If the NSA had only been spying on terrorists we wouldn't even be having this conversation. (although it's not really a conversation, but you get my point)

Why would the NSA and CIA be spying on Congress? Is it someone's goal to set up the apparatus of a police state?

Why is the NSA spying on the EU Parliament? Are they looking for terrorists in Parliament?

See: TED How the NSA betrayed the world's trust — time to act
at: 4:30
also see at: 12:40 (or at 12:00 for better context) "I don't think they're looking for terrorists in Parliament."
(see at: 6:00 if you believe in encryption golden keys)

Maybe Space X will have a requirement to sell space launches through dealer networks, but United Launch Alliance will not have such a requirement.

I tried that and got a virus, and now every time I pass through a McDonalds, the car automatically maneuvers through the drive through, generating a "referral" fee for the virus writer. You have to order SOMETHING so you don't look like an idiot. Do you KNOW how many McDonalds there between Greensboro, NC and Charlotte? A lot, I will tell you that. I've gained 20 pounds in the last week.

I like getters/setters in Java because in practice, the JVM compiles everything down to native code and aggressively inlines. So typical getters/setters cost nothing and are direct accesses to member variables. But it gives you the flexibility to later make the getter/setter do something else without affecting other code.

Suppose you were to change the getter/setter and then dynamically re-load the class at runtime in a running system. The JVM will immediately de-optimize (go back to interpreted bytecode) for all methods that now have stale inlined code (from the old version of the class). Dynamic profiling may then quickly reveal that the de-optimized code is (still, as it was before) an actual CPU hot spot, causing it to get re-compiled again, and if appropriate, to have those getters/setters inlined, or not.

The JVM compiler is like having a global -O 5 optimizer that can optimize globally across the actual code running on the machine, and the code generator of the compiler is tailored to your actual hardware and whatever instruction set extensions it might have.

The JVM as a runtime platform will probably outlast the Java language.

> It seems the hackers are demanding money else they will release the rest of the data.

Would the hackers instead release the data in exchange for money?

Your never going too get you're weigh on this. Their are just two many people out they're using there words wrong too get to upset. Sew don't loose you're cool about it. You can sea mini common examples that exist of incorrect usage. People pick the write words two use according too there porpoises. But you'd have two be a fool to begin or end a sentence with the word "but". And only an idiot would begin or end a sentence with "and". And a preposition is a very bad word too end a sentence with.

I made such an effort to conceal my sexual orientation!

Or not using a large enough font or large enough monitor. Or using a font where the asterisk glyph is visually similar to a quote glyph.

Hey, it's always easier to blame the programming language for things done by stupid developers, stupid practices, stupid managers, stupid organizations, stupid vendors, stupid requirements, and stupid teachers.

But your list of the bashing comment types is right on the money as evidence in these comments.

While operator overloading can be used for good, it is far more often used to create huge messes. It makes the simplest expressions impossible to understand locally because now, everywhere there is an operator, you cannot be sure what is actually going on. IMO, operator overloading is evil, despite the good intentions.

I hear you about type erasure for generics.

Lambda statements in Java are a recent addition. But I hear you about first class functions. There are a lot of other languages that run on the JVM platform and are interoperable with Java. And many of these have first class functions. JavaScript (Nashorn), Clojure (a modern lisp with concurrency and immutable structures), Groovy, Scala and many others. And the interoperability is very real -- because they all pass around the very same underlying types and objects from the underlying runtime system.

I hear you about lack of properties and the annoyance of getters/setters. IDEs help, but its not the same thing. (like kissing your boyfriend through a veil)

Please don't assume that bad developers and practices are intrinsically tied to a language or platform. As I said in this same thread, that kind of stupidity transcends languages. :-)

You forgot: . . . and not check the licensing conditions of all those 3rd party packages.

I have not switched to Maven . . . so far.

But your 'three line loop' example is NOT a Java problem. That same kind of stupidity transcends languages, platforms and tools, and often opens up career paths into management.

Don't blame Java for that. It is the fault of many managers. They want cheap, interchangeable droids to build their applications. Run them hard, burn them out, throw them away like a used spark plug. They're cheap to replace. So those managers want a language all these droids understand. So not only do you get experts, but hoards of below average drones who's main skill is interviewing and taking certification exams. (aka 'certified idiots')

Any programming language could have stumbled into that phenomena. It just happened to be Java. That doesn't make Java itself bad. If anything, the huge community of wealthy enterprise Java users has benefited the Java ecosystem tremendously.

The platform itself has its major strengths. For just one example, in 2012, Twitter switched from Ruby to Java because Java could scale. You need major scalability when you handle a billion tweets per day and must route each of them to many destinations and platforms. It doesn't matter how much cpu / memory the platform uses, it matters that you can scale it linearly by just adding more boxes. Java already has a lot of ecosystem and infrastructure that enables that kind of scalability. You can google for twitter's 2012 switch from Ruby to Java, and they also have (last time I looked a year or so ago) a lengthy YouTube video presentation discussing the benefits of the change after the fact.