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.

Java. It has the broadest popularity in industry, isn't tied to any one company (e.g. Microsoft), can be developed using a wide variety of host operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux), lends itself well to teaching O.O. design and has a wealth of free tools. It's also what the majority of universities use in their intro level courses. (Though that's changing.)

Fewer features in each release. More time to fix bugs, test, "get it right the first time".

It currently doesn't, but BSD's code could make the same guarantee, right? At the point where it recurses left and right, compare the length of the two sub-arrays. Sort the shorter one first via a recursive call, then take advantage of the tail recursion and sort the larger one by overwriting the current stack frame and jumping back to the top of the function. They already go halfway (taking advantage of the tail recursion); they just don't use any heuristic to choose which sub-array gets sorted via the recursive call. It's always the "left" side.

It looks like GNU actually allocates its custom stack *on the stack*. However, in the comments they claim their algorithm guarantees that the stack need only be as large as log(sort elements), so they allocate a stack that is (in theory) guaranteed to be big enough. You can check out the code here. I'm not sure what version of glibc that's from, but it looks similar to what I extracted from 2.10 a while back.

It should be noted that since both BSD and GNU versions rely on a stack (and neither chooses its pivot point randomly, so far as I know) they're both vulnerable to crafted data that's designed to cause the algorithm to exhaust its stack. It's possible GNU dynamically grows its custom stack when it nears the point of exhaustion, but I kind of doubt it.

Slasdot ate my less-than symbol. They short-circuit to insertion when N < 7.

They use the method described in Bentley & McIlroy's paper, which uses a "median of medians" for large arrays, a simple median of first/last/middle for mid-sized arrays and the mid-point for small arrays. See page 1255 here. No idea how effective that is. They also short-circuit to insertion sort when N 7 for a given sort window.

So your current salary is approximately 2x what you started at 10 years ago (i.e. 1.07^10)? Nice. I'm 15.5 years into my career since graduating with a M.S. If my salary 15 years ago is what I think it was (am having trouble remembering) then I'm averaging only 5%/year. It's possible that the yearly increase is steeper during the first 10 years than in the next 10. Then again, maybe I'm just consoling myself. :)