In Switzerland the people can instigate referenda and overturn government decisions. It takes about 100,000 signatures to trigger a referendum on an issue.

It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are unemployed.

Indeed. These companies are not creating JavaScript replacements because they just want it their way, there are real issues with using JavaScript for large developments. Why are we still waiting for basic features like optional static typing and classes to be added to JavaScript? Static typing is a very important feature. From it flows not just basic type checking, but also autocompletion (a major productivity booster), ease of re-factoring and useful code analysis (what functions use this particular type of object etc). There's now a whole list of languages that are aimed as direct replacements for javascript because of its failings, and transpilers to convert from various languages such as Java and haxe to JavaScript. All because JavaScript, for whatever reason, refuses to make any serious moves forward.

Sooner or later, if it continues to stand still, JavaScript will be replaced by one of these contenders. If we're unlucky, it will be replaced by several of them.

Indeed. I'm finding it's particularly bad for game development where you want to avoid continuously allocating objects on the heap. So if you need to continuously call some mathematical function from the game loop that uses a temporary vector as part of the calculation, this is an issue. How do you create this temporary vector? If we create a new one in the function, it will go on the heap, so we don't want to do that. You could have some module-level variable that the function uses, but that's rather messy. I ended up having to make an object caching system. When a function needs a vector, I pop one off the global vector cache, do the calculations, then push it back. This is messy and dangerous in its own way too though.

In C# you could just implement the vector as a struct, since structs go on the stack rather than the heap (and in C++ you can put what you like on the stack). C# stucts have value semantics too, which I think is an added bonus for something like a mathematical vector. Java is quite crippled in this respect. Another annoyance I immediately found with Java is that you can't pass parameters by reference. Why does Java have such a restriction? Even Visual Basic 6 could pass by reference. It's not that often that I want to pass a parameter by reference, but sometimes you really need to.

I also made the mistake of trying to use Generics in Java. I knew ahead of time that due to type erasure, there would be no performance improvement, but I didn't quite realise how crippled the Generics were. I first noticed this when trying to declare an array of a generic type. This does not work due to type erasure. Java Generics really is a train wreck.

It's a shame C# is so strongly tied to windows (and Microsoft) because it's one of the most advanced modern languages there is. Compared to Java, it really is a joy to use. It doesn't get in the way of what you want to do.

The soldier at the scene who picks up the child from the minivan (Ethan McCord) believes that the attack on the van was a war crime. They seemed all too quick to decide that people were carrying weapons and all too eager to shoot. I've heard many accounts where all civilians were considered as the enemy whether or not they were armed. e.g.

Exactly. News organisations are not objective. The style of reporting and even whether a story is reported at all depends on who it damages. So if some Iranian police are beating protesters, an American newspaper can really go to town on the story, using emotive language etc. If some US police beat protesters in the same way the story (if printed at all) would have a much more neutral tone and probably would downplay any police violence.

Getting angry about issues which make an enemy look bad but downplaying or ignoring issues which make your own country look bad is standard practice. If a US newspaper routinely got just as angry about US police violence as it did about Iranian police violence, then it would be viewed as some crazy left wing pamphlet and widely ridiculed.

The best way to get your news is to shop around through. Look at the BBC, CNN, Aljazeera, Russia Today etc. Between them all you can get a good picture of what is going on.

More like an offer they couldn't refuse. It was one of the conditions of removing the occupying force.

"They know they (the government) can trust us not to be really impartial" - Lord Reith in his diary during the General Strike in 1926.

The BBC is in no sense independent. The board of governors is appointed directly by the government. Trying to argue that the BBC is independent is like trying to argue that the department manager has no influence over you because you only answer to the line manager (who is answerable to the department manager). There are plenty of examples of the BBC being highly partisan and serving the interests of government. Perhaps one of the most notable is the BBC's involvement in the 1953 Iranian coup. The BBC broadcast the "go" code for the operation.

Most of the time though, you don't need to have some government minister secretly complaining to the board. Like most news organisations, the BBC is well versed in self-censorship. Even the language used betrays the establishment mindset. You can see this most clearly when you contrast reporting on a domestic issue with reporting on a similar foreign issue. So for example, when police are hitting protesters with batons in the UK, the BBC will describe it as "police scuffled with protesters". In contrast, when police in Iran hit Iranian protesters in similar ways, the BBC describe it as "batons swinging wildly at unarmed protesters" etc.

Another example is the seige of Grozny where the BBC reporter was allowed to get fist-shakingly angry (because Russia is an enemy) and demanded to know what right the Russians had to order the citizens to leave.

In contrast it is interesting to see how the BBC dealt with the very similar situation of the seige of Fallujah. This time the army carrying out the siege was the US army, so the gloves go back on. Instead of a angry reporter cursing the US, we had articles like "Fixing the Problem of Fallujah".

Notice the difference?

The threat of communism was largely used as an excuse to target any left-wing/socialist government or even those that just wouldn't play ball. If a country started doing things the US didn't like e.g. nationalizing an oil company, angering a US company etc, suddenly they would be considered as a communist threat. In the case of Guatamala it was the Union Fruit Company. They owned 42% of arable land due to purchases and/or land being ceded by military dictatorships. When the government of Guatemala tried to free up that land, Union Fruit went crying to the US government. Before long there was a US-backed coup. The official excuse was that Guatemala was going to become a "Soviet beachhead".

