Stop right there. Sun is one of the biggest corporate contributors to open source. Go ahead, count lines of code. I'm betting Sun will be in the top two if not #1.

Here's a brief list of things Sun has open sourced:
Solaris - Their entire OS, including ZFS and Dtrace
SPARC - Their CPU line
Java - Maybe you've heard of it.
OpenOffice - The office suite that ships with every desktop Linux distribution.
VirtualBox - A GPL desktop virtual machine.
NetBeans IDE - A multi-platform IDE.
OpenDS - LDAP Directory Server
High Availability Cluster

Honorable mention:
NFS - The Network File System
vi - developed by Sun founder Bill Joy
MySQL - Now owned and maintained by Sun-paid engineers

So, next time you say Sun hadn't done much for open source, look again. It would be a shame if Sun was bought by Oracle and all of their valuable contributions were abandoned.

Exactly. Scalability problems arise from poor implementation, not from language choices. Scalable platforms have been implemented in the past with PHP, ASP, Perl, C, Java, and I'm sure with Ruby, Python, or your favorite new language. Twitter is a massive-scale site, they should be looking at deep engineering, not a buzzword platform that promises easy scalability for dummies.

Scala may help them alleviate problems they've hit in the Rails framework. What will help them with the problems they hit in Scala?

I know, I'm a bad Slashdotter. Actually someone pointed this poster out to me a while ago, and I verified his claims and have since been more aware of his activities.

You're right that we should not ignore stories from authors we don't agree with. But we should also be wary of sources that are trying to push an agenda through their presentation of a story. Everyone has bias, but it seems that the stronger the bias, the more distorted the truth becomes to fit the author's world view. There is some threshold in which the presenter can no longer be counted on as a source of reliable information, even in seemingly benign cases.

This is yet another story by our friend "Anti-Globalism" (or "Defeat Globalism" in this case). Note the website the name links to (amerika.org). If you follow it, you'll reach a network of nationalist, anti-foreigner, and eventually racist (neo-Nazi / white power / religious hate), anti-democratic sites. The idea is to start you off with something that will get your nerd-rage going. "How dare those judges redefine libel". Then you'll go to a site that builds on that, but broadens the idea. "It's the Massachusetts liberal activist judges trying to take away our Libertarian freedom". Then it's a few more hops to full on "The Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, white-man hating Liberals are trying to take away our freedoms and give them to urban unwed teenage drug moms on welfare".

You can safely ignore this story.

If you need very specific behavior, as a high level developer you should be calling your environment's DoExactlyWhatIWantNotJustWhatIAssume() implementation (which in this case would be something like SyncFileDataToDisk() or TransactionCommit()). Implementing this function is for the authors of the interpreter or library set so that you don't have to understand the disk IO API. If your environment does not provide one of these, you're probably using the wrong tool for the job and you better make friends with some low level programmers.

Apple has 25,000 employees in the United States, 12,000 of which are in Cupertino, California, and the vast majority of those are in engineering and product development. Apple is one of the few computer makers that designs their desktop and laptop motherboards itself, in the U.S. (as opposed to buying a design from Asian ODMs [see Dell]). All Apple products, from phones to iPods to base stations to accessories are designed, programmed, debugged, and tested in the United States.

Apple writes its own OS entirely in the U.S. It does not have any international code development centers (unlike say Microsoft) except for a few small acquisitions. Apple writes an office suite, various other tools, runs web services, and creates professional grade video and audio software (such as Final Cut Pro), all from California offices. Apple now owns a chip design firm in the U.S. (PA Semiconductor).

The only thing that Apple has outsourced is manufacturing.