I am not talking about the electronic version, but your post makes no sense. If I was away from my desktop most of the day then a print dictionary wouldn't do me any good. On the other hand, if I didn't have a good smart phone/plan, then an electronic dictionary wouldn't do me any good. You seem to be arguing that I am beyond the aid of any dictionary. Which is kind of silly, because believe it or not, I was using dictionaries many years before the smartphone was invented.
I have no connection to any university, but the same is true of the San Francisco Public Library. I want a print dictionary.
Also, the OED may be the "definitive" record of the English language, but that doesn't actually (believe it or not) make it the best dictionary. Proof? Oxford University publishes other dictionaries, not all of which draw from the text of the unabridged OED.
I'm in the market for a good dictionary, but I think I'm going to wait until the 5th edition American Heritage comes out in November. That dictionary is pretty much the standard for most professional writers and editors in the U.S. I've also heard that the New Oxford American is a good dictionary -- some say better -- but I'm leaning toward the traditional.
And you do not find an armed crazy drunk, addict, or mentally ill person worthy of concern? I would say that you have an under developed sense of self preservation.
I probably wouldn't know he was armed. For all I know, they're all armed. Until the cops showed up, this guy's only crime was being drunk. I don't find that worthy of concern, no. It was the cops' job to do something about it, though, and they did it in a way that escalated almost immediately to fatal violence.
Aw, maybe you have to live in the Bay Area. I see guys who look like that every day. He looks pretty desperate, if you ask me. Our streets are crawling with crazy drunks, addicts, homeless, and the mentally ill. I'm sure the guy was acting pretty erratically, but if you read reports, nobody on the platform ever felt particularly endangered. It's an everyday thing out here.
More to the point, though: Would I personally want to try to detain this man and physically restrain him? Hell no. I'd leave that to trained law enfo... oh, wait.
On the other hand, if regular citizens were allowed to carry firearms, and I was on that BART platform and I had a handgun on me, would I have approached that man and shot him stone dead? Somehow I don't think so.
In less than half a minute, these two officers managed to escalate a drunk-and-disorderly call to a violent episode that ended in a fatality. I wouldn't categorize this as a murder -- not like Oscar Grant or Kelly Thomas. But a wrongful death? Very possibly. And at the very least, BART must answer for the actions of its officers, and "thank you for your interest, but we have decided we did nothing wrong" isn't going to cut it.
People want to act as if these protests are over the actions of two police officers. They're not. It's too late to take back what those two officers did. What the protests are about are the policies and practices of BART Police, and BART's ongoing unwillingness to address the matter or even discuss it. BART Police are not city, county, or municipality cops. They are part of the BART organization. So to send a message, protestors disrupted the operations of BART -- a perfectly logical move, if you ask me, when the goal is to get the attention of whoever manages and oversees BART Police.
BART's answer so far has been to escalate the whole situation into a media circus in an attempt to distract attention from its own culpability in these matters. In so doing, it has drawn a lot of negative attention to itself -- so I'd say the protests have been fairly effective.
That would be a lot of thinkin for a person to be doing in a split second while a knife is flying at them
I hear you, but you missed one point: The knife was not flying at them. The officer shot the guy first, then he threw the knife.
If you read other accounts, there was some other Keystone Cops type stuff, where the guy threw the bottle, liquid spilled out of the bottle, and one of the officers slipped on the liquid and fell on his ass. That was when the second officer drew his weapon and reportedly fired two seconds later. If you read between the lines, it sounds like a pair of poorly trained, less-than-competent officers felt like they were losing control of a situation (with a crazy drunk, no less) and freaked out.
I mean, come on... this is who they were up against. And that photo isn't a mugshot, it's his driver's license photo. That's what he used to look like when he went to the DMV. In all honesty, I don't even know you, but I'm pretty sure you could take him.
Did you not read the headline of the story you linked? "Bart shooting video shows thrown knife, but not threat man posed."
BART police arrive on the platform in response to a call of a man being too drunk to stand. Within 30 seconds of arriving on the platform, they had shot the man to death -- apparently, for being drunk and mouthing off to police.
