I think the reason why the students are being taught Java is so that the Professors can focus on those other things. For lots of students the gotcha's of native code get in the way of learning the theories, algorithm tuning, and data structures. So by using a managed language in the classes, the classes can spend more time focusing on something else besides language implementation details.

Compile time type checking is a major reason to pick Java over a scripted language. It's not like performance requirements are binary either. There's a lot of distance between optimized assembly and runtime type checking scripts.

Actually, isn't that what it's supposed to be. I'm sure pre-America British citizens were free to say whatever they wanted, they just had to deal with the consequences of their speech (imprisonment, torture, being blockaded from opportunity, etc). So the founding fathers of the US, put forth laws to prevent certain "consequences" from happening when people decided to speak their mind.

That is so incredibly irrelevant. We're talking about the taxing of one legal entity, don't try and push the conversation to knock on affects to other legal entities.

Oh, what the heck, let's talk about those other legal entities. If Microsoft paid all of the taxes from revenue generated in the US, those employees would have a lower tax bill, and could have better lives. As a matter of fact, perhaps all citizens of the US would have a lower tax burden. That might really help those who are just trying to find a way to eat every night.

Windows RT allows for multiple accounts.

Are you saying that Windows can't be locked down with a white list of only authorized programs?

Because American's are following through on Linux?

You can. Nothing is preventing you from doing that.

That depends upon how much you're worried about the functionality than the brand name. IE's plug-in model is different than Firefox and Chromes (which are, or at least started out, identical). So if you look up adblock's FAQ on IE, the author pretty much says he could write adblock for IE, but doesn't feel like it. So there are other ad blocking plugins for IE. I don't know about the others, but I'm sure the story is similar. But IE does have a feature called TrackingProtection which allows you to block anything you want that's coming from a third party website. Also, plugin's can be loaded on a whitelist per website basis. So you can accomplish all of the same functionality that those brand names give you, but by other means.

Start living honest lives...

That would most likely be due to the fact that they can actually learn on them instead of just goofing off.