The far future may be similar to Banks's Culture novels: each of us supports a cloud of thousands and thousands of micro-drones. As the ages pass countermeasures against these drones lead to counter-countermeasures lead to counter-counter-countermeasures and on and on until our sea of micro-dones essentially becomes an extension of our own immune system.
I considered switching to sublime from vim just for sane line wrapping. If you have indents, vim forces you to hard wrap or else end up with an unreadable soup. Sublime, on the other hand, makes the sane choice of preserving indentation level when a line is wrapped. Sublime's setting makes editing large HTML files in a variable width window much more pleasant...
Each function has its own this binding - the conceptual model for this is that its an implicit argument to every function call. There is no scope chain lookup for "this". Although, there is no way to observe any difference between your understanding of the semantics or the bind semantics (which is a valid desugarding AFAIK) so the distinction is mostly moot...
Yahoo did and does have a spot at the table because they are a dues-paying member of ECMA. They have as much weight in the committee as any other member (MS, Google, Mozilla, now Facebook, etc.) Presumably Yahoo cares because they have millions of users running JS code.
I don't think "threw a fit" is an accurate description. More like, objected to many aspects for technical reasons. And, considering that TC-39 agreed at the Oslo meeting to pursue ES3.1 over ES4, presumably they had a pretty good argument. Brendan Eich's mail sent after the accord[1] has some detail.
This is explicitly about getting more sites to work /without/ forcing older sites to update their stuff. Older sites have ifIE() checks that return true and serve IE old legacy IE-specific code. IE11 is more compatible with standards-compliant code than legacy IE-specific code so forcing existing sites to serve IE the same code as FF/Chrome results in more sites working in IE.