Apparently the man was belligerent, apparently he had a weapon, and he threw the weapon at them. What did the officers think he was -- a circus knife-thrower? Was he planning to pin the officers to the wall with knives, maybe? He was apparently too drunk to walk straight, so maybe he was planning to do that with his hand over one eye?
But hold on -- according to the story you linked, the man wasn't considered a threat because he threw a knife at police. He threw a bottle. I'd hardly call that a threat to the officers' lives. They say the bottle cut them. Well, show me the hospital report or boo fucking hoo.
But let's say he did throw a knife. Is that when you decide you have no recourse but to shoot a guy -- after he's thrown away his weapon? If he'd just tossed it down on the ground, presumably they would have still screamed "he's got a knife!!" and shot him?
But no -- the truth is, according to the very story you linked, the suspect didn't even throw the knife until after the officer shot him. If a belligerent police officer came out of nowhere and started shooting at you -- remember, police had arrived on the platform less than 30 seconds ago -- might not you also try to to defend yourself?
How did any of this happen? Did the officer not have time to say "halt"? Or "drop your weapon"? The drunk man, who was reported as being too drunk to stand and too drunk to walk straight, was such a threat to the officers' lives that even though they were armed and wearing body armor, as soon as they him, they realized they had just 24 seconds to shoot him dead?
And perhaps the most pertinent question: Why did they choose their firearms instead of their tasers? When Johannes Mehserle murdered Oscar Grant by shooting him in the back while Grant was face down on the ground and handcuffed, Mehserle's excuse was that he mistook his firearm for his taser. Many, many law enforcement experts came forward to say that this was highly unlikely, as officers are required to keep their taser and their handgun on opposite sides of their bodies. Mistaking the two would be tantamount to mistaking your own left hand for your right. Now this other officer chooses to draw his handgun and use lethal force on an inebriated suspect, while his taser sits in his holster, unused. That's an interesting coincidence, don't you think?
I've always thought it was interesting, too, that BART police officers seem to carry 2-3 extra magazines on their belts when patrolling trains. Just how many shots do they expect to have to get off on an occupied train or inside a subway platform, anyway? 45?
Might it not be that BART police training encourages officers to use their firearms as the first line of defense? And that BART needs to answer to this pattern of behavior by its police force? But that it chooses not to answer, because its police force is not answerable to any city's mayor or city council, and in fact is answerable to no organization but BART itself? And therefore the public's only real recourse is civic unrest?
I explicitly allow ads on Slashdot, and other sites I enjoy, since keeping them around is beneficial to my entertainment.
I generally run AdBlock for all sites, because Web ads are just so annoying and ugly, and keeping them around is detrimental to my entertainment. However, I don't have to feel guilty on Slashdot, because Slashdot graciously offers to not serve me ads if I choose, and I accept. I'm not sure why it does that, but I think the checkbox started showing up around the same time as Slashdot rolled out "Achievements." It's basically a perk for longtime participants -- which seems like a pretty good idea for a community-driven site, to me.
If someone needs to dial for help and they can't because BART has disabled cell phone service?
No. There are telephones with a direct line to BART employees on every platform. If a problem occurs on a train itself, there are phones with a direct line to the train operator at both ends of every car of every train. The same phones are routinely used by BART maintenance staff to communicate with train operators, so with rare exceptions they are always available and in service. You are much better off alerting the train operator of a problem on a train than calling 911 and waiting for emergency services to find a way to contact the operator.
then you would go to jail. "Excessive Defense" is a crime you know.
I've never heard that phrase used in the United States. I don't think there is any law that uses that language. In many states, you would be perfectly within your rights to use lethal force to deal with an attacker armed with a knife if you felt your life was in danger.
First, if we're going for semantics, you said "that lucrative, lucrative browser market", which implies (since you were being sarcastic) that there's no money to be made by having more people using your browser. In the macro sense, this just isn't true.
Sorry to reply twice, but how is it not true? Right now, what makes producing Firefox "lucrative" for the Mozilla Foundation is.... (drum roll please)... royalties from Google from searches powered by the Firefox search bar. That's it. 97 percent of Mozilla's income derives from that one source: Google. Google obviously profits even more from the same searches, though, or it wouldn't have the money to pay the Mozilla Foundation. That's business.
