watts is not an energy unit, it's a power unit. To get a figure for the energy used we need to know how long it took you to travel that mile. If you're* using 300watt-years/mile it's not so good...

* see the punctuation there?

Err, don't think so. A Cooper made beer barrels, from wood with iron rings. Now if the virus was actually yeast and you could brew a battery the size of a barrel... excellent.

If all you're doing is moving files around or creating tarballs etc. then all those backticks in perl can become a PITA

shell is still around 'cos it's still the right tool for some jobs...

Because Steve Bourne was doing this work back in 1975! About that time people had only just got beyond programming by biting holes in paper-tape with their teeth!

These days it is quite easy to get embedded perl or lisp etc.

Test Driven Development is a very useful practice. The test suite describes the standard unambiguously (and, hopefully, accurately :-) and then you develop until all the tests work.

Greenspun's Tenth Rule: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp"

So Javascript is becoming what Java should have been, the run-anywhere language, if only Java hadn't been such a superficially ugly language and goddam slow - the browser is the equivalent of the JRE.

If all JRE's (browsers) are alike in syntax, semantics, security and libraries then the faster one will become the shell of choice to run these cloudy, ajaxy apps. And we'll partying like it's 1980 with browser-and-cloud architectures replacing greenscreen-and-mainframe.

It's a shame that, like you said, javascript is superficially pretty but deeply broken (namespaces? proper, native OO? etc.)

(I managed to attract a flame when I commented on the New Zealand filter at El Reg - so let's see how I do here :-)

Basically, through superior techy knowledge, most of us have been able to access any information we like, of any kind, on the Internet. We've been able to access stuff that, under other circumstances, would be illegal in our own country.

For example, the UK, like many other countries, has a film classification board that determines "for the public good" what can be shown in cinemas, licensed sex shops, or not at all. With our technical know-how we've been able to punch a hole in the UK's Customs border controls and, now that the government is getting more tech savvy, this hole is slowly being closed... There exist articles of content that, by UK law, would be illegal to import or own if it was rendered in some kind of physical media (books, photos, film etc.). There's no reason to expect a government would allow it to be imported via the Internet for ever...

Shame, we're no longer going to be able to moderate our own behaviour and viewing pleasure.

But, and this is the BIG POINT, ranting on about how "the Internet wants to be free!!!!" is misguided for (at least) two reasons:

1. it never was. It's a redundant network that had the nice feature of being hard to shut down or block off

2. the key issue is WHY are these things illegal in the first place! Write to your MP and get something done (yeah, I know, good luck with that when we're arguing against a "protect the children" mantra, but armchair activism really doesn't cut it).

Of course there's also the question of how good the IWF are at interpreting the law.

The point is facial recognition alone is so vulnerable! All you need is a cameraphone and a photo printer - and you can't revoke your face as your password either. At least with fingerprints you can get hacked nearly 10 times (on average) before it becomes a problem.

We already have gated communities on the web: they're the "web2.0" sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc.

1. You have to give up some identification when you enter/join (even if it's quite weak: ie. usually you're verified email address)

2. You have to introduce yourself (or be introduced as in LinkedIn) before you can send anyone a message.

3. All you communications are through a central server that verifies the identity of both endpoints and records all communication (possibly for ever!).

And, yes, it's been seen that people happily give up a whole heap of private info to be part of these clubs...

It would be interesting to find out what the ratio is between email and social-site IM'ing these days.

Step 3. Profit!!

A beginner blames their tools whereas an expert knows when they are defective...