'the harm to consumers that Microsoft's decision could create.'" The only harm is to these business' pocketbooks.. For once I'm on MS side in this matter...

Then you are failing to think this through. The only effect of this will be to give advertisers an excuse to ignore "do not track". How does undermining "do not track" help anyone?

For once I agree with Microsoft that WE DO NOT BENEFIT FROM TRACKING.

Are you stupid, or can you just not read? Microsoft is UNDERMINING "do not track" by turning it on by default, because that only gives advertisers an excuse to ignore it. "Do not track" is entirely voluntary on the part of advertisers.

Because it renders "Do Not Track" useless. Apache is already ignoring Do Not Track if it detects that you are using IE10. It's a boneheaded move on Microsoft's part.

The Tahrir Project is trying to create an anonymous microblogging platform, similar to Twitter or Facebook. Google was sponsoring development on it over the summer so with any luck it won't prove to be vaporware like Diaspora.

Like many workplace practices, it's something worth trying, but not something to be trumpeted as "the way" to do things. Some people get on with pairing, some don't. And it's OK either way. Likewise, there are writers who work in pairs, but many who do great work alone. There are architects who work in groups and alone. So it goes for software developers.

Where it goes sour, however, is when people who find pair programming valuable start tarring anyone who doesn't do it as being error-prone slackers.

That said, if there is some way to create a parallel version, a version not intended to pay for a yacht, I would be all for it.

Forking, perhaps?

You can just type:

X nm = (X*10) angstroms

The plan is that people will be able to define lots of functions like this, along with much more complicated ones, and then share them. The best of them will become part of the default vocabulary.

Please sign up for the mailing list if you'd like to keep up with developments (or, if you can code Java, perhaps you could help?!)

Or somehow silence grammar nazis...

Yeah, it kinda is. Did you ask that when Slashdot opened their codebase many years ago? How about when Reddit did it? What about Google with their various open source projects?

You should be glad that people open source things.

Nah, just wanton irresponsibility :-)

Soulver was actually what inspired LastCalc, but I wanted to bring it to the web, and make it programmable.

OpalCalc looks neat, unlike Soulver it supports functions, and I'm sure it has a few features that LastCalc currently lacks.

However LastCalc has a few features that OpalCalc lacks too, such as support for higher-level datastructures like lists and maps, pattern matching (like Haskell), and the ability to pull data from the web to use in calculations.

So I'm not sure that I would describe OpalCalc as "LastCalc on steroids" by any stretch.