Stability, predictability and reliability could be done with Erlang, Occam, Eiffel, Smalltalk or Ada.

Business could have build "enterprise" applications with any of these. Most existed before Java or, indeed, the web. Servlets could have churned out WAIS or Gopher data for businesses. Graphics, via SGI's VRML, Apple's Postscript or the ancient GKS standard, could have given you everything that Swing delivered. Not that businesses use Swing, as a rule.

Portable applications in the form of Tcl/Tk packages could have provided everything Java applets did. Not that anyone uses applets either.

It should be self-evident that absolutely bugger all of the usual explanations hold water. If the explanations were valid, the role would already have been filled and Java would have never taken off.

Businesses flocked to Java and not to any other technology. Even technologies pushed by very large corporations. Businesses liked, and like, Java. That is obvious. "Why" is not obvious, Java does nothing that couldn't be done better in other ways. It isn't done in other ways, it's done in Java. There will be a sound reason for this, but it won't involve stability, reliability or predictability.

Oak was originally designed for household appliances.

D looks intriguing, certainly superior in theory to C++ or C#, but I'm seeing nothing substantial in it so far.

For other C derivatives, there's Aspect C and related attempts at adding high-level abstraction. On the other end of the spectrum, you've Silk and UPC - efforts to make parallelism simpler, safer and usable. Again, though, how many here have even got these compilers, never mind written anything in them?

For highly protected work, Occam-Pi is unbeatable. And almost unusable. Extraordinarily powerful, but extraordinarily formal. You could easily write an OS or virtual machine using it that could exploit multicore, SMP and clustering transparently. You just couldn't easily get it to do anything else, like hot-swap resources, add memory, access the busses, support RDMA, exploit hardware...

That's the rub. Most of what is needed in an OS is inherently unsafe. It's why there's so much interest in splitting operating systems into unsafe parts (which often need to be fast and low-level) and safe parts (the stuff that does all the managing and abstraction). So long as the unsafe parts are well-behaved with valid data AND the safe bits provably give only valid data (though it doesn't have to be provably correct), then the system is guaranteed to be stable.

You ideally want to split these up further. The safe bit should access an independent security kernel that handles all the access control, for example. The security kernel should be provably correct, which is a very different constraint than that imposed on other safe sections. Some sections of code should be able to self-replicate or migrate, to take advantage of resources rather than create bottlenecks. That would require greater emphasis on abstraction and adaptability, rather than validity or correctness.

No single language can handle this level of versatility. All languages obtain specific characteristics through constraints and freedoms. This means you need superior linkage between languages and optimization that takes into account that different paradigms are used to solve different problems and that there is insufficient data to optimize at compile time, that it has to be done at link time.

The problem is that the article is saying this is bad science, when it's really bad science reporting

NASA did the right thing. They tested something, they got weird results, they published it. The article points out the results were no different than the null control, and that's true, so clearly the supposed design of the drive is bullshit. What the article doesn't point out is that the interesting part is that neither of them should have shown any thrust. So something is going on that the experimenters don't understand, and they've published the results to find out why. Is it a measurement / equipment / methodology error? Probably, actually. But if you can't find the error yourself, you publish the results you get, and let your peers help you. Papers will be published criticizing their methodology if there are problems with it, or proposing reasons for why the measurements look like they do. It's a long shot, but maybe there is some effect actually happening which we don't understand, and papers will be published with possible theories.

That's not bad science. It's the definition of good science. It's bad science to imply that you should ever not publish the results you get. And it's bad science reporting to look at what NASA published and incorrectly translate it to the public as, "NASA proves impossible drive"

I've been pointing out the risks of router poisoning for, what, 17 years now.

Ever since the NSA started demonstrating router poisoning, it was only a matter of time before even the script kiddies figured it out.

I've been pointing out that the current rash of cryptocurrencies have excessive reliance on trust for the past year.

This sort of attack was inevitable. Bitcoin can plead semi-innocence because strong authentication is counter to strong anonymity. However, no router on the Internet should accept rogue announcements - even from three letter agencies - or accept unauthorized changes to the running configuration or active router tables.

