Who cares? I mean - really - you can get a fake degree based on "Your life-experience" or any number of junk bits of paper.

The fact is that when you go for a job someplace waving your Ph.D in Creationism - the people offering the job are going to have a really good laugh at your expense. The only job you're going to be able to get will be working for the Creation Research center.

Think of this as "educational Darwinism" - those with degrees in junk subjects will be rapidly eliminated from the business gene-pool.

Meh.

C is a mere subset of C++. So you might as well cross C off the list.

Fortran is hopelessly obsolete - although it's certainly still used in a few niches.

You'd be certifiably crazy not to pick either C++ or Java.

Frankly - if you can get your head around C++, Java is a snap because it's little more than a C++ subset too.

The other thing you perhaps don't realise is that a halfway decent programmer can pick up a new language in a weekend - and be 100% comfortable in it in a month. I've totally lost count of how many languages I know...but a quick count says it's at least 30.

C++ or Java - you choose...but forget C and Fortran.

Back when we had a bunch of big SGI graphics machines we decided that they were basically cold heartless bastards with no love of humankind - so we named them after mass-murderers: Hinkley, Lechter, Sutcliffe, etc. This was considered to many to be kinda tasteless - but hey - we're geeks.

When we started to transition over to using Linux PC's for doing our graphics, they seemed like little toys - so we had all sorts of toy names, stuff like Crayola, Etchasketch, etc - but as we learned to network a bunch of them to do the same work, they earned names like Lego, Duplo, Erectorset, etc.

When I named my machines at home, my son was going through a 'batman' phase - so we had Batcave, Waynemanor, Batmobile (a laptop), Alfred, etc. Later the craze was The Matrix - and we used the names of the hover-craft. The machine I'm using now is still called Gnosis for that reason.

Wait - it's MUCH worse than that:

"...publishes orally or in writing, exhibits, or otherwise makes available anything obscene to any a group or individual;" ...so exhibiting anything obscene to any individual...is illegal? Doesn't that mean that I can't get naked with my g/f?

Even counting the number of hours for which people read doesn't help - some people read slowly, others very fast. And that still doesn't account for the "Herlequin Romance" factor. Does 10 hours reading of "penny dreadfuls" count as much as 10 hours of Anime, 10 hours of Neil Stephenson, 10 hours of Linux Manuals, 10 hours of Shakespeare's Sonnets or 10 hours spent reading the phone book? What about one's comprehension level? Does it count to have read a book and not understood a word of it - or worse, to have read - but completely misunderstood it?

In the end, this comes down to "amount of benefit gained from book reading per year" - and that's almost impossible to quantify.