Java abstracts away all the fun in programming. You cannot really target specific hardware with it, and it means you cannot get (close to) maximum performance on any given piece of hardware - you are deprived of control over processor cache, memory locality of data and code, or access to vector instructions. JIT, which "compiles" the code piecewise, is at obvious disadvantage compared to a proper compiler that has global view of the program (and JIT is also more time constrained, compiler can spend hours compiling the code), and uncontrollable garbage collector means that you will have hard time enforcing even "soft realtime" requirements.

Different people may look differently, but for me, all that means that Java is suboptimal for games or other heavily performance-oriented stuff, and this is the only kind of software I enjoy programming. Making performance-insensitive backends full of "business logic" is for someone who is in the software industry for money only...

I don't think "an app" applies to web "applications" and not sure those two will ever blend. The depedency on a (good) connection is still a problem, if you are commuting or, say, torrenting. Even on mobile devices, people want offline maps and offline dictionaries precisely for the reason of being location-independent.

You may want to hash them for maps or sets, log them out, or even save to disk (the latter might not make sense at first glance, but sometimes it's convenient as it provides an "unique ID" for objects in a saved file, helpful if your data is an arbitrarily connected graph).

Why do you limit "market" to a single country only? One day we will witness formation of the United States of Earth, and artificial obstacles for population movement will be quickly forgotten. The market is already global.

I imagine he might be reading slashdot and enjoying all this =)

Kind of disagree. Granted, that is an anecdotal evidence, but I had brought my Linux desktop down by just allocating - and actually "touching" - too much memory (like 2x more than physical RAM) in a program of mine. While Windows may also suffer if you decide to memset() a 32GB array, I haven't yet seen the same unresponsiveness of the system - not even Ctrl-Alt-F1 worked.

Also, Linux the kernel is one thing, and Linux the OS is another. Linux graphics stack is certainly not "lightyears ahead" of Windows, where you can reset/reinstall graphics drivers as if they were userland programs - vice versa, we still have X server that probes PCI bus (try grep -i pci /var/log/Xorg.0.log).

I, for one, bought a few games via SC (I'm using Kubuntu) a year ago or so. Not that I play them that often though :)

Come on, US is free. Sure, NSA collects a lot of data, but goddamn country has no notion of an ID for its citizens! You can buy a SIM card without leaving any personal traces (provided that you pay cash). You don't have to register your residence anywhere, you can leave the country without being thoroughly checked by border guards, you can be issued a credit card without proving that you are a citizen/lawful resident... now, try doing all that in European Union and compare where you have to disclose more information about yourself.

Disagree. European countries are not "very very different in all aspects". There is some variety, but Europe is locally continuous: differences between, say, Poles and Czechs are not that pronounced and you can find people that are hard to classify as either of these nations, the same could be said about differences between Belgians and Dutch (or Belgians and French), Norwegians and Swedish, Ukrainians and Russians, Portuguese and Spanish, Poles and Belarussians etc etc. Looking at Europe from bird's eye view, one may notice a few large clusters (Slavic nations, Germanic nations, Romance nations) that differ somewhat, but they blend into each other (migration, intermarriage) making people roughly compatible.

Note that doesn't mean that people of similar culture do not hate/despise/fight each other. Vice versa, it seems that the most fierce rivalry happens precisely between parties that are similar to each other (see Balkans, or Polish-Russian rivalry, or Norwegian-Swedish relationships, or Portugese-Spanish, historical English-French, etc etc), just like relatives happen to quarrel more often than strangers.

Why? I know a case when a person was asked about his github projects by recruiter (and that positively influenced his chances to get that job) - and I see nothing wrong with this. Isn't the whole idea of sites like github/sourceforge/etc to make your work (which you willfully shared) more discoverable?

I meant news that would be retrieved without my direct intervention. Prefetched and cached - better?

Will it fetch it for me in advance? :P

Web interfaces always look second-class to me, moreover, it's harder to control their behavior on the device. I can start with a web interface, but if I really like the site and going to frequent it, I want an app for it (preferably with some offline functionality, if applicable - like reading [pre-]cached news).

People will eventually learn to treat Android devices the same way as PCs. Nobody is voicing concerns regarding variety of PC resolutions (or even number of monitors), nobody suggests testing on thousands of "PC devices" out there. Android is the new PC.

I agree with that statement, but Macs come with a pretty hefty pricetag. In the country I currently reside (Poland) a Mac that can do all the aforementioned things costs you more than a typical monthly developer salary (which is averaging a bit below $2k/month). For the same price, you can get a monster PC here.

What iOS developers normally do here is getting used hardware (particularly Mac minis) for development while keeping PCs as their main machines. I have seen people who could afford (in my opinion) getting a "normal" Mac do this.