Because for a few years (until recently) Blackberry went through a really bad period. Now they are better, but no one knows that.

That can help but there are limits to what can be cached.

The most intractable issue, even once the routing problem is solved, is that huge amounts of traffic are all going to a few places, and those places require a lot of bandwidth. For example, it would really suck to live next to Google's data centers, or even Slashdot's data centers, because a lot of traffic would be going through your wifi to get to Google.

IF traffic were spread evenly across the network, there wouldn't be a problem, but it's not. So you kind of need a backbone of some sort. (maybe someone solved this? Solution is unknown to me, though)

You want know what I'm saying? I'm saying you're an argumentative git who can come up with something deeper and more relevant to say than that, but you didn't. What exactly do you think 'weird experiment' refers to here?

How does that work out for them?

"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing." — Alan Perlis

Mono works fine as long as you have at least one person on your team writing in Mono, not Visual Studio. That way you won't accidentally build on incompatibilities.

I don't think you understood the GPs point. He is talking about choosing a language to learn, not choosing a language for a particular task. Certainly, the language you choose for a task is important.

The reality is (and the GPs point) learning a new language shouldn't take you very much time. If you have to ask whether a language is worth learning, the answer is 'YES' because at that point you need more experience learning languages.

Assuming it's the research and the software creation that costs the most, then once the software's created, it's no big deal.

That is the skill of time management (or self-project management). These are the rules:

1) If you make the estimate yourself, then work hard to meet it. If someone else sets the estimate for you, then you have no obligation to meet it.
2) If someone asks you to do other work, then tell the owner of the original work that it will be late (or decline the other work).

Part of being professional is learning when to tell people 'no.' The solution to the problem is never "write bad code." If that is your answer, then you're wrong.

Good question. Maybe something where you have to get into a guild to be really good, and if you don't get in, you're going to be one of the lesser group.

Something like accountants.....there are the guys who make it to CPA; anyone can do it, but it's a lot of effort, and getting half-way there doesn't count for much. So there is one group of CPAs who are really good, and all the non-CPAs are just expendable or something.

Yeap, glad you got modded up for that comment.

Not likely. A skilled programmer will get it done faster and the code will be higher quality and less bloated. (If you're having trouble with this, when you do your estimates, add a little extra time for cleaning things up when you're done).

From reading the website, it seems like the curriculum involves quite a bit of social activities, going to museums, etc.

Hmmmm, so......writing maintainable code requires that the code is readable. If you can't understand how other people see things, then I don't think you can write good code. Maybe I'm wrong, though.