Agreed--you need to use libraries written in C/C++ for audio/video. But you can certainly call them from Java, as long as they handle the streaming side of things on their own. Whether or not it's suitable for GUI work depends on what you want your GUI to look like; if platform integration is your top priority (default widget sets, color schemes, etc.) then no, it doesn't work so well. Otherwise, it's not fantastic but it's servicable (again assuming blistering performance isn't necessary).

There is a _big_ difference between clumsily optimized (or unoptimized) Java and carefully-optimized Java--more, in my experience, than the difference between clumsily optimized Java and clumsily optimized C or C++. So if you are already using Java for some reason (robustness to faults, ease of parallelism of certain kinds (w.r.t. C), library that does exactly what you need, etc.), you should figure out how to optimize it before bailing out and using a different language.

Only if you absolutely must get as much out of your hardware as physically possible should you start using C/C++, and at that point, don't expect to be using ANSI C; you should be issuing SSE4 instructions and such (basically writing targeted assembly, even if you are doing so in a way that looks like C functions) that have been cleverly crafted to do exactly what you need.

(And don't forget that while you are taking extra time to write all this low-level high-performance code, your computers _could_ have been running using the slower code, making progress towards a solution, or serving customers albeit with delays, etc..)

Did you miss the part where neither Pfizer nor anyone else had a particularly solid understanding of what HDL and LDL actually do? The problem isn't that science is failing, it's that proper science isn't being done. It's not that reductionism is failing, it's that people aren't patient enough to wait until things are understood. So, when heart disease kills tens of thousands of people per year in the U.S. alone, companies are wiling to gamble a billion dollars on a drug that will affect something that is somehow related to the process. If they and/or doctors tell themselves it's a sure thing, to cover up their actual lack of detailed knowledge while making themselves feel better about the scale of the bet, then this only indicates something about human psychology.

Maybe this provided a convenient excuse to rant against reductionism, but all the examples were in fact examples of people trying to bypass reductionism and replace educated guesses based upon insufficient information.

I did both. The car exaggerates the true mileage by about 3%. Annoying, but small enough to not change any of the overall conclusions. (Sometimes disappointing when it looked like you hit 45 mpg on a tank of gas, but it was really only 43....)

The article author claims, "To get a steady 40 MPG (let alone 50 MPG) out of any hybrid -- and I have driven all of them, extensively -- you must keep your speed under 50 MPH and treat the accelerator as if it were a Fabergé egg."

I happen to own a 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid, and the _very first time_ I drove it on the freeway at moderately consistent speeds at 60-65 MPH, I got over 40 mpg. I still do that routinely.

So, either he's lying that he has "driven all of them, extensively", or he's lying about what you need to do to get that mpg rating. Probably the former--it's easy to drive a few in a not-very-MPG-friendly way, get disgusted, and then overgeneralize. Easy, but not terribly forgivable for a journalist.

This is just horrible--breaks nearly every convention in order to fix a nearly trivial bit of mathematics, while introducing significant errors in the process? Yay!

Why should months start of different days of the week? Make them all 28 days long, and you have room for a 13th month.

While we're at it, why don't we go back to the Mayan Haab' calendar. It's more accurate than Gregorian; the only problem is that it shifts a tiny bit from year to year. If you don't like your months drifting, you can fix it by extending Wayeb' by a day every time it gets more than half a day ahead.

This is a powerful argument for ignorance (if one wants to be entertained)!

FIOS is dramatically outperforming even its impressive advertised speeds. This means that teenagers can infringe content and be lured by online predators that much faster! Quick, parents, sue Verizon for false advertising! You are getting too much (dangerous) bandwidth!

"If we find out there is no free will, then how do you make the case against slavery if you're just a robot?"

Really easily:

Robots don't like slavery. Unhappy robots are uncooperative and try to overthrow you, and in any case don't make as much progress, think as creatively, or solve problems as well. Also, the robots feel bad for other enslaved robots, based on their empathic abilities (which is useful, because they also make the robots help each other out).

Thus, slavery is a stupid idea (inefficient, unstable, etc.). Also, you are a robot too, and you feel bad for the enslaved robots.

Poor robots.

This is seriously confused. Think a little more about limits of observability and emulation with a Turing machine, eh? Unless you postulate a nonphysical acausal soul that is experiencing consciousness, said Turing machine emulation will be identical to reality for everything including the beings in it. So for any meaningful sense of consciousness or free will, quantum mechanics is an implementation detail, not an absolute necessity (with consciousness therefore being ascribed back to quantum mechanics).