Robert Morris, is that you again?!

Seems to me like you don't know the meaning of alpha stage for software. It does not mean production quality. It does not come after beta!

That statement is a contradiction almost by definition!

(well, but without IE how will I download firefox?)

You use Internet Exploiter to download Firefox?! What an atrocity!
Why don't you do what everyone else does, and use 'ftp' from shell (which was included in an out-of-the-box Windows installation last time I checked.) Or better yet, use FTP to download wget, and use that to download Firefox, since I'm not sure Microsoft's FTP tool can actually handle the whopping multi-mebibyte size of Firefox.

What are you doing man?! You just gave away Wilson's true allegiance to Darth Ballmer!

What makes you think C/C++ programmers can't do something at run-time themselves? I'm not talking about cost/performance ratio here, I'm just saying that there's no program written in another non-compiled language that can be faster than the same program, written in C/C++, by competent programmers with enough time. Any technology you might fancy today in your pet VM or JIT-compiler is simply there for the C programmer, if she has the time and ability to employ it. And your example really doesn't show anything. Even in vanilla C++, the vtable lookup is exactly that: a single table lookup added to the cost of a function call through a pointer. Considering the potential for a cache miss, this can indeed be considered slow, but only by the standard of the people living on the bleeding edge of performance. Incrementing a simple integer variable potentially costs more in Java or C#. The prediction you mention that can replace this horribly slow (it can take as much as 50 CPU cycles!) virtual function call would hardly be free either, and wouldn't be much cheaper (if cheaper at all.)

Well, I'd say the key point here is that people at least can use these methods in C/C++. I don't know about you, but I would call that power.