On my laptop, a Sandy Bridge i7, on a cold start, Netbeans 8 takes 57 seconds to launch before it's clickable, Visual Studio 2013 takes 68 seconds. Netbeans is also more responsive while it's busy, with Visual Studio displaying the full hourglass cursor and triggering the "application not responding" behaviour if its window is clicked before it's ready.

The basic idea is that in Java programs, you can understand what's going on by looking at a fragment of code. Therefore the code is easy to read and to maintain. With syntactic sugar such as properties, operator overload and closures, you can't know which statements will cause side effects without inspecting upstream definitions.

Type erasure, on the other hand, is pure evil - to me, it's the representation of what happens when a pragmatic language ends up into the hands of computer scientists.

By the way, in Java all lists have the get() method with no exceptions (this includes Lists, HashMaps, Vectors) and all collections have the iterator() method with no exceptions. The At() method doesn't exist.

And then, they try to fire up Microsoft Visual Studio, and they wait even more, and they realize that their perception bubble isn't reality.

Java != Java applets.

The JDK had already been released under the GPL by Sun before the Oracle acquisition.

No, it wasn't... in the old times it allowed you to skip whitespace in order to save memory, so programs used to become wall of characters, and you couldn't even call a variable "sprint" because it contained the reserved word "print". And its later incarnations were full of puzzlers. Just the first ones that come into my mind: "On Error Goto 0" means "throw an exception"; functions and procedures have a different invocation syntax and invoking a procedure as a function doesn't fail but results in a different operation; the assignment operator is different between objects and non-objects; function parameters are passed by reference by default...

So they are going to peek inside my network packets, looking for ads? And modify them, in order to remove those ads? Sorry, but I don't need yet another big brother looking at my private stuff, whether it’s for my own good, for maintaining the order of society or for the sake of whatever replaced the STASI nowadays.

Besides, what if I’m using TLS? Are they going to require me to install rogue certificates just to make their inspection more comfortable? No thanks. Telecom companies had better learn already that with the advent of the Internet, their trade is to sell dumb pipes, competing with the others over the price of that service; the good times when they could milk their customers for “value added services” is over.

No, that only works when the ISO has been expressly engineered to have in its first sectors a fake HD boot record whose boot code will jump into the el torito boot floppy image. Traditional ~year 2000 BIOSes won't look for ISO9660 structures on anything that isn't optical media.