We have a similar story when it comes to the Iranian Coup in 1953. The government there wanted a better deal when it came to oil revenue from the AIOC (Anglo Iranian Oil Company, later it became BP), so they nationalized their oil industry. Although AOIC wasn't a US company, the nationalization was seen as a threat to US oil assets. An example that other countries in the region might follow. The US and Britain arranged a coup know as operation Ajax which replaced the democratic government with an unpopular dictator (the Shah) and a brutal CIA-trained secret police (SAVAK) to keep him in power. Again the threat of communism was used as a smokescreen.

Here are just a few US-backed dictators from central and south America alone.

• Nicaragua - Somomza Dynasty
• Guatemala - Carlos Enrique Castillo Armas (and others)
• El Salvador - Maximilliano Hernandez Martinez (and others)
• Chilie - Augusto Pinochet
• Argentina - Jorge Rafael Videla
• Paraguay - Alfredo Stroessner
• Bolivia - GEN. Hugo Banzer Suarez
• Cuba - Fulgencio Batista

We know the anti-communism crusade was an excuse, not just because of specific evidence in each case (Union Fruit etc), but because US policy towards left/socialist governments has remained largely the same despite the end of the cold war and break up of the Soviet Union. There has been continued interference in the governments of Central and South American states. e.g. Bolivia, through selective funding of parties opposed to Moralez and the coup attempt against Chavez (there is significant evidence of US involvement). Communism was used as a smokescreen during the cold war just as terrorism is used as a smokescreen today.

That system is known as Demarchy.

I've worked in business software development for vertical markets (particular industries) for many years. It's full of incompetence both at the management level and the programming level. For example, a company will put out an RFP (Request for Proposal) for software that performs a particular task (e.g. managing customer orders in the gas industry or something) and it will consist of hundreds of pages of requirements that interested parties must fill out (does your software do X, etc).

What tends to happen though is that nobody wants to say no to anything in case your competitors lie. So everyone ends up saying yes, and either you quickly develop the missing functionality in some hasty half-arsed fashion or late in the day you basically say "We meant yes in the sense of no". These kind of shoddy practices distressed me initially, but eventually I came to realise that the whole industry was like this. Full of crooks and incompetence. Far shoddier than anything you would encounter on the shelves of a high-street software store.

Part of the problem is due to lack of funds, particularly in smaller companies. There often just doesn't seem to be the money to employ proper testing/quality assurance teams, so the programmers themselves end up doing those tasks. Also, due to money issues they end up employing inexperienced students instead of experienced industry professionals. The software managing your gas bills may well have been designed by someone straight from college who is still trying to learn C#/ Java etc. This is not uncommon at all.

So yes, the software suppliers are often unprofessional crooks but so are the customers. For example, there is a legal requirement (at least in Europe) that procurement of something over a certain cost has to go open to everyone. You can't just say "we want to spend £1000,000 on a customer management system from Company X. So the customer is forced to put out an RFP even though they have no intention of buying anything from anyone other than Company X. So software companies end up completely wasting their time filling out these RFPs. It can be really time-consuming and costly. So sometimes you make a judgement call that "this customer always buys from Company X, so lets not go through the costly charade of filling out their RFP".

It's quite a different world from that of developing Microsoft Word, or Google Docs etc. If you are in charge of software procurement at a company and you have to deal with this industry, you need to be incredibly cautious. As early as possible you need to demand to see demo installs of software to confirm that the RFP requirements are indeed met, and the companies concerned were not just lying through their teeth.

I agree with you totally there. The lack of static typing (or even the option of static typing) seems to be almost universal in scripting languages. The issue goes further than just type safety and avoidable bugs though. Static typing allows you to better express your intent, not just to other programmers (which you can do with comments) but to the program itself. This makes it easy for a development environment to provide useful things like auto-completion. Auto-Complete saves so much time and also helps you broaden your knowledge of the available classes and functions.

Another issue that sometimes pops up in scripting languages is a lack of constants. I remember bringing this issue up on a python forum and they just told me to use variables instead. When I pointed out that you could easily change the value of the "constant" in code by mistake, I was told something along the lines of "well that would be your own stupid fault."

There seems to be a general attitude in certain circles that the basic protections you get with static typing and constants etc are somehow pointless or unnecessary. Google seems to recognise their importance though, which is no doubt why they created Dart. I believe they have been using some kind of enhanced Javascript internally for some time. I know there was a push to add things like static typing, classes etc to Javascript but it was resisted.

It seems bizarre to me that with more and more being done in the browser, we are still stuck with a Javascript, a language that increasingly seems ill-suited to the tasks it is being used for.

You missed out that amazingly advanced feature that C# has and which Java is still working on. i.e. The ability to pass arguments by reference. Can you believe that? The inability to pass by reference! I was in disbelief for a whole day over that. I've had to work with Java a lot recently and the language is so crippled it just makes me want to punch everyone involved in it's development.

I don't know about the possible legal issues, but C# would be great for game development on Android. The stack-allocated structs alone would be a real boon.

I love the idea, but they have shown very boring uses in their video. Surely there are more exciting applications they could have shown.

e.g.

1. Watching tv at work without your boss knowing.

2. A virtual assistant that you can customize who actually stands in the environment around you (locked into place using SLAM). Think Number Six from Galactica.

3. Objects that appear in the environment that only you and and your friends can see. e.g. A huge statue of yourself at a popular tourist location.