But wait! Google would profit even more if it didn't have to pay the Mozilla Foundation anything -- right? Well, not really. There aren't just two browser choices on the market. So if Google took a bunch of dynamite and blew up the Mozilla offices, every single person who uses Firefox now would need to switch to Chrome in order for Google to be assured the same number of searches it gets now (because to my knowledge, no other browser but Firefox and Chrome has a search bar that automatically defaults to Google). Would that be a smart business decision? Would the additional amount it had to spend marketing Chrome be substantially less than the portion of search royalties it pays Mozilla?
Google wants to create a high-performance Web browser and generate user excitement around the concept of Web browsers and browser technology because it is a company that has staked its entire strategy on Web browsers and browser-based software. If all software is going to run in the Web browser, the way Google wants it to, the software has to perform well enough that people are willing to use it. Google is trying to make sure this is true, and to the extent that other browser vendors need to compete, it has forced them to improve their own JavaScript performance, among other things.
As for "taking their market share," though, as I said, I really do not believe it is on Google's agenda. Google would obviously like users to steer clear of browser deficiencies that cause Google's Web applications to perform poorly. But it doesn't make much of a difference to Google whether that means users switch to Chrome or that the other browser vendor simply fixes the deficiencies. Google does not make any money directly from Chrome (except possibly by licensing Chrome OS to Samsung and Acer, I'm not sure about that one). To the extent that Google makes money indirectly from Chrome, however, it makes just as much (if not more) from Firefox, and almost as much from the competing browsers (to the extent that the people who use those browsers also access Google Web applications and services).
I really hope this doesn't happen, I like an array or competing browsers, but I don't see Google backing down just to let Firefox keep up.
Who said anything about Google backing down? If Google really does succeed in making a browser that's demonstrably superior to Firefox in every respect, I would switch tomorrow and so should you and everyone else. But since you don't use Chrome and I only use Chrome some of the time, apparently Google has yet to succeed at that. Still, any product that has that much of an advantage over all of its competitors deserves to succeed, and I won't spend any time crying over Firefox if that happens.
What you seemed to be saying, though, is that Google wants browser market share. I and others argue that's not the case; Google simply wants to create a better browser. If that leads to Chrome gaining more market share, well, that's how markets work.
Last time I tried regular-old NaCl, the startup time for NaCl modules was already significant. Really the whole experience reminded me of nothing so much as Java applets circa 1997. I'm sure performance can be enhanced in various ways, but at this point I'm still skeptical that NaCl will have much more appeal than Java did back then. The reason ActiveX was successful was because it exposed a lot of Windows functionality for browser-based apps -- it wasn't just wedging an immature platform into a little box inside a browser window. NaCl doesn't seem to be doing anything as compelling so far.
Do I really need to explain why it's beneficial to own the leading browser? The leading browser sets the agenda
That's not what you just said, though. You said Google "wants the browser market," in rebuttal to a guy who basically said Google made Chrome as a way to set the agenda (causing other browser vendors to "step up their game" in the process). Google still makes 100 percent of its money from Web sites, not browsers. As such, it still does not benefit Google to create a browser full of nonstandard things as a way to "own the browser market." The more different browsers that can use Google's Web apps, the more Google benefits.
Right now, Google's Web apps are accessible to pretty much 100 percent of the browser market. Some browsers might run them more slowly, and some might have some rendering quirks, but they're mostly available to anyone. As soon as Google starts restricting things to its own browser, it effectively cuts off a part of that market share. If Google's compatibility is 100 percent now, what sense does it make to start pushing toward 85 percent compatibility or lower?
Likewise, what sense would it make for Google to crush Firefox, Opera, and Safari, and leave the market with only two credible choices: Chrome and IE? Is that a scenario Google wants to see happen again? (And you know IE will never go away as long as Microsoft ships it free with Windows.)
So while yes, Google would like people to use Chrome and benefit from its fast JavaScript performance, good Web standards support, and automatic updates, "owning the browser market" is not really on the agenda, IMHO.
NaCl has access to the DOM via the "bridge" you mention, but in practice what that means is that NaCl's access to the DOM is handled through inter-process communication calls. Google has said that games that rely on a lot of DOM access would probably be better off being written in JavaScript for this reason. The two technologies are clearly meant to be complementary.
