Urrrrgh. So close. Darn you for getting there first.

The clipboard isn't visible, but it's absolutely a virtual physical space related to the mouse. Because selections are, by and large, made by the mouse - and this is truer for novice users than for experienced users.

So, it's not nearly as "abstract" as you're claiming - it's saying "grab the thing I put in my pocket, and put it where I'm touching."

You, sir, have my vote for senior executive in charge of killbots.

The "vertical-align" property only functions as a general vertical alignment tool in table-cells. Now that we have "display: table-cell" in basically all modern browsers, this is more or less sufficient, but it's still a far cry from being as simple as you've made it out here.

Columns are HUGELY more complex to build than they have any right to be, and they are fragile in any number of cases where they shouldn't be. Support for true multi-column content panes is far from where it should be.

Saying "the developer builds their own" is the same as saying "one is not provided." Whether it should be provided is a worthy argument, but it's not a foregone conclusion, and calling the OP a poser isn't remotely justified here.

Doing rich interface design is unquestionably clunkier in HTML/CSS/JS than in dedicated GUI toolkits on the desktop; I don't agree with the parent that it's not suitable for any real work, but your dismissing him out of hand isn't remotely fair. And it's pretty clear that he's not a "poser web dev," but rather a native dev who's used to more explicitly specified layout mechanics (that is, not having to work around the assumptions inherent to HTML as a descendant of a width-specified static document format.

Maybe you could disentangle your good point ("Tenured faculty can, in fact, be fired for cause, and teaching standards can be cause.") from your misplaced rage at liberal arts and business majors? Because, at least on the liberal arts side, we're not all party monsters - and subjective fields aren't necessarily less demanding. I mean, I've had multiple 30+ page papers due over a single weekend, and I've had intensive programming assignments due over the same time, and I know which one I'd choose.

This. Also, tenure has the significant role of giving professors more scholarly AND instructional independence from their host institution. Which is important in times where academic censorship is an actively supported stream in the public consciousness. It was incredibly important in the McCarthy era, and it's looking like it's getting very important again, just when it's being erased.

That you noticed. There's a fairly high bias inherent there; it just has to not have hit something that was both noticeable and that you knew was incoming.

There are multiple definitions of stalking - I don't believe the one in the VAWA requires a time component. Also, I'm really talking about harassment and intimidation, the relevant components - which are illegal and not necessarily "over time." I used the stalking article because it has the most concise set of references.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking

Following someone with intent to intimidate or do them harm (or even, speculatively, to do them harm if you decide they're no good) is absolutely not just good faith, obeying-the-law behavior. Private citizens (like Trayvon Martin) have a right to be protected from intimidation and harassment as much as from assault and violence.

That's certainly not a "pumped up on the thrill of my own potential deadliness" mindset you've got there, it isn't at all more about macho posturing than calm consideration of self-defense, and it definitely isn't the mindset that leads to misjudging situations and "emptying a mag" into someone who's not doing anything wrong except triggering your paranoiac tendencies. /sarcasm

But there's a trade-off between less code run and less code written (by you, that needs to be looked at to maintain/debug). You have to make an informed choice about performance vs available time and visible complexity. jQuery et al. arel going to turn out much smaller blocks of code (that have to be written, and later read by the maintainer) for a lot of common operations. This is especially true if your support window includes IE or mobile.

There are a lot of tasks where using a resource (that's likely already in cache, if you're loading from the CDN) to smooth over AJAX handling or deferred event assignment is absolutely more valuable than making it so an operation that runs maximum three times per pageview can run a billionty times per second. And there are times when it would be stupid.

More accurately, they branched the codebase into the 1.x branch that supports IE8 and the 2.x branch that doesn't, because a large set of support windows now don't include OldIE. Both of which are fully supported.

And that dropdown menu works in the absence of hoverstate support? I'm a big proponent of doing it in CSS if you can, but Javascript is basically necessary to get menus that support touch, even if it's just by adding and removing a toggle class.