Hurray for Chic-let keyboards! Those things are truly awful.

I believe they were referencing this little gem from The DailyWTF:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_.aspx

This is the same Dart that compiles down to JavaScript, yes? If anything they've invested so heavily into Dart because it rounds off some of those nasty little corners and edge cases folk are always bitching about W.R.T. JavaScript. So Google could re-write Gmail entirely in Dart and it would end up being compiled into JavaScript, taking it's fair place amongst the rest of "web 2.0." Does that make Google a "non-JavaScript shop"? Possibly, but in the end it's JavaScript, all the way down.

The lay of the land at this time is JavaScript as the WWW/HTML scripting language, no matter how you want to dress it up. Is is perfect? Nope. Are there initiatives out there to work around the perceived issues with the language? Yep. So until the Python Gods smile upon web browsers everywhere and release us from our JavaScript bondage, we'll just keep working around the problems laid upon us by our forebears. As for JavaScript... it ain't going anywhere fast.

Duh, they're made out of cheese like the rest of it. Sheesh!

He means HTML entities like &amp or whatever as opposed to every other website in the modern world where you can just use regular ass Unicode.

Awesome, thanks for that. Started sharing it around.

Yep, but unfortunately that cute little idea they had in the Enlightenment? How's that working out again? Oh, you mean power is doing what it always has done and always will? I'm always hearing the word sheeple bandied about and it seems to me that people (or some majority thereof) have always been, and always will be apathetic and ignorant of the shit power does. The only reason that all those high flown Enlightenment ideas seemed to work so much better in the past is because like any corpse (this one being stillborn) it takes time to decay (power being the maggots that aid in said decay). All our grandiose ideas about liberty and sovereign citizens are practically dirt by now, and thus the status quo of unrestrained power is just about restored.

Not saying I like it, just calling it like I see it.

Think hell, this is just one more piece of evidence that US laws in fact do so!

This is pretty much exactly what I was going to say, but I wasn't about to do it so politely. Who hasn't had that boss who thinks that because he once worked as a trainer in a group that did Java work and puzzled out god awful VBScript and perl scripts while creating an abomination of a MySQL database where everything is a string, but we can't change anything because hey, it works (for some values of "work").

In other words, until you've supported (and god help you had to modify) the hoary abominations cultivated by these "self-trained" deciples of the Elder Gods, you really haven't any cause think that the bitterness directed at these "teach yerself to code" websites as anything more than the the resigned realization that now there are even more imbeciles devoted to ruining your life that it is.

TL;DR: If you're to goddamned stupid to come to the realization that your abortion of a VBScript ASP classic "website" is slow because your're executing a query in a tight loop based on an ID you retrieved from a previous query that you could have trivially retrieved all at once in a single query then maybe, just maybe, you're too goddamned stupid to be programming. Furthermore, when you refuse to acknowledge that that very same website does absolutely no validation on input and it's breaking the bloody fucking things you wanted ME to develop because "it works", but if I forget to validate some obscure edge case you jump down my throat... then maybe you're just a douche bag as well.

P.S. Sorry, got a little ranty there... wish I'd submitted some of that shit to The Daily WTF.

Well to be fair, they didn't exactly delete it... they obfusticated it and then no-one bothered to implement it. That being said, I guess it amounts to deleting it, doesn't it?

I've spent some time in the HTML trenches and my take on the whole thing is to hell with XHTML, use the original HTML properties when they make sense and the CSS rules everywhere else. Then again, I was lucky (relatively speaking) I was working on an intranet project (my idiot boss insisted on IE9, even though no-one used it so I targeted Chrome, Opera, Firefox, and put in IE kludges when he noticed the site wasn't working right in his useless fucking excuse of a browser)

Did I mention I'm no longer employed at that company? Funny that. Bunch of useless gits, the lot of em.

Please don't construe this as an attack in any way shape or form, but you lawyer types inevitably say some variation on this phrase and it makes me wonder. I understand that pragmatism might cause the use of this phrase when opining on some legal type matter, but have there been actual cases where some lawyer neglected to include this little C.Y.A and got caught up in an actual lawsuit where someone interpreted the "off duty" opinion of a lawyer as real legal advice? Or is it one of those things that you just say just in case?

Personally, I don't care for Paul or his ideas. That being said, would I vote for him? Absolutely. Put up or shut up. Honestly the president doesn't have the power to push through even a fraction of what these fools proscribe for "fixing the nation". Why couldn't Obama fix the economy? Because the president of the united states of America, while figuratively the "leader of the free world" actually has but the most limited of powers.

And for that exact reason, Ron Paul, assuming he became president, couldn't possibly follow through with even a quarter of his high flung campaign promises. None of them can. The congress decides the ins and outs of national policy. The president merely gets to implement it.

All these sweeping campaign promises are nothing more than dust in the wind, sweet nothings whispered into the ears of a public who has forgotten (if they were ever taught!) about the way this country's government actually works. To paraphrase Portal, "the president is a lie".

And we all still believe in the fallacious "social contract theory", which, as theories go is about as debunked as possible.

Why do the scumbags in congress vote for endless graft? Why do they ignore the constitution? Because it actually is just a god damned piece of paper. It's not as if the founding fathers magically imbued it with some spooky powers. It's paper, scribbled on by men, with all the force that implies, I.e, none what so ever.

Whatever force the constitution ever had was (and remains) is entirely social and the idea that it is some force of nature is the very epitome of naivety. The fact that you're surprised that this country is drifting BACK to the default power structure of totalitarianism merely highlights your naive belief that "liberty" and "freedom" and all the other fallacies of the enlightenment are anything more that the fleeting dreams they turned out to be.

Face the facts: the reason governments devolve into authoritarian/totalitarian models is simply due to the fact that humans are not the enlightened, rational actors that enlightenment era thought made us out to be.

This the exact same reason that the libertarian's ideal society wouldn't work. We already tried it. Welcome to the future of the libertarian utopia.

One last thing, since I just can't let a good rant lie. So, libertarian/anarco-capitalists, once we're freed from the yoke of government what exactly is supposed to stop the same processes that formed the concept if government in the first place? One has to imagine that whatever force of nature which necessitated the forming of governments in the first place hasn't just up and vanished. The whole argument is just a hand waving, idealistic nonsense.

I'll be in my cave, if you need me.

Are they all in the same photo? That would at least prove it was one hell of a party!

Oh yes, nothing like another layer of indirection to make everything much simpler!

Pointers to pointers. Fantastic.