*BSD is dying. Perl6 is dying. If they'd just implemented a Perl6 interpreter in the NetBSD kernel, they could have immanentized the eschaton.

My non programmer wife wrote a custom device driver in AppleScript

Read: pie recipe.

From the linked comment, emphasis mine:

The best way to illustrate cognitive dissonance is via the classic experiment: you assign someone (e.g., a student) a Homer Simpson-esque job that's boring him to tears. Then you one day say he can stop doing it, you have something better to do with him. But you ask him if he can find a replacement for that previous crap job. You even offer a dollar if he does. So he'll go try to convince someone else that it's a great job to take. The fun thing is, after a while he'll have convinced himself too that it's a great job.

Question: is manipulating others fundamentally immoral in all cases?

My critique of Java is the same. It's design patterns applied with a bloody-mindedness that only a PHB could love.

Apple, Microsoft, and Google walk into a mall:
Apple: I will seduce them with Jobsian user experiences!
Microsoft: I will bury them with my usual, cheap second-mover tactics!
Google: I will claim not to be evil, and send Androids to drink both Apple's and Microsoft's milkshakes.

Great analogy, but I think you're selling Java a little short there, and missing one of its major points:
Java is here to spread fat, bloody-minded VMs all over the place to trigger hardware sales.

I see a different trajectory. At the same time technology has the government veering wildly Orwellian, there is a substantial chunk of people using the technology to resist.
Hopefully, 2013 is the nadir, and we can start recovering with the next mid-term election. Assuming the impending crash doesn't break the country outright.

Actually, it's a distorted Adrenaline O.D. reference.

Give Bloomberg more time. And a Nurse Ratched suit. He'll get there.

. . .I'm thinking: "Is this some kind of Twitter prototype?"

Just Emmanuel Goldstein; fairly certain it wasn't a plural job.

For crying out loud in the dark, man, can't someone make a pure geek joke now and then?

Oh come on. Everyone knows that Bigfoot had the autopilots wired, and controlled the 9/11 aircraft from his UFO.
Those Muslims were just fall guys.

"Hey, you let us do it, and the election results are chunks in the pudding."