"Things Only Slashdot (and maybe io9) Readers Worry About".

I've worked as a developer for the past 15 years. In that time, I'd break down the quality level as follows (roughly):

10%: Absolutely terrible; should be fired even if they were willing to work for free
40%: Not absolutely terrible, but also not someone I'd hire if I were building my own team (even if they came cheap)
40%: Someone who does decent work but isn't going to blow you away; I'd consider hiring someone in this group, but wouldn't pay a premium to bring them on board
10%: Exceptional. Not only would I hire someone in in this group, I'd be willing to pay "above market" to get them

The numbers are, obviously, rough (no to mention subject to personal bias and totally anecdotal).

One problem: plenty of people in the first two groups interview like they're in the third group. Also, some of the people in the 4th group interview like they're in the 3rd group. I submit that some of the most successful teams are successful not because they have great ideas (although that never hurts), but because they have an interview process that's able to sort people into the right "bin" more accurately than their competition can.

Maybe I'm crazy, but 20% yearly revenue growth for a company Google's size seems pretty healthy.

At least all the unvaccinated kids would be confined to a ghetto, of sorts. Maybe more outbreaks (and, consequently, more dead kids) would motivate more parents to vaccinate.

Why? It's not like infections only happen in schools. Or that students spend 100% of their time at school. Look at the Disneyland outbreak.

The main reason to require vaccination in public schools is that they're a resource that's supposedly available to everyone. I shouldn't have to expose my kid to other kids who haven't been vaccinated in order to access the public school system. So we require vaccinations there. Private schools are private. That's why you can send your kid to a school that teaches young earth creationism if you want. Likewise, you could elect to send your kid to a school that doesn't require vaccinations. I would support a reporting requirement, though, obligating private schools to publicize in their promotional materials whether they allow un-vaccinated students to enroll. That way parents can make an informed decision.

I think that you are under the impression that it is ONLY transmitted via sex or needles.

Not really. It's transmitted by blood, or bodily fluids containing blood. That can happen without sex or needles but, outside of mother-to-child transmission during delivery, its more rare. I would be much less concerned about sending my kids to a school where some of the students weren't vaccinated against HepB than I would be about sending my kids to a school where some of the students weren't vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, etc.

Primarily from mother to child during delivery. The likelihood of an child who hasn't been vaccinated both 1) contracting HepB and 2) passing it to someone else at school are fairly low. Much lower than, say, measles.

I'm cool with the public schools only admitting kids who're vaccinated. Imposing the same approach on private schools seems like overreach. Also, HepB shouldn't be in the schedule of required vaccines to enter kindergarten given its method of transmission.

Make fewer claims in order to drive down the % that end up having to be reversed.

Redbox, coupled with Netflix's service where they mail you the discs.

I've steamed movies over this DSL connection. On a laptop. Point being: not everybody streams HD movies. You seem to want to define "broadband" as "what it takes to adequately stream HD content". That seems like a somewhat arbitrary way to define "broadband".

1. The FCC should establish a "moving definition". Identify a set of peer countries and define U.S. "broadband" relative to some measure of those countries' broadband capability. Maybe "broadband" is "just faster than the slowest peer nation". Or maybe it's "the median among all peer nations". Etc. Revise the standard yearly according to the moving definition.

2. To what extent is Sweden's network access made cheaper by way of public subsidy? The amount of the subsidy should be included in the "price", even if it's less visible.

3. Not everybody streams HD video. If you don't stream HD video then 25/3 is more than adequate. I watch TV shows from Hulu on my laptop over a 6 Mbps DSL connection.

I agree. LoC needed to implement Hello World is a dumb metric. Even by that dumb metric, though, he exaggerates, since the number needed in Java is 6 and not 50.

Huh. I thought the whole "community" aspect w/ Java allowed for more non-Oracle input into the development of the language, whereas VB and C# were tightly controlled by MS. If you're cynical you could view Java as being tightly controlled by the triumvirate of IBM, Google and Oracle. I agree you can find a job doing .Net, but I'd still argue if you had to choose between the two (C# and Java) then Java is probably the better choice of the two (if only because it potentially opens up Android positions and there are many more Android positions than Windows Mobile).

If I were designing an undergraduate C.S. curriculum I'd want students exposed to Java, C, Python and SQL (arguably not really a "programming" language). C# would be a bonus. Probably also some functional language (Scheme, Lisp) just so they leave with a sense of what those languages are like. If I were designing a high school curriculum and had to choose a single language to teach, given the present realities of university curricula and industry adoption, I'd go with Java.

Java is pretty much only fit for the enterprise

Google would seem to disagree.

where it was developed in order to pad out kLOC numbers and the corresponding contracts.

False.

Enjoy your hello world in 5 lines of code, 50 lines of syntatic sugar, and 500 lines of XML.

Exagerration. Hello World in Java is about six non-empty lines, i.e. on par with C.

I've used Ruby and Java and, honestly, I prefer Java. But I recognize I'm an outlier in that respect. C#/VB + Mono gets you additional platform support, but not quite as robust as the situation with Java. Also, despite Mono, isn't the "spec" for VB tied to Microsoft in a way that exceeds Java's link to Oracle? C# and VB (especially VB) are also not as popular in industry. So Java has that advantage over those two. Nor are they what's commonly used in intro courses at universities which, IMO, should be a factor in deciding what to teach pre-university students.