Gah, Larry Wall and his "natural language" crap, he's a terrible language designer and an even worse linguist. And I'm sure you've seen the Perl 6 periodic table of operators, which I'm fairly sure the Perl core think is a good thing, not an utterly obvious example of why Perl 6 is still not near release.

Powershell 3 seems to have a bunch of syntax improvements that make it better though, had a look earlier, you can now write "(dir).fileName" rather than "dir | % { $_.fileName }" and everything works the same now with both a single output or a list of outputs, along with a bunch of other stuff that should make it less of a symbol-fest. However, in the mean time I've finally remembered the syntax for FOR in cmd.exe, and have written most of what I need as a file-processing library in Python. I'm not a Windows admin, that'll do for me.

PS. lol, just remember that one of the new syntax features is that instead of writing $_ you can now use $PSItem - apparently lots of people had complained about strange, meaningless symbols being confusing. Fancy that!

I like everything about Powershell except the syntax... which was inspired by Perl according to one of the designers. When I read this it explained a lot, because I hate Perl's syntax as well.

Glad you found the info, I meant to reply sooner but got distracted by shiny things.

There's been a huge flux in all areas of web development the last few years, who knows what will come up in the new few. At the moment a good portion of the problems I have is there's too much code out there for everything, all in different states of development and with slightly different features and methodology - it's not always easy to find the right tools. Still, I'm sure something like the Apache Commons, Spring, etc. will eventually arise as a de-facto standard.

No, because JS scripts get cached locally and loaded from there if already present - many, many sites use Google's JS library CDN as the source for libraries, as then the user's browser only ever downloads each file once, and then every site that also links to the same library loads it from the local cache.

Plus there's things like local storage now, which means web sites can store data and assets locally (up to a limit), and use that as a cache. Writing a remote version check and update handler is pretty trivial for an application.

The first two are about 1% of the internet, and how do screen-readers distinguish between DOM elements in the original HTML and DOM elements created by Javascript?

Wow, that guy is a huge dick.

Except I wasn't talking about gas emissions from volcanoes.

I was talking about the basic frequency of volcanic and geologic activity. Let's just say "Earthquakes" so we can stay clear of preconceptions.

Earthquake frequency is steadily rising, and this, among the other non-emission related items indicated, are tightly linked to the climate change events we are experiencing today.

People are clinging to the belief that climate change MUST be our fault, and therefore is also within our power to fix.

It isn't.

As for reading about sun spots. . , I suggest you do some.

Why would the government know better than a particular person what is in that particular person's best interest for them to do?

Because they have more information about the global picture, a longer-term view, lack that person's bias and can consult expert opinion. How many of these are actually followed would be the difference between good and bad government IMO. And if you've read about behavioural economics, then you know that people don't act in their own self-interest a lot of the time due to how our brains work and evaluate things like sunk costs, risk vs. reward or relative value.

Also, asking about a particular person's best-interest is a straw man, government is about society as a whole, and because society is made of up of lots of people with all kinds of complex interconnections, often what is best for one particular person isn't what's best for everyone as a whole. Being a criminal might be best for one person, but negative for lots of other people - and you can't just have criminals, or they have nothing to steal.

The Daily Mail website has a different editorial staff and content entirely from the paper.

Julian Barbour's The End of Time is a good read by someone who's done a lot of work on this issue.

No, half of all gold ever mined has been mined since 1967.

The design of Powershell was heavily influenced by Perl...

Ah, so it does... doh. 20s versus 60m is quite a difference though!

The best thing about my alarm clock is waking up about ten minutes before it goes off. Never fails to amaze me :)

Seconded. Although I do find the transition quite obvious - unlike my daylight alarm clock which goes from dark to bright over half an hour, Flux does it in about five seconds. Once it's changed you don't notice the difference though, and it's definitely less glaring.