Note that NaCl code is only cross-platform in the sense that it's OS-independent. Being true native code, it's not processor-independent; if you want NaCl modules to run on x86, x64, and ARM, for example, you need to have compiled three separate versions of your NaCl binary, one for each architecture.
Such a law does exist, but it's not what the GP remembers. The law applies only to immigrants and it requires them to carry their Green Card with them at all times.
Which, incidentally, is a pretty lousy thing in and of itself. I carried a Green Card when I was a teenager, and the last time I had to have it replaced because my wallet was stolen, it cost about $550 and took maybe nine weeks to get a new one. That's a pretty brutal burden for someone at the bottom rung of the work ladder or, for example, day laborers.
"Safety" here means that code cannot break out of the sandbox - it can, of course, still crash itself, but that would be fully isolated, and cannot be used in the usual manner as a privilege escalation exploit.
Said native code can be the output of a compiler of any language - there are some restrictions on what the output can look like (e.g. opcodes must be aligned), but there's no inherent restriction on languages. Today, Google supplies a C++ compiler (modded Clang? not sure what it is) that respects those constraints, but anyone can do so as well, including VC++.
I guess in theory there's nothing stopping any compiler from outputting NaCl binaries, but at present none does, except for the aforementioned Google toolchain that comes with the NaCl SDK (which is a modded version of GCC). Code output for NaCl carries the extension ".nexe" -- technically it is native machine language, but the binary won't execute anywhere but inside NaCl. The SDK and its APIs are also changing a lot;.nexes compiled with earlier versions of the SDK won't work with Chrome 14 or later.
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I am not talking about the electronic version, but your post makes no sense. If I was away from my desktop most of the day then a print dictionary wouldn't do me any good. On the other hand, if I didn't have a good smart phone/plan, then an electronic dictionary wouldn't do me any good. You seem to be arguing that I am beyond the aid of any dictionary. Which is kind of silly, because believe it or not, I was using dictionaries many years before the smartphone was invented.
I have no connection to any university, but the same is true of the San Francisco Public Library. I want a print dictionary.
Also, the OED may be the "definitive" record of the English language, but that doesn't actually (believe it or not) make it the best dictionary. Proof? Oxford University publishes other dictionaries, not all of which draw from the text of the unabridged OED.
I'm in the market for a good dictionary, but I think I'm going to wait until the 5th edition American Heritage comes out in November. That dictionary is pretty much the standard for most professional writers and editors in the U.S. I've also heard that the New Oxford American is a good dictionary -- some say better -- but I'm leaning toward the traditional.
Google doesn't have it in their DNA to do consumer electronics; they are into advertising and SAAS.
So you're saying that if Google wants to get into consumer electronics, it had better acquire a consumer electronics manufacturer?
And you do not find an armed crazy drunk, addict, or mentally ill person worthy of concern? I would say that you have an under developed sense of self preservation.
I probably wouldn't know he was armed. For all I know, they're all armed. Until the cops showed up, this guy's only crime was being drunk. I don't find that worthy of concern, no. It was the cops' job to do something about it, though, and they did it in a way that escalated almost immediately to fatal violence.
Yes he looks scary as hell to be honest.
Aw, maybe you have to live in the Bay Area. I see guys who look like that every day. He looks pretty desperate, if you ask me. Our streets are crawling with crazy drunks, addicts, homeless, and the mentally ill. I'm sure the guy was acting pretty erratically, but if you read reports, nobody on the platform ever felt particularly endangered. It's an everyday thing out here.
More to the point, though: Would I personally want to try to detain this man and physically restrain him? Hell no. I'd leave that to trained law enfo... oh, wait.
On the other hand, if regular citizens were allowed to carry firearms, and I was on that BART platform and I had a handgun on me, would I have approached that man and shot him stone dead? Somehow I don't think so.
In less than half a minute, these two officers managed to escalate a drunk-and-disorderly call to a violent episode that ended in a fatality. I wouldn't categorize this as a murder -- not like Oscar Grant or Kelly Thomas. But a wrongful death? Very possibly. And at the very least, BART must answer for the actions of its officers, and "thank you for your interest, but we have decided we did nothing wrong" isn't going to cut it.
