There's no need. There are no segementation faults in Java. There's no way you can access memory you don't own. And then, any error just provokes an exception, which can be catched.

You are right that Java model help with the need of having finer-grain-than-a-process security. It's partly because it was made for applets. Java supports running safely completely untrusted code.

And your objection to "virtualness" can be replied with an analogy of C vs assembly language. In Java you loose control, but the VM gains control to optimize... just as in C, gcc usually knows more about how to optimize. And speed-wise Java is very good, is at most 2x slower than pure C (I think it's even faster), which is a great thing actually.

Java "machine code" targets an abstract CPU which can handle "objects", "methods". You can disassemble compiled Java code and you see "invokevirtual" which means "invoke a virtual method on an object".

Then, an object in Java is a fundamental thing, there's no way to "decompose" it. There no way of getting its memory image. This has some nice properties:

• The vm can reorder object fields to play nice with machine's alignment.
• Security, you only can access the objects you have been given to. There's no pointer arithmetic. At all.
• All objects know who they are, there are no undetected wrong casts (similar to the newer dynamic casts C++ now have)

Absurd, Marx was a "hit" well before any revolution happened. And there were lots of other "revolutionaries" in the XIX century that nobody care about now. Marx is relevant because the amazingly sharp analysis of capitalism.

... so... wouldn't it be the same just putting your data in the body of an ICMP echo message (ping)?

What I say is it wasn't created for profit, it was created very far from the market. There were no MBAs involved, no managers. It was a community puting out software and RFCs. The corporate world, at that moment was busy creating zillions of incompatible little LANs, onthe low end, or a monstruosity (the ISO/OSI model... X.25) on the high end.

No. Sony isn't just a "media company". It's one of the big technology companies. And it's relevant that one of the biggest technology companies hate Internet.

Capitalism can't produce common goods. Internet would've never had existed if it weren't for the US government. It was created in an academic environment, by passionate people that cared about the advance of technolog (indirectly: of mankind). Internet advanced quickly, different protocols appeared, once replacing the other (Gopher, SMTP, HTTP, POP, IMAP, NNTP, etc.).

Then the companies came. Those set of protocols froze, some began to fade. Companies didn't care about "what's right". They didn't care about advance the network. The HTTP/1.0 -> 1.1 transition took years, and still hasn't finished (e.g. http pipelining). IMAP mail stalled, and got replaced by webmail. Multicast was never deployed at large. Newsgroups got replaced by phpbb.

These companies hate Internet. If they praise it, it's only when they realize they can't afford to ignore it (or destroy it).

You certainly don't sound like you know. Saying "trust me, it was my minor" is not very interesring or useful... The US has a history of messing with LA, an History other countries don't have. Nnot only private companies, but the CIA itself had participated in many LA tragedies. Go read a bit about this, very interesting.

Ask in Bolivia if they have forgotten.

You should read a bit about history of Latin America =). Just one example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_massacre (there are more)

Of course, Bolivia doesn't have access to ocean ports because Chile took Bolivian coast by force.

Your message might look "Intereseing" to the Latin America history ignorant. The truth is that most of the time the money go to foreign companies, based on countries like yours.

The big question is if Oracle will keep being Oracle. This company has swallowed something bigger than him. Oracle might be more firmly sat on top of a revenue generator product, but Sun is a much larger operation, involving a dektop presence pretention, mobile, high end hardware design, high end software (Solaris), etc. (That's a reason IBM was a less conflicting buyer for Sun). In turn, Oracle sells a databse, and some enterprise programming tools, they have a much narrower scope (even the name implies this focus).

Perhaps, Oracle should rename themselves to Sun, and just sell a database called Oracle. =)

And I thought the only nazis here were grammar related...