MITM attacks are exceptionally dangerous and the hazards can only get worse.

IE is supported? When did this happen?

Last I heard, they reluctantly release updates when other parts of the OS beat them on bugs per kg of code. (They stopped measuring lines when someone googled the term.)

I wouldn't worry too much about Fukushima, per se.

It's the fact that the State Secret law passed days after the abandonment of the pacifist sections of the Constitution, at a time Japan desperately needs to get rid of masses of deadly radioactive material, that you need to concern yourself with.

The union of the two sets is not equal to the universal set of all nuclear power options.

Your argument is therefore irrelevant. Please meme and try again.

I can accept that, but with reservations.

A lack of timely information lies at the heart of all nuclear accidents, large and small. It would seem to follow that to improve safety, you'd want to improve on sensors - the number, resilience and backups.

They were using helicopters, IIRC, which raises the question of what cameras and other sensors could have been used on those helicopters to fill in the gaps in their knowledge.

Did they try firing simple rockets into the reactor core? Something capable of carrying a rad-hardened instrument package and a transmitter capable of being received by a helicopter. A camera, a spectrometer, a thermometer even. Something that would extend their knowledge of the problem.

If they failed to make any real effort to prepare an adequate sensor grid in advance and failed to take basic steps to minimize uncertainty, then blunders from a lack of knowledge can't be blamed simply on that lack of knowledge. It stops being one of those things and starts looking like a massive failure and disastrous incompetence.

Back when the accident happened, a significant number of Slashdotters were saying that no meltdown had occurred, that there was no significant structural damage, that no radioactive material would reach the sea, that the incident was overblown and that the plant would be largely still operational.

At this point, the discussion is not about how thoroughly the facility has been totalled but in what way.

I don't care that there was limited data available at the start, drawing conclusions from data you don't have (aka making things up) is not an excuse. If you don't know, don't pretend you do. It is because TEPCO pretended that they knew that the world lacks much-needed nuclear power. It is because TEPCO made things up rather than obtained data that an accident was possible. Don't be a TEPCO.

For those who defended the company, who downplayed the crisis as a nothing, who ignored any available information that didn't suit their preferred outcome, I am still awaiting an apology.

An apology for deliberate pollution of the debate
An apology for every post by every sceptical slashdotter modded to oblivion for the purpose of stifling debate
An apology to Slashdot itself for so abusing the moderating system
An apology for depriving the community of your own thought processes
An apology for not once, in all subsequent Slashdot debates, conceding that honest debate is superior to dishonest control

Maybe, by 2024, pride and conceit will be at levels where this is possible.

My comments were (falsely) premised on one guy suing Sony. Others have pointed out that I failed to see that this is in fact a class-action suit.

I just didn't think one guy suing Sony for 'all economic, monetary, actual, consequential, statutory and compensatory damages' had much of a chance, and his better option was to return the product, and then perhaps give Sony the finger in online reviews. Now that I realize it is a class-action suit, I think he has a good chance and I cheer him on.

DOH!!! Sorry, my bad. I glossed over the summary too quickly.

On the other hand, I used to pick hotels based on my free WiFi experience. So if you charged for WiFi, I'm not paying for a room at your place. If two different places have free WiFi, but I had a flaky connection in one hotel,and an ok connection in another, that's the deciding factor. All other concerns were secondary.

Of course, I would also have considered the case where the $10 a day a hotel would charge for WiFi would make up the difference in room cost, but it always turns out that expensive hotels charge for WiFi and cheap hotels don't, so that never came up.

These days I don't care, because 4G.

IANAL, but I doubt he will win. It seems to me that the proper remedy for him is to return the product and get his money back.

Sony should be punished for lying, but I don't see how one person suing them is going to work. Others may be satisfied with the product, even if Sony was being dishonest about its capabilities.

Now, if a group of consumers started a class action suit against Sony for this, I'd imagine their chances of winning would be much better.