forward so you intercepted one in advance of the other two, then caught the others closer in. Alternatively, just sidestep one and deflect the other 2.
2. Items with mass could be controlled by force telekinesis
3. Nobody was particularly interested in killing Jedi when the only ones around were a mountain hermit and a swamp rat

On the other hand, this is twenty-five years after the Alliance victory. The Empire should be the underdogs now, so a bit less Goliath treatment for them might be appropriate.

Why would cab companies clean up their act, when they can just rely on government to prevent competition anyway - as, apparently the Nevada government did.

Absolutely. BitCoin wasn't designed to be an investment, it is intended as a means to store and transfer wealth.

The fact that some people made out like bandits investing is a side-effect of the system, not its reason for being.

Because "non-binding resolutions" are so impressive.

I'd also say that the group of people willing to install a non-default browser (not IE, not Safari) are also more likely than average to change default search providers.

What else is distinctive about an iPad apart from those two things? Really, all tablets look the same. They're basically just a rectangular touch-screen. About the only variations possible in their hardware are colour, size, and buttons - and some utilitarian designs as to which ports are located where, which are hardly distinctive.

Because goodness knows, nobody's been assaulted by a licensed taxi driver.

By "retire" I mean "not use anymore". Of course, we'll still be stuck supporting the legacy crap for decades to come. Much as we'll be stuck supporting HTML5 when the new shiny comes over the horizon.

It's basically just a bunch of new features that are wrapped up into a bundle with the label "version 5" slapped on it. It's usually accompanied by CSS3, which adds new features for styling stuff.

There are two reasons people like HTML5, in my experience. Firstly, the canvas element lets you do arbitrary drawing with javascript, opening up a large range of applications for pure-HTML that used to rely on stuff like Flash or Applets (most notably games). Secondly, HTML5 does a lot of stuff natively, that used to have to be added (somewhat hackishly) by javascript and UI libraries - form validation, colour pickers, date selectors. When you add CSS3 into the mix, you can make quite rich UIs with very little (if any) use of javascript.

Basically, HTML5 will let us retire a whole bunch of crufty old legacy hacks from the bad days (Javascript everywhere, Flash, Applets, etc)

When you get to international scale, tax is just like everything else; it's a competitive market. Once they have the size to make it feasible, corporations will go to whatever country offers them the best benefits for the least money, just the same as corporations inside the US shop around from state to state looking for the best tax deal.

It's no different to what happened in Soviet Russia with individuals, really. Those that were the most productive, and earning the most money, were those "taxed" the most. They didn't like that, so they left the country. Faced with the mass exodus of their most valuable citizens, the USSR made it illegal to leave. We're just seeing the US government go through the same cycle. Rather than control its own massive spending on military campaigns and welfare, the US is trying to squeeze more and more income out of their tax base, and their tax base is leaving the country. All this crying about "tax avoidance" is just the first step in trying to compel them to stay.