I can't even successfully troll non-anonymously on slashdot now. Where did everybody go???

The best you can hope for is more secretive mass surveillance and more limited internal access. If every country is also aiming to mass surveillance, any country that doesn't will be left behind.

I agree that there are many poor asp/vbscript programmers out there, but this is more a result of the language being easy to learn than being a bad platform. The quicker the learning curve on a language the more people there will be who overestimate (or overstate) their skillset, and vbscript is easy to learn on a fundamental level. Javascript has a similar problem - it is easy to learn the basics, but many people who claim to be "javascript" developers miss the majority of the elegance and power found in advanced javascript development.

I do a large amount of ASP/VBScript programming due to the need to support legacy applications, and despite its flaws it can be an acceptable platform for enterprise level applications when used properly.