He is probably that guy who built the robot wife from the story yesterday.

For the first time in *at least* 8 years, I am quite jealous of you US guys. If you ask me, people in senior positions are are not 'politically savvy enough' is *exactly* what the world needs right now.

In any case, it sounds to me like he has designed himself a robot *girlfriend* at the moment. When it is capable of having a simulated headache, we can upgrade it to 'wife' status.

More rubbish I am afraid!

If the compiler/runtime writers can implement highly complicated features that exist in things like hotspot I am damn sure they can implement multiple inheritance! The problem is that there are too many ambiguous cases that can be introduced by using multiple inheritance.

The reason that Java provides both interface implementation (and inheritance between interfaces themselves, including multiple inheritance (which does not have the problems found with multiple implementation inheritance)) is because they are used for two different things. One is used to express common, generic functionality, the other is used to specialize on implementation details. A very short browse through the Java API docs will demonstrate many cases where interface implementation and concrete inheritance are used to great effect.

For me the jury is out on whether I would find MI useful in Java, but you are probably right about operator overloading. As a lone, and fairly experienced Java programmer I would probably find some sensible uses for operator overloading. I am also certain I would sit through more than one deeplying annoying conversation with a junior developer who is trying to explain to me why adding two 'Customer' instances together makes some kind of sense (or worse, dividing them!). Personally, I tend to feel it is not worth the aggro. Mileage may vary.

Rubbish!

You are clearly speaking as somebody who has not yet grasped what interfaces give you. An interface is an indicator that a class provides a particular service, many classes can provide the same service in different ways, all would implement the interface.

So you have an interface called 'Dateable' which defines a method 'setDate(Date date)'. Your Appointment class and your MissleLaunch class both implement this interface. Then your cool little date chooser widget just takes a 'Dateable' as a parameter somewhere (either constructor or setter). It 'interfaces' with the dependent class via the type safe interface type without needing to know whether it is scheduling a trip to the dentist or the end of civilisation as we know it! *That* is what interfaces give you, far more than just 'documentation'.

People get lead down the wrong path because someone will say... "Java doesn't have multiple inheritance, but instead it has interfaces", but this is like saying... "I don't have a hammer, but instead I have an apple". Two concepts, two jobs. Java doesn't have multiple inheritance because some of the end-case rules are a bit strange, and god knows, even single inheritance is badly abused by poor programmers. Sun seem to have taken the line of not giving people the rope with which to hang themselves (even if a small percentage would use the rope responsibly), operator overloading is not in Java for the same reason.

We can argue whether this was a good approach (there are are strong arguments from both camps!), but interfaces are *certainly not* 'essentially documentation'.

"You'd think someone would come along and say, "Enough is enough" and start spelling English the way it sounds: "Enuf is Enuf"."

Already happening! The generation of SMS messengers and facebook status updaters are already setting off down this path.

Yes, but TFA states this will happen indirectly. They are not talking about looking up your credit history and deciding which ads to push to you, but rather one partnership is going to use the credit history to decide which shows people in different income brackets tend to watch, and it is this information is going to be used by google to decide upon which adverts go with which shows.

I am 100% certain that this 'income bracket to likely TV shows' correlation has been going on for years.

So, factor the rubbish out of the story, and basically they are saying, google has invented a new technology that makes it easier for lower turn over business to access TV advertising and they are going to use all existing available data to target this advertising in a way that makes it a relevant ad to the viewer, thus increasing advertising investment efficiency for the advertiser. In other words, exactly what they do on the web.

Google's justification for this will be exactly the same as their justification for their censored search results in China. The 'evil' will happen with or without them, but they believe that everyone is better off by having the service they provide. As somebody who accepts advertising as a necessary, an acceptable 'evil' to gain the benefit of media that is free at the point of delivery *and* somebody who uses google adsense I agree with them. Google has succeeded in making advertising less of a nuisance and I am happy for that.

Basically, the worst you can say about this is that google are complicit in the 'evils' of somebody else. That alone might be enough for some to condemn them, I mention it purely in the interests of clarity.

I think you might have meant to type this reply to another thread you are involved with. We were discussion finite universe theory rather than the relative merits of Windows/Linux. I have my views on this too, but I will catch you in some other thread to go through those! ;o)

Absolutely no problem at all. My original reply to your post was unfair anyway. I was having one of 'those days', sorry.

Yes yes yes... it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye, or takes a chair in the face.

Thank you :)

Slightly less sarcastically, it should be fairly obvious that in theories that predict a finite universe that there is nothing on the 'other side' of any boundary, as the other side, would be, part of the universe. You are partially right about my ignorance actually, I have some basic ideas on this stuff based on my layman reading but I am no cosmologist. As I understand it, the primary suggestion is that it would work a lot like the surface of earth, start out in a straight line in a given direction and you can quite happily travel in that direction indefinitely, but you will return to your origin an infinite amount of times also.

Of course it is much more difficult to imagine this situation in 3 (spacial and perceivable) dimensions rather than 2, and I believe even Hawkings suggests that it is effectively impossible for the human brain to visualize this situation which is why things such as this tend to be represented mathematically.

It is a bit like when people ask, "So what was there before the big bang?". Well, there is no before, the big bang was an 'explosion' of both space *and* time. The arrows of time as we know them did not exist before the big bang, there simply was no *before*.

The problem that you are having (and most people, including myself have) is that you are using a brain that has evolved for the purposes of 'hunt, eat and fuck', to understand something that was never in our evolutionary benefit to understand. The fact that we even have the capability to understand the slightest amount of this stuff is only really a side effect of genetic mutation that was chosen to remain in our genome for other, more beneficial reasons.

My view point is that in reality the universe may be beyond our comprehension in the same way that the nature of the planet is beyond the comprehension of an ant. We might have uncovered 10% of the workings of the universe, we might have uncovered 0.0000000000000000000000000000001%. There is no limit to the potential complexity after all. In fact, believing that the nature of the universe must be within our comprehension pretty much leaves us with an intelligent design theory. If it is definately within our understanding... somebody must have made it that way :o).

What I can tell you however, is that scientists who study cosmology for their entire career and have proposed the idea of a finite universe have not overlooked the question of... "Yes, but what is over the wall?" :o).

Hopefully that is a better answer!

Sounds great in principal but hasn't the problem always been that Microsoft counters action like this by telling the manufacturers that if they ship competing software they will lose their OEM discounts for Windows? I am not completely up to date will the anti-trust judgements against Microsoft but assuming that this counter-attack hasn't been legally ruled out already, can't we expect Microsoft to do the same here?

You are about 30 years behind the curve with your questions.

So that you can immediately exclude any candidate who includes 'cheap' in their choice of two on the basis that they are clearly an idiot?

"I am not very good, but at least you won't have to pay me much!"
"It takes me ages to do anything, but you won't have to pay me much!".

Two phrases that are pretty much certain to ensure that you remain unemployed!

...uphill, both ways...