People want to act as if these protests are over the actions of two police officers. They're not. It's too late to take back what those two officers did. What the protests are about are the policies and practices of BART Police, and BART's ongoing unwillingness to address the matter or even discuss it. BART Police are not city, county, or municipality cops. They are part of the BART organization. So to send a message, protestors disrupted the operations of BART -- a perfectly logical move, if you ask me, when the goal is to get the attention of whoever manages and oversees BART Police.
BART's answer so far has been to escalate the whole situation into a media circus in an attempt to distract attention from its own culpability in these matters. In so doing, it has drawn a lot of negative attention to itself -- so I'd say the protests have been fairly effective.
The story about the officer slipping and falling to the ground was from the article I linked above, the one with the pic of the homeless guy.
That would be a lot of thinkin for a person to be doing in a split second while a knife is flying at them
I hear you, but you missed one point: The knife was not flying at them. The officer shot the guy first, then he threw the knife.
If you read other accounts, there was some other Keystone Cops type stuff, where the guy threw the bottle, liquid spilled out of the bottle, and one of the officers slipped on the liquid and fell on his ass. That was when the second officer drew his weapon and reportedly fired two seconds later. If you read between the lines, it sounds like a pair of poorly trained, less-than-competent officers felt like they were losing control of a situation (with a crazy drunk, no less) and freaked out.
I mean, come on... this is who they were up against. And that photo isn't a mugshot, it's his driver's license photo. That's what he used to look like when he went to the DMV. In all honesty, I don't even know you, but I'm pretty sure you could take him.
Did you not read the headline of the story you linked? "Bart shooting video shows thrown knife, but not threat man posed."
BART police arrive on the platform in response to a call of a man being too drunk to stand. Within 30 seconds of arriving on the platform, they had shot the man to death -- apparently, for being drunk and mouthing off to police.
Apparently the man was belligerent, apparently he had a weapon, and he threw the weapon at them. What did the officers think he was -- a circus knife-thrower? Was he planning to pin the officers to the wall with knives, maybe? He was apparently too drunk to walk straight, so maybe he was planning to do that with his hand over one eye?
But hold on -- according to the story you linked, the man wasn't considered a threat because he threw a knife at police. He threw a bottle. I'd hardly call that a threat to the officers' lives. They say the bottle cut them. Well, show me the hospital report or boo fucking hoo.
But let's say he did throw a knife. Is that when you decide you have no recourse but to shoot a guy -- after he's thrown away his weapon? If he'd just tossed it down on the ground, presumably they would have still screamed "he's got a knife!!" and shot him?
But no -- the truth is, according to the very story you linked, the suspect didn't even throw the knife until after the officer shot him. If a belligerent police officer came out of nowhere and started shooting at you -- remember, police had arrived on the platform less than 30 seconds ago -- might not you also try to to defend yourself?
How did any of this happen? Did the officer not have time to say "halt"? Or "drop your weapon"? The drunk man, who was reported as being too drunk to stand and too drunk to walk straight, was such a threat to the officers' lives that even though they were armed and wearing body armor, as soon as they him, they realized they had just 24 seconds to shoot him dead?
And perhaps the most pertinent question: Why did they choose their firearms instead of their tasers? When Johannes Mehserle murdered Oscar Grant by shooting him in the back while Grant was face down on the ground and handcuffed, Mehserle's excuse was that he mistook his firearm for his taser. Many, many law enforcement experts came forward to say that this was highly unlikely, as officers are required to keep their taser and their handgun on opposite sides of their bodies. Mistaking the two would be tantamount to mistaking your own left hand for your right. Now this other officer chooses to draw his handgun and use lethal force on an inebriated suspect, while his taser sits in his holster, unused. That's an interesting coincidence, don't you think?
I've always thought it was interesting, too, that BART police officers seem to carry 2-3 extra magazines on their belts when patrolling trains. Just how many shots do they expect to have to get off on an occupied train or inside a subway platform, anyway? 45?
Might it not be that BART police training encourages officers to use their firearms as the first line of defense? And that BART needs to answer to this pattern of behavior by its police force? But that it chooses not to answer, because its police force is not answerable to any city's mayor or city council, and in fact is answerable to no organization but BART itself? And therefore the public's only real recourse is civic unrest?
