If you are planning a career switch, C++. No question.
Just to teach something to you to do some hobby work? Pick something and go. You are over thinking it. You don't need the best in class, no pun intended, just anything will do.
If you are planning to create a course to offer to some college students, go with Java or something
If all you want is to troll the slashdotters to argue endlessly, congratulations, you have done it. Let me add my contribution too, emacs man! Use emacs. vi sucks.
But all those images and animations came from Ansoft High Frequency Structure Simulator software. Not actual experimental physically observed phenomena. And not at light frequencies. Microwave wavelengths mostly.
So seen it so many times before, but definitely not meh.
More citations:
The most important thing to remember is the back cardboard thing that closed the shelves and stuff is not a purely decorative item. It is not for aestherics. This provides the torsional rigidity needed to keep the shelf square. Make sure it is maintained right. The nails go into the soft exposed particle board and comes loose. Make sure it is nailed back in.
Get some 1inch x 1 inch steel L clams and lots of M5 or M6 nuts and washers too. Stress concentration is murder on particle boards, so use washers to spread the load around the clamps. Shake the furniture, find which parts shake and "give", add a few L clamps judiciously, the furniture will feel a lot more solid.
It is a security hole and all the dire warnings by others are true. Most of these companies are run by people with no IT or computer expertise. The top man is going to haul the IT dept on the carpet and demand an explanation. You think the IT chief is going to admit that he/she was running a moronic system? No, she/he is going to shift blame and find some convenient scape goat. Given the top honchos don't know much about anything other than their bonus calculation, IT chief is going to claim, "It is a hack! That guys hacked into my super secure site". Then the PHBs running the company would call in the lawyers and make a mess out of the situation.
One thing the anonymous guy can do is to call the company that issued the mail-in-rebate and tell them, the outfit they had out sourced their rebate processing has holes in the system. Now it is the very big company that issued the rebate coupons run by PHBs fighting a smaller company that got the rebate processing contract run by PHBs. And quietly withdraw without drawing too much attention.
There's tons of very skilled and usually-careful criminals in prison.
The above is complete bullshit.
The prisons house people who were sloppy, stupid, and lazy.
The smart criminals are in political office and on boards of corporations.
No. Medium level smart criminals become politicians. The real top level smart criminals become C?O of publicly traded corporations, usually banks, and mutual funds. The super smart criminals buy the politicians to provide safety net for the smart C?O criminals and they remain largely opaque to scrutiny.
Read the The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley to get an idea of the doom and gloom being predicted for centuries. Matt takes the view all these gloom predictors were wrong and the industrialization is an unadulterated success for humanity. He seems to think humanity consists of Europe and USA. This review sums it up nicely
The job destruction is also accompanied with wealth transfers and power transfers. Finally the job destruction finally lapped up the shores of Europe and USA by 1980s. Slowly middle class of America is waking up to what has been done to them. Their jobs are gone. The "wealth" they have as home equity is a fickle fictional paper gain. Their pensions are gone. Their investments in 401K funds is being used to transfer more power to the top 0.5% of the rich.
Typically very smart and hard working people end up in the top 2% by income and usually end up in the band 98th percentile and 99.5percentile. (To reach the top 0.5% you must have inherited wealth or take huge risks and be lucky). The wealth transfers from third world to industrialized nations had run its course, wealth transfer from the bottom 80% to top 20% has run its course. Till then these guys were very happy and egging it along. Now there is no real wealth left below 90%. The momentum of the economic policies set in motion by them is taking money from the 90 to 98 band and moving it to the top 0.5%.
If you finish college and get in to the 99% cut off entry level salary and stay exactly at the 99% cut off all through your career, it is not enough to get you into the top 1% by wealth (5 million according to IRS and 8 million according to the feds). Till about 2000s, top doctors, lawyers, accountants routinely made it to the top 1% without inheritance. Not any longer. Citation provided
"Been through Hell? Whaddya bring back for me?" -- A. Brilliant