Maybe so, but I've still got one of those plain old telephones that do work on a POTS line lying around. And I would not be surprised if many people still have one of those lying around as well. Of course, I've long given up on the POTS subscriber line, so it won't make much of a difference.

No internet means no television, no radio, nothing. I've however got 3 internet connections; one DSL, one mobile backup provided by my internet provider and a telephone. This telephone is will also receive an SMS if anything catastrophic happens in the neighbourhood.

I'm hoping on quick restoration of mobile lines if something does happen. In the Netherlands that's probably a storm, an industrial accident or flooding, we are happily void of earthquakes, tornadoes, tropical storms...

As a European, I truly must ask: "What is a telephone pole?" Never seen one.

Yes, you did...

OK, I can understand this one, but there are so many ways of hiding information in a channel that you simply need to have a blanket permission. Otherwise you are promising something that you cannot enforce.

What I could see is permissions for specific ad services, or access to specific servers. Even then the last one is of limited use; it could only help against sharing information with a *third party*. If you don't trust the developer, then just connecting with the server of the developer is enough to share any information with anybody. Sometimes however you *don't* connect to a server of a developer, it would be helpful if an IMDB app could just connect to IMDB and not to the developer of the app.

Oh, yes, thank you for generating another Slashdot meme...

I'm just glad you used the back of a napkin and not a piece of toilet paper...

Smartphones are not useless toys by any means. If you think that then I'm afraid your century has gone.

That is certainly true, but most of the libraries that are used for core functionality of applications (at least if your application is not just a GUI or Android specific) are fully compatible with the Java runtime after compilation, and almost any third party lib can be compiled and run. The only problem is that many applications are too dependent on the GUI - in other words if they are badly written.

Dunno, but it keeps managers from only allowing the "free" version I suppose, and it does not have any relation to the word "cheap" and therefore "sub-par". Although I guess it does by now, at least for software.

It used to be that reporters first learned basic grammar before creating an article. English is not my first language, but that article has been written so badly that it is hurting my eyes. Even the quotes don't make sense (if they are actually quotes, who can tell?)

PyDev is an Eclpise plugin, which is build using Java. I find it a bit ironic you are immediately pointing to a very successful Java IDE.

Crap should break. Otherwise, if you spend just a bit of time making sure that your application has been created using Java rules.

Java is well known to be a pretty conservative language regarding new features, so I really don't know what you are talking about there.

And *any* language has it's crap API's or bloatware, Java is certainly not an exception there.

The Java API is generally considered a very well written and documented API. Many functions are not directly present from an OS. Stating that the OS functions are easier to program against is certainly - well, actually just wrong. Generally they are much more complex and much less documented than the Java API. The tool support tends to be much worse too, with a steep learning curve (in general), never mind trying to compile for another platform with different libraries and drivers.

I'm not a big fan of using Java or Flash in web browsers, although I think the access controlled Java is at least a lot less vulnerable - if updated from time to time - than flash. Unfortunately, it is also pretty shitty for web applications/games compared with flash.

You should look at another Vendor, because it is *broken*.

I'm a really big proponent of Java, but I'll be the first to say that it failed to make an impact as web-plugin. I don't know how they could screw up so badly (I do have a few pointers such as the horrible AWT / Swing idea) but I'll be the first that applets and - in lesser form - webstart completely and utterly sucks. And you could say that for many Java GUI applications, if only for the horrendous, evil, completely useless file chooser dialog box that should somehow reassemble the OS provided one.

I'll make a small exception for Eclipse and Eclipse based applications, which does have a pretty good (underestimated) application framework.

Right.

Point me to the mature crypto library for those frameworks. The static code analyzers. The parsing IDE's. The tools. The extensive libraries. The up to date unicode handling. I've seen many many claims about "mature" frameworks that simply aren't. Actually, I make a point of trying out frameworks. Many don't even make it into the first week, and I have met none that are as mature and maintainable as Java.

In my spare time I have thought of many many ways of creating a more mature language than Java, fixing many of it's mistakes. I *know* it can be done. Unfortunately most languages seem to focus on sparsity and features instead of readability, security and maintainability. I'll happily switch if I can find one that does a better job (and isn't SmallTalk).