Lexical scoping, fast interpreted language, automatic memory management, same language client and server-side, dynamic typing, are all good reasons to use it, if you actually want all these things; otherwise there are almost certainly better choices. JavaScript is a really nice language if you ignore the parts of it that are terrible. The language is largely mis-understood and has a long history of abuse at the hands of those who mis-understand it. This is a real problem if you want to build a maintainable system and all the developers don't have a clear view of how to program well in JavaScript. The language is more like Lisp (specifically Scheme) than it is like Java, but not that many people know or even understand the idea behind Lisp nowadays. I would think that the resurgent interest in functional programming would ameliorate this to some extent but most of the JS I've worked on is crap and I would strongly recommend against using it unless you have a clear picture of why you would want to do so.

Development on the ASCII standard started in 1960 FWIW :D

They did exactly this with Spirit and Opportunity, although I have no idea if there were any cost savings. Clearly, it is possible, and those were both successful far beyond the original mandates of the mission.

Whenever I hear these types of arguments I always think there must be some psychological term for this. That is, whenever someone has been deprived of some benefit, it is all too easy to get him to rally behind depriving others of the same.

Why should every business endeavor be a race to the bottom for everyone but the shareholders?

And good god do you really want the people who will do the job just because it's a job? Desperation breeds loyalty by necessity but it is not a very healthy state of mind. I guarantee the civil service job is anything but sexy and probably pays nothing more than a reasonable wage. These are the tradeoffs that, generally speaking, have emerged from the free market system.

Yup, perfect example of a greedy algorithm - this will cost me less today, so it must be the best action! Businesses fail at an alarmingly high rate; just because a few people are taking the greedy choice does not mean it is optimal.

Oops wasn't logged in but that was me, in case. You were wondering.

You are wrong, broadly speaking. This is the whole point of machine learning: given a very complicated task that it would take a human a tremendous amount of effort to program correctly, you can instead get the machine to figure out how to perform the task itself, rather than explicitly programming it to do one thing. Some types of learning are supervised, particularly classifiers: I tell the computer which items belong to which class, and given a new, previously unseen item, the computer attempts to determine its class based on the training. Others are unsupervised: set the robot free in the environment with some goal function and let it learn through trial-and-error how to optimize its behavior toward the goal. Watson is a combination of first-order logic (prolog and a huge kb) and a variety of such learning algorithms. Some of this is stuff that was considered an industry failure in the 80s but, paired with modern machine learning techniques, is quite powerful. Indeed we may be seeing the first instances of computers that have some form of this "intelligence" of which you speak, though I think we are still a long way from "strong AI".

Isn't he proposing a hyped-up relay station (I have not RTFA)? Even a relay station with just the relay capabilities is going to need a decent amount of processing power. "Supercomputer" is hopelessly vague, but it will have to operate autonomously to relay a large amount of traffic, and be radiation-hardened and able to operate in near-0K temperatures. Probably more ambitious than any other computer we have launched out of our gravity well, but then again probably only by an order of magnitude or so.

I hate reviewing LaTeX documents, as the software doesn't come with any revisioning/collaboration tools to speak of. Word, on the other hand, PITA though it may be, comes with very good tools via track changes and comments. Not revisioning in the sense of version control, but in the sense of what most people actually need for document editing. For an open textbook a VCS would work great, but it's overkill for smaller, article-length papers.

Your account is just an MS schill account, judging by your comment history. Vista was a steaming pile of crap when it was released. After four years of work on it, MS scrapped anything innovative and rushed for a year just to get *something* out the door. SP1 fixed a lot of the issues but I still have problems with my one remaining Vista box that have nothing to do with driver support. It is just...buggy. Win7 was great, but it sounds like they are once again rushing a Win8 release to get something out the door. I predict a moderate disaster, followed in about 12-18 months by a really solid new release for the desktop.

Truth is, it is hard to know. Cannabis research is underfunded and publication of completed research is suppressed by the relevant journals. As hazah mentioned, there remains much to be concluded. For years, all we had was propaganda, so it's really hard to tell when something is valid or not. This goes for arguments both for and against the drug. What has been discovered over the last 20 years or so is that it's not nearly as bad as the propaganda made it out to be on most fronts, and that there are real medical benefits to its use.

Good damn thing there is a 2nd Amendment

I'm all for second amendment rights but I really don't think they are going to help with any of these things. If we can't live together as a society without the threat of violence, there is not much hope of maintaining a stable, long-lasting state. It is violence spurred by political unrest and divisiveness that the OP is predicting, go figure.

Please post your name here, and we'll all do our best to help...

The DC metro area is the second most congested in the country next to LA, so, it's probably worse than you may imagine.