Google *is* innovating. It does so in a similar way as Philip Glass music. You listen to it and you barely notice how it evolves and keep adding to the whole, but should make the effort of listening to the beginning and then the end, there is a *huge* difference between them. Google is slowly but surely changing our lives. Apple is more about blowing our mind, which honestly besides the iPhone, there is not much else that did it. Small incremental innovation is still innovation.

It's not about the message, it's how you package it. To be blunt about it, I find his social skills to be far superior to the average guy here ..

From the article: "I have also heard from a continuing stream of extraordinarily hostile young men (always men) who insist on "educating" me on the ins and outs of cybermorality, the definition of "stealing," and why I deserve to choke on my own obsolescence."

He is talking about YOU guys from slashdot. Way to go! Don't you understand that you get more bees with honey than vinegar? And further than that, that whole nasty behavior of yours make us all who tries to change mentality to look even nerdier and jerks than before. *sight*

If you expect to program in other frameworks the way you do in Java, then yes you are right, it will be painful as it should be. You need to do a mind shift and see the problems through different glasses. Functional programming is really another universe and if you have never done anything beside pure OO, it will take time for you to really see what you missed all those years. And yes, you can do everything you asked and much more.

1- 2pc is easily done with a specialized server (which should use a platform agnostic protocol)
2- single-sign-on solutions are not exclusive to Java (nor should they!)
3- session failover can easily be done by storing state in a db or specialized switches for example
4- as long as there exist an interop layer between both platform, you can do that. If JVM is the only choice, there are other languages than Java that can be used.
5- debugging/tracing is dependent on ide/tools, not the platform. Again it is not exclusive to JVM nor Java.

One framework you can try is Lift (http://www.liftweb.net) made with Scala on the JVM. You will still be able to use your frameworks of choice while learning to master Scala and its libraries. If nothing else, learning functional programming will make you a better programmer/architect.

Or they can install a single program, Opera, and be done with it.

I am curious what someone with your experience thinks of PostgreSQL ? Would you say that it can scale properly as Oracle does ?

This is a genuine question as I am pondering between both for my startup. Even thought I already done my investigations, one more opinion cannot hurt :) Assuming my current DB design holds, it will have about 50 tables, most having less than 10,000 records and some having few millions records (they will be partitioned). The volume of reads will be much higher than writes. Write queries will involve mostly 1-2 tables and short transactions. Typical read queries will require many joins (thought most can be cached or materialized as the data is quite stale).

1- There is nothing else to do in Utah
2- By now, they must be a virtual backup of all the pron on the net

p.s. I'm only kidding, I have never been there ;-)

"The patent system is seriously flawed, as the obviousnless requirement for an invention is generally ignored. Let's fix this and only award patents to creations that actually required serious effort, and not to every troll that wants a patent on how to scratch your butt with both hands."

Have you missed the last part of his comment ? The article you linked is a perfect example of what is wrong and should be fixed, as the parent poster said.

Yet it does make its point come across clearly and sensibly. I find the OP brings a balanced *opinion* on the matter. Without a thorough study and unbiased historic data, that's all you will get: opinions.

vi?

Buy a console. Or play other kind of "games" with her ;) Or go out. I mean anything where you actually spend time interacting with each other in the real world.

I think you should replace some M with B in your comment ;)