This is a courageous decision. They should also ban 3.5mm jacks whilst they are passing legislation.

Pretty sure I read that Helium was a precious commodity.
Do we really want a fleet of these things?

I know that Go is being pitched as a systems language - but surely it would be easier for Google to do the work necessary to switch to Go and improve it than use Swift.

Based on my (brief) look at Swift it seems to me that they have tried to be too clever by half - throwing everything in to it. Love or hate Java, C, Go - they have the benefits of being clean and simple languages.

A non CS degree may stop you getting a development job in some companies - but not all.

Your degree should have taught you to think, to write, to organise your thoughts, to ask questions etc. All of these are highly prized by employers, I see far too many developers who are great at cutting code without thinking and who can't communicate well.

Don't simply think that you MUST get a CS degree to continue; get enough core knowledge to program well. Build something. Contribute to an open source project (most FOSS projects would welcome literate people to help write documentation or to write additional test cases etc). Create an app for Android or iOS etc

One of my sons is just finishing up a Philosophy degree and I would employ him in a heartbeat because he has excellent communication skills, is well organised and most of all - knows how to think about a problem.

Good luck!

If step 1 is Learn the language then step 2 is Learn the idioms.
Get a copy of Effective Java, read it, understand it and you will be half way there.

People will not buy them again in an even higher quality. Barely anyone cares about quality anymore - they listen to compressed music on a poor format (mp3) on a portable device using low-fi earbuds.

If quality is such a big argument - why isn't blu-ray doing better than it is?

100% agree with this. You can't get HD without Sky+.

Do what I did - write to James Murdoch. That got things moving.

If that doesn't work - write to his Dad.

I think a lot of Sky subscribers would prefer them to fix the issues with existing HD boxes first

1. Freezing an HD picture can crash the box
2. Timing issues with cutoff of program ends
3. IR interference on some boxes.

and many many more

Whoops. Just read the last line of the article. Someone did claim it causes Cancer.
 

The Daily Mail is on a mission to separate all known substances into those that may cause Cancer and those that do.

So they are now trying it on with other stuff as well. I'm surprised that they didn't claim it causes Cancer and Birth Defects as well.

Err... Scala uses the JVM. So the performance in Scala and Java would be roughly the same.

My wife worked in the IT dept of a large UK school with (1600+) pupils until recently. Their biggest problem is getting good staff who know their way around systems.

The money available to hire good staff is pitiful and you won't be swamped with good IT people wanting to earn 10-15000 quid.

In addition, students try and break things as much as possible. Use cheap commodity kit and be prepared to switch it out at a moments notice.

Also be prepared for the 50% of teachers who can't (or won't) get used to technology.

Enlist the local councils IT dept for firewalls, virus checkers, p0rn filters etc.

Setup a policy to stop ALL use of USBs and reading from external devices. If you don't you will have a multitude of viruses and trojans on day one.