emscripten is compilation in advance of massive complex C code into JavaScript that truly runs anywhere. In most cases keeping your source code to yourself is unimportant; Facebook and Google ship MBs of JavaScript source to billions of browsers every minute. My impression is Java has more security vulnerabilities than JavaScript, but then again it's able to do more.

Java in the browser did deliver benefits; yet Java in the browser is almost completely dead. Maybe a bytecode or native runtime would have delivered more than the astounding progress in computing, technology, and society that JavaScript in the browser has brought us for 18 years. I doubt it.

No, the squabbling companies have agreed on JavaScript and the DOM as the runtime, and agreement on additional Web APIs for audio, game pads, fullscreen mode, orientation, etc. is likely soon. It works, it's spectacularly compatible in the latest browsers, and there's little need for anything more.

LLVM isn't a runtime, NaCl or better PNaCl talking to the Pepper API is a runtime, but it's an underspecified Google-controlled approach that Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft and Opera will never adopt . For all the alleged benefits of running some lower-level bytecode in a VM, there's no credible or likely path to a standard. Meanwhile JavaScript rolls on.

I made the mistake of going to the disco in my light-activated exoskeleton... Freak Out!

(Disco Stu meets Lise from William Gibson's great short story "The Winter Market".)

Except they weren't, maybe you mean "they came before". Microsoft Windows for Pen Computing was a ripoff of GO's PenPoint from 1991, right down the the notebook metaphor in their promotional slides. PenPoint launched on tablet computers from IBM and NCR before Microsoft was able to cobble together their first demo. And before GO there were attempts such as Pencept and Momenta to interact with an LCD screen with a tethered pen.

Stylus computing works great for annotating existing content (cue AT&T's "Some day you will fax from the beach" ads) but handwriting recognition remains terrible, even 98% successful recognition means you stop every few words to correct. PenPoint and software written for the O.S. won awards but never got traction, just like Windows for Pen Computing never went anywhere. A web full of content to consume didn't exist and there were only a few vertical markets of doctors, insurance adjusters, and construction supervisors to mark up existing documents (and fax them from the beach).

Yes, Windows for Pen Computing just added an ink layer to the desktop. It was the other companies that rethought interaction: besides GO, the later Apple Newton and Palm PDA innovated. PenPoint provides a huge trove of prior art for direct screen manipulation, tap and drag, other gestures, and novel metaphors for a bookshelf, notebook, and page-turning, which is why Apple hasn't been able to broadly patent IOS features.

I've only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.

... I've never supported physical music as a consumer. As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life, I've never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and T-shirts.

But I didn't illegally download (most) of my songs. A few are, admittedly, from a stint in the 5th grade with the file-sharing program Kazaa. Some are from my family. I've swapped hundreds of mix CDs with friends. My senior prom date took my iPod home once and returned it to me with 15 gigs of Big Star, The Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo (I owe him one).

(Yet she doesn't feel she owes Big Star, VU and YLT anything? Her selective gratitude is disgusting.)

During my first semester at college, my music library more than tripled. I spent hours sitting on the floor of my college radio station, ripping music onto my laptop. The walls were lined with hundreds of albums sent by promo companies and labels to our station over the years.

She (and her asshole prom date) indulged in various forms of copyright infringement clearly against the "All Rights Reserved" clearly printed on all those CDs, not just exchanging mix tapes (and even there she didn't just swap CDs, she uploaded someone else's songs into her own iTunes collection) . Considered in total, a fair use defense would not fly. And if you think there's nothing unseemly about acquiring that much beloved music without any compensation to the artists, there's more than one group of "mindless idiots" in the world. All your ranting about evil corporations ignores the very real harm that artists suffer from actions like hers.

I think I understand what you're saying, though you say it in a silly way. A song isn't bandwidth, it's the manifestation of a creative work.

People still desire particular songs, and we're in a golden age where the music industry has responded to that desire by making nearly every song available in an unrestricted quality format worldwide at an exceptionally reasonable price! Saying artists insist on this or calling it "lunacy" is a bizarre twisting of history, this is exactly what consumers said they wanted when they were bitching and moaning about iTunes DRM and $16 CDs with only two good songs. So you'd think that collecting a buck from 60,000 fans of a good song should be easy... except most of the audience would rather get it for free, and paper over their moral and ethical deficiencies by mouthing the tired Slashdot line on evil record companies-Founding Fathers' intents-information wants to be free-not stealing-blah blah, to which you're adding the "blame the artists for everything" twist. (As David Lowery/The Trichordist waxed so poetically, "On nearly every count your generation is much more ethical and fair than my generation. Except for one thing. Artist rights.")

