And also, decades later, Slashdot hasnâ(TM)t figured out character encodings. Â\_(ãf)_/Â

Old man shakes fist at cloud? All of us read whatever codeâ(TM)s available to us (often open source, under whatever license) that informs our problem solving on any given task, and we all reuse whatever solutions we figure out on subsequent tasks. A machine learning process that complements our own natural learning isnâ(TM)t worth any fuss.

I'm confused by your claims. First, you're telling me sales tax is regressive even though it's proportionate to consumption (the wealthy tend to purchase more, and more expensive goods). Second, you're then asking me accept that closing a tax loophole used primarily by the wealthy makes the sales tax increasingly regressive. How do you figure?

Of course, we can argue this point until we're blue in our faces, but one thing is certain: if we're going to have a tax law, we ought to apply it consistently so that no group may escape it. For the moment, it's politically unfeasible to eliminate the sales tax, so whether I'm tapping away on my iPhone or walking into my local Wal-Mart should make no difference to how I'm taxed.

We should be ashamed these ever existed in the first place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_bundle

Once again, racing as fast as we can towards where the puck was 20 years ago.

As I should be. Imposing a sales tax on in-store purchases but not online is fundamentally regressive. But there's no need to make the argument all over again here. Visit http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/04/22/1900551/how-closing-the-online-sales-tax-loophole-would-help-low-income-families/ and read the sourced articles.

Some big online retailers charge you sales tax, some patchwork of others do. Currently, I have to dig back through receipts to report unpaid sales tax come April and it's a hassle. How about some of you stop your whining and accept that a tax code should be consistently applied.

Your comment's an admission that you didn't read my supporting material--material that unequivocally demonstrates that W3Schools is full of junk information. Beginners should not be taught the wrong way to use a technology, and they should not be taught things that are outright false.

I've been developing web applications for well over a decade. Try again.

First, you lose credibility for linking w3schools.com. Professional web developers wouldn't be caught dead referencing them. Second, you're referencing a tag that's deprecated because of CSS. Professional web developers wouldn't be caught dead using a font tag (or any other stylistic tags for that matter).

This is tantamount to taking drinks from a bottle of water, and asking yourself if the bottle will ever become empty.

Yes, if our consumption of oil and other fossil fuels continues, unabated, they will eventually run out. You can debate when that'll happen, but it's inevitable.

You've just dismissed what is probably one of the most powerful and flexible languages ever put into practice. Congratulations on being impossibly boneheaded.

You're talking about politics and conspiracy theories in an article about big data. Yes, that is off topic.

You're living in a dreamland. Like it or not, electricity, hardware, and wires cost money.

FYI, Mozilla Foundation is funded, in large part, by Google.

And it has scant adoption. Meanwhile, the rest of us are charging ahead and getting stuff done with steadily advancing tools rather than messing around with arcane operating systems that have 10-year-old feature sets.

In addition to testing on Trident 8, 9, and 10; Gecko; and WebKit, we've now got to add Servo and Blink! to the pile. Thanks, Mozilla and Google, for making my job as a web developer much harder! Yay! Innovation! And when we come out the other end, we'll have HTML5! Well, uh, sort of, I guess. The existing engines aren't all standards compliant. But I'm sure these new ones will be better. Hurray for progress!

What concepts does Rust introduce that aren't already present in the latest C++ standard? Which aren't already present in Scala? Which aren't already present in Go? Do you really want me to believe that memory safety, concurrency, generics, and exception handling present in half-a-dozen off-the-shelf (and mature) languages weren't sufficient? (And let's not forget that every new language departs from existing tool chains that service to multiply development efforts.)

I'll say it for the umpteenth time on Slashdot: why do we need dozens of half-baked projects instead of a few that are exceptionally solid? And I'll, again, give my own answer: because every one of these geeks who designs to start his own little, duplicative project thinks he's smarter than everyone else. You know, because those guys are idiots, and we couldn't possibly build upon their work. Greenfield development is always fun! (Am I right?)

But let's forget all that for the moment, and concentrate on our shiny new browser engine. If and only if this project is successful when all is said and done, it will produce exactly the same output as its siblings and predecessors--output that's dictated by standards. Indeed, after devoting person-years worth of hard labor, we will end up with something with exactly the same functionality as what we had before.

Sigh. Obligatory XKCD.

http://xkcd.com/927/

Our wheels aren't a thousand years old. They're barely even a few.

Ignoring the fact that this analogy has broken down into uselessness, let's talk about this new browser engine. Is it going to conform to the existing standards and produce output identical to its predecessor?