I'm just floating the possibility out there.
I'm sure it's some of both, actually.
I explicitly allow ads on Slashdot, and other sites I enjoy, since keeping them around is beneficial to my entertainment.
I generally run AdBlock for all sites, because Web ads are just so annoying and ugly, and keeping them around is detrimental to my entertainment. However, I don't have to feel guilty on Slashdot, because Slashdot graciously offers to not serve me ads if I choose, and I accept. I'm not sure why it does that, but I think the checkbox started showing up around the same time as Slashdot rolled out "Achievements." It's basically a perk for longtime participants -- which seems like a pretty good idea for a community-driven site, to me.
But then, in this post-Columbine era, who is?
what kind of doctor is poor enough to take a fucking subway/regional rail?
The kind who doesn't see any sense in paying $50/day for downtown parking. No joke.
If someone needs to dial for help and they can't because BART has disabled cell phone service?
No. There are telephones with a direct line to BART employees on every platform. If a problem occurs on a train itself, there are phones with a direct line to the train operator at both ends of every car of every train. The same phones are routinely used by BART maintenance staff to communicate with train operators, so with rare exceptions they are always available and in service. You are much better off alerting the train operator of a problem on a train than calling 911 and waiting for emergency services to find a way to contact the operator.
then you would go to jail. "Excessive Defense" is a crime you know.
I've never heard that phrase used in the United States. I don't think there is any law that uses that language. In many states, you would be perfectly within your rights to use lethal force to deal with an attacker armed with a knife if you felt your life was in danger.
First, if we're going for semantics, you said "that lucrative, lucrative browser market", which implies (since you were being sarcastic) that there's no money to be made by having more people using your browser. In the macro sense, this just isn't true.
Sorry to reply twice, but how is it not true? Right now, what makes producing Firefox "lucrative" for the Mozilla Foundation is .... (drum roll please) ... royalties from Google from searches powered by the Firefox search bar. That's it. 97 percent of Mozilla's income derives from that one source: Google. Google obviously profits even more from the same searches, though, or it wouldn't have the money to pay the Mozilla Foundation. That's business.
But wait! Google would profit even more if it didn't have to pay the Mozilla Foundation anything -- right? Well, not really. There aren't just two browser choices on the market. So if Google took a bunch of dynamite and blew up the Mozilla offices, every single person who uses Firefox now would need to switch to Chrome in order for Google to be assured the same number of searches it gets now (because to my knowledge, no other browser but Firefox and Chrome has a search bar that automatically defaults to Google). Would that be a smart business decision? Would the additional amount it had to spend marketing Chrome be substantially less than the portion of search royalties it pays Mozilla?
Google wants to create a high-performance Web browser and generate user excitement around the concept of Web browsers and browser technology because it is a company that has staked its entire strategy on Web browsers and browser-based software. If all software is going to run in the Web browser, the way Google wants it to, the software has to perform well enough that people are willing to use it. Google is trying to make sure this is true, and to the extent that other browser vendors need to compete, it has forced them to improve their own JavaScript performance, among other things.
As for "taking their market share," though, as I said, I really do not believe it is on Google's agenda. Google would obviously like users to steer clear of browser deficiencies that cause Google's Web applications to perform poorly. But it doesn't make much of a difference to Google whether that means users switch to Chrome or that the other browser vendor simply fixes the deficiencies. Google does not make any money directly from Chrome (except possibly by licensing Chrome OS to Samsung and Acer, I'm not sure about that one). To the extent that Google makes money indirectly from Chrome, however, it makes just as much (if not more) from Firefox, and almost as much from the competing browsers (to the extent that the people who use those browsers also access Google Web applications and services).
I really hope this doesn't happen, I like an array or competing browsers, but I don't see Google backing down just to let Firefox keep up.
Who said anything about Google backing down? If Google really does succeed in making a browser that's demonstrably superior to Firefox in every respect, I would switch tomorrow and so should you and everyone else. But since you don't use Chrome and I only use Chrome some of the time, apparently Google has yet to succeed at that. Still, any product that has that much of an advantage over all of its competitors deserves to succeed, and I won't spend any time crying over Firefox if that happens.
