Openness to all & the free exchange of ideas and information with curious people doesn't seem compatible with the exclusion of any one group.

I'm surprised he didn't get in on this to further tie his horrendous Star Trek movies to something else (as if Cadillacs, Asus notebooks, Burger king, Pepsi, and some kind of Watch weren't enough)....

Although, according to Abram's "canon"; Vulcan has an icy (but habitable) moon, which is the only way Old Spock and Young Kirk could have witnessed the destruction of Vulcan.

Uhhh, maybe you've forgotten this bit of American History, where we killed 1.4 Million civillians.

What about a "firebomb"? Because of the offices of the woman who recently filibustered the Texas Senate over an abortion bill were firebombed. I don't see Texas in lockdown and performing a house to house search for THAT terrorist!

"Any explosive device" could include the gasoline tank in your car. So therefore, EVERYONE IN 'MURICA has a weapon of mass destruction in their driveway or parked on the street, right?

Got a propane BBQ grill? WMD. Got a can of starting fluid? WMD. How about hairspray? Powdered non-dairy creamer? Under this definition, I probably have a dozen, maybe two dozen WMDs in my home, and so do the rest of you. Everyone is a perp, a potential terrorist and a criminal.

No wonder the NSA is spying on everyone; because according to the government, you're all guilty of high crimes against the people of the United States, and you should all be incarcerated. Notice how you're the victim and the perp at the same time. Makes things nice and convenient.

Mongo's console is a javascript interpreter. The folks at 10gen seem to have been the first (only?) modern NoSQL development group to have the blindingly obvious realization that javascript would be the ideal interpreter language for their database. The rest has been history....

I think there's a good chance it will. Just remember that Javascript is based on Actionscript, based on Scheme, based on Lisp. It's actually got a a much better pedigree than most people realize. It implements the lambda calculus wherever there is a web browser. That's pretty much exactly what it needs to do to 'win the wars'. Be ubiquitous and support the lambda calculus. Everything else is just syntax.

Word. +1

Some people like riding a chopper. :)

In all seriousness, this is an insightful comment. I tend to make the analogy that LAMP stacks are like prop propeller airplanes, whereas Javascript/Mongo frameworks (like Meteor) are akin to Jet Turbines. If you want to break the sound barrier, a propeller airplane simply won't do the job. But a jet can.

Overrated. Most use cases don't need proper relational theory. Convergence to consistency is sufficient for most people's needs. Denormalized DRY data is less important now that memory is plentiful. Speaking as somebody who was an SQL admin for 10+ years, and am happy to have made the leap to Map/Reduce and won't ever be looking back.

+1 Wish I had mod points.

That's changing rapidly. Lots and lots of active development with REST libraries, and a number of packages providing that functionality becoming mature.

Peer-to-peer networking applications.

I'm a Meteor developer, using full-stack Javascript 100% of the time... Node.js, MongoDB, and jQuery are my stock in trade. If you're not familiar, Meteor is basically 'Javascript on Rails'. And, in my experience, everything in the article is spot on. As to the jaw-dropping abilities...

- developing in a unified language has increased my productivity 5x to 10x. I get done in a weekend what used to take me a month or more to do in PHP or C#. That's jaw dropping from a business sense, and has allowed me to completely change my business structure and approach. Frameworks like Meteor and Derby are going to win out on productivity gains alone. I can go from an initial client meeting to launching a beta of a multi-user application in a weekend.

- remember that javascript is based on actionscript, based on scheme, based on lisp. When you have your client, server, and database all using a functional language, you can start creating UI elements as monad operations on datastore elements. No objects ever on the heap. Just chained functions from database to server to client to UI. Among other things, this allows for things like reactive templates, demonstrated in the following screencast:

http://meteor.com/screencast

- besides the reactive templates, sharing of libraries between client and server makes every Meteor application theoretically capable of becoming a peer-to-peer distributed application. No PHP or Ruby or C# web application can do that. In theory, you could bundle the node.js libraries themselves into the client, and have each served client become a new peer-to-peer node.

- this allows mesh networking functionality, with monad operations defining computations between and through nodes. Think of it like routing protocols, but with computations. Lots of distributed computing possibilities here, obviously. More importantly is bandwidth usage, offline data synchronization, and the like. Instead of going to a data center to get the latest package updates, applications will be able to query neighbor nodes. Think IPv6 functionality, mesh networking, and being able to query data states from intermediary peers. The people in the Meteor dev community are actively working on things ranging from meters for smart energy grids to real-time bee pollination tracking.

Those technical details aside, the underlying reason why pure javascript can result in jaw-dropping applications is because, at it's core, javascript is a functional language, in the manner of lisp (if you know how to use the lambda calculus). It's lisp for the web (or scheme for the web, if you prefer). And putting it on both the server and client and database allows developers to do crazy monad calculations and method chaining. The monads will update and recalculate themselves in real time, as the underlying data changes. The end result is reactive templates and data-driven animations and UI elements.

If you want a better understanding how this is going to play out, check out the D3 visualization library here:

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery

Then, imagine all those visualizations used to create applications like in Processing:

http://processing.org/exhibition/

That's the direction this stuff is headed in. If you want to see some real examples in action, consider the interactives on the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/business/dealbook/how-the-facebook-offering-compares.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/13/us/politics/2013-budget-proposal-graphic.html
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/04/us/politics/democratic-convention-words.html#Ryan
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/11/sunday-review/drought-history.html
http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/ratings/electoral-map


And imagine these kinds of interactives being built on real-time data, so when the underlying data changes, the changes are pushed to all the clients automatically.

It's late. I'm not sure I'm explaining this very clearly or coherently. But all I know is that pure Javascript frameworks, like Meteor or Derby, are the way of the future. Had Python or PHP been installed on Netscape instead of Javascript, we'd be talking about Python on Rails or PHP on Rails. But they weren't. So, we're talking about Javascript on Rails. And it's a beautiful thing when you grok it.

#1) Booth babes are offensive to the larger population of women, even in the tech industry, there are more and more women present compared to say... the 1990's where it was almost 100% male dominated. In fact, there was a recent story about a female journalist harassed at E3 because it was just assumed by some that any woman at a gaming convention must be 'meat'.

#2) They are as clueless as their looks would lead you to believe. I remember being at a Motorcycle convention, and while that was once a male dominated event, the new market for motorcycles is now women -- but I digress... at the "Vespa" booth (Vespa, of all places, scooters appeal to women!), we had a question about some seriously radical Vespa merchandise (I think I was a cool looking leather bag, or a jacket), and I go to ask what I thought was a saleswoman, but she didn't know anything about what it was or how to buy it, even though she was dressed in Vespa branded attire. Point is; I was interested; but they lost a sale because the lady was apparently hired as decoration, but wasn't trained to even point me to a real salesperson!

If you want to talk to a "digital computer", ultimately, your code has to be translated into on/off (1, 0) pulses. Therefore, the simpler, the better. Unless the author of this article has another type of computer that can understand more complex states than on/off, his entire treatise is bunk.

I know there used to be analog computers, and quantum computing might have states other than on/off, I can't speak for these systems. However, the more common digital computer is what I am referencing.