Several artists have tried Kickstarter-like deals to get their recordings funded, without much success, e.g. http://www.artistshare.com/ You may be right that it's the only way to collect in the future but that sounds like a terrible world for the artists who pay recording engineers like you.

And before [artists] see any [royalties] they have to pay off certain things the label forces them to pay for

So what? "This restaurant owner doesn't distribute gratuities fairly, therefore I won't pay for the meal I enjoyed" keeps money from the hardworking staff. I'm not sure what argument you're failing to make, but whatever it is David Lowery demolishes it in the section starting

“"t’s OK not to pay for music because record companies rip off artists and do not pay artists anything.“ In the vast majority of cases, this is not true. ...

Emily White violated the copyrights on the music she acquired ("I've swapped hundreds of mix CDs with friends. My senior prom date took my iPod home once and returned it to me with 15 gigs of Big Star, The Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo"). You'd think RMS would be against that, since the GPL expresses (admirable IMO) restrictions on what you can do with it under those same copyright laws. His arguments why Emily "did nothing wrong" are mostly the lame tired shit piracy apologists have trotted out for decades now

After all, how can we support musicians? Buying recordings from record companies won't do it. For nearly all records, the musicians get none of that money; the record companies keep it. See this article and this article.

Untrue. Artist royalties are often ~20% of the sales price; this chart says $.09 for an iTunes download, and artists self-releasing through CD Baby keep 75%. The meme that artists don't get money seems to be a deliberate misunderstanding of the money record companies advance against royalties so artists can make a quality record (The Trichordist explains this well). Regardless of the percentage it is not the consumer's right or job to decide if that's a reasonable or obscene deal from the record company and online store. FFS, if you don't like a song enough to pay $0.99 for an unprotected DRM-free legal copy of it so the artist gets some money in exchange for your enjoyment of her creative endeavor:

1. Skip it and enjoy the zillions of free songs out there — under CC share licenses, out-of-copyright, in the public domain, live performances from trade-friendly artists on Internet Archive, etc.! As RMS knows from software, there are great free alternatives to restricted paid works, so go support those!

2. If you whine "Waahhh, this song I want ought to be free like all those others" so you pirate it anyway, your parents raised you badly.

RMS goes on

Practically speaking, the only effective and ethical way you could support musicians was through concerts.

Not true. Paying for the copyrighted recordings you want and love works great and delivers money to artists so they can make more! It's insulting to suggest artists should instead try to collect money for something completely different — "touring and T-shirts&quot. (No Sgt. Pepper for you, John Paul George and Ringo are going deaf on another tour that only their teenybopper fans attend.) The idea that artists should not charge for a quality studio recording has been immensely damaging to "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" in the area of recorded music, it's a big reason why today's songs are made on laptops instead of with crack session musicians. And as RMS later acknowledges, touring doesn't even work for those bands that do perform live, because they can't afford to travel to all their fans, then on any night only a fraction of fans in an area make it to the show.

RMS is on better ground with the first of his two ways to support artists

Put a tax on Internet connectivity, and divide the money among artists.

Great idea, let's hope it happens. But his second is a fantasy:

Give each player device a button to send 50 cents anonymously to the artists.

It's been tried, the Fairtunes service during Napster's golden era. I ponied up money for a song I shared, but in several years of operation I think they only received $50,000 (when there were 25 million Napster users). Jane's Addiction succinctly expressed the reason: “When I want something, I don't wanna pay for it”

It's ugly, and the fine Ghostery extension tells me that Atlantic page has 15 web bugs and ad trackers from AdThis, Bizo, Chartbeat, Disqus, Doubleclick, Facebook Connect, Facebook Social Plugins, Google +1, Google Analytics, Omniture, Outbrain, Parse.ly, Quantcast, Scorecard Research Beacon, and Twitter Button. Each one of those is another image and/or increasingly, another 10kB of JavaScript crap just so third parties can watch what I'm doing on that page.

A Wikipedia page: not one.tracker or web bug. "You're beautiful to me on the inside."

Since a wikipedia page is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starting cap word phrase , you can just create a bookmarklet for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s, assign it keyword 'w', and then type [Ctrl+L][w]Criticism of Wikipedia to jump directly to a page. Even if you guess the page title wrong Wikipedia often has a redirect.

Also works well for Wiktionary, etc. Some browsers only let you keyword a search form with a query string, but this is fabricating the page's actual URL

It's a great Mozilla feature. You can't (?) do it on Android, Google wants you to search with them. And keep you in Google rather than jumping to Wikipedia: Google's "Knol" wikipedia competitor folded but now now with Knowledge Graph in search results (seemingly culled from Wikipedia) Google is showing you the quick Wikipedia info without you needing a trip there .

My F5 key hasn't moved in years
Fk fkeys, Ctrl+R FTW.

Also, SeaMonkey still has a reload button in its toolbar.

Possible benefit to vendors: it's an alternative to Android that's based on industry standards and thus with much less lock-in.

Also Telefonica claims it "will be more open than Android, and will run on lower-specification hardware", we'll see about the latter. The HTML5 UI layer "Gaia" and the additional web APIs are well-isolated from hardware, hence there are nightly builds of B2G for Mac and Windows without the phone part. From the architectural overview Mozilla's initial smartphone target is a "Gonk" hardware abstraction layer on top of parts of the Android runtime and an Android kernel, but people are already porting to generic Linux + framebuffer/Open GL.

I suspect the development isn't easier than a native Android or iOS port, but if you've got a web site or HTML version of your app, then the additional work to make it an installable web app is minimal; besides, a lot of Android and iOS webOS apps are just HTML5 under the covers. Tizen, Blackberry OS, even Windows Phone — everyone who isn't yet successful in phones and tablets — are all promoting development using HTML5 technologies.

Abandoning desktop Firefox is just FUD, you're overreaching. Meanwhile if a thriving web of millions of sites that run on any browser is supplanted by proprietary apps supplied by closed app stores, then the web loses. Firefox OS and a Mozilla app store platform are entirely appropriate counter-reactions to that trend that are aligned with Mozilla's mission.

What's your solution, or do you not even think there's a problem? Should Mozilla not even take on challenging tasks that might fail?

I wish they'd just get it over with and fully disown Thunderbird so that others who do give a damn can do something with it.

You seem rather unclear on the concept of open source. Anyone who cares can contribute to Thunderbird development. Anyone who has a better idea for its direction can take the code and fork it, even turn it back into a commercial product. And they have, there's a list of e-mail clients based on Thunderbird on Wikipedia, one of which is Postbox for $30.

Only in the minds of entitled armchair whiners does Mozilla paying salaries for Thunderbird engineers and even a messaging team for years somehow equate to "not giving a damn." The reality is there's little interest and clearly no money in a standalone e-mail client, and it's somewhat tangential to Mozilla's mission. As users moved to web mail and ISP-provided clients, Mozilla's various experiments to do cool collaborative and communication things with Thunderbird didn't have much impact.

(I've used the SeaMonkey browser-editor-mail-IRC suite since it was Netscape Navigator 2.0. SeaMonkey 2.11 remains a solid useful product with all the performance and memory wins of recent Firefox, and I really appreciate the talented few who keep it going with the aid of Mozilla's infrastructure.)

Anti-hybrid articles full of crocodile tears over the pollution from batteries and rare earth are just hand-waving drivel. Most transportation lifecycle analyses just take the weight of a car; the Prius weighs the same 1.5 tons as other midsize cars. So cue fact-free diatribes about dirty rare earth and nickel mining, complete with pictures of Sudbury from 40 years ago.

But here's where you need to apply common sense. The 100 pounds of recyclable NiMH batteries (including about 20 pounds of nickel) and ?? pounds of rare earth for magnets and electronics in a hybrid probably *do* involve more pollution pound-for-pound than all the other crap that goes into making a conventional car. But over 120,000 miles they result in 3 tons less gasoline getting burned compared with the 35 mpg TDI for which diesel fanbois have such a hard-on (here's the math). Every one of those 6,000 pounds of gasoline saved would have been dirty and polluting to produce, spill, and refine, and they all wound up in the atmosphere.