What you seemed to be saying, though, is that Google wants browser market share. I and others argue that's not the case; Google simply wants to create a better browser. If that leads to Chrome gaining more market share, well, that's how markets work.
You're basically asking Google: "would you like to have Firefox's market share?". Do you really think they'd say "no"?
That's what I'm saying.
As long as there's no direct profit to be had from gaining Firefox's market share, it's not a discussion that comes up at meetings at Google.
Last time I tried regular-old NaCl, the startup time for NaCl modules was already significant. Really the whole experience reminded me of nothing so much as Java applets circa 1997. I'm sure performance can be enhanced in various ways, but at this point I'm still skeptical that NaCl will have much more appeal than Java did back then. The reason ActiveX was successful was because it exposed a lot of Windows functionality for browser-based apps -- it wasn't just wedging an immature platform into a little box inside a browser window. NaCl doesn't seem to be doing anything as compelling so far.
Do I really need to explain why it's beneficial to own the leading browser? The leading browser sets the agenda
That's not what you just said, though. You said Google "wants the browser market," in rebuttal to a guy who basically said Google made Chrome as a way to set the agenda (causing other browser vendors to "step up their game" in the process). Google still makes 100 percent of its money from Web sites, not browsers. As such, it still does not benefit Google to create a browser full of nonstandard things as a way to "own the browser market." The more different browsers that can use Google's Web apps, the more Google benefits.
Right now, Google's Web apps are accessible to pretty much 100 percent of the browser market. Some browsers might run them more slowly, and some might have some rendering quirks, but they're mostly available to anyone. As soon as Google starts restricting things to its own browser, it effectively cuts off a part of that market share. If Google's compatibility is 100 percent now, what sense does it make to start pushing toward 85 percent compatibility or lower?
Likewise, what sense would it make for Google to crush Firefox, Opera, and Safari, and leave the market with only two credible choices: Chrome and IE? Is that a scenario Google wants to see happen again? (And you know IE will never go away as long as Microsoft ships it free with Windows.)
So while yes, Google would like people to use Chrome and benefit from its fast JavaScript performance, good Web standards support, and automatic updates, "owning the browser market" is not really on the agenda, IMHO.
NaCl has access to the DOM via the "bridge" you mention, but in practice what that means is that NaCl's access to the DOM is handled through inter-process communication calls. Google has said that games that rely on a lot of DOM access would probably be better off being written in JavaScript for this reason. The two technologies are clearly meant to be complementary.
Note that NaCl code is only cross-platform in the sense that it's OS-independent. Being true native code, it's not processor-independent; if you want NaCl modules to run on x86, x64, and ARM, for example, you need to have compiled three separate versions of your NaCl binary, one for each architecture.
It's not just a tech demo anymore. They want the browser market.
Ah, yes... that lucrative, lucrative browser market.
Such a law does exist, but it's not what the GP remembers. The law applies only to immigrants and it requires them to carry their Green Card with them at all times.
Which, incidentally, is a pretty lousy thing in and of itself. I carried a Green Card when I was a teenager, and the last time I had to have it replaced because my wallet was stolen, it cost about $550 and took maybe nine weeks to get a new one. That's a pretty brutal burden for someone at the bottom rung of the work ladder or, for example, day laborers.
"Safety" here means that code cannot break out of the sandbox - it can, of course, still crash itself, but that would be fully isolated, and cannot be used in the usual manner as a privilege escalation exploit.
Or that's the idea, anyway.
Said native code can be the output of a compiler of any language - there are some restrictions on what the output can look like (e.g. opcodes must be aligned), but there's no inherent restriction on languages. Today, Google supplies a C++ compiler (modded Clang? not sure what it is) that respects those constraints, but anyone can do so as well, including VC++.
I guess in theory there's nothing stopping any compiler from outputting NaCl binaries, but at present none does, except for the aforementioned Google toolchain that comes with the NaCl SDK (which is a modded version of GCC). Code output for NaCl carries the extension ".nexe" -- technically it is native machine language, but the binary won't execute anywhere but inside NaCl. The SDK and its APIs are also changing a lot; .nexes compiled with earlier versions of the SDK won't work with Chrome 14 or later.
I kicked the tires on NaCl for InfoWorld earlier this year.