The worst thing about Flash weren't its security implications. The problem was that Flash put islands of non-HTML in the middle of HTML pages, complicating their description, their development, their deployment, and therefore complicating the software implementations required to render them; also, increasing the time required to train people into writing web pages, and introducing the conflicts between two standards that are planned and evolve independently, yet have to intercommunicate. Often only to obtain similar results to plain HTML - especially in the post-HTML5 world.

Security problems came as a corollary of all this.

JavaScript wasn't chosen as the official language for interactive HTML pages because of technical advantages of the language itself. It was chosen because it was already standardised, it was platform-neutral, and it was already ubiquitous. Those motivations still hold, against the adoption of NaCL.

Metro isn't bullshit.

Indeed, unfortunately it's real.

JavaScript-generated content isn't good for information interchange, which is what the Web was all about, back then when MathML was designed.

You're not informed about that case, which was precisely about Oracle thinking that Google didn't have permission to make their own implementation of the Java APIs without giving them money.

A GPL project enjoys patent protection and can have no field of use restrictions by virtue of the GPL itself. As for the fact that Google dislike the GPL, hear it from themselves.

It's not them who said that. Google have always said clearly that Android development is based on the Java language. When the Oracle vs Google case was going on, it was a lot of people here on Slashdot who were saying that Android makes no use of Java the language, and that Google didn't need to copy the Sun APIs because they didn't care about compatibility with a language that they did not use, and whose ecosystem they did not take any advantage from. Not that I support Oracle's crazy stance that APIs can be copyrighted, it's just that I can't stand knee-jerk reactions to defend a company.

Oracle provide a state-of-the-art, GPL-licensed, 3 years old Java implementation that works and is secure. Google prefer to roll their own (inferior) virtual machine because they do not like GPL, and while doing so they copied in 2010 the behaviour of a 2006 implementation to be included into a 2011 product — and the fault is Oracle's?

(By the way, so much for “Android does not use Java and does not care about Java compatibility”.)

A future-proof data signal (e.g. Thunderbolt, which can carry a signal fast enough that it won't be obsolete within a couple of years of release), that doesn't need to be supported by endpoints but can be detected and used if it is.

Micro-USB has the USB 3 signals. If you plug a Micro-USB 2 cable into a Micro-USB 3 receptacle, it will work at USB 2 speeds.

A widely-supported legacy signal (e.g. USB) so that it works everywhere

A Micro-USB cable will work literally on every cell phone not made by Apple nowadays. On other kinds of hardware, like tablets and cameras, custom connectors are still found, but even there Micro-USB is still the most common connector.

A lightweight mechanism for negotiating power demands and capabilities between supply and device.

There's the USB 2.0 battery charging standard: http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/batt_charging_1_1.zip

A physically sturdy connector, with a reference design of a socket that will stand at least 1,000 insertions and ideally 10,000 in normal use.

Compliant MicroUSB connectors are required to withstand 10,000 insertion/extraction cycles.

A connector that either has an orientation so obvious that no one could possibly plug it in the wrong way, or one that works in either orientation.

Here Micro-USB fails. It's even harder to figure out the correct orientation than it was for Mini-USB connectors. And that's a feat.

Any patents that cover the design must be licensed royalty free, so third parties can interface with it cheaply and easily.

That would be great, but seeing how cheap USB peripherals are nowadays, I doubt that USB royalties are the biggest concern of anybody entering the market of hardware manufacturing.

Is HDMI getting feature parity with 1980s SCART cables? Back then it was pretty common to daisy-chain set-top boxes. Well, now we only need bidirectional audio-video, although I have a feeling that DRM will get in the way of that.

It's anonymous. Google would have to do nothing less than an INNER JOIN between two tables of their database in order to associate your name with the identifier. Therefore you can assume that your privacy is 100% safe.

Wine does have an implementation of cards.dll.

I for one hope that it never happens! To me Scala is a puzzler generator. I prefer complex, but readable code instead of shorter code whose complexity - and bugs, and unforeseen interactions - have been hidden away by the pantagruelic grammatical structure of a programming language.

Java generics, by the same author of Scala IIRC, were supposed to make our lives only simpler. They usually do. But then they also brought in type erasure; they introduced compiler warnings, their suppression mechanisms, and the concept of "unsafe" code into the language; we started to see confusing signatures such as Enum<E extends Enum<E>> ...

That's the only reason they're making all this hand-waving: have their customers believe that their data is safe with them - even when obviously it isn't the case - in order to reduce the damage to their revenue. Google's core business model lies in harvesting, analysing and storing massive amounts of user data. This depends entirely on Google's ability to have access to that data unencrypted. NSA and the likes will always share that ability with Google - or be a piece of paper away from acquiring it - so talking about encrypting the "pipes" while retaining the key to the data is pure gimmick.

Thank god vocabularies exist.

I speak concepts, and I do not question other people's motivations. The image of Google is painted by none other but Google themselves, with the actions they choose to take. You can't have a cake and eat it too.

Yes, resorting to personal attacks is the best-known sign of having good points.

Yes, they've put those words in the terms of services just for the fun of it. Because lawyers are such funny persons.

Google was born out of net neutrality, and now that they've grown into a position of power, they suddendly find themselves against it. What specific words they chose to use has only a secondary importance. The decision they've made is political: you can only be in favour or against net neutrality, and they chose to be against. They don't want you to choose what to do with your internet connection. They want to be in control. In geekspeak, they're evil.

My comment was tongue-in-cheek. All current mainstream processors already have operating modes that allow the firmware to run code without the OS knowing (or having a way to know). But then no CPU vendor is, yet, in the market of collecting and analysing personal information.

...that spy^H anonymously profile your behaviour at the microcode level? I'll pass, x86 SMM is